I start thinking about Dad and what he used to do to me and suddenly I’m a three-year-old kid, frightened, alone, lying on the bed, bawling my eyes out. Although I physically left Dad behind the night of our showdown in St Filland Road, he still has a stranglehold on my soul. Every brick of the wall I have built up round myself has the name ‘Jock’ stamped on it and I know it’s something in myself I’ll have to change as nobody else is going to help me.
So much for my new start, my new dreams, my new hopes, my new life…
Chapter Twenty-Seven
A Voice in the Wilderness, a Face in the Crowd
By April Benidorm has turned from a ghost town into a never-ending party. I get a job as a dancer and though it’s only one night a week, it’s more money in my pocket and I’m feeling better about my life. My anger is subsiding, or at least being locked up again. I’m still drinking every night but my body is not receiving the same punishment I’ve been giving it for the past four years.
Bobby decides to join me in Spain as he feels the same about Dundee as I do. I’ve got him a job as a doorman after a couple of weeks and he’s having a ball.
Then one day, out of the blue, something extraordinary happens. I meet Sophie Jones, one of the most beautiful creatures on God’s earth.
The first time I see her I pick her up over my shoulder and take her into the club that I work for. I do this with anyone who tries to walk past, as you get money for each person that comes in. I’ve met some really nice-looking girls over the summer and seen a lot of stunners but Sophie is in a league of her own. She has long blonde hair, brown/hazel eyes, is really tall and slim, tanned and politely spoken, and I have a funny feeling she’s been sent down to me from heaven.
She has this green dress on, very short, just below her backside, and legs that seem to go on forever. What’s more I click with her straight away. She’s different to all the other girls I normally come into contact with. I know that she’s special, a class apart, and I’ve never expected to meet anyone like her.
It’s three in the morning and we’re both still in the club. She looks over and I’m dancing with a palm tree. So even if I can’t say for sure whether I’ve swept her off her feet, I’ve certainly had an impact on the palm tree.
At this stage in my life, although I have always been searching, I always thought I was destined to be a loner. I don’t want to be a loner but I never thought in a million years that I would find anyone, even though I’m desperately looking for someone to trust.
My natural reaction to anyone who ever shows me any love or affection is to back off. I still remember how Dad would tell me he loved me and do me in on the same night. I won’t let anyone get that close to me or mess with my head – which is all I have known when it comes to intimacy. The hand that fed me has been the hand that bit me and I’ve told myself so many times that I won’t be fooled again.
But something about Sophie throws me off guard. She sweeps under the radar. I’m not expecting someone like her to come into my life and it knocks me sideways.
I spend every day of the two weeks of her holiday with her. Bobby has met Katie, one of her friends who is one half of a pair of twins. It’s a great release for me to be spending time with someone so genuine and honest and innocent. Sophie’s only three years younger than I am, but I seem much older as I’ve had to grow up fast.
The day she’s meant to go home to Cheshire, she cries because her father has told her she can’t stay and get a job. This girl is more impulsive than I am, I think to myself. I’m pretty gutted when she goes home, as I’m getting used to seeing her every day and I actually miss her. I’ve never had that feeling before about anyone as I’ve always been a bit of a loner. I like my own company but Sophie Jones – she is a light in a dark room.
She heads back home and almost immediately I am missing her badly as it’s suddenly dawned on me that she has been the only good thing in my life. I cope with this in the usual way I always cope with problems. I go back to my crazy world and take more drugs and fill myself with more booze to forget. I have started to become really close to a group of lads from Algeria. They’ve taken me under their wing as one of their own. We teach each other Scottish and Algerian football songs, and laugh about things we’ve done in the past. They are the nicest people you could meet, but if you get on the wrong side of them, it’s a different story.
I feel quite safe though, as I’m like a brother to them. I have met some seriously disturbed characters over the years and people that are known as gangsters, but these lads are basically trained killers and in a league of their own. Some are ex-soldiers who have completed the compulsory two years in the army. Others have gone AWOL before joining, as they know it would mean they’d have to wipe out whole villages of their own friends and people. One lad, Jamal, has killed over thirty people while in the army and has never batted an eyelid.
They never boast about these experiences. We just sit and chat, swapping stories about our lives. Then one day when I’m dining with them in one of their houses, I walk into the kitchen for a glass of water and see two black 9 mm handguns sitting on the worktop. Instantly I realise that they must be involved in something that’s way over my head.
With Sophie gone I’m back on drugs again, doing things that only a man high on cocaine would even dream of. As I grew up I always had a cut-off switch, and could stop when I knew something was a bit too much. But that switch has now gone.
As part of my initiation into their group I agree to go on the back of a motorbike, get dropped off behind a building where some Spanish guy works, wait until he comes out, then stab him in the arse as he owes the Algerians a lot of money.
Jamal goes over exactly where to hit the guy and what to say as I do it. ‘You push the knife in his left ass cheek, straight in the middle.’
He’s standing up in front of me, pointing at the area I have to go for. ‘This area is safe, there’s no main artery, it is just muscle.’
‘What if he moves and it goes in the right cheek?’
‘Fuck him, he shouldn’t have moved. It’s his own fault. If he’d paid my money he would have no problems with his ass. After you do it, he’ll fall to the floor. All you say is dos million pesetas! Then you walk away.’
I work it out, the bloke owes him £10,000, but I never ask what it’s for as it’s really none of my business. I’m just there to carry out orders.
I leave the house and jump on the back of a motorbike with another lad, putting a seven-inch lock knife I’ve been given into my inside pocket, then we’re off – on a military mission to search and destroy. As the bike tears through the back streets of Benidorm, I’m mulling things over in my head as warm air blows into my face. I don’t really feel any emotion or fear as the drugs I’ve taken to psyche myself up have clouded my thoughts, convincing myself that this guy deserves what he’s about to receive.
After ten minutes we arrive at a car park behind some apartments in the middle of nowhere. It’s pitch black as it’s about one in the morning and the place looks deserted.
‘OK, I’ll be over there. When you have done it, get here quickly.’ He points to a dark street between two apartment blocks that are only half built. I have already been given my instructions – what he looks like, what time he finishes work, and so on.
I’m on my own from here on in, dressed like a cat burglar and high as a kite.
I calmly walk into the car park and crouch down behind a bin shelter, between two parked cars, thinking which way I’m going to run and what to say, going over it in my head so I don’t make any mistakes. Talking to myself, as my heart starts pumping.
‘In the left cheek, dos million pesetas.’
Then I started having doubts and qualms.
What if I miss his arse and hit a main artery by mistake and kill him? What if he has kids?
It seems even the evil voices in my head that used to make me snap are having second thoughts. I have turned into two different people, two voices arguing with each
other.
What if you kill him?
Fuck him, stick it in his back!
This goes on for around fifteen minutes and there’s still no sign of him. All of a sudden a door opens at the back of a restaurant next door to the flats. Someone comes out and walks into the car park, passing the car I’m now crouched behind. It’s definitely the bloke.
I take the knife out of my inside pocket and walk up behind him, ready to do what I’ve gone there to do. Then I stop.
I’ve had a vision of Dad. And instead of it fuelling my rage, the licence to kill, I suddenly begin to wonder if I’m becoming Jock. An unstable maniac with a chemical imbalance or a self-inflicted drugged-up thug that wants revenge against a world that has done nothing against him. At this moment I’m two different people, one of whom I’m seriously starting to dislike.
I’m standing in the middle of the car park with the knife by my side only feet from the guy, shocked at what I’ve nearly done. The good voice in my head has overpowered the evil one that wanted me to kill him. It’s like being in a film – it never seems real. The lad has now turned around as he must have heard my footsteps behind him. He looks at me, then his eyes look down towards the knife.
‘Dos million pesetas.’
I can see by the look on his face that he’s petrified.
‘Sí, mañana,’ he says as he takes off into the darkness.
I just can’t do it. All the way back to the getaway bike I keep thinking I can’t believe I was about to stab someone who’s never done anything to me.
‘Did you get him?’
‘No, he seen me and ran into a car, but your money is on its way.’
‘Did you say what I told you to say?’
‘Yep, he’ll bring it tomorrow. Your money is on its way.’
We don’t speak much on the way back to the house. He doesn’t ask me what’s gone on, as I’ve now promised him his money will be paid in the morning. I’m ninety-nine per cent sure after seeing the look on the lad’s face in the car park. Well, I’m praying I’ve read his expression correctly.
Luckily for the bloke, the good side of me has the upper hand. Luckily for me, the next day, the bloke sends a woman to Jamal’s house with the £10,000 he owes them. He must have seen the look in my eyes, the one that sometimes scares me when I look in the mirror.
The Algerians ask me what I said to him and why I didn’t stab him but I just tell them, ‘There’s more than one way to skin a cat.’
Not that they care how I did it, they’re just impressed at how quickly they got their money back. But I think it’s fate that I’ve gone that night – fate giving the guy a helping hand – as I’ve seen a few of the not so fortunate people they’ve paid a visit to. And fate for me too, as I have this odd feeling of vertigo, like I’ve been standing on the edge of a cliff, ready to fall – and something has held me back.
I’m back from the brink, back in the real world, back on dry land. I don’t want to be in that negative limbo land of drugtaking and violence; I don’t want to be running all my life from a father whose anger has infected my mind and whose sickness has eaten into my soul; I don’t want to see that blackness behind the eyes when I stare into the glass.
I want to be Good Charlie, whatever that means and whatever it takes.
* * *
After that night I know I have to change my ways and try to turn my life around yet again. I’ve been writing letters to Sophie since she moved back to England and she’s started an Advertising course at Lancashire University in Preston. There’s something about her I can’t get out of my head, like she’s been sent down to me from whoever’s up there to save me from myself – like a kind of guardian angel – and she’s the only one who can do it.
When her face flashes through my mind it makes me happy: it’s like an oasis of calm and serenity in the turmoil of my life and I feel better about myself. Is it her innocence or am I idealising her and putting her on a pedestal? After all, she’s not really an angel, she’s just a human being, flesh and blood like me. But she seems so nice and friendly compared with some of the people in my life.
I have to move on from Spain, as it clearly isn’t helping at all. I decide to go back to see Sophie in Preston, to see if it really was just a holiday romance or something stronger. I still don’t trust myself and think that maybe my mind wasn’t operating rationally the last time I saw her, and Bobby wants to come with me see his girlfriend Katie.
I haven’t told Sophie we’re coming, as Bobby and I want to surprise her and Katie. Armed only with an address of some student halls in Preston, we board a train and set off on the journey. On the train I start worrying that maybe she’s met someone else or has gone home to Cheshire for a holiday, or even worse, given me the wrong address. But Bobby reminds me that we’ve been writing to each other and it’s obviously the real address.
When we arrive at the student halls Sophie isn’t there. Someone on the intercom buzzes me in when I explain who I am. Sophie has been telling all her student friends about me – brilliant.
I leave my bags there, and Bobby goes off to see the twins in the next block and I go for a walk outside to calm myself down, as I’m getting really excited about seeing her again. Bobby comes back out from the other block and we decide to go for a beer in a pub near the halls. I only have one drink, just to calm my nerves, then have a game of pool, thinking about what I’m going to say to her. Then we walk back half an hour later to see if she’s come home. I press the intercom.
‘Hello, is Sophie home yet? It’s Charlie.’
‘Hi! It’s me,’ comes a familiar voice. ‘I’m coming down now.’
My heart is pounding and Bobby keeps ruffling my hair up, trying to make me look a mess while giggling in that mad way he has. The door opens and there she is, looking even better than I’ve remembered. I must have dreamt about this moment.
I still can’t believe it’s Sophie, or that she could really be pleased to see me.
But I can’t mistake that look on her face. I can see she’s deliriously happy to see me. We grab each other really tight and kiss. It feels unbelievable to be back with the only person on the planet I’ve ever had a serious connection with. There’s something about her, the way she looks at me, that smile that would light up a room, her infectious laugh and her honest eyes.
That’s what I’ve thought about all this time. How honest her eyes are.
We stay in Preston for three months, Bobby with Katie, me with Sophie. Bobby and I get jobs in Southport at Pontin’s Holiday Camp – not as Red Coats but as builders. The place is having a revamp and they need people to demolish it.
Travelling is a nightmare every day, and Sophie only has a tiny room in the halls with a shared kitchen and toilet. It’s cramped and I’m not used to sleeping next to anyone, especially in a single bed. But the boss of the building company we work for has some chalets on site that aren’t being used so we move into them and the girls sneak up at weekends. We hide them in the back of a van and nip them past security at night.
I’m finding it hard to adjust back to a normal life as I’m still a bit wild and have come off drugs very fast. I can also be paranoid, waiting for something to go wrong, as it normally does when I’m around. Bobby’s getting restless as well: he went abroad for the high life and a change of scenery and we’re now back working in the UK – and in a place as dreary as Dundee if not worse, only now without his friends.
One night I’m feeling particularly edgy. I’m sitting in a pub in Preston with Sophie and I’m pissed.
‘What are you looking at?’ I say if anyone even glances at me.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ Sophie asks me.
And before I can stop myself I tell her everything. It all comes flooding out, everything about my childhood, about how my parents split up when I was ten months old and how me and Tommy spent the next three years being snatched by either Mum or Dad in a tug of war. How I told the judge I wanted to be with my dad when I was only four and how fo
r the next twelve years I paid the price for my stupid mistake by being put through daily torture and living hell by my drunken, psychotic father who beat, punched, kicked, bit, strangled, smashed and battered me and then subjected me to hours and hours of mind-bending inquisitions more or less every day of my childhood until the night I paid him back – just ten minutes in return for twelve years of horrific abuse. How I then walked out and went to live with my mum who I’d hardly even seen between the ages of four and ten.
Sophie just sits there saying nothing. She can hardly believe what I’m telling her at first, but she knows how hard it’s been for me to open up to her like that and that everything I’ve just told her is the plain, honest truth.
‘I always saw you as this bright, funny guy,’ she says.
She is overwhelmed, but at the same time I think she now wants to save me – you’ll do for my summer project, she must be thinking.
But I know it’s more than that. For me to let my guard down and tell her this is huge and I can only do it because I know she’s a really genuine, kind and caring person. If you met her you’d know what I mean.
And even now as I’m telling her about what I went through I still can’t understand why someone like her, as beautiful as her, would go for someone like me.
The work has finished at the holiday camp and Bobby decides to go back to Scotland, as he’s never felt the love he first thought he had for Katie. I’m getting restless as well, because I’ve moved back to the small room in the halls with no job while Sophie is at university. I have too much time to think again as I’m alone most of the day and I never really wanted to move back to the UK. It was meant to be a holiday but has turned back into a life.
I sit down with Sophie one night and tell her I’m going back abroad for a while, as I can’t handle not working and her being at uni all day. I know it’s going to break both of our hearts but I can’t be alone for more than a couple of hours as I start thinking about my childhood – my demons are never far away.
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