Page 37 - James Caan - The Real Deal

3 · Breaking Free

agreed that I’d just take a handful of stuff so that I could avoid a
big exit. He agreed to take one bag of my things out of the house
at a time a bit later and give them to a friend of mine with a car
who would then drop them off in Kensington.
By the time I was ready to leave it was mid-afternoon. My
mother was in the kitchen, my father in the front room. Neither
of them would say goodbye, so I just walked out of the front door
with my bag as my brothers and sisters watched from an upstairs
window.
The walk from the house to the railway station had never
seemed so long. I was so tense that it was all I could do just to
keep looking forward and put one foot in front of the other. I was
just a skinny kid – I wasn’t even fully grown yet – and yet there I
was, walking out on my family towards uncertainty. I only knew
that I couldn’t look back: one tiny moment of weakness and I
might not have been able to carry on.
I half expected – and maybe half wanted – someone to come
after me. If my dad or my brother or my sister had followed me
out on to the street and asked me to go home, I absolutely would
have, not just because they’d asked but because by this stage I was
broken. It took everything I had to hold it together. I had spent all
my time thinking about the practicalities – I’d worked out what to
say and where I would go – but I had never really considered how
I would feel. I’d always known it was going to be bad, and because
of that I hadn’t wanted to go there and had just blanked it out.
As long as I was still in Forest Gate there was a chance someone
would run after me, so I had to keep up the appearance that I was
OK with what had happened. I walked along the street as casually
as I could, but as soon as the train came in and the chances of
someone I knew finding me had gone, I let go. As the doors closed,
I started crying. Those closing doors meant there was no going
back. It wasn’t theory any more, it was real, and I was off to start
a new life about which, frankly, I didn’t have a clue.

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