Locked Out of Heaven

by Shirley Benton

  At first, they couldn’t believe it. They’d seen so little of Ricky since he’d taken up with Stacey that they hadn’t noticed how severe his change in behaviour had become. It was only when he downright refused to go to school the following week that they accepted that something serious was up. They started monitoring his every move and finally realised that the son they’d known for nineteen years had become an overnight stranger. He was an addict now, a zombie – a completely different person.

  They tried everything to save Ricky. They were determined to make him go cold turkey, so Dad put up bars on the window of Ricky’s room, took everything out except the bed and locked him in his room for a week with a few buckets. Mum was convinced that if Ricky got the drugs out of his system, he’d be fine and we could move on from all this nastiness. I was sure she wasn’t the first parent to think that and be completely wrong, but I said nothing.

  The roars and screams out of Ricky that week were unnatural. Cliff, who still lives at home with us and has been working in a supermarket near Blackbeg since he finished school, moved to a friend’s house for the week to get away from it. For the first few days, Ricky hit and kicked my parents whenever they brought him food or tried to take his buckets away for cleaning. My mum came downstairs one day covered in blood from him lunging at her face and scraping it to bits.

  I couldn’t believe it was happening. Ricky had been the softie of the family, the one who’d scoop the spiders up on a bit of cardboard and put them outside instead of stamping on them like the rest of us would. It was incredible how much the drugs had transformed his personality. And for all his knowledge and fancy big vocabulary, the only thing he was saying now was the F-word.

  When he came out of his room after the week was up, he resembled his old self, only more cowed and broken. He bawled and apologised and promised Mum and Dad he’d sort himself out. Mum said he either went back to school or he could go and live on the streets and never darken their door again. I didn’t think she really meant it and knew that she’d go to the ends of the earth to fix Ricky up if needed, but thankfully he decided to go back to school anyway. The other condition was that he had to agree never to see Stacey again. After a lot of arguing, he grudgingly agreed that he needed to stay away from her if he was to recover.

  For two weeks, we held our breath and prayed things would go back to normal as Ricky went to school each day with me. After the first few days, he drew up a schedule of extra study time to make up for the weeks he’d missed. Mum and Dad were thrilled. I wasn’t so sure. It was all going too well . . . it was too easy. I knew it wasn’t meant to be this easy.

  He was studying on a Saturday afternoon when the landline rang. He got up and grabbed it before anyone else could. Mum and Dad had been screening his calls and disconnecting any from people they didn’t know as his friends, but they were outside gardening and I’d had my hands plunged into the sink. Cliff was out, as he always was these days. Ricky sounded a bit dubious when he heard whoever it was. I took my hands out of the sink and ran out into the garden.

  “I think it’s one of the druggie lot on the phone,” I hissed to Mum and Dad.

  They ran in immediately. When we got in, Ricky was wailing at the top of his voice. We ran out into the hall to find him slumped beside the phone, roaring like a madman.

  “Jesus, love, what is it?” Mum laid a hand on his shoulder.

  “Don’t touch me!” He got up and backed away from her, sobs racking his body. “It’s all your fault!”

  “What is?” I asked, moving towards him.

  He put his hands up. “Don’t you come near me, either,” he said. “You’re all in this together . . . you did this to her!”

  I immediately copped it. “Has something happened to Stacey?”

  “Has something happened? She’s dead! She took too much . . .” He collapsed against the front door and roared like a banshee.

  Mum and Dad looked at each other. Mum tried to move towards Ricky.

  “Stay back!” he screamed.

  “This is what we were trying to save you from,” Dad said slowly.

  “You don’t have a fucking clue!” Ricky got up and walked over to Dad, looking like he wanted to square up to him. “She took an overdose not long after I ended things with her. What does that tell you?”

  “You don’t know that she meant to overdose!” I said. “She probably took too much by accident.”

  “Oh yeah, and you know her yourself, do you? Like fuck you do. When you met her you looked at her like she was pond life.”

  “Only because I knew she was on that shite! She was probably a lovely person before she got involved in that.”

  “Well, now you’ll never know what she was like, and all because you forced me to stay away from her! I hate you all!”

  He ran out of the front door. Dad ran after him and wrestled him to the ground, then dragged him into the house by his legs. Ricky managed to flip himself free and tried to punch Dad in the face, but Dad hadn’t lived his whole life in our area without learning a thing or two about how to fight. He pinned Ricky to the wall and kneed him in the balls, then threw him over his shoulder and fired Ricky into his room. Mum locked the door while I sat on the bottom step, trembling even harder than I had the day I realised Ricky was on the gear.

  They came downstairs and we all went into the sitting room. Even with the door closed, the sound of Ricky wailing and kicking the room apart was as loud as if he were right beside us.

  “The second he gets a minute of freedom, he’ll be out there hunting for drugs again,” I said. “This changes everything.”

  Neither Mum nor Dad said anything for a long time. Eventually, Mum looked up and nodded.

  “You’re right. I was fooling myself to think the bad times were over.” She smiled sadly. “Someone your age shouldn’t be able to work these things out.”

  It only took less than a fortnight. The day after Stacey’s funeral, Ricky said he wanted to go back to school. Nobody believed him, and Mum and Dad kept him home from school for a week to keep an eye on him. They couldn’t keep him home forever, though – I understand that, Diary – and they dropped the pair of us at the door of the school the following Monday. I’d been tasked with keeping an eye on him at all times.

  The following Thursday, I was asked to practice singing a hymn with my music teacher for an upcoming school Mass at lunchtime. I asked my teacher if someone would keep an eye on Ricky and was told one of the other teachers would, but when the teacher left the room for just a few minutes, Ricky bolted out of the school.

  The teacher alerted the principal, who got in his car and drove down the road immediately, but Ricky was nowhere to be seen. I rang Mum and Dad’s landline from the school office to tell them and Mum said she’d just noticed a significant amount of money missing from her bills fund. Enough to buy drugs.

  Mum and I took our area, while Dad and Cliff took downtown, and between us we scoured the city to look for him. It was Mum and I who found him. He was in the very same block of flats that Mum and I had been to years ago. He was lying at the bottom of the stairs with a needle sticking out of his arm, just like the boy we’d seen on the first-floor landing. The difference was that Ricky was dead. Just like Stacey, he’d died of an overdose. People had probably been walking past him completely ignoring him as he lay dead, like we’d done with the first-floor boy. We never knew if he’d taken the overdose accidentally or intentionally, but it didn’t even matter. He was gone. Nothing would change that.

  I knew the second I realised Ricky was on the gear that his addiction was going to destroy our family, but the extent of the carnage has been unbelievable. Cliff has retreated into himself and barely communicates with any of us any more. I’m the only person he’ll talk to, but only about random stuff. Maybe he blames Mum and Dad for what’s happened, but in truth, we don’t know because he won’t talk about it.

  Mum just isn’t able to deal with it at all. Day by day, she’s falling deeper into her own sorrow
and right now, she’s just a shell of herself. As for Dad, he spends all of his time trying to reach out to her, but I think he’s soon going to have to stop trying for his own sake – she’s dragging him down with her. And me . . . I’m filling the hole by stepping into Mum’s role as housekeeper and Ricky’s role as the student. I’m throwing myself into my books and I’ve vowed to do what Ricky had been so determined to do before drugs took hold of him.

  A deep hatred of the place I’ve grown up in is simmering inside me, fuelling my need to learn everything and do whatever it takes to get out of Blackbeg.

  Chapter 17

  “Holly? It’s Janice!”

  Wow. Janice sounded like she was greeting an old friend. I instantly wondered if she’d laugh like Janice in the sitcom Friends, which was a stupid thing to wonder, but nonetheless the thought was there. I hoped I managed to say something vaguely funny and laughter-inducing in the course of this conversation.

  “Hello, Janice. Thank you for ringing me. I take it Luke has filled you in on my . . .” No, predicament wouldn’t do – he wasn’t going to tell her about my predicament, he said. Situation? What if she asked me what exactly that situation was? “Requirements.”

  I winced – requirements sounded a bit up my own arse, like I thought she was here to serve me. But it was said now and all I could do was see how the conversation went from here.

  “He has indeed. I’ve spent the entire morning looking for opportunities for you and you won’t believe what I have!”

  “Oh?”

  A little bud of excitement took hold and rippled through me. God, she’d found something already – she was good!

  “Yes, a weight loss clinic in the city centre is looking for volunteers for a new nose-tube diet. It’s the next big thing in dieting, for sure, and the results of the diet are going to be high-profile. It’s definitely an unmissable opportunity! I’d do it myself except . . . well, I can’t really work here with a nose tube, can I? So not a good look.”

  My subsequent silence was of the stunned variety.

  “Nose tubes?” I eventually said. “As in, the nose tubes used on seriously ill patients? Or people who can’t feed themselves?”

  “They’re the ones!”

  “Janice, are you taking the piss?”

  “Of course not, Holly. Why would I? Anyway, the idea is that the dieter gets a tube inserted in their nose that goes down to their stomach. A liquid containing a mixture of nutrients and a limited number of calories constantly drips through the tube. After a few hours, your body will start burning body fat owing to the lack of carbs. All you have to do is not eat and just take the bag of fluid around with you! It’s that easy!”

  “And you thought of me for this because?”

  Go on, say it.

  “Oh, just because it’s an opportunity and Luke said you’re happy to consider all options. That’s all! There’s no other reason, honest.”

  Yeah, right. “Janice, you’re so kind to consider me for such an outstanding opportunity, but no. A million times over, no. In fact, I wouldn’t do a weight loss programme of any kind in a fit.”

  “Of course not. You don’t need one.”

  A funny noise followed her words. It sounded remarkably like a chortle being stifled. Not the kind of laugh I wanted to hear.

  I hung up before I said something I’d regret. I needed to make money somehow and if I blew this opportunity with Luke, I couldn’t see a way that I’d get another one. Besides, Luke didn’t strike me as someone to mess with. He was very well connected within the media industry and I didn’t want to burn my bridges. Or my copious amount of excess body fat through a nose-tube diet, for that matter.

  I had to ring Sammy and tell her. I couldn’t keep something as crazy as this to myself. It was funny, but after only one night in each other’s company, I knew we were already at the stage where I could ring her to tell her something like this. It was as if the years of absence had never happened.

  “Did you ever hear the like?” I said when I retold my tale.

  “It might not be a bad idea.”

  “What?”

  “Well, you did say you wanted to lose weight but couldn’t afford to pay for a slimming club and all the special foods that go with a particular programme. Why not let someone else pay for it and hopefully pay you to be their ambassador? I wish I could get someone to come along and sort my fat out!”

  “But I told Janice I wouldn’t do a weight loss programme in a fit, remember? I can’t go back to her now and tell her to keep an eye out for a good one!”

  “Why not? Just tell her you’ve changed your mind.”

  “But . . . that’ll make me look stupid.”

  “Em . . . four words, Hol. Diary of a Boomeranger. That box is already ticked.”

  “Aaarggh!”

  “Listen, I’ll ring you back tonight. I’m in a play centre at the moment and it’s like a zoo. I have a proposition for you that I can’t really discuss here.”

  “Oh? Sounds intriguing.”

  “I’ll ring you after kiddie bedtime, okay? So probably around eleven.”

  She hung up, probably to deter me from asking any questions. A proposition? What could that possibly be?

  A couple of minutes later, I was on the phone to Janice backtracking.

  “I’ve given your weight loss idea some serious consideration, Janice—”

  “In ten minutes? That’s how long ago you hung up on me.”

  She sounded sour. Oh dear.

  “Smartphones have such dodgy connections, don’t they? Give me the old briquette-sized mobiles any day.” I didn’t have a smartphone any more. I’d sold it and taken up with an old Nokia briquette-style model from a decade ago that I’d found in the house. “Anyway, I think you might be on to something. I’d be happy to avail of any weight loss opportunities that don’t involve tubes up the nose or up the bum or anywhere else.”

  Janice sighed heavily. I wasn’t going to get to hear her laugh any time soon.

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Sammy rang at quarter to eleven.

  “Early night for the kids, Sammy?”

  “Oh, don’t talk to me. I had them all down and now two of them are up again looking for a drink. They’re a pack of insomniacs. Anyway, that’s Rory’s problem now. Let’s get on to what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “Fire away.”

  “We had a very sad event in the family three months ago. Rory’s brother, James’s wife, Eileen, died. Their two children, Moya and Louis, are thirteen and sixteen, and they really don’t know how to deal with it. Moya started comfort eating after Eileen’s death and it’s really become a problem. James hasn’t a clue how to deal with it, so he asked me if I’d talk to her.

  “Moya understands she’s engaging in unhealthy and obsessive behaviour with food since her mother’s death but doesn’t know why she’s chosen to deal with things this way, or how to stop. I told her I’d help her in any way possible and my first thought was to get her a good counsellor. Then you came back into my life. Do you think you could do some sessions with Moya in her own home? I’d pay you well, of course.”

  “Oh, Sammy, I’d love to, but I haven’t worked for the last five years.”

  “So? You haven’t lost your skills in that time frame, I’m sure. Is this something you’d be interested in?”

  “Definitely.”

  “Well then, you’re hired as far as I’m concerned. If anyone can help Moya, it’s you.”

  “Sammy, I’d absolutely love to.”

  We sorted out the initial details of how we saw the arrangement working out, then Sammy hung up so that she could ring Moya and fill her in. I went to the kitchen to make myself a cup of tea, delighted with myself. A counselling job! It wouldn’t solve my money worries, but it was better than any pimping gig I could possibly have hoped for in its own way. It would be amazing if I could do both . . .

  For the first time since I left Terry, I felt a frisson of hope. Maybe I
could make this whole thing work out, after all.

  Chapter 18

  “So, what do you think?” I said when Susie eventually put my magazine down.

  “I think,” she said with a sigh, “that your first pimping gig was always going to come to this. Wouldn’t a run around the block five times a week serve you just as well?”

  She was probably right, considering the amount of dodgy folk around here who’d stop me to rob my iPod – you had to run fast in these parts – but I couldn’t get away with saying that now. Not after I’d had the cheek to leave Blackbeg, turn my nose up at it and then come running back to it when I was stuck. As I’d be reminded of if I said anything.

  Personally, I was thrilled when a women’s magazine had offered me an opportunity to lose weight and document my journey weekly, thanks to a contact Janice had at the magazine. Sammy was right – I needed something that someone else was paying for.

  “It’s all right saying that, but it’d never happen. There’s always something else to do – clothes to wash, ironing to do—”

  “An argument to have with me?”

  “They are time-consuming, I must admit, but I wasn’t going to bring that up.”

  “Well, Holly, rather you than me. There isn’t much about your life that isn’t out there now and I don’t just mean your waistline. I know if I needed to lose three stone, I’d prefer not to have the whole country watching and probably laughing at me as I did so.”

  “Of course people would be laughing at you if you suggested losing three stone, Susie. Nobody wants to see a walking skeleton except at Halloween. Anyway, the whole country is stretching it a bit. The percentage of people out of the entire population who’ll collectively watch Diary of a Boomeranger and read the magazine your weight loss is featured in is quite small.”