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Stuart: A Life Backwards
Alexander Masters
A major launch for the paperback edition of the most original, capitvating and award-winning memoir of the year.Stuart, A Life Backwards, is the story of a remarkable friendship between a reclusive writer and illustrator (‘a middle class scum ponce, if you want to be honest about it, Alexander) and a chaotic, knife-wielding beggar whom he gets to know during a campaign to release two charity workers from prison.Interwoven into this is Stuart’s confession: the story of his life, told backwards. With humour, compassion (and exasperation) Masters slowly works back through post-office heists, prison riots and the exact day Stuart discovered violence, to unfold the reasons why he changed from a happy-go-lucky little boy into a polydrug-addicted-alcoholic Jekyll and Hyde personality, with a fondness for what he called ‘little strips of silver’ (knives to you and me).Funny, despairing, brilliantly written and full of surprises: this is the most original and moving biography of recent years.
Stuart
A Life Backwards
Alexander Masters
Copyright (#ulink_b18ff8d6-27b6-50d7-ac4a-68cff7ec6058)
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.4thestate.co.uk (http://www.4thestate.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2005
Published in paperback by Harper Perennial in 2006
Copyright © Alexander Masters 2005
‘Obituary of Stuart Shorter’ copyright © Alexander Masters 2002
Alexander Masters asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
Front cover photograph: Stuart Shorter as a child
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007200375
Ebook Edition © August 2011 ISBN: 9780007374144
Version: 2015-09-18
Dedication (#ulink_152556de-6061-5325-a36d-8994c99abebd)
For my father, Dexter Masters
Epigraph (#ulink_bf75ee31-9232-5607-9d4c-2c48b05cdd6e)
‘Alexander, sort it out – you’re the writer. I just done the living.’
Stuart Shorter
Contents
Cover (#ue54bb156-a985-5361-b709-d96f45c2b88e)
Title Page (#u36953795-30c1-5d9f-86ea-9e5b87f8e4ce)
Copyright (#u51bfb63c-710b-5417-bd86-27e19bed0054)
Dedication (#uea139726-7bf2-5225-b063-194c76ea65a6)
Epigraph (#ua4acd94f-7905-52f4-8e75-32a5a1f3bc7a)
Map (#u6bf34870-75e1-5903-9f95-7d1d1f055501)
Chapter 0 (#u2f2d4ae2-8504-59e9-9b83-786501eb2996)
Chapter 1 (#u094a7973-acea-55c2-9075-9f94375b1456)
Chapter 2 (#uc2396c6f-cae6-5bf5-9198-9b932350ab22)
Chapter 3 (#u738d8ba3-5889-5406-8088-b1722ed9864d)
Chapter 4 (#u78b34f09-1075-51a3-9b47-a752c894bd13)
Chapter 5 (#u4db38f3d-a83f-5ff2-95fd-92115c30f580)
Chapter 6 (#u9747ae18-88cf-5c31-89f5-b94a82b29eac)
Chapter 7 (#udabe5bd0-f320-5d81-81c0-e4c8ad4b5bf3)
Chapter 8 (#uce1d4215-9d9d-55cc-8729-6ee7a1238f6c)
Chapter 9 (#u6e09d760-017a-574a-a2e4-99daa91f689e)
Chapter 10 (#ua15ebd65-08b8-532c-955e-55bc96588eb8)
Chapter 11 (#ubb3180a9-8c84-52ea-ac59-697babb85b74)
Chapter 12 (#u2d8ca046-12d2-50d6-9ca6-4e529a421841)
Chapter 13 (#u4652cd1b-4f49-591c-9f00-cedb29678718)
Chapter 14 (#ud7f12b4c-206f-53e1-ac0b-30371e7c2ca4)
Chapter 15 (#ua7e36f39-9721-565a-97d1-8a482dd60ce4)
Chapter 16 (#u1b494555-bcc6-507f-8642-add3bed86cff)
Chapter 17 (#ubbd1a752-f4a1-58b3-ae2c-139125fd788c)
Chapter 18 (#ua38b9ee4-a522-559c-8cb0-f9e6fa8f55da)
Chapter 19 (#u404246c8-21fa-505e-a45b-bac7bde2153e)
Chapter 20 (#u462928a1-d1d4-5dfb-a3fe-b3ba8566271b)
Chapter 21 (#u095e46d3-6ff8-540f-875a-01ddcd5b97ba)
Chapter 22 (#ubc79bbda-f241-582d-ac08-57c81fec7b14)
Chapter 23 (#u7f376edf-c25d-555e-8168-fef777536788)
Chapter 24 (#ua1d11ef3-ea2c-590b-a373-509ce1de44af)
Chapter 25 (#ub6b169d1-2d63-5ad3-a8fe-595c693e02db)
Epilogue (#u7fe34364-48de-5484-84cc-d9aad6b019c4)
Postscript: Obituary of Stuart Shorter (#uf88736a5-79fe-516d-ab74-d6cb4e491c10)
Footnotes (#u852d76fe-a908-58d3-a4f5-ff4bb4cfa0eb)
Acknowledgements (#u91c2b579-1e15-5441-a1c9-b70040ba8f83)
Forthcoming: A Life Discarded (#ud8312227-8cc1-5e07-8fce-407d920c49fe)
By the Same Author (#u54926c35-777d-53c1-a283-3e3c6f51da5d)
About the Author (#ua6694555-a0cb-516a-b3f0-941372af77db)
About the Publisher (#u7f84c235-e126-574d-8961-3959187569e4)
0 (#ulink_c002ec19-e1a6-5c1a-8eb5-556b37bd706f)
Stuart does not like the manuscript.
Through the pale Tesco stripes of his supermarket bag I can see the wedge of my papers. Two years’ worth of interviews and literary effort.
‘What’s the matter with it?’
‘It’s bollocks boring.’
He fumbles in the lumpy bulges of his pockets, looking for roll-up papers, then drops into my armchair and pushes his face forward, surveying the drab collection of twigs and dead summertime experiments on my balcony. One arm remains, as it landed, squeezed in beside his thigh. Outside, it is getting dark; the trees in the garden have started to grow in size and lose their untended shapes.
‘I don’t mean to be rude. I know you put a lot of work in,’ Stuart offers.
Put briefly, his objection is this: I drone on.
He wants jokes, yarns, humour. He doesn’t admire ‘academic quotes’ and background research. ‘Nah, Alexander, you gotta start again. You gotta do better than this.’
He’s after a bestseller, ‘like what Tom Clancy writes’.
‘But you are not an assassin trying to frazzle the president with anthrax bombs,’ I point out. You are an ex-homeless, ex-junkie psychopath, I do not add.
Stuart phrases it another way, then: ‘Something what people will read.’
There are numerous types of homeless person:
There are those who were doing all right beforehand, but have suffered a temporary setback because their wife has run off with another man (or, surprisingly often, another woman). Their business may have collapsed. Their daughter has been killed in a car crash. Or both. Self-confidence is their main problem and, if the professionals can get hold of them in the first few months, they’ll be back at work or at least in settled, long-term accommodation within a year or two.
Men outnumber women ten to one on the streets. For women, it is usually sex or battering or madness that has brought them to this condition. They are better at coping with financial failure and betrayal, or their expectations are more self-effacing.
Then there are the ones who suffer from chronic poverty, brought on by illiteracy or social ineptness or what are politely called ‘learning disabilities’. Perhaps they are dyslexic, autistic, shy to the point of inanity, never went to school. They may be just ill or blind or deaf or dumb. They move from garden shed to bedsit, shelter to hostel to garage to friend’s sitting-room floor, to the wheelie bins at the side of King’s College. They are never quite able to rise above their circumstances.
The youngsters who have fallen out with their parents, or have come out of care and don’t know what to do next or even how to make their own breakfast: they’re a third homeless category. If they haven’t, within six months, found a job or a room or a girlfriend to put them to rights, there’s a good chance they’ll be on the streets instead.
Ex-convicts and ex-army – take away the format of their lives and all they can do is crumple downwards. This is just the beginning.
Right at the bottom of this abnormal heap are the people such as Stuart, the ‘chaotic’ homeless. The chaotic (‘kai-yo-ic’, as Stuart calls them, drawing out the syllables around his tongue like chewing gum) are beyond repair. When Stuart was first discovered, Kaspar Hauser-like, crouched on the lowest subterranean floor of a multi-storey car park, the regular homeless wanted nothing to do with him. They called him ‘Knife Man Dan’ and ‘that mad bastard on Level D’.
One arm remains, as it landed, squeezed in beside his thigh.
The chaotic have usually been to prison, but they are not career criminals. Stuart’s conviction sheet is twenty pages thick, but he has only once stolen to make himself rich and on that ridiculous occasion he scooped (after taking overheads into account) £500, or £100 for each year he spent behind bars as a result. Among the few staples in a chaotic person’s life are heroin and alcohol. For some their habit is what has brought them low, while for others addiction is like a hobby taken up since arriving. The chaotic are not always poor, even if they are on the streets. During the three years I have known Stuart, my income has rarely exceeded his from the state. An unemployed man with a physical or mental disability, or alcohol or drugs dependence, can qualify for up to £180 a week from social services. On top of this, housing benefit pays the rent.
What unites the chaotic is the confusion of their days. Cause and effect are not connected in the usual way. Beyond their own governance, let alone within grasp of ours, they are constantly on the brink of raring up or breaking down. Charity staff fuss especially hard over these people because they are the worst face of homelessness and, when not the most hateful, the most pitiable extremity of street life.
Two years ago, Stuart was living out of skips. When the city outreach workers discovered him, he was a polydrug-addicted, alcoholic, ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ personality with delusional paranoia and a fondness for what he called ‘little strips of silver’ – knives, to you and me.
He still is.
But something remarkable has happened since then: he is not quite so much of a drug-addicted nightmare. No one can understand it. It is highly unusual, suspicious even. All chaotic people have good and bad periods, but Stuart genuinely appears to have turned over a new leaf. He has separated himself from the street community, got himself on to the council housing list, started a methadone programme to get off heroin, renegotiated his court fines and begun paying fortnightly instalments, bought himself a discount computer. None of this is normal. Many of Stuart’s old friends would rather die than take a shower and pay debts, and quite a few do: overdoses, liver or kidney failure or both, hypothermia. Rough sleepers have a life expectancy of forty-two years. They are thirty-five times more likely to commit suicide than the rest of the population. In the great bureaucracy of the police and social support services, everyone is patting their backs at Stuart’s extraordinary return from this medieval existence towards respectability and secretly waiting for him to grab the nearest meat hook and run amok.
Furthermore, not only has Stuart enough undestroyed brain cells left to describe what such a life is like, but he can pinpoint, almost to the hour – between 4 and 5 p.m., one weekday in early summer, when he was twelve – the symbolic moment when he made the change from (in his mother’s words) a ‘real happy-go-lucky little boy’, always ‘the considerate, very considerate’ one of her two children, into the nightmare Clockwork Orange figure of the last two decades. If his own life were not still so disordered, he could make good money explaining to parents what makes children turn into authority-despising delinquents.
‘This is what I don’t like, Alexander,’ observes Stuart, interrupting my thoughts and picking out a page from the dog-eared manuscript that he has now tipped on the floor. ‘Joyriding.’ It concerns his adolescence, when he used to sneak around streets at night smashing the windows of Ford Cortinas. I have opined:
Technically, joyriding does not involve stealing a car, because the person who takes the vehicle doesn’t intend to keep it: he ‘twocs’ it. It’s an acronym that comes from the charge: taking a vehicle without the owner’s consent. In the Juvenile Joyrider,
Jeff Briggs proposes, in addition to theft of a car’s contents, five different categories of car crime: a) ‘twocking for profit’, b) ‘long-term twocking’, c) ‘twocking for the purposes of joyriding’, d) ‘twocking for use in other crimes’ and e) ‘utilitarian twocking’. To date, Stuart has been guilty of c), d) and e).
‘Uty-what?’ Stuart sucks in his cheeks for a final attempt. ‘“Uty-lity-aryan twocking.” What’s that when it’s at home?’
I cut the passage.
The accompanying flow chart, entitled ‘Dr Kirkpatrick’s Joyrider-Progression Schematic’, he dismisses with: ‘Looks like an Airfix kit.’
