by Liam Livings
“Maybe sometimes,” I said.
“Thanks for agreeing to this first visit.”
I shook my head. “It’s nothing. Who doesn’t want a trip to the New Forest?”
“You realise why you’re here, don’t you? It was in the letter.”
“Closure, apologies, witnesses to your addiction, it said, didn’t it?”
“Didn’t one of The Friary staff explain it to you?”
“Were they meant to?” I sat back in the chair, my legs fidgeting, as Paul called the matron over.
She explained that part of the treatment programme involved admitting wrongs, apologising to those the residents had wronged and how difficult it often was for all involved. She added that they’d tried to think of other people Paul could have asked to fulfil this role but hadn’t come up with anyone else suitable—“Or anyone whose details Paul has so he can contact them. His parents are out of the question. They only witnessed things at the end. It needs to be someone who saw things as they worsened.”
Paul avoided my eyes.
“All right. Tell me more about what’s involved.”
The matron explained Paul would put everything in a letter inviting me for the first group session, which I was under no obligation to attend, even though I’d agreed to participate now.
“First?”
“It’s a series. We can’t go too far in one session, it’s very tiring for all involved. We can space sessions out as you wish, to suit you and the resident.”
She went over the details, then left us alone in the visiting room. Well, I say alone; sitting in the corner was a man in a white tunic and black trousers who looked like a nursing-bouncer mashup.
Paul said, “It’s to stop anyone smuggling in anything to give us.” He rolled his eyes. “Thanks for coming. It means so much to me. Even though we’re not together, it’s kind of you.”
“What happened for you to end up here? What did you do?”
“No.” He looked away. “I’ve not come to terms with that yet. I’m going to bring it up in group this week, then I’ll put it in the letter I’m sending you. It’ll all be in the letter, everything about what you need to do when, if, you come back here to help me.” He shook my hand. “Sorry. Please read the letter. Some people’s relatives return theirs unopened. Just read the letter and give me a chance, OK?”
“’Course I will.” Come to terms? Bring it up in group? Who is this person? “There’s no if. I will come back.”
I left feeling like I’d agreed to do my good deed for the season, dismissing it all as a trivial series of talks with Paul in the glamorous country spa where he’d been staying for a while.
Piece of piss.
Simple.
It seemed like a good idea at the time.
***
Paul’s letter arrived a short while later, in a thick, A5, brown envelope, his familiar, twirly, copperplate handwriting leaning to the right and reminding me of every Victorian person’s letters I’d seen in museums and archive collections. I knew it wasn’t a bill; since moving back with Mum and Dad, I’d been mercifully saved from those.
I didn’t want to open it on my own in case it contained terrible news, so I handed it to Mum, who was smoking, leaning against the kitchen sink.
“Terrible news? What, worse than going off his nut in Ibiza?” She took a drag of the cigarette, holding it in her mouth while she opened the envelope.
I shrugged. “He could have died.” It had been one of my biggest worries when his partying had got really out of control, with no sense of ever being able to put the brakes on it.
“Writing from the grave, is he? Very impressive.” She glanced at the letter. “It’s dated a few days ago, so I think you’re all right on that count, love. Besides, you only saw him last week. What’s going to have happened to him since then in that nuthouse?”
“Read it, will you?” I wiped my sweaty hands on my grey combat trousers, fiddling about in one of the enormous pockets for my cigarettes. I lit one and tapped it on the ashtray before any ash had accumulated.
Mum rifled through the letter. “It’s pages and pages. Fucking War and Fucking Peace. I’m sitting down for this. And I’m having a new cuppa tea. You?”
Because I knew it would delay the inevitable letter reading, I agreed and waited while she made it. I stared at the pile of his handwritten words fanned out on top of the envelope. What will they contain? Why has he chosen now to write to me? Should I have just thrown it in the bin and ignored him?
Mum sat opposite me, handed me my drink, clipped me round the head lightly, told me to chill the fuck out and began reading Paul’s letter.
Dear Tom,
I’m sorry. I’m sorry for what I put you through. I’m sorry for forcing you to leave. I wasn’t myself. I don’t remember you leaving that squat party. I got home sometime later, and when I found you not at the apartment assumed you’d gone to work. It took me three days to realise you’d definitely left me.
THREE DAYS!
That’s how off my box I was. And had been for some time.
Mum paused. “I didn’t know he was this bad. Bless him. Bless his little heart, writing all this to you. I’m filling up, I am. I take back what I said.”
I coughed. “When you’re ready. Let’s get to the end and then we can discuss it, all right?”
Mum saluted, took a drag on her cigarette and continued reading.
I don’t know what happened after you left. I sort of carried on as best I could, but the promo work dried up as the season ended. Most of the clubs didn’t want me to DJ on my own, said we came as a package, like French and Saunders, Morecambe and Wise. It was great at first. I thought I could do what I liked with no one saying I needed to stop, needed to be ready for work or anything, nowhere to be in the future. No one else to think about. No commitments. There was no work, so I just carried on and got right into it.
It was like a fortnight-long party, moving from one closing party, birthday party, anniversary party, party for Wednesday, anything, to the next, going to squats, hotels, people’s apartments to carry on. Once, I forgot where I lived. I’d ended up in someone’s flat on the other side of the island, and when everyone drifted off to fly home, I was left in this flat with this woman I didn’t know, and she said she had to catch her flight as the holiday rep season had ended and she had to leave.
She turfed me out on her way to the airport, and I was alone on the other side of the island with no money and no memory of where I lived. I slept on the beach for a few days, then gradually it came back to me, piece by piece, like a ripped-up newspaper as the pieces blow into a room.
I assembled the pieces of my newspaper until I remembered the town where I lived, so I walked there, and the memories of our apartment came back to me. I walked into our place, the door left open, bodies of sleeping people I’d never met strewn across the floor, the music playing too loudly, the window left open.
A girl stood to hug me, said she’d been expecting me and wanted to know where she could get some more pills – could I sort her out.
And do you know what I did?
Did I chuck them all out, tidy it up and straighten my life out?
No, I raided the wooden box in our bedroom and dished out some party sweets to everyone and carried on partying until sometime later when we’d really run out of drugs and the sun had risen and set once more.
It always still felt like our place, our bedroom, our apartment, even after you’d gone. I somehow hoped you’d come back. I didn’t really understand what I’d done that was so wrong. Why wouldn’t you want to join me for more partying? I tried calling your parents, and your mum said she’d pass on the message. I didn’t hear back, so I assume she didn’t.
Mum looked up from the letter. “Bloody right, I didn’t. Fucking cheek of him. You was in bits. I wanted to protect you. Last thing you needed was him begging you to come back, saying he’d change when he didn’t even fucking know what he’d done wrong.” She coughed, then cont
inued reading.
It wasn’t until I woke in hospital that I realised I had a problem. The bills piling up, the unpaid rent, the lack of money to buy food – none of that really bothered me because I was off my face most of the time.
I found myself at a party in a derelict apartment building due to be pulled down as it was filled with asbestos or something, with a group of people I barely knew and who all seemed content to stay there as long as they liked. None of them seemed to have anything to get back to. It was the early hours of the morning, you know the time that feels like it belongs to the clubbers, the party people, as everyone else is sleeping, the streets are empty of cars.
I walked to the balcony overlooking the pool, filled with dirty grey-green water, white plastic chairs and tables and bits of clothing from when we’d thought it a good idea to swim in it when we first arrived at the hotel. A group of grubby men and women with wide red eyes sat cross-legged by the window. As I leant on the wall, lighting a cigarette, wondering if I had anything that needed doing in the day in front of me, I noticed someone pulling at my shorts.
I woke from my not particularly deep thoughts to find a greasy-haired woman proffering a small plastic bag of light-brown powder. She said, “Want some?”
“What is it?”
“H.”
Without even thinking, I nodded, joined her on the floor and watched as they chopped lines of the powder onto the back of a CD case, handing it round as the group leant over it, sniffed, and it disappeared up their noses.
Since then, I’ve thought back to what I was doing at that point. I knew H meant heroin. I’d not done heroin before, but somehow, as they were snorting it rather than injecting it like I’d seen on the films, it seemed the same as snorting cocaine or crushed ecstasy pills, like I sometimes did at the end of the night when there weren’t enough left to go round.
Just writing that makes me feel sick. The thought of a group of near strangers crushing white pills and snorting them to make sure there was enough to go round at the end of a night, to stave off the inevitable end of the party, makes me feel sick. But that was me. That was what I used to do, just like I would make you a cup of tea. In that space, the strange time before the day starts, while last night’s party continues, in that time, all this seemed normal, usual, the done thing.
The others around me were lying on their backs, grinning in pleasure, or curled into a ball. That looked like just what I needed at that stage of the party. A bit of fluffy, cuddly sleepiness. That’s how someone had once described the effects of heroin to me, so why should I question that?
I picked the larger of the two lines left on the CD case, because, well why not, fuck it? I blocked one nostril and sniffed through the other. I pulled my head back.
Fuck me, but I woke up in hospital, with my parents at the bedside.
Eventually—as she watched a removals company box up my things because she didn’t let me out of her sight while she flew home with me—I got the full story out of Mother.
She told me I’d been dumped at the doors of the hospital. She told me my heart had stopped at least three times. She told me if I’d been lying on my back during the journey to the hospital, I would have choked on my own vomit. She told me I was in a coma in the hospital for three weeks. She told me the first she knew about it was a Spanish doctor in broken English telling her on the phone he thought he had her son in hospital and if she wanted to see him before he left, she had better fly over soon. She told me she wasn’t at first sure what the doctor had meant by left, until he explained what had happened. She’d screamed and dropped the phone. Father had taken the details from the doctor, and they had jumped on the first flight to Ibiza.
I asked, joking, was it a budget airline and how had she felt about that?
She slapped my face so hard it left a hand-shaped bruise for days.
She told me she loved me, but as I’d already technically died three times, she wasn’t taking any chances and the only thing that would kill me now was her if I didn’t come home and take up the place at The Friary they’d booked for me.
We went straight from Heathrow airport to The Friary. I didn’t pass Go, didn’t collect £200, didn’t stop at home first. They didn’t want to let me out of their sight.
They signed my papers and left me at the reception where I was shown a tiny, cell-like room with a bunk bed against one wall and a small window in the far wall.
A rotund, smiling man uncrossed his legs as he sat at the table by the window, introduced himself with a limp handshake and a smile as “Harold. Overeater. And you are?”
Harold? Really. I’m sharing a room with a man called Harold who eats his feelings and looks like he could do without food for at least a month. I put on my grey tracksuit bottoms and grey sweatshirt with a green tree logo of The Friary and jumped onto the top bunk.
“What do we do now? Can we watch TV or listen to the radio?”
“You need to get your schedule from the resident who’s on orientation this week. It shows you the group therapy, lessons and free time you have scheduled. Time flies. It’s fun.”
Fun. Just what I needed. I lay back on the bed and closed my eyes.
Harold continued talking. He’d been there for two months and still had another month to go and said we might be in the same groups together as they usually paired people with their roommate for at least some of their timetable.
Roommate. I rolled my eyes, even though they were still closed.
Harold said, “What was your name? I didn’t catch it.”
“I didn’t throw it. Can I just have a moment, please? It’s all a bit too holiday-camp for me – orientation, schedules, timetables, bunk beds. I thought I’d be here for a few weeks, stop taking drugs and then go back to real life.”
He snapped his fingers. “Thought so. Thin ones are always drugs. What was it?”
I sat up, hitting my head on the ceiling. “What was what?”
“Your drug of choice? Mine was teacakes. And jars of golden syrup.”
“That’s not drugs.” I sighed, realising this was to be my lot for at least the next few weeks so I might as well make nice with Harold. I held my hand out. “Paul. Drugs.”
Harold shook my hand. “More than pleased to make your acquaintance.”
I rolled my eyes again. Bet he’s an estate agent, I thought to myself. “So, teacakes and golden syrup, what’s that about?” Throwing him an open-questioned bone, I hoped he’d run with it and leave me to think about my new situation from the relative isolation of the top bunk.
“Biscuit base, filled with marshmallow, all covered in chocolate. They come wrapped in foil in packs of six.”
“I see.” I didn’t, but I wanted to show willing. Despite trying to sit still, my skin itched and I found myself having to jump from the top bunk to stand in the middle of the room, my hands thrust in my pockets. I stepped from one foot to the other.
“All right there, Sparky?”
“Fine. Go on. Teacakes.”
“I was up to thirty a day towards the end. It got worse when they sacked me at work. I couldn’t fit in my car or walk more than a few steps. I’d started getting taxis and asking the customers to see themselves round the houses.”
“Estate agent?” I huffed under my breath.
“You?”
“DJ and party planner.”
“Get you!”
“Thirty teacakes a day, that’s quite a habit.” I laughed to myself quietly.
“Thirty packs of six a day.” He stood, his arms resting on his wide hips. “Never mind laughing at me for what I’ve done to bring me here. I suppose what you were doing was brain surgery or something, wasn’t it? You’ve still not told me what your drug of choice was.”
“Sorry. Ecstasy. And cocaine, I liked that too. Sometimes a bit of hash, to take the edge off, when I needed to get to sleep after a big night. You know.”
He shrugged.
I told him how much I loved drugs, how they made me feel so good I c
ouldn’t really believe how that could be wrong, how I hankered after the perfect moment of coming up on the first pill of the night at the start of the evening, when everything and anything was possible, when the music filled my head, when I was stood next to my boyfriend, my ex-boyfriend Tom—I couldn’t really believe we weren’t together anymore—in the DJ booth, with a crowd of 10,000 in our hands, manipulating their moods with the songs we played. How nothing had ever beaten that feeling.
“Who’s your significant other for the admitting-the-problem session?”
I had no idea what he was on about.
He explained after the first few sessions, when they make you admit you have a problem—I snorted at that, saying it was just a bit of recreational drug use and nothing to worry about—he asked what brought me there if it was all so under control.
I stared at the floor, clenched my fists, tried to stop myself hopping between feet and said, “Had a teensy-weensy bit of an accident with a bit of heroin.”
“That’d do it. I was making myself sick so I could eat more. When I couldn’t get upstairs to use the bathroom and started using a bucket, I thought I had it all under control. Even when I ordered taxis to buy food and deliver it. Still under control. It wasn’t until my friend from work visited me. She told me how wrong I was and called my parents. I was here soon after. Sometimes it takes someone else to point out how abnormal your normal behaviour is.”