Stuart (3 page)

The purple sauce burps and splatters. Stuart does not like hot food himself. The first time in his life he ever sat in a restaurant was when he and I and another campaigner, Cathy Hembry, went to Leeds to berate Keith Hellawell, the Labour Party's ‘Drugs Tsar'. Stuart ordered a chicken tikka masala, which, he claimed, pushing the plate away and fanning his mouth, was ‘kuu-aaah, un
eat
able!' That night in Leeds, he also stayed at his first ever hotel. Since then he has become an expert on Indian restaurants in Cambridge (non-spicy dishes only).

The purple sauce burps and splatters.

The Convict Curry is served late in the evening. Rich, hot, oily, profound, and infused with powerful flavour when cooked by a master–even if the accompanying rice tastes like builder's slurry–the cheapo-chicken-shaped Eskimo chins become tender, beautifully moist and pull back reassuringly from the bone.

Stuart picks up his plate and drops himself in his chair in front of the television. ‘There, where's the remote?' He takes a bite of mushroom and chews breathily.

The Dukes of Hazzard, Starsky and Hutch, Knight Rider
–these are his favourite programmes: anything with muted 1980s colour, an atrocious plotline and car chases.

We watch
The A-team
for five minutes. Another car crash. George Peppard dropping watermelons from a helicopter onto Bad Guy's windscreen, which promptly smashes, sending Bad Guy soaring off the side of the road. In the next shot–car midair, heading towards disaster–the windscreen is intact again. Stuart bursts out laughing. ‘That's why I love it. It's brilliant.' The car flops into a shallow lake.

‘Let's go, partner,' mimics Stuart happily.

A moment later he flicks through the channels again and finds what he really wants. ‘This is the best.'

We settle down to watch a programme about archaeology.

The last bus into Cambridge is the 11.10.

‘We'll do some book tomorrow, yeah?' says Stuart. ‘Get to see what your gaff is like, can't I? Give it the third degree like you just done to mine.' He pokes out his tongue in concentration and squashes his diary over his knee.

In the dark alley out of the estate on to the main road, I discover that I have forgotten to bring enough cash for the bus driver. Stuart pushes a fiver into my hand.

I protest and shove it back. I know that he's been saving this money for a visit to a lock-up pub after I'm gone. ‘I can't take your drink money. I'll get a taxi and stop at the bank on the way.'

‘No, honestly, Alexander.' Stuart forces it on me a second time. ‘I've had enough. You'll be doing me a favour to stop me having any more. You'll be doing society a favour.'

Convict Curry–Recipe

Fry the onions and the jar of curry paste together ‘until you feel satisfied'. Throw in your two tins of tomatoes, mushrooms, sweetcorn, and chicken. Rinse out the curry jar and add the water, sprinkle in the mixed spice and cumin, stir, bring to a splattering boil, and simmer for two and a half hours.

4

‘When and how did you become…'

‘This horrible little cunt?'

‘No.'

‘Sorry.'

‘We'll get to that later.'

‘Sorry.'

I check the tape recorder and discover I have to begin again anyway because I've forgotten to release the ‘pause' button.

‘When and how…'

Again we have to stop. This time my landlord interrupts. Stuart has come to my rooms today and sits, squashed between the arms of my comfy chair, his legs curved and folded like a cross between a cowboy and a grandmother. Landlord stomps up from downstairs and pokes his head around the door.

‘Hullo,' he says, blankly.

‘Hello. Me name's Stuart. Pleased to meet you.'

‘Hullo.'

Twice winner of a Mathematics Olympiad Gold Medal, coauthor of
The Atlas of Finite Groups,
my landlord is a generous, mild man, as brilliant as the sun, but a fraction odd. Women have a habit of shrieking when they come upon him unexpectedly, waxen and quiet, standing on the other side of a door. His hair is wild, his trousers, torn. But one of Stuart's most personable (and most annoying) qualities is his refusal to judge strangers until he knows them, especially if they're peculiar. Even people who are positively half-witted, open to obvious snap assessments, he will refuse to summarise, suspecting that hidden behind their veneer of idiocy is some pathetic, convoluted tale of grief.

Landlord stomps back downstairs again, tearing at his morning's post.

I reach out again to the tape recorder.

‘When and how…'

‘You ain't got a hot drink, have you, Alexander?'

Unwilling to leave Stuart alone in my room, I dash up to the kitchen, suppressing frustration. ‘Thank you,' he calls. ‘Four sugars with tea or coffee, please, don't matter which.'

‘Thank you,' he shouts again when I yell down to find out if he wants milk.

Although Stuart and I have met dozens of times now, this is his first visit to my house and I am worried. His wild life and humorous criminal anecdotes suddenly seem a little alarming. Perhaps he cannot help himself. Perhaps even now he is squeezing all my possessions into his enormous pockets. At his mother's pub–in the village where he grew up, on the other side of Cambridge–Stuart says the women ‘blatantly' hide their handbags when he comes into the lounge bar.

‘Which I don't understand,' he likes to observe. ‘I don't do bag-snatching. Don't approve of it.'

What about wall decorations–does he ‘do' them? My beautifully framed and glazed pink ostrich feather fan? Or the floral teacups on top of the piano? The Volterol (50 mg) in the bathroom medicine cabinet?

I hurl slop out of mugs, plunge for a spoon in the washing-up bowl, swoop through cupboards in search of tea bags, and dart back down the stairs splashing hot water on the carpet.

‘Thank you,' he says a third time as I step into the room again.

There is no evidence that he has moved. Nothing appears disturbed. The only noticeable change is the brown blanket that has slipped off the back of the chair and fallen over his ear. A ponderous length of ash drops off his roll-up.

‘These books,' he says, nodding at the shelves above my desk. ‘Have you read them all?'

‘No.'

‘Half?'

‘Not exactly.'

He notes with surprise one on the floor near his chair: ‘
The Hunting Wasp
–a whole book just about them little summer things?'

Leaning forward, he picks out another. ‘This one,
Mauve
: what's that about?'

‘The colour mauve.'

Stuart slowly shakes his head as he sits back again. ‘How'd he fucking get away with it?'

‘Right, ready? Right, you done? You're doing me head in with that machine, Alexander. What's that first question again, then?'

‘When and how did you become…' I begin.

But yet again there is a delay. How difficult can it be to get started on a person's life? Stuart has accidentally knocked the microphone off its perch. I replace it on his knee.

‘And you're sure that red light means it's working?' he checks. ‘Cos I know what you're like, Alexander, with technology. It shouldn't be green?'

‘Stuart, it's a tape recorder, not a traffic light.'

‘Just checking. No offence. Bit nervous, I think. Me fucking life, you know. By the way, I've been thinking of a title.
On the Edge of Madness
. What do you think?'

‘I think it stinks.'

‘Right.'

James Cormick, a linguist friend of mine, describes Stuart's voice as ‘a light tenor with a slightly “old” timbre that makes him sound in some way tired or prematurely aged'. Ironically, the weakness in his voice is his strength as a speaker, which is why he does so well on our talks together. He is not a bully boy bragging about his exploits. He comes across as a bit of a weakling–a flimsy article, in fact, if you were to hear him only on tape–who has somehow survived, scoring points by timing and intelligence rather than noise. ‘He can describe things with absolute brutality,' says Denis Hayes, the second of the two homelessness workers who most helped Stuart to get off the streets. ‘No matter how appalling whatever it was, he has this deadpan delivery. It's disconcerting because the words coming out from this gently spoken person need Peter Cushing to be reading it. It is completely the wrong voice.'

I rewind the tape a fraction and replay a few seconds:

‘…Bit nervous, I think. Me fucking life, you know…'

Stuart says ‘fucking' frequently, but rarely plain ‘fuck' or ‘what the fuck' or ‘fuck that'. Sex is ‘a shag', not ‘a fuck'. ‘Cunt', his only other swear word, is also never used sexually. A ‘cunt' can be a nasty or an ordinary person, or a thing, such as a toilet brush. There's usually no aggression in these terms and they are not there because he's too stupid to think of a more appropriate one. ‘Fucking' and ‘cunt' are just part of the flicker of his speech.

In this excerpt he's talking about what happens when he gets ‘rageous':

You know, we're not talking kitchen knives, we're talking, like, fuck-off-cunt knives. So, like, obviously me stepdad's a bit fearful. He's a big fella but he's not getting any younger. With ten years he would have fucking thrown me all over the gaff. Now the family don't know who's going to get hurt, or whether I'm going to end up getting locked up, or is me mother going to end up losing her husband? How do they deal with it? It's hard on them, because this fucking cunt gets scary. It can get scary for the person who does it, because there's no control. It's not until sometimes months afterwards that you can sort of really reflect and see it for what it was, because you're living in this different world at the time when it happens, because your head's not like on a normal cloud.

Stuart's vowels often turn into diphthongs, as if he has pressed the sound out against the roof and walls of his mouth: not ‘of', but ‘
u
-uhv'; ‘you know' becomes ‘you knah-ow'.

‘Oh, noooo, is that what I sound like? Oh, fucking…Don't ever do that to me.' He winces, shakes his head as if caught by a bitter taste, laughs.

‘Right, again.'

‘When and how did you become homeless?'

Stuart checks his tea by dabbing his finger in it, then sinks half the mug.

‘Well, each time is different, Alexander…'

5

‘Homelessness–it's not about not having a home. It's about something being seriously fucking wrong.'

2 Laurel Lane: Aged 29

‘I
put
meself on the streets this last time,' Stuart says firmly. ‘29 years of age. Just come out of prison: robbery, a post office. Done four and a half years out of the five-stretch because I'd been a bit of a bad boy, got this day job at a vehicle recovery company. It was legal, did a lot of police work, but you couldn't help learn a few useful bits and pieces. Like, an XR3i? A Ford XR3i? At the yard, I learnt all you had to do was get the screwdriver, take the two screws out gently from the side indicator, take out the plastic bit, take the light bulb out, get a piece of tinfoil, put it in, put the light bulb back in, shake the car to set the alarm, and it'd fuse it. End of alarm. I really did actually find me job interesting.

‘Slide-sticking–that's another one. Sliding a stick down the window to pop the lock? Well, the AA and the RAC had a memo out at that time because in America someone had locked their keys in and they'd put the stick in and the door had a side impact bag. The bag went off and the stick shot up and killed the bloke. Went under his chin and right into his brain. That's why I liked it there. There was always something different. Never got bored.

‘Trouble was, money. Too much of it. It's a funny thing about money, in't it? A lot of people, it's not being skint what gets you, it's having your pockets too full. Where, when I had money, I'd come home from work and wouldn't go get a shower some nights. I'd just sit there Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, drinking. I started to get a bit lairy, agitated on drink. But on the Friday I'd go to Huntingdon and smoke smack. Literally, within three months, a £70 a day habit. A gram a day!'

‘Why?' I ask, irritated by the speed at which Stuart's life is turning to waste.

‘Well, that's what the book is about, in't it?'

‘It's going to be that miserable?'

‘Nah, that's the point: heroin isn't miserable, not at first. It makes you feel good. It don't matter if you got lots of troubles or no troubles, it takes them all away. All you people think is nasty, dirty needles because of the adverts, which I think is fucking wrong and dangerous because when you're on the smack, at the start, you don't feel like a dirty, nasty, scummy person so you know the adverts are lying. You feel happy. You like everyone. It's peaceful. Like that feeling you get when you wake up in the morning, feeling really, really tired, and know you don't have to get up.'

‘But–'

‘Alexander, if we're going to get on, you'll have to learn to stop interrupting. Anyway, like I says–the machine still on?–right, the drink and the drugs were ruling my life. So I started having to go out and thieve at weekends to pay for it. Opportunistic. If I was walking along the street and saw a car with a briefcase in or a laptop, I'd pop the window. Then use the money for drugs, not riches, if you know what I mean. Or I'd take special orders. If someone wanted a new pair of wheels, I'd take them off the scrap heap from work. Not if I knew the boss needed them–of course not. Stuff he was throwing away anyway. Lights, indicators, mirrors, handles. Down the pub. Here you are, mate. Nice one. Off to Huntingdon. Spend the money what I'd got to pay for the habit what was so large because of the money I'd got. Fucking stupid! Fucking Stupid: it is me middle name!'

Stuart plunges his hands into his pockets and takes his annoyance out on a pouch of Old Holborn–biff, biff, tumble, squash–then rubs a worm of tobacco into a Rizla.

‘If I was a bank I'd have been liquidated years ago.'

Stuart's whole attitude to gaspers could suggest a disdain for my carpet if I didn't know him better. Once lit, not only does he let the burning end go untapped until there is half an inch of ash quivering in the draught, but when it does fall he ignores ashtrays: he tries to catch the powder in his hand. This process continues until the butt has become smaller than a splinter, then he stubs his fag out in the ash pile he is holding, flips his palm and rubs everything that he hasn't dropped onto my floor into his trousers.

‘Then one day I'd had enough. So I did what a lot of people who end up on the streets do. I fucked it up–deliberate. Told the manager to stuff the job, stole a packet of money off me mum, took the bus into town and, like I told you, put meself on the streets.'

Recently released prisoners often end up sleeping rough. Institutionalised, broke, addicted to drugs and hated by their old friends–after a month or two of free life under these conditions, giving up your house and responsibilities to sit on the pavement with a bunch of like-minded ex-burglars doesn't look so bad.

Stuart's case was slightly different: his family was supportive; his friends were not disloyal; he was able to get a good job even though he'd just been in for a violent offence and his prison behaviour had been diabolical.

So, ‘Why mess it up?'

‘I don't know, Alexander, sometimes it gets so bad you can't think of nothing better to do than make it worse.'

‘Two old boys called Scouser Tom and Asterix, in the park behind the bus station, them's the first ones I got talking to when I got off the bus.'

‘No one on the bus?'

‘Wasn't in the mood for talking on the bus, was I? That was the old world still, weren't it?'

‘How did you meet Tom and Asterix, then?'

‘They were just sitting there.'

‘What were your first words?'

‘Can't remember.'

‘What sort of thing?'

‘Haven't a clue. What's it matter?'

A great deal, I think to myself in frustration. The moment of transition is one of the great mysteries of homelessness. At what point does a person change from being inside his house to being outside all houses? When does he go from being one of us to one of them? I can imagine being desperate; I can see being up against the wall, bills dropping through the letter box, wife in bed with the bailiff, bottles piling up on the kitchen floor, closing my own door behind me, walking down the hill with my bag, getting on the bus–what I can't see is the point at which I think to myself, ‘Bother! Homeless!' and genuinely believe it. Do I look in a panic through my wallet as the bus pulls out of the station (no credit cards, no chequebook), beat my pockets (no keys, no addresses, no letter from parents with gruesome invitation to return to the room I used to have as a boy), and wonder how I'm going to work up the nerve to start begging? Then suddenly it hits me: Jesus Christ! No bed! No home!

Caitlin Thomas–in the last words of her autobiography, after Dylan's death in New York–says she could make out only two phrases in the sound of the train wheels banging over the rails as she travelled back to Wales: ‘No Dylan, no home, no Dylan, no home, no Dylan, no home.' Is this what real homelessness is like? Not just a particular set of roof and walls gone, but a sense of the death of companionship? Is this why outreach workers say it is so important to catch new homeless people within a few weeks of ending up on the streets, maximum, because otherwise they will start to build up a new sense of belonging, to the street community, because they are human and must have companionship, and thereafter it is a hundred times harder to get them back where they started, among the rest of us?

A third possibility: it is a gradual disillusionment. The homeless person is playing at the start. It is almost fun to sleep rough. He is like the waiter in Sartre's
Words
: acting the role of waiter–a waiter in bad faith–until one day he looks around and finds all his friends are rough sleepers, the girl he fancies is a rough sleeper, the things he looks forward to doing each evening are rough-sleeper things, like getting plastered on Tennant's Super behind the Zion Baptist Church; his whole community, no longer with any irony, is made up of rough sleepers, and now, at last, he is among them.

For a person like me, who knows I would never let myself get into this stupid, degrading situation, it is hard to find a good metaphor for this moment of transition. That is why every word of the opening conversation with Asterix and Scouser Tom matters.

‘So you just saw these two people,' I try again, ‘and said, “Hello, I'm Stuart, I'm homeless,” and started a conversation?'

‘No, of course not–I didn't say “I'm Stuart, I'm homeless,” did I? Why would I do that? I'd known them two cunts for years.'

They sat together behind the bus shelter and drank for three days.

Stuart's night address was 2 Laurel Lane, Christ's Pieces. Set in three acres of mature park, with
en suite
toilets, six tennis courts and a bowling green, he slept soundly. When he woke, he crawled out, covered in old cigarette boxes and polystyrene cups, and bought coffee and a slab of shortbread from the gazebo stall. Christ's Pieces is the public green at the back of Christ's College. Number 2 is the second shrub from the left–the one with the biggest cavity in the middle. Stuart did not brush his teeth. He did not wash. Between beers with Asterix and Tom he puffed away at the heroin he'd bought with the money he'd stolen from his mother. It made Stuart laugh that the police walked by thinking that all he had was an ordinary roll-up.

On his fourth day in the park he met Smudger, a man with a home, and moved on to his floor. Smudger had himself been living on the streets a week earlier. This new tenancy of his was move-on accommodation, provided by the city council, which sets aside a handful of properties every year to be handed out to the homeless. Smudger had a lot of friends: they hurried off the streets to congratulate him on his good luck; drank his coffee; brewed up his tea; stole his chewy muesli bars, tinfoil, spoons, matches; then jacked up on the floor and got bored.

To liven up the evening they went on the rampage (Stuart not included, he insists) and barricaded an eighty-year-old neighbour into her flat with flowerpots.

Another man living in the same block of flats got all his windows shot out with an ‘Uzi'. The bullets made a curve on the opposite wall, like this:

Smudger was evicted for non-payment of rent and having atrocious friends.

‘But that's just life's story, in't it? Everybody expected everything for nothing not realising that he had bills to pay.'

Stuart moved back into the open. To keep costs down, he started injecting heroin instead of smoking it. ‘I almost overdosed, the buzz was that strong. And I thought, “Ah brilliant, I've cut me habit from seventy quid to a tenner a day.” A month later I was doing £70 a day in me arm.'

‘Can we leave it at that?' says Stuart.

‘What? Stop recording? But we've only been doing it half an hour.'

Stuart shuffles in my armchair. ‘Got a busy day,' he complains.

I reach out to click off the tape recorder, think twice, and sit back. ‘OK, but five more minutes. Let's just recap. You were in prison, yes?'

‘That's right, for–'

‘We'll get to that, that's for later. Then you came out, messed up your life for six months, and ended up on the streets?'

‘Exactly, like I just explained it all. I was thirty at the time, and I stayed on the streets from June until December.'

‘Which is just after I first saw you, round the corner from Sainsbury's, correct?'

He nods in exasperation and starts struggling with his puffy jacket.

Busy? What's a benefit bum like him got to do?

‘Look, I'll tell you what's bothering me. Why didn't you just go straight to one of the homeless agencies and get yourself booked into a hostel? They could have got you on a job programme, into a shared house, or in a private tenancy and arranged to sort out your deposit. That's why these hostels cost so much, because the money is used to fund twenty-four-hour support staff: they're there, specially employed by what you please to call the System, to help you. In other words, you didn't have to live outside in parks. If you did, it was because you insisted on it. Why?'

For a moment Stuart looks at me as if I am beyond hope. His shoulders slump in disbelief. ‘Nah, Alexander, keep your tape recorder on. You fucking nine-to-fives believe everything you read in the bloody newspaper or watch on the telly, when the reality of it is so fucking different, it's unreal.'

Show a tiny element of responsibility, don't assault anyone or openly take drugs, and the staff at Wintercomfort Day Centre will connect you to the outreach team, who will get you into a hostel, usually an English Churches Housing property. Willow Walk hostel for rough sleepers, or Willow Walk's big sister, 222 Victoria Road, are the ones. They have small private rooms with settled accommodation. At 222, there are seventy-four beds. A Dantesque institution with an innocuous pale brick façade not far from where I live, I pass by it on my way to the local supermarket. Occasionally there are ambulances or a police car outside: somebody has overdosed, been beaten up, been beating someone else up, or smashed the window of a nearby off-licence and come stumbling back with an armful of chilled beers. It is run by a friend of mine, a conscientious, highly intelligent, imaginative woman who, with her staff, performs something of a miracle to keep this place going every day.