Part 24

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Thank-you to: Jen for this.

True to his word, Ross Bathurst was back in the afternoon at three o’clock for visiting hours. Seeing his way too familiar face made me miss Kayla desperately. I wanted to hold her and have her safe with me. She was the only thing I had left and the urge to protect her was more intense than ever before. I was worried about her. These people had no idea what she had been through or what she needed. I wondered what they had told her about Anthony and about me. I wondered if she understood where I was and why I hadn’t come to get her yet.

“Can we talk now?” asked Ross.
“I don’t care what you do,” I said. “Talk if it makes you feel better.”
“I wanted to tell you about myself and what happened between your mother and me to try and help you understand.”
I shrugged. “Whatever. Just as long as I can see my sister.”
“I promise I will bring her to see you tomorrow,” he said.
“Fine,” I said. “Talk.”

“My life wasn’t so different from yours. Although from the outside it must have seemed like another world. I grew up in Kent in one of those towns where everyone pretends to be perfect but under the surface it’s a seething mess of secrets and lies. My parents were absolute pillars of the community. My father was a stockbroker who helped run the local business association and my mother was a florist who headed up the parish’s Sunday school. Everyone compared themselves to us and wanted to be just like us but behind closed doors my father drank heavily and he beat up my mother in front of me and my sister.

My mother told us it was her fault that she hit him and that she would never leave him but I eventually realised that her constant domestic “accidents” gave her the opportunity to go to the doctor and get more and more of the painkillers that basically kept her going.

I never told a single soul about what happened in my house because I knew if anyone found out that they would know we weren’t perfect and that they would separate me and my sister and lock my father up. Better the fucked up life you know, right?

When I was sixteen my mother finally lost the plot. Somewhere between the Demerol and the constant blows to the head she completely snapped and she shot my father in the head before turning the gun on herself. My sister was in the room with my parents when it happened. She was ten years old.

They took my sister into care since she was so psychologically damaged by the event that she needed to be hospitalised where she remains to this day. I was declared old enough to look after myself and since I was now in possession of a what seemed to me to be an absolute fortune of an inheritance, I didn’t resist the idea of continuing my life with no further adult interference.

I was adamant that I was going to prove to everyone that what my parents had done had no affected me and that I was absolutely fine no matter how fucked up they were. So I bought myself a little flat and I got five A-Levels and went to The London School Of Economics.

After I graduated I got into a high power programme and within five years became a sales director in a high-flying multinational company. I was what you might call an overachiever. But you can’t run from the past or from who you are and the nightmares followed me around. I started to make mistakes. I couldn’t cope. The strain of work and the strain of keeping my family secrets was turning me into a basket case.

I was at a party another sales director offered me cocaine. I swore I would never touch drugs but he managed to convince me that everything would be clear if I just tried it and that everybody did it. In fact he found it laughable that in my position I had never tried coke since it was almost expected that you would need it to survive. He made it seem so logical and simple and so I had a line. And he was right; it made everything seem clear and completely surmountable.

Within a month I had a thousand pound a week habit. When I met your mother I was completely off the rails and living exactly the same kind of double-life I had grown up with. On the outside I was a respectable businessman, smashing my sales targets and en route to becoming the youngest CEO in the history of the company. Behind closed doors I was a coke fiend burning my six figure salary on drugs without a second thought. I was drawn to your mother because she was an absolute mess and didn’t seem to be making any attempt to hide it. She was on the outside, exactly how I felt on the inside and that made her irresistible to me. It was like being able to hold up a mirror and say this is who I really am. I didn’t have to pretend in front of her. I could tell her all of my horrible stories and she had worse ones. I could do line after line in front of her and she did more. She knew what it was like to crave your next fix and to hate yourself and hate everyone else and so we egged each other on to greater and greater levels of absolute debauchedness.

I think I would have ended up exactly where your mother is now if I had not met my wife. I still used to go and visit my sister in hospital and Alison was one of the psychiatric nurses. She instantly recognised the signs of addiction in me and she convinced me that I was ruining my life and that I needed to get help.

I tried to get your mother to go into rehab with me but she laughed in my face. She said she didn’t need anyone telling her what to do and that she had managed perfectly fine for thirty years on her own without anyone else and so I completely cut her loose, just like the programme I was in told me to do.

She tried to contact me a number of times but I ignored her because she was part of the me I was trying to escape and heal. What I didn’t know was that she was pregnant with Kayla. She never told me. I promise you, Eric, if I had known I never would have run away like that.”

He seemed close to tears now and as much as I wanted him to just go away and leave my sister and me alone, I didn’t doubt his sincerity.

“I can’t tell you how sorry I am that it’s taken the loss of someone close to you for me to find out I had another daughter and to finally meet Kayla. When the police rung me to tell me that my name was on her birth certificate I was in absolute shock.”

“It’s a total soap opera to be sure,” I said. “And I’m sorry your life was a total fuck up before you went to rehab but what does any of this actually have to do with me and Kayla?”