Junk - Melvin Burgess [106]
I’ll think of it on my deathbed, I know I will. Maybe it’ll be my last thought on earth.
The news spreading round the staffroom. Mr Lawson wet his pants at a staff meeting.
David Hollins, the Head, was very nice about it. I’d been at the school twenty years. ‘We can’t go on like this, Charles.’ Phrases like that. ‘I’m putting you on indefinite leave.’ And, ‘Not fair on the kids…’
Wife, son, job, bang. And what’s left, you ask? Ah. A corny answer to that one, but the truth. God’s left.
Sorry. I’m not one of your evangelical types. I’m not out to convert anyone. I was always a believer, I don’t want anyone to think that God is a replacement for the bottle. I always prayed. I pray more these days. I go to church. I think to myself, At least I have my faith. Now, David, he really has nothing. Not that he ever had a job to lose. But he’s lost his wife, or the equivalent, and his daughter. At nineteen that’s a slightly different proposition. He has his daughter to gain. Maybe I have my son to gain.
I did try to convert him. I said, ‘What else is there that’s outside yourself and big enough and strong enough to help you with addiction if it isn’t God?’
‘Faith, hope and charity,’ he said with a smirk. I think he was being sarcastic.
The thing about me and David is, we have so much in common. There’s so much we could talk about. But he isn’t really interested. I think he’d despise any insights I could give him. All he really wants to talk about is me being a bastard… hitting her, hitting him. I suppose he’s outraged that I should even try. The thing is, I have a point of view. Murderers, psychopaths, angels – everyone has a point of view. You don’t have to agree with it but if you’re going to have some sort of a relationship with them, you have to understand it. But perhaps he doesn’t want a relationship with me.
We saw quite a bit of each other when he first came back. I was living in a bedsit down the road, a reformed character, so he must have thought he ought to give me a chance. He used to come round and let me hold my granddaughter. I was very grateful. I still see her… Gemma comes round from time to time. I take her for walks in the park and feed the ducks and push her on the swing…
‘Hello, clouds!’ I shout.
‘Hewo, cwouds,’ she yodels.
‘Hello, sky!’
‘… skwy…’
‘Hello, birds!’
‘Hewo…’
‘Hello, God!’
I wonder if her father would approve?
He didn’t talk to me very much about his own private life, only mine, so I had to piece together what happened later on. Basically, it didn’t work. He came out of prison and she didn’t want to know. That’s why I say it wasn’t a love story. Jane and I met each other and fell in love without the aid of any artificial stimulants… and we stayed in love. I think we still are despite the anger and the failures and the violence and the booze. It’s not possible for us to live together, of course, that’s the tragedy of it. But we loved… we love. I do anyway. But David and Gemma were on drugs the day they met. The beach crowd. Not heroin, I daresay. But drugs are drugs, aren’t they?
I accused him of that and he rolled his eyes and said, ‘Just a bit of smoke – that’s nothing.’
‘Is it?’
‘It’s better for you than fags,’ he said, and we said it together:
‘I couldn’t do without my smokes…’ I say that often enough. We had a laugh about it.
Anyway, it didn’t work, that’s the point. He wanted it, she didn’t. I don’t like Gemma very much. I blame her. I blame myself – but I blame her too. Apparently, it went on for months. She asked him to go; he wouldn’t go… it was his child too, why should he go, that sort of thing. In the end she moved back into her parents’ house and told him she wasn’t coming back. He hung on for a week, then he gave in and moved out of the flat so she could come back. Obviously he couldn’t sit there leaving her and the child stranded