by Jenny Molloy
‘None of my other kids have been taken into care,’ he moaned and, while this was true – he had three children with two other women – they weren’t in care because he hardly had any contact with any of them and the mothers were doing great jobs of raising them entirely on their own.
My social worker seemed really young to me and I didn’t trust her. I spotted a torn packet of King Size Rizlas in her car, so I was certain she was smoking weed and that made me think, ‘Who is she to tell me what I’m doing is wrong when she’s a drug user, too?’
‘Michael was removed from your care because of your drug use and your relationship with Robbie,’ she told me. ‘You can’t be with Robbie if you want to be a mother to Michael. That’s never going to work.’
I was puzzled. How did they know what Robbie was like? I had no idea they’d spoken to him. I was also really surprised that I was seen as a risk to Michael. I had no idea, they didn’t tell me at any time that they were doing an assessment and what their analysis of me might mean.
‘So what’s next?’ I asked.
‘If you accept a mother and baby placement with a foster family who will supervise you, then you can move in with them with Michael. You’ll stay there for a few months and then a decision can be made as to your future.’
I agreed and moved with Michael to a house a long way from home – in a small town by the sea on the south coast. At first I was devastated and couldn’t understand why Robbie couldn’t come. Despite what I’d been told, I still thought that we could be a family.
The foster mum, Maggie, reminded me of my step-mum. She was amazing, so chatty but in a way that made me feel really relaxed, like I was a member of the family from the first moment. I was appalling at social interaction – I’d spent the last two years in bed floating on a heroin cloud. On top of this, I was scared about the placement, but Maggie did her best to put me at ease.
‘Here I am rabbiting on, you must be exhausted,’ she said, beaming at me. ‘You get unpacked, come back down and well have a cup of tea and a piece of cake waiting for you.’
My room was beautiful. I could hear the sea washing over pebbles and, carrying Michael, I walked over to the window. There was even a balcony. I stood on it and watched the waves for a while and forgot all about unpacking. I felt like I’d been given a second chance, I could start again clean, and I was determined not to let Michael down.
Maggie and her husband, Dave, had two beautiful daughters. Dave would joke that we ladies were ganging up on him, as we always outnumbered him in family votes. And that was how they made me feel – like part of the family. They showed me so much care and love and they let me get on with being a mum. They didn’t interfere or push me down any particular route; they just let me find my way with Michael.
They wanted me to carry on living there but, as much as I liked it, I still missed Robbie, the man I loved.
‘Wouldn’t you want to go back to Dave, if you were forced to be apart like me?’ I asked Maggie.
‘Yes, but Dave isn’t taking drugs, Sarah, and I don’t have a little baby.’
Although Michael had been born small, he’d made an amazing recovery. It seemed that despite my drug use, I’d been blessed with a beautiful, perfect little boy. And I did as much as I could to make it up to him as a mother. I was supposed to be writing daily reports for social services, but after a couple of weeks they reduced them to weeklies as I was doing so well.
After five months at Maggie and Dave’s, social services gave me the all clear.
I could not have done it without Maggie, Dave and their family.
I asked Robbie, ‘Would you give it up for me and for your son? So we can be a family?’
He looked at me a long while. I loved his eyes; they were the nicest thing about him. Despite the drug abuse, they were clear blue and sparkled no matter how dull the light was.
‘Yes,’ he said, stroking my face, ‘I would do that for you.’
PETE
Pete and I had been friends ever since living in the same children’s home as kids. He was a mixed-up kid, joking one moment, bullying the next. He did not know when he was crossing inappropriate lines, something that hadn’t been solved by the time he left the home. Out in the ’real world’, Pete became a danger to society and himself. His story serves both as a terrible warning and, I hope, an inspiration that the capacity for positive change lies in everyone – without exception.
I was having the Addict Dream again. Night-time. Of course. I’m in a squat. Naturally. A lounge. Dark carpets and ratty furniture. The smell of dampness and cold. All is as it should be.
Except for the fact that in front of me is a roll of tin foil, a bank note, a mirror, cigarettes, a plastic bank card, a lighter, a brown lump of sticky hashish, a small plastic bag filled with white crystalline powder that I know is speed and another bag that contains heroin. I am surrounded by dozens of cans of high-strength, ice-cold beer. I don’t know where to start. I’m on my own. Everything is mine. I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve this good fortune but something inside me tells me I have no time to waste, so I get started. I roll a joint, a large one with three King Size Rizlas, line it with tobacco, burn and crumble the hashish, pop in a roach made from the card of the Rizla packet, roll it, lick and stick, twist the end and tap it down. I fire it up and draw in the smoke with hungry sucking breaths. It burns and I feel my saliva production go into overdrive. I suck again, holding my breath, and I lay the joint on the table, while I reach for the speed, cut a fat line on the mirror, roll the note and snort. My nose explodes, my brain lights up electric blue and turns to ice as I swallow and the thick, sticky amphetamines pulse down the back of my throat and this sets my mind on cold fire with the thought of the rush yet to come. Then it is there and my head glows more and more brightly until it explodes with orgasmic pleasure, oh please, please, please, please, never let it stop, and I’m riding a wave of pure rushing and soaring joy until I feel as though I can’t take any more. But I want it to take me past what’s possible, so that it kills me and, as I hover over that ultimate moment, the wave crashes, and I’m left with a terrible feeling of uncertainty, anxiety and a plunging, lead-weight-to-the-bottom-of-the-river sensation of fear. Desperately, I reach for the heroin and place a fat line of the brownish powder on the foil, shiny side down, and hold the rolled note in my mouth. As I burn the foil’s underside, the heroin liquefies and evaporates and I draw it in. The taste is metallic and flowery and I wait for the hit, the joy of pain gone, of relief, that the thing that spends every moment of my life eating me up inside vanishes. It almost but doesn’t quite go away. My head is pulsing, I can hardly breathe from everything I’ve just inhaled but it’s not enough. I grab the joint and take another draw. Then another, and another line of speed, and another. I pour all of the heroin into the foil and burn it, sucking, sucking until I can’t feel my mouth and my lungs are raw. I open a beer and pour it in and my tongue comes back to life, tasting of something rancid, of rotten oranges. I can’t feel my throat as I swallow and I choke. I smoke more, more, more. I drink and my head is full of the taste of a high but none of the high itself. I look at the table and there’s a mess of powder and paraphernalia and I can’t see any more drugs. Nothing left. And I start to search. I wet my finger to collect powder, I lick the mirror, unravel and lick the note and shake, panic, scream that I want to die, die, die . . .
I wake, swearing and sweating. I don’t know where I am for a moment and then I remember. My drug taking is all behind me. My heart breaks at the thought as it always does, that I won’t be able to have another hit, never, ever again in my life. I think about killing myself, as I always do. I could do it, of course. But if I do then everything will be lost. I gave up so much to get here. Fought so hard. For what, I’m still not sure, except that it can’t be for nothing. And then I remember.
I’d run away from more children’s homes than I had fingers and toes. Every time I ran away they put me in another one.
Every time I
think of the children’s homes, I am reminded of why I was there.
A police interview room. I was seven years old. One of my first clear memories. The cops were really nice to me (not so much once I grew up, when I was six feet tall and found out I was able to hurt them). They talked to me about school (which I liked; I was especially interested in dinosaurs and outer space), as well as my friends (I didn’t have many; I wasn’t exactly popular and I didn’t really know what to say to anyone) and games (kicking a ball against a wall on my own). It was cosy. Not like how I imagined a police interview to be from the telly and the way my dad and everyone at school spoke about them. They hated the cops.
I was interviewed by a woman. There was a man there, older, like a granddad. I didn’t have a granddad.
‘You live in a flat in Somers Town with your mum and dad, don’t you, Pete?’
‘Yes.’
‘Any brothers or sisters?’
‘No.’
‘What does your dad do?’
‘Nothing.’
‘He doesn’t have a job?’
‘No, he can’t work ’cause he’s sick.’
‘Does your dad sometimes shout when he’s at home?’
‘Yes.’
‘How does that make you feel, when he shouts?’
‘Scared.’
‘What do you do when he shouts?’
‘I put my hands over my ears and shut my eyes.’
‘Does your dad shout at your mummy sometimes?’
‘All the time. She screams at him sometimes.’
‘Does he shout at you?’
‘Yes. When he drinks a lot.’
‘How often does he drink?’
‘Every day.’
‘Does he frighten you when he’s drinking?’
‘Yes.’
‘Does he frighten you when he’s not drunk?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know if he frightens you?’
‘I don’t know when he’s not drunk.’
‘Do you go out together as a family?’
‘No.’
‘Do you play together?’
‘No.’
‘Does your dad ever hit you?’
This one was hard. Dad did hit me but I kind of knew that if I said he did then he’d be in a lot of trouble. That might mean he’d hit me again when I got home. I felt like I was already in trouble. The police had turned up when Mum and Dad’s screams led to a window being smashed with a brick. I don’t know where it had come from but it had somehow ended up landing on someone’s car.
‘That’s all right, Peter; you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.’
Cool. I nodded and waited. I’d think about that one for a bit longer. I liked the woman who was interviewing me. She had a nice voice. I don’t think Dad would have ever tried to hit her.
‘Does your dad ever hit your mum?’
Now I was on safer ground. Everyone knew that, right? The police had even been around before and seen it for themselves.
‘A lot. Dad hits Mum a lot.’
What I didn’t know was that this time Dad had hit Mum so hard he broke her jaw, putting her in a coma.
‘You’re doing great,’ the woman said.
I nodded. Sure I was.
‘Did your mum ever try and stop your dad from hitting her?’
‘She can’t. She wants to but he’s way too strong.’
‘And what happened last night?’
I stayed quiet.
‘Peter? Can you tell me what happened?’
Silence.
‘It’s OK, you don’t have to but it would be helpful if you could tell us a little bit about what happened.’
Dad would do many unpleasant things to me. For no reason at all. I’d be walking across the lounge, he’d be sitting on the sofa, drinking, watching something on the box and before I knew what was going on, my head was ringing from a punch that had left me on the floor.
That was nothing, though. I got used to getting hit. That stood me in good stead later on. The other stuff he did was harder to deal with. He rubbed curry powder in my eyes. He burned me with hot water. He choked me until my eyes started to roll back into my head. He held my head down the toilet. All the time he told me what a worthless little piece of rubbish I was. There was never any reason, any explanation for why I was this little piece of rubbish. That was what I was and that was all there was to say. Mum was usually asleep or being hit by Dad, too. I wasn’t going to tell the cops this, though.
No one had loved me. I hadn’t loved anyone. Didn’t know how, or what it was. Didn’t think I ever would. I never loved or cried or felt happy. Only for moments at a time. And when I laughed it was cruel – because I was about to do something bad, or had just done something bad.
I never told the police what really happened that night. What Dad had done. I couldn’t. The words wouldn’t come.
I never knew my dad, not really. He was just a tightly wound, wiry ball of fury who was angry with everyone, all of the time. Especially me and Mum.
Mum had a problem I never knew about. She’d managed to keep her benzodiazepine habit from me. It was odd because afterwards, when someone finally explained it to me and I understood, I knew. I knew she was keeping something from me. I knew there was a secret, that something wasn’t right. The feeling was so strong I never doubted it for a moment and I think that the social worker who told me was expecting a much bigger reaction. But I displayed what a psychiatrist later described as ‘flat affect’. Zero emotion.
It made total sense to me – why mum was always tired and forgetting stuff that made Dad angry and beat her up. She needed relief from the stress of living with Dad. Me and her both.
Anyway, with Dad looking at jail time and Mum unable or unwilling to stop taking her pills, I was fostered for a while but I proved ‘difficult’ and was put in a home for ‘special’ children, which only increased my tendency towards violence. I ran away as soon as I could. I was moved to other children’s homes and when I was sixteen they stopped worrying about me when I ran away. There was a routine. I’d leave, they’d report it and I’d come back, but in my own time. It worked just fine.
The first time I took drugs suddenly all the shit that clogged up my mind every day wasn’t there any more. I had no fear of any drug. Marijuana first. Aerosols and glue were amazing. When I tried heroin I kept smoking until I puked, then I went right on smoking. Oh my God, the sheer relief and joy I felt. I developed a hacking cough that wouldn’t go away. People told me to go see a doctor; they were fed up of hearing me. Made people sick, it did. But there was no way I was going to see a doctor. Then I took speed. Injecting. Then crack. But heroin was the best for the anger. I was terrified of anger, of being like my dad.
I started squatting once I left the children’s home permanently. There was a house we broke into. A nice house in Camden in north London. It was empty but it seemed as though someone was trying to sell it because the estate agents came around the next day. We tried to ignore them, told them to get a court order, then we’d go, but they kept saying they wanted to come to some arrangement, so we talked.
The guy said: ‘You leave in a week’s time and well pay you a thousand pounds.’
I didn’t believe him.
‘We could take you to court but that would take time and almost as much money. We have a buyer lined up and don’t want to tell him he can’t move into his new home because it’s being squatted. This way we cut out the middle men, get the house, sell it and you get a nice cash sum.’
We said yes. We got our stuff together, found another squat, cleared the house and then came back to wait for the agent, only to find two rough-looking builders fixing a steel door to the front of the house. We asked them about the estate agent. They told us to eff-off, so we did. Ripped off. From that moment rage burned within. I didn’t know how I was going to control it. I got as high as I could but the rage stayed, and grew. I hit myself. Punching my head until I couldn’t th
ink straight. Then my stomach until I couldn’t breathe. Then I pounded my legs with my fists until I couldn’t walk.
The next day I went back to the house. It was mid-afternoon and no one was about; the neighbours weren’t in, everyone was at work. The house was a big semi and I walked around the back, where I jimmied a window with a crowbar and climbed in, nice and easy.
I started in the kitchen. I had brought a 7.5kg mallet, one of the ones with the metal head. I smashed some cupboards, then took aim at the sink, pulling it off the wall until the pipes burst, then I attacked the oven, then the walls, smashing through plaster and pulling everything down. My rage was total. I kept going. I went to the top of the house and swung down on the top step until it snapped. Then I levered it out with the crowbar. I did that from top to bottom, so the stairs were impossible to climb, stopping only to smash up two bathrooms and put a few holes in the walls of each bedroom.
I walked away and came back a few hours later. The whole street was cordoned off. I’d broken a gas pipe. I felt good.
A mate of mine sold grass. He kept a stash of cash behind a bookshelf. One day he told me someone took it.
‘You know who done it?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, this junkie, lives down in Camden, Pratt Street.’
Late at night. The two of us were outside the door. It was in a council block, a nice one, about five floors high. I took out my knife.
My mate looked panicked. ‘I don’t want any trouble.’
‘Do you want your money back or not?’
The door was glass in a plastic and metal frame. I took out my knife and started to scratch grooves into the glass, etching ‘junkie’ in rough letters. The hall light came on and someone started running down to the door. They threw it open. A lanky blond man was standing there.
‘What’s happening?’ he said, looking scared. ‘What the fuck’s going on?’
I took a step towards him and he saw the knife in my hand and backed off. He knew what was coming. He had it coming. At the sight of his pathetic, cowardly face, The Rage came down and I stepped forward. My mate was trying to hold me back but I pushed him away as I grabbed the blonde guy’s outstretched arm and stuck the knife in. He screamed, so I took the knife out and punched him in the face. He was on the floor, crying, whimpering, pleading and then begging for mercy, crawling back towards the lounge. He’d give us the cash, he didn’t have it right now. I put away my knife and picked him up, dragging him to the sofa.
