Stuart

1998: Alexander Masters stopped to talk to a wreck of man who was begging near Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. The man, pasty looking, shaven-haired, missing several teeth, told him that he would be topping himself at the first opportunity. Thus began the friendship between a middle-class ‘nonce’, who worked as an assistant at a care centre for rough sleepers, and a ‘psycho, sociopathic street raconteur’.

The reasons behind the hurricane of violent behaviour that accompanied Stuart wherever he went has its roots deep in his past, a past that is slowly and depressingly revealed as the books progresses backwards through Stuart’s life. Interspersed among these revelations is the story of Stuart and Alexander’s friendship, and the ever-present and unpredictable ups and downs of Stuart’s life.

Some of the things they do: for three nights, they – and a number of other misfits – sleep rough outside the Home Office to protest against the imprisonment of two care centre directors who were convicted for allegedly allowing heroin to be sold on the premises; Stuart teaches Alexander how to break into cars, and how to survive in prison (‘attack first’); Stuart gets a pacemaker inserted into his thigh (his habit of injecting citric acid, among other things, has wrecked the veins around his heart); Alexander attends Stuart’s latest court hearing and has his first-ever bacon-and-fried-egg sandwich afterwards. The chaos of Stuart’s existence rumbles on, and Alexander is there to witness it.

Stuart has led an appalling life, let down by his brother, his schools, the care services (‘The System’) and himself, yet he can be chipper and funny; in fact, he is so maddeningly talkative on occasion that he drives Alexander to distraction with his yap-yap-yapping. When Stuart's ‘rageous’ black mists come over him, Alexander wishes him dead and out of his life forever.

Ultimately this is what is so great about this book: hard as Alexander tries to understand why Stuart and others like him live in the way they do, it is too remote a thing from his own experience to ever fully comprehend (as Stuart repeatedly points out).

Masters salutes the painful, schizophrenic life of Stuart Shorter, but this is also an angry book about the way society treats those who have been horribly abused and abandoned. It was a long time in the writing, but A Life Backwards is a labour of love that demands to be read.