The Choice, page 6
But we were.
‘How long has he been like this?’ I asked.
‘A year,’ Dad said. ‘Maybe a bit longer than that. We thought it was just drink at first. He’d lie to us when he came in and say that he’d just been having cans with the lads, but soon we knew that wasn’t it. We could tell by the way he was acting. I thought he might have been smoking or something.’
‘Did you know anything about this?’ I asked Kellie. She was tracing a pattern on the table with her finger while she listened.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I wish I did.’
‘How was he able to keep hiding it?’ As I said it, a second thought occurred to me. ‘He wasn’t doing it here, was he?’ The flat was big enough for the five of us but too small for secrets. I had always shared a bedroom with him.
‘No, I don’t think he’d ever do that,’ Mam said, but I wasn’t too sure. We’d never spoken about the day he missed my match, when I’d come home and found him lying there asleep in all of his clothes – asleep or passed out? Now wasn’t the time for me to bring it up.
‘He’s very good at hiding it,’ Mam continued. ‘I always thought, looking at those poor divils out on the street and all of their families, that it would be obvious, that he’d let something slip by accident or there’d be some sort of clue, that we’d just know by the way he was. But there was never anything really. I don’t know.’
All of those nights I’d spent out in the field with John and his friends, I knew that there were two Johns really: the John when I was there hanging around with them, not exactly trying to be a good influence, but definitely trying not to give me too many bad habits; and then the other John, who could do what he wanted when I was gone home to bed. He didn’t mind if I saw him having a can or two of beer or cider, but he’d never get drunk when I was with him, even though I’d heard him stumble in to bed on plenty of occasions. If I was there when his friends were smoking hash, he made sure that I noticed him passing on the joint without taking a drag himself, but once you know the smell, it’s hard to miss it, and there were nights when it followed him in the door, stuck to his clothes like glue. Maybe that’s just what big brothers do; they hide things from their little brothers.
But even though heroin was all around us, right there on our doorstep, I’d never once heard him or any of his friends suggest it, not even as a joke when they were fed up and making dares to see how far they could push each other before someone backed down.
‘I warned him so many times,’ Dad said. ‘It’s lethal. He didn’t even realise himself. He told me that he didn’t think it would do any harm because it was only a little bit.’
‘He came in one night and he was bad,’ Mam explained. ‘Your dad checked his pockets. He didn’t have any drugs – I think he knew better than to bring them into this flat – but he had little strips of tinfoil that he was using to smoke the heroin and your dad found them. There was no point in him lying to us then. We’re not stupid.’
She let the tears roll down her face now. The tissue had practically disintegrated in her hand, and she wasn’t bothered with it anymore.
‘We can’t help him if we don’t know what’s going on,’ she said, her voice breaking. ‘I don’t care what mistakes he’s made. I just want him to tell us so we can help him get better. How many flats have we gone into to say we’re sorry to heartbroken mas and das? All those poor families. How many funerals have you all been to?’
I thought she was going to start listing them out but she didn’t. She didn’t need to. We knew exactly who she was talking about.
‘Promise me,’ she begged us, looking at me and Kellie like we were the only two people left in the world. ‘Promise me now, both of you, that you’ll never touch it. You’ll never think about it. You’ll never even look at it. Because I can’t. I just can’t –’
The worry came pouring out of her in floods of tears. Kellie moved to sit beside her and put her arm around her, hugging Mam into her side while she cried on her shoulder. Every sob was like a knife. Wherever John was, I hoped he knew what he had done.
‘Where is he now?’ I asked Dad. Part of me wanted to go and find him and bring him back so he could see for himself the world that he had turned upside down.
‘I don’t know where he went,’ Dad said. ‘I just told him to pack his bags and be gone before you and your mam came home. We had this conversation with him before. We told him that he wasn’t welcome here if he was still using drugs. If he was going to live here, he had to be clean. They were the rules.’
‘Who is he going to stay with, though?’ Kellie said.
‘Let him figure it out,’ Dad snapped. He leaned forward in the chair, his elbows resting on his knees, his right hand pinching the bridge of his nose so that we couldn’t see his face. It was a good question. If I ever needed somewhere to stay, Kev’s would be the first place that I’d try; maybe Aaron would let John stay.
‘We didn’t put him out because we don’t love him,’ Mam said. ‘We love him to bits. That’s why we’re doing it. But he has to understand, it’s either us or the heroin. He can’t have both. He has to choose. I can’t do another night lying awake in bed waiting for him to come in, wondering if he’ll come or if he’s lying in a stairwell somewhere. I can’t be afraid to answer the door every time there’s a knock in case it’s a guard standing there with bad news. I can’t do it. I’m not able.’
‘It’s the only way,’ Dad agreed. ‘If he’s here and he’s using, and now he’s stealing too, and we let it keep happening, we’re killing him. He’ll never get better. It’ll just get worse and worse.’
‘I just don’t know how he’s managed to keep going with work this whole time,’ Mam said.
I jumped in. ‘He’s not working. He got sacked about a month ago.’
I told them about walking home with John that day after the fight up at the Monos and how he’d told me not to say anything. I felt stupid now for keeping his secrets for him. More than stupid, I felt guilty, like this all could have been avoided if Mam and Dad knew that John was out of work and struggling for money.
And when I was finished, I told them about the night when he had been threatened out in the field.
‘It was the same man whose flat we called to tonight,’ I said to Mam. ‘Is that who’s dealing to him?’
Mam frowned at the mention of him, or maybe it was at the thought of her missing jewellery. ‘No, he just collects the money. He was always hassling Claire Mac’s Wayne when he was alive – that’s how I know where he lives. He’s a nasty one, though, threatened them with all sorts if they didn’t pay up.’
‘He’s only a little runt of a gofer,’ Dad muttered. ‘One of Charlie Hanlon’s crew, I’m sure. They’re all little bloodsuckers, those lads. I know plenty that would love to meet them in a dark alley some night, see how brave they are then.’
Just hearing the name Charlie Hanlon was enough to make me shiver.
‘Anyway,’ Mam said, ‘you’re to stay well away if you see him around again, do you hear me?’
I promised her that I would. I didn’t want to ever see the man again. I didn’t want any of this. All I wanted was for life to go back to normal.
The clock beside the fridge ticked and ticked, and as the four of us sat there and everything sank in, I realised that life hadn’t been normal for a long time, a lot longer than I had known.
9
Kev and I stood at the gates and looked up nervously at the big cold building staring back down at us. We had been standing there for at least five minutes and nobody had gone into the building or come out of it. Every window had a shutter pulled down tight on the inside and, at the top of the stone steps, the front door was shut. For all we knew, the place was empty, closed for the day. The three or four cars parked up on the tarmac driveway in the front were the only clue that suggested otherwise.
The steel sign beside the front door had turned dull long ago. If you didn’t know anything about the Brickhouse, about the people who needed it, you wouldn’t have guessed much by looking at it from the outside.
‘Do you wanna go in?’ Kev asked me as he eyed up the windows for any signs of movement. We had walked by this place hundreds of times, but normally from a safe distance on the opposite side of the road, and this was the closest we’d ever been to the inside.
I looked around. The usual Wednesday-afternoon mix of cars and people were going about their business, not paying us the slightest bit of attention. I was more worried about bumping into someone from school, someone who knew us and might ask us what we were up to. Al and Shane had walked out with us when we were finished for the day. I’d told them we were going to collect something for Colm, and they’d rolled their eyes and gone off home.
It was two weeks since Mam and Dad had put John out of the flat, and Kev was the only person I had told about what had happened. It had been his idea for us to come up here. The two of us had been friends forever; he didn’t have any brothers or sisters, and he was the closest thing I had to a brother my own age. I told him the whole story of that night – the money, the jewellery and the conversation in the sitting room afterwards – because I could trust him not to tell anyone. I didn’t want anyone feeling sorry for me or looking at me and thinking I was going to end up doing heroin too. I didn’t think what was happening in our family was anyone else’s business. Besides, it was Ballymun; everyone would know soon enough anyway. Secrets never stayed secret for long.
‘Come on, are we going in?’ Kev asked me again.
‘For what?’
‘This isn’t bleedin’ Macari’s – we’re not going in for a quarter-pounder and chips,’ he said, shaking his head at the stupid question. ‘What do you think we’re going in for? To ask them.’
‘Ask them what?’
‘I dunno,’ he said with a bit of frustration. ‘Ask them all these questions that you’re asking me. Ask them the stuff that you’re worried about. They’ll know the answers.’
I had been asking Kev a lot of questions. It was the only way I could stop worrying. I didn’t expect him to know the answers any more than I knew them myself, but at least by asking them, it was getting them out of my head and into the world and freeing up a little more space in my brain, which was starting to feel more and more like a squeezed sponge these last few days.
But the Brickhouse was for people with a drug addiction, not for their little brothers. I couldn’t just walk in and expect someone to hand me a leaflet that said ‘My brother’s using heroin. What do I do now?’ on the front of it.
‘No,’ I said, hesitating. ‘Come on, let’s go.’ But I didn’t move to leave, and neither did Kev. ‘Do you think they have someone who I could talk to?’ I asked. ‘They’ll probably just think we’re on the wind-up.’
Kev stared at me as if I’d lost my mind. ‘How many people do you think go into a drug treatment centre’ – he paused, pointing at the crest on his jumper – ‘in their school uniforms and ask for information about heroin as a wind-up?’
Well, when you put it like that, I thought.
He started to move towards the door, waiting for me to join him. ‘There might not be anyone there today,’ he said. ‘Or maybe they don’t have anyone who does stuff like that. But at least you’ll have asked. Come on anyway, let’s go in or let’s go home. This place freaks me out.’
He’d said it before he could catch himself. It was true; it freaked me out too. It just wasn’t particularly helpful to hear it.
‘Sorry,’ he said with an apologetic smile.
He was right, though. I had nothing to lose by asking, so I took a deep breath and walked across the driveway and up the steps to the front door before I changed my mind again. I pushed it, hoping that it might swing open and we could let ourselves in without making a scene. A few flakes of chipped red paint came away in my hand, but the door was heavy and it didn’t budge.
I looked for a doorbell or a buzzer but I couldn’t see one. There was an old brass knocker, though, and just as I reached for it, I heard voices on the other side of the door and the sound of a key in a lock.
‘Sketch,’ I hissed at Kev, panicking, as I turned and ran without a second thought. I don’t know why we hid – go with what you know, I suppose – as if we were about to do something wrong by knocking on the door and asking for help. We ducked in between two of the parked cars just as the door swung open and a woman came out onto the top step.
When the door closed behind her, she was by herself. She was a young woman, no more than five or six years older than John, but she moved slowly and uncertainly, with a shuffle rather than a step, which made her look much older than she was. She should have been tall but she wasn’t standing fully straight, hunched over as if the faded shopping bag in her left hand carried the weight of the world. Her hair was tied back into a ponytail but it made her face – her eyes, her nose, her lips – sink back into itself like little dots and lines. She looked frail, skinny, as she sat down on the steps, no more than a couple of metres away from where we were, and started to cry.
I watched as she put her head in her hands, talking to herself quietly in between sobs. Even though this was a place where people came to get help, everything about the Brickhouse was grim and miserable and made me anxious. That uneasy feeling twisted inside me, getting worse as I watched this poor woman crying alone on the steps. I didn’t want to be there any more. We needed to get out.
‘Should we check if she’s okay?’ Kev mouthed, but I shook my head. We couldn’t suddenly pop out from our hiding place to ask if she was all right – we would frighten the life out of her – but I also knew there was no way for us to leave without being noticed either. Our only option was to stay where we were and wait for her to go. It was obvious that she needed help, but nobody was coming to help her, and neither would we; that made me feel even worse.
When she got up and left after a few minutes, I was ready to go home too. Maybe the people in the Brickhouse would be able to help me, but I’d come back another day. As I stood up and went to come out from between the cars, Kev grabbed me by the arm and pulled me back down beside him, pointing over to the gates.
The woman was still standing there as a man cycled up beside her. His tracksuit was pristine, every bit as flashy as his bike. It was hard to know which was more expensive. The woman’s face froze when she saw him. She knew him but she wasn’t happy to see him.
‘No, no, no,’ she said. ‘Just go away, would you? I told you already to leave me alone.’
‘What sort of a welcome is that?’ the man said, but he was the only one who found it funny. ‘I have your stuff for you. What do you want and I’ll go and get it for you now?’
They were only standing a couple of feet apart, but they were speaking at the tops of their voices, loud enough for anyone to hear.
‘Leave me alone,’ the woman said, agitated, needing to get away from this conversation as quickly as possible. She went to walk past him but the man rolled his bike out in front of her, blocking her way.
‘What’s that in your hand?’ he said, snatching a piece of paper away from her before she could respond.
‘No, I need that, give it back,’ she pleaded, unable to hide the desperation in her voice. ‘I’ve to go up to the chemist to get that.’
The man wasn’t interested, moving his arm out of her reach as he unfolded the note. ‘The chemist?’ he said, mocking her. ‘Let me have a look so and see what you’re getting.’ He read it aloud. ‘Methadone? Did they tell you that would help get you off the heroin? They’re full of it. You’re wasting your time with that stuff. It’s not going to do anything for you.’ His tone changed and he suddenly sounded a lot less aggressive and a lot more friendly. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll sort you out. I told you, I have the stuff for you. I’ll do you a swap.’
The woman held out her hand again for her prescription, but he made no move to give it back.
‘I said leave me alone,’ she repeated, but this time, she didn’t sound as sure about it.
‘Go on then, do what you want,’ he said. ‘I’m only trying to help you. Don’t come looking for me tomorrow when your teeth are going to fall out of your head with the pain, because that’s what that other stuff is going to do to you.’
He offered her the prescription but she didn’t take it back. She looked like she was worn out and not able to keep up the fight. He saw her starting to crack. ‘You don’t even need to pay me,’ he explained, as if he was doing her a favour. ‘We can do a swap. Go on, here, take this back. You go and pick it up from the chemist, and I’ll meet you up there and sort you out with a couple of grams.’
He put the prescription back into her hand and jumped back on his bike, taking off in the direction of the flats before there could be any further discussion. The woman looked after him for a moment as he cycled away and then picked up her shopping bag again, shuffling up the road in the direction of the chemist.
‘That’s messed up,’ Kev said eventually as we walked home. I didn’t ever want to go back to the Brickhouse after what we had seen. I couldn’t stop thinking about that poor woman, how trapped she looked as the dealer finally broke her. She had gone there to get help, but if that was what she was up against, how could she ever hope to get better? How could anyone?
‘Ah, jeez, Philly, I dunno,’ Kev said when I didn’t answer him. He knew what I was thinking. ‘I only saw John with you a couple of weeks ago. He definitely wasn’t as bad as that.’
Kev was right. He wasn’t that bad. Not yet anyway.
10
For the next few weeks, training was crazy, which kept my mind off John. Or maybe it was crazy because I was trying to keep my mind off John. Either way, I was glad of it.
By the time Colm blew his whistle at the end of a session, every one of us was wrecked. He’d gather us around for one last chat before sending us home, and he’d be surrounded by T-shirts soaked through with sweat, red faces looking back at him and hands on heads as we tried to gulp down the air to catch our breath.
