The Good Samaritan

by John Marrs

‘I’m sure your children don’t see you like that . . . They just love you for who you are. They aren’t aware of the life you’ve given them. The mess they’re in is all they know.’

  ‘What do you mean by “mess”?’

  ‘That their mum is dependent on drugs or drug substitutes; that she doesn’t have enough money to give them food with proper nutrition; that when they’re old enough to go to school they’ll see that all their classmates have things you’ll never afford. And I know you’re the kind of person who’ll feel dreadful for that, aren’t you?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Do you think they might grow up resenting you?’

  ‘Yes, all the time.’

  ‘Does it worry you that they might follow in your footsteps and end up addicts like you and their father, too? It can be hereditary, can’t it?’

  ‘I won’t let them get into drugs.’

  ‘I bet your mum said the same thing about you, but it’s hard to tell people what to do, isn’t it? It’s no wonder you feel like you’ve let them down as a mum. What else do you worry about?’

  ‘That they’ll feel disappointed in me.’

  ‘It’s very easy to fall into bad habits when it comes to addiction, especially when you don’t feel like there’s a reason to stay on the wagon.’

  ‘I thought I had a reason – for my kids . . . but I’m not strong enough.’

  ‘And as you’ve already told me, you know they’re probably already disappointed in you for the life you’re giving them. And life away from heroin is hard, isn’t it? Especially when you have nothing else. It must feel like life is never going to get any better than it is now.’

  ‘What can I do to make it better for them?’ she wept.

  It was the question I’d been waiting for her to ask. And I knew that once I talked her back into her addiction, she’d reach the same decision I’d made for her. Everyone would be better off without Chantelle.

  When her day of reckoning arrived, she’d purchased enough heroin from her violent, drug-dealing ex-boyfriend to do what was necessary. I closed my eyes and listened intently to the sounds of her feet shuffling along bare floorboards she couldn’t afford to carpet, her curtains being drawn, the bedroom door quietly closing and her body stretching out upon her bed. I heard the flame from a cigarette lighter and imagined it heating up the metal spoon. I pictured the barrel of a syringe drawing up the dirty liquid and Chantelle tapping at her arms and legs, trying to raise a vein that hadn’t already collapsed under the weight of her weak will.

  ‘You’ll find my kids when they’re older and tell them I did this because I loved them, won’t you?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course I will,’ I lied. ‘Just keep reminding yourself that you’ve explored every other avenue, but this is the only route that makes sense. You are moving on and allowing everyone else you love to do the same. And I admire that so much.’

  Within moments, the needle had penetrated her skin and I listened with blissful satisfaction right until her final breath. That’s the one sound that matters to me above all others . . . that one precious moment when someone breathes their last then slips away. People in pain like Chantelle place themselves in my hands because I understand them better than anyone else in the world can. I know more about what they need than their brothers, sisters, parents, spouses, best friends or children. I understand them because I know what’s best for them. If they place their trust in me, I’ll reward them by going to the ends of the earth to help them. I’ll alleviate their suffering. I’ll bring all that is bad in their lives to an end. I will save them from themselves. That is what I am: a saviour of lost souls.

  Twenty-two days after I saved Chantelle, she and I were finally in the same room together. A burgundy-velvet curtain encircled her coffin before she disappeared from view. And as her friends made their way back outside, I took Chantelle’s order of service and placed it inside the black bag I carried with me to all the funerals I attended.

  It was where I kept all the other orders. Chantelle’s made fifteen in all. It was becoming quite the collection.

  CHAPTER SIX

  ‘Oh, Laura, this is as light as air,’ began Kevin as he took a second mouthful of my Victoria sponge cake. I hadn’t been able to resist leaving a slice on the desk of a man with high cholesterol.

  I tried to divert my stare from his scruffy beard as he approached me in the office kitchenette. He was kidding himself if he thought it was distracting anyone from his rapidly receding hairline. He spat a crumb onto my skirt. I’d have to wash that tonight.

  ‘Thank you,’ I replied with false modesty. ‘It’s not as attractive as I’d have liked it, and the homemade jam got a bit gloopy.’

  ‘I can’t believe you make your own jam, too. You are like the perfect wife.’

  ‘I try my best.’ I silently thanked the supermarket and encouraged him towards another slice. There are many sides to me, but all they ever saw was one: the nurturer.

  ‘I know why all that food you make for the fundraisers sells, literally, like hot cakes,’ Zoe added. ‘Seriously, though, you should think about entering one of those baking competitions on the telly. You’d storm it.’

  She had lipstick on her front teeth again. What was wrong with people?

  Fundraisers are my speciality. End of the Line is a registered charity and doesn’t receive local or national government handouts. With branches in almost every county, they’re all expected to be self-sufficient and responsible for paying their own running costs. Telephone lines, computer upgrades, software, stationery, rent, utilities and council tax, et cetera, all total around £80,000 a year. As treasurer, I’d been quite happy to lead the charge myself to find the money, until head office promoted Janine Thomson to manager. She didn’t just tread on my toes, she danced all over them with the grace of an ostrich on hot coals.

  I’d known at first sight when she started as a volunteer two years earlier that we were unlikely to become friends. Everything about her appearance offended me, like her squinty little eyes and her brows plucked into ridiculous curves resembling the McDonald’s golden arches. Grey hairs crawled across her scalp like unsightly slugs, and she tried to plump up her paper-thin lips by colouring above and below them in a gaudy red. She was a clown in search of a circus.

  Then, when she was given the manager’s position above me after all the hard work I’d put in, my dislike turned to loathing. I hadn’t even wanted the job, as it would have given me less time to man the phones, but it was the principle that mattered. It should have been offered to me on a plate.

  Janine immediately became one of those women who needed you to know that she was in charge, even though we’d been running things successfully long before her interference.

  But what annoyed me the most was that she demonstrated an unhealthy preoccupation with me. Sometimes as I sat in my booth listening to another troubled soul spilling their secrets, I’d catch her in her glass-walled office, her glasses perched on the tip of her nose, staring at me, straining to pick up on something I was saying that wasn’t in the rule book. If only she knew just how far away from that book I could stray when the mood took me. And when Tony had accompanied me to a dinner to celebrate Mary’s sixtieth birthday, Janine could barely take her eyes off him. I watched as she flirted and he humoured her. But deep down she must have known that she could never attract a man like my husband, or any man with a pulse and without cataracts, for that matter.

  ‘Try some of Laura’s cake,’ Kevin suggested when Janine stepped into the kitchen to rinse her coffee mug. An awful orange handbag with the emblem of a Chinese dragon on the side – a self-portrait, I assumed – hung from her sloping shoulder. It was the only bag she appeared to own and it matched nothing in her limited wardrobe of drab, patterned rags. I believed her when she said the bag was one of a kind, because nobody else would want it.

  ‘I don’t know how you find the time to do so much,’ she began. The others couldn’t hear it but I recognised something accusator
y in her tone. ‘You volunteer here, you have a family and you still manage to give Mary Berry a run for her money. Quite the domestic goddess, aren’t you?’

  ‘I like to set a good example for my children and I’m very good at multitasking,’ I replied through a narrow smile. ‘If you need me to give you some tips, you have only to ask. Would you like a slice?’

  ‘No thank you, I’m gluten intolerant.’

  ‘Is that really a thing? Do you just wake up one morning and realise that after fifty-odd years you can’t eat cake?’

  ‘I’m forty-two.’ She glared at me and I made an imaginary chalk mark on a board. Kevin and Zoe tried to hide their amusement.

  ‘I’m not very good with ages,’ I added.

  Janine had soon learned that her job would be much more difficult without the thousands of pounds’ worth of sponsorship and donations I alone brought in each year. I had no hesitation in going cap in hand to local companies or schmoozing at business leaders’ events to get what I wanted, even if it meant being pawed at by overweight bald men who stank of whisky, cigars and desperation, and who assumed I found them attractive.

  My hard work brought me praise and freed up Janine’s time to spend on the gambling websites she visited when she thought nobody else was looking. She might have deleted them from the Internet browsing history, but I found them in the cookies section of her computer with the speed of one of those roulette balls she liked to bet on. I’d kept that knowledge, the screengrabs I’d taken and her account password to myself. For the time being, anyway.

  The afternoon shift was often quiet. Desperate housewives and mums rang during the day when they were free of husbands and children. It was a time also favoured by prisoners, making use of our freephone number. Early mornings were mainly men on their way to work, commonly plagued by money worries and scared what bills might be lying on the doormat on their return home later. Most suicidal callers waited until the evening, when, alone, they had time to think.

  That was the time David had favoured. More than seven months had passed since we had first come into contact, and almost five months since we’d spoken last. Sometimes I missed him so much that it physically hurt me.

  I’d known from his very first call that he and I shared a connection. My intuition picks up on desperation in a voice, in the phrasing or the way a person articulates certain words. Instinct will tell me from that conversation if they’re a candidate. And there’s no feeling quite like when they come into my life.

  David was a gentle, softly spoken but emotionally paralysed man who’d struggled to move forward after the violent death of his wife. She’d been killed at home following a break-in by three men while he was working nights. An oppressive cloud of guilt had since smothered the new life he hadn’t chosen for himself. It became impossible for him to navigate it alone, which is why, one desperate evening, he picked up the phone and reached me.

  There was something about David’s sadness that mimicked mine and bonded us. He wasn’t seeking sympathy or asking for someone to assure him that her death wasn’t his fault, because he had plenty of people around him to do that. All he wanted was for someone to listen and really hear him – and there was no one better suited to understand loss than me.

  We were kindred spirits, bound together by the atrocious actions of others. I had chosen to soldier on. He, however, was done. And as our conversations became more frequent and our emotional connection grew, I found myself wanting to keep him alive for selfish reasons. I needed our discourse, I needed to hear him speak and I needed him to need me. I veered away from my well-trodden path and threw myself into trying to help him see that if only he could fight that little bit harder and stretch his hand out that little bit further, his might reach mine and I could save him. My objective became to keep him with me, while his was to convince me that he was better off dead. I already had my anchor and I was willing to be his. But I was being selfish. I just didn’t want to let him go. And eventually, although it broke my heart, I conceded defeat.

  David’s biggest challenge was that he didn’t want to leave this life alone. So my biggest challenge became trying to find someone willing to end theirs with him.

  Then suddenly she came along.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I was grateful the house had more than one bathroom when the side effects of my slimming tablets began making themselves known.

  I found myself glued to the en-suite toilet for the best part of half an hour. Afterwards, with the smell of Febreze in the air but still with a cramping tummy, I examined the side profile of my torso in the mirror. There were definite signs it was becoming a little flatter, even in the last week. I ran my fingers across it and imagined they belonged to Tony. I could burn at least two hundred more calories that morning if I did the school run by foot rather than by car. If I kept making this kind of progress, he might really see me again.

  I loaded the dishwasher with my breakfast dishes and saw Tony had used one of the good mugs for his coffee again, much to my irritation. Outside, it was warmer than the tubby weatherwoman on breakfast television had predicted, so I tied my hoodie around my waist and thought of how it didn’t seem like five minutes ago when I’d taken Alice for her inaugural day in reception class. Week in, week out we’d make the same journey as I had with Effie, who’d eventually thought herself too cool to be with us so skipped a few feet ahead. Alice would hold my hand, singing the chorus of a song she’d heard on the radio over and over again, driving me mad with her love of repetition. I’d squeeze her fingers just hard enough to make her squeal and beg me to stop. Nowadays, neither wanted to hold Mummy’s hand and that suited me. And by the time I arrived at the school gates, Alice was already in the distance running around the playground with her friends.

  For a moment, I considered trying to engage in conversation with a few of the other mums as they took up their regular positions in the morning gossip circle. ‘The Muffia’, Tony had nicknamed them. But it would have been pointless, because there were never any vacancies in their superficial little clique. I’d see them on the gym floor like a pack of hyenas, their knowing glances tearing strips off any woman above a size ten. Then I’d watch them from the back row of a spin class and imagine them sweating out their skin fillers onto their white towels below. Afterwards, I’d be quietly amused as they devoured sugary smoothies and pastries in the café. They fascinated and repulsed me in equal measure.

  My journey from school to my next destination took exactly twenty-two minutes, a time I used to smoke a cigarette and empty my head of all negatives. Because whenever I went to visit my anchor, I needed clarity. I wanted my thoughts and my heart to be as pure as his.

  Before long, the Kingsthorpe Residential Care Home loomed ahead of me. It was a large rectangular building with wings sprouting from each side like branches from a tree. Broad, established oak trees flanked the brick-paved driveway that led up a slight incline towards the frosted-glass double doors of the entrance. It was surrounded by rolling landscaped gardens and a lake.

  I smiled at the young receptionists and signed the visitors’ book. I checked to see if Tony or the girls’ signatures had been added since my last visit, but their names were absent. They were always absent. None of them knew I went four times a week.

  I was buzzed into the communal area where I found Henry with a small group of his peers, all sitting separately and all preoccupied with different objects.

  He sat almost motionless in his wheelchair and didn’t acknowledge my presence. I’d come to expect that and it didn’t matter. I could tell he knew I was there. Call it a mother’s intuition.

  My son’s head had drooped to the right but his eyes remained transfixed on the television attached to the wall. I never really knew just how much he was taking in, but he appeared to be concentrating intently on a Peppa Pig cartoon. A thread of saliva, as faint as a spider’s web, had fallen from the corner of his mouth, down his chin and onto the breast pocket of his T-shirt. I took a tissue from my bag and
dabbed at it, then used my fingernail to gently prise small crumbs of breakfast from the other side of his mouth.

  I slid my hand under the straps holding him firmly in his wheelchair to check they weren’t too tight around his waist or shoulders. I’d yelled at a nurse once when I found the belts had left deep impressions in his skin. I hated that he might be in pain and unable to express it.

  I stared into Henry’s eyes; once upon a time they could light up a room, but now they seemed to be losing their shine. It hadn’t been an immediate transformation but I was scared I was beginning to lose him. I had no one to share my observations with, because I was the only one who ever came to see him.

  I ran my hand through his fine, mousy brown hair. It had been combed forward even though they knew I didn’t think that style suited him. So I splashed some water from a plastic cup over my fingers and rearranged his fringe into a side parting. That seemed to be the favoured style with the boys his age at Alice’s school.

  Henry’s sinewy arms and legs jutted out from beneath the clothes they’d dressed him in. He’d not put the weight back on that he’d lost when he developed pneumonia. I’d spent the best part of two weeks here sleeping by his side in an armchair, then again later, in hospital, when his lungs needed draining. It was just my son and me together and it was the longest period of time I’d been able to spend with him since before the ambulance arrived at our house to take him away from me.

  I was the first to admit those early days with Henry hadn’t been easy, from his weak immune system that rendered him susceptible to all manner of infections, to the screaming fits that lasted the best part of a day. Of course he was a lifelong commitment, but then what child isn’t? But try as I might, I couldn’t get Tony to accept him. Towards the end, he could barely even look at his son.

  I knew I’d never walk Henry to school, watch him play with his friends, or be the mother of the groom at his wedding. We wouldn’t share memories and I’d never really get to know what he was thinking. All the dreams and plans I’d made for him when I was pregnant had long since evaporated.