by Peters, Joe
‘They’ve stolen my money,’ I wailed to the driver. ‘I don’t know what to do.’
‘Don’t worry, lad,’ he said kindly. ‘Just take a seat.’
The doors hissed shut and as the bus pulled forward I felt a huge wave of relief come over me. I’d made it. I was free again, even though I had no idea what I was going to do next or where I was going to go.
Chapter Twenty-Four
On the Run
I arrived back in Plymouth with my trusty bag still over my shoulder, six months after leaving on the train to Cornwall. I didn’t want to go back to Lulu’s flat because she would ask all sorts of questions, and I felt a bit guilty about just walking out on her without saying anything and then not getting in contact for such a long time, so I sauntered back to Colin’s flat as if nothing had happened.
‘Where the fuck have you been?’ he asked when he saw me walk in. He looked genuinely pleased to see me, which was a nice feeling.
‘I’ve been in a mental hospital,’ I said casually. ‘They said I was a schizo. I only just escaped.’
‘You’re not a nutter,’ he said. ‘How did you get out?’
He was laughing so hard as I told him the whole story that he set me off too. It felt so great to be back amongst friends that I quite forgot that it was living with Colin that had nearly driven me mad in the first place.
‘I probably need to move out of the area,’ I said later that evening, when we were mellowing out, ‘because they’re bound to be looking for me, since they think I’m a high-risk patient. If a copper stops me for anything around here, I’m going to end up being dragged back to the nuthouse so they can continue my “treatment”. Have you still got the Granada?’
‘Yeah, of course. Where do you want to go?’
‘I don’t know. Anywhere really. You got any ideas?’
‘I know a few people in Watford. There’s a lot of homeless people up there. We’d be OK there.’
‘That’ll do.’
So we packed a few possessions into our bags, got in the car and drove to Watford, which was a couple of hundred miles away on the north side of London. It took us hours, which made me feel safer with every mile that we travelled away from Cornwall.
There was a YMCA in Watford that Colin knew all about, where homeless people could get really nice rooms and meals without too many questions being asked. I had to give my name and details and I worried that they might lead the authorities back to other things, but it was a risk I was going to have to take if I didn’t want to sleep on the street. Not only did I have a record for escaping from the psychiatric unit, and for skipping bail to go to Cornwall: I also still owed the money that I had been fined for the smash and grabs, since I hadn’t been in a position yet to pay any of it back. I took the gamble that as long as I didn’t get into any more trouble no one would bother to do a police check on me.
We stayed at the Watford YMCA for nearly a year in the end without anyone asking us any questions, by which time I was twenty years old. Colin and I stuck together the whole time, which inevitably led to me going back to drinking and smoking pot to pass the time and to dull some of the pain of depression now that I was no longer living on a cushion of tranquillizers. Although I needed the drink and drugs just to get me through the days, I felt guilty and inadequate for being unable to resist them. The guiltier I felt the more depressed I became and the more I wanted to escape through drink and drugs. It was a vicious circle. I would really have liked to have been able to fight my inner demons without those crutches, but I wasn’t. Instead of addressing my problems, I was trying to run away from them, hide from them, drown them.
Our need for drink was soon out of control. It was leading us to stealing it when we didn’t have the money to buy it and our cravings were driving us to take stupid risks. Mostly we would pinch it from the big supermarkets. We must have looked very suspicious, because at one of them I noticed the security man was watching every move we made from the moment we walked in. I sent Colin off to distract him while I grabbed a couple of bottles of vodka off the shelf and slipped them into the pockets of my coat. As I ran out the doors, I was grabbed by a man in a white coat who had been working on the cheese counter and had spotted what I was up to. Desperate to get away, I wriggled and struggled but he was strong and wasn’t about to let go.
One of the bottles wobbled out of my pocket and burst on the pavement as I caught the second one just in time. Lashing out to try to get free, I accidentally whacked him on the head with the remaining bottle. He still didn’t loosen his grip and I didn’t manage to get away, which meant I ended up back in the police station yet again, charged with theft and with grievous bodily harm of the cheese man. I put my hand up to stealing the bottles but I really hadn’t meant to hit the guy. In the end they dropped the charge to ‘actual bodily harm’ instead of ‘grievous’. I really had learned how much easier it was when I cooperated with the police rather than giving them a load of cheek as I would have done a couple of years before. However, though I gave them my right name, I added a few extra middle names to muddy the waters a bit, and I still changed my date of birth to make it a bit harder for them to track down my records, since I assumed I was still listed as a missing person and I really didn’t want to be carted back to the psychiatric unit.
I always found Colin very easy to be with, because he had been through many of the same experiences as me. He’d been sexually abused as a child and there wasn’t anything that we couldn’t talk to each other about. Neither of us had any contact with our families and we both relied on one another for all our moral support. We actually became ‘blood brothers’ during one intense conversation, each cutting our wrists and pressing them together so that our blood mingled, bonding us for ever like some sort of baby Mafiosi.
As I still hadn’t had any luck with meeting a girl, I was more than ever convinced that I was too ugly for anyone to ever love me. But one afternoon as I was waiting for a bus to pass so that I could cross the road I looked up as it drew level with me and made eye contact with a pretty girl who was sitting in a window seat. She held my gaze and broke into an instant smile, which made my heart skip. I wanted to get on the bus and talk to her, but the traffic was moving too fast and I was left standing by the road staring gormlessly, watching it disappearing. It’s funny how the tiniest moments can sometimes touch something deep inside you, remaining as vivid memories long after other, bigger events have faded. For a long time I thought about that girl on the bus several times a day, imagining how I might be able to meet her and how we would fall in love and live happily ever after. It was what I wanted more than anything else in the world, but all I actually had was Colin and a fair amount of beer, vodka and pot.
I knew it was only a matter of time before the Watford police cross-referenced the fingerprints I’d given at the station and matched them up with the records in the other cities, so I told Colin it was time we moved on again. He was a bit reluctant, because he liked life in Watford, but in the end he realized that there was no choice and gave in. We climbed back into the faithful old Granada and headed north to Bradford in Yorkshire, with him moaning all the way.
Although he was a good mate, I didn’t trust him any more than I trusted anyone else. I was pretty sure that once we got there he would wait till I wasn’t watching and then take the car and drive back down south. Remembering how Jake’s betrayal had led to virtually everything that had gone wrong in my life since then, I was determined to get in first. If there was one thing I had learned, it was not to trust other people, especially other alcoholics.
When we arrived in Bradford, he hopped out to buy us something to eat, leaving me waiting in the car. The moment he disappeared into the shop I slid across behind the wheel and drove off. I bought myself a load a beer and tried to drown out the feelings of loneliness and vulnerability that threatened to overwhelm me now that I was sitting alone in a car in a strange city watching the light fade. Without Colin there to distract me I thought about everything t
hat had gone wrong and remembered just how shit my life was. Not only did I not have a girlfriend, but I didn’t even have a friend who I felt I could trust. I was pretty sure that sooner or later the police would catch up with me, and they would either put me back in prison for clocking the cheese man or stick me back into a nut house. Neither of these options seemed bearable at that moment.
It all seemed so hopeless and taking another slug of beer was my only hope of making it feel better, and then another and another. Alcohol has a habit of taking all your normal thoughts and twisting and exaggerating them even further, convincing you to do things that you would never do if you were sober. I wanted to die in order to end all the pain, but I didn’t want to stab or hang myself, because I already knew how much both of those methods hurt. Since I had the car, I decided to use it to gas myself. If I was drunk and falling asleep, I reasoned, I wouldn’t feel a thing.
I had to find a way of piping the fumes from the exhaust into the car, so I drove myself to a nearby DIY store and bought everything I needed. Next I drove to a deserted industrial area where I was sure no one would ever find me. I fitted one end of the hose to the exhaust pipe and pushed the other end through the back window, taping up the gap to make sure all the fumes stayed inside. Then I set about getting really drunk. As I felt myself drifting towards unconsciousness, I switched the ignition back on and drifted off to sleep.
I have no idea what happened after that, but something must have made the engine cut out because the next thing I knew I was waking up in the car, surrounded by police. Maybe I had bent the pipe too sharply and the fumes had gone back in and cut the engine. As they dragged me out of the car, I realized it was morning. The rest of the world had woken up and come to work, and someone had spotted me in the car with the pipe going into the window.
By the time they got me to the hospital they knew everything about my past and they had me in a decompression chamber to get my lungs clear of anything I might have breathed in before the engine cut out. They locked me into it with latches with my arms pinned to my side, and the pressure on my ears was horrible, as if I was coming down too fast in an aeroplane, making me shout at them to stop and let me out, kicking and punching the sides.
‘You’ll be out in a minute,’ someone said.
They didn’t tie my hands when they took me back to the wards, which I thought was decent of them, but the coppers were hanging around to make sure I didn’t try to do another runner. Another psychiatrist came to see me, reminding me of everything I had been through already, and I was sectioned for another twenty-eight days so that they could have another go at working out what was wrong with me.
‘Listen,’ I said, ‘if you think you are going to be knocking me to the floor and sticking needles in my bum and zapping electricity through my head, you can think again.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘There won’t be anything like that. It’s not a secure unit where we’re sending you. It’s a nice place.’
I doubted that very much, but I have to say, if you are going to go into psychiatric care, Bradford is the place to do it. Compared to the previous unit it was brilliant. The staff were really nice and helpful, and I had a lady doctor who never pushed me. Initially they talked about sending me back, but she vetoed that idea.
‘As you are of no fixed abode either here or there,’ she said, ‘we might as well just keep you here. What would be the point of spending NHS money to send you half way across the country?’
Because they had decided I was mentally ill, the police couldn’t do anything about the other charges, which I couldn’t resist teasing them about.
‘You can’t do anything to me,’ I grinned, ‘because I’m mentally ill.’
‘We’ll wait,’ one of them said, ‘and get you when you come out.’
To be fair they had been very reasonable with me. One of the sergeants had sat with me for a bit.
‘Nothing’s worth killing yourself for,’ he said. ‘You’re young, you can do anything you want. Why would you want to end it all? Just get yourself better, face up to whatever it is you’ve done, take a slap on the wrists and then do something with your life.’
I was very short of money and wanted to sign on for my benefit payments, so I walked out of the unit the next day to sign on. Even though the unit wasn’t meant to be secure, the staff reported me, knowing exactly where I was because I had to give my address as the hospital to the benefit officers and they immediately called them. One of the policemen who turned up was the same sergeant as before, but he didn’t seem too bothered.
‘What are you doing causing trouble in here, Joe?’ he asked.
‘I just want my money!’
‘Come on, let’s take you back.’
‘Do you want me to cuff him, sarge?’ his colleague asked.
‘No, he’s a good lad. He won’t give us any trouble.’
He was right, because I never did give trouble to people who treated me right. I went back to the hospital with them and instead of telling me off as I expected the lady doctor gave me a cuddle. She seemed to instinctively know that however much I might be strutting around, inside I was feeling vulnerable.
‘If you want to go out, Joe,’ she said, ‘why don’t you do it properly with one of the nurses? If you just walk out without telling anyone it’s going to get you into trouble, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah,’ I said, good as gold. ‘Fair enough.’
Any minute I expected someone to throw me to the floor and ram a needle up my arse, but they never did. They didn’t insist I took any drugs apart from a few sleeping pills to ease my worries while I went cold turkey yet again to get off the drink, and no electrical treatments. They nursed me with a gentleness I hadn’t experienced before and suggested that I did some talking. It was to be the first proper psychotherapy I had really had.
‘I’m not letting you out of here until you are ready,’ the doctor told me, but the way she said it made me feel protected rather than threatened as I had felt in the other place.
I spent a lot of time lying down, listening to soothing music and talking about the things that worried me. And that led on to anger management classes. I trusted her to keep my secrets and started to open up a bit more about the things that had been done to me as a child. I was encouraged by how shocked she was at the things I had suffered. I felt that finally I was being listened to and believed. They could have sectioned me for longer than the twenty-eight days, but they said they would rather I stayed voluntarily. I liked that idea and so I did what they wanted.
For some reason, after I had been there about six months, I got it into my head that I wanted a passport. I think it started because I wanted to have a form of identification so that I could do things like open a bank account. I had built up some money from my benefits once they started giving them to me and I wanted to look after it properly, like everyone else, instead of sticking it under my mattress. The staff wanted me to as well, because they were worried it would go missing and everyone would fall under suspicion. The doctor helped me with the application form and the passport was sent to the hospital.
As I sat looking at my picture in this official document, I felt the familiar urge to move on. It was nice in the hospital and the people had been incredibly kind to me, but I didn’t want to stay there for the rest of my life. I thought I was strong enough now to stay off the drink and be a good boy, but I didn’t want to face the police, so I decided to disappear again while no one was looking. I managed to get hold of a screwdriver and unscrewed one of the windows one afternoon, chucked my bag through, squeezed through after it and made a run for it again.
Chapter Twenty-Five
A Bit of a Houdini
This time I made my way straight to the railway station, although I had no idea where I would take a train to. Pausing for a moment on the concourse to take in what was going on around me, I heard an announcement coming over the tannoy for a train which was about to leave. I was anxious to get moving as quickly as possible.
‘Can I buy a ticket on the train?’ I asked a man in uniform who was standing at the barrier.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Hop on.’
As I walked through the carriages to find a seat and the train began to move slowly away from the platform, I felt strangely elated at the thought of starting over again. My sessions with the psychotherapist had lifted my spirits and made me feel that I could cope with life on my own now, that I was ready to give it another try. I chose to ignore the fact that there would now be a missing persons report from the Bradford hospital as well as the previous one, and the police in Watford were still after me for the cheese man incident, not to mention the problems after I was caught for the smash and grabs, which had never been sorted out. I decided there was nothing I could do about any of that, so I might as well not think about it all.
As I strolled out of the station, wondering which direction to turn in order to start my new life, two British Transport policemen called me over, putting an abrupt end to my optimistic mood.
‘There’ve been a spate of crimes committed on this station,’ one of them said in quite a friendly manner. ‘Do you mind if we search you?’
‘I’ve just come from fucking Bradford,’ I said, showing them my ticket. ‘You can search me if you like. I’ve got nothing to hide.’
I handed my bag over to one of them while the other patted me down. I was willing myself to keep quiet and not antagonize them, but I was already feeling threatened and vulnerable and wanting to lash out.
‘What’s your name and date of birth?’ the one patting me down enquired.
‘What do you want that for?’ I asked, sensing that I was being drawn back into their net.
‘It’s all right,’ his colleague said. ‘I’ve got his passport here.’
He opened it up to scrutinize it and then they radioed my details into their station. I felt a sickness of anxiety knotting my stomach but I forced myself to stay calm. Maybe they wouldn’t make any of the connections immediately and they would let me go. Once I had disappeared into the streets, I would know to keep my passport better hidden. The radio crackled back into life, bringing the information that I was wanted by the Watford police. I had been free for only a few hours before I found myself sitting in the back of a police car again, being taken into custody while they did a bit more research into my background. It wasn’t long before they discovered I had done runners from two different hospitals.