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The Stairway to Heaven.

Twyford was having a bad day. She had run out of phone credits, smoked her last fag and the hangover from last Wednesday showed no sign of improvement.

In an obscene rant, she exhausted the number of times you could use a certain word in what passed for meaningful street-speech.

Syringe wasn’t much better. He emerged from a drug-induced fug, and had a go at ‘improving’ Twyford’s f-word count. He failed miserably and collapsed in the corner.

Life was indeed a bitch. At least that was the conclusion Jamie the foetus was coming to in Twyford’s abused womb.

Her off-the-scale stressed, frustrated and useless existence served to create a nightmare world for little Jamie too. He had narrowly missed being ‘terminated.’ And had the bus turned up, the clinic would have added Twyford’s name to their list of clients.

She seemed locked forever in a vicious spiral of despair and pointlessness. Her name came during her mother’s hallucinations in a drink/drug binge at the local club, ‘Oblivion.’ Having spent hours with her arms wrapped around a toilet, the word ‘Twyford’ became etched on her consciousness.

The name sounded exotic to many of Twyford’s peers, and virtually guaranteed her a place at any auditions for TV humiliation which would prove her massive lack of any obvious talent or endless capacity to present herself in the worst possible light.

Of course like everyone she dreamed of becoming an actress or singer. Didn’t the magazines, the songs [‘Do what you want’, ‘You can do anything’, ‘You can have it all’], the pop ‘gurus’, the ads, drug-addled [role] ‘models’ all sing off the same song sheet?

You can have it all; it’s just a question of how much you want it.

Years of convincing people they too could have it all worked well. It took a long time to realise you couldn’t, and even longer to admit to yourself in those quiet moments it was all b*ll**ks. And in the depths of despair, it still offered an illusory lifeline.

‘If I could [I can] get just one more chance…’

Jamie had deliberately chosen a hard path.

His ‘birth’ family ancestors had hardly progressed in six generations. Any problem? Kick ‘em or run off. Rant or sulk. Feast or famine. Substance-induced bliss or despair. Stab ‘em, get arrested. The new hot Cher one minute, the cold Janis Joplin the next.

The males abused their women; the women found abusive men like guided missiles.

Life was short, like a mixed box of duff and genuine illegal fireworks going off prematurely on a roller coaster. You got burned, you got wasted. You threw up. You were made deaf. You had aspirations as the car climbed up to the top of the first and highest peak. They evaporated as the car sped down. You got a lukewarm glow again with each successive peak, but each peak got smaller.

When the car stopped, you got off and looked around in vain for another ride…

Having the outlook, sensitivities and knee-jerk life of a reptile was not an option for Jamie.

He eventually emerged, having fought off the effects of stress, drugs, drink, sugar, fat, salt, nutrient-free food, and the chronically depressing thoughts Twyford wrestled with each minute of her life.

He was determined never to experience the sense of separation from every being on the planet his mother’s ‘life’ epitomised. Syringe wasn’t his father.

For reasons no-one could ever fathom, little Jamie ended up at nursery school. He became the star of the show.

Other mothers, who had threatened to withdraw their kids from the nursery when they found out who Jamie’s mother was, felt something almost magical about the place. And no-one would admit it, but they knew it was Jamie who had created the magic.

And their kids too had become different. Not for them the X-boxes, the endless hours in front of the television, the poisonous diet, the sugar spikes and tantrums. Jamie and the other kids respected each other. And because they respected each other, their parents seemed to realise the mother next to them was no lesser being because she didn’t pay £500 for her handbag.

One of the parents was from Finland. She had ensured that her pregnancy would be stress-free. In her former country, parents were paid during their pregnancy year, to ensure Finnish kids had the potential to become mature, loving, creative and intelligent people, not Pavlovian reptiles.

She knew what Jamie was doing, and encouraged her child to be with him as much as possible.

The nursery had animals, and each child had learned to communicate silently with them. Slowly, over time, the nursery attracted interest from all over the country. There was a long waiting list.

Jamie left, and went on to primary school. Twyford’s binges and rants had almost completely stopped. And she was grateful to Jamie, because he didn’t crave toys, gadgets, chemicals and the endless stimulation other kids seemed to need like air and water. What she spent went on decent food, books and time in nature.

Teachers noticed Jamie had well-develop frontal brain lobes, his forehead didn’t slope back like the overwhelming majority of the population. And he smiled a lot. In fact he rarely did anything but smile.

Because Jamie was different, he attracted a following. The usual rag-bag of bullies, hyped up burger-munchers and rubber-neckers left him alone. Jamie’s ‘people’ were like him. Sane, loving and inspirational.

Jamie never criticised the majority of kids who succumbed to the tidal wave of junk and trivia. He knew that the key to turning the world around meant people who were happy in their own skin, who accepted themselves, and saw their purpose as helping to create a world in which all beings were at piece.

He also realised how the false dichotomy between peace, calm and joy and ‘feeling alive’ when driving at 150 mph, or being a ‘hell-raiser’ was used to put down those who radiated bliss.

Syringe was/had been an adrenalin junkie, and of course, each adrenalin rush became addictive yet insufficient. And the logistics of creating an opportunity to go an extra 10, 20 or 50 mph were often far more demanding than chopping powder with a credit card and bending over a toilet.

Whilst a punk version of ‘My Way’ was belting out at ear-damaging levels on the stereo, ruining the peace for dozens of neighbours, Syringe took refuge in the fact they were all losers.

They could keep their bingo, the lottery, spam, oven chips, cans of cheap booze, the X factor, the odd meal out and stuff it up their a****. No Syringe was alive all right, high as a kite on coke, 120 decibels and an imminent drive in his mate’s Subaru. If someone got damaged by his excesses, so what, it was better for them than a lifetime of Coronation Street.

One of Syringe’s mates said coke made him feel like ‘being in the arms of God.’ That was good enough for Syringe.

Jamie knew all about the bloke who had shared his mother’s needles. Love had eluded him as a kid, and his mother’s performance when she was pregnant was on a par with Twyford’s.

Syringe was an ‘individual.’ So unique was he that Twyford’s washing machine used more of its intelligence and had more programmes. To get Syringe to move required about six stimuli. Drugs, fags, a fast car, sex and anything which contained caffeine. He did some robbing to buy ‘street’ clothes made by multi-nationals in Asian sweat shops and sold back to gullible idiots like him for obscene prices. A £50 T-shirt with ’Noke 53’ on it was making a massive statement against ‘the system.’

As Jamie continued his blissful way through life, in between altered states, local Syringe clones had often wondered how he could seemingly get in and stay in states they got into fleetingly without destroying his veins, nose and life. What puzzled them most is that Jamie continued to function, and didn’t need to shut himself down, collapse and hang out in unsanitary hovels.

Those a little higher up the food chain were too intrigued by Jamie. He was least like a ‘celebrity’ as you could find, and seemed totally incorruptible.

Twyford had grown tired of turning her random, scattered and totally pointless thoughts into speech via a mobile phone, and forgot about phone credits. As she no longer jammed up the airwaves with obscene gossip and trivial bull****, she found her thoughts became more in tune with her son’s thoughts of oneness, peace and harmony.

And she began to realise she could have and be these things without a nicked credit card, CD or hairspray.

She took one look at the expendable, time-bounded ‘fashion icons’ who kept themselves slim through fags, drugs and not eating, and thought, no, that’s not for me.

She knew it was off the wall, but her brain felt different. She felt different. Life was different.

And Jamie regularly maintained contact with his siblings through thought. They too were influencing their parents, their peers and their communities.

Syringe? He began to wonder if his name served him…

Jack Stewart, October 2007