Chapter 24
TWENTY-FOUR
I felt very little gratitude to him at the time, but whatever else happened, that money changed my life.
I took a while to decide how to use it, but I knew I couldn’t continue as I was.
The paint was peeling off the walls of the windowless room where I slept.
It was always cold in there, and mould was starting to form in one corner.
If I hadn’t been doing an excellent job of making myself ill, that room would have had a shot at it.
The other lads I lived with suddenly repulsed me, even though they were probably much better people than I’d ever been.
I don’t know if it was the fact that I finally had some real money, but I felt out of place with them, and the pull of another drinking session no longer had the shine it had previously possessed.
I’d always had the idea of moving abroad, so two days later, I flew to Barcelona.
I didn’t speak any Spanish or have anywhere to live, but that’s not as scary as you might think when you’re running away.
I’d bought new clothes from a charity shop and left pretty much all my old possessions at the squat.
I didn’t tell anyone in London I was leaving.
I just walked out of my life and into a new one.
I stayed in a cheap hostel for a few weeks, resisting the temptation to go to bars.
I knew that if I went out drinking, within forty-five minutes at most, someone would have offered me cocaine or a spliff.
There’s a quality about me that makes people think I must be a junkie.
It’s the same thing that turned off my schoolteachers when I was a kid.
Even in the daytime, just walking down Las Ramblas, the beer sellers would run over to me and whisper synonyms in my ear. “Charlie, coke, pasta?”
If I started drinking, then the drugs would follow, and I’d wake up a few months later with no money left.
I couldn’t let that happen. I booked myself onto a course to become an English teacher.
I had a flat lined up for the end of the month and, until that time, I spent all day long on the beach, or in a library teaching myself Spanish, or reading the kind of books I hadn’t read for the last two years because I was hooked on drink or fame or Bridget.
My head was clear, and I felt free. I did the TEFL course to the best of my ability. I made friends with the Americans, Canadians and South Africans who qualified alongside me. I started playing tennis, of all things, and I liked my life.
It’ll come as no surprise that this didn’t last. The reality of staying sober for a short time in order to achieve a simple goal is different from taking a job and knowing that you will have to do it day in, day out for months or even years when the only reward is a low salary and a bit more free time than other professions offer.
I wasn’t a dreadful teacher, and I really did like my students, but by the end of the first term, I needed something more exciting to look forward to.
I convinced myself I could go out in town and not have a problem.
The first time I went out was a Friday night; I didn’t go home again until Tuesday. I never messaged my friends or parents in that time, and I failed to turn up to my job on Monday. I can’t remember where I went or what I did. All I know is that it wasn’t good.
My bosses were surprised and sympathetic and knew I wasn’t the kind of guy to let them down, so they gave me another chance. By the fifth time, they kindly “let me go”.
I still had half of the money from Ade, and I could probably have found another job teaching which might have lasted a month or two, but that was just kicking the can down the road. And when things were starting to look black, I met a bright light in the city.
Charlie had nicely groomed hair and well-cut suits. No one wears a suit on a Saturday night in Barcelona, but he did. He was from Cambridge or Winchester or somewhere posh, and he flashed the cash around like he was a sheikh.
We met in a tacky Irish pub where he was buying everyone drinks, so we soon ended up talking. There was something about the way he smiled – as if he wanted me to know that we were in the same club now, and we could do anything together – it reminded me of those first days getting to know Ade.
Charlie worked in an office and earned 5k a month.
I’d never known anyone who made that kind of money, and I decided I wanted to be just like him.
If he’d told me that there was a job cleaning up after the elephants in a circus, I would have done whatever it took to get it.
To be perfectly honest, that would have been a much better outcome, because Charlie was a conman.
That’s not how he phrased it, of course. A few weeks after we first met, he broke it down like this: “My company offers people the opportunity to invest in something that could make them a fortune.”
I mean, this should have been enough to tell me that the only ones making serious money were Charlie and his bosses, but as you’ve probably already worked out, I wasn’t the smartest kid in the world.
“It’s actually quite beautiful in a way.” He held his hands up like a movie producer laying out his vision. “All you have to do is call people up who are already looking for investments and convince them that we’re the right fit.”
Charlie took me out that afternoon to buy a better suit, and I turned up at his work the following Monday already sold on a dream.
I was given a script and made to learn it. Everyone I worked with massaged my ego into thinking I was a natural, and perhaps I was. I would ring up fifty people a day, and I would get 30 per cent of them to chat to me, which was apparently pretty good going.
It required a series of calls that went back and forth between myself and a colleague, but it set the mark off guard. We didn’t ask for anything at first, so it didn’t feel like we were out to get them, and people fell for it.
“Hi there, my name’s Jake, and I’m calling from RP it was straight-up fraud.
The stocks we were selling were in companies that didn’t exist. I still had principles, and this wasn’t what I wanted to do with my life, but the hourly rate, the commission on top and the constant compliments were just too good to give up.
I felt like one of the boys in a way I never had before, but my conscience was loud and throbbing, and I had to do something to shut it up.
At RP&B, or whatever the company was called that month, you didn’t lose your job if you failed to turn up one morning. Charlie knew what he was doing when he chose me. He was a master of spotting vulnerable idiots who cared more about money than other people.
I kept telling myself, Do this for one more month to save up and then show them who you really are.
But the months rolled on, and I grew richer because other people were growing poorer.
I was a reverse Robin Hood, so I bludgeoned my brain every night to numb the pain and rolled into the office the next morning to repeat the process.
I’ve never added it up, but I must have stolen millions of pounds.
Everyone there was loaded, and the big bosses hardly ever showed their faces in the office because they were paying us to distance them from their shame.
And I really do believe that they all felt it.
Even criminals know the line between right and wrong.
I saw it whenever someone like me boasted about ripping off an old granny.
Charlie and his boss were all smiles, but I could see that it didn’t sit well with them.
I knew that, deep down inside, they wanted to believe they were still good eggs.
This may have continued for ever if it weren’t for my parents.
I was twenty-three by now, and I’d been promising that they could visit ever since I moved to Spain.
I kept putting it off because I didn’t want them to see the person I’d become, but then one day my dad called up to say that Mum, of all people – who’d practically disowned me because I wanted to play the guitar for a living – had booked tickets and they were coming that month.
I freaked out, tried to clean up my act, failed, tried again and, by the time they arrived in Spain, I at least looked like a functioning person. I put on my best suit and took them out to a nice restaurant overlooking Barcelona.
Dad was clearly proud of me. Mum pretended she wasn’t there, and I acted as though I was a big success.
I took a day off work to show them the city I’d fallen in love with and try to make them believe I was a decent person.
By the end of the day, even Mum was beginning to enjoy herself.
When we sat down for dinner, she smiled at me for the first time in years.
At work the next day, it took me about seven seconds to realise that my parents were just like the people I was ripping off.
I spent the day in a slump, longing for the clock to tick faster so that I could see my folks and feel clean again.
By the end of my shift, I felt so bad that I called them to cancel.
I stayed at home and got drunk, called in sick the following day, lost track of time and found I’d slept through twenty no doubt terrified calls from my parents.
When I was finally lucid enough to see them, they could tell that something was wrong. I showed up at their hotel, and my mum’s stern expression said, I always knew that this would happen. That’s what you get when you study music!
“Your mother thinks there’s something up with you, Jacob,” Dad said in his heartbreakingly sympathetic voice, which made me feel like I was six years old. “I’m afraid I’m inclined to agree.”
And because I felt as though I was made out of paper that had been ripped up and glued back together, I didn’t lie and promise them that everything was fine. I told the truth.
I started crying and shaking. My face turned red, my nose ran, and I wanted to hide under the bed. No matter what we’d been through, they were still my parents. I cried, and Dad held me, and Mum spoke to me for the first time in years.
“My poor boy, why didn’t you just tell us?”