Eureka!

I’m half wasted today. Yesterday nearly did my head in. I caught the train to Kingston and wandered along to Middleton, not expecting to find anything – it just seemed a good place to start. Wasn’t too bad either until the crazy woman turned up and spoiled things.Weird to see it boarded up like that when just a month or so ago it was home of a sort. I tried to ring Sandy but all I got was her answer machine. Bloody hell, I thought, I’ve come all this way for nothing. Then I got some sort of odd craving to see inside, snooped all the way round the outside and KEEP OUT stuck up everywhere before finding a gap in the wire (lucky I’m not too fat) and getting close, trying to see through the cracks in the boards covering the windows. I was thinking that if the builders were meant to be coming as Sandy said, no one would mind too much if I broke in, then I thought, why should I care if they did? Being Saturday of course, no one was working on it. Then this feeling crept over me that Danny was inside. Told myself, YOU WISH, but all the same once you’ve had a thought like that it’s hard to let it go. I just had to get in then, didn’t I? Went round the back where I couldn’t be overlooked and tried to find a hammer or some tool to use as a lever, but not a bloody thing. Then I remembered the window of the upstairs loo that doesn’t shut properly and thought if I could find something to stand on I might be able to get up onto that bit of flattish roof, slip my hand in and open it. No ladder, not even an old table or chair. I was just thinking of leaving when I tried the handle of the back door and – straight up – it opened! I slipped inside easy as a double vodka over Marz tongue and shut the door behind me, stood there in the dim and quiet, listening, remembering when the house had been alive. Ted’s old sax smooching down the passage, Eva singing in the kitchen and the smell of soul food, the TV on downstairs and maybe Danny’s Eminem CD jumping.
Now I was in it didn’t feel as though Danny was around. I walked through the rooms just to make sure tho. Everything was gone – all bare floorboards and echoes. I called out Danny’s name just to hear it, to imagine him answering, then got sick and ran downstairs again. I was halfway out the door when I saw him, folding his long body through the gap in the wire. I screamed out and he turned for a second which was just enough time for me to leg it across the grass and grab his jumper.
‘Danny, Danny, I’ve been looking everywhere for you,’ I almost yelled. ‘I’ve been so worried and here you are trying to get away from me and I just want to help,’ and Danny’s saying, ‘It’s no good Jazz,’ and his look is killing me and ‘I’m not going back to the hospital.’ And I’m still holding onto his jumper but he’s back in the garden now and standing looking at me and I’m thinking that I can’t let him get away again now I’ve found him.
‘You know I wouldn’t dob you in,’ I’m saying, and he’s saying ‘Yeah,’ you’re the one who kept on at me to keep taking the tablets and I told you I didn’t want to,’ and I’m saying, ‘OK, OK, Danny, whatever you want, only come home with me now and we’ll talk about what to do, you can’t stay here.’