A good week

It’s six in the morning; I’ve been up since five. Guy doesn’t sleep well anymore. Most nights he wakes at around four, with a silent sigh, and gets up to read in the study next door, falling asleep again about an hour later. He’s been thinking the same early-morning thoughts for years, he tells me  – work, money and William, but not always in that order. He’s now sleeping again, and I can’t.

I’ve stopped worrying about Will, I’ve just realised. We’ve had a better week generally. Things are calmer. Last week, after moving into his new place, Will  was at our house most days. Normally, he’d ring first to say he needed some more clothes, and then come over and spend time in his old room, mainly using his computer, which is still in there due to lack of space in his new room.

He had come over one morning when I was due to attend an afternoon meeting in London: there has been interest in turning the Cannabis Diaries into a book, and I was going up to meet an agent. The Easter holidays had just started, and Jack and Alex were both at home. I suggested to William that he might like to play tennis with Alex again, and left them all in the house together, as I went off to catch a train. I got a phone call about an hour later, just as I was sitting in a Soho coffee shop, drinking latte, and thinking about the impending meeting. It was Will to say that Jack had thumped him several times, and then thrown both him and Alex out of the house.

‘I just wanted to say, that it wasn’t me this time. I didn’t hit him back, I promise. He pinned me up against the wall, the kitchen carpet has come up. I didn’t hit him, though, it wasn’t me – just so you know, okay?’ he was saying.

‘Is Alex alright?’ I sighed into the phone.  ‘Look after him won’t you. Why don’t you both just leave Jack now, and go up to the courts to play tennis? I’m going into the meeting now, I’ll phone you later’. I seemed to have stopped breathing.

I spoke to Jack later.

‘I can’t bear it’ he said. ‘He was bossing me about after you’d gone, being really arrogant and cocky. How dare he? He doesn’t live here anymore, and should be acting like a guest when he’s here. I told him this, right, and he said that it was more his house than it was mine, pulling that awful face the way he does, so I hit him, and I’m not sorry - he deserved it. Alex started sticking up for him, they ganged up on me, so I threw them both out’.

Fair enough, I thought. It’s been a long time coming. I told him there was never any excuse for physical violence though, and meant it.

The next day, Guy told me that Will had begun discarding clothes and leaving them on the bed in his room, when he was visiting, before going off again, usually leaving the computer on too. He wasn’t happy about this, he said. I remembered the tom-cat spraying he used to do here when he was supposedly living with us, but in reality would only visit once every few days to shower, change his clothes, get more money and then go again, leaving all of us feeling upset and used. I also thought that he should have been asking permission to use the internet, in his old room, seeing as he no longer lived with us. But Will’s rules of conduct have always been quite different from the rest of us here. And Jack was getting upset with Will being here, which needed to be recognised. He’s been so wonderful these past few years, not being able to be rebellious due to the fact that Will was doing enough for them both.

Walking into Will’s room, I picked up the jeans he’d been wearing when he arrived, that were now lying discarded on the bed, along with a hooded sweatshirt I didn’t recognize. This wasn’t unusual. Since Will was sixteen, and began living a peripatetic life, most of his clothes, and possessions, seemed to be elsewhere and a lot of the time he’d be wearing someone else’s things. Frowning now, I picked up the jeans and an empty baggy fell onto the bed. I had hoped never to see one of those things in the house again. I felt a wave of nausea and anger hit me, as the theme tune ‘After all we’ve been through’ began striking up its first notes.  Nothing makes me more angry than Will bringing drugs into the house (‘After all we’ve been through’ now had the added chorus ‘and he’s still doing it, how dare he’), even though the bag was empty. It was proof he was still smoking too, the idiot. He’d stopped going to his drugs counsellor, and to college – guess that smoking was his still his foremost career choice. Christ.

Almost running out of his room and down the stairs, I began rummaging around in the kitchen cupboards. I couldn’t find what I was looking for – black bin-liners. Grabbing the back-door keys off their hook on the dresser, I went out to the shed, knowing that there must be garden bags in there. Yes, there were some old ones screwed up in the trug. Good, they would do. It only took me a short time to pack up the rest of Will’s things. Guy asked me what I was doing. I knew he’d think that Will wouldn’t have enough room for all of his things in such a small room, and logically he was right, but this was for us not for Will.  I showed him the baggy, and the Rizla packet that I’d found under the bed. ‘Ah’ he said.   

Piling the bags into the car, a voice of my own came in to tell me that of course none of this would fit into his room, that I was going to make a cluttered  mess – what did I think I was doing? Getting him out of my hair, I replied. Everything had to go.

I gave Will the baggy and the Rizlas when I saw him, and told him never to bring those things into our house again.  Guy helped me unload the bags. ‘Decide what you want, and I can bag up those things you don’t need, and put them in the attic’ I said sharply, feeling better that all of his things were now with him and not with us.  Boundaries.

I knew that Jack would feel better too. Guy and I decided that Will should be told that he is not allowed here without either of us being in the house. It’s not fair on Jack. His opinion of Will has changed, since last week when he hit him.

‘You know the way I always used to stick up for Will? Well, I can see what you and Dad mean now. I just looked at him that day, and thought he was so out of order. If I’d been asked to leave, I wouldn’t dream of coming back here and throwing my weight around. He should be on his best behaviour, he doesn’t live here anymore, it’s not his house, but as soon as you’d gone he was speaking to me in that way of his. You know how he does. Oh, he’s so…….ugh. I’m glad I hit him. I don’t want to see him. I’m still angry with him. He gets everyone on his side, he draws Alex in. What is it about him? It’s the same with Grandma and aunt Martha – they think he’s wonderful no matter what he does, like he’s a king or something. It’s always been the same since we were little. He would get everything he wanted, and still does. Grandma really spoils him, buying him expensive trainers, and giving him hundreds of pounds. Alex and I are not seen as half as good as he is. He charms them, but not me’.

He was referring to Guy’s mother and sister, who have both had difficulty in seeing any wrong in Will, looking at us as his family for the answers to Will’s behaviour.  And Jack is right, Will does have a certain energy about him that is charming and seigniorial.  Curious.

Will rang the next day to apologise abut the baggy.

‘Sorry about that, I realise that all the good things I have in my life, are because of you’. He rather ruined it then, by asking if he was still going to get his money from us as usual this week.

I explained that he would, if he signed on for housing benefit.

He came to the house the next day to say he had done so. Asking for proof before I gave him money, he said that the letters were in his room. It was around eight o’clock in the evening by this time, and still warm out, so I decided to walk back with him to his house. I’d forgotten how quickly it becomes dark, though, and as we walked down the hill together dusk fell quickly.  I still feel nervous around William, but the ‘red alert’ feeling has almost gone, so my adrenalin levels are lower.  I usually start chatting ten to the dozen, as my dad would have said. 

I began telling him about Oz, Jack’s guitar teacher to whom I had been speaking that morning on the phone. He’d phoned Jack to tell him he wouldn’t be able to come over to teach him that week: his flatmate had hanged himself from the banister at the weekend. Jack had come into my room saying Oz was on the phone

‘I think he wants to speak to you, Mum. He’s choked up, nearly crying’ he said.

Oz told me what had happened, and sounded desperate. He said he just wanted to thank me for helping him the week before. He was talking about the conversation we’d had about women. He had been telling me that his girlfriend had dumped him; this has happened a lot to Oz. This woman had been twenty years younger. I found myself talking to him about what he really wanted from a relationship, telling him that he maybe needed to be really clear about that, really defining what he’d like, even writing down just what he was looking for. Crystal clear instructions to the universe.

Oz has been coming to teach Jack for two years or so, and is excellent. Jack is now really good, and music is a very big part of his life. Guy and I are usually sitting down to supper or to a glass of wine as the lesson finishes, and Oz sometimes joins us. He is a singer- songwriter and in a band who were recently signed to a well-known label and have a second album out now.  He is only a bit younger than us, but lives a very different life.

He wasn’t staying for a drink that day, and Guy had yet to return from work, but we chatted for a while. I remembered something a woman whom I’d met on a trip to Egypt had told me about attracting love into your life, she said that it had really worked for a friend of hers, and I told Oz about this now. He’s open to things like this, or seems to be anyway; maybe he simply humours me. But now, talking about the trauma of his friend dying so violently in the house they shared, he was saying that what I’d told him last week had really helped, not with finding love it would appear, but with coping with the trauma of the past few days.

That evening whilst we’d been talking, I’d sent Jack upstairs to get a piece of rose quartz and gave the stone to Oz, telling him that that in addition to writing down exactly what he wanted in a partner, he should programme the crystal by cleansing it, and then instruct it to help him.  He should then light a candle, place the stone and his list next to it and wait for love to enter his life.  Simple, apparently!

He looked happy, if not surprised, when Jack dropped the crystal in his hand. I explained what I knew about rose quartz – it was a wonderful crystal for opening the heart and bringing in love.  I looked down into Oz’s hand and saw that Jack had chosen one of three that I had bought to put in Will’s room, next to a picture of himself and me on a beach in Southwold, taken when William was eighteen months old. William is looking at the camera smiling, little legs outstretched on the sand, and I am tickling him. I’ve kept the photo and the crystals in the same place for months now: to bring the love back into our relationship. Not sure if it’s working or not, but the crystals were still there, only two of them now, one was off to work somewhere else.

I knew how powerful these crystals were. When I began bereavement counselling, my therapist had advised me to buy one and sleep with it under my pillow. She was careful how she talked to me about this sort of thing, saying ‘I don’t want to give you too much mumbo-jumbo’. I’d done as she advised, and know that doing so had really helped kick-start my own healing, to an extent that I would never have believed possible.

Oz was talking to me on the phone in a way that certainly touched my heart now.

‘I put the candle and the crystal together, like you said. I’ve kept a candle burning all the time since Joe died, and it’s really helped. I just wanted to say thank you. It’s funny how sometimes you meet people in life, just by chance, and they really help you’.

It’s not me, I wanted to say, I’m just a conduit for these ideas. Instead, I thanked him and told him to buy himself some black tourmaline to dispel negativity, it would help ground him too. I wished he’d been here, so I could give him a piece of mine. Funny how you just want to help, and be there for someone, even someone you don’t know very well. It’s natural to want to help, I suppose. I told Oz I knew about the effect of suicide, as my own father had died that way. He didn’t know, of course, and I didn’t go into detail, but maybe the connection helped.

I was telling Will about my chat with Oz, as we walked down to his house, leaving out the mention of crystals and hocus-pocus. Turning into Will’s road, I was startled by a man’s low whispers somewhere below us. Looking down to where cars were parked below the steps leading up to the housing estate, I saw a man’s face appear between the railings. A foreign accent, a wild-looking stare. What the..?

‘Oh, he’s some crack-head. Come on’ said Will.

‘Have you seen him before then?’ I asked, turning my head to see the man run up the steps towards us. Oh, god, so Will was right about this place, about getting mugged.

The man lurched at us, gabbling something I couldn’t catch, but Will calmly opened his door and we were inside.

‘You can’t come up, the place is a tip, you’d hate it. You wait here while I find it’, he was talking about the letter confirming he’d applied for housing benefit.

I looked out through the net-curtains, I could just make him out up the steps. He was dancing, his arms held high, and moaning loudly. I could see him picking up a long metal pole, and waving it about Oh, my god, I’m leaving my son here, this is awful.

Will came down again to say he couldn’t find any proof about the benefit. Guy and I had decided that we would tie in getting an allowance from us with him making the effort to apply for his rent to be paid, so that we weren’t in the same situation as we were last year, when we paid hundreds of pounds  in rent owing, and other debts outstanding. It had to be different this time.

‘Ok’ I said, not believing he’d applied and now here was the confirmation. ‘I can’t give you any money, then, until that’s done, but if you like I can pay for some groceries.’

‘Yeah, okay, you can’t walk out of here by yourself anyway’ he said.

So, he was going to make sure I was safe from that marauder, oh. But were we both safe, even together? It’s at times like these that I realise how protected I’ve been living where I do. Later, when I saw the police arrest him on the main road, I wondered why I hadn’t called the police myself, as if I believed that living ‘down here’ meant that you were prey to people like him, and you had to put up with it. Where did I pick that idea from?

We walked out of his house, and made our way down the steps. The man came bouncing over to us, telling us in faltering English that he was Polish and had been arrested for stealing something from a shop and now couldn’t get a job. Stealing, eh? Well, that’s something we know about. He’d ditched the pole, thanks god. Will was very calm and spoke to him gently, saying that we couldn’t give him anything, and that he should leave us alone.

Phew. We made it over the road to the supermarket, and went in. I thanked William for being so calm and helpful.

‘That’s okay, mum’.

The next day Will dropped round with the confirmation that housing benefit had been applied for. He said  he’d been up early and gone to the Job Centre, and then onto Charlton and Millwall football clubs to ask about work and training projects that they might be running.

‘I’ve had a really good day. I’ve found a free course starting in two weeks, it may lead to getting a qualification to do football training. There was a guy at Millwall who said it would be just the right thing for me, he told me to apply to the press office too. I told him how I had thought about being a sports journalist and he said to apply’.

We both sat down at the kitchen table and he passed me the leaflet about the course.

‘I know you probably won’t approve but….’

Wouldn’t approve? He did all this by himself. What I did say was a big well done, and gave him a hug. I remind myself that if you try to help a butterfly out of its cocoon, it dies, it has to do it itself. Maybe this particular butterfly is  now ready to emerge from its cocoon. I look at William, and I’m struck again by how beautiful his eyes are – light, yet bright, blue. It’s his eyes that are the first to give it away when he’s ‘blazing’, and I can tell that today there is a change. A good day.

© Debra Bell 2007