to the back of a car and dragging him down the road,’ growls Stuart. It is three weeks after Stuart’s visit to my rooms when we began recording his life. We are walking along the verge of the A10, outside Cambridge, kicking our way through the flowering coltsfoot, towards the Emmaus Homeless Project, which runs a furniture shop. ‘Tying him up on a lump of wood like the Japs did, burying him up to his neck in a pool of slurry, and then dragging him up and splitting him, cutting him slightly in places and putting him in so he all got infected and died a painful death. Or just sit there playing darts with him. Slow and suffer. I just wanted him to know what fucking suffering was about.’
Stuart wants a display cabinet. It is to go alongside the Boing, Boing, Whoosh bed. It is for his stereo, his Teach Yourself Driving books and his bong. The air blast of a passing pallet lorry makes his legs sway.
Stuart leans out into the A10 and eyes the traffic.
Another HGV appears round the corner half a mile away and Stuart steps quickly back.
‘Something’s coming – I can feel it. It’s not all gone.’
‘What’s not all gone?’
‘The anger and bitter twistedness. I’m not finished. I’m going to be not very clever again. Somebody’s going to get hurt, that’s what scares me.’
‘When is this going to happen? In a week?’ The juggernaut thunders past. ‘In the next ten seconds?’ I add, humorously.
‘Don’t know when this thing will come, Alexander,’ says Stuart, stopping again and looking up and down the road. ‘It’s me black mist. It will come.’
‘Who is this man you want to torture?’
‘He knows. I let him know. I’ve phoned him up a couple of times since I got out of jail, telling him that his time was coming. I’ve let him know. But anyone can do it over the phone. And then one night before I become homeless it got to the stage where me head was telling me I had to go, his time was now, and I’ve gone to his house and kicked his door in.’
There was nobody there.
Next, Stuart tried the bedroom door, and it was locked. So he kicked that in, too.
‘And there was this girl in there screaming. So I’ve left her, gone round and there’s another door upstairs locked and I just kept head-butting it and punching it until it just fell away, I went through the middle of it, and nobody was in there. I’ve gone in another room and I’m undoing wardrobes and fucking punching them as I’m undoing them, and I seen this other woman, weeping on the floor, so I picked her up, let her know that I ain’t coming to hurt her, but she’s seen it as threatening and she’s run off. So I’ve gone out his front door there and that’s when I seen all the police. And there he was, sitting on one of their cars. “Ha, ha, you didn’t get me, didya?”
‘He’s laughed at me! Then he’s run off down into his garden, shouting to the two coppers with the dog, “He’s got a knife, he’s got a knife, he’s got a knife!” So they set the dog on me, and the dog took the arm clean off my jacket and bit me straight through the arm, even though I didn’t have no knife. And the coppers jumped on me, and I started saying to them “What you doing protecting a fucking kiddy-fiddler? What are you doing defending a fucking child molester scum cunt nonce?”
‘So, like I say, the boss got a right arsehole with me for going and getting meself involved with the police, cos he’d given me a chance and he has police work. He was unhappy about it.’
‘You surprise me.’
Stuart shrugs. ‘Up until two years ago, I used to mentally burn out before I’d physically burn out. So if I went on one, I’d mentally burn out and then there’d be a right lull. All the anger would be gone and I’d be physically fucking knackered. Where …’ Stuart pauses. He often begins sentences with this word, ‘Where’, as if literally lifting the thought out from a back room in his brain, like a box, and placing it in front of the listener. ‘Where, in the last two years there’s been so many curious instances, back to back, that I think it is because I don’t peak. I physically get exhausted before I do mentally.’
He gives the road in front of us another suspicious up-and-down glance, then indicates a collection of pitched roofs beyond a line of bushes on the other side of the road: Emmaus, the homeless community. It is half a mile from the nearest village, cut off from the rest of human habitation like an Amish settlement.
A Fiesta appears far away, heading from Cambridge – and God’s Gift to Road Safety waits for that to pass too.
Then we cross in a hurry. ‘Fucking maniacs,’ he says.
Set up in Paris in 1949 by a French cleric, Abbé Pierre, the Emmaus communities put homeless people to work repairing and selling cheap household goods in return for an income so small that the wind blows it away before they can clench their fingers on it. Drink is banned. Any hint of drug taking: immediate eviction. The idea has so much right with it that is wrong with hostels: it makes the homeless work to regain their ‘self-respect’; it takes them out of the street community that’s holding them down; it breaks the cycle of dependency on the welfare state, and because it works them on slave wages they can’t afford to splash out on a three-week sherry binge even when they do manage to escape back to the city on their one free day a week. ‘Like a detox programme for being homeless,’ grumbles Stuart.
‘Through here, Alexander.’ We duck into a hedge gap, down a little ditch, another hole and finally into a farm courtyard.
An ancient urchin with a face like sucked parchment lifts his screwdriver hand to Stuart, grins, and goes back to staring at the bedside cabinet slumped between his legs.
From another direction, beside a tractor, a black beard nods at us.
‘Watcher, Alan!’ Stuart calls.
‘Stuart,’ it returns.
The twenty men and women who live here are happy. The work they do is important. Further up the road they have allotments and greenhouses and keep chickens.
The dens of Emmaus are ordered in mountain ranges. One big room is filled with cabinets and tables and squishy chairs; two smaller ones with Hoovers, fans and sound systems; a side den full of music; then there is a book room, a knick-knack lobby and a cafeteria with a little toothless man sitting outside looking up donated LPs in a book of record values the size of a six-pack.
‘Why aren’t there Emmauses in every town?’ I quiz. Stuart looks around theatrically, shrugs, then plunges among the vaults of junk on the other side of the main entrance. ‘Isn’t the answer obvious?’ his gesture has said. ‘Because homeless people don’t all want to spend their time mending cheap furniture with Olde English doorknobs for £35 a week. They don’t fancy living with two dozen ex-alcoholics and failed bankers five miles away from the nearest pretty girls. Excellent for some, the regime might be. For others it reminds them of prison or Eton.’
Stuart soon discovers something he likes. A glossy ‘ebony’ display case with leaded windows and a dainty writing surface to pound your head against in disgust. ‘That’s good that.’ He pats one of the glossy shelves. ‘Lovely bit of workmanship.’ The price is on a cardboard star stuck to one of the leaded windows. ‘Sixty-five quid? Now that’s value!’
People sometimes ask me if I am ever frightened of Stuart. Never, not for a second, not in the smallest way. Why not? I don’t know.
