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 13

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 man who entertained everyone on those visits, and I always had a great time. I think they did too.

Geoff knew nothing of my past so it must have been a huge shock to him when he opened a newspaper one morning in August 2000 to see that I'd been arrested for killing my stepfather. I could understand anyone not wanting anything more to do with me after the way the papers reported it at first: ‘Cold, calculating killer in a black BMW executes well-loved family man and outstanding council employee’ was the general message. But I wrote to Geoff and Sue from jail apologizing for the fact that I wouldn't be around for a while and telling them the bare bones of the story, and I got a lovely letter back.

‘Our hearts go out to you,’ they said. ‘We had no idea what you'd been through because all we saw was this happy-go-lucky jokey guy. As soon as we saw your car pull in at the farm, we'd start laughing.’

I got lots of letters from former Norweb clients, all expressing support, but Geoff's was the one that meant the most to me.

He asked if he could do anything at all to help. Now, in the early months I was in jail, Tracey began having trouble keeping up with her mortgage payments and I wasn't earning so I couldn't help her out. We decided that she should sell the house and rent somewhere until I got out of prison, then we'd be able to buy a place together as we'd been planning. However, her house needed some repairs before she could get a fair market price for it and Tracey didn't know any builders she could ask. I was worried she might get ripped off so I wrote to Geoff and asked if he would help her to find some reputable people, and he did what he could.

Next, Geoff wrote to say that he and Sue wanted to visit me. This was around December 2000, four months after I'd gone in. I was a category A prisoner by then so they had to come right inside the jail. I was embarrassed for them to see me like that but Geoff made it clear where he stood straight away.

‘You shouldn't be in here,’ he said. ‘It's a piece of nonsense. I'd like to stand bail. I'll suggest that you come and stay with Sue and me at the farm until the trial and I'll vouch for your behaviour. After that, I've no doubt you'll be released. Any judge will be able to see you're a good man.’

I was so emotional I couldn't speak. If I'd felt that he was a father figure before, now he was offering to do things for me that a real ‘dad’ would have done and I was incredibly moved. No one had ever taken care of me like that before.

The bail application didn't work but he went through the whole rigmarole anyway. A team from the court went to Geoff's place to assess his suitability, then he appeared in front of a judge and offered £30,000 as bail. In court, he said that I would live and work with him, that it was obvious I wasn't a danger to society, but the judge refused his offer and I was taken back to my cell feeling totally dejected.

Geoff didn't give up, though. He made a second bail application offering £50,000, but this was turned down as well. I was distraught. Each time I got my hopes up that maybe I would be walking free that day and going back to the farm; each time those hopes were dashed. I suppose the judge was reasoning that I'd been charged with the crime of murder, which was too serious for bail. I'll always be grateful to Sue and Geoff for trying at any rate.

When I came out of Strangeways in September 2001, Geoff was on the phone straight away, urging me to come and work for him, but I didn't feel ready to take on any kind of responsibility. My head was shot to pieces and I had no confidence that I'd be any good any more. I worried that when I went to visit business clients they would be whispering behind my back: ‘He's the one I told you about; he's the murderer.’

Geoff kept trying, though. He said, ‘I want you to be my business-development manager. I wouldn't offer if I didn't know for sure that you can do it. Besides, it will be good for you to get back to work.’

I had my pride and I didn't want to accept what I saw as his charity but I started helping out just to keep myself occupied. I've always been a person who needs to be busy and I'm a perfectionist in everything I do. I wouldn't take a salary at first but I started popping into the office and making suggestions about ways he could increase turnover and attract new clients and Geoff seemed to like my ideas.

By November, Tracey and I were able to move out of the pub and start renting a lovely little house in Ashton-under-Lyne. It was on a quiet, suburban street and I felt safe there. I felt we'd be able to nest and create a proper home for ourselves, just as soon as I could get over all my problems.

But despite the support I was getting from Geoff, Sue and, of course, Tracey, my life was worse after I came out of prison than it had been before I went in. I couldn't cope with the reality of what was going on inside my head, and so before long I fell back into taking street drugs, just as I'd been doing around about the period when I killed my stepfather. Just as I'd been doing ever since I was five years old and hung around sniffing glue with some older kids in our neighbourhood.

It was plain stupid. I hadn't touched a single drug in prison, despite the fact that they were widely available, but as soon as I was out I felt I needed something to numb me and make reality more bearable, and I had plenty of mates who could get me drugs at the drop of a hat. In my experience most bodybuilders have psychological problems and they take drugs to mask them, trying to change their state of mind and get happy again. In my case, I felt this huge, gaping emptiness inside me – I describe it as feeling like a hole in my soul – and I kept taking different substances to try and fill it.

Drugs had always been a comforter to me, especially cocaine. That white powder seemed to wrap its arms around me and take away all the demons. I could find it at any club I went to, often without paying. I'd slip off to the toilet with a snappy bag of white powder and a house key and snort a couple of lines inside a cubicle, then I'd feel uplifted, confident and comfortable. The abuse I'd suffered faded into the background and I'd chat away animatedly, living in the moment.

The buzz doesn't last long, though. Fifteen minutes later you have to slip back to a cubicle for another couple of lines or you'll plummet down further than you were before you started. You feel elated and energetic while it lasts, then knackered when you come down. While there's plenty of white powder around, it's easy to stay up all night chatting and drinking and smoking the hours away, but when you get home and crawl into bed you feel as though you've been knocked over by a juggernaut.

I'd been offered ecstasy several times but was wary of trying it after the case of Leah Betts hit the headlines in 1995. She'd taken an ecstasy tablet at her eighteenth birthday party, collapsed into a coma and subsequently died. It was reported at the inquest that it wasn't, in fact, the ecstasy alone that killed her; she had died of water intoxification. You're told to drink lots of water to avoid dehydration at ‘raves’ but she had drunk too much and the ecstasy prevented her kidneys being able to deal with it, so the combination of the two proved fatal.

Her parents mounted a huge campaign to raise awareness in young people that it could happen to them too. There were posters with the slogan, ‘Sorted: Just one ecstasy tablet took Leah Betts', and I think it had a big influence at the time. It certainly made me stop in my tracks.

But then, as my mental problems worsened, and after I'd made several suicide attempts anyway, I thought ‘What the heck? If I die, I die.’ And the first time I took an ecstasy tablet, I thought, ‘You bastards! All this time society's been keeping me away from this drug and it's wonderful!’

It was a good substance for me because I loved the universe when I took it. I felt loved-up and not at all angry or depressed. I'd stand in the club saying to Tracey, ‘I love you, I really love you,’ for hours on end. You don't feel ‘drugged’ on ecstasy – you feel as though you are thinking really clearly for the first time in ages and you are acutely aware of little things, like the curve of an earlobe or an individual melody in the music that's playing.

The main component of ecstasy is MDMA, a drug that causes abnormal quantities of serotonin (the ‘happy hormone’) to be released in the brain. A few hours after taking a standard ecstasy tab, you'll have no serotonin left in storage because it will all have been released into the bloodstream, so it's obvious that it's going to mess up your moods. It takes a while for your body to produce more serotonin so that you can feel cheerful again without chemical help and in the meantime you can get very low.

MDMA makes you feel speedy and energetic when you're still up, and much more sociable than usual. It's all very intense, so sometimes you need to drink a couple of pints to bring you down a bit, and if you go down too far you might need a couple of lines of coke to bring you up again. Finding the right mood can be a delicate chemical balancing act.

And this wasn't all I was taking. Some bodybuilder friends introduced me to GHB (gammahydroxybutyric acid) because it promotes REM sleep, during which your body secretes growth hormone so it helps you to build muscle. I soon found it had plenty of other effects as well. GHB was used as an anaesthetic during World War II, when they had to perform amputations on the battlefield. It's also been used medically to treat depression and insomnia, and to help recovering alcoholics. At the levels you take in clubs, it produces a sense of euphoria and increased libido, and it can make the effects of ecstasy even more intense. It was first used as a recreational drug in the gay community in the 1970s and 1980s, and River Phoenix (star of My Own Private Idaho) had some in his bloodstream when he collapsed and died outside Hollywood club The Viper Room in 1993.

GHB is a colourless liquid with a slightly salty taste, a bit like pee. If you have more than two capfuls of it, it will knock you out for four to five hours, so it can be a good way to come down at the end of the night when you want some sleep. I have also heard of several cases where it has been used as an alternative to the date-rape drug rohipnol because it's easy to slip into a drink yet it can't be detected in the body more than four hours later. It's a very dangerous drug, especially combined with alcohol, and it's also addictive after a while, causing withdrawal side effects of insomnia, anxiety, sweating, chest pain, aching muscles, and even convulsions and hallucinations.

Of course, it was all a ridiculously bad idea to be tampering with my mental state in this way, feeding myself a cocktail of uppers and downers to try and achieve oblivion. I didn't think I had a problem, though, because I only did drugs at weekends and I always got myself back to work first thing on Monday morning.

In a typical weekend Tracey and I would go out together on Friday night but she'd want to come home around midnight while I stayed out all night with my mates, going from club to club drinking and drugging. I'd stagger home at some stage on Saturday morning, sleep all afternoon, then go out on Saturday night to get off my face again, and sometimes I'd do the same on Sunday as well. Monday to Wednesday were my days for recovery and I felt like shit, but I went to work, came home and had a protein shake, changed into my gym gear, went to the gym for a workout, then came back for dinner and bed. By Thursday I'd be feeling better again and raring up for another ‘lost weekend’.

As you can imagine, Tracey was very unimpressed by this behaviour. In the months before I went to prison she'd known I took drugs occasionally, but nothing like this. She says that my chemical-induced moods were so unpredictable that when the front door opened she had no idea which Stuart was going to walk in. I could be aggressive and argumentative or, occasionally, loving and affectionate (but this was becoming quite rare).

Looking back, I've got no idea why she stuck around because there was nothing in it for her. She was getting nothing back from me except grief. One minute I'd completely ignore her and the next I'd be all upset and needing comfort and love. She'd try to talk to me and I'd either respond with a grunt or by bursting into tears.

Tracey's never been a nag but she began to try to get me to calm down and think about what I was doing to myself.

‘You can go out and have a few pints, Stuart, but just come home with me at a normal time and we can enjoy the rest of our weekend together.’

She was never a big drinker and she didn't touch drugs so I thought she was just trying to spoil my fun. She'd try to pin me down, asking what time I was coming home, calling me on my mobile when I was out drinking and drugging with the lads – all perfectly reasonable behaviour when you think about it, but the more she tried to change me, the more I resisted it.

‘What are you doing later?’ she'd ask, and I'd ignore her.

‘Stuart, what's going on? Why are you not talking to me?’

‘It's your own fault,’ I'd say. ‘You never stop bloody nagging.’

I'd often start an argument deliberately on a Friday night because I wanted the freedom to drink and drug as much as I chose over the weekend. If I managed to manipulate the situation so that we had a row and I stormed out, it left the coast clear to party.

‘Anyway, it's your fault I go out and get drunk,’ I'd say. ‘If things were right between us, I wouldn't need to.’

Everything was Tracey's fault, to my mind: the reason I went out, got drunk, took drugs – the reason why my life was so horrible. The bottom line was that no matter how hard she tried, it seemed as though she couldn't save me. I'd thought that if she loved me enough, really loved me to the core, then I would get better, but instead I was getting worse. I was having more and more flashbacks of the abuse, and my sleep was disturbed by horrible nightmares that left me dizzy and hyperventilating when I woke.

I was stark naked and my stepfather was tying me up with ropes at the back door. He twisted me so that my feet were trussed up to my neck, secured my arms behind my back so I couldn't move a muscle, then just laughed and laughed at the sight of me trapped there. ‘Try and get out of that!’ he sneered, proud of his handiwork.

Shirley and Christina were watching but I knew there was nothing they could do to help without bringing his wrath on themselves. Dad's terriers were running around, yapping with excitement, and I was scared they would nip at my exposed flesh. The ropes cut into me but I tried not to wriggle, which would only make it hurt more. I knew I couldn't get free until he decided to untie me again.

I was doing well at work but I didn't believe in myself so I'd come home and cry to Tracey, ‘Geoff hates me, they all hate me; they only asked me to work there because they felt sorry for me.’

Sometimes she'd pick up the phone and call Geoff when I wasn't around, saying, ‘Will you please talk to Stuart and tell him you don't hate him and that he is doing OK?’

They'd both try to calm me down, but at times I was inconsolable. It didn't occur to me for one moment that the chemical cocktails I was putting in my body might be making the problem worse. They were what helped me to cope with my problems, I thought, and Tracey was trying to stop me taking them and therefore she was in the wrong. She wasn't helping me after all; in fact, she was hindering my recovery by trying to stop my drug-taking.

In a furious row one night at the end of February 2002, not quite five months after I was released from jail, I yelled at her to get out.

‘Why don't you fuck off back to your mum's and leave me alone? I've had enough of you going on at me all the time,’ I screamed.

‘Stuart, calm down. You don't mean that. I love you and I'm just trying to help you.’ She tried to put her arms round me but I dodged out of reach.

‘I love you too but it's obviously not enough,’ I told her. ‘We can't be right together or I wouldn't feel this way.’

Tracey continued to reason with me but I was adamant, so at last she packed an overnight bag and off she went. It was Friday evening, so that left me free to go out drinking and drugging to my heart's content for the whole weekend, but as soon as she left my spirits plummeted like a rock. I hated everybody and everything. Looking back, I was mentally ill. My thoughts were all over the place. I felt I couldn't trust anyone any more – not even Geoff and Tracey. I was lonely, worthless, tortured, the most pitiful creature on the planet as far as I was concerned. Being me was unbearable.

I dragged myself through my normal weekend routine of sloshing booze down my throat and snorting coke up my nose, but I felt like an outsider in the crowd. I couldn't find jovial Stuart, the one who was always up for a laugh. Someone much darker had taken over in my head.

A dealer I knew – let's call him ‘Dave’ – had recently moved close by, so on the Sunday evening I called and invited him over to do some cocaine with me. I didn't have anything in common with this guy apart from drugs. There was nothing for us to talk about so I put on MTV full blast in the background and we watched rock videos in between chopping lines.

It was late – maybe two or three in the morning – when I made the decision that I couldn't go on living any more. Enough was enough. I'd tried my best to cope but I couldn't do it. My life was intolerable and now I'd even driven Tracey away, the only good thing I'd had left.

As ‘Dave’ sat on our sofa, I went through to the kitchen and found a bottle of Bell's whisky. I don't like the taste of whisky so I only ever drink it when I'm trying to kill myself. Next I went into the kitchen and pulled out all the bottles and packs of paracetamol I could find.

I stood by the kitchen sink swallowing the pills one by one, washing them down with glugs of whisky. I reckon I took fifty to sixty paracetamol altogether. I knew from my research on the Internet that as few as twelve could be a fatal dose, so I reckoned it was a pretty sure bet I would die after taking so many.

None of my suicide attempts have been ‘cries for help’. Each time, I've been determined to die. When I ran a pipe from my car exhaust back through the window and turned on the engine in the garage one night back in 1999, the only thing that saved my life was that the pipe fell out while I was unconscious. When I slashed my wrists in prison, I cut so deeply that blood sprayed all round my cell and the wounds had to be stapled together in hospital. And that night, in the house with ‘Dave’, I no longer wanted to be in this world. I wanted the peace and calm of death, of nothingness, no more flashbacks and no more nightmares. I don't believe in God as such but I think there might be some kind of afterlife and, if there is, I hope I meet up with my sister Shirley who died in 1990. Lovely Shirl the Whirl, the gentle, compassionate spirit who was the only one I could talk to in my family.

‘Shirl, please help me,’ I was thinking in my head that night. ‘I just want to be with you now. You're the only one who's never let me down.’