Junk - Melvin Burgess [104]
It’s just gone. Where’d it go? Funny thing, I was going to give him the elbow just before I met Lily and Rob. Funny thing. I just feel so bad about it.
I was on the phone to Sal the other day. She keeps wanting to come and visit but I put her off, it’s too early. She’s not clean, she’s on methadone but she slips up from time to time. She’s got this new boyfriend, Mick, and they’re going to go to Amsterdam together and live over there for a while. Yeah, she’s bound to stay clean over there in the Drug Capital of Europe, as my dad likes to call it. To be fair to Sally, she doesn’t make much of a pretence that she’s going straight. But she’ll be all right, if anyone is. Sal’s one of those people who can go on forever.
I envy her. I’d like to go but I know what’d happen. Me, I don’t even dare go back to Bristol for a visit. So I’m stuck here in sodding Minely for the rest of my natural. Well, for a bit anyway.
But she said a lot of interesting things, Sal. She said, maybe it was some sort of comeback for being on the game. You know, maybe it put me off sex. That’s an interesting one. I try to think it’s that. I asked her, What about you?
‘Oh, no, oh no,’ she said. ‘You know me…’
I can’t tell because I never slept with anyone while Tar was away. But I don’t think so. I mean, it’s not the thought that turns me off. Just, not with Tar any more…
And she said, ‘You’ve got to give it a chance, Gems.’ Everyone says that. And she said this: ‘You’ve gotta do what you feel in the end.’ That’s what my mum says, too. And that’s what everyone says. But I don’t wanna do what I feel. I wanna do all right by Tar.
I just feel so sick about it, it’s so unfair. He could do with a break, Tar, and I thought – I suppose I always thought – that I was the break. And then I think, what good have I ever done for him? He’d never have got in with Lily and Rob and junk if it wasn’t for me; he’d have stuck at the squat with Vonny and Richard.
Actually my mum disagrees with that. She says he’d have found his way there on his own in the end. Maybe… he was a bigger junkie than I was. I don’t mean he took more; I was up there with the best of them while I did it. But when I came here, I did my cold turkey and that was it. I just didn’t want to know; I didn’t want to go near the stuff ever again. But Tar… he’d hitchhike halfway round the country to score. In fact he did, several times. So maybe my mum’s right. But it’s still not fair, is it?
He loves Oona so much.
Give it six months. I just wish…
I just wish he didn’t want to sleep with me.
Chapter Thirty-One
Tar’s Dad
It wasn’t a love story.
That seems a hard thing to say, but one of the things you learn is to look facts straight in the eye. Not necessarily without flinching.
For example… I’m a sad old man. You try it, at the age of fifty-five. Your only child hates you, your wife hates you, your colleagues – ex-colleagues – despise you. All for good reasons. Everything you worked for is gone and there you are. It doesn’t feel like standing at the threshold of a new dawn, I can tell you. I don’t feel sorry for myself… well, that’s not true, of course I feel bloody sorry for myself. I mean to say, I know that it’s my fault.
Jane and I, that was a love story. We fell in love when we were young – deeply, deeply in love. It went wrong later on. You can say all sorts of things about why – she wasn’t who I thought she was, I don’t suppose I was what she thought I was. In the end though there’s only one answer – booze, booze and booze. I like a drink, I used to say. Not any more. Bit late in the day. The funny thing about it is that we both ended up on the bottle. Isn’t that odd? Neither of us was at it to start with, it just seemed to happen. Makes you wonder.
When David came back to Minely, I was scared silly. But I hoped.