by Marian Keyes
Then there was me, Chaquie and Misty, the old-timers.
As each new person arrived, they didn’t remain new for very long. As always in the Cloisters, deep intimacy was established almost before you knew a person’s name. Fresh arrivals got folded into the rest of us immediately and within minutes it seemed as if they’d always been there.
I knew I really was one of the senior citizens the day I got to be head of one of the housekeeping teams. I was in charge of breakfasts, Chaquie of lunches, Angela of dinners and Misty of hoovering.
‘Now,’ said Chaquie briskly, ‘Angela and I have already sorted out our teams.’
‘When?’ I asked in alarm.
‘When you were watching telly,’ she said, shiftily.
‘You big hoor,’ I complained. ‘I bet you took all the able-bodied, able-brained ones and neither of you picked Francie.’
‘You big hoor yourself,’ Chaquie said. ‘First come, first served.’
I was so touched by her saying ‘you big hoor yourself’ that I forgave her. She’d come a long way.
‘So you sit down with Misty and share out the rest,’ Chaquie said awkwardly.
I was appalled. I hated Misty. Then it struck me that the tension which normally zinged between the two of us hadn’t been as electric since Chris had gone. Still, I didn’t want to sit down and do anything with her and I said as much.
‘Come on now, Rachel,’ Chaquie cajoled. ‘Act like an adult and give the girl a chance.’
‘God, you’ve changed your tune,’ I complained. Chaquie and I had soothed ourselves to sleep every night for the previous six weeks, by detailing how much we hated Misty.
‘Ah, the poor girl,’ Chaquie said wistfully. ‘Those terrible things that happened to her, no wonder she’s such an unpleasant little madam…’
‘I’ll only talk to her if you take Francie off my hands,’ I bargained. None of us wanted Francie on our teams because she was stone-mad, an awful handful and a lazy bitch to boot.
Chaquie wavered, then gave in. ‘All right then. God help me.’
And, very reluctantly, I went to find Misty.
‘We have to sort out our housekeeping teams,’ I said. She looked at me coldly.
‘OK,’ she surprised me by saying. ‘Will we do it now?’
So we got the list of lame brains and loopers that Angela and Chaquie had left for us and shared them out. And, once I was actually talking to her, I found that in the midst of all the other upheaval that was taking place inside me, I didn’t hate Misty anymore. I was no longer consumed with jealousy of her dainty beauty, I actually felt protective of her. A reluctant warmth passed back and forth between us.
And as we stood up from the table, having masqueraded as grown-ups, Misty touched my cheek with her hand. It was a funny thing for her to do, but I stood there and let her, feeling compassion, affection and strange friendship throb from her. A little flower in a burnt-out land.
‘You see,’ Chaquie smirked at me later.
‘You should get a job in the UN,’ I said, with fake sourness. ‘As a diplomat.’
‘That’ll give me something to do when Dermot divorces me,’ she said, thoughtfully. And for some reason we both found that hilarious and laughed until we cried.
That evening, when the housekeeping list went up on the notice board, I heard Larry, a seventeen-year-old heroin addict, who’d done time in a reform school for GBH, whine ‘I don’t want to be on that Rachel’s team, she’s so aggressive.’
Was I? I wondered, more amused than irate.
And it was then I found that a miracle had happened. Even though I still burned with rage against Luke and, to a lesser extent, Brigit, I was no longer angry about being an addict. I’d watched a lot of the other inmates move away from rage and into the calm waters of acceptance, but I hadn’t for a second believed it would happen to me.
I was filled with a very unfamiliar sensation. A kind of peace.
So, I was an addict. So what? I was no longer tormented as I wished things were different. Let’s face it, I told myself, I’d always known something was wrong with me. At least now I knew what it was.
For the first time I felt relief. It was a relief to stop fighting, to stop resisting the insistent knowledge that my life and behaviour weren’t normal. And it was a relief to know that I wasn’t mad or stupid or useless, all that was wrong was that I was immature and had low self-worth, which would improve by staying away from mood-altering chemicals. The future looked promising. It all seemed so very straightforward.
Over the next week a whole load of other things fell into place once I accepted all that stuff about my low self-esteem. It explained why I’d thrown myself at men who didn’t want me. As Josephine said on my fourth-last day in group, ‘You got them to reinforce your own sense of self-loathing.’
And it explained why most men didn’t seem to want me.
‘You were too needy,’ Josephine said. ‘You scared them away with the big, gaping hole you had in your soul.’
I was high with understanding, marvelling at the wonders of psychotherapy. I would get over Luke and have a lovely relationship with some other man.
‘And now let’s talk about your unhealthy attitude to food,’ Josephine announced. My happiness fell from the sky like a stone.
‘You abuse food almost as much as you abused drugs,’ she said. ‘You were like a skeleton when you arrived…’
‘Ah, go ’way, I was not,’ I joshed, hanging my head, smiling warmly with pride.
‘You see!’ she screeched. ‘Unhealthy, very unhealthy. It stems from the same source as your drug addiction. You avoid your immaturity and defects by focusing on something you think you can control, that is, your weight. But you can’t change your inside by changing your outside.
‘All that starving and bingeing you do,’ she said. I began to object, but she cut across me. ‘We’ve been watching you, Rachel, we know. You’re obsessed with your weight. Although it doesn’t stop you going on plenty of chocolate and crisp binges.’
I lowered my head in shame.
‘You’ve got to admit,’ she said slyly, ‘for all that song and dance you made about your vegetarian food, you didn’t go hungry.’
But nothing could dampen my spirits for long. I was in such irrepressible good form I was prepared to acknowledge Josephine might have had a point about my attitude to food. Why not? By then I was an old hand at believing six impossible things before breakfast. I’d accepted I was a drug addict, why not throw a food disorder in for the laugh? Any other aberrations you can think of?
It wasn’t a problem, because as Josephine said ‘Fix the source of one, and you’ll fix them all.’
‘I’m really looking forward to my new life,’ I sang joyously to Misty that afternoon in the dining-room.
‘Go easy,’ Misty urged anxiously. ‘Not everything falls magically into place the minute you stop. Knowing why you took drugs is only the tip of the iceberg. You’ve got to learn how to live without them and that’s not easy. Look at what happened to me. I relapsed.’
‘Ah, no,’ I smiled, touched by her concern. ‘That won’t happen to me, I’m determined to make a go of things.’
‘Will you go back to New York?’ she asked.
I instantly felt confused and fearful. And very fucking angry. My rosy outlook on life hadn’t extended as far as Luke and Brigit, the bastards.
‘I don’t think I’ll ever go back to New fucking York again,’ I muttered.
‘Are you worried about what those glamorous people will say?’ she asked. ‘What’s your one’s name? Helenka?’
‘Helenka?’ I hooted. ‘No, she’s always horrible about everyone and I couldn’t be bothered anymore.’
I briefly savoured that feeling of liberation before saying gloomily, ‘No, it’s Luke fucking Costello and Brigit fucking Lenehan I have problems with.’
‘You’ll have to go back,’ said Misty the sage. She was starting to annoy me. ‘You’ll have to make your peace with th
em.’
‘I’ll never make my peace with those bastards!’
The night before I left, Josephine took me into her office for a private session. Everyone got a one-to-one with their counsellor just before they left. Like a football team getting one last talking to from their manager before the big match.
And basically she told me I could do nothing when I got out.
‘No drugs, and that includes alcohol. No starving, bingeing or excessive exercise. And, most importantly of all, stay away from relationships with the opposite sex for a year.’
I almost passed out. I thought you were my friend.
‘But why?’ I hooted.
‘You’ve an unhealthy attitude to men. Without drugs, there’s going to be a big gap in your life. A lot of people latch onto relationships to avoid being alone with themselves. You’d probably be one of them.’
Cheeky bitch, I thought, offended.
‘We say the same to everyone when they leave here,’ she pointed out.
Everyone? I wondered, thinking of Chris.
‘It’s only for a year,’ she added kindly.
She might as well have said a hundred of them.
‘In that case I’m going back to New York,’ I said sulkily. ‘Even if I don’t want to be celibate there, it’d be enforced upon me.’
‘No New York,’ she said. ‘Give yourself a year to get better.
‘And are you trying to tell me you were celibate with Luke?’ she asked with a sly smile.
I managed to forbear from letting rip a string of expletives about Luke, but my hatred for him was obvious from the look on my face.
‘Luke is an exceptional man,’ Josephine said. ‘You may not think so yet, but he did the right thing by you.’
I said nothing.
‘He’s loyal, has integrity, intelligence and he’s very…’ she paused and kind of patted her hair ‘handsome.’
I was astonished. So the old bat was human after all!
But not for long.
‘Now that you’re going out into the outside world,’ she said sternly, ‘the hard work is only beginning. You’ll have to come to terms with your past and learn new responses to every situation life throws at you. It won’t always be easy.’
I wasn’t fazed. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe her, but I felt my willingness would overcome anything.
‘There’s still unresolved tension with your mother,’ she warned. ‘If you stay around her it’ll probably come to a head. Careful that you don’t relapse if that happens.’
‘I won’t take drugs, I promise.’
‘No point making promises to me,’ she said. ‘It’s not my life that’ll be destroyed.’
‘It won’t be mine either,’ I said, a mite defiantly.
‘Go to your meetings, keep up the therapy and in time, everything will be very good,’ she promised. ‘You’ve so much going for you.’
‘Like what?’ I asked in surprise.
‘We don’t focus too much on people’s good points here, do we?’ She smiled. ‘Well, you’re bright, perceptive, entertaining, very kind, I’ve seen the way you’ve been to the others in your group, and to the new people. You’ve even managed to be nice to Misty.’
I reddened with pride.
‘And finally can I say,’ she said ‘what a satisfying experience it has been for me to see how you’ve changed and grown over your time here.’
‘Was I awful?’ I asked, out of curiosity.
‘You were a tough one, but you weren’t the worst.’
‘I hated you,’ I was appalled to hear myself say. Although she didn’t seem at all put out.
‘There would have been something wrong if you didn’t,’ she agreed. ‘What’s that they say in the film? “I’m your worst nightmare”.’
‘How do you know so much about me?’ I asked shyly. ‘How did you know when I was lying? When any of us were lying?’
‘I was at the coalface for a long time,’ she said.
That told me nothing. ‘How do you mean?’
‘I mean, I lived with a chronic addict and alcoholic for years,’ she said, with a secret smile.
I was shocked. Poor Josephine. Who could it have been? One of her parents? Or brothers? Or perhaps even a husband. Maybe she’d been married before she became a nun.
‘Who was it?’ I blurted out.
I expected her to say something uptight and counsellory like ‘That’s not an appropriate question, Rachel,’ but she didn’t.
Instead she paused for a long, long time, her eyes holding mine, before softly saying, ‘Me.’
60
My last day finally came. Like my birthday, my first communion, my wedding day and my funeral all at once. I was the centre of attention and I loved it; the card, the speech, the good wishes, the tears, the hugs, the ‘I’ll-miss-you’s. Even Sadie the sadist, Bubbly the receptionist and Finbar the halfwit gardener came to wish me well. Plus Dr Billings, all the nurses, counsellors and, of course, inmates.
I gave the speech that everyone made, about how when I’d first come I’d thought there was nothing wrong with me, how I felt sorry for all the others etc, etc. And they whooped and cheered, clapped and laughed, and someone shouted – as someone always did – ‘Have a pint waiting for me in Flynns.’
Then they all went off to group and I waited to be collected. Watery-eyed but excited, nostalgic yet elated. Eager to begin my new life.
I’d been in the Cloisters for almost two months and had managed to survive. Pride in myself was the order of the day.
Mum and Dad came and, as we drove out through the high gateway, I symbolically took off my hat and bowed my head in remembrance, as I thought back to the day I’d arrived. Agog and expectant, on the lookout for famous people. It seemed like a million years ago, as if it had happened to a different person.
Which in a way it had.
Apart from my brief foray to the dentist, I hadn’t seen the outside world for two months. So I was highly excitable on the journey back from Wicklow, keeping up a nonstop, running commentary in the back seat.
‘Oh, look, there’s a letter box!’
‘Oh, look at your man’s hair!’
‘Oh, look, there’s a KFC box in a doorway!’
‘Oh, look at the funny bus!’
‘Oh, look at that woman buying a paper!’
‘Oh, look, did you see that baby’s ears? They were like Spock’s!’
When we finally arrived home, the thrill of it all nearly sent me into orbit. I almost had hysterics at the sight of the front door, the door that I could go in or out of any time I wanted. And almost had to be sedated when I saw my room. My own room. With no other people painting their toenails in it. My own bed. A proper duvet! That didn’t smell funny! Or make me itchy!
And no more being woken in the middle of the night to fry seventy eggs. I could stay in bed all day if I wanted. And I did want.
I ran in and out of the bathroom, the bathroom that I had to share with only four other people! I ran my hand along the television and rejoiced that the only limit on the amount of trash I could watch was how much sleep I needed.
The hoover was standing in the hall, so I paused to have a good laugh at it. My brief acquaintance with its brother in the Cloisters had come to an end and I wouldn’t be doing any more housework. Possibly ever.
I threw open the door of the fridge and looked at all the yummy things inside, and I could have anything I wanted, anything. Apart from Helen’s chocolate mousses that she’d sellotaped a picture of two fingers onto, of course. I opened the kitchen presses, looking for, looking for, looking for…
And then I felt very, very depressed.
Very depressed. So, I was out.
So what?
What could I do? I’d no friends, I was forbidden to go to pubs, anyway I’d no money… Was the rest of my life going to be a succession of Saturday evenings sitting in, watching Stars in their Eyes with my mother? Listening to her whinge that Marti Pellow should have won.
That he was miles better than Johnny Cash.
And was I condemned to watch my father stand up at half-past nine every night and announce ‘Right, I’m off down to Phelans for a pint’? Then being forced to sing tunelessly with my mother and whoever else was there ‘Phelans, nothing more than Phelans…’
That ritual had existed for about twenty years, but I’d forgotten about it on my first night home, when it was just me and Dad in the room. So things got a bit nasty when he announced his intention to go to the pub and I didn’t burst into song. ‘Don’t they sing in New York?’ he demanded, fixing me with hurt cow-eyes. ‘Singing not grand enough for them?’
I rushed out to the kitchen. ‘God,’ I complained to Mum. ‘It’s worse than the Cloisters here. The looper count is higher.’
But Mum urged compassion. She said Dad hadn’t been himself since Oklahoma had finished its run of one night. ‘It kind of went to his head,’ she explained. ‘And now he’s just back to being ordinary Joe soap.’
‘But it was only a chorus part.’
‘All the same, it made him feel important,’ she said, wisely.
‘What’ll I do?’ I moaned, bored and miserable. I’d only been home a day. I missed the Cloisters and wished I was still there.
‘Why don’t you go to one of your funny meetings?’ Mum suggested brightly.
I thought of the meetings list I’d been given before I left the Cloisters and realized I didn’t want to be the kind of person who goes to ‘funny meetings’. I wouldn’t take drugs, but I’d do it my way. So I said vaguely ‘Um, in a couple of days.’
What I did want to do was ring Chris, but I just couldn’t summon the nerve. However, on Sunday I was at such a loose end, I found myself going to Mass. That was the last straw. As soon as I got home, with shaking hands I picked up the phone and rang him.