скачать книгу бесплатно
We went off to one side of the club to sit on our own and just talked for the rest of the evening. She told me she was in a relationship that wasn't working out. I lit a cigarette at one point and she grabbed it and stubbed it out, saying it was a filthy habit. I thought ‘Stroppy cow!’, but I liked it. She obviously had a bit of spirit to her. By the end of the evening we'd agreed to meet again somewhere not as noisy and I said I would phone her at the shop.
Thursday, 2 March 2000 was our first proper date. I was nervous as hell and it took me ages to get ready because I wanted to make the right impression. I kept trying on different shirts and walking backwards and forwards in front of the mirror, talking to myself. If Tracey could have seen me I'm sure she would have called me an ‘old tart’.
We drove over to Bradford and spent the day just walking round, holding hands and talking. She was obviously a very caring person so when she noticed the slash marks on my arms, I told her the truth – that I'd cut my arms with a razor while I was up in Edinburgh for Hogmanay when everything got too much for me. That led to me telling her about being abused as a child, and my sister Shirley dying, and all the bad stuff that had happened in my life. It just poured out. Tracey listened in a sympathetic, non-judgemental way, asking a few questions and saying all the right things, which is not easy because I can be very touchy if someone is insensitive or clumsy.
By the end of the day, I had made up my mind that Tracey was the woman I wanted to be with and, amazingly, it seemed as though she wanted to be with me as well. We just ‘clicked’ in a way that felt very natural and real.
I went back to my mum's place above the pub she ran – the Hawthorn Inn, in Oldham – and waited to hear from Tracey.
It wasn't straightforward for her because she had two sons, aged sixteen and seventeen, and although the house they lived in was hers, her boyfriend said he couldn't afford to move out till he got paid at the end of the month. For a whole week I didn't hear anything from her and I thought she must have changed her mind. I was a nervous wreck waiting for the phone to ring, but knowing that I had to let her sort things out in her own way. Finally, she called and said she had had a terrible time with her now ex-boyfriend, who loved her dearly. Any break-ups are hard but when you leave one person for another feelings are especially raw. I told Tracey to come back and stay at Mum's pub for the time being, and she agreed.
We got very close, very quickly, spending lots of time together and talking constantly, filling each other in about all the details of our lives. I'd often had sexual problems in the past due to the abuse I'd suffered, but things were fine with Tracey because she was always so affectionate and caring. It was true love-making rather than just sex, and she'd hold me afterwards in a way that made me feel very secure. I had never experienced such a powerful emotion for another person before and I was completely swept off my feet.
At the end of March, her ex finally vacated the house and we moved in there, together with her sons Jamie and Lee. My relationship with them went well from the start. They hadn't liked Tracey's ex but said that I reminded them of Jimmy, their real dad, and that was a good thing. I told them there was no way I wanted to take their dad's place but that we could be mates, and that was what they wanted as well. I took the four of us on a holiday to Malia in Crete and we had a wonderful time messing around on jet-skis, sunbathing and generally bonding with each other. Back home I took the boys out clubbing a couple of times and they were impressed that I could walk straight in without queuing because I was friendly with all the doormen round our way. Basically they were nice lads, and I was happy to have them around.
There was never any doubt in my mind that Tracey was the woman for me. This was it. I'd thought for some time that if I could find a woman who really loved me to the core then it would solve all my problems, and it seemed as though Tracey was the one. When I was a child, my sister Christina used to tell me fairy tales about princes and princesses and I had this idea that when you met the right girl and fell in love you would settle down, have a couple of kids, move into a ‘palace’, buy a nice car, make a bit of money and live happily ever after. I was being hugely over-optimistic, though. One good relationship wasn't going to compensate for all the bad things that had happened in my life. No matter how loving Tracey was, it didn't stop my insecurities, and sometimes I tried to lift my mood with alcohol and street drugs like cocaine and ecstasy. She knew I took drugs from time to time but she had no idea how much.
She was also aware that I often had horrific nightmares that made me twitch and cry in my sleep, and sometimes I spoke in a strange high-pitched voice, like a little boy, like little Stuart saying, ‘Please, Daddy, no.’ She learned to recognize the times when I suddenly became deadly quiet and still as meaning that something had just caused me to have a flashback to some horrible incident from my past.
Meanwhile, I was driving myself crazy with the intensity of my feelings for Tracey. I couldn't get close enough no matter how tightly I held her. Touch wasn't enough – I really wanted our souls to entwine and for her to hold me and never let me go. I couldn't bear to think of her with anyone else; I wanted her to be mine and only mine, so I found it hard living with her in the same house where she'd lived with her ex-husband Jimmy, the boys' father, and with the boyfriend she'd been seeing when I met her as well.
I began to get stupidly insecure and would test her, saying she didn't really love me, just to see how she'd react. Sometimes I'd manufacture a silly tiff about nothing and I'd pack my bags and threaten to leave, wanting her to stop me to prove that she really did care and wasn't going to end up hurting me. I was petrified and so afraid of trusting anyone. All I knew was that if you trusted you got hurt. When Dad moved in with us when I was three years old, I thought I was his ‘special one’ and I gave him my heart on a plate. Even after he started beating and abusing me, I was devoted to him and yearned desperately for him to love me back. As an adult I still yearned to be loved but I put so many barriers and tests in the way that they alienated most people and stopped us getting close.
Tracey did her best to reassure me. ‘But why do you love me?’ I'd ask over and over. I thought maybe she liked me because I bought her lots of meals and flowers and treated her like a lady, but she said no, it wasn't that. It was the fact that I let her see the vulnerability beneath the extrovert veneer of a successful businessman and joker. The story of my childhood moved her deeply and made her want to care for me. She claimed it was the real Stuart she fell for, not the public mask.
Still I had problems trusting. Roughly three months after we'd moved in together, things came to a head and we agreed that I would move back to my Mum's pub until we could sell her house and buy somewhere new together – somewhere without history, that was just ours; somewhere she hadn't lived with another man.
Without her there to cuddle up to every night, I started hooking up with the lads and going out drinking and drugging with them. It wasn't long before Tracey began to complain bitterly that I either disappeared at weekends or was too hung over to do much with her, so to make things up I took her away for the weekend. On 20 August 2000 we ended up in Wales, in the village where my stepfather was now living, and briefly met my Aunt Doris and her husband Stewart.
Later that night, tortured by all the memories, and convinced that I would never be able to form a good relationship until I got answers to some of my questions about the past, I drove back to visit my stepdad to try and talk to him about everything. But once I got inside his house, I became a frightened little boy again rather than a thirty-two-year-old man. Dozens of little things triggered horrific childhood memories: his dogs' bowls sitting on the step, which made me remember all the times he'd forced me to eat from them; his feet soaking in a bowl, which brought back their vile, rotten smell and all the times he made me scratch the dead skin off them; the way he sat in his chair with that twisted smile on his face. There was a hammer beside him in just the place he would have kept whatever weapon he was about to beat me with.
He started shouting at me and I began to sob convulsively, crouching down on the sofa in a submissive, child's posture. He ranted and raved, denying everything, utterly furious with me, and when he stood up I felt sure he was standing to attack me.
‘Please, Daddy, no!’ I screamed. I lunged across and grabbed the hammer and brought it down on his head in a moment of blind terror. It was a gut reaction, a pure survival instinct. It was and still is like a terrible nightmare that never happened.
Even as I ran out of the house and down the hill to my car, I was terrified he would be running after me and about to grab me and beat me to a pulp. I fled like a naughty child as if my life depended on it, my veins flooded with adrenalin, my teeth chattering and my entire body twitching with shock. There was a buzzing in my ears and I felt hot all over. I've never been so scared in my life. I thought that any minute he was going to catch me and beat me to a pulp. I didn't realize that he was dead.
Chapter Four (#ulink_4d84f40b-f1c8-5057-afaf-c6119fff3cee)
BEING INSIDE (#ulink_4d84f40b-f1c8-5057-afaf-c6119fff3cee)
The next morning I was arrested and taken into police custody. It was only then I found out that David Howarth hadn't been my real dad; George Heywood, Mum's first husband, was my biological father. Although I'd had my suspicions after overhearing the conversation in Wales, it was still a very strange surprise.
I told the police about all the abuse I'd suffered as a child and they interrogated me in detail about it. There were hours and hours spent going over and over events until I thought my head was going to explode.
I was in a state of extreme fear and confusion as I was marched to the cells and strip-searched. Right from the start prison was a huge shock, a dog-eat-dog world where both inmates and guards seemed out to get me. My nerves were jangling; every sound of a clanging door or a shout from another inmate left me petrified and shaking. I'd killed a man. My life was over. I made up my mind to kill myself as soon as I got the chance – but they put me on suicide watch so there was nothing I could do.
At this stage I'd only been with Tracey for five months. Most women would have run a mile, and with my set of life problems and issues I was sure that's what Tracey would do too. When at last she was allowed in to visit me, my first words were: ‘Just leave me now. It's over.’
Looking me straight in the eye, she said: ‘I'll never leave you, Stuart. I love you.’
A couple of days later, as I sat in my prison cell, a letter was tossed inside. I recognized Tracey's writing and when I picked it up I felt something hard inside. I ripped open the top of the envelope and a white-gold wedding ring fell out and spun across the floor. As I bent down to pick it up, my heart ached. A note from Tracey said simply: ‘I'll never leave you and I will always love you.’ It was the most powerful gesture of love that I'd ever experienced in my life. Who was this amazing woman and what on earth did she see in me?
Over the next seven months while I was on remand awaiting trial, Tracey visited me every single day, bringing me the few items of clothing I was allowed and some CDs to try and relax me. But the regime in prison was a living nightmare. I was in a permanent state of terror at the unpredictable nature of the other prisoners and the cruelty of some of the guards. It culminated one night when I was told I was being moved to a cell just by the sex offenders unit and I totally lost the plot. I had hidden two safety razors in my cell and I used them to slash at my arms until blood was spraying round the room and gushing down my legs.
They stopped me before I managed to kill myself but after that I was transferred to Manchester's Strangeways prison, where things went from bad to worse. There were some sadistic guards in there who used strip search as a form of punishment, and after I complained about it my treatment got even worse. My food bowl disappeared, I was moved to increasingly dilapidated cells, there was verbal abuse and all kinds of insidious harassment. I began to keep a diary of events and that seemed to wind them up even more.
At my trial in March 2001 I was sentenced to two years in prison for taking the life of the man I had always known as ‘Dad’. The judge said he believed I'd had diminished responsibility at the time and told me that the case was one of the most graphic and depraved instances of child abuse he had ever come across, and that my stepdad was a sick and twisted man. Taking into account the time I had already served, I would be released in September, six months hence. But how would I get through those six months without losing the plot completely?
Tracey was the only thing that kept me going, but it was tough for her too. After I was sentenced the visiting was substantially reduced and she was only allowed to come once a week. It got even harder when I was placed on the category A side of Strangeways. Category A is for hardened criminals or those assumed to be a risk to the public or national security. Category A prisoners aren't allowed to leave the wing so any visitors have to come to them. When she visited me there, Tracey had to walk right into the heart of the prison past all the other prisoners, who would whistle, catcall and jeer as she went by.
We sat for an hour facing each other across a table with a guard hovering nearby, only allowed to kiss briefly at the beginning and end of each visit. I desperately needed to hug her for comfort but this was never allowed. Yet Tracey turned up faithfully every single visiting time, trying to lift my spirits as best she could.
After a visit when she knew I was in a bad way, she would drive back late at night and park on the road outside Strangeways where I could see her from my cell window, then she would get out of the car and wave to me, shouting that she loved me. It brought me a lot of comfort on the lonely nights. We'd talk daily whenever I wasn't banged up in my cell and got a chance to reach the phone, and we would write letters to each other as well; sometimes I wrote as many as three times a day.
Tracey's whole life revolved round prison visits: organizing her shifts at work to fit around them, rushing through Manchester city-centre traffic to get there on time, never once letting me down. In many ways, it was as if she served that sentence with me.
I had some counselling in prison with a decent guy called Neil Fox, but in a way it made things worse by bringing the trauma to the surface. Psychiatrists diagnosed me as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) because I never knew when some seemingly insignificant trigger would bring back the sights, sounds, smells and sheer misery of my younger days, as vividly as if they were happening all over again. It was as though I was right back in the bedroom at home with him towering over me, shouting abuse.
I clung to the hope that I would be able to turn my life around once I got out. I'm a physically strong guy, used to working hard and bright enough to get good jobs. But in my head, I kept hearing my stepfather's voice saying, ‘You're bad, you're naughty and you're no good. That's why no one loves you.’
I did my best to blank out the flashbacks and to trust the good people around me, especially Tracey, but that childhood conditioning runs deep. I was suicidal throughout the whole thirteen months I served in prison. At times I thought that maybe it was true: that I was a bad person and no one would ever truly love me. There were many days when it seemed there was no way out of the nightmare except death.
Вы ознакомились с фрагментом книги.
Для бесплатного чтения открыта только часть текста.
Приобретайте полный текст книги у нашего партнера:
