Freddie, who used to smoke like a trooper, no longer smoked, so when Pat needed to light up one of her ten-a-day – ‘I am going to give up!’ was her constant refrain – Callie and Freddie sat outside in the garden and filled each other in on their lives.
‘So you don’t think he’s coming back, then?’ Freddie asked finally about Jason.
‘I hoped he would. I hoped it was a bad dream, but it kept going on, and bad dreams stop. So no. He hasn’t made contact with us. I was obviously imagining that he loved me, but, Freddie, he adored Poppy. If he could leave her, just run off, then it must all be true: every word of it. He’s gone and he’s never coming home. He did all the things they said.’
When Poppy got up, she was at first shy with this new uncle, but soon the two of them were talking nineteen to the dozen, with Poppy asking endless questions about her mother as a child.
‘She cut my hair once when I was asleep,’ Freddie was saying. ‘a weird fringe like a scarecrow – high up one side and longer the other. I was mutilated!’
‘Don’t listen to a word he says, Poppy,’ laughed her mother. ‘He’s an awful liar.’
Poppy and Freddie took Ketchup out for a walk and Callie, worn out from the emotion of the morning, sat with her mother.
‘I pray you never have to see Poppy go through addiction,’ Pat Sheridan said fiercely. ‘It was hell, pure hell. He started on the hash and then that wasn’t enough, and he was on to everything he could get his hands on, and finally, because it was cheap, he moved on to the heroin. I kept thinking he’d overdose and he’d be gone. Now they have that drug, Naloxone, and some families have it for their kids – it gets the lungs working if they overdose by mistake.’
Callie inhaled swiftly. This truth was so brutal, so real. Imagine a parent having to inject a drug into their child to overcome the effects of a heroin overdose. She’d been absent for it all, on the missing list when it came to helping her mother.
‘Oh Ma, I know it was bad but I didn’t see much of it,’ said Callie, holding her mother’s worn hands. ‘I just took Jason’s money and sent that. But you needed real help and I wasn’t there. I’m so sorry. I can never pay you back for taking us in like this, after everything.’
‘It’s what mothers do,’ said Pat simply. ‘You don’t have to pay me back for anything. I got you and Poppy back. That’s all I need.’
Freddie could only stay one day and when he left the next day, Callie felt unaccountably low.
Poppy and her mother had gone off to a garden centre – Poppy willingly going to a garden centre! – and Callie was alone with the dog.
Sitting there, hugging the small dog, she cried.
Alone at last, she let the pain and the betrayal emerge.
She hadn’t known, hadn’t seen, the real Jason. He had cut her off from her family, had conned her and abandoned their beloved daughter. How foolish had she been not to have seen any of this?
She cried till she didn’t know if she could cry anymore.
What next for her and Poppy? How could there be any decent future for them? She had no qualifications to get a good job, and besides, she was forever marked by Jason’s actions.
At that moment, she felt lower than she’d ever felt.
And then, even though Freddie had spent a day talking to her about his life, about the depths to which addiction had brought him, she thought of Xanax again, something to help her cope for a while.
It wasn’t addiction: heck, no. It was just something to help her, to take the edge off, like the odd glass of wine. Plus, a doctor had originally prescribed them to her, so it was fine. Really.
Callie walked with a quick step the half a mile to the Russet Lounge.
The Russet was not the sort of classy establishment that Jason and his pals would have liked, as it did not feature any expensive Armagnacs or unusual craft beers handmade by an ancient order of monks.
No, the Russet Lounge catered for a wide variety of people, some of whom were unemployed and liked to watch sports on the television, some of whom had decent jobs and liked a few pints after work, and some of whom were less easily classified.
In Callie’s day, her mother or her aunt would never have dreamed of going into the Russet Lounge on any but rare occasions where they’d partake of a small gin and tonic or a hot whiskey. But now there were plenty of women in there: women like Glory, who sat in the corner and played solitaire on her own on her phone.
Long before Freddie had turned up, Callie’s mother had been filling her daughter in on the various local people and the troubles they’d had over the years. She mentioned an old friend’s daughter, Glory, who was only in her early thirties but was known for selling drugs.
‘Not the hard stuff, mind you,’ her mother had said wearily, ‘but enough to land her in court a couple of times. She can’t stop, sells out of the Russet Lounge and they just leave her to it now. There’s a market for it. She tells her mother she has the kids to look after and needs the money, but sure, her mother looks after those kids most of the time.
‘Feeds them too,’ Pat went on. ‘Freddie says she’s an addict but she’s feeding other people’s addiction too, which is part of the pattern. Sell to feed your own habit. I don’t know whether to feel pity for her or to hate her.’
At the time, Callie’s first thought had been that perhaps poor Glory had never had the chances in life to get clean the way Freddie had. And then that night in bed, her mind had begun clicking over.
Glory was somebody local and possibly,possibly,a safe person for Callie to ask about getting some Xanax. She’d had none left for ages now and she felt the loss keenly.
