He inhaled the smoke, the first cigarette of the day always his favourite. All the others that followed had a diminished effect because the hit wasn’t as perceptible, just topping up the levels. He could apply anything to his recovery now – there were metaphors everywhere. He finished his fag and stubbed it on the wall, then ran it under the tap before throwing it in the bin. He always wet the end now. He’d had a nasty almost Towering Inferno experience when he’d been shit-faced in a girl’s high-rise flat a few years back, put his fag end in the bin and slowly set light to the entire thing. It had caught on one of the girl’s make-up wipes, which are almost fifty per cent alcohol. They woke choking in the morning with the bin smouldering, a fog of smoke blackening the bedroom. That had caused him to have one of his many lightbulb moments about his drinking. How he should ‘cut back’. He shook his head. What a fuck-up. When he’d finally read chapter three in The Big Book: ‘More About Alcoholism’, rather than just carrying it around like some magic talisman against denial, he’d seen himself reflected back in a slew of situations over the last twenty-odd years. That had been the defining lightbulb moment, and having the seizure to end all seizures. He’d pissed himself during it, not that he remembered, but he was pretty sure it was his incontinence episode that had driven Betsy away, rather than his untethered drinking.
Carl snooped through the gauze curtains he’d put up to prevent everyone seeing in so easily. They worked like a two-way mirror – he could still see out but no one else could see in, something he revelled in – weren’t all photographers nosy? Alison was marshalling Grace into the car for the school run, with the lost bag under her arm. When he’d first met her at Jo’s party, he’d been with Betsy, but she’d managed to blindside him. She’d reminded him so much of Janey that he wasn’t able to speak to her properly for about an hour, the quicksand of unexpected grief threatening to pull him under. She was sweetly pretty with her tufty blond crop and Slavic cheekbones. It had been more about the way she held herself, how she walked into the party not knowing anyone but deep down knew she would make friends because why wouldn’t she. They’d had a stilted conversation in the kitchen about how he might be able to get her some work, which was a joke really because his work had been drying up like a slug dipped in salt. He was lucky that Jeff, his agent, hadn’t dropped him.
It had been the subject of work that had lit the fuse for the bender that brought him to this meeting today, accompanied by Ali. He wasn’t sure whether he was edgy because of the meeting – he already knew he was going to share because he was finally ready to be honest – or because Ali was coming. About ten times he’d walked to his front door to knock on hers and say he was fine going on his own, and then the fear gripped him round the throat and he’d bottled it. He knew he needed someone there today to bear witness because this time it was different. He was well aware that phrase was worn paper thin now, so actually having a fresh, unseasoned pair of ears might be helpful.
He watched Ali reverse into the road and pull away round the corner. His phone chimed on the breakfast bar in the kitchen where he’d left it charging. Jo and her morning chivvy.
Meeting today at 12. Good luck. Keep it up. I can come to one Friday if you want. x
Jo – she was a piece of work. He could talk about her for hours. As much as he loved her (and he did, like a sister), he also needed a break from her. Living opposite her was like being back in Kent in the eighties, with her and Steve round the corner on their estate, when they’d lived in each other’s pockets. What you wanted when you were a teenager wasn’t necessarily what you wanted when you were an adult, but he admitted it was what he needed. He didn’t want to move out, he just wanted to ease back into his own life without the constant commentary from her. He knew the only way to do that was to stay sober, and today felt like he’d come to the end of a road. Time for the less-travelled path.
17
AA
‘Hello, my name is Katrina and I’m an alcoholic.’
The camera panned around the room, finally resting on a shifty Hugh Grant hiding at the back, obviously feeling superior that his own drink problem was no way near as severe as everyone else’s here. Just the odd gin binge…
‘Hello, Katrina,’ the room answered back to the middle-aged woman wearing jeans and a faded grey hoodie. I glanced round at the people sitting on the orange moulded plastic chairs that had been set out in a semi-circle on the perimeter of the church hall. There was no typical age, typical attire, no one looked like I’d imagined, but I didn’t even know what I had imagined, if I were honest, hence conjuring up good old Hugh, a reliable stalwart in all my everyday fantasies. There were equal numbers of men and women, black skin, white skin, one Asian gentleman – I heard the cheesy hymn we used to sing in primary school ring out through my head: He’s got the whole world in his hands… The only person that stuck out for me was a very young girl who appeared to be about eighteen, and that made me feel strange, wondering how long she had suffered as a child to end up here.
A youngish woman, maybe around thirty, sneaked in late and scooted into a seat opposite me, stashing her black briefcase under her seat. Kerry, the forty-something woman with shocking red lips running the group, was a vivacious bubbly chairperson who commanded respect but who also radiated kindness. I felt a fondness for her already.
‘I’ve been coming to these rooms now for five years,’ Katrina began softly. ‘And I want to say to those of you who are new here, just keep coming. You might not think you’re an alcoholic…’ I shot a sly glance at Carl to my right. Did he think he was one? He must do. ‘You might think none of us are like you, or that you didn’t end up blacked out on a pavement face down in vomit so you must be OK. Alcoholism wears many masks, spits out a million different excuses, doesn’t care about how rich you are or how poor, whether you drink wine because it’s not as bad a neat vodka, whether you would never drink before breakfast. Just keep coming, keep listening, soon you will hear the same things. Don’t look for the differences. God bless.’
‘Thank you for that, Katrina,’ Kerry said. ‘I’d like to add to that I was one of those people. I never thought I was an alcoholic. I think we’ve all been there. I didn’t even drink that much. It creeps up on you.’
Fear collected in my belly. Did I drink too much? Was I an alcoholic? Yes, I had also never ever woken up face down in my own puke, but I did sometimes drink way too much, occasionally carrying on long beyond any sensible limit. I was overcome with a desperate urge to run from the room but remained rooted to my chair. I did actually want to hear what others had to say. I wondered if Carl would speak.
‘Katrina pointed out about the similarities and she’s correct. All of us are individuals, so our experience of what it is like to be an alcoholic will be intrinsically different. But start digging deeper and soon the parallels will reveal themselves. Themes, actions, thought processes, which is why we hold these meetings. Support for those who need it and no judgement.’ She smiled beatifically and soon another member repeated the war cry and revealed a fragment of his own drinking journey. The stories were as varied as the people in the room. Some just numbed the pain but functioned in their lives, then realised it was no way to exist once they had lost everything. Others trail-blazed through a warzone of their childhood, arriving at adulthood as raging alcoholics. And some had no discernible motive to begin a drinking career at all other than that they could. The latter reason scared me the most.
‘Hello, my name is Carl and I’m an alcoholic.’
‘Hello, Carl.’
I was transfixed. Carl had barely spoken other than to express thanks for bringing him when we jumped on a bus down the hill. ‘I appreciate you coming. I know I can go on my own, but embedding it with a support really does help me at the beginning.’ We had sat for the rest of the journey in silence, Black Beauty accompanying me as I surreptitiously studied his face. He was classically good-looking in that tall, dark and handsome way that I usually zoned in on, but there was something ab
out him that made me not fancy him. I skated through some possibilities: maybe it was knowing his wife had died and competing with her untouchable ghost was far worse than competing with a fully animated ex-wife; or perhaps it was because he was vulnerable right now and it would be morally wrong. Or it could have been that he was an addict and we all knew they were like catnip to me and I needed to avoid the drama. Another consideration was quite revolutionary – maybe I actually wanted to be on my own and all men were temporarily off the table. Thoughts and turbulent emotions about Ifan still regularly bombarded me: anger, sadness, wishing we were together, then a volcanic fury when I remembered my infection, and praying his cock would shrivel up to the size of a hamster’s scrotum.
‘I haven’t shared here for a while,’ Carl addressed the room. ‘I fell off the wagon spectacularly again and ended up in hospital, trying to escape my bed and asking why I was in the liver ward with all these sick people.’ Some people laughed faintly while Kerry pulled a concerned face and nodded empathetically. ‘I think all the other times I shared I was just paying lip service, which I know happens and is all part of my journey. I’ve never been completely honest. I always said when my wife died it pushed me into drinking to block out my feelings, that I used it as a coping mechanism. But that’s not true. It gave me an excuse to openly drink shit loads because I had a concrete reason to. People were a lot more tolerant of a grieving husband than of an out-and-out drunk.’
I sat very still, listening with every fibre in my being. I felt like I was the wrong person to be here. Jo should be witnessing Carl lay down the truth as his best friend. I didn’t even know Carl.
‘I have always drunk far too much, and when Janey and I met we went crazy, going out all the time, drinking, taking cocaine, Es, clubbing. But when we got married, she calmed down and stopped all the craziness. She wanted a baby, but we couldn’t get pregnant. The doctor did loads of tests and it was me: I had lazy sperm, most with no tails, probably caused by years of partying, smoking and drug abuse. I promised to rein it in and get healthy for her. But I couldn’t. I hid my drinking up to a point. If we went out I would get hammered and she would drink too, but not anywhere near like she used to; she knew when to stop. Every day I was getting up early in the morning and drinking vodka before going on a shoot. I stashed miniatures around the house where she would never find them, but I told myself it was all OK because I had completely knocked the drugs on the head. I loved her so much, but I loved booze more. Before we started a round of IVF, Janey found out she was pregnant. We were so happy, but I ruined it by going out and celebrating after work and getting so leathered I was in bed for two days. That was when she said she knew I had a drink problem, but she also knew giving me an ultimatum would never work. But what she did think would work would be the baby’s arrival; that I would want to stop for them. She was beside herself, crying, saying she didn’t want the father of her baby to be an alcoholic but she loved me and it was for better or worse, etc.’
My eyes stung. How could Carl sit there so calmly and cut his heart from his chest and offer everything out on show?
‘So I said I would get help. I started coming to AA near where we lived in Barnes. I hated it. I wasn’t like the other people there, I didn’t live in a phone box, I hadn’t lost everything. I didn’t like the whole God part of the meetings, the Serenity Prayer, listening to other people’s shit. My wife was pregnant and my business was booming, so what if I liked drinking? So I carried on boozing, but only at weekends, genuinely thinking I had it under control, and going to the meetings made me feel like I was being proactive. Janey seemed happier and then at the three-month scan, we found the baby had never developed further than six weeks. Janey had experienced a missed miscarriage. She was devastated. I stopped going to AA. I didn’t need to – there was no baby. She was so enveloped in grief that she never even noticed. I easily slipped back to drinking heavily every day, but promised myself I would go back to AA once Janey was pregnant again. We tried as soon as we were able, but nothing happened. And this is the really hideous part: secretly I was glad. I wanted a baby, but I wanted to drink more. Then the worst day ever happened. Janey was on a work night out and a driver lost control of his car and ploughed into a crowd of people and killed her and another girl from work. He was drunk – the irony wasn’t lost on me. I was broken and I’m not going into that. It’s a whole separate story and I’ve shared it before to some of you here. I gave up drinking for six months, completely stopped. I took the drunk driver killing my wife as a warning shot across my bows. But I stopped drinking as some kind of punishment, not a positive step at all. When nothing changed, I felt worse. All the aftermath support of casseroles and friends stopping over petered out and I was left with drink. And that’s where I began my story in AA here, with the untruth of Janey’s death pushing me over the edge.’
Tears were streaming down my face. A man on my other side silently handed me a tissue. I thanked him and blew my nose loudly.
‘Wow, well done, Carl,’ Kerry said quietly. ‘That must have been very hard to admit, but as you know, it’s one more step forward on the journey in recovery.’
‘Carl, I needed to hear that,’ the woman in the business suit said. ‘My own story of excuses is very similar. Thank you.’ A few other people expressed similar feelings and then a few more shared. But I was done and I zoned out from the few who opened up before the meeting closed.
‘Have you never said that out loud before?’ I asked Carl as we walked back up the hill. It felt somewhat surreal, having a deep and meaningful with someone I barely knew day to day, but whose soul I’d had a fleeting glimpse into.
‘No, not even to myself.’
‘That was so moving, so raw. I was in bits. I don’t know how you were so composed.’
‘Because in a way it was like it all happened to someone else. I know it happened to me, and I now know I was an alcoholic before Janey died. I knew before I last fell off the wagon and I think I fell off because I wouldn’t admit the truth, so once again, blotted it out.’
We carried on up the hill with just the sound of the traffic and distant sirens punctuating our companionable silence.
‘Are you and Betsy still together?’ I eventually asked as we reached the brow of the hill where the buses turned left.
‘God, no!’ he laughed. ‘She freaked out after the ambulance situation.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘Don’t be. She was too young. We’d only been dating for a few months. It wasn’t serious.’
‘How long did you leave it until you started dating after Janey died?’
‘Once I started drinking again and went downhill, so about six months after. I was desperately trying to fix the pain by fucking it away with models at work, girls I met at parties, and when that didn’t work, I drank to excess. I barely functioned and that was when Jo stepped in. We’d been best friends at school. She told me I was going to die if I didn’t sort myself out. I wanted to die, though. Janey had been the love of my life.’
‘What did Janey do? How did you meet?’
‘I met her at a club when I was out with Jo. She was a midwife, entirely disconnected from my fake world. She delivered babies and nurtured people. I thought she was amazing. She was so beautiful too – not like the models I worked with, more in a girl-next-door way, very natural. We just clicked and were engaged after six months. I just knew I wanted to be with her. I never looked at anyone else again until she died.’
‘It must have felt pointless getting sober then, once Jo intervened.’
‘Yes, it really did, but she made me see I still had a life. She knows all about this kind of shit. My parents were worried sick, my brother had a baby during the whole débâcle of Janey’s death and I’d never met my nephew. So Jo took me to see him when he was about eight months old. I’d been on the piss solidly for two weeks and she threw me in the shower and drove me to Kent. When I saw this little baby boy who was related to me, something shifted. I real
ised I wanted to be a father at some point. So Jo helped. I sold my house in Barnes, where Janey and I had lived. By the time I moved out she had been dead over a year. And I bought this place to be near Jo and closer to Kent and my parents. And be part of the Mews. I’m no good on my own.’
‘Me neither!’ I laughed. ‘So you kept falling off the wagon? Do you think this will be it now?’
‘As in stay sober? In AA, you always say “one day at a time”. For me, at the very beginning of my journey it was a minute at a time, then an hour, then a day.’
‘How do you feel about meeting someone else now?’
‘I think I need to be on my own, which is a first for me as I hate it and I never last more than a month. AA don’t recommend embarking on a new relationship when you’re doing your twelve steps. I have to get back on track, concentrate on my recovery and get on top of work.’
‘I hate being on my own too. I broke up with my last boyfriend in January and it was a total nightmare.’ No one else in the Mews knew what had really happened. Something about Carl made me want to spill my guts; I could tell he wouldn’t gossip.
‘No way!’ Carl exploded into raucous laughter when I recounted my sob story, immediately slapping his hand over his mouth. ‘I’m so sorry, it isn’t funny at all. It was just when you mentioned the leather chaps.’
‘I know!’ I burst out laughing too. ‘I mean, all I could think about when I saw him on the screen was I bet they’re sticking to his leg hairs and how icky and painful that would feel.’
‘What a dick,’ he said once we’d calmed down. ‘You’re better off without him. Have you started dating again?’
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