4 August 2003
Tim summons me to our bench as soon as he gets back from India. His face is tanned and he pulses with self-satisfaction.
I can barely look at him. I wonder what pills he needs from me this time.
‘Kerry and I are getting married,’ he announces, studying my reaction.
‘Wow,’ I manage. After a few seconds, I add, ‘Congratulations, I guess.’
‘We’re waiting till after my finals. July 2005. Save the date.’ He laughs. ‘Actually, don’t save the date. I don’t think you’ll be invited. Though the final guest list will be Kerry’s department. She’s already planning it all.’
I can’t imagine my Kerry getting excited about bouquets or dresses. But I can’t imagine her saying yes to marrying Tim either.
‘Anyway, Joel, that’s not why I came. I did without . . . help while I was in India, despite being in the middle of a conflict zone. So I’ve realized I don’t need pills any more.’
‘Seriously? It’s not easy to come off some of the stuff you’ve been taking.’ And if he quits so easily, what does it say about me?
‘It was tough at first. But my body is now a temple.’
He could have told me this by text. The only reason he wants to meet is to see my face when I find out he’s won and I’ve lost.
I try to smile but my heart – my bloody heart – isn’t in it. He slaps me on the arm – a victor’s gesture wrapped up as friendliness – and walks away.
The tide is all the way out and a heat haze rises under the remorseless sun. I ache from loss and missed chances. How can I stop feeling this way?
I go down to the narrow sandy strip and I run and run and run. This heatwave is killing people; on the news they’re telling the elderly and infirm to stay indoors. To me, it sounds like a challenge. How much further before I set the ICD off? I crave a flash of pain, or oblivion.
I collapse from exhaustion but somehow my heart keeps on beating.
When I get home, I throw all my prescription pills down the toilet. Let’s see how my traitor body likes that.
Two weeks after meeting Tim at the bench, and eight days after my twenty-first birthday, it happens. I die for the second time in my life.
I’ve just bought cider for me, Spike and Zoë. We’re on a comedown, and I need booze the way other people need Nurofen, to dull the pain of normal. The heat and the bright blue sky make my head throb.
Two Staffies are tearing round the Level in front of our bench. I light a fag.
The world darkens and the scorched grass horizon is now diagonal.
I take a breath, but there’s no oxygen in the air. My chest is tight. This is how it felt in training, after sprints.
Again, I try to suck in breath. Nothing. Not like training, then.
As I topple onto the grass, I picture a goldfish, plucked out of its bowl by a cat, lying on the carpet, gasping. Will the cat slice it open with a claw, or will the end come more slowly, from suffocation . . .?
Flash.
Kick.
Which comes first? They’re both ferocious.
And a current stops my useless heart. Electricity ricochets through every cell, followed by oxygen. Sweet, sweet oxygen.
I’m back.
I understand, suddenly, what happened. The doctors told me the ICD firing would feel like a kick from a donkey. That was a juggernaut.
‘Greenie, what’s up?’ Zoë’s shrill voice, from a long way away. I try to answer her but nothing comes out. ‘Greenie . . .’
Another shock. Just as painful. My eyes spring open but all I can see is the striped plastic bag from the off-licence, right next to my face, rustling in the breeze.
Is this going to be the last thing I see?
Darkness falls again and there is a big Staffie drooling onto my face and I don’t know if it’s trying to revive me or savage me and I close my eyes and picture Kerry. In my head, I apologize to her for wasting the chance she gave me.
Sorry for messing everything up . . .
How long do I die for? Three seconds? Less? But the ICD kicks in again in time to hear Ham begging some guy to call an ambulance.
I spend two days back in the cardiology ward on the seventh floor. My dad comes, eyes red, asks me why I stopped taking my pills. I can’t talk to him, or to the good-cop/bad-cop cardiologists, pacing team and physio. They even wheel in a shrink, who tries to talk me into trying antidepressants, but is too uptight to prescribe me the Valium I’d really like.
The minute I get out, I look for Ham, Spike and Zoë again. I find them in the puddles under the Palace Pier, smoking crack.
Until now, I’ve been playing at being an addict. But I’m sick of games. For the first time, I join in.
Oh, it’s perfect. Better than I could have imagined . . . Before it’s even worn off, I know I will want to do it again and again.
Weeks pass in a blur even though every single day lasts a lifetime. A few days stand out, like the night that Rooney became the youngest player ever to score for England during their match in Macedonia. I celebrate with heroin. My parents threaten to stop paying my allowance but don’t have the guts to cut me off completely.
When autumn comes, Tim slopes back, saying he needs a little pick-me-up to help him cope with uni, but I can’t feel smug because what’s the odd Ritalin compared to what I’m using?
On an icy November morning, Ham dies.
I’m not there – it’s one of the few nights I’ve bothered to go home, for warmth and for another handout. Spike was the one to find him and I get nightmares imagining what Ham’s face looked like, that red beard surrounding bloodless blue lips. We hold our own funeral service, decorating a bench on the Prom with flowers we nick from Tesco. Then we get high to take away the pain. This time, it’s heroin, and by the end of the night I can’t picture him anymore. Death isn’t that unusual on the streets but it’s enough to freak Zoë out and she disappears from Brighton to get clean.
So now it’s only Spike and me. We can’t bear to go to the Prom because it reminds us of Ham, so we mostly hang out on our favourite tomb behind St Nick’s church, chasing oblivion.
Today is no different. Till I realize I’m dying, for the third time.
Except this time it’s not on purpose.
‘Spike . . . I’m crashing . . .’
He’s out of it. Snoring.
Christmas shoppers are walking past, scowling and tutting, like we’ve walked into a church in the middle of a funeral and started swearing.
My funeral?
They are my only hope, the tutting people. I know my ICD should protect me again. But the wave of fear that’s travelling through me convinces me I can’t survive this. That whatever shocks my black box might generate, it won’t be enough.
That without help, I will die.
Unexpectedly, I don’t want to.
My limbs won’t co-ordinate and my mouth is spouting gibberish. Come on, come on! Shout, scream, anything.
‘Help me. I’m fucking dying here!’
I come round in the ambulance, more sober than I’ve been in months.
‘Back with us, then, lovey?’ A paramedic older than my mother pats my hand. ‘Don’t worry. You’re going to be fine, now. Till the next time, at least.’
Narcan. It has to be. Other junkies talk in awed tones about the miracles it creates: about dead men walking again, blue-faced corpses pinking up within seconds of receiving the Lazarus drug.
‘Can you tell me who you are?
‘Joel. My name’s Joel.’
‘Good lad, Joel. And can you tell me the date?’
‘December. 2003. Is it the twelfth? Fourteenth?’
‘The twenty-first but you’re near enough. How do you feel?’
‘I feel . . .’ Relieved. And very nauseous. ‘I want to be . . .’
‘All right, lovey,’ she says, managing to get a cardboard dish under my mouth in time to stop any vomit hitting the floor of the ambulance, though some runs down my chest.
I claw at my stinking T-shirt, trying to pull it off. The paramedic does it for me, raising my arms and rolling the fabric up. She has tinsel wrapped around her neck. I hadn’t even realized it was so close to Christmas.
When she sees the raised bump on my body, her eyes widen.
‘What’s that?’
‘ICD.’
‘You get arrhythmias?’
Before I can answer, she’s shouting through the hatch, telling her colleague that we need to get to casualty on blues and twos, swearing under her breath.
‘I’m fine,’ I say, though really I’m desperate for another fix: that’s the downside of Narcan. ‘Seriously, I’m good to go.’
‘You’re not. The medication we gave you can cause . . .’ Her voice is reassuring but the calmness doesn’t extend to her eyes. ‘Problems.’
The vehicle speeds up. The siren sounds. I sense death in here, circling.
I am seeing my funeral again: a room full of people I know. My parents, Ant. Kerry. Though I have used up all the sympathy I deserve.
My hand grips the paramedic’s until we reach the hospital. The doctors stabilize me and for the first time, when I see the impatience in their eyes, I feel shame.
Someone finds a hoodie from lost property to replace my vomit-stained T-shirt. I am about to start the walk back to St Nick’s to score again, but something stops me.
Another first: I don’t want to die. Or at least, not like this.
I’d like to go and see Ant, but his dad has had a stroke that’s made his mum stop believing in God, and Ant is trying to run the cafe single-handed. The last thing he needs is me and my self-pity.
So I go home.
Dad is in the kitchen when I let myself in. He takes in the state of me but says nothing and the weariness in his expression looks like defeat.
‘I’m going to try harder this time,’ I say.
He smiles sadly but he doesn’t believe me. Even I can see it’s like Groundhog Day.
I go back to the den and I drink a pint of water instead of helping myself to beer. I turn on the heating and within seconds my shivering stops. I climb under the thick throw on my sofa.
For years, I’ve had the same words on loop in my head: I didn’t deserve what happened to me.
But the same is true of the good stuff. I don’t deserve my parents or the wealth that cushions me. I did nothing to deserve the talent I was born with or the cute face that the drugs have destroyed.
I did deserve to lose Kerry. It’s time to accept that and move on.
I make no promises out loud. But I start to eat regularly, and I stop drinking. I go to bed early on 31 December, wake up ready for 2004 to be the year I finally sort my shit out and stop hurting everyone else.
One day, when I look in the mirror, I see myself instead of a cadaverous junkie, and that’s the morning I call Ant and ask if I can work a few shifts for him again. He takes some convincing, but when someone lets him down for a Burn’s Night ceilidh at the end of January, I fill in and work harder than I have in years. Gradually the shifts get more regular. I don’t go looking for Spike because I can’t trust myself not to relapse. Busy, busy, busy. The less time I have to think, the more likely I am to stay clean.
I’m walking home from a St Patrick’s Day party shift, my hair sprayed shamrock green, when I get a text.
GREENIE! Am back in Hove. Call me. Luv Zoë.
I haven’t heard from her since Ham died and she took off, saying she was going to get clean. Should I ignore her? Probably. But the fact she has a phone – and credit to text me – is positive. Life has been tough for Zoë but maybe she’s going to be OK.
I call because I want to know how she’s doing. ‘Hey, Zee, I thought you’d disappeared for good.’
‘Could say the same about you, Greenie. You well?’
‘Yeah. I’m . . . not using anymore.’
She laughs. ‘Snap. Boring, innit? Fancy meeting up for some herbal tea?’
I know ex-users are the worst people to help each other, but even so, I’m desperate to talk to someone who understands how hard this is. So I tell her my address.
When she arrives at our house, her eyes are clear and bright as they widen in amazement. ‘I knew you had money, but this is fucking incredible.’
‘Yeah, I was born with a silver spoon . . .’
‘Nothing better for chasing the dragon.’ She laughs and the lines at the corner of her eyes crease with wickedness. ‘Kidding. Ha, look, you’ve got green hair!’ Her laugh sounds different to when she’s high: more childlike.
When we get to my den, I make coffee. As I hand it over, I can smell alcohol on her breath. Not completely clean then, but booze has to be an improvement on what she was doing before.
‘So where did you go?’ I ask her, after she’s stopped stroking the furniture and cooing over the window boxes. The daffodils Mum plants every year are starting to come through.
‘Back to my home town. It wasn’t all that,’ she says, grimly. I wait for her to say more, but instead, she points to the flowers. ‘That’s a Martinette. They bloom earlier down here.’
I try to imagine where Zoë learned the names of daffodils. But before I can come up with a reply, she’s reaching for me, touching my neck.
‘Hold on, Zoë.’
‘Shhh. You like me, don’t you? And I’ve always fancied you. Let’s have fun. Where’s the harm?’
Where is the harm?
She’s not Kerry.
But I can’t have Kerry, because she’s chosen Tim.
Zoë’s lips touch mine.
Afterwards, we lie sweating on the floor. She’s naked but I’m not: I stopped her taking off my T-shirt because I didn’t want her to see my ICD. None of that lot know about my heart. After the big drama when I arrested on the Level last year, I told them I’d had a fit after overdoing the pills.
Zoë’s body is as slight and pale as I expected. But now I see her skin is covered in scars: faded track-marks, crisscrossed self-harm lines, and a nasty pink slash across her stomach. Surgery, or self-inflicted? Clearly, we both have secrets.
I pull the throw off the sofa to cover her up, as much to stop me having to see her pain as to keep her warm. But she beams at me for the trivial kindness, as though I’ve presented her with a giant bunch of flowers.
‘Why fank you, you are a gent and no mistake.’
It’s a perfect music hall Cockney accent. ‘Where did you learn to do all those voices?’
‘We moved a lot when I was a kid, so I adapted my accent to fit in. Then when I went into care, it was handy to be able to make people laugh by doing impressions.’
I want to look after her, show her she’s worth more than she’s been given. I want to help her.
Maybe this is my turn to save a life.