My life, since telling my parents about my drug addiction, has become complicated in a cocktail of ways. The main and most prominent issue is their total lack of trust in me financially. Of course, drug use and poverty go hand in hand, skipping through the dirt and snow, but I’d like to think that the hole I’d found myself in, both financially and physically, was stable in its depth and not looking to go any deeper. I know this because I was sat at the bottom, looking up at the sky, a pinhole of colour in the dark. Financially, I’ve always been strong, never swaying too far over the criminal line in search of funds. To set the scene, I wasn’t in horrendous debt, and the money spent on drugs was truly money I could afford to lose. Addiction is a hole, dark and damp throughout your soul. Confessing to my parents, shouting up towards the light, with them lurking around the top, throwing stones down to gauge the depth, only for my yelps of pain to go unnoticed. In confessing my problem, I’d hoped to show that I was: one, in pain; two, fully aware of my predicament; and three, in need of help. “You need a ladder? Ask for the ladder!” echoed down the hole as if I’d missed a line in this poorly scripted play. “Oh sure, I could use a ladder, yeah, toss it down.”
A delay and murmur between my parents as they consulted on my request resulted in a sigh and sorrowful apology, “Matt, your mother’s worried you’ll smoke it, so we’ll keep it up here until you really need it.” Where’s this analogy going? In summary, it’s hard to help someone you barely know.
My mother slips me and my brothers money whenever she feels we’re in need. This started with pound coins when we were younger, her taking our hands and pressing them into our palms one by one, “One…Two…” As we grew up, this turned into two twenties, assumed to be spent on food for our journey to wherever we were off to. The week I told my mother, we’d argued over fines my older brother had accrued against a Renault Clio registered in my name. The notices had ironically gone unnoticed, and over time, I was being threatened with a court date, something that would likely open the door for my family into the Matthew Cammiss Low Criminal Record Hall of Fame, a place I’d managed to keep locked for quite some time and had no interest in reopening for admissions.
A key point to add is that when arguing about this, with her wishing I’d just pay the fine and me wondering why I was facing the heat for Joe’s unparalleled ability to drive through bus lanes, I used the word “cunt” to explain how this whole ordeal made me feel. “Like a cunt,” I told my mother. Days later, I was lying on the sofa in Caitlin’s lounge, attempting to recover from a near stimulant-induced heart attack, when my phone buzzed with messages from my father, asking who I thought I was to call my mother such a word. “No son of his,” that was for sure. He was right. I had always wondered if I was the child of another man and often hoped that when I turned 18, I’d be informed, to no avail. The C-word was nothing new. My father often took bad information and ran with it. The day I arrived at my mother’s, we hadn’t spoken in over a week. She opened the door, and after Nelly gave me an excited pat-down for edible contraband and cuddles, we hugged and both cried. Over the following hour, I answered every question she had ever wanted to ask: who my friends were, the drugs I used and why, and my past issues with the law. It was unheard of for us both to share such honesty, as we’d founded our original connection on the basis of “Ask no questions, hear no lies,” a rule that was now fragmented.
Watching my mother pull two twenty-pound notes out of her pocket, in keeping with our tradition of me leaving at short notice, she paused for a moment, then slipped one back, looking up to check if I’d noticed this internal calculation. Out of fear, she explained, I’d overdose with the second. As confidence in my progress goes, that didn’t spark much hope in their view of it. Not that I blame her, but we were past the petty change strata and well and truly into the uncharted waters of supplier-level purchasing just to fund my own use, so £40 wasn’t worth worrying over. I mean, hell, at my peak, I was taking out £200 at every chance I got. Shortly after confessing my dilemma, my father consulted my mother, asking whether I’d be able to work around solvents when down at his house. That really was salt in the wound. I mean, really, who do these people think I am? I guess that’s where the problems really lay their head: they didn’t know. Growing up, I had no interest in showing who or what I am, so when the inevitable request for help came along, they seemed to struggle with knowing where to start. My father’s face when I told him the age I started using drugs—it was like telling lies with proof. I’ll always disagree with my father on countless topics, and often he’ll even look to out-do me in areas he truly has no reason to know. Drugs, for example—he’s constantly referring to me as the one in the family closest to death, which struck me as odd the first time I heard this. “Me?” “What about you?” His finishing line, which will forever haunt me as the worst thing to tell a drug addict, played on repeat throughout his dialogue: “You. Are. A. Drug. Addict.” I mean, he’s right, but come on, there’s having a problem and then having it weaponised and thrown back at you—it’s like refusing the ladder and being told, “Keep digging, maybe you’ll find one down there.”