The Lost Child (16 page)
You must come too (to Epsom). Stay here and then I shall have the pleasure of talking to you. You've been forgetting how happy I am between [?] too. I'll do everything you tell me whatever I do. Ah, you are all perfection, I do not require any change. Take my [?] and [?] to each [illegible initials]. Come to find us to say goodbye. How long do you love [?] . . .
The writing is so faint, so almost not there, that there are a few words I just can't make out, words I have to give up on. What does it mean? And I can't quite tell if it's your sister's handwriting, the same as the journal, or whether it was written by someone else.
The only thing I'm sure about is this: almost two hundred years ago, under a card table, during a lengthy opera, or on the crowded edges of a bazaar, these words were hastily scribbled by one person for another to see:
Ah, you are all perfection.
I'm looking at a secret two-hundred-year-old love note.
Our old house - our father's house - was different. We didn't live there any more. It wasn't the same. There were sad patches on the wall where pictures had been, dusty dents in the carpet where furniture had gone. The fridge was empty and the toilet bowl had a rusty ring. There was fluff on the carpet and a dead spider in the plughole of the bath.
Downstairs, though, there was a bigger TV and a brand-new thing, a video recorder. He showed us how you could be in the middle of watching a programme and make the people freeze.
The Sale of the Century, New Faces.
You could make them all go backwards and start again. When he showed us, we laughed and laughed and said: Do it again, so he did it again. For a while it felt like we had our old fun daddy back.
There was more whisky than there used to be and there were all the same old ashtrays, including the one where you pressed the button and it went around and the ash fell down, but they'd just been emptied not wiped. And he had another new toy, an electric organ (he had a talent which was that he could play any instrument by ear without music). He played it for us, hands all flat on the keys and cigarette held in the side of his mouth. When he played, his eyes went dreamy and his face turned into someone else's face and something about the electric texture of the music made me feel a bit sick.
Upstairs our rooms were sad and cold and all our ornaments were gone. Just fluff and dead flies on the shelves where our glass animals had been.
Well, they're gone because your mother took them, he said and we couldn't really argue with that. He said he wasn't replacing anything she'd taken. He said we couldn't really expect to benefit from being the children of divorcees.
I never asked her to go, he reminded us as he shook another cigarette out of its packet, and we felt sorry for him all over again.
He said it wasn't really worth turning the radiators on, now we, his own daughters, weren't living here.
But just for the weekend?
He shook his head.
They wouldn't get hot in time. And by the way, he said, he'd rather we didn't call that other house, our mother's house - the house where she was living in sin with That Man - home. This was still our home, this empty cold place with nothing on the walls.
OK, we said.
We listened to our father and we tried to be sympathetic. Maybe we were sympathetic. It wasn't his fault, after all, If he was a bit upset. I thought I'd be a bit upset too if I had my whole life taken away like that, in the space of one August night.
Even the dog, as he pointed out in a voice so angry it was almost a whisper. He told us he was asking our mother for the value of half of the dog: £8. The dog had cost 16 and so he was asking for 8.
I call a branch of Narcotics Anonymous that meets in Bloomsbury once a week. It's the only one in Europe that's specifically for under-twenty-fives.
The leader tells me it's fine for our boy just to turn up. Or he can call and speak to him first if he prefers. I tell him that the boy in question doesn't believe he has a problem and is unlikely to call. I just wanted to be able to let him know what was available.
Just give him the information, the leader says. You're doing the right thing. This way you're equipping him, so that when he's ready he can make the choice himself
My darling,
Please read this letter from your interfering mother who loves you so much.
I could be wrong (please forgive me if I am) but I still very very strongly feel/sense that you are smoking too much cannabis. I don't care how much you're smoking whether every week, every weekend or every day.
Whatever. I just have this hunch that everything (I mean school AND everything else, your music, your relationships, your sense of fun, everything!!) would go much more how you want it to go if you were able to stop.
Wait! Don't tear this up! Hear me out . . . please. I do know that feeling of wanting to get OUT of your head (you won't believe me but I've been there and used other things to get there). But why not try staying INSIDE your head for a while? It's may be not as scary or boring a place as you think. Your head is fascinating. You're turning it to mush with drugs. You know this and it's scary.
No, don't tear this up! Just read it, OK?
A NICE NORMAL guy called R. runs the only Narcotics Anonymous meeting in the whole of Europe for young(er) people. They meet every Friday in Bloomsbury. You can just turn up. The people are aged mostly between twenty and twenty-five though some are younger and the point is that though a few of them have moved on to heroin, most HAVE NOT. Most are just doing WAY more cannabis than they want to be doing. Plus (R. says) usually a bit of coke. Like you, in fact.
The reason they've (finally) given in and come to the meeting is they've tried very hard to smoke less but have failed. This scares them. R. says it does a person's head in when they're quite strong and intelligent and therefore presume they'll be able to kick something when they want to . . . then they decide they DO want and find they can't.
I very very much want you to try going to a meeting. All right, I can't make you. So you can:
a) Tear this piece of paper up (no, please don'tl).
b) Refuse to go because you're sick-of-me-interfering in-your-life-and-I've-got-it-all-wrong, but AT LEAST fold the piece of paper up and keep it in your pocket for when you change your mind.
c) Go to a meeting with ME next Friday 19th and I buy you dinner afterwards. . .
d) Go to a meeting on your OWN next Friday 19th and meet me for dinner afterwards . . .
Or just call R. on this number. He says you can call him at any time if you want to find out more. You can say I gave you the number or you don't have to. Just say you got his number from Narcotics Anonymous. He gets called all the time, it's what he does. He sounds really nice. Intelligent, sense of humour, kind of normal.
The thing is, I know we went on last year about you going into rehab but I think that wasn't quite it. I don't think you need rehab. But I think you need a reason (and some help) to quit something that you thought you enjoyed but is in fact taking over your life. I think you know this. These meetings (and NA itself) have only been running this long because they work. Most people decide to quit and do quit and get happy, get clean.
You can go to just one meeting or you can go when you feel like it or you can go every Friday. But it's worth a try. I don't see what you have to lose . . .
That letter. I spend time on it. I write it so carefully, choosing every word with the very best intentions. But reading it back now I wince as I see how badly I got it wrong. It's far too long, for a start, and it's trying much too hard. A boy can smell a mother's anxiety a mile off and this letter stinks.
I don't know If he ever really read it. But I do at least know that he took option b.
Because months later, clearing out the flat he's just been evicted from, the same flat where he abandons his cat, I find the letter - its once-sharp creases fuzzy with age, folded and zipped into his old jacket pocket.
Caroline Baron returns my call.
Oh I'm sorry, I tell her, I thought your name was Suckling.
No, it's Baron. Used to be Baron Suckling, I think, a long time ago, but at some point the Suckling bit was dropped.
I explain what I'm writing about.
Oh well, it's my father you need to talk to, she says. He knows everything. All I know, you see, is just what he's told me. He lives half the year in Tenerife but he's back soon. I can give you his email.
I thank her and say I'll contact him.
We're about to say goodbye when she adds: Did you know, by the way, that the curse continues? Yes, well, it's supposed to be the eldest male in the family and it always skips a generation but, twenty years ago when my cousin David died of a brain tumour, my father thought, Ah.
Your brother Sam's journals, kept while he's living in London and Ipswich, supposedly studying the law, but in fact putting far more energy into having a good time, are more revealing than Sarah's.
Sam always has plenty to say, doesn't he? He's lively, vociferous, likeably curious, a little bit full of himself, perhaps. You wouldn't exactly call him quiet and bookish - he never seems to opt for an evening in when he could go out. But he does like reading and seems to get through many of the notable volumes of the day (Anne Grey, Hallam, Preston, Blackstone, Allemagne), gobbling them in late-night bursts, or else at breakfast.
Sam is sociable. Very interested in women - quick to notice pretty ones, inclined to complain about ugly ones. He enjoys eating and drinking and smoking his pipe. He is, he happily informs us, 5ft 10 ½ in his boots and weighs 11st 6lbs. Quite bulky, then.
He has plenty of friends and, so it seems, no shortage of invitations to dinner and to the theatre and opera. He spends a lot of his London time following up contacts of his father's people who are not always in or available when he calls. But this doesn't seem to throw him. He's affable, persistent, an all-round good chap, easily amused - even if the jokes he cracks in his journal are maybe not always quite as funny as he thinks they are. His landlady doesn't seem to find him all that amusing either - especially not his lateness, his rowdiness and his off-hand manner. But at least when she gives him a jolly good talking-to he's sufficiently stung to record it in his journal.
He always reports very solemnly on the weather.
And he's a good correspondent - regularly writing individual letters to all of you - mother, father, sisters, brothers, even you, Mary. But he seems to allow himself to be dragged back to Woodton only on sufferance, always slightly cross with himself for staying for longer than he intended. The comfortable lure of home.
I'm not sure how you feel about him as a brother, but from here he looks like a young man full of energy and optimism and good humour, keen to make his way in the world, keen for independence. Deep down, though, perhaps it's dawning on him that he's neither as bright and hard-working as his distinguished and successful father, nor as artistic and engaging as his mother and sisters. I wonder how he copes with this.
In his journal, your brother describes a freezing, wet Ipswich February - the February of 1838. We know he discusses world affairs over pipes and ale and, skates slung over his shoulder, walks down to test the ice at Mill Pond, sometimes getting his feet wet. We know he eats partridge and gets his hair cut and stands on Waterloo Bridge to get a good view of the traffic passing up and down the river to Greenwich.
And I've no idea what was happening to you that February, no idea whether you were sick already and, if so, how sick. I don't know if you stayed in bed, coughing and gasping under your chilly sheets, or else were brought to lie on a couch in the drawing room. I don't know if you were well enough to sew frills on to sleeves and paint and draw and even venture down the icy church path to gather snowdrops.
But I hold this journal of Sam's in my hands right now and it makes my heart lurch to think that, sitting up after a smoke and a jug of ale to write it, he was almost certainly in the very room in Ipswich where, less than six months later, you would come to die.
I take a train west, on a boiling hot late-spring day, to visit a rehab centre that the addiction counsellor has told us is the best in the country for young people. Not the slickest or the most expensive, but the one with the highest success rate, simple as that.
Kids agree to go, thinking they're there for six weeks, she tells us. But they end up staying six months. That's why it works.
We are nowhere near getting our boy to agree to go anywhere. He is still, just as he always has been, absolutely in denial about the seriousness of his drug use. But it seems to me that we need to know about this place. His father and I talked to him last year about the possibility of rehab. But back then we had only the vaguest sense of what we were talking about. Now I want to have a clear and practical picture of it in my head so that, when the time comes, I can say: OK, here you are, this is where you're going.
The person who gets on that train on a sunny summer morning and goes there doesn't feel like me. The person who is shown around the clean, friendly, but shabby and no-nonsense house where our boy would live is not a mother. I don't know who she is, not really. She is a lost person, a person in waiting, a person who would really sympathise with the poor mother to whom this is all happening.
How must it feel, to need to send your child to a place like this.
But downstairs, lunch is cooking and it smells OK. Plastic beakers of weak orange squash are lined up on the counter. A placid young man is laying the table.
Everyone has jobs, says the warm young woman who shows me round. It's very important that everyone pulls their weight, everyone belongs.
Upstairs, the rooms are neat and warm but - she explains-possessions from home are not encouraged. No photographs from home. No personal stereos and so on. This place is all about a fresh start. Facing yourself without props, without the means to escape back into yourself Escaping the desire to self-medicate.