Escape From Evil - Cathy Wilson [52]
I can only imagine what my classmates must have thought. I wasn’t aware of them or the teacher. All I could see were the words: ‘Jennifer Wilson’, ‘dead’ and ‘drugs’. They filled my mind. That’s what the story was saying, it had to be. Mum had died because of drugs.
I was out of control, I admit it. My composure at home had been an act, a brave front. It had to have been. How else can I explain how quickly and explosively I crumbled? In the space of a couple of seconds I went from a poor little girl doing her best to get over her mother’s death to a howling, wild child screaming, ‘It’s not true! It’s not true!’
The next thing I remember is Granny arriving. I don’t know how long it took for her to get there or how hard they’d tried to console me before calling her. All I know is that as soon as I saw her I shouted, ‘They’re liars!’ and fell into her arms.
Back at Tremola Avenue, the truth came tumbling out.
‘Your mother did die of cold,’ Granny – left by Grandpa to handle what he saw as women’s work – explained. ‘But that’s not the end of it.’
She paused to catch her breath. It must have been hard for her to dredge up the painful memories, but I was desperate to hear them.
‘What happened?’ I urged.
‘As the police explained it to me, she had taken so many drugs that she collapsed in an alley.’
‘Didn’t anyone help her?’
Granny shook her head. ‘It was the middle of the night and it was freezing cold. No one was around. She was there for ages. By the time someone found her and called an ambulance, she had contracted pneumonia.’
So Mum had died of cold, that much was true, but only because she was out of her head on drugs. She’d overdosed, collapsed in an alley on a really frosty night and been too wasted to move. Those were the facts, but even as I made Granny go over and over the details, they wouldn’t sink in.
So much of it just didn’t make sense to me. It seems stupid now, but I never had any perception that joints or bongs were drugs. We might as well have got out a packet of biscuits. I had no idea at all.
‘Drugs’ was a word I’d heard about and I knew they were bad. When the police had taken that pouch hidden in my panda, they’d mentioned drugs then. But Mum had assured me they’d got it wrong. And of course I’d believed her. The fact that they’d released us so quickly backed up her story in my mind.
In other words, I knew early on that drugs were bad. People who took drugs were bad. So what did that make my mother?
But it turned out that Mum hadn’t died from marijuana. She’d been addicted to heroin, Granny said, for years. Even though I didn’t know what ‘heroin’ meant, I got the sense that it was as bad as you could get. ‘The police and the doctors said it’s the worst drug there is,’ Granny explained, as innocent as me in such matters.
‘So the newspaper was right?’
She nodded. In fact she went to a drawer and pulled out a different clipping from another paper. I’ve still got it today.
‘Do you want to hear what it says?’ she asked. When I said yes, she began to read.
‘A grim warning about the dangers of drug abuse was given at the Brighton inquest of a 23-year-old girl. Jennifer Wilson, a drug addict since she was just seventeen, died on April 30 from septicaemia and bronchial pneumonia brought about by a barbiturate overdose. Said coroner Dr Donald Gooding, “This is an oft repeated story of a young person who starts on marijuana, which is supposed to be harmless. It is not. It is dangerous and invariably leads to the situation where a person progresses from one dangerous drug to one even more dangerous.”’
‘“Drug addict since she was seventeen”?’ I repeated the words over and over, but they still wouldn’t sink in.
How had she kept it a secret? Why hadn’t I noticed?
Obviously she hadn’t kept it a secret at all. Any adult who’d observed her behaviour for more than a day would have put two and two together. And if they’d turned