Exactly how a family should be.
* * *
When people meet me now, they find it difficult to believe I used to be a hard-nosed career girl. For four years I worked in the City for GMSilver, a mid-sized investment bank dealing in securities and derivatives. It seemed the natural transition back then, for a girl with a first-class degree. When they offered me the job I didn’t hesitate to say yes, my eyes full of pound signs and thoughts of glamour.
And it was glamorous, or at least some of it was, for a time. Along with the other interns they to
ok on each year, I worked my arse off, arriving in the office at around seven in the morning and often staying until ten at night. We used to have a game, the other interns and I, where we’d try to be the last one to send an email in the evening. Some of them even took to hiding in the toilets so we’d think they’d gone home, waiting until everyone else had left to hit the final ‘send’ button. Whoever won that week didn’t have to buy any drinks on Friday night.
Of course, we drank a lot on Friday nights. Hedonistic evenings full of alcohol, white powder and casual sex. It was incestuous, too; we tended to keep to our small band of interns, maybe twenty or so, hooking up with different partners each week, never mistaking sex for anything more than the basest of releases.
One Friday we were celebrating landing a major deal. One of the partners had given us his Black Amex card, and we were using it to the full. Bottles of champagne were succeeded by vintage Macallan, which I pretended to like because it was so expensive. When the bar closed for the night, we were all still too amped to go home, not ready to pair off. Instead, we headed for a seedy club west of Wapping, giggling at our bravery, smiling because we were ‘slumming it’.
The club wasn’t seedy as much as it was industrial. In the basement of an old, Victorian building, it was all red brick and exposed pipework. Among the crowd inside—mostly young and hipsteresque—there wasn’t a business suit or a shift dress to be seen. We stood out like sore thumbs.
Yet, there was something about it that called to me. By that point I was already feeling the strain of working seventy-plus hours a week. And though I didn’t realise it then, now I understand I was yearning for something deeper than ten more years of the same.
After paying the cover charge and getting our hands stamped, we joined the people clustered around the stage, entranced by the performance going on in front of them. It wasn’t only that the band were good—although they were—but they had charisma leaking out of their pores, clinging onto the notes as they danced through the air.
It was impossible to do anything but watch, listen, and dance.
At some point I lost my jacket. Though it had cost me the best part of three hundred quid, I didn’t care; I was too excited, too alive, too blissed-out to bother. Instead, I let myself be dragged forward by the crowd, riding the wave of their surge, trying to avoid being pulled under. When the band finished their song, the movement stopped, and I found myself a few heads away from the front of the stage.
That’s when I saw him.
Jet black hair. A T-shirt that looked sprayed onto his muscled torso. Tattoos that seemed to cover every single part of his body. He was the complete opposite of every boyfriend I’d had. The clean-cut city types who hardly knew how to kiss.
I was entranced. Maybe it was the buzz of the alcohol, or the lingering victory of our earlier deal, but when he finally raised his head, glancing up from his guitar, I didn’t look away.
Neither did he.
Though that moment only lasted for a few seconds, half a minute at the most, it was the most powerful thing that ever happened to me. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t move, I couldn’t feel my heart beat. All I could do was stare at this glorious, sweaty, messed-up guy, and pray he wouldn’t look away.
People say that some moments are life-changing, but seeing Alex that night was more revolutionary than that. He transformed me completely, nucleus by nucleus, until my old life was little more than a discarded snakeskin left drying in the desert sun. When he mouthed two words to me, all I could do was nod, finally sucking in a breath, still failing to do anything but look at him.
“Stay there.”
That was all he said. That was all I wanted to do. So I stood, and I stayed, and I watched as Fear of Flying finished their set, all thoughts of multi-million pound deals wiped clean from my brain.
3
Two days after our trip to Plaistow, the sun is beating fiercely down as I emerge from the tube station and the sudden brightness is a shock after the dull gloom of the underground. I blink a couple of times to acclimatise, and the world appears before me in bleached-out colour. When I reach the street, I stand for a minute, watching the blur of people as they pass by, clasping bags, Styrofoam cups of coffee, all with a look of determination on their faces.
They have somewhere to go. So do I, but first I need to catch my breath.
I haven't been to work for nearly six months, and though I've brought Max into the clinic to show him off, this time it's different as I walk through the doors. My arms are empty, my heart is full, and my baby is being looked after by a stranger.
It's harder than I thought it would be. Everything is the same here; the harassed receptionist, the aroma of antiseptic that clings to the dull, tiled floor, the posters whose corners are peeling off the wall. They contain warnings about substance abuse and drug addiction, adverts for group therapy and various medications.
It's only been two hours and I already miss Max desperately. He cried when I left him at the nursery, his tiny fists rubbing at his red eyes, his bottom lip sticking out as he hiccoughed and sobbed. And even though the carer promised me he would stop as soon as I walked out, I could still hear his screams reverberating in my mind as I walked up the street.
I'm a bad mother and a bad employee. I can't even imagine counselling anybody when I'm hardly able to think straight.
“Hey, you’re early. Want a cuppa?” Elaine is my supervisor at the clinic. When I’m back here full-time, we’ll meet weekly to discuss my caseload, for me to share my worries, my fears. For now, though, our catch-up consists of a quick hello and occasional gossip, while I visit the clinic for half a day. I’ll only have a couple of clients assigned to me when I return and I suspect they’ve given me the simple cases to ease me back into the swing of things. One of them is an ex-cocaine user who has long been sober, and another is a parent of a seventeen-year-old boy who has been using crack. Though sad, their stories aren’t heart wrenching. Not yet.
“I’d love a coffee, please.” With the sleepless nights I’ve had, tea is for wimps. “How’s everything?”
“Same old stuff, really. Emergency calls, relapsing patients. Poppy is doing brilliantly at arranging the outreach classes.”