Over the course of the last ten years I’d been more used to signing drug prescriptions and police release forms. It felt weird scrawling my name, but also, I had to confess, very, very exciting.
There were times when I woke up in the morning thinking it was all a figment of my imagination. This couldn’t really be happening. Not to me.
I didn’t want Garry coming round to my flat at that point. So I began meeting him once or twice a week in Islington. There were pros and cons to the arrangement. On the plus side, it meant that I could top up my money and spend a few hours working afterwards. But it also meant that I had Bob with me, which meant that finding somewhere to sit and talk was a challenge, especially when the weather was bad. The local cafés wouldn’t let a cat on the premises and there wasn’t a library nearby. So we had to find alternatives.
The first people to invite us in from the cold, ironically, were Waterstones, the bookshop on Islington Green. They knew me in there. I’d often pop in with Bob to look through the Science Fiction section. The manager there, Alan, was on duty and we asked him if he minded us working upstairs in a quiet corner. He not only said yes, he got a member of staff to organise two chairs for us in the history section. He even brought a couple of coffees in.
When the sun was out, we used a place on the Essex Road that had tables outside. I could smoke there as well, which was a bonus for me.
Garry and I were determined that the book wouldn’t just be about my life with Bob. We wanted it to offer people some insights into life on the streets. I wanted to get across to people how easy it was for people like me to fall through the cracks, to become forgotten and overlooked by society. Of course, in order to do that, I had to tell my ‘backstory’ as well.
I really wasn’t looking forward to that part of the exercise. Talking about myself wasn’t something that came easily to me, especially when it came to the darker stuff. And there was a lot of that. There were aspects of my life as an addict that I had buried away in the farthest corners of my mind. I’d made choices that I was deeply ashamed about, done things that I didn’t want to share with anyone, let alone put in a book. But once we began talking, to my surprise, it was less painful than I’d feared. I couldn’t afford to see a psychologist or a psycho-analyst but there were times when talking to Garry was as good as talking to a shrink. It forced me to confront some painful truths and was strangely cathartic, helping me to understand myself a little better.
I knew I wasn’t the easiest person to deal with. I had a defiant, self-destructive streak that had consistently got me into trouble. It was pretty obvious that I’d had a childhood that had messed me up. My parents’ divorce and my peripatetic years, flitting between the UK and Australia, hadn’t exactly been stabilising forces. I’d always tried really hard to fit in and be popular as a kid, but it had never worked. I’d ended up trying too hard – and become a misfit and an outcast as a result.
By the time I was an adolescent my behavioural problems had begun. I was angry and rebellious and fell out with my mother and stepfather. For a period of around two years, between the ages of 11 and 13, I’d been constantly in and out of the Princess Margaret Hospital for Children outside Perth. At one point I’d been diagnosed as either bi-polar or manic depressive. I can’t remember exactly which it was. They seemed to come up with a new diagnosis every week. Either way, the upshot was that I was prescribed various medications, including lithium.
The memories from that time were mixed.
One vivid memory that sprung to mind was of going into the surgery at the Princess Margaret for a weekly blood test. The walls of the surgery were plastered in posters of pop and rock stars so I had the blood tests done while staring at a picture of Gladys Knight and the Pips.
Each time the doctor assured me that the injection he was about to give me wouldn’t hurt. ‘It will only feel like a scratch,’ he’d say, but it was always more than that. It was kind of ironic, I suppose, but I’d had a phobia about needles for years after that. It was a measure of how deep my drug addiction had been that I’d somehow forgotten this and happily injected myself on a daily basis.
On a happier note, I remembered how, after leaving the hospital, I had wanted to give something back and had begun donating boxes of comic books. I’d managed to get myself some work experience in a comic book shop nearby and had persuaded the boss to let me take boxes of unsold magazines for the kids at the hospital. I’d spent many hours playing air hockey and watching video games in the activity room they had in the children’s ward so I knew they’d all appreciate something decent to read.
In the main, however, the memories of that time were pretty grim. They opened my eyes to aspects of my youth that I’d never really examined before.
At one point, for instance, we were working on the book on the day after I’d watched a film by the documentary-maker Louis Theroux about how parents in America were using more and more psychoactive medication to treat their kids for disorders like ADHD, Asperger’s and bipolar disorders.
It occurred to me suddenly that this was exactly what had happened to me. And it struck me that being treated like this must have had a huge impact on me when I was young. It made me wonder what had come first. It was a chicken and egg question: had I been given the drugs because I was acting up? Or did I start acting up because of all the visits to doctors who convinced me that there must be something wrong with me? Perhaps most scary of all, what effect did all that medication have on me and my young personality? As a young kid I’d considered myself quite a happy-go-lucky character, but since that time I had been what I suppose you’d call ‘troubled’. I’d struggled to fit into society and suffered from depression and mood swings. Was there a link? I had no idea.
What I did know, however, was that I couldn’t blame the doctors, my mother or anyone else for the way my life had gone since then. Yes, they had played a role, but the buck stopped with me. No one told me to develop a drug problem. No one forced me to drift on to the streets of London. No one made me take up heroin. They were mistakes that I made of my own free will. I hadn’t needed anyone’s help to screw up my life. I’d done a perfectly good job of that on my own.
If nothing else, the book was an opportunity for me to make that crystal clear.
For a moment my dad was lost for words. The expression on his face was a mixture of disbelief, happiness, pride – and mild apprehension.
‘That’s a lot of money, Jamie,’ he said after a couple of moments, putting to one side the manila coloured cheque I’d just handed him.
‘You’d better be careful with that.’
The reality of what had happened hadn’t really sunk in until now. Not just for my dad, but for me either. There had been meetings with publishers, contracts signed, even articles in the newspapers. But it hadn’t been until I received this cheque for the advance that it finally struck home.
When it had first flopped through the letter box a couple of days earlier, I had opened the envelope and then simply sat there looking at it. The only cheques I’d seen in the past decade had been from the DHSS. They were for small amounts, £50 here and £100 there, never anything with more than a couple of noughts on it.
Compared to some people, especially in London, it wasn’t actually that large a sum of money. For a lot of the commuters walking past me each day on their way to the City of London, I guess it wasn’t even a month’s salary. But for someone for whom £60 was a very good day’s wage, it was an eye-watering amount of cash.