‘More than my life’s worth to answer that one,’ Lou said, standing and leaving the room.
‘See,’ Dawn said. ‘Lou’s scared of her too.’
‘He is. And rightly so. And I’m taking that answer as a yes.’
‘Are we searching her room again?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think we probably are.’
We tried shrinks, but she wouldn’t turn up. We tried picking her up from school to take her to the shrink, but she’d leave by a fire door on the far side.
At fifteen it was the police who brought her home from Canterbury before we’d even known she was missing. She’d been picked up smoking weed in a bus shelter.
‘Howclassy,’ I remember Dawn saying.
‘Well at least I’ve met my dad,’ she replied. ‘Unlikeyou. Talk aboutclassy…’
We both forced ourselves not to react to that one. Because once you reacted, that was it. She’d use the same insult over and over.
We talked about Lucy first thing in the morning, and we talked about her last thing at night. We discussed her with school psychiatrists, with helplines and with friends, a couple of whom shocked us by asking if we’d ever tried ‘giving her a good hiding’.
But violence wasn’t the answer, something thankfully Dawn and I agreed on. And even now, even having lived through it all, I’m glad we weren’t those kinds of people, because I’m certain it would have made things worse. We would have been just like the rest of her life: violent and sordid and awful. So I still believe that our pacifism was the one thing that enabled her to come back to us when the time finally came for her to be saved.
Anyway, slowly but surely, and despite our very best efforts, Lucy began to sink into the swamp.
She stole, and drank, and got arrested for drink-driving, under the influence of drugs without a licence – too young even for a licence. She got pregnant, had an abortion, and got pregnant again, this time by a guy who also beat her up.
By the time, aged nineteen, she finally ‘moved out’ – read,ran off and didn’t come back– we felt guilty that we felt so relieved. The mayhem she’d been weaving through our lives had been exhausting and all three of us had been running on empathy reserve for years.
So we made the most of the sudden calm around the house and pretended not to know that Lucy was living in a squat in Hastings.
When she got arrested, we bailed her out. When she needed money for food, we sent her food, and, when she needed money for clothes, we took her shopping – all so that she wouldn’t buy drugs.
When, the day before Christmas, she broke in and stole my computer, Lou’s PlayStation and Dawn’s purse, we called (after considerable angst-filled arguments) a mate of mine who happened to be a policeman. It was supposed to give her a scare, but Lucy seemed to think it was funny.
When, for burgling someone elseandbuying and selling drugs with the money she made, she got arrested by a proper on-duty policeman and sent to Maidstone Prison, we met her at the prison gates and drove her to a rehab facility in Rye. She later told us she’d got high half an hour after being released.
But eventually she did come back to us, turning up on the doorstop one evening dressed in filthy clothes. By the time that happened, she was twenty-two.
‘Can you help me?’ she asked, shaking as we helped her indoors. ‘Because I think I’m actually going to die if someone doesn’t do something to save me.’
‘Onlyyoucan save you,’ Dawn told her. ‘We’ve been through this a thousand times.’
‘Sure,’ Lucy said. ‘I want to this time. Really. But I need help. Will you help me?’ Tears were rolling down her cheeks.
‘Of course we’ll help you,’ Dawn said unconvincingly, sounding tired even at the thought of getting involved again. ‘You’re still our daughter, sweetheart.’ She looked at me questioningly and I nodded. By then I believed that I hated her, though I still loved her even more.
‘Yep, you’re still my little Lucy Boop,’ I said, trying to sound like I meant it.
Saving Lucy took another two full years out of our lives: years of therapy and community service and methadone; years of relapses and thefts followed bymorerehab and tears and reparations.
But incredibly, unexpectedly, after her fourth stay in rehab, she got better. In the end she didn’t have the Devil in her after all. And she reallydidn’twant to die.
EIGHT
THE JOSS BAY YEARS (BY DAWN)
So now we knew, it was genes after all. And Lucy had inherited all the bad ones – the Weaver propensity for teenage sex and pregnancy plus the Ruddle fondness for drugs. She’d been blessed with Billy’s arrogance, too – something I’d found inexplicably sexy in a man, but which was utterly repulsive in my child.
