Blood Family Read online

  I waved one at him once. ‘Steady on, Nicholas, or you’ll end up leaving home too.’

  He blushed. And after that he got a grip. But that’s a little how things were for quite a while. I felt as if I was the only one in the house who could believe that Eddie might be all right. I know that they were worried sick he might be dead.

  Until that postcard came to Ivy House. The manager herself rang. I was the one who picked up the phone. She must have thought I was Natasha because she started, ‘It’s about your son—’

  I whispered, ‘Eddie?’

  ‘The boy that’s missing.’

  Natasha had already snatched the phone from me. I watched the blood drain from her face. But then she said, ‘A postcard?’

  And both of us burst into tears.

  Eddie

  I think my brain must have turned into Stupid Soup. Instead of going home, or even waiting to be found, I pushed off further north. I’m pretty sure it was because by then with me life was a simple choice. Drinking or thinking. And I couldn’t bear to think – about how frantic they must be, and how they’d tried so hard to offer me a brand-new life and I’d as good as thrown it back in their faces.

  So I kept drinking. And left town. I knew from others that the easiest train to catch without a ticket was the Football Special, running north. It was so crowded with drunks that half the time the staff stayed out of sight. I meant to leave the train at Newcastle, but I slept through and found myself tipped out in Glasgow in the early hours.

  Don’t ask me where the weeks went. They’re a blank. I have a few clear memories. Some girl with a messy blue tattoo across her cheek dragging me into a clinic where someone bright and clean informed me that I’d let my big toe get in such a mess I could have died from septicaemia. I can remember crying when I peed my pants. I can remember stealing a blind woman’s purse, and kicking the shins of some small kid who was refusing to hand over his chips.

  I don’t want to remember any more. All that is bad enough.

  Then, finally – finally – my whole life changed.

  Nicholas

  I suppose hospitals don’t sleep. We got the call at five minutes after midnight.

  I don’t believe I’ve ever thrown my clothes on so fast in my life.

  Eddie

  I doubt if I’d have been so lucky if I’d still been in the squat. I would have just been stepped around, like Charlie after he overdosed and no one realized till Stomper finally leaned over the unmoving body and muttered, ‘Hey-up, mates! I reckon poor old Charlie here’s been given the red card.’

  But we had just been rooted out of the cellar of some leprous tenement. The other three must have been in a slightly better state than I was when the police moved us on because they were some way ahead when I collapsed in the street.

  The paramedics dumped me off in A & E. I had my stomach pumped and then the nurses left me in a corridor to sleep it off, but I must still have been drunk because, checking to see if any of the bottles in my backpack had vanished during the time that I was out of things, I leaned too far over the safety bars and fell off the trolley.

  It seems I made it down the corridor as far as some bright white examination room, went in and then passed out, slumped up against the door. I must have been there quite a while because the nurses had assumed I’d done a runner from the hospital while no one was watching. (Not that they would have cared. It was a Friday night. The place was humming.)

  Then I came round.

  Staring at me from across the room, I saw Bryce Harris. Really. We had a conversation. I remember it. ‘Well, look at you!’ he jeered. ‘You’re worse than me. At least I always managed to stay on my feet.’

  ‘You keep away from me!’

  ‘I wouldn’t touch you with a bargepole, toe-rag! You stink! You’re drunk! You’re stupid!’ That threatening leer that I remembered so well twisted into a grin before he added, ‘And you’re just like me.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Oh, yes. Blood family, we are!’

  Now I was weeping. ‘No!’

  ‘We are,’ he told me, almost confidingly. ‘You’ve gone right down my path. I am inside you now. Yes, toe-rag. You have the Beast living with you every day.’ He licked his lips as if I were some tasty pie he was about to reach for and stuff down his throat. ‘You won’t be rid of me now, you little runt. Not ever. No.’

  That’s when I started to scream. That’s when some burly hospital porter shoved at the door and sent me skidding over the polished tiles. That’s when the nurses followed him and pulled me upright, and I saw that, facing me, was no Bryce Harris at all.

  Simply a mirror.

  That is what did it, I think. I didn’t want to look like him. I didn’t want to be like him. And I was in a place where I could make at least one tiny choice.

  I told them who I was.

  I gave my real address. I told them they could phone Natasha and Nicholas. And one of the nurses told me afterwards that I asked them to lock me up so I couldn’t change my mind.

  They wouldn’t do that, but they kept the strictest eye on me. One of the doctors wanted to throw me out. ‘He’s fit to go – well, as fit as he’ll ever be.’ But someone else did me the favour of losing my paperwork all night, over and over, so I still hadn’t been discharged when Nicholas arrived.

  ‘My Christ!’ were his first words. ‘What have you done?’

  He meant ‘done to yourself’. But still I couldn’t help but see that child’s shocked face when I reached out to snatch those chips. I swear he clung to the package out of sheer panic. If I had given the boy even a moment to think, he would have handed them over. I didn’t have to raise my foot like that. And I’d forgotten that, before we phoned the cops about poor Charlie and scarpered, I’d swapped my worn-out shoes for his thick boots.

  And they had studs.

  Oh, God! The blood on that child’s leg! It streamed down. But I just took off and scoffed the chips.

  Now, simply remembering set me off crying again. ‘Sorry,’ I said to Nicholas. ‘I’m sorry. Sorry about everything.’

  ‘You’re coming home with me?’

  I held my arms out like a tiny child. ‘Please, Nicholas. Oh, please.’

  V

  Eddie

  It wasn’t easy. But it wasn’t the worst. One of the doctors at the unit told me that she thought the hardest drug to give up was plain nicotine.

  After that, booze. ‘And that can be dangerous, even with supervision, if you’re too far down the road.’ She frowned at the blood-pressure strap she’d wrapped round my arm. ‘I wouldn’t want to come off methadone, either, to be honest. That can be really nasty, and take a horribly long time.’ She broke off, humming, while the stethoscope was in her ears, then added cheerfully as she peeled off the strap. ‘The easiest one to come off has to be heroin. Almost a doddle. Cold turkey is no worse than going through a really rough bout of flu. And afterwards it’s easier to keep off the habit.’

  The unit cost the earth. ‘Put it this way,’ said Nicholas. ‘We could have bought a Porsche instead.’

  Natasha, for once, was gentler. ‘Don’t fret about it, Edward. We spent a fortune sending Alice to that school to save her going off the rails. No reason why you shouldn’t cost as much, getting yourself back on them.’

  I didn’t see Alice for a while. The unit wouldn’t let you have visitors around your own age in case they brought in drugs. It was just parents and such. They let in Linda and Alan, who brought me tons of chocolate. ‘Natasha said you were rail thin.’

  ‘I’m getting fatter. They make us help in the kitchen.’

  ‘Keeping you busy, are they?’

  I nodded.

  Linda put on the old worried look. ‘So, is it hard?’

  I must have nodded again because I do remember she reached out to pat my hand. ‘Alan and I, we felt so guilty. That day you just showed up – we knew that you were in a state. Anyone would have seen it. But we just thought it might be a one-off – you k
now, ploughing through exams or having some blazing row best left to cool on its own. We wondered if we ought to phone Natasha. But, you know. Meddling . . .’

  I tried to comfort her. ‘It doesn’t matter. I wasn’t ready anyway.’

  She’d spent enough time around therapists to recognize the phrase. It sent her up another track. ‘So, are they good here?’

  I shrugged. ‘Don’t know. Nicholas says it costs the earth, so I suppose they are.’

  ‘Or ought to be!’ She laughed, and we went on to talk of other things. But then they realized I was getting tense and restless, so they left. I went through to the telly room to waste a couple of hours before my next session. Tiffany was alone there, picking at her multi-coloured nails. The staff would never let us talk about what we’d been on. We were supposed to be ‘leaving behind the person we used to be’, and ‘getting a new life in which drugs have no place at all. In fact, they’re of zero interest’. We weren’t encouraged even to guess what anyone else had been hooked on, though it was mostly obvious.

  So far as I could work it out, Tiffany was the only one who’d been on the bottle like me.

  ‘Doing all right?’ I asked.

  She pointed to the screen. ‘It’s crap. You can change over if you want.’

  I cruised through some stations, then back to what she’d been watching when I came in. If we were bugged, we were bugged. Too bad. I wanted to talk.

  ‘Tiff,’ I said, ‘how do you stop yourself thinking about it?’

  She didn’t need to ask me what I meant. ‘I count to ten,’ she said. ‘And then I think about my primary school playground and spinning around on the witch’s hat, and how I had no problem being happy back then, without it.’

  ‘Does that work?’

  ‘No.’

  We watched some stupid bloke drive some mad vehicle over desert sands, and then she said, ‘What about you?’

  I wondered whether to tell her. But then I thought, Why not? ‘I sing myself a song.’

  ‘That’s good,’ she said. ‘Any old song?’

  ‘No. Always the same one.’

  She reached for the remote and turned the sound off. Then she turned to me. ‘Well, go on. Sing it.’

  I wouldn’t have, except she smiled – the saddest smile, as if she’d snatch at anything that might help. So off I went, through Mr Perkins’s song about winning through because you’re strong and brave inside, and really really want to.

  ‘Sing it again,’ she told me as soon as I finished.

  ‘Not if you’re going to laugh.’

  ‘I’m not going to laugh.’ She made a liar of herself by laughing. ‘Well, obviously I am,’ she said. ‘But if it works, I’m going to learn it. It probably works a whole lot better than counting to ten.’

  ‘It doesn’t,’ I admitted.

  ‘I don’t care. I want to learn it anyway.’

  So we sang it together till she had it right. And we got louder and louder. A couple of the others came in and watched us. Tod even sang along. (It turned out he had passed his Grade 8 oboe exam and was a musical ace before he got in trouble.)

  Then we linked arms and sang it as a trio in the dining room while that night’s kitchen helpers wheeled in the supper:

  ‘Some things seem very hard to do

  You think you won’t be able

  To get them right

  But then you do

  And you win through

  Because you’re strong and brave inside.

  But most of all, of course, because

  You want to, want to

  Because you’re strong and brave inside

  And really, really want to.’

  The staff all cheered. (They’d have cheered anything that sounded positive.) Most of the others in the room just seemed to put up with us. They stared morosely at their cutlery. The song wasn’t working for them.

  I don’t know if it worked for Tiff either. But she and I did sing it now and again over the next couple of weeks, and we became good friends. Tod too was much more friendly after that, and when the staff were out of earshot we swapped horror stories, and felt less alone.

  Harriet Roberts, Psychotherapist

  Some of these kids are really smart. (And if their parents can afford to send them here, they’ve probably had the best start.) We have some interesting discussions.

  Take Eddie, for example. He had a hard time with ‘sorry’.

  ‘Oh, I can say it easily enough. And everyone is kind and acts as if the problem’s smoothed over, everything’s fine, we can all start afresh.’ He stared at his gnawed nails. ‘But that’s not how things are, is it? I mean, there’s this black patch of what you’ve done that sits behind you in their minds and in your own. And “sorry” can’t fix that.’

  ‘You feel it wears you down?’

  ‘I feel I’m stuck with it.’

  ‘Nobody’s perfect,’ I reminded him. ‘And nor is life. It works more like a book – some pages sad, some far more cheery. And you never know what’s coming next.’

  ‘Until “The End”,’ he told me gloomily.

  I smiled at him. ‘Oh, come on, Eddie. Hopefully not too soon!’

  Eddie

  One morning Nicholas showed up earlier than usual. They wouldn’t let me out of Group before the end, so by the time I joined him in the lounge, he had been kicking his heels for half an hour.

  He came straight to the point. ‘I want to tell you something. Don’t say a word to Natasha if she rings, but I am whipping her off to Spain this Friday for a surprise holiday.’

  Natasha hates surprises. ‘You won’t be popular,’ I said, ‘if she’s got stuff to do.’

  He laughed. ‘I’ve fixed all that. I’ve been conspiring with the people in her office. They’ve filled her calendar with one or two spoof dates, and say that they can cover everything else themselves.’

  ‘Clever.’

  ‘Anyhow,’ he said, ‘it means we won’t be coming for ten days. I’m sorry about that. But up till now, Natasha’s been refusing to go anywhere.’

  I thought I knew why that was – in case the police rang to say I was dead while she was sunning herself on some lush beach.

  ‘I’ll manage.’ That sounded sour, so I made a joke of it. ‘I’ll borrow someone else’s mum and dad.’

  He gave me such a grateful smile. I realized that it had been years since I’d referred to them as ‘Mum and Dad’. Alice kept using their first names after adoption, and probably feeling wary of the very word ‘mum’, I’d picked the habit up.

  ‘Alice will visit,’ Nicholas said. ‘She’s back from Bristol tomorrow.’

  The place they kept us couldn’t have been further in the sticks. ‘She’ll never get here,’ I warned. ‘Tod’s uncle took three hours to get here on buses.’

  ‘But Alice drives.’

  That came as news. I hadn’t thought what might be happening while I was gone.

  ‘But they won’t let her in without an adult. They don’t trust anybody under twenty-five. It’s in the thing you and Natasha signed.’

  ‘Alice will think of something.’

  Alice did. She brought my mum. She didn’t spring it on me – not entirely. She rushed ahead to poke her head round the door of the room I shared with Jean-Pierre. ‘Surprise coming up,’ she warned. ‘I did phone Linda and Alan, but Alan’s on bed rest after some hernia thing, so I didn’t like to ask.’

  ‘So who—’

  But Alice had already opened the door a little wider so I could see my mother wandering down the passageway, staring about as if she’d never seen a long pink wall before. Alice ushered her in and settled her on the bed till Jean-Pierre took Alice’s blunt hint, prised himself out of the only comfortable chair and left the room.

  ‘Bit of a sourpuss, that one,’ Alice remarked.

  ‘He’s French,’ I said.

  We had a laugh about that. My mum joined in, though she had not the least idea what we were talking about. Alice went off to make some tea for all
of us in the shared galley kitchen. And I was left alone with Lucy.

  I thought I ought to say something, but I had no idea whether or not she even knew I’d disappeared for months on end. ‘How’s things with you?’ I asked.

  She nodded, smiling. ‘We brought cake. Alice says that it’s lemon.’

  I had a sudden memory of Great-Granny Dinah in the home Rob took me to when I was young. She had gone on about cake. In Group, the leader had discussed the sort of damage drugs did to our brains. ‘Excess of alcohol,’ he’d said, ‘has pretty much the same effect as being punched in the head. A boxer’s brains look like the brains of an old man.’

  My mother had taken punches and I’d taken drink. She’d reached the stage where she could not walk out. I’d reached the stage where I couldn’t leave an inch of drink in a bottle. Apart from the fact that Lucy already had the brain of an old lady, what was the difference between us?

  It was a miserable thought. But I really didn’t want Alice to come back and find us sitting like two stones. So, ‘Lucy,’ I said, ‘did anybody tell you I’d run away?’

  She smiled at me. ‘Eddie!’

  Lord knows what that meant.

  ‘Well, I did,’ I said. ‘I ran away, but now I’m back. And I’ll be out of here in a few weeks. And then I’ll come and see you at your place.’

  She nodded brightly. ‘We’ve been painted pink.’

  I pointed. ‘Pink like the corridor out there?’

  She didn’t know what I was talking about. But when Alice came back with the tea tray, Lucy and I were at least exchanging words. It wasn’t talking really. We were just reeling off our favourite colours. Lucy had several, and I was making all mine up.

  At least it was a start.

  I got to talk to Alice alone while I was showing the two of them around the gardens just before they left. ‘How did they take it?’ I asked. ‘No messing. The grim truth.’

  She made a face. ‘How do you think? Nicholas was destroyed and Natasha was livid. She tried to hide it, but she couldn’t. You could tell that she thought they’d offered you this stable, happy family, better than anything you’d ever had, and you had chucked the whole lot in her face.’