by Marian Keyes
‘If only it was that simple,’ I said sadly.
‘It is that fucking simple,’ Helen said, sounding irritated. ‘Stop feeling sorry for yourself.’
‘Fuck off,’ I muttered.
‘Fuck off yourself,’ she replied equably.
She made it sound so reasonable. As if I’d just over reacted. Maybe I had overreacted, I thought hopefully. That would be wonderful, to find out that everything was salvageable.
Mum arrived in the room after Helen and Anna had left. I sat up in the bed, nervous and anxious to apologize, but she beat me to it.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, abject misery on her face.
‘No, I’m sorry,’ I insisted, a lump in my throat. ‘You’re right. I was selfish and thoughtless and I’m mortified about worrying you so much. But I won’t do it ever again, I swear.’
She came and sat on my bed.
‘I’m sorry for the terrible things I said.’ She hung her head. ‘I overreacted. But it’s just my way, I didn’t mean any harm. It’s only because I want the best for you…’
‘I’m sorry for being such a bad daughter,’ I said, feeling deeply ashamed.
‘You’re not!’ she exclaimed. ‘You’re not at all. Weren’t you always a pet, the most affectionate, the best of the lot of them.
‘My baby,’ she wailed, flinging herself around me. ‘My little girl.’
A torrent of tears gushed from me at her words. I fell into her arms and sobbed as she stroked my hair and shushed me.
‘I’m sorry about Margaret’s Easter egg,’ I eventually managed to say.
‘Don’t!’ Mum exclaimed wetly. ‘I could’ve cut my tongue out. The minute the words were said…’
And I’m sorry for embarrassing you by being a drug addict,’ I said humbly.
‘You’re not to be,’ she said, wiping my tears away with the sleeve of her cardigan. ‘Sure, it could be miles worse. Hilda Shaw is having a baby. Another one. And she’s still not married. And, wait till you hear,’ she suddenly dropped her voice to hushed tones, even though there was only me and her in the room, ‘Angela Kilfeather is after deciding she’s a lesbian…’
Imagine! Angela Kilfeather, of the blonde ringlets that as a child I was so jealous of, was a lezzer!
‘… and parades up and down the road french-kissing her…’ Mum paused, almost unable to say it, ‘… girlfriend. Sure, a drug addict is nothing compared to that. Marguerite Kilfeather probably thinks I’m dead lucky.’
We laughed tearfully. And I made a solemn vow never to french-kiss a woman in full view of our neighbours. It was the least I could do for my mother.
67
As soon as I was liberated from hospital, Dad said that someone called Nola had rung me. Blonde, glamorous, beautiful Nola, who’d come into the Cloisters for the NA meetings. Thank you, God, I thought with shaky, heartfelt relief. I had to start going to my support groups but I didn’t want to go on my own.
I rang her back and, mortified, told her about my relapse. She didn’t give out to me. Just like the two times I’d seen her in the Cloisters, she was really nice, if a bit scatty. I soon found out that Nola was always really nice, if a bit scatty.
She said that maybe I’d needed to relapse to find out I didn’t want to anymore. It was a bit complicated but, as it didn’t involve me being pilloried, I was happy to go along with it.
‘Forgive yourself, but don’t forget,’ she urged.
She took me to an NA meeting in a church hall. I was wobbly and paranoid. It was my first trip to the outside world since that terrible day with Tiernan. And I was petrified that I’d run into Chris, still smarting, as I was, from the memory of the humiliating night I’d had with him. Luckily he was nowhere to be seen.
The meeting was quite different from the ones I’d gone to in the Cloisters. There were a lot more people, all of them friendly and welcoming. And instead of just one person describing their drug-taking past, several people spoke about what was happening in their current day-today lives. How they were managing to cope with jobs and boyfriends and mothers without taking drugs. And they were coping. I got great hope from it. And sometimes when people were talking, they could have been describing me. I knew exactly what they were getting at when they said things like ‘I compared my insides with everyone else’s outsides.’ I felt like I belonged and I was surprised that that made me happy.
Not to mention that mad Francie had been right about the ridey lads. There were loads there.
Marvellous, I thought. One of these fine young men will assist me to get over Chris.
‘Don’t even think about it,’ Nola said with a warm smile when she caught me looking sidelong at one of them.
After the meeting, she interrogated me in the next-door café. ‘What were you up to, giving all the boys the hairy eyeball?’
So, with longed-for relief, I spilled my guts about my awful experience with Chris. The dreadful inconclusive sex, the suspicion that he hadn’t even fancied me, the fear that he fancied Helen, the humiliation, the feelings of inadequacy. ‘And I think the best thing for me to do is get back in the saddle,’ I finished hopefully.
‘Ah no,’ Nola said with a mildness that briefly fooled me. ‘Sure, what would you want to do that for? Relationships in early recovery are a big mistake. You’ll only make yourself miserable.’
I couldn’t have disagreed more.
‘You’re too young and immature to make the correct choices!’ She made it sound like a compliment.
‘I’m twenty-seven,’ I objected sulkily.
‘Aren’t you lucky to be so lovely and young?’ she beamed, missing the point. Deliberately, I later found out.
‘All the same,’ she said jovially, ‘leave the boys for a while. You’re only just out of a treatment centre.’
That really frustrated me, but she was so nice I couldn’t complain.
‘D’you know something?’ she chattered. ‘This’ll give you a good laugh, now, but lots of people make the mistake of thinking that NA is like a dating agency.’
Francie, you lying wagon!
‘Isn’t that a scream? Sure, look at the disaster it was when you went out with an addict who’d only just stopped.’ Nola looked at me fondly. ‘It made you relapse! Ah, you wouldn’t want that to happen again, would you? You’ve too much respect for yourself.’
I hadn’t, but I liked her so much I couldn’t bring myself to disagree.
‘The whole Chris thing was awful,’ I was forced to admit.
‘It was, of course!’ Nola exclaimed, as if someone had been trying to suggest otherwise. ‘But forget him.’
It struck me that every conversation that ever took place between two women, whatever the context, had those exact words in it, at some stage.
‘I think it hurts more to be rejected by someone I kind of hero-worshipped,’ I struggled to explain. ‘He was always giving me advice in the Cloisters. He was so wise.’
‘But he wasn’t wise,’ Nola said, with innocent surprise. ‘He was full of shit.’
I was shocked. I’d thought she was too sweet to say such a thing.
‘But he was, though,’ she said, with a little giggle. ‘Full of it. I’m not saying it’s the poor craythur’s fault, but he didn’t behave wisely, despite giving you a rake of advice. Talk is cheap, but look at how people behave, not at what they say.’
‘But he was really nice to me in the laughing house,’ I felt obliged to protest.
‘I’d say he was indeed,’ Nola agreed sympathetically. ‘Especially when you were upset?’
‘Yes,’ I said, wondering how she knew.
‘Sure, a lot of addicts are very manipulative,’ Nola said with great compassion. ‘They can’t help picking on people when they’re at their most vulnerable. I’d say you weren’t the only woman the poor divil was nice to.’ She said everything in such a mild, vague voice that it took me a minute to understand just how scathing she was. And she was right to be, I realized as I was blasted with an unwelcome memory.
Of the time Chris had wiped away Misty’s tears with his thumbs, the way he’d done to me a short time previously. The way he’d looked at me to make sure I saw. That had undeniably been some sort of gameplaying. Haltingly, I told Nola about it.
‘You see?’ she said, triumphantly. ‘So get over him. He doesn’t sound a bit well, the poor boy. Making you think he knows it all, when he’s no better than you. And so insecure, God love him, that he had to seduce you just to prove to himself you fancy him.’
Then I remembered the walk he’d taken me for in the garden at the Cloisters. The provocative things he’d said. That had been deliberate, I realized in shock. He’d said those things on purpose. The manipulative bastard.
In an instant I was raging. To think I’d blamed myself for the crappy sex with him! What a joke. He was far too focused on himself for me to have mattered in any way.
‘The prick!’ I exclaimed. ‘Playing games with me, getting everyone to fancy him just because he feels inadequate, leading me on…’
‘Arra, girl, go easy on him,’ Nola interrupted, as if it was the simplest thing in the world. ‘It’s not his fault.’
‘That’s OK for you to say,’ I said, breathless with what I felt was justified rage.
‘Would you not try to remember that he’s no different from you?’ she suggested kindly. ‘Just an addict very early on in a new life.’
That took the wind out of my sails.
‘Even though he was giving you a load of guff about how to behave, he obviously hasn’t a clue how to conduct himself.’ She smiled fondly at me. ‘If he had half a brain he’d never have slept with you.
‘No offence meant,’ she added, nicely.
I muttered that none was taken.
‘So, come on now, calm down,’ she urged. ‘Deep breaths, good woman.’
I was almost annoyed when I found I was calming down.
‘Forgive yourself,’ Nola said, just as I realized I had. ‘It wasn’t your fault he rejected you. And forgive him while you’re at it.’
And to my great surprise, the anger I felt for Chris and the hurt he’d inflicted on me, just shimmied away. Everything had changed and I saw him as a poor sap, no more able to cope than I was. He shouldn’t have slept with me, but I shouldn’t have slept with him either. I wasn’t a victim. I’d made the decision to go out with him, even though I’d been warned not to. And if it all went pear-shaped – as, of course, it had – I was partly to blame.
I liked that feeling. Responsible, in control.
‘Anyway,’ Nola pointed out, ‘you went off him as much as he seemed to go off you.’
But instead of feeling victorious, I found I was thinking of Luke.
‘What’s up with you now, girl?’ Nola asked.
‘How d’you mean?’ I asked.
‘You’re looking a bit, I don’t know… annoyed.’ My eyes were almost popping out of my head in rage, but Nola couldn’t seem to deal in any emotion more negative than annoyance.
‘I had a boyfriend,’ I found myself saying, my eyes filling with unwelcome tears. ‘A real boyfriend, I mean, not just a half-shag like Chris.’
Burning with anger, choking with bile, I told her about Luke, what a complete bastard he’d been to me, how he’d humiliated me and hurt me with the terrible things he’d said the day he came to the Cloisters.
Nola listened sympathetically. ‘And you still love him,’ she said, when I finished.
‘Love him?’ I demanded, looking at her as if she’d lost her reason. ‘I fucking hate him!’
‘That much?’ She looked at me compassionately.
‘No, I mean it,’ I insisted. ‘I hate his guts.’
‘Even though he was fierce good to come all that way and help you see how addicted you were to the quare stuff?’ She sounded amazed. ‘I think he sounds like a dote.’
‘Oh, don’t you start,’ I said moodily. ‘I hate him, I’ll never forgive him, I hope I won’t clap eyes on him until my dying day. That’s one part of my life that’s well and truly finished.’
‘Sometimes, if it’s meant to be, people from your old life come back,’ she said, as if it was meant to be some sort of comfort.
‘If it’s meant to be,’ I mimicked. ‘Well, I don’t want him back!’
‘You’re in desperate bad humour.’ She smiled indulgently.
‘I mean it, I don’t want him back,’ I insisted to her fond face. ‘But I’ll never meet anyone ever again,’ I wailed, flattened by sudden despair. ‘My life is over.’
Nola stood up suddenly.
‘Hurry up, finish that,’ she ordered, pointing at my coffee, and throwing a couple of quid on the table. ‘And come on!’
‘Where…?’
‘Just come on,’ she said, breathless and excited.
She marched out up the street and, rattling keys, approached a silver, sporty-looking car.
‘Get in, good woman,’ she ordered me. Fearfully, I got in.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked, as she sped like a mentaller through the streets.
‘Something to show you,’ she muttered, vaguely. ‘You’ll like it.’
And she said nothing more until we came screeching to a stop outside a red-brick house.
‘Out you get,’ she said. Nicely, but very firmly. I no longer thought Nola was the mild-mannered sweetie she seemed on the surface.
I got out, and she marched at high speed over the gravel, opened the front door of the house and gestured me in.
‘Harry,’ she called. ‘Harry.’
I thought Harry must be her dog because no Irish person was called such a thing.
But when a dog didn’t come scampering, it dimly occurred to me that Harry was the nine foot three, tanned, blond-haired ride who came into the hall in response to her summons.
‘This is Harry,’ she said. ‘My husband. I met him when I was three years off the quare stuff, when I was eight years older than you are now. He’s pure mad about me, aren’t you?’ She turned to him.
He nodded. ‘Pure mad about her,’ he told me, confidentially.
‘We have a fabulous relationship.’ She twinkled at me. ‘Because I’d learnt to live with myself before I met him. I was an awful miserable poor eejit until I learnt that.
‘Am I making myself clear?’ she asked, her face a sudden picture of perplexity.
‘Crystal,’ I mumbled.
‘Good.’ She beamed. ‘Great! Sometimes I seem to confuse people. Come on, so. I’ll drive you home.’
And every time over the next twelve months, whenever I woke in the middle of the night thinking I would die without ever feeling the touch of a man again – and such occasions were many – I would think ‘Operation Harry’, and the panic would abate. After I’d been clean and celibate for a year, I could claim my free Harry.
Nola rang me and took me to a meeting the following day. It was in a different church hall, with different people, but the format was the same. ‘Keep coming back,’ everyone said to me. And things will get better.’ The next day Nola took me to yet another different meeting. And the day after that.
‘Why are you so nice to me?’ I asked, a bit alarmed.
‘Sure, why wouldn’t I be?’ she exclaimed. ‘Aren’t you a dote?’
‘Why?’ I persisted.
‘Ah,’ she sighed wistfully. ‘When I saw you in the Cloisters, with your cross little face, you reminded me of me. It took me back seven years to that desperate misery. The confusion and the shocking heebie jeebies! The minute I clapped eyes on you, I thought “There but for the grace of God, go I.” ’
I bristled angrily. The cheeky bitch!
‘You’re just like I was,’ she exclaimed fondly. ‘We’re no different.’
That mollified me. I wanted to be like her.
‘I wouldn’t be off the quare stuff today if people hadn’t been nice to me back then,’ she said. ‘Now it’s my turn. And when you’re a bit better, you’ll help the new people.’
I was both touched and irritated.
>
‘Haven’t you a job to go to?’ I asked the following day when she arrived to take me to yet another meeting.
‘I’m my own boss,’ she said reassuringly. ‘Don’t worry about me.’
‘What do you do?’ I asked, curiously.
It turned out she ran a modelling agency, one of Ireland’s most successful. And she used to be a model herself. That cheered me up. I loved it that she could be an addict, yet have a glamorous, successful career. It ameliorated the slight residual feeling that I belonged to an underclass of losers.
‘There’s a pile of us recovering addicts, with fierce successful careers,’ she said. ‘When you’re a bit better you’ll probably have one too.’
I found that hard to believe.
68
Everytime Nola caught me talking to a man, she sabotaged it by saying to him ‘Don’t go near this one, she’s stone-mad, got herself knocked down and nearly killed, she’s only a couple of weeks off the snow,’ then whisked me away. Instead she introduced me to lots of women addicts, of whom I was initially a bit wary.
But, as the weeks passed, I found that, in the same way that I’d ended up being really fond of everyone in the Cloisters, I’d started to consider some of the NA people to be friends. I met Jeanie, the skinny, good-looking girl who’d run the NA meeting at the Cloisters the night I’d faced my addiction for the first time. And I got pally with a chain-smoking butcher (that was what she did for a living, not what she did for a hobby) who went by the unfortunate name of Gobnet.
‘No wonder I’m an addict,’ she said, when she introduced herself to me. ‘With a name like that.’ Then she dissolved into a fit of coughing.
‘Holy jayzis,’ she said, her eyes watering. ‘Give me my fags.’
After a while I found I’d fallen into a routine of going to a meeting almost every day.
‘Isn’t this a bit excessive?’ I anxiously asked Nola.
‘Arra, no,’ she said, as I should have bloody well known she would. ‘You took drugs every day, why not a meeting every day? And, sure it’s not forever, only till you get better.’