by Julia North
‘So, Melissa, welcome to the funny farm,’ says Karlos. He pulls his legs in and leans towards me. ‘It’s not a patch on my old mealie farm, but what can you do? If a man makes a mess of things, he must change and put things right. That’s what I’m here to do.’
What is it with these people and their open confessions? ‘You look like a farmer,’ I say, cringing at the high pitch of my voice and stupid comment.
‘They’re killing vite farmers in Namibia like fooking flies. They’ll kill them here too now,’ says Wolf in a tone of authority.
Karlos ignores the comment as Helen bustles in followed by a casually dressed, fifty-something man with salt-and-pepper hair. He must be the doctor, although his large glasses make him look more like a friendly owl. He gives me a wide smile and comes over with his hand outstretched.
‘Welcome, Melissa. I’m Gareth Brink. I’m really pleased you’ve joined us.’
I suppress a smile. His name reminds me of the game Happy Families I used to play with Nat and Elsa. What could be better than Dr Brink for the doctor who brings people back from their self-created disaster?
The room falls silent as Dr Brink rustles through some papers. ‘Right, I think we’re all here. George is not feeling too well this morning so he won’t be joining us in the sessions until tomorrow. Helen, please set up the video for me.’
Hattie turns to me. ‘Time to share,’ she says with a smug smile. ‘Alison doesn’t like to talk,’ she whispers. ‘You can only do so much, you know.’
My palms grow damp. I just want to go home! But, of course, I can’t. ‘Group therapy is a very important part of recovery’, Helen had admonished this morning when I voiced my opposition. I don’t see why. This is my problem, not theirs. Why can’t I just have therapy on my own? My head grows light and I don’t think I can do this. I’m going to have to leave …
‘I’d like to welcome Melissa to our group.’ Dr Brink’s voice has a professionally honed, calming quality. His eyes shine at me through the owl glasses and all eyes turn to me. I push myself back into my chair and clench my jaw and fists. ‘We’re only starting the programme proper this morning, although some of our patients are repeating it,’ he says, flicking his eyes across the chairs. ‘But first we’ll start with some pseudonyms for our names for a bit of fun.’ Dr Brink pauses while I bite back dark laughter. I don’t know which is worse – the typical alcoholic introduction or this so-called ‘fun’. How the hell can any of us have ‘fun’ in a place like this? Maybe what we should rather do is crack open a bottle.
‘You need to choose the same letter as your name to convey how you feel now, and then choose one you’d like to aim for by the end of the course. Nic, you start.’
Nic thinks for a few seconds with pursed lips. ‘Nasty Nic, I’m afraid, when I let the beast enter my brain, but now I’m sober for a few days I’ll be Nice Nic.’ He follows his revelation with a wink in my direction.
‘Was Heroin Hattie, now I’m getting to be Heroic Hattie. Not many okes can keep fighting to defeat the H-man,’ says Hattie, puffing out her chest like some ridiculous bantam cock.
I tense my face to stop the scorn parading over it. I don’t even know what the hell I’m even doing in the same room as someone like her? All I do is drink a bit too much sometimes.
Karlos’ deep voice breaks into my thoughts. ‘Agh, I was “Kicked Karlos”,’ he says, ‘but now, hopefully, with round two, I’m getting to be King Karlos.’
‘Ja, like King Kong,’ says Hattie, following with an attention-seeking laugh which Karlos ignores.
‘I’m fooking Vashed-up Volf, but I vill be Vonderful Volf,’ says Wolf, clenching his fists. ‘This fooking detoxing is bad man … I don’t fooking want to do it again.’ He scratches his septic arm with dirty nails and stares at the carpet.
I wrinkle my nose and look away from the weeping sores.
The room falls silent. It’s Alison’s turn but she continues to stare forward, fear etched deep into her eyes. She’s as fragile as a butterfly’s wing, poor girl.
‘Alison?’ Dr Brink coaxes her as if he’s talking to a two-year-old.
Alison stays silent, her eyes fixed on Karlos.
‘Still Anxious Alison then perhaps,’ says Dr Brink. ‘Not to worry, we’ll move on.’
Dr Brink turns to me. ‘Melissa?’
Shit, I haven’t been thinking of anything. What should I be? Malicious, Mocking …? ‘Uh … Miserable, I guess.’ I recoil inwardly, surprised at my own honesty.
‘That will change,’ says Dr Brink.
My chest mottles. I can feel them all watching me. I give a wry smile. ‘I guess I’ll aim for Merry Melissa sans the alcohol.’ Nic guffaws while Hattie sneers. They’re all looking at me now. I draw in a deep breath and slowly exhale to calm the sudden panic inside.
Dr Brink clears his throat. ‘Right, we’re going to look at the Twelve Steps. Do you know anything about them, Melissa?’
I give a curt nod and swallow hard. I’ve got some vague recollection of them when someone visited Mom years ago and left a booklet. I remember Dad telling her they were proven to work, but I don’t think she ever read it. Whatever, they certainly didn’t stop her drinking. This is all going to be a complete waste of time. I know it is.
‘Good. We start each session reminding ourselves of the steps by reading them aloud. You don’t have to accept them all, but I ask that you keep an open mind. They have helped millions of people worldwide, so perhaps they can help you too.’ He turns to Helen. ‘Please hand them out.’
Helen hands me a leaflet, and I scan down the numbered steps while the paper trembles in my hands. Why the hell am I still shaking? I push my legs together and lay it on my lap. I wipe my hands against the sides of my jeans and press my hands against the sides of the paper to hide the traitorous tremor. I keep my palms hidden.
‘Karlos, could you start, please,’ says Dr Brink.
Karlos recites the first step of, ‘We admit we are powerless over alcohol – that our lives have become unmanageable.’
As I listen to the words, the memory of repulsive Chino-man and the stink of my own urine regurgitates back into my mind. That was probably my worst low, but if I’m really honest with myself, there were so many others. I think back to that night at Antonia’s when I fell drunkenly back in my chair with my feet stuck out in front like some dead chicken, and then catapulted face forward straight into my spaghetti. We were supposed to be celebrating Elsa winning her case against that racist bastard landlord, and instead I was asked to leave and had to stagger out looking like some drunken Rastafarian puppet with spaghetti stuck all over my hair. They must’ve been so ashamed of me. There were other nights, more than I can count, when I’d toddled to my bedroom and collapsed into bed fully clothed, or stayed sitting double-eyed and slack in front of the television until I fell asleep in the chair. I remember falling over on the dance floor and flashing my knickers to everyone at Nat’s party and rolling out of countless pubs at closing time. I close my eyes and shudder. They were all embarrassing, but none of them top the shame or revulsion of that night in the Maharani. Do all these add up to an unmanageable life? Do the sodding maths, Melissa, of course they do!
The room is silent. They’re all looking at me and waiting. Hattie’s eyebrows are raised. She points down at the paper. ‘You need to read step two.’
I stare down with an irritated frown. ‘Sorry … We have come to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.’ My voice echoes back to me. I’ve never thought of it as a form of insanity before but I guess that’s exactly what it is. I hold my head in my hands. I can’t deny I’ve done this it to myself. Why didn’t I stop?
Alison refuses to read so Wolf reads steps three and four in his ugly, guttural accent, promising to, ‘Made a decision to turn our vill and our lives over to the care of God, as ve understand him.’ Scorn parades across my face, although I’m sure he means every word.
The emphasis on the next steps of the
‘fearless moral inventory’ and the ‘admitting to others and God the nature of our wrongs‘ brings more guilt. I probably won’t even be able to count all the wrongs I have to admit to. So much for the steps helping. Surely there must be something better we can do? A heaviness lodges in my chest, eased only by irritation as Hattie dramatically recites her request of ‘Humbly we asked Him to remove our shortcomings’ and settles back smugly in her chair. It’s obvious to anyone with brains that she doesn’t mean a word of what she’s just read. Stupid bitch probably thinks she doesn’t have any shortcomings other than heroin addiction.
But as Nic reads the promise to ‘Make a list of all persons we had harmed, and become willing to make amends to them all’, my irritation turns to despair. I hear my nine-year-old self screaming, ‘I hate you, you horrible drunk … I hate you!’ at Mom as she lay in her sour and stinking bedroom one night. ‘Get out of my room … you bloody brat,’ she’d spat back. ‘It’s okay,’ Nat had said as she placed her arms around me, ‘She doesn’t mean it.’ But I’d screamed back, ‘Yes, she does … she hates me and I hate her.’ My shoulders sag as the angry words replay in my mind. I really don’t want to end up like Mom.
‘Try and read step eleven now, Alison, you can do it.’ Dr Brink’s coaxing voice breaks into my thoughts. Alison sits frozen, staring at the paper clutched between her trembling hands. My heart goes out to her. Poor child. She’s worse than all of us. She swallows and attempts to stutter through the penultimate step, ‘Sss … ought th … through p … prayer and m … mm.. m.. editation to improve our c … conscious contact with God as we understood Him …’ She stops and glows red as if she’s about to burst into tears. ‘Yes, “praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out”,’ completes Dr Brink. ‘Well done, Alison. That was a really good effort.’
I smile wryly to myself. It’s going to take a lot of prayer and meditation and knowledge of His will on my part. My conscious contact with God feels like a lifetime ago. I don’t know whether I can ever get back to that.
Hattie takes over and recites the last step of ‘Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs’ in her loud, abrasive tone while I flick my eyes around the group. I wonder if any of us really means any of what we’ve just read? This recitation all just feels so ridiculous. I certainly can’t see Hattie or Wolf believing in any Higher Power, and anyway the phrase irritates me. The Higher Power is called God. We don’t need the ‘as we understand him’ bit added. I rub my hand across my forehead. I’m starting to feel dizzy. I’m sure they must all have seen my guilt and pain parade across my face. Why didn’t I control myself more?
‘We’re going to watch something now which might be a bit uncomfortable, but it’s necessary.’ Dr Brink’s tone is low. ‘It’s a video of patients from the liver clinic at Addington.’ He pauses and looks at us one by one. ‘Most of them were in the last stages of the disease I’m afraid.’
Helen switches on the video. A young man with blond hair appears on the screen. He’s wearing a hospital gown and has a drip in his arm. The narrator tells us he’s on day four of his detox, but he still looks drunk. His eyes are glazed with an empty look and his spindly legs and arms are covered with blotchy, multi-coloured bruises. A monotone voice tells us that his cerebellum has been damaged from the alcohol abuse and he’s suffering from ataxia and he’ll never have full control of his limbs again. He looks about my age?
I shift uncomfortably in my chair. The second patient is worse, with a belly more swollen than a child with kwashiorkor. A transparent pipe drains litres of yellow fluid from his stomach into a transparent bag. His liver function score we’re told is twenty-two. He’ll have only three months more to live if he’s lucky. ‘I should’ve listened to my wife,’ he sobs, ‘I should’ve listened.’ His sobs grow louder until they become a wail of raw pain and self-pity.
‘I’m afraid both these patients are no longer with us,’ says Dr Brink. He pauses and looks at each of us. ‘With addiction, everyone has their rock-bottom and sometimes, sadly, it’s death.’
I place a hand on my stomach and close my eyes in silent thanks for its flatness. Shit! I’ve done plenty of liver scores on patients in my time and know the type of damage alcohol can do. That could so easily be me in a few years’ time. Why didn’t I think about what I was doing to my body? I look around the group and for the first time I have to acknowledge that, maybe, in some unbelievably surreal way, I’m not a misfit here. I guess we’ve all fallen off the merry-go-round of life and are crawling our way back on, hanging onto the rail despite being dragged through the dirt. What a farce my life has turned out to be. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
‘I’m sorry, we don’t mean to upset any of you, but it’s important that we face the reality of where addiction will take you,’ says Helen as she clicks off the video.
Dr Brink clears his throat. ‘We want you to realise it’s not too late,’ he says, his voice thick with sincerity.
I stifle back the sob which wants to break free from my belly like the dead patient’s did.
‘Any thoughts on the Twelve Steps?’ says Dr Brink, breaking into the smothering silence which has covered the room.
‘It’s dangerous stuff,’ says Nic. He rubs a shaky hand across his forehead. ‘So fucking dangerous …’
‘Heroin is worse. It’ll tear your liver to shreds. I think maybe you need this Higher Power to help,’ says Hattie. She throws back her head in a loud, ugly laugh. ‘Ja, the H-man is like a demon that just climbs inside your head …’
‘Yes, heroin is a powerful and very destructive drug,’ says Dr Brink as Hattie rises from her chair in a grotesque demon imitation, ‘but so, I’m afraid, is alcohol.’
‘He burns into you. Yslike, once he’s got you, you’re fucked, man.’ She turns to Wolf and karate chops her leg. ‘I’ve even seen okes say the doctor must take off their infected legs rather than stop injecting.’ She leans forward in her chair and grips the armrests. ‘Ja, they’d rather crawl on their fucking arse than give up the H-man.’ Her face contorts as she spits out the words. I withdraw from the spraying saliva.
‘I was like a fooking rat in a cage,’ says Wolf. ‘In the morning I had to have drink or I would go fooking mal.’ He turns pale and clenches his jerking hands. Sweat dots his brow. ‘It tasted like fooking petrol, but I had to have it.’ His blatant agitation and the pain in his voice take me by surprise. He drops his head down and shakes it from side to side. ‘I thought I was fooking dying,’ he whispers, ‘I really thought I was fooking dying … even my arse was bleeding.’
‘Ja, I know what you mean. It takes you down like a spiral all the way to hell,’ says Hattie.
Nic laughs. ‘A demonic roller-coaster from which you never escape. Well, until you die, I guess.’
Wolf joins in with a crude laugh. ‘Maybe ven you die and go to hell it carries on,’ he says, spinning his shaking hands in front of his face.
‘I think we’re going off a little at a tangent,’ says Dr Brink. ‘Just remember fighting addiction is like eating an elephant,’ says Dr Brink. ‘You need to take it one day at a time. Don’t let the thought of eternal sobriety overwhelm you.’
I smile at his metaphor. I guess the only time we’ll manage eternal sobriety with no effort is when we’re all in heaven; that is if any of us are lucky enough to make it there. All I know now is that I want to get better. I don’t want to end up like those patients on the video.
Chapter 5
That afternoon I rap on Dr Brink’s office door for my three o’clock appointment. I’m not going to beat this regimented system so I might as well embrace it. The last thing I need is someone telling me off and, in some strange way, the rigid timetable helps.
Dr Brink gives me a broad smile. ‘Please come in, Melissa. Take a seat.’
Waves of nausea wash over me as I wipe my clammy hands against my jean
s. He’s a nice enough guy. Why do I feel so anxious?
‘I’m just going to do a few routine medical tests and then we can have a chat.’
I sit in silence while he takes my blood pressure. He gives me a thumbs up then places the cold stethoscope on my chest. My heart beats in my ears. ‘Sounds okay. I’m just going to take some blood so we can test your liver enzymes and potassium. Alcohol’s not good with those two. I want to test your spleen and pancreas and I think it’s best we do a MELD test. It’s a liver function test. Would you like me to explain it in more detail?’
I shake my head. ‘I’m a medical technologist … I know what it is.’
Dr Brink pauses and looks at me for a few seconds. ‘Alcohol’s no respecter of persons, Melissa. We’ve had all types of professionals come through here. It really is everyman’s drug.’
My shoulders sag. Shame sits on me like a toad as I watch my blood rise through the test tube. The video of the man’s swollen stomach being drained comes back into my mind. Thank God I never got to that stage.
‘Right, time for the comfy seats,’ Dr Brink says. ‘Let’s go next door.’
I follow him into a carpeted room with two armchairs. A ceiling fan wafts a cool breeze to ease the humid atmosphere.
‘Have a seat, Melissa. Can I get you a glass of water?’
I shake my head and grip the sides of the armchair.
‘I’m going to ask you to fill this in. You don’t have to share your answers if you don’t want to, but there may be some things that you’d like to talk about.’
I take the clipboard and pen from him.
‘I’ll wait in the other office for a few minutes. Try and be as honest as you can.’
The door clicks closed. I look down at the form with the pen lodged between my lips. The first question asks how I thought my drinking affected me – mentally, physically, spiritually and emotionally. I take out the pen and give a wry laugh. ‘Not very well thank you’ would be the answer. Flashes of self-loathing flit through me. Those drinks at the lab when we won the St Augustine hospital contract when I got so loud and made a complete tit of myself. Dr Bachelor definitely knew I was drunk. I could see the pity in his eyes, and if he saw, then Dr Pillay must’ve too. I’m surprised he didn’t fire me then and there. Chino-man and my myriad of drunken episodes are back loud and clear in my mind and so are the judgement stares from the people around me. I give my head a shake. Who said ‘Thanks for the memories’? At this moment I don’t want to remember anything; in fact, I’d rather have sodding amnesia. But if I’m really honest, the alcohol demon had crept up without me even realising it. It deadened me inside, deadened me from God, but at the same time it numbed the pain. I didn’t do it for fun: I did it because I needed help. This exercise isn’t helping. It’s making me feel worse and I’ve only read question one.