by Liam Livings
She retold me the bit about her friend Caroline, and how she'd helped her. And then Clara-Bell offered to read my manuscript, adding that she was an old hand since she was one of the manuscript readers for the Scheme for New Writers, and had read plenty through that scheme, so she'd happily give mine, 'A look through, gratis of course.'
Ah yes, it was all coming back to me now.
For fear of losing it all again, I quickly wrote the main tips on a bit of paper. She waved me goodbye, a vision in silver and glass beaded necklaces and a voluminous red kaftan dress.
While waving from my car I read the piece of paper with my scribbled notes:
- Website and blog
- Time to write
- Freelance writing
All I had to do now, was work out how to make my own website, what a blog was, carve some time in my already full schedule to write - about what, was a whole other question - and look into the freelance writing stuff she'd talked about.
Damn I wished I'd taken notes last night, rather than licking the bowl of plum crumble. Damn you, plum crumble! Now I felt even more clueless than I had before, because I now had a list of things I didn't know anything about, rather than just a general vague understanding that I didn't know much about writing.
Was that progress or sorts?
And there was the small matter of pretending to be a recovering cocaine addict, and the fact that Darren, the possible love of my life - who may or may not be straight - had deserted me.
Chapter 11
Lucy and I were doing detention together. Not us being in detention, because we'd been naughty a boy and girl - no, we were the teachers who got the short straw to stay behind after a day at school, to spend time with the precious, joyful pupils who had to do detention that evening.
The room had six students, four male, two female. In theory they each had their own specific detention punishment to work on, depending on what they'd done, and which teacher had given them the detention. In theory all we had to do was stand at the front of the class and make sure they did whatever they'd been asked to do, and didn't talk. The Breakfast Club it wasn't. There was no sign of Molly Ringwald, no Emelio Estevez, and they couldn't be divided into geeks and cool students either. Nope, this was an ordinary class room, with a wooden desk at the front at which Lucy and I sat, and the front two rows of desks facing it had the six students sitting silently, doing their detention work.
Lucy whispered - we both whispered, you can take that as read while we're in detention. 'What's with shaving off the beard all of a sudden? I was just getting used to it. I didn't like it, but I thought - he's finally joined us in the twenty-first century where beards are cool, where beards aren't only the reserve of geography teachers with elbow patches and tweed jackets. But then you go and shave it all off, what's going on with you?'
I told her about the last writers group I'd gone to, and seeing Clara-Bell.
'Let me check - you missed a meeting with the sexy, weather-worn men in sportswear in their late twenties and thirties, to sit with a group of middle aged women and eat bread and butter pudding and talk story arcs?'
'It was bread pudding.'
'You missed all that pent up unsure sexual tension - not to mention the whole is-he-or-isn't-he Mister Blowjob Lips - for that?'
'It was the next meeting. It's monthly. I had to go back, that's the whole point of me going to the other meeting. Remember?'
'Oh yeah. I kind of forgot that, I was focussing too much on this Darren guy, you'd mentioned to me a bit.'
'Very funny.'
'This Clara-Bell - she's not got her eye on you has she? I mean, does she know you're not that way inclined?'
'She wouldn't care if I turned up with another man surgically attached to me, as long as I wasn't rude.'
'Well, that sounds pretty rude. Who would be stuck to whom, in front of one another like spoons, or would you be next to each other, like in a police line up?'
'Lucy, I think we're getting a bit off topic.' I noticed one of the older male students had his hand up at the back of the room. I walked to him, established he had used up his paper writing lines about not watching inappropriate materials on his phone while in science lessons, and could he have another few sheets? This created a ripple of paper requests as the others suddenly realised they needed some more. I circulated around the room, dropping off paper where required. Then I escorted one of the male students to the toilet, afterwards Lucy did the same for one of the female students, and then it was five o'clock and end of detention.
The students handed us their lines, essays about the importance of listening to teacher in chemistry class, or French verb conjugations repeated over six pages, and they left.
'I'm thinking of leaving.' I shuffled the students' papers.
'I'm going home too. It's gone five, and I've loads of prep for tomorrow's lessons to do tonight.'
'No, I mean for good. Once I have the website and blog thingy, I will be unstoppable. You just watch.'
'I don't think you should rush into anything.'
'She gave me some good advice, and I intend to make use of it.'
'Say this Darren is on your team. Say he does like you. What are you going to say when he finds out you've never so much as seen cocaine in your life, never mind been addicted to it? Isn't the Daniella Westbrook story getting a bit obvious for them all?'
'No one questions it. It's not like that in the group. It's all about trust. They take you on face value, it's wonderful. Very liberating, and refreshing actually.'
'Oh well, if it's all about trust, that's all right then.' She rolled her eyes and gathered up her pile of books. 'He came round mine, to give me a quote.'
'What? When was this, why haven't you mentioned it?' I blocked her exit with my arms folded across my chest. 'This is serious news. This warrants a sit down and a drink in the Bag o'Shite. Come on.'
'I'd love to, darling, but I've got a date with a curry ready meal and two romcoms. Himself is out tonight, so I'm making the most of it.' She tapped her foot on the ground, shifting the books awkwardly between both arms.
I sat on the desk. 'Please don't leave. Please don't leave until you've put me out of my misery. Is he or isn't he on my team?'
'I answered the door in my negligee and a little fluffy bed cardigan Himself got me one Christmas. That was a fun Boxing Day if I remember correctly.'
I flapped my hands in front of her eyes. 'The point, please. My heart is in my mouth, and you're talking about your bloody negligee.' I started to hum one of my favourite Girls Aloud songs about a negligee, ending with 'What will the neighbours say? Sorry, miles away. It's all these nerves. I'm wracked with them, honestly, they're jangling like a bunch of keys. So?'
'Not even a peep at my cleavage. Or my legs. I lay on the sofa while he talked about Artex and gypsum, no idea what either of them are, but all I do know is he didn't look at my legs once. And I'd shaved and moisturised them. Either he's one of yours, or he's very very polite. Can I go now?'
'He may be polite. He did come over as a well brought up lad. Like his mum would have taught him right from wrong, and given him a slap if he got it wrong.'
Lucy walked along the corridor, clutching her pile of books. She waved behind her with half a hand. 'Call me.' And she was gone.
I spent the next week growing back my beard. This was accompanied, once again, by many comments from pupils like, 'Forgotten your razor, Sir?' or the beautifully original, 'Looks like you've got something growing on your face, Sir' but my favourite, to which there's not really an answer was the ubiquitous, 'Are you growing a beard, or have you just stopped shaving?' I got quite good at smiling sweetly, stroking my facial foliage and moving onto a different topic of conversation as the week progressed.
Lucy first pointed out that it contained both ginger and grey hairs in the staff room on Thursday morning. I knew this, she knew this for she'd seen it before, but this had given the other teachers carte blanche to comment on the various colours and how i
t showed me as ageing, now I wasn't twenty any longer. The PE teacher, Mr Wood thought it hilarious to comment on the ginger bits and added, 'You look like an Open University lecturer on those programmes late at night. All you need is some flares and thick glasses.'
It was all water off a duck's back, for every night as I struggled not to scratch my face off with the itchiness growing with every day, I remembered Darren in his vintage sportswear, revealing just the right amount of leg hair at his ankle, and then allowed myself to wonder even more when I'd get a glimpse of the bumps and bulges contained within the vintage tracksuit trousers. And that kept my resolve strong to keep growing the beard.
Chapter 12
Back at the village hall, I rushed from my car, through the entrance hall and straight into the wrong room - but for this week, it was very much the right room in my be-bearded disguise.
Jay, the leader started with this week's story about himself. He explained that he lost his job when they found out he was snorting cocaine during office hours. 'I mean, there were others doing it too, but they were a bit more subtle about it, I suppose. Towards the end, I was walking into meetings sniffing and this friend of mine leans towards me and wipes off some white power on my top lip. I used to check that sort of thing in the mirror in the toilets, before I went back to work, but by the end, I'd got lazy, see. I thought I was invincible, nothing could touch me. Guess that was the coke, eh?' He looked around the room and everyone nodded with recognition, like this was the most obvious thing ever.
I nodded too, keen not to stick out from the rest of them.
'And that was when they took me to HR office. Human Resources, it's called. Human Remains more like. Not one bit of sympathy, or humanity between the lot of 'em. They said it would be best for me to leave, they'd pay me my notice, and could they have my office pass? When I started to walk home in the middle of the day, I didn't know what to do with myself. So I dropped my box of stuff in the cloakroom of a bar round the corner from the office - somewhere I'd been hundreds of times before - went to the toilet to top myself up, and sat there until it was dark and I couldn't walk. Somehow I got home - a taxi was involved, but I don't remember calling it.' He paused to look around the room. 'So that's me, I'm the leader, and that's how fucked up I let it get me.'
'Why do you always come here in a suit, if you were fired?'
'I realised that, apart from the coke, my job was all I had. It was me. I was a banker who made lots of money in the City, playing about with other people's money. Take that away from me, and all I was was a man who had a big cocaine habit. Doesn't sound so impressive does it? So I kept on wearing it every day, 'cause it made me feel like I was still that banker man.' He looked around the room as we all digested what he'd just said.
I started to clap as was expected, for him. The other men followed my lead. Jay sat back in his seat and asked who wanted to go next. I caught Darren's eye and my heart jumped that he'd returned. He wore a tight white tracksuit with green stripes, and white trainers. The trousers were tighter than the last ones he'd worn, definitely not contemporary, sadly the way he sat didn't reveal any of the contents of the trousers in any detail. The tracksuit top had a certain seventies air to it, the collar on it was large, edged in bright frog green.
The unemployed man, Pete, who used to do a bit of the powder as a reward for going to the job centre stood slowly, cleared his throat and continued his story. 'We got bored of just plain old sniffing it, so we thought we'd try to smoke it. Just to see what it was like, we said. I didn't know, but that's called crack cocaine, and it's much easier to get addicted to it than the normal stuff. But I didn't know this at the time. My friend said it would just be a clearer buzz than normal. So we did it, we smoked it. And we smoked it again. Then there was no going back to plain old sniffing it. This friend, he started to behave weird, like every time I saw him he'd forget who I was, where we were going.' The man swallowed, took a breath and looked around the room.
Jay stood next to him, patting his back. 'You can stop whenever you want, Pete. Okay? You only have to go as far as you want today. You can always come back to it next week.'
Pete nodded his head. 'This friend, he kept on about injecting. Said he'd got some clean needles, and it would all be fine. But I knew I didn't want anything to do with injecting, nothing to do with that shit. That was definitely my line. I mean, I thought my line was snorting it, but I knew my line was definitely injecting. He tried heroin, injected it and died the first time. I found out when he didn't turn up to meet me for a few weeks, didn't answer his calls. After a few weeks I got a call from his mobile. I laughed, started taking the piss out of him for not calling me back. It was his daughter. She'd finally managed to go through the bag of his things the hospital had given her when he died. She switched on his phone and was ringing all the people who'd left her dad a message. That was when I knew - I knew I had to get help, or that would be me. I knew that the lines people draw for themselves are only imaginary, they can easily move, and I didn't want mine moving, so I knew I had to knock it all on the head. That's when I started coming here. I've been two months with none of it. I still have a drink, but that was never my problem. If I drink too much I just pass out, or I'm sick. With coke I could carry on and carry on for days, with nothing to stop me. Not any more.'
The silence which followed felt like it lasted an hour. Jay broke it with clapping and a few of the men walked up to Pete and hugged him, patting his back hard in that manly straight man way.
Pete sat and I noticed him wiping his eyes as he stared at the floor, in the middle of the circle of chairs.
I went next, and recounted a story from the autobiography, saying I'd got so desperate for my next bag of coke, I'd sold my vacuum cleaner for some money. I finished and my hands were shaking, aware of the huge holes in my story, and that this was a well known, well documented story from that particular celebrity's 'cocaine shame hell', as the tabloids had described it at the time. I felt like my story was unravelling around my ears. I stopped talking and closed my eyes, squeezing them tight.
Jay's voice filled the hall. 'Okay, that's enough. No questions all right, lads? No questions, not tonight. Everyone get themselves a drink, and come back in five, and I'm going to start to talk about personal responsibility, and how what we do when we're using cocaine can affect people we love.' He clapped twice, and everyone stood. Some walked towards the kettle area, others went to the porch for a smoke.
Jay's talk was very interesting, as he explained that one of the twelve steps of the programme was taking responsibility for what we'd done, and apologising to those we'd affected: people we'd let down, people we'd stolen from, people we'd ignored for the attention of the drug instead.
I remembered this step from my internet research and made a note to revisit it, and to get myself some better, more original back story, rather than relying on the bloody autobiography.
Jay announced the time was up and asked for someone to help tidy up. I hung back until Darren walked to the sink to start washing up. I collected some mugs and met him, sleeves rolled up and up to his elbows in bubbles. I put some mugs on the draining board. He nodded and continued to wash them.
Everything collected, I stood to Darren's right and dried the clean mugs. I thought I'd take a risk so started with 'Very domesticated of you! Someone's got you well trained.'
'Piss off, and get on with your drying up.'
I picked up a mug and dried it slowly. 'I like this.' I touched his tracksuit top. 'Where'd you get it?'
'Vintage place up London.'
'Suits you.'
'Fanks.' He looked at me and handed me a mug, our hands touched briefly.
'Didn't think you'd come back. I missed you last week.'
'People to see, places to go. You know how it is.' He didn't look at me this time and shrugged.
'This ex of yours. I noticed you did the pronoun thing. What was the ex called?'
'What you on about?'
I explained the pronoun
game, how it had jumped out at me, because I often did it, even now, but for most people it just went over their heads.
'Chris.'
'Who, Chris?'
'Me ex - Chris.'
'I see.' I didn't, because out of all the bastard bloody names this ex could have been of course it was one which could be either male or female. I was still basically as in the dark as I'd been the last time I'd seen him. Bollocks.
'That beard suits you.'
'You think?'
'Bang on. You've a bit of the Danny Dyer about you, I reckon. Very nice.' He looked at my eyes, then straight back to the sink.
A bit of the Danny Dyer. Blimey. But hang on a minute he's a man's man, is Danny Dyer. He's a hard man, geezer, bloke. It's not the sort of compliment you give to someone you fancy. That's a nice one, cheers, another pint, compliment. Not a 'can I get to know you in a biblical sense' compliment. Bollocks. Still none the wiser. 'Where did you meet, this Chris?'
'Some club up London, in Vauxhall.'
Bingo. I swear I heard hallelujah fill the room. 'I go up Vauxhall too.' I found myself putting on a bit more of a cockney accent for him, dropping t's and h's left, right and centre - like Danny Dyer actually.
'You can pick up some good sorts there, can't you?'
I nodded.
'Chris was just that. Just a bit of sex. Then we bumped into each other the next week and came back to mine together. Then the week after. It got silly in the end. I said, let's just cut out the middleman and go back to mine before the club instead. Chris,' he swallowed. I watched his Adam's apple bob up and down his throat, covered with a light dusting of hair, which I wanted to bite hard, but resisted. He whispered, 'He liked that idea so we did. I lost half a stone and couldn't sit down for the next week. Told all the people I was plastering for I'd pulled it in the gym.' He chuckled then looked around the hall. No one was anywhere near us. 'What about your they, why did you play this pronoun thingy too?'