“I’ve had it, Gems, I’m going to bed.”
“Okay, Lil.”
She got up and she had to walk past me on her way to the door. I had to force myself not to move back away from her. She looked at me and she said, “It’ll be all right, Gems.”
“I know, Lily.”
“Night.”
“Night.”
I watched her as she left the room. She turned at the door and gave me a big warm smile, and that scared little look again. Then she went out. I sat back down on the rug and drank my tea. I listened to her getting into bed. I waited a long time.
That baby was all she had. He’d always been such a good baby, so quiet.
I thought to myself, I’ve followed you everywhere you’ve gone. I’ve followed you everywhere but I’m not following you here…
After a while I went down the hall and got my big coat on. I went ever so quietly down the corridor and let myself out of the front door. It was late, two, three o’clock. It was cold but I was scared to get dressed in case Lily came or Tar woke up. I went very quickly round the corner because I didn’t believe Lily was asleep. I got to the telephone booth and I dialled 999 and asked for the police.
When I’d finished I said to the woman, “Will you go round straight away?”
“They’ll have to get a warrant first, it’ll be a few hours…”
“Goodbye.”
“Just a minute, Miss…”
I put the phone down.
It was a real drag that it was going to take so long. I’d been planning on going back and waiting for the music to start with the rest of them, but I just couldn’t stay round there waiting for hours.
I had nowhere to go.
I began to walk up the road. A car pulled up by me—someone kerb crawling. I just shook my head and walked on. I was only in my nightie and my coat and my shoes. I carried on walking for a while and I began to cry, trying to think what on earth I was going to do next…
Vonny
Wednesdays we play badminton.
I moved to Clifton when I got my place at college. Now I pay rent and everything. Boring really, but you need a good base when you’re doing something like that, and you could never tell how long a squat was going to last. I took my course at college seriously and I didn’t want the hassle of having to move every few months.
John’s an art student. After badminton we usually go for a few drinks. He gets through his grant in about the first month, so if I want to go out with him I have to buy the drinks, which irritates me no end. He gets the same as me, why should I pay for him? He says his appetites are bigger, which is true—he drinks more than me. Maybe he should apply for an extra-large drinks allowance.
Normally we stay at my place because it’s so much nicer, but on Wednesday we usually go to his because mine’s a bus ride away and his is just round the corner from the Sports Centre. I usually stay there and go straight into college the next day. So I don’t get home till Thursday afternoon.
I’ve got a garden flat that I share with a girl called Sandy, but she was away that week. Willy lives a few doors up from me. We call her Willy because she has two kids and she used to yell, “Are the children all in bed?” out of the front door when she wants them to come in and go to bed, like Wee Willy Winkie.
She came round to see me an hour or so after I got back.
“There was a girl sitting on your doorstep yesterday morning. A punky type—one of the scabby ones. She was there for hours.”
I’m a bit of a punky type, as Willy calls it, although never one of the scabby ones. I couldn’t work it out because I don’t know anyone like that any more, not since I left St. Paul’s.
“She was there for ages. I think she only had pyjamas on under her coat, she must have been freezing. She was there first thing in the morning, God knows how long she’d been there. I went out about ten o’clock to see what was going on and I told her you wouldn’t be back till this evening. She looked awful.”
“Didn’t she tell you her name?”
“No. She knew you, though.” Willy looked suspiciously at me. “Who was it then?” she asked.
I scratched my ear. “I can’t think…What did she look like?”
Willy started to describe her, but that didn’t help either. I just suddenly realised…
“Gemma.”
I hadn’t seen her for ages. It got worse and worse round there, full of brain-dead zombies. I used to go round and nag her quite regularly. She was boasting about it all the time—being on the game, using needles. She thought it was all a big gas. I kept on going for a bit after Richard moved out of Bristol, but then I stopped.
I thought she must be in trouble. I mean, she’d been in trouble for years, but now she’d realised it at last.
I drove straight round to her place but I couldn’t get an answer. I looked through the windows and there was no one there. I got back home, fiddled about. I was worried about her—scared, really. She was in such bad trouble for so long and she never even knew it. I like Gemma. She had a lot going for her, but she was just such a lousy judge of character.
It was six o’clock in the evening before I discovered the note. She must have pushed it through my letter box, but there’s a little piece of carpet I use as a mat and sometimes it rucks up and letters get stuck underneath it.
“I can’t wait any longer, I’m going to the hospital to try and get them to admit me. Gemma.”
I’d told her so many times I’d always be there if she needed me, and she’d just laughed at me. But she remembered in the end. I ran out and jumped in the car and drove straight there.
She looked like death. I sat on the bed and listened to her story, and I kept thinking, she’s eighteen and I’m twenty-four, but she’s so much older than me. She’s an addict, she’s fallen in love, she’s slept with dozens of men, she’s pregnant. She was only eighteen but I felt like I was sitting there listening to an old, old woman telling me what had happened to her when she was still young.
The police had been round to interview her but Tar, bless him, had taken the rap again even though he must have known she’d called the cops…and even though it would mean youth custody for him this time.
The hospital was keen to get rid of her. She was just taking up a bed as far as they were concerned. She’d only got in because she was getting these violent stomach cramps. She said she always got them when she was coming down but to be honest, I think she’d exaggerated it so they’d give her a bed. So she was just lying there waiting to be chucked out with nowhere to go.
Poor Gemma! Of course I could take her into my house. I would have done but…
“Give me your parents’ number, Gemma. Let’s try that first.”
“I can’t.”
The number of times I’d asked her. The number of times she’d said that. I didn’t know if I was doing the right thing.
“It’s out of your hands, Gemma. Just say the number.”
She covered her face with her hands. “0232…” she began. She remembered after all those years.
The phone rang three times. A woman picked it up and said, “Hello.”
I said. “Mrs. Brogan?”
“Yes.”
I took a deep breath and said it. “It’s about your daughter, Gemma.”
Emily Brogan
Three and a half years.
I wanted to catch the train. It would be quicker but Grel insisted on driving. I suppose the driving took his mind off things. I thought it’d be unsafe, but in the event he was as good as gold. I sat there and thought about all the things I’d missed—the things Gemma had missed—growing up, going to school, exams, boyfriends in the living room, parties…”
I’d looked forward to all of it. Having a daughter was like living my own childhood over again, and I’d missed out on so much. We all had. I was furious with her because of that. And because…You see, after all those years, you try to tell yourself you’ll probably never see her again until you’re an old woman. And
then this happens and the wounds are all as fresh and raw as they were when she first left. She was eighteen years old and in trouble but she was still a child to me.
How could she do that to us?
I kept remembering what that girl had told me. “She’s in hospital. No, she’s not hurt.”
“But why?” I kept saying. “Why’s she in hospital?” I assumed she was having a baby.
And then at last, “She’s a heroin addict. She’s having severe withdrawal symptoms, apparently.”
Three and a half years. She could have died. She still could.
We got to the hospital and asked for Gemma Brogan. They made us wait and there was a doctor who wanted to discuss her case with us before we saw her. He told us she was pregnant, after all. As well as. He gave me to understand there wasn’t a lot of sympathy for someone with her problem.
“Hospital beds are for people who are sick,” he said. In other words, she was going to be booted out. He clearly expected us to take care of her.
We walked towards the ward. Grel said, “A baby. She’s been taking that stuff with a baby…” He sounded furious. We walked a bit further. He said, “I suppose she’ll expect us to bail her out.”
I couldn’t believe my ears. I just stopped and stared at him. She was our child. I was so angry with him, I was prepared to have a row right there in public, standing in the middle of the corridor. But when I turned on him, I saw that he wasn’t furious at all. He looked at me with big wet eyes—that’s how he cries, his eyes just get wet, and his hands hanging by his side and his face as grey as winter rain. He looked like his whole world had been blown up.
I suppose we let Gemma down in many ways. But she let us down too. She destroyed our lives. The way Grel and I were with each other after she went. We blamed each other. The bitter, bitter arguments we’d had about what we’d said and done and what she’d said and done. It nearly wrecked our marriage. Perhaps it did wreck it. Perhaps we’re just together because we have nothing better to do.
But at least we are still together…
I took his arm and squeezed it. God knows, we’re none of us perfect. And he, God bless him, he hung his head and closed his eyes for a moment and a tear trickled down his cheek. Then we hurried on. I can take anything but Grel crying. It always makes me blub and I wanted to save any tears I had for Gemma.
At the ward I did a very selfish thing. I said to Grel, “I want to see her alone.” I don’t defend it. He had as much right as me. I suppose I wanted that precious moment all to myself.
He just shook his head. I nearly said, “I’m a mother,” but I bit it back just in time. Then we walked in…
My first thought was, My God, she looks like my mother. Despite everything I still thought of her as a fourteen-year-old girl. But she looked like my mother, my own mother. An old woman.
I went to sit next to her and put my hand on her hand. I wanted to make it as normal as possible for her sake, talk about home and ask her what she’d done, although how on earth we could talk about what she’d done in those years I don’t know. I didn’t want to cry, I knew I shouldn’t but I thought of all the things I’d missed and I couldn’t help it, I couldn’t get even a word of what I’d planned on saying out. I just started to weep. I tried but I couldn’t speak at all so I laid my head on her breast and I wept and I wept and I wept…
She was crying too. I knew it was all right when she started to cry. The tears said everything for us.
Then she said, “I want to come home, Mum, can I come home, Mum, please?” I nodded my head and tried to say yes, yes, and we just held one another and cried.
Tar
You keep your head down and you get on with it. That’s how you do your time. If you suck up to the screws you get trouble from the other lads. If you suck up to the other lads the screws think you’re becoming a hard man and start putting you down. It’s bad enough being locked up all day without the screws screaming at you.
I think I’m going to get through it. I’m steady. Just this past week I’ve been thinking like that. Maybe it can be an opportunity. Before that I was so depressed, and before that I was ill, of course.
The first thing was coming down off the methadone. I’d been on a script for over a year. They put me on twenty-five mil and I’d come down a few mil a week, but of course I was using all the time as well. Well, not all the time. A lot of the time I was selling the methadone to buy smack; you get plenty of methadone users, too. Then I’d have a binge and tell the doc to put me back up to twenty-five or thirty. But in the last weeks before my case came up I was doing quite well. It was something to focus on, I suppose. I was thinking: don’t use needles, stick to chases if you have to, do your best not to take any at all. And I did all right, considering I’d been in such a huge mess in the months leading up to it. I managed to get by without any junk at all in the last week, and that’s not bad because you can imagine how tempting it was—the last fling, make myself feel better, you know…
So coming down was the first thing and it was awful. Coming off methadone is worse than coming off junk. It really makes you feel bad. They’re crazy, because that’s what they give you to come off heroin—something that’s even more addictive and worse to come off. The only reason they give it to you is because you don’t get the same hit. It’s not fun. It’s medicine so it can’t be nice. It’s bonkers, really.
I spent a few hours rolling around groaning in my cell and they let me go to the pharmacy. I was in a horrendous mess—sweating this horrid yellow juice that stung, and aching, and my teeth with this toothache that kept jumping from tooth to tooth.
I explained to the nurse what I needed and she just laughed at me.
“We don’t have methadone in here, David.” Stupid git that I am, my heart actually leapt. I thought, Yeah, they’re going to give me a diamorphine script—that’s the real stuff. You don’t get it any purer than the hospital gets it.
“But I need something…”
“You’ll live,” she said.
I waited a few seconds as it began to dawn on me that the heartless bitch was going to give me nothing. My teeth started screaming in horror.
“You don’t understand—”
“I don’t suppose I do. But I do know we don’t give methadone to heroin users in a young offender institution.”
I said, “Some Valium.”
“Sorry.”
“Something,” I croaked. She pulled a face and went to the medical cabinet and broke off a couple of tabs which she handed to me.
“Two Paracetamol?” I said. I couldn’t believe it. I thought, Doesn’t she know anything?
I tried to be patient and explain to her. “Two Paracetamol won’t do anything to me. I’m a big user, I need something a little bit stronger…” I smiled encouragingly at her, which wasn’t easy when your bones are trying to break themselves up in your body. She’d just about had enough.
“I’ve got a lot of people to see…”
I stood there staring at my miserable two tabs of headache pills until the screw pushed me back outside.
I was horrified. Two Paracetamol! It was monstrous. It had to be against the Geneva Convention or something. I mean, locking you up, I could understand that, maybe even electrodes up the bum. But giving me just two Paracetamol in the middle of methadone comedown was inhuman.
“You don’t understand,” I said to the screw as he slammed the door in my face. The thud of it went right through my spine; I thought it was going to snap in twenty different places.
“Have a nice time,” he told me. And they just left me there.
I’d have escaped. I’d have committed murder. I broke the Paracetamol into four halves and took a half then and saved the rest for later. When that’s all you have to get you through, you might as well go for the placebo effect. I even ground one of them up and snorted it, but that wasn’t much good either.
That’s the way it works. You’ll eat shit or go in the ring for ten rounds with Mike Tyson—slave, h
ero, rent boy, pimp, master of the universe—you’ll do whatever you have to do to get your next hit.
Looking back—some of the things we were doing. Rob was cottaging—you know? Selling sex to homos in the public toilets. Lily went mad when she found out, it totally did her head in. It was all right her doing it at home, but him doing it with men—she just went ape, running around screaming and crying. Me, I was nicking stuff. Not from the shops; I’d lost the bottle for that ages before. From Gemma, from Rob, from Lily. Anyone, I’d turn up late at a friend’s house, stay late, ask if I could stay and then get up in the night and sneak about opening drawers and digging around in cupboards and coat pockets.
Gemma was the only one who seemed to be getting better. She stopped doing jumps at the parlour. She was a heavy user, though, She was using as much as me, I reckon, and I was using a lot. And then, of course, she broke out. Trust Gemma.
There was all hell that night when the pigs turned up. Everyone knew, somehow. Lily was screaming at me, “Bitch! Bitch! Bitch!” as if Gemma was sort of a part of me. Actually I had a pretty good idea it was going to happen. I didn’t know about the baby till much later, but Gemma had been going on about Lily using and having a baby. I think that really shocked her. I heard her going out of the front door that night and I knew all her clothes were in the bedroom, so it had to be something pretty weird. And she didn’t come back.
I lay there and I thought, Is this it? I just lay there. I thought I’d find out soon enough.
They hauled us all in. Me and Rob took the rap, or tried to. Lily tried to implicate Gemma but it didn’t wash.
“It’s that bitch who rang you up—she did, didn’t she? It’s all hers, we’re just living here…” Standing there in the middle of the floor in her short nightie with her beautiful legs all covered in needle bruises…yeah.
They’re both in care now. I’m the only one who got a custodial sentence. Lily and Rob didn’t even see the light of day, they never even got bail because they were considered to be so much at risk. Lily went with the baby into one detox centre, Rob went into another. Then straight into separate rehab centres. And there they are now, eight months later. Gemma says they’ll be moving into halfway houses in a few months. I don’t suppose either of us’ll ever see them again.
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