by Liam Livings
In the kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil, Mum said, “You gotta do this malarkey again, have you?”
“So they said.”
“I can soon give ’em a ring, tell ’em to stick it.” Her fingers were poised over the numbers on the white cordless phone she’d treated herself to after the Luella money came through.
“I don’t hate him. Not anymore. I think I still love him. I thought I’d gone past that, that he’d pushed me away so much I wouldn’t love him anymore. But no. Seeing him again, it all came flooding back.” I let out a long sigh, willing myself not to cry again. “Idiot!”
“That was a big sigh, love. You sure you’re up to talking more, or do you want to have a kip and we’ll talk about all this tomorrow, or not at all? No need to ever mention it again if you don’t want to. Like I said, one call is all it’ll take.” She rapped her nails on the phone. “You thought he’d crossed the line, now you’ve realised he hasn’t, he’s still his side of the line and in here.” She patted my chest. “Fair enough, we’ve all done it.”
“The line?”
“The thing he would do that you knew would make you leave him. That one thing.”
“Not coming home with me from that horrible squat party. After a whole series of just another hour, just another pill, just another… That?”
“That’s the one. For your dad, it’s cheating. I told him if I ever found out he’d cheated on me, that was the end of it. And violence, but then again, can you imagine him being violent?”
“I can’t imagine him cheating, but anyway. Maybe that wasn’t the line. So what is the line? Where is this line, eh?”
“Cheating, violence?”
“He said he’d never cheat on me. Said no matter how long he disappeared for, he’d always come back to me in our bed.”
“And you believed him?” She tapped the ash off her cigarette into the Ibiza-shaped glass ashtray on the table.
“Why not?”
“I’m just asking. Gotta make sure someone’s looking out for you. Daft romantic.”
“He’s had plenty of opportunities, but he hasn’t. I know someone would have told me—one of our partying friends would have let me know. But, nothing. Besides, we were the gay DJing couple of Ibiza. Everyone knew we were together. If he’d been shagging around, it would have got back to me somehow, don’t you reckon?”
“Fair point, love, fair point. Just checking.”
“And he’d never hit me. He might hit himself, for doing something stupid, but never anyone else.”
“That’s it, then. He’s not crossed the line when you thought he had, and now you’ve seen him again, bang, you’re back where you was before. You’d better be careful, love, cos if you don’t watch yourself, you’ll be back in that afterparty, six o’clock in the morning, surrounded by strangers, asking him to come home as soon as you can say heroin overdose.”
“That’s what I’m worried about.”
“Better help him get through this programme they have at this Friary place, then, hadn’t you?”
“Better had, hadn’t I?” Damn. Bollocks. Shit.
“How many visits, did he say in his letter?”
“Up to six, depending. Barbara explained in her introduction at the first session.”
“Do you want me to drive you next time?”
“Do you think there should be a next time?”
“Up to you, my love, but if you’re in love with him, I’d say better being in love with an ex-addict than being in love with an addict. Do you know what I mean? I’m no expert, but that’s how it looks from where I’m standing.” She pulled her bra strap up so it showed above her hot-pink vest top.
***
The next time I visited Paul, Mum drove me.
Of course I went back. Obviously, I couldn’t have just left him hanging there, part way through the rehab. Even if we were just friends, and honestly, that’s all we were now, I would have helped just a friend. So a friend who was also my ex-boyfriend, he was obviously going to get my help.
Mum kissed me while we were inside the car, wished me good luck.
“Come in, you can’t wait in here the whole time. They’ve got magazines and books in reception. You’ll have to smoke outside, but I can introduce you to the receptionist, she’s nice. She’ll look after you.”
“That’s exactly what I’m afraid of. No fear, I’m staying here, smoking in me own car, thank you very much. This place is freaking me out, even sitting this far away. It’s like some big mouth people disappear into and never leave.”
“Dramatic much?” I was standing next to the car now, leaning down to meet her eyes.
“Now you know where you get it from. Door, I’ll be fine. Go on.”
Not long afterwards, after checking the paperwork, I took my seat opposite Paul. Barbara was in hers, this time wearing an aquamarine dress with floaty sleeves that looked like a nightie from the seventies, over stonewashed grey flared jeans, and again with the matching aquamarine chunky jewellery.
She introduced us to the room for the new patients sat round the edge. “Who would like to go first?”
Feeling a bit buoyed up from last time, and having spoken to Mum, I decided to take the awkward dead-auntie’s-inheritance bull by the horns. “You said when I left, it all fell apart for you. But it’s not my job to look after you. I’m not your mum.”
Barbara put her palm near my face to signal I stop speaking. “Feeling words, please. Using words about how you feel, please.”
“I feel upset when you say you fell apart after I left. It wasn’t just my idea to go to Ibiza, but it was helped by Luella’s inheritance. It wasn’t me who was spending all the money on partying. That was you.”
“Feeling words, please.” She turned to Paul. “How does that make you feel, Paul?”
“Fair enough,” Paul said. “I thought she’d want us to enjoy the money. We enjoyed it, didn’t we, when we first moved out there?”
“Paul, how do you feel?” Barbara asked.
“I feel we enjoyed ourselves when we first got there. I feel we decided together how to spend the money. I feel my partying got out of hand on my own. I don’t blame you, your inheritance, or anything. It was all me. I was the one who took all the drugs, not you.”
I said, “What if everything we had wasn’t real? What if all the love we had for each other was just based on chemicals, on drugs, not a real relationship? Have you thought about that, eh?”
Barbara started to mention feeling words, but Paul interrupted. “It can’t have been. We weren’t off our faces the whole time.”
Someone laughed from the seats behind me.
Barbara turned, glared at the laugher, returned to focus on us and said, “Paul, say more about what you mean. How often were you off your faces?”
“Sometimes.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“Two, maybe three times a week, in peak season, obviously.” Paul shrugged.
Obviously. I bit my lip, willing the truth not to escape, but very soon it was too late. I blurted, “More like four or five times a week.” The silence filled the room as I stared at Paul. “Ask him about when his parents visited.” This is meant to be hard, so why hold back? I was going great guns now, a little bit of me was enjoying it slightly.
Barbara turned to Paul, her hands folded in her lap. “Would you like to comment on that, Paul?”
Paul crossed his arms across his chest and turned his back to me.
This time, the silence didn’t just fill the room; it crashed in like a wave a surfer would be pleased to ride, filling the room with nothingness. We sat like that for five minutes. I don’t know if you’ve ever sat in complete silence in a room full of people for five minutes. It’s a bizarre experience, and I was constantly expecting someone to break it, to dive in and make a joke, but they didn’t. I didn’t want to speak because I wanted Paul to describe what had happened rather than me harping on like some old fishwife ex. I was particularly keen for him to
talk about is since we’d not spoken about it at the time. Even after his parents had gone home, Paul had dismissed it as nothing, saying he was tired, and he needed to see a man about a dog.
The longest five minutes in history passed at a glacial rate. I was beginning to contemplate jumping out the window for some entertainment but noticed the bars on the window and reflected on us being on the ground floor.
Paul said, quietly, slowly, almost inaudibly, “That was a bad time.”
“What was that, Paul?” Barbara asked, writing something on her clipboard with three confident strokes, her tongue sticking out between her lips like a piece of ham.
Paul repeated himself, slightly louder this time.
“Can you tell us how that was a bad time, Paul? What made it a bad time for you?” She leant forward, again with the scribbles on the clipboard.
“I was hanging around with some people who were doing a lot of heavy-duty partying. I was in with the wrong crowd.”
“Now, Paul, what did we learn about personal responsibility?”
He sighed the sigh of a long-suffering man. “I was influenced by these people. I went to talk about some promo work and ended up getting on it with them. It seemed like a good idea at the time.” He looked round the room, trying to catch the eyes of the others sitting by the walls. “Doesn’t it always, eh?”
I looked at Paul and said, “Your parents flew over to see you. And you buggered off for most of the time, seeing a man about a dog, or whatever you said. No apology, no explanation, nothing. And who was left holding the fort, entertaining them? Muggins here.”
Barbara mentioned feeling words. Again.
I wanted to throttle her but suppressed the urge, pushed it deep, deep down to the bottom of my soul and instead said, “I did it because I loved you. Because that’s what you do when you love someone. I listened to you talking about your promotion ideas. When you weren’t sure you could do the party planning, I was there, persuading you you could do it. I could have just seen a spoilt rich kid when I first met you, but I knew you were a worker, a grafter, someone who’d work hard for what he wanted. Just like I did.
“But that was the old you, the you I first met. You turned into this whole other person towards the end. Not caring who you upset, what you did—nothing mattered to you except the next party, the next pill, the next sniff of cocaine. Why did you disappear when your parents were visiting, eh? What was so good you had to drop us for hours on end? Which drug is better than seeing your parents and your boyfriend?”
“It all made me feel suffocated. Being tied to a time, an event, people.” He briefly looked at me before staring back at the floor. He swallowed. “My name is Paul Stockton and I am a drug addict.”
The room filled with applause.
I wanted to jump up from my chair and rip Paul’s tongue out of his throat. All that shitty behaviour and he gets a round of applause? Will they give him a round of applause for being a commitment-phobic selfish prick too?
Even though I wasn’t perfect, I knew I was far from useless, and deserved a fuck’s sight better than that.
Above the clapping, I said, “I loved you. I would have done anything for you. In fact, that’s why I’m still here. Stupid twat. And all you have to say is you were an addict. Pills and coke were better company than me, is that what you’re saying?”
“You were hardly pushing them away if I remember rightly. You’re not exactly Mother Theresa when it comes to narcotics.”
Barbara put her hand up to stop Paul. “We’re here to talk about your addiction, Paul, not Tom’s.”
“Fucking good job, or we’d be here all day.” He glared at me.
What a fucking low blow. Maybe I make men treat me like this. I am useless. I didn’t know my left from my right, my wrong from my right anymore. “Did you love me, or was it all a chemical lie? When you used to shout in my ear when we were on the dance floor how much you loved me, what you wanted to do with me when we got home, when you held me so tight I could hardly breathe, did that mean anything, or was it all nothing?”
“I think so. I mean, what’s love really?” Paul was staring at his lap. “Yes, I said stuff when I was pilled up, who doesn’t? Think of all the things we did straight, all the times I told you I loved you when we were living in London working in shops, before it all got out of hand. All the date nights. All the times I came round to your parents’ house for dinner. Nights in on the sofa watching TV. That was all real. Those were real feelings.
“But I can’t have a relationship now. I’m not ready for one. It’s one of the rules they give us when we come out. We have to get a houseplant and if it’s still alive in twelve months, then buy a goldfish. If they’re both alive in another year, then we can get a little pet, a hamster, something like that. And only when they’re all alive four years after we leave here are we ready for a relationship. That’s right, isn’t it? It was in the relationship workshop last week.”
Barbara nodded. “Well remembered.”
“I’m so done with this. Fuck this.” I turned to Barbara. “Fuck you and your feelings.” I turned to Paul. “Fuck you and not answering my questions. All I wanna know is if you really loved me or if I was wasting my time. All I want is a yes or no. Did you really love me?”
“Dunno. I started loving partying with you.”
I stood. “That’s all I wanted to know.” I left the room, slamming the door behind me, storming past the receptionist shouting for me to sign out, running to Mum’s car and telling her to start the car straight away before I exploded.
Mum started the engine. “Good, was it?”
“Drive, please. I must have FUCKING MUG written across my forehead. What the hell was I thinking, agreeing to do this? Four more times. Four more fucking times. I swear to God, if I hear one more person telling me to talk about my feelings, or Paul blaming everything on his addiction, I’m going to kill someone.”
Mum offered me a cigarette.
I lit it and inhaled deeply, wishing the day to disappear with the smoke as it blew out the window, wondering why on earth I was putting myself through this, remembering the words he’d said, right before I’d reached the end of my touchy-feely-ness psychobabble tether and left. As I felt the tingling in my hands subside, my shoulders lowered from where they’d been up by my ears and I blew out, watching the smoke fill the car then leave through the window.
“No one said it was gonna be easy, love.” Mum squeezed my knee.
“I’m gonna call them and tell ’em to stick it, say Paul can get some other gullible twat to come and play his game.” I sucked so hard on the cigarette I thought I might give myself haemorrhoids.
“All right, love. We’ll sort it all out when we’re home.”
An hour of travelling in silence later, as we approached home, I had calmed down, and we decided me doing it all was a bit much.
“Way I see it, love, is Paul’s parents should be pulling their weight too. Going to some sessions as well. Take the pressure off you a bit.”
“They are paying for it all,” I said. “The Friary.”
“Throwing money at a problem is the easiest solution, especially if you’ve got lots of it. Means they’re not getting their hands dirty. Think on that, love.”
CHAPTER 20
THE NEXT DAY—after trying to write a letter to Paul explaining I wouldn’t be coming back to The Friary and ending up with just ‘Dear Paul’ and three lines of scribbled-out sentences about it being too much for me, about me being very sorry, and how it had been harder than I’d thought—I reluctantly realised I needed Marilyn and Roger’s help.
They’ll be fine, I told myself on my way to their house. We’ve bonded over calamari and Spanish wine. We’re practically old friends by now. It’s just a little favour I’m asking them, not much really. Just a visit to see their son. Simple.
I passed Marilyn’s bright-red Mercedes cabriolet sports car with matching red wheels, rang the Big Ben–like doorbell and leant against the wall, compos
ing myself, bracing myself for the onslaught.
A Filipino maid in a black and white uniform opened the door and asked who I was and who I wanted to see. Ignoring the maid, I pushed open the door, said I was the ex-son-in-law and wanted to see the lord and lady of the house. The maid ran after me waving her hands.
“Where is Marilyn?” I shouted, opening doors off the entrance hall.
“She said not to be disturbed. Unless it is an emergency.”
“Where is she? This is an emergency.” I strode into the dining room where, on the table, lay Marilyn, on a white towel, face down, naked except some white material over her bottom, while a large, blond, muscled man massaged her body. Two Filipino women tended to her nails at the same time as another man, this time smaller, thinner and pretty camp, was fiddling about with her hair.
Marilyn removed the cucumbers from her eyes. “Yes, who is this, please?”
I introduced myself, said I wanted to talk about Paul and no, it wouldn’t wait.
She sighed. “Must you? I’ve a ball this evening to prepare for. Roger is entertaining some sheiks and it’s all to be on Middle-Eastern time—they don’t like to suffer from jet lag, evidently. Their menu choices are very strict. I have a chef working on it as we speak.”
“I’m not leaving until we have this conversation. I can have this conversation with these people here, or I can wait until they leave us alone. The choice, Marilyn, is yours.” Fuck me, I’m on fire. But I suppose that’s what two sessions in The Friary with Paul has done to me.
She barked some orders for someone to tell Chef something, and said she’d call them when she was ready. “Any of you leaving without my say-so will not be invited back.”
They left her with combs and curlers in her hair, pieces of foam between her toes and half her nails buffed, polished and painted.
Marilyn snapped her fingers. “Robe, please, unless you want to see my Brazilian bikini wax?”
I quickly threw a bathrobe at her, turning away while she slipped it on.
She rang a bell.
The housemaid arrived, took her order for champagne.