BEFORE I SLIP AWAY

By Will McCloy

Jack Lindsay is a ghost. Well, he tries to be. Battling anxiety, shame and the guilt of an accident that nearly killed his best mate and sent his dad bankrupt, Jack is at a new school and trying hard to deal with his nightmares and successfully lie about taking his tablets.
Which is going okay, all things considered, until he meets Bart.
Bart's gotta be at least 70, and he's definitely a drunk, but this chance meeting awakens something in Jack that he has been hiding for too long.
Which is really no excuse to engage in a kidnapping.

BEFORE I SLIP AWAY is a novel about personal and social connection, finding the courage to confront your past and the strength to shape your future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tablo Publishing
• Release date: Oct 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781685830236

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Right in the middle of Sydney Road. That’s where they found me.

It’s a busy road, normally, four lanes of traffic streaming past on the way from the Northern Beaches to the city. On that particular Thursday morning, though, there was no movement at all. Cars banked up in both directions.

Dawn gridlock in Balgowlah.

The house had been full of raised voices, despite the lateness. I couldn’t sleep anyway, I never can after the nightmares. I’d listened for a while as they’d argued, before grabbing a jumper and book and slipping out the sliding doors into the welcome dark.

The streets were quiet and I walked for a while, thinking. My mind roamed back and forth though time like a passenger staring out a plane window at the distant landscape. At least a passenger was safe behind the window glass, I thought. Insulated. None of that for me though. I was out here feeling things with the same rawness as if they’d just happened.

I’d tried to calm my mind and forget the images that had assaulted me before waking to the yelling. It was the same dream I always had. The one where my teeth were falling out and I couldn’t stop it. I had Googled what it meant long ago. Powerlessness, anxiety, low self-worth. Nothing good.

After a while, the rhythm of my feet on the pavement relaxed me. The night’s suburban solitude wrapped around me as I wandered through the ceaseless hum of five million sleeping souls. By the time I’d looked up, I was near the shops and it was close to midnight. I sat on the side of the road under the fluorescent orange glow of a street light, put my headphones on and opened my book.

I read for a long time, the still air growing colder in the deepening of the night. At some point I had stood up, untied my jumper from around my waist and slipped it on. When I sat back down, the grass had felt cold, so I shifted forward and lay on the tarmac, the hood around my head softening the gutter’s hard edge.

There were no cars for ages, and at some point, I must have drifted off. When I woke up, I was in the middle of the left hand lane of the main road winding through the beaches to the city. 5:45am, sky clear as a bell and a fresh onshore wind blowing off the water and up the hill toward me.

Thursday.

I should point out early on that I am not, despite subsequent rumours to the contrary, insane. In fact, my actions always feel perfectly sane to me. I will admit though, this one did push the boundaries.

It was the cops that woke me in the end. Responding, no doubt, to a very strange phone call.

‘Hello, triple zero. What is your emergency?’

‘Yes, hello, there is a boy on Sydney Road, lying on the ground.’

‘Has he been hit?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Is he hurt?’

‘Doesn’t look like it.’

‘Okay, what’s the problem?’

‘I think he’s asleep.’

Afterwards, there was a ton of questions. First the police, then Mum and Dad, then the psychologist. I told them all the truth, that I just went to go for a walk, to get away. Apparently though, that’s not enough of an excuse to lie down in a major thoroughfare. There’s been two weeks of long and frustrating discussions about it, during which I’ve constantly regretted making myself the centre of attention again.

In the end, only one thing has really come of it. That one thing is the reason why I’m perched on a brick wall right now, out the front of the burnt house at the top of our street.

I studied the house. It was only six weeks ago when the place went up in flames. Flashing lights everywhere, my sister Em desperate to go see what was happening. We went out onto the lawn and there was this orange glow on the clouds. It was less than a kilometre from us, and most definitely qualified as the biggest thing to happen in Balgowlah Heights in a hundred years. We saw the place the next morning when we walked to the bus stop. Smoke and police tape and charred walls.

Since then, no one had really done anything about it. What was left of the house remained. Charred walls and beams surrounding black, dusty nothingness. The low brick wall was untouched, but a new chainlink fence now loomed behind it with signs to keep out.

Apart from the fact that it fronts the burnt house, the brick wall where I'm sitting is no different to any other, except that it’s directly across the road from the Balgowlah Heights pharmacy. My destination, supposedly. I forced myself to turn round and stare across at it as I considered what I should do next. My next move should have undoubtedly been to enter the pharmacy, get the drugs, and go home like a normal person. But then, it could equally be to have a full-blown nervous breakdown right here in the afternoon sunlight. This is the fine line I’m walking right now.

I remembered the doctor’s words. He’d said not to worry, that the reason I had ended up on the road was because of the accident with Simon all those months ago. That my need to wander the streets alone was because of unexpressed guilt or anger or something. It was triggering anxious tendencies, and that anxiety had caused the road nap thing. He said all of it wasn’t my fault. Lots of people feel out of control occasionally and it comes out in different ways.

At least that’s what I think he’d said. I’d spent most of the time in his office fighting the urge to escape.

I felt like my brain was just hardwired this way, and if it wasn’t, I wouldn’t have been involved in the accident in the first place. Simon never would have been hurt. I told him that, and he nodded in that way people do when they are absolutely sure they know better than you. Then he gave me a piece of paper. The same piece of paper I now had in my hand while I watched the pharmacy door.

I made the decision, crossed the road, and paused at the entrance. There was no one in there I could see except for the shop assistant, which was not ideal for me. I’m not the most comfortable in social situations, but when it comes to shops, the more people the better. Safety in numbers. I don’t like being the only one in there, the beady eyes of the staff following me around, asking me if I need help. I like to shop in anonymity. I like to do everything in anonymity. Before I had time to abort and regroup outside, the pharmacist saw me in the doorway and attacked down aisle three.

‘Can I help you?’

‘Er, yeah,’ I said, fully aware I was mumbling into the top of my St Xavier’s hoodie. ‘I need, like, an order filled.’

‘No problem,’ she said brightly. ‘Just give me the prescription and it’ll be a few minutes.’

I looked down at her hand outstretched. She only wanted the paper, but it felt like she was trying to take another piece of my diminishing control. I just wanted things to go back to the way they were before the accident and everything that happened after. Back then I felt like I was in control, or maybe I was just blissfully ignorant of the way life can mess you up.

I eventually handed it over, hoping that she would get the drugs without knowing what they were. No chance of that. She looked down at the scribbled writing and frowned.

‘Have you taken anti-depressants before?’

CHAPTER 2

Anxiety is an odd thing.

I imagined it like ducks on a pond, floating along, happy as anything. They’d be smiling, if they had lips. Serene. Floating with the current, letting the water take them wherever it will. What do they have to worry about? They’re ducks.

Except my duck. My duck looks the same as the others if you’re watching from the shoreline. Under the water, though, my little duck legs are churning as fast as they can go, spinning, unstoppable. They aren’t making me go anywhere any faster. In fact, I’m losing ground and exhausting myself in the effort of it. That’s me out there, using up most of my energy in the stress of getting through the things that seem so effortless to everyone else, and the rest of it worrying that I am different and wrong and defective.

That’s my particular brand of anxiety. The Jack Lindsay special.

Spending large amounts of effort dealing with myself makes me do stuff that I guess people might consider a bit unusual. I vacuum my bedroom floor twice a day, which is apparently excessive. I mow the lawn when it really doesn’t need it. I never leave washing up to dry in the rack. I fold my underwear.

Order keeps the water just calm enough to swim through.

Right now though, the water was definitely not calm. The panic of having those anti-depressants in my bag was taking every fibre of my being to control. It had been five weeks since the road nap, but now I had another problem. Three weeks since that first pharmacy trip and I hadn’t taken a single tablet. Twenty-one little white happy pills still sitting in their packet.

That meant it was time to get another packet from the pharmacy or they’d ring the house. Everyone knows everyone around here. Mum would answer and then I’d be grilled mercilessly.

Not much gets past Olivia Lindsay, but somehow I’d managed it so far. She assumed I was taking them, but hadn’t actually asked me outright if I was. She hadn’t said a thing since that first day I’d come home with them. I’d been halfway though dumping my school bag inside the kitchen door when I’d noticed her sitting at the big wooden kitchen table she loved so much.

‘Hi Jack,’ she’d said, suspiciously brightly. 

‘Um… hi? What are you doing?’

‘Waiting for my favourite son. How was school?’

‘I’m your only son, and school was good.’

‘Anything special happen?’

I had known where it was heading. This was unmistakably a post-drug-purchase-mental-health-check-up.

‘Not really,’ I said, delaying.

‘That’s nice. Did you get to the pharmacy?’

Apparently Mum had been just as nervous as me about it. A couple of easily overheard phone discussions with the doctor confirmed that. I had never heard her discussing it with Dad though, which wasn’t overly surprising.

‘Yeah, I got the pills.’

‘Well, what did they say?’

‘That I should take them all at once with a bottle of tequila.’

She smiled and waited.

‘Or that I should take one a day in the morning and not to worry too much about it.’

‘Well, good. That’s good. So, how do you feel about it?’

‘Fine, Mum. Don't worry so much.’

Telling Mum not to worry was like telling water not to be wet. Right now though, she had that same smile on her face that the lady at the pharmacy had. Far too happy for the situation.

‘Okay, well, you know that you can talk to me whenever. Even at work, just call.’

‘I know, Mum. Thanks. Really.’

Dad had walked in at that moment, earlier than usual. He had his work gear on, covered in sawdust and paint splotches. Another guy’s company name was embroidered on his shirt pocket. I’d met the guy who owned the company. He was at least ten years younger than Dad.

‘Hi,’ he said to no-one in particular, rubbing his calloused hands on the front of his pants. They were huge, Dad’s hands. Years of carrying and sawing and nailing things with hammers. It made me a little ashamed of my soft, white, clean ones.

‘Hi,’ I said. ‘How was work?’

‘It was work,’ he replied, like he did every single time I asked him. He headed to the fridge, pulled out a beer, tossed the bottle top on the bench and walked behind Mum on the way to the living room. I saw Mum give him a squeeze on the arm on the way past.

‘Paul…’ she said.

He didn’t react. He just kept walking.

There was this brief silence that followed his exit, one of those ones that isn’t silence at all but rather filled with collective silent screaming. The unheard trauma of a thousand things left unsaid.

The days since that first grilling had been filled with unusually bright smiles and cheerfulness as Mum and I both ignored the pill situation. Not talking about it was made easier by the fact that even after three weeks, neither Dad or Emma even knew about it, as far as I could tell. I mean, they knew about my cameo as a speed bump, but not the doctor trip or the drugs that followed.

That must seem a bit weird, I suppose, that half our family had no idea about something as big as their first born son’s new drug dependency. All I can say is that it’s as though we were once all living in one universe together, and now we are just three separate planets revolving around Mum. She is the gravity that is keeping us all from just floating off.

So I had to get rid of the packet.

I should point out that I am extremely aware that any reasonable person would flush them down the toilet. I know this. Drop. Flush. Watch. Walk away. Ten seconds. Then again, reasonable people wouldn’t require anti-depressants, would they? They’d be out there having fulfilling and exciting lives on their yachts in the Mediterranean or whatever.

I knew I couldn’t flush them because I knew myself. If I did, the guilt every time I walked into the bathroom would be so intense I’d never go in there, which meant I’d have to use the school bathrooms, and they were not great if you liked even a basic level of sanitation. So, flushing them was not an option. Likewise, if I buried them in the bottom of the garbage bin, I’d never be able to go into the kitchen, and I was not about to forgo my morning Coco Pops. Hide them under my bed, and I faced a lifetime of sleeping on the couch.

I envied people who could move on from things. I’d never been able to do that. Things trigger me. Example, every time the phone rings in our house, it conjures up the same two minute incident from seven years ago. I was nine and had been staying at a friend’s place. His step-dad scared me. He was big and loud and had a moustache. On the Sunday night after I’d got home, Dad told me I had to call and say thank you for them having me over. Maybe not a big deal for other nine year olds, but an incredibly hectic experience for this one. I wrote out exactly how the conversation would go so I had some kind of game plan. As the phone rang in my ear, I prayed that the mum would answer.

She didn’t.

‘Hello?’

The step-dad’s voice. I panicked and read out the whole conversation in one go, as fast as I could get it out. I said everything, including what I thought he might say in response.

‘Hello sir, it’s Jack Lindsay. Oh hello, Jack. I’m just ringing to thank you for having me to stay, I had a great time. Oh Jack, that’s no problem, we loved having you, please come anytime. Thank you, sir. I’ll see you soon, bye. Okay bye.’

I read all that in one go. He worked it out too, somewhere during my monologue.

‘Oh, sorry mate,’ he said, laughing. ‘This is the fire station. I think you’ve got a wrong number.’

I hung up and never went back there again. I refused all offers from my friend, and never told him why. He moved away, eventually. To this day, I avoid making any kind of phone calls unless I absolutely have to.

So, the tablets needed to disappear as far away from home as possible. Where was somewhere I would never go? Where would they not be found? It was a pity, I thought, that we weren’t going anywhere on holiday soon to somewhere far away, say, the Middle East.

It came to me. The burnt out house right next to the pharmacy. It was perfect. All I needed to do was walk past and chuck the packet over the fence behind the low brick wall. It would be swallowed by the wild long grass. I would never go there. They’d build again and that would be that.

I had a plan. It was time to begin Operation Drug Dump. Yes, I had immediately given it a name. The key, I reckoned, was to remain super casual, as though I sneak out to throw drugs over fences all the time. Having said that, it’s surprisingly difficult to make up a story for why you want to go out for 20 minutes on a wet Tuesday evening.

Dad was where he always was, in front of the TV with a beer.

‘I’m just heading up to the shops. I need a… stapler. From the shops.’

I said shops twice. Not a great start. He didn’t notice.

‘Stapler. Don’t we have a stapler?’ he asked, without turning his head from the screen.

‘I broke it. From stapling.’

‘Sounds like the likeliest way to break a stapler.’

‘Yep. Stapling. Anyway, shops.’

‘Okay. Can you get milk?’

‘Milk. Got it.’

I understand, in retrospect, that no one really cared what I was doing or where I was going, and yet I couldn’t help feeling like I was doing something wrong. In the time since Simon’s accident, I’d been very careful not to step outside the lines. In fact, for a very long time I didn’t even step outside the house. When those solitary holidays were over, I’d made no fuss when I was told I had to change schools. Since then, I’d done whatever was asked of me.

That was nearly a year and a half of living like a ninja, and in return for keeping my head down, home had settled into an uneasy routine where no one spoke about what happened with Simon and the construction site. We all just tried to get on with it. Now though, the road nap incident had brought doctors, secret drug prescriptions, lies about taking them, and then lies about where I was going to get rid of them. All this secrecy and betrayal made me more and more anxious, which was exactly what these tablets were supposed to help. Ironic.  

I reminded myself again to be super-casual, before super-casually beginning my stroll up my street toward the shops. The city hum kept me company, cars occasionally lighting up the wet road. The house slowly revealed itself, the fence gleaming in the light from the pharmacy sign across the road.

I stood there looking at it. It looked a bit sad and another bit scary.

Like the construction site.

The reason I was in this mess.

Overwhelmed, I sat back on my spot on the bricks, my conscious brain finding space in the anxiety to explain to me that it would take less than ten seconds for my backside to get completely wet.

It took five seconds.

I had to fix myself. I knew that. I had to move on and forgive myself and forgive Pete and relax and enjoy life and be more friendly and go surfing and be a kid again.

Taking medication was not the way to do that, right?

Right. A hundred per cent right. I could be normal without them.

I stood up again. My butt was extremely cold. Goosebumps ran up my arms as I turned around and faced the house. I had to get milk and get back and get on with things.

Without even feeling myself throw it, I watched the white packet sail through the air and land in the long grass.

Right next to a knee.

Sitting behind the chain fence on a chair I hadn’t noticed beside a pile of old bricks was a man, looking so weathered and rough it was possible he had lived his whole life in that exact spot.

‘Good evening,’ he said in a gruff voice.

He looked old in the way people do when they have given up on themselves. Cracked and beaten and weighed down by the gravity of things. His shoulders were hunched, as if protecting him from something. His face ran with deep lines and was tanned dark from the elements that almost hid a yellowish tinge. Grey stubble swept down his jawline and framed a reddish nose. Wild black hair streaked with grey shot out from beneath a battered black felt hat. A white crumpled business shirt was covered by an old tan leather jacket and a brown scarf hanging off his angular frame. Pinstripe suit pants and leather boots wore a layer of dust and completed a man whose whole being seemed primarily to consist of spare parts jumbled together and then left out in the sun. My eyes settled on his wrist where a huge silver watch sat oddly. It looked like the kind of thing rich bankers in the city wore, not homeless guys in a Balgowlah garden.

‘You dropped your