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