28 May 2004
This time, I don’t want to be saved.
Or even found.
I’ve been in a squat since I started using again and my parents threw me out.
‘Joel! Joel, someone’s here for you.’
People coming to see me is always bad news, but I can’t move. I don’t remember what I’ve taken and I close my eyes, hoping like a little kid that if I can’t see anything, no one can see me.
‘Joel?’
A wave of self-loathing spreads through me when I recognize her voice. ‘Go away.’ I still don’t open my eyes.
‘What the hell have you done?’ She reaches out to grab my arm and I flinch. It’s been days since anybody has touched me.
I open my eyes now. Kerry’s rounded face and clean hair make her seem like an angel sent down on a mission to hell.
‘Go away. I don’t want your help.’
And I definitely don’t want her to see me like this: face bloated, limbs wasted, my skin permanently sore from not washing properly. My hair’s been proving too much hassle, so I’ve shaved it off, badly.
‘I didn’t come to help you. I came to ask why the fuck you want to ruin my life as well as your own.’
‘What are you talking about?’ But I already know.
‘I get that you’re not happy with how your life turned out, but that’s not our fault. So why are you so determined to drag us down with you?’
When I don’t answer, she looks around her for the first time and I see the disgust on her face. This is no hippy squat, with sunflowers painted on the wall and a rota for cooking nut roast. It’s a secret slum, hidden inside a sturdy red-brick house. I’ve got used to the smell, and to the obstacle course on the floor: sharps and bottles, takeaway trays, and coils of stained bedding, sometimes cocooning people, but mostly impossible to tell.
I’m not a junkie-tourist anymore. I’ve gone native. What I did to Zoë proved what a waster I really am.
‘Oh Joel.’
For the first time she doesn’t sound angry, but I prefer rage to pity. ‘Have a good look and then go, all right?’
‘Do your parents know how you’re living?’
‘They’ve given up. How the hell did you find me?’
She looks shifty. ‘There are a few perks working for the ambulance service. Like having access to certain addresses we get called to a lot. This is the third shithole I’ve tried.’
‘I’m flattered.’
‘Don’t be. Tim’s failed his exams thanks to you.’
Typical of that wanker, to blame someone else. ‘You believe him?’
Doubt crosses her face, then disappears. But it’s enough to tell me she hasn’t only come to berate me. She also doesn’t know whether to trust Tim . . .
I could tell her my side of the story: that Tim started it. That if he hadn’t asked for that first favour, I’d never have met Zoë or the other junkies, would never have ended up like this. But that’s not really the truth. My fall into oblivion is all my own work.
The wound on my abdomen throbs where, during the worst trip of my life last week, I tried to gouge out the ICD. Two of the other squatters stopped me, but only just. I had wanted to die, but knew my defibrillator would fire over and over till the batteries ran out.
Kerry stares at me. ‘Of course I believe him: he’s my fiancé. You’ve screwed us both over, by the way. It was meant to be my turn next.’
‘For what?’
‘I always wanted to be a doctor, Joel, remember? But you dumped me and I failed my A levels. In another universe, where we’d never met, I’d be almost qualified by now, a long way from you, from Tim, from all of this . . . mess.’
She’s close to tears. I can’t bear it.
‘If I’d known how it would turn out, I’d never have sold him drugs.’
Kerry hesitates, but when she speaks, it’s quiet and bitter and certain. ‘And if I’d known how you’d turn out, I’d have left you on the grass to die on New Year’s Eve. I’d have walked away.’
After she’s gone, a hint of her perfume remains, a pocket of rose-scented air in the fetid stench of the squat, until that fades away too.
I suppose it’s the last time I will ever see Kerry Smith.
Someone is grabbing my hand.
‘Jesus Christ, mate, talk about in the nick of time. Come on. You’re not staying here.’
Ant. I want to hide under the nearest duvet because I’ve let him down too. After I paid for Zoë’s abortion, and she slipped away from Brighton like a ghost, I stopped turning up for cafe shifts. Again. Loyalty took second place to wallowing in my own self-loathing.
‘Leave me.’
I’ve no strength, thanks to what I smoked after Kerry left. He slots his hands into my sweaty armpits to haul me up and a sudden jolt brings me upright. I think he had been expecting me to weigh so much more.
‘Ugh, Banana Man, your clothes really stink.’
I laugh in his face.
He recoils. ‘And you need some Tic-Tacs. Your breath could spontaneously ignite, it’s pure alcohol.’
‘Just mouthwash.’
‘Is any of this your stuff?’ he asks, casting a disgusted look at the blankets and carrier bags that surround me.
I gesture at my big coat with all its pockets. ‘Most of what’s mine is in here.’ There’s a rucksack too, but I don’t plan to be alive by the time the weather turns cold enough to need the sleeping bag or army boots again.
He helps me towards the front door and out into the blinding day.
I groan.
‘Are you hurt?’ Ant asks.
‘No, the sunshine—’
A Fiesta is parked outside the squat with its passenger door open, and it reminds me of something. Someone.
Kerry sits in the driver’s seat of her mother’s car, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel. The passenger seat has been covered in a bin-bag, and the footwell too. It’s like they’re trying to get rid of a body.
I laugh.
When Kerry sees us, she gets out of the car and moves towards me. She doesn’t say a word but the two of them manoeuvre me into the passenger side and then pull the seatbelt across.
‘Where are we going?’
‘Somewhere safe,’ Ant says.
Somewhere safe turns out to be the second bedroom above the cafe. I don’t know how Kerry’s persuaded Ant to let me stay here, but it’s this or the streets as no B & B would let me within five hundred metres without full decontamination.
This used to be Ant’s bedroom before his parents went back to Spain and he took over the Arsehole. The single mattress has been covered in a thick rubber fitted sheet and layers of fleece blankets, and they’ve covered the Smurfs roller blind with a black bin bag to cut out all the light. The other furniture’s gone, though they’ve left his New Kids on the Block posters. There’s a plastic bucket, a row of mineral water bottles, and a stack of old towels on the floor, plus a clock and a radio on a high shelf that I can’t reach.
And there’s a bolt on the outside of the door.
I’m afraid.
‘This is an intervention, is it?’ I say in a fake Californian accent, my sarcasm failing to disguise my terror.
‘More like the last chance saloon,’ Ant says.
‘Isn’t a last chance saloon meant to have liquor?’
‘Funny.’
Kerry still hasn’t said a word to me. But she stays in the room after Ant goes down to the cafe.
It begins. The beginning of the end or the end of the beginning.
Kerry sits with me during the days, and holds my hand and even embraces me when I shake. She takes away my puke, brings me cereal and toast, takes me to the toilet outside, though she lets me piss and shit alone so long as I don’t lock the door. But she still doesn’t speak, beyond asking me what I want.
It’s Ant who talks to me in the dark. He tells stories I’ve forgotten from our childhood. First thing this morning, he started one and then put his hand to his mouth when he remembered that the memory was connected to football. Most of my best memories are.
‘It’s OK, Ant. They were the good times.’
We play cards, talk about his dad’s failing health, his mother’s bitterness that the dreams she’d had of their retirement years have been replaced by the slow lonely drudgery of stroke and vascular dementia.
But discussing anything else after my cardiac arrest is off-limits. My choice.
I’m too tired to fight. They bring in a private GP to prescribe something for my nausea, but apart from that it’s the three of us, sweating together in the flat, as one hot day turns into another. I don’t know what Kerry’s told Tim to explain her absence, but maybe he’s too scared to ask. She’s still raging at both of us for screwing up her life.
‘Why are you helping me, Kerry?’
It’s day four – the shakes have stopped and I am waiting for the hallucinations – when I finally ask her a direct question. She seems to be weighing up whether to answer so I keep talking.
‘I’ve ruined your life. You said so yourself. Are you trying to get made a saint?’
‘Canonized,’ she says. ‘When you’re made a saint, it’s called canonization.’
‘Thanks. Of all the things that need fixing about me, improving my vocabulary has to be high up the list.’
She can’t stop the smile that twitches on her lips. ‘Well, well, a full sentence! Makes a change from the grunts and the moans. Does this mean you’re feeling better?’
‘For now.’
‘Hungry? I can ask Ant to make you whatever you like.’
What I really want is for her to talk to me, but offering me a choice of food seems like a big leap forward. ‘I don’t know what I like.’
‘How about scrambled eggs on toast?’ she suggests. ‘That’s what my mum always made me when I was feeling poorly.’
‘Sounds great.’ I don’t even like eggs, but knowing they’ll be cooked for me by someone who cares, who hasn’t written me off, despite all I’ve done, makes them sound like the most delicious meal ever.
She stands up. ‘Don’t you dare go anywhere.’
‘I’m too much of a coward to risk your anger, Kerry.’
She opens the door, then turns back. ‘To answer your question. It’s because otherwise, what’s been the point of any of it?’
‘Huh?’
‘The reason I’ve stuck around. It’s because I am too stubborn to give up on either of you.’