Stuart Read Online Free PDF Page A

they’re just ordinary. I was a bit shocked, to tell the truth.’

    Stuart and I have given nine or ten talks together about the campaign since we began working together: in Birmingham, London, Oxford, in villages around Cambridge, to a hall full of university students at Anglia Polytechnic. We are the only people on the campaign who have the time to do it and we have developed a good pattern. I speak first, for twenty minutes, about the details of the case and push the petition or protest letter to the local MP or the forthcoming march in London, then Stuart gets up and knocks the audience out of its seat with a story of his life.
    â€˜I am the sort of person these two dedicated charity workers were trying to help,’ he says, in effect. ‘Do you see what a nightmare I was? Do you see how difficult it would have been to govern a person like me? Do you see now why we should have awarded Ruth and John medals for what they were doing rather than sending them to prison for what they could not control?’
    Sometimes in his talk a stray ‘fuck’ or ‘cunt’ will slip past and then he’ll blush or laugh, put a hand to his mouth in an unexpectedly girlish fashion and apologise for ‘me French’. He often ends by suggesting that the government kick out their current homelessness ‘tsar’ and employ Ruth instead. ‘I really do honestly believe that.’
    Clap! Clap! Clap!
    More often than not, a standing ovation.
    This speech and tactic are entirely Stuart’s ideas. He does two things for the campaign: he folds letters and he exposes his soul.

    â€˜Here, Alexander, you’ve missed the bus,’ exclaims Stuart. He has startled me from my ruminations. ‘There isn’t one for another two hours. Do you want to stay for supper?’
    My heart sinks. More palm-shaped sarnies?
    â€˜Me favourite–curry.’
    I go out to the local shop and return with supplies. Bulgarian white for me; eight cans more of lager and a packet of tobacco for him.
    â€˜What’s that you’re having? Wine? Ppwaaah!’ Stuart sniffs the bottle. ‘Smells like sick. Have a Stella.’
    Curry is ‘Convict Curry’. His mother’s recipe. On very special occasions, he used to try to make it in the inmates’ kitchen in HMP Littlehey, where he was serving five years for robbing £1,000 and a fistful of cheques from a post office.
    â€˜Mushrooms?’ A tin of buttons; Stuart tips the little foetuses in.
    Then he opens a packet of no-label, super-economy frozen chicken quarters. Pallid and pockmarked, they look like bits of frosted chin, as if he did over a fat Eskimo last week. He extracts an onion from behind the toaster and begins hacking at it with one of his knives.
    I finish my survey of his bedsit room.
    The picture on the wall is of a place with mountains and a lazy blue lake. The plaster it covers is gashed down to the brickwork from one of his periodic bouts of ‘losing it’, when he gets into a sort of maelstrom of fury and–highly private occasions, these, he does not like to think about them–takes it out on the furniture and fittings. On the floor beside the desk is an empty carton of Shake n’ Vac, decorated in pink flowers.
    â€˜Good stuff, that. Use it for anything. Like, see round the bed there? There should be a huge stain because I overdosed there last week. But just put Shake n’ Vac down. All the spilt cans and vomit–cleaned it up really well. Leave it for a week first though, before you Hoover.’
    The bills on the bedside cabinet are red.
    No, Stuart does not mind if I rifle through them.
    Cable: he has five extra channels, none of them sport, and no telephone. The reason homeless people use mobiles is because they’re much cheaper than ordinary phones if you take only incoming calls. In fact, with pay as you go, they cost nothing. It’s when the homeless start hanging around the public