Stuart by Alexander Masters Page B

What Stuart has forgotten to tell me is that Smithy was no ordinary blagger. He was a multi-talented man.
    ARMED RAID: Pair jailed for post office robbery *
    BUBBLEGUM KING STUCK BEHIND BARS
    BUBBLEGUM-blowing champ John Smith is starting a five-year prison sentence today after an armed attack on a post office.
    The city’s Crown Court heard how the British bubblegum-blowing record holder and his accomplice staged the attack on the post office at Coates, near Whittlesey, earlier this year.
    The pair made off with more than £1,800 in cash and postal orders, after terrifying the elderly staff who ran the shop.
    The court was told Smith fell into a life of crime after a series of TV appearances ground to a halt.
    The 25-year-old is named in the Guinness Book of Records as the young
    British record holder after blowing a 16 1⁄2-inch bubble in 1983 at the age of 15.
    But by his late teens, he found his fame was drying up.
    Brendan Morris, representing Smith yesterday, told the court how success at an early age had affected him.
    He explained: ‘He had a taste of the high life but no skills to sustain it.’
    Poor fellow. Who can blame him for turning to a life of crime and terrifying little old post-office ladies?

10
    Sunday is hard outside the Home Office. Excitements include three cups of coffee, a bacon-and-egg sandwich, closing eyes and imagining Spain, rolling up a sleeping bag, rolling up Linda’s sleeping bag, counting signatures, recounting signatures, checking to see if any famous names are among the signatures and finding an actress on
EastEnders,
eating a lamb samosa from the work-every-day-especially-on-Christmas-then-rack-the-prices-through-the-roof shop round the corner–too bored even to read a magazine.
    I begin to see why bag ladies have bags. When life is this dull, you have to invent purpose. Collecting torn-up newspaper gives you a hobby, provides an anchoring intimacy with your surroundings, keeps the streets clean. Or so you think. Then one day you wake up and realise that it was all a con: what you had thought was an escape from madness was in fact the arrival.
    During the morning people stray off. Often it is just Stuart and me together keeping fort, and Stuart is talking too much again. If words were legs he’d be a billionipede.
    Yap, yap, yap.
    Andria says all ex-junkies are like this. After so much time brainless on heroin, they soil the road with spittle trying to make up for lost time.
    Yap, yap, yap.
    Andria is an ex-junkie. Once, she stormed the stage at the United Nations and berated all the world’s delegates on their inhumane policies towards her fellow ex-junkies.
    Yap, yap, yap.
    Andria talks a lot, too.
    Stuart has decided that Fat Frank Who Never Talks About His Past is a paedophile. He has no grounds for this. It is entirely based on ‘me sixth sense’. Stuart can’t even pronounce the word properly: ‘ped
e
-
o
-phile’, he says, undoing the diphthong. He’s ‘really worried’ because Mr Frank spent the night in Stuart’s flat the night before we came down to London and might have looked at Stuart’s address book and found telephone numbers. John Brock has children–did Fat Frank get their number? He’s just had his arms around John’s sons, hasn’t he? Ruth has a daughter. Is Fat Frank interested in girls, too?
    Stuart, I say in my roundabout way, calm yourself. He’s smelly, that’s all. There’s obviously also mental health ‘issues’ as workers in the care professions call it when someone’s as loopy as a carousel. But so what? You’ve got heaps of those, too. In the meantime he’s our best petition collector. He’s gathered double the rest of us. A dedicated worker–don’t alienate him. We could do with ten more like him.
    But Stuart’s not to be put off.
    Why did the fucking nonce end up staying at Stuart’s place? That’s what Stuart wants