How Not to Be a Loser Read online

  See! my anxiety sneered. Out there is dangerous, full of evil people and trouble waiting to happen. How are you possibly going to manage this on your own, without Cee-Cee? Are you crazy? You should ditch this stupid Programme before—

  ‘Oh, shut up!’ I threw the letter in the recycling.

  Later on that evening, I pulled a chair up to the window and watched the stars for a while. Blotting tears on my cardigan sleeve, I cranked the window open and leant out into the night. I sucked in the forgotten scents of earth and trees, letting the faint whiff of smoke linger in my nostrils. I pushed my face into the gentle breeze, eyes closed as it caressed my skin, seductive and intoxicating.

  I hung there for a while, the crisp September air conjuring a thousand memories of late summer nights stretched out on picnic blankets, skinny-dipping in a moonlit lake with my squad, the prickle of damp grass under my toes as we ran for home…

  Over the past few years, I had mentally and emotionally shrunk to fit a life behind four walls. Survived by making the best of things, banishing any thoughts or dreams of outside as much as possible, avoided total breakdown through focusing on what I had, where I was, not what I was missing. But things were changing.

  The quiet of the night wooed me with the promise of safety beneath its thick canopy. I softly closed the window and padded upstairs to bed, wondering if soon I might accept its invitation.

  6

  Stop Being a Loser Programme

  Day Four

  Monday was a bad day, riddled with anxious thoughts about a million things. I wittered through my work, trying to ignore the shadow of shame on my shoulder. I was feeling small and scared about the enormity of the challenges ahead and crushed with the grief at what I had lost. I needed to recognise how awful my life had become to keep going forwards, but at the same time that was gut-wrenchingly painful and left me feeling desperately exposed. My fracturing relationship with Cee-Cee meant that my security was crumbling away, too. Without her, I felt lost and alone.

  And to add to all this was the guilt. Cee-Cee had taken me in, and then spent all these years helping us, being there. We’d become family. Was it right to suddenly change the rules, start putting limits on her time with me, and more importantly with Joey? Perhaps I was kidding myself, saying it was for her good as well as ours to move the boundary lines. Should I try harder to work things out, see if she could help me with the Programme instead of assuming she’d sabotage it?

  The trouble was, I had no idea. No clue how healthy, functional families worked. And right then, I had neither the energy nor the strength to try to figure it out.

  That evening, I held the door open for three seconds before slamming it shut in a fit of panic. A new personal worst.

  7

  Stop Being a Loser Programme

  Day Five

  Joey watched me over the top of his breakfast bowl. ‘You look well rough.’

  ‘Thanks! I’ve not washed my hair yet.’

  ‘No. I don’t mean that. Are you sad?’

  ‘I had a setback with the Programme yesterday.’ I sloshed some coffee in a mug and came to sit opposite him.

  He tipped out another half bowl of cereal. ‘So, what did you do when you were swimming, if you had a setback? You didn’t give up, did you?’

  I sighed. ‘I set the alarm for fifteen minutes earlier. Trained harder. Stayed longer. Made sure it didn’t happen again.’

  ‘There you are, then.’

  I had planned on working late that evening. My client had changed their mind about how they wanted to address the contract they were hoping to win, and the deadline was zooming up fast. The boss of the tender company I freelanced for only tolerated me missing client meetings and training days because I reliably produced good work, on time. Maybe I would manage a meeting soon, but in the meantime I was heading for an all-nighter.

  A few minutes after five, my phone rang.

  ‘Amy? It’s Lisa, Ben’s mum.’

  ‘Yes, hi. Is everything okay?’ Joey had arranged for Lisa to give him a lift back from the athletics tournament.

  ‘Joey’s not here. Ben and his mates have had a good look around, but he’s nowhere.’

  A tentacle of fear uncoiled in my stomach and began slithering up my ribs. ‘Has Ben called him?’

  ‘It goes straight to answerphone. Sounds like the battery’s run out. He left the changing room before Ben and no one’s seen him since. The teachers are looking, I’m sure he’ll turn up any moment, I just wanted to let you know, given that letter we had about the strange bloke hanging around.’

  ‘I… um…’ The tentacle reached my brain, clamping a sucker on so hard, I couldn’t think. I tried to remember where the tournament was, how far away. Could I get there? For Joey?

  ‘Could he have forgotten he was coming with me? Got a lift with someone else? Most of the other parents are still here, but we could send a text out.’

  ‘Th… thank you. Yes. That’s probably a good idea.’ I could call a taxi. Ask Lisa to come and fetch me… pace the streets until I found my boy. I could do that, couldn’t I? ‘Should I come down? Help look for him?’

  As if should would make any difference.

  Lisa hesitated. She knew full well I was the crazy lady who never left the house. ‘No, no, it’s fine. There are more than enough people looking here. You’d better stay there, in case he turns up at home.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I’ll keep you posted. I’m sure he’ll appear in a minute and we’ll feel like right wallies for worrying. I mean, that dodgy car was at Brooksby school.’

  Lisa, God bless her, called me back every ten minutes. However, the initial surge of hope every time the phone rang was swiftly replaced with increasing anguish. The school grounds had been searched top to bottom. On the third call, having recovered my voice, I asked to speak to Ben.

  ‘Hey, Ben. Did Joey seem okay today? I mean, had anything happened that might have bothered or upset him? Did he do okay in his events?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Ben’s voice was huskier than last time he’d been round for dinner. I couldn’t tell if it was his age or anxiety. ‘The teachers already asked me. But he was just usual, you know? He was laughing when we came in to get changed and he said he’d see me in a bit when he left.’

  ‘You’re sure? You know it’s really important to be absolutely truthful. If there’s anything, even the tiniest thing, it might help us find him. If Joey’s in trouble, or… or…’

  ‘Nah, Joey’s never in trouble. There’s nothing, honest.’

  By five forty-five, I started to consider if something genuinely terrible had happened. Instead of panicking me further, I fell into a surreal state of numbness, mentally listing the possible scenarios.

  Joey was strong, nearly six foot now. And loud. Surely someone would have heard him if that man had tried to take him? Seen him struggle?

  It goes without saying that being stuck at home had never felt as hideous as watching the minutes tick by between Lisa’s updates. How could I be here, pacing up and down my living room and leave other people to find my son? People who liked Joey, some who even cared about him, but none who loved him enough to quite happily rip out her own heart if it meant he was okay.

  Yet not enough to open a door and start looking for him yourself.

  And that brutal thought was enough to try calling the only other person who felt anything close to my pathetic, impotent love. The one who had rocked him to sleep in the middle of the night when I was too exhausted to walk straight any more. Who had stood by my side as we waved him off into the classroom his first day of school. Who had introduced him to the love of his life in the Brooksby pool, before he could walk.

  I gripped my phone and dialled Cee-Cee’s number.

  ‘What is the point of people having phones if NO ONE EFFING ANSWERS THEM?! This is the ONE TIME you decide NOT to be there when I need you!’ I shouted, a minute later, hurling the phone across the room where it ricocheted off the wall. ‘SHIT!’ I scrabble
d across and scooped the different pieces back together. If I’d killed the phone, then Joey, Lisa, the hospital, the kidnapper making ransom demands, no one could get in touch with me.

  As I pressed the battery compartment back into place and switched it on, Lisa called again.

  ‘Yes?’ I gabbled, for the seventh time.

  ‘Nothing yet. Amy, do you think it’s time we contacted the police?’

  The words hung between us, a huge chasm straddling ‘oops, of course it was nothing to worry about, Joey you little monkey you scared us all half to death’ to ‘this is real, my son has been missing for nearly an hour and no one can find him. Least of all me, because I haven’t made it past my front door in over two years’.

  I was passing on a description to the very patient, sombre-voiced woman at the local police station when the door opened and Joey sauntered in.

  With Cee-Cee right behind him.

  Good job I was half blind with shock and rage, because with a slightly better aim, the vase I’d thrown would have made a serious dent in her head. I did have naturally strong shoulders after all. Joey, thankfully, ducked.

  ‘What the hell?’ he squeaked, and the look of confusion and fear on his face was enough to clear the black mist, leaving an eerie calm.

  ‘Joey, please go upstairs.’

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘I’ll talk to you soon.’

  I waited until his bedroom door had slammed shut before addressing Cee-Cee, my voice trembling.

  ‘I’ve just been on the phone to the police. The whole school has been hunting for an hour. Ben’s mum has been out of her mind—’

  ‘What? What’s happened?’

  ‘Are you kidding me? You took Joey! That’s what happened. You can’t just take a child from a school and not tell anybody!’

  Cee-Cee looked affronted. ‘I always pick him up. How else would he have got home?’

  ‘LISA WAS GIVING HIM A LIFT, AS ARRANGED BY ME, HIS MOTHER.’

  ‘Well, you could have said.’

  ‘Didn’t Joey tell you?’ I asked.

  ‘He asked if I was supposed to be picking him up, I said of course.’

  ‘It’s a twenty-minute drive home. Where have you been?’ My voice was ice. I don’t know about Cee-Cee, but I was scaring myself.

  ‘We picked up goggles from the sports shop on the ring road. I wanted to treat him, celebrate his trial.’

  ‘You saw that letter about a weirdo hanging around the school gates! Didn’t you think I might be worried?’

  She shrugged. ‘Not if he was with me.’

  ‘Cee-Cee, this has to stop.’ The adrenaline was fizzling into exhaustion now. ‘I don’t want you giving Joey lifts. Or buying him things. Or contacting him without speaking to me first. Please, we need a break. You need a break. Go and live your life. Let us live ours.’

  ‘You need my help. For his sake.’

  ‘No. No, we really don’t. I appreciate everything you’ve done, more than I can say. But this is not helpful any more. I am not that vulnerable, broken girl any more. This time, I need to fix myself. And if you can’t respect that, or my choices for my family, then I can’t trust you to be part of it.’

  Cee-Cee blinked, several times. It was the most emotion I’d seen in her in over a decade. ‘Very well then. You’re on your own.’

  The door closed behind her. I closed my eyes, breathing in a deep lungful of regret, relief and utter terror. Firing off a text to Lisa to explain, I went upstairs to speak to my son.

  More than a little unnerved by the evening’s events, I ploughed through a load more work, most of which would probably read like drivel, and stood up to stretch the kinks in my neck. Digging through the pantry, I found a dusty bottle of red wine. I poured out a decent-sized glass and took a sniff.

  ‘Okay, Piper. This is happening. It’s time for stage two of the Programme.’ I paused to remember the feeling of helpless horror from earlier that day, weighed it up against the anxiety now stirring at what I was about to do. ‘No contest,’ I announced, whipped the back door open and took a step out into the night.

  ‘Okay, just keep breathing, nice and steady, in and out, you can do this, you’re a champion, remember? You can do anything you put your mind to.’

  I followed the technique I’d read about so many times in the past few days: found a patch on the garden path to focus on, waited for the swaying and the clanging in my head to ease, considered it objectively, as an irrational reaction due to a problem in me not out there. I’d read that panic attacks last five to twenty minutes.

  ‘I’ll stay here and endure this for twenty-one if I have to,’ I gasped. ‘Do your worst, pathetic panic, you’re just chemicals and nerve signals and brain electricity. You aren’t controlling me any more.’

  After a while (I guess somewhere between five and twenty minutes, but honestly it could have been five hours), I managed to take a sip of wine. I took a quick look around at the garden, then tipped my head up at the sky. Another clear night. Without a pane of glass between us, the stars were so bright, they held me spellbound. If I had climbed next door’s chestnut tree, I could have stretched up and caught one. Far enough from the city to be undimmed by light pollution, they spread so wide and high and deep, it seemed there was a star for every person on the planet. I spun slowly around, studying every one, their glorious, ancient beauty. A rustle from the bushes near the back gate startled me, but I kept my eyes up and remained standing until I’d finished my drink. It was maybe a little faster than if I’d been inside, but, hey, it wasn’t quite a guzzle.

  I didn’t know why coming outside at night felt easier. Maybe the lack of people, maybe the lack of vision. But I had done it. I had breached the invisible barrier, once impassable as the widest ocean, as unreachable as those stars. Dizzy with emotion, I poured myself another glass and used the adrenaline to power me through the night to my deadline.

  Tonight, one step into the garden. Next stop, the world.

  8

  Stop Being a Loser Programme

  Day Thirteen

  Sean emailed me again. I deleted the message without reading it. I knew I was being unfair, but when it came to his son, fair meant nothing. The only good thing about that man was him living five thousand miles away.

  Joey stumbled into the living room and fell face first onto the sofa. ‘Dying,’ he mumbled into the cushion.

  I put down the book I was reading – having successfully completed my latest project, I’d given myself the day off – and went to have a look. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Feel,’ he croaked, feebly draping one of my hands across his forehead.

  ‘Ouch.’ He wasn’t dying, but it did seem like he was brewing a nasty infection.

  I tucked him up in front of the television under a duvet, praying that a few hours of sleep would let nature do its thing. A miracle-requiring prayer, given that his swollen throat couldn’t swallow the stockpiled paracetamol tablets.

  ‘You have to call Cee-Cee,’ Joey croaked, after gagging on his latest attempt. ‘I need Calpol.’

  Even if he didn’t strictly need a good dose of strawberry medicine, he jolly well shouldn’t have to go without it when there was a pharmacy in the village square half a mile away.

  But no way on this earth I was calling Cee-Cee.

  Despite my now nightly trips into the back garden, stepping out through the front door was like walking onto a ship in a raging storm. My rational self knew the evening was mild, the air gentle. But somehow the ground dipped and bucked, as the street ahead spun like the whole village had been chucked in a tumble dryer. I clung to the door frame, gulped in a wisp of oxygen, tried to find somewhere on the front path that would stay still for long enough to be a focal point.

  Holding my arms out either side for balance, crouched low like a goblin, probably sounding like one as I wheezed and gibbered, I shuffled first one foot forwards, then the other.

  ‘Go, Mum!’ Joey cheered feebly from the sofa as I pulled the
door closed behind me. ‘I love you!’

  Keeping my head down, I shuffle-squat-scampered to the gate post at the end of the garden, feeling like a piece of debris hurtling through open space. I grabbed on with both arms, taking a moment to steady myself. I had left at six-thirty. The pharmacy closed at seven. It was an eight-minute walk for a normal, functioning human. For me, in this state, it could end up taking hours.

  Pressing on, I shambled along, clutching the fences that lined the path to the square, my body pressed against them, face turned in. Trying to push down the waves of nausea and wipe the sweat dripping off my forehead without letting go. I was still breathing, albeit in frantic, shuddering gasps. My heart most definitely continued to beat, thundering in my chest like a racehorse. I was actually doing this, one tiny step at a time.

  And then I reached the road. And beyond it, the square. Fifty metres of wide-open space stretched out like the Kalahari Desert.

  Crap.

  ‘Come on, now. You can do this.’ I closed my eyes, counted to ten in my head and prepared to make a run for it. A car suddenly roared past, music blaring, and I nearly disintegrated right there on the pavement. I opened my eyes again. Prised one hand off the fence post. Stretched out my feet closer to the kerb, until I couldn’t go any further without letting go of the fence altogether. But I didn’t let go. Instead I felt the panic begin to bubble, boiling over like a hot pan, so I retreated back to the fence. I crouched down, pressed up against the wood, vaguely aware that somehow, at some point, I had to pull myself together, get up and go somewhere. But helpless to do anything while the world spun all around me, I buried my head in my knees and tipped over into the abyss.