A Gift From Bob

by James Bowen

  We did have family in Australia, in particular my mother’s brother, my uncle Scott and his family, who we saw on rare occasions when we visited Sydney. We didn’t spend the holiday season with them, however. Instead my mother’s idea of a Christmas celebration was to spend a lot of money on trips for the two of us. She must have been making quite a bit of money at the time because they were quite lavish affairs. We made at least three trips like this and flew to America, Thailand, Singapore and Hawaii. One year, for instance, we flew east from Australia to Hawaii, passing through the International Date Line. So we were effectively flying back in time. We left on Boxing Day but arrived in Hawaii when it was still Christmas Day.

  So I had two Christmas Days. It must have been very exciting and I’m sure I must have had a great time. My mum has often talked to me about our travels, but I remember very little.

  The one thing I do recall though is that I spent a large part of these trips on my own. One year we stopped off in Las Vegas where my mother spent most of the time in the casino, leaving me in the bedroom. There was absolutely nothing for me to do so I just watched television. I wouldn’t have minded too much, except for the fact that it was pay-per-view television and I didn’t have access to that. So I spent the holiday endlessly watching the only free programme on the hotel’s own channel, a preview of Dolly Parton’s Christmas Special. Can you imagine the nightmare of watching Dolly Parton saying ‘Howdy folks’ over and over again for hours on end? I still wake up in a cold sweat about that programme every now and again.

  We also visited New York. It should have been a really exciting trip, but my mum got a migraine so I had to look after her. I was cooped up in this darkened room for days, or so it seemed. At one point I was so bored, I remember vividly standing on the other side of the drawn curtains, with my face pressed against the glass watching the snow fall on the New York city sidewalk below. It looked absolutely beautiful, like something out a 1950s Hollywood movie. It’s about the most magical thing about Christmas that I can recall from my childhood.

  There are other, powerful memories. For instance, I remember on one of the long-haul flights we took I spilled a large glass of orange juice all over the smart blue suit I was wearing. I have no idea how my mother had afforded it, but we were travelling in first class. My suit was so thoroughly soaked that the stewardess had to take me downstairs and back into economy to change into a dressing gown. But when I tried to get back into the first-class lounge they wouldn’t let me in. My mum was asleep, so she hadn’t realised I was missing. A male steward kept forcefully putting me into a seat in economy. I can still see his face; he looked a little like Barack Obama. He would sit me down then make a grand gesture of closing the curtains that separated economy from first class, closing the Velcro fasteners on them as he did so. It was as if I was being punished for even thinking I belonged in such a rarefied atmosphere.

  I will never forget the look of embarrassment on his face when, at the fourth attempt, I managed to sneak through the curtain and slipped back upstairs and into the chair next to my mother, who was just waking up. He couldn’t quite believe it when she assured him that I was, indeed, travelling with her. I have often thought about that moment as symbolic of the way my life went after that. It still pretty much summed it up now. No one wanted me spoiling their cozy little world, no one thought I belonged. I was always the boy on the wrong side of the curtains.

  I don’t want to sound ungrateful, nor do I want to blame my mother for this. She had plenty of problems of her own and I wasn’t always the easiest child, there’s no doubt about that. At the time she probably thought that she was doing a good thing, showing me the world and the finer things in it. But from my point of view, it looked very different. To me she was trying to make up for the fact she was never there during the rest of the year. These ostentatious Christmas holidays were simply her way of compensating for that absence. She couldn’t see that what I needed was not first-class air travel or five-star hotels. I just wanted to spend some quality time with a mother I hardly knew in a proper family environment. Most of all, of course, I just wanted to be loved.

  When I was around ten or eleven, my mum and I moved back to England for a couple of years. Christmas remained a pretty lonely affair, for different reasons this time. Both the Christmases I spent there were memorable in their own ways. I spent the first with my dad and his then wife Sue and my half-sister Caroline, who was then a toddler of around three. It was, probably, the closest I got to a ‘normal’, ‘happy’ Christmas in the sense that I was with an extended family, eating, handing out presents, watching television. I really enjoyed the feeling that I belonged in a larger family group. And, of course, it felt great to be with my father at Christmas time, rather than talking to him long distance on the phone. It was a typical family Christmas in other ways too, there were arguments, for instance. I remember my mum buying a baby doll for Caroline at a petrol station on the journey there. The baby was one of those ones that cried waaah when you rocked it. Caroline was still very young and I used to encourage her to make a noise just like the doll, much to my dad’s annoyance.

  ‘James, cut it out,’ he would shout all the time.

  Looking back on it, I can see that my father would already have seen me as a rather troubled soul, even at that age. Twelve months later it was an opinion that was shared by others too. I spent the following Christmas being assessed at a mental institution for young people, Colwood Hospital in Haywards Heath, West Sussex.

  By that point me and mum clashed a lot. My behaviour was so extreme at times that she had been convinced there was something psychologically wrong with me. One of the doctors I saw had been worried that I had depression so I was put on lithium for a few months. It wasn’t a long-term solution, however, so I was sent for assessment. They tested me for everything from schizophrenia to manic depression and ADHD but failed to come up with a definitive answer to what was wrong with me.

  I’ve blanked out a lot of what happened during my stay at Colwood. That’s partly because of what I went through during my period of assessment, but partly too because I was treated with all sorts of drugs. I still have vivid memories of having injections that would send me to sleep. I often wouldn’t have a clue where I was when I eventually came round. Sometimes it would happen completely unexpectedly; a doctor would appear at my side with a syringe and I was suddenly losing consciousness. I never resisted, it was scary but I trusted the doctors and wanted my troubles to go away. They didn’t, of course.

  It’s hardly surprising then that the Christmas I spent at Colwood is a real blur. The only thing I recall is my dad taking me out to see a pantomime. That was a happy memory. It must have been Cinderella because I remember the character Buttons throwing out Cadbury’s Buttons™, the chocolate sweets, into the audience. I also remember Caroline crying on the way home because her magic fairy wand had broken. It’s strange what the mind retains and what it discards.

  By the following Christmas we were back in Australia. My mother was a little homesick but I think she thought the move back would be good for my state of mind too. So with her new partner Nick she decided we’d better get away. But there was no running away from the fact that I was an unhappy child and that she and I didn’t get on.

  I missed England and my father. I also missed the affection I’d found there. I continued to fight with my mother and Nick, with whom I really didn’t get along. Aside from that Christmas with my dad, the warmest memory from our time back in England was of a nurse called Mandy. She was the kindest person I’d ever encountered. She had spent a lot of time with me when I’d been at Colwood Hospital, not just caring for me but talking and listening to me, something that I hadn’t really experienced much before.

  Back in Australia I adopted a feral cat from a rescue shelter. I really liked the cat and she seemed to really like me too, so I called her Mandy to remind me of a happy time back in the UK.

  Otherwise, however, my life in Australia went downhill pretty stead
ily. I spent time in more institutions, but they only made the situation worse if anything. For a while I’d been in a psychiatric ward in the Princess Margaret Hospital in Perth, Western Australia. When I was nearly seventeen I was put in a place called the Frankston Psychiatric Unit For Children on the other side of the country, in Victoria. By now I was a real tearaway and was experimenting with drugs. I’d try anything, from glue to medicinal drugs that could give me the highs I craved. There was absolutely nothing else to do in that hospital. It was also my way of escaping from the grim reality of the place.

  During my time at Frankston I saw things that I’d not wish on anyone. One day an older inmate who I had befriended, a grungy kind of biker guy they called ‘Rev’, asked me whether he could borrow my razor. Naively I thought he wanted a shave, but, of course, he didn’t. I felt really guilty about that for a long time although fortunately he didn’t die. He just needed to make a cry for help.

  It’s very easy for people to say they never had a stable childhood but in my case, I think that’s a pretty true statement. The combination of my parents’ separation and a childhood that felt like it was spent constantly on the move, often from one side of the world to the other, made it extremely unstable. Given this, I guess the decline that happened when I arrived back in England at the age of eighteen was almost inevitable. Back in Australia I’d been diagnosed with Hepatitis C, which the doctors ascribed to my drug-taking. I’d cried when they told me that, back then, my life expectancy was no more than ten years. It turned out I had a very strong immune system and was able to survive it but I didn’t know that at the time.

  I’d headed back to England with a kind of death sentence hanging over me. I’d had ambitions to be a musician but they had come to nought. Instead, I’d drifted from one home to another and eventually one sofa to another and finally on to the street where I spent a time sleeping rough. Once I got there I turned to heroin and other drugs as a means of escape. I took anything that dulled my senses. My life just spiralled downward and downward. Sometimes I shake my head in wonder at how I am still alive.

  As a result, Christmas had become even less meaningful to me. It was simply a time of the year that needed to be survived, not enjoyed.

  By now, I’d had a couple of Christmases with my father in south London but they weren’t brilliant. I didn’t really connect with my family any more; I felt that they thought of me as the black sheep, which was a valid point of view. I certainly wasn’t the easiest stepson in the world.

  As a consequence, Christmas with my dad meant literally turning up on Christmas Eve, staying for Christmas Day then being dropped off at the station on Boxing Day morning. One time I got dropped off only to discover that there were no trains, so I had to walk the four miles or so to Croydon to get the overground train, which took me the best part of an hour. It had all just underlined what an awful time of the year it was, for me at least.

  To be honest, the main reason I went was to get a really decent meal. At that point in my life, good food was a real rarity for me. I was living in sheltered accommodation and earning no money. There were times when I was so desperate I’d even resorted to rummaging in skips at the back of big supermarkets. I really didn’t care what I ate as long as it was edible. So I really looked forward to Christmas dinner, to seeing that giant plate of food served up and then being allowed the freedom to pile up another plateful of food as soon as I’d finished.

  Given all this, it was hardly surprising that Christmas had meant very little to me even when I began to get my life sorted out. All the things it represented – family, togetherness, kindness, community and charity – simply didn’t register with me. While everyone else looked forward to it and enjoyed the build-up, I never understood that excitement at all. I couldn’t understand why people spent so much money and got so worked up in anticipation of what, to me, seemed like just another day of the year. I actually viewed it with a sense of foreboding, almost fear.

  It was something that Belle, in particular, found hard to comprehend. My friendship with her was, like most things in my life, complicated. We had first met back in around 2002, when I was trying – and failing – to make a name for myself in a band called Hyper Fury. The band had a brief period when we were playing a few gigs around London, especially in Camden. I met her at a club there called The Underworld. I’d been at the bar when she had come up and overheard me talking to another woman about the fact our birthdays were on the day after each other, mine on March 15th and hers on March 16th.

  ‘Oh that’s funny,’ Belle had chipped in. ‘My birthday is March 17th.’

  ‘That’s St Patrick’s Day,’ I’d said. We’d quickly fallen into a conversation.

  I’d found her funny and easy to talk to and we had spent the rest of the night chatting.

  She had been in a relationship with another guy at the time, but they had been drifting apart. We agreed to meet up a week or so later and really hit it off, so Belle ended her relationship and we became an item.

  Belle was a Londoner, born and bred, and was a couple of years younger than me. But even though we’d grown up on the other side of the world from each other our lives had followed very similar trajectories. She had gone through a difficult time at home, in particular the loss of her grandmother who she regarded as her second mother. She had, like me, become a troubled teenager with similar psychological issues. She had been prone to spates of depression and had also developed a drug habit, in her case going from pot to harder and harder drugs. I understood it completely when she said it was her way of blocking out the pain she felt, of escaping a world in which she felt so alone. I knew exactly how she felt. This created a really close bond between us and our relationship briefly blossomed. For a while we shared a flat together.

  It had been during that period while we were going out together that Belle had seen at first-hand how and why Christmas meant so little to me. I’d been invited to stay with my stepmother Sue in south London in the run-up to Christmas so I asked Belle to come along too to meet my family. She quickly sensed what a difficult atmosphere there was between us all. There had been lots of arguments, not least over a remark that someone had made about not understanding what a nice, normal girl like Belle was doing with me. This had really angered me.

  ‘Try living my life,’ I’d spat back at them.

  Belle, on the other hand, was close to her mum and dad and was planning to head back to her home in west London to spend Christmas Day with them. It was a special time of the year for them; they really went to town on the celebrations. On Boxing Day I had been invited over to meet her parents. The atmosphere there could not have been more different; it was very warm and welcoming. Her mum made a huge fuss over me, effectively cooking a second Christmas dinner with all the trimmings. They even bought me a present, which completely threw me. It gave me an inkling of what a big, happy family Christmas could be like.

  Unfortunately, our relationship hadn’t lasted. At that time in our lives, we were both battling with our personal demons and it was just too difficult. We weren’t good for each other in that respect. We’d drifted apart for a little while, but we’d stayed in touch. As the years had passed, we had slowly grown to realise that we were better as friends than as boyfriend and girlfriend. As we’d both dealt with our respective problems, that friendship had deepened into a really close bond that, we both knew, was going to last a long time.

  Belle and I got on like a house on fire. We shared a lot of common interests, including cats. When she was a teenager, she had adopted a cat called Poppy from the Cats Protection charity. Poppy had been found in the home of an elderly guy who had offered sanctuary to more than a dozen cats. When he had passed away the cats had all been taken in by the local Cats Protection branch. Poppy had been seven when we met and was still as lively as ever at the age of fifteen. In many ways, Poppy was as important to Belle as Bob was to me. She put a smile on her face even on the darkest days. She was her source of unconditional love.

&nbs
p; Given this, it was no surprise that Bob got on really well with Belle. He had always been happy to stay with her when I was ill or not around. In particular, he had stayed at her flat during our second Christmas, when I had made an emotional trip to Australia to see my mother for the first time in years.

  It had been Bob who had really begun to slowly change my attitude to Christmas. Our first Christmas together, in 2007, was the simplest of affairs. The two of us had eaten a meal and then sat in front of the television for the day, but it was without doubt the happiest holiday season I’d ever had. It was the first time I’d got that Christmas ‘feeling’.

  By that point we’d been together for nine months and had been through a lot. When I’d found him he had looked like he’d been in a fight of some kind, probably with another animal. I’d assumed at first that he belonged to somebody else, but when I saw him rooted to the same spot a few days later I decided to do something about it. I’d taken him to see the local RSPCA where I’d bought some medication for him. I’d then gently nursed him back to health.

  I’d taken an instant liking to him. He had a real personality, a quiet, knowing air. I’d tried to find his owners, but when no one claimed him I assumed he was a stray or street cat. That’s when I’d named him Bob.

  I’d expected our friendship to be a brief one. I guessed that he’d want to return to the streets once he was fit and well. He was a boisterous character and looked like he could handle himself out there. He had other ideas, however.

  When I’d tried to send him on his way he refused to leave. To my amazement, one day he’d even jumped on board the bus I was travelling on so as to be with me.

  And so it was that we had become inseparable. In many ways we were an odd couple but in others we were two peas in a pod, a pair of lost souls trying to survive day-to-day life in London. I also felt like he was my family. He provided the kindness and companionship and, yes, love that I’d craved for so long. He’d even given me the prospect of a new kind of life, one that just might get me off the streets. In the past few months I’d had a couple of unexpected encounters, the first with an American lady who lived in Islington. She was a literary agent who had seen us sitting around Angel Tube station. She wondered whether the story of Bob and me might make a book. Subsequent to that, a few weeks ago, before the bad weather arrived, I’d met up with a writer who the agent thought might be able to help me get the story written. It was all very flattering, but I didn’t expect it to amount to much – if anything at all. A book seemed a ridiculous pipe dream. That kind of success didn’t happen to people like me.