At first, I hid it from Ant. I hid it all over the house – under the mattress in the spare room, in the bathroom, behind the sink. I’d hide a bottle in the garage, or the shed, or even in some bushes outside, and I’d nip out to sneak a shot when I needed it, straight from the bottle; or I’d lock myself in the bathroom and drink it where he couldn’t see. To begin with, I could just carelessly throw a bottle in with the weekly shop, innocent as you like, and he’d think nothing of it.
But then it started to escalate. It was scary how quickly it spiralled – spiralled out of control. It got to the point where I would just try to down as much as I could. I was drinking a litre a day, but I wasn’t addicted to the alcohol as such.
I was addicted to not feeling that hideous, horrible pain.
One afternoon, Ant announced he was off to the corner shop to get some dog food and I said casually, ‘Oh, can you get me some vodka, please?’
He didn’t say anything. He brought it back for me, and he put it high up on the Welsh dresser we had in the living room, out of my reach.
‘What’s all this about then, Victoria?’ he said. He was angry, I could tell; it was like the penny had dropped, and he was fuming. ‘I can see what you’re doing. You’re a pisshead, aren’t you?’ He pointed towards the bottle, so high up on the shelf. ‘You’re not having it. You need to go cold turkey and come off it.’
There’s no manual for these things; he was doing the best he could. I don’t think either of us realised until that afternoon just what a big problem it was. I think for Ant – well, no one wants to think the worst of people they care about, and he didn’t want to think the worst of me. He’d had blinkers on, but they were coming off now. As for me, I had fallen so far down the rabbit hole I didn’t know which way was up anymore. That afternoon was the moment I realised I was too far gone even to care.
I was lying on the sofa, with dirty, greasy hair, covered in a cold sweat. The dogs were lying by the sofa beside me, casting worried looks up at the raised voices in their home. I needed a drink; I needed a drink so badly.
‘You’re not getting it!’ Ant shouted at me fiercely.
I started to shake. My body craved the alcohol so much. I shook and shook and eventually I passed out. Ant was watching me. I went bright blue and then I bit my tongue mid-seizure and blood started pouring from my mouth. Ant rang for help; he rang the paramedics. They rushed into the house and gave me the medical attention my body now required: it couldn’t live without the booze any more.
When I came round, still lying on the sofa, I found Ant’s eyes, and I locked onto them. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, ‘I’m so sorry.’ I took a deep breath, and when I closed my eyes I found tears were in them, sad and shameful. ‘I am an alcoholic,’ I said. ‘I am, I am. I’m so sorry, Ant. I’m so sorry.’
I never denied what I was, after that.
But that didn’t mean I could stop myself drinking.
Life isn’t as easy as that.
CHAPTER FORTY
I heard the door slam from my pit on the sofa. The house was a mess, and so was I.
‘Come on, Victoria,’ Ant said. He lifted my hair out of the pile of sick it was resting in, and made me sit up. Then he changed my stoma bag for me. He was nurturing and sweet and kind.
Other times, he wasn’t. He would be very angry, and yell in my face. He poured away my vodka, even though the doctor told him not to, because he said that the withdrawal could kill me stone dead.
From where I was sitting, barely propped up with vomit in my hair, that would be no bad thing.
What a fall from grace it had been. In my befuddled state, I could still remember people who used to say to me, ‘You’ve done so well, given what you’ve been through.’ It had become too much to cope with, though, trying to keep that perfect, jolly, happy life in place – a life that had been happy only on the surface. It had been too hard, trying to be with people who had lived a much more normal life than me: struggling to appear as ordinary and well adjusted as they were was just too exhausting. Well, I didn’t bother with any of that artifice anymore.
Gradually, I stopped paying my bills. The council took over my rent but only on a temporary basis, they said. Because Ant didn’t work, he was paying nothing towards the utility bills. The compensation money was long gone, sucked into payments to the landlord. I found Ant not working very, very stressful. He had never worked in all the time I’d known him. I felt like I was being used; that he wasn’t paying his way. My neighbour, Emma, tried to help, but she didn’t really know how, and her encouragement, kind-hearted as it was, was somehow not enough to get through to me. We didn’t fall out, but I’d sunk so low her friendship didn’t reach me any longer. I felt more and more isolated and alone. In the end, my money arguments with Ant were another thing I wanted to forget about; another thing the vodka dulled the pain of. I just wanted all my pain to stop, and the only way to make that happen was to drink the next bottle of vodka.
My GP tried to help me over the next year, in a number of ways, some of them absolutely incredible – he would clear his diary of appointments to come and see me, and even visit on weekends, just to check how I was – and others seemingly bizarre. He told Ant that he had to give me alcohol; he told the corner shop they had to sell it to me. Because without it, now, I would die: my body couldn’t live without it. He tried to get me help for alcoholism, but the alcoholism team told me I should be cared for by the mental-health department; when I went to them, they sent me back to substance misuse. I felt like a sausage in a factory, that nobody understood. I felt I had no one to turn to.
When Ant poured away the booze, I’d end up in A & E with severe withdrawal symptoms. He and others thought that was the best place for me. ‘If she’s in hospital, she’s safe,’ they reasoned. But as my visits added up, the A & E staff grew more and more exasperated. ‘You’re a pisshead, you don’t belong here, go home’ – that was their attitude.
People told Ant to leave me. ‘Stay away from her,’ they said, ‘she’s scum. Leave her alone.’
But he refused to give up on me. ‘No,’ he would say, ‘this is not the Torrie I know, this is not her.’ He’d get me up and wash my hair. And he’d take the dogs for a walk for me, after I’d put down their food on the kitchen floor with a shaking hand. I was still managing to keep the dogs fed and watered, because I loved them so much, but everything else in my life was a mess.
I tried to come off the alcohol for him. ‘Well done,’ he would say, ‘well done, Torrie.’ I wanted to come off it so badly. I think I came off too fast, though, wanting to impress him, and I took ten thousand paces back. Sweats, shaking, seizures in the living room, biting my tongue, sometimes even losing my sight – it would fade out in front of my eyes. So, so scary.
It nearly tore us apart. I was barely there, just existing, really, a shell of my former self. But Ant looked inside that shell and he knew me, he knew. And he didn’t give up.
‘Leave her, she’s not worth it! You’ve done your best for her, now let her go!’ people would screech at him.
The more they shouted, the more I drank.
In the end, sometime in the spring of 2012, Ant did move out. I didn’t blame him. He was only a young man, and he couldn’t cope with watching someone he loved drink herself to death. It was fair enough.
I watched him go and I thought, if I could think at all, That serves you right, Torrie. You have let everybody down. Just like your mother always said … you are the scum of the earth.
I kept drinking after he left. Of course I did – I had to numb the pain. Every day, I’d drink until I was asleep, and then when I was awake I’d drink to sleep again. I didn’t want to be awake; I didn’t want to be alive. Over and over I would think about Mum, and then I’d raise that nasty bottle to my lips and try to drown her out with desperate mouthfuls of acrid, bitter booze.
I became a skinny girl sitting on the sofa, my blonde hair stringy and thick with grease, lying lank about my shoulders. I didn’t bothe
r putting in my dentures, so my mouth reverted to its natural state: dark gaps in my tooth-line where the vodka could flow through easily. And my hands? Oh God, my hands. They were dry, dry as dust from all the dehydration.
I knew of only one other person who had dry hands like mine: Phil. Uncle Phil. I was turning into the man I hated and that was just the most, the most awful thing in the world. I looked at my hands, and felt their calloused yellow skin, so familiar to me from when his drunkard’s hands had touched my young white body, and I thought, You’re turning into him, you’re turning into that man you detest.
I reached for the bottle and I drank some more.
One morning in the May of 2012, a letter landed on the doormat with a slim, thin sound. It was from my landlord, telling me I was out: he was going to evict me. I tried to sober up, and I went down to the council offices to ask them to rehouse me, hopefully in a place with a garden or a nearby park, so the dogs would be OK.
But they said I owed them rent, and that as far as they were concerned, I had nowhere else to go. I qualified for a place on the street: no more, no less.
And I knew. Oh God, I knew.
I knew at that point I was going to lose the dogs.
Ollie, Milly, Alfie, Berry: my babies, my family.
I was the worst mother in the whole wide world.
‘Ms Spry …’ I heard a European accent from somewhere through the pounding fug of my head. ‘Ms Spry …’
Opening my eyes, I squinted against the glare of the hospital lights. I was in A & E … again. I was always in A & E, having been picked up for being collapsed in the street; or Ant might have called 999 if he’d come round to walk the dogs and found me passed out in my bed. He did still pop in regularly, no matter what some of his friends – or even the doctors – said. He was still my best mate; it was just a very hard thing for him to handle. One out-of-hours doctor told him he didn’t know why he bothered, though – ‘You might as well leave her in her pit to die because some people you can never help.’
I tried to focus on the doctor before me now. He had a German accent. I could hear beeping machinery, and the occasional glug of drips as they pumped vitamins into my arms, replenishing my battered body.
‘Ms Spry, time to go home now, yes? Nurse, take the drips out. If she wants to go home and drink herself to death, we might as well let her.’
And I was unceremoniously chucked out of bed. I nearly fell down the stairs on my way out; I was shaking so much from the withdrawals.
A lot of the nurses and doctors felt like that about me. In many ways, I didn’t blame them. I went to A & E nearly forty times in eighteen months. Nurses would tell me in disgust, ‘I wouldn’t spit on you even if you were on fire,’ or ‘An old lady just died up there because people like you are taking up beds.’ I felt so guilty about that. More murders to add to my conscience. More reasons to drink myself to death.
The problem was, if you break your leg in society, it’s all plastered up and people can see it, so they’ll leap to their feet to help you: they’ll offer you a seat, or go to fetch a glass of water. But with mental ill health, especially a case like mine, where I had decades of anguish eating at my soul, it’s an invisible affliction, and you can’t see it, so no one offers you a way to take the weight off your figurative feet. I don’t want this to make me sound like a victim because the drinking was all my fault, and I admit that, hand on heart, but I felt so awfully misunderstood at that time. I wasn’t trying to cause trouble; I was just trying to take my pain away. I’d ended up in this fucking pit and I didn’t even know how I’d got there … it was truly terrifying.
Some of the nurses were nice, though. Some of them would say gently, trying to get through to me, ‘You’re going to kill yourself if you go on this way.’ But I’d think, So? I didn’t love myself, so I didn’t care. I couldn’t understand it when they, or Ant, would get angry with me. My reaction was, ‘Nobody cares about me. Why are you getting angry? No one has ever cared about me. Why should you?’ I couldn’t see Ant’s love, anymore; I could only remember my mother’s hate.
I’d be released from A & E, over and over, and I’d go back home. I reverted to how I used to live, back when I was a child: the curtains drawn against the world, living in filth and squalor. My only routine was that of caring for the animals, for my precious dogs. In the end, there was no heating in the house, no running water; no loo that flushed. The place was a tip. I ended up living in a place as dirty and messed up as I was.
But … I couldn’t stay there forever. The clock was ticking. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Louder and louder, no matter how much I tried to drink to make it stop. If I was asleep all day – I reasoned, in my illogical, drink-addled state – did it mean that day hadn’t happened? If I drank enough, would the day never come when I would have to say goodbye to my beautiful dogs?
Of course it didn’t. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. And, too soon, far too soon, that horrible, desperate day dawned on me. And I knew, in the bottomless pit of my soul, that I was doomed.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
It was a glorious summer’s day, on the worst day of my life. Friday, 29 June 2012 dawned bright and clear, a summer scorcher. Through my closed curtains I couldn’t see the sunshine, but the bedroom felt airless and stuffy as I pulled out the vodka bottle from under my mattress and reluctantly swigged from it. I hated every mouthful that passed my lips, but I knew my body couldn’t cope without it – my body or my mind. I was hooked, no matter how much I hated that fact. My ‘medicine’ taken, I padded downstairs.
The dogs twisted about my feet and tried to lick my dry hands, but I pulled my palms away from them. Ever since I’d got the letter from the landlord, I’d tried to keep my distance from them. I felt like I’d failed them, just as all the adults in my childhood had failed me; I hadn’t protected them. They were loving someone who didn’t deserve it; best not to lead them on.
It didn’t stop them, though. They would still sleep with me, up in my tip of a room, and Berry would lie on me and lick my face until I came round from one of my drunken stupors. Ollie would look at me with those wise brown eyes of his, as though to say, ‘It’s OK, Mum, I’m here. I’m always here for you.’
I had rare visitors that day: a social worker, Ant, and a woman I’d never met before. Her name was Belinda. She worked for a local Labrador rescue group.
I can still see her now, striding into my living room in her Dubarry leather boots. Very posh and well spoken, she was tall and wiry, with practical, short hair. She was there to talk to me about rehoming the dogs, because the landlord wanted me out and I was going to have to move soon – no matter how many times I buried my head in the bottom of a bottle, trying to keep time standing still.
It was my GP who had found me somewhere else to live, in the end. He’d helped to organise these multi-agency meetings and eventually they found me a room in Cheltenham in a place called Belroyd House. It provided assisted accommodation for people with mental-health problems. Pets were banned.
Jeremy had begged for me, though. He’d said, ‘She lives for those dogs; you’ve got to let her keep a dog.’ And, after all his efforts, they relented. ‘One dog,’ they said. I could keep just one dog.
Belinda was only there to talk to me that day, to give me the lowdown on how she could help. The Labrador group she worked for was a special kind of rescue service – the dogs remained in the charity’s care for life, even after they were rehomed, so I knew transferring ownership of the dogs to them would mean my family would go to good, safe homes, that they were guaranteed to be well looked after. If Belinda took them, they wouldn’t just be abandoned in a cage in an anonymous animal shelter, their future happiness left to chance. I felt I couldn’t let her walk out of my front room and risk that, so I raised my shaky voice above the hubbub of conversation in the room and I said, ‘Can you take them today, please?’
Ant and the social worker protested – ‘No, next week, next week would be fine’ – but I raised my voice again and said, ‘
Please, this is killing me. I want them to go now. Please let them go now.’
It was too much for me to have their fate hanging over them for one day more. Belinda sized me up with her no-nonsense eyes. She nodded briskly, and then went out to make a few phone calls. When she returned, I was sitting on the sofa, watching the dogs gambolling about my feet. She came over and perched on the arm of the sofa next to me, and she wrapped her strong arm tightly around me.
‘I can tell from the way you spoke just then,’ she said, ‘and the way you took control, that you really love these dogs.’
I nodded wordlessly, tears streaming down my face. I was so distressed at the thought of losing them. My heart was breaking before her eyes.
‘I’ve rescued a lot of dogs,’ she told me firmly, ‘some of them are scared and fearful, but your dogs are not like that. Your dogs are loved.’
She gave me some forms to sign then, transferring ownership of my babies to her charity. I signed them blind, blinded by my tears, my hand scribbling out a shaky signature that I could barely see through the sheets of salty water that fell from my eyes.
And then she said six words that chilled me to the bone. ‘I’m ready to take them now.’
I called the four of them to me and they came running up obediently, as they had always done, dutifully responding to their mother’s cry. I didn’t make much of a fuss of them; I didn’t want to upset them. Wiping the tears from my wet face to try to hide my sadness, I bent down to their level. I kissed each of them on the top of their beautiful heads.
‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘thank you for everything you’ve done for me. I will always, always love you.’
‘You can keep one, Torrie,’ Ant reminded me. There was a tremor in his voice: he was cross at me. He was sad to see the dogs leave so suddenly, for he had loved them, too. ‘You must keep one.’
‘But how can I choose between them?’ I cried. ‘How? How?’
Tortured: Abused and neglected by Britain’s most sadistic mum. This is my story of survival. Page 25