New Beginnings

New Beginnings

We helped Will move into a room in a shared house last weekend. Just down the hill from where we live in leafy suburbia, there are large areas of council properties that I’ve never really looked closely at before. The house is set in a development that was probably built in the late 70s, behind an old people’s home and opposite a grassed square, with a central cherry tree that is already in full bloom. Although it is just off the main Lewisham to Deptford road, it is quiet here. The house has a small, pretty garden at the back, the first thing that attracted me to the place. The grass has been recently mown, and the fencing is new. There is a small, perfect camellia bush in full flower and a table, chairs and barbecue out there too.

The landlord had told me, on the phone, that the other tenants are two young Thai women, and a more mature Polish woman who lives downstairs next to the kitchen, in what would once have been the lounge. When I rang Will to tell him about the place, initially, and mentioned he’d be sharing with three women he’d said ‘Well that’s no good, women hate me! Don’t put me off the place before I’ve even seen it.’ I wanted to laugh when he said this, which women hate him? That’s a new one. Guess he’s talking about me, I know he feels sore that I’m writing about him.

I had asked the landlord on the phone if the other tenants would have to approve Will before he moved in. He said that wasn’t the way things were run, and he was the one who found the new tenants. After he’d shown us around, I wanted to give the landlord a month’s deposit there and then: it was cheap, clean, although the kitchen smelt a little of trapped fried food fumes, but on the whole it was just fine, but Will wasn’t happy. As we left the place, he said he’d get mugged every time he went out. I looked around but could only see an elderly man and his plodding dog, slowly making their way down the steps to the main road. But, I’m not a nineteen year old; maybe it would be stressful to live here. So, I shrugged and said if he wanted to try and find somewhere else he could, trying to get the sulky sound out of my voice as I spoke.

We walked over to the supermarket. Will picked up a copy of Loot, saying he’d look for ads in there and I got a basket, putting a couple of things that I needed in it. As I was queuing to pay, Will asked me if he could get a drink. I said that he could buy it himself, he had money. He took offence at this, and left the store saying he’d see me later. As I watched him leave, with the newspaper in his hand, I realised that he hadn’t paid for it.

I didn’t have chance to discuss the place we’d looked at with Guy, until the next morning. When I described it, he said it sounded like the sort of accommodation we’d both been living in at university, when we too were nineteen. Yes, I thought, that’s about right. I’d been living in a purpose-built flat on campus. Each of the bedrooms were yale-locked and students shared the kitchen and bathroom. Will isn’t a student, but when I looked at it that way, it seemed an appropriate place for him to live. We were both in the study, Guy had been looking at his email as I came in to talk to him. As Guy was speaking I looked over at a newspaper cutting on top of one of my files – its title was ‘Lifeclass’. Yes, William ‘should’ be at university, but isn’t, which could be a cause of pain to both of us if we thought about it, which we’re not, because that way lies madness. But the message was there for me – he’s not a student at uni but maybe the curriculum, classes and teachers are there all the same, just in different guise.

Guy said it sounded ideal, and that we should grab it with both hands. I immediately picked up the phone to ask Will how he was getting on with finding somewhere.

‘I’ve got a couple of numbers, but I haven’t rung them yet. I’ve just been to the gym’, he said.

No sense of urgency, you could say. I felt weak, all this inaction is exhausting. I feel I’m revving up trying to help him move forward, and he’s slamming his foot on the brake each time. But, this is for us too. Bed and breakfast is expensive; rented rooms in shared houses seem to be about half the price.

I passed the phone over to Guy, who told Will that we were going to take the room. It was available immediately, and great value, he told him – so could he tell his landlady he’d be moving out by the end of the week? I listen to Guy talking. Good, he needs to be told like that. I’m so tired, and don’t seem able to strike the right note with Will. He seems to drain some of my life-force from me, and I feel depleted when I’m dealing with him.

The way Guy sees it is that the next step is to get housing benefit in place for Will, (he’s already receiving jobseeker’s allowance), so that then we can start to cut ties with him, and hand him over to himself to sort out. Will has been saying that he would get the relevant housing benefit forms to fill in, but still hasn’t. I get the feeling that he wants to keep us there for him, to keep the contact in place – a reason to see us.

I rang Will’s landlady to check that Will had told her he was moving out. He hadn’t told her, she said, and then came an embarrassing moment.

‘I saw you on the telly yesterday’, she said ‘I always watch LK Today in the mornings, when I’m feeding the baby. I hadn’t realised that’s what you were going through’.

Oh, god. I felt mean not having told her anything about William’s history. There was I talking on national television about Will’s stealing and appalling behaviour, and I’d calmly left him in her house, saying nothing to her about him. I started gabbling about moving Will out, anything other than to talk about our family. She listened, and said that was fine, then started to talk again about the GMTV piece.

‘I know about cannabis’ she said, ‘It breaks families, I should know both my brothers are cannabis addicts. Both started smoking when they were teenagers. One of them stole over seven grand off my mum, she’s been heartbroken, it’s nearly killed her. He’s living in a council flat by himself now, and no one in the family wants to talk to him anymore. He’s in his thirties. He had such a good job, and gave it all away, he can’t stick at anything. It’s been the same with my other brother too. He’s eighteen and a complete mess’.

I listened with a sense of unreality as she told me about her family. I’d been reading stories sent to me by email most of the day, and now here was another family story being told to me. I apologised for not having explained more about Will.

‘I never ask any questions, it’s fine. He’s been lovely, no problems at all’

Well, that was a relief.

Guy and I helped move Will’s stuff to the new place. One of the Thai women turned out to be a Thai male instead. He lives in the bedroom next door, and came out to welcome Will, in faltering English. He seemed fine, maybe he would dilute the hated female feelings Will had been worried about. Will has signed a lease for six months, as long as he doesn’t do anything crazy maybe we can all relax for a while.

We took him to the supermarket across the road (again) to buy groceries. As he pushed the trolley around the shop, I asked him how he felt about his new place. I think I must be programmed always to want my kids to be happy, here I go again, still anxious after everything Will’s done, to ensure he’s happy. What is that? If he weren’t happy, what would be wrong with that? I’ve spent a lot of my life being very unhappy, yet I’m still standing. It seems to be important to me, a primary role of mine – to ensure William’s happiness, even after everything that’s happened. Hang on - where is his responsibility in this, though, I begin thinking as I’m asking him now how he’s feeling.

He smiles and says he’s fine.

‘It’s closer to you too, so I feel it’s more controlled’ he said.

He was referring to the last time he’d moved away from home. This time last year we had offered to pay three months’ rent on a place, if he wanted to leave home. He’d hardly lived with us anyway, spending most of his times sleeping on other peoples’ floors. He would turn up when he’d run out of cash, or needed a bath and change of clothes, usually both. He would hardly speak to us, when he did he was verbally abusive. He smelt of that now very- familiar odour of weed – sweet yet with unpleasant sour notes. He actually sweated the smell through his pores. He was rude and aggressive to all of us, picking fights with his brothers. Alex was often in tears, a favourite insult of Will’s was to tell him he was fat. Jack seemed confused. He loved his older brother, and tried to lighten the ghastly atmosphere by being funny and trying to bring some peace to things, but Will was irritable and moody. I hardly recognised a thing about him.

He had always talked about ‘getting us off his back’ so he could be independent. When we talked about him getting a job to get his independence started, he said that he would find something himself. We asked him what ideas he had – we often said that maybe he should try the local supermarkets, possibly train to be a manager. He would always yell at us when we made this suggestion, saying that the staff were all retards in supermarkets, and he’d never work there.

We knew that Will was stealing from us, too, although the worst of that was yet to come. He had been kicked out of his school, and was unemployed. There are echoes of that situation again, but Will obviously feels different about things this time.

In January 06, Will had come into some money after turning eighteen. His grandmother had given him over £3,000, so we thought that with that money to fall back on, he could find somewhere away from home to live. We would pay the deposit and first quarter’s rent, by which time he would have found a job and he could take over from there. It didn’t work out that way at all. His girlfriend of the time said that she thought that one of the reasons Will wanted to live away from us was that he wanted to smoke as much ‘draw’ as possible, which is exactly what happened.

Within three days, he’d found a flat to live in – over in South West London, near to where most of his friends lived. Will had gone to school in central London, about an hour by bus from where he lived. Most of the friends he made at school did not live locally, so he moved closer to where the majority lived. The boy he moved in with had a father who did a lot of cocaine and cannabis, we found out later.

The day he moved out, I felt like he’d died. I left him at his flat, thinking that I hated the place and couldn’t understand why William would choose to live in such horrid surroundings when he could be with us. I cried all the way home, wondering if I’d ever get used to the way things had turned out. Guy had been abroad at the time, so I’d done the move by myself. When I got home I went into William’s room and sat on the bed, letting myself cry. I started to clean up, and moving the bed to hoover, found around fifty small ‘baggies’ that had once contained weed. We’d declared the house a drug-free zone years ago, and seeing evidence of the amount of weed he’d been doing helped me stop crying.

Last time he went he never found work, nor did he sign on for benefit. Every time I saw him he seemed dirtier, and stank of weed and tobacco. He gave up cleaning his teeth, it would appear, and one of his front teeth became dark brown in colour. After two months, I talked to him about how he was going to be able to take on the rent of the flat. He told me there was no problem with it, and that he was working in a video shop so he could make the rent.

There was no job. He stole jewellery from my room during his grandmother’s 80^th birthday party, which we were hosting, and pawned it. The next month’s rent was paid for with a forged a cheque of mine he must have taken at the same time. Cheques were also cashed on his girlfriend’s mother’s account. Chaos.

He came to us in June last year to say he wanted to come back home. We later found out that he was sleeping on the sofa at his flat – had had given his room to a friend who said he would pay the rent, but didn’t. We paid for this along with the outstanding bills and debts that William had built up, it amounted to thousands.

Looking at Will now, I know what he means about things being more controlled. He must have been very frightened too, living in such a mess, feeling completely out of control. He later told a psychiatrist that he always did everything ‘to the max’.

I’m feeling that possibly things will be simpler, now he’s settled somewhere, but a letter has come from his bank, though, saying that he is overdrawn. Guy and I are worried by this, but William says that they are scamming him, and he’ll sort it out. I offer to drive him down to the local branch. Asking for a print-out, the amount he owes now seems to stand at £275.00. I tell him to close the account immediately, and live off cash - that way he can’t get into trouble. I have withdrawn some cash to put into the account to close it, so that we can end this immediately. But he begins to tell the cashier that his account must have been debited by someone else, because the latest transactions aren’t his. He has his cash card on him, though, I say.

‘This must be someone who knows me’ he says’ These ATMs on here are all around college – I don’t know what’s going on here. I did lose my card on that bus, briefly, you remember?’

He reports the fraud, using the bank’s phone.

The next day, Guy and I talk to him about the fraud. Guy warns him not to take on a bank, because you’ll never win. Neither of us believe it is a fraud, and now are fearful that he’ll be prosecuted for false allegations, which may mean he’ll be unemployable. William is standing by what he’s said, someone must have copied his card and used it, he’s saying. I can’t believe I’m hearing this, and start to get very angry with him, saying that the first person they will look to for this is him.

‘Don’t you think they will think it a bit odd when the card was on you, and the places where money’s been drawn from are in the area where you go to school, not that you’ve been in for two weeks though, which is another thing that I don’t understand. You’ve always taken out small amounts, too, just like these transactions are. The same pattern’. I can feel a tight metal band appear from nowhere, wrapping itself around my head.

I calm down later after sitting in Tesco’s underground car park for an hour, trying to get out of the car to buy some groceries, immobilised by anger and upset. I needed to write but nothing to write on. Reaching over to open the glove compartment I find a notebook I’d forgotten I’d put there. That’s lucky. I begin to write, and find my way back home to myself, and my heart, which seems to hold what I need to get out of the car. It feels like compassion.

As I make my way up the stairs to the store and step out into the sunshine, I find myself pushing the Search button for William’s number on my phone.

He picks up.

‘You know I’m really worried about you.’ I say.

‘You mustn’t worry, you get really angry and that’s not good, you know. You’ve no need to worry. You’ll see over the next few months, I’ll get myself together now. You just have to trust me.’ he says.

‘I’m worried you’re not safe, William, I can’t trust you’re not going to do something crazy again.’

‘Yeah, I know what you mean, but I’m not.’

‘I just want you to say grounded, Will’

‘Yeah, that’s the word – grounded, yeah I need that, that’s right. I know.’ He was smiling, I could hear it.

I start to tell him that all I’ve ever wanted was a normal life, how I’ve never felt the same as other people, never having found anyone who had had the same life experiences. No one I knew had lost both their parents so early on, and could understand how alone I’d felt since I was twelve, and my mother died. I had always felt that, because I had never found anyone whose story matched mine, that I must be peculiar, and that it must be my fault otherwise none of it would have happened. I had wanted a normal life, I continued, and now all this stuff with him had been going on for so long. Will said it all depended on your idea of ‘normal’.

‘You need to define normality’ he said ‘I’ve never felt remotely normal, but it’s not something I want to talk about on a train.’

Oh, he was on a train, I’d envisaged him in his room.

I began to say that what was happening with the web-site, how many people had been moved by our story, was not ‘normal’ either, but was something wonderful, despite its sadness. I don’t know whether he caught the last bit because the phone cut off then, but in spite of that it had been a helpful conversation. I felt we’d been able to reconnect on a new level, for a while at least.