It was impossible to say.
Unless by hating something you straightaway started to turn into it. As though your hate was a sort of magnetic field, turning you around like a compass needle, dragging you into a new shape like iron filings.
Jess’s father crashed and raged in the maze of her childhood memories like an intermittent minotaur. “Where’s my fucking coat? Did you take money out of my pocket? Did you hide my shoes? What’s the fucking kid looking at? Are you telling her lies about me?”
Addiction. Addiction was the real monster here. And young Jess knew, watching her parents, that you could get addicted to anything. Barry Moulson was addicted to alcohol, and Paula Moulson née Ketterbridge was addicted to him. It didn’t matter how many times Baz turned up, took command of Paula’s pay packet, raided their pathetic savings, pawned the TV and then hit the road again. The next time he appeared, Paula’s arms would still be wide open.
In school and then in college (maths and physics, combined honours), Jess steered a course as far away from all that bullshit as she could get.
“You want to smoke some weed?”
No.
“Pop an E before we go into the club?”
Actually, I don’t.
“The sex will be way better if you snort some bloom.”
Thanks but no thanks.
The first sip, the first drag, the first pill… that might be all it would take. Better not to start than to start and never stop. “It’s okay,” her friend Kit said to her at the end of her first year at Durham. “Everyone thinks you’re a frigid prude, but they’re way too scared to say it out loud so it all balances out, you know?”
But it got seriously unbalanced in year two. That was when her mother got sick. Not-ever-getting-better sick. Sick with cancer – first of the liver, then of the everything. Seriously? Barry floats his organs in sixty per cent proof, and Paula’s liver goes? Clearly there was no God, no justice, nobody at the switchboard. The universe was a badly written soap opera where every plot twist strained credibility just that little bit further.
Jess went to her pastoral supervisor, explained the situation and dropped out of uni.
“You don’t have to do this,” her mother protested. “I’m not an invalid, Jess!”
But you will be, Jess thought. And in any case, their time together had become something that could be counted. That needed to be counted. She didn’t say any of that. What she said was, “Durham is six hours away, Mum, and the train ticket costs ninety quid even with a railcard. And I can pick up again from right where I was. I want to be with you, just until you’re all right again.”
The huge lie making it impossible for Paula to protest against the smaller one. They hugged and cried, and nothing more was said.
In fact it took three years for Paula to die. Four rounds of chemo, three operations, an endless drip-drip-drip of bad news followed by worse news followed by outright disasters. Jess had never regretted her decision. She was with her mother at the end and her being there made a difference. Everything Paula did – moving, talking, blinking, breathing – brought a little gasp of pain, but she didn’t die alone and she didn’t die afraid. She went into the dark with Jess holding her hand. Holding it so tightly that for hours afterwards it felt as though they were still touching. Still together.
So no regrets, ever. But she couldn’t just pick up where she’d left off. This was the second time around so she wasn’t entitled to a student loan. She would have to save up the money for her tuition fees and her living expenses – a tall order when the economy was tanking. She got a job at Half the Sky, a feminist-slash-ecological bookshop on Caledonian Road, and started to put a little by.
Broke her collarbone in an accident at the shop involving a stepladder.
And made a brand-new friend.
“This is about managing the pain,” the doctor told her. “Oxycodone is a very powerful analgesic, so it’s not to be abused. These are controlled-release tablets. You take them twice a day, and they sustain what we call a resting level of the drug in your system throughout the next twelve hours. We’ll review in a week’s time.”
Where have you been all my life, oxycodone?
Jess was in ecstasy. Some of that was not feeling the physical pain from her injury. The rest was not feeling anything else. There was an old ache inside her that forgot to ache when she was high.
She lived on oxy and fresh air for three months. But then the prescription ran out and she crashed. It was impossible to hide, like a disfiguring illness. Like a bereavement. “I need your mind to be here as well as your body, Jess,” her boss, Susan, warned her. “No point turning up for work if you’re just going to sit there.”
“You need me to fix you up?” her colleague Nicola asked. “Seriously, what do you need? I can get it.”
Nicola Saunders was only at Half the Sky one day a week. The rest of the time she worked in the pharmacy of a private hospital. “You want oxy,” she assured Jess, “all you’ve got to do is ask. There’s no need to suffer.”
There was no need to suffer. Money would buy her perfect happiness.
“Not that I’m doing it for the money,” Nicola said. “I’m doing it for you.” She took the money anyway though, and her prices went up on a regular basis.
“You want to try something stronger? Drop one of these just as the oxy kicks in – you won’t believe where it takes you.”
Jess stuck to the devil she knew. “I don’t care about the thrill,” she told Nicola. “I’m just in a bad place right now, and it helps.”
“Oh sure, I get that. It’s temporary relief, absolutely. It’s not, you know, a lifestyle thing. You can always stop.”
And Jess knew she could. Any time. But somehow at the moment of decision she found herself popping a tab anyway. And the moment of decision was coming on her with a quickening tempo. In the aftermath of a fix, she felt a blissed-out calm. A few hours later she started to get ragged around the edges. Bad nerves gave way to irritation, and irritation was the tip of an iceberg that shelved off steeply towards gnawing anger for anything that was between her and her next hit.
Barry’s voice came back to her. “Let’s open another bottle. The party’s just getting started. Come on, Paula, name me one single thing that looks better when you’re sober!”
That was what gave her the strength, in the end, to kick the habit. She knew that dance so well. It had been part of her life for as long as she could remember, not constant, but refreshed and rediscovered whenever Daddy came calling.
She fought her way out of the trough. Not cold turkey or anything like it. She eased off slowly over the space of a couple of months, buying the same amount of the drug from Nicola every week and measuring her progress by how much of each blister pack ended up in the bin.
She got clean. It was the hardest thing she’d ever done.
Then at one of Nicola’s parties, she met John Street.
And finally took delivery of the disaster her whole life had been preparing her for.
8
Jess woke to find herself already sitting up, her heart hammering. The dream was gone, the normal world was back. But only up to a point.
She knew that the normal world was a dream too. You could wake up from it any time you liked.
They had taken her belt and her shoelaces. They had fastened a thick plastic cover over the light fitting so that she couldn’t smash it and expose the wires. They had fixed a camera to the ceiling of her cell so she could be monitored for her own good whenever the authorities saw fit.
But there was one door they couldn’t lock. Their jurisdiction ended at the surface of her skin. As long as she could kill herself without any props, tools or external assistance, there wasn’t a damn thing they could do to stop her.
And she could, of course.
It was basic human kit.
PART TWO
THE HARDEST TIME TO BE ALIVE
9