‘Hello, I’m Ellen, Stuart’s grandmother. Ninety-three years old: pretty good, aren’t I?’
She is the sort who’d be a boon in a war.
Little Bert is eight years younger. ‘My toy-boy,’ she glows. ‘Where’s our tea?’ Bert starts to roll into the room behind me. He reverses happily, renegotiates the door frame and rumbles off into the kitchen.
‘So, what can you tell me about Stuart’s ancestors?’ I begin, lowering myself to fit on a chair opposite Grandma Ellen.
‘Nothing,’ she snaps.
Aha, then it is just as I suspected: he was brewed in a cauldron.
‘My first memory is from 1912. Before the war, when I was at home with my mother in Buckinghamshire and she was took ill. We had a lavatory at the end of the garden, and I remember running down to it and looking through a hole in the wall, like this. I saw them through the hole coming to pick my mother up, in a cab and horse and they laid her on the back of it. It was the last time I ever saw her.’
Grandad Bert arrives back from the kitchen. He has attached a special tray of tea things to his Zimmer crossbar; they jiggle nervously as he wheels over the carpet strip. In the 1940s and 50s he was the herdsman in the neighbouring fields. Then he packed away his crook and goatskin cassock and became a bread slicer at a local bakery.
But, like Ellen, he can’t say anything about Stuart’s forebears. Bert grew up in a Welsh orphanage. His father was a merchant seaman and killed during the Great War. How? He doesn’t know. Why? He doesn’t know. Did his father die in the water, crossing the seas in a ship full of munitions and bandages, or on land? Bert hasn’t been told.
He pours my tea. ‘Milk?’
The only story Little Bert offers about his mother is that once he got a message from the orphanage that she had died. So he took three days off work and went to Swansea for the funeral, but as he walked up the road towards her house he found his mother lounging in the doorway with a bottle of beer, uproarious at the joke she’d just played on him, giggling at his bunch of flowers.
Stuart’s ancestors belong, it appears, to the forgotten poor. Ellen and Bert were the first generation on his mother’s side to step up from the unwritten classes. Anonymity presses in from all sides. Even to themselves Stuart’s family is almost invisible.
I sip at my tea daintily. Manly glugs seem out of place.
‘Biscuit?’ suggests Bert.
When I look up again, Ellen is watching me. ‘We haven’t seen Stuart in years, you know.’
I do know.
‘Lots of years.’
I nod, moving my head slowly and sympathetically. ‘What’s the point?’ was Stuart’s explanation to me. ‘They’re grand, me nan and grandad, but they’d want to know about what I’ve been doing and what could I tell them? They wouldn’t understand.’
‘His mother says it’s because of the buses. They’re not very convenient for coming out to us.’
‘He says he would love to see you,’ I offer, ‘but life hasn’t been easy for him recently.’
‘I know, I know. That boy has suffered.’
The surfaces of Ellen and Bert’s lounge are covered in photographs: their five children, sixteen grandchildren, twenty-seven great-grandchildren and two great-great-grandchildren. Panoramic shots of Midwest prairie, pleasant and inviting in this hot little room, are along the window ledge above Ellen’s armchair. Their eldest daughter’s American husband is in furniture retail. On the other window Judith, Paul and Karen have pushed forward to raise glasses around Ellen’s head on her ninetieth birthday. Glance up during the adverts in Weakest Link and you can even see Stuart’s rapist: Gavvy–heavy-eyed, hook-nosed–is marrying a buxom lady on top of the television. The mantelpiece basks below a school portrait in an oval mount of a fair, smiling boy: Stuart’s son, the Little ’Un.
The only person missing in this mist of family pride is Stuart.
Bert bends down and struggles with a box in a side cupboard. ‘They’re some of him in here somewhere–just can’t seem to get them out.’
‘It’s because you’re so fat, dear,’ remarks Ellen. Then, turning to me: ‘We used to have wedding photographs of our daughter and Stuart’s dad getting married. But one day Stuart come in and ripped them all to shreds. No, I don’t remember what day it was. Or what set it off.’
Bert’s box, now split across the floor, contains hundreds of snapshots. Stuart with half-long, half-shaven hair and broad shoulders. I don’t recognise him. His sweater has a large hole exposing his bare arm. He is sitting–late teens–with his pretty, dark-haired girlfriend on a sofa, holding the Little ’Un. The second is another schoolboy: plump, shiny-eyed, dogooder smile and fine, light brown hair brushed across his face in a sideways sweep. He looks exactly the same as his son above the mantelpiece; shirt collars out to his elbows.
A third, again from school days, is Ellen’s favourite: Stuart wearing a glaring red sweater with an edge of pyjama top underneath, his hair unbrushed and dishevelled. He looks charming and not to be trusted. The other photographs I recognise as the man I know. Stuart in his late twenties: cropped hair; stubbled, ruminant jaw; shoulders weak, smile gone.
‘And I know why he began to change,’ pronounces Ellen, almost swankily. ‘His brother told me. He came round one night special to let me know. No, can’t tell you.’ She shakes her head playfully. ‘Promised I’d never tell. Three days later he committed suicide.’
After an hour, I get up to go.
‘We’ve met as many famous names as posh people,’ says Ellen as I say goodbye. She is eyeing me from behind her Zimmer again. ‘When I was working as a barmaid, I saw the Prince of Wales there, which I didn’t shake hands with. And I had an Egyptian who used to go shopping with me and I met his cousin, which I did shake hands with, and that was Omar Sharif.’
Bert has also touched the famous. When he was still at the bread-slicing factory, an elegant Indian boy used to come across from the university for temporary work during the holidays and raise Bert’s cut loaves on to the packaging conveyor belt.
‘And he was Rajiv Gandhi,’ Bert reveals as he rolls me to the front door. ‘Ever such a nice lad. He wrote a letter to a friend of mine a while back, which said, “And how is Little Bert?” After all these years! Something wrong with the post over there, though. It arrived six months after they, you know…did him.
‘You never can tell, can you?’ he adds, smiling proudly. ‘Our families were down, then they come up, then up higher, but some come down again, like Stuart.’
The first decade of Stuart’s life is easy to summarise. He does not remember it.
‘I blew it out.’
‘ “Blew it out”? How can you blow your memory out? It’s a faculty, Stuart, something you’re born with, not a candle.’
‘Me mum says it’s a shame.’
I have a bad memory. I used to play a game on the train when I left home for the term to go to my school in Hampshire: I’d try to remember what my parents’ garden looked like. Half an hour before I had been walking through this same garden, carrying my heavy suitcases, but it still took me ten or fifteen minutes to remember.
‘I know the facts, but I don’t got no pictures’ is the way Stuart describes it.
‘How can you not have pictures? Everyone has to have a picture of what they’re thinking about. I mean, if I say “car” it’s because in my mind I have a picture of a thing on wheels.’
‘Did you have pictures of your garden?’
‘No, but that was the point. I couldn’t remember. I was trying to remember.’
‘Exactly. But you knew you had a garden, didn’t you? If I’d turned up and said your mum and dad didn’t have one, you’d have told me to fuck off, wouldn’t you? That’s a fact about it, in’it? That you got one?’
‘Yes, but–’
‘Like I said. No pictures.’
Even recent events escape him, such as the sleep-out.
‘Two years ago? I can’t visually remember the sleep-out. I know wh
at happened.’
‘Can you see the pavement? Do you remember where we were staying?’
‘No.’
‘What about something more dramatic? For example, the time you threw Sophie in the river. Can you picture that?’
‘No. The only thing I know is the river. I know where it happened, but I’ve got no visual memory of it.’
One reason for this forgetfulness, he thinks, is drugs–legal ones.
‘Cos that’s exactly what a lot of the anti-psychotics I’ve had over the years are designed for, to stop you lying there, brooding, going over and over the same things. When I go on a really bad one, start smashing things up, cutting meself, it’s because of all the thoughts that are still there, but there’s no reality to them any more, there’s no visual reality, it’s just feelings within.’
Despite Stuart’s insistence that his ‘memories’ are like a sequence of written facts projected across the back of his skull–and that even these may not be his own–he often talks about previous events as though he were studying a damaged photograph pixel by pixel. Parts of the image are missing entirely. Other parts are so clear that he will go over the smallest irrelevant detail, such as what colour shoes he was wearing or whether he waited ten or fifteen minutes at the pub before throwing the half-full ashtray at the whisky bottles.
Cycling back through Fen Ditton after visiting Stuart’s grandparents, it strikes me how much of Stuart’s life is based on forgetfulness. Is this a way to characterise the chaotic: they are people for whom forgetting has become more important than remembering?
Is this just a trite observation? Of course a chaotic person like Stuart wants to forget. He’s been raped by his brother, raped by his teachers, bullied by school friends, told he’s evil by the social services, spent eight years of his life with his nose stuck in a bag of Fix-a-fix, three more with his veins impaled on the end of a 5p syringe, tattooed FUCK in letters big enough for a road sign down his right arm, and thinks the police are hiding cameras in his kitchen ventilation grate. Who wouldn’t want to forget a life like that?
But as Stuart himself often points out, lots of people have had similar childhoods to his and still turn out decent citizens.
On the other hand, not all people who are chaotic became so after unpleasantness. A few come from extremely wealthy backgrounds, with kind parents, happy childhoods and genteel schooling. They have no apparent reason to be forgetful.
Even Stuart’s ancestors are infected with memory blight. Ellen lost her mother before she knew her; Bert was rejected by his, then rejected her in turn; the paternal side are a bunch of tight-lipped Gypsies who refuse to supply information. And none of them write things down: the father’s side, because they distrust the whole process, the mother’s because they did not know how. It’s hard to think of more ways in which a family can cut itself off from its own history.
It’s pleasing that Stuart is their saviour. There’s more written about Stuart in the papers, social service reports, police records, and recorded on videotape in television archives than about the rest of the family put together.
Stuart’s childhood home is in the centre of Fen Ditton. Number 30 Church Lane: a condemned cottage without running water or mains drainage when he was born. Rupert Brooke sneers at the village in an especially doggerelish verse of ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’:
At Over they fling oaths at one,
And worse than oaths at Trumpington,
And Ditton girls are mean and dirty,
And there’s none in Harston under thirty.
In the 1930s, Stuart’s other grandmother, the Gypsy one, a sharp-witted woman, dressed in a shawl, used to come to this village to sell matches door to door. Grandmother Ellen would bring her a cup of tea but never let her into the house. This Gypsy grandmother had ten children (including Stuart’s father, Rex) and died young, whereupon her husband, a strict old stick who liked to belt his boys and girls, took to his bed and refused to get up again. Two months later he was dead, too. It was Rex whom the other children followed and imitated after that. They admired his contempt, his under-age drinking, his talent for fixing beaten-up old cars and his waddle. They used to march behind him like a line of young geese, imitating his distinctive, lilting walk. Then, after a few years, the boys (not the girls) discovered they could not escape the procession. They began to waddle the muscular dystrophy walk of their own accord.
In the 1960s, Rex strained his atrophying limbs across the fields from Cambridge to chat up Stuart’s mother. He followed the river from the disreputable end of Chesterton Fen Road like Yeats’s ‘Second Coming’, up to the paddock gate by the fourteenth-century church. When the mist buckles off the river in the early morning, Fen Ditton seems to rise from the vapour like a feudal island.
I think about knocking on the door of number 30. It would be interesting to see where Stuart slept. I could stand on the stairs that Stuart’s brother leant over and cracked their dad, the unspeakable bully, across the head with a broom. A great moment.
But I don’t knock. What would I say? ‘My friend, a homeless thief, lived here, and I’m writing a book about him. Do you mind if I come in and spread myself around a bit?’ If it had been Newton’s old home or Bertrand Russell’s or…but Stuart’s? Suddenly conscious that I have just betrayed my friend, I get off my bike to do a drawing as a compromise. Stuart is waiting on the steps of my front door when I get back.
Stuart’s mother carrying Stuart. Gavvy scuffing behind.
‘Your gran wants a visit,’ I tell him, locking up my bike.
He extracts a tobacco pouch from his pocket. ‘Me old nan used to make me laugh, because she used to love a fag, and if she hadn’t a fag, she’d roll tea leaves. Did she tell you much about me as a little ’un?’ he asks politely, but without considerable interest. ‘She’d know. She was old “old” even then.’
He pauses. ‘I’m in court tomorrow. This time for real.’
How does he know that it’s not another bluff? It has been a year since Stuart destroyed his flat and tried to burn himself alive. The magistrate said, because of Stuart’s state of mind, that this matter should be resolved in ‘weeks not months’. Since then, 3 per cent of Stuart’s life has passed while he waits for the case to come to trial. Apart from when we took the train to King’s Lynn together, Stuart has had one other appearance in Crown Court about the case, and that was also a false alarm: the witnesses didn’t show. The Crown Prosecution Service had messed things up, contacted the witnesses too late, or sent the summoning letters to the wrong address. ‘Look on the bright side,’ the judge had said to the jury when he let them go without apology, half an hour in to a wasted day, ‘at least you’ve got the afternoon off. It’s nice and sunny out there. Have a sunbath.’
But Stuart is adamant. ‘I feel it in me bones this is the one. Pray to God it’s not Howarth.’ (‘Cambridge’s answer to hanging Judge Jeffries’–Private Eye.)
Stuart has asked that the judge in his case not be Howarth. Please, Your Honour, not Howarth. No chance of fairness from Howarth. The next morning, Stuart and I go to the court together. It is Howarth.
For some reason I expect drum rolls and banners and flash photography. A man’s life is at stake. A family’s happiness, a little ’un’s paternal influence, our friendship, my future as a writer, Stuart’s role in biographical history–profound matters are up for question today. Perhaps the press have just rushed away for a moment, like the ornithologist who waits through hail and storm, sun and snow, to photograph a rare bird only for it to flash past when he is peeing behind a tree, or campaigners sleeping outside the Home Office hoping for three days and nights to see Jack Straw, and missing him because for five minutes they’d popped off to get radio batteries.
Before we push through the absent press corps and invisible banner-waving crowds, we wander twice around Market Square, saying, in effect, our goodbyes.
In the waiting room, I work myself up into a little rant. The last time I was in this dingy l
obby with empty offices along one wall, which looks like a border crossing into an East European dictatorship, was when Ruth and John had just been jailed. As the sentence was read out, a homeless woman had stood up and clamoured, ‘These people saved my life!’ Then Ruth’s son had shouted loud enough to rattle the cells, ‘You bastard, you fool, you fuckwit!’ Or words to that effect. Whereupon Judge Howarth promptly had him arrested and made to apologise. People said Howarth had been ‘visibly shocked’ at the vehemence of it all. He didn’t know what he’d unleashed. And we’d showed him–got Ruth and John out in seven months. Then ‘The System’ showed us. Two weeks ago the Appeal Court upheld the convictions. A clumsy, terrible, unjust moment in the history of law.
‘Stuart Shorter!’ The usher’s call.
Inside the courtroom, the visitors’ benches are almost empty. There are three reporters on the press seat. The police benches, set off to one side, are nearly full. I recognise a number of faces from the Ruth and John trial.
‘All rise!’ calls the usher, and Howarth-cum-Jeffries enters.
An hour later it is all over.
Howarth has thrown the case out.
He was, he said–we can hardly remember what he said–who cares what he said?–we are dancing!–it is beyond understanding–isn’t the justice system delightful?–what a nice man that Howarth is, what a clever, fine, insightful man!–here, you, yes, you, sitting on the pavement there, here’s a fiver from me and Stu! Take it, go get high! Make sure you get Howarth when they catch you!
Howarth said the case should have been dismissed months ago. He said that the police attempt to add and subtract charges in King’s Lynn so long after the incident was against all good practice, and, in short, that the whole thing was a ragtag of mismanaged nonsense.
Howarth the Understanding! Howarth the poor man’s friend!
I am even a little alarmed.