Stuart (14 page)

‘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 wires 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.'

Three days later, he was allowed to have his ECG. Result: normal.

Stuart's mother gathers her coat and bags, and gives a last comic look at the comatoses, as if to say ‘Poor you–soon it will be night-time and you'll be here on your own with him' promises to come again first thing in the morning, and walks off in the direction of Dermatology.

‘Like I told you before,' Stuart resumes, ‘if you don't actually hit a screw, just do something mad like throw shit at them or chase them around with a lump of wood, it's a good way of getting things done.'

Muscular dystrophy–is that the one that has posters of an attractive female cellist with a strip torn down her back? Or is that spina bifida? Perhaps muscular dystrophy is the one that kills kids, drowning them in their own spit, after a lifetime of twisted wheelchair misery? Or maybe that's multiple sclerosis.

I look it up on the Internet. Muscular dystrophy is wheelchairs and wasted biceps.

There are lots of types. MD is one of those broad medical terms which uses up labels like a new star formation. Limb-Girdle affects the limbs by eating at the muscles of the pelvic and shoulder girdles. Distal begins in the hands and feet and works inwards. Oculopharyngeal, the eyelids and throat. Some of them set in when the person's a child, some when you're as old as sixty. Duchenne's is the nastiest, and the most common. These victims of God's omnipotent love die in agony and terror in their teens.

When Stuart was three, a doctor in the same hospital he's in now had pulled him about like a doll, pinched his fingers, flicked his arms, made him stand up and down as if he were on a baby parade ground, tutted over his weak, side-to-side walk and nodded with approval when Stuart fell over…but got up again more or less like an ordinary human being and not with the Duchenne's weird trick of ‘climbing up his own legs'. ‘If you're going to have muscular dystrophy,' said the doctor, looking up at Stuart's mother with relief, ‘he's got the best sort to have.'

Fascioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy affects the muscles of the face (
fascio
), shoulder blade (
scapulo
), and upper arm (
humeral
). Transmitted through a damaged genetic structure, there is a fifty per cent chance that the offspring, male or female, of an affected parent will inherit the disease, which is why Stuart never wanted to have kids. Some people with FSH, if they treat themselves well and are lucky, can live as long as the rest of us and not notice a single symptom. Stuart's father, Rex Turner, who also had the illness, led a busy schedule throughout his life.

Cambridge Evening News
, Tuesday, 2 January 1973

Jailed man told: Illness no excuse for crime

A detective was forced to leap for safety as a 29-year-old muscular dystrophy victim drove through a police roadblock, Cambridge Crown Court heard yesterday. Rex Turner, who admitted a series of thefts and driving offences, was jailed for four years with a warning from Judge David Wild that his illness was no excuse for preying on his fellow citizens.

The court were told that Turner had appeared in court 31 times before and committed the crimes, thefts and driving offences while on bail for another offence.

Turner's counsel, Mr Frank Keysell, said that parts of Turner's body were wasting away and his anti-social behaviour might have been the result of his realisation that he would only have a short active life.

Stuart has made a bad mistake treating his muscular dystrophy with disrespect. Because of ‘me eccentric lifestyle' it has ceased to be a minor complaint. It has taken offence at being soused in strong lager and illegal substances for the last twenty years. It is starting to look more like the considerably worse Emery-Dreifuss muscular dystrophy. It has started to attack his heart.

Stuart is alone in the ward. The lady patients have vaporised. He is drowsy. For much of the time that I sit here on this second visit he sleeps. When he is awake, we tease each other, or I get him some food, or he tells another prison anecdote, which seem surreally out of place in this sanitised hospital room.

‘I knew a fella at Littlehey who stuck three children on a pike fence. His excuse was that he was out on acid. I used to talk to him, you see, and a lot of people started giving dirty looks. He'd said that he'd killed a child, but it wasn't deliberate. It sounded quite feasible.'

Of course it does, Stuart. Nothing could be more understandable.

‘Then it turns out he's up for sticking three kids on a spike.'

‘All at once?'

‘Same evening. Three children in one night.'

‘Because of acid?'

‘Yeah, but that's no excuse. I've done acid. The only thing with it is, he was one of the best prison artists I've ever seen. He was really gifted with waterpaints. The rough side of hardboard, he used to paint on that. Even though he was a really bad nonce, other people used to pay him £50, which is a lot of money in jail, to do portraits of their loved ones, he was so fucking good at it. He was wicked at art.'

He fiddles with the tube in his arm to admire the injection technique of the nurse, then drifts off. My manly, emotionally embarrassed bonhomie is more than matched by his quizzical detachment. This is interesting, he seems to be saying about his predicament, I wonder if I'll die from it.

In the afternoon, he is transferred to the specialist heart unit at Papworth, a small town outside Cambridge, where he undergoes a third operation.

When I arrive to visit the next day, he is back in his room, propped up in a metal cot, a white bib around his chest, and a doctor, stethoscope strung round his neck like a seamstress's tape measure, is giving him the third degree.

‘Do you understand what the situation is?'

Lisping with humility, Stuart says that he does: ‘Yeff.'

‘Good. What has happened so far is this: the first two tries were not successful. Because of your drug abuse, your veins were too weak to hold the connection. That was why you were brought here. This morning we tried a third time to fit a permanent pacemaker, and because of the difficulty I decided to use a top-of-the-range piece of equipment. Fortunately, we were successful, and you now have £5000 worth of technology embedded in your chest. I want you to look after it.'

‘Fankyou.'

‘If it goes wrong and you have to come back here for me to take it out in six months,' he adds, ‘I can't afford to give you another. I have decided that.'

‘Fankyou.'

‘That means no needles.' He points at the still glisteningly fresh tattoo covering Stuart's right arm where FUCK used to be. ‘No more of those.'

‘No.'

‘No injections.'

‘No.'

‘What do you use?'

‘Meffadone,' mumbles Stuart, ‘what I drink, and Es, and amphetamines…and smack,' he admits. ‘And citric.'

‘Pure?'

‘Yeff.' Part of his new speech impediment is due to the anaesthetic, I tell myself hopefully. This fit of respectability will soon pass.

‘You can't do that any more. You understand? You'll have to stop, and stop today. Not next month, not next week–today. The risk of infection from injections is too high. Even with sterilised needles, you can get diseases pushed through from the skin. If you get an infection in this piece of technology I'll have to have you back here and I'll have to take it out, and, like I said, I won't give you another.'

When it comes to reclaiming Stuart's artificial lifesaver, he is determined not to miss a trick.

‘I know what I'm talking about,' adds the doctor. ‘I took four pacemakers out of your uncle.'

After the doctor has gone, Stuart tells me that the thought of having to stop injecting pleases him. Now that he's been told that his next dose of heroin could kill him, he has the incentive to come off completely. He'll ‘never touch the stuff again'.

I note that Stuart has curiously mistaken what the doctor has said–it is not the heroin that is dangerous, it is Stuart's method of putting it into his body. No one has ruled out smoking or eating the stuff. He can still snort whatever he wants. But I don't say anything. Drugs have almost killed Stuart more times than he can count and if he stops doing them simply because he's too dopey to figure out the doctor's real message, then that is as good a way as any.

‘What did the man mean about your uncle?' I ask.

‘Uncle Nigger?' Stuart perks up.

Uncle Nigger turns out to be Uncle Roddy, who earned his nickname as a child because he fell in a puddle one day and came home covered head to toe in mud. Of all his father's family, Stuart was closest to Uncle Nigger. Uncle Nigger used to give him lectures on how to grow up responsibly, and then go out and get himself nicked for car theft or burglary. Uncle Nigger ended up in a wheelchair because of his muscular dystrophy, and died on his fifth pacemaker.

‘The day I'm like Nigger is Death Day. I'm
not
going to be no
Uncle Nigger
.'

Stuart's wounds, where the surgeon has cut flaps into the flesh of his chest on both sides, are causing him agony, but as a known drug addict, he isn't allowed proper painkillers. Painkillers might be combined with illegal substances, or overdosed, or sold, ground up and injected.