The Lost Child (7 page)

We both agree that I must find another meeting, a different venue and on a different night. I make a note in my diary to do it. And do nothing about it.

He comes back from his second meeting looking upset.

Are you sure it's helpful? I say. You don't have to go, you know. Should you do it if it makes you feel worse?

He shakes his head and something about the look in his eyes makes me feel very far away from him. He's been where I haven't been. He tells me he's sure it's the right thing.

Just listening to the other people's stories, he says. I don't know why but it helps. It's hard to explain what it's like. You really must put aside some time to find a meeting and go.

I tell him I will, and I do manage to find one up in north London but, when the evening comes around, I decide I have a headache and I mow the lawn instead.

I still remember the length of time that he's away from us (not ever actually on the streets but sofa-surfing, sleeping on the various floors of various friends) as a long, bleak period of dark and frightening winter months. But in fact it's only a couple of weeks. All right, maybe three.

Three frightening weeks. I can't do it.

All day I pace the house, unable to concentrate. Every night I surprise myself by somehow managing to fall into sleep, his cat hunched against my legs. Every morning there are balled-up tissues all over the floor on my side of the bed.

Things keep on coming back. Things I haven't thought about in years. Pulling a vest over his fidgety blond head. A white vest with cap sleeves. How it felt to do up the poppers on his Babygro, his wriggling body warm inside, the bulk of his nappy getting in the way. Kissing his three-year-old fingers and toes till he laughed so hard he kicked me in the stomach. Staying up late to make him a
Power Rangers
cape. Letting him come into bed and watch a film with me because he couldn't sleep. Trying to explain the grown-up plot in six-year-old's language. Snuggling up, the biscuity smell of his hair. Serious, tearful conversations about God and death and bad things happening to animals.

His father and I make an effort to go on as normal, we try to work. But again and again, drifting around the house, we'll find ourselves grinding to a halt at the same time and in the exact same spot, and then that's it. The day is over. We're lost.

Long sad hours of talking about him, hours of sitting and going over and over it. What to do, what might be the best way to help him. Why we mustn't ask him back, why we must. What sort of expert help we should seek. Whether or not it's right to tell his grandparents. What exactly to say to his teachers. Which of our close friends it's acceptable to bore with this. Because we know that this is the truth - that we've turned into dull, onetrack people. People who've forgotten how to have a good time. People who just aren't very good company any more.

The friend in Manhattan who paid for us to talk to the psychiatrist also sent us a box of American books about coping with cannabis addiction. Tough Love. I read them in one quick sad burst and for a few days they did seem to give me a kind of strength. The stories were so depressingly - reassuringly? - similar to ours, the symptoms so clear, the cure so clean and brutal, so obvious.

The books described a method known as
intervention.
You get a whole crowd of people, relatives or friends who really care about your child, people who have been a part of his life, to tell him he needs to go to rehab.

But it has to be a surprise. So the addict is either lured somewhere - a hotel room, somewhere he can't easily get away from - on some false pretext, only to find all these people there waiting for him. Or else may be they burst into his bedroom, wake him up at dawn. And he - blinking and baffied by sleep, presumably? -lies there and listens while they read out letters that they've written. Passionate, upsetting letters that tell him how much they care for him but also tell him the truth: that, unless he goes to rehab, they don't know how to be a part of his life any more. Unless he goes to rehab, they don't want him around them. They won't see him any more.

If he agrees to go, then great: the car is waiting. The plane ticket. His bag is packed. It's very important he goes immediately, before he can be distracted or change his mind.

But if he refuses, then that's it. He's out and the door is closed to him. And hopefully, that soon sends him to rock bottom, which is where he has to go, that place of no hope. He has to bottom out. You have to lose your child to that terrible, no-hope place, in order to find him again. Hopefully.

That's the idea anyway and, while I was reading the books, I thought I could almost imagine finding the strength to do this.

This really could be the answer! I said, turning, elated, to his father, and I explained what this thing called intervention was, and we discussed which friends and members of the family we might be able to line up: his grandmothers and his grandpa, his uncle and aunt, his lovely old primary-school teacher?

He'd just tell them all to fuck off, his father pointed out.

No, that's the point. He wouldn't be allowed to. It would just be too powerful - seeing them all there.

His father looked at me, unconvinced, but I think I really did believe this for a moment. But then, as soon as I closed the book, all conviction and energy seemed to drop away and all I could think of were the poppers on his Babygro, the way he'd shriek when I kissed his tummy, the tender way he used to talk to his cat.

I told his father he should read the books anyway, just in case. And he said he would, he promised he would, even though we both knew he wouldn't. And how could I blame him? I'd said I'd go to Families Anonymous and I hadn't. The broken-hearted can't make themselves do anything.

All right, for a quick few moments, we do pretend to weigh up the pros and cons: What exactly are we doing? Is this really right? We have two other children to protect, remember.

But then again, they miss him. We know they do. It's just not natural to live without your brother. It's too unnerving, surely, to know that he's out there somewhere, adrift and alone, moving from sofa to sofa?

And although it's true that we all felt relief when he went, it's been too long now, too painful. It feels right to try and put the family back together. This is what we tell ourselves.

If we can just draw up a set of conditions, his father says brightly, already excited at the prospect of living with his boy again, If we could just manage to negotiate something that he could try and adhere to -

I tell him I agree, that would be good. But in fact I'm barely listening. It's too late, I'm gone, I want my boy. Love shoots through my veins. I want the mummy-fix of seeing him fast asleep, safe and warm in his own bed.

Help with what?

Your addiction to cannabis. We know an awful lot more about it than we did a few months ago. There are people you can talk to - people we can take you to see.

As usual he laughs loudly.

You guys. I can't believe it. You're just cracked.

OK, may be addiction's too strong a word. But we think you're smoking far too much.

What's too much?

I take a breath.

We think you're smoking pretty much all the time.

He rolls his eyes but he does not look at me.

Fuck's sake, Mum, I'm smoking when I want to smoke. Now and then I do a bit more than I want to, yes, sure, who doesn't?

But then I pull back.

So when did you last smoke a joint?

None of your fucking business!

Have you smoked one today?

I told you, it's none of your business. But I don't have one every day. Last week, for instance, I didn't smoke for three days.

Three days? I say, looking at his pale, pale face. You think that's a long time?

He shrugs.

It means I can stop whenever I want to.

But darling, three days is nothing. You need to try and stop for three weeks at least - three months may be. Three days proves nothing. In fact, to be honest, it just makes me feel even more certain that you're addicted.

Now he looks at me with real anger.

I'm not sure I can live here with you guys if you keep on treating me like some fucking junkie. It's quite insulting, you know.

I'm sorry, I say, but I'm not always going to be able to say what you want to hear.

It would be nice if you could learn to mind your own fucking business.

I give him a long look.

Well, let's just see how it goes, shall we? I say.

When we take him back, we do it because we hope that, with love and patience and understanding, we can get through this.

You'll get him back, well-meaning friends have told us again and again, you'll see. It'll be all right in the end. We're not just saying it. We know it will.

But it's not true. They are - just saying that. They don't know. No one knows.

Soon, he is keeping everyone awake by coming home at 2 a.m., making cheese on toast, watching
South Park
DVDs, playing the guitar till four or five in the morning. Sometimes, coming home late, high and wired, he fries eggs and leaves the gas ring on. Or else wakes his brother up for a chat.

Please, darling, I beg you not to wake your brother up on a school night!

What the fuck're you on about? What's it to you? I swear he doesn't mind.

He tells you he doesn't mind. But look at him, he's shattered.

But I needed someone to talk to. Seriously, what else was I supposed to do?

His brother and sister stagger around, tired and bad-tempered. Both go off to school looking like they've been punched in the eyes.

Meanwhile he sleeps in. Despite being woken by me and offered breakfast each morning, he hardly ever gets to school on time and sometimes doesn't make it in at all. He skips school and sleeps in, his cat hunched on his shoulder, a satisfied, protective look on her face.

He starts almost every day with a roll-up, smoked in the garden with his coffee.

What is it he's smoking, his father asks me as he glances out of the kitchen window. Is it just tobacco?

I think so, I say. I smelt it just now. It's not cannabis.

And a part of me thinks how it's quite funny really - his father and I have never smoked cigarettes in our lives, and I never dreamt the day would come when we'd both be openly, innocently relieved that our baby was inhaling tobacco smoke.

He sits outside in the sun and smokes and writes poetry in a red leather-bound journal.

Where did you get that book? I ask him, because it looks expensive and we know he has no money.

He smiles. His eyes are as frank and blue as when he was five years old. He hesitates a moment.

I helped myself to it, didn't I? he says.

You mean you stole it?

He shrugs. Call it that if you like.

That's the only thing I can possibly call it.

He shrugs, carries on writing.

Do you mind? he says. You're disturbing me. I really need to get on with my work.

Sometimes we try to talk to him.

We can't live like this, we tell him.

What do you mean? Like what?

You're disrupting family life. Making life impossible for all of us.

Oh yeah? So what're you gonna do? Kick me out again?

You know that's the very last thing we want to do, we tell him.

He says he wants money. He needs money. He says that if he just had some money, everything would be all right. He'd feel more relaxed and he'd be able to behave. So we try to draw up a contract.

We'll give you a generous allowance (so you don't have to steal) and total freedom at weekends to do what you want, stay out all night if you like. In return, you stay at home in the week, eat supper with the family, do some studying, don't wake your brother and sister, get to bed on time.

He tells us these conditions are cracked, warped, insane. He calls us cunts. He says our standards are ludicrous, restrictive, monomaniacal, middle-aged and middle class.

We plead guilty to the last bit.

All we want, we tell him, is for you to be able to fulfil your potential.

He laughs. He says it's up to us. If we don't give him money, he'll take it anyway. He'll help himself. And by the way, it's no good our putting locks on our study doors. Because he'll just kick them down anyway. A few cheap little locks aren't going to stop him.

Please don't make threats like that, his father says.

But a few days later he does exactly that. Takes a running leap with his foot up the way he's seen them do in the movies. Our nice Victorian bedroom door is broken, a jagged fist of splinters sticking right out. I pull the lock out of the wood and lay it carefully on the windowsill. Then I go on making the bed.

Everyone in the house is exhausted now. Everyone is having trouble getting up in the morning.

We sit in a little room in the art block, sunshine pouring in.

Please, we tell his warm, open-faced young tutor, be as tough with him as you like. We'll support you all the way. He needs to know that the rules still apply, that he isn't special, that he can't get away with this kind of behaviour.

She and her colleague hesitate, glance at each other. They speak very carefully, clearly anxious to handle this matter as sensitively and appropriately as possible. They say they do know there have been some problems at home of late. They know, for instance, that he was out of the house for a while. That must have been very traumatic for him. They hear what we are saying, but at the same time they know we'll understand that they want to be as supportive as they possibly can.