Mobility

"He's going to be Grand-dead number one if he's not careful!" my driving instructor said. We laughed a lot together, we shared exactly the same birthday and I passed my driving test with her sitting in the back. Then she and her many daughters dropped off a doll with green plastic skin and green nylon hair in bunches for my daughter who was 3 years old. I don't remember the present she gave me. The doll had big green shoes and socks that came off and a pinafore dress. The number plate on the agility scooter (as I like to call them) said "Number 1 Grandad". 
Then there was the couple going to church on theirs that I passed at the weekend. I guessed they were going to church, anyway. She had a fancy hat on with netting, and they both were in suits. He drove in to the road in front of my car and then saw me coming and reversed back on to the pavement. Then when I stopped and motioned him across, they both slid across and turning to face me on the other side, were on the road moving slowly towards me so that another car turning the corner towards us had to steer suddenly wide around them. 
Then there was Frank. I was "getting back in to work" : "Chronic over stimulation" the Psychiatrist told me. I thought it an unusual diagnosis, but with his prescription and the threat of being made homeless, I found a job and had to turn up and do something again, despite myself. 
Working with heroin users on a rolling six week programme aimed at levelling, reducing or eliminating their drug use was mostly boring, occasionally very depressing and nearly always pointless, evidenced by the fact that now nearly 15 years on I still see the service users sitting begging on pavements, or doing that heroin march, all twitchy: off to get money so they can use and feel normal again. 
Frank'd groomed a teenage runaway in to being his girlfriend; by the time we met her she was considered an adult and making her own decisions about taking heroin and living with a long term user over twice her age on the streets and in the shelters of Nottingham. Years later I saw Frank had progressed to buzzing around the city centre. He parked his up near where the Savoy used to be before the council dug up a giant crater of a sore in between Barnardos and Hallmark. Then he'd get off to sit and beg up the road outside MacDonald's with his dog and his once pretty young thing turned pock marked and skeletal, cuddled up and hiding their cans badly under sleeves and jacket fronts. 
The likes of Frank never managed to trap me. I woke up once, naked and sore after a promised "party back at my house" of an old acquaintance. I couldn't tell anyone and I didn't see the friend I was visiting and had gone out drinking that night with for another 10 years until I bumped in to her on the bus in another city. That Special brew-head bastard had conned himself in to my acquaintance's home for the weekend. Him and his mates had parked up and smacked up out of his vehicle, he was on the prowl for opportunity and saw my vulnerability and I saw his filthy and repulsive exterior. The party persuaded me to stay, to not make negative assumptions. They laughed at me, I had a southern accent, they didn't. I had clean clothes on and I was a world away from their life in their eyes. I'd seen their like before, falling out the back of an old ambulance in a lay by. We were on the way to one of those raves where you rang a number and never found the address, but spent the weekend squashed in the back of a mate's van smoking spliffs. That van had needles littering the floor, not one scrap of comfort on the inside, they were on a permanent bumpy ride to nowhere good. I'd seen them and I saw through him straight away, but I'd already drunk too much and was too easily influenced in to a sip of something, he was ugly, dirty, repulsive and insistent. I remember hating it, hating him and the feeling that he despised me for who I was. I vaguely remember my body responding to his touching me. That was the most difficult thing to overcome psychologically in the very long aftermath. I was a sexy body and a person he despised who he thought deserved that and and he was a dirty nasty stranger. I pulled my clothes on, staggered out and back to Karen's. Their vehicles had gone when I walked past on my way to the train in the morning. I wouldn't be able to identify any of them.
She was a different shade of green to that doll, but I imagine her that colour inside, toxic from Frank and from the poison she put in to her veins, initiated in a filthy squat - that one by the train station where the Police found the 2 dead bodies, I'll bet. It's a fabulous old building, like the ones they gentrifiy and turn in to flats and galleries like the Docks in Liverpool . Old warehouses, huge things built to last. It's go no roof or glass in the windows now and buddleia grows from the walls. He got her by stealth, I'll bet, the same as he got his housing association flat and his scooter. I imagine he's happy with his lot, enough pocket money from sitting on the pavement for his daily special brew, a methadone script to keep him from rattling and home comforts with his little girl. She has to walk of course, she doesn't get a lift. Not that sort anyway. 
Then of course there's the people who are so fat they have to scoot, wedging themselves in, getting their forever seat, stuck in their own prison of soft cellulite and sweat. I feared becoming one of them so much I made myself sick, and the sickness became it's own daemon of a pathology until I couldn't stop, and the voices like wallpaper coating the inside of my brain all the while, zoetroping round and round and round and round whilst I pedalled endlessly to nowhere and then vomited on Asda Woops!'s until I collapsed. That was if I had managed to get out of bed at all. I wanted to die from the moment I woke: I was relentlessly pursued by my own thoughts, but I had to get that job and I had to get better.  No amount of being fucked, fucking or getting fucked up made anything better, food was a nightmare and not a comfort and cycling only took me round in big circles. Psychotherapy lead to confusion, lies, dependency. I thought she would rescue me but it took me 10 years to get away. Turns out her professionalism was never honest. She'd never completed her training. A parasite to dysfunction.
We called the doll Zakia, after my birth twin who made me laugh. I pulled myself along in the end. I persevered. I learned to walk again in the world and to sit up straight, right from the beginning and to stay safe for my own sanity. Understanding that nothing can get better until you are stable and healthy is a long old bumpy road for the likes of me.