Free Stuart by Alexander Masters Page B

is clutching a pigskin suit-holder in businessman’s-overcoat beige with ‘Louis Pierre, Paris’ woven below the handle. In the other car, Linda the Outreach Worker, Fat Frank Who Never Speaks About His Past, and space for two King’s College students who said they wanted to join in, were ‘passionate about social justice’ and absolutely to be relied on, then couldn’t be bothered to get out of bed.
    â€˜And hairy places,’ continues Stuart. ‘Under your arms; if you’ve got hairy legs, on your legs. That’s the difference between lice and scabies. Lice is when you’re on the street and someone pulls a blanket out and you sit on it.’ He holds up his hand, thumb and forefinger pinched together. ‘Not as thick as a match–a third of a match long is fucking ginormous. A fucking monster lice that is. It’s scabies, what are smaller, what goes under the skin. You scratch and that’s what ends up. Literally, live under the skin. Where, lice–all you need is one lice. A male or female lays eggs. At the same time, the cold doesn’t kill them. Last year, sleeping out under the bridge, Tom the Butcher had lice and they was hopping over his three mates next morning. It weren’t because it was fucking warm!’
    Stuart has been talking non-stop since 4.30 a.m.–I feel he has been talking ever since the Blinding Idea first came to him–yap, yap, yap, HIV, hepatitis C, why homeless people smell, why homeless people can’t get their heroin doses right, why homeless people never
do
anything except shout obscenities and shit on charity workers, why homeless people always feel obliged to make ten times the amount of noise as anyone else, why homeless people blame everyone but themselves for being homeless, yap, yap, yap.
    â€˜Then you got drying out and foot problems. Homeless people get wet, you know.’
    Who cares?
    â€˜Your foot just fucking ends up mouldy basically.’
    I wish it would drop off.
    â€˜You know what it’s like…’
    No, I work for my living. I’ve got a house.
    â€˜â€¦if you go out and your socks get wet, you come home and your skin’s white, in’it? Imagine that when it’s been raining for two or three days. It’s all water and little mushrooms and no foot.’
    The fourth passenger in the car, a man generally sympathetic to the poor person’s complaint–a union member, a lifelong activist for the cause of Right and Fairness–has cupped his hands against the side of his face.
    â€˜â€™Ere, Drew, something wrong? What for are you holding your head?’
    â€˜I’m trying to block you out, Stuart.’
    Stuart keeps his thoughts sealed as we come down into London from the northern hills, but one might as well try to button up the ocean. His lips twitch. His face stiffens. He stares out of one window, then the other, looks at the lining on the car roof, fidgets with both sides of his hands. At Walthamstow Town Hall he draws a preparatory breath but stops. By Seven Sisters and Holloway it’s beyond control.
    â€˜Not being funny, is that a prison?’ he blurts.
    â€˜Holloway, mate,’ confirms Drew.
    â€˜Here’s another idea you should think of doing, Alexander,’ he gushes forth, laughing with relief. ‘Get a room full of, like, policemen and MPs and judges, then get someone else with, fucking, a couple thousand quid of smack and get them to put loads of little £10 bags in everyone’s pockets.’
    Brilliant, Stuart. Excellent. How do you think of them?
    â€˜Nah, serious, I am. Cos then they’d understand what John and Ruth was up against. Any good dealer could do it, cos a £10 packet is only about the size of a sweetcorn kernel, then at the end you’d tell them what had happened while they was all standing round having fucking sherry and them little pieces of toast with orange bits on, just to let them know how