Stuart (12 page)

14

‘Clothes washers–there's a fucking mystery.'

Stuart peers at his broken wing mirror, glances over his shoulder, and creeps into the slow lane of the triple carriageway–at every sideways movement, flicking on the indicator. Stuart is driving us to Norfolk like a pair of old men.

‘I mean, you put ten socks in the machine, and only seven comes out. Where
do
they go? And I'll tell you another thing, if you take the machine apart they ain't inside it neither.'

This Volkswagen Polo in which we are sitting is one of Stuart's rare legal cars, in that it was
purchased
(from his sister), its transfer
declared
to the DVLA, and the fact that it has alloy wheels does not mean somebody else's motor has been left with its axles balanced on bricks. They, too, have been
bought
. As for the rest: there is no insurance, the tax will be out of date in ten hours and seventeen minutes, Stuart shows a disappointing lack of interest in when the MOT is due, and he does not have a driving licence. Indeed, Stuart cannot have a driving licence. There are already so many penalty points lined up in police stations waiting to be put on the licence the moment the licence comes into existence that, even if such a licence ever were to exist, it would at one and the same time be impossible for it to exist. Only Stuart could manage to give his relationship with vehicle documentation a flavour of quantum mechanics.

But the fact that the acquisition of this vehicle was honourable is, as social workers like to say, ‘a start'.

The inside of the car is nasty. The shelf under the glove compartment has given up. Fiercely coloured wires that look important have disconnected themselves from mysterious spots behind the heater unit. Put your feet on the dashboard to escape them and the cigarette lighter pops out. In the middle of the front seats, slightly advanced from where your bottom rests, there are stains, mostly round–the best one can hope for is that they are spills from lager cans. In the tray around the gearstick are more stains, this time three-dimensional. With hairs in.

Forty minutes into the journey and we have puttered as far as Exning, fifteen miles away. Stuart glances in the broken mirror again. He is just checking, he says, for pursuit cars. He crashes the gears. A punk in a red turbo hatchback harasses our tail, lights flashing, bobbing like a hornet, then zips past and vanishes in a belch of oil. ‘Mad, dangerous bastard,' tut-tuts Stuart.

At Newmarket we slot cosily between a BP oil tanker and a juggernaut full of pigs, and Stuart relaxes. ‘That's another thing about washing machines, right?' he shouts above the thundering din. ‘I was watching this programme. There was this geezer what put three, like, washing-machine
drums
together–you know, just the skinny metal inner bits, not even the concrete or nothing–and said it was a sculpture! And somebody bought it!' The car weaves between the behemoths of doom as he shakes his head in disbelief. ‘It's got me thinking. All I got to do is buy a job lot of clothes washers–probably get them for a fiver each–from the yard in Peterborough. Not being funny, it's what artists want to buy these days.'

He has, he bugles on, found out that the costs to rent a barn as a scrap washing-machine outlet are ‘quite reasonable', and is pleased to observe that security will not be a significant issue (who–except artists, of course–would want to
steal
such stuff?). He knows also that the business must be within five miles of Cambridge (because, although artists ‘often live in fields', they prefer cities), but he has concerns about getting enough car-parking space for the convoys of eager sculptors.

‘That's what really annoys me, you know, Alexander. I'm always having these ideas, ways to make money and that. But I'm always getting told they're wrong. I never get no encouragement. Never no encouragement at all.'

Stuart's mind is turned constantly to jobs these days. His ideas trip from one scheme to another and each one sounds the sort of thing that gets exposed by BBC investigative journalists who will want to shout at him through letter boxes.

‘Why don't you just get an ordinary job?'

I never get a good answer to this question.

When he worked at the recovery firm, he got himself sacked because of the amount he was spending on heroin, but he's off the smack now. When he came out of prison the first time, for taking his son hostage, he didn't buckle down but instead teamed up with Gypsy Smithy and rammed village shops and plotted against post offices.

Why didn't he take his chance to earn an honest crust then? ‘You'd just spent five years in a cage. Didn't it put you off crime at all?'

‘Hated jail,' agrees Stuart. ‘Drove me mad being inside. Locked up like a fucking animal, getting beatings off the screws. But when I got out I needed money to drink.'

‘Why didn't you get a job?'

‘How could I? Always drunk.'

The only other time, as far as I can make out, that he's got near to proper employment was when he was sixteen and was offered a placement at Woolworth's Goods Yard in Cambridge. He lost that before he'd even started because he spent his first day sniffing glue on the other side of town.

‘Nah, that's not rightly fair, I done valeting work for a mate of me brother's.'

‘So? Why aren't you still doing it?'

‘Head-butted the bloke.'

Excellent. Of course you did. Just the thing. Stuart's version of putting your head down and getting on with it, I suppose.

‘It was when me sister was about fourteen, fifteen, and he tried to fiddle with her. So instead of going to work one day I phoned him up to ask him to come round, and as he come in I done a flying head-butt off the top of the stairs, banged his head near enough through the sitting-room window…'

Stuart clashes the gears as we join a line of traffic clogging up Thetford Forest and head up among the twisted Norfolk pines, towards the Brecklands.

‘…blood everywhere, the front door, the window, the floor, everywhere. And then you know, later, aah, I dunno.'

‘You “aah, dunno” what?'

‘Nothing, Alexander. Just…later, when she was eighteen, me sister said she was too scared to say it, because she didn't want me to kill…you know, she was very confused…when me brother killed himself…and she sort of said to me, she says, you know, me sister, she's scared to say it, because of what I'd done to this fella, rather…'

‘You don't have to say anything, Stuart. We can get to it another time.'

‘Yeah, Alexander. Thanks, Alexander.' He settles in behind a tractor. ‘Mind if we give jobs a rest now?'

‘Nah!' exclaims Stuart.

Twenty miles on, we have spotted a roadside sign: ‘CHAINSAW CARVED MUSHROOMS'. Troubles promptly forgotten, Stuart falls to gawping at the road ahead. What could it all be about? ‘As one victim to another,' his body language seems to marvel, ‘what's a mushroom done to deserve that kind of abuse?' Not even in the worst days of street-fighting did he ever experience ill-treatment on this scale.

We pull into a lay-by among the pines to stare at a display of wooden sausages with hats on. They appear to have jumped out of the back of the Volvo Estate parked to one side, and arranged themselves as if for a school photo. Behind them all, a man in a butcher's apron is leaning against a tree, counting through a wedge of notes. What on earth provoked this wizard? How did he discover that what people really wanted along this stretch of road was to pay £45 for two-foot-high fake wooden mushrooms ‘sculpted' by a chainsaw? Stuart and I are drop-jawed with admiration.

‘Fucking nice little number you got going here, mate! Get many cunts falling for it?' Stuart's voice softens and rises a note when he is being polite. ‘Do you know about clothes washers? No? Thank God for that, mate.'

On the other side of the road, in the woods, Stuart notices a Gypsy camp. ‘Did you know Gypsies steal homeless people?'

This makes me laugh so much.

‘Yeah, pinch them off the streets. Force them to work. Make them lay Tarmac.'

Gypsies achieving the impossible: marching befuddled alchies and junkies off to labour. Stuart doesn't know why Gypsies always want Tarmac, but if this camp is representative I can see why. What else is there to park caravans on in a Norfolk forest? And the piles of burnt-out cars such people always like to have nearby–a male Gypsy needs Tarmac to roll them around on, too.

‘Have you ever been stolen?' I ask Stuart.

‘Nah, they want a worker, not a waste of space.'

All these distractions have made me forgetful. I haven't explained why Stuart and I are driving through Norfolk (if you can call this slug speed driving). The purpose is to get out of Cambridge, leave behind the campaign, banish Stuart's miasma of troubles, to go away for a few days to a house in the country.

Secretly, I have also asked a bunch of friends–a writer, a custodian of an academic trust, a Research Fellow in art history, experts in the underprivileged life, all of us–to judge whether this man is really worth a book.

Stuart swears for a full five minutes, in appreciation.

He extricates himself from the car. ‘ 'Enry Eighth! 'Enry Eighth! Think about it. England was a fucking big forest before that. Couldn't see nothing. People bumping into trees all over the shop.'

‘What's that got to do with it?'

He hauls our bags from the boot. ‘These big houses is what used up the wood. And some of the beams I'll bet are fucking big. They're made from boats. Fuck me, that roof's a hundred feet, in'it! You'd need a pint after bunging that much thatch on! Archaeology's the best, in'it?'

Recognising my computer printer wrapped in my duvet, Stuart gingerly picks it up and rests it on the bonnet.

‘Yeah, it's these houses what got rid of the forests. That and the…you know.'

‘No. What? I don't know.'

‘Yeah,
you
know…'

‘No. Not a clue.'

‘Think, what's made out of wood?'

‘Stuart, what are you wittering about?'

‘Nah, Alexander, thought you'd gone to university. Don't they teach you posh cunts nothing? The mushrooms. Fucking wooden mushrooms everywhere in them days. Ouch! No, honest, Alexander! 'Enry, ouch, that hurt! You punch fucking hard. 'Enry, he give one to one of his wives what he was always having, then they all had to fucking have one!'

We push through the gate, bundled up like donkeys with weekend supplies.

‘Hello, James, you're very tall. What's the weather like up there? Alexander was telling me you run an Indian museum,' Stuart mumbles, his mouth muffled by pillows. James is also the linguist who described Stuart's voice for me in Chapter 4. ‘Hello, Reuben, you're an art person. Very interesting.' Then he looks at Reuben closely for a second. ‘You indulge in the substances, don't you?'

‘Hello, Dido.' He has no trouble with the pronunciation of Dido's name. He does not accidentally or humorously call her Dee-do, Fido, Dildo, or Dodo. Stuart is conscientious about names. He believes they are important to a person's self-respect and, to Stuart, there is nothing more important than that.

‘Lovely house you got. Alexander told you I'm an alcoholic, didn't he?'

Stuart likes to say the worst about himself at the first opportunity. ‘I'm a Schedule 1 offender also, and a thief. But I won't cause no trouble. Can I do a tour of the estate?'

In the orchard, Stuart trips and waddles through cow parsley. ‘That's a pear tree? Make cider out of that. And them apples on the ground, put them on a table at the gate with a tin of baked beans. Make a good impression on the neighbours, save them going shopping, apples is heavy. Not a fucking full tin of baked beans, Alexander! Empty, for the money. People are honest in the country.'

As we progress around the garden, the flavour of the place begins to rub off on Stuart.

‘Laurence Olivier played tennis here, did he?' waving an imaginary racket above his head. ‘Really? On this very spot? Love twenty-five!'

‘They like swimming, too, people in the country,' he continues, unstoppable. ‘It's cos the smells what get under the skin need to be washed out. So tell your friend to put a swimming pool there. What's that? A bomb shelter? Make it changing rooms. See, you just gotta think, gotta have your head screwed on. I wasn't delivered with this morning's milk!'

In the stable each brick is worn to scoops between the pointing. There is a line of hay feeders made from an oak plank severed off the side of a tree. The worm has eaten everything but the shape. There is just the apparition of wood.

Stuart agonises up a ladder and gets his legs to the fourth rung so he can pontificate into the hay loft.

‘Holiday lets. Honestly, not being funny, I'll build them meself, for free. You let me stay in this attic for nothing, and pay for the wood and nails. Can't do electrics. My mate Tommy will do that. I'd get housing benefit transferred, so you wouldn't lose out, because I've been wanting to get out of Cambridge and this'd suit me fine. There's loads of government ini-
auau
-tiatives…' he babbles on, his tongue entangled by enthusiasms. ‘And I'd be away from the dealers and the criminal elements which is good because me head's going a bit doolally at the moment. Yeah, something's coming. Don't know when, don't know where.' He tests the beams with his knuckles. ‘You'll need plumbing. You know that? But that's OK, plumbing's easy. Watched me mate Terry at it. Oh…I'm stuck.'