Callie woke with Ketchup fast asleep beside her. It felt so strange being back in her childhood home, but feeling her mother accept her again had made her both so very grateful and so tired that she hadn’t been able to do anything except relax into the feeling. After such stress, her body simply needed to let go of all anxiety.
They’d had a wonderful evening that first night, with her mother and Poppy talking non-stop to each other. Poppy even looked like her grandmother, Callie realised now.
Poppy had been so little when she’d last seen them together that she hadn’t realised how alike they were in so many ways. They laughed and giggled, talked about the soaps they liked and discussed different people. It turned out that her mother watched Keeping up with the Kardashians and had her own ideas on which of the family was the more interesting.
It was early in the morning, just after seven, and Callie knew she ought to get up. From downstairs, she could hear her mother rattling around in the kitchen – comforting, familiar sounds. The dog had slept most of the night with Poppy but Callie had heard him come downstairs early on, probably because the attic was very hot at night. He’d panted loudly beside her in the heat until he’d finally fallen asleep.
‘You’re lovely but you are wriggly and noisy,’ Callie had said to the little dog, as she picked him up, snuggled him and then carried him out onto the landing. There wasn’t a sound from the attic so Poppy hadn’t stirred. Sleeping the sleep of the exhausted and happy? At least, Callie hoped she was happy. Poppy had been through so much. From listening to her daughter and her mother, it turned out that lots of Poppy’s friends had been in touch with her and most of them had been nice. A couple had apparently said bitchy things about her father, but her grandmother had airily said that it would all be sorted out soon, which was what she and Callie had agreed to say.
‘I can’t tell her everything yet,’ Callie had said.
‘No,’ agreed Pat. ‘She adores him, doesn’t she? Poor child. Let’s break it all to her gently. Softly-softly, I always say.’
The early-morning peacefulness in the house was shattered when she heard a car door slam. There were voices, one high-pitched, the voice of their neighbour who was always out doing her garden and therefore saw the goings-on of the road, and another lower voice that Callie would have recognised anywhere. Her brother Freddie.
She hurriedly pulled on some clothes and ran into the bathroom to scrub her face with a facecloth and brush her teeth. There was no time for primping or beautifying – not that she bothered with much of that these days. Her skin looked on the outside the same way she felt on the inside: dried up. She used a bit of her mother’s deodorant and a quick squirt of a perfume she was sure her aunt had once had, and was therefore at least thirty years old, and went downstairs to meet her brother.
Who knew what he’d say when he saw her?
The tall man in the kitchen both looked like her younger brother and looked different: he’d filled out, grown older and had a beard that was greying. He was still good-looking, hair cut short, and there was the most wonderful sense of calm around him. His eyes, the same grey as her own, were warm as he saw his sister.
He smiled.
How could he look at her so warmly when she’d abandoned them all . . .?
But the thought stilled in her mind as Freddie crossed the kitchen to hold her in his arms.
Callie let the tears flow. ‘I am so sorry. I thought you’d hate me, never want to see me again—’
‘Cal, babes, I’m the one who was the heroin addict, I get to make the amends and say sorry. Sorry for what I put you through. I’m clean for nine years now. And there’s nothing to forgive. Drugs meant I wasn’t there when you needed me. I hated Jason and he put you in a cage.’
‘That’s what I always said,’ said Pat Sheridan, standing with a tea towel in her hand and watching her two children embracing. ‘The heroin had a grip on you, Freddie, and Jason had a grip on you, Claire. It’s like you were addicted to him or something. Now you’re back.’
With that simple explanation of it all, she turned and went back to the stove where a panful of rashers and sausages were frying.
‘Do you want eggs too, Freddie, love?’ she said. ‘I get the nice free-range ones.’
Freddie still held on to his sister, still hugging her as if trying to make up for the lost ten years.
‘Eggs, lovely. Let’s talk about all that another time,’ he said. ‘For now let’s just sit down and try and visit. I want to hear all about my beautiful niece.’
Callie began to cry. She didn’t deserve this but she wanted it so much. She held on to her brother, feeling the solidity of his chest as he embraced her. He was the same build as her father: tall, broad, with a barrel chest and solid arms.
‘Hush,’ he said now. ‘You’re back.’
They sat at the kitchen table as he ate his breakfast with relish and Callie drank coffee.
‘Eat,’ said her mother. ‘You’re too thin.’
‘Ah, Ma, leave her alone,’ said Freddie, and they both laughed.
It was like all those years ago, except Da would have been pottering around and Aunt Phil would be belting in, fag in hand, lippie in the other, saying she was late for the bus and was going to get a ride on Larry from across the road’s motorbike.
Someone would have made a remark about how a Honda 50 would only be marginally faster than walking to the factory but not much, and Phil would have roared laughing with that deep smoker’s voice and slammed the door on the way out.
Aware of Poppy being asleep upstairs, Freddie kept his voice low as he told his sister about the years of addiction and where it had brought him.
‘I owe you an apology, and Jason for paying for rehab when I ran off from it,’ he said.
‘You don’t owe that piece of shit anything,’ said Pat.
‘No,’ insisted Freddie. ‘That’s not how it works. I have to say sorry to the people I hurt and one day I’ll say it to him. Well, maybe,’ he amended, seeing the doubt on Callie’s face. ‘So I’ll say it to you instead. I put Ma here through hell but she did her best to stay with me.’
Pat blushed with pleasure. ‘It’s what a mother does,’ she said. ‘If she can. I was nearly broken, Freddie, you know that.’
‘I wasn’t here to help,’ Callie added guiltily.
‘You had your own problems,’ Freddie pointed out.
‘How are you so calm?’ cried Callie.
‘I meditate and go to Narcotics Anonymous meetings. Kerry keeps me sane. Walking in the woods, feeling the air, the trees, nature all around me. I’m lucky: I got out and managed to stay out. Something like ninety per cent of heroin addicts don’t. How could I say a word to you for your life choices, Cal? You didn’t end up selling drugs on the street to keep your habit going, did you?’
Freddie, who used to smoke like a trooper, no longer smoked, so when Pat needed to light up one of her ten-a-day – ‘I am going to give up!’ was her constant refrain – Callie and Freddie sat outside in the garden and filled each other in on their lives.
‘So you don’t think he’s coming back, then?’ Freddie asked finally about Jason.
‘I hoped he would. I hoped it was a bad dream, but it kept going on, and bad dreams stop. So no. He hasn’t made contact with us. I was obviously imagining that he loved me, but, Freddie, he adored Poppy. If he could leave her, just run off, then it must all be true: every word of it. He’s gone and he’s never coming home. He did all the things they said.’
When Poppy got up, she was at first shy with this new uncle, but soon the two of them were talking nineteen to the dozen, with Poppy asking endless questions about her mother as a child.
‘She cut my hair once when I was asleep,’ Freddie was saying. ‘a weird fringe like a scarecrow – high up one side and longer the other. I was mutilated!’
‘Don’t listen to a word he says, Poppy,’ laughed her mother. ‘He’s an awful liar.’
Poppy and Freddie took Ketchup out for a walk and Callie, worn out from the emotion of the morning, sat with her mother.
‘I pray you never have to see Poppy go through addiction,’ Pat Sheridan said fiercely. ‘It was hell, pure hell. He started on the hash and then that wasn’t enough, and he was on to everything he could get his hands on, and finally, because it was cheap, he moved on to the heroin. I kept thinking he’d overdose and he’d be gone. Now they have that drug, Naloxone, and some families have it for their kids – it gets the lungs working if they overdose by mistake.’
Callie inhaled swiftly. This truth was so brutal, so real. Imagine a parent having to inject a drug into their child to overcome the effects of a heroin overdose. She’d been absent for it all, on the missing list when it came to helping her mother.
‘Oh Ma, I know it was bad but I didn’t see much of it,’ said Callie, holding her mother’s worn hands. ‘I just took Jason’s money and sent that. But you needed real help and I wasn’t there. I’m so sorry. I can never pay you back for taking us in like this, after everything.’
‘It’s what mothers do,’ said Pat simply. ‘You don’t have to pay me back for anything. I got you and Poppy back. That’s all I need.’
Freddie could only stay one day and when he left the next day, Callie felt unaccountably low.
Poppy and her mother had gone off to a garden centre – Poppy willingly going to a garden centre! – and Callie was alone with the dog.
Sitting there, hugging the small dog, she cried.
Alone at last, she let the pain and the betrayal emerge.
She hadn’t known, hadn’t seen, the real Jason. He had cut her off from her family, had conned her and abandoned their beloved daughter. How foolish had she been not to have seen any of this?
She cried till she didn’t know if she could cry anymore.
What next for her and Poppy? How could there be any decent future for them? She had no qualifications to get a good job, and besides, she was forever marked by Jason’s actions.
At that moment, she felt lower than she’d ever felt.
And then, even though Freddie had spent a day talking to her about his life, about the depths to which addiction had brought him, she thought of Xanax again, something to help her cope for a while.
It wasn’t addiction: heck, no. It was just something to help her, to take the edge off, like the odd glass of wine. Plus, a doctor had originally prescribed them to her, so it was fine. Really.
Callie walked with a quick step the half a mile to the Russet Lounge.
The Russet was not the sort of classy establishment that Jason and his pals would have liked, as it did not feature any expensive Armagnacs or unusual craft beers handmade by an ancient order of monks.
No, the Russet Lounge catered for a wide variety of people, some of whom were unemployed and liked to watch sports on the television, some of whom had decent jobs and liked a few pints after work, and some of whom were less easily classified.
In Callie’s day, her mother or her aunt would never have dreamed of going into the Russet Lounge on any but rare occasions where they’d partake of a small gin and tonic or a hot whiskey. But now there were plenty of women in there: women like Glory, who sat in the corner and played solitaire on her own on her phone.
Long before Freddie had turned up, Callie’s mother had been filling her daughter in on the various local people and the troubles they’d had over the years. She mentioned an old friend’s daughter, Glory, who was only in her early thirties but was known for selling drugs.
‘Not the hard stuff, mind you,’ her mother had said wearily, ‘but enough to land her in court a couple of times. She can’t stop, sells out of the Russet Lounge and they just leave her to it now. There’s a market for it. She tells her mother she has the kids to look after and needs the money, but sure, her mother looks after those kids most of the time.
‘Feeds them too,’ Pat went on. ‘Freddie says she’s an addict but she’s feeding other people’s addiction too, which is part of the pattern. Sell to feed your own habit. I don’t know whether to feel pity for her or to hate her.’
At the time, Callie’s first thought had been that perhaps poor Glory had never had the chances in life to get clean the way Freddie had. And then that night in bed, her mind had begun clicking over.
Glory was somebody local and possibly, possibly, a safe person for Callie to ask about getting some Xanax. She’d had none left for ages now and she felt the loss keenly.
But she felt ashamed even thinking it after Freddie had talked to her about his time with heroin. The woman she’d been before would never have sunk to this level, but the woman she was now was desperate. She justified it to herself constantly: it was a drug she’d had before, just something to take the edge off. A few to tide her over. Just for a week, perhaps. Because she had to face her future and do something about getting a job. Buying prescription meds was not the same as being a proper addict, was it?
Walking into the pub, she spotted a woman sitting alone with a glass of something that looked like fizzy orange but might have been heavily spiked with alcohol, playing on her phone.
Glory had ombré hair – dark brown roots and blonde tips – but it wasn’t the ombré of expensive salons. More the ombré of someone who didn’t care what the world thought of her hairstyle or didn’t have money to waste when she could use it on pharmaceuticals.
Nervously, Callie approached her.
‘Glory?’
The woman had looked up at her suspiciously. Then the suspicion went and she broke into a smile. Not a nice smile, either.
‘You’re that woman, aren’t you? The one whose husband’s done a runner with all the money.’
‘Yes,’ said Callie flatly, ‘that’s who I am. The woman whose husband has done a runner.’ Callie sank into the seat opposite and kept her voice really low this time. ‘I thought you might be able to help me with getting something I need?’
‘Like what?’ said Glory, raising her eyebrow.
‘Xanax. I don’t know any doctors around here and . . .’
Glory looked at her, then looked down to see Callie’s hand shaking.
‘I might know someone who could,’ she said cautiously.
She watched Callie’s shaking hand again for a moment. Assessing.
‘An hour. Back of the pub. Have cash on you. Don’t bring anyone with you. If you’re messing with me, don’t. I know you, know your ma’s house.’
‘OK,’ said Callie, scared at the implied threat.
She got to her feet quickly and almost ran out of the pub. She must have been mad. How could she even think of doing this? Even if they were drugs that doctors prescribed, she was still buying them illegally. That was a criminal offence.
And it meant dealing with a woman who scared her.
But she couldn’t cope on her own, couldn’t afford to pay a doctor anymore and was out of options. Under her current financial and legal cloud, she would never qualify for the medical card that would entitle her to free medical care, so she would have to shell out cash for a local doctor. And with no income, that wasn’t an option.
She spent the next half an hour going around in circles in her mind, torturing herself with the thought of what she was about to do. Then she went home, slipped in the back door and took forty of her precious euros from her stash. She hadn’t asked how much the drugs would cost, but this was the most she could spend.
When the time was nearly up, Callie walked slowly towards the pub, hating herself. No. She was not going to do this. She would not sink this low. And then she thought about how she’d run out of tablets a few days ago, how it had stressed her, and how sometimes being able to take one was the only thing that got her through the day.
When the panic came, she felt the calmness as the drug hit her system and she could relax just that little bit. That’s all she wanted – to be able to cope.
She met Glory at the back of the pub, her heart rate seriously elevated.
Glory was sitting on a wrecked old pub chair beside the bins and slowly smoking a rolled-up cigarette. Callie smelled hash, which she didn’t think she’d smelled so close up since she’d gone out with Ricky all those years ago.
‘Fifty quid for ten since you’re a first-time customer,’ said Glory, getting straight down to business.
‘What?’ said Callie, shocked. ‘They’re not that expensive.’
‘Not if you are buying them in the pharmacy.’ Glory’s smile was cold. ‘But you’re buying them from Glory’s Pharmacy, so the price is different.’
‘I only have forty euros.’
‘Fine. You can have eight.’
Callie handed over her valuable cash.
Glory, in a very skilled move, found her roll-ups pack and seemed to be messing with cigarette papers to the outside eye. But Callie could see her using a small razor blade to cut off part of a card of bubble-packaged tablets.
She then handed over the small package as smoothly as if shaking hands.
Getting to her feet, she took a deep drag on her cigarette.
‘See ya around.’ And she was gone.
Callie felt a rush of guilt and anxiety.
What was she doing? Who had she become?
She was going to use these Xanax to get her through and then after this no more. No more.