‘Then don’t go,’ I told him, simply. ‘Tell him to open the damned box or bin it. Leave it up to him.’
‘I kind of feel that Ineedto go,’ Rob admitted, after a moment’s thought. ‘Or Imaybeneed to go at any rate, and if I don’t I’ll never know if I needed to or not.’
‘You think you might regret it later on?’
‘Something like that,’ Rob said. ‘It’s messy.’ He tapped his forehead with one finger. ‘Up here,’ he said. ‘It’s all messed up, really. None of it makes much sense.’
‘No, it does,’ I said, reaching for his wrist and giving it a squeeze. ‘They’re your parents. Whatever they’ve done or not done, they’re still your parents.’
‘Don’t say that,’ Rob said quietly. ‘Please stop saying that.’
‘OK,’ I said, releasing his wrist. ‘I’ll stop. I’m sorry. You’re right. I don’t know.’
We were still expecting Lucy to relapse at any moment back then, and in the past such events had been spectacular – involving threats and theft or even violence.
Lou was down in Bath, Mum was working and I did not want to be left alone looking after our daughter. I could perfectly imagine Rob coming home and me having to announce that I’d lost track of her – or, worse, that she was dead. So we travelled to Anglesey as a family, the three of us, Rob and me taking it in turns to drive, the soundtrack provided by Rob’s old Duran Duran and OMD CDs, which had, it transpired, migrated from the oblivion drawer to his car.
It rained all the way up the M2, around the M25, and even hailed a bit on the M1, half of which had been coned into contraflow damnation, seemingly for no reason. We never saw anyone with so much as a spade, never even a workman with a mug of tea. Lucy said the cones were maybe alien invaders, and no one realised they were about to attack – an idea that Rob said would make a great episode ofDoctor Who.
It was nine in the evening and dark and blustery when we arrived in Red Wharf Bay. ‘Lovely,’ Lucy said, sarcastically. ‘Anyone for a swim?’
Once we’d eaten a pub dinner and gone to our rooms, I asked Rob if he thought Lucy would be OK. ‘Do I need to go sleep in her room, do you think?’
‘Whether she’ll be OK is up to her,’ Rob said. ‘But I think even she’d struggle to find a dealer here.’
‘Lucy can find a dealer anywhere,’ I reminded him.
He sighed deeply. ‘She’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘And if she isn’t we’ll just leave her with her lovely grandparents.’
The next morning, the weather had changed and in the morning light the bay looked stunning.
The tide had gone out, beaching fishing boats on the shiny mudflats. These were bordered by an autumn-leaved coast peppered with quaint cottages and low outcrops of cliff. ‘Who knew Anglesey was like this?’ I said. I couldn’t believe that I’d never been there, that I’d never even known anyone who’d been there. It was stunning.
We walked half a mile in the morning sunshine and then sat, side by side, on a wall.
‘It’s gorgeous,’ Lucy said. ‘It’s like a Turner painting.’
Rob and I glanced at each other. He discreetly raised one eyebrow.
Lucy had been unable to experience any kind of happiness for ages, that was the thing. Beauty, sunsets, music, joy – for years they’d passed her by. For most of the past decade the only comment she would have ever made about somewhere like Red Wharf Bay was that it was ‘boring’ and there was ‘nothing to do’.
Eventually, we’d come to understand that what she meant when she said she was bored was merely that there were no drugs to take. And without drugs to enhance the experience, everything, to Lucy, looked grey. After years of drug-enhanced ecstasy her brain had rewired itself so that life without drugs just seemed interminably awful.
So she shocked us, that morning, with her simple, ‘It’s gorgeous.’ I think we were both thinking that just perhaps, for the first time, something had changed. Either that or she’d managed to get hold of more drugs.
‘What?’ Lucy said. ‘It is!’
I realised I’d been staring at her, trying to catch a glimpse of her pupils.
‘She’s right,’ Rob said, raising his fingers like a picture frame. ‘It’s the mist that does it. It makes it look like a picture.’
‘Do they live on the coast?’ Lucy asked.
‘My parents?’ Rob said. ‘I don’t know.’
‘You must have looked it up on a map,’ I said.
‘Yeah,’ Rob admitted. ‘Yeah, I think the house they’re moving out of is pretty near the coast. Not so sure about the home.’
