The Lost Child

by Julie Myerson

The air outside London is fresh and golden, cows lowing in the distance. A smell of manure as we get out of the car. And the counsellor doesn't look at all how I imagined her. Homely, kind-faced, but reassuringly authoritative, she reminds me of my old piano teacher.

  She makes us tea. There are biscuits. And we sit on comfy sofas in her large, pale-carpeted sitting room and, taking it in turns, try to tell her our story. A slightly enlarged and more detailed version of the story we told the psychiatrist.

  We tell it haltingly, struggling to get the timelines right, struggling to be absolutely fair to our boy, handing the narrative back and forth between us when it gets too tough. Once or twice I have to bite my lip. But, although there is a big white box of tissues on the low coffee table, I don't cry.

  When we've finished, she looks at us both. Asks us a few things about our boy. Does he do this? Is he like this?

  Yes, we say, Oh yes - slightly amazed as she somehow guesses accurately about so many specific aspects of his behaviour over the past year.

  What you're describing, says his father with an exhausted face, well, I couldn't have said it better myself That's exactly what he's like.

  She looks at us carefully.

  Then, just like the psychiatrist, she asks if we know the difference between cannabis and skunk.

  Now we're quick to tell her we do. The frontal lobes. The potentially irreversible damage. We tell her we worry for our youngest child too, who was given the drug by his brother when he was only just thirteen.

  The look on her face makes me feel momentarily sick.

  Certainly all the evidence says the younger they start the more likely the damage is to be irreversible, she says gently. But there is hope. First, your youngest may well never develop a problem with the drug. Not everyone who tries the drug gets addicted, remember. And even addicts can get clean and lead normal happy lives again.

  That's what we want, I tell her quickly.

  It's a tough one, she says, because so few people understand the true nature and seriousness of cannabis addiction. There's an awful lot of denial out there. And ignorance. Skunk's been around less than ten years. Back when cannabis was reclassified from B to C, there was no such thing as skunk - not that anyone had heard of, anyway.

  She tells us that she is currently working with many families whose children are either in denial, like our son, or in and out of rehab. She tells us that addiction often runs in families. She's working with several families where two or more siblings are affected in exactly the same way.

  More than one child? I whisper, thinking of our youngest.

  She reaches to pour more tea.

  The children who're experimenting with it now are guinea pigs, in every sense. For instance, I'm treating some people at the moment, a lovely couple, you couldn't ask for better parents, both of whose teenage sons are out there on the streets right now, trying to prove they're not addicted.

  And they are? Addicted, I mean?

  She looks at me.

  Of course they are. And as soon as they realise that, we can help them. Meanwhile, though, their parents, these poor people, are going through hell.

  People think cannabis is a soft drug, she says. And in some ways the old-style cannabis was. But it's actually harder to deal with than almost any other drug, because the addiction is far more mental than physical. And of course social attitudes don't help. In my opinion, she says, skunk is more dangerous than heroin.

  We both stare at her.

  Unlike heroin, it's being used regularly by children. And unlike heroin, it's much less likely you can make a full recovery.

  Because of the damage to the brain?

  I'm afraid so, yes.

  Silence as we take this in. I can't look at the boy's father's face. I know he is feeling what I am feeling: pure despair.

  Outside the evening sun slides over the warm green slope of the garden. I have a brief sense of freedom - of floating out of my body and up, up into that bright evening sky. At last I think of the question I want to ask her.

  So, if this happens to your child, to someone you love so very deeply and feel so responsible for, then what do you do? How do you go about getting them clean?

  She takes a breath and looks at me kindly, hands me a box of tissues.

  There's a photo of our boy, not an especially good one, just a snap really, which sits on a chest of drawers at Granny's in a little silver frame. I know this photo so well. It's been there on that polished chest of drawers for years.

  In it, he's about nine or ten years old, dressed in cricket whites, leaning rather self-consciously in the hall doorway at our old house, hand on hip, one leg crossed over the other. He's beaming- one of those smiles that use up his whole face. And it's Sunday and I've probably just picked him up from cricket practice and am asking him to lay the table for lunch. And this is something he will do cheerfully, with good humour and without complaint.

  I know that, in the kitchen, his father will be baking fish and roasting vegetables, Van Morrison or Springsteen playing or else some political discussion programme turned up loud on the radio. And the boy and I will be having the same old tired debate about whether or not he should change out of his whites before lunch.

  He'll insist that he doesn't need to, that the trousers are already all grass-stained and dirty, so why does it matter? And in the end I'll probably give in and let him change afterwards. He's so good-natured when he argues, so reasonable most of the rest of the time. What's the harm in letting him get away with this?

  And it's a sunny day and outside in the garden the dog's probably barking a little bit too much and his brother and sister are shouting and laughing and our boy is about to lay the table, and yes, he will wash his hands, but first he pauses for one quick moment in that doorway so that someone - is it Granny who has come to lunch? - can take the snap.

  Our boy after cricket practice on a Sunday.

  The other day when we were round there for some reason or other and, for a moment or two, no one else was in the room, I found my self reaching out for this photo, picking it up and staring and staring at it, my face close to the glass, greedy for whatever it could give me. A clue? A jolt of pain? A taste of what we'd lost?

  * * *

  You don't know this, but your eldest sister Sarah, the one who brings you back home to Woodton from Ipswich after you die, has a late marriage. She is fifty-seven when, in 1864, she marries a widower called Samuel Severne and goes to live with him at Poslingford House near Clare, not far from Cavendish, in Suffolk.

  It's a summer wedding and Sarah and her new husband give a generous supper for all the villagers in celebration of their marriage. It's even reported in the Bury & Norwich Post:

  On Tuesday night the populace of Poslingford were regaled by Mr and Mrs Seveme to a most plentiful supper, all labourers' wives and children above the age of 12 years assembled in the most capacious bam which was decorated with flowers and evergreens. Hot joints of beef and mutton-plum pudding and vegetables were liberally supplied to the company by the many helpers of young people from farming families. A band from Clare added to the cheerfulness and the evening passed pleasantly and the large assemble of near 200 separated in good order.

  Their happiness is short-lived, though. What Sarah and her new husband don't know, as they celebrate their union in that capacious bam with the villagers, is that he has only seven months left to live. He dies the following spring and your sister lives out her remaining thirty-two years as a widow.

  On Friday, 24 October 1896, in her ninetieth year, Sarah dies in her chair. In her Last Will & Testament, written in an elegant, sloping hand, she asks to be buried

  in a coffin similar to those which my brothers and sisters had and not in a leaden one, and I direct my executors to erect a neat tablet in Woodton Church (the last resting place of many of my dear family) to my memory and that of my late brother Samuel and my late sister Ellen Tyssen, the expense of the tablet and the erection thereof not to exceed the sum of Twen
ty pounds (exclusive of a proper fee which I wish to be paid to the Rector of Woodton on the occasion).

  Just like her sister Anna, Sarah leaves a huge quantity of possessions and ornaments, but unlike Anna she seems to have a much longer list of friends and relatives to leave them to. She makes careful provision for her servants too - making sure they have money to buy mourning clothes as well as something to spend on themselves.

  Even the lad who works in the garden is told he may help himself to any loose numbers if British Workmen, Animal World and The Vet.

  We had our babies too fast, too easily. I didn't think it at the time but it's what I think now. I think we were having much too good a time of it, taking for granted how easy it all was, jumping in there without much thought or fear.

  We were so young. We thought we were perfect. We didn't know that bad things could happen. As soon as we tried for a baby, a baby came, just like that, boy, girl, boy. And we were so absolutely caught up in the rhythm of it - the nappies, the night-time feeds, the exhaustion and exhilaration of holding one new person after another in our arms - that we just kept on going. We didn't look down.

  But I'm looking down now - from the dark, churning centre of my middle-aged anxiety - and certain moments make my heart stop. The time I let an inexperienced friend hold our baby girl on his knee over our stone-flagged kitchen floor and when, as he took one hand off her to reach in his pocket for something, I saw her wobble for a quick second, some kind of crazed politeness stopped me diving forwards and snatching her away. The time I raced back from work in my lunch hour to check on our nine-month-old, our boy, who was being looked after by a temp from an agency. And found her smoking and chatting on the phone while he lay in his cot crying so furiously his face had turned a whole new colour I'd never seen before.

  Not only that, but he had on two woollen cardigans buttoned up to the chin and, when I touched him, felt like he was running a fever. And what did I do? I unbuttoned and soothed him, asked her steadily and politely if she could take him out in his pram, before heading straight back to work, anxious not to be missed. Why? Was I completely insane? Why didn't I just stop right there, fire the nanny, and lose my job if necessary? What job is more important than the welfare of your child?

  In the bleak middle of the night, I punish myself with these questions. In the bleak middle of the night, I remember that, when our boy was about thirteen, his father and I went through a difficult patch. And I think now that I was very much to blame for the atmosphere that this generated. Temporary, but potent, and all my fault.

  And even though I thought - we thought - that we were still being genuinely good parents, loving and caring for our children, I think for a while we were very centred on ourselves. It took us a year or so to sort out our problems. A year of self-centredness. And because we managed it, because we came through, I automatically assumed the family would be OK too. But is that when he started smoking?

  There was the day we were looking for something in his room and we stumbled on a DVD case labelled Hands Off. Straight away we opened it and found a little bag of weed. Not that worrying, really, not that surprising. We'd always known our kids would come across drugs, would probably try cannabis, maybe Ecstasy, hopefully nothing much else. And we prided ourselves on not being so naive as to think these substances any more dangerous than alcohol, for instance. We really hoped they would never take up smoking tobacco, but a little bit of cannabis? Where was the harm in that?

  So on that day, after a quick discussion - and faint guilt that we'd invaded his privacy in the first place - we put it back exactly where it was and agreed to say nothing. Our boy was bright, happy, energetic, easy-going. He was working very hard at school. So what if he occasionally smoked with his friends? Was it even any of our business?

  We go over that scene again and again. So many times we replay it, question our actions. And again and again, we do the same thing. We put the cannabis back, close the case, leave the room, say nothing. I can see us doing it right now. Closing the case, leaving the room. Leaving his things as they were, walking out quite carefully, with respect for his privacy, pulling the door behind us. Closing the door, smiling and shaking our heads - leaving our child to his fate.

  The moment haunts me. How did we miss the signs? And would it really have made any difference if we hadn't?

  An old schoolfriend who lives in Canada emailed me recently to say that her youngest child - her late baby, her joy, the apple of her eye, the one who'd never caused them any problems - had developed eating and self-harming issues. We certainly didn't see that one coming, she wrote.

  I hadn't seen her for years and could only really remember this child as a baby - dark-eyed and plump-cheeked. And that sentence - so lightly written, without anger or self-pity, yet somehow loaded with parental responsibility and remorse made me want to weep.

  The boy's father sometimes says that a bomb went off in our family. That it went off without any warning and left destruction in its wake. And there was nothing we could possibly do except sort through the wreckage, salvage what we could. That's how he looks at it.

  But I don't really see it like that. For me it's not a bomb, but a tidal wave. There we all are, a little family group standing on a beach with our backs to the sea. Holding hands. Happy. Stupidly happy, because just behind us - towering and terrifying - the wave is approaching. A vast dark curve of water just waiting to knock us off our feet.

  I come home one night after doing a late-night TV programme to find our boy sitting alone at the kitchen table, head in hands, face raw with tears. Arranged in front of him, eight or nine pieces of sodden and scrunched-up kitchen paper. And three kitchen knives.

  Hey. I touch his shoulder with my hand. What's going on here?

  He says nothing.

  I get a glass of water and sit down at the table next to him, kick off my shoes.

  What are these doing here?

  He picks one up, gently rests the tip on the pine table, lets it drop. He looks at me with pinprick eyes.

  Dad threw them there.

  Why?

  He says nothing.

  I stand up again, my bare feet sticking to the kitchen floor.

  Why would he do that? I say.

  No reply.

  I gather up the knives - which have only recently been allowed back into the drawer from their hiding place in the cupboard under the stairs - and carry them back over to the drawer where I lay them carefully, blades pointing down. I make a mental note that they might have to go back into hiding tomorrow. These kinds of precautionary measures have now become a normal part of our daily lives and no longer strike me as strange or tragic, the way they did at the start.

  I sit down again. I'm starving. I pick up a banana, start to peel it.

  Did you have a fight? I say.

  Believe what you want, he says. I don't care.

  Did you have a fight? I say again, my mouth full of banana.

  Why don't you go and ask him? He's the one being a fucking insane idiot.

  We sit together for a few more moments. He doesn't say anything else. He doesn't need to. I know how the evening will have gone. He will have threatened and his father will have stayed calm. Then he will have threatened again, he will have done one more destructive and outlandish thing may be looked around for money, maybe tried to kick a door down - and his father will have cracked. Or maybe he won't have done anything else. may be he didn't have to. Maybe his father will have cracked anyway. Sometimes the threats are enough: one moment you're trying to be a calm and loving parent. The next, you're shouting, screaming, weeping.

  Recently, we've returned to the old, depressing dialogue. We can't live like this. We really do mean it this time - behave or go.

  If we don't do as he wants, If we don't give him the things he wants, he punishes us. He plays guitar, turning the amp up so loud the house shakes. He shouts and he throws things. He broke my vintage phone - a present bought on eBay by his father - by slamming it against the
wall because he couldn't get through to someone. If! refuse to give him money, he sits on my study floor, his whole body blocking the door, his eyes on my face, smiling because he knows I won't be able to write a word.

  This last kind of menace - not violent exactly, but making full and calculated use of his physical bulk - is the worst. At times like these I'm shocked to find myself feeling little love for him. It's all been squashed out of me, squeezed out through the smallest hole. Is this what abuse is? Is this a definition?

  One time, when he's followed me all around the house for an hour demanding cash, I lock my study and, grabbing the car keys before he can stop me, rush out to the car and drive away. Just around the corner, I pull in and sit in a side road, shaking and crying, till I think he'll have given up and it's safe to come home.

  Another time, I walk right out of the house without a coat or bag and have to stand in Superdrug, pretending to look at the nail polishes, swallowing tears of loneliness and frustration. The security guard eyes me. He knows something's up, he just doesn't know what. I'm tempted to beg him to come home with me.

  And then another time - the time he picks up a little set of espresso cups that he and his sister jointly gave me for Christmas, and walks outside and proceeds to drop them, one by one, on the pavement.

  I remind him that I actually gave him the money to buy me that Christmas present as he'd spent all of his. He grins. I then plead with him not to do this terrible and destructive thing, because didn't his sister pay for half the set with her own money?

  He looks at me.

  You're right, he says. I didn't think of that. And he smashes exactly half of the cups, leaving the rest on the kitchen counter.

  You shouldn't have watched him do it, his father tells me later. He was only able to do it because you gave him the satisfaction of watching.

  And I know he's right. Of course he's right. But the instinct to beg him to stop, the instinct to prevent damage if you can, is strong. Still, I think I'm tougher now. Replay that situation today and just watch me walk away.