1I didn’t think Bob and I could have become closer, but the experience we’d just been through together tightened our bond even more. In the days that followed, he stuck to me like a limpet, almost watching over me in case I had some kind of relapse.

2There was no danger of that, however. I felt better than I had done in years. The thought of returning to the dark dependencies of the past made me shiver. I had come too far now to turn back.

3I decided to celebrate my breakthrough by doing up the flat a little bit. So Bob and I put in a few extra hours each day outside the tube station and then used the proceeds to buy some paint, a few cushions and a couple of prints to put on the wall.

4I then went along to a good second-hand furniture shop in Tottenham and bought a nice new sofa. It was a burgundy red, heavy-duty fabric, with a bit of luck the sort of material that would be able to resist Bob’s claws. The old one was knackered, partly down to natural wear and tear, but also because of Bob’s habit of scratching at its legs and base. Bob was banned from scratching the new one.

5As the weeks passed and the nights turned even darker and colder, we spent more and more time curled up on the new sofa. I was already looking forward to a nice Christmas for me and Bob, although, as it turned out, that was a little premature.

6It wasn’t often that I got post apart from bills, so when I saw a letter in my mailbox in the hallway of the flats one morning in early November 2008, I immediately noticed it. It was an airmail envelope and had a postmark—Tasmania, Australia.

7It was from my mother.

8We’d not been in proper contact for years. However, despite the distance that had formed between us, the letter was very chatty and warm. She explained that she had moved to a new house in Tasmania. She seemed to be very happy there.

9The main point of her letter, however, was to offer me an invitation. ‘If I was to pay your air fares to Australia and back, would you come and see me?’ she asked.

10She explained that I could come over the Christmas holidays. She suggested I could also take in a trip to Melbourne to see my godparents, to whom I’d once been very close.

11‘Let me know,’ she said, signing off. ‘Love, Mum.’ There would have been a time when I’d have thrown the letter straight into the dustbin. I’d have been defiant and stubborn and too proud to take a handout from my family.

12But I’d changed, my head was in a different place now. I had started to see life a lot more clearly and I could almost feel some of the anger and paranoia that I’d felt in the past falling away. So I decided to give it some thought.

13It wasn’t a straightforward decision, far from it. There were lots of pros and cons to take into consideration.

14The biggest pro, obviously, was that I’d get to see my mother again. No matter what ups and downs we’d had over the years, she was my mother and I missed her.

15We’d been in contact a couple of times since I’d fallen through the cracks and ended up on the streets but I’d never been honest with her about what had really happened. We’d met once in the past ten years, when she’d come to England briefly. I’d gone to meet her in a pub near Epping Forest. I’d taken the District Line up there and spent three or four hours with her. When I’d not returned as expected after six months, I’d spun her a story about having formed a band in London and said I wasn’t going to come back to Australia while we were ‘trying to make it big’.

16I stuck to that story when I met her in the pub.

17I hadn’t felt great about telling her a pack of lies, but I didn’t have the courage or the strength to tell her that I was sleeping rough, hooked on heroin and basically wasting my life away.

18I had no idea whether she believed me or not. At that point in my life, I really didn’t care.

19We’d talked occasionally after that, but frequently I would go for months on end without making contact, which had obviously caused her a lot of grief.

20She’d gone to amazing lengths to get hold of me at times. I hadn’t thought to ring her when the 7/7 bombings happened in London in July 2005, I was— thankfully—nowhere near the blasts, but—stuck on the other side of the world— my mother had no idea that I was all right. Nick, whom she was still with, was serving in the police force in Tasmania at the time. Somehow he managed to persuade a member of the Met to do him and my mum a favour. They looked me up on their records and sent a couple of cops round to my B&B in Dalston one morning.

21They scared the living daylights out of me when they arrived banging on the doors.

22‘Don’t worry mate, you haven’t done anything wrong,’ one of them said when I opened the door, looking petrified probably. ‘There are just a couple of people on the other side of the world who want to know you are alive.’ I had been tempted to make a joke and say that they’d almost given me a heart attack but I decided against it. They didn’t look like they were that pleased to have been given the job of checking up on me.

23I contacted Mum and reassured her that I was OK. Again, I hadn’t even considered that somebody else might have been concerned about me. I didn’t think that way at that time. I was on my own and concerned only with my own survival. But now I’d changed.

24After all the years of neglect and deception, it would be a chance to make it up to her and to put the record straight. I felt like I needed to do that.

25The other obvious positive was that I’d get to have a decent holiday in the sun, something that I had been deprived of for years living in London and working mostly in the evenings. I still felt drained by the experience of switching to my new medication and knew that a few weeks in a nice environment would do me the power of good. My mother told me she was living on a little farm way out in the middle of nowhere, near a river. It sounded idyllic. Australia, or more specifically, the Australian landscape, had always occupied a special place in my heart.

26Reconnecting with it would be good for my soul.

27The list of pros were long. The list of cons, however, was even longer. And at the top of the list was my biggest concern of all: Bob. Who would look after him? How could I be sure he’d be there waiting for me when I got back? Did I actually want to be separated from my soulmate for weeks on end?

28The answer to the first question presented itself almost immediately.

29The moment I mentioned it Belle volunteered to look after him at her flat. I knew she was totally trustworthy and would take care of him. But I still wondered what the effect would be on him.

30The other big concern was money. My mother might have been offering to pay for my fare, but I still wouldn’t be allowed into Australia without any money. I did some digging around and found that I’d need at least £500 in cash to gain admittance.

31I spent a few days weighing up both sides of the argument but eventually decided I’d go. Why not? A change of scenery and some sunshine would do me good.

32I had a lot to do. For a start I had to get a new passport, which wasn’t easy given the way my life had disintegrated in recent years. A social worker gave me a hand and helped me organise the necessary paperwork, including a birth certificate.

33I then had to sort out the flights. The best deal by far was to fly with Air China to Beijing and then down to Melbourne. It was a much longer journey and involved a lengthy stop-off in Beijing. But it was way cheaper than anything else on the market. My mother had given me an email address by now. I sent her an email with all the details, including my new passport number. A few days later I got a confirmation email from the website through which my mother had booked the tickets. I was on my way.

34All I had to do now was raise £500. Easy.

35The flight I’d found was heading to Australia in the first week of December. So for the next few weeks, I worked every hour of the day in all weather. Bob came with me most days, although I left him at home when it was raining heavily. I knew he didn’t like it and I didn’t want to risk him catching a chill or getting ill before I went away. There was no way I’d be able to go to Australia knowing he was ill again.

36I was soon saving up a bit of cash, which I kept in a little tea caddy I’d found.

37Slowly but surely it began to fill up. As my departure date loomed into view, I had enough to make the trip.

38I headed to Heathrow with a heavy heart. I’d said goodbye to Bob at Belle’s flat. He’d not looked too concerned, but then he had no idea I was going to be away for the best part of six weeks. I knew he’d be safe with Belle but it still didn’t stop me fretting. I really had become a paranoid parent.

39If I’d imagined the trip to Australia was going to be a nice, relaxing adventure I was sorely mistaken. The thirty-six hours or so it took me was an absolute nightmare.

40It started quietly enough. The Air China flight to Beijing took eleven hours and was uneventful. I watched the in-flight movie and had a meal but I found it hard to sleep because I wasn’t feeling fantastic. It was partly because of my medication but partly also because of the damp London weather. Maybe I’d spent too many hours selling the Big Issue in the pouring rain. I had a horrendous cold and kept sneezing all the way through the flight. I got a few funny looks from the air stewardesses and some of my fellow passengers when I had a bad attack, but thought nothing of it until we landed in Beijing.

41As we taxied towards the terminal, there was an announcement from the captain over the tannoy. It was in Chinese first but there was then an English translation. It basically said that we should stay in our seats until we were asked to leave the plane.

42‘Odd,’ I thought.

43The next thing I saw was two uniformed Chinese officials wearing facemasks.

44They were walking down the aisle—straight towards me. When they got to me, one of them produced a thermometer.

45An air stewardess was standing there to translate. ‘These men are from the Chinese government. They need to take your temperature,’ she said.

46‘OK,’ I said, sensing this wasn’t the time to argue.

47I opened wide and sat there while one of the officials kept looking at his watch.

48After they’d muttered something in Chinese the air hostess said: ‘You need to go with these men to undergo some routine medical checks.’ It was 2008 and we were at the height of the swine flu scare. China, in particular, was being incredibly nervous about it. I’d watched a report on the news a few days earlier in which they’d talked about the way people were being turned away from China if there was the slightest hint of them being infected. A lot of people were being placed in quarantine and held there for days.

49So I was a bit apprehensive as I walked off with them. I had visions of me being holed up in some Chinese isolation ward for a month.

50They ran all sorts of tests on me, from blood tests to swabs. They probably found all sorts of interesting things—but they found no trace of swine flu, SARS or anything else contagious. After a couple of hours, a mildly apologetic official told me that I was free to go.

51The only problem was that I now had to make my way back to my connecting flight and I was lost inside the humongous, hangar-like space that is Beijing airport.

52I had about three hours to find my luggage and my connecting flight. It had been years since I’d spent any time in an airport terminal. I’d forgotten how big and soulless they were, and this one was especially so. I had to take a train from one part of Terminal 3 to another part.

53After a few wrong turns I found my connecting flight less than an hour before it was due to take off.

54I breathed a huge sigh of relief when I sank into my seat on the plane and slept like a log on the flight to Melbourne, mainly through exhaustion. But then at Melbourne I hit another snag.

55As I made my way through the customs area I was suddenly aware of a Labrador dog sniffing animatedly at my luggage.

56‘Excuse me, sir, would you mind coming this way with us,’ a customs guard said.

57‘Oh God,’ I thought. ‘I’m never going to get to meet my mother.’ I was taken to an inspection room where they started going through my stuff.

58They then ran an electric drug detector over my bag. I could tell there was a problem from the expressions on their faces.

59‘I’m afraid your luggage has tested positive for cocaine,’ the guard said.

60I was gobsmacked. I had no idea how that was possible. I didn’t take cocaine and didn’t really know anyone who did. None of my friends could afford it.

61As it turned out, they said that it wasn’t illegal for me to have traces of it for private use.

62‘If you are a casual user and it’s for private consumption all you have to do is tell us and you can be on your way,’ the guard said.

63I explained my situation. ‘I’m on a drug recovery programme so I don’t take anything casually,’ I said. I then showed them a letter I had from my doctor explaining why I was on Subutex.

64Eventually they had to relent. They gave me a final pat down and released me.

65By the time I emerged from the customs area, almost an hour had passed. I had to get another flight down to Tasmania, which took another few hours. By the time I got there, it was early evening and I was utterly exhausted.

66Seeing my mother was wonderful. She was waiting at the airport in Tasmania and gave me a couple of really long hugs. She was crying. She was pleased to see me alive, I think.

67I was really happy to see her too although I didn’t cry.

68The cottage was every bit as lovely as she’d described it in her letter. It was a big, airy bungalow with huge garden space at the back. It was surrounded by farmland with a river running by the bottom of her land. It was a very peaceful, picturesque place. Over the next month I just hung out there, relaxing, recovering and rebooting myself.

69Within a couple of weeks I felt like a different person. The anxieties of London were—literally—thousands of miles away, just over ten thousand, to be precise.

70My mum’s maternal instincts kicked in and she made sure I was fed well. I could feel my strength returning. I could also sense me and my mother were repairing our relationship.

71At first we didn’t talk in great depth about things, but in time I began to open up. Then one night as we sat on the veranda, watching the sun go down, I had a couple of drinks and suddenly it all came out. It wasn’t a big confession, there was no Hollywood drama. I just talked … and talked.

72The emotional floodgates had been waiting to burst open for a while now. For years I had used drugs to escape from my emotions, in fact to make sure I didn’t have any. Slowly but surely I’d changed that. And now my emotions were coming back.

73As I explained some of the lows I’d been through over the last ten years, my mother looked horrified, as any parent would have done.

74‘I guessed you weren’t doing so great when I saw you, but I never guessed it was that bad,’ she said, close to tears.

75At times she just sat there with her head in her hands muttering the word ‘why’ every now and again.

76‘Why didn’t you tell me you’d lost your passport? ’ ‘Why didn’t you call me and ask for help?’ ‘Why didn’t you contact your father?’

77Inevitably, she blamed herself for it. She said she felt like she’d let me down, but I told her I didn’t blame her. The reality was that I had left myself down.

78Ultimately, there was no one else to blame.

79‘You didn’t decide to sleep in cardboard boxes and get off your face on smack every night. I did,’ I said at one point. That set her off crying as well.

80Once we’d broken the ice, so to speak, we talked much more easily. We talked a little about the past and my childhood in Australia and England. I felt comfortable being honest with her. I said that I’d felt she’d been a distant figure when I’d been younger and that being raised by nannies and moving around a lot had had an impact on me.

81Naturally that upset her, but she argued that she’d been trying to provide an income for us, to keep a roof over our heads. I took her point, but I still wished she’d been there more for me.

82We laughed a lot too; it wasn’t all dark conversation. We admitted how similar we were and chuckled at some of the arguments we used to have when I was a teenager.

83She admitted that there had been a big conflict of personality there.

84‘I’m a strong personality and so are you. That’s where you get it from,’ she said.

85But we spent most of the time talking about the present rather than the past.

86She asked me all sorts of questions about the rehab process I’d been through and what I was hoping to achieve now that I was almost clean. I explained that it was still a case of taking one step at a time, but that, with luck, I’d be totally clean within a year or so. Sometimes she just simply listened, which was something she hadn’t always done. And so did I. I think we both learned a lot more about each other, not least the fact that deep down we were very similar, which is why we clashed so much when I was younger.

87During those long chats, I often talked about Bob. I’d brought a photo of him with me, which I showed everyone and anyone who took an interest.

88‘He looks a smart cookie,’ my mother smiled when she saw it.

89‘Oh, he is,’ I said, beaming with pride. ‘I don’t know where I’d been now if it wasn’t for Bob.’

90Spending time in Australia was great. It allowed me to clear my mind. It also allowed me to take stock of where I was - and where I wanted to go from here.

91There was a part of me that hankered to move back. I had family here. There was more of a support network than I had in London, certainly. But I kept thinking about Bob and the fact that he’d be as lost without me as I’d be without him. I didn’t take the idea seriously for very long. By the time I’d started my sixth week in Australia, I was mentally already on the plane back to England.

92I said goodbye to my mother properly this time. She came to the airport with me and waved me off on my way to Melbourne, where I was going to spend some time with my godparents. They had been quite significant figures in my youth. They had owned what was then the biggest private telecom company in Australia and were the first to form a radio pager company in the country so had a lot of money at one point. As a boy, naturally, I used to love spending time at the mansion they’d built in Melbourne. I even lived with them for a while when me and my mother weren’t getting on very well.

93Their reaction to my story was the same as my mother’s - they were shocked.

94They offered to help me out financially and even to find me work in Australia.

95But again I had to explain that I had responsibilities back in London.

96The journey back was much less eventful than the outward trip. I felt much better, fitter and healthier and probably looked it so I didn’t attract so much attention at customs or immigration control. I was so rested and revived by my time in Australia that I slept for most of the trip.

97I was dying to see Bob again, although a part of me was concerned that he might have changed or even forgotten me. I needn’t have had any concerns.

98The minute I walked into Belle’s flat his tail popped up and he bounced off her sofa and ran up to me. I’d brought him back a few little presents, a couple of stuffed kangaroo toys. He was soon clawing away at one of them. As we headed home that evening, he immediately scampered up my arm and on to my shoulders as usual. In an instant the emotional and physical journey I’d made to the other side of the world was forgotten. It was me and Bob against the world once more. It was as if I’d never been away.