by Jenny Molloy
I’m not tempted to use. What I find hard to deal with is being near people who are able to use drink and who can still get on with their lives. It doesn’t feel fair but I know where that one drink will take me – it will lead to a needle in my arm in a matter of hours.
Now I think social services do an amazing job. They always put the child first and that’s what counts. Any mother, no matter how messed up, will hopefully understand that one day. I think there could still be more support for mums who lose their children, though. I was left on my own and I wasn’t able to process what had happened in a way that would have allowed me to go through a natural grieving process, a process that helps people to accept the unacceptable. Some other mums cope by having another baby, which is not the answer, by any means.
I think of Michael every day. Several times a day. I know that if he ever wants to find me, he will find a different person, the real me. I hope he can forgive me and I hope he will understand that, for some people, addiction is more powerful than any love you can give or be given.
PETE
I wake up angry. I’m in a hospital bed and in pain, so much pain. I am fastened to the bed with broad straps. I want to get out and smash my way out of this room. I try to sit up and vomit blood and a nurse comes. She looks frightened. I try to tell her I won’t hurt her but the words won’t come.
This happens over and over again over the next few days.
I try to tell the doctors that I don’t want medical attention; that I have always dealt with pain myself and I will deal with it now. I want to fight my way out of here but there’s no hope. I’m already in prison.
My legs are broken. I have an ugly scar on my shaved head with many stitches. I know some ribs are broken, I can feel them poking around inside me as I try to move. Some teeth are missing. My hands are broken. Fingers are broken.
Someone tells me I am lucky to be alive. I just stare at the ceiling.
The cops tell me that Dave is badly hurt but he will make it. They want to know what happened. I just stare at the ceiling. They tell me I am wanted for other crimes involving GBH. They have a witness. I need a lawyer, they tell me. They found no drugs and no other people at the scene but they are going to prosecute me for the other crimes. I stare at the ceiling. I wonder what happened to the men I hurt. The cops eventually go away.
It is night-time and I want a drink, a smoke, a hundred lines of coke and a thousand hits of heroin. They have drugs in hospital but I can’t move. I have to get out.
A doctor comes.
‘We ran some tests,’ he says. ‘Your stomach, bladder, liver and kidneys are in a bad way. I’m most concerned about your heart.’ He tells me I’m lucky to be alive. I tell him he’s not the first person to say that.
‘If you use drugs again, you will die from them,’ he tells me. ‘Probably in just a few weeks.’
I want to tell him I could have told him that.
I started stealing swigs from Dad’s golden booze when I was six years old. I’d top up what was missing with water. Eventually it got too much and he noticed, especially when I puked up one afternoon. He made me a glass of vinegar to drink.
A year later, in care, I was smoking dope with other kids I had met down at the local park. And then that’s all I remember. Every day was about getting out of it. If it ended with me unconscious in a park or in my bed, then so much the better. I was arrested a few times. I joined in with car thieves, ‘taking without consent’, then vandalism, possession (for which they stuck me in a cell; they wanted to give me a scare but I was so far gone I slept through the whole thing and even the next morning was just a cosy soft bubble of stonedness). School was just a place to sleep or run from. I was arrested a few more times and then I ran away from everyone and everything.
Then came speed, crack and heroin.
And here I am, twenty-three years old and at death’s door.
But I just stare at the ceiling.
The doctor talks about the medication I’m on to deal with the pain and my addiction, that it’s a very fragile balance but that once I’m strong enough they’re going to take the drugs that are helping me away.
I just stare at the ceiling.
The doctor leaves.
I wake up every night, my brain screaming the same thing. Feed me. Coke, smack, booze, dope, whizz, crack. I want it all. I’m sobering up and it scares me; it’s the scariest thing I’ve ever been through. I vomit a lot. I walk with crutches. The breaks were only fractures, I’m told. I’m lucky but I’ll have a limp unless I do physio. Fuck physio, I think. I stop sleeping. I shake and ache and puke and feel scared. I’m sick. I need something to fill the void in me. The fear, the pain, the thing that hurts so much and is missing. Every time I open my mouth to say something I vomit.
I look at myself in the mirror. I see a grey, old man. Bald, scarred, limping, missing teeth. Pale, saggy skin. I look at my eyes. I am twenty-three years old. I try to see myself by looking deep into my eyes. I just see two blue and white orbs. I don’t see a person there. There is no one there. Nothing behind my eyes, just emptiness. I feel scared and want drugs. I don’t know anything about this person looking back at me. I don’t know who he is. I’m scared and want drugs but I can’t. I’m helpless and I can’t.
Remand first, then court, then prison. Three years for GBH. For something I can’t even remember. Which is what I said. I was high. I don’t remember. Diminished responsibility, my solicitor said. Sounds about right to me, I thought. But three years, said the judge.
Every night in my cell I was alone. With this person I did not know.
I soon got into trouble when someone tried to challenge my washing-up abilities and they ended up on their arse with a saucepan-shaped dent in their head.
I got left alone. Then someone came to see me. A charity. They came and saw prisoners who had no one, made sure we were all right, that we had proper representation, if we needed it. The person was a lady. Her name was Janet.
I told her I wasn’t a good talker.
She asked me why I was there and I tried to explain about diminished responsibility.
She asked me if she could come back in a few days and I said sure.
It felt good talking.
There were drugs in prison but I knew no one and had no friends inside. I never found out what happened to Dave. If he was out, he never came to visit. If he was dead or in jail, no one thought to tell me about it and I didn’t ask. I wanted drugs but the doctor’s words stayed with me. Dead in a couple of weeks. I don’t know why I didn’t want to die, but there was something in me that said no, hang on. Just another day.
Next time Janet came, we ended up talking about my dad. I’d never talked about him to anyone. No one had ever asked me and I don’t volunteer information. I told Janet how he used to hit me and torture me. She was shocked.
‘Yeah, but I rubbed him up the wrong way,’ I said. ‘I tried his patience.’
‘So that makes it all right, does it? Do you think it’s OK to beat and torture a small boy for his difficult behaviour?’
I had to admit she had me there. But I didn’t say so. Something in me made it hard to reply, and I thought of Etta – the Danish girl, the only girl I’d ever been able to talk to. And that made my eyes go wet.
We talked the next week. I told Janet that this wasn’t the life I’d hoped to have. But I didn’t have a clue what other kind there was. I had never tried to change. I just did whatever I felt like whenever I felt like it, without a thought of the consequences for me or anyone else. If someone stepped up to me, I made them step down and that was all. I did not know how to talk to people. No one had ever really tried to talk to me, except for Etta, and that had only lasted just a little while.
Janet asked me whether I would change my life if I could.
Sure, but to what I didn’t know. ‘I am a criminal and a drug addict,’ I told her. ‘I don’t know anything else.’
She said she wasn’t surprised. She said she might be able to g
et me into a programme that helps people like me.
‘Will it get me out of here?’
‘It might help get you out sooner,’ she said.
There were activities for prisoners and I discovered I was good at metalwork. I made Janet a gift. A human figure. I saw it as me, crouching, with head lowered, one hand on the ground and one hand out to the side balancing, as if having landed from a great height. Bottoming Out, I called it.
I smoked a lot of cigarettes and drank a lot of coffee. They had their own little rushes that I liked.
I learned a great deal about who this person I am is while I was in prison. I hate what I’ve become. I hate that my humanity is defined by what is in the bottle, pipe and wrap. Drugs made me. They killed whatever was in me, whatever I could have become before I started taking them. And I hate my dad for killing whatever I might have been before that. The drugs had taken my personality and they were killing me physically. I am alone, so alone. When I am with people, I am alone. I can’t connect, I can’t relate and I can’t understand. I don’t feel what other people feel. And I can’t stand it. This is what the drugs gave me. They filled that hole of loneliness. I want to understand people but I hate them because I can’t understand them. I want someone to tell me it’s going to be all right, that I’m not a worthless piece of shit, that I’m a person just like them. I have no one. Never had, except for Etta. And the thought of what I might have had with her, and what she might have given me, kills me. I doubt if she even remembers who I am. When I wake in the night, wanting drugs, after having the addict’s dream, crying for help, asking for Etta, or someone who can give something like she could, there is no one and I am alone.
This is what goes through my mind while I’m in prison, after talking to Janet and, later, when I’m in therapy. I want to communicate but I don’t know how. They ask me how I feel. Like shit. But I can’t explain. The words don’t come. Admission is weakness.
But if you don’t admit to your weakness then no one can know you. And you will be alone.
I don’t want to be alone.
Ah, so you don’t want to be alone. You’d like to have a friend.
I can’t speak, something is squeezing my throat. But that’s it, I do. I want a friend. I want someone who can trust me, help me, love me. It feels like it’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted. I am going to die alone.
I want to run, I want to smash things up, I want to hurt myself and I want to take drugs. I say it out loud and tears sting my face, and I weep. I cannot live like this any more, I say. I should just die. That’s payback for all the people I’ve hurt. The men I stabbed. The things I smashed. All the things I did that hurt people in more ways than I know. I am nearly dead. My mind is something I do not know. I genuinely do not know who I am and this realisation blows my mind and scares me so much I start to shake. No one can tell me who I am. I am just a monster. That’s all that people know me as. The police called me a monster. The judge called me a monster. Everyone I knew was frightened of me. Except for Etta. And the pain of that thought of Etta makes me sob and shake even more. I can’t look myself in the eye, I say, because I’m scared of what the person behind the eyes has done. It’s not me, that person. It’s not me.
I agree, the counsellor says. I can help you know that person. It won’t be easy but it is possible. And if you’re prepared to work, to listen, to hear and to try to understand what passes through your mind, to focus and pay attention to your thoughts, then you have a future. It’s you who will have to do the work.
I cry so much I start to gag. Then my breath catches, my heart is bouncing in my chest like a rubber ball. I’m addicted to my life. To my lifestyle. I don’t know if I can be anything else because I don’t know what anything else is like. I am scared to try. I’d never thought about the future past the next hit. Never even considered it, except to know that I’d die one day and I hoped I would be high and that it would be quick. I had no thought of giving up drugs. Hadn’t imagined that it was possible to live without them. Everyone I’d ever met drank and took drugs.
I cough and reach for a cigarette and light it with shaking hands. I calm down as the little rush of nicotine tingles in my head and in my heart.
‘OK,’ I say. ‘OK, I’ll work.’
They helped me and helped with my rage but I couldn’t get my head around many of the things they told me about addiction. Eventually I told them that I’d made a decision not to take drugs or drink alcohol.
When I see drink or drugs, I tell them, I will reject them. And I will keep doing that until it is part of who I am.
They try to talk me out of this plan. They think it is a bad plan; that I will fail. I tell them I won’t and we go back and forth for a while. They say my chances of relapse are 99 per cent. Eventually we both agree we’re just going to have to let me find out if I can survive in the outside as a sober person.
Alcohol is everywhere on the outside. There are two pubs in every street. Two off-licences, plus supermarkets with rows and rows of cheap booze. Everyone who lives in the halfway house drinks – high-strength, cheap beer and cider. The road outside reeks of it, from accumulated spillages and the smell of the men who stand, swaying, on the pavement, watching the world walk past. Alcohol isn’t allowed in the house. Anyone caught drinking inside gets thrown out. I smoke a lot of cigarettes.
I work in a warehouse where they bake bread for a supermarket. It means getting up very early in the morning and so I sleep when most people are drinking. Sometimes I see the nightclub zombies staggering home or wherever on my way to work; they are out of their minds, their bodies doing their best to move on their own.
I do a lot of lifting and packing. The work is dull, repetitive and bad for my back, but I stick with it. In between, I think about killing myself and using drugs. If I use drugs then I will take up the life of an addict again. I will go to prison or die. I don’t know what it is that is inside me that stops me from taking drugs or killing myself; I can think of no good reason not to do either of those things. Maybe it’s because I feel as though I’ve been cheated out of something and if I stick around then maybe I’ll get what it is I want.
This is where I meet Nadia. She’s from Poland and I like her straight away. I didn’t talk to her until she spoke to me. People tend to look at me and not talk to me much. I look like Bad News. When I look at myself in the mirror I see the shiny pink scars, the skin so thin and stretched on my knuckles and elbows that comes away if I twist too quickly while resting against something. The scar on my head is a good one, a thick pink line that would one day be white. My eyes are hooded and the skin around them is grey and swollen. I am twenty-five but I look so much older.
Nadia is beautiful – her eyes, skin, hair and figure – and I stare too much. I know it but I can’t stop myself. At the same time, I don’t how to talk to girls. I think of Etta and how we started talking and I can’t remember. We were high and it just happened.
Nadia asks me my name and I tell her. She asks me where I’m from, what I did before and some other questions. I answer so that my past stays secret and then she says: ‘Don’t you want to ask me something?’
My mind goes blank.
Nadia speaks again: ‘It helps to pass the time if you talk, you know?’
My mind is still blank.
After another moment, Nadia shrugs and turns around to a line of boxes and starts sticking labels on them. ‘Suit yourself.’
I feel even more confused and then, suddenly, without knowing what I am going to say, I start to speak. I ask her where she’s from and she tells me. I ask her how long she has been working here and she tells me. Once I get going I ask lots of questions, they just keep coming, about her family, what she likes, what music, where she goes to have fun, about work, her flat. I start feeling funny. The feeling is not exactly better than drugs but it is more whole, more complete, less of a rush and more of a high. Whenever I see her at the beginning of each shift it’s like a hit. There’s a sudden jump and then the fe
eling eases and holds. It doesn’t fade. At some point I realise that I’ve fallen in love with Nadia and I don’t know what to do.
Nadia has a boyfriend. A boyfriend. I did not do anything for several months except speak to Nadia. I wanted to be with her but I was scared, so scared. And now she has a boyfriend. He works in the bakery and he is a nice guy and I hate him and I want him gone. I see him talking to Nadia one day and then he talks about me. I look at Nadia too much, he says, and he calls me a weirdo. I feel rage and I know I have to walk away. I walk out of the building quickly. I’m shaking and sweating. The rage is so strong, I need an outlet. I am in an alleyway at the back of the factory and I see a wooden pallet leaning against the wall and I destroy it, with my fists, arms and feet. And it is in bits and I am still shaking and I don’t feel any pain despite the blood on my hands. I keep walking, walking, walking, breathing hard. I smoke and breathe it in as hard as I can. I am an addict. The life of the addict is the same shit every day. There is no fun. No Good Times. There is no future. All I have is an obsession that overwhelms my body and mind. I am an addict to violence, an addict to drugs. I want both.
I stop at a greasy spoon and have a coffee and sit outside and smoke two cigarettes.
I go into the toilet and clean my hands and splash cold water on my face. I look into my eyes.
I want love. But no one sells love in a packet, pill or tube. I might never find love. But I want it and to know of it is enough to make me want to live.
Maybe one day.
I have another coffee, smoke two more cigarettes and then I go back to work.
Part Three:
THE OTHER SIDE OF LOVE
HOPE
Watching the files burn in our back garden with Dan. Kids in bed. Safe, warm, secure. I watch the flames swallow the past, the reports that said one thing, when something different had happened, that said things no one had ever told me. Many had cared and many had tried. But everyone has their limitations. It could have been better but it could have been worse. I watch the fragments go up, carried by the heat.
