Thursday, February 18, 2004, was the school half-term and the chill in the air
was fierce. But that evening I went to bed in a happy mood after attending a
concert in London.
In the middle of the night I became aware of movement in the bedroom. Tony, my
husband, asked me to get up. There was a gentle anxiety in his tone. Still
half asleep I put on my dressing gown, my heart pounding. I had already
guessed what I was about to face.
Most mothers blame themselves for things that go wrong in their children’s
lives, and I am no exception. If you can benefit from my experiences and
errors of judgment, then so much the better.
I am just an ordinary mother and wife who would never have believed that my
life – our lives – would be devastated by drugs.
MY twin sons were born in 1976, younger brothers to my daughter Marie, who was
two. With blond hair and identical faces, they grew into a pair of beautiful
“imps”, as one of their nursery teachers called them.
At 12 they were interviewed for a television programme about twins. How did
they feel about growing up?
Simon: “Well, I wouldn’t like to grow up ’cos I like my life as it is now and
I don’t know what it is going to be like when I am growing up. If I do grow
up I would like to live in the same house as my brother, with our wives, if
we have any.”
Nick: “I don’t want to do that because we would argue too much. He gets too
possessive of me. I am not that possessive . . .”
Unknown to me, by 13 they were experimenting with cigarettes in the park
behind our house in Reading, Berkshire. They soon moved on to cannabis.
“It was very easily available,” says Simon.
Worried about their slow academic progress, and not realising it was due to
drugs, I thought of putting them in a smaller school. When I was offered a
new teaching job in Bath I moved there with the children. Lawrence, my first
husband, kept his job in London and came down at weekends.
By the end of our first year in Bath, alarm bells were ringing. They confessed
they had visited a local travellers’ site to get some “wacky baccy”.
Simon told me years later: “By the time we were in the sixth form and doing
A-levels, we were smoking pot in bongs or big water pipes rather than in
spliffs or cigarettes . . . As youngsters this was our life; we couldn’t go
to the pub, so that was our entertainment.”
At the same time my marriage was failing and at Christmas 1993 Lawrence and I
separated. Then the twins decided to leave school. I felt I was a single
mother fighting the iron will of two teenage rebels.
Over the next few years we moved back to Reading and I married again – still
unaware that the twins were progressing through LSD, ecstasy, cocaine and
crack to heroin.
Heroin, Simon explains now, “takes you somewhere unbelievable . . . when I
wasn’t doing it my body suddenly came alive again where before it had been
asleep. I could feel senses and smells – it was like being pulled out of a
womb as an adult and I didn’t like it”.
Somehow I remained ignorant of all this until an evening in the summer of 2000
when Simon called me, telling me he had bad news. Every parent’s nightmare
was about to unfold. It took a while for Simon to get to the point, but he
confessed: “Mum, I’m a heroin addict.”
Recent events all began to make sense: the loss of his job as an estate agent,
his unpaid rent and bills, the times he had asked me for money, the £4,000
he had borrowed from Tony, my new husband. I realised how gaunt he had
become.
His flatmate Matthew was also an addict. These two young men sobbed in front
of me about their inability to give up their addiction. It seemed that the
only thing that mattered in their lives each day was to get enough heroin to
smoke to keep them going until the next day. On waking up, the whole
revolting cycle of finding the money and contacting a dealer to score would
begin again.
Simon was committed to overcoming his addiction. Moving in with a former
girlfriend, he began “clucking” – the heroin addicts’ word for medically
unsupervised withdrawal from the drug. This, he said, was “hellish,
extremely unpleasant sweating, chills, stomach cramps, a very painful
cluck”.
Full of hope, I paid the deposit on a new flat for him and helped him get back
on his feet financially. But by setting up a clean slate for him I was
enabling him to go back to drugs.
I didn’t tell Tony, who had already lost a large amount of his own money
trying to help Simon without realising it had gone on drugs. But by keeping
things from my husband I was becoming caught up in the dishonesty, insanity
and twisted thinking that goes hand in glove with heroin.
I had also been manipulated into helping Nick to settle debts without
realising he was on drugs too. “Blagging” is an addict’s ability to
manipulate others. Nick was extremely proficient at blagging, always
presenting plausible reasons why he and and his girlfriend Joanna needed
money. He would turn up at my school or the gym, asking: “Mum, can you lend
me 20 quid?”
Since I had helped Simon I couldn’t deny the same to Nick. He would complain
how awful it was that Simon had gone down the dreadful route of heroin
addiction and pretend that he himself did not use drugs.
Simon’s “cluck” was in vain. Within a year he had gone from smoking heroin to
injecting it, which was much more dangerous. Tragically, he did so to follow
Nick’s example.
Simon recalls: “When he admitted to me that he’d been injecting for a few
weeks I said that, as I was his identical twin, I didn’t want him going down
that path without me by his side. So I got him to do my first injection sat
on the sofa in his flat. I can’t remember much after that because I was out
of my head.”
A few months later I was sitting on a bench outside a pub on the outskirts of
Reading, waiting to meet Simon, who had asked to see me. From a distance I
caught sight of a young man walking towards me. He was thin and bedraggled.
He looked filthy. Poor chap, I thought, he must be on drugs. I hope to God
that Simon will never get into that state. I had failed to recognise my own
son.
I DON’T remember the precise date when it finally dawned on me that Nick was
also an addict. Out of loyalty to his brother, Simon never told me, although
he says now: “Nick used to put blusher on his face so that he looked well .
. . It frustrated me that everyone looked down on me when Nick was so
heavily into it. If the police had raided Nick’s house, he might easily have
had a 10-year prison sentence.”
I finally faced up to the brutal truth when my bank card went missing after
Nick and Joanna had come round for supper. About £200 was taken out of my
account at a local hole in the wall. I felt violated and sickened that my
own son could steal from me.
With Simon beside me – he seemed at last to be getting his own life in
some sort of shape – I confronted Nick and Joanna. I was in no mood for
more lies. They broke down in tears. Nick confessed that addiction had
turned them into “very nasty people”.
Their flat was filthy. Piles of dirty plates and cups were scattered
everywhere and maggots had hatched. Most of the electrical appliances,
including a record player Tony had given them, were gone – sold for
heroin. The car Tony had passed on to Nick was also gone.
On the morning of August 8, 2002, my sons and I boarded a train to Paddington
to take Nick into the Florence Nightingale hospital. A physical and mental
wreck, I had drawn out the last of my savings, £11,560, to pay for his
treatment in drug rehabilitation.
Tony was angry and frustrated about this; both of us had already parted with
thousands of pounds, and he had even paid off a couple of drug dealers who
were threatening Simon – taking an iron bar with him to defend himself.
Tony recalls: “I will never forget the first time I took £3,500 out of the
Bradford and Bingley building society . . . I thought the first time I did
it would be the end of drug dealers, but it was only the start.”
He was trying to cope with serious financial loss, if not bankruptcy. Our
marriage was near to breaking point. Yet I pinned my hopes on this one
chance of helping Nick.
As Nick began withdrawing from heroin, I felt I was getting to know my son
again. I recorded many of our conversations.
Nick told me: “I can’t believe the things I’ve done. I’ve sunk to the point
where I even became part of a trio of bag-snatchers. My mate Phil, another
addict, would grab a lady’s bag and run off with it. Joanna and I would then
go to the lady to check if she was okay. We needed to know she wasn’t hurt
but we also needed to make sure she couldn’t identify Phil.
“We always asked, ‘Are you okay, love? Did you see who did it? Can you give us
a description?’ Once we’d checked she was all right and couldn’t identify
Phil we would leave. We would meet up with him and take any cash out of her
bag to buy heroin.”
He also told me that he and Joanna had once stolen drugs from the home of one
of Reading’s Yardie drug dealers. Simon revealed the aftermath: “The cocaine
dealer eventually beat the hell out of Nick. I took him to hospital because
he had about 20 lumps on his head where the coke dealer’s mates had hit him
with crowbars and truncheons . . . if it hadn’t been for adrenaline kicking
in, so that he managed to escape and get to his flat, I’m sure these blokes
would have beaten him to death. It was awful to hear his screams and cries
of fear.”
Once Nick was out of hospital I thought both my sons were now drug-free. But
one evening Simon went round to Nick’s – they lived in adjacent
houses – and a catastrophe occurred.
Simon: “He had a guilty look on his face and I said to him, ‘What’s wrong,
what’s wrong?’ He pulled out four needles full of heroin. Waving them in
front of me he said, ‘I’ll do it if you’ll do it’.”
Simon remonstrated with him but could not resist: “It was like sticking a
bottle of vodka in front of an alcoholic and letting him stare at it all
night . . . I was in tears when I injected heroin into my arms again,
knowing I was going to go downhill and yet accepting it. Sticking the needle
into my arm, knowing I had just wrecked my life again, wrecked Mum’s life
again, the guilt was awful.”
It took me months to recognise the truth, and when I did Tony had had enough.
He told me I would have to choose between him and the boys: “Can’t you see
we have nothing left to give Nick and Simon? We’re on the road to ruin.”
I seethed with rage, even left home for a few days. Then one afternoon during
the February half-term of 2003 I was giving Nick and Simon a lift in my car.
As I was driving, Nick put his right hand into the top pocket of his shirt.
With one eye on the road and one on Nick’s hand, I caught sight of a needle.
Then he injected in front of me, lifting the skin on his arm in search of a
vein to dig the needle into. It was repulsive and terrifying.
My eyes darted between the traffic on the road and the veins in Nick’s arms. I
felt as if I was about to faint and be sick.
I don’t remember much more of that day, but I wrote a letter to the boys
saying I could do nothing more to help them. “I do wish you well but please
do not contact me again until you are off drugs, whether that takes months
or years. Hold on to the fact that you have been and always will be loved.”
I didn’t expect a reply. I wondered whether they would even open the post.
Tony and I sat down and added up our losses so far. They amounted to £70,000.
We decided to remortgage the house.
Simon and Nick did receive the letter. They tried to phone me at home, but we
had changed the number. So they rang me at work. As soon as I heard Nick’s
voice say, ‘Hello, Mum’, I put the receiver down. It was upsetting but my
resolve was firm.
I discovered later that their lives went downhill immediately. They took more
drugs, financing the habit by working 24 hours a day for a dealer. Then they
spent money they owed the dealer and used his drugs. Afraid to walk around
Reading to “score” for themselves they were reduced to shoplifting and
living with down-and-outs.
In July 2003, almost six months after I had cut myself off, I saw Nick and
Simon in a gutter near Wokingham in Surrey. I pulled my car over to check
that they hadn’t been injured in a road accident. They were both in an
appalling state from “clucking”, as they did not have any money to buy
heroin. They were vomiting and sweating.
I went to a cash machine, gave them some money and drove away. I can’t put
into words how I felt about my sons lying in the gutter and the guilt I felt
about giving them money for drugs.
The endgame of this story was about to begin. In the summer of 2003 they at
last got themselves onto separate drug rehabilitation programmes, knowing
that they had to be apart to succeed.
“We had spent so much time together as addicts that we had become very close
as brothers,” says Simon. “It was very hard when we knew that there was now
no choice and we had to disperse.”
Both were treated with Subutex, an opiate blocker that took away the desperate
physical craving for heroin but not the desire for the drug. Unknown to me,
they were still using heroin – although not as frequently as before.
They were “Giro junkies”, using their welfare payments for weekly binges.
But they regained their appetites and began to take a more positive interest
in their lives.
Nick did so well that by Christmas he was allowed to live with Simon at a
refuge in Wokingham. Frances, one of the volunteers there, told me Nick was
“cheeky and chirpy”; he loved to share a joke and sang when he did his
washing. Tough love seemed to be working. Like me, no one there realised
they were still using drugs.
In reality it was virtually impossible for either of them to break free from
their brotherly bond and twin addiction. Disaster was imminent.
During half-term in February 2004 I went to see them. Nick vowed to me that
they wanted to get better and live normal lives. Both sons gave me a huge
hug as I left, and Nick called out: “Love you, Mum. You’re the best mum in
the world.”
It was the last time I saw him alive.
AS I walked into the lounge in the early hours of February 19 I glanced at the
clock. It was 3am. Two police officers stood there, some distance from one
another.
“I am sorry, but your son Nick is dead,” said the female officer. She was
kind, compassionate and professional.
I sat down with calm resignation, murmuring to myself: “He knew that I loved
him. Right up to the end, he knew he was loved.”
I asked after Simon. Thank God, he was alive. At least one of my sons had
survived. I felt as if I was operating in two emotional dimensions, with
relief and grief intertwined.
The woman police officer touched my arm and explained that Simon had found
Nick dead. But what she then told me was nothing like the pictures I had
painted in my mind: Nick drifting into unconsciousness after accidentally
taking an overdose, Nick having some kind of accident while under the
influence of drugs.
Simon later gave me the full story. Two days earlier, on February 17, the
twins had woken at their “usual time” of 2pm or later and had watched
television and DVDs. In the evening they were invited to a party and bought
some crack cocaine to take with them.
“We arrived at about 9pm and by 5am we had managed to smoke £600 worth of
heroin and crack accompanied by a bottle of vodka, a bottle of brandy and
half a bottle of Jack Daniel’s,” said Simon.
Nick decided he wanted to go and “bang up” – inject some
heroin. Simon tried to talk him out of it. “We argued, and Nick ended up
punching me around the face and walking out of the house.”
Back at the refuge they found Nick asleep and a needle and spoon in his room.
Angry, Simon woke him up.
“Not only had he wrecked the night and made a spectacle of himself but he had
banged up as well. Another huge argument started which went on for an hour
or so. We were screaming at the top of our lungs and calling each other all
the names under the sun.
“The argument came to a halt with Nick saying that I didn’t love him . . .
Finally came those dreaded words, ‘I’m going to kill myself.’ He slammed his
bedroom door shut while I shouted back, ‘Go on then.’ “As twin brothers, of
course, we’d had big arguments before. I assumed he wouldn’t be so stupid
and would just go to sleep once he had calmed down. So I went to bed.”
Simon had slept all day and into the evening while, unaware of the terrible
drama in my sons’ lives, I was going to London for a concert.
When Simon awoke at last at 10pm he went to Nick’s room to make up; but the
door was locked and he could get no answer. He and another resident broke
into the room. The bed had not been slept in and Nick’s toilet door was
locked. Panicking, they kicked it in.
“Nothing could have prepared me for what stared me in the face,” said Simon.
“Nick was slumped on the floor, dead.”
His “lifelong soulmate”, as Simon described him, had hanged himself from the
window with a shoelace.
What made Simon’s desperation even worse was that he couldn’t call me. He was
frantic, but I still hadn’t given him our phone number. Nor could he get
hold of anyone else in the family.
What a helpless, lonely situation, but one which they had brought upon
themselves. Saying yes instead of no to drugs was their choice. Their bond
of twinship was incredibly strong. They did everything together, good or bad.
© Elizabeth Burton-Phillips 2007
Extracted from Mum, Can You Lend Me Twenty Quid? to be published by
Portrait on May 24 at £14.99. Copies can be ordered for £13.49 including
postage from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585
