What Doesn’t Make the Records
There was a moment when I stopped looking for someone I used to know. I couldn’t tell you exactly when. One day they were there, the next they weren’t, and somewhere along the way I stopped wondering what had happened. I told myself it wasn’t my problem. That there was something in them I couldn’t fix. That others had already tried with better tools than mine. The last time I heard anything, someone told me they weren’t doing well. I said that’s too bad. And went on with my day.
Stuart Shorter grew up in Cambridge. At twelve, he entered his first detention center. At thirty-three, he died beside the train tracks in Waterbeach on a July night. The jury’s verdict was open: neither accident nor suicide. Just a thirty-three-year-old man at the edge of some tracks at eleven at night. The records have dates, diagnoses, institutions, reoffenses. What doesn’t make the records is that Stuart was funny. That he was sharp. That he could take you apart in a conversation and make you laugh in the next. That he spoke before Parliament on the rights of homeless people. That he organized marches, negotiated with police. That before he died, he asked his friend Alexander Masters for one thing: tell my life backwards. Like a criminal case. Figure out who I became by finding what happened to me.
Masters wrote that book. It won the Guardian First Book Award in 2005. In 2007, the BBC — with Sam Mendes as producer — brought it to the screen. Tom Hardy plays Stuart. Benedict Cumberbatch plays Alexander. Hardy was BAFTA nominated for that performance. This was before Bane, before Sherlock, before either of them carried the weight of what they were going to become. There’s a scene. Alexander asks Stuart what he would change about his life if he could change one thing. Stuart doesn’t answer right away. When he does, he gives no names. He says: the day I met violence. Violence as a place. A threshold he crossed as a child and never found his way back from. No music. No dramatic close-up. Just that sentence floating. And Hardy carrying it with his whole body — shoulders down, eyes nowhere.
What Stuart was asking of Alexander wasn’t pity. It was time. For someone to stay long enough to understand that the same person sleeping on Cambridge streets was also the person no one had taken the trouble to know. Alexander wasn’t the enlightened hero who saves the marginal. He was a middle-class man with his own blind spots who stumbled into someone who fit no box and learned, slowly, to care about him without needing him to change. That’s everything. And sometimes that’s all anyone needs. For someone to stay.
I think about the moment I stopped looking for that person I used to know. About the sentence I told myself: not my problem. And I wonder if someone, somewhere in Stuart’s life, said the same thing. Whether it was that simple. Whether it’s always that simple. The film is available on HBO Max and Prime Video. The book exists too, and does things the screen can’t reach. Two different experiences. Both ask the same question: what killed the boy I used to be?
