SUNDAY IN MEMORY LANE (Episode 16)

Can it get any worse? Sure it can....

I walked into my former home and recognised virtually nothing.
The first room on the ground floor, my former lounge, was stacked high with furniture that I had never seen before and it was clearly being used as a store room.
The next room down the battered hallway was my old bedroom and that was badly damaged, broken mirrors and detritus from careless occupants was strewn everywhere.
The kitchen was sickening, smelly with filth and piled mouldy dishes.
Tony led me upstairs to the front bedroom which was the largest room in the house. This was a little more respectable but not much. Adele had painted it a bright blue and white before leaving to take up a council house offer. Tony was using it as a bedsitter.
Adele's old kitchen diner was relatively smart but barely furnished. It did not look as if it had been used in a long while. Most of my stuff had been stacked in there, in a haphazard way.
Danny was getting all his toys and clothes out of their boxes and bags. He was arranging them in his old bedroom overlooking the garden. I guessed he was afraid that I would pack them all up again and force him to leave.
I did not even consider that possibility.
I knew that in kidnapping Dan and all my stuff the way he had, Tony was not going to let me out of the house with a brass razoo.

The first music I put onto my battered old record player was Fleetwood Mac, the Rumours album.

It gave a perfect background to the hard work I faced to get the place suitable for a four year old child. I had to persuade Dan to use a bucket as a toilet for the first couple of days. That is how long it took me to get the toilet cleaned, the walls bleached and repainted, a new carpet laid and a door lock repaired. The state of that tiny space had turned my stomach.

There was dirt and thick dust everywhere in the house. I asked Tony if the vacuum cleaner had broken or something.
The cobwebs blew as I took down the nicotine stained nets and opened the stuck misty, mouldy windows giving testament to the fact that the house had been completely neglected for the entire eighteen months of my absence.

Within days there was a Bailiff, unexpectedly at the door and he took my record collection, record player and most of the white goods in the house. That was how I discovered that Tony had not paid the mortgage, the rates or any bills for a very long time. He was up to his neck in debt.

The salary Tony earned was colossal. Plus he was still running Apex Roofing when he was onshore. Where had all the money gone?
Into off licence, pub and fast food tills I guessed, judging by the huge amount of bottles, cans and Chinese takeaway containers I found stacked in the downstairs kitchen and where the bin should have been in the garden.

I searched out as much paperwork and unopened mail as I could find and piled it on the kitchen table. Sure enough, Tony was into a sizeable overdraft at the bank and there were dozens of letters addressed to us both from the bank, the building society and every other screaming, threatening utility company.
Painstakingly, I made a list of all the debts that were outstanding and added them up in disbelief. I made a sobering realisation:

Tony HAD to have me back in his life.
He was on the verge of losing everything completely.

I phoned all the debtors in apologetic fashion and asked for time to sort out Tony's finances. The girl at the bank was pleased to hear my voice and she got the bank manager to phone me back immediately. Thanks to a strong reputation for prompt payment in the past, I was able to hold off the inevitable eviction that the building society were threatening by arranging a hefty repayment plan.

Tony was out on a roofing job on the day that all this transpired. When he came home I presented him with a carefully written account of his financial situation together with an almost impossibly tough settlement scheme. He ate his dinner with Dan and promised that he would replace everything that the bailiff had taken. Most of it had been mine, after all. What Tony possessed was nothing but trash.

He asked me about the furniture in the front room and I said I had prevented the bailiff from touching that room because I had no idea to whom the contents belonged. Awkwardly, Tony looked down at his cigarette and stated quietly, "Good. That stuff is all Lorraine's."

A couple of days later, Lorraine was doing the most bizarre thing I had ever seen.
She was trying to climb the lamp post outside our house with a rope tied in a noose. It was broad daylight and her mother was causing a major commotion in the street trying to get her down.
I saw all this from behind the nets of the bedsit window. I was beginning to think that nothing more could shock me when a tearful Lorraine and her raging mother were knocking on the door. They asked for the furniture and I showed them that it was all safely stacked in the lounge. Lorraine's pinch-faced and pale mother promised to arrange for it to be removed as soon as possible. She was as good as her word and a van arrived later that day with a couple of strange men who worked very fast to remove it all.

Tony went offshore again and suddenly I was feeling very strange in my health. Every time I stood up I was missing my footing somehow. I did not feel as if my brain was firing on all channels. I was frequently too tired to go on with the cleaning but I did, like a robot.

Eventually I collapsed. I think I fainted. Dan had called 999 like the sensible lad that he was. What a brilliant child he had become. It turned out that I had glandular fever.
A condition usually caused by severe shock, the doctor said. I just lay in the emergency room laughing and crying at the absurdity of it all. "Well yeah." I replied to the doctor flatly. However, I could not stay in hospital. I had nobody to care for Dan.

Back at home, I was unable to do very much at all and Elaine was blanking me as if I was the most idiotic waste of fresh air she had ever known in her life. I missed her and so I sent her a card begging her to forgive me for being a spunkless victim of my own weakness. I explained exactly what had happened, but I knew her well enough to imagine that she had no sympathy whatsoever.
Thankfully her heart was bigger than her anger and she turned up a day later, made me to get into bed and took over looking after the house, Dan and all the paraphernalia that a young mum has to deal with. She was her usual self, on top of hell’s inferno but coping in spite of the heat.

She went home around 10pm that night and I was hallucinating wildly under the influence of the glandular fever, I was drifting in and out of sleep. There was a strange noise downstairs. Dylan did not bark but wagged his tail and went to greet someone so I knew that this was somebody we both knew well.
Alan, Jai, Chas and Billy had slipped into the house using Chas’ housekey and they came into the room. I struggled to gain full consciousness. I was more ill than I had ever been in my life and it frightened me. It frightened them too.

Alan had a terrible tale to tell as they lounged around the room in grim silence.
Was I ready for any more shocks? I said that I was not but the absence of Dougie gave me a shudder of premonition.
"Where is Dougie?" I asked panicking slightly.
This was precisely what they had come to tell me.

The night that Tony had forced me back into his life, Dougie had turned up at my flatlet, as usual, to find Chas and Babs settled in there.
Upon hearing that I had been unceremoniously whisked away by Tony, he had walked out of the flat and headed for the shopping centre in the middle of town. He had commenced smashing shop windows with his fists and feet and anything he could lay his hands on. He had smashed into 6 shops, setting off all the alarms by the time the police wrestled him to the floor and arrested him.
He had been remanded to Chelmsford Prison awaiting trial.

The realisation of what had motivated Dougie to behave so irrationally hit me hard. It was all my fault. Dougie had a terrible criminal record, so I knew that he was facing a custodial sentence. The boys gave me the prison address and urged me to write to him.
"He is in a really bad way, Fran." Alan warned me, showing me a letter he had received from Dougie.

The letters I wrote and received over the following months were the most important things in my life at that time. It was easy to hide the communications from Tony, he never looked at the mail. He didn't even pick it up from the doormat, preferring to just step over it as he left to go in or out whenever he was at home from the rigs.

Tony arrived back from his tour offshore in a really bad drunken state, as always.
On this occasion he saw how ill I was, washed, changed and walked out of the house.
He said he was going to the pub. Elaine was relieved. She only wanted to punch him in the face whenever they shared space. She really disliked Tony. A lot.

The next day, a Friday, Jai called at the house around 7pm in the evening and Tony went out with him and Alan, who was waiting outside. This struck me as a bit strange, but I thought nothing much of it. I was still semi-conscious and the world was a foggy, cloudy place that I could hardly fathom, as the glandular fever ravaged my senses.

Around midnight there was a knock at the door. I staggered down the stairs, thinking that Tony must have forgotten his keys. I had dragged on an old army shirt of Dougie's over my nightdress. Jai, Alan, Jake, Phil and Billy were waiting, crowded on the doorstep. I let them in and waited for Tony to appear, but he was not with them.
They all went up the stairs in silence, respecting that Dan was asleep.
I asked "Where is Tony?" and Jai said to get back into bed before I fell down. They proceeded to tell me the shattering news that they had just left Tony with Lorraine, at her mother's house. They said that they had the impression that he was planning to stay the night there.

The full importance of what they were telling me entered my head like a lead balloon.
It filled my consciousness and I could not find a way to react at all. It was one shock too far. One more shattering pain to add to the many deep heartbreaks I had already suffered.

Alan took over the situation with his customary authority.
He ordered Billy to make coffee, Chas to skin up and me to stay right where I was while he informed me of what I was going to do next. He said that Tony did not deserve a woman like me. I was far too good for all this hell. He also pointed out that, as half owner of this house, I should not leave again. This time, he stated with a very serious expression on his face, this time would be very different.

He ordered me to act as if I knew nothing about Tony seeing Lorraine again and to carry on as normal as possible until I was well enough to think properly. He passed me the joint and said "Don't worry about a thing, Fran. We will help you get this place fixed up, won't we boys?" He turned to glare at everyone in the room and they all nodded in agreement immediately.

"We are your friends, Fran. Not Tony's. But he won't know a thing about it. OK?"

I had no idea how serious they were.
But I soon found out.