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

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.’