a van! It’s lateral thinking, isn’t it? Gets off the plane at Stansted, straight in the back of me van and I drive him to meetings. No time wasted, see? It’ll have everythink, this van. Good-looking bird – one what can do shorthand – fax, Internet, mobile phone. His own office, just for the journey. Wires all over the fucking gaff. Brilliant!’
In the centre of Stuart’s table is a brown folder with his purple handwriting on it:
THEORY DriViNG QueSTiOn’S & PRATCIL HELP
A moment later, Stuart is at the desk himself. He has remembered an important engagement with an Internet-savvy friend, and now has his diary out of its home-made plastic wallet and pressed against the table.
In order to keep track of his newly busy life, Stuart has devised a special colour-coding for this book: green highlighter for family, yellow for social, orange for duty. His handwriting is not excellent. Even when there’s only one word to be got down, he sometimes begins his gigantic letters too far across the line and has to pack the end into a pea-size, as if the letters had bunched up in fright at the thought of dropping off the page. At other times the phrases are neat and slow. His spelling is part phonetic, part cap-doffing guesswork: ‘Monday: ADDanBRocK’s.’ ‘Tuesday: QuiSt going to Vist VoLanteR service’s. ASK for NAME & ADReSS For AwarD organation.’
March: SAT’S LOTTO 5 10 17 20 44 48 7.30 Cam. 2 meeting Bath House if not Brambram.
April: Phone to DR P------. CAnCell if in court. 2OCLOCK go TO ALEXDER’S BooK must go ScriPt PicK 200 100.
May: MuSic FesTervile. STUART LOOK → SET ALRAM. MAKE SURE ALRaM Button is up not Down. When WeaK up is needed.
‘I still don’t know me alphabet,’ he calls out blithely. ‘First place I get stuck is N. I only remember the S, T, U bit because it’s me name, Stu.’
Pages stiff with Tipp-Ex in his diary indicate appointments made too far ahead, subsequently cancelled, because events take place with startling swiftness in Stuart’s life and he can never be certain that, though happy and full of plans on Monday, he won’t be in prison, or in hospital, by Friday.
‘ADDanBRocK’s’ is Addenbrooke’s, the hospital complex of beds, smoke stacks and research departments on the edge of Cambridge; it looks over the wheat fields and the train line to London, like a crematorium. ‘Brambram’ is Babraham, a village three miles outside Cambridge. You’d think he could get at least that one right: he’s been a local boy all his life. ‘When WeaK up is needed’? Who knows what that means. ‘ScriPt PicK 200 100’ refers to his methadone prescription. 100 ml is high. Between 60 and 80 ml is the average for street addicts. 200? In his dreams.
‘ALEXDER’. That’s me. In speech, Stuart is careful to give my name its full four syllables. But in writing, he always drops the third syllable: not Alex, but Alexder.
Stuart’s backwards inspiration has turned out to be excellent. At a swoop, it has solved the major problem of writing a biography of a man who is not famous. Even with a well-known person it can be boring work to spend the first fifty pages reading facts and guesses about Grandpa, Granny, Mum, Dad, subject aged one, two, three, seven, eight. But introduce Stuart to readers as he is now, a fully-fledged gawd-help-us, and he may just grab their interest straight away. By the time they reach his childhood, it is a matter of genuine interest how he turned into the person that he is. So we’ll move backwards, in stages, tacking like a sailboat against the wind. Familiar time flow – out the window. Homogeneous mood of reflectiveness – up in smoke. This way, an air of disruption from the start.
Will it work? Can a person’s history be broken up? Isn’t a life the sum of its pasts? Perhaps Stuart’s approach is possible only with Stuart, whose sense of existence is already broken into fragments.
At long last, the sarnies arrive, drippling marge and ketchup, the top slice of bread moulded into the shape of Stuart’s palm.
Stuart Clive Shorter – the first time I saw him, in 1998, he was pressed in a doorway next to the discount picture-framing shop, round the corner from Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge. He had an oddly twisted way of sitting on his square of cardboard, as if his limbs were half made of rubber. Pasty skin, green bomber jacket, broken gym shoes, hair cropped to the scalp and a week’s worth of stubble; his face, the left side livelier than the right, was almost mongoloid. Several of his teeth were missing; his mouth was a sluice.
I had to get down on my knees to hear him speak.
‘As soon as I get the opportunity I’m going to top meself,’ he whispered.
He picked at the sole of his gym shoes. The tattoos on his hands were home-made. A huge ‘FUCK’ began on his bicep, right arm, and ended just above his cuff.
‘Yeah, I’m gonna top meself and it’s got to seem like someone else done it. Look, if you’re not going to give me money, do you mind moving on?’
The legs of Christmas shoppers and delayed businessmen hurried beside us. Clip, clop, clip, clop – a pair of high heels rushed past, sounding like a horse. It was, it struck me, comforting to be at this level: a two-foot-high world, shared with dogs and children. Adult noises dropped down with the context of the conversation missing and sibilants exaggerated. The smell of street grime, the wind and hot underwear of passers-by, was not unpleasant, rather like salami. Someone stooped and dropped a coin; another person threw across a box of matches. A third declared he would buy a sandwich, but ‘I won’t donate money. You’ll only spend it on drink and drugs.’ Stuart opted for bacon and cheese.
I had to get down on my knees to hear him speak.
On Christmas Eve a beggar can earn £70–120 in Cambridge.
‘But how are you going to make suicide look like murder?’ I asked.
‘I’ll taunt all the drunk fellas coming out the pub until they have to kill me if they want a bit of peace.’ He slurred; it was as if the words had got entangled in his lips. ‘Me brother killed himself in May. I couldn’t put me mum through that again. She wouldn’t mind murder so much.’
‘Gotta have shuume tea! Buncha cunts! I’ll fuuughck-ing do you all in! Gimme me fuuughcking tea!’
Among the odds and ends of jobs I did during that year, after I first met Stuart begging by Sidney Sussex, was part-time fund-raising assistant at Wintercomfort, a rough sleepers’ day centre in Cambridge. My brief was to find benefactors, make trust applications, write the lesser press releases and produce an erratic newsletter. This was not an altruistic job for me: I did it for the money. (£9 an hour, more than I have earned ever since.) I worked in an attic room, out of reach of the beer-sloshing rabble three floors below and, with a bit of luck, if I arrived early enough I could get through the gate, past the art group’s paintings of hallucinogenic mushrooms, and up the stairs to my office without encountering a single one of the ‘clients’.
On this day, however, something was wrong.
‘Fuuuccking tosshhers, open up!’ burbled the blotchy-faced drunk toppled against the front door. His face came attached to a grizzled beard; a finger jabbed at the reinforced glass. ‘What you fuccchking cloasshh-ed
