Hans-Jürgen Waldinger had been really sweet to me in these past two weeks. He’d not permitted Bruno to attend any more classes because he was so disruptive, but he had arranged a rota of tutors to keep him occupied. All of them had reported how astonished they were at his intellect – at least two to three years advanced for his age.

  I’d tried to keep myself occupied by attending the daily courses assigned to me as a first-year student. But this whole mind-spirit stuff just wasn’t my thing. Trying to get my head around some of the concepts the airy-fairy tutors spouted at us felt, at times, like trying to grab smoke.

  I had dinner with Hans-Jürgen most evenings. Our bond of friendship had definitely deepened, but so had the divide between us. The more time I spent with him, the more I realized what different journeys we were on. He genuinely believed it was possible – and passionately wanted – to make the world a better place.

  All I wanted was to stop feeling so utterly shit. To sleep through an entire night without being woken by nightmares. To wake one morning without a feeling of dread in every cell of my body and pore of my skin, and the sense that a cement mixer was churning in the pit of my stomach.

  For a short while, I’d thought the Jersey Evening Post had lost interest in the story and it had gone away. Then I’d read a front-page splash from a few days ago.

  MISSING SAILOR’S PARTNER QUESTIONED IN MUNICH

  To make it worse, they’d used my name. Sandra Jones.

  Perhaps I was being paranoid. Roel Albazi was in prison in England and going to be there for a long time. He was hardly likely to be getting the Jersey newspaper delivered to his cell every day.

  But all the same, I needed a Plan B. Hans-Jürgen made it clear that while he was always here for me as a friend I could rely on, Bruno was a problem, and until he was capable of socializing with other children, he was not welcome here.

  I had a good look around for child psychologists in Munich, but I couldn’t find any who were a match for Dr Ramsden in Frankfurt – and nor, crucially, any who were sufficiently fluent in English. Bruno and I both needed to learn German if we were to stay in this country, but that would take time. Moving to Frankfurt seemed the only real option, to try to get Bruno sorted. Maybe Dr Ramsden could work enough magic on him in six months for us to be able to return to the sanctuary – of a kind – of the schloss.

  If I was sensible, I could stretch my funds for some while by staying in a cheap hotel or rental flat. Tutor myself and Bruno in German and perhaps in six months, if Dr Ramsden had improved him, get him into a nursery school and maybe I could then get a job.

  Another option I considered was to track down some of my relatives. How would that play out?

  Hi, I’m Sandy, I’m a recovering drug addict and my son, Bruno, is a borderline psychopath. Thought you might be pleased to see us!

  The tutor in the last class I had attended at the schloss had banged on and on about karma. All of us, he said, by virtue of us just being here in the schloss, had good karma. Out there, beyond the schloss walls, there was more good karma awaiting us. Every act of good karma earned a karmic reward.

  I thought he was talking bollocks.

  What had I ever done to deserve karma?

  The answer was provided by a conspicuous absence of karma in the months that followed.

  81

  Autumn 2011

  The worst hotel I’ve ever stayed in and times by ten. That’s the Gasthaus & Hotel Seehaus, on Elbestrasse in Frankfurt. The best thing anyone had said about it on TripAdvisor – and the only person to give it a review as high as three stars – was that their room was clean. The rest of the reviews were two- or one-star. Someone gave it two stars for its central location. Another person gave it two stars for it having laundry facilities. Someone leaving a one-star review said they’d seen the largest rat ever in their bedroom one night.

  But it did have an amiable day-time receptionist, called Maria, fifty-five going on twenty, who had a black fringe like the 1950s American model Bettie Page and told me she had written a novel, which she was trying to get published. And if I ever needed anyone to babysit Bruno, she would always be up for earning extra cash when she was off duty.

  At 6 p.m. every evening, except Sundays when there weren’t any staff at all, Maria was relieved by a surly, heavily bearded goblin, who chain-smoked until midnight, then locked the front door and buggered off. The only other staff member was a cleaner as shy as a nervous sparrow. I tried to engage with her a few times but she made it clear she spoke no English and I don’t think she spoke any German, either.

  The bedroom, with one solitary bare lightbulb, had a single bed for me that felt as if I was at an angle all the time like a boat keeled over in the mud at low tide, and a bunk bed for Bruno that he said was fine. The view from the window was down onto a street populated by hookers, drug addicts and a fair percentage of Frankfurt’s down-and-out population. But, hey, it was just forty-nine euros a night, breakfast not included. I saw the breakfast on our first morning, a sad display of nothing I would ever want to put in my or Bruno’s mouth, and was glad it wasn’t included, in case of the temptation to eat it.

  Something that was included was an unusual line in gift toiletries. A bar of partially used soap on which nestled a small, curly hair. It lurked on a shelf behind the plastic curtain – with four rings missing – in the shower cubicle, where there was black mould in each of the four corners of the tray that looked like lurking spiders. There was a part-used mini tube of toothpaste with the top off, left over from a previous guest, that made me think of Roy.

  He was pretty fastidious about tidiness in the bathroom, whereas honestly I was less fussed. Few things pissed him off more than when I squeezed the toothpaste from the middle of the tube and left the top off. Now in these years since I’d left Roy, I could do it to my heart’s content, a small symbol of my new freedom!

  Roy had a thing about an orderly bathroom. He was forever tidying it, but then, ironically, leaving clutter, including his vinyl collection, all over the rest of the house. Whereas I obsessed about keeping our minimalist home clutter-free, and didn’t really care about the bathroom so long as the towels were clean and soft.

  What I didn’t know as I checked us in, on the first day of our new life, was just what a handy location this was going to prove to be. All I thought, gloomily, on that warm October morning as I stripped all the bedding to take it down to the row of washing machines in the basement, so that we would know it was clean at least, was that this was going to be a longer road to recovery than I’d first imagined.

  And I was remembering a gloomy quote from King Lear: The worst is not, so long as we can say, ‘This is the worst.’

  I countered it with John Lennon’s words. He said so many smart things. I had always particularly loved, Everything will be OK in the end. If it’s not OK, it’s not the end.

  Except it was the end for him and it wasn’t OK.

  Shit.

  I felt so badly in need of a hit that first night, after getting takeaway burgers and fries for Bruno and myself. I needed something stronger than the Espranor. I knew I couldn’t go back to that life, so I worked hard to resist the temptation. But it was hard. A constant battle and an easy one to give in to if I let myself.

  I also desperately needed some adult company or I would go crazy. But I couldn’t risk leaving Bruno, especially if there were rats around, so that wasn’t going to happen, not tonight anyway.

  He had his first appointment with Dr Ramsden tomorrow at midday. It was now 7 p.m. There was an ancient television in the room that only seemed able to get German channels. The Wi-Fi did at least work – most of the time – three euros extra per day. And the electricity in the room, I discovered, when it plunged into darkness at 9.30 p.m., was on a meter. Luckily, Old Smokestack downstairs, as I nicknamed him, had a stash of coins he was able to give me in exchange for notes.

  I went back up to my room, popped a euro in the meter, then stared down at the street below. It wasn’t wide but the traffic was solid, lit by the glare of neon lights from the strip clubs and sex shops. The blare of music, some from a nearby bar, some from the stereos of the passing cars with deaf drivers. A large sign, directly across the road, flashed orange, blue and yellow, CABARET. PIK-DAME.

  I realized I’d only viewed this room in daytime. I hadn’t reckoned on a ringside view of the seediest aspect of Frankfurt’s night-time economy.

  I stared down at a row of small, beat-up cars parked one-wheel on the pavement. A couple of down-and-outs were leaning against one, seemingly sharing a joint.

  I drew the curtain, a flimsy piece of cheap fabric that was about as useful at keeping out the flashing neon light as the proverbial chocolate teapot, and turned to Bruno. He was on the top bunk, his head in a book, oblivious to all around him.

  And at that moment, I envied him that so much.

  Oh God.

  I looked at the flashing lights against the curtain. Heard the sound of rap music booming out from a passing car in the street below. A siren somewhere in the distance. My bag with all the money I had in the world sat on the floor beside me. There wasn’t even a safe in this room. I would have to hide it somewhere, but I had no idea where, and under the mattress seemed the only place at the moment. But not great.

  Then when I stacked my coins into neat piles beside the meter, I realized that Smokestack downstairs had short-changed me by one euro. Deliberately or a mistake? I decided to swallow it for now rather than go down and confront him, but I would be wary of him in the future. Not great to feel ripped off, even by a tiny amount.

  It really wasn’t great being here at all.

  What actually had been great since leaving Roy, I was thinking with a tinge of nostalgia?

  Leaving the home I loved and had put so much love into.

  Leaving the man who had never judged me. The man who if I’d given him the chance would have supported me in embarking in a career of my choice.

  The man who had rarely raised his voice in anger at me, and never, ever, in a million years would have hit me.

  A decent, honest human being who would have made a great and caring dad for Bruno, whether he was actually his biological father or not. Hell, he’d never have known.

  I’d exchanged him for Nicos, a violent bully and a criminal.

  Then for Hans-Jürgen Waldinger, utterly charming but now celibate and on another planet to mine.

  I was here trying my best in an awful part of a strange city. Strung out, with my son, in a country where I didn’t speak the language. With a past that was a train crash and a future that looked like an even bigger one. Leaving my home was my only option at the time; it wouldn’t have taken Albazi long to find me and kill me, I had to escape from that. But was leaving Roy the biggest mistake I’d ever made?

  82

  February 2012

  Guten Morgen, meine geschätzte Damen und Herren!

  I never imagined six months ago that I’d be saying a very polite good morning in German.

  Bruno speaks it pretty well now, too – he picked it up quicker than me – and it’s thanks to an online course on the internet and practising out and about. Learning it was a good way to fill many very long and lonely days for both of us – not that we mind each other’s company, we are a good team. But the older Bruno gets, the more introspective I notice he is becoming.

  Today, like most days now, I have company. I’m watching a man shooting-up in a corner of the room below me. Baseball cap, shoddy clothes and filthy trainers planted on the red-tiled floor. Like pretty much everyone who comes in here off the street, he looks a lot older than he probably is. And he has the typical bad posture. He’s seated on one of a row of hard plastic chairs, hunched over the stainless-steel shelf that runs most of the way around the room, oblivious to the mirror in which he can watch himself steadily killing himself, jab by jab, day by day.

  It’s ironic that the word heroin comes from the German heroisch, which actually means heroic. And doubly ironic, it was originally used to treat a drug addiction – to morphine.

  The man is cooking. He holds the flame from a plastic lighter beneath a spoon that contains white heroin powder and a saline solution. In approximately one minute the mixture will turn brown. He will draw it into the hypodermic syringe and then inject – once he’s found a vein that’s not shot to pieces. I don’t know this guy’s name although I see him a couple of times a day, because he doesn’t do conversation, but just watching him makes me so grateful for getting off all this. A year ago this would have been me. Nine months ago, even. Unable to function without my fixes, with the time gap between them growing steadily shorter and the doses stronger.

  Now I’m on the other side of the fence – literally. It’s a glass fence – well, a shatterproof screen – between those of us who work here and those who come to shoot-up. I’m working in one of Frankfurt’s four drug consumption rooms. I discovered this place was just a few minutes’ walk along the road from our hotel – I noticed people coming and going every time I walked past. Pretty sad-looking people, but I recognized something about them, something that had not long back been me.

  Then by chance I got chatting to a guy in a bar, whose name was Wolfgang Barth. He told me he was in charge of this establishment. He explained they had a doctor on the premises 24/7, a rota of nurses and social workers and twenty beds.

  The drug consumption rooms don’t sell drugs, but users can bring their own drugs to these premises, be given a sterile spoon and needle, and take their drugs in the presence of someone able to administer instant medical help if required. Wolfgang joked that these places are known as shooting galleries. But the statistics are no joke. Since the first one opened, here on Elbestrasse in 1992, the annual rate of drug overdose deaths in Frankfurt dropped from 192 to thirty, year-on-year.

  Wolfgang had no budget to pay me, but he was immensely grateful for my offer to volunteer, and that worked well for me, as I could fit it around taking Bruno to Dr Ramsden, and spending more time with him on his days off. It works well around my part-time paid job, which is flexible, cleaning and ironing for some clients. And it was giving me back my feeling of self-worth. The volunteering meant I was doing something positive. I was helping people. And I could understand something of the dark place they were in. I also felt that the desperation I saw through my work there shocked me enough to stay on the straight and narrow. A constant reminder that I did not want to be on the other side of the glass wall.

  Where I’m sitting is known as the nurses’ station. There is a constant, pervading smell of disinfectant that reminds me so much of the Brighton and Hove Mortuary, where Roy took me once, in those early happy days, to show me where he had to go to view post-mortems of murder victims. We are elevated, like having balcony seats in a theatre, looking down at the room itself. When people come in the door, which is always unlocked, they have to look up at us – which is for our protection. The occasional one is violent, especially when badly strung out, and we are out of reach, just.

  A man is coming in the door now, and this one does like to talk. His name is Tomas Arlberg. He could be anywhere between forty and sixty – that’s what years of shooting-up heroin do to someone. It’s not so much the drug itself but the crap it’s cut – mixed – with. Street dealers never sell 100 per cent pure heroin – or, for that matter, pure crack cocaine, methamphetamine or any other opiate – mostly it ranges between 5 and 15 per cent pure, with the rest of what you are buying normally being chalk or cement dust. And that’s what Tomas Arlberg has been injecting into his veins every few hours for the past twenty-five years, if I understand him correctly.

  And it’s not too easy to understand him, because he mumbles. He has only a few teeth and lank, dark hair turning grey that covers his eyes until he remembers to shake it away. His face is gaunt and many weeks unshaven; his body looks painfully thin, enveloped in a charcoal herringbone greatcoat with holes in the sleeves and is at least three sizes too big. He smells pretty rank, like, I’m afraid, so many of our visitors. And yet he has beautiful blue eyes. Every time I see him I wonder about his past – that long distant past – and just how good-looking he might have been. I wonder what was his journey to here? He’s clutching the large plastic carrier bag, white with red and black markings, stuffed full, which he always has with him.

  Full of everything he owns in the world?

  He looks up and smiles, seems genuinely pleased to see me, and asks, ‘Wie geht es dir?’

  At least I think that’s what he says. ‘I’m fine,’ I reply in German and thank him for asking.

  He nods, seeming pretty happy about this. With my rubber-gloved hands, I lean over and hand him his kit of a sterile spoon, saline solution and needle, and he shuffles off towards an empty place in the far right-hand corner, which he always favours, settles, pulls his wrap of heroin from his coat pocket and finds his lighter in another. I stop watching, the memory of my three years of doing just this – albeit in nicer surroundings – too painful.

  Everything has gone quiet in Jersey. I’ve heard nothing more from the police there. I had one scare soon after relocating to Frankfurt, when I read in the JEP that a male body had washed up in Guernsey. There was speculation for a few days that it might be Nicos, and I didn’t know how I felt about that. I was relieved when it turned out not to be him, but a man from Guernsey who had mental health issues and had been missing for some weeks.

  Although I didn’t really understand why I felt that way, why I was happy to think that Nicos might still be alive and not murdered by Saul Brignell and his henchmen because of what I had done. Because there were moments – the way he treated Bruno – when I could have throttled Nicos myself.

  Equally, I worried that all the time there was no body, it meant Nicos might still be alive. Out there somewhere – and coming for me?