Читать книгу I Just Wanted to Be Loved: A boy eager to please. The man who destroyed his childhood. The love that overcame it. - Stuart Howarth - Страница 12

When you're released from prison, there's virtually no support network waiting for you. I was a big guy – six foot three, weighing twenty-one stone – and thirteen months earlier I'd killed someone due to diminished responsibility, yet I was just sent back into society without any doctor's appointments or psychiatrists to advise me or help me stay sane and grounded. I'd been thoroughly assessed before the murder trial, but after that there was no more help. If anything I was more damaged after prison than when I went in.

I had a probation officer, who by bizarre coincidence had been the magistrate who gave my stepdad permission to adopt me when I was five years old. We both remembered her asking me at the time if I liked my new daddy, and I said, ‘I don't like it when he hits me and hurts me.’ All the adults in the room thought I was joking. No one took me seriously, and the adoption was approved. I always felt weird about seeing her because of that, but in fact our once-weekly meetings were just a formality. I'd turn up at her office and say ‘Hi’; she'd ask how I was and I'd say ‘Fine’. She would ask me how I was coping and if I had any problems but I didn't feel I could tell her the truth: ‘Yes, I'm having flashbacks and nightmares and I'm not coping at all.’

Dad peeing into my mouth.

Dad forcing me to eat pig swill.

Dad ramming my face into my dinner and saying, ‘You're a naughty little bastard, aren't you?’

I was terrified they might decide to lock me up in a mental institution if they knew what was really going on in my head. Mental illness runs in my real dad's family. I was scared that I'd end up in a psychiatric ward somewhere, pumped full of pills and rocking back and forwards all day. Given my record of killing a man, I might never get out again.

I occasionally saw Neil Fox, the counsellor I'd had sessions with in prison, but it was difficult to arrange appointments because he was always so busy. I never blamed him for this in any way; he had his own life to get on with. What I really needed was a regular therapist on the outside with whom I could discuss all the pressure I felt under, the fears and the depressions that were weighing me down. I needed someone to say, ‘What your stepfather did to you was wrong,’ and to help me find a way through all the conflicting emotions that were chewing me up inside.

The one thing that no one understood was that I missed my stepdad. I loved that guy so much as a child and, while I didn't like him hurting me, I never really understood that what he was doing to me was wrong. When I visited his house that night in August 2000, I was still yearning for him to love me back. Once he was dead, it was like a massive chasm that could never be filled. I ached for a man's love, a guiding figure in my life, someone who would give me a push when I needed it, or offer a shoulder to cry on. I missed him – and it was my fault he was dead.

I knew I needed help but I didn't know how to get it. I didn't think I could just go to my GP and say, ‘I can't cope.’ That would have felt as though I was a real failure, and I wasn't sure what he could do anyway. No, I decided; I would just have to find a way through this on my own, with Tracey by my side.

It wasn't only the after-effects of having killed someone, and the experiences I'd had in jail. Lots of other things were preying on my mind as well. There were two court cases pending that would drag all sorts of memories to the surface again. One was the trial of an old friend of my stepdad's who used to babysit for us when we were kids. While I was in prison, Christina had gone to the police to complain about him and he had been arrested and charged with several counts of rape and buggery. Christina and I were both due to testify against him.

The other case looming on the horizon was the one against the prison service for all the abuses that had taken place while I was inside. There were the ridiculous number of strip searches, often carried out without so much as a nod to the rules that you should be allowed to protect your dignity by keeping an item of clothing on. There were the unbelievably cruel comments made by one guard in particular, who never missed a chance to taunt me, saying, for example, that I'd probably enjoyed it when my dad was raping me. There was also the fact that they often prevented me from getting to my therapy sessions on time and sometimes made me miss them altogether: ‘We run the jail, Howarth, not you.’ And then there was the fact that I was put in cells near the sex offenders' wing, which drove me completely mental given my background.

Originally I'd been suing the Home Office and the United Kingdom Detention Service but that proved too complicated so we'd switched just to focus on Strangeways. The case was moving slowly and I'd no idea when I'd have to go to court, but until it was over I couldn't leave my prison sentence behind me. Every day there seemed to be some new information required by my solicitors or a guard's statement landing on the door mat, which I would have to read and check carefully. It took me right back into the prison, reliving every minute. As I pored over the paperwork, I could still smell the stale stench of the cells and hear the clamour of echoing voices in the stairwells.

My mum was doing her best to welcome me back home, but there were times when she could be very insensitive to what I'd been through. A couple of days after I got back I found out that Clare, who lived in the pub with us, was sleeping with a picture of my stepfather (who was her real dad) by her bed. Clare had severe learning difficulties, so I didn't blame her. I knew she had been to his funeral while I was in jail and I was annoyed that she was being fed this view that he was a normal, straight-up guy. She couldn't remember the time he deliberately dropped her down the stairs when she was six months old; she didn't know that he used to threaten to kill her when we were all out at school. She was still just a toddler when her dad went to jail for abusing her big sisters, so she never saw at first hand what he was really like. The fact that she was now sleeping with a picture of him destroyed me and I had words with Mum about it.

‘She's got a right to know her own father,’ Mum argued back.

‘Well, she's got a right to know what a sick, evil bastard he was in that case,’ I yelled. ‘I'm not having her turning him into a saint. That's not right.’

But Mum insisted I wasn't to say anything that would disillusion Clare about her biological father, and in my precarious state that didn't go down too well. I was still annoyed with Mum about her testimony in my court case. She had argued that I should be locked up in a mental institution, and if that had happened I would never have got out. It's just as well the judge hadn't listened to her.

I was also upset about my own children, Matthew and Rebecca, who were now aged twelve and nine respectively. A couple of days after I got out of prison I'd driven over to see them, only to find out that their mother, my ex-wife Angela, had moved house. My first paranoid thought was that she had fled with the children so I wouldn't be able to find them. However, I called my mum at the pub and she gave me the address that Angela had left with her, and I drove over to the new place, feeling like a bag of nerves. I was sweating and my heart was pounding so hard it was like having a rock band in my chest.

When Angela opened the front door I had tears in my eyes and she seemed shocked to see me like that.

‘How are you?’ she asked gently.

‘I'm OK,’ I sniffed, wiping my eyes with the back of my hand. ‘How are the kids?’

‘They're fine. Just fine. I took Matthew to see a counsellor a couple of times because he was so upset about you being in jail. I had to tell them the truth about what happened because other kids at school knew and it would have come out anyway.’

‘Yeah, of course.’ I'd guessed they probably knew. ‘But they're OK now? Do you think I could see them? Would that be all right with you?’

‘Sure, I'll just get them.’ She turned and shouted: ‘Matt! Becky! Can you come here a minute.’

Matthew appeared first and I was stunned to see how much he'd grown in just fourteen months. He was a couple of inches taller and looked more mature altogether. Then a waft of blonde hair came down the hall and my daughter said ‘Hiya!’, her face so like my own that it was like looking in a mirror. I had a massive ache in my chest.

‘How are you?’ I asked.

‘We're all right,’ Matthew answered on behalf of them both.

‘How's school?’

‘It's all right.’

I was desperate to take them in my arms and hug them but they were so pure and fragile I was afraid of breaking them. I didn't feel I had the right to touch them any more.

They stepped outside into the garden and leaned their backs against the wall, waiting for me to talk again. What should I say?

‘Look, you know where I've been and what I've done. I'm really sorry it's been hard for you. I love you both dearly and I'd like to start seeing you again. Would that be OK?’

They both turned to Angela, checking her expression for permission, and she smiled and nodded.

‘Yeah, OK,’ Matthew said, but he seemed unsure, as if I was a stranger.

‘We could go to the zoo or whatever you want,’ I said. ‘Just let me know.’

‘Will Mummy come too?’ Becky asked.

‘I don't know. We'll see.’

She looked at the ground, scuffing the toe of her shoe on the path.

I racked my brains for more questions I could ask about their lives but I just couldn't get a conversation going. Later, when I described the scene to Tracey, she said, ‘Why didn't you ask this? Why didn't you ask that?’ but at the time I couldn't think of anything. I just stood there like a lemon, shifting my weight from foot to foot.

‘Is there anything you need?’ I asked eventually. ‘New bikes? A computer for your homework, maybe?’

‘Dad got us a computer,’ Becky told me, and I was taken aback for a minute. It was a huge shock to realize she called Angela's new husband ‘Dad’.

‘If he's Dad, what do you call me?’ I asked in a jokey voice, trying not to let them hear how hurt I was.

‘Old Dad,’ Becky whispered.

‘I'm not that old,’ I joked, but I was deeply upset.

I left not long afterwards – the whole reunion didn't take more than a few minutes – and my heart was breaking as I drove home. I didn't feel angry or even surprised that my place had been usurped like that. I felt as though I was a little boy again, being punished because I was no good. That's what Dad always used to say to me: ‘You're too naughty to be loved, Stuart.’

Suddenly I had a flashback. I was sitting in a cold salt bath to relieve the hot stinging pain of the welts on my backside from Dad's belt buckle. Sobs escaped from my chest like hiccups and I tried to stifle them in case they made him angry again. He stood watching me with cold eyes, his arms folded, saying, ‘See? This is what happens when you're a naughty lad. Why can't you be good?’

I didn't know what I'd done wrong. I just got home from school and he sent me straight upstairs to my bedroom to wait. When he came up, the belt was in his hand. I trembled with fear as he made me take my clothes off then turned me over onto my stomach on the bed and hit me over and over again, pushing my head down into the pillow to muffle my screams.

Afterwards I felt guilty and sad, sure it must be true that I deserved all the beatings. I didn't ever mean to be naughty; it seemed I just couldn't help it. I must have been born bad in some way.

In the car that day after visiting Matthew and Becky, I had the same feeling. If only I was a good person, I would have the right to a relationship with my children. As things stood, I didn't deserve them. I had no right to demand their affection.

What was wrong 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.