Stuart Read online

‘What’s a kennel?’

  ‘A house.’

  ‘What’s wrong with living in a kennel? I live in a kennel.’

  ‘They don’t trust people who live in kennels.’

  ‘What does Smithy live in?’

  ‘Well, he’s in a kennel as well, only he ain’t, because he’s most the time in jail.’

  One day, Smithy drove Stuart to visit a Gypsy relative who gave Stuart a funny look. ‘And Smithy jumped up,’ recalls Stuart, voice rising an octave with pride, ‘and said, “No, mate, he’s ‘kushty’ [OK], he’s safe with the ‘gava’ [police]. Ain’t got to worry about this man in the ‘gavakel’ [police station].” ’

  Smithy took Stuart on drives to pinch things from village shops.

  At a village supermarket they stopped off one day to buy cigarettes. It was just after closing and they were the last two customers. They asked for twenty B&H. The young cashier, who was on her own, had to leave her position by the grocery till where she was counting the day’s take and step into the cigarette cubicle.

  The cigarette display was locked.

  Stuart and Smithy kept up a playful banter.

  ‘Bit quiet round here, is it, love?’

  She had to bend down.

  ‘Where’s your husband then–left you to do all the work as usual, eh?’

  She laughed, hitched up her tight skirt, inserted the key in the lock of the secret storage cupboard.

  When she re-emerged, Stuart paid and they left.

  At 3 a.m. that night they smashed the door off the supermarket with a car stolen in the next village, broke open the revealed storage cupboard and filled two sports bags with cigarettes.

  Driving back across the fens, they were as excited as spring lambs. Whooping and punching the air, they pulled the car over at a lay-by near the Tate & Lyle sugar factory and set light to the front seat. By the time the fuel tank caught they were halfway across the second field, Smithy carrying the two bags of fags and Stuart doing his best not to stumble in the ruts.

  Over the next week they sold the cigarettes–£1.50 a pack (‘£1 for the shittier brands’) or £5 for four. Twenty went to Stuart’s mum and stepdad. Ten to his sister. Her boyfriend wanted five. Smithy’s Gypsy connections were like a black hole for the remainder. They’d stolen two hundred packs, risked a year in jail and made £183.

  Another time, Stuart threw a TV at a policeman.

  PC Shedding: ‘As a result of information received we had reason to attend H——Junior School, H——.

  Upon our arrival at around 2.47 a.m., we approached the school on foot and due to the nature of the call began to check for any insecurities…I heard another door begin to open about five yards away to my left, I moved towards this door and it opened further. I saw a dark figure appear at the door and shouted, “Stop, Police!” As I did so the figure threw a large object at me, which I later discovered was a television set. Then I ran round to the front of the school and as I rounded the corner, I saw two white males running from the front of the school towards the entrance to the playground. I managed to grab hold of and restrain one of the persons. I brought him to the ground and he began to struggle, as a result of this I restrained him using Home Office–approved restraint techniques.’

  ‘I ain’t got much of a run in me,’ admits Stuart. ‘I used to do the eyes and the ears, and Smithy’d do the graft, because I needed a head start if it come on top. And I was good at that. I’ve always been the eyes and the ears, but it was hard work.’

  ‘So, was it Smithy you did the school with?’

  ‘Not saying. No use asking twice. No. No comment.’

  ‘I was on duty with Police Dog Shadow,’ the second officer at the scene remembered. ‘When PD Shadow indicated a track, he continued tracking out of the school gate and turned left travelling adjacent to the pond.’ Shadow chased the scent right up to the high street but it had vanished down the quiet, lamplit macadam.

  ‘All I can say is you caught me bang in the act and I’ve got nothing else to say on the matter,’ Stuart grumped at his interrogation.

  It was Smithy who heard about the post office.

  He shouldered into Stuart’s fetid living room one day at about noon, when Stuart was still on bail for the school burglary, snapped off the TV, wrenched back the curtains. Sunlight flooded in.

  ‘Wake up, you lazy bastard. I’ve got it. I’ve got it! Twenty…Wake up! Open your frigging eyes. Twenty fu…Fuck me, are you dead or what? All we gotta do is…Stu! Twenty fucking thousand knicker!’

  Coates village post office.

  PD Shadow

  ‘You muppet, Alexander, it was an Alsatian not a pug.’

  Stuart opened his eyes and felt round for the Stella. Half a can later, he spotted the weakness. ‘Smithy, fucking brilliant, wicked. Just one small thing. What about the owner?’

  ‘An old woman, on her own.’

  ‘It don’t matter if she’s 104 with no legs. She isn’t going to want to give it to us. She won’t be able to give it to us. It will be in her safe, on a time lock.’

  ‘Exactly,’ crowed Smithy. ‘We do it before it gets in her safe, on delivery day. I’ve got the times, everything. Every fortnight, Monday, 10.30 a.m.’

  It was early in the day, but Smithy was usually a bit brighter than this. ‘Smithy, on delivery day there’ll be guards. Remember them? The big fellas what likes hitting people with truncheons?’

  ‘No, Stu, that’s the point. A friend worked there. The old dear doesn’t lock the money. She puts it under the counter until closing time. It’s down there, four, five hours, asking to be nicked. Twenty fucking grand. Then we’ll go back to my missus’ and have a proper party.’

  In the swirls of dust and summer leaves, Smithy and Stuart cracked open another round of cans and celebrated. A big winner. Twenty grand! Arabic riches! Stuart would be able to buy a caravan, and retire somewhere quiet and sympathetic, like Swansea.

  Three questioned following robbery*

  DETECTIVES were today questioning two men from St Ives and a third from Whittlesey in connection with a raid on a sub-post office near Whittlesey.

  Two raiders smashed their way into the post office at the Green, Coates, in broad daylight yesterday morning.

  They broke open the door and made off with an unknown quantity of cash. One raider, believed to be carrying a screwdriver, forced open the till and grabbed the money.

  The pair headed towards Whittlesey at 11.13 a.m. in an X-registration red Ford Cortina estate. It is believed they dumped it between Coates and Eastrea, changing to a red Escort car.

  He and Smithy figured it out afterwards, as they lounged in remand. ‘We were set up. How’d the Old Bill know it was us? We got away. We weren’t followed. The descriptions from the witnesses were terrible. Every one was different about the two assailants. How’d they get to your missus’ house so quick?’ said Stuart.

  ‘The police were waiting outside, hidden, when we got back,’ he repeats to me, shocked by their duplicity. ‘They didn’t jump on us straight away. His missus–he was bang in love with her, and she had expensive tastes–she was looking right excited, then, crash. Loads of Old Bill on me back. Like insects. Old Bill crawling up the curtains, Old Bill under the sofa. Wherever you looked, fucking everywhere. Old Bill in the sink.’

  Stuart refuses to be drawn on the name of who set them up. He is old-fashioned about such things.

  ‘Let’s just say it was funny the way as soon as we was sent down Smithy’s missus moved in with the fella who’d told us about the job. I’d only been out six months from my previous when I got banged up again for a five-stretch for this, and the joke was the old lady didn’t get no money that day. There wasn’t £20,000 there. The police had gone through the fucking routine of pretending she’d got a delivery, hadn’t they? Left a few hundred quid in the till. Didn’t want us to be put off, did they?’

  ‘Five years. That’s pretty strong for stealing nothing, isn’t it?’ I ask.

  ‘Not really. I�
�d been doing loads of silly things. Stupid things. They was getting pissed off with it.’

  ‘Were you armed?’ I suggest.

  ‘No,’ replies Stuart. ‘Well…only with a crowbar.’

  Stuart has forgotten to tell me something. (Perhaps, in fact, he does not remember. He does not keep a scrapbook of the newspaper reports of his notable moments as an ordinary person would. Any cuttings he might own have long since been destroyed in one of his periodic rages that purge his flat of possessions.) What Stuart has forgotten to tell me is that Smithy was no ordinary blagger. He was a multi-talented man.

  ARMED RAID: Pair jailed for post office robbery*

  BUBBLEGUM KING STUCK BEHIND BARS

  BUBBLEGUM-blowing champ John Smith is starting a five-year prison sentence today after an armed attack on a post office.

  The city’s Crown Court heard how the British bubblegum-blowing record holder and his accomplice staged the attack on the post office at Coates, near Whittlesey, earlier this year.

  The pair made off with more than £1,800 in cash and postal orders, after terrifying the elderly staff who ran the shop.

  The court was told Smith fell into a life of crime after a series of TV appearances ground to a halt.

  The 25-year-old is named in the Guinness Book of Records as the young

  British record holder after blowing a 16 1⁄2-inch bubble in 1983 at the age of 15.

  But by his late teens, he found his fame was drying up.

  Brendan Morris, representing Smith yesterday, told the court how success at an early age had affected him.

  He explained: ‘He had a taste of the high life but no skills to sustain it.’

  Poor fellow. Who can blame him for turning to a life of crime and terrifying little old post-office ladies?

  10

  Sunday is hard outside the Home Office. Excitements include three cups of coffee, a bacon-and-egg sandwich, closing eyes and imagining Spain, rolling up a sleeping bag, rolling up Linda’s sleeping bag, counting signatures, recounting signatures, checking to see if any famous names are among the signatures and finding an actress on EastEnders, eating a lamb samosa from the work-every-day-especially-on-Christmas-then-rack-the-prices-through-the-roof shop round the corner–too bored even to read a magazine.

  I begin to see why bag ladies have bags. When life is this dull, you have to invent purpose. Collecting torn-up newspaper gives you a hobby, provides an anchoring intimacy with your surroundings, keeps the streets clean. Or so you think. Then one day you wake up and realise that it was all a con: what you had thought was an escape from madness was in fact the arrival.

  During the morning people stray off. Often it is just Stuart and me together keeping fort, and Stuart is talking too much again. If words were legs he’d be a billionipede.

  Yap, yap, yap.

  Andria says all ex-junkies are like this. After so much time brainless on heroin, they soil the road with spittle trying to make up for lost time.

  Yap, yap, yap.

  Andria is an ex-junkie. Once, she stormed the stage at the United Nations and berated all the world’s delegates on their inhumane policies towards her fellow ex-junkies.

  Yap, yap, yap.

  Andria talks a lot, too.

  Stuart has decided that Fat Frank Who Never Talks About His Past is a paedophile. He has no grounds for this. It is entirely based on ‘me sixth sense’. Stuart can’t even pronounce the word properly: ‘pede-o-phile’, he says, undoing the diphthong. He’s ‘really worried’ because Mr Frank spent the night in Stuart’s flat the night before we came down to London and might have looked at Stuart’s address book and found telephone numbers. John Brock has children–did Fat Frank get their number? He’s just had his arms around John’s sons, hasn’t he? Ruth has a daughter. Is Fat Frank interested in girls, too?

  Stuart, I say in my roundabout way, calm yourself. He’s smelly, that’s all. There’s obviously also mental health ‘issues’ as workers in the care professions call it when someone’s as loopy as a carousel. But so what? You’ve got heaps of those, too. In the meantime he’s our best petition collector. He’s gathered double the rest of us. A dedicated worker–don’t alienate him. We could do with ten more like him.

  But Stuart’s not to be put off.

  Why did the fucking nonce end up staying at Stuart’s place? That’s what Stuart wants to know. Does Stuart attract kiddy-fiddlers? Is there something about Stuart that makes boybuggerers reach for him? Is Stuart to blame? Is Stuart a Perv Pimp?

  Forget about Fat Frank. Stuart doesn’t need hate figures. Just Stuart dissecting Stuart makes Stuart want to vomit.

  In the afternoon comes the shock. The police contact me through a social worker. They have observed and waited, not wanting to intervene before now unless it is absolutely necessary, but a photo of the sleep-out, published in the Cambridge Evening News, has forced them into action. It is difficult for the social worker to be direct. Let him put it this way: there is someone, a homeless man, who is playing a prominent role in the campaign–do I know him? Yes, a very intelligent, capable, eloquent, but very erratic individual who lives in the vicinity of Cambridge. A character who is highly dangerous. ‘Are we on the same wavelength?’ I must kick him off the campaign immediately.

  ‘Why?’ I demand, outraged.

  ‘Like I say, it’s difficult because of confidentiality…’

  ‘To hell with confidentiality. You’ve got to tell me. This is a democracy, not a fascist state,’ I find myself saying in a Ping-Pongish way. ‘The police can’t just demand that I evict any campaigners they don’t like.’

  ‘If I tell, will you promise not to let it go any further?’

  Fat Frank, it turns out, is not just dodgy, he is number four on the list of Britain’s worst paedophiles.

  The extra shock is that Fat Frank is well known to the homelessness services, and his social worker knew of Fat Frank’s involvement in the campaign long before the sleep-out. But he couldn’t say anything because he has a professional vow to keep his clients’ secrets.

  How tortured is that? Ruth and John are sent to prison for upholding the principle of confidentiality. Yet here, in this case of Fat Frank, concerning the same category of people–i.e., the homeless–social workers are forced by the same principle to put John’s children at risk.

  I do not tell Stuart.

  At around lunchtime I want to cry. Perhaps it is tiredness–although, as I’ve said, I have slept extremely well on the street. Nevertheless, I have a sense that I am losing control. I can imagine that if it goes on like this there will be nothing left of me by Monday. I will not be myself. I will be like the dead, a function of other people’s thoughts. Two days on the concrete trying to run a camp and I’m cracking up. I am sick of my friends. I am especially sick of Stuart. I have lost sight of my enemies. Everything is messy. Nothing is simple. I wish I could simplify the enemies of the success of this campaign like Stuart does. I wish I could gather them under a single heading. I wish I had the quasi-religious spirit of homeless people and conspiracy theorists to believe in the System or the Masons or the FBI.

  Looking up, I catch Stuart watching me. It is still early afternoon. There is a long time and another night yet to go.

  ‘You alright, Alexander?’

  I nod. Is there any point in saying that if I have ever been close to punching him, it has been during the last yapping half-yapping-hour?

  ‘Don’t get stressed, mate,’ he says softly and lifts his Stella. ‘You done alright, Alexander.’

  It is in the evening that Stuart finally ‘loses it’. Walking along Victoria Street with Linda Outreach after dark I see him lurching towards us, pressing campaign stickers on shop windows, telephone boxes, the pavement, and rattling the HSBC bank doors and shouting through the letter box because he thinks there is someone hiding in the building. It might be amusing to watch, but there is a feral quality. A little tipsy myself, I see him as a Robert Louis Stevenson character, trying to escape the good mann
ers and parental neatness of people such as Linda and myself. He is sniffing out an atavistic world, beyond words.

  As he reaches me, his expression changes. Standing himself against a dustbin, he jabs a finger in my direction.

  ‘You fucking, wanky, middle-class cunt-fuck, Alexander, always saying “What’s the answer?” That’s the difference, in’it? No answers! You want to know how I become what I am? Write a book what don’t have no answers. But that won’t make your fucking name, will it? Nah, see? Fuck off. Go find your fucking answers.’

  He gives the dustbin a thwack and then peers unsteadily through one of the rubbish slots. ‘Not here. Stuart Fucking Shorter, ask them, how can he justify his mother lying across his brother to stop him chopping him up with two catering knives? Ask the fucking answers about that!’

  Back at the camp the others leave, muttering things about supper, when they see us approach. Stuart perks up when a police car arrives.

  ‘Tell you what,’ Stuart goads across the pavement at the huge officer who’s rolled down his window to wish us good-night, ‘since you got so much fucking time on your hands, answer this one for me. Ten people on the street beat the fucking crap out of somebody and they’d all get ten years for it, where, in prison, your mates put on shields and riot gear and fucking pour into somebody’s cell and do the same thing, and they’re doing a public service. Explain that. And then they wonder why the person they just beat up so there’s blood all across the walls and screaming what can be heard from one end of the wing to the other doesn’t turn into a nice boy. Do you know what I mean? Do you? Do you? Nah, of course not. You ain’t got the faintest fucking clue, have you?’

  The officer stays in his car, smiling back.

  Never one to shy away from making a bad situation worse, Stuart picks on another topic. ‘You know there are drugs in the hostels in London, don’t you? You know they’re full with drugs, don’t you? Why don’t you fucking arrest the hostel managers then, like they arrested Ruth and John? Give me the fucking answer to that, then, will you?’