You Left Early

by Louisa Young

Patient RJ Lockhart 14/12/05

  *

  AA and the Twelve Steps come in for mockery. People say it’s religious, fatuous, new-agey, profiteering, culty, only for fools who can’t run their own lives; they hoot with laughter at the idea of a Higher Power. Some who do this are the very ones who might benefit – as an addict, or as someone close to an addict – from what it has to offer. Mocking denial is, I would say, behavioural Trait Number Two of the intelligent addict (Trait Number One being ringing up at all hours to talk without listening about how everything is somebody else’s fault, and Number Three being hiding empty bottles in places where they are bound to be found, and saying somebody else left them there). After all the discussions and the articles and the books about AA and NA, only one thing matters: if you can do it, it works.

  Everything was inconceivably tender. Everything was – or might be – possible. Robert planned, as well as his own four or five meetings, to go to two meetings a week with Will (‘being an ex-junkie coke addict and alcoholic he knows a bit about it. Extremely helpful. He’s been clean six years now’). I let myself dream about him getting back to work, living well, writing glorious music, playing the piano again and being happy and useful. I fantasised again a future where he would go round schools to explain the dangers of drink, and this time it seemed plausible. There would probably be a honeymoon period, they said. I was prepared for that. I was prepared to be very happy.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Home, 2006

  My father was ill: Alzheimer’s was moving in on him. He remained himself, a very nice man, intelligent, judicious. And a charmer. He had a melancholy streak which came out at dusk each day, and he loved music, talk, social justice, his children and our mother. All of this is what came out. It wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t as hard as it is for many. In February he was in hospital with the usual problem: is it his heart? It often had been. He’d had his first surgery when he was fifty-six, and plenty more since. Now, because of his dementia, one of his numerous offspring would always spend the night on the borrowed mattress on the floor behind his bed. That night it was me. We were all used to early hospital mornings, the clattering of cleaners and the vicious fluttering of overhead lights, but neither Dad nor I expected to be woken by our core family – seven or eight of them, led by our ghost-pale mother – gliding and crowding into the small room on a cloud of trepidation.

  ‘Good morning,’ said Dad, cheerfully. I rose squinting from behind the bed. It was about 6 a.m.

  A night nurse had rung Liz in the small hours and told her Wayland was dead. She had turned two pages in the nurses’ book, and rung the wrong number. ‘Hello, this is the hospital, is that Mrs xxxx?’ sounds much the same whatever the surname, at four in the morning when your eighty-three-year-old husband is in hospital. But Wayland was not dead. The man in the next room was dead, God rest his soul.

  How happy we all were! ‘Lazarus!’ we cried, and sent the youngsters for coffee and were glad to be all together and wondered if there was a word for the opposite of disappointment, because that was the elation we were feeling. Later it occurred to me that for everybody apart from me this had been a practice run at losing him. In the next room the other man’s deathbed had been made up again.

  And Robert was recovering. The slow, hidden self-slaughter was over. Clouds was a success, an effective, strong re-introduction to a new life of sobriety, possibility, health and hope. Robert was to demonstrate to me his sober life; making the territory safe, bit by bit, so that I might, at some stage, not become hysterical at the idea of thinking about starting to trust him. Aspects of daily life were to improve, and the improvements were to become manifest. I had told him often enough that nothing he said meant anything to me now. By his deeds I would know him and witness the change. He would go to ninety meetings in ninety days. He would carry on with the Twelve Steps, study them and apply them. He could have secondary rehab if he wanted. He would bathe and shave. Will would be his sponsor and he would get a shrink of some sort. We would go to a counsellor together. When he felt ready, he would get work. He would go to bed at night and get up in the morning, and try to eat regularly whether or not he felt like it. He would have physiotherapy for his leg, and training to make him stronger all round. He would make his flat nice. I would be invited round. We’d see friends. Easy nice things could happen now. And did! We were at a neighbour’s house eating fish pie. Robert, fearing there would be no gherkins, brought his own, loose in his coat pocket, and had the children fish them out, squeaky green and wet. He’d been thinking about a haircut: he invited the children to do it. Three deliriously happy six-year-olds, almost sick with excitement, clambered over him with scissors, snipping wildly and quickly in case someone made them stop. Robert sat statesmanly, quelling his own laughter, looking like Sid Vicious with extra bald patches and mock dignity. Easy to love.

  I found myself writing songs. This was new. Robert was the music in our house, and at such a level that any musicality in me had only ever been in relation to him. With him, I could now sing those intoxicating French songs ‘Après un Rêve’, and ‘Clair de Lune’, and ‘Lydia’, with their air of absinthe and green velvet and drippingly emotional Parisian nights. And homegrown songs: ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’ (the Britten and the Ireland – yes, he found the names very funny), and ‘O Waly Waly’, where pale youth believes in love, and is belied, in crunching chords of heart-piercing stringency. And American songs: he snorted at the piano arrangements of the Cole Porter songs in the book, and improvised new ones as we went along, in whatever key worked for me, cool, spare jazz versions which felt mine, ours.

  This was an area in which he and I were right: the home life where he played and I sang. He taught me, so kindly and with astonishing patience given the standard of musician he was used to working with. He gently guided my utter lack of rhythm. We did Fauré and Duparc, Cole Porter and Billie Holiday, and then he would indulge me with sweeping arias from La Bohème and La Traviata where I would just start crying in the middle. And not forget to go TING for the most sublime use of the triangle in western civilisation. At the piano, he was superb, I was pretty terrible, and together we weren’t bad. He liked the humility it brought out in me who was usually such a know-all, and I loved to see him doing what he was so good at. At the piano he was himself, his best self. I would weep at the lyrics, and he at the chords, and we would laugh at each other and at ourselves, because that was always the same: words and music. When we watched TV or a film together, I would make my comments when there was no dialogue, and he would shut me up because he’d be listening to the score. And then when the characters started talking again, I’d have to shut him up. When he was sent a tape (in the old days) or CD or link to watch something for which he was going to write the music, I’d often sit with him, because though his talent for mood and character was spot on, he was terrible with plots and never knew what was happening. ‘Are they lesbians?’ he’d ask, or ‘What are those cows for?’ I (not surprisingly given my line of work) knew not only what was happening in the plot but often enough what was going to happen. He thought this miraculously clever of me.

  So when I found myself writing songs, bluesy, countryish, guitar-type songs in three or four chords, it was a bit surprising. They were – still are, though they’re more sophisticated now – all about him. In this period, they veered to the happy: songs of world-weary survival.

  But. Slowly and against every desire of my heart—

  Things did not improve.

  Those things which were meant to come to pass still did not come to pass.

  By March, though I didn’t know it, couldn’t see it, didn’t want to see it, didn’t dare see it, Robert was drinking again. As a result, I drove myself actually mad, trying to reconcile opposites. To match up what he said with what I saw, I entertained total contradictions as if they made sense. He looked drunk, talked drunk, behaved drunk, but my judgement was so bamboozled by now, reeling in the renewed onslaught, that I did not have the conf
idence to respect it and to say: You are drunk, and it is my judgement which stands on this, not what you say. After climbing that long, hard ladder, with such a shining prize at the top, you have fallen down this fucking snake.

  Here is something I wish someone had said to me at the time: This is part of it. It is a three-point turn with many many points. Falling down the snake is not the end of the world. You just have to start again.

  Actually, they may well have said it. Anybody could have said anything to me at that time. I was not hearing because my ears were stuffed with contradictions masquerading as alliable truths, with Dirty saying, ‘Hey, I’m Clean’, with Putrid going ‘I can’t smell anything’, and Drunk drawling, ‘Of course I’m Sober, Jesus, and it’s a fucking miracle I am the way you go on.’

  There was an argument where I sort of came to, in a moment of clarity. Robert was living in his flat nearby. I didn’t go to his flat – he didn’t want me to; I didn’t madly want to anyway; periodically I’d try and he’d make excuses and I would think ‘hmm’ but not want a fight about it. My home is nice and has my kid in it. He stayed every night with me, and went off when he woke (which could be any time) saying he was going to do his VAT. VAT! Well. He was not an organised man. I had moved my – our – bed from the big bedroom at the front into the little bedroom at the back beyond the bathroom, to be further from Lola’s bedroom in the middle. Why? So that she wouldn’t be disturbed, because he was up and down all night, unable to sleep, searching for painkillers, grimacing with tinnitus, feeling sick, in pain, stomping about, refusing help, going out to smoke, getting up to pee, retching, keeping me awake, coming in at all hours, going out at all hours. One evening he was on the floor on the landing, for ages, saying he couldn’t stand, and I was so distressed – and then he stood up, and said he’d been pretending. It was not the rehabilitatory behaviour they had told us needed to be achieved. I was concerned for him and I was pissed off too, because I was a writer and a mother trying to finish books and make a living and look after my youngster. Could he not perhaps, I suggested, do the things? Go to the counsellor, to AA meetings? Get up in the morning? Sleep at night? Brush his teeth? Eat? Perhaps even at mealtimes? With me, even? And he would call me a nag, and I’d say ‘Show me a nagging woman and I’ll show you a man not doing what he should’, and during an argument in that back bedroom I found I was banging my head on the bedroom wall.

  Just as well I had swapped bedrooms.

  But Jesus – you step back and you see yourself. Swapping bedrooms so your daughter should not hear you arguing with your boyfriend. Banging your head on a brick wall. Literally. Bang bang bang.

  *

  I thought people were thinking, If only he’d pull his socks up and sort himself out. I thought they thought me a fool. I used to fight them in my mind, the way you fight the voices which torment you when you’re fourteen, telling you you’re fat and will never be loved. ‘It’s an illness,’ I’d say to them, in my head. ‘People die of it. It takes time. He’s doing his best.’

  I didn’t have these fights out loud because actually no one was saying anything to me that would warrant that reply. So who was I fighting with? Myself, of course. And trying to live by my own rule: help him if he asks; other than that, do nothing for him or about him. And longing for him to ask.

  *

  I was writing two novels at the time. One was a children’s novel, Lee Raven, Boy Thief, about a dyslexic boy who ran around the sewers of a futuristic dystopian London with a stolen magic book which gave a different story to whoever opened it – the story they needed. I reread it recently and yes, the hero stuck in darkness and shit, and the obsession with the desired story, do throw some light on my preoccupations at that time.

  The other was a novel for adults about an alcoholic concert pianist in the 1960s, his wife, his girlfriend and his dysfunctional family, entitled How Do You Like Living Here?. The dedication was ‘For RJL. You probably think this book is about you’, and the epigram from Liszt’s mistress, the author Marie d’Agoult: ‘Rarely do those we love deceive us; we deceive ourselves in them.’ I adapted liberally from our own home life. It never worked and was never finished, but it contained lots of our conversation, more or less verbatim.

  ‘Beethoven piano sonatas?’ he says. ‘Fucking Germanic four-square plinky-plonk crap. And I hate that fucking self-congratulatory pompous laughter you get when a middle-class audience just has to demonstrate that it gets some stupid little Schubertian joke …’

  I take his talk personally. I don’t feel equipped to judge Beethoven, or Schubert’s facetiousness. I flinch when he talks like that. He doesn’t notice. Why not?

  ‘Because I am so hypersensitive I have to block out what other people are feeling,’ he says. ‘If I have to deal with that on top of what I am feeling myself it’s just too much. I can’t handle it.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say. There’s a word: mimophant, meaning sensitive as mimosa regarding one’s own feelings, and as an elephant regarding those of other people.

  ‘I think that’s why I’m a drunk, as well,’ he says. ‘I drink to desensitise myself because it’s all too much.’

  A week ago he said he drank because he couldn’t bear reality in all its inordinate ordinariness; to maintain the intensity of the day’s musical experience. Or intense anything. To maintain intensity.

  I try to think of a way for both to be true. I am still trying to square his circles. But he’s talking about it. That’s good, isn’t it?

  *

  We were sitting miraculously by the fire in the sitting room, London dim beyond the windows, him sober-seeming, me relaxed, patience and affection sitting with us. He was looking at the paper and I was looking at him. How handsome he was, how weary he looked.

  ‘This is nice,’ he said softly, not looking up.

  I tucked my feet up under me, and he reached out for one and squeezed it. My feet are always cold. His hands are always warm.

  ‘It is,’ I said.

  Comfortable silence.

  ‘I’ll run you a bath, shall I?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t want one,’ he said.

  ‘It would be nice,’ I said, kindly, thinking it safe. ‘To bathe.’

  ‘I do bathe,’ he said, sports pages aweigh.

  ‘More often,’ I said, hideously embarrassed even to be having this conversation, again, with a grown man.

  ‘Why?’ he said. ‘I don’t smell.’

  ‘Well, you do, actually.’

  ‘Actu-welly,’ he said, mocking my accent now for being well-bred.

  ‘Well, you do. You smoke, and … well, you do. People do.’

  ‘Ah. People.’

  ‘Yes, people.’

  ‘Mmmm,’ he said, in a camp, eyebrow raising, slightly mad, slightly bored way.

  It really irritated me when he said ‘mmm’ like that.

  ‘Darling, please,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t call me darling,’ he said.

  ‘You’re behaving like a stubborn schoolboy,’ I said. ‘Don’t make me mother you just so you can be clean.’

  ‘My mother’s dead,’ he snapped.

  ‘I know. Funnily enough, over all these years, I’d noticed, actually …’

  ‘Actu-welly,’ he murmured.

  I breathed out through my nose, gently.

  A moment ago he was a charming bon viveur, a drinker, for sure, but a professional, a man, a life being lived – How come now he smells peculiar? When did his glamorously tousled look become stale and ugly? When did his loucheness begin to turn? When did that elegant cigarette, held as if slightly too heavy for his wrist, change his skin to grey?

  ‘Please don’t mock how I speak,’ I said automatically. How many times have I said this to him?

  Perhaps this endless repetition is just how things are between couples.

  A different thought assails me. Everything is terrible, and I won’t see it. I am force-feeding us. I am dragging us around dressed up in a party frock. I am parading us like a fucking
corpse in lipstick.

  ‘You chose the wrong man,’ he said. And this too is something he has said before, many times, something to which I refuse, in turn, to listen. ‘That’s all. Don’t do it. Don’t try and help me. It’s all a waste. You need some strong man in a clean shirt, with a big dick and biceps. You deserve that.’

  ‘I want you,’ I said, as if from far away. ‘I want you strong, in a clean shirt. Your dick is fine, I don’t care about biceps. I love your arms. I love you.’

  ‘Well don’t,’ he said.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘It’s dead. It’s over. You can take your things. Go on then. Goodbye.’

  ‘No!’ he said. ‘No. I don’t want it to be over. I don’t want it to be dead. I want it to be alive and all right. I want to eat naturally and sleep at night and go to parties looking healthy and happy. I don’t want it over. I want—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I want you to—’

  ‘You want me to?’

  What he wanted, was me to forgive him.

  ‘That doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘I forgave you long ago; I was born forgiving you—’

  ‘It does matter!’ he cried. ‘Every horrible thing I have done to you matters because while you sit there saying they don’t matter we never get beyond them – you’re denying their existence, not forgiving them. Not the same thing.’

  ‘Well I can’t go through them one by one,’ I said. ‘Did you keep a list? – and we’re all right now, aren’t we? I’m all right, you’re in recovery—’

  ‘Do you know Schubert’s Sonata in A?’ he said.

  ‘Um – what – A major?’

  ‘Of course A major. A is major, unless you say it’s minor. Do you know it?’

  ‘I don’t know – you know I don’t recognise music by name – which one is it?’

  ‘God, you can’t be wrong, can you – you can’t admit not knowing.’

  ‘Well I might know it, if I heard it—’

  ‘So, what, could you play it?’

  ‘Not know it in that sense, of course not—’