CHAPTER 6

Escalation

I think my grandparents must have hoped my time in prison would act as a kind of wake-up call, but in fact it had little effect on me; I continued with my self-destructive ways.

Shortly after my release, I met another girl and was finally able to forget about Jane. My new girlfriend’s name was Christine, and she was wonderful. I met her when I was working on a building site in Raynes Park and living with my grandparents again. Nan had been persuaded to give me another chance, despite all the good advice to the contrary that she’d received from her sons and daughters.

Christine was another blonde. She was very slim and tall, with long legs. She was working on the conveyor belt in a local factory, putting things into boxes. Christine did all she could to keep me on the straight and narrow, and seemed to like and respect me for who I was, and not in spite of it. Thanks to Christine, I found that I was able to scale back my drug habit quite a bit, although not as much as either of us would have liked.

Still, a degree of drug-taking notwithstanding, things were going well for us, and for the first time in my life I began to have feelings for a girl that approached real, mature love. When I was with Christine, I felt less need to take drugs that would change the way I felt. But of course, when I was with my friends, I took drugs as I always did.

I think I was able to reduce my intake of drugs at this time because, thanks to Christine, I was happier than I had been before. Our relationship was less volatile than the other two I had experienced, and I simply didn’t feel the need to use as much as before. Even Nan and Grandad could see that things were better for me and that my life was a lot less unstable than it had been in recent years. We all began to hope that maybe now I would manage to hold it together.

Christine and I were a regular, normal couple. She introduced my mate Brian to a girl called Sophie – the sister of her best friend, Jean. They hit it off, so the four of us hung around in a little gang. Brian and Sophie became serious about their relationship and got engaged. It all felt very stable and, although I was still using drugs heavily, so long as I was with Christine I felt that I had things more or less under control.

Then I found out from her mum that Christine had a condition called Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a sort of cancer of the blood, and was going to die. Christine was in her late teens. It all seemed so unfair.

Now that she had been diagnosed, Christine had to go to the Royal Marsden Hospital for blood transfusions on a regular basis. I often took her to the hospital, but I never went in. There was no effective treatment for Christine’s condition, but the blood transfusions were supposed to prolong her life and help her to feel a little better. I was desperately worried about her, but mostly for selfish reasons.

Although I thought I loved Christine, I had always had a lot of difficulty in seeing things from others’ points of view. When I considered the fact that Christine was going to die, I thought, “What is going to happen to me when Christine is gone?” and “How long is it going to be before I am on my own again?” and “How am I going to manage when the only person who has ever really cared for me disappears?” I can only imagine how Christine must have been battling with fear and anger about what was going to happen to her. So far as I was concerned, it was all about me. I had thought that, finally, I’d found a girl who would stick around, but, instead, this one was going to leave me, too.

Despite the fact that Christine was so ill, we continued seeing each other for about eighteen months before I got in trouble again. This time, I was arrested for shop-breaking, handling stolen goods and taking a car to do the theft in. Although I was working for Tony at the time and making decent money, I still felt that I needed the thrill and the money to buy drugs. When an acquaintance came and asked me if I would steal a car and do the driving for them in a smash-and-grab, I was happy to get back in the driving seat.

I was good at stealing cars; it was easier in those days. Anyone in the business had a big set of keys, and usually you’d find one that would open the door and another that would work in the ignition. If you didn’t, it was rarely difficult to hot-wire any vehicle. And it was fun sneaking into someone’s drive, breaking into their car and driving off without them even waking up. I didn’t care whose car I took. I was happy to take a neighbour’s if they had what I was looking for. A good getaway car was something fast and small, like an MG Metro that was easy to manoeuvre and big enough to hold four people.

When it came to the break-ins, we had a system. We’d put on the gloves, dress in black and climb across the rooftops to a shop that we had checked out beforehand, so as to figure out how to get in. We would have found out what sort of lock there was and whether or not there was an alarm. In the winter, as early as nine was late and dark enough for the job. This particular night, we had decided to do a tobacconist’s as we would be able to fill our sacks with cigarettes and tobacco and sell the lot on in bulk to a fence who would give us decent money for it. But of course we were caught, despite all the careful planning, and I was looking at some more time behind bars.

After the arrest, I knew that I was facing prison time again and felt that this was more than I could cope with, because I had come perilously close to cracking up the last time. I sat down to think about how I could get out of this situation and, after giving the matter due consideration, decided that if I took a large overdose, enough to kill me or do serious damage, and passed out while somebody rang for an ambulance, then they would not send me to prison. I would be brought to hospital and cared for, so that the overdose did no lasting damage, and I would have demonstrated remorse, so they wouldn’t lock me up again. I didn’t know anyone else who had carried out a plan like this, but I still felt quite confident that it would work and was not remotely concerned about doing myself any long-term damage.

I went through with it. I took an overdose of Tuinal with alcohol while I was with Christine and asked her to call the ambulance as soon as I fell unconscious so that we could be sure that I wouldn’t die or suffer any lasting damage.

“I’m relying on you,” I warned her. “Leave it too late, and I’m a goner.”

Christine was pale and scared, but she nodded and said that I didn’t need to worry, because she would make sure that the ambulance got there on time.

I have always regretted doing this. Christine was a beautiful young woman who was going to die before she had even finished growing up, and yet I was selfish enough to put her in this awful situation. I could have died. I could easily have been left with a permanent disability. And how would Christine have felt then? I have never come to terms with what I did, because by the time I was able to think rationally about it and see just how awful my behaviour had been, it was too late. The stupid plan didn’t even work, because when I went to court I was sent away to serve fifteen months in Wormwood Scrubs.

What can I say? Wormwood Scrubs, my new home. What a shithole. This was far worse than the other places I had been detained in. I was surrounded by filth in a small two-man cell that I shared with a traveller called Dave – a Gypsy from Kent of about my age. Dave was in for receiving stolen goods and, like me, had a history of getting into trouble with the law.

Dave and I were two peas in a pod. I thought he was alright, and he returned the compliment. Neither of us could read or write but I was OK at cutting hair and would give Dave haircuts with a razor blade. There were some awful characters in the Scrubs, such as the Hussein brothers, who had been sent down for murder. They had been convicted unanimously, but nobody had ever found the body of their victim, and one of the ways to have a laugh in the Scrubs was to walk past their cell calling out, “Where’s the body? Tell us where the body is!” Another notorious killer in the prison had killed a little girl in a wooded area. The press had referred to the crime as the Little Red Riding Hood Murder, and the name had stuck. I was given a job working in the kitchen, which meant that I often found myself serving the child-killer tea and cakes.

Some of the prisoners were so dangerous that they were kept away from the others. In general, there was a very tense atmosphere, and a feeling that the whole thing might explode one day. I worked on the kitchen’s hotplate, from where we served all the meals to the inmates. As usual, I managed to work the situation to my advantage and didn’t lose any weight while I was in prison.

I can’t say that I had any real mates there, but I had lots of acquaintances. Working in the kitchen gave me greater access to baths and showers, which was a good thing, because if you were in the main flow you were lucky to get a bath and a change of clothing once a week. I had always been quite meticulous about tidiness and hygiene and would have hated that. All of my clothes were prison issue and consisted of two white and blue striped shirts, one pair of greys, which were trousers, a grey jacket, two pairs of blue overalls, two pairs of socks, two blue T-shirts and two pairs of white pants, which were like oversize boxer shorts.

We were occasionally allowed to watch films on a portable screen that was set up in one of the rooms at weekends. This gave the prisoners the opportunity to mingle and sort out deals. I earned a lot of tobacco in prison. I became involved in dealing when I was in the Scrubs: sugar, tobacco, food and even drugs. I could arrange for visitors to bring in things in small amounts and get them to me so that I had some currency to deal with. It wasn’t hard for my mates to smuggle tiny portions of drugs past the guards. As soon as I got it, I would swallow it or stick it up my bum to be retrieved later; this was the system that everybody used, so my friends knew how to wrap the drugs carefully in plastic so that they would be safe to pass through the digestive system.

Even tiny amounts of drugs were very valuable in prison. Friends brought various things: heroin, dope, cocaine, and more. Another route for drugs to enter the prison was via the inmates who were allowed to work on the outside. In any prison, there are multiple entrance routes for illegal substances.

I wasn’t making much money but it was a huge help in making sure that the prison sentence was as comfortable as it could possibly be, and it was a way to pass the time while also raising my social status among the other prisoners. The principles are the same, no matter what you are dealing. On occasions I would want a nice starched shirt for a visit. I would be able to organise this, as well as a decent pair of strides, through my contact in the laundry. Payment was made in tobacco. If, however, we were dealing with something a bit more lucrative, such as drugs, we had money sent to our partners outside and the drugs would be exchanged once information had been received that the money had arrived. Although I was hardly happy during my stay in the Scrubs, I was learning a lot about how the dealing business operated and I was doing quite well.

Despite all the stress that I had put her under, Christine came to visit me throughout my sentence, and we often talked about how one day we would get married and life would be grand. We never discussed the fact that that could never happen, because Christine did not have long to live. In any case, as soon as I came out, I went straight back to my old ways. I started using drugs very heavily, ignoring Christine and generally getting into trouble.

I saw very little of her in her final months, and in fact, she died not that long after I left prison. She was just twenty-two years old when they buried her. Of course, when the news of her death reached me and the reality of how selfish I had been slowly began to sink in, I felt awful. I still feel awful about the way I treated Christine, to this day. I felt so guilty that I could not face attending her funeral. What a great boyfriend. Because I knew that I was a bad person to know, I decided that in future I would avoid nice people. They didn’t deserve to have someone like me in their lives. I even drifted away from my old friend Brian.

When I was twenty-one, I served some time in Brixton for stealing cars and some other bits and pieces. I had been involved in “ringing”, which is a term that refers to stealing cars, changing their number plates and selling them. I was a petty criminal, so I was remanded and bail was set at £25, which of course I didn’t have. Even when I was making decent money through fair means or foul, it was a question of easy come, easy go. As soon as I had a few banknotes in my pocket, I spent them on drugs.

My grandparents were fed up with me at this stage, so rather than asking them to pay the bail, I asked my aunt. Auntie Pat knew that I was taking a lot of drugs and that I was spending time with a lot of very bad characters. But she had always been fond of me, and I was hopeful that she would step up to the plate for me one more time. At that time, I was using a lot of opiates – coke, heroin and Physeptone – as well as some illegally acquired prescription drugs that I had been using for a while, such as Tuinal and mandies. I had discovered that most drugs seemed to do the trick for me, especially if I combined them with alcohol. I wasn’t that fussy about what I took and liked the way I felt on just about anything.

Auntie Pat, who had been helping to take care of me since I was a little boy, felt that I needed a shock and that maybe Brixton would frighten me straight. She hoped that this would help to shake me out of my complacency and encourage me to take a long, hard look at my life and where I was heading and make some wiser decisions about what I wanted to do with myself before it was too late. She refused to pay bail, so it was back behind bars for me. I was not happy about it, and felt that she had abandoned me in my hour of need. I railed against her and blamed her for the fact that I had been locked up.

I had served all my previous sentences as a juvenile, but this time I was in with the men. It was completely different from what I’d grown used to. So long as you were a juvenile, there was still the idea that you had some hope of getting your life back on track, and that you weren’t so far gone that there was no hope of rehabilitation. But Brixton was a holding ground for hardened criminals.

I had thought that the other sentences were bad, but this was much worse. Sexual abuse was very common in prisons – it still is today – and I was a good-looking young man at the time, with long blond hair, and not nearly as tough as I thought I was. In retrospect, I was an ideal victim, and perhaps the authorities should have been more aware of the vulnerable situation I was in. One of the inmates, Steve, who was about ten years older than me, befriended me. He was a figure of respect on the landings and I trusted him. He encouraged me to be banged up in the same cell as him, as he said he would look after me and make sure that nobody bothered me. Of course, what he was really doing was grooming me. And as soon as he got me on my own, he subjected me to some pretty rough sexual abuse.

I got out of that cell as quickly as I could. I spoke to one of the prison officers and told him that Steve was “trying it on with me” and, without saying exactly what had happened, I told the officer that they needed to get me away from that guy as soon as possible. I never wanted to be left on my own with him again. I was moved rapidly into another cell up on the threes (on the third landing).

I have never felt as frightened and betrayed in all my life as I did when I was sexually assaulted. On many levels, I blamed Auntie Pat for what had happened, because I had been given the opportunity to be bailed out, and she had refused to come up with the money, even though I knew she had it and could easily have afforded the relatively small sum.

To this day, I have never told her what happened to me while I was in prison, and while of course I know that it was in no way her fault, I do sometimes wonder what my life would have been like if I had never served that sentence and never suffered that sexual assault. There are still times when I am round at Pat’s house having a cup of tea and a chat, and suddenly it all comes back to me. In those days, if you were a man and you were sexually abused, you didn’t tell anyone, because that sort of thing wasn’t supposed to happen to real men, hard men.

Thinking about what happened to me, even after all these years, I often end up with a lump in my throat. I can think about it rationally; ultimately, I was the one who had mucked up and it would never have happened if I had not been involved in crime in the first place. And, of course, the only guilty party involved in the sexual assault was the man who hurt me. No victim of a sexual assault should ever feel that it was because of something they did or didn’t do. I know that now. But then, emotionally, I felt as though I had been deserted again and I reacted by becoming determined to be able to take care of myself in every way, no matter what it took. I still hope that one day I will be able to put these feelings completely to rest, because they have stayed with me throughout my whole adult life.

It has often been said that prison is a very good educational centre for anyone who plans to continue a life of crime. Of course, the reality is that prison is mostly full of the least successful criminals, the ones who actually got caught, and one has to wonder how useful their advice is. The real experts stay on the outside; they are smart enough to either evade the authorities, or to pay them off. Nonetheless, any aspiring criminal will pick up a few tips by being around prisoners and chatting with them about the things they have done that have worked out, that they have got away with.

Perhaps most of all, prison is a place where identities are moulded. It is where you start to see yourself as belonging permanently on the wrong side of the law, of being external to society and not answerable to its laws, while at the same time knowing that “society” doesn’t care about you.

After my brief stay in Brixton and the sexual assault, I became more and more aggressive in my interactions with people on the street. I had always had a short temper, and I had become quite a rough young man in general. I would get aggressive even before I knew there was a reason to defend myself. My reputation as a hard man grew and the more I got involved in criminal situations and carried them off, the more reliable I proved myself to be to the sort of person who needed a chap like me. I was still using drugs, of course, and stealing, and I was always working my way up through the system – essentially as an apprentice in the criminal underworld – and getting to know serious people who were involved in serious business and making big money.

I was still a registered addict at St George’s Clinic in Tooting, just around the corner from Wimbledon speedway stadium. This meant that I was getting some help from the health authorities, at least in theory. I would go to St George’s to pick up my dexamphetamine time-release capsules; dexamphetamine was a precursor to methadone and was used to treat hardened addicts. I picked up my script weekly and cheerfully combined it with whatever I could get on the street. I also used cocktails of different drugs mixed together. I was off my face most of the time. I wonder now how I even managed to carry out my daily affairs, how I could even function.

Eventually, and not surprisingly, I ended up having another psychotic breakdown because of all the amphetamines I was taking. I presented myself at the clinic where they told me they were stopping my script, because it clearly wasn’t working out. They told me to go willingly into hospital or they would section me, because I was not safe to be allowed out on the streets. As I was not in a proper frame of mind to do anything for anyone, I was duly taken in an ambulance from the clinic to Tooting Bec Hospital.

I was totally unstable, virtually paralysed, and went quietly, understanding that there was no other option. I was put on a ward with schizophrenics and patients with other mental illnesses. I was drugged up to the eyeballs and behaved like a zombie. My situation was horrendous. At one stage I developed a condition that is known as “mental lockjaw”, which meant that I couldn’t open my mouth and believed I couldn’t eat or talk. I walked around the hospital corridors for hours on end, not realising where I was, or even who I was. I didn’t understand why I was there or what I was doing. I was just an empty shell, wandering around with no purpose. There didn’t seem to be any point to anything and I couldn’t even summon the initiative to wish that I was dead.

I was medically controlled and heavily sedated, and to this day I can’t really remember what went on at the hospital. However, I do remember getting into one fight and the trouble that ensued. The guy in question had had a lobotomy and was sixpence short of a shilling. He was, I believe, a permanent resident at the hospital. Our row had started off as a simple argument about something very minor. He was a big lump of a man and was trying to frighten me. Eventually, we had to be physically separated. Loads of nurses arrived and we were given drugs, separated and told to calm down.

As time went along, I started to feel a bit better, was drugged a little less and had a bit more freedom. One day I remember meeting Kenny while walking around the hospital grounds. Kenny didn’t live at the hospital, but he came in regularly to pick up his script from the drug unit. We had chatted and started to get to know each other a little. As I was getting better now, I was allowed to leave the psychiatric unit and wander around the grounds of the hospital, although I was not allowed to go off the site. Life was rather monotonous, so when I saw Kenny I was always happy to spend some time with him. I continued getting better and was allowed to go for longer walks on the common outside the grounds, without supervision. One day I was having my walk when I met Kenny, who had just picked up his script and was in a jovial mood.

“Hey, mate,” Kenny said. “Do you want a hit of Physeptone?”

“Why not?” Life was very boring at the hospital, and I was up for anything that would make the day more entertaining.

Kenny told me that he injected the Physeptone for a better buzz and asked me if I would like to try it that way. I had never injected, but it sounded like a good idea, so he set up the works, broke open the ampoule and drew the Physeptone up inside the syringe. He put on a tourniquet, a scarf, at the top of my arm. He slapped my arm until the vein produced itself and then he injected me.

This was the first time I had ever taken drugs intravenously, and I remember it vividly to this day. I was really scared because there was quite a lot of blood coming from my arm, but the rush once the drug entered my blood stream was absolutely unbelievable, like nothing I had ever experienced before. The hit was amazingly fast and powerful. And more than a little frightening. However, it made me feel physically sick, and I slumped to the ground to deal with the overwhelming sensation of nausea. Time stood still and I found myself goofing or drifting off to sleep. It was great, I thought, like a type of magic. It was as if I was under a spell.

Throughout the rest of my stay at the hospital I continued to see Kenny and often bought drugs from him. After he picked up his prescription, we would go over to the common and fix it. Kenny taught me how to do my own fix, and I decided that this was what I would do from now on, as it was so much more effective than anything I had tried before.

Finally, I was discharged. I managed to get a flat opposite the hospital, and before long, I was living with a girlfriend. I met Julie one day when we were both smoking a little dope with some mutual friends. Julie liked the occasional smoke, but she didn’t take any other drugs. Although I had been so badly hurt by the failure of my previous relationships, I let down my guard and fell for Julie. She seemed very grounded, and I felt that I could rely on her. We started to see each other and quickly became an item.

Julie was a very caring person, who worked for the Freeman’s Catalogue Company. She was an attractive girl, a brunette with pretty features, who could have gone out with just about anyone. I don’t know what she saw in me at the time, but maybe she was just looking for a little excitement. Julie moved into my flat with me and after nine or ten months we decided that we would get married. I was managing to work most of the time and, although I was still using drugs, I was reasonably stable. And now I had another white wedding to look forward to! I had no doubt that this time everything was going to go swimmingly. What could possibly go wrong?

Julie and I got married at the Methodist church in Streatham. Although they were very worried about our relationship, and far from happy about Julie’s decision to throw in her lot with me, her parents attended the wedding. None of my family turned up. A few of my friends were invited but I can’t remember who the best man was. After the ceremony, we went to Julie’s mum’s for a celebratory buffet.

Julie and I lived in the flat in Tooting, but after about six months Julie left to go back to her parents’ house because I was behaving like a nutcase again. Whenever we argued, which was often, I became very aggressive, and she would be afraid that I would lash out and hurt her. Julie hated some of the people that I was hanging out with: minor drug-dealers, petty criminals and generally young men who were up to no good. She realised that in getting involved with me, she had made an awful mistake.

Looking back, I don’t blame Julie in the slightest for bailing out of the marriage, but at the time I felt abandoned again and absolutely furious about this betrayal. I worked hard on our relationship and managed to entice her back into my lair. I did this by telling her that I was going to sort myself out and start behaving normally. I promised to get off the drugs and away from bad company. I went back to work at a local building firm and levelled myself out with the drugs. As well as working for the building firm, I was also buying and selling vehicles, mostly legally.

Then I became tempted by the thought of increasing my income and got involved in a sort of scam called the Long Firm. One person would buy a car, and then I would sell it on. Basically, the arrangement was that someone would buy a car by putting down a small deposit, and then there was a brief period of time during which the car was unregistered; this was referred to as “being on the HPI”, a list of all the cars that were being bought using a hire-purchase scheme.

I would get the car and go into a sales room, explaining that I was emigrating to Australia and needed to sell the car quickly in order to raise a bit of cash, and that I was prepared to accept a low offer in return for a quick sale. These were top-of-the-range cars, and the car salesman would offer to buy it for maybe half of what it was actually worth. He would know that he was getting a good deal, but assume that I was in a hurry to sell, because I was about to leave the country. He would ask if I had all the paper-work and check if the car was on the HPI register, and of course it wouldn’t be yet. I would say, “I don’t want a cheque because I’m closing all my accounts so I need the money in cash.” I’d get the cash, he would get the car, and by the time he tried to sell it, it would be on the HPI register and there would be a problem. Of course, by this stage I would be long gone. I made quite a bit of money doing this and thought of myself as a success.

This was a great time for music in London, and all the young people followed the latest bands. I loved music and was lucky enough to see Slade at the Temple in Wardour Street. This was in their very early days, when they still had short hair. I’d had to be persuaded to go, because I had seen a picture of the band, and their appearance suggested that it wouldn’t be my type of music at all. In the event, they turned out to be a heavy rock band, which was right up my street. I took a lot of amphetamines, smoked a fair bit of dope at the venue and had a fantastic night.

Because drug-taking at rock venues was common, there were often drug raids by the police. They would turn up in uniform, which would give the DJ enough time to warn us about what was going on. We would drop our gear on the floor around us, the police would come in, target a few people and take them away to make an example of them – or fill their targets. As soon as they were gone, the music would start again and we would all be scrabbling on the floor to get our gear back, laughing uproariously.

The police raids were very much part of the fun. That’s how it happened at the Slade concert. After the gig I went upstairs, had a couple of amyl nitrates and spent half an hour talking to a parking meter outside the club. As I recall, it was a very serious conversation.

At one stage, I found some legitimate work at the Whisky A Go Go, which was the club above the Temple. The Whisky was a club for soul music and most of the clients were black people of Caribbean descent. Fred, the licensed manager, and I were often the only two white people there. Dope-smoking was the favourite vice of the Temple clients, and as everyone was stoned the whole time there were lots of fights, for one reason or another, usually over some thing stupid that you could be sure nobody would remember the following day.

Despite the scuffles, I liked working at the Temple, and Fred and I became close friends. I had been introduced to him by a girl I had been seeing on the side, and he had sorted me out with a job as a bouncer. I enjoyed listening to the soul music, which was different from the rock I was used to. I found soul quite relaxing, and listening to it gave me a glimpse of a different lifestyle.

Fred was in a band, and sometimes I would work for him as a roadie. At one stage, he did a little singing for a band called Elmer Gantry – his claim to fame – and I worked as roadie for them too, responsible for setting up the stage, sound checks, lights, and so forth. I really enjoyed this work and, being mechanically minded, was quite good at it. It was great fun, and doing something that was both hard work and creative helped me to keep the amount of drugs I was taking down to a more reasonable level than usual.

Afterwards, Fred and I were briefly involved in clothes wholesaling, dealing in the sorts of fashions that the likes of Twiggy and Sandy Shaw were wearing at the time. We were always on the lookout for new ways to make money, and because Fred liked to stay on the right side of the law, we stuck with legal channels. We bought a gowns van, which is a vehicle that has been set up inside to carry clothes on hangers, and we collected high-fashion items from warehouses to sell on to boutiques on the high street. We made good money for a little while before that line of business ran dry and we moved on to something else.

Fred and I also worked backstage in pantomimes. I remember doing a production of Cinderella – starring Dick Emery and Joe Brown – at a theatre in Stratton. I was involved in the lighting: dimming the lights at crucial moments, turning them up and setting up a controlled explosion in a bucket at the climax of the show! Because this was a job that meant having to have your eye on the ball, I wasn’t using drugs heavily – just enough to keep me going.

Things were OK for a while. I was making money, and so was Julie. But the more interesting jobs fizzled out and I returned to maintaining a very high level of drug use. I gradually sought out more and more highs and forgot the promises I had made to my wife. Julie and I moved to Croydon into a really luxurious flat. I was earning good money as a jobbing builder for a letting agency, taking care of the maintenance of their properties.

My drug use ebbed and waned. There were weeks when I was more or less in control of the situation. But then there were weeks when I consumed industrial quantities of drugs and treated Julie to an array of dysfunctional, aggressive behaviours. Our domestic bliss was short-lived, as after a couple of months in the new flat, Julie could stand no more of me and left, announcing her attention to arrange a divorce as soon as possible so that she could get on with her life far away from her junkie ex. She left no forwarding address, and I had no way to get in contact with her.

I had lost it all again. It was all Julie’s fault, I decided. Stupid cow. Yet again, I had let a woman into my life and she’d messed it all up. Presumably because she was frightened of me, Julie went to live somewhere I could not find her. She was a sensible girl, who was doing the right thing. I couldn’t live with myself, so why on earth should I expect anyone else to? Although I was angry and upset, on some level I didn’t blame Julie for disappearing and I didn’t try to find her or harbour fantasies of revenge, as I had before.