Addicted to LIFE
Gavanndra Hodge GREW UP SURROUNDED BY ADDICTION. SHE COULD HAVE FOLLOWED THE SAME PATH,UNTIL SOMETHING MADE HER CHOOSE A DIFFERENT FUTURE
My father is in bed: a mattress on the floor. It is midday; the curtains are drawn, the room smells of sweat and cigarette smoke. I am seven-years-old and we are meant to be going to London Zoo – he promised – and yet here he is, groaning, white foam gathered at the edges of his mouth.
‘Daddy,’ I whisper. He replies: ‘My head, my head is broken.’ He digs his fingers into his skull as if to stop it splitting in half. I am terrified, my heart ping-ponging in my chest. Is dad dying? I look closer. There is no blood, no jagged bone, no glossy exposed brain. His head seems fine. My heart stills. I creep away, go into the sitting room, turn on the telly. We won’t be going to the zoo today.
My dad was always breaking promises. He was a heroin addict, but it wasn’t just heroin – he was addicted to pleasure, which he pursued with an intensity that would have been impressive were it not so damaging. He was a hairdresser. He was also a part-time dealer, selling heroin, cocaine and dope to the Chelsea aristocrats who came to our flat to buy drugs in the 198Os. My mother, a former model, was an alcoholic who couldn’t take her drink. She would be asleep by 9pm, unaware that I’d steal out of bed, staying up long past midnight to watch the sons and daughters of baronets as they held a lighter under a strip of silver foil, liquefying the heroin and inhaling the thick yellow smoke it emitted through a rolled-up £5O note. I was waiting for them to pass out so I could do my fire checks: pluck the smouldering cigarettes from between their stained fingertips; blow out the candles; feel safe enough to go to bed, finally.
My father got clean when I was eight. We had been raided one too many times and the court offered him a choice: rehab or prison. He chose rehab and my mum got sober. A new phase began, of Narcotics and Alcoholics Anonymous, and help groups for addicts’ children – municipal rooms with tea and biscuits where I had to talk about how I felt. (I did not like talking about how I felt.)
It was a time of relative normality. I got into a posh girls’ day school and discovered that I loved Latin, chemistry, order and rationality. My parents, who’d both left school at 14, were freaked out by my newfound bookishness, especially Dad, who was so
dyslexic he was almost illiterate. Still, they encouraged me, were proud of me. My life started to feel like it was under control.
It was all brought to an abrupt end when my sister Candy died of a rare airborne virus in a hotel room in Tunisia, aged nine. In the unreal aftermath of that awful moment, my mother found God and my father found strong alcohol. They were both unmoored by pain, but Mum was able to face it and Dad was not. The morning after Candy’s death, he had drunk a whole bottle of whisky by 1Oam. And that was just the beginning.
My dad never took heroin again, but he took everything else: MDMA, weed, my grandmother’s painkillers. He started selling drugs again, crushing Pro Plus with cocaine in a pestle and mortar so it would go further, in the tinting room of his Knightsbridge salon. Now, instead of just watching, I joined in.
I was 14 when my dad gave me my first spliff; 15 when he gave me my first line of coke. There was a clandestine camaraderie about our drug-taking, but also an inability to feel the grief of Candy’s death. I numbed myself with booze and drugs. I did my History GCSE on speed.
The children of addicts don’t really get to be children. Chaos and fear are always close by. We must be constantly vigilant to make sure the worst doesn’t happen, because no one else is alert, least of all the adults. So even though I was high, I was never so off my face that I forgot any of the things I did, or said, or saw – however much I wanted to. But that is not the hardest thing about being the child of an addict. The hardest thing, I think, is the disappointment. Nothing matters more to an addict than their drug of choice. And that is a tough lesson when you are a little girl (or a big girl): that a pile of powder is more lovable than you. It was a lesson I never really managed to learn.
I discovered my father was leaving my mother for a girl who was at school with me on the same holiday I got my crappy GCSE results. I felt like I was drowning. But the children of addicts are strong. I am making generalisations here, but the people I know with the most similar experiences to me tend to be the most indomitable. We have to be. So I made a choice: I would not drown. I realised there were things I couldn’t change – my father, for instance, and his choices – but I could change my behaviour. I stopped taking drugs and going to clubs on school nights. My dad moved out (and in with his girlfriend) and, even though this was another grief, it was a blessing. Without him telling me I was being boring, I could rediscover my love of study.
Mum cleared his room and got lodgers so we could keep the flat; she persuaded school to give me a bursary because we couldn’t afford the fees, and I went into sixth form and I worked.
Bloody hard. It paid off. I won a place at Cambridge to study Classics. When I arrived, I felt light, easeful – like I was finally on my own path. Suddenly a different future unfurled in front of me.
Of course, these things are never so simple. The pull of the past was always powerful. I still went through phases when I took a lot of drugs and drank too much, lured by the familiar ease of pleasure you can purchase, rather than the harder work of finding happiness within. But I began to enjoy the feeling of waking up without a hangover more than how I felt after my third martini. My father still disappointed me, but it became less sharp. I never stopped getting angry with him, but I also never stopped loving him. I was heartbroken when he died, suddenly, of pulmonary complications, aged just 65. (He’d had a party the night before, taking coke and MDMA, two stereos going at once.) By then, I had my own baby, and I’d made decisions about the childhood I was going to give to her. In fact, this decision-making process started when I fell in love with a man who couldn’t have been more different to my father: honest and responsible; funny, clever and kind. Mike made me feel safe, and I knew he would make our children feel safe, too.
I decided to give my daughters (now 11 and eight) the childhood I hadn’t had. I would be the stable centre from which they could adventure into the world. And that is what I am. They are not the children of addicts. They know that if someone promises to take them to the zoo, they will be going to the zoo. And that is because I chose to break a cycle that, if left unchecked, could spiral from one generation to the next.
It is not always easy. There were (and still are) moments when I missed my dad so much, his charisma and naughtiness, that I misbehaved in ways I knew would make him proud. There were other times when I was fighting so hard to be this upstanding human – with a career, family, home – that I started to lose a sense of who I really was.
I was pretending to be someone else, locking away the little girl who had watched her dad taking heroin every night, who had seen her sister die in a hotel room. It made me feel isolated and unemotional and mad all at once. I realised I had to integrate my past into my present, in ways that didn’t involve taking MDMA at parties in Mayfair or dancing on a restaurant table after six sambucas, but by talking to my children about their grandfather and their aunt, having therapy, writing a book, finally giving my childhood structure – words, sentences, chapters.
They say that you are always an addict, that being sober is the work of a lifetime. Well, I will always be the daughter of an addict, and this is an ongoing process but, right now, I’m good with it. The Consequences of Love by Gavanndra Hodge is out 14 May
“THE CHILDREN OF ADDICTS DON’T GET TO BE CHILDREN. Nothing matters more TO AN ADDICT THAN THEIR DRUG OF CHOICE. THAT IS A TOUGH LESSON TO LEARN when you’re a little girl”