I Just Wanted to Be Loved: A boy eager to please. The man who destroyed his childhood. The love that overcame it.. Stuart Howarth

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СКАЧАТЬ with me? Why did I have to endure so much pain? The only reason I could come up with was that there must be something wrong inside me, some aura, some entity that attracted hurt, pain and misery. I felt as though I was scum of the earth, and the way other people treated me seemed to confirm it.

      After that first visit, I continued to go and see Matt and Becky for a chat but they seemed shy about coming out anywhere with me so I decided to leave it until they were ready. Angela never invited me in to the house because I think her new husband wouldn't have liked it, but she was perfectly polite and nice. I always sent cards and presents for birthdays and Christmas, plus money for their upkeep, but I didn't feel involved in their lives. It was their new ‘Daddy’ who had the right to go to school plays and sports days and football matches, and I didn't feel I could complain. I'm the one who had messed things up. This was the way it had to be for now. The most important thing to me was my children's happiness, and if that meant I had to take a back seat, then so be it.

      I think there are times when we all still feel like a child inside, especially in circumstances when we are vulnerable, but I was walking round full of fear and self-loathing the whole time. ‘Little Stuart’ was in my head from morning to night, and then in my dreams as well. The way I decided to tackle this was to make myself physically bigger so that the feelings would disappear and I'd be strong enough to fend off any attackers.

      I'd started body-building back in around 1996–7 after I bumped into a guy called Mark, whom I'd known when he was still a scrawny young lad that everyone used to push around. When I met him again, he'd got really big and strong and I thought to myself: ‘I wouldn't mind some of that.’ I started going to the gym with Mark and he introduced me to a bunch of other guys there who were all into building muscle. Most of them were doing it through fear, to protect themselves out on the street and to feel better about themselves physically. Today a lot of men carry guns or knives and this is because they are full of fear. I saw loads of evidence of this in jail where young men, some of them just children, had ended up with a twenty-five-or twenty-eight-year stretch because their fear got too much for them and in the heat of a situation they lashed out.

      After I started working out with Mark, I quickly got a buzz. Within a couple of weeks I could lift heavier weights and in two or three months I could see a real difference in my body. I became addicted to the gym and started going virtually every day for a couple of hours a time. It felt as though I was achieving something. People began to comment on my new physique and I was flattered.

      I looked up to the guys I was hanging around with, because they seemed to have what I wanted. They gave me advice about my diet, about drinking protein shakes, for example. When I found out some of them took anabolic steroids to help them build muscle mass quickly, I was more than willing to give it a try. When you use steroids on a ten-week cycle and combine them with a high-protein diet and plenty of body-building exercise, the effects can be dramatic.

      The names are probably familiar from all those newspaper stories of athletes caught cheating; they include nandrolone, sustenon and deca-durabolin (known to us simply as ‘deca’). They all have an effect similar to testosterone, the male hormone, and cause the body to build tissue, so they can help muscles to heal after an injury, for example. When prescribed by a doctor in the right circumstances they can be very useful drugs, but bodybuilders taking them in gyms are almost always self-prescribing. You're supposed to calculate the dose you take based on your body weight but most guys just take whatever their mates are taking, so it can be a risky business.

      There are all sorts of side effects of steroid abuse. In the worst cases, you can get liver damage and women using them might start sprouting a beard and talking in a deeper voice. The excess testosterone in your system tells your scrotum to stop producing it, and sperm production ceases. On the other side of the coin, too much testosterone floating around in the body can give you a voracious sexual appetite. I started to build up muscle so quickly that I was happy to put up with the risks. Anything was better than feeling scared. At least as ‘Big Stuart’ I could be fairly sure that guys in the street, or who I bumped into in clubs, would think twice about taking a pop at me. It made me feel a bit more secure.

      Another side effect of steroids can be that they make you more angry and aggressive, but I don't think that happened to me. I didn't feel any difference mentally, although Tracey says now that there was a coldness about me. She says she could tell when I was using them because I had a certain look in my eyes, and that I tended not to treat her so well in those periods.

      A lot of the guys at the gym worked as doormen at pubs and clubs and they'd hang around together on their nights off, or after they finished work. You can't get much safer than when you're out with a crowd of fifteen to twenty bodybuilders! I called them my friends, but in fact they were friendships mainly based on a shared interest in building muscles, going to clubs and access to drugs, especially steroids.

      I didn't realize at the time that most of these guys had issues and they were dealing with them the way I was. Looking back, none of them was in a successful relationship and a lot of them had dodgy backgrounds. The whole scene was based on drinking and drug-taking, and it was the worst possible crowd for me to take up with again after I came out of prison in 2001. But I wanted access to steroids with which to get bigger, so I fell straight back in with that old crowd within a week of walking out through the gates of Strangeways. I just wanted to feel safe and it was the only way I knew.

       Chapter Eight

       SELF-MEDICATION

      Fortunately, bodybuilders weren't the only friends I had. Back in 1997 when I was working for the electricity-generating company Norweb, I'd met a local businessman called Geoff Hadfield. Geoff had started out as a farmer, then branched out into skip-hire business and finally he'd launched a wood-recycling company. He phoned Norweb because he wanted to upgrade his electrical installations to supply more power. I was sent along to meet Geoff to talk about it, and right from the start we had a laugh together. He was a blunt, straight-talking guy, with a good sense of humour, and I felt comfortable chatting to him.

      We had several meetings to discuss what his company needed before I costed the project and gave him a quote of three-quarters of a million pounds.

      ‘All right, Stuart,’ he said. ‘That's the starting price. How are you going to save me money on that?’ He wasn't a top businessman for nothing. I suggested, ‘Why don't I get you a refurbished transformer rather than a brand new one? That would save you about a hundred and fifty grand.’

      His eyeballs shot out of their sockets. ‘That sounds a bit more like it.’

      We were both early risers and got into the habit of meeting for a coffee about six in the morning, when we would chat about business. I knew for sure he respected me the day he first offered me a job.

      ‘You'd be all right working for me,’ he said. ‘Come and see me if you ever want to make a move.’

      Geoff's wife Sue worked in the business as well, and I always stopped to have a chat and a joke with her on the way in. We just got on. They were both in their mid-forties, only twelve years older than me, but I remember thinking, ‘They'd be good parents. I wish I had parents like them.’ I was like a little kid looking for a father figure and right from the start I cast Geoff in that role.

      They invited me for dinner at their farmhouse – Lumb Farm – and I met the extended family: Grandad Geoff, who was about seventy-five, and their kids Geoff (again!) and Cherie, who were in their twenties. Everyone welcomed me with open arms and it was a very special feeling for me. I was the funny СКАЧАТЬ