Chapter 36 ~ Void
August 20, 2010
I dreamt of emptiness, blackness, a chasm swallowing me whole without even chewing. I dreamt of silence crushing my will, eager oblivion sucking the life from my tiniest movement.
This empty, searing void.
I dreamt and dreamt and could not, would not, wake up.
Even though I screamed into that silent vacuum.
Screamed.
And screamed.
I could not wake up.
I will not wake up.
* * *
I woke to the sound of my own screaming.
Lying contorted on the couch, where I had crashed after putting Bella down.
I hadn’t had that dream for many years. Cold darkness as recurring nightmare; I must have been around thirteen. It came every night. That sense of silent, oppressive darkness, of sitting at the bottom of some unimaginably deep pit with nothing save the knowledge I was breathing; even that inaudible.
I always ended up screaming.
Screaming.
And unable to move.
Unable to move.
* * *
Like when he’d been behind me.
* * *
Like when I’d heard that Jamie was dead.
* * *
When I got back to the apartment my mother was waiting for me.
For once, there was emotion on her face, some tiny gleam in her eye.
I put down my stuff – I’d spent the day idling in Greenwich Village, watching the students from NYU, wishing that I’d studied enough to join them – not really caring, just wondering when I’d be able to get my next score.
It was still a few months before I’d see the gaping red smile of a bum’s slashed throat.
I hadn’t got the shakes just yet.
But they were coming.
I knew that.
“Kenneth,” she said, framed in the living room doorway.
She was all flowing chiffon and expensive prints, choking scent and perfect hair. Disgust and harmony. Superiority and damnation.
My mother.
What is that look on her face? I thought.
“Yeah?” I answered, determined to retreat to my room, avoiding whatever it was she wanted to discuss.
I walked towards my room.
But it seemed that she was committed to the discussion. She moved to block my way, placing one hand on my chest. She didn’t break eye contact and I couldn’t avoid the gleam that shone there. She had steam pressure building up within.
“Kenneth.”
“Yeah?”
“Will you stop for just one second,” her lip actually curled into a smile as she continued, “I have something to tell you. Something important.”
And just for a second, I thought that she might have had a sudden change of heart, be willing to undo the past twenty-odd years of my life, remorse and redemption, choosing to lay the peace-work of reconciliation. Some small, insignificant part of me wondered whether that was what was in her eyes.
For a brief moment, I was surprised to feel hope.
But it only lasted a second.
That bitch was as cold as the statues in Central Park.
Though at least they warmed up in the summer.
“Kenneth.”
Like she’d only just learnt my name.
“Kenneth… Kenny…”
I stopped pushing against her hand. She had my attention.
“What?”
There was a moment of pause before she spoke and later, after I’d had chance to deal with what she shared, I would remember that pause. I would remember it forever.
Crystalline. Focused. Pure.
Her eyebrow raised slightly.
One corner of her mouth in that slight smile.
Her eyes grew even brighter.
There was almost a chuckle to her voice; a brook babbling over rounded pebbles.
“Jamie is dead,” she said.
Then leant back to watch the show.
I was sure I hadn’t heard her right.
“Jamie?” I asked.
She nodded, maintaining eye contact all the time.
“Yes,” she said, just to make sure she was clear.
A punch to the gut. Winded; unable to breathe. Weight came down on me, pressing my shoulders, crushing my neck.
Jamie.
My mum.
My mother telling me my mum was dead.
“You gotta be kidding…”
She shook her head and I sensed her glee afresh.
“Huh… How?”
Jamie would have been in her late thirties at that time. Too young to have…
“How did she die?” my mother faked insouciance; butter wouldn’t melt.
I nodded. Not really listening. Unable to hear anything past that ghastly look on her face; she was revelling in that moment.
My mother.
Bitch.
“Well,” she began, “it seems to have ended up where it was always destined.”
“Huh?”
“Oh don’t tell me you didn’t… No, of course not, you were only a child at the time. She was a junkie. Seems like she overdosed a couple of days ago. She died a junkie’s death.”
“No she wasn’t, Ja…”
“Oh, not when she was on the show… Afterwards. Once it had all gone south. Look, Jamie was just a good time girl with great tits. The best she should have hoped for was a job in some little shoe shop somewhere. Give people like that money and they will always, always squander the opportunity.”
I didn’t catch much in the way of words as my mother spoke. All I was hearing was: Jamie’s dead, Jamie’s dead, Jamie’s dead… But I did catch the tone in her voice, that resonance, redolent of the Pimms and Lemonade set that my Mother had left behind in the UK. For women like her, the working class were nothing but butterflies on pins, to be studied, catalogued and filed under ‘of passing interest’. That and to provide service, obviously.
Tears pricked the back of my eyes, a lump forming in my throat. And a sudden pang that I wished I had scored and scored big that morning.
I wanted oblivion. I wanted emptiness.
I wanted to know what had happened.
“What happened?”
“As I said, an overdose,” she stretched the ‘s’ slightly, adding venom and irony. “Heroin. Seems like she had been in descent for a long time.”
As I danced on the edge of understanding what I was being told, I was suddenly all too aware that I hadn’t heard anything of Jamie for years and years. It must have been at least a decade. Back before puberty.
The last meaningful contact had been our last day on set. When the hugs had been reserved for everyone but the near-collapse kid in the corner, suffering from a depression that no child of five should ever have had to carry.
Jamie had sat with me for a while. Holding my hand. Talking about this and that. Talking about her plans. About how she was going to get into movies, where her real talent could show through. How when she made it, she’d look me up if any parts came through. And I stared into space. Not hearing. Not listening. Just staring.
The last time saw Jamie, I didn’t say goodbye.
“Yes, “ my Mother continued like she was telling someone about a soap opera she’d just watched on television, “it appears that Jamie didn’t really do much after Family Rules! You know, the odd chat show, went on some celebrity quizzes, you know the sort of thing. Well, when the money dried up she…”
Another pause. And I knew she was using them on purpose.
“Well, she…”
“What?”
“She…”
Pause.
“According to Darren, she tried to get back in the newspapers but she was too old. They wouldn’t have her.”
Darren. Her golden boy paparazzi friend from London.
I could just hear his voice on the phone, telling her all this. The source of her glee.
“Once gravity goes to work, the pretty young things aren’t nearly as alluring.”
She barked a laugh. And I could have throttled her.
“Started out as just a nude scene in some cheap drama but within a couple of years, your friend Jamie was sucking cocks on VHS machines the country over.”
Her eyes gleamed. She licked her lips like a wolf tasting blood, teeth bared in a snarl of pleasure.
“Of course, by this stage she was a regular junkie. A real mess. You should have seen the pictures. My Lord, she was a shadow of her former self.”
She smiled at that.
And I suddenly read the jealousy in her, how much she must have hated Jamie becoming famous and adored, and I understood her sense of triumph at the news.
“Overdosed in an apartment in Amsterdam.”
“I do hope she didn’t suffer too much.”
And there was so much sarcasm in that last sentence that it almost dripped on the carpet.
The bitch.
I pushed past her, trying to remember Jamie’s face but finding it near impossible past the bile my mother had introduced.
I grabbed my bag and headed out of the apartment.
As the door was about to close, I heard her crow.
“Looks like we did the right thing getting you out of there!”
The door slammed behind me.
