Goodness, it has been a Day.
We looked forward to the weekend, because of only having one job then, but really I think that we could do with another weekend now to get over it.
We brought the camper van around to the back of the house to clean it again. I am aware that this sounds a bit excessive, but it really did smell dreadful. Cigarette smoke and cannabis combine to smell very much like rat wee, which is not the nicest perfume for your favourite home from home.
In any case, although I had thought that I had cleaned it thoroughly, of course I hadn’t, and extra little horrors kept turning up, like cigarette ends in beds and burn marks on things. We were suddenly rather grateful to whichever Gods are responsible for managing affairs of Health And Safety that the whole van had not gone up in a sheet of flame.
We took everything down from the shelves and washed it, which it needed anyway, it is some time since I have done any serious cleaning in there. We had covered all the carpets and cushions in bicarbonate of soda, which helped absorb horrid smells, and we hoovered it all off and made everywhere smell better.
We kept discovering new little disasters, a missing cup made me feel very sad, because it is my favourite Royal Albert china.
The bathroom was pretty awful, not just because it is not nice to have to empty a loo which has been used a lot by people with drug-induced diarrhoea, but because when we looked we discovered that they had taken Mark’s razor, and his shaving cream, and his deodorant, probably to help them pretend to be him.
That felt pretty bleak.
We had decided from the outset that we would just get on with it all. This was the road that the Gods had given us to walk, and so we would just walk it, to the best of our abilities. Raging about things would not help, but would eat us up from the inside.
We played some noisy music, the soundtrack to Cabaret, actually, and walked our road all day.
I sent about a dozen emails to the nice policeman whilst we were doing it, every time we found something else or thought of something else. I thought this was quite therapeutic, although I expect it was a bit of a surprise when he came on duty in the evening to find pages and pages of vague ranting about missing deodorant and coat hangers that he was expected to detect on our behalf.
We had finished, and were putting the van back in its parking space, when a young man came up to Mark.
He said that he had got Mark’s dressing gown and would bring it if we waited, and wandered off.
We were most certainly not going to let that pass, so we dived in the taxi and rushed after him. It was pouring with rain, and we picked him up.
It was the young man who had been in the camper van.
He was most definitely not all right.
His speech was loud and fast, tumbling over itself as he waved his hands about and rolled his eyes.
Mark drove and I questioned him as gently as I could.
He had been wearing the dressing gown, he explained, to sit in a secret shed that he knew where he could smoke drugs without anybody noticing.
He was not going to go to his house to meet the police at six o’ clock, he said, because the police could not be trusted, and he knew that they would take him away and beat him up.
I could not imagine the patient policeman who was coming to see him beating anybody up.
I told him that he need not worry, that if we could get Mark’s things back we would not press charges, and wondered if he could remember what he had done with the rest.
He said that his mother had the jackets and if we went round to his house she would give them to us, but that he would not go because the police were coming.
I asked him about the rest of our things, and he said that they were in a woodland near his house, and described a tree.
He hopped out and dived though a gate, and reappeared a few minutes later with Mark’s dressing gown.
The smell of rat wee drugs made our eyes water.
He would not get back in the car but rushed off and climbed over a wall.
He was gone.
We were immensely cheered by the dressing gown, even with its attendant perfume, and thought that we would go and hunt through the woods to see if we could find the tree he was describing.
By now it was almost dark. It was raining hard, and because we had only been parking the camper van, we were not dressed for it. We did not even have jumpers, and I was wearing flip flops.
We went anyway.
The rain was battering down through the trees, and the ground was a sodden mire. We slipped and struggled through the mud, and then suddenly there it was.
There was an almost imperceptible clearing in the gloom. In front of us was a little cluster of trees which had been festooned with clothes and shoes.
It was very disconcerting indeed.
We stood there in the grey murk and stared.
Coats and shoes, shirts and trousers, hung from every branch.
They were not ours.
In the end we found our missing quilt cover, and a tea towel. They were muddy and soaked, but ours all the same.
We slithered back down the hill and dumped them in the car.
Then we went to see if the boy’s mother really did have Mark’s jackets.
To our surprise he opened the door to us himself, and went trotting off to find them.
They were a bit smoky, and crumpled, but intact.
We were just thanking his mother when the doorbell rang and it was the police.
The boy’s mother took them downstairs, and the boy went to join them.
We waited, uncertainly for a moment, with his grandmother.
Seconds later we heard the most awful yelling and crashing.
The boy had panicked and started to shout and attack the police.
The noise went on for ages.
I held his grandmother’s hand and we listened.
Eventually they sprayed him with pepper spray, sat on him and put him in handcuffs. Some more police turned up and they took him away.
We felt terribly upset.
They boy’s mother cried, and we wanted to cry as well.
He was not all right.
It is not all right to be terrified of police who are not going to arrest you. It is not all right to be jumpy and scared and not understanding that you are upsetting the people around you. It is not all right to be dressing up in other people’s clothes and hiding in other people’s sheds.
All these things are very unstable indeed.
We felt an aching sympathy for his poor family. They were looking after him as well as anybody possibly could, but old age pensioners and lone mothers are not going to find it easy to look after frightened violent mentally ill people.
The policeman came back to see us later. He told us that they were going to get the young man assessed by a psychiatrist, and we all hoped very much that he would get some help.
We came to work feeling exhausted and subdued. That poor little family, that poor distressed young man, having their lives constantly rocked by outbursts of agonising turmoil that they are all powerless to stop.
I am feeling very grateful for my good health tonight, for my lovely family, for my stable children, for my life.
We are beyond fortunate.
