‘I thought something must have happened to his aunt. I opened the wardrobe to check if his turquoise suit was there because he always wore it to visit her. He didn’t own many clothes; he wore his whites most of the time by then. The suit was still there, but if he’d had to leave in a hurry… Suki picked up a carrier bag from the floor. It was full of money, mostly five-pound notes, the subs collected at meetings. I said he wouldn’t have gone far without money.
‘Suki got down on her knees to unzip the holdall. I said it was probably full of vitamin pills – he used to buy them in bulk by mail order – but going by the expression on her face when she opened it up, my guess was a bit wide of the mark. Inside there were two stacks of twenty-pound notes, new, still bound in those paper strips. It didn’t look much, but when you worked it out… Suki was about to pull a bundle out and I don’t know why but instinct made me yell at her not to touch it. Too many detective novels, I suppose. I grabbed a sock from the floor and put it over my hand like a glove puppet and zipped the bag up then wiped it all down. Suki started crying, blubbing that he’d told her he’d no money to support her and the babby. “Well, maybe this is for you and the babby,” I said, rather crossly, I’m afraid. Instead of reassuring her, that made her even more convinced that something bad had happened and she started going on about calling the police, but I said we should give it another day. I knew the police wouldn’t do anything anyway, he was a grown man. I took her downstairs and made her a cup of camomile tea then told her to go home and rest. I promised to call her as soon as he turned up.
‘But after she’d gone I sat there at the kitchen table, puzzling over that bag of money. I couldn’t sit still for thinking about it. Where had it come from, and why would someone keep so much cash in the house when they had a bank account? Robin always paid his rent in cash, but I’d seen bank statements arrive in the post so I knew he had an account. The money must have not been his. He was on benefits, for God’s sake. I found myself wondering if he was some kind of terrorist or a drug-dealer and if all the spiritual stuff was a cover-up. These people have to live somewhere and there is probably always an unsuspecting landlady somewhere in the background. I knew I was jumping to extreme conclusions. But no matter how hard I racked my brains I couldn’t come up with an explanation. So I went back up to his room to look for his bank statements.
‘I was more comfortable up there on my own; after all, it was my house, and I had a right to go into whichever room I pleased.’
In case you’re wondering, I am still awake.
‘I rummaged around and didn’t find anything, then I put the bedside lamp on the floor and got down on my hands and knees to check under the bed. I pulled out a couple of dusty old socks and then noticed that pushed right up against the skirting board was a shoebox. I almost didn’t see it. I managed to hook a fingernail under the lid and drag it out. I should have been a detective. His bank statements were all stuffed inside it, all curled at the edges from being crammed into the narrow box. I took the whole lot up to my room in case he came back while I was going through them.
‘There was a one-page statement for every month going all the way back to 1989, the year before he moved in with me. Each one was identical – one deposit of three thousand pounds on the first of the month or thereabouts, followed by one withdrawal of two thousand five hundred a few days later and then another separate one of five hundred. No variations. He gave me thirty-two pounds a fortnight in cash to cover rent, food and bills, which he paid from his unemployment and housing benefit. I’d thought about asking him for more when he started to make money from Trembling Leaves, but didn’t so he could enjoy having a bit more to spend. I felt such a fool.
‘I couldn’t sleep that night for wondering where the rest of his money was, because it definitely wasn’t all in that holdall. I did the sums. He had lived in my house for five years. Just over thirty thousand pounds a year for five years was a hundred and fifty thousand pounds. He could have bought himself a house of his own. In those days it was enough to buy several houses. There were only two possible explanations. Either the money wasn’t his, which I had to admit was looking less likely, or he had given it all away and kept only a few hundred pounds for himself. Maybe the money in the holdall was waiting to be distributed among good causes. Maybe it was for the babby. Ownership of a bagful of money doesn’t make a person dishonest; if the money’s his he can do what he wants with it. And if a rich person chooses to reject material wealth and live simply then he should be praised for it. And if he chose to continue to live with me when he really didn’t need to, then that implied there was something special about our relationship. Eventually I came round to thinking I’d been right about him all along. Yes, he had some odd ideas and ways, but in my eyes that made him special, and he at least deserved my loyalty and for me to think the best of him. If I didn’t look out for him, then no one else would.
‘After work the next day, I went up to his room to see if he’d come home. Well, did I get a fright! All the stuff on the floor had been swept into a big pile. The bed had been stripped and the bedding dumped in another pile on the floor. The mattress was up on its side and had been slashed open and left leaning against the wall. Drawers had been pulled open and left hanging with socks and underpants spilling out. My feet crunched on vitamin pills that had been emptied out of their bottles on to the floor. The two bags of money were gone. I ran up to my own bedroom but, apart from his room, the whole house was exactly as I had left it that morning.
‘My first thought was that Suki had come back while I was at work, taken the money and wrecked the room to make it look like a burglary. She knew I never locked the front door, and she’d seen where I kept the key to Robin’s room. But then I sat down and thought about it and talked myself around to calling her. That Andrew chap answered the phone and said she wasn’t there. When I said I needed to speak to her urgently he told me that she was meditating and wouldn’t speak to anyone. His tone of voice was so pompous that I slammed the phone down on him.
‘All I could think to do then was call the police. I could prove the money was his and they would get it back from Suki if she had it. But I had another shock coming. When I called the police station, they told me that Robin had been arrested and was being held in custody. They wouldn’t tell me why so I assumed it must be to do with the money after all and that Suki had reported him.’
Wow, she really hated you, right?
‘I broke down then, at the thought of him shut up in a stinking cell like a criminal. It wasn’t until they came to take my statement that I found out how that witch Ruth Williams had betrayed us all.
‘I called an emergency meeting of the core group. Without Suki and Ruth there were only four of us. I made up a story that Robin had had to go away. Used words like temporary and postponement and holiday, but I had to be honest and say I had no idea when he’d be back. I think they assumed Suki was with him. None of us could face going out to the summerhouse so we all sat and stared at the teapot in the middle of the kitchen table. Naturally I said nothing about the money; there was no reason to upset or frighten anyone. Alison broke the silence. She said it was our Karma, that we had all been too lazy spiritually. “When a Master leaves his followers,” she said, “they must accept that he considers his work with them to be finished. The fault is always with the followers and never with the Master.” She said she was going to see if that other group would take her back and I knew it was over. I was absolutely bereft.’
Bewhat? Who says that?
‘We met in town that weekend to take back leaflets from wherever we could, and then again at the house the following Tuesday to turn anyone away who came for the general meeting. As soon as they’d all gone, I locked the front door for the first time ever and went upstairs to tidy Robin’s room.
‘The next year or so was a nightmare. The trial was horrible. Robin called Suki as a character witness and she laid right into him, accused him of sleeping with other women while she was pregna
nt and of lying to her and everyone else. It was heartbreaking for me to see him up there, under attack, but even then he carried himself with dignity.
‘They sent him to the Isle of Sheppey. I wrote asking when I could visit, but he replied that the time had come for me to find my own path, that the Universe had sent him on a different course and that he would always be with me in my meditation. I experienced true loneliness then for the first time in my life.
‘The other prisoners adored him, you know; he must have been suffering so much but he still managed to do so much good for others, taught them all how to meditate, even the staff, and he even took that waster Thomas under his wing and transformed him.’
I can feel myself slipping, like I’ve woken up on a narrow ledge halfway up a sheer rockface with no discernible route up or down. It’s not just her voice, it’s her whole being – her fakery. She’s just like him, like she’s reinvented herself in his image, it’s pathetic.
The hand reaches out again. ‘Are you okay? It must be hard for you to think of him in that situation. Maybe we should go back to my house and I’ll make us some dinner.’
I ponder on this a few seconds, weigh it up, overcome my repulsion and cave. If I can just hang on in there another hour or two, I could be free of Marsha Ray forever. ‘Okay,’ I say, ‘let’s get this over with.’
So I’m sitting at her kitchen table (no need to describe it, you’ve been there a million times) and she puts a book down in front of me, real gentle like it’s some fragile religious relic. Her book of recipes. For me to read while she prepares dinner. Fascinating stuff, all right. I learn that my dad rated veggie lasagne eight out of ten. I can’t read his comments because his handwriting looks like the footprints of a million termites in process of destroying a house and Marsha’s already back on Planet Bim so I don’t ask her to translate.
‘Always had the most gentlemanly manners. Opening doors for me to go through first and standing aside for me to climb the stairs first –’
‘Can I ask you a question?’ I interrupt.
‘Of course, darling, what do you need to know?’
I let that go. ‘Why didn’t my dad give Ruth one of his alphabetical names?’
‘Oh, that’s easy: because he didn’t like her.’
But I know that’s not it. I just worked it out. My dad only alphabeticised the women he had control over. So were you Mrs G, or not?
Marsha puts whatever vegan delight she’s made into the oven and suggests we go out to the summerhouse while it’s cooking. So I drag myself along behind her, through the back yard. She’s a gardener all right. In RB the cultivation of flowers is done out front on the street, where passers-by can see it; the back is usually just grass. Marsha Ray’s huge yard is all over flowers and bees and butterflies and bird-feeders.
The summerhouse is dope, kind of a studio version of our beach bungalow. Marsha slips off her shoes and wiggles her candy-pink-painted toes while she waits for me to untie my laces, turns to take in the full view of the garden as if she’s never seen it before, sighs at the high flint (that’s a kind of stone) walls, sighs at the back of the house with its two sets of french windows. Sighs a little louder to get my attention and points a finger in the direction of the second floor (okay, first floor). ‘That’s his room there,’ she says. ‘The one with the curtains shut. Exactly as it was.’
In my imagination, that untouched room, that shrine to my father, is a combination of my own room in RB and my father’s room in Brazil as it was the last time I saw him, with its drips and other medical paraphernalia and the stink of the Deep Heat cream he had Ken ship in bulk from the UK. I sense she’s building up to an invitation to go up there. I cut her off with a ‘Shall we go in?’ meaning the summerhouse. Another sigh and she pushes open the door and it’s just as she and Ruth described it to me, a plain white room with a polished wooden floor like a gazillion other rooms all over the world. There are five or six pillows thrown here and there, in various shades of red, and a shrine in the corner, which seems to be dedicated to my dad.
I’m busy picturing a bunch of losers all flailing and falling over each other when she says, ‘I’m fairly sure you were conceived in this room, you know.’
Gross.
I say we should end it there because I need to go meet my fictional girlfriend and she gets all upset that I won’t stay for dinner, tries to persuade me to bring fake girlfriend to meet her and her friends on the beach later for a barbecue, so I say we already have plans to go dance round a fire with my girlfriend’s friends and she is stupid enough to believe it.
I walk through town, listening to the soundtrack of SOTD, but even Ed and Shaun can’t erase the snaky sound of Marsha Ray’s voice from my head. Just the thought of the echo of it makes me want to punch the nearest seagull. I feel myself disappearing, being sucked along a desire line towards getting high, towards meth-land, tasting the bitter drip of it rolling from my nose to the back of my throat, reliving the burning rush of it, like my whole body is being fed through one of those high-speed hand-dryers. And I miss that place so much I want to cry. FUCK YOU, MARSHA RAY.
Someone needs to remind me at this moment why drugs are a bad idea.
Seeing how Brighton is the Drug Death Capital of the UK, it’s easy to find a meeting to go to. My first since leaving RB. My first since graduation. I’m kind of angry that I’ve ended up here again.
I don’t intend to speak or anything, I just need to be in a safe place for a while. I never did speak much at meetings, even at home. Writing, reading, listening, watching, I’m down, but talking, not so much. I guess that’s another reason why I don’t have a girlfriend: girls like the talkers.
Seriously, the idea of having a girlfriend scares the crap out of me. I get how life can be easier with someone else to cling on to when shit gets difficult. But what if that person turns out to be the thing that’s making shit difficult? And what if you’re both doing the clinging, like with Ed and Shaun in the movie – that can’t be comfortable or easy, right? The girlfriend I told you about earlier, Anna, she thought us being together meant I shouldn’t need to go to meetings any more. I should be able to talk to her, right? If I couldn’t do that, it proved I didn’t love her (which I didn’t anyway, but let’s not overcomplicate here). And not eating meals together and not letting her do those little pecky kisses proved I didn’t love her. Anna said my misophonia (yeah, it has a name, she looked it up) was a neurotic construct to keep her at a distance. But when I offered real proof of not loving her, like wanting to break up, she’d tell me I was broken and just needed someone to love me.
I’m thinking all this in the meeting when I should be listening. It’s probably disrespectful to say I’ve heard it all before, but, you know what, I really have. A gazillion fucking times.
Which leads me to thinking about the purpose of meetings in general and that thing my father had going on, Trembling Leaves or whatever, and the kinds of people who sign up for shit like that, who need it to get from one end of the week to the other. I guess I’m no different from them. What I’ve gotten from meetings is probably not so different from what they get from following some weird guy who says he can show them the way to enlightenment. All these things just help you avoid having to deal if you can’t avoid it by having a relationship with another person or getting high.
Thomas says that people like to have something to fill in life’s holes because the holes are full of questions that no one knows the answer to, like what it’s like to die, and what happens afterwards and most other death-related stuff. People are scared by all the Big Questions we can’t answer, so when someone comes along, an inspirational writer, a preacher, a guru, who says they know all the answers, we latch on like a baby at the nipple. Feed me, feed me. But Thomas says there’s nothing wrong with not knowing, that we can’t know everything, that Fear of the Unknown causes way too much anxiety. And that’s how I came to convince myself I didn’t mind not knowing about you. I guess these days I prefer to be one
of those people, one of the humans, who’s scared and alone, over one of those zombies who makes themselves feel better, or special, or important, or clever, by following someone like my dad, who’s just using them anyway to make himself feel better about himself.
Everyone’s clapping. The woman who was speaking has stopped. To bring you into the picture (yes, I was listening), her son overdosed fifteen years ago and she still comes to meetings three times a week. I get that she might be there to help other people who are going through what she went through, I get that, but three times a week? You lost your son sixteen years ago and couldn’t give a shit, right? Couldn’t she just have someone give out her number when a grieving parent comes along? Who needs who here? There’s a lot about all this that I still don’t get.
But one thing I do get is that a person who tells you they have all the answers to life’s mysteries is lying. And a drug is the equivalent of that person in pill or powder form. Like Thomas says, learn as much as you can about the things you can know about and imagine and dream the other stuff and use it to create something worthwhile. Just because Thomas killed someone, that doesn’t turn everything he says to crap. And, before you say anything, Thomas is not my guru, I just happen to agree with most of the shit he says.
The meeting has wrapped and people are up off their seats and moving towards the tea kettle. There are no cute girls present to hang out and watch and like I said I’m not of the mind to speak to people for the sake of hearing my own voice. And I need to eat. I guess I’m through with NA.
As I step out the door I get this sudden rush of adrenaline, whoosh, like I’m about to cross the Grand Canyon on a tightrope.
I walk down to the water behind a couple guys about my age dressed in identical white T-shirts and jeans so super-skinny they walk like they’ve shit their pants. They’re holding hands and swinging their arms like a couple of eight-year-old girls. You don’t see that in RB, it’s kind of sweet.
Narcissism for Beginners Page 15