The Longing: A bestselling psychological thriller you won’t be able to put down. Jane Asher
sometimes wondered if her early memories of her father, Ian, were imaginary. She was uncertain whether she had invented the times when the house felt happy; when he didn’t shout at her mother, when she and her younger brother, Peter, were given hugs from him at bedtime and treats at weekends. Years of watching perfect families in her favourite television series – when she had wanted to be like them so much that she had sat in front of the set, screwed her eyes tightly closed and prayed and prayed to be taken into the screen and into their lives – had confused her.
But her memories were right. It was only after years of being unemployed since the closure of the tobacco factory where he had worked for over two decades that the morose, defeatist side to Ian Watkins’ nature was released, producing a bitterness that resulted in a lack of kindness and affection to his wife and two children that amounted to cruelty. The bitterness had infected his children: Anna made no real friends at school, and alienated her teachers with the harsh cynicism she expressed with sharp intelligence.
She had always known she would get out of the family home at the earliest opportunity, and the continued daily diet of television for her and Peter had helped to instil in her the illusion that if she could only get herself ‘down South’ she would be able to make something of her life, and even return in glory after a few years, bringing back fame and fortune as in the fairy tales she had read to herself as a young girl.
At the age of fourteen she began to plan her escape. She took on an early morning paper round and started to save the small amount of money that it brought in, and in spite of her father’s insistence that it was to be given to her mother to help with the bills, she managed to lie sufficiently well about exactly how much she was making to be able to put tiny amounts aside in a tin on top of the old-fashioned wardrobe in the bedroom she shared with her brother.
At sixteen she packed her few belongings into a carrier bag in the middle of the night, emptied the tin into her purse and left, making her way down to London by hitching lifts and buying just enough food to survive. Her family made rather half-hearted attempts to find her, but deep down her mother recognised in herself an envy at Anna’s freedom, and knew that even if they did succeed in tracking her down, they had nothing to offer which could persuade her to return. Only Peter was truly sad at losing her, and cried himself to sleep for many nights in their room. For months he waited for some news of her – a letter or call – but gradually began to face the fact that she was gone from his life for ever.
It didn’t take long for Anna to discover the reality of trying to survive in a large city where jobs are impossible to find unless you have a permanent address, and where a permanent address is impossible to find unless you have the job to pay for it. Having no family or friends to turn to, she found that the helping hands she was offered tended to come with invisible and insidious strings attached. Not that she was sexually inexperienced, having had several rushed and unfulfilling encounters after originally losing her virginity at fifteen in the back of a van, but she was streetwise enough to be suspicious of every stranger she met.
She inevitably found herself clinging to the first person who spoke to her with what appeared to be genuine warmth and kindness, knowing that his motives might not be entirely altruistic, but unable to resist basking in the gentleness of his tone and the comfort of his arms around her at night. This was Dave, an eighteen-year-old from Brighton. Having made his way, like Anna, to the streets of London, he had found them paved not with gold but with crumbling, unwelcoming concrete. They met in Piccadilly Circus, where many of the homeless gathered to watch the world go by or to intoxicate themselves into a senseless, or at least differently sensed, stupor in which they could then see it through the comforting haze of drugs or alcohol. Anna, having run away from Glasgow partly to escape the effects of the drug culture, found herself straight back in it, and it soon became clear that Dave himself survived by pushing relatively small amounts of crack and ecstasy around Wardour Street and Soho Square. She added to their meagre finances by begging, something she could only allow herself to do by telling herself, in a piece of tortuous logic, that at least she was going out and finding the money herself, and that it was better than living off the state.
When every penny is a struggle to find, even the smallest expenses become difficult. Anna soon convinced herself that as Dave was sleeping only with her, and as she believed his tales of relative monogamy prior to their relationship, condoms were a luxury that could be dispensed with. She had a vague idea that they were being handed out free somewhere locally, but never got it together to find out where or to bother to do anything more constructive about protecting herself. As a girl who had grown up knowing several friends who’d either had full-blown Aids or were HIV positive, she knew she was taking a calculated risk, but strangely enough the more obvious, and more likely, outcome of a pregnancy never seriously occurred to her.
She put off confronting her condition for months. Somehow in the mess of her life, the lack of periods and the sickness assumed an insignificance they would never have had if other more pressing physical problems hadn’t had to be faced. Anna’s priorities were finding her next meal and a place to sleep without compromising herself with what she saw as the ‘system’, and the momentous change taking place in her own body almost appeared to be part of someone else’s life, belonging to a future that seemed unreal. Perhaps she also knew, without admitting it to herself, exactly what Dave’s reaction to prospective fatherhood would be, and hoped that by ignoring her condition, she could make it disappear. But of course it didn’t. Anna’s impoverished and undernourished body nurtured the tiny uninvited guest in spite of her, and the embryo that was Harry grew and grew until, demanding more space, it began to make her belly swell.
She was right about Dave. Struggling unsuccessfully to take responsibility for his own life, there was no way he could countenance taking on another one, and as soon as Anna had reluctantly confirmed what he had been beginning to suspect, he was off. Anna wasn’t surprised to find herself abandoned – she felt herself destined to be so, and it only seemed to fit into a pattern which had been laid out for her from the start. Perhaps it added another little brick of bitterness to the defensive wall with which she encircled herself, but she almost enjoyed the sheer predictability of it, and if she had believed in God would certainly have been tempted to congratulate Him on the thoroughness of His planning when it came to a life of unhappiness and hopelessness.
Her small effort at coming down to London in order to better herself had landed her in even greater trouble than before; now she saw no possibility of the imagined successful job or marriage, and resigned herself to a future of poverty and dependence. Since her arrival she had thought very little of home, managing to keep her mind carefully turned away from worries about Peter or her mother, frightened that to start on that road would lead her only too quickly towards a horizon of unbearable loneliness. But now the pull of the past was almost irresistible. She admitted to herself for the first time how much she missed not only the two of them, but also, to her own surprise, her father.
She considered an abortion, of course, but having let matters drift for such a long time she knew it was very late for that and, with the loss of Dave, she was already beginning to think of this mysterious lump inside her as her one ally against the world. She was also realistic enough to know that the existence of a baby would secure her some sort of housing, and for once she allowed herself to join the system and accept help. By the time she made the fatal shopping trip when her whole world was to be turned upside down, Lambeth Council had settled her in a high-rise flat in Streatham, where she managed efficiently, if uncomfortably, on benefits. And where she lived for one reason only – to love and protect the little boy who had come to mean everything to her.
The awe-inspiring medical charisma of the Harley Street and Wimpole Street names has been lent so generously to the lesser-known streets that cross them that over the years the houses using the addresses of their more illustrious neighbours have stretched further and further around the corners in a proliferation of ‘A’s and ‘AA’s until they almost meet halfway between the two streets, leaving only a handful of correctly named houses between them. The address of Professor Hewlett’s clinic was officially given as ‘Harley Street’, and so it took Juliet and Michael several minutes to find the pillared white house round the corner in Weymouth Street, separated by at least four houses from the junction. They were surprised by its ordinariness, perhaps expecting the building to show some