The World According to Bob

think he quite grasped why I hadn’t been able to do the same thing. To his credit, he had never washed his hands of me. He’d tried to help. At one point I had been keen on getting into music production and he’d wanted to give me a helping hand to get on a course but it hadn’t panned out. The thought was there but the motion behind it wasn’t. He had remarried since splitting with my mum and had two children, my half siblings Caroline and Anthony, to look after. It got complicated.
    I’d never really considered working for his business and he’d never really offered. Quite rightly, he felt that business and family didn’t mix. Besides, deep down he knew that I wasn’t reliable – or presentable – enough to interact with the public.
    ‘What about training in computing or something like that. There are loads of courses around,’ he said.
    This was true enough but I didn’t have the qualifications to get on most courses. That was partly my own fault.
    A few years back I’d had a mentor, a great guy called Nick Ransom who worked for a charity called Family Mosaic. He had been a really good friend. He’d either come to my flat or I’d go into his office in Dalston where he’d help me with everything from paying the bills to applying for jobs. He had tried to get me involved in a variety of courses, from bike building to computing. But the struggle to kick my addiction had been all consuming and I’d never knuckled down to it. Busking had always been an easier option for me and when Nick moved on to pastures new the chance slipped through my fingers. It wasn’t the first opportunity I’d messed up, nor would it be the last.
    My dad said he’d ask around to see if there was anything going. ‘But things are pretty rough everywhere at the moment,’ he said, holding up a copy of the evening paper. ‘Every time I look at the paper it’s all doom and gloom. Jobs going everywhere.’
    I wasn’t that disconnected from reality. I knew there were millions of people in the same situation as me, every single one of them with better qualifications. I was so far down the pecking order in the jobs market I felt that it wasn’t even worth applying for jobs.
    My dad wasn’t a man to bare his emotions with me. I knew he was frustrated by the way I lived my life. Deep down I knew he felt I wasn’t trying. I understood why he felt that way, but the truth was that I was trying. Just in my own way.
    To lighten things up a little we talked a little bit about his family. I wasn’t particularly close to Anthony and Caroline; we met very infrequently. He asked me what I was doing for Christmas – I’d spent a couple of Christmases with him but it hadn’t really been a barrel of laughs for either of us.
    ‘I’m just going to spend it with Bob,’ I said. ‘We enjoy being together.’
    My dad didn’t really get my relationship with Bob. Tonight, as usual, he stroked him occasionally and kept an eye on him when I popped to the toilet. He even got the waitress to bring him a saucer of milk and gave him a couple of snacks. But he wasn’t a natural cat lover. And on the one or two occasions when I had talked about how much Bob helped me in sorting myself out he just looked baffled. I suppose I couldn’t blame him for that.
    As usual, my Dad asked after ‘my health’ which I always took to be code for ‘are you still off the drugs?’
    ‘I’m doing all right,’ I said. ‘I saw a guy drop dead from an overdose on the landing of my flats a while back. That freaked me out quite a lot.’
    He looked horrified. He had no understanding of drug culture or the way it worked and, like a lot of men of his generation, was a little bit scared of it truth be told. For that reason, I don’t think he’d ever really grasped how bad my situation had been when I’d been at my lowest ebb on heroin.
    He’d seen me during that period, but, like all addicts, I had learned to keep that side of my life hidden when necessary. I’d met him a couple of times when I was off my face on gear. I’d just told him I had a bout of the flu and assumed he wouldn’t know any different. He wasn’t stupid though, he probably sensed something was wrong but wouldn’t have been able to put his finger on what it was specifically. He had no concept of what it was like to do drugs. I quite envied him that.
    We spent an hour and a half together, but then he had to catch a train back to south London. He gave me a few quid to tide me over and