by Marian Keyes
I had had my blood test and passed with flying colours, my knickers hadn’t been searched, my bags had, but nothing untoward had been found, and Dad and Helen had left with the minimum of affection and tears (‘Behave yourself for Christ’s sake. I’ll be up on Sunday week,’ said Dad. ‘Bye bye, you mentaller, weave me something nice,’ said Helen.)
As I saw Dad’s car pull, very slowly, out of the grounds, I congratulated myself on how calm I was and how the thought of a drug hadn’t even crossed my mind. Drug addict, indeed!
Dr Billings interrupted my staring out the window and told me that the other clients, as he called them, were having their lunch. He just missed Helen making grotesque faces at him out the back window as the car disappeared.
‘Come and have lunch,’ he invited. ‘And I’ll show you to your room afterwards.’
A thrill of excitement ran through me at the thought of seeing some pop stars. Despite Helen convincing me that the famous rich people would be segregated from the ornery folk, hope jumped in my stomach like a frog.
And, of course, the mad addicts and alcoholics and compulsive overeaters and gamblers who made up the rest of the clientele would be worth a look at also. It was with a light step that I followed Dr Billings up the stairs and into the dining-room, where he introduced me by saying ‘Ladies and gentlemen, meet Rachel, who’ll be joining us today.’
A sea of faces looked up at me and said ‘Hello’. I did a quick sweep of them and, at first glance, there was no one that was obviously a pop star. Pity.
Neither did anyone seem very One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Even more of a pity.
In fact the alcos seemed very friendly. They made a great show of making space for me at the table.
Once I got a proper look at the room, I found it was surprisingly unglamorous. Though it was always possible that the interior designer had meant the yellow, shiny, institutional walls in an ironic, postmodern way. And, of course, lino was very fashionable again. Even if the buckled brown tiles on the floor looked as if they’d been there from first time round.
I had a quick look round the table and there seemed to be about twenty ‘clients’. Only about five were women.
The fat old man on my right was shovelling food into his mouth. A compulsive overeater? The fat young one on my left introduced himself as Davy.
‘Hello, Davy.’ I smiled with dignity. There was no need to be completely standoffish. I would keep a strict distance, but I would always be pleasant and polite, I thought. After all, I was sure that their lives were miserable enough. There was no need for me to add to it.
‘What are you in for?’ he asked.
‘Drugs,’ I replied, with a ‘Would-you-believe-it?’ little laugh.
‘Anything else?’ asked Davy hopefully.
‘No,’ I said, puzzled. He looked disappointed and stared down at his plate of food. Mountains of turnip and spuds and chops.
‘What are you in for?’ I asked. I felt it was only polite.
‘Gambling,’ he said gloomily.
‘Alcohol,’ said the man beside him, although I hadn’t asked.
‘Alcohol,’ said the man beside him.
I had started something. Once you asked someone what they were in for, it had a domino effect and the whole place felt obliged to tell you the nature of their addiction.
‘Alcohol,’ said the next man, although I couldn’t see him.
‘Alcohol,’ came another voice, further away.
‘Alcohol,’ said another voice, even further.
‘Alcohol,’ came a faint voice at the end of the table.
‘Alcohol,’ came another voice, this time slightly nearer. They’d started working up the other side of the table.
‘Alcohol,’ a tiny bit louder.
‘Alcohol.’ All the time the voices were getting nearer.
‘Alcohol,’ said the man sitting opposite me.
‘And drugs,’ interrupted a voice from further back. ‘Don’t forget, Vincent, you found out in group that you’ve a problem with drugs too.’
‘Fuck off, you child-molester,’ said the man opposite me angrily. ‘You’re a fine one to talk, Frederick, you shirt-lifter.’
No one batted an eyelid at the fight. It was just like dinner in our house.
Was Frederick really a child-molester and shirt-lifter?
But I was not to find out. At least, not yet.
‘Alcohol,’ continued the next man.
‘Alcohol.’
‘Alcohol.’
‘Drugs,’ came a woman’s voice.
Drugs! I craned my neck to get a good look at her. She was about fifty. Probably a housewife addicted to tranquillizers. Pity that, for a second I thought I might have someone to play with.
‘Drugs,’ said a man’s voice.
I got a look at him and my blood quickened perceptibly. He was young, the only person I’d seen so far who was about my age. And he was really good-looking. Well, maybe he wasn’t, but he seemed good-looking in comparison to the gang of bald, fat, undeniably unattractive – although I’m not for one moment saying that they weren’t nice people – men that the table was packed with.
‘Drugs,’ came another man’s voice. But he looked like a bit of an acid casualty. The bulgy, staring eyes and backcombed hair gave it away.
‘Alcohol.’
‘Food.’
‘Food.’
And eventually everyone had introduced themselves to me. Or at least they’d let me know what they were in for. The alcoholics outnumbered the drug addicts by about four to one and there were a couple of overeaters. But there was only one gambler, Davy. No wonder he was disappointed.
A fat woman in an orange overall banged a plate of chops and turnip down in front of me.
‘Thank you.’ I smiled graciously. ‘But I’m actually a vegetarian.’
‘And?’ She curled her lip at me in an Elvisesque manner.
‘I don’t eat meat,’ I explained, unsettled by her aggression.
‘That’s tough,’ she said. ‘You’d better start.’
‘P… pardon?’ I asked nervously.
‘You’ll eat what’s put in front of you,’ she threatened. ‘I’ve no time for any of that nonsense, not eating or eating too much or eating it and then making yourself sick. I never heard the like! And if I catch you in my kitchen trying to find where I hide the jelly, you’re straight out.’
‘Sadie, leave her alone,’ said a man diagonally across from me. I immediately warmed to him, even though he looked like a prizefighter, and, even worse, had tight curly hair in the style favoured by Roman Emperors. ‘She’s here for drugs, not food. So knock it off.’
‘Oh, I beg your pardon, miss.’ Sadie was effusive in her apologies. ‘But you’re very thin and I just assumed that you were one of the not-eating brigade and they give me the pip, so they do. If they knew about real hunger they’d quickly put a stop to their carry-on.’
The warm glow of being mistaken for an anorexic momentarily overrode my anxiety.
‘Sadie wishes she was a therapist, don’t you, Sadie?’ joked the man. ‘But you’re too thick, aren’t you, Sadie?’
‘Shut up with yourself, Mike.’ Sadie sounded in remarkably high spirits for a woman who’d just been insulted by (if I’d remembered correctly) an alcoholic.
‘But you can’t even read and write, can you, Sadie?’ said the man – Mike?
‘I can so.’ She smiled. (Smiled! I would have belted him.)
‘The only thing she can do is cook and she can’t even do that,’ said Mike, gesturing to the table at large and receiving enthusiastic agreement.
‘You’re crap, Sadie!’ someone shouted from the end of the room.
‘Yeah, bleedin’ useless,’ called a young boy who didn’t look a day over fourteen. How could he be an alcoholic?
After she had assured us that ‘None of yiz will be getting any tea this evening,’ Sadie moved off and I was surprised to find that I felt like crying. The good-natured insults, even thou
gh, for once, they hadn’t been directed at me, nearly reduced me to tears.
‘Talk to Billings after lunch,’ advised the Mike man, who must have seen my wobbly lip. ‘In the meantime why don’t you eat the spuds and the turnip and leave the chops.’
‘Can I have them?’ A moonfaced man stuck his head around the fat old man on my right.
‘You can have the lot,’ I said. I didn’t want turnip and potatoes. I wouldn’t eat that kind of thing at home, never mind in a luxury place like this. While I knew that the fashionable restaurants had re-embraced sausages and mash, onion gravy, steamed puddings and similar, I still couldn’t bring myself to like it. Even though it might no longer be fashionable, I had been looking forward to fruit. Where was the help-yourself salad buffet? Where were the delicious calorie-counted meals? Where was the freshly squeezed fruit juice?
I shoved my plate towards the fat man and it caused uproar.
‘Rachel, don’t give it to him.’
‘Someone stop her.’
‘Eamonn isn’t allowed.’
‘He’s a compulsive overeater.’
‘Please do not feed the elephant.’
‘It’s not our policy to do special food for anyone,’ Dr Billings said.
‘Isn’t it?’ I was astonished.
‘No.’
‘But,’ I protested, ‘it’s not special food, I’m a vegetarian.’
‘Most people who come here have eating disorders and it’s very important for them to learn to eat what’s put in front of them,’ he said.
‘I quite understand,’ I said nicely. ‘You’re worried about the anorexics or bulimics or overeaters or whatever. They might get upset when they see my special dinner.’
‘No, Rachel,’ he said firmly. ‘I’m actually worried about you.’
Me? Worried about me? What on earth for?
‘Why?’ I struggled to sound polite.
‘Because although your primary addiction is to drugs, you may well have unhealthy relationships with other substances, food and alcohol for example. And you run the risk of cross-addiction.’
But I wasn’t addicted to drugs. Although I couldn’t say that because he’d tell me to leave. And what was cross-addiction?
‘Cross-addiction can occur when you try to tackle your primary addiction. You may get the primary addiction under control but become addicted to another substance. Or you may simply add the second addiction to your first one and remain addicted to both.’
‘I see,’ I said. ‘I come here to get treated for drugs and, by the time I leave, I’m an alcoholic and a bulimic. Sort of like going into prison for not paying a fine and coming out knowing how to rob a bank and make a bomb.’
‘Not quite,’ he said with a cryptic little smile.
‘So what am I supposed to eat?’
‘Whatever you’re given.’
‘You sound like my mother.’
‘Do I?’ He smiled neutrally.
‘And I never ate what she gave me either.’
That was because my mother was the worst cook in the known universe. All that talk of tinfoil and turkeys when she first found out about my so-called suicide was just wishful thinking on her part. No matter how much tinfoil she had her turkeys always ended up shrivelled and dehydrated.
Dr Billings just shrugged.
‘So how am I supposed to manage for protein?’ I was surprised that he didn’t seem worried.
‘There’s eggs, milk, cheese. Do you eat fish?’
‘No,’ I said. Although I did.
I was shocked that he didn’t seem to care. Dr Billings ignored my obvious confusion.
‘You’ll be fine.’ He smiled. ‘Come and meet Jackie.’
Who was Jackie?
‘The woman you’ll be sharing your room with,’ he added.
Sharing with? I thought, shock being heaped upon shock. Surely at the prices they were charging I’d get a private room? But before I could question him further, he had opened the office door and led me towards a blonde, glamorous woman who was half-heartedly rubbing the reception area with a hoover. So I stuck a ‘I’m nice, you’ll like me’ smile on my face. I’d just have to wait until she was gone before I complained. Nicely, of course.
She extended a smooth, tanned hand. ‘Pleased to meet you, I’m Jackie,’ she smiled.
She was about forty-five but from a couple of feet away she could have passed for at least ten years younger.
‘And that’s spelt C-H-A-Q-U-I-E,’ she added. ‘Jackie’s so common when it’s spelt J-A-C-K-I-E, don’t you think?’
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I smiled again.
‘I’m Rachel,’ I said politely.
‘Hello Rachel,’ she said. And is that Rachel with a Y and two Ls?’
I was sharing a room with this lunatic?
And why was she hoovering? Wasn’t she an inmate? I was certain that I’d seen her at the lunch table. My heart sank. Surely they hadn’t taken that Betty Ford stuff to heart?
‘You missed the bit by the door, Chaquie,’ Dr Billings called and made for the stairs.
The look that Chaquie gave his disappearing back could, as they say, haunt a house.
‘Don’t forget your bag, Rachel,’ reminded Dr Billings.
And off he went, up the stairs to the bedrooms, leaving me to carry my bag. And it weighed a ton. In case there were lots of famous people at the Cloisters, I’d taken the precaution of bringing all my own clothes, plus any of Helen’s that fitted me. I would have borrowed everything Helen possessed but she was dainty and tiny and petite and I was five nine, so there was no point in taking anything other than her ‘One Size Fits None’ garments. Apart from the fact that it would be a right laugh when she opened her wardrobe and found every stitch she owned gone, of course.
As I bumped and banged my way up the lino-covered stairs and past walls with peeling paint, I cursed my bad luck that my stay coincided with the Cloisters being redecorated.
‘When will the decorating be finished?’ I shouted up to Billings, hoping that he would say ‘Soon.’
He just laughed and didn’t answer me. He really was a mad bastard, I thought in a sudden burst of rage.
With every breathless, puffing step I took, my heart sank further. I was sure that, when the walls were repainted and the new carpet laid, the place would look just like the luxury hotel I’d been expecting. But in the meantime I was uncomfortably aware that it was more like a Dickensian orphanage.
When I saw my bedroom I was even more disappointed. Downright puzzled, in fact. Surely it didn’t need to be so small? It barely held the two tiny single beds that had been shoehorned into it. Apart from the size, or lack thereof, the similarity to a monk’s cell ended there. Unless, of course, monks had pink nylon fitted bedspreads, the type that I remembered from my childhood in the seventies. Not exactly the crisp, white, Irish linen counterpane that I’d been expecting.
As I walked past the bed, I heard a faint crackle of static and the hairs on my legs stood up.
A white rickety chest of drawers was loaded down with bottles of Clinique and Clarins and Lancôme and Estée Lauder skin-care stuff. They must have been Chaquie’s. There was no room for my pitiful couple of jars of Ponds.
‘I’ll leave you to it,’ said Dr Billings. ‘Group starts at two and you’re in Josephine’s. Don’t be late.’
Group? In Josephine’s? What would happen if I was late? Which bed was mine? Where would I get hangers?
‘But what…?’
‘Ask any of the others,’ he said. ‘They’ll be happy to help.’
And he was gone!
The cheeky bastard, I thought in fury. Lazy, unhelpful layabout. Wouldn’t get me vegetarian food. Wouldn’t carry my bag. Didn’t stay to help me settle in. I might have been very upset, you know. He wasn’t to know that I wasn’t really an addict. Ask any of the others, indeed. I’d write a letter to the papers when I got out and I’d name him by name. Lazy bastard. And he was probably being paid a fortune, out
of my money.
I looked around the little room. What a dump. In misery, I flung myself on the bed and the forgotten Valium bottle nearly disembowelled me. When the agony abated I fished it out and decided to hide it in my bedside locker. But when I tried to get up, the pink nylon bedspread came with me. Every time I tore some off it swam back to me and reattached itself.
I was frustrated and disappointed and pissed-off.
9
Come now, come, I cajoled myself. Let’s look on the bright side. Think of the Jacuzzi, the massage, the seaweed treatment, the mud wraps, the funny stuff they do with the algae.
OK, I said grumpily, reluctant to let go of my self-pity.
I half-heartedly unpacked a couple of things until I found that the tiny wardrobe was already packed to bursting with Chaquie’s clothes. So I redid my make-up, in the hope that I might find some celebrities in Josephine’s group, and forced myself to go back downstairs.
It had been quite a battle to leave the bedroom. I felt shy and self-conscious and suspected that all the others were talking about me. When I got to the dining-room (hugging the wall and sucking a finger in a childish and unattractive gesture. A woman of my height just doesn’t cut the mustard in the ‘cute’ stakes) I could barely see into the room for the cigarette smoke. But, from what I could hear, everyone seemed to be sitting around drinking tea and laughing and chatting and very obviously not talking about me.
I sidled in. It was just like going to a party and knowing nobody. A party where there was nothing to drink.
With relief I saw Mike and, even though I’d be afraid to give him the time of day in the outside world in case somebody thought I hung around with him, for the moment I was too scared to care. I was quite happy to overlook the fact that his trousers were Farrah slacks and that he looked like a bull wearing a curly wig, because he had protected me from Sadie of the orange pinafore.
‘Where do I go for Josephine’s group?’ I asked.
‘Come here and I’ll show you how it all works.’ He took me over to a notice board on the wall and pointed out a timetable.
I did a quick scan of it and it seemed to be very full. Group therapy both morning and afternoon, lectures, talks, films, AA meetings, NA meetings, GA meetings…