The beginning of the end

I’ll always remember the look on Joel’s face the morning the limo pulled up outside his front door. I’d stayed over to see him off. It was just me and Marnie there. T was away with his girlfriend on a yacht. We’d been watching from the window for a while, killing time before he left. He lit up with excitement, grabbed my arm and said “Fuck! They’ve sent a limo! For me!”

It had all happened really fast once he'd said yes to the job. After leaving school he’d started work as a runner at a record company – the lowest of the low, but because he was such a nice person, so likeable, he’d become the company pet and they were all lovely to him. It must have been a year or so later when he was told that two of their big heavy metal bands were doing a US tour and they needed someone to go along as a kind of general helper – would he like to do that? I was so thrilled for him. It was like a fairytale – we couldn’t believe the luck of it. We danced around the room when we saw that big black limo.

For the next few months I was so happy each time a thin little airmail letter landed on the doormat. They went all over – New York, Philadelphia, Dallas – they rarely stayed longer than a day or two in each city. Joel loved every second. The job was a doss really. They hadn’t been very specific about what he’d have to do but it soon became clear that mainly, he had to pursue pretty girls – either ones he’d spotted in the crowds himself, or ones the band members had pointed out to him. It was his job to persuade these girls to come along after the gig. He was very good at it – talking people into things was his forte.

One of the things he didn’t say in his letters – only later when he was home – was that he’d also tried new stuff there. A lot of cocaine, which we didn’t do much in London, and also he’d been shooting up smack. Only once or twice - but it worried me. I’d seen enough to know it wasn’t a good thing. He was on such a high when he came back – full of tales – throwing me great armfuls of cool tshirts he’d brought back as presents.

I had missed him so much. I don’t think I’d realised before then how much I depended on him always being there. Whenever there was some drama I was in the middle of, some argument I’d had with T, it was always Joel I ran to first, and he always made it better, whatever it was. His thin arms wrapped tightly around me – the fierce hugs he gave. Nothing mattered so much after those hugs.

It wasn’t long after he got home that he started feeling unwell. Tired, feverish, forgetful. It took a while before the test came back positive – it’s hard to diagnose glandular fever straightaway sometimes. He had to stop working. It was too much. I used to go there after college almost every day to try to cheer him up.

Sometimes we went to the country on our own. His parents had a cottage in the grounds of a big estate in Suffolk. When we all went down for weekends it was a big event - there was a house party of Marnie and David’s friends, long, complicated meals around the big dining table, sitting for hours playing word games that got more and more difficult the more we drank.

Joel had friends from the area who would come too – Ben especially. His parents were both artists who lived in a nearby village and he was their nightmare son - the one who’d become a smack addict at sixteen. He was lovely apart from the death wish life he led. He’d been expelled from all the local schools. He would bring us weed from the local US airforce base, and we learned how they rolled their tiny little joints, and how they used crocodile clips to get the most out of them without burnt fingers.

Sometimes Ben came up to London to stay and when we were younger he’d asked me out. I hadn’t really wanted to go, but he just wouldn’t give up and eventually I arranged a date so horrible I hoped it would make him stop asking. Poor Ben; it worked, but I always felt guilty afterwards, dragging him round London Zoo on a freezing February day. We were both blue with cold and soaked to the skin by the end of it – even the animals had gone into hiding, the weather was so horrible.

Later, when Joel was sick, we would spend quiet time at the cottage on our own and it was a different place then. It was a mile and half down a track to the nearest village pub. We had one old chopper bike between us, and tired and drunk, it was a long way home, trying to balance together on the bike, falling off, bickering. We were both hopeless at looking after ourselves. Joel knew how to cook a steak, and I managed to boil an egg after looking it up in a book. It all seemed like such hard work, we didn’t bother to eat that much.

One night, quite late, we heard the crunching of gravel outside. There was no other house for miles around – we were in the middle of nowhere. There weren’t any lights in the garden, and we couldn’t find the torch. We were petrified. We huddled in bed together, wide awake, until it got light, straining our ears for more terrifying noises. It never occurred to us that it was probably some nocturnal creature until the morning.

During the days we’d lie in long grass in the garden, talking and watching the pheasants and deer. We talked about everything. Once, I said I thought I might kill myself before I got too old – I didn’t like the idea of being grey and ancient. Joel said I was mad. He said he was looking forward to lying in this garden when he was old, watching his grandchildren playing in the sunshine. I said he was the mad one, and I laughed and threw a handful of grass at him