As I made my way through the customs area I was suddenly aware of a Labrador dog sniffing animatedly at my luggage.
‘Excuse me, sir, would you mind coming this way with us,’ a customs guard said.
‘Oh God,’ I thought. ‘I’m never going to get to meet my mother.’
I was taken to an inspection room where they started going through my stuff. They then ran an electric drug detector over my bag. I could tell there was a problem from the expressions on their faces.
‘I’m afraid your luggage has tested positive for cocaine,’ the guard said.
I was gobsmacked. I had no idea how that was possible. I didn’t take cocaine and didn’t really know anyone who did. None of my friends could afford it.
As it turned out, they said that it wasn’t illegal for me to have traces of it for private use.
‘If you are a casual user and it’s for private consumption all you have to do is tell us and you can be on your way,’ the guard said.
I explained my situation. ‘I’m on a drug recovery programme so I don’t take anything casually,’ I said. I then showed them a letter I had from my doctor explaining why I was on Subutex.
Eventually they had to relent. They gave me a final pat down and released me. By the time I emerged from the customs area, almost an hour had passed. I had to get another flight down to Tasmania, which took another few hours. By the time I got there, it was early evening and I was utterly exhausted.
Seeing my mother was wonderful. She was waiting at the airport in Tasmania and gave me a couple of really long hugs. She was crying. She was pleased to see me alive, I think.
I was really happy to see her too although I didn’t cry.
The cottage was every bit as lovely as she’d described it in her letter. It was a big, airy bungalow with huge garden space at the back. It was surrounded by farmland with a river running by the bottom of her land. It was a very peaceful, picturesque place. Over the next month I just hung out there, relaxing, recovering and rebooting myself.
Within a couple of weeks I felt like a different person. The anxieties of London were – literally – thousands of miles away, just over ten thousand, to be precise. My mum’s maternal instincts kicked in and she made sure I was fed well. I could feel my strength returning. I could also sense me and my mother were repairing our relationship.
At first we didn’t talk in great depth about things, but in time I began to open up. Then one night as we sat on the veranda, watching the sun go down, I had a couple of drinks and suddenly it all came out. It wasn’t a big confession, there was no Hollywood drama. I just talked … and talked.
The emotional floodgates had been waiting to burst open for a while now. For years I had used drugs to escape from my emotions, in fact to make sure I didn’t have any. Slowly but surely I’d changed that. And now my emotions were coming back.
As I explained some of the lows I’d been through over the last ten years, my mother looked horrified, as any parent would have done.
‘I guessed you weren’t doing so great when I saw you, but I never guessed it was that bad,’ she said, close to tears.
At times she just sat there with her head in her hands muttering the word ‘why’ every now and again.
‘Why didn’t you tell me you’d lost your passport?’
‘Why didn’t you call me and ask for help?’
‘Why didn’t you contact your father?’
Inevitably, she blamed herself for it. She said she felt like she’d let me down, but I told her I didn’t blame her. The reality was that I had left myself down. Ultimately, there was no one else to blame.
‘You didn’t decide to sleep in cardboard boxes and get off your face on smack every night. I did,’ I said at one point. That set her off crying as well.
Once we’d broken the ice, so to speak, we talked much more easily. We talked a little about the past and my childhood in Australia and England. I felt comfortable being honest with her. I said that I’d felt she’d been a distant figure when I’d been younger and that being raised by nannies and moving around a lot had had an impact on me.
Naturally that upset her, but she argued that she’d been trying to provide an income for us, to keep a roof over our heads. I took her point, but I still wished she’d been there more for me.
We laughed a lot too; it wasn’t all dark conversation. We admitted how similar we were and chuckled at some of the arguments we used to have when I was a teenager.
She admitted that there had been a big conflict of personality there.
‘I’m a strong personality and so are you. That’s where you get it from,’ she said.
But we spent most of the time talking about the present rather than the past. She asked me all sorts of questions about the rehab process I’d been through and what I was hoping to achieve now that I was almost clean. I explained that it was still a case of taking one step at a time, but that, with luck, I’d be totally clean within a year or so. Sometimes she just simply listened, which was something she hadn’t always done. And so did I. I think we both learned a lot more about each other, not least the fact that deep down we were very similar, which is why we clashed so much when I was younger.
During those long chats, I often talked about Bob. I’d brought a photo of him with me, which I showed everyone and anyone who took an interest.
‘He looks a smart cookie,’ my mother smiled when she saw it.
‘Oh, he is,’ I said, beaming with pride. ‘I don’t know where I’d been now if it wasn’t for Bob.’
Spending time in Australia was great. It allowed me to clear my mind. It also allowed me to take stock of where I was – and where I wanted to go from here.
There was a part of me that hankered to move back. I had family here. There was more of a support network than I had in London, certainly. But I kept thinking about Bob and the fact that he’d be as lost without me as I’d be without him. I didn’t take the idea seriously for very long. By the time I’d started my sixth week in Australia, I was mentally already on the plane back to England.
I said goodbye to my mother properly this time. She came to the airport with me and waved me off on my way to Melbourne, where I was going to spend some time with my godparents. They had been quite significant figures in my youth. They had owned what was then the biggest private telecom company in Australia and were the first to form a radio pager company in the country so had a lot of money at one point. As a boy, naturally, I used to love spending time at the mansion they’d built in Melbourne. I even lived with them for a while when me and my mother weren’t getting on very well.
Their reaction to my story was the same as my mother’s – they were shocked.
They offered to help me out financially and even to find me work in Australia. But again I had to explain that I had responsibilities back in London.
The journey back was much less eventful than the outward trip. I felt much better, fitter and healthier and probably looked it so I didn’t attract so much attention at customs or immigration control. I was so rested and revived by my time in Australia that I slept for most of the trip.
I was dying to see Bob again, although a part of me was concerned that he might have changed or even forgotten me. I needn’t have had any concerns.
The minute I walked into Belle’s flat his tail popped up and he bounced off her sofa and ran up to me. I’d brought him back a few little presents, a couple of stuffed kangaroo toys. He was soon clawing away at one of them. As we headed home that evening, he immediately scampered up my arm and on to my shoulders as usual. In an instant the emotional and physical journey I’d made to the other side of the world was forgotten. It was me and Bob against the world once more. It was as if I’d never been away.