A Street Cat Named Bob

‘If you are a casual user and it’s for private consumption all you have to do is tell us and you can be on your way,’ the guard said.

I explained my situation. ‘I’m on a drug recovery programme so I don’t take anything casually,’ I said. I then showed them a letter I had from my doctor explaining why I was on Subutex.

Eventually they had to relent. They gave me a final pat down and released me. By the time I emerged from the customs area, almost an hour had passed. I had to get another flight down to Tasmania, which took another few hours. By the time I got there, it was early evening and I was utterly exhausted.

Seeing my mother was wonderful. She was waiting at the airport in Tasmania and gave me a couple of really long hugs. She was crying. She was pleased to see me alive, I think.

I was really happy to see her too although I didn’t cry.

The cottage was every bit as lovely as she’d described it in her letter. It was a big, airy bungalow with huge garden space at the back. It was surrounded by farmland with a river running by the bottom of her land. It was a very peaceful, picturesque place. Over the next month I just hung out there, relaxing, recovering and rebooting myself.

Within a couple of weeks I felt like a different person. The anxieties of London were - literally – thousands of miles away, just over ten thousand, to be precise. My mum’s maternal instincts kicked in and she made sure I was fed well. I could feel my strength returning. I could also sense me and my mother were repairing our relationship.

At first we didn’t talk in great depth about things, but in time I began to open up. Then one night as we sat on the veranda, watching the sun go down, I had a couple of drinks and suddenly it all came out. It wasn’t a big confession, there was no Hollywood drama. I just talked . . . and talked.

The emotional floodgates had been waiting to burst open for a while now. For years I had used drugs to escape from my emotions, in fact to make sure I didn’t have any. Slowly but surely I’d changed that. And now my emotions were coming back.

As I explained some of the lows I’d been through over the last ten years, my mother looked horrified, as any parent would have done.

‘I guessed you weren’t doing so great when I saw you, but I never guessed it was that bad,’ she said, close to tears.

At times she just sat there with her head in her hands muttering the word ‘why’ every now and again.

‘Why didn’t you tell me you’d lost your passport?’

‘Why didn’t you call me and ask for help?’

‘Why didn’t you contact your father?’

Inevitably, she blamed herself for it. She said she felt like she’d let me down, but I told her I didn’t blame her. The reality was that I had left myself down. Ultimately, there was no one else to blame.

‘You didn’t decide to sleep in cardboard boxes and get off your face on smack every night. I did,’ I said at one point. That set her off crying as well.

Once we’d broken the ice, so to speak, we talked much more easily. We talked a little about the past and my childhood in Australia and England. I felt comfortable being honest with her. I said that I’d felt she’d been a distant figure when I’d been younger and that being raised by nannies and moving around a lot had had an impact on me.

Naturally that upset her, but she argued that she’d been trying to provide an income for us, to keep a roof over our heads. I took her point, but I still wished she’d been there more for me.

We laughed a lot too; it wasn’t all dark conversation. We admitted how similar we were and chuckled at some of the arguments we used to have when I was a teenager.

She admitted that there had been a big conflict of personality there.

‘I’m a strong personality and so are you. That’s where you get it from,’ she said.

But we spent most of the time talking about the present rather than the past. She asked me all sorts of questions about the rehab process I’d been through and what I was hoping to achieve now that I was almost clean. I explained that it was still a case of taking one step at a time, but that, with luck, I’d be totally clean within a year or so. Sometimes she just simply listened, which was something she hadn’t always done. And so did I. I think we both learned a lot more about each other, not least the fact that deep down we were very similar, which is why we clashed so much when I was younger.

During those long chats, I often talked about Bob. I’d brought a photo of him with me, which I showed everyone and anyone who took an interest.

‘He looks a smart cookie,’ my mother smiled when she saw it.

‘Oh, he is,’ I said, beaming with pride. ‘I don’t know where I’d been now if it wasn’t for Bob.’

Spending time in Australia was great. It allowed me to clear my mind. It also allowed me to take stock of where I was - and where I wanted to go from here.