They Thought I Was Dead: Sandy’s Story

47 Jersey, Channel Islands, 2011

There is so much I miss about Roy in these increasingly hellish days with Nicos. I’m missing him more and starting to regret increasingly what I’ve done. One thing I miss especially is Roy’s kind nature. He would never treat a child or anyone in this way.

He would have made a good father, a truly fine one. He’d have instilled good values into Bruno, such as plain decency. What was Bruno learning from Nicos, other than fear and violence? And from pathetic me? Nothing. Last night I’d had enough, and snapped. I’d yelled at Nicos not to touch my son, and I now had a painful shiner of a black eye to show for it.

I’ll dodge the question if anyone asks about it — I’ll say I’m fine, that it was a genuine accident, I walked into a cupboard door. I guess because I am still terrified that Nicos will carry out his threat and tell Roy about me. Tell him the truth.

I would love to find a job just to get out of the flat, but Nicos won’t hear of it. Sometimes I try to argue but I am scared — scared about what he is capable of. The increasing violence. Especially when he drinks, he is very angry and doesn’t know his own strength. But there is the other reason I’m scared of him, too. Thanks to my blindness in seeing it coming and Nicos’s clever manipulation, I’m so heavily addicted to heroin and sometimes cocaine — as well as alcohol — that I’m totally dependent on him.

I realize now that the wild social life he threw me into when I first arrived on this island was all for a reason. To help him worm his way more into Jersey society through his charitable donations — and in doing so increase his contacts for his core business of drugs. When he met me in the casino he was looking for someone just like me and I fell for it.

It makes me so sad to look in a mirror now at the clothes I’m wearing, which Nicos bought me and insists I wear. Baggy tops and trousers to hide my weight loss and my bruises, the track marks, the damage to my veins. My face shows how drawn the drugs have made me, my sallow skin, which was once so rosy. I think how good I have got at using make-up as a disguise, but underneath it all I am crumbling. I hide myself away and barely see anyone.

And yet, despite all the attempts Nicos has made to break me, he has still not yet broken my spirit. There is still a little bit left inside, a corner of me that he hasn’t yet got to, that tells me I have to get out of this dangerous cycle of addiction.

I owe it to myself and to my son.

This week I read a piece on drug addiction in the Jersey Evening Post that could’ve been written just for me. It was about a doctor called Deryn Doyle who runs a clinic helping addicts. It got me thinking more clearly than I had done in a while. If I could speak to her and get some help, secretly without Nicos knowing, maybe I could get off this drug dependency — and with that, out of this relationship.

In my more lucid moments, I think, What relationship?

Our relationship has gone from lovers to adversarial strangers, held together by a bond.

He supplies my drugs — holding back if I annoy him until I am desperate and pleading with him — and in return I play the role of the loving, always-smiling, presentable partner he could take on his arm to a cocktail party at Government House or to a fundraising ball for the hospice, or the Shelter Trust, or any of the numerous other high-profile charities he has managed to attach himself to.

He certainly won’t imagine I could get myself off the drugs — and that gives me all the more determination to do it. It’s not about proving him wrong, it’s about self-preservation. I am almost ready to do it. I will book to see Dr Doyle, and then after a few more hits, maybe I will be free of this. Please God.

I know in all honesty I have tried and failed coming off the drugs recently, but it seems through Dr Doyle’s clinic I may have access to some help. Addicts can be cured, can’t they? ‘Clean’, they call it. I want just two things right now. The first is to be clean. The second is for Nicos to have no idea that I am.

He was out at a meeting tonight and I was glad about that. Four years ago I’d been crazy about him and now I hated him so much I could hardly bear to be in the same room. I can’t stand him touching me. Recently sex with him had pretty much stopped — coinciding with the day, three months ago, I started noticing the smell of a perfume on him that definitely was not his own.

He had ‘meetings’ three nights a week and would never say anything about with whom or what it was about. I had long stopped bothering to ask, it just made him angry when I did. It’s a meeting, right? he would snap. A business meeting, someone has to earn the money to keep your little bastard at school.

The programme I was watching, when the front door crashed open, was a documentary on the Colombian drug cartels, focusing in particular on a monster called Pablo Escobar. Nicos had dropped his name casually on a few occasions, like they’d been good mates. In his dreams. And yet I could see them being two fish in the same seas, except that Nicos was, relatively, a wannabe minnow and Escobar had been a Great White shark.

There was a time when, at the sound of Nicos coming home, no matter how late, I would have jumped up and thrown my arms around him. Now I looked up anxiously.

That was the time when he would have run over to me and thrown his arms around me.

A time long past.

‘Where the fuck did you get that wine?’ was his opening gambit.

‘From the fridge.’

‘So why didn’t you put it back in to keep it cold?’

It was a fair point. The half-full bottle was sitting on top of the breakfast bar. Nicos was right, I should have put it back into the wine fridge that was built into the bar. But the truth was I was drinking it so quickly, I didn’t have to worry about it getting warm. I was celebrating my future, when the drugs became just a part of my past, part of life’s rich tapestry. Granted, I hadn’t got there yet but at least I was thinking about it and that was worth a celebration.

He was drunk and furious. A dangerous combination, and a regular one.

He peered at the bottle. ‘Can’t you read, woman? Are you illiterate or something? This was on the bottom shelf of the fridge, which I told you never to touch.’ He held the label in front of my face.

Chassagne Montrachet 1997, I noted. I knew I shouldn’t have said it, but I couldn’t help it, I was drunk myself and angry — more angry than scared at this moment. ‘It’s old, so I thought I’d better drink it before it was past its best before date,’ I replied.

‘You stupid bitch.’

That was the last thing I remember hearing before my hair felt like it was being wrenched out of the top of my head.

My next memory was waking up, feeling dizzy, with a blinder of a headache, and looking at my watch. The back of my head felt sticky.

Sticky with blood.

It was 3 a.m. I was lying on my back on the kitchen floor, bleeding from the back of my head. When I see Nicos come over to me the first thing I think is that he’s there to comfort me, to take away the pain. Instead, he injects me with a hit of heroin.

And weirdly, I’m grateful.