Page 63 of Days You Were Mine

‘When will it end?’

Eddie shrugs. ‘He’ll burn himself out sooner or later.’

‘Shouldn’t he see his doctor?’

‘He should but he won’t. What will happen now is that he’ll come to his senses and he’ll quit drinking. And for a while everything will be fine.’

I wake in the middle of the night and sense Jake’s presence even before I see him sitting with his back against the bedroom door as if he has simply slid down it, his knees pressed high against his chest.

‘Jake?’ I whisper and he says, ‘Hey.’

I can tell from this one word that he is sober. His face, lit up by the moon, seems so lovely to me and I am overwhelmed with longing for him.

‘I miss you.’

I cannot stop myself from crying.

‘Will you come to bed?’

He shakes his head.

‘You want to know about that time when I was sixteen?’ he says and his voice is so sombre I feel afraid.

‘Yes. If you want to tell me.’

He takes so long to begin that I am drifting towards sleep when his voice cuts into the darkness.

‘My grandmother knew about the beatings. And she blamed me for them. She used to say, “Your grandfather is a good man but you push him to the limit.” She resented me living with them and she told me that most days. She’d say: “Even your own mother doesn’t want you. Don’t you think you ought to try and be more lovable?”

‘I tried to change, but whatever I did it wasn’t enough. And whenever my grandfather beat me up, she would tell me: “Look what you’ve made him do now.” So I grew up thinking I was flawed. But I had an escape route and that’s what kept me going.

‘When I turned sixteen, I was going to live with my mum in London. “Just wait till you’ve left school,” my mum would tell me, “you and I will have so much fun.” I was going to get a job and earn enough money to buy myself a decent guitar. And then I could join a band.’

I know that I mustn’t talk or touch Jake or do anything to stop his story. But I move noiselessly from the bed and I sit on the floor, just a few feet away, in a pool of moonlight.

‘My mum came to stay on my sixteenth birthday, she gave me a Van Morrison record and my grandmother made a cake. And in the morning my mum said she had some news. She told me she was moving to Canada with her new boyfriend and I could join her in a year or so if I wanted. She’d bought her plane ticket and was leaving in a month. She had known for weeks but she didn’t want to spoil my birthday …’

He stops speaking for a moment and this heartless betrayal, a decade old now, lingers in the air.

‘I didn’t mean to kill myself. It was an impulse thing. I saw the kitchen knife and I was drawn to it. But the doctors thought I was suicidal. Next thing I knew I was in a secure psychiatric unit in Epsom. I was locked up there for nine months.’

‘Jake.’

I inch towards him, needing to be closer.

But he says: ‘I’m going to finish, Alice.’

His voice is determined, almost chilling, and so I stay where I am, just out of reach.

‘My mum came to see me a few times before she left for Canada, but she never stayed long. She was too scared.’

‘What was it like?’

‘Do you really want to know?’

I nod my head, unable to speak.

‘It was like hell, or worse maybe. I was so out of it to begin with, I lost my grip on who I was, I just existed in this crazy place where people banged on the walls and shouted and wept and moaned all day long. There was one young guy and he used to talk to the wall, a proper conversation with pauses, like he was addressing an invisible alien or something. There was a woman in the room next door to me who used to howl every night, these long, awful cries of anguish. The Screamer they called her. So much anger, everyone fighting and shouting and arguing, the patients, the staff. And sadness. It was like bathing in it all the time. These people had nothing and no one cared about them. And suddenly I was one of them.’

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