Alexander Masters - Stuart - A Life Backwards

He still is.

But something remarkable has happened since then: he is not quite so much of a drug-addicted nightmare. No one can understand it. It is highly unusual, suspicious even. All chaotic people have good and bad periods, but Stuart genuinely appears to have turned over a new leaf. He has separated himself from the street community, got himself on to the council housing list, started a methadone programme to get off heroin, renegotiated his court fines and begun paying fortnightly instalments, bought himself a discount computer. None of this is normal. Many of Stuart’s old friends would rather die than take a shower and pay debts, and quite a few do: overdoses, liver or kidney failure or both, hypothermia. Rough sleepers have a life expectancy of forty-two years. They are thirty-five times more likely to commit suicide than the rest of the population. In the great bureaucracy of the police and social support services, everyone is patting their backs at Stuart’s extraordinary return from this medieval existence towards respectability and secretly waiting for him to grab the nearest meat hook and run amok.

Furthermore, not only has Stuart enough undestroyed brain cells left to describe what such a life is like, but he can pinpoint, almost to the hour – between 4 and 5 p.m., one weekday in early summer, when he was twelve – the symbolic moment when he made the change from (in his mother’s words) a ‘real happy-go-lucky little boy’, always ‘the considerate, very considerate’ one of her two children, into the nightmare Clockwork Orange figure of the last two decades. If his own life were not still so disordered, he could make good money explaining to parents what makes children turn into authority-despising delinquents.

‘This is what I don’t like, Alexander,’ observes Stuart, interrupting my thoughts and picking out a page from the dog-eared manuscript that he has now tipped on the floor. ‘Joyriding.’ It concerns his adolescence, when he used to sneak around streets at night smashing the windows of Ford Cortinas. I have opined:

Technically, joyriding does not involve stealing a car, because the person who takes the vehicle doesn’t intend to keep it: he ‘twocs’ it. It’s an acronym that comes from the charge: t aking a vehicle w ithout the o wner’s c onsent. In the Juvenile Joyrider , fn1Jeff Briggs proposes, in addition to theft of a car’s contents, five different categories of car crime: a) ‘twocking for profit’, b) ‘long-term twocking’, c) ‘twocking for the purposes of joyriding’, d) ‘twocking for use in other crimes’ and e) ‘utilitarian twocking’. To date, Stuart has been guilty of c), d) and e).

‘Uty- what ?’ Stuart sucks in his cheeks for a final attempt. ‘“Uty-lity-aryan twocking.” What’s that when it’s at home?’

I cut the passage.

The accompanying flow chart, entitled ‘Dr Kirkpatrick’s Joyrider-Progression Schematic’, he dismisses with: ‘Looks like an Airfix kit.’

He knows about Airfix toy-aeroplane kits: he used to sniff the tubes of glue from them.

‘ Kilpatrick hypothesises that joyriding guides children into delinquency for the sake of interest, then delinquency for the sake of profit, and then adult crime ,’ I see that I have written. ‘ It is one of the conduits of corruption, from innocence to criminality. ’

Stuart does not bother to comment on this one.

‘And another thing …’ he says.

‘Yes?’ I sigh.

‘Do it the other way round. Make it more like a murder mystery. What murdered the boy I was? See? Write it backwards.’

So here it is, my second attempt at the story of Stuart Shorter, thief, hostage taker, psycho and sociopathic street raconteur, my spy on how the British chaotic underclass spend their troubled days at the beginning of the twenty-first century: a man with an important life.

I wish I could have done it more quickly. I wish I could have presented it to Stuart before he stepped in front of the 11.15 London to King’s Lynn train.

‘It was cutting me throat what got me this flat.’

Stuart pushes open the second reinforced door into his corridor, turns off the blasting intercom that honks like a foghorn whenever a visitor presses his front bell, and bumps into his kitchen to sniff the milk. ‘Tea or coffee, Alexander?’

He is a short man, in his early thirties, and props himself against the sink to arch up his head and show me the damage. The scar extends like a squashed worm from beneath the tattoos on one ear to above his Adam’s apple.

The kettle lead is discovered beneath a pack of sodden fish fingers. ‘How about a sarnie? Yes?’

Stuart stretches his hand to the other end of the kitchen, extracts a double pack of discount economy bacon from the fridge and submerges six slices in chip-frying oil. ‘Cooked or incinerated?’

It is a cramped, dank little apartment. One room, ground floor. The window looks across a scrappy patch of grass to a hostel for disturbed women.

‘One of the few times I’ve been happy happy, the day I got this flat,’ Stuart smiles at me. ‘That’s why I want you to write a book. It’s me way of telling the people what it was like down there. I want to thank them what got me out, like Linda and Denis and John and Ruth and Wynn, and me mum, me sister and me dad, well, I call him me dad, but he’s me stepdad, if truth be told.’

The bread starts to burn. Stuart pumps the toaster release and the slices fly high into the air.

‘Cos there’s so much misunderstanding,’ he concludes angrily. ‘It’s killing people. Your fucking nine to fives! Someone needs to tell them! Literally, every day, deaths! Each one of them deaths is somebody’s son or daughter! Somebody needs to tell them, tell them like it is !’

I move into the main room. There is a single bed in the corner, a chest of drawers, a desk – sparse, cheap furniture, bought with the help of a government loan. Also, a comfy chair. I drop into it. It is not comfortable at all. I flop on to the sofa instead. A 1950s veneer side cabinet, with bottles and pill cases on top, is against the inside wall, and in the corner a big-screen TV standing on an Argos antique-style support.

Stuart likes his TV. He has thrown it at the wall twice and it still works.

In return for a crate of Foster’s, Stuart explains from the kitchen, ‘the bloke upstairs has promised to make me a James Bond mattress base that folds up against the wall, which will give me more room. It’ll have big springs on either side what does the moving, and latches on the floor, because otherwise, it’s boing, boing, whoosh.’

‘Boing, boing, whoosh?’

‘Well, a bird’s not going to be too happy if she suddenly finds her face squeezed against the plaster, is she?’

Another friend is going to put up shelves, partition off the kitchen and repaint the walls gold, instead of green on the bottom half, cream above, as they are at the moment, like a mental institution.

The man in the bedsit above is a cyclist – a short, bespectacled Scotsman whose legs hardly touch the pedals; next to him a mute woman who beats out chart tunes on the floor with her shoe heel; and on the other side of the entrance lobby, Sankey, son of an RAF pilot – he sleeps with an aluminium baseball bat beside his bed.

The only problem Stuart has in his desirable new home is mould. It prickles up the bathroom wall and creeps across the ceiling in speckled clumps, so that he has to stand on a chair and scrub it back once a month as though he were stripping paint. Now and then it floats down the hall to his bed side and his clothes; he smells like a garden shed on those days.

‘By the way,’ he calls out, ‘I’m thinking of sticking a reflective sheet over that window. What d’you reckon?’