Chapter 25
TWENTY-FIVE
I moved back home again. I did very little, and my parents watched over me like jailers.
I tried to be grateful for small mercies.
I was alive, for one thing. I’d never got involved in more dangerous substances.
I hadn’t got arrested and ended up in a Spanish prison.
I was no longer plotting to swindle people out of their retirement funds.
I eventually got a job in a musical instrument shop in my little town in Surrey.
It was safe and undemanding. Years passed.
I got older but couldn’t bring myself to try dating or going out again because I knew what would happen.
I really didn’t want to mess up. I couldn’t stand to do it to my folks, if no one else.
I lived my life knowing that potential disaster was just around the corner and that the solution was to keep things simple.
I watched Ade go from big to bigger to stratospheric.
He outsold The Weeknd and then Coldplay and then, one year, Beyoncé.
I don’t know whether I felt jealous or angry.
To be honest, I doubt I was capable of any great complexity of emotion.
I was simply aware of the difference between our two lives and uncertain whether mine would ever start again.
The narrative that my mother did her best to believe was that I’d had a hard time but was getting back on my feet. Whenever she talked to friends and family on the phone, she’d say that I was saving for a place of my own. The poor woman needed something to hang on to.
By the time I’d been at home for four years, I’d come to believe that was what I wanted too.
I rented a flat in the neighbouring town, so as not to be too far from my parents’ civilising influence.
But nothing else changed. I had the same empty life and the same poorly paid job.
I played my guitar when no one else could hear me, but I no longer thought of myself as a musician.
And through it all, I thought of Bridget and the two years we’d spent together.
Perhaps I’d idealised everything from back then.
Perhaps Ade and the others weren’t the best friends I could ever have.
Perhaps Bridget wasn’t even the best girlfriend, but none of that mattered.
I loved thinking about that time and trying to play back the conversations we’d had around the chipped dinner table in the ugly brown lounge of our second-year maisonette.
I forgot the bad times. I could even overlook what Ade had done, because I was living my life as a tribute act to my late adolescence.
Working in a music shop is the perfect job for a daydreamer, and so that’s what I became.
Whether I was taking inventory, unpacking boxes or waiting for customers to appear, my head was permanently somewhere else.
The problem with living in the past like that is that you forget you have a present.
I was so lonely in the flat I never wanted, with Sundays at my folks’ house the only break from the routine.
There was no way things could go on as they were.
I suppose that, by ignoring all the mistakes I’d made, I forgot what a mess I’d become.
I forgot about the mouldy squat in Croydon and finding myself alone at four in the morning on the beach in Barcelona without knowing how I’d got there.
And if the truth be told, I never thought of myself as an addict.
I hadn’t been through rehab or followed any kind of programme.
I thought I’d be fine to start drinking again as long as I was careful.
That went pretty well for a week or two.
I proved to myself that I could take things slowly, that I didn’t have to worry too much, and so off I went once more, out with school friends who’d been saying we should meet up again after all those years.
The very first night I went up to London, I got blackout drunk. I don’t know what else happened because my brain helpfully erased the details, but I woke up in a police station, and they certainly hadn’t taken me there for my own safety.
Once I’d sobered up enough to sign my name, they charged me with trying to throttle a guy I’d hated when I was at school.
In a street in Holborn outside an All Bar One, the rage I’d been storing up for years had flooded through my hands and into poor Wayne’s neck.
My sweet, kind father had to come to pick me up, and I almost cried at the sight of him.
I knew right then that this wouldn’t lead to the kind of slap on the wrist I’d had whenever I’d got in trouble as a kid.
‘Life-changing injuries’ was how the local paper described what I’d inflicted.
A court date was set, and I was actually relieved. I thought that I’d been waiting all those years to get my life back on track, but the truth is that I was awaiting my sentence.
I saw myself as a potential killer. That’s certainly how the judge painted me, and I refused to weasel out of it.
My solicitor wanted to talk about my issues with mental health, the fact that I had no previous convictions, and my general good behaviour since a minor run-in with the police when I was eighteen.
I wouldn’t allow him to put forward any mitigating circumstances.
I deserved what was coming. I’d robbed people blind and never been punished, and I was so out of it that I could have killed Wayne.
I had to plead guilty because I wanted to admit what I’d done, but if I’d lied and said that I was innocent, I would have got a heavier sentence.
I was given twelve months in prison. I thought I deserved more, and I told the flabbergasted judge just that.
My parents were horrified, but they came to the court, and they stuck by me.
Even Mum was painfully nice about the whole thing.
To be honest, I revelled in the thought of my punishment.
When I walked through the prison gates, I thought my suffering was unique, but there were blokes inside whose lives made mine look like a trip to feed the ducks.
Some of them frightened me, some of them terrified me, but quite a few of them talked to me, and it wasn’t difficult to see that I was the lucky one.
There were drugs in there, just like everywhere else I’d been for the last ten years, but I knew what they did to people, and I found it in myself to resist. I selfishly used every last haggard face as a mirror, every sad story to inspire a course correction of my own.
I served four months because they needed the space for someone else.
It’ll sound like another cliché but, at the end of it, I came out a better person.
I engaged with rehab. I found a group that suited me, rather than sticking with the first I tried.
I told my parents everything I’d done throughout my life, right down to putting pins on the teacher’s chair when I was nine years old and getting that girl pregnant at uni.
That was the first thing they made me face up to.
We tracked the mother down, and suddenly I had a daughter.
And even though I missed all those years of Heather’s life, I’ve tried to make it up to her since.
And I am honestly thankful every single day that she was willing to let me try.
I see her every other weekend, and we go up to London together to museums and parks.
I’d like to say that I show her the city that has meant so much to me.
The reality is that I get to see everything through her eyes now, and it’s incredible.
She is bright and brilliant and beautiful, and though it breaks my heart to think of the time I wasted, I love every moment that I get to spend with my daughter.
I’ve never touched another drop of drink.
I don’t spend time in places where I’m likely to be tempted by drugs, and I don’t feel sorry for myself like I used to.
I could have given up and given in. I could have counted my sorrows instead of my blessings, but I wanted to build my life back properly this time.
I wanted to be there for Heather, after I’d gone missing for so long.
So I became boring, and I love it. I have a nice, easy, boring life.
I will never become famous – never write a hit song or perform at Wembley Stadium.
Aside from my daughter, my greatest achievement by far was when the rock star Adesina Okojie sent me a ticket to Mauritius to spend time on his yacht, and I thought, Meh. Can I really be bothered?