They Thought I Was Dead: Sandy’s Story

82 February 2012

Guten Morgen, meine geschätzte Damen und Herren!

I never imagined six months ago that I’d be saying a very polite good morning in German.

Bruno speaks it pretty well now, too — he picked it up quicker than me — and it’s thanks to an online course on the internet and practising out and about. Learning it was a good way to fill many very long and lonely days for both of us — not that we mind each other’s company, we are a good team. But the older Bruno gets, the more introspective I notice he is becoming.

Today, like most days now, I have company. I’m watching a man shooting-up in a corner of the room below me. Baseball cap, shoddy clothes and filthy trainers planted on the red-tiled floor. Like pretty much everyone who comes in here off the street, he looks a lot older than he probably is. And he has the typical bad posture. He’s seated on one of a row of hard plastic chairs, hunched over the stainless-steel shelf that runs most of the way around the room, oblivious to the mirror in which he can watch himself steadily killing himself, jab by jab, day by day.

It’s ironic that the word heroin comes from the German heroisch, which actually means heroic. And doubly ironic, it was originally used to treat a drug addiction — to morphine.

The man is cooking. He holds the flame from a plastic lighter beneath a spoon that contains white heroin powder and a saline solution. In approximately one minute the mixture will turn brown. He will draw it into the hypodermic syringe and then inject — once he’s found a vein that’s not shot to pieces. I don’t know this guy’s name although I see him a couple of times a day, because he doesn’t do conversation, but just watching him makes me so grateful for getting off all this. A year ago this would have been me. Nine months ago, even. Unable to function without my fixes, with the time gap between them growing steadily shorter and the doses stronger.

Now I’m on the other side of the fence — literally. It’s a glass fence — well, a shatterproof screen — between those of us who work here and those who come to shoot-up. I’m working in one of Frankfurt’s four drug consumption rooms. I discovered this place was just a few minutes’ walk along the road from our hotel — I noticed people coming and going every time I walked past. Pretty sad-looking people, but I recognized something about them, something that had not long back been me.

Then by chance I got chatting to a guy in a bar, whose name was Wolfgang Barth. He told me he was in charge of this establishment. He explained they had a doctor on the premises 24/7, a rota of nurses and social workers and twenty beds.

The drug consumption rooms don’t sell drugs, but users can bring their own drugs to these premises, be given a sterile spoon and needle, and take their drugs in the presence of someone able to administer instant medical help if required. Wolfgang joked that these places are known as shooting galleries. But the statistics are no joke. Since the first one opened, here on Elbestrasse in 1992, the annual rate of drug overdose deaths in Frankfurt dropped from 192 to thirty, year-on-year.

Wolfgang had no budget to pay me, but he was immensely grateful for my offer to volunteer, and that worked well for me, as I could fit it around taking Bruno to Dr Ramsden, and spending more time with him on his days off. It works well around my part-time paid job, which is flexible, cleaning and ironing for some clients. And it was giving me back my feeling of self-worth. The volunteering meant I was doing something positive. I was helping people. And I could understand something of the dark place they were in. I also felt that the desperation I saw through my work there shocked me enough to stay on the straight and narrow. A constant reminder that I did not want to be on the other side of the glass wall.

Where I’m sitting is known as the nurses’ station. There is a constant, pervading smell of disinfectant that reminds me so much of the Brighton and Hove Mortuary, where Roy took me once, in those early happy days, to show me where he had to go to view post-mortems of murder victims. We are elevated, like having balcony seats in a theatre, looking down at the room itself. When people come in the door, which is always unlocked, they have to look up at us — which is for our protection. The occasional one is violent, especially when badly strung out, and we are out of reach, just.

A man is coming in the door now, and this one does like to talk. His name is Tomas Arlberg. He could be anywhere between forty and sixty — that’s what years of shooting-up heroin do to someone. It’s not so much the drug itself but the crap it’s cut — mixed — with. Street dealers never sell 100 per cent pure heroin — or, for that matter, pure crack cocaine, methamphetamine or any other opiate — mostly it ranges between 5 and 15 per cent pure, with the rest of what you are buying normally being chalk or cement dust. And that’s what Tomas Arlberg has been injecting into his veins every few hours for the past twenty-five years, if I understand him correctly.

And it’s not too easy to understand him, because he mumbles. He has only a few teeth and lank, dark hair turning grey that covers his eyes until he remembers to shake it away. His face is gaunt and many weeks unshaven; his body looks painfully thin, enveloped in a charcoal herringbone greatcoat with holes in the sleeves and is at least three sizes too big. He smells pretty rank, like, I’m afraid, so many of our visitors. And yet he has beautiful blue eyes. Every time I see him I wonder about his past — that long distant past — and just how good-looking he might have been. I wonder what was his journey to here? He’s clutching the large plastic carrier bag, white with red and black markings, stuffed full, which he always has with him.

Full of everything he owns in the world?

He looks up and smiles, seems genuinely pleased to see me, and asks, ‘Wie geht es dir?’

At least I think that’s what he says. ‘I’m fine,’ I reply in German and thank him for asking.

He nods, seeming pretty happy about this. With my rubber-gloved hands, I lean over and hand him his kit of a sterile spoon, saline solution and needle, and he shuffles off towards an empty place in the far right-hand corner, which he always favours, settles, pulls his wrap of heroin from his coat pocket and finds his lighter in another. I stop watching, the memory of my three years of doing just this — albeit in nicer surroundings — too painful.

Everything has gone quiet in Jersey. I’ve heard nothing more from the police there. I had one scare soon after relocating to Frankfurt, when I read in the JEP that a male body had washed up in Guernsey. There was speculation for a few days that it might be Nicos, and I didn’t know how I felt about that. I was relieved when it turned out not to be him, but a man from Guernsey who had mental health issues and had been missing for some weeks.

Although I didn’t really understand why I felt that way, why I was happy to think that Nicos might still be alive and not murdered by Saul Brignell and his henchmen because of what I had done. Because there were moments — the way he treated Bruno — when I could have throttled Nicos myself.

Equally, I worried that all the time there was no body, it meant Nicos might still be alive. Out there somewhere — and coming for me?

I check my Jersey Evening Post app religiously every day; Nicos and the Bolt-Hole really do seem now totally to have fallen off their radar.

I guess that’s pretty much it for the good news. The bad is that Dr Ramsden is not happy with the progress he has been making with Bruno. Actually, that’s an understatement.

On the positive side, the psychologist does feel he can make progress with him. On the negative, he’s taking a two-year view. Two years of therapy, three times a week. From now, on top of the almost £8,000 I’ve already handed over — thank you, Nicos — Dr Ramsden thinks Bruno will need two more years, at least. Which works out at a tidy £35,000 or so.

Which I do not have.

So far, while I’ve been as frugal as possible, our classy hotel lodgings and our living expenses over the past five months have still burned through nearly £10K. Which means, according to my calculations, that I’ve burned through a total of almost £18,000.

I have around £12K left.

And at the moment, although I am doing some paid work, it’s not earning me much and I can only do this thanks to Maria — AKA Bettie Page — who has turned out to be a bigger angel than I could ever have imagined. She adores Bruno — they seem to be, in their eccentricity, kindred spirits. While I’m volunteering at the drug consumption room, ten doors along the road Bruno helps Maria on reception.

Bless her, she has convinced Bruno that she couldn’t do her job without him, and he is being polite to people and they seem to like him. OK, so they are the hotel’s weird ragbag of guests that he sees, but at least it’s a start of his developing some normal social skills.

And they are a weird lot in the Gasthaus & Hotel Seehaus.

There’s Erika, who’s older than God, an Auschwitz survivor, who has lived in room 103 for, she told me proudly, forty-one years. She showed me her arm where she had the faded tattoo with her number from Auschwitz, telling me, ‘I was the lucky one, I lost all my family.’ She wears dark glasses and walks with a stick, but is still fiercely independent. And, most importantly to me, she spends time with Bruno and he seems to react to her in a good way.

He said, poignantly, one night, ‘Mama, Erika says the Nazis stole all her family’s money. Can’t we go and find it and get it back for her?’

Another morning, Bruno met a Moroccan chef, from room 206, who worked in a restaurant somewhere nearby, and showed him a bunch of knives he carried in a belt around his waist. And another afternoon, he met Stefan Pfeiffer, a dopehead who came down unsteadily from his room — never rising before midday — and offered him a toke on his spliff.

Dr Ramsden didn’t feel Bruno was ready enough yet, with his lack of association skills, to be enrolled in a normal kindergarten — or even a special-needs one. But I had the feeling that hanging out with Maria was giving him enough of an education. Approaching his fourth birthday, he was truly a willing — if unwitting — undergraduate in the University of Life.

Dr Ramsden’s office was a forty-minute walk each way from the hotel, and to save money, and because it was good exercise — and helped make the day pass — I walked Bruno there and back three times a week, except when the weather was truly vile. And it had been horrible, cold and wet for the past month. Frankfurt had hot summers, but its winters were bitterly cold — at least judging by the one we had just emerged from.

It was late February, and there was a hint of spring in the air. I had been to see Dr Ramsden alone for a review session about Bruno — who I’d left in the care of Maria back at the hotel. As before, the psychologist felt he was definitely making progress, but not as fast as he would have liked.

Crucially, Bruno had bonded with Dr Ramsden. And I could see small but significant changes in him, week on week. I had to keep the therapy going, but there was no way I could afford it. I was faced with a stark choice. Blow the rest of my funds — and then what? Or pull him out of his treatment and take my chances with him?

And then — maybe it was the months of working free at the drug consumption room or perhaps because I had a karmic credit carried over from some former life — the gamechanger occurred.

Totally out of the blue.