by John Lynch
We were waiting to see our counsellors. He told me that he had always found women difficult; they brought out the worst in him. He blamed his father, he said. He had stayed with his mother even though she had affair after affair. It was a bad example. As a child the first woman he knew was conniving and duplicitous and it coloured the rest of his life. It was something that he had spent years trying to come to terms with. It was one of the reasons that he drank, he told me. He also said that he didn’t know an alcoholic who didn’t have rage in his soul, he was no different, and you’re no different, he said, looking at me. It’s in your eyes, he said, they are the window to everything after all. I look at the side of his face and wonder at what it is that drives men like us to destroy the beauty of the world around us. I think about where I’ve been, about the dangerous places that my mind took me to, of the terror and the pain. I know that insanity stalked men like us, that it was the coat that we had been given to wear.
‘Don’t make the mistakes I’ve made, my friend,’ Clive said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Find out what it is. Find that fucker deep inside you that breaks everything you touch and drag him into the light and kill him dead.’
Christopher, Clive’s counsellor, was standing in front of us; neither of us heard him arrive. He had a smile on his face.
‘I couldn’t have put it better myself, Clive.’
Almost Time
She doesn’t look at me as she takes her seat. She is late and we have been waiting for her. I want to be anywhere but here, in this modern room with its large panes of glass, surrounded by people who have pain carved into their faces and misery in their gaze. I don’t want to be counted with them, I am different. I resent the glances of comfort I get from one or two of them; I want to tell them to concentrate on their own hearts. I need nothing or no-one, I want to tell them. I’m sweating, it is not fear, I tell myself, pull yourself together, look the world straight in the eye and tell it to fuck off like you’ve always done. Thaddeus comes over to me and kneels in front of me. For a moment I don’t look at him, but he waits until I do, I have the feeling that he will wait all day if necessary.
‘You okay?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You don’t look it.’
‘I’m okay.’
‘Don’t shut down.’
‘What?’
‘You heard me. I know that this is tough.’
I look around at the faces, at the other drunks and their wives, at their clasped hands.
‘You have to give this a chance,’ Thaddeus says.
I look back at him. I try and tell myself that he cares, that the concern I see in his eyes is real.
‘This is your first time and you’re bound to want to fight it. Family programme is an important part of recovery. You must try and trust the process. Your wife understands this. We’ve talked to her.’
It is then that she arrives. It is over a week since I’ve seen her. I was so drugged that I’m not sure if it wasn’t something that my imagination had dreamed up. One or two of the couples sigh impatiently as she makes her apologies. Thaddeus gets up and goes to the centre of the room to meet her and indicates with his arm that she should seat herself next to me. He smiles as she takes a chair and positions herself at the end of the far row of people as far away from me as possible. All this time she hasn’t looked at me. Thaddeus walks over to her and leans down to speak quietly in her ear. I see him look in my direction. For a moment she doesn’t say anything and then looks at me. I can see she is deciding whether to come and sit beside me or not. Then with a sigh and a murmured ‘Excuse me’ to the couple next to her she picks up her chair and comes and places it next to mine. Instinctively I reach out to take her hand that’s resting on her lap. She pulls it away without looking at me. I look at the side of her face, I can see the tendons in her jaw tensing and relaxing as the anger pulses through her body.
‘Okay,’ Thaddeus says.
‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ my wife says before he can continue. ‘I nearly didn’t come at all.’
‘That’s fine, Mrs O’Rourke. We all understand that this is a difficult situation. Everyone in this room is not a stranger to this…’
‘I still don’t know why I’m here…’
‘But the fact is you are.’ he says.
‘I’m so sick of this…’ she says.
‘I know. It’s normal that you should feel like this.’
‘Give it some time, love,’ one of the other wives says.
‘That’s all I’ve fucking done. Excuse me for my language. That’s all I’ve ever done is give it time. Time only makes it worse.’
I stare at the floor. Clive leans into my ear and tells me not to worry. I don’t look at him. I think of the mess, and the terror that I laid at her door. I think of my son and the question in his eyes whenever he looked at me, as if to say which father will you be today, the good one or the bad. It’s a moment before I realise that Thaddeus is talking to me. I look up to meet his gaze.
‘I’m going to start with you. Both of you. Bring your seats out here into the middle of the room and place them facing each other. I want you, Mrs O’Rourke, to…’
‘Cathy,’ my wife says.
‘Fine. Excuse me, Cathy. Place the chair at a distance that you feel sums up how close or how far apart your relationship is at the moment. Do you follow?’
‘No,’ my wife says.
‘Okay bring your chairs. I’ll show you.’
We both walk to the centre of the room and he takes the chairs from us, placing them one opposite the other so that the front of their seats are almost touching.
‘Very close,’ he says. ‘Maybe too close. A marriage that is intimate to the point of suffocation…’
He then takes one of the chairs and puts it down far away from the other near the outer ring of the circle of people. He points to it and says: ‘Divorce territory. No hopesville. You see?’
We both nod. He goes to move the chair back to the centre of the room when my wife says: ‘Leave it there.’
Someone laughs. I look to Thaddeus, he shrugs.
‘So be it. Please, both of you sit. Now all I want you to do, Cathy, is have a think for a second and then address Gabriel. Talk to him. Tell him the things that you have wanted to tell him. Explain what it was like to be with him when he was using, how it affected your life. Please remember this is confidential. And that everyone in this room will be in these hot seats…Sooner rather than later…’
‘I can’t do this,’ she says.
I see her look to me as she says this as if to say I won’t betray you. I know that this won’t do, that Thaddeus is sharper than that.
‘With all respect, Cathy, it’s not important what he thinks, this is about you. You owe it to yourself…to your child…to stop this. To reclaim the time that his illness has taken from you. And that begins by defining it…by telling it. Do you understand?’
She nods. I see her take a deep breath. The room is waiting. I am waiting. I have nowhere left to run to.
‘And Gabriel?’
‘Yes?’
‘Listen. Just listen,’ he says.
‘I don’t love you anymore. That’s what I came here to say today. I don’t know you. Not the man you’ve become. I want out. Normality, that’s what I want. Boring, boring normality…for me and for our son. I don’t want the jealousy, the worry and the pain, the violence. It wasn’t a life what we had. It was just one crisis after the other. People don’t live like that. I’m sorry, but for a while I thought that I could…help. But I think you’re beyond help. Even a place like this is no use to someone like you. What saddens me even more is I think that you don’t remember half the things that you did…the dirty sordid things. The way you spoke to my friends, my family. You’re just an animal. And you still blame me for everything: for your sickness, for putting you in here. Do you realise that you ended up with the winos lying in the street, like a dog that was dying. Do you? You don’
t see, do you. You never have.’
She takes the tissue that Thaddeus offers her and nods her thanks. I look around the room. One or two of the women are crying, some of the men are staring at the floor. I know that they see themselves in what they have just heard.
Thaddeus looks at me. For a minute or two I don’t return his gaze. When I do I see that he is smiling. I know that he is trying to reassure me, but I don’t want his concern, or his professional empathy.
‘Do you want to say anything?’
‘He won’t say anything. He never does,’ my wife says.
‘With all respect…’ Thaddeus says, raising his arm as if to say you’ve had your moment.
‘Gabriel?’
I don’t reply. All I see is the dark dance of my body falling, flailing into the end of things. I feel the vastness of space holding my body as I tumble, like a large black blanket unfolding into infinity. I see the shape of my despair as I flit between the clouds; I feel its hungry breath on my skin. I see the ground lying below me like a bride eagerly waiting in her marriage bed. I think of the faces I have worn in my time, ones of deceit, ones of pain. I hear the whistle of the wind in my ears and the roar of my old life splintering like an oak tree hit by lightning. It won’t be long now, I tell myself. No, it won’t be long.
Walking Backwards
‘You are my special project,’ Thaddeus says.
‘I don’t know whether that’s a good or a bad thing.’
‘Believe me it’s good. It’s very good. I asked for you. Made my pitch at the weekly meeting of the counsellors. I see me in you. And I think that I am in a good position to help you.’
I watch as he tightens the knot on his tie and then smoothes it with the palm of his hand. I know that means he is ready to begin. I ask him if I can smoke. He shakes his head and smiles.
‘No, afraid not.’
‘Why not?’
‘Good thing to hide behind, a smokescreen. I prefer that you are present and not hidden by clouds of cigarette fumes. I’ll give you a few minutes at some point and you can nip out. Deal?’
‘Deal.’
The first time I had met him, I wanted to shove his smugness where the sun didn’t go but I have mellowed towards him, in spite of myself. There are still moments though when I want to strike out at him. I’d like to take the coffee I’m holding and dribble it down the front of his immaculate blue suit.
‘The other day was difficult for you, wasn’t it?’
‘What do you think?’
‘Yes. Stupid question, I suppose…Family meetings are always barbed with resentments and anger. Still we all have to go through it…to bring those secrets out into the light…’
‘I hated the way she looked at me.’
‘Like you were an animal?’
‘Yes.’
‘How is your head?’
‘It’s okay.’
‘No strange beliefs or…?’
‘No.’
‘Well we are at the point in your treatment where things get a little more serious. A little more grown-up. You are someone who needs to be force-fed reality sometimes. Now it gives me no pleasure to say that. But I was the same. My mind was a tinderbox looking for a match. And alcohol was that spark that made me, well, insane.’
‘I wasn’t insane.’
‘No.’
‘No.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Just…’
‘I have your file here…’
‘So?’
‘So. The black and white of these pages tell me something very different to what you’re saying.’
‘Is that a fact?’
‘Yes. On the street. Cautioned for violence. Sleeping in doorways. Begging for money. Harassment of your wife and child. Hospital stays. Lock-up ward…’
‘Alright. Alright.’
‘Now I know that in the light of day and with a bit of distance and some food in your belly these things can seem outrageous, as if they happened to someone else. But the fact is, Gabriel, they happened to you. That’s the truth.’
‘Yes.’
‘The only way to stop them happening again is to arm you. To give you a recovery programme that is watertight. That involves going to meetings and staying dry. It’s going to be difficult.’
‘How did I know that you were going to say that?’
‘Nothing that’s worth anything is easy.’
‘How did I know that you were going to say that too?’
He leans forward and holds me with his eyes.
‘Let’s get one thing straight before we start, Gabriel. I have a very thick skin. And you…You have yet to grow one.’
Missing
There are about twelve of us. We are crammed into a white minibus. I’m sitting between Greg the young lawyer and Clive. There is another one behind us that holds the rest of my group. We are on our way to our first AA meeting. Two people are missing so we are waiting, the engines of the buses idling as one of the counsellors scours the rooms of the institute for them. Mrs Johnson hasn’t turned up, which is no surprise to any of us. She had spent the previous few days saying that everything was a big mistake, that she knew who she was now, that she was indeed Mrs Johnson and that the others had left her for good and since it was they who had the problem, she was free and demanded that she be allowed to go home. At first she had made her request politely, but the more she was ignored by the therapists the more her voice rose. At one point Thaddeus had turned round and told her to be quiet, that she had been assessed, and that no-one believed her stories of Cassie and Angelina, that it was a trick to cover the fact that she was just a dirty drunk like the rest of us. That had shut her up for a while. Thaddeus had that effect on people with his no-nonsense voice and his unrelenting stare. But her protests continued and eventually one of the other therapists, a woman called Ursula, had asked her to step outside one of the classes so that she could have a word with her in private. We all sat and listened as we heard Mrs Johnson’s voice rise, saying that they had got her wrong, all wrong. ‘I’m fine, it’s just me, just Mrs Johnson now.’
The other person who is missing is Josey, the girl I met in the secure unit. She has been skipping more and more sessions, sometimes arriving late, her thin face drawn and haggard, her eyes moist and red. As I sit in the minibus waiting for the news on our two missing people I think of how within the space of a couple of weeks my soul had righted itself, and how the other man I had become had begun to recede like the shadows in a dark room as daylight invaded it. But for all my sudden optimism I knew that he would always lurk within me, waiting to pounce like a cheetah bringing down its lunch.
‘Right. Let’s go.’
The counsellor is back. He climbs into the passenger seat of the minibus and whispers something to the driver.
‘Any luck?’ Clive asks.
‘Sorry?’
‘Any luck with the others?’
‘No. They won’t be joining us tonight.’
Alf had taken me aside earlier in the day and told me to keep up the good work, that I had been doing really well, and that I was unrecognisable as the angry spiteful man who had arrived ten days before. He told me to have faith and that the powers that be had made a decision to allow me out to go to my first meeting as they felt that I was ready for what I would hear. He then leaned into me and said that this would be the single most important moment of my life and that I should make sure that I stayed open and receptive. He told me to listen for the similarities in what I would hear, to be positive. Identify, he said, identify with the people in the room. So as we pull out the drive of the hospital, I try and quell the desire to run that rises in me. I realise that it’s because I am suddenly travelling in the outside world again, that it’s been a while since I’ve seen its streets and felt its hot energy in my veins. I look through the van window at the rain-black streets and the lights as they bend and twist across the night. I see myself as I was only a few weeks before, a figure shorn of love, spinning in
the terrors of his mind. Every building we pass seems to house a bar, and I imagine myself there cocooned in their warmth, lifting a beer to my lips. I wonder at the hold it still has on my heart, this thought, this substance that all my life I have looked to, asking it to solve me, to hide me from the world. I shake my head and wipe away the condensation that has formed on the glass. I see the ghostly reflection of my eyes as I do. I see the hunger and the need in them.