Chapter 7 #2
John: I lost everything. Everything. My family, my park, my home, my dignity.
I longed for a prison sentence, some days.
At least it would be somewhere warm to rest my head.
So when I heard, about the fine, I felt oddly cheated.
I was bankrupt; there was no way I was ever going to be able to pay it.
So it was over, or as over as it ever would be.
The lawyers had decided I was negligent, that I hadn’t taken the necessary measures to ensure AJ Silver’s safety.
I didn’t agree, but no one was asking what I thought.
Cathy: I got a job. Two jobs. Days I worked in a care home, bathing and feeding and chatting to old people who couldn’t cope on their own.
Nights I served pints in a local pub, making conversation with men sitting alone at the bar.
In some ways, the jobs were different. But really, it all came down to loneliness.
To helping people through their loneliness.
I was lonely too, but I didn’t have a chance to feel it too often.
I was dead on my feet, shattered from trying to keep a roof over our heads.
John didn’t manage it. He ended up on the streets.
It broke my heart when I found that out.
I didn’t want to be married to him any more, and I hated the danger he’d put us all in, but I didn’t want him to have nothing, either.
Sebastian: I think I was probably the least affected, of the four of us.
Pea was heartbroken. I’d never been in love, so I didn’t know how that felt.
Mum and Dad lost each other, and Dad lost a lot more than that.
A few months after it all happened, I saw Dad on the street.
I’d finished college and I was doing some temp work, trying to get into graphic design, and I was on my way to the office.
It was before nine in the morning and he was clearly drunk.
I asked him what he was doing, where he was staying, and he gestured to the shop doorway behind us.
I was horrified. I thought about all the arguments we’d had over Wildworld.
How much I’d hated him at times. And there he was, reduced to this.
I told him to come to the flat we were renting.
He said Mum didn’t want him there. But I thought he must have been wrong about that.
I told him to come for dinner that night, said I’d make spaghetti Bolognese.
But then I got caught up at work and by the time I got home, it was past the time I’d told him.
I thought maybe he’d forgotten, or spent all day drinking and thought better of it, but as soon as I saw Mum’s face, I knew he’d turned up.
Cathy: John came to the flat one day, reeking of booze, swaying on his feet.
Said Sebastian had invited him for dinner.
Sebastian wasn’t home from work yet and I didn’t want to let him in.
How had it come to this? I had loved this man, had married him, and now I didn’t want to be alone with him for a single minute.
Pea came out of her room and saw us standing there, on either side of the door.
Her eyes were full of pain. I told him I didn’t think it was a good idea for him to stay, and I was expecting a battle, but he just slunk off. There was no fight left in him.
Pea: It was worst for Dad, yeah. He really went off the rails.
People talk about teenagers going off the rails, don’t they, but I think it’s an apt description of what happened to him.
His life just went off track. That night he came over was the saddest. It was clear that Mum didn’t want him anywhere near her and when she sent him away, it was like she’d kicked a puppy.
Sebastian: I was too late. She’d sent him away. I stood in the kitchen with my back to her, my knuckles digging into the worktop. I asked her if she knew he was living on the street. I heard footsteps and turned to see Pea had walked into the room.
Pea: That was how I found out he was homeless, yeah. Once I knew that, Mum turning him away seemed pretty unforgiveable. How do you go from loving someone to that, so fast?
Cathy: The thing was, it had been a gradual demise, our relationship.
I hadn’t loved him for a long time. And if he’d got sober, maybe it would have been different.
Maybe I could have helped him get back on his feet.
But the way he was drinking, I didn’t want him around any of us. I knew no good would come from that.
Pea: I kept waiting for a letter from Zak.
For weeks, months even, I believed he would write.
And then one day, I came home from school – I was repeating my GCSE year – and for the first time, checking the post wasn’t the first thing I did.
I got an apple and a cup of tea instead, and that’s when I knew I’d stopped hoping for it.
There was this boy in the sixth form at school who’d moved from a different school and didn’t know anything about my involvement with AJ Silver.
His name was Thomas. He made it clear that he liked me, and we went on a few dates and sort of fell into a relationship that lasted three years.
It was nice, it really was, but it was nothing like it had been with Zak.
John: I was on the street for two years, on and off.
Sometimes I slept on friends’ sofas, but it’s amazing how fast friends disappear when you really need them.
I didn’t keep in touch with Sebastian or Pea.
It was clear that Cathy wanted me out of their lives and I was low enough to believe she was right.
And then one day, this young guy crouched down in front of me where I was sitting in a doorway, a blanket around me for warmth, and he asked me if I wanted some real help to get out of this situation.
I thought he was going to start talking about God, but he just handed me a leaflet and it was for a treatment centre for addicts.
I threw it away, but it planted a seed. Two months later, I woke up one morning in a pool of my own piss and I decided enough was enough.
And I remembered the name of the treatment centre.
I waited for someone to come along who looked kind.
It took more than half an hour, but then there was a woman, about my age, and I asked her if she would do me a favour.
She looked a bit shellshocked, a bit frightened, but I assured her it wasn’t anything improper.
I asked her to look this place up on her phone and tell me where it was.
Turned out, it was three streets away from the doorway I’d been sleeping in.
I went there right then and marched in, said I wanted some help.
They had these sponsored places, and they gave one to me.
In there, no one knew who I was or how far I’d fallen.
No one really cared. It was all about battling your own demons, and I did a good job of that, I think.
It wasn’t a straight line to sobriety but I’ve been sober now for over twenty years.
Every day, I wake up and think, I won’t drink today, and that’s as much pressure as I put on myself.
Danny: Wow.
Cathy: A year or so after it all happened, Sebastian came to me and said he didn’t want me running myself into the ground.
I was doing two jobs, like I said, and he was doing graphic design.
He was bringing in a bit of money, and he contributed what he could, but that day he said he could give me money to cover the rent for the next two years, but I wasn’t allowed to ask any questions about where it had come from.
Well, as a mother, you can’t just accept something like that, can you?
I thought he must have got himself mixed up with drugs or something.
But he assured me it was nothing like that.
I said I didn’t want the money if I didn’t know where it had come from, in case it was dirty, and he just laughed and walked out of the room.
In the early hours of the next morning, I woke up, my heart pounding.
I thought, He’s sold a story to the press.
I went to his room and woke him up, there and then.
Asked him if he’d been talking to journalists about Wildworld and AJ Silver.
But he said no, it wasn’t that. He kept offering me that money week in and week out, and eventually I took it.
I gave up the bar job but stayed at the care home.
I’d become attached to some of the residents there.
I felt like I was doing some good, making people’s lives a little bit better.
Whereas at the bar I was just helping them to get into a state like the one John was in.
Pea: Mum never told me about Sebastian’s money.
Sebastian didn’t either. But I knew about it somehow.
How he’d got it was a total mystery to me.
I didn’t think he could possibly be earning enough to have that sort of money.
But sometimes you just accept something even though you know there must be something a bit fishy about it, don’t you?
Never look a gift horse in the mouth and all that.