Stuart: A Life Backwards. Alexander Masters

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.

       4

      ‘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 and how …’

      ‘You ain’t got a hot drink, have you, Alexander?’

      Unwilling to leave Stuart alone in my room, I dash up to the kitchen, suppressing frustration. ‘Thank you,’ he calls. ‘Four sugars with tea or coffee, please, don’t matter which.’

      ‘Thank you,’ he shouts again when I yell down to find out if he wants milk.

      Although Stuart and I have met dozens of times now, this is his first visit to my house and I am worried. His wild life and humorous criminal anecdotes suddenly seem a little alarming. Perhaps he cannot help himself. Perhaps even now he is squeezing all my possessions into his enormous pockets. At his mother’s pub – in the village where he grew up, on the other side of Cambridge – Stuart says the women ‘blatantly’ hide their handbags when he comes into the lounge bar.

      ‘Which I don’t understand,’ he likes to observe. ‘I don’t do bag-snatching. Don’t approve of it.’

      What about wall decorations – does he ‘do’ them? My beautifully framed and glazed pink ostrich feather fan? Or the floral teacups on top of the piano? The Volterol (50 mg) in the bathroom medicine cabinet?

      I hurl slop out of mugs, plunge for a spoon in the washing-up bowl, swoop through cupboards in search of tea bags, and dart back down the stairs splashing hot water on the carpet.

      ‘Thank you,’ he says a third time as I step into the room again.

      There is no evidence that he has moved. Nothing appears disturbed. The only noticeable change is the brown blanket that has slipped off the back of the chair and fallen over his ear. A ponderous length of ash drops off his roll-up.

      ‘These books,’ he says, nodding at the shelves above my desk. ‘Have you read them all?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘Half?’

      ‘Not exactly.’

      He notes with surprise one on the floor near his chair: ‘The Hunting Wasp – a whole book just about them little summer things?’

      Leaning forward, he picks out another. ‘This one, Mauve: what’s that about?’

      ‘The colour, mauve.’

      Stuart slowly shakes his head as he sits back again. ‘How’d he fucking get away with it?’

      ‘Right, ready? Right, you done? You’re doing me head in with that machine, Alexander. What’s that first question again, then?’

      ‘When and how did you become …’ I begin.

      But yet again there is a delay. How difficult can it be to get started on a person’s life? Stuart has accidentally knocked the microphone off its perch. I replace it on his knee.

      ‘And you’re sure that red light means it’s working?’ he checks, ‘Cos I know what you’re like, Alexander, with technology. It shouldn’t be green?’

      ‘Stuart, it’s a tape recorder, not a traffic light.’

      ‘Just checking. No offence. Bit nervous, I think. Me fucking life, you know. By the way, I’ve been thinking of a title. On the Edge of Madness. What do you think?’

      ‘I think it stinks.’

      ‘Right.’

      James Cormick, a linguist friend of mine, describes Stuart’s voice as ‘a light tenor with a slightly “old” timbre that makes him sound in some way tired or prematurely aged’. Ironically, the weakness in his voice is his strength as a speaker, which is why he does so well on our talks together. He is not a bully boy bragging about his exploits. He comes across as a bit of a weakling – a flimsy article, in fact, if you were to hear him only on tape – who has somehow survived, scoring points by timing and intelligence rather than noise. ‘He can describe things with absolute brutality,’ says Denis Hayes, the second of the two homelessness workers who most helped Stuart to get off the streets. ‘No matter how appalling whatever it was, he has this deadpan delivery. It’s disconcerting because the words coming out from this gently spoken person need Peter Cushing to be reading it. It is completely the wrong voice.’

      I rewind the tape a fraction and replay a few seconds:

      ‘… Bit nervous, I think. Me fucking life, you know …’

      Stuart says ‘fucking’ frequently, but rarely plain ‘fuck’ or ‘what the fuck’ or ‘fuck that’. Sex is ‘a shag’, not ‘a fuck’. ‘Cunt’, his only other swear word, is also never used sexually. A ‘cunt’ can be a nasty or an ordinary person, or a thing, such as a toilet brush. There’s usually no aggression in these terms and they are not there because he’s too stupid to think of a more appropriate one. ‘Fucking’ and ‘cunt’ are just part of the flicker of his speech.

      In this excerpt he’s talking about what happens when he gets ‘rageous’:

      You know, we’re not talking kitchen knives, we’re talking, like, fuck-off-cunt knives. So, like, obviously me stepdad’s a bit fearful. He’s a big fella but he’s not getting any younger. With ten years he would have fucking thrown me all over the gaff. Now, the family don’t know who’s going to get hurt, or whether I’m going to end up getting locked up, or is me mother going to end up losing her husband? How do they deal with it? It’s hard on them, because this fucking cunt gets scary. It can get scary for the person who does it, because there’s no control. It’s not until sometimes months afterwards that you can sort of really reflect and see it for what it was, because you’re living in this different world at