You Left Early

by Louisa Young

  He made friends, in his pubbish way. They nicknamed him Professor, of course, because he was educated. He was incessantly sorry for the other people there – for all the other things they had to deal with. Women with babies; people with no money, no family, no work, no alternative. He said someone brought in crack, and he didn’t know what to do about it, not that he wanted to use it but because he was afraid if offered he might. But he didn’t want to be the grass. It scared him and it offended him. He felt that being locked up with crackheads was not helping his recovery. I thought, You feel that you have a recovery, and I was glad. He said it hurt being made to look at things clearly. His past was a festering sore and hurt when he touched on it. I thought, if each time your glance falls on the past it hurts, then even as you do that, you’re building what will in time become your past. And that will continue to hurt, when you touch on it in the further future.

  He was out ten days later, in time for Jim’s birthday, feeling it had done him a lot of good and proud to have made it. He was going to see his son, sober. I would go with him, and he would come back, sober. I felt – cautiously optimistic.

  And then it was Christmas, and I wanted to go somewhere nice so it could be nice. God how I longed for straightforward ordinary niceness.

  We thought – I thought? – New Year’s in Norfolk was in order: some gorgeous little hotel on the coast, good food, we could tramp about in the mist and see some birds and sit by a fire, that might make him happy, and I would like it. I was Bridget Jones, searching for the right mini-break. Of course the nice hotels had been booked up months before by functional people. We spent New Year’s Eve in King’s Lynn, in a B&B which was not the nice old vicarage in the picture but a nasty modern annexe with plywood doors and overhead lighting, and the so-called double bed was two light singles (on wheels) pushed together with a double sheet across them, a potentially perilous hammock of cheap polycotton. It poured with rain and the cobbles were slippery. Everybody was drunk except for us. There was a good chippy though, on a beach. I was totally on for it to be all right, for us to make the best of it, because things were improving! But it wasn’t all right.

  There was someone on the radio, one of those glamorous 1960s actresses, talking about their marriage to one of the glamorous 1960s drunk actors – Richard Burton? Richard Harris? Peter O’Toole? She said, ‘It was always just about to be marvellous.’

  Anyway it was dismal. And a minefield. Simultaneously. Trying to get to sleep, I thought, We’re not even really in the same bed.

  Chapter Fifteen

  On the train to Wigan, February 2005

  We played a lot of backgammon. I always won, though we agreed that he was a much better player than me and my constant success was really quite extraordinary. He always wanted to gamble; I never did. He called it frontpork. It was for him the perfect combination of luck, skill and captive conversation; he loved to teach it to people, and spread it through his hospital wards and rehabs, challenging strangers, setting up tournaments. You know, when playing backgammon, that the person you are with isn’t going to go away.

  John’s sister, Robert’s Auntie Sybil, had died. We arrived on the train north to her funeral in a fluster and found seats at a table, next to a Russian in a flat black hat, clean-shaven, nice watch. His fingers were fat and he had a nineteenth-century air. Robert was in a mood of determined lunacy, making a fuss about not being able to smoke, getting up and down, saying it was too hot but not taking his coat off.

  I said to the Russian, as we got out the clattery old inlaid-wood Greek backgammon board, ‘I hope this won’t disturb you too much.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ the Russian said. ‘I am interested.’

  I was winning. Robert appealed to our neighbour at the unfair luck I had, calling me ‘Chair of Backgammon at Trinity College Cambridge. She’s so fuckin’ lucky.’

  ‘So have you been lucky,’ the Russian says.

  ‘Not like this jammy fucker,’ says Robert.

  ‘Perhaps she is more prepared for luck,’ the Russian says.

  These words dropped like jewels in slow motion through a storm, and I considered leaving Robert for this man, this character out of Flaubert.

  ‘What does that mean?’ asked Robert.

  I was thinking: It’s self-fulfilling. Because you cannot understand the notion of being prepared for luck you never will have the benefit of what luck you get and you will always be unhappier than you need to be. And I who do understand all this will be equally sad as a result. The Russian looked as if he understood all this. I was careful not to catch his eye.

  At Sybil’s funeral, the all-female brass band with which her daughters had played since childhood lined the path to the church, playing beautifully in the chill air. Robert had started to write a brass band elegy for her. We visited his mother’s grave, and I left him in Wigan with John when I came back to London.

  *

  Things were meant to be better! As they weren’t, the fact of them being meant to be only made them even worse. My step-grandmother had just died. She was ninety-five, and asked me, in her narrow hospital bed, did I think the doctors would mind? I said that she had lived a good life and she needed nobody’s permission to die if she wanted to. She looked doubtful, so I said I didn’t think the doctors would mind at all. I said, not entirely truthfully, I don’t mind if you die, Pam. And a friend, a curly-haired big-hearted sparkly dancing man in his early forties, dropped dead, jogging to the gym. His funeral was one of those floods of love that leave you shipwrecked.

  Robert was upset – if even people who jog to the gym fall dead in the street, what hope is there for anyone? This, like most things, was probably a reason to drink. He wasn’t behaving right. He did stay sober after Max Glatt, but he was not using the support available to him, so became a bolshy dry drunk, sober on will-power, a toxic angry mode. His being crippled undermined my capacity to be disciplined about not doing things for him. He was in physical pain; I thought that was what made him bad-tempered. It was important to me not to be seen as pushy, bossy, enabling or a nag.

  ‘Impairment of social and behavioural function’ remained strong in my sweetheart. He had a bad habit of repeating to people mean things other people had said about them. Like ‘What, Louisa? She looks like a man. And he’d be with anyone who’ll wash his T-shirts.’ I told him once that a particular person wasn’t pretty, interesting or intelligent enough for him; he told me he’d told her what I said, and she didn’t mind. I had no idea who was the lying lunatic in this situation. Consensual reality slips away in dribs and drabs; the first to go is often manners.

  We went round to dinner with Deborah and her husband, Robert’s kind-of friend Will (nickname Lurch, for his imposing demeanour, pale skin and deep-set eyes), a tall and famously articulate novelist. They knew a bit about recovery – including that you can’t really call two addicts, as Robert and Will were, friends, at least not until they’re both in recovery. They had invited some good rehab types, as encouragement to the ‘newly sober’ Robert. Robert arrived separately, late, edging to the piano to avoid the dinner table. They all knew that Robert was a faker. He knew they knew, and that’s why he could hardly sit at table with them. All I knew was that nothing added up, all was disharmonious, I was comfortable nowhere.

  Learning the ways of tough love, I put his clothes into bin bags. He was to take his stuff home because he did not live with me. Included was a replica of the T-shirt Jack Nicholson wore in Five Easy Pieces (one of Robert’s favourite films: ‘I faked a little Chopin, you faked a big response’), the one with TRIUMPH written on the front, that Jack Nicholson wears in the sex scene where he’s whirling Sally Struthers around and around and around. I gave it to Robert when he triumphed at the Max Glatt Unit. I never saw any of those clothes again.

  Was this the occasion he described later in his rehab papers as me ‘throwing my things down the stairs, saying fuck off (not like her)’? Maybe. I was angry. I sent his grandfather clock back to his flat; a fam
ily heirloom, Victorian with a bucolic scene of a lady with sheep painted on the clock-face. It was too big and though I liked it, it couldn’t just loom in my hall being bumped into. At some stage around then I read somewhere, and wrote down: ‘The life you are in danger of losing is GOOD and worth holding on to.’ It seems extraordinary to me now that such a thing was worthy of note.

  Late in April, I drove past the Anglesea, the local gastropub where we used to have long lunches when Lola was little and before his drinking became the enemy; happy stupid lovely lunches. He was sitting outside. There was a glass of something brown on the table.

  I parked, and walked over. By the time I reached him the glass wasn’t there, so I knew. It was under the table, on the pavement. Big round brandy glass. He said it wasn’t his.

  A kind of slow-motion disbelief descended, a suspension where everything around me – all these people sitting about, the geraniums, the remains of food on plates – shifted in relation to itself and to me, and my head floated.

  I said, I don’t think I want to see you for a while, and I left him to it.

  And that became the summer of 2005. I’d see him outside some pub, and he would pretend he was drinking water, or I would give his drink back to the barman saying, ‘He doesn’t want it’, and occasionally I’d pour it in the gutter, or knock it over and say, ‘Oh. Whoops’ in the sarkiest tone of voice. And I would say ‘Not dead yet then?’ and ‘Your next step is living rough, you know that, don’t you?’ and he’d say ‘Yes’. Once a drunk person came out of the pub where I had left him, trying to persuade me to go back and be nice to him. Another time I overheard one drinker say to another, ‘Oh Christ, it’s him – hide or he’ll come and talk to us.’

  It’s impossible, and wrong, not to love, when you love. Love will find a way to manifest itself, every time. Now, it made me Google rehab centres up and down the country, and talk to kind women who dealt with admissions. I slept a lot – undisturbed, my God, what a miracle – and forgot about him for entire hours at a time. This built up my strength.

  One day I saw him in the street: a shambolic, lurching, unshaven damp creature, half dead, to be honest. Old man smell. Skin flaking off him, hair matted, teeth broken and scurfy and yellow. He tried to hide from me. ‘Are you going to meetings?’ I said, and he lied. I said, ‘And are you going to go to the clinic?’ And he said ‘Yes, yes.’

  In one of these encounters, we fixed on a rehab place called Clouds. I can’t remember why. It was his choice. Random, probably, with me as a gun to his head. He said he’d sent for the admission papers. He hadn’t. He said he’d talked to them on the phone. He hadn’t. He said the application must have been lost in the post. He was a great master of masochistic procrastination.

  I rang Clouds. I got the papers, filled them out, tracked him through the pubs of the neighbourhood and made him sign them, there in the street. I rang the clinic and put my phone in his hand, and made him tell them to let me deal with his things.

  One by one the pubs banned him, and he was no longer visible on the streets outside. So I doorstepped him one morning. I took supplies and a newspaper, thinking I might be there a while, and I sat in the car outside his flat like a detective with a box of doughnuts. He shambled out quite soon. Saw my car. I had been prepared to bundle him in and drive him straight there, to wrestle him or hit him or anything. But he just came and sat in the car, quiet. I took him home, put him in the bath, peeled off his clothes and put the ones I didn’t throw away in the laundry, washed his hair, shaved him. Behind his ears were strips of ancient soap scum, or dead skin, settled into the crevice: I peeled them off, fearing, because I didn’t know if they were part of him. The skin beneath was raw pink and shiny.

  While I was cutting his hair he began to shake, his whole body chattering like teeth. His hands started to go, and he straightened out, and his head shook. I stood back, and a sort of small trance descended on me. I was holding the scissors high like a totem, safe. Would he fall? Would I catch him? I put the scissors far away behind me; scanned the surroundings for things he would grab and pull down on himself, for corners he could smack his head into, for rugs he could clutch bringing lamps crashing around him, for furniture he might wrench his foot against, and rip apart his rebuilt ankle. And it passed. I laid him down and he was resting.

  Later he had another. Big, frothing at the mouth on the sitting room carpet. He was on the floor on his back, rigid like a hawk’s claw, gripped by it, still roaring, roaring at the outrage. Foam dribbled from his mouth. Every string of his body had been pulled tight and twisted; every speck of his own strength was doing it. Because I was trying to stop him hitting his head on furniture, I couldn’t quite move. Lola, back from school, rang for an ambulance while I held his hand; calm as you like, twelve years old, yes we need an ambulance please, my mother’s boyfriend is having an epileptic fit, yes he’s had them before, and giving the address. ‘It looks very scary but it’s all right,’ I said. No recovery position till he’s stopped. Couldn’t move him anyway; mustn’t force him. Blood in the foam. Choke on your tongue? No. He didn’t seem to be breathing. But then how could a lung swell or fall with breath in a body so utterly rigid?

  I was very grateful for Lola’s calmness and capability, and very sorry and ashamed that she should be having these experiences, so early in her life, and yes, of course, thinking how I could have protected her better.

  ‘Does it hurt him?’ she asked.

  ‘He won’t remember it,’ I said.

  Can I yet admit how naïve I used to be? Hope is a good breakfast but a bad supper. It won’t keep you going all day, and it’s folly to stick too long with it if it’s all you have. I had a postcard of the painting by G. F. Watts on my desk in those days: blindfold Hope playing her broken lyre on a rock as the waters rise.

  They came and took him to hospital, read him the riot act. I went to see him later. He was shocked, and tired. ‘Is it over yet?’ I said. Because this seemed like a different kind of rock bottom.

  I went home and played backgammon against myself. It’s one of the holding patterns I use in times of slow-motion crisis. To admit that you cannot help someone you love who is suffering is a very long, slow adjustment of the ego, and there is a limit to how long you can bear it. Particularly when their suffering manifests in their being a shit.

  Part Three

  2005–07

  Chapter Sixteen

  West London and the West Country, October 2005

  Years ago I wrote a piece for the Guardian about how men choose what to wear. Robert said, ‘Whatever’s nearest on the floor.’ He was aware that other people washed their clothes and put them together in a particular way, but it meant nothing to him. Once he turned up in a pair of women’s trousers – purple velvet, size 12 – and he honestly didn’t know where he’d got them. Off the floor, no doubt. But he wasn’t aware that they were a woman’s, that there was a story in why he was picking a woman’s trousers up off the floor – whose floor? – in the first place. They were excellent on him, with his je dois me laver look, so cool at twenty, so revolting after thirty-five.

  As Will said, Robert took dishabille to the level of an art form, while displaying an anti-materialism that verged on contempt. Getting him into decent clothes was a problem. As it was not a need he recognised (except on the two occasions when he fixated rather demoniacally on having a white suit), he would not go to shops. So I would buy things for him, and after some days or weeks he might put one of them on, and then whether or not it fitted, or pleased him, he would not take it off, because the whole dressing/undressing thing was an expenditure of energy he resented. He would come to bed in his overcoat, and lie there declaiming about my southern bourgeois recalcitrance in wanting him to take it off.

  I would say, Please don’t muck up these new clothes you’re not going to keep, I need to take them back. Meanwhile he would fall asleep in them, sit on the rainswept front doorstep in them, and burn a hole in them with his cigarette.

  I
lured him into Gap. With his sticks, he refused to come up to menswear on the first floor so I was running up and down holding things, waving them at him. I proffered a blue flowery cotton shirt which would suit his blue eyes and haggard demeanour. In 2005 there was an eruption of men’s blue flowery shirts. It was the ‘I’m still getting it’ look for men of a certain age. I had bought a pair of black Levis, low loose 509s, size 34/32. Bought on 26 October at ten past six in High Street Kensington. Here’s the receipt on my desk. They were new clothes for going to rehab.

  He was going to rehab! Proper, long-term, residential, expensive. Clouds. The oddest people asked me if I was paying for it. No I bloody wasn’t paying for it. He was paying for it.

  The more physical damage his illness produced, the harder I found it to step away and let him get on with it, wherever it took him. How could I? He’d die. He’d get himself murdered, winding people up. He’d set fire to himself, the alcohol-related medical conditions he already had would take him over, he’d get knocked down by a car.

  This is where I remained confused. When the alcoholics said, in Alcoholics Anonymous, ‘I admit I am powerless against alcohol’, I got it. An alcoholic is powerless in the face of alcohol, and needs constant supportive voices from his AA meetings and mentors to shout down the constant ‘oh go on’ voices from the demons, the booze, the shame, the self-loathing, the pain. That made sense to me. And I understood the higher power business: I’m not God, I’m not in charge, there are many other powerful influences on humanity: nature, science, brain chemistry, genetics, love, society, biology – I don’t rule. I’m a termite in the mound – an aware termite, a termite with imagination – but a termite, and I acknowledge the mound. I acknowledge powers more powerful than me.