Stuart (15 page)

‘Oi,' Stuart whispers, ‘did you get what I asked you for?'

I nod and fish a bottle out of my bag.

‘Quick, before the nurse comes, empty the water jug. They'll never know the difference.'

Stuart, abruptly energetic, takes the emptied jug back and hurriedly splashes it half full of the new clear fluids. Plymouth Gin: £14.99. Nothing but the best for a delicate patient.

‘Fancy a sip yourself?'

Over the next two months, I see little of Stuart. There is an enormous amount to do on the campaign. Ruth and John's application for an appeal is in July. The committee has newsletters to write, MPs to contact, vigils and protests to organise, press releases, press releases, press releases: Michael Winner has supported the campaign; UNISON is backing the campaign; Alan Bennett (spotted by me, skulking in my neighbourhood bookshop) has signed our petition; Joan Baez is advertising the campaign on her American tour; Victoria Wood and Simon Hughes MP have taken a stand outside Number 10; one of our main antagonists, a city councillor in Norwich, needs to be deflated, which means a press release to reveal that this gentleman once smashed up five police cars with an axe during a drugs raid in Norwich. Another, a sniping, thorn-in-the-side Cambridge councillor, has made loopy hints that the campaign is sending her death threats. A photograph of a gathering of people that includes her has been put through her letter box, she says, and her head is ringed. On the back, the words ‘You're Dead'. She is telling people that because of the drugs Wintercomfort should be closed down. But I am becoming meaner at this game of local-politics brawling. I have learnt that the best way to defend your morally noble cause is to get nasty fast. Head-butt him while he's still rolling up his cuffs, so to speak. I contact
Private Eye
. A piece appears in ‘Rotten Boroughs' noting that the councillor is on the advisory board of a hostel for the homeless in another part of Cambridge in which nine people have died of drug overdoses in the last year and a half. At a supper party some weeks later a council official whispers congratulations in my ear. She has, he says, lost an appointment to head the city's housing committee, because of ‘bad publicity'.

Stuart, worried by his own disruptions, drops away. He should be joining in. But he's gone, vanished.

July comes.

The week of the 11th arrives.

The day of the hearing finally dawns.

The campaign committee–fifteen of us–drive down to London three hours too early, spend the dawn rubbing our hands around hot cups of coffee and sticking posters to the railings, then wade
en masse
into Court 5, where three amiable judges chat for two hours, Michael Mansfield QC mumbles rotundly through his arguments, the prosecution pats a few counter-arguments back, and Ruth and John are pronounced

Seven months after disappearing into a small hole in a provincial crown court to start five and four years in prison, our old friends re-emerge back to their families' embrace, under the neo-Gothic portico of the Royal Courts of Justice, arms aloft, laughing faces lit by flashbulbs.

Daily Telegraph
, 12 July 2000

Charity Pair are freed to appeal over heroin case

After 207 days in prison, two charity workers were freed on bail yesterday pending a full appeal against their landmark conviction for permitting drug dealing at a homeless day hostel…On the steps of the High Court in London, more than 50 supporters, who have campaigned for their release for seven months, cheered as Wyner and Brock appeared with their families clutching bunches of flowers.

Wyner, a mother of two, who was the director of the Wintercomfort charity in Cambridge, said: ‘I am looking forward to spending some precious time with my children and some private time with my husband. Now I just want to go home and have a decent cup of coffee.'

Brock, who suffered a breakdown in jail and is being treated for depression, clutched his wife and sons, Lloyd, 16, and Dylan, 11, outside court. ‘I am just very glad to be back with my family,' he said. ‘The opportunity to be with them might be brief and so at the moment it's a cautious celebration'…His wife, Louise, 39, who has decorated their home in Cambridgeshire with yellow ribbons, added: ‘I just want to take him home.'

Ruth comes out, overtly at least, as she went in: defiant, self-controlled, calculating how best to survive the next step of the fight. Within a few weeks she is writing up her prison diaries for publication and has started working for a prison reform charity. Her determination is a source of awe. Knock her down with a breaker's ball, squash her flat with a ten-ton steamroller, and still she stands up and carries on walking.

John, a more normal human being, is destroyed. Emptied of direction, desolate in his impotence, he goes back home and sinks out of view.

‘How do you feel?' he is asked by a respectable woman at the first post-celebration campaign meeting.

‘Like I want to kill a certain person,' he retorts. ‘You know who I mean.'

We all nod, although there are at least four candidates who come to mind. But that's not the point. What matters is the wholesomeness of this response. Good for John, we are saying to ourselves–honesty, truthfulness. He's reached Step One on the Road to Recovery.

‘Then I'll go out and piss on his corpse,' he adds.

The lady bristles. John's wife is abruptly alarmed. ‘You don't mean it like that, really.'

‘That is exactly how I mean it.'

The subject is quickly changed to the unexpected cost of a recent minibus bill.

Even in the hellfire of unrequited justice there is expected to be propriety.

I browse through Stuart's diary during these remote weeks. ‘FACIO scapulo humeral muscular DyStRophy' is now spelt correctly. ‘STUART LOOK SET ALRAM. MAKE SURE ALRaM Button is up not Down. When WeaK up is needed.' I can understand this entry now. It means not that he is too weak to manage the ‘alarm' button, but that when the disease is ‘on a bad 'un' and feels like it is stripping the muscle from his bones, a twenty-minute bus journey into town–to fetch his methadone prescription or attend a job-training course–can exhaust him so much that he has to sleep for twenty-four hours when he gets home. The moments of weakness are, understandably, more common than usual these days. He is another rung down towards what he calls ‘Death Day'–the day when he can no longer make it from his front door to the bus stop in the centre of his village without the help of a wheelchair. On that day, he insists, he will screw up his body for one last flowering of strength and (with the help of a crate of Stella) cripple his enemies, so that it is they who end up in the wheelchairs–so that they may spend the rest of their lives ‘knowing what suffering is about, like they made me suffer'–and then kill himself.

In one sense, suicide is always reminding itself to Stuart: the scars on his neck from failed shots at it, the watchfulness with which doctors hand him his necessary pills, the memories of his brother's suicide during Stuart's second prison sentence, the longing for an apocalyptic revenge against his unnamed ‘enemies' that would leave him no option but to dispense with himself immediately after.

In another sense, suicide pops out at him by surprise, like a jack-in-the-box. He is almost as startled by it as his friends are. With Jack-in-the-Box Suicide, if I have understood Stuart properly, he is suddenly overwhelmed by a desire to die
now,
this
instant,
and by any method to hand. Or it might be the other way round, with equal unexpectedness: he realises that an opportunity has suddenly presented itself and rushes to take advantage. No time for hesitation. No time for a note. Got to get it done before some grave-saver spots what he's up to. He is too excited, has too little time, to plan this properly. Result: a failure. Every time, a failure. Every time so far, at least. In Suicide Land, Stuart has no more self-control than he has here.

That is why it is wrong to assume that a failed bid is, as the nauseating cliché will have it, only ‘a cry for help'. It could be–is usually in Stuart's case–just the opposite. Its failure is the result of too great a desperation to get the job done.

The latest attempt occurred several weeks ago, using a weekend's worth of heroin. It wasn't a ten-minute decision. Not even thirty seconds. Just a snap of the fingers. ‘Here's the spoonful of molten smack and citric. Let's have a good time,' he thinks to himself. ‘No, let's kill myself with an overdose instead.' Thump. In it goes.

He doesn't remember the reason–there was no specific reason. Just an unbearable sense of hatred and waste. But because Stuart didn't know what he was about to do, he didn't use a syringe with a large enough capacity to kill him on the first injection, so he had to fill up again. By the time that was done, the heroin he'd already taken had long ago made him unsteady and he couldn't find the original vein. All the others in his arms and legs had also disappeared. He ripped off his shoes and socks and stabbed between the tendons on his feet to find another entry point, wasted half the vial, realised he had only a few seconds of consciousness left, twisted round and emptied everything that remained into his right buttock. He was out cold for twenty-four hours.

Other attempts appear as scars, weals, parentheses in conversation, absent days in his diary. But, at the same time, according to Stuart's weird sense of etiquette on such subjects, only one son in a family is allowed to kill himself, else it puts too much strain on the parents, and his brother, Gavvy, like Jacob in the Old Testament, has stolen Stuart's birthright. That's why, when I first met him begging outside Sidney Sussex College, he was planning to get himself punched and kicked into non-existence by taunting drunks from the pub.

‘Aah, suicide–it's a difficult subject. Do you mind if we give it a rest now?'

All this interpretation gives me a slight thrill. Beneath the mould in the bathroom of his flat, the melamine sideboards, the fussing with welfare payments, the tedious addiction to drugs and alcohol, Stuart is a biblical character. His symbolic sense of justice, the expressions of hatred, his carelessness with life and longing for calm–cut out the ‘fucks', add a few ‘thous,' and he belongs in the Sinai Desert.

16

Despite his poor handwriting, Stuart is generally tidy in his diary, which allows for further exegesis. June begins well. He has arranged a home visit from his social worker, plans to sign up for disability living allowance, books in with his doctor for a drug detox programme. Then, Friday the 9th, the entry above: ‘Phone KAyT 1 yer To Day She nerly DieD on me.'

The weekend is empty. Monday's a mess. Stuart's attention has clearly gone. The coloured highlighting vanishes. He doodles:

He dozes off:

(Which translates as: ‘8 p.m., go to CB2 café for a campaign meeting. Get there early.' He did neither.)

Temporarily he revives:

Then he collapses altogether:

The recollection of this business with Kayt has cast a strange, fading rhythm over Stuart's days. He is like a man falling asleep on the bus. The next month, triumphant for so many of the campaigning people around him, is blank.

In August, he reawakens: the highlighters are back–yellow for health, green for social, orange for duty.

And:

‘K-A-Y-T, she spelt it,' explains Stuart, weighing up my room with a single glance to confirm that I have not got up to any decorating silliness while he's been away. ‘I told you about that already, remember?' He pushes back the brown cover on my armchair and heavily flops down. ‘She was the one I cut me throat over, what got me me flat. I first met her in Hospital Town after I put meself on the streets the second time, because she'd had to have her stomach pumped.'

Of course she did, Stuart. You wouldn't want to meet a nice, stable, ordinary girl, would you, now?

‘This wouldn't have been around May, by any chance?'

‘Yes. How'd you guess?'

May is the anniversary of Stuart's brother's suicide, and it has set up a sort of periodicity in his life. His sense of disturbance is at peak amplitude; it is just the time when he is inclined to be pounded on the head by furious memories, to ‘kick off', ‘be not too clever', and find himself in hospital meeting unsuitable women. I have noticed this, or been told about it, with a number of chaotic people. The ones who end up on the streets following a major, well-defined disaster–their wife left them, their mother died, their business collapsed, their brother took an overdose (it is always a death of some sort)–acquire a new pattern in their lives, a sort of fundamental harmonic. As the anniversary of the event comes close they get agitated, swing off course, ingest rock-star quantities of narcotics, slurp enough beer to fill a football stadium, and soon all sorts of things are going wrong–smashings, bashings, evictions, convictions, vibrating from one mood to the other, maximally displaced. Then, after a couple of weeks, the annual peak passes into middle distance and once more there are moments of calm. The lesser harmonics reappear: the weekly disruptions around pay day at the dole office, the more or less bimonthly fussing of housing benefit, occasional affairs, breakdowns of relationships. The odd arrest.

‘So, like I was saying, I'd met this Kayt, and fallen bang in love with her. But, like, three times on that night I'd have to get her to promise me before I let her go that she wasn't going to kill herself. At the time I was trying to get it together so much myself, I was just doing the meth, not using the smack or nothing, and I had just got me flat.'

‘Your current flat?'

‘No–how could it be me current flat? I haven't cut me throat yet, have I?'

‘Silly me. OK. Go on.'

‘It's no use you asking questions before I've got to where the answers is kept. This were just after I come off the streets. I decided I couldn't handle it no more, I've gone to the council, explained to them I was disabled and apparently, because I had muscular dystrophy, it was detrimental to my health to be homeless for four months.'

The council, obliged to house him, found Stuart a bedsit just around the corner from the hospital.

‘So, me and Kayt never had a sexual thing, only the odd kiss and cuddle, and we had a few little disagreements, where I wouldn't see her because it was doing me head in, I was so in love with her. Then we had a little argument at Strawberry Fair [an outdoor music festival in Cambridge that Stuart ranks high in the list of the glories of the year], and I said I'd never speak to her again and that, then I went and wrote her a letter and said I was sorry. This perticliar night someone's turned up and she's gone off with him. I was in me flat and, at the time, I believed that I'd brought the Devil into that flat because I'd painted the walls burgundy, and I had black-painted wood. Black for the blackness, and red for the blood, the Devil's colours. I believed it so much at the time, I was having conversations with meself about it. So I got pissed off with just being in the black and red there, gone back down the pub and sat drinking and talking to a friend of hers, saying how I was bang in love with her, and she's come in and says, “Come on,” she says, “Come on,” so we went back to mine. And I'd bought a bottle of vodka before I went to the pub, and I drunk a quarter of it, so there was three-quarters a bottle of vodka.'

Back at his flat, Stuart and Kayt drank the rest of the vodka, took methadone and sleeping pills, ‘which I knew she was scripted for. I had just me boxer shorts on, you know, and we lay on the bed.'

The next morning Kayt didn't wake up.

‘I'd set the alarm, but when I woke up all the lights were flashing on me clock, so we'd had a power cut. I didn't think much of it. I looked at Kayt, asleep there, and I just thought, ah well, she's fucked from a heavy night, and I sort of dozed off cuddling her again. I don't know how long later, because like I said the clock was all in bits, I woke up and I've shook her and I couldn't wake her. I've slapped her round the face, and couldn't wake her. I've picked her up and she's felt like you'd expect a dead person to in your arms. I've slapped her round the face again, I've tried finding a pulse, I've put me cheek to her mouth and when I pulled her eyelids back, her eyes were rolling in the back of her head. So I just laid there cuddling up to her. I don't know how long, an hour, two hours, I don't know how long. Then she just started making a really funny noise, like hhhhuuuunnn, hhhuuuunnn.' The sound Stuart makes causes him to bare his teeth and strain his neck.

The last sight Stuart had of Kayt was when the emergency services turned up in the early afternoon. There was only one ambulance man, ‘but she must have been half conscious, because whenever he tried to open her mouth, she kept trying to bite his fingers, because she was having trouble breathing'.

At the hospital, her parents refused to allow Stuart in the room to see their daughter. They said the sound of his voice made them want to be sick. ‘I didn't know what state she was in, but everybody's telling me what happened, they weren't
asking
me, they was telling me, and what they were telling me weren't fucking right at all.

‘I should have phoned the ambulance when she started making that funny noise, I know that now. But I didn't, I phoned me mother, told me mother what had happened, but my money run out in the phone.'