Stuart: A Life Backwards. Alexander Masters

On Tuesdays and Thursdays she ran the soup kitchen in the market square. This service is gone now, but in the late 1990s it was not only a charitable provider of food and hot drinks to rough sleepers, it was the best way to learn street gossip.

      That evening, after the soup kitchen was locked away, Linda met up with her work colleague, Denis Hayes, an ex-film cameraman, and went to seek out Psycho.

      For outreach workers, the best way down to Level D is by the car ramps, because it brings each floor gradually into view – allows them to assess the situation slowly and not to pounce in on it through small yellow stairway doors at one end.

      ‘I always think if I wanted to do a film again, the scene that night would be the opening shot,’ remembers Denis. ‘I’ll never forget that image. It was, like, coooold. Me and Linda go right down until we get to the last bit, Level D, and that would be how I’d start. Coming down the ramp from Level C above, panning slowly across this eerie, vast space. Empty car park. Left to right: not a car, not a car, not a car, nothing, nothing, and then … Psycho!

      ‘What he reminded me of was an IRA hunger striker. Skeletal, in his cell, all his things around him. He was like that man in Birdie, crouched on the end of his bed. Nobody could make him up to look how he did at that moment. Angry as hell. Hated me. Hated Linda. Hated everything from the fucking dust upwards.’

      Psycho!

       8

      Stuart says it is a ‘blinding’ idea.

      He is in my study again, standing by the piano, swiping the air with his arm in excitement. He and I and half a dozen street homeless smackheads and drinkers will sleep rough on the concrete pavement outside the Home Office, corner the Home Secretary when he arrives for work on Monday morning and force him to release Ruth and John. That’s Stuart’s inspiration.

      Always the first to discourage unnecessary illegality, Stuart points out that we will have to warn the police about what we are going to do, but not tell them until after 4 p.m. on the previous day, ‘because that way the courts will be shut and it’ll be too late to get an injunction what can stop us. Then there’s the security cameras.’

      I look quizzical.

      ‘All over. And that’s not counting the ones you can’t see,’ he adds darkly.

      ‘It’s better than that nutter Brandon’s idea, in’it?’ Stuart enthuses. Professor David Brandon is the ex-director of another charity for the homeless; it was his suggestion that he and half a dozen other homelessness workers present themselves to the police and demand to be arrested. If Ruth and John are guilty of ‘knowingly allowing’ drugs in their day centre, then they are all guilty of it, since other homeless charities are run according to the same rules. I disagree with Stuart. I think that is a gem of a stunt, too.

      ‘Fucking stupid. Asking to get arrested! Then who’s going to get him out? Expect his missus will be wanting a go next.’

      ‘But that’s the whole trick, isn’t it? They can’t put him in prison too. He’s known all around the country – there’d be an outcry. Cambridge Police Gone Mad!’

      Stuart shakes his head, his mood suddenly dampened. ‘Fella goes to the Old Bill and asks to be banged up, and they don’t do it? Don’t make sense.’

      I return to typing the campaign newsletter.

      ‘All of us in fucking nick and no one fucking left to get us out. Just a load more work all round, that’s what I think,’ Stuart rumbles on. ‘See, you got all your nine-to-fives saying what drugs is about and they don’t know the first fucking thing. Like piss-testing prisoners. Everybody thought that was a good idea cos drugs leave traces in your urine, so with piss-testing you couldn’t get away with it any more. More tests, less drugs. Right? Wrong. It’s because of them tests that there’s a heroin epidemic in prison. Why? Because the drug of choice used to be cannabis, but cannabis lasts up to three weeks in your system, so if the screws do the random tests at weekends, like they do, you’ve got three chances of getting caught. Where, heroin lasts only three days. Result: everyone starts switching to smack. Your nine-to-fives think they’ve done something useful, where in fact they’ve just made the fucking problem worse.’

      For a few moments longer Stuart falls back to brooding on the wickedness of ignorance and people who disorder the world by asking to be put in jail. To cheer him up I return to his Blinding Idea. I really do like it. Exciting, freakish, bound to get publicity. The more I think of it, the more it sounds a corker.

      ‘What else should we plan for?’ I enquire enthusiastically.

      ‘The brass.’

      ‘Top brass? Policemen, you mean?’

      ‘Alexander, what are you like? In London, the pavement isn’t all public: some of it belongs to them and some of it belongs to us. The brass bits is little bits put in outside of all government buildings in London what lets you know the difference – there’s brass bits all over London. If we sleep on the bit what belongs to them, they do us.’

      ‘So, we’re OK if we sleep on the other bit?’

      Stuart shakes his head. ‘Nah. If we sleep on the bit that belongs to us they still do us, only it’s not the same.’

      ‘The main place you get them is around your bollocks.’

      It is six in the morning, six weeks later. We are flicking beneath the motorway lights in convoy, in one friend’s beatupsmellymobile and another friend’s smooth new Volvo estate, down towards the doomed Home Secretary and the Home Office in London. The boots are filled with posters, badges, T-shirts, petitions and pale Tupperware boxes containing sandwich-shaped objects beneath the lids. In the back of the seedy conveyance, Stuart and I are squished up with Deaf Rob, whom we picked up off a Cambridge bridge, where he was sitting in the honey glow of the street light surrounded by luggage. He had sneaked out of a hostel an hour earlier without paying his rent. Tongue-twisted, pallid, his hair sawn at the night before with a grapefruit knife, he is clutching a pigskin suit-holder in businessman’s-overcoat beige with ‘Louis Pierre, Paris’ woven below the handle. In the other car, Linda the Outreach Worker, Fat Frank Who Never Speaks About His Past, and space for two King’s College students who said they wanted to join in, were ‘passionate about social justice’ and absolutely to be relied on, then couldn’t be bothered to get out of bed.

      ‘And hairy places,’ continues Stuart. ’Under your arms; if you’ve got hairy legs, on your legs. That’s the difference between lice and scabies. Lice is when you’re on the street and someone pulls a blanket out and you sit on it.’ He holds up his hand, thumb and forefinger pinched together. ‘Not as thick as a match – a third of a match long is fucking ginormous. A fucking monster lice that is. It’s scabies, what are smaller, what goes under the skin. You scratch and that’s what ends up. Literally, live under the skin. Where, lice – all you need is one lice. A male or female lays eggs. At the same time, the cold doesn’t kill them. Last year, sleeping out under the bridge, Tom the Butcher had lice and they was hopping over his three mates next morning. It weren’t because it was fucking warm!’

      Stuart has been talking non-stop since 4.30 a.m. – I feel he has been talking ever since the Blinding Idea first came to him – yap, yap, yap, HIV, hepatitis C, why homeless people smell, why homeless people can’t get their heroin doses right, why homeless people never do anything except shout obscenities and shit on charity workers, why homeless people always feel obliged to make ten times the amount of noise as anyone else, why homeless people blame everyone but themselves for being homeless, yap, yap, yap.

      ‘Then you got drying out and foot problems. Homeless people get wet, you know.’

       Who cares?

      ‘Your foot