Can't Anyone Help Me? (30 page)

He stood there, a reed-thin young man in an old man’s bent and unsteady body. It was Aids, he had told me in his letter. The drugs he was on had ceased to work.

I phoned the hospital, gave his name, and they told me to bring him in. He was dying, I knew. I also knew how much he had hoped I would come and how he had hung on for as long as possible, waiting for me. A taxi took us to the hospital, and once there I went to the ward where so many young men had spent their last days. The doctors told me it was only a matter of time, but I already knew that. I waited in the visitors’ lounge while they settled him in. A boy in there tried to comfort me. He was, I think, no more than eighteen. ‘I’m making my will,’ he told me, ‘saying how I want my funeral done. I’ve chosen the music – thought I’d get them to play “Burn Baby Burn” when the coffin goes out through the curtains. What do you think?’

I looked at his gaunt face, his emaciated body, and noticed the telltale purple marks under his hospital pyjama jacket. I wanted to cry, ask where his mother was and who was caring for him. Instead I looked into eyes that were sparkling with mischief and gave him what I hoped was my biggest smile. ‘Sounds good,’ I said. ‘That’ll get them talking, all right.’

It was he, a boy of eighteen who knew he only had a few days left, who comforted me during the time I spent in the hospital. When he saw me sitting in the lounge smoking a cigarette and nursing plastic cups of foul coffee, he followed me in with unsteady steps.

It took Dave four days to die. Four days when I lied about my life in London; four days when I listened to his painful, rasping breath; four days until both he and I welcomed his death.

His face turned yellow, his eyes dulled and not one hour passed when he was not in pain.

‘Can’t you give him something?’ I asked – and later pleaded.

‘No,’ I was told. Painkillers would affect his tortured breathing.

Instead, they moved him to a smaller ward and placed an oxygen mask on his face.

‘He has the right to live as long as he can,’ a nurse told me.

‘He has the right to die in peace,’ I cried.

But he didn’t die in peace.

On the fourth day he stopped breathing, but they resuscitated him.

He has to go in an iron lung, they said.

Then the nurse explained that, for that, he had to have an injection. ‘Then he will sleep,’ she said.

His eyes begged for it, begged to be released, for he knew what I didn’t know then: that he wouldn’t wake up.

It was the nurse who told me gently that it was possible he wouldn’t regain consciousness. That if I had anything I wanted to say, I needed to speak before the injection was given.

I held his hand and told him I loved him.

‘I love you too, Jackie,’ he said, his last words before the injection.

He was never put in the iron lung. His heart gave out. I went outside the screens as the crash team went in, heard the activity and then the doctor’s unemotional voice stating the hour and minute of his death.

Later they took me into a private room where he lay. He looked young again. I kissed his cheek, and his flesh was cold against my lips.

He was twenty-two years old.

I slept with Kevin that night, which until then I had refused to do. I needed warmth, comfort, but just that first time told me he would never give me either.

Anna was the only person I told about what had happened. Dave was not someone I wanted to share. I kept quiet and carried my grief inside me and that, I guess, was another thing that made me careless.

To add to my misery, Gina announced she was getting married and she and Rob were moving out of London.

Three months later Kevin caught me throwing up in his bathroom.

‘Are you fucking pregnant?’ he asked, in tones that told me this was not something he considered good news.

I looked at him wretchedly. ‘I must be,’ I whispered.

His face flushed with anger, as though only one of us was responsible for my condition and that someone was not him.

That was when I said I would go home. My parents would take me in. I was not going to have an abortion and he couldn’t make me.

‘So, where do your parents live, then?’ he asked contemptuously. ‘Some bleeding squalid northern council estate, I suppose.’

Pride made me raise my head defiantly and tell him that my father was well off. Why didn’t I just keep quiet?

As my words sank in, I went, in Kevin’s eyes, from encumbrance to possible financial asset. He didn’t mention marriage, not then, just asked me enough questions to start believing that I was telling the truth. Then he checked up on my parents. I discovered later that he’d gone to Companies House to find out just how much my father’s business was worth. But he never told me – any more than he divulged that he was aware of my time with Eddie and that I had been hooked on hard drugs. It was something other than love or decency that motivated him to propose to me.

I knew he didn’t love me – he never pretended to – but I wanted the baby. I think after seeing what had happened to Dave and dealing with my feelings for Gina, I also wanted the label ‘normal’.

So I accepted.

I was seventeen.

Anna tried to persuade me not to. ‘You don’t love him, Jackie,’ she said. She told me that she was keeping the flat on after Gina was married, that I could stay with her, that she would look after me and help bring the baby up. I had other options, she kept repeating.

She kissed me then.

But she was not the person I wanted – that person whose wedding I had been invited to.

I drew away. She repulsed me with her kindness, her caring, as though that was enough to make me want her.

It wasn’t.

I told her that it was no use. I was going to get married. I saw the hurt on her face as the realization registered of how lonely she would be, without either Gina or me.

She’s another person I find it hard to talk about. Her name brings back not just memories of loss but of guilt as well – for I was not kind in my refusal to stay with her. I just spurned her friendship without thinking of her feelings. She was too good a person not to have looked after me. I would never have had to pay for her caring with sexual favours. I knew even then that the thought of having a baby in the house, a small person she could shower her love on, and who in turn would love her, was what she wanted.

But I turned my back on her and chose a man who had more interest in my father’s money than ever he had in me.

I phoned my parents and threw myself on their mercy. My mother was mollified by the fact that the man who had made me pregnant wanted to marry me. It was agreed that I could stay with them until the wedding. A month after I returned home, I was married. I was four months pregnant. My parents paid for the wedding and gave my new husband and me a generous cheque to use as a deposit on a house.

My father didn’t like Kevin. I think he sensed that this was not going to be a marriage full of love. ‘Jackie,’ he said, a week before the wedding, ‘you don’t have to marry him, you know. We could help with the baby.’ But in my head I did. My mother, I knew, didn’t want me back in the house and I didn’t want my baby growing up in her cold, sterile home as I had.

Shortly after the wedding, which was not the big white one my mother may once have dreamt of but a small ceremony in a register office with a handful of friends present, we moved into a house on the outskirts of London.

Five months later I gave birth to my baby, a healthy eight-pound boy. I loved him from the first moment I saw him.

My marriage was another story – not one I want to dwell on for too long. He was an abusive man, who took out his resentment at having married me with hurtful words and flying fists.

I had managed to stay clear of drugs since rehab, but by the time my son was crawling, I had a relapse. My husband – my ticket to respectability – would have been horrified if I had accused him of being a user. Cocaine wasn’t a drug, he said, as he and his friends sniffed it. Well, he might not have considered it as such, but dealers I knew had fewer qualms. First it was Mandies that I purchased, but what I really wanted was the buzz that wrapped me in cotton wool and made the world seem a brighter place. It would take away the physical pain when my husband hit me, and the mental one when he called me a druggie whore. So, wanting it, I found it.

After the birth of my son, he had made no bones about his true feelings for me. ‘I knew what you were when I first met you,’ he taunted. ‘Everyone knew you were one of Eddie’s girls. Knew you were trash. So does your old man – that’s why he wouldn’t cough up enough cash for a decent place for us to live. He didn’t think you were worth it.’

That was when I realized why he had married me: the house was in his name. He had paid the minimum deposit; the balance of the cheque had gone into his bank account.

Why then did I not do what my teenage self would have done and walked out? I could have admitted that my marriage was a failure and asked my father for help.

I think the fight had gone out of me.

It took the birth of my daughter to bring it back. He had not wanted another baby. But he should have thought of that when he drunkenly forced himself on me. ‘She’ll end up like you,’ he said, ‘a good-for-nothing little whore.’ He repeated similar words to the baby lying sleeping in her cot. ‘You’re going to be a junkie whore, just like your fucking no-good mother,’ was what he said. She was six weeks old.

I left. He could keep the house, I said.

I moved back up north; accommodation was cheaper there. I found a house with a garden that I wanted to rent. The next thing I had to make my mind up about was how I was going to support two children and myself. I knew a combination of state handouts and guilt money from my father was not what I wanted.

I decided on escort work. It paid well and the tax man didn’t take a large chunk of it. And it was the only thing I knew I was good at.

‘OK, Jackie,’ said my therapist. ‘Let’s stop there. I want you to think for a moment. What made the work Eddie forced you to do so different from what you decided to do? Not just then, but also when you were younger.’

‘When I was twelve,’ I said, ‘it made me feel good that I could buy whatever I wanted. And when I made those friends, that I could pay for my own drugs and drink.

‘But it wasn’t just the money. It was more about the control. When I first had sex with that friend of my father’s, I felt it was me who controlled him. So, to a certain extent, it was about power. When I was in that car and saw the expression on his face, I just knew he wanted me. His hands were almost trembling on the steering-wheel. He could hardly meet my gaze and that made me feel powerful.

‘I had been controlled for so long and I felt then that it was my turn. In my twenties, I felt the same.

‘And,’ I said to her, ‘I’ll tell you something. A lot of men out there like to be controlled. They like pain and being humiliated, and I found them.’

‘You mean you became a dominatrix?’

‘Yes, that’s exactly what I was.’

As far as I was concerned, my life was sorted. I was only in my twenties and earning more money than I had ever dreamt about. I was able to send my son to a private junior school and have an au pair living in who babysat when I was out working.

Once again, I had a wardrobe of nice clothes, only this time I had paid for them myself, plus I had plenty of money in the bank. I planned to buy a house, then another to rent out. In a few years I could retire, I thought. I’d be financially secure. Maybe buy a small wine bar, give myself something to do.

But the one thing I was determined not to do was get emotionally entangled. I had affairs with women, nice affectionate ones, but nothing too deep. Men were solely business.

‘What changed?’ asked my therapist.

‘I met Helena – believe it or not in a music venue, in Manchester, though, not London. It might sound corny to say our eyes met across a crowded bar, but that’s exactly what happened.’

She nodded, and I told her the final part of my story.

I saw a slim girl, dressed casually in jeans and a loose sweater. Her hair was straight and glossy, her skin smooth and her eyes, when I caught her gaze, were brown. Not the brown so dark that little of their expression is evident, but the soft colour of a creamy caramel toffee. Those warm eyes smiled at me and, picking up my drink, I moved over to where she was sitting.

That night, we talked incessantly, as if we had known each other all our lives. I was oblivious to everyone else around me and I knew I must see her again. I asked for her phone number and telephoned early the following morning. ‘I want to see you,’ I said.

We met in a small, cosy wine bar where she told me she had taken a degree course at Leeds University and was now working for Social Services.

She asked me what I did – which, that night, I brushed off. I said something about being between jobs, which, although partly true, gave little away as to what my profession was.

I already knew that I didn’t want to walk away from her.

I told her the truth before we went to bed for the first time. I felt I had to – I owed her that. Then, without meaning to, I told her everything else. We talked – or, rather, I talked and she listened into the early hours of the morning.