Stranger at Home

1984

The year of 1984 was a strange one for me. There were plenty of things going on in the world. The miner's strike began that year, lasting twelve months, during which the strike pickets and police clashed several times at pits and collieries around the country. In the North East, it was particularly significant, since the region is renowned for its vast number of pits. Yvonne Fletcher, a police officer in London, was famously shot by a Libyan Diplomat. English pound notes were taken out of circulation. Brunei gained independence from Great Britain. The country replaced O-levels and CSEs with GCSEs. The AIDS virus was finally identified. In the world of technology, the first Macintosh went on sale, and genetic fingerprinting was now more widely used when obtaining evidence of a crime – something that would have come in extremely handy for me fourteen years before. It was a huge year for pop culture, too. Jeremy went to see a wide range of films, including Ghostbusters, The Terminator, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Police Academy, and The Karate Kid. Popular artists included Michael Jackson, Tina Turner, Phil Collins, Wham, Duran Duran, Bruce Springsteen, among many others. I could often hear songs by these people blasting in the street somewhere.

I was only vaguely aware of these things half the time, though. While it seemed the rest of the world was out having fun, I was in a world of my own. My mother's words had hit me hard the year before, and it really knocked my confidence. I never allowed her the satisfaction of knowing what it did to me, but it hurt me all the same, mostly because I believed it was true. It was then when I started having the bad dreams. I hate to say it, but I also believe that these nightmares were partly down to Jeremy's increasingly bad behaviour. As bitchy and as spiteful as she was, my mother was right – Jeremy was becoming more of a drinker. I tried to stop him, but it's impossible when your child has a mind of their own and they are as determined as you are. If he wanted to go out, he would go out, and there was nothing I could do to stop him, unless I somehow managed to pin him down and chain him up in the house until he matured. Jeremy could never see the wrong in it – it was the eighties after all, and everyone was, and still is, doing it. Everyone was doing it in the sixties and seventies, too, but this decade has just been wild. Jeremy also grew his hair into a mullet, which I did not like. They were common among boys his age, but I thought it made him look a bit scruffy, especially since he did not take proper care of it.

His drinking got worse throughout the year. He wasn't even going to clubs and bars some of the time. I heard from a few of the neighbours (who happened to be on the neighbourhood watch scheme) that Jeremy was just at the end of the street some of the time, sat on the bench probably with a cheap plastic bottle of cider. He was causing no trouble to passers-by, I was pleased to hear, but his presence there, along with the others he hung around with, was causing people to be anxious. They were not bad kids. They had been in my house plenty of times and were all polite to me, but people were wary of them all the same.

He gave me abuse when he came home drunk. To the outside world, he might have been this boy who wouldn't say boo to a goose. Yes, he drank, but other than that he was no problem in the community. But when he entered my door, he was a different person. I only hoped that he would not get married one day, because his wife would have a hell of a life with him if this were to continue.

He never raised a finger to me, but he shouted and verbally abused me, mainly crying on about Christopher, and how I wasn't doing anything to help get his dad's conviction overturned because he was dying. He did not understand the laws on compassionate leave, which I had read about as soon as I found out Harry Preston was dying. Jeremy did not understand that the courts would not let him out, mainly because he might have had several years to go with no health problems anyway, but also because he was convicted for murdering his own baby. No court in the right mind would let him just walk out of those prison gates. To the rest of the world, Harry was up there with the likes of Ian Brady and Nazis. Harry Preston was going to die in prison, and Jeremy could not accept that. He genuinely believed that there was a chance that his father was innocent, and he saw it unjust that Harry should be kept in there until the end of his days.