We went off to one side of the club to sit on our own and just talked for the rest of the evening. She told me she was in a relationship that wasn't working out. I lit a cigarette at one point and she grabbed it and stubbed it out, saying it was a filthy habit. I thought ‘Stroppy cow!’, but I liked it. She obviously had a bit of spirit to her. By the end of the evening we'd agreed to meet again somewhere not as noisy and I said I would phone her at the shop.
Thursday, 2 March 2000 was our first proper date. I was nervous as hell and it took me ages to get ready because I wanted to make the right impression. I kept trying on different shirts and walking backwards and forwards in front of the mirror, talking to myself. If Tracey could have seen me I'm sure she would have called me an ‘old tart’.
We drove over to Bradford and spent the day just walking round, holding hands and talking. She was obviously a very caring person so when she noticed the slash marks on my arms, I told her the truth – that I'd cut my arms with a razor while I was up in Edinburgh for Hogmanay when everything got too much for me. That led to me telling her about being abused as a child, and my sister Shirley dying, and all the bad stuff that had happened in my life. It just poured out. Tracey listened in a sympathetic, non-judgemental way, asking a few questions and saying all the right things, which is not easy because I can be very touchy if someone is insensitive or clumsy.
By the end of the day, I had made up my mind that Tracey was the woman I wanted to be with and, amazingly, it seemed as though she wanted to be with me as well. We just ‘clicked’ in a way that felt very natural and real.
I went back to my mum's place above the pub she ran – the Hawthorn Inn, in Oldham – and waited to hear from Tracey.
It wasn't straightforward for her because she had two sons, aged sixteen and seventeen, and although the house they lived in was hers, her boyfriend said he couldn't afford to move out till he got paid at the end of the month. For a whole week I didn't hear anything from her and I thought she must have changed her mind. I was a nervous wreck waiting for the phone to ring, but knowing that I had to let her sort things out in her own way. Finally, she called and said she had had a terrible time with her now ex-boyfriend, who loved her dearly. Any break-ups are hard but when you leave one person for another feelings are especially raw. I told Tracey to come back and stay at Mum's pub for the time being, and she agreed.
We got very close, very quickly, spending lots of time together and talking constantly, filling each other in about all the details of our lives. I'd often had sexual problems in the past due to the abuse I'd suffered, but things were fine with Tracey because she was always so affectionate and caring. It was true love-making rather than just sex, and she'd hold me afterwards in a way that made me feel very secure. I had never experienced such a powerful emotion for another person before and I was completely swept off my feet.
At the end of March, her ex finally vacated the house and we moved in there, together with her sons Jamie and Lee. My relationship with them went well from the start. They hadn't liked Tracey's ex but said that I reminded them of Jimmy, their real dad, and that was a good thing. I told them there was no way I wanted to take their dad's place but that we could be mates, and that was what they wanted as well. I took the four of us on a holiday to Malia in Crete and we had a wonderful time messing around on jet-skis, sunbathing and generally bonding with each other. Back home I took the boys out clubbing a couple of times and they were impressed that I could walk straight in without queuing because I was friendly with all the doormen round our way. Basically they were nice lads, and I was happy to have them around.
There was never any doubt in my mind that Tracey was the woman for me. This was it. I'd thought for some time that if I could find a woman who really loved me to the core then it would solve all my problems, and it seemed as though Tracey was the one. When I was a child, my sister Christina used to tell me fairy tales about princes and princesses and I had this idea that when you met the right girl and fell in love you would settle down, have a couple of kids, move into a ‘palace’, buy a nice car, make a bit of money and live happily ever after. I was being hugely over-optimistic, though. One good relationship wasn't going to compensate for all the bad things that had happened in my life. No matter how loving Tracey was, it didn't stop my insecurities, and sometimes I tried to lift my mood with alcohol and street drugs like cocaine and ecstasy. She knew I took drugs from time to time but she had no idea how much.
She was also aware that I often had horrific nightmares that made me twitch and cry in my sleep, and sometimes I spoke in a strange high-pitched voice, like a little boy, like little Stuart saying, ‘Please, Daddy, no.’ She learned to recognize the times when I suddenly became deadly quiet and still as meaning that something had just caused me to have a flashback to some horrible incident from my past.
Meanwhile, I was driving myself crazy with the intensity of my feelings for Tracey. I couldn't get close enough no matter how tightly I held her. Touch wasn't enough – I really wanted our souls to entwine and for her to hold me and never let me go. I couldn't bear to think of her with anyone else; I wanted her to be mine and only mine, so I found it hard living with her in the same house where she'd lived with her ex-husband Jimmy, the boys' father, and with the boyfriend she'd been seeing when I met her as well.
I began to get stupidly insecure and would test her, saying she didn't really love me, just to see how she'd react. Sometimes I'd manufacture a silly tiff about nothing and I'd pack my bags and threaten to leave, wanting her to stop me to prove that she really did care and wasn't going to end up hurting me. I was petrified and so afraid of trusting anyone. All I knew was that if you trusted you got hurt. When Dad moved in with us when I was three years old, I thought I was his ‘special one’ and I gave him my heart on a plate. Even after he started beating and abusing me, I was devoted to him and yearned desperately for him to love me back. As an adult I still yearned to be loved but I put so many barriers and tests in the way that they alienated most people and stopped us getting close.
Tracey did her best to reassure me. ‘But why do you love me?’ I'd ask over and over. I thought maybe she liked me because I bought her lots of meals and flowers and treated her like a lady, but she said no, it wasn't that. It was the fact that I let her see the vulnerability beneath the extrovert veneer of a successful businessman and joker. The story of my childhood moved her deeply and made her want to care for me. She claimed it was the real Stuart she fell for, not the public mask.
Still I had problems trusting. Roughly three months after we'd moved in together, things came to a head and we agreed that I would move back to my Mum's pub until we could sell her house and buy somewhere new together – somewhere without history, that was just ours; somewhere she hadn't lived with another man.
Without her there to cuddle up to every night, I started hooking up with the lads and going out drinking and drugging with them. It wasn't long before Tracey began to complain bitterly that I either disappeared at weekends or was too hung over to do much with her, so to make things up I took her away for the weekend. On 20 August 2000 we ended up in Wales, in the village where my stepfather was now living, and briefly met my Aunt Doris and her husband Stewart.
Later that night, tortured by all the memories, and convinced that I would never be able to form a good relationship until I got answers to some of my questions about the past, I drove back to visit my stepdad to try and talk to him about everything. But once I got inside his house, I became a frightened little boy again rather than a thirty-two-year-old man. Dozens of little things triggered horrific childhood memories: his dogs' bowls sitting on the step, which made me remember all the times he'd forced me to eat from them; his feet soaking in a bowl, which brought back their vile, rotten smell and all the times he made me scratch the dead skin off them; the way he sat in his chair with that twisted smile on his face. There was a hammer beside him in just the place he would have kept whatever weapon he was about to beat me with.
He started shouting at me and I began to sob convulsively, crouching down on the sofa in a submissive, child's posture. He ranted and raved, denying everything, utterly