Merrily, Stuart dispatches swathes of the tall grass, and vetch and dandelions, chickweed, fat hen, speedwell, elder, four nicely ripening Gardener’s Delight tomato plants, hoary plantain, fumitory, horsetail, then back to grass. The lawns and meadow haven’t been mown in months. While I lug the cuttings half a mile to the compost heap, he changes direction and slashes across towards the specimen trees. In the nick of time the art historian deflects him towards the giant hogweed. It is about to flower and this, despite their splendid lunar extraordinariness, is a bad thing. Stuart jumps up before he can be told and assaults one.
This afternoon is one of the few times I have seen Stuart unreservedly happy.
‘Lapsang shoe-pong? Ve-rry tasty.’
We are all having tea on the freshly skinned meadow. Stuart pokes his finger in his teacup. It is tepid: it is suitable. He sinks the lot and lies back in the grass.
‘Fucking amazing. A-fucking-One,’ he says lazily. A moment later: ‘I don’t believe she burnt them.’
‘Who? Burnt what?’
‘Princess Margaret. Her legs. It was given out the reason what she was in the wheelchair was because she scalded herself getting in the bath. But how you gonna get in a boiling bath with both feet–take a running jump? Do you know what I think? I reckon she might have tried to torch herself. Another cuppa? Yes please, ta, James.
‘What you reading, Reuben? Hello! So false, false tits is. I like a bit of natural bounce. If they’re going to sag, they’re going to sag. That’s just the way it goes, in’it? See, women haven’t got to impress the men. Women have the one thing that men always want: TLC. A cuddle. That’s the thing a man misses. That physical contact is more important than the sex. Though,’ Stuart adds reflectively, ‘I’m not saying the sex isn’t important, because if a man don’t get rid of it–either by hand shandy or by a quickie, it has to be done–his balls end up on the floor. See, me, I suffer from premature ejaculation meself. As soon as it’s up, it spits. I’m mature enough now to say, well, that’s just the way it is. Is it frustrating? Yeah. And if it’s frustrating for me, think how much more frustrating it must be for the woman.’
In certain slivers of his personality Stuart is profoundly well balanced.
‘Once when I was begging late at night, three girls come up. They had Christmas hats on and shiny stuff. Pink tops. Short skirts. And I’m not lying, they started masturbating in front of me. Truly, lifted up their skirts.’
‘Bet you’d like some of this, wouldn’t you?’ they chanted at him, pushing back their underwear. ‘Yeah, looks good, don’t it? Ooooh! Aaaah! Well, you can’t have it! You can’t have it!’
Then they danced off.
Stuart does not seem to be disturbed by this. ‘Giggling, they was,’ he notes. ‘But some women are fucking vicious cows. Homeless women perticulier give as good as they get. There’s one I come across, a crusty–you know, the smellies who don’t shower and wander from one town to another. This one, if anyone tried it on with her, she’d claw their eyes out. Most women you find on the street aren’t timid, they’ve got their body to use, and they’re hard inside.’
In the evening, we move back inside the house, eat Convict Curry and lounge around the fire. Stuart the Yapper is still going strong. (‘Nah, James, you don’t want to put that log there.’) It is like a scene from Agatha Christie’s Thirteen Problems. Everyone in the living room, cosy, entertained.
(‘Nah, not there, neither.’)
Or a Boccaccio setting, after the population has fled Florence and keeps each other occupied by telling stories.
(‘James, what you like? You gotta stick that branch between them three logs, and those other twigs on top.’)
Except in this case no one but Stuart can get a word in edgeways.
(‘Ooh. It’s gone out.’)
‘And the working classes?’ he gabbles on. ‘That’s the trouble about them. If you come up with anything rather than going and working for somebody, you was never encouraged to go and do it. But to be honest with you, if I’m pissed up and in one of my drunken, don’t-give-a-fuck moods–you know how you get–and someone comes by who talks like they’ve got something stuck up their arse? You know, I say out loud, “Here comes a Nobby Cunt.” ’
‘What! That person was just minding his own business. He didn’t come up to you and say, “You sound like a yob.” ’
‘That’s where you’re all wrong. The middle-upper class never spoke to the kids on the council estate, even though a lot of them went to the same comprehensive school. It was because you didn’t have £50 trousers on, and your fucking shoes might have holes in, they’d just walk by sniggering and laughing.’
In Stuart’s vision of the British class system, everyone from lower-middle class upwards is, at best, furtively upper class. From swells in bowler hats to oiks with two Fords on a herring-bone drive, all are Nobby Cunts. ‘Upper class’ does not mean the highest level of non-aristocracy to Stuart, it refers to an entire social landscape, never quite in focus, of lost and unavailable chances.
‘Yeah. The other day, me and this friend of mine, we were saying, all the people we used to take the piss out of for being nobs and cunts and arse-lickers, the truth of it is, most of them now have got really nice houses, driving really nice cars, and here we are still sitting in a pub being angry and bitter about the class war. Who’s ended up losing out?’
He mentions that lately he has been on TV, which brings up another odd fact about Stuart. He is on public record much more than ordinary citizens. It is true of so many chaotic people: they are far more likely to be given historical permanence than your average taxpaying citizen. Their exploits make headlines, their sleeping habits get annual weepy features in the local paper, they are interviewed for TV whenever the police do a crackdown on anti-social behaviour, their haircuts, tattoos, and facial piercings are photographed for postcards and people doing art-school assignments. By the time Stuart gets to front an eight-minute, nationwide documentary on BBC2 about homelessness and police bungling in Cambridge, he is so blasé with publicity that he almost forgets to mention it.
‘Quite funny, really. Last year, it was. Or was it the year before?’
The programme is called Private Investigations.
‘Stuart, why didn’t you tell me this? Have you got a copy of the programme? I must see it!’
‘Sorry, Alexander, forgot to get a video. It’s only TV. You musta been on TV before…haven’t you?’
And so our evening continues. Stuart’s gasbaggish mood never lets up, leaving us bemused and dazzled and furious and entertained and lectured and with tired ears.
‘You know what you lot want to do?’ yawns Stuart at last, getting ready to go upstairs to bed. ‘Fix this place up. Rip them roses off the front of the house, cos they trap the damp. Turn the sheds into a youth club with them flats I was talking about. Seriously, I’ve got it all planned out–where the mower was, that’d be the disco. You’d earn a packet. Then the ponds. Know what you should do there? Fill ’em in. Then you could make that fieldy bit into a go-kart course and charge a fiver a go. It could be really lovely here.’
‘You fucking ponce, I’ll rip your head off!’
He rushed for the door, kicked aside the table, squashed a window pane as he hit the wall, sliced his finger on a shard of glass.
‘Ring the fucking Old Bill on me, then, Alexander!’ he hollared. ‘The fucking Old Bill know all about me! I’m gonna fucking tear your throat out!’
It was 8 a.m. in the morning. Everybody else asleep.
The bottles of beer and bowls of congealed Convict Curry stacked up by the inglenook–he scattered them across the floor.
‘Think you’re fucking clever, eh? Think you can fucking talk down to me, eh? Eh? Eh?’ He jammed me up against the broom-cupboard door, his fingers digging around my windpipe, squeezing sharply with every ‘eh’: ‘Eh? Eh? Eh?’ He sprayed spittle over my glasses. I tried to take them off. I jerked like a chicken.
‘Fucking stupi
d name, Alex-ander, fucking poncey name, Alex-ander, eh? Eh? Eh?’
Afterwards, I decided what I should have done: I should have reached down and stroked his thigh. That would have shocked the name-snob ponce-hater. Face wide with horror, I then would have jabbed my inkpen in his eyeball and flicked the jelly out. That would have made me happy.
I’m proud of myself for what I said next.
‘Go on, do it,’ I gurgled. ‘Do it, do it, do it.’
‘Eh? Eh? Eh?’
Jerk, jerk, jerk.
‘Hit me, hit me, hit me.’
My memory about the rest of my stay at Fir Grove is in shreds.
Stuart, asleep upstairs throughout the uproar, was woken by silent blue lights flashing across the ceiling of his room and jumped out of bed and locked himself in the wardrobe.
With the arrival of seven policemen, shame set in on me. I wandered about the orchard and paddock at a distance from the officers, hands in pockets, worrying at my foolishness. Why had I tried to imitate Stuart? Who did I think I was? How embarrassing!
‘Right, officer,’ my attacker was vociferating, ‘this fucking ponce…’
‘Now, sir, I don’t think that’s a helpful attitude.’
‘Right. This ponce…’
‘Let’s try and calm down, shall we, sir?’
‘I am fucking calm! He was trying to stop my missus getting the things what’s in this house.’
And why shouldn’t I? The woman was an ex-tenant of Fir Grove who’d refused to pay the rent. She’d also tried to punch her landlady. I wasn’t going to let them drive up and steal back a load of stuff they’d forfeited. All I’d said was the two numbskulls would have to sort the matter out with the owners before they could start grabbing whatever took their fancy. At that point the male of the two subspecies assaulted me.
‘Then you had fisticuffs?’ said the officer, deadpan.
The subhuman jolted forth. He jabbed his finger in my direction. ‘He fucking provoked me!’
‘Provoked you, did he?’ The policeman’s interest perked up. ‘How did he do that?’
The man swelled his shoulders, his neck got thicker. ‘He took his fucking glasses off!’
‘Shut it, sunshine, or we’ll nick you.’
I love the police. I wish we lived in a police state.
‘Lovely visit, that, thank you.’
We are driving back to Cambridge. A lady in a three-wheeler shoots past, then a scooter.
‘Not being funny, allowing for where the house is,’ he muses, ‘you putting a padlock on the gate this morning might be a deterrent to them tenants in your own mind, but your padlock isn’t going to stop nobody. It don’t make no difference to a thief, a professional thief. We’d just climb over the fence…’
‘We’re not talking about professional thieves,’ I snap. I confess, I am slightly wounded that Stuart has not paid more attention to my brawl.
‘No, no! But it won’t stop nobody. They’ll just climb over and walk up.’
‘Of course it won’t stop anybody if they’re determined. The point is to stop them driving in. It’s a small thing, but…’
‘But it’s not. See, that’s the difference between the way you and me think. Anybody who knows anything will tell you all you need is a screwdriver. As quick as it can be done is as quick as I can click my fingers. It’s off.’
‘That is the point, because we’re not talking about thieves. We’re talking about two-bit losers. Just trying to stop them making a nuisance of themselves.’
‘They’re screwing with you again, they’re screwing with you again!’
‘Why? How do you know? You didn’t even meet them.’
‘Exactly! Just because you met somebody, doesn’t mean to say you know anything about them.’
‘No, but you’re one up on the person who hasn’t met them.’
‘They only let you see what they wanted you to see.’
‘OK, what should be done, if not a padlock?’
‘What? Seriously? Change nothing. They ain’t going to do nothing. Stop worrying. But the one thing I would suggest is that maybe them at Fir Grove get a couple of infra-red beams, straight across, and a Chubb lock, like on each door, and the windows: at the back you could put bars. The wires from the detectors? Put them in metal tubes what can’t get short-circuited…’
Isn’t this the most boggling conversation ever heard? But it is echt Stuart. His maddening insistence, his pleasure in technical detail and system even when it leads him completely off the point and convinces you he doesn’t actually understand the subject and he’s just being windy, his concern over false appearances.
Sometimes Stuart seems like an irritable fisherman. He bobs about, on the disruption of his life, a small, unsteady figure, fishing for order. Then he gets into a rage, ‘goes right on one’, and it is as if he’s taken out the gutting knife and mashed his catch to pulp–every sign of hated, repressive, reminding order is gone again. Because order has also been the abiding malevolent force in Stuart’s past–police order, prison order, court order, order in the care homes run by council-sponsored paedophiles: the order of ‘the System’.
This tussle between disorder and order occupies a large part of Stuart’s time.
Plots, for example. He likes plots. The police, he is certain, have teamed up with his girlfriend and the ventilation repairman to record him in compromising conversations. The second room on the first floor of the building opposite contains a drugs squad stake-out. A city councillor who came by to visit last Thursday was really planting heroin. I am not writing a book about him, I am eliciting confessions that will be used to justify locking him up for good the next time he finds himself in court. These little fishes of order make sense of some loose ends. When his fit of paranoia passes, he throws them back and the elucidations disappear again for a while.
Other catches are more helpful–at least, to a biographer.
‘When did you discover violence?’ I ask. Give him a moment to cast about and reel his thoughts back in, and what’s he caught? A great sturgeon of order. The exact day he made the find. He knows the very day, the exact moment, that he went from a ten-year-old to a lawless, grade-one, society-loathing bastard.
15
‘It’s me muscular dystrophy,’ trumpets Stuart. ‘Haven’t I told you about that yet? That’s why I walk funny. Humeroscapu-something muscular dystrophy. It’s a real gobstopper, but I don’t want to look it up. What you don’t know can’t hurt you.’
He is lying in a metal-barred bed, in a small public ward in Addenbrooke’s Hospital, clear disproof of his own defiance.
The three other beds in the ward are taken up by silent ladies in various states of pretend coma, their noses pointing at the ceiling. A nurse is standing next to Stuart’s bed, tapping his drip feed. His pretty half-sister is perched on the other side. As usual–surrounded by women.
‘I only come in because I wanted to get a cuddle and it spits too soon,’ he says, turning to his mother. ‘I thought, maybe it’s cos of me muscular dystrophy. Cos your dick’s a muscle, in’it?’
‘Stuart! Shhh!’
‘Well, no bird’s going to look at me if I can’t keep her happy, is she? Know what I mean?’
‘You are such an embarrassment!’
The outpatients nurse who’d first had to listen to these happy explanations about his useless member hadn’t been particularly interested in the case to begin with. Then she’d taken his blood pressure, screamed, and rushed him to Emergency. The normal heart rate is around seventy beats per minute. Stuart’s sagged in at thirty. By the time his mother had been contacted, the surgeon had already cut two flaps into Stuart’s chest and embedded a set of wires into his thigh. Stuart had come to hospital to cure his premature ejaculation and discovered he’d almost lost his heart.
Not that this seems to have dampened his enthusiasm. ‘Do you want to see me new ticker? It’s in me leg,’ he says with pride. His attitude to his body has never been one of reverence. The wi
res come out above his knee and are attached to an electrical box that emits curiously unreassuring blips, as if each one is considering whether or not to be the last. It is a temporary pacemaker, to keep him alive over the weekend. Now that he is in good hands, there is nothing to fear.
‘Doctor says he can’t understand it. He says I should have been blacking out all the time, which I was sometimes, but no more than I always do.’
Stuart is looking surprisingly respectable. Recently, another friend he’s made on the campaign drove him to Birmingham so that he could get his FUCK tattoo covered up by a thick twining pattern that looks as if it’s been grafted from the neck of a Maori warrior. His usual stubble is shaven off; his T-shirt is remarkably white and washed; his skin is without its normal ghostly pallor.
‘They tried twice to put a proper pacemaker in me tit, but it wouldn’t stick to the veins because of all the citric and smack I’ve injected. They just crumbled. Ironic, in’it? Gotta laugh, haven’t you? Want to see the scar?’
Two of the Silent Ones in the surrounding beds open their eyes.
Stuart’s mother quickly tries to change the subject but ends up making the situation worse. Remembering that Stuart has once before felt chest pains, she muses, ‘But what I can’t remember is, was that during the first or the second time you were in prison?’
‘Second,’ says Stuart immediately. ‘Here, that’s another story for you, Alexander. Funny as fuck. Right, Long Lartin? When I was doing me five-stretch for the post office? I started getting these pains in me chest then, but the screws kept “losing” my request to see the doctor for an ECG. So I had to think of a way to fuck them off so that they’d move me to another prison where I could see a doctor, but not do something what would get me in so much trouble that I’d get another sentence on top. That ruled out the usual, like hitting a screw. I thought about it for fucking ages, then I saw that every day at four o’clock these four screws went into their office to have their tea. Regular as clockwork. You could set your watch by it. That’s what give me the idea. So I got these two buckets and went to where everyone was having their dinner and said as they come out, “If you want to have a shit, shit in that one; if you want to have a piss, piss in that one.” There was enough fucking volunteers! Mixed the two buckets into one, and stuck it next to a radiator for two hours to make it sweat. Ppphwwwwaaawww! And when it was ready, at teatime, I took it to where the screws was just sitting down to have a cuppa. I didn’t say nothing. I didn’t give them time to do nothing, duck or nothing. Just went in and threw the bucket all over them. Just went bosh. One, two, three walls I done, bar the wall I was stood at. It made like a big, fuck-off “O” shape of shit, all round the room. Hit everything. Got all four of them.’