I’m sorry we’re not together to help each other. I miss you, and I can’t believe our baby girl has been gone a year. Every day I wish things were different. That we hadn’t been in that place at that time. It all feels so random and unfair – a few minutes either side and our lives would have carried on. She’d be four now, and we’d be looking forward to another Christmas together.
Anyway. Stay strong, Jess – because where there’s life there’s hope. We’ve got to believe that. I just wish I had a time machine, and I could change everything back to normal for all of us.
As usual – baby, I love you,
Joe xxx
1 Jan. 2004
Hey Jess,
Guess what? I have a hangover! I’m sure I’m not the only one, it’s New Year’s Day. I went to Belinda’s last night, she had the old gang around, and even with little Mal there we managed to do some damage (not Belinda though – she was a sober mama!).
There was a lot of vodka, definitely some Jack Daniel’s. I have a vague recollection of a drinking game involving Buckaroo and shots.
That all sounds like a lot more fun than it actually was, and it’s definitely not fun this morning. I don’t usually drink that much, you know I don’t. But it’s been a shitty year, and my mates were all there, and I needed to blow off steam. Plus – this is not something I’m proud of – seeing Belinda with Malachi had a weird effect on me. It made me feel jealous. I saw her with her baby, and I wanted mine, and I was jealous. Isn’t that crap?
I am a bit crap, I’m starting to think. I spoke to your mum today. To be precise, I spoke to your mum and your dad, at around 1 a.m. I was tired and emotional, as they say, and decided to wish them a happy new year. Duh. I should maybe have got the message after your dad hung up the third time – but I was acting like a vodka knob.
I called again this morning to apologise, and your mum basically told me to stop calling. Stop visiting. Stop trying to see you – because it’s not going to happen. You need to get better, and apparently there’s no place for me in that brave new world, and no point in me harassing them. She said you’re OK with that because you know you’ll get better faster if I’m not there to remind you of all the bad stuff.
I’m not sure I believe her, Jess – but maybe that’s just wishful thinking. Maybe I’m deluding myself?
All I do know is that I love you, and I miss you. I miss you and I miss our baby and I miss our life together. But it’s been over six months since I’ve seen you or spoken to you, and I’ve been writing all these letters and sending cards and I’ve never heard back.
I don’t know if you’re getting them, or if you’re too weak to respond. For now, I’ll carry on – because I need you to know how much I love you. How much I want to fight for you, and fight with you, and help you get better. How much I want to be at your side.
Belinda was listening to me moan about it last night and said I should see a lawyer. She says someone at her firm might help. She thinks even though I’m not next of kin, I lived with you for long enough to have rights, and I could force them to tell me where you are and to let me visit you. She says I need to stop distrusting everyone involved in the legal system, and stop seeing myself as an outsider, and start taking action. That’s Belinda for you – power to the people!
I’m going to think about it but I’m not sure if it’s the right thing to do. I am desperate to see you, Jess, I really am – but I am starting to wonder whether your parents weren’t right all along.
When I met you, your life was on track – you were a clever girl, going places. Now look at you – and sometimes I think it’s all my fault. That you’d have been better off if I’d never spoken to you that first day, and left you to pick your own make-up off the floor. You’d have been embarrassed and stressed out, but probably you’d be finished at university by now, and starting some amazing career, instead of being in hospital. I feel like if I’d left you alone, you wouldn’t be broken.
This is a miserable letter, isn’t it? What a morose wanker. Must be all those shots coming back to haunt me. Maybe I should be more positive – it’s 2004. It’s a whole new year. Anything could happen!
Anyway, don’t forget – baby, I love you –
Your very hungover Joe xxx
8 May 2004
Hey Jess,
Went out with the crew last night, for my birthday. I was planning to stay in, and have an ‘it’s my party and I’ll be a miserable sod if I want to’ vibe. But they dragged me to the pub, that one under the arches in town, with the really good jukebox? I played some tracks for you – they had the Ramones on there, and ‘Disco 2000’ by Pulp. Belinda did her ‘look at me I should have been famous’ dancing to ‘Groove Is In the Heart’ all around the pub, scaring the old men drinking their pints of bitter, and then I got a bit sad and put ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ on. Never a party classic, that one.
I went back to the flat after. I pretended you were there and had an imaginary conversation with you. You told me how much you loved me, and you made me cheese on toast, and we fell asleep together on the sofa. Except we didn’t.
Love you,
Joe xxx
10 June 2004
Hey Jess,
It’s been a weird old year, hasn’t it? Strange how life carries on, even when you think it can’t. When you think it shouldn’t – when something so big has happened in your own existence that everything is disrupted by it. Like an earthquake has opened up massive tears in the ground and all the buildings and stuff you thought would always be solid has disappeared, sucked into a big, gaping hole.
But while all of that is happening – while your life is getting sucked into a pit of rubble – nobody can really see it apart from you. Like it’s an hallucination or an alternative reality, and to everyone else, you just look normal.
Reminds me of that poem in the film – the one about stopping all the clocks in Four Weddings. Can’t remember who wrote it but I’m sure you can. Everyone else’s life is going on around you but yours has stopped, and even if you look normal, you feel about a million light years away from normal.
So, things haven’t been brilliant at my end – I hope they’re better at yours. Your mum and dad are, quite rightly, at the end of their tether with me now. I’m sure they’ll tell you, anyway, about the thing with the shed and the police.
It wasn’t me, though, Jess, honest. I wouldn’t ever do anything like that, you know I wouldn’t. At least I hope you know – but it’s been a year since I saw you. I’m sure you’ve changed, and so have I – but not that much.
The shed thing wasn’t me. It was Liam, one of the latest foster-kids at the Crazy Bunch house. In a moment of lunacy I went there and had a moan to Mother Bunch, and next thing you know, the whole family is in on it, and they’re drawing up war plans, and it was mental. You know what they’re like – they hate each other’s guts unless there’s someone else in the firing line, then suddenly they’re united against the common enemy.
Poor Liam, he’s only fifteen, proper ginger, and not the brightest. Somewhere out there a village has been deprived of its idiot, put it that way. He’s only been with them a few months, and has your typical makes-you-want-to-weep backstory – shitty parents, and now he’s with that lot, so a happy ending doesn’t look likely.