Snakes and Ladders

This diary entry is very late; I haven’t known quite where to start and I’ve also been very busy trying to keep everything going here - including myself.  I suppose the first thing to say is that our youngest son Alex, 13, has been upset at school, breaking down in tears twice now. I was called in to talk to the two Lower School heads last week, who wanted to know more of what was happening at home. Alex had told them something of the problems we have had over the past years. They were surprisingly sympathetic After I had stopped talking, I looked over at one of the men and looked away again quickly after noticing tears in his eyes. Both of them remembered William, and asked if he had begun smoking cannabis at their school, and where I thought that he had first obtained it. They seemed ready to admit that it was a problem for all schools and that it needed careful attention. I took the opportunity to tell them what I was doing to help raise awareness of skunk and smoking in childhood years. I was pleased to see that both of them seemed up to speed with the damage that it can do. They were also very supportive of Alex, wanting to help and asking me what I thought they could do.

The week before, Alex had explained that he felt he may turn out like William. He was sitting in the kitchen, still in school uniform, telling me that he had been crying that day at school. Looking at him as he spoke, I found it hard to empathise at first, wondering why he should be thinking this way. I don’t think he and Will are alike in any way, so what was going on here?

‘I’m about the same age as he was when it all began, or near enough – I’ll be in year 9 next year which is around the time……. I go to the same school, he’s my brother and some teachers have said how alike we are. What if I start to become like him, and begin stealing and going crazy.’

Turning to put the kettle on, and asking him if he’d like a cuppa, Alex went on to say that he just needed to talk.

I made tea, and sat down at the kitchen table opposite him. He was looking down at his hands, explaining how awful it felt to be thinking these thoughts.  Alex, my sweet boy.

Part of the picture here is that William had come to the door the week before saying he had nothing to eat, and this had upset Alex more than I’d thought. We have not been giving him cash, only supermarket gift vouchers. I had seen him earlier in the day and said I would buy him another voucher; he had said he had no food in his fridge. Later on at home, I had begun to feel unwell, so drained, my head aching; I’d decided that it would have to wait until the next day. I didn’t want to get back in the car to drive to the supermarket. We had told Will that he must not come to the house without being invited, but he had done so twice before – once when Alex was in the house alone, and he did so again this time. Jack opened the door to him and told him that I wasn’t well and that he should go.

I could hear William crying saying that we were abandoning him, pushing past Jack and refusing to go when asked, saying that he needed food. He sat on the front step as Jack closed the front door, refusing to move. Sighing, and saying that we needed to sort this out, Jack grabbed a plastic bag and began filling it from the fridge. Will went then. It was later that week that Will sent me a text saying goodbye forever, and two days later, said that he needed to talk to us. He later told us that he was determined to give up cannabis, saying it was ruining his life.  I told both the boys, after the last incident, that I would talk again to Will about coming to the house uninvited, and this would not happen again, I would make sure of that.

The good news is that after this episode that had clearly upset Alex so much, William seemed motivated to stop smoking and to get a job, which he did. It was Friday morning two weeks ago, I was getting ready to go up to Herefordshire for the weekend with my sister to see my brother and his partner, when William rang me to say he’d got a full-time job in a pub in St James’s.  He was so excited he could hardly speak. I told him to slow down and tell me the details. It had to be true, he sounded so genuinely euphoric.

I told him that he had done this by himself, and how wonderful that was.

‘Yeah, well I did -  but I couldn’t have done it without you in the background helping me, though. I knew I could do it, someone’s said ‘yes’ after all the interviews I’ve been for. I can get off benefits now. Yes! I’ve done it. I can start again now and put everything behind me. Yes! Oh, I just feel so amazing.’

I looked around the hallway as I listened to him talk, coats and shoes lying expectantly, waiting to be chosen for packing. I breathed slowly and deeply and said a silent ‘thank you’ to a universe that had become such an  inflexible teacher. Here was a reward for his working hard to get a job. He had still to find somewhere to live, though. The day he got his job, that day, was also the day he had been told to vacate his room. I talked to him about this, and he said he’d found a room in a house in Blackheath village, about ten minutes’ away from where we are. Apparently, he had told his present landlord that he would move out in the early part of the next week, a few days after his eviction notice, and that the landlord was cool with that. There was no problem, he said. I was unsure how the timing would work out, but decided to trust it all, because Will seemed very relaxed.

Will began working the following Monday. His landlord rang me that evening to say that he had cleared out Will’s room and had his things –  they were in the back of the car and could he bring them over? ‘Oh, I suppose so’ I began saying. As the car drew up ten minutes later, the landlord beginning to carry several black bin-liners of clothes and books to our door, I wondered where Will was going to sleep that night. I rang him. He was at work, saying he couldn’t understand why his stuff had been taken from his room, he had nowhere to sleep now.

Alex had had another outburst at school. We had just finished talking about how William would never live with us again, that Alex could be assured that even if things didn’t work out with Will’s job he would always live away from us, his behaviour was too damaging. Now, here I was only minutes later, at 6 o’clock in the evening, with Will’s stuff in the hallway, and a promise echoing in my head that I had just made to Alex about Will never living here again. Of course he never would – but tonight? If Will had nowhere else to go – what should I do?

I knew that Guy was going into a meeting at 6 pm, so he was not contactable. Guy would be furious about this whole situation. He had been angry for months now, this was more ammunition for his already overcrowded arsenal. When Will rang me again later I said that he should come to our house after work, which was going to be around midnight, and sleep at our house that night. 

Guy rang me then, and when I explained what had happened, he asked me what I thought I was doing telling Will he could stay. He rang Will and told him not to come to the house. He was right, but homelessness scares me especially when Will had only just that day begun a new job, which I was praying he could hang onto. But, I knew I couldn’t win on this one.

Guy hardly spoke to me that night.  He said he couldn’t understand how I could have made that decision. He then sat down in the sitting room with his meal, and began laughing loudly at ‘Frasier’. I went to bed alone, wondering how he could be so cruel to me.

However, Will had a job. He then moved into his new place, between shifts, I helping him in the rain. Things seemed more certain than they had for months. I had also persuaded Guy that he and I needed to get some counselling support together. We went to see the therapist that has been helping me these past few years. She is an expert in addictions, and had offered to see us, together, many months ago.

I had been talking to my sister on the telephone about the strain on my relationship with Guy, and she told me that most couples who have similar issues split up, because they blame each other. She cited a few high profile cases, like the family of Stephen Lawrence, whose parents had separated. What? Okay, I needed to gain some control here. As I put the phone down to her, Guy rang me from Sussex where he was working. He sounded very cheerful, and loving. This was a pattern though; he usually left his smile at the garden gate when he came home in the evenings.

I told him what my sister had just said, and managed to get him to agree to come with me to a counselling session. We made an appointment for the next week, and went along. It was enormously useful, one of my better ideas. We talked about our son, and what the trauma and loss had meant to both of us. I listened as Guy talked about his feelings, and something happened in that room that day. Guy seemed to leave some of his cares in there, and came away lighter and happier than I’d seem him in years. So far, he has remained in that space.

We discussed with the therapist our concerns about Alex and Jack. Guy said he needed a break from Will – that when he comes home at night he doesn’t know what to expect, and needs to think about the other members of the family, that we’ve spent too much time trying to get Will back on track, and that it was time now to look after ourselves – as a separate unit.

We decided that the way forward should be that we would tell Will that he should not come to the house for three months. The therapist advised us that we needed this amount of time to for recovery of the four of us. She told us that we needed to ensure Alex did not try and get comfort elsewhere – either through drugs, alcohol, or even latching onto another family. He needed time to relax and breathe, as we all did. This seemed like a good solution, one which I could see working. This decision would be reviewed in October, and we would continue to meet Will away from the house, on a regular basis.

We told Will that weekend what we had decided, and he seemed to take it well. We asked him what support he needed from us, and he said he needed nothing. Guy bought him groceries, though, and a supermarket voucher so he could feed himself for another week. We also bought him a travelcard so he could get to work.

It would appear, though, that Will didn’t go back to his job. He rang me late on Sunday night to say that he had bumped into his ex-girlfriend over the weekend and he was unsure whether he could go through life knowing how much he stolen off her, and how he’d hurt her. He said he couldn’t understand why he’d smoked so much draw and become a thief, how crazy it all was, and now he was having to live with it. We talked about making changes, and how he could look forward, and how useless an emotion guilt was. He was very low, and I tried my best to say how well he had done getting a job and moving into a new place – all of which he had accomplished himself. I also talked about how the bad times are like compost for growth – the more shit you throw on flowers the better they do and it’s the same for our own growth - it’s only in the bad times that you really learn anything. We talked until the early hours, and I offered to meet him for breakfast the next day. He said he wanted a lie- in, so I said I’d call him in the morning, before he set off for work, which I did.

He said he still felt like shit that morning, and asked if I’d meet him after all, but I said I couldn’t do that then, arranging to meet instead for breakfast the next day, Tuesday, which he didn’t turn up for. He wasn’t answering his phone, either, but rang me two days later, yesterday, asking to meet for coffee. Something in me wants to leap and help him automatically, and I virtually dropped everything, including our puppy, and drove over to his house in the village. As I was reaching for the car keys, though, I hurriedly tore open a letter which was from the landlord of Will’s old flat. We had asked for the balance of the deposit to be sent to us.

It wasn’t a cheque, though, but a letter saying that William’s room had been in a ‘disgusting state’ and that there would be a charge for cleaning it, and replacing the mattress which had ‘usually been slept on without a sheet’. Memories of trying to clear out the flat in Streatham that Will had rented with a friend, this time last year, surfaced. We had paid £500 deposit that time, of which none was returned. I can still smell the foul stench of that place when we went to clear Will’s things out the day we admitted him to The Priory. We had to give up trying to clean that flat, it was too big a job. There had been dirty clothes everywhere, and evidence of drug use in every room, along with used condoms and cigarette butts littering every inch of floor. There were cob-webs on the stairs, something I’d never seen anywhere before. The refrain ‘here we go again and why can’t he behave like normal people’, began now to strike its first notes and as I closed my eyes to calm myself, I could feel the anger surging, even though I had missed William this week, and wanted to see him.

As we sat down in a coffee shop and began talking, I began to feel that Will was lying to me again. He said he wasn’t working, and hadn’t been for two days, because a wall had fallen down outside the pub. He would be going in later. The conversation continued to decline after this. We had paid off his overdraft at the bank: he had originally said that someone was ‘scamming’ his account, and we had settled the amount – with the proviso that he would close the account, and not begin to run up another overdraft on there.

We began to talk about that account now: he was saying that he didn’t want to close it because his employer needed somewhere to bank his wages, which he wouldn’t get for another month, incidentally. I asked him if he had money, he said that I was the one with the money – he didn’t have any. He hadn’t signed on either, so no benefits were in place anymore.

I began to feel so angry, and flounced out telling him he was full of crap, and drove home. I rang the pub when I got back. It turns out he worked for four days last week, and hadn’t returned again this week. I rang him then, saying I wanted to give him the opportunity to tell me the truth.  He said that seeing his ex-girlfriend had upset him too much, he couldn’t go back. (‘You don’t understand the pain I’m in’). I screamed at him then, and slammed the phone down. Despair, again. Part of me was glad the job had existed at all, because there was always an outside chance he was lying about it. I had tried to help him, such as sorting out things for him to wear for his first week, and washing all his clothes that had been dumped here – everything had been dirty, so I had taken the whole lot down to the laundrette.

Now, he hadn’t continued with it. Something I knew he’d been so happy to get. But, thinking about it: he had been unable to do one day a week at college – so it was optimistic to think he could do a job. I didn’t like the look of his eyes when I met him yesterday. Although he looked clean, his eyes looked drugged and dull.

It feels like this is the end of something. Both Guy and I believed that if our son could find a job, he may find self-respect and would enjoy having his own money, and his life would begin to get better – and ours too. But, he had a job, one which he seemed to enjoy, and now this. An ongoing nightmare is what it feels like. I am determined that he is on his own now. If he wants to lie in bed and not work then he’s going to have to fund his own life, and sort things out for himself. He had a chance to get his life on track. The irony is that I have recently had two good, long telephone conversations with him. I am impressed each time by how intelligent he is, how informed he is and also how emotionally literate he is too.  I don’t know what this means, it doesn’t make any sense. I don’t know what the future holds, how many times you can ride this particular roller-coaster without it making you sick.

It is a matter of priorities now. My priorities are to my other two boys, who need care after what they have been through, and to keeping our family safe. My other priority is to the wider picture, and to the campaign to help make sure that this cannabis epidemic does not affect the next generation of children and families as it has this one. It is a public scandal that so many families are afflicted because cannabis is seen as a safe, cool drug. Tony Blair’s government let us down when they reclassified this drug, as parents we have been undermined by the highest powers in the land, what chance did we have of persuading our children away from this evil? We have a new government: I’m determined that they listen to us, those of us who are watching our children destroy themselves.

©  Debra Bell 2007