Stuart (11 page)

Drawing by Stuart Shorter

‘Another time, my boyfriend had these two really dodgy characters in the car who got out when we stopped at this town on the way and come back with black bags full of stuff–they were professional shoplifters. They just sat in the prison car park, waiting, while we went in for the visit.

‘Money and puff, we used to take in. Ten- or a five-pound note, fold it up until it's as small as you get, then wrap it really tight in cling film and burn the cling film round it, because Stuart's got to swallow it, hasn't he? That's how he gets it past the screws who rub him down after the visit. You'd take it into the prison however you could. If you've got an onyx ring, that's obviously raised, put it under your ring to get it in, or in your bra. Next, go up to get your Stu a drink from the machine at the other end of the room, then hand over the packet when you come back and give it him. Simple.'

Most smuggling does not go on in the visitors' room. It is done over the perimeter fence, at least in the lower category prisons. Girlfriends, parents, friendly businessmen, strong children–they stand in the fields outside and lob whatever's been requested (usually stuffed inside tennis balls) into the compound. Then the prisoners on gardening duty (known as ‘Wombles') clean up the mess and get it back to the cells.

One Saturday afternoon, a few months before Stuart was due to be released, his name was shouted over the tannoy because his visitor had showed up. Stuart was surprised. It's only with a visiting order that a visitor can come in and Stuart hadn't sent out any visiting orders. No one was allowed to visit him. He had to borrow a pair of decent jeans off a mate because he wasn't prepared. He hadn't an ironed shirt ready nor had he shaved in a week.

He never got to the visiting room. Just before he reached it, an officer guided him through an alternative door into a private area he didn't know existed. To his astonishment his mother and stepfather were sitting there, together with the principal officer of the whole wing.

‘The hard bit to me is that Dad was crying. Dad broke down in tears. First thing I said, is, “Is Marcus and Karen alright?” Me little half-brother and sister. Me dad's really upset.'

His mother said, ‘Nah, they're grand.'

‘Who's died? What's up? Who's ill?'

And his mother said, ‘It's your brother, Gavvy. He's killed himself.'

RECIPE FOR HOOCH

For one person, ‘to get pissed, not drunk'.

‘You ever tried it, Alexander–proper prison hooch? We'll do that some day. Make a bucket and get rat-arsed.'

Mix 1 litre of the water in the bucket with Marmite and sugar, add orange/apple juice for flavouring and potato for starch. Top up with remaining water. Leave, loosely covered, for two weeks. ‘You know, it's not very nice to drink, it gives you gut ache and everything, but it does the damage. It's good stuff.'

METHOD FOR MOONSHINE

‘Distilling? Yeah, you can do that, too. Remember me telling you about Colin? The one who was in a wheelchair and had catheters? I just used to go see him…'

‘It takes a bit of fiddling, but then what you got to do in prison but fiddle?' Set the pressure cooker to 78°C, pack the catheter tube in ice, and arrange so that the vapour passes from the cooker through the tube. ‘Then drink the dribbles what come out. Nah, the screws were horrible to Colin. They wouldn't give him clean catheters so he always had infections and that.'

12

‘There's Old Bill outside the fucking house galore.'

The Unmentionable Crime: Aged 20

The Unmentionable Crime, the crime of Stuart's life, the crime-about-which-he-would-ask-that-the-world-be-forgetful (although, when he does get on to the subject, it is hard to get him to shut up again) occurred four years before the post office robbery: it concerns the Little 'Un.

Sitting here in my study, working on this book for the last four years, growing a little squalid in my habits, feeling I'm finally getting the hang of the man as I reach the last half (by which I mean, of course, the first half) of his life, the table and floor covered in photocopies of articles about prison food, glue-sniffing, joyriding, ram-raiding, suicide, and manuals on drawing, and the thesaurus, the thesaurus, the thesaurus, I am often appalled by Stuart.

The Unmentionable Crime appalls me. His behaviour in prison appalls me.

At this point I get sick of the whole project, wonder why I bother, go off, get drunk, stomp about this study with its flower-covered throws, round carpet, pink fan on the wall, think, ‘There, idiot, another year wasted. Stupid man.'

Then I wake up in the morning and think, ‘Hey, might as well start again.'

I can't hope to justify or explain Stuart, I realise, nursing my headache: just staple him to the page.

Stuart has specific conditions for talking about the Unmentionable Crime. Only in the morning, and only on a Thursday. He wants the afternoon to recover. Thursday is the day after Dole Office Pay Day, so he will still be able to afford £30 for his dealer. As he recovers he will need a hit.

‘It was a fucking charade, me and Sophie.'

Sophie was his girlfriend, mother of the Little 'Un.

‘Because she was so kind, I just kept taking the piss out of her. We'd get in loads of debt, then I'd go and live in a bedsit for a while, glue-sniffing and drinking. Then I'd move back with her and stop the sniffing but carry on drinking. I was in and out, in and out, in and out, in and out.'

Over Christmas, the pair struggled for money. But, ‘to prove her love' for Stuart, Sophie spent £900 on a credit card to buy him a motorbike. It was a Yamaha RS100, with a burgundy gas tank. She insured it, taxed it, bought a crash helmet, ‘the whole lot for us, and within six weeks I'd blown it up and shagged it out, crashed the bollocks out of it. You know, it was fucked. Six weeks, and I'd hammered it into the ground. I was on it like twelve hours a day, racing taxis around the town. Thrashed it to pieces.'

One night, ‘out of me head on glue, I went round this girl's house and she wouldn't let me in, and she was with her boyfriend. I didn't like the boyfriend, so I smashed all the windows in her house, dived through one of the smashed windows, picked a piece of glass up, and threatened to cut meself open with it. She used to glue-sniff with me. Then she'd met this fella and blanked everybody, and I had nowhere to sleep this night. I was sleeping in an old abandoned house, and it was really cold this night, so I gone round hers to sleep and she wouldn't let me in, so I've just gone off me head. And I tried cutting meself. But I didn't press hard enough, did I? Just ended up with a graze around me neck.'

The police shook their heads in disbelief, ‘wrapped their dustbin lids around me head a few times,' and sent him to Norwich County Hospital for a psychiatric report.

At the end of the interview, Sophie asked to speak to the psychiatrist in private, too. She told her that Stuart scared her rigid.

‘I think he's going to try and kill me,' she said. ‘He's frightening me. When he's not living in the bedsits, he walks around the house with knives, and he walks up behind me. I can see the madness in his eyes. I'm really scared, but I don't think he realises what's going on.'

‘What did the psychiatrist say?'

‘She told her to go away and stop being so paranoid,' says Stuart, baffled by other people's irresponsibility.

‘Anyway, one night down at the pub a man says to me, “Oh, didn't you know? Sophie's fucking Graham.” '

When the pub closed, Stuart walked the streets. At around 1 a.m. he returned home and for a few minutes watched television. ‘And there was boxing on. I don't know why, it just wound me up even more.'

Finally, he went upstairs to the bedroom.

Sophie's adulterous, ignorant body lay spread out across the mattress, asleep.

‘So I give her a little nudge, try and kiss her, she says, “Oh leave me alone, you're drunk.” I tried getting really fresh with her and she turned round in the bed and said, “If ya fookin want it you gotta rape me.” Then 'parently, I went downstairs, come up with a kitchen knife, and says something like, “If you don't give me all the fucking money you've got, I'm gonna kill you and everyone in the fucking house.” '

In law, a Schedule 1 offence means many things: it covers kiddy-fiddlers, nonces and other ‘dirty scum fucking cunts', but also any serious crime against children, sexual or otherwise, including ones that appear to the rest of us mild. For example, a sixteen-year-old boy who goes to bed with a fifteen-year-old girl is a Schedule 1 offender.

The police arrived at Stuart's house in convoys, lights pulsing in the midnight, sirens howling. ‘You know, I don't know if I do hear voices in me head or not, but a few months before this happened there was a
Bill
episode on the telly, where a Polish fella holed himself up in his house with a Second World War German Luger gun. There was a big stand-off with the police, and I'd obviously thought a lot about that house siege situation, because I knew what was coming next all the time, you know with negotiators and putting the fear in. I'm not proud of it, but it just all took over.'

For an hour Stuart waved his knife about, shouted at the police to fuck off, then abruptly decided to give himself in. ‘But just as Sophie's gone out before me, the cop grabbed her, so I've kicked the front door shut, run in the kitchen, grabbed another knife, run upstairs, in the bedroom, barricaded meself in the bedroom, lit six fires in the bedroom and stood there inhaling big blooms of smoke.

‘Well, they've come up with all the riot gear, and they've took the top half of the door down, and with the suction of air, it created a flashover, and this big ball of fire, from all the fires, went right down the room, and I went with it. Right into the riot shields.

‘ “Out, out, out, everybody out, out, out!” One of the coppers is whacking the fuck out of me arm.

‘ “We've got him, we've got him, we can't disarm him!”

‘Well, they've disarmed me, they've dragged me out, they threw me head first down the stairs, as quick as I've hit the bottom of the stairs, some cunt, it's felt like he's jumped from the top of the stairs with his riot shield and landed on me, then they've dragged me outside, jumped on me again with the riot shields, punching and kicking me, dragged me in the back of the van, given me a right hiding on the way to the Old Bill station, calling me a bastard, kicking me in the bollocks and in the stomach, stamping up and down on me fucking head.'

Stuart's crime is not abated by the excuses of suspected adultery, quick defeat, disturbed youth, attempted suicide, self-hatred. When the police arrived at Stuart's house, he had done something unspeakable. ‘I'd got the Little 'Un in me arms, and I've still got this knife with me at the time, and I've stood by the window and I've said, “Right, if anyone comes in the fucking house, I'm gonna kill him.” '

As is usual for those involved in Stuart's explosions, the officers received commendations for bravery. Just a few hours before, they'd tucked their children up in bed, sat down with their wives, prayed for a quiet, gentle night. Then this hell-hound had burst on the scene, flinging knives and fire.

Stuart had threatened to kill his own son.

That made him a Schedule 1 offender, and among prisoners words lose the range of meaning that free people give them.

From HMP Grendon to Whitemoor, it indicated one thing: Stuart, nonce-hater, was a nonce.

13

‘I wish I wasn't me.'

Meekness:
Aged 20–24

During this sentence for threatening to kill his son–his first large sentence–Stuart slumped in his cage.

After the beating up in the back of the police van, he was put in a strip cell with nothing except a nylon gown, a thin mattress on the floor with two blankets ‘what were supposed to be unrippable,' and a bucket for excrement.

Stuart shat on the floor.

No one particularly minded.

This was the remand wing of the prison, where juvenile offenders were kept until trial. Stuart could hear inmates shouting out of the windows at night at each other, guitars being played, Radio 1 till three in the morning. Sometimes the clatter of an officer's feet down one of the landings, a crash, cries, swearing, catcalls, then feet being dragged backwards, after which the sounds would gradually pale off again.

Stuart lay down, naked, not on the bed.

‘Remand is when nobody knows what's going on. If you're three up in a cell, one of you might be expecting a probation order in two days' time. Another one might be expecting ten years, fifteen years, so he's really hyper and lairy, cos he's got to do that bird, so he's got to harden up. And you might get someone who could get twelve months. All it takes is for one of you not to get on–someone who winds you up or someone who farts. Punch-ups. Not just someone giving a dig. Suicide.'

His meals in the strip cell came with regularity.

8 o'clock: Porridge, tea.

11.30: Fish, cabbage, mashed potatoes.

17.20: Fish pie, mushy peas, chips.

One time he tried hiding. He pressed himself flat against the wall so that he couldn't be seen through the warden's spyhole in the door, and stayed silent when the watch came by on the half-hour check and shouted out his name. A minute later the spyhole in the roof snapped back. ‘Having fun down there are we, Shorter?'

8 o'clock: Porridge, tea.

11.30: Stew, proper peas, chips.

17.20: Shepherd's pie and swede.

Another time he crawled under the mattress and lay as flat as possible.

8 o'clock: Porridge, tea.

11.30: Sausage, egg, bubble and squeak.

17.20: Sausage hotpot with a potato topping, mash, cut grey beans.

On the third day Stuart saw a six-foot beetle jump out of his shit bucket. On the seventh, two wardens lifted him up from the floor and gently guided him down the corridors to the hospital wing, where the cells were the same but the wardens were called nurses. Stuart's loopiness was now getting out of hand. He was moved again, hallucinating and incapable, to the hospital wing at Glen Parva Prison, near Leicester, and kept under sedation for nine months.

It was at Aylesbury that Stuart began mutilating himself in earnest.

Self-harm is epidemic among prisoners and the homeless and is not just about taking knives to your arms, biting your calves like a battery hen and stubbing cigarettes on your skin. Those are the easy-to-spot tricks. There's a whole continuum of others. Further down the line are the hard-to-spot ones, such as swallowing glass, injecting acid, inserting needles into your groin. After that come the part physical, part tempting fate ones: picking stupid fights, taking huge concoctions of drugs when you don't know what they are, walking too slowly in front of an oncoming vehicle. Then the tricks that provoke disgusted/humiliating/belittling/contemptuous/abusive responses, which may or may not lead to physical pain.

And so on, until you arrive at the other side, among the purely abstract self-harming: the grinding over your failures, the refusal to remember anything good, the determination to ensure–if anyone falls into the mistake of making it clear they actually
like
you–that the next time round they change their opinion pronto. Emotional self-cannibalism, in other words, like those tessellated pictures of a person grappling with a mirror image of himself.

That's the range, from chickens chewing off their legs to Escher drawings.

The point that strikes me most about Stuart's discussions of self-harming is his emphasis on separation. As a child, he says, he learnt how to separate himself from an ordinary mood and enter into a rage. He has also separated himself from his childhood (and many of the other periods of his life) by removing all recollections of pleasure from them. At times when he loses his cool, he says he often separates himself into two people who argue with each other even as he is ranting and raving–one of the people is telling him not to be silly, the other is urging him on. And, as he slices himself open like a chef producing pork crackling, Stuart is able to step back from the agony. ‘Doesn't it hurt?' I ask him. ‘Yes, but at the same time the pain is pleasurable. Not sexually pleasurable, but it's not like ordinary pain. It's like you are separated from it.'

There is also a sense of unity. The physical act displaces the mental pain, says Stuart. It unites everything under one heading. ‘I know someone who used to get a hard-on out of pain. It's not like that. The physical pain is a release. It takes away what's going on up in me head.' Injecting yourself with pure citric acid (used to dissolve street heroin, so he always has lots of it lying around) is for Stuart a way of drowning out or simplifying the mental mess–giving it a physical, tangible focus.

Stuart does not remember the first time he cut himself up at HMP Aylesbury, or even why. His more recent scars form a sort of diary: the blunt pale tissue at the top of his bicep is where, a few years back, he stuck a finger in so he could splash blood at a policeman who was trying to arrest him. The jagged slash on his right forearm (he is left-handed) is four inches long and still fleshy red. The shape of the mark tells him it was either glass or a razor that buckled during the job. That it is so low down his arm indicates an unusually powerful disturbance. Normally he likes his scars higher up, where they are easier to hide. An X-ray at the hospital recently revealed he had a twenty-year-old fracture in his skull caused in the BC (Before Cutting) times, when he used the alternative method of ‘lifting up a table in me maths class and banging it up and down on me nut'.

‘If you took all the clothes off all the people in Cambridge,' declares Stuart, ‘you'd be amazed how many of them had scars underneath.'

When you began at Aylesbury, I ask again, was it anything like the woman I have read about who started one day when she was chopping carrots in the kitchen–and just decided to keep chopping? Did it start as a suicide attempt? Was it ‘a cry for help'?

‘Alexander, I keep saying, No. If you're fucked up in the head there's no explanation. You might think about it one way one minute then two hours later you'll think about it totally different. It's too confusing to even try and put your head around it. Now, can we leave it alone?'

‘Sorry. We'll drop the subject. We'll talk about it some other time.'

‘Don't mean to be rude. But–you know.'

I say that I do know.

‘What implements did you use?' I ask a moment later.

‘Grendon was me cushiest jail. Horrible fucking gaff.'

Stuart liked HMP Grendon at first. A therapeutic institution for mentally distressed prisoners, it is regarded as the most pleasant prison in the country and there is a waiting list for men who want to be transferred there. (Stuart had asked to be considered during one of his rare moments of lucidity while at Aylesbury.) He joined in the group therapy and did his life story. When the session was over, the therapist hurried after him in the prison corridor and said, ‘Don't you see? That explains it all. That's why you've been offending.'

To encourage tolerance and openness, paedophiles, ‘grannybashers,' and ‘straight' convicts are mixed at Grendon. Every session Stuart had to listen to someone spout off about how they had raped old women with kitchen implements or murdered pre-pubescent girls on the Underground, and then whine about the miseries of their childhood.

‘What you read in the paper is about a fifth of it. Some of the descriptions are fucking horrific. Some of the things these women experience are unthinkable.'

Stuart demanded to be returned to an ordinary prison.

The final days of his sentence, when he was in HMP Wayland, Stuart was banging off the walls to get out. It wasn't two months: it was seventy-five days, or 1,800 hours, or 108,000 minutes, or
one-third of a million
times the three seconds it takes to read:

8 o'clock: Jam sandwich, tea.

11.30: Corned beef in soup, peas, potatoes.

17.20: Corned beef shepherd's pie, chips.

And

8 o'clock: Porridge, tea.

11.30: Fish, cabbage, mashed potatoes.

17.20: Fish pie, cut grey beans, chips.

Stuart had seen other prisoners released. Some went mad with joy, cackled, whooped it up, took a billion addresses, made a trillion promises, then forgot to say goodbye. Others fell into terror. A lot overdosed: as soon as out of sight of the prison walls, they celebrated with a hit that would have pushed them close to the edge even in their drug-tolerant pre-prison days. Now it killed them.

A month before he was released, Stuart's father, Rex, died.

In terms of facts alone, I know more about Rex Turner than Stuart does. Stuart estimates that, in total, he was in this man's company for less than three months. An easy-come, easy-go sort of man, after he married Judith and had Gavvy and Stuart, he went–off with a younger woman, and was rarely seen again. ‘He'd had these strokes and it fucking done me head in, because I'd never had a chance to talk to him. I'd only seen the man four or five times in me life and the last time we had this big fistfight. Then me mum was going down seeing him, and at the time I was getting really concerned that my stepfather would leave her, because she was offering to go and look after me real dad because he was so ill. I'd got so much respect for my stepfather by this time because of the way he'd looked after me mum and held the family together through all the problems I'd given them. I really had a lot of time for him.'

But Stuart never stops talking about Rex. As a young child, his father's violence horrified him. As a schoolboy, Stuart wavered between hatred and admiration: one day shouting that everyone could fuck off, he was going to live with his dad, and bumbling out of the school gate in tears; another day conning his grandmother into letting him look through a suitcase full of his parents' wedding photographs, and ripping them to pieces.

‘But he must have had something to him otherwise me mum never would have loved him and had us kids by him,' says Stuart. ‘I think I never loved me dad as much as I do now.'

The last sight he had of Rex was when the prison let Stuart out for the day to visit him in a hospice in Portsmouth. At first Stuart didn't recognise his dad, he was so shrunken and pale, ‘a fucking vegetable'. Still only in his mid-forties, he was chewing on a grape stem because he was too weak to eat the grape.

After the funeral (attended, again, on compassionate day release) Stuart arranged in order of importance all the things he was going to do as soon as he recovered from his 250,000 pints of lager laced with vodka post-release hangover: go straight, become a mechanic, go straight, buy a flat, go straight, have a spliff on the footbridge behind his mum's pub, go straight, make the Little 'Un take an MBA and go to business school.

As his mother drove him away on the day he was let out, Stuart broke a cardinal prison rule: like Lot's wife, he looked back, at the building he'd just left.