Was there light up there somewhere? Somehow, he didn’t care one way or the other.
13
Bernard Harris sat in the back of the police van with a bloody graze across his face and pain in both his arms. They had been twisted behind his back and they were still fixed together with cuffs. The graze was from where his face hit the ground after an officer had yanked him out of the car and slammed him into the pavement.
The police had been armed, fully padded up like futuristic soldiers. From the moment he saw them, Bernard knew it was over. Their Renault had hardly come to a stop before he and Punky had thrown their guns out of the window and held up their hands in surrender, just like the Asian chap in the petrol station had minutes before. The two cop cars had all but run them off the road, one to the right and one close behind, inching them closer to the pavement, threatening to collide.
After that, everything had happened quickly. Bernard had opened the door himself, his hands in the air, but a white cop had torn him to the floor, slammed a boot between his shoulders and pointed a gun into the back of his neck. Another came over with one more heavy boot to drop onto his lower back, just for good measure. There was a lot of shouting, a lot of swearing, a lot of hard grit on the floor.
After four or five minutes of eating dirt, a third officer had come over to yank Bernard’s arms behind his back and lock them in place. Then they lifted him off the floor, grabbing under his shoulders, twisting his arms even further and pushed his head down painfully towards the floor. He was thrown into the back of the police van, which had just screeched up behind where the three cars had clustered.
Bernard welcomed it. The cravings had gone, momentarily replaced by adrenaline. The excitement of the ‘getaway’ and the ruckus of being taken down by the police. He knew the cravings would come back, but for now he was happy to just sit on the hard bench. He relished the moment of peace, even though his head was pounding, his face hurt and his heart was pumping blood furiously into every inch of his body.
He just wanted to rest.
He woke up the next morning on a hard blue mattress in a cell at Ilford Police Station. He’d given his name and details the night before to the custody sergeant. Then he had been cautioned and told a duty solicitor would arrive tomorrow morning.
The police could hold him for up to 48 hours before any charges, the sergeant had said, but let’s be honest: with the CCTV, the police car footage and the testimony of four police officers plus the Sri Lankan station attendant, it’s unlikely to take that long.
Bernard peered around the grey-tiled cell, trying to take in every inch of his surroundings, hoping to put off the inevitable: the deep need, the craving, the sickening desperation for a hit. An hour later he was banging on the metal door, crying through the grate, until an officer came to tell him to calm down.
Two hours later, Bernard had told the police he was a heroin addict and desperately needed something. When the duty solicitor arrived, he took one look at Bernard and asked for him to be given medical help.
Pleading not-guilty was never an option. He’d gone to the Magistrates’ court to confirm his details, but armed robbery was too serious to be dealt with at Magistrates’ level. He’d been sent temporarily to prison until his Crown Court case came up.
Plead guilty and you’ll get three years, probably out in eighteen months. You’ll be put through a drug rehabilitation programme, the solicitor had urged him. Bernard didn’t want to go to prison for 18 months and he definitely didn’t want to come off the drugs. But it didn’t seem like anyone was going to give him a choice about either. So he pleaded guilty.
The Crown Court judge gave him six years.
14
In the dark, half asleep, Giles thought about something he hadn’t laid out on the steps when Megan had demanded it this morning. It was an empty blister, which had carried two small tablets.
Giles had remembered to take the first one, just before Megan had called for the show-and-tell and popped it with a little Lucozade on one of his trips to the toilet. Then, with more difficulty, he’d taken the other late afternoon, with no liquid at all. It has stuck in his throat and Giles had had to wait until the little mucus in his throat had dissolved the starch outer, so he could swallow the revolting tasting tablet.
He’d been on the pills, or at least one version of them, since not long after university.
There’s an old saying at Cambridge. Whatever you do there, you do it to extremes. If you’re into your studies, then you work very hard and come out with a first and probably stay on for a post-grad. If you’re into playing the flute, or the violin, or the piano, you spend every spare moment practicing and play with the university orchestra. If you’re into student politics, then you spend your life on the streets or in fraught meetings with political opponents or chaining yourself to the Vice Chancellor’s front gate.
For Giles it was the good times. Drinking, a bit of drugs, late nights, incredible highs followed by disastrous hangovers and an empty feeling of self-loathing.
For three years, it seemed, Giles was either out in pubs or nightclubs, or lying in bed in dark rooms, staring at the wall, not wanting to get up, not wanting to see anyone, not wanting to work or even eat.
Essays were handed in late or not at all. Giles rarely attended lectures and was boisterous and bullying in student seminars, or withdrawn and cold, not even answering when his tutors asked him direct questions. Just university life, thought Giles.
A problem, thought his tutors. Twice they’d tried to rusticate him: to throw him out of the university. But each time, Giles had come through. He handed in his essay at the last minute or managed to sweet-talk the rustication committee, recovering a just-in-time natural charm. He’d scraped through with a Desmond: a 2-2 degree that meant, academically at least, he might as well not have gone at all. But still, he had Cambridge on his CV. And that meant a lot in the City.
It wasn’t just university life. Out of college, he’d moved with a few of his university mates into a crappy terrace in Hackney, rented from a dodgy landlord who demanded 12 signed cheques up front. The drinking and drugs continued. But while his mates trooped off the next day to their milk-round jobs in London, relatively recovered from the previous night’s excesses, his hangovers were always the worst.
He’d say he couldn’t face work. He knew he couldn’t face anything.
A few times in that first year after uni, the friends he lived with came back to find Giles wasn’t there. For days he’d be gone, no phone calls, no texts. He’d return with a huge grin, a crate of beer and money for pizzas all round. He’d been at his parent’s house, or staying with his brother, or saying he’d scored with a girl and had been too busy to call in. Then it was all backslapping and back to the pub.
One Christmas it was particularly lively. The Hackney House, as they called it, threw a massive seasonal bash. All the Cambridge-to-London expats from their year were invited, the alcohol and the drugs were in abundance. The music was so loud and went on so late that even the neighbours had been pushed over their Christmas tolerance, been round a few times and then called the police. Officers made a good natured visit around 3 a.m., knocked on the door and told Giles and his stumbling mates it was probably about time to round things up.
They sat in their marked Sierra outside the terrace, and half-an-hour later the lights inside dimmed and the music stopped. A few left for taxis, the night bus or houses nearby. A handful sat around the living room smoking the last of the spliffs and drinking whisky, determined to stay up until morning. Most floated off around the house, finding sofas and floors and anywhere else where beds weren’t already packed four or more-across with passed-out bodies.
The next morning a light revelry continued, albeit more sedate. Someone was frying up bacon. A few were gamely cracking cans of Carlsberg, but drinking them without genuine conviction. One by one, the remaining partygoers rose to join the party debrief, and no one was surprised that Giles was still missing by noon when t
he consensus emerged that lunch would be taken at the Princess of Wales down by the canal.
A few pints of IPA would send the group on their various ways around the country to spend Christmas with their family. When the time came, someone popped upstairs to wake Giles and tell him the plan. They found him in just boxer shorts on top of the covers, shaking and kicking out at the walls. When they tried to calm him, he lashed out at them too, screeching and crying, biting into bloody lips, his toes covered in blood from the kicking.
The ambulance took ages to come: there had been any number of Christmas party detritus for the paramedics to clear up that morning. Giles was just the latest, but once they’d seen Giles’ state, they’d called the police for backup. With the officers, the paramedics strapped Giles to the gurney, and an officer had travelled in the back to watch over him. At A&E the doctors had immediately sedated him, sending Giles into a deep sleep while the night before dissipated from his system.
When he came round on the ward, a few friends were at his bedside. They joshed him uncomfortably about pushing it too far. It would be a party to go down in history: one that had been so kicking that Giles had actually ended up in hospital.
But Giles just lay on his side, stared out of the window at the grey afternoon sky until they’d given up. They said they’d call his folks, then headed off to their families. Giles didn’t say goodbye. Or Merry Christmas.
Giles had been the wildest of the bunch last night, jumping around to the music and challenging everyone in sight with tequila shots, kissing and trying to grope the girls. A severe case of alcohol poisoning, they concluded.
The consultant who found a moment in her schedule to see Giles in his hospital bed that evening concluded differently. The duty psychologist who came to see him next morning would end up being the same one who Giles would see every six months for the next five years as they tweaked his meds, trying to smooth out the creases of his mood swings.
They talked about how he had always been in trouble at boarding school: the biting and lashing out during rugby matches. They talked about how he had liked to be the centre of attention, playing up for the teachers and for the girls. They talked about university and his friends, about panicking over essays and deadlines that got him so worked up he’d bang the wall with his fists.
He’d burned himself with a cigarette. The voices in his head had told him to.
They talked about the early years after university, when some days he’d sit at his desk at his sales job with his head in his hands, wishing for the day to be over, but on others could leap around a client’s boardroom getting them so excited about some crappy piece of software that really could change the way the company worked, forever!
Giles was released from hospital, and his father came to pick him up. A panic attack brought on by too much booze, he’d told his folks with a thin smile.
He was planning a quiet Christmas this year, he said, and spent most of the time in his room. On New Year he cried off the festivities with his old school friends. He had a stomach bug. His folks never let on what the doctor had told them in a private room, just before they’d seen him.
Bi-polar disorder is a particular mental illness, one more frequent in younger adults than those younger adults care to admit. It’s depression, but it’s marked by incredible highs and excess: overt happiness, particular sociability, generosity, behaviour that seems to lack tact and social awareness. But those periods of elation are followed by devastating lows: the black dogs as black as they can get. Voices. Self-loathing. Physical pain, invented by the brain.
The drugs helped, at least when his medical team found the right ones and the right dose. But Giles had to remember to take them. Morning and afternoon.
“A missed pill here and there won’t matter too much, but just keep taking them,” Doctor Potts had told him. “Don’t come off the drugs completely, and definitely not too quickly. And try to ease off the booze, and any recreational drugs.”
It wasn’t that they would clash with the anti-depressants. It was that Giles was more likely to neglect to take them too many times, lifting him into a high that made him think he no longer needed them, or a low so deep he didn’t care if he took them or not.
Over the last five years, Giles had fallen off the wagon only three times. A year before he’d met Lisa, his room-mate at boarding school had died. It was Hodgkins Disease, a cancer caught too late. The two had kept in touch, but hadn’t been that close. But it was the first time someone Giles knew well had died. Simon had been Giles’s age, maybe just a few months older. It was impossible that he wasn’t around anymore. That all those times, all that growing up together, had been for nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
And if that could happen to anyone, well, what was the point? It took a brief stay in an acute mental health ward and two months of bi-weekly meetings with Doctor Potts to get Giles back on the anti-depressants and back on an even keel.
To Giles’ knowledge, there were only three people in the world apart from his parents who knew Giles was bi-polar - though he still refused to use the term - and one was Giles himself. It’s not something you mention at work. Not if you wanted to succeed. Another was Doctor Potts (and Giles supposed some other doctors working with her, but they didn’t count.) The other was Lisa. She didn’t find out until three months after she’d moved in with him.
Giles hid the meds from her and, because they weren’t there in the bathroom every morning and evening, it was too easy to forget to take them.
Once, about six months after she’d moved in, Giles had fallen out of the habit of taking his meds. He’d found himself more frequently going on drinking binges with old university buddies. That turned into drinking with anyone who’d go out with him. Sometimes, he drank alone.
Then he’d come home at 2 a.m. and play music at top volume, overturning the furniture and tossing crockery around the room as if it was some manic game.
Then for two weeks he’d lain on the sofa and refused to go to work. All the guys were doing better than he was, they were all on the up. He was shit. What did he have?
What he had was Lisa.
She knew Giles well enough to see something wasn’t right with this picture. Sure, she too went out with her friends, but this was something else. This wasn’t the charming, relaxed boy who’d leant back in his chair and invited her for tassels and tagine at a Moroccan restaurant. At the end of Giles’ second week of calling in sick, she’d taken the day off herself and spent the day with him on the sofa, holding Giles’ head in her lap. He’d lain there silently. Then he’d wept. Then he’d cried.
“I’m not who you think I am,” said Giles. “I’m nothing, just a failure. You deserve more. I won’t blame you if you go.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Lisa said. “You’ve got me.” It seemed to make him cry harder. She said it over and over: “You’ve got me, you’ve got me, you’ve got me.”
She held him in her arms, rocking him, crying too.
“I’ll always be here for you, no matter what,” she promised.
And so Giles told her. He told her about the party, about the psychologist, about Simon, about the meds. He showed her the prescription, the blister of little pills. They looked up his drugs on the internet, followed the links to bi-polar disorder and read the symptoms together.
On Monday morning, he went back to work. On Tuesday, he gave her the number for Doctor Potts. On Wednesday, Lisa put his drugs on the shelf above the bathroom sink, next to their toothbrushes.
That’s where they stayed until Lisa left.
You’ve got me, you’ve got me, you’ve got me.
Liar, liar, liar.
15
It was Megan that noticed it first. She could have been asleep for hours, but it felt like days. The first feelings were the painful stiffness in her neck, and her ear ringing where it had pressed against her handbag for hours.
Then as she swallowed, she felt the gritty soreness of her dry throat. But as she
rose her head and blinked her eyes, there was a feeling of something different. Something had changed. She shook her head and looked around her.
The lights had come back on.
The others blinked into the light moments after Megan, and there was groaning and yawning as they shook themselves awake. Giles looked down for a moment into Megan’s eyes, which were red and a little crusted. Her cheek had a deep crease in it, where the handle of her bag had been. He looked for a moment more, then spun round to look up at Benny.
Benny had sat up and was staring at the ceiling, nodding slightly, the shadow of a puzzled smile on his flaking lips. No one needed to speak, and they sat there for a moment taking deep breaths as if they were gasping in fresh air.
“Wake up Charlie Boy, we’ve got news.”
Giles called down past Megan where Charles was still sleeping. He winced as his dry voice came out high and croaky, just like it had been in his early teens. He looked around the chamber, a grin growing on his face.
He lit a cigarette, blew smoke around with satisfaction. Six more in the box.
“Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m going to get a coffee. Who wants a croissant?”
He noticed a little laugh from Megan, as she rubbed her palms up and down her face to bring herself into wakefulness. He looked at his watch. It was 5.15 a.m. His first thought was that it felt like he’d slept for more than the four hours he had. His second was that it was still very early morning.
Morning.
“Hold on,” he said, turning to Benny. “Morning. This matters. It’s Tube time.”
Benny looked back, his face unmoved.
“The first Tubes go through at this time. They’ve switched the lights on. There’s someone there. We must be part of the network, just lost somewhere in the depths.”
The Spiral Page 8
