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We watch with baited breath as Max moves his right hand forward, his face screwed up with concentration. Amy leans across and grabs onto my arm tightly, as excited as I am.
“Come on, Max,” Tina encourages. “Do it for Nanny.”
Slowly, tentatively, he shuffles his left knee forward, making the top half of his body lunge ahead.
Silently, we wait for him to do it again. And he does, managing three shuffles before he collapses in a heap on the rug, clearly exhausted from all the effort. We break out in loud cheers
, clapping loudly, Amy whooping as she captures a picture of him on her phone. I lift him up, grinning, kissing his sticky face.
“You did it!”
“He did! The best birthday present ever.”
Max gurgles and makes a grab for me, then he starts laughing wildly. Amy snaps away, while Tina squeals, and Luke ignores us all, muttering at his phone.
Every once in a while there are moments like these. I hold my son close as he slobbers on my shoulder, and ignore the one dark thought that tries to make itself heard.
Max crawled for the first time and Alex missed it.
16
On Tuesdays at the clinic I run a group session for parents of addicts. Dragging our chairs into a makeshift circle, the eight of us sit down, and I take a moment to look at each one of them. The longest-serving member is Jackie Clack. She’s been coming to these meetings for five years, ever since she found her son injecting himself in their downstairs bathroom. Though Seth’s fallen on and off the wagon more times than a drunken cowboy, Jackie has remained consistent throughout that time.
She’s like everybody’s grandma. When a new member joins, she takes them under her wings, coddling them, telling them that though things may not ever get better, they will definitely become more bearable.
Next to Jackie is Peter Stanhope. He’s only been with us a few weeks. His daughter, Kate, is a meth addict and her two children have been taken into foster care. Every time Pete comes to a meeting he shows us their photos, holding them with a shaking hand, telling us that this week he hopes he’ll get to see them.
The saddest member of all is Carla Dean. She’s not that much older than me, though the furrowed lines that have made a home across her brow make her look at least a decade more advanced than she is. She had her only son—Connor—at the age of seventeen. He’s now fifteen and addicted to smack. She hasn’t seen him for three months; the last she heard, he was seen in a drug den in Wandsworth. Since then, she’s been walking the streets every night, questioning the homeless, searching for a sign of him.
It’s as if the streets have swallowed him whole. It never fails to amaze me how a fifteen-year-old can disappear into thin air. In this day and age, it’s still possible to lose a child.
“I thought I saw him last week,” Carla tells us. She won’t catch any of our eyes, and simply stares down at the floor. From my position opposite her, I can see the grey roots of her hair have grown in, giving her a pale white stripe across her parting line. “But it wasn’t him. It was some kid with bleached blond hair. I tried to get him to come home with me for a decent meal but he told me to fuck off.” She wrings her hands nervously together. “I told him that his mum must be worried sick, as I am. But he told me his mum chucked him out.” Finally, she looks up. “I mean, who would do that? Throw their kid out?”
“I threw Kate out when I found out about her drugs,” Pete says, with a thin smile. “Fat lot of good that did. She shacked up with her deadbeat boyfriend instead. The one who got her hooked in the first place.”
“You did what you thought was right.” Jackie pats his hand. “None of this is your fault.”
There’s silence for a minute, and I turn my attention on our newest member. Laurence Baines is fifty-something and a headmaster of an up-and-coming school in East London. In the past two weeks that he’s attended the group he’s been nothing but perfectly turned out. Suit jacket still on, not a single hair out of place; he looks like the ultimate professional.
“How’s your week been, Laurence?” I ask.
“I visited Tom yesterday. He cried for an hour.” Laurence catches my eye. “I cried, too. For the first time since my mother died twenty years ago.”
Tom was convicted for dealing while studying at Oxford University. Unlike many others, he had everything going for him from the start. Wealthy parents, a middle-class upbringing, an education people would kill to get, and yet now he’s serving time in a prison surrounded by thieves and murderers. A different type of education altogether.
“How are you feeling today?” I ask him.
“Exhausted. Depleted. I spent most of the night holding Julie while she cried herself to sleep.” Julie is Laurence’s wife. She’s taken her son’s incarceration badly. Understandably so. “All she kept asking me was ‘why’? I couldn’t tell her I want to know that, too. That I don’t have the answers.”
“Do you find not having the answers difficult?” Jackie asks that question.
Laurence turns to look at her. “I’ve never felt this helpless before. I’m always the one with the answers. At home I’ve looked after the money and the house. Julie relies on me to keep things straight. It’s the same at school. I’m the one who gets to make all the decisions. The one people look up to. But now I’ve no idea what to do. I hate feeling so bloody useless.”
“Sometimes there isn’t an answer,” I point out, gently. “Life throws a curveball and we either duck or get hit.”
These sessions are always tough. It’s hard enough when it’s one on one. But in a group setting there are so many desperately sad stories, they never fail to touch me. The worst thing about them is the inevitability of it all. Even when one of their children has finally kicked the habit, we all know that around 90% of them will return to drugs within the next twelve months. That’s why so few of them stop coming even during a sober period.
I think of Max and the way he actually waved me goodbye this morning when I dropped him off at nursery, lifting up his tiny hand and flapping his fingers as I left him playing with Holly. I can’t imagine going through what these people have endured. To see the child they love stolen away by an addiction so cruel nobody can escape from it.
