One of her roommates was Scottish Gladys, who talked incessantly to herself but avoided talking to anyone else. She occasionally called out into the darkness with some snippet of information – ‘I had them all christened, I did!’ – usually random, but enough to make Romilly wonder about the life that had gone before. The other roommate called herself T and, unlike Scottish Gladys, liked to speak a lot. Her favourite topic was Leighton, her ex-boyfriend, who was in prison, not that it was his fault. ‘No, he was fitted up by his wanker mates, and when he gets out, they’d better run, cos he’s had eighteen months to think about how he’s going to shit them up…’ Romilly refrained from jumping in with the punchline night after night.
She tried to avoid thinking about her own loved ones. It was too painful. But sometimes the least little thing triggered a memory and the tears came. Like the evening she found herself unwrapping a small packet of two fruit shortcake biscuits that someone had given her, the kind you might get on a tray in a budget hotel. As she nibbled the soft edge, dropping sugary crumbs down her nightdress, a conversation floated into her head. ‘In fact I sometimes think if I didn’t have to shop and cook for you two, I’d still live off biscuits and crisps and the odd bit of toast. I’d go back to being like a little nibbling mouse.’ She saw herself standing in her beautiful kitchen on that glorious sunny morning with the people she loved. The stream of tears made her nose run and her sobs made it almost impossible to swallow the flavourless grains.
She looked for ways to distract herself. After lights-out, she’d pull the thick grey blanket up over her shoulder, lie on her side and stare at a stain on the shiny pale green wall. She decided it was a map of the world and she spent hours looking at each country, thinking about its food and vegetation, its sea, land and mountains, its animals and insect life. She thought of all the places she had visited and those she wanted to visit, using her mind to escape from the room in which she found herself and the desperate, all-consuming desire for a drink that threatened to drive her insane.
*
Romilly had completed the first phase of the Clean Life, Clean Start programme and had managed to remain alcohol-free for two weeks. This earned her another month in the programme and today she was going to attend her first meeting, the beginning of phase two.
Father Brian smiled and nodded his encouragement as she walked into the room. He had the wonderful knack of making her feel special, and judging by other people’s reactions to him, she was not alone. There were filing cabinets and bookshelves lining the walls and she rightly figured that this dusty old place that smelt like a library was used as an office during the day. But now, with all the desks pushed to one side and the chairs placed in a circle in the middle, it was serving as a meeting room.
Romilly was quiet. She pulled her hair into a ponytail and fastened it at her neck as she took deep breaths to try and calm her flustered pulse. She was nervous, scared about so many aspects of this, not least about starting, properly starting something that she didn’t want to fail at. She couldn’t afford to fail.
Pulling out one of the chairs in the circle, she took a seat and glanced at the other ten or so people gathered around her. It was the usual cross-section – male, female, old, young, black, white. She now understood that this affliction was indiscriminate; it could get its hooks into anyone: a clever, clever girl like her or even an academic surgeon from Stuttgart.
A young woman opposite checked her phone and stretched her legs out into the circle, crossing them at the ankle as she sighed. Father Brian clapped twice, his voice calm but commanding.
‘Good evening, everyone, and thank you so much for your punctuality and your willingness to be here. I would encourage all of you to keep your hearts, eyes and minds open. We’re here to see if we can learn from the experiences of others and, more importantly, to help support each other through this difficult time. I’d like to remind you though that the hardest thing is coming here in the first place and you have all achieved that and so be proud of taking that very difficult first step and know that you are not alone. You are not alone.’
He paused and smiled at each of them and Romilly felt warmth spread through her. I don’t want to be alone any more. I miss my little girl. I miss my David. I miss me… She shook off the emotion that threatened, knowing she had to keep it together.
Father Brian invited a man to speak. He shuffled to the edge of his chair and told of his journey, conquering his nerves to explain how he had been a maths teacher for many years at a boys’ school in Kent but had then lost his wife and had been unable to cope. Romilly looked at the girl with the phone, sitting opposite her. She saw how her eyes rolled with impatience and how she stole glances at the large clock on the wall. She then sighed and shoved her hands into the pockets of her bomber jacket and Romilly could read her mind. ‘I’m not like these people, these poor bastards. These people have serious issues, but me? I’m different; I’ve just hit a bump in the road.’
She didn’t realise she was crying until Father Brian spoke to her. ‘Romilly? Would you like to say something?’
He smiled and stood to hand her a large box of tissues. She grabbed a few and held them to her running nose. Then she nodded and took a deep breath. She’d sat in on sessions like this so many times before, at The Pineapple and in Austria, and they’d never felt relevant or real, but this one was different.
‘I… I’ve lost my husband, my home, my job and I don’t see my little girl, my beautiful girl.’ She pictured Celeste. ‘I can’t see a future for me if I don’t stop drinking. I had it all, and that’s the hardest part for me, I really had it all… But I need some help. I do.’ She gulped her tears. ‘I need some help because… because I’m ill. I am ill. I’m… I’m an alcoholic.’ She let her head fall to her chest as she remembered waking with her head next to a bag of dog shit. Her tongue probed the hole in her gum where her tooth once lived.
‘I’m an alcoholic.’ She sobbed. ‘I know it here…’ She touched her trembling fingers to her head. ‘And I know it here…’ She laid her fingers on her heart. Sitting up straight, she looked at Father Brian, who smiled at her. ‘I’m an alcoholic.’
Celeste
I guess you could say I grew less curious about my mum as I got older. I knew that she was living in London. Aunty Holly and Aunty Carrie saw her once and tried to fill me in, but it was hard for them to soft-soap what they’d seen, make it appropriate for my young teenage ears, and just as hard for me to hear it. They spoke about her with an affection that I found hard to match. It was as if they were talking about a total stranger. I didn’t have the decades of memories and closeness they did or the advantage of adult perspective that could visualise things restored. I tried to picture her with this other life and it made it seem very final. I knew then that she definitely wasn’t coming home any time soon, if ever.
Annie, who at that stage was Dad’s new friend, made it easier for me to talk about her. She was a wonderful conduit between Dad and me; still is. My life is definitely richer for having her in it.
Ironically, I still used to imagine, sometimes, that Mum had died. I concluded that it wouldn’t feel that different if she had: I never saw her, never heard from her, and I was used to it being just Dad and me, with Granny Sylvia coming to stay every so often.
It was around this time that I went to my first grown-up party, the first party where there was snogging and smoking and not party games and cake. It was hosted by a boy called Ben, a friend of a friend who had been shoved into an expensive boarding school and whose parents were living abroad; he’d managed to get the keys for their house, which was bursting at the seams with teenagers. To be there was exciting and scary all at the same time. My friends were desperate to get drunk, swigging at anything that was passed to them. Amelia pressed a glass bottle of beer into my hand. It was open, and half-drunk, and I went to swig from it just like everybody else. But as I brought it near my mouth, the smell hit me. It was just the same as that sour smell that used to be on my mu
m’s breath when she tucked me in at night, that her minty chewing gum could never quite mask. I had a sudden flash of memory of my mum passed out with her pants around her ankles and covered in sick, with my dad standing over her with his sad smile, the one where he was trying to be kind and patient even though every drop of booze that touched her lips just drove him further and further away from her. My friends teased me and said I was being a baby, but I didn’t drink a mouthful that night, and I still don’t drink. I told my friends I just didn’t like the taste, and that’s the story I’ve stuck with ever since.
Nineteen
Romilly was a star pupil and the further she progressed through the Clean Life, Clean Start programme, the more clearly she could see her horizon. After eighteen months, her model behaviour and commitment had earned her a tiny single room in one of the independent flats owned by the trust, a short stroll from Waterloo Station. The Tube trains rattled her windows as they rumbled along beneath her block on their way to Kennington, sending a judder through the entire building that unnerved newcomers, but she’d got used to it. She found the hum of all those people travelling underground like little moles quite comforting.
Her room was sparse, just the way she liked it. Anything more homely might have made it feel permanent and that would have been wrong. This was always going to be a stepping-stone. Tempted one weekend to put up a poster that T had given her, to cheer up the white wall above her single divan bed, she hesitated and thought about the house in Stoke Bishop, the cool, tiled floors, comfy sofas, soft bathroom lighting and fluffy white towels nestling on a rack. She quickly folded the poster and put it in the cupboard. Let someone else prettify the walls, not her. This was a rare slip. She deliberately avoided thinking about the house, because if she did, she inevitably started thinking about the people in it, and to even picture their faces was more than she could cope with.
The ache she felt to be with her family did not fade with time. In fact, the closer she came to feeling ‘cured’, the more she ached, as if her mind allowed those feelings to stir now that it was all within reach, almost. She had started to look at her recovery in terms of probability, understanding that the longer she abstained from drinking, the clearer her mind became, the more her physical cravings weakened and the less she felt like she needed a drink. And so it went. She was learning that it was important to stay locked in an upward spiral of success, celebrating every day of sobriety and taking great care not to spoil or undo all the work she’d done so far.
Her regular attendance at the group meetings helped. For the first time, Romilly listened, really listened and was able to identify with many of the tales told within that circle of chairs. The routes there were many and varied and they were bound not by where they had started but by their having ended up in that room, rock bottom for many. Among her own group of mumblers, shufflers, nail biters, angry men and crying women was a managing director, a florist, a grandparent, a teacher and a policeman. Ordinary people like her, former functioning members of society who had fallen into the dark crevice, lured by the scent of a cork or the feel of a glass bottle against their mouth.
Romilly walked to Chandler House every day, in all weathers. Pulling her jumper over her hands and buttoning up her coat, she marched over Waterloo Bridge, never tiring of the majestic view of Big Ben to her left and the City rising high into the sky to her right. The Shard stood like a razor, sharp and gleaming in the morning sun. She walked in a throng, everyone but her tapping or talking into phones, gripping cases and bags whose laptops and tablets linked them to the rest of the planet. She, however, felt removed from the world, unconnected, without a phone, computer or purse. She had no real identity, at least not there, and that was the way it needed to be for her.
She knew that, though she was doing well – it was twenty-two months, three weeks and two days since she’d had a drink – she was still teetering at the edge of the crevice, balanced on tiptoes. One harsh word of criticism from her mother, one flippant remark from Holly or indifferent sigh from David and she couldn’t guarantee that she wouldn’t jump. Only when she could confidently remain flat-footed and steady on the surface, with the crevice behind her and her purposeful stride taking her in the other direction, only then would it be time to pick up the phone or hop on a train. Only then would she make contact with Celeste, when she was certain that she was not going to let her down or harm her ever again.
Romilly stopped every morning to pick up a pint of milk at a corner shop on the edge of Theatreland. It was an incongruous little space among the bars, restaurants, coffee shops and designer offerings of this London postcode. Here, the shelves bulged with cheap white bread in plastic bags, no-brand biscuits, bottles of fizz, a huge variety of crisps, tiny jars of coffee, tinned peaches in syrup, cans of deodorant and a whole range of birthday cards aimed at young girls who loved glitter and cats. Romilly liked it because, for a minute or two while she surveyed the shelves, she could be anywhere, in any little shop in any street in any city, and it made her happy. There were a multitude of memories for her among these shelves, from nipping to the store for her mum, with coins nestling in her palm, to stopping at the shop on the way back to halls after a night out, eager to pick up junk food.
‘What are you doing?’ the middle-aged man behind the counter asked as she stood with her hands in the fridge, moving stuff around.
‘Oh, sorry! I was just sorting your milk. You had the bottles with the older dates at the back, so I was just bringing them forward, otherwise you’ll be left with a lot of out-of-date milk tomorrow morning.’ She looked at the floor.
‘I see. And what else would you like to change about my business?’ He folded his arms across his fat belly, which was encased in a zip-up cardigan that had dark stains down the front.
She looked around. ‘Well, you’ve put household bits and bobs like floor polish and scourers next to the cakes – that’s no good, they should be separate. People don’t want to think about bleach and cake.’
He sighed. ‘Anything else?’
She held his gaze. ‘You have too many of the same type of greetings card. You should have “Sorry You’re Leaving” cards and “Congratulations On Your New Job”. There are lots of offices around here and I bet people would pick them up.’
The man scratched at his grey stubble. ‘You want a job?’
‘Do I…?’ She thought she might have misheard.
‘What am I, a parrot, having to repeat everything? Do you want a job? The money’s crap and I am the worst boss in the world. I will forget to open up and leave you outside in the rain and I am one miserable bastard.’ His stony expression indicated he wasn’t lying.
‘I… I’m in a programme at Chandler House. I drink. Well, I did. I haven’t for a long time and I don’t intend to again. I’m from Bristol, but I’m here away from my family.’ She felt her lip tremble.
‘For God’s sake, do I look like I want your life story? I don’t!’ He shook his head. ‘So is that a yes?’
‘So, come on! Tell me! Is it yes or no? Don’t leave a guy hanging!’
Romilly smiled at him and nodded her head. ‘It’s a yes.’
‘What’s your name?’ he asked, lifting his chin.
‘Romilly.’
‘What kind of name is that!’
‘What’s yours?’
‘Doruk.’
‘For some people that might be as odd as Romilly,’ she shot back.
He ignored her. ‘Three days a week, ten till three. Start tomorrow.’ He threw a tabard at her, bottle-green with red piping.
She caught it between her hands and stared at it and then him. Feeling the polyester squeak between her fingers, she smiled at him. This was so much more than a job, this was a chance and it was a gesture of trust that she had no right to expect.
‘Oh and Ronnylee, or whatever that was, don’t be late!’ And he winked at her, flashing a wide, brief smile.
*
The round of applause was loud and heartfelt; it had been
a great meeting. Father Brian stood and started to collapse the chairs, turning the space back into an office.
‘Father Brian?’
‘Yes?’ He continued to work as she hovered in the middle of the room.
‘Guess what? She beamed.
‘I don’t know!’ He removed his glasses and returned her smile.
‘I got a job! Someone gave me a job! Can you believe it?’
‘Yes, I can! And congratulations. At this rate, Romilly, you’ll be out of our hair before we know it. I’m so pleased for you.’
‘It feels like a big step.’
‘It is, that’s why.’
Romilly held the doorframe and looked at the man who had helped turn her life around. ‘You know, I used to have a great job that I loved, and a lot of responsibility.’ She pictured Tim, her lovely colleague, and the kind, kind Dr Gregson. ‘But I can’t imagine doing that now. I’m different, things are different.’
‘Yes. Now they are, but who knows about the future?’
She shrugged. ‘I guess. I wouldn’t have done any of this without you, Father Brian.’
‘Oh yes, you would. You’ve done it all. I’ve just provided the tools, but you’ve had to work hard with them and you have and you still are. You are a strong woman. Stronger than you know.’
Another Love Page 23