he disregards. ‘Just go back and get resentenced, won’t I? Do three/four months inside to wipe them off. At the minute, me head’s that off-key, I could actually do with going away for a bit.’
Stuart also has the ex-con’s mathematical knack of immediately calculating release dates. ‘Alright, Ruth got a five,’ he says, dipping his finger in the sauce and licking thoughtfully, ‘but it’s John what I feel really sorry for because he got a four. Anything under four years and you only got to serve half before you automatically get released. If the judge had made it one day shorter – three years, 364 days – John could be out in two years. The extra day is the next bit up. It means he’s only up for parole. He could get the full two-thirds: two years and ten months. Look, Alexander, if you want to do something useful, why don’t you wash up some plates?’
His kitchen is a bombsite. Environmental health should close it down. I am committing an offence by not reporting it. The slats suspected of containing microphones are above the sink. The sink is invisible. Its rough location is marked by a swarm of dishes trying to escape down the plughole. Disgusting.
The purple sauce burps and splatters. Stuart does not like hot food himself. The first time in his life he ever sat in a restaurant was when he and I and another campaigner, Cathy Hembry, went to Leeds to berate Keith Hellawell, the Labour Party’s ‘Drugs Tsar’. Stuart ordered a chicken tikka masala, which, he claimed, pushing the plate away and fanning his mouth, was ‘kuu-aaah, uneatable!’ That night in Leeds, he also stayed at his first ever hotel. Since then he has become an expert on Indian restaurants in Cambridge (non-spicy dishes only).
The purple sauce burps and splatters.
The Convict Curry is served late in the evening. Rich, hot, oily, profound, and infused with powerful flavour when cooked by a master – even if the accompanying rice tastes like builder’s slurry – the cheapo-chicken-shaped Eskimo chins become tender, beautifully moist and pull back reassuringly from the bone.
Stuart picks up his plate and drops himself in his chair in front of the television. ‘There, where’s the remote?’ He takes a bite of mushroom and chews breathily.
The Dukes of Hazzard, Starsky and Hutch, Knight Rider – these are his favourite programmes: anything with muted 1980s colour, an atrocious plotline and car chases.
We watch The A-team for five minutes. Another car crash. George Peppard dropping watermelons from a helicopter on to Bad Guy’s windscreen, which promptly smashes, sending Bad Guy soaring off the side of the road. In the next shot – car mid-air, heading towards disaster – the windscreen is intact again. Stuart bursts out laughing. ‘That’s why I love it. It’s brilliant.’ The car flops into a shallow lake.
‘Let’s go, partner,’ mimics Stuart happily.
A moment later he flicks through the channels again and finds what he really wants. ‘This is the best.’
We settle down to watch a programme about archaeology.
The last bus into Cambridge is the 11.10.
‘We’ll do some book tomorrow, yeah?’ says Stuart. ‘Get to see what your gaff is like, can’t I? Give it the third degree like you just done to mine.’ He pokes out his tongue in concentration and squashes his diary over his knee.
In the dark alley out of the estate on to the main road, I discover that I have forgotten to bring enough cash for the bus driver. Stuart pushes a fiver into my hand.
I protest and shove it back. I know that he’s been saving this money for a visit to a lock-up pub after I’m gone. ‘I can’t take your drink money. I’ll get a taxi and stop at the bank on the way.’
‘No, honestly, Alexander.’ Stuart forces it on me a second time. ‘I’ve had enough. You’ll be doing me a favour to stop me having any more. You’ll be doing society a favour.’
Convict Curry – Recipe
To feed four
7 × economy chicken quarters. (‘There’s always someone what won’t want two.’)
4 × onions.
1 × jar of curry paste, ‘whatever sort they’ve got’.
2 × ‘cheap and cheering’ tins of tomatoes – Aldi, Sainsbury’s or Tesco.
Mushrooms, sweetcorn, ‘anything like that’.
Mixed spice.
Ground cumin.
Fry the onions and the jar of curry paste together ’until you feel satisfied’. Throw in your two tins of tomatoes, mushrooms, sweetcorn and chicken. Rinse out the curry jar and add the water, sprinkle in the mixed spice and cumin, stir, bring to a splattering boil and simmer for two and a half hours.
‘When and how did you become …’
‘This horrible little cunt?’
‘No.’
‘Sorry.’
‘We’ll get to that later.’
‘Sorry.’
I check the tape recorder and discover I have to begin again anyway because I’ve forgotten to release the ‘pause’ button.
‘When and how …’
Again we have to stop. This time my landlord interrupts. Stuart has come to my rooms today and sits, squashed between the arms of my comfy chair, his legs curved and folded like a cross between a cowboy and a grandmother. Landlord stomps up from downstairs and pokes his head around the door.
‘Hullo,’ he says, blankly.
‘Hello. Me name’s Stuart. Pleased to meet you.’
‘Hullo.’
Twice winner of a Mathematics Olympiad Gold Medal, co-author of The Atlas of Finite Groups, my landlord is a generous, mild man, as brilliant as the sun, but a fraction odd. Women have a habit of shrieking when they come upon him unexpectedly, waxen and quiet, standing on the other side of a door. His hair is wild, his trousers, torn. But one of Stuart’s most personable (and most annoying) qualities is his refusal to judge strangers until he knows them, especially if they’re peculiar. Even people who are positively half-witted, open to obvious snap assessments, he will refuse to summarise, suspecting that hidden behind their veneer of idiocy is some pathetic, convoluted tale of grief.
Landlord stomps back downstairs again, tearing at his morning’s post.
I reach out again to the tape recorder.
‘When
