Stuart: A Life Backwards. Alexander Masters

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       1

      ‘It was cutting me throat what got me this flat.’

      Stuart pushes open the second reinforced door into his corridor, turns off the blasting intercom that honks like a foghorn whenever a visitor presses his front bell, and bumps into his kitchen to sniff the milk. ‘Tea or coffee, Alexander?’

      He is a short man, in his early thirties, and props himself against the sink to arch up his head and show me the damage. The scar extends like a squashed worm from beneath the tattoos on one ear to above his Adam’s apple.

      The kettle lead is discovered beneath a pack of sodden fish fingers. ‘How about a sarnie? Yes?’

      Stuart stretches his hand to the other end of the kitchen, extracts a double pack of discount economy bacon from the fridge and submerges six slices in chip-frying oil. ‘Cooked or incinerated?’

      It is a cramped, dank little apartment. One room, ground floor. The window looks across a scrappy patch of grass to a hostel for disturbed women.

      ‘One of the few times I’ve been happy happy, the day I got this flat,’ Stuart smiles at me. ‘That’s why I want you to write a book. It’s me way of telling the people what it was like down there. I want to thank them what got me out, like Linda and Denis and John and Ruth and Wynn, and me mum, me sister and me dad, well, I call him me dad, but he’s me stepdad, if truth be told.’

      The bread starts to burn. Stuart pumps the toaster release and the slices fly high into the air.

      ‘Cos there’s so much misunderstanding,’ he concludes angrily. ‘It’s killing people. Your fucking nine to fives! Someone needs to tell them! Literally, every day, deaths! Each one of them deaths is somebody’s son or daughter! Somebody needs to tell them, tell them like it is!’

      I move into the main room. There is a single bed in the corner, a chest of drawers, a desk – sparse, cheap furniture, bought with the help of a government loan. Also, a comfy chair. I drop into it. It is not comfortable at all. I flop on to the sofa instead. A 1950s veneer side cabinet, with bottles and pill cases on top, is against the inside wall, and in the corner a big-screen TV standing on an Argos antique-style support.

      Stuart likes his TV. He has thrown it at the wall twice and it still works.

      In return for a crate of Foster’s, Stuart explains from the kitchen, ‘the bloke upstairs has promised to make me a James Bond mattress base that folds up against the wall, which will give me more room. It’ll have big springs on either side what does the moving, and latches on the floor, because otherwise, it’s boing, boing, whoosh.’

      ‘Boing, boing, whoosh?’

      ‘Well, a bird’s not going to be too happy if she suddenly finds her face squeezed against the plaster, is she?’

      Another friend is going to put up shelves, partition off the kitchen and repaint the walls gold, instead of green on the bottom half, cream above, as they are at the moment, like a mental institution.

      The man in the bedsit above is a cyclist – a short, bespectacled Scotsman whose legs hardly touch the pedals; next to him a mute woman who beats out chart tunes on the floor with her shoe heel; and on the other side of the entrance lobby, Sankey, son of an RAF pilot – he sleeps with an aluminium baseball bat beside his bed.

      The only problem Stuart has in his desirable new home is mould. It prickles up the bathroom wall and creeps across the ceiling in speckled clumps, so that he has to stand on a chair and scrub it back once a month as though he were stripping paint. Now and then it floats down the hall to his bed side and his clothes; he smells like a garden shed on those days.

      ‘By the way,’ he calls out, ‘I’m thinking of sticking a reflective sheet over that window. What d’you reckon?’

      ‘It’s dark enough in here as it is – why make it even darker?’

      ‘It’s to stop them spying on me.’

      ‘Don’t be silly. No one’s spying on you. Who’s them?’

      ‘I’ve seen them but not seen them, if you know what I mean. Red sauce or brown?’

      He is also going to block up the air vent above the freezer because there could be microphones secreted between the slats. ‘Not being funny, you got to think about these things when you’re redecorating.’

      Stuart has also had a ‘brilliant’ idea for a job. If it works, it will be the first honest work he’s been able to hold down in his life. New flat, new job, new Stuart. Already he has signed himself up for an IT course.