Stuart (26 page)

Stuart complains that he has been driven half to sleep by my awful sentences and lack of dramatic structure, but he hasn't put anything on the manuscript to help with that. It is as though only the labels of his past, not the evocations, can be fixed by writing anything down.

‘His table manners,' noted the headmaster at Elmfield, ‘are poor; throwing food and cutlery around and sometimes spoiling other people's dinner with salt or pepper…He dresses with reasonable care although he will often wear dirty underwear. This also reflects his personal hygiene, outwardly appearing clean but in reality, dirty.' When teachers questioned his disruptiveness, ‘he would show no response and on most occasions would continue with his threatening behaviour. Then if staff felt it necessary to physically restrain him, Stuart would lose his self-control completely and lash out at any person or object near him. It has been noticed on a couple of occasions that Stuart's eyes were actually “rolling” and whenever questioned later his memory of the previous events has been very poor.'

‘I used to go in such a state, just so I didn't feel nothing. Get yourself so fucking psyched out, so you couldn't feel it when they were jumping on you, pinning you down. You just keep struggling, whatever pain or position you're in, you still try and wiggle and get out. I've been tied up in blankets like as a straitjacket, just so they don't have to have so many staff holding me down. The police have come and handcuffed me in Kneesworth House and handcuffed me ankles, hands behind my back, then they used something like bootlace to get the two together, and then they tied a blanket up round me, on me chest, so I couldn't do nothing, then one just sat there and held me head. They always had to hold me head.' His head, he boasts with a toothy smile, ‘is me strongest muscle'.

Stuart's old supporter Keith Laverack was now the principal at the next school, Midfield Assessment Centre. With Laverack came hope. Laverack had the intelligence to treat his pupils and their needs individually. He was the social services' ‘Golden Boy'. Because of his height, the children affectionately nicknamed him the ‘Giraffe'.

‘But not you, eh, Stuart?' I remark, becoming, as I periodically do, rather sated with his misfortunes. ‘You didn't like him any more than any other teacher who had tried to help you, did you?'

Stuart shrugs and remains silent.

‘You know what makes it difficult for me? You don't like spaggy school: understandable. So you get out of it. Your brother was horrendous, so you then demand to be put in a children's home: understandable. What I don't get is that at the same time as wanting these things, you also turned against them and against your mother and your supporters, your parents, the teachers who were good to you. Then, to cap it all, when you are in care you repeatedly run away,
back home, to where your brother was
. Explain that if you can.'

Stuart has no explanation. ‘Running away from institutions may represent a compensation for dependency cravings,' noted Keith Laverack in his thesis, ‘obliquely revealed by the compulsive way absconders seek out further “trouble” and bring about inevitable re-commitment to institutional care.'

Stuart nods. Might be that, he thinks. Sounds a bit glib to Stuart. ‘When you've been brought up in the System it's a very common thing that you're suspicious of everyone and their motives. When people get close, if you've been abused, you often set out just deliberately to wreck that relationship.'

‘Oh, this bloody conspiratorial “System”,' I say, frustrated. ‘Linda, your Outreach Worker, she was part of The System, wasn't she? And you like her, don't you? Denis, he's part of The System, you told me these two people got you off the streets, saved your life. Wynn, your drugs counsellor–another System person.'

‘That's not me point, Alexander.'

‘Me, when I work at the Day Centre or Willow Walk Hostel, I'm part of The System, aren't I?' I pound on. ‘Laverack, he got you out of the school you hated, didn't he? Another System man. Other teachers, I've seen it in the reports, they tried to make life better for you. System men and women, every one. Couldn't you see that? Couldn't you see any of the good? Distrust, yes, I understand, but why all this loathing before you'd even given the people a chance? In fact–no,
wait,
let me finish–your brother, your abuser, is just about the only character in this whole story who wasn't part of The System, isn't that the case? See, you ought to be thankful to The System, don't you think? The System's been the safest place for you. Why not try and be nice about it once in a while?'

A decade and a half after Stuart left Laverack's paternal care, the nationals broke the story:

Keith Laverack was convicted of eleven specimen counts of buggery and four of indecent assault against girls and boys.

His actual offences probably numbered thousands.

The prosecutor compared him to Captain Hook, in
Peter Pan
: ‘He is never more sinister than when he is at his most polite…The courtliness impresses even his victims, even his victims on the high seas, who note that he always says sorry when prodding them along the plank.'

I have now told Stuart many times that he should see the lawyer who has been fighting Cambridge County Council to get compensation for Laverack's victims. This lawyer is someone I know. A courageous, tireless man. He has had three group actions already, secured over a million pounds, and will soon be starting on a fourth.

Stuart shakes his head. He knows one person who gave evidence in a nonce trial to get compensation, and because of the memories he ended up ‘cutting himself to pieces and hanging himself'. Also, Stuart finds it hard to be specific about what happened to him, because most of the time he was high on glue. ‘One particular time, I'd been sniffing in a wood next to the school. Something horrible happened, but I don't know what. I don't know if it was with a member of staff or not. Sometimes when I used to glue-sniff, I used to see all the spunk over the bag, and you weren't sure if you was tripping or if it was real. Used to make me physically sick.' To some extent he holds himself responsible. ‘When I used to get pinned down and they used to touch us up, well, one of the dirty cunts, he used to sit on me, right on me face with his bollocks on top of me gob. It's hard to say it, it's a horrible thing to admit, I made some of the abuse so easy for them because of my behaviour. They could justify bending me up or dragging me off somewhere quiet, to pin me down. Looking back, that's exactly how it feels, is that I created it to the extent that it happened. You've got this young violent little cunt who needs controlling.'

Stuart has, however, read the sneering remarks in certain papers about ‘compensationitis' and how, when claimants start making money, it just brings scum out of the woodwork, making up stories, looking for easy cash. ‘That can be so wrong,' he says quietly. ‘Often, it's only because the victim's seen that other people have got through it, not all of them's hung themselves, that they get the courage to have a go. Them later claimants could be some of the most abused.'

Most of his life, he says, has been spent ‘trying to block my experiences at these schools out. Every day, every day, it's like a big war what I'm always losing.'

The closest I have got to details is this: we were driving around the countryside together one day, and we passed the Midfield School site where Laverack had been his headmaster; Stuart took me down the drive to have a look, and became momentarily confused by the building–a dull, extended, typical piece of nasty council work. It is now used as an old people's home.

‘It's different–something's changed. I can't put my finger on it.'

Incidentally, I asked, ‘How many times did you run away from here?'

‘That's it, that's what's changed, it's only got one floor now. They must have knocked the old structure down and put this one up. I remember now, because I had to tie the sheets together to climb out of my bedroom, because it was on the next floor up. That day was the only time I ever run off twice in one day.'

‘Why twice?'

‘Because the police brought me back from Girton the first time. The police always brought you back here. That was one time it happened. That's why I ran off a second time.'

‘Happened?'

‘You know, in the office, after the police had gone.'

‘What happened?'

In that chilling way that Stuart often manages to capture the essence of a thing, he says: ‘I don't remember the face, only the movement.'

‘Not Royston, Girton' he has written on his copy of the first, rejected manuscript of this book, beside the section on Kneesworth School. I had made another mistake in those pages. It was not from Royston but Girton the police brought him back to perform fellatio and be buggered.

24

‘There's 365 days a year, all the different things what happen. For someone who's got a pea-brain like me, it's hard to keep anything.'

The Forgotten Years: Aged 0–10

‘Going to write a book, are you? Thought so. As soon as I heard your voice, I said to myself, “He's going to write a book about Stuart.” That boy has suffered. He deserves a book. You should write a book about me, too.'

Grandma Ellen and Little Bert live in Fen Ditton, on the edge of Cambridge, in a tiny prefab cube at the end of a line of paving slabs: a bungalow, an outsized sugar lump. ‘Nan's small; she's always been small,' says Stuart. ‘But she knows about me forgotten years.'

Grandma Ellen is sunk in an armchair peeping out over the middle rung of a Zimmer frame that she has parked in front of her. Her face is like a polished string purse. She has got so ancient that she's started to smooth out again.

‘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 what 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.