by Louisa Young
3) Speaking as your girlfriend who does not accept the role of counsellor/therapist, it’s time you got one: (here follows a small list of carefully researched possibilities; their phone numbers, the names of their secretaries). You are being unnecessarily cruel to yourself trying to keep straight alone. Talking of which, despite how Monday night turned out [I can’t recall how Monday turned out either], I will come to meetings with you any time you want if you want.
4) Get a doctor who will look at all your stuff – sleeplessness, depression, booze, the legs, the sickness …
5) Go and see Jim
Now if you don’t really want to be sober, clean, healthy and sane, that’s a different question. As you know I don’t want a drunk dirty sick mad boyfriend, and you’re not one, but he’s still too close for comfort. I made that clear at the beginning and it hasn’t changed. I’m not with you to keep you just happy enough to carry on fucking up without quite killing yourself. I’m here for the love and the happiness. I’m not asking you for anything you don’t have in you. I’m not asking you to be anything you can’t be. You’re right when you say I want a strong and decent man. You are the strong and decent man I want.
As I said before, you know what to do, do it. Be proud of what you’ve managed so far. Do more.
Love (really. Believe it.)
*
We went to Buckingham Palace. An ancestor of Robert’s, William Ewart Lockhart, had painted an enormous picture of every potentate of the British Empire inside Westminster Abbey for the occasion of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee – a massive item which nobody had seen as it hangs in the Queen’s private area. Kath, Robert’s stepmother, had been bombarding the Keepers of the Queen’s Pictures for years, asking to be allowed to see it. Finally, Kath, her sister Chris, Robert and I were invited. He had washed his hair and put on a clean shirt and was being cantankerous enough for me to tell him if he didn’t behave we were going home. Christ. A naughty boy in his forties and a nagging mother figure. Repellent.
We were taken upstairs and admired the painting, in a long corridor. Our guide turned out to be vulnerable to Robert’s charm.
‘Here,’ he said, with a conspiratorial expression, and opened a door. We looked in: a large light-filled oriental saloon, full of mirrors and gilded chinoiserie like something out of Brighton Pavilion. Because it was out of Brighton Pavilion – extracted and recreated here.
‘And look,’ he said – and pointed towards French windows, the other side of the room. We went over – at this point we had no idea where we were: we had walked a long way through the palatial labyrinth. We looked out – across a balcony, and up the Mall, lined with trees and flags, wingéd Victory on her perch below. He opened the tall window so we could peek out – and Robert pulled me over and kissed me just where Prince Charles had kissed Princess Diana in those famous photos.
The thing is he would have done that anyway, drunk or sober. Taken it that bit too far. Kath and Chris were in hysterics, the official got us back in, it was funny, it was embarrassing, it was too much, it was great.
Kissed me on a balcony. Jesus, what’s wrong with me?
And – was that how it happened? Could they really have opened that tall French window, just like that?
*
The twenty-eighth of January 2004 was a filthy night; snowy, wet, freezing on top of the slush. Unsurprisingly, I was at home. The phone rang.
An Australian voice said, er, did I know Robert Lockhart? And could I come? The voice had the edge on it which tells you you must go.
At the top of the road stood the bemused Australian. Robert lay at his feet, sacrificially recumbent in the filthy snow, propped against the side wall of the laundrette. Charles, our friend and neighbour, was kneeling by him, while his tough little dog licked at splashes of blood on the snow. It looked like some surreal Irvine Welsh nativity scene, a living Banksy, permeated by the hot, clean, incongruous smell of clothes dryers. And here came me; the third Wise Man, or Mary Magdalen, or something.
Robert’s foot was hanging off, backwards, with a shaft of bone sticking out from blue-grey flesh. He didn’t seem very concerned. He’d slipped, he said, down by Goldhawk Road. Or, he’d been in an altercation—
But he’d walked the half mile from his flat to my house, before collapsing.
On that? You walked on that?
He’d been thinking, he said, about my famous ancestor, about how impressed I would be at this heroic Scott-like trek across the icy wastes, defying the cold, ignoring the pain and the damage …
Ostensibly, at that time, he was sober: i.e., he said he was sober.
In my desire to make sense of it, I came up with:
It’s a sort of hysteria, a euphoria, that thing that lets people bite off their own arms when they get them caught in combine harvesters. Or,
It’s a hallucinatory response to the extreme cold. Or,
It’s the pain.
To a clear-eyed person – to me, if it had been anyone but him – it would be patently obvious that he was off his head pissed. I didn’t see it—
Why not?
Because when it is all around you, you lose your sensitivity. You actually cannot see what you desperately don’t want to see. I finally had the man I loved loving me, being in my house and my life, stacking loo rolls in my garden to amuse me, writing music on my piano, coming to Christmas, playing duets with my dad, being my guy. I was still at this stage a naturally optimistic person. I was profoundly invested in his sobriety. I was in love with him. His wanting and working towards sobriety was the basis and sine qua non of the relationship. He’d promised me that getting sober was his prime aim and desire. I did not want to be the one to screw that up.
Because it was unbearable. Because it had been creeping around us like Birnam Wood and the Troops of Midian, slipping in and out of view, gradually normalising itself. Because I did not have the courage or clarity to say to my beloved – who declared, slurrily, that he was stone-cold sober and why did I have to fucking undermine him all the time – that he was drunk. Because I had not been long enough in this quagmire to learn that I had to make my own decisions based on the evidence of my own eyes, and ignore what my hyper-articulate, much-loved, lying-through-his-teeth boyfriend said.
Because if he was drinking I was obliged by good sense, sanity, self-preservation and my own promise to him as well as to myself, to leave him. Because in order not to suffer, we fool ourselves. Because, as Etta sang, I would rather go blind than see him walk away from me. So I went blind.
I hate the assumption that if you’re with an alcoholic you are co-dependent. I was becoming familiar with the term: co-dependent, to me, involved colluding to protect the drinking, losing the boundaries between yourself and the alcoholic, blurring the responsibilities, being in love with their drunk self – whereas I fought and resisted the drinking every way I could for ten years. That’s not to say I did it well or effectively, or that it necessarily did any good, or that I didn’t lose boundaries and blur responsibilities – but fighting drinking, not protecting it, was my base. Some say that a co-dependent can become attached to the fight – that was not me. I had better things to do, and spent a lot of time doing them. Should I have had nothing to do with him? Arguably. But what undermined the fight at the time was that I genuinely couldn’t tell if he was drinking or not. I couldn’t believe myself – does that come under co-dependence, or denial? I found myself laughing: still living my life at the age of forty-eight to Rod Stewart lyrics: yes, he lied, more-or-less straight-faced while I cried, and yes I still looked to find a Reason to Believe. (I know Tim Hardin wrote it, but Rod sang it best. Or at least, sang it when I was fourteen, and most susceptible.)
And love anyway involves protection, losing boundaries, combining responsibilities. I was not experienced at actual love. Weakness at the knees, adventure, yes. But I had never lived with a man. I knew little about combining responsibility, or judging which boundary meant what and went where.
Robert
both wanted to stop drinking, and didn’t want to. It turned out this change of direction for him was not so much a 3-point as a 157-point turn. I’d said I’d give him a year; we had just doubled that.
*
So the ambulance came and took him and his foot away. I thought about my own foot, in the dream.
In A&E at Charing Cross Hospital, the doctor said, ‘Do you smoke?’
‘Like a fuckin’ chimney,’ Robert replied.
‘Well you don’t any more,’ said the doctor – young, blond, and upright. ‘Or you can’t have the surgery. We need your blood flowing for it to work.’
Robert said he had a meeting at the BBC and wouldn’t be able to make it to the operation. They looked entirely disbelieving. I said it was perfectly likely but I would sort it out. They gave me the ‘Shine’ look. It goes like this: part one – ‘This pile of rags does not have a meeting with the BBC/a double first from Oxford/any reason to be lurching up to that piano’. Then part 2: ‘Oh! Wow! Really?’ (Shine being the film in which Geoffrey Rush plays a pianist who falls on hard times and looks like a tramp but remains brilliant throughout. See also, Susan Boyle, The Lady in the Van, etc, ad infinitum. The amazing miracle by which a non-fancy-looking person can turn out to have something after all! Who knew!)
Was it co-dependent of me to check if he had a meeting and if so cancel it for him? Because you’d do that for anybody, under the circumstances, wouldn’t you? But he’s not anybody. You’re not anybody. The situation is caused by his drinking, therefore must be cleared up by him.
But then – how far do we take this? What if he was in a coma? Lying half dead in the street? Do I not call an ambulance? And – I didn’t know he’d been drinking.
When he was sent off upstairs, they gave me his jacket to take home. It was a good leather jacket, initially. Agnes B. I think I gave it to him for Christmas, or I’d snuck it in as a ringer while trying to remove some foetid old favourite. Once he had something on he’d never take it off. His pockets became sinks of receipts, lighters, mints, dribbles of tobacco, actual fag-ends, a CD or two of preferred recordings of something abstruse, wads of cash. Today the pockets were heavy; I emptied them out. Among the detritus: little red lids from vodka miniatures; receipts for lunches with BAR in capitals at the beginning and end, 2x vodka tonic double, 3x brandy. Keys to his flat.
I felt bad at every step. A person is entitled to their privacy. I’m a writer; I know about space and creative solitude. That area of boundaries I am familiar with. I had four elder siblings and a strong history of ‘Don’t go in my bedroom’ and parental ‘Not now, I’m working’. I’ve never liked going where I’m not wanted.
Even the door was filthy. Inside, every surface bore vodka bottles full of piss. Fag-ends. Ancient newspapers. Cardboard boxes still not unpacked. An uncashed cheque for ten grand on the floor. The remains of my lipstick heart on the mirror. No sheets on the bed; no curtains. Just filth and manuscript paper.
Shame is a very particular kind of heavy, a clammy pain and disappointment. Surely the shame should be his though? Why was I ashamed? Because I felt I had been had, when all I was doing was keeping faith? Yes.
Of course I wanted to be the woman who meant so much to him that for me he would sober up. Then there is the version that says If He Loved Me then he wouldn’t go prancing off with Lady Vodka, the Enemy. Neither of these are in any way real things in the face of actual alcoholism, but certainly it feels like a mighty slap in the face, it feels very personal, when you’re on a lovely project together to sort his life out and it turns out that actually only you are on the lovely project, because he is locked away in a sordid room pissing in his empties. And even when you recognise that he’s not doing it to you, he’s just doing it – that’s still an insult. A chopped-liver moment. Yes, you are chopped liver. And yes, he is ashamed. His shame puts your shame to shame. His shame about his drinking is so vast that the only way out of it, past it, round it, is to get drunk.
In hospital you can’t get drunk. Instead, on morphine, he was shocked, sheepish, and charming.
‘I do rather specialise in nadirs, don’t I?’ he said.
By the time I made my first visit, the mother of the Polish man in the next bed knew all about his passion for Chopin and had brought him in home-made pierogis. A week later the surgeons repositioned the bones of his right ankle, lining up his fibula (now in three pieces) and his tibia (in two); realigning his foot. When that was in order they sliced a deep circle of flesh from the front of his left thigh, and sewed it in, vein by vein, artery by artery, all the tiny blood vessels, over the fixed-up area. They drilled a hole across his knee and another through the repaired ankle and one through his foot, and put steel bolts through, held in place by butterfly nuts, and between those short bolts a long, elegant rod ran down the outside of his lower leg like a Meccano scaffolding. They encased all this in a voluminous bag, attached to some kind of pump, which breathed slowly like a hot-air balloon, protecting the whole caboodle, and delivered him back to the ward.
That night I went to my first Al-Anon meeting, in a hall on the King’s Road. Everybody said, and when everybody says it is wise to listen, that you have to look after yourself.
But he is the one with the problem! I would reply.
They looked meaningful, and repeated, You have to look after yourself. I have said this myself, under similar or equivalent circumstances, to various people. Boots had said so, months before, as well. The analogy of the oxygen mask comes into play: on the aeroplane they tell you to put your own oxygen mask on before helping your child with theirs. Parental instinct says ‘No! Help the child first!’ Parental instinct in this case is a fool. No child wants their oxygen mask faffed around with by a parent who is gradually asphyxiating. So I must help myself; I must go to Al-Anon.
Al-Anon is a sister organisation to Alcoholics Anonymous, for the relatives, partners and friends of alcoholics who find their lives and emotions invaded by addiction. It works along the same lines as the Twelve Steps, and is a good thing. At this stage I didn’t like it at all. The relation between alcoholic parents and their children, and that between a woman and her alcoholic lover, seemed to me to be quite different. They had been formed from childhood in the shade cast by their parent, someone they had not chosen; I had grown up with no such knowledge or damage, and was being poisoned now by the sickness of a man I was in love with, i.e. some part of me had chosen him. Totally different. I was chilly, miserable, I did not want to share or to be welcomed or given a cup of tea. I found their friendliness weird. I made one rude outburst; they all nodded sadly. There was a musician we knew on the other side of the room, in front of whom I had no desire to speak my secrets and betray Robert’s. Well, they told me to go and I went, I said to myself. Now I don’t have to go again. A very Lockhartian illogical reaction.
I rang the Japanese restaurant with an order for him that I was going to pick up: mackerel and ginger pickle make, mixed sashimi, agedashi tofu, miso soup, spring roll.
‘But that’s Mr Robert’s order!’ the lady said. ‘Why isn’t he coming in?’ I told her he was in hospital. She was sorry to hear it and sent their best wishes. Was that co-dependent of me? Bringing him a takeaway? Surely you’re allowed to look after someone with a massively broken leg? Plus he was sober. Admittedly, enforcedly.
I took him home. He was brave and funny about life in pylons, took care of his wounds, adjusted the little butterfly nuts as instructed. Our sex life became hilarious, manoeuvring the cage around the place – cripple-sex, he called it. I took him to AA meetings, helped him in and out of the bath, the encaged leg sticking out like an unwieldy joke. We were in it together, me and his sweet self.
Ten days after his surgery I was due to go on a book tour to Japan with Lola, then to Ireland, and after that there was a family trip to Ghana to see Grandma. I was glad about this, because it helped me to maintain balance and apply attention where it best serves. Judge a moth by its flame. Lola and my work and Robert were my flames.
But his illness was not to be my flame. I loved him, was interested in him; not his illness. I was not in the least co-dependent. See? I was leaving him to get on with it. He was sober, and making plans to go into rehab. Breaking your foot off was a rock bottom, wasn’t it?
Chapter Twelve
London, Oxford, 1978/2015/2004
Here is a small paper-bound booklet: Bartók Quartet no. 1 in A minor Sz. 40, BB 52 (Op. 7) (1908), a miniature score. The cover is grey, the font stylishly 1930s. There are very slight rust marks around the staples holding it together, and the binding looks like gaffer tape. It has the very slight smell of damp and neglect that books have when they’ve been unopened for too long, in the wrong place. It should smell of clean dry library, of rosin. It doesn’t. Inside the front cover is a little beige card which tells me with a purple-inked date-stamp that the book was due back to the Oxford University Music Students’ Library on 21 May 1978.
On the opening page someone with firm, rounded, neat handwriting has written, in pencil: Please do not draw on this score. Underneath, in tiny spidery blue biro, Robert has written Fuck Off, and underlined it.
I looked at the Bartók score in May 2015, with a view to taking it back. But the Oxford University Music Students’ Library no longer exists. I tried to pick out the opening on the piano.
*
He was out of hospital; I was back from Japan and Ghana. The honeymoon, such as it had been, was now over, again. He hadn’t done anything about rehab; the footbreak-inspired sympathy was wearing off. I asked him to take me out somewhere, for it to be nice, just ordinary, and nice.
‘I’ll come to yours around eight,’ he said.
He turns up at seven, on his crutches, unshaven, his grubby tracksuit trousers torn up the seam to the knee, and no shoe on that foot obviously, with its pins and screws jutting out. The unavoidable horribleness of his lower half he used as an excuse for crappy T-shirts; the difficulty of bathing as a justification for staying dirty. He says, ‘There’s Tchaikovsky at the Festival Hall.’ He’s got a cab, it’s waiting, I’m to come now.