Review: Down the Tubes
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 07 4, 2014
This contemporary story is a challenging read, dropping a normal fortyish mother in among drug addicts as she takes a job in a London counselling service.Interspersed with Cheryl's musings on her own children and work on statistics, we meet a pair of young addicts who take anything and everything and want to keep on doing that; it's easier than having to make a living, and they like being off their heads. Cheryl's expanding files as she gets to know some of the service's clients are contrasted with the health hazard and safety hazard that is the flat where Nicky and Dodo make a base.Before long I was asking myself why it is that unemployment giros are paid to people who patently have no intention of ever working and who spend as much as they can on drugs of all sorts to deal to friends to pay for their own habits. Some are burglars and prescription forgers too. We're told we should be non-judgemental. The centre staff however have enough experience of manipulative addicts, and their distressed families, to be judgemental - to be realistic."Alice went through all her grandfather's inheritance in a matter of weeks. We didn't even know she had a problem back then, Charles and I. Of course, in our will we've arranged for Alice's share to be put in trust. It's been terrible, it really has. Alice sold lots of my jewellery including my mother's wedding ring, you know. She's only twenty-two."Contrast this with the eagerness of the dealer to meet up with people who've got clean, moving in on them and pretending friendship until they're worse hooked than before. Life on the streets seems like an option for Dodo, begging and buying. Eventually, after hitting rock bottom, he gets a chance at rehab and his real name of Michael emerges. We know that Cheryl has a missing son called Michael, who left home as a teen. The rehab centre opens a door to another world for the addicts, though for some of them it doesn't last.I noticed that smoking is still permitted in offices in this tale, though it's been illegal to smoke in the workplace in Ireland for several years now, and the counsellors' smoking isn't giving the addicts a good example. The jargon used - passive-aggressive, dysfunctional families, undermining - isn't so crystal clear when Cheryl sees that it could apply to her own past efforts at raising a family. And really, who is a perfect parent?  This story, called Down The Tubes to resonate with London and motherhood, told in the vernacular and rich with contrast, asks difficult questions about the way society has been travelling and how a minority of people are getting excluded from all positive life opportunities, just because someone - we aren't shown who - can make a profit from gradual poison. Kate Rigby is an English author who has studied psychology and her book would form a good background for anyone interested in writing a crime series.