1

“He’s dead. Michael Jackson is dead everybody! Right, now you’re all awake, breakfast in 5 and be ready for hiking at 9!”

I was still rubbing the sleep from my eyes as Mr Williams darted out of our dormitory as quickly as he had burst in. We were sixteen at the time, on a school residential to Somerset, and this is how we were given the news.

People often say that you remember exactly where you were when hearing news like that. What you were doing, the weather outside, the music playing on the radio, maybe even the certain smell of a room. But to tell you the truth I’ve never been able to do this.

My friends however, they still laugh about that morning in Somerset and how shortly afterwards, we ate pancakes to ‘Beat It’ and moonwalked through Cheddar gorge in the rain. But these are all details that I have long since forgotten.

And even now, I forget the meal I was cooking three weeks ago, when they rang with the news.

Your sister has relapsed.

I sure as hell don’t remember the weather as I drove to hospital that night.

But I do remember the faces. Looks of concern from doctors, and tired eyes of nurses, swapping cannulas under the late night glow of the monitors.

“I’m sorry Lucy.”

I’d arrived at hospital to find my sister, Ana, asleep in the bed, her childhood friend Lucy by her side.

“You have nothing to be sorry for Matt.”

“No, I should have gone round to the house, before you did. I was worried last week and it shouldn’t have taken you to find her like this.”

Lucy had explained the situation, but I was still trying to catch the eye of passing doctors, eager to hear from them myself.

She put a hand on my shoulder, “Well it doesn’t matter now. We’re both here with her and she’s going to get the help she needs.”

I nodded appreciatively at that, and forced out a slight smile as if to say, I really hope you’re right.

Lucy always had been the optimistic type, someone that could dig the positive out of any bad situation. Since primary school she had been a good influence on my sister, but that effect seemed to wane the moment she moved out of London a few years ago. In fact, it was a lucky coincidence that she had even decided to drop in on Ana that day, only to find her overdosed on morphine instead.

I glanced down at Ana, asleep in the bed next to me, she hadn’t moved since I’d arrived. The way she lay there, sprawled out under those thin hospital sheets, it resurfaced a memory that I’d not replayed for years.

“I haven’t seen her this out of it since that birthday party all those years ago, Molly’s eighteenth I think?”

There was a brief pause as I watched Lucy wind back her mind to the memory of that day.

She let out a sudden snort, “Well it wasn’t my idea to leave Ana and I unsupervised with a cupboard full of rum! We were only fourteen after all. Anyway, wasn’t that the night of your break up?”

I still maintain that Molly, Lucy’s older sister and first real ex-girlfriend of mine, was the one that got away.

“Well how was I to know that flowers from the BP garage opposite was a sign that I had ‘given up on our relationship’?”

It was meant as a slightly facetious comment but there was an element of truth to it. The uneducated, eighteen-year-old me was naïve to the expectations of those early relationships, however immature they seem looking back.

Lucy laughed at this, “If it counts for anything now, you were always my favourite boyfriend of hers.”

I smiled gratefully, and then we returned again to silence, watching the nurses fuss about the ward before starting to dim down the lights.

“You should head off Lucy, you’ve got a long journey back up north. I’ll be here in the morning when she wakes up.”

This was met by some initial protest, but I think underneath it all, Lucy was grateful for the chance to get back home, and she eventually conceded to the idea of leaving me to handle things from here.

I called out to her just as she was rounding the corner to leave the ward, “Thanks again Lucy, I’m not sure how she’d be now if, you hadn’t, you know-”

“She’s going to be ok Matt”, and with that she smiled, stole one final glance at Ana, and then turned to leave me alone with my sister.

And alone with my guilt.

I hadn’t wanted to discuss it with Lucy, but I hadn’t been giving my sister the support she needed, and I wasn’t even really sure how Ana would react to find me there when she woke up. The truth is that over the last eighteen months our relationship had deteriorated, a slow decline that I imagine had been kickstarted by the death of our mother.

The substance abuse had begun first with alcohol, something that I had started to notice during those initial few months. She’d gotten blackout drunk the night of our Mum’s funeral, and I wrote that off in my head as a temporary coping mechanism. But it wasn’t temporary, and in the weeks following, I’d pay visits to the house to find her with copious amounts of empty wine bottles left by the back door. My sore-headed sister would always pooh-pooh my concerns, explaining them away as ‘weeks' worth of recycling’ that she’d failed to take out. But I’d found receipts on the kitchen counter that had gone to show the wine was actually more like days’ worth.

She used to look up to me, but in those times, she inherited the soul of a different beast, someone that resented my help and perceived all of my concerns as judgement. Looking back, I was probably too admonishing but I don’t think anything I could have done would have prevented her inevitable descent into the harder drugs.

By that stage, I’d lost nearly all of the contact that I had with her, and it was only by the forced intervention of her work manager, that her abuse came to an end. We now know with hindsight that it was not the end, but a short hiatus she managed before slipping back to misuse.

She had no rent to pay - whilst I had moved out years before, she was still living in our childhood house, something we now both owned through inheritance. But even so, the threat of no job and thus no income was enough to force her hand into the start of her rehab. I also suspect that it was the undeclared love for her work manager, the owner of a shady little café near Wimbledon Common, that helped make her decision. I find that it’s often the love for others and fear of their disappointment that can help you make the hardest decisions.

During her rehab, the beast from months past had withered into an empty shell, and in those brief visits I made during her recovery, she would hardly engage in conversation. Instead, she’d sit at her window, a vacant stare painted across her face that offered no sign of emotion. They told me she was making progress, and I lapped it up, keen to convince myself that her habits were a thing of the past.

As I drove back from hospital that night, I thought back to those days in rehab and berated myself for ever pretending that she was fit to leave. I had known deep down that she was not herself.

And that relapse, that guilt, was on me.