A Street Cat Named Bob (23 page)

It was strange. Coming off heroin years ago wasn’t as bad. The transition to methadone had been reasonably straightforward. This was a different experience altogether.

Time ceased to have any real meaning, but by the following morning I was beginning to experience really bad headaches, almost migraine-level pains. As a result I found it hard to cope with any light or noise. I’d try and sit in the dark, but then I’d start dreaming or hallucinating and want to snap myself out of it. It was a vicious circle.

What I needed more than anything was something to take my mind off it all, which was where Bob proved my salvation.

There were times when I wondered whether Bob and I had some kind of telepathic understanding. He could definitely read my mind sometimes, and seemed to be doing so now. He knew that I needed him so he was a constant presence, hanging around me, snuggling up close when I invited him but keeping his distance when I was having a bad time.

It was as if he knew what I was feeling. Sometimes I’d be nodding off and he would come up to me and place his face close to me, as if to say: ‘You all right, mate? I’m here if you need me.’ At other times he would just sit with me, purring away, rubbing his tail on me and licking my face every now and again. As I slipped in and out of a weird, hallucinatory universe, he was my sheet anchor to reality.

He was a godsend in other ways too. For a start, he gave me something to do. I still had to feed him, which I did regularly. The process of going into the kitchen, opening up a sachet of food and mixing it in the bowl was just the sort of thing I needed to get my mind off what I was going through. I didn’t feel up to going downstairs to help him do his business, but when I let him out he dashed off and was back upstairs again in what seemed like a few minutes. He didn’t seem to want to leave my side.

I’d have periods where I didn’t feel so bad. During the morning of the second day, for instance, I had a couple of hours where I felt much better. Bob and I just played around a lot. I did a bit of reading. It was hard but it was a way to keep my mind occupied. I read a really good non-fiction book about a Marine saving dogs in Afghanistan. It was good to think about what was going on in someone else’s life.

By the afternoon and early evening of the second day, however, the withdrawal symptoms were really ramping up. The worst thing was the physical stuff. I had been warned that when you go through ‘clucking’ you get what’s called restless legs syndrome. In effect, you have incredibly uncomfortable, nervous pulses that run through your body, making it impossible for you to sit still. I started doing this. My legs would suddenly and involuntarily start kicking – it’s not called kicking the habit for nothing. I think this freaked Bob out a bit. He gave me a couple of odd, sideways looks. But he didn’t desert me, he stayed there, at my side.

That night was the worst of all. I couldn’t watch television because the light and noise hurt my head. When I went into the dark, I just found my mind racing, filling up with all kinds of crazy, sometimes scary stuff. All the time my legs were kicking and I was feeling extremes of hot and cold. One minute I was so hot I felt like I was inside a furnace. The next I’d feel ice cold. The sweat that had built up all over me would suddenly start to freeze and suddenly I’d be shivering. So then I’d have to cover up and would start burning up again. It was a horrible cycle.

Every now and again, I’d have moments of lucidity and clarity. At one point I remember thinking that I really understood why so many people find it so hard to kick their drug habits. It’s a physical thing as well as a mental thing. That battle of wills that’s going on in your brain is very one-sided. The addictive forces are definitely stronger than those that are trying to wean you off the drugs.

At another point, I was able to see the last decade and what my addiction had done to me. I saw - and sometimes smelled - the alleys and underpasses where I’d slept rough, the hostels where I’d feared for my life, the terrible things I’d done and considered doing just to score enough to get me through the next twelve hours. I saw with unbelievable clarity just how seriously addiction screws up your life.

I had some weird, almost surreal thoughts as well. For instance, at one point it occurred to me that if I was to wake up with amnesia I’d get through the withdrawal, because I wouldn’t know what was wrong with me. A lot of my problems stemmed from the fact my body knew exactly what was wrong with me and what I could do to fix it. I won’t deny that there were moments of weakness when it crossed my mind, when I imagined scoring. But I was able to fend those thoughts off pretty easily. This was my chance to kick it, maybe my last chance. I had to stay strong, I had to take it: the diarrhoea, the cramps, the vomiting, the headaches, the wildly fluctuating temperatures – all of it.

That second night seemed to last forever. I’d look up at the clock and it seemed at times as if it was moving backwards. Outside it seemed as if the darkness was getting deeper and blacker rather than brightening up for morning. It was horrible.

But I had my secret weapon. Bob did annoy me at certain points. At one stage I was lying as still and quiet as possible, just trying to shut out the world. All of a sudden, I felt Bob clawing at my leg, digging into my skin quite painfully.

‘Bob, what the hell are you doing?’ I shouted at him a bit too aggressively, making him jump. Immediately I felt guilty.

I suspect he was worried that I was a little too still and quiet and was checking up to make sure I was alive. He was worried about me.

Eventually, a thin, soupy grey light began to seep through the window, signalling that morning had arrived at last. I hauled myself out of bed and looked at the clock. It was almost eight o’clock. I knew the clinic would be open by nine. I couldn’t wait any longer.

I splashed some cold water on my face. It felt absolutely awful on my clammy skin. In the mirror I could see that I looked drawn and my hair was a sweaty mess. But I wasn’t going to worry about that at this point. Instead I threw on some clothes and headed straight for the bus stop.

Getting to Camden from Tottenham at that time of the day was always a trial. Today it seemed much worse. Every traffic light was on red, every road seemed to have a long tailback of traffic. It really was the journey from hell.

As I sat on the bus, I was still having those huge temperature swings, sweating one moment, shivering the next, my limbs were still twitching every now and again, although not as badly as during the middle of the night. People were looking at me as if I was some kind of nutcase. I probably looked unbelievably bad. At that point I didn’t care. I just wanted to get to the DDU.

I arrived just after nine and found the waiting room half full already. One or two people looked as rough as I felt. I wondered whether they’d been through forty-eight hours as hellish as those I’d just been through.

‘Hi, James, how are you feeling,’ the counsellor said as he came into the treatment room. He only needed to look at me to know the answer, of course, but I appreciated his concern.

‘Not great,’ I said.

‘Well, you’ve done well do get through the last two days. That’s a huge step you’ve taken,’ he smiled.

He checked me over and got me to give a urine sample. He then gave me a tablet of Subutex and scribbled out a new prescription, this time for some Subutex.

‘That should make you feel a lot better,’ he said. ‘Now let’s start easing you off this - and out of this place completely.’

I stayed there for a while to make sure the new medication didn’t have any odd side effects. It didn’t. Quite the opposite in fact, it made me feel a thousand times better.

By the time I had got back to Tottenham I felt completely transformed. It was a different feeling from what I’d experienced on methadone. The world seemed more vivid. I felt like I could see, hear and smell more clearly. Colours were brighter. Sounds were crisper. It was weird. It may sound strange, but I felt more alive again.

I stopped on the way and bought Bob a couple of new flavoured Sheba pouches that had come on to the market. I also bought him a little toy, a squeezy mouse.

Back at the flat I made a huge fuss of him.

‘We did it mate,’ I said. ‘We did it.’

The sense of achievement was incredible. Over the next few days, the transformation in my health and life in general was huge. It was as if someone had drawn back the curtains and shed some sunlight into my life.

Of course, in a way, someone had.

Chapter 18

Homeward Bound

I didn’t think Bob and I could have become closer, but the experience we’d just been through together tightened our bond even more. In the days that followed, he stuck to me like a limpet, almost watching over me in case I had some kind of relapse.

There was no danger of that, however. I felt better than I had done in years. The thought of returning to the dark dependencies of the past made me shiver. I had come too far now to turn back.

I decided to celebrate my breakthrough by doing up the flat a little bit. So Bob and I put in a few extra hours each day outside the tube station and then used the proceeds to buy some paint, a few cushions and a couple of prints to put on the wall.

I then went along to a good second-hand furniture shop in Tottenham and bought a nice new sofa. It was a burgundy red, heavy-duty fabric, with a bit of luck the sort of material that would be able to resist Bob’s claws. The old one was knackered, partly down to natural wear and tear, but also because of Bob’s habit of scratching at its legs and base. Bob was banned from scratching the new one.

As the weeks passed and the nights turned even darker and colder, we spent more and more time curled up on the new sofa. I was already looking forward to a nice Christmas for me and Bob, although, as it turned out, that was a little premature.

It wasn’t often that I got post apart from bills, so when I saw a letter in my mailbox in the hallway of the flats one morning in early November 2008, I immediately noticed it. It was an airmail envelope and had a postmark – Tasmania, Australia.

It was from my mother.

We’d not been in proper contact for years. However, despite the distance that had formed between us, the letter was very chatty and warm. She explained that she had moved to a new house in Tasmania. She seemed to be very happy there.

The main point of her letter, however, was to offer me an invitation. ‘If I was to pay your air fares to Australia and back, would you come and see me?’ she asked. She explained that I could come over the Christmas holidays. She suggested I could also take in a trip to Melbourne to see my godparents, to whom I’d once been very close.

‘Let me know,’ she said, signing off. ‘Love, Mum.’

There would have been a time when I’d have thrown the letter straight into the dustbin. I’d have been defiant and stubborn and too proud to take a handout from my family.

But I’d changed, my head was in a different place now. I had started to see life a lot more clearly and I could almost feel some of the anger and paranoia that I’d felt in the past falling away. So I decided to give it some thought.

It wasn’t a straightforward decision, far from it. There were lots of pros and cons to take into consideration.

The biggest pro, obviously, was that I’d get to see my mother again. No matter what ups and downs we’d had over the years, she was my mother and I missed her.

We’d been in contact a couple of times since I’d fallen through the cracks and ended up on the streets but I’d never been honest with her about what had really happened. We’d met once in the past ten years, when she’d come to England briefly. I’d gone to meet her in a pub near Epping Forest. I’d taken the District Line up there and spent three or four hours with her. When I’d not returned as expected after six months, I’d spun her a story about having formed a band in London and said I wasn’t going to come back to Australia while we were ‘trying to make it big’.

I stuck to that story when I met her in the pub.

I hadn’t felt great about telling her a pack of lies, but I didn’t have the courage or the strength to tell her that I was sleeping rough, hooked on heroin and basically wasting my life away.

I had no idea whether she believed me or not. At that point in my life, I really didn’t care.

We’d talked occasionally after that, but frequently I would go for months on end without making contact, which had obviously caused her a lot of grief.