Thread: Finding Fathers; Dangerous world

Hey Kate

Just read the last, printed out, 17 pages of ur diary.... what an amazing writer you are I'm practically there with you.

Looking forward to your next installment when you are up to it.

Hope things are well with you sweetie

lots and lots of love xxxxxxxxx

That's v weird.
Just gone back to my old weight loss diary now, then thought I'd check here.
Thanks so much Gen.
I'd like to get on with this at some point but am loath to go back to it while I have stuff on in the real world. A few weeks I think.

xxx

Originally Posted by HelenG

Hi Kate

Seen a couple on posts from you on other threads today - are you doing OK?

Hello!
Just seen this. Thanks for asking and noticing.
Yes, am okay on the whole. Emerged back into the "real world" for a bit, so had to step away from this for a while. Will be back.
Must say, I'm not as content now as when I was immersed in doing this though, even though it required me to go to dark places!

Take care
Kx

If you're sixteen they'll call your leaving home running away.
If you're a 46 year old man, they'll call it leaving your wife, or leaving your family.

For me when I was sixteen I was certainly leaving my family.
Maybe my real father was running away when he told his wife and son he was going to be with someone else, with my Mum.

My Mum, who didn't have anything to lose or leave, since she was already waiting in the flat they'd rented.

Anyway, that's her story. The one I don't know. The one she summed up in the first words she wrote me in sixteen years, with the sentence "I should have known better, but we all do silly things sometimes".

This is mine.

One October day in 1991 I left home. I left my family. I ran away. Or, I ran towards. I was running towards a man who said I deserved more than my parents. Who was offering me a life of freedom. A life of freedom that he was going to control. Anyone thinking, out of the frying pan and into the fire? Even part of me was then. But mostly, I was acting on instinct. Fight or flight, and I'd chosen flight. One heading from Leeds-Bradford Airport to Paris on October 1st 1991.

That morning I closed the red back door behind me, took a last look through the kitchen window where that red aga and round pine kitchen table seemed to promise a cosy space, somewhere warm, where a family could gather, but where they never actually ate together and hadn't for years. I had a blue canvas sports bag with some more of my clothes in, some toiletries, and a bigger canvas bag, folded up and ready to be filled with the clothes I'd been storing in my locker at school.

I took my usual route to school, along the main road, past the sandstone mill building that had once been the beating heart of the village, cutting down the snicket across the wasteland and through the back gates into the sixth form entrance. Streams of students in blue and white uniforms pouring into the grey building to sit in rows. I avoided the eyes of some I knew and half knew. Head down, looking purposeful, knowing I was about to start walking against the tide. I'd timed it well, the bell rang as I got through the door and people began surging towards registration. My heart beating I got to my wooden locker, hands shaking, getting out the bigger bag and shoving clothes and the smaller bag into it. I hoisted it over my shoulder. It could look like a very bulging sports bag, but the bit that might arouse suspicion was when I headed back out of the sixth form door while everyone else was in the common room round the corner. I walked quickly, feeling the weight of the handle digging into my shoulders. Walking out across the tarmaced grounds. Shoulders tensed, half expecting a shout of "Oi, where are you going!" even though I'd left school during the day several times during the last month. I hadn't been carrying a big bag any other time though. Crossing the road to the post office, to the bus stop. Willing the 576 to be quick, to take me away before anyone stopped me. Relief as the green and white double decker rounded the corner. Fumbling for change and flashing my half fare pass. Signs on the bus advertising Day Rover tickets. Travel all over Yorkshire for just one fare. Things I didn't need to know about any more. Those journeys I wouldn't be making anymore. Signs for other people, not for me. This world having somehow an air of being out of date. I breathed a huge sigh of relief as I settled into my seat, bag balanced awkwardly on one next to me.

Twenty two minutes later, if the 576 was on timetable, hauling it up the steps to get the train to Leeds. Scrap of paper in my pocket with bus and train times scrawled across it. Nowadays maybe I'd have been texting Jim throughout the journey; "I've made it out of school", "I'm on the bus", "I'm getting on the train". Then, knowing I was completely alone for this part of it. Having faith, because there was nothing else to believe in, that he would be waiting for me at the airport in Paris.

At Leeds train station I went to the dirty, white tiled toilets, tried to avoid the pools of water on the floor and got changed into my black jeans and a grey and black striped cotton top. Clothes I hadn't worn to school. Not quite a disguise, but enough to make me feel like I wasn't as obvious a sixth former in "smart casual" skirt and tights. I pulled out my StepDad's passport and American Express book from my bag and tore the pages in the passport and pulled the binding off, and ripped the chequebook, as best I could, into quarters. I put them into a yellow rubbish bin on the train platform, they still had bins in stations then, pushing them under white polystyrene burger cartons and soiled tissues. Feeling a frisson, a thrill and a fear, at destroying important documents. My Stepfather's important documents. This was the first time I felt a sense of freedom. I was leaving, I had left, I had broken the rules and no one was going to be able to come after me or doing anything about it. I was stepping into another world now. I wasn't playing to my parents rules anymore. Unfortunately, dangerously, I wasn't going to be playing to my own either...

I find the right bus for the airport just outside the train station and settle into my seat with a sigh of relief. Each stage in this journey feels further away. Another hurdle crossed. No hand tapping on my shoulder yet to stop me.

Checking in at the airport is another stage. Leeds-Bradford is only small and I can see immediately which desk I need to be at for Paris. I feel more conspicuous now. There's no shortage of teenage girls on their own wandering around Bradford or Leeds train stations, but there aren't any others in this glass and chrome building. I hand my passport over, the woman at the desk gives it a cursory glance and checks my big holdall in. It's a relief to get it off my shoulder. I follow the signs to the departure gates. Heart pounding as customs men and women in uniform scan the passengers walking through security. My ears tense as I pass under the X ray machine but there's no beep.

I'd bought a Daily Mail and try and read it on the plane but I can't concentrate. I watch the safety briefing and try and take it in. All the flights to America to see Dad's family and then in recent years flights to France. This is the first where I'm entirely alone though. Pushed back into my seat by the power of the takeoff I see the green patchwork quilt of Yorkshire fields on a tilt below us. This leaving that still doesn't feel quite real.

Then, a landing that doesn't feel real either. I remember my twin brother's reflex of always being sick at the exact moment of landing. The sick bag being marshalled into position at just the right moment for the inevitable. I don't feel nauseous but my stomach is light. Butterflies at the thought of seeing Jim again. It's been a month.

I have two picture memories of our reunion. They're like a before and after. In the first he is smiling at me as I walk through passport control. His wide grin, teeth white against his dark beard. "Let's get out of here" he's saying, after kissing me quickly on the lips, putting his arm round me. "I've seen two people I know in the last twenty minutes, I don't like airports".

Then, we are in the lift down to a multi storey car park. It's dark, smells foisty, there's French graffiti on the walls. "You put the passport and the card in the bin?" Jim is saying incredulously. My stomach drops along with the lift. Seems this wasn't the plan. I was supposed to have them with me. We were going to use them. Now there's no money "I had to leave in a hurry" Jim is saying. "I don't know how we're going to get to Turkey". Seeing my stricken face he adds "It's alright, I'll come up with a plan, I always do". I have a feeling that I can't quite name as dread in the pit of my stomach. I wish this was straightforward. I feel like I've messed up. Shown him that he can't rely on me. I just want to stay in the lift and be held by him but we get straight out as the doors open and walk quickly to a small, white car. The seats smell strongly of leather. Jim takes the wheel confidently. I stay quiet as he negotiates the streets out of Paris, and says we're heading for Germany. He switches the cassette player on and country music fills the car. A woman singing with a catch in her voice about wishing she was "back on Blue Bayou". Louisiana, Paris, Bradford, Turkey, Germany. I feel dislocated in the midst of all these places that I'm getting tastes of, but aren't fixed in any of them. I'm relying on Jim to be an anchor. "This car's stolen" by the way he suddenly announces.

These sections are difficult to write. The 32 year old and 16 year old me are so far apart.

I read this in the diary I started a couple of months after I got back;

“We talked about sex a lot in the car and he managed to drive and grope me thoroughly at the same time”.

Then after we’d checked into a small hotel near the German border;

“We went to a supermarket and got some coke and grapes. I envisaged future domestic scenes. We ate at a Chinese restaurant and then went back to the hotel and made love. We talked for ages, the Leonard Cohen tape was on and I slept in his arms, although neither of us slept much. I suddenly went all quiet and tearful and wanted him to hold me. Shock I suppose. He woke me up by making love to me very violently and kneading my breasts so hard I cried out”.

I was sixteen, he was forty six.
A summer romance is one thing. Sunflower fields, Jane Eyre fantasies, a mysterious older man. But now the balance of power had tipped too far his way. I’d left the shifting tectonic plate that had passed for my family stability, but much as I would like to have thought the opposite, I couldn’t easily make my own way without him. Anyway, I had no destination or goal of my own. The impulse had been to leave home and to go towards Jim. My life had narrowed down to that push and pull. Even if I could have recognised the increasingly obvious fact that he was a violent and controlling man taking advantage of a vulnerable and inexperienced girl, then I don’t think I could have allowed myself to see it properly at that point. I’d spent several years thinking that I was standing up to my controlling Stepfather by either arguing or withdrawing. The words “vulnerable” or “victim” weren’t in my dictionary for myself. It makes some of the diary and the way it seems to merrily hop from statements which should set alarm bells and sirens sounding, to factual descriptions of our journey on the run, difficult reading for me.

“We set off early for Saarbrucken. Jim had left the keys in the boot all night and that set him off worrying about why he was trying to destroy himself-no conclusions but he was unsettled. I looked awful and thought I was going to start my period but didn’t. He said when we got to Frankfurt I was to ask for Herr Kutzner and say a man outside wanted to take him for dinner. Underworld code? Apparently not. We got to Frankfurt and after endless driving around got to Opalstrasse, which was apparently a place Jim used to live and had relieved a nearby bank of £19 000. He told me of how he used to sell wool in the German market and chat in German to the old ladies. Once the tax people got him and he didn’t know what was happening when they knew the exact times of all these wool deliveries until it was pointed out to him that the building he lived in was riddled with tax workers. Kutzner had apparently gone to a caravan exhibition in Essen and we set off in that direction. We stopped at another B and B, had a meal and went to bed. He seemed unaccountably eager to show our father daughter passports. He said that to inflict pain during sex turned him on. I’m not a true masochist though. Transport was a prerogative and it was in connection with this that we were seeing Kutzner. Eventually we got to the Messehaus in Essen and after what seemed like hours we found this man’s stall. He greeted Jim effusively and showed him into one of the show caravans. “And this is…?” he said looking at me, plainly wondering if I was Elinor (Jim’s daughter) grown abnormally. “No” said Jim “This is a friend I met in Spain six weeks ago”. This man was ages showing others around and when we finally got to talk to him we got nowhere, though of course I didn’t have any idea where Jim was aiming for. He needed hospital treatment at this point for his leg but wouldn’t get it. Kutzner was a creep, said I was ”pretty” and was Jim good in bed. I was stunned but said “I’ll reserve judgement on that”. A man was asking me about Spain where I was supposed to have come from-what a farce. Jim was unconcerned and no help.”


I read this now and find that both my memory and re-engaged brain can fill in some gaps that the diary doesn’t.

We’d met this old associate of Jim’s at a huge motor show. Gleaming cars and caravans filling a large modern hall space. Kutzner was a tall, lean man with sculpted features and sparse greying hair. He’d looked amused throughout Jim’s introduction of me, knowing that “friend” was a euphemism, and his later mentions of Jim’s former partner and daughter were obviously calculated to make him feel uncomfortable, or at least were teasing nudges. He’d also asked me what I saw in Jim and said “Is it is big, blue eyes?”. It was an adult set of transactions that felt strange and way over my head. Whoever the man was who was asking me about Spain, and I can’t remember if it was a passing customer or someone who was working for Kutzner, may well have thought it was obvious that we were fabricating a story and was testing it out for fun.

Jim presumably went to Kutzner to call in a favour from someone he’d formerly been involved in dodgy deals with. A seller of caravans and motorhomes would be a pretty handy person for a general all-purpose smuggler to know. Kutzner told us that the vehicles from the motor show were all taken out of the back doors at night and security was lax if we needed transport. Jim had scoffed at the suggestion afterwards, he’d been angling for more immediate financial help than that. Though I hadn’t remembered until reading the diary just how in the dark I was. It was as if I had no expectation that he would tell me what his plans were, or that I had a right to ask. Just the way I’d been brought up at home.

And then there’s that sentence casually shoved in the middle of this ill advised quest for help, and just after I’d noted how at the Bed and Breakfast he’d shown our matching family passports when we signed the registration forms. It had turned out that Jim had stolen my Stepfather’s passport months earlier. I remembered the fuss my Stepfather had made when it went missing, turned the house upside down and in the end had to apply for a new one. Jim had had it all along. I didn’t quite understand why. He said that passports came in useful. And indeed, in the life of an international criminal, the greater number of identities you can have, the better. I felt queasy though at the way that we were going up to the room as father and daughter. I was still reeling from the shock of discovering that my father wasn’t my father. A man who was my lover posing as my father on my imposter father’s stolen passport was a set of identity shifts too far.

Many thanks Sara.
I'm quite close to the end of the writing now and am okay (and in love with a lovely, kind man which helps!). A literary agent's agreed to look for a publisher for this for me and is very hopeful and encouraging about it, so fingers crossed. Just going to keep adding more installments as I write them.

******
I didn’t mention our bank robbery did I?

There I go again, melodrama, since it wasn’t quite a bank robbery. It’s frustrating sometimes how I seemed to have stepped into a crime novel, when I was also in the middle of what could be sensitive rite of passage writing about how a sixteen year old girl’s sexual awakening and identity construction were being influenced (hindered) by some bullying, not quite paternal older men. I suppose we can’t always (or even usually) end up with the narrative that we’d most like to tell.

Anyway, I stepped out of chronological order a bit, when I went into parts from the diary about Jim and his newly revealed sadistic tendencies. The robbery happened on the way from the airport. The plan Jim came up to with to compensate for how I’d got rid of the cheques and passport. He said that actually, he had some of my Stepfather’s documents, including his Credit Lyonnais chequebook and perhaps we could use them to get enough money from his account to see us through to Turkey.

My diary is understated as ever;

”We found a Credit Lyonnais branch and I did all the talking in French. We got 5000 francs. I was elated.”

Jim said that we could say that our car had broken down and we needed cash for garage repairs. About £500 would be plausible. Well, by we, he meant me, since he didn’t speak much French. My heart was thumping as the cashier in the quiet, soft carpeted bank called the manager out to see if they could bend the rules and let us draw cash on a cheque. I used my acting skills, seeing this as some kind of audition to be in Jim’s life as a useful partner, and elaborated in French about how we were on our way for a little holiday in Germany and my father’s car had broken down, but a little garage had told us they could repair it straight away for 5000 francs. Smiling and nodding the manager agreed to arrange for us to have it in cash “pas de problem!”.
Jim and I grinned at each other as he instructed the cashier. I was rationalising this in my head as money that my Stepfather would have spent on me if I was still at home. Sort of an advance on the sixth form years he wasn’t now going to have to feed me during. Although I was naturally fairly honest, I felt a thrill at how easy it had felt to construct a story and get someone to believe it. I’d also enjoyed playing a part. Escaping from me for a while. It was another irony of course that I’d been playing the part of a helpful daughter on a leisure jaunt with her Dad.

After the abortive attempt to get help from Jim’s creepy old associate at the motor show we headed into the next big city of Cologne. That area of Germany felt very grey and industrial and ugly. Road after road of factories and smoking chimneys and warehouses and graffiti. The leaden feel matched our mood. I recorded;

“We were both quiet and despondent. He needed hospital treatment for his leg at this point but refused to get it. We didn’t make love that night though he woke me up with it in the morning. He said he felt guilty about Evie and I hoped that was the explanation. We went back to the Messehaus and he saw Kutzner alone while I went and had a coffee (feeling dead grown up). He came back and said that Kutzner was playing games. It was then that we formulated the plan. It felt better to have a plan. He said he needed excitement and intrigue and he should have been a General in a war, and when he didn’t get it he was sulky and bored (with the implication, like this morning). He had that said that he’d been stuck in moneyless situations before but something had always turned up and he hadn’t been able to see how it was going to this time. He felt hopeless. Then he rang James in Blackpool and Andrew, we changed £150 of English money and got the plane ticket for me. I was taken aback by the speed of it. I don’t think I fully understood the plan at this point.”

I definitely didn’t. But it was relief to have him seeming to be in better mood. I was being given a role. And even though I didn’t understand exactly what he wanted me to do in Blackpool, I felt like I was going to be able to be useful somehow. It was a measure of how convinced we were that my family wouldn’t risk drawing attention to themselves by making a fuss about my disappearance that we would risk me going back to England. I had been trying to put my family out of my mind completely. On the teatime of the day I left home we’d walked to a phone box and I’d dropped one French coin into the slot. Dialled my home number, knowing my Mum would just have got in. She said “Hello?” and I quickly launched into the paragraph I’d rehearsed in my head;

“I’m leaving home because of what I’ve found out about you, I’m going to London, don’t try to find me, there’s a letter in the post”.

It all came out in one breath and I clanked the receiver down before I could hear any reaction. Not that there would have been a loud or instant reaction. My Mum was as emotionally closed as I was then.

Later that night Jim had gone to ring Gill, leaving me in the hotel room. He came back with his face grim, saying my Dad had rung her straight after my call home and said Jim had twelve hours to ring him or he’d inform the Police. My diary records that “We couldn’t work out how my parents figured out so quickly that we were together”.

Though what strikes me now, with a distance of years, is how irrationally we were all thinking. With the letter Jim had insisted I write to the school going to arrive the next day, it was very unlikely that the Police weren’t going to be called anyway. It also leaps out that me going back to England when all parties involved knew I was with Jim, wasn’t a very good idea. Especially when the plan seemed to involve drawing on more money from my Stepdad’s account.

My diary entry about the last day that Jim and I were together goes into quite a lot of detail, but also misses out some vital things. I rifled back and forth through the pages of my diary when I realised this, checking that I hadn’t at least hinted at it, but I hadn’t. The repression or denial or skipping over was total. Although I had gone as far as to say;

“He said that to inflict pain during sex turned him on”…

but I merely commented that; “I’m not a masochist”




In reality, my chest was a mass of bruises from how he was handling me roughly. I kept up the same sort of mental resistance that I had to my Stepfather’s conflicts “This isn’t me, I’m something else”, which allowed me to separate myself from the pain I was feeling, and therefore also separate Jim in my head from the person who was causing it. I recorded;

“It was that day we did the lottery tickets. On one of them we won another ticket. It was at a vendor outside the Bahnhof and the beautiful Cathedral. We took it as a sign. Also, on our way to the hotel, he suddenly said “Do you believe in signs?”. It turned out that the car in front had part of its registration as “Kay” which was his real name. Earlier he’d said Eveleigh wasn’t his real name and so we’d joked the dedication for the book (he’d said suddenly sincerely that he thought I would write one day) could be “To Jim, whose real name I never did find out”. Turns out even Gill didn’t know his real name which pleased me. He went off that night before the meal to ring Julie, Gill’s sister, he said. Fishy? We’d had a drink of champagne in Cologne Hauptbahnhof, then we had some cheap wine he bought. Then God knows how many glasses of German white wine before and during the meal. He told me lots of anecdotes about his tearaway youth in Redcar with Peter who seemed important to him. He then said that tonight I could “win or lose”, nothing about me could be private. I was well away, the room spinning. I was in an unreal world. We got up to the room. I asked if it was as intense as this with Gill- “In the beginning”, “Will you love me more than Gill?” “Yes”. He started to make love to me but then I felt sick and the whole of my stomach went in the sink. He cleared it up. I had a shower. We slept. In the morning his leg was killing him he said. He had a shower, then made love to me. I showered and packed. We had breakfast. He was hungover because he’d mixed his drinks he said. We laughed about it.”


Again, still more things strike me even now in the writing. He rarely drank. Said he didn’t like being out of control. But he made sure that I was drunk that night.

I remember our meal was steak. Two thick red steaks that left pools of blood on the plate.

And I remember that he used a wine bottle on me, inside me, even when I asked him not to, and it hurt. I remember feeling bruised, inside and out the next day. But somehow I compartmentalised this, though I didn’t forget it. I didn’t tell anybody for years. Because it didn’t fit with the narrative I was telling myself and other people about the soulmates, separated by bad luck and difficult circumstances.

The diary recounts the morning that I flew back to England from Frankfurt Airport, four nights after I’d flown to Paris;

“We had a cold drink at the airport. He’d given me all the stuff. I was to meet Andrew in Blackpool. I had his number to ring him from London. I had qualms about the supposed plan to dump him in Germany but was looking forward to driving to Turkey through Poland etc. Jim said “How do you feel about being a jetset?”. He put his arm around me as we said goodbye at the gate. I set off through the barrier, waved. He waved and smiled and that was the last time I ever saw him”.


That was the case when I was writing the diary two months later. When I had no idea where he was, or if he was alive and was convinced we would never meet again. It would actually be nearly five years before we met again. At a time when I had finally begun to recognise how someone treated you if they really loved you. When I’d finally begun to recognise that I needed to treat myself with love too. As I looked back and waved through that departure gate, I was blissfully ignorant of the departures and losses that were yet to come.

Breathtaking read thank you x

Thanks Mandy! It's a very strange story, but good to get it written down.

******

In the next few days I am going to see a heroin addict shooting up, walk past the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the street, commit another bank fraud, have my palm read, feature in “The Sun” and be arrested.

Luckily I don’t know any of this when I touch down at Heathrow. In my diary entry I don’t so much have the wide eyed enthusiasm of someone as old as sixteen; more like someone as young as six;

“On arrival at Heathrow I was impressed. Here I was on this big adventure all on my own. A part of me was still numb though.”

Carrying out Jim’s instructions I got the tube to Euston. Overwhelmed by the mass of people, but feeling purposeful. I rang Andrew’s Mum to give my arrival time after I’d bought my ticket up to Blackpool. My diary says I posted a letter to Mum and Dad and a postcard to my friend Amanda. I can’t recall at all what I put in these, but know the purpose of them was to throw them off the scent by making them think I was in the capital after all.

I read papers on the train, relieved to see I wasn’t in them, and watched the fields and cities blurring past the window. Nothing felt real. I’d worried I wouldn’t recognise Andrew when I got to Blackpool station, but I did straight away. Tall, dark hair, long face. Something of the look of a young Hank Marvin I thought. I didn’t tell him that. I suggested we go for a coffee at the station so I could tell him Jim’s plans. Because I was in possession of knowledge that he wasn’t, and because I was an emissary for Jim who had things he wanted, like the expertise to smuggle antiques and guns, then I suddenly felt quite empowered. Here I was chairing a meeting at a railway station to discuss criminal plans. What with the British Rail coffee, and the fact that I was in reality, entirely at Andrew’s mercy, then I wasn’t very close to being the Mafia-type chief I temporarily seemed to imagine I was. I did give him the message that Jim had told me to convey though; “Any cock ups and it’s either suicide or a monastery”. He’d said that Andrew was scared of him which would come in handy. I was also supposed to tell him that we were all going to Turkey and that there were loads of antiques (Smuggled ones to sell. This wasn’t true. I was definitely not supposed to let on that Jim had no money or means of getting any).

We walked then through back streets of Blackpool to find a Bed and Breakfast. It was dark and flashes of Blackpool’s promenade life could be heard drifting through the streets as we walked. The clack of slot machines, and pop music blaring from arcades.
We stopped at one called “Thirlmere”, on it's own at the bottom of what seemed to be a quiet residential street. A friendly middle aged woman let us in and said she had a vacant single room. I didn’t care whether or not she thought Andrew was my boyfriend. It felt like ages since I’d had a conversation with someone in which they knew who I really was, and what my true relationship was to anyone else around me. Andrew said he’d wait in the lounge for me while I got sorted out and then perhaps we could get something to eat. I liked the room. Chintzy but cosy with a washbasin on the wall and a flowery bedspread. It felt like a safe place. I quickly changed my top and me and Andrew walked back out into the night.

The next morning I would discover that this B and B was directly behind the Imperial Hotel. The hotel where Margaret Thatcher and John Major and lots of other Tory bigwigs were currently staying because it was the week of the Conservative Party Conference. That was why Police officers lined the back street and the front of the prom at regular intervals just in front of the B and B and there were snipers on the roof which overlooked it. In a town with one of the highest proportions of Bed and Breakfasts and hotels in the country the “Thirlmere” didn’t therefore stand out as one of the best choices for a teenage runaway who had been sent there to commit a cheque fraud, helped by a man I was about to discover was a heroin addict…

More unfamiliar surroundings; a scruffy house on a council estate, takeaway wrappers and cans strewn across the floor, semi darkness, a smell of stale cigarettes and three or four people sprawled nearly comatose on settees and chairs. Andrew is looking for his friend Mark who he seems to urgently need to see for some reason. We find him. I have no recollection what he looked like. We headed to a pub somewhere near the house. My diary records that I ordered a Cinzano Bianco and lemonade. The drink I used to have on Sundays when I went to my friend Fiona’s house for dinner with her and her parents. We’d have a bacon sandwich, watch “Tour of Duty” about American soldiers in Vietnam and “Stay Lucky” with Dennis Waterman, recorded from the night before. Her Dad would take us for a swim at the local pool, then we’d all have a Sunday roast, me and Fiona enjoying our Cinzano and lemonade in fake crystal glasses. It was a taste of a different sort of family life for me, in which the members ate together and actually talked to each other. Both that and my own family life seemed very far away now as I sat in this pub in Blackpool with these two men.

They were friendly enough, but I didn’t feel comfortable. Andrew was talking through how he wanted to learn the “tricks of the trade” from Jim. He talks casually about my parents. Says that my Mother came on to him, but he wasn’t really attracted to women in their forties and she wasn’t the prettiest. He preferred Sindy the French girl who lived in the hamlet near our house, but she was only fourteen so he wasn’t going to do anything. He thought my Dad was weird, and said he’d asked him to get rid of our cat, Topsy down the well, because he couldn’t do it himself, but my Mum wouldn’t leave France if it meant having to put her in quarantine. All of this hit home with a series of hammer blows, that constituted another few impossible things to believe before breakfast and that I couldn’t quite take in properly.

He said that tomorrow we’d go to his and Jim’s friend James Battersby and ask him to do the photocopying that Jim had suggested, and Jim had said he would ring me there. Then on Monday we’d go to two building societies and open a student account in each in my name and ask them to express through the cheques that Andrew was going to forge with my Stepfather’s signature. The cash should be collectable by the next day or Wednesday and then we’d be able to fly back to Jim in Germany. That was the plan. It was clearer in my head now.

Andrew walked me back to the B and B and asked if he could come in for a cup of tea. In the room he asked if I minded if he sorted himself out with some heroin. Actually, I have no memory of how he asked this. Given that I’d never even been in the company of someone smoking cannabis, I’d failed to spot any of the signs of someone who had really needed to score. Perhaps he asked politely “Do you mind awfully if I shoot up?”. I do remember trying to appear blasé when he did. He asked me if I would go downstairs and get him a dessert spoon. I have memory flashes of him heating the spoon over the sink, tying a tan belt round his arm and me looking away or reading the paper. I mused that Jim’s belief that Andrew was a former heroin addict was a bit optimistic. When he’d left, having arranged to meet me outside James Battersby’s offices the next day, I cleaned the spoon with water and toilet roll. A couple of days later I would use it to eat a Muller Fruit Corner yoghurt.

A few months later I would have a couple of sessions with a counsellor who I dismissed as no help because she constantly “Hmm’ed sympathetically” and I felt she didn’t understand what I was talking about. But I did write down how she said “Love is where you don’t lead the other person into danger”. It was as if that was some exotic concept I was just getting ready to consider. I can finally feel angry now about the danger I was in. Both at home, and when I left home. Ironic that I was spending most of my thinking time worrying about whether Jim was okay. With his tumour, his gun shot leg, his being on the run, and even more ironically; his guilt about having no conscience. I’d mistakenly convinced myself that I didn’t either.

Later that night I walked down the main promenade into Blackpool’s surreal street life. It’s brashness- all surface and shine, deflecting the eye from the rubbish and dirt underneath- was both appealing and terrifying to me.

Snatches of disembodied voices distorted and amplified floated out of arcades;
“Two little ducks”, “Hold tight, for the ride of your life”, “Five for a pound, that’s five for just a pound”
My own echoed in my head; “What do you say to a man who says he’s lost his soul?”, “Who are you when your Dad’s not your Dad?”, “My Mum advertises for other men to sleep with her, so he can watch, look, I’ve got photographs and everything…”

Families walking in uneven lines across the pavement, children swamped by huge fluffy cellophane wrapped bears.
The smell of fish and chips permeating everything.
Red, yellow, blue lights, twinkling and blinking and refracting and dissolving into the blackness of the night. Disco balls spinning, glittering, reflecting me, bits of me, me as a blur in one arcade window, a stretched reflection in the aluminium fascia of a slot machine, broken up into sections in the shining, mirrored back of a hot dog stall.

The clank and clack of slot machines. Money being fed into holes, dropping off shelves, clinking and chugging into metal trays. Risks happening here, but mostly measured in coppers, in ten pence pieces. Gambling on cartoonesque horses, on machines with Elvis Presley grinning on the front, not seriously looking for wins or losses. Enjoying the game, passing the time, forgetting the world for a while. Was that what I was doing? Maybe I was safer here on my own than with any of the other people who had a claim on me…

I cross over to the other side of the prom, where there are no shops, just a wall and the beach on the other side. I walk down a few steps to where the sea washes back and forth, white foam in the blackness. There’s just me down here and I feel a relief and stillness in the silence after the noise and chaos of the street.

When I emerge back onto the front, I stay rooted for a while trying to cross the road. Cars and trams seeming to zigzag in a never ending convoy after slowing past the illuminations, kids craning out of windows at the neon seahorses and octopuses mounted on the lamp posts at this lower end of the prom. A stooped elderly man in a long beige coat stands next to me for a few seconds as we wait. Then says “Now!” and we cross together, he briefly clasps my arm, then releases it as we reach the other side. I’m surprised but touched and we mouth goodbye as we head our separate ways down the pavement. Such a tiny encounter, but it feels like something I haven’t had before. The random kindness of strangers at an age when you’re still being told not to talk to strangers.

Policemen with hands clasped behind their back stand with firmset mouths at even spaces in front of the Imperial Hotel, the handles of their black batons sticking out of waist holsters. I put my head down as I head up the side street back to the Thirlmere.

The world is safe.
The world is dangerous.
People are safe,
People are dangerous.