He realized what it was. He wanted a drink.
The fact was, he wanted a drink more than he wanted to die.
3
‘My name is Tom. I’m an alcoholic.’
‘Welcome, Tom. Good to have you with us.’
It was the open AA meeting that Dr Pierce had told him about. He had found the initial confession, ‘I am an alcoholic,’ amazingly easy to get out, almost as though he had been wanting to say those words, without knowing it, for a long time. They were four words that changed him, and changed the world he lived in.
What most surprised him was the warmth of the group, and the welcome they offered him. They were men and women of various ages and from obviously different walks of life, from executives to artists to blue-collar workers. They didn’t ask questions or want anything from him, not even his second name. All they wanted was to hear his story, and have him listen to theirs.
Some of those stories, he soon realized, had been told many times and were now polished performance pieces. Others were stumbling, inarticulate attempts to express painfully won self-knowledge. Everyone was listened to with the same thoughtful respect, and everyone was thanked with the same warmth for his or her contribution.
Throughout the remaining period of his physical recovery, Tom went to these meetings several times a week. He gained in strength and confidence and clarity of mind. But the real change had taken place on that first day. He changed, he realized, because he had wanted to. There was no other way.
Then, one day, something happened that would alter all the days that came after it. He was on his way back from a physiotherapy session, walking down a hospital corridor with the help of a cane. The sun was streaming in through tall windows and reflecting off the white walls and polished floor. It gave a shimmering quality to the figure walking towards him, like a form taking shape as it stepped out of a mirage. At first he supposed it was a nurse, then he saw that she was wearing not a uniform but a cotton dress and simple flat-heeled pumps. She had a dancer’s walk, light and fluid, yet every step was firmly connected with the ground. As she came closer he could see that her dark blonde hair was drawn back in a ponytail, which emphasized the almost perfect symmetry of her features. She had a strong jaw, a generous mouth, and green eyes that seemed to pull you into an orbit of their own once they fixed on yours. He must have been staring at her, from the way she turned her frank gaze back on him. It was a moment before her mouth opened with the surprise of recognition.
‘Tom Freeman! What are you doing here?’
‘I was about to ask you the same thing.’
They had stopped, facing each other, people hurrying past them in both directions.
‘I was just visiting my cousin,’ she said. ‘She’s been having her wisdom teeth out.’
‘You live here? In Albany?’
‘About twenty miles away. A little place by the river. Saracen Springs. And you?’
‘Oh, I was just passing through.’
She looked at his cane, and took in the painful stiffness of his body. ‘What happened to you? Did you have an accident?’
‘Yes,’ he said, his mouth twisting into a wry smile, ‘rather a long one.’
‘Tell me.’
‘D’you have time for a cup of coffee?’ he said.
‘Yes, of course.’
They sat on lightweight aluminium chairs at a Formica-topped table in the hospital canteen. It was ten years since they had seen each other – a lot of time to cover.
‘I heard everywhere that you were doing fantastically well in advertising,’ she said. ‘Then suddenly nobody knew where you were or what you were doing.’
‘Well, now you know,’ he said, mentally noting that she had kept track of him, which was something he would never have expected. He and Clare Powell had been friends in college, though they had never dated. He had always been slightly intimidated by her – attracted by her beauty and her openness, but sensing a refinement and a reserve in her that made him nervous. Besides, she had been going out with someone else, a boy from an old Boston family. Old money, Tom always thought, would suit her better than any other kind.
‘You married Jack, didn’t you?’ he asked, noticing that she wore no wedding ring.
She glanced down, as though following his thoughts, to her unadorned finger. ‘Yes,’ she said, a note of self-consciousness creeping into her voice. ‘We divorced three years ago. It was all quite civilized, we just went our separate ways.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, telling himself at once he was a hypocrite. ‘Any kids?’
She shook her head. ‘I think we both suspected on some level that it might not work. We were too young. Anyway,’ she shrugged, ‘no children. You?’
‘Kids? No – I haven’t even been married.’
She gave that little flashing smile of hers that had always made his heart beat faster. That smile, he used to tell himself, was something she bestowed on everybody. It was just part of the way she was with people, so he had no reason to feel special when she turned it on him. But now here he was, alone with her in these drab, colourless surroundings, and that smile was making him feel very special indeed.
‘Ah, yes,’ she said, ‘you always were the dashing bachelor.’
He blinked a couple of times, meeting her gaze but feeling awkward and a little stupid, the way she always used to make him feel. ‘Dashing’? Was she making fun of him? Or flattering him? Flirting with him, even? He cleared his throat, shifting his position to reduce the pins and needles in his left leg.
‘More like crashing,’ he said, with a self-deprecating laugh, ‘as in crash and burn.’ He wanted to get this out of the way. He wanted to make sure that this lovely and desirable young woman knew the kind of mess he had made of his life. ‘They tell me I’m lucky to be alive,’ he said. Then, still looking at her, he added, ‘I’m beginning to agree with them.’
The look between them extended, and became a kind of understanding.
‘I always thought you’d have to burn out a little before you really hit your stride,’ she said.
‘You did?’
She nodded.
‘Well,’ he said, and again let the silence lengthen until they were both quite sure what was going on between them, ‘who’d have thought it?’
4
After the break-up of her marriage, Clare had left New York and travelled in Europe for six months. Then she returned to rent a small house in Saracen Springs, because it was a place where she had been happy for an important part of her childhood: when she was seven, her father, who taught political science, had taken up a post at Albany University. Ten years later he had been appointed to a full professorship in California, and they had moved again. But she had kept some good friends from those early years, and was currently working for one of them in a business consultancy he had set up. Clare specialized in small-firm start-ups, many of them the second and third generation of dot.coms keen to benefit from the painful lessons learned by the first generation of dot.bombs.
The more he thought about it, the more amazing Tom felt was the coincidence that had brought them both to this place at this time.
Sometimes, though, he found himself giving way to a superstitious fear that it was all too good to be true, that he had been far luckier than he deserved and he would be made to pay somehow. But he quickly banished such negativity as simply an echo of the bad days. He could never go back to being who he was. He was a different man now.
Tom and Clare were married as soon as he was able to remain upright for the brief ceremony without the use of a cane. Her parents flew in for the event, plus her sister, a portrait painter who lived on Cape Cod, and her brother who was a doctor in Miami and came with his wife and three young children. Tom enjoyed the feel of having a family around him, since he had none of his own. He was an only child, and his parents were divorced by the time he went to college. His mother had since died; and his father, a marketing executive for a soft drinks conglomerate, was remarried with a n
ew family and living in Asia.
The newly married couple moved into Clare’s rented house, which was fine for the two of them though not big enough to start the family they both wanted. But the most important thing for the time being was to get Tom’s career jump-started. He put out feelers to old friends in the advertising business, and got a sympathetic hearing but not much else. The fact was, he knew perfectly well, they saw him as yesterday’s man.
Undeterred, he tried other avenues. With Clare’s help he put together a prospectus for a company of his own and they started looking for investors. Then he had a brainwave. He saw that an old friend of his, a promoter in the music business, was putting out tours of old rock bands that appealed both to the nostalgia market and to a surprising number of kids. He made a call and was given permission to go along with a couple of them, just himself with a video camera.
Travelling for weeks at a time with a bunch of hardened rockers was an experience designed, as he and Clare had foreseen, to put anybody’s dedication to sobriety beyond a casual test. Tom came through not only without a slip but without a moment’s temptation. The first week on the road he checked out a couple of local AA meetings, but more out of habit than need. After that, he didn’t bother.
The footage he got was sensational, and the result was a documentary that got invited to Sundance, started picking up prizes, and was sold to television throughout the world. He also started getting calls from companies that wanted to be in business with him.
Although he wasn’t making the kind of money he had once made in advertising, he was enjoying his work and life a lot more. He and Clare took out a mortgage on a beautiful colonial-style white clapboard house on a leafy avenue. Besides, money went a lot further in Saracen Springs than it did in Manhattan, to which he commuted several times a month for meetings.
They had barely got the carpets down and the curtains in place when Clare announced, to their mutual delight, that she was pregnant.
5
Julia Katharine Freeman weighed in at six pounds twelve ounces. Because she was the first child of a woman over thirty, her parents had taken their doctor’s advice and had all the tests available. Aside from being reassured that their baby was healthy, it meant they had not needed to waste time thinking about boys’ names when they knew for sure they were having a girl.
The first time Tom and Clare brought their daughter home, she seemed to positively gurgle her approval of the light, brightly painted room they had prepared for her overlooking the leafy garden.
‘I think we got it right,’ Tom said, watching her happily batting a small hand at the delicate mobile suspended over her cot.
‘I think we did,’ said Clare, catching his eye with a smile.
Throughout the following weeks and months, Julia did her share of screaming through the night, catching small infections, and giving her first-time parents one or two stomach-churning scares. The worst was when she crawled into a linen cupboard and fell asleep, leaving them frantically searching the house for what seemed a lifetime but in fact was a little under twelve minutes.
Making friends between baby and household pets was one of the subjects they had read up on. The best advice, endorsed by friends who had tried it, was to place the child on a rug with the pet or pets in question, and let them get on with introducing themselves to each other – while, of course, keeping a careful watch to make sure things didn’t get out of hand. But both Sam, their black Labrador, and Turk, their Siamese cat, seemed delighted by this new addition to the family. Turk initially tried to feign lofty indifference, but soon began to purr with satisfaction as the small pink hands learnt how to pat and stroke him without poking him in the eye or pulling his whiskers too hard.
Clare had continued working through almost the full term of her pregnancy. She had planned on taking at least a year off to look after Julia full time; then, perhaps with the help of a nanny, she thought she might ease herself back into work, much of which she could anyway do from home. But that was a decision she would make later.
She had still not gone back even to part-time work by the time Julia had her second birthday, which was around the time she started to talk. Her first word out of nowhere one morning was ‘melon’. Why she should have made that choice baffled and amused them both. They weren’t even sure that she’d ever seen a melon, let alone tasted one.
‘I don’t believe she said the word at all,’ Clare maintained. ‘It was just a baby noise, like poo-poo or coo-coo.’
‘No, she was really making an effort,’ Tom insisted. ‘It was something she was trying to say.’
‘OK, so let’s see if she says it again. Come on, sweetie, talk to Mommy and Daddy. This is Mommy . . . this is Daddy . . .’ The three of them were sitting cross-legged on the floor of Julia’s room one Sunday before breakfast, with old Sam sitting off to one side, his tongue lolling out of his mouth, observing the ritual with genial curiosity.
‘Mommy . . . Julia . . . Daddy . . . Mommy . . . Julia . . .’
Both Tom and Clare repeated this mantra several times, tapping each other or Julia herself on the chest to demonstrate which name applied to whom. The child watched with bright-eyed interest as first her father’s finger, then her mother’s, moved around their little triangle. She quickly caught on to the idea that they wanted her to repeat what they were saying. And so she tried.
‘Mom-ma . . . Dad-da . . . Mom-ma . . . Da-da . . . Mom-ma . . .’
Clare let out a squeal of delight and swept the child into her arms. ‘She did it! She’s talking! Oh, aren’t you a clever little girl! You’re talking!’
They continued with the exercise, wanting to be sure that this wasn’t just some fluke but that Julia really had grasped the idea of what communicating in words was all about. Certainly, it was clear that she had got the hang of Mommy and Daddy; what she had more difficulty with was her own name.
Clare repeated, ‘Mommy . . . Daddy . . .Julia . . .’
‘Mom-ma . . . Da-da . . .’
‘Julia,’ Tom finished for her when she stopped yet again, unable to go further. He tapped her softly on the chest several times to emphasize that this little person right there was Julia.
She seemed to understand. She fixed him with an intense wide-eyed gaze, then copied his gesture, tapping herself on the chest.
‘Mel-on-ee,’ she said.
Tom and Clare looked at each other, more amused than anything else. ‘Does she know any Melanie?’ he asked.
Clare shook her head. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Julia,’ Tom repeated, turning his attention back to his baby daughter. ‘Mommy . . . Daddy . . . Julia.’
The child frowned. This was starting to confuse her.
‘Mom-ma, Dad-da,’ she said, more firmly than before, waving an arm at each of them in turn to make absolutely clear that she had got the point they were trying to make. Then she hit herself on the chest with an open hand, and repeated, ‘Mel-on-ee.’
This time their smiles, Clare’s and Tom’s when they looked at each other, were replaced by mild concern. Was there something wrong with the child’s hearing?
Clare said, ‘She got “Mommy” and “Daddy” all right. Maybe she just can’t say “Julia” yet.’
‘Then how come she can say “Melonee”, or “Melanie”, or whatever it is?’
Clare thought a moment. ‘Maybe it’s Susan,’ she said. Susan was the girl who babysat for them once or twice a week. She was the fifteen-year-old daughter of a neighbour, smart and totally reliable.
‘You mean Susan calls her Melanie?’
Clare shrugged. ‘Maybe Susan’s got a friend called Melanie. Maybe she’s heard them talking on the phone and made the wrong association. I don’t know. I’ll ask Susan. It must be something like that.’
They looked at their daughter, and she looked back at them, her face reflecting the puzzlement she saw.
‘Julia,’ Clare repeated softly, but with an undertone of quiet urgency, resting her hands lightly on the chi
ld’s tiny shoulders.
‘Julia,’ Tom echoed as she turned to look up at him, searching his face for confirmation of what her mother was trying to tell her. ‘Julia.’
She looked back at her mother, then back at Tom. Abruptly, her face lit up with one of those dazzling infant smiles of recognition where all doubt is swept aside and everything is suddenly right with the world.
‘Joo-ya,’ she said, swinging her arms and clapping her chubby hands in front of her. ‘Joo-ya.’
6
He could not remember where or when he’d had that first drink. As every alcoholic knows, the first drink is the only one that counts. The others just follow on, drink after drink, with no end in sight. It’s part oft the disease: a pattern. If for some reason you forget where it leads, that first drink, you start again . . . and pretty soon you find out.
Of course, Tom knew perfectly well that you don’t really forget. What you do is push the memory down into your subconscious and slam the lid. And suddenly the lid becomes a bar stool.
Which was why, however many drinks later, he found himself stumbling through a tangle of undergrowth and wild grass, falling on the muddy earth, picking himself up and struggling on. Up ahead of him the ground rose towards a few straggling bushes that seemed to mark the limit of what might once have been a garden. All he could see beyond that was a cold slate-grey sky.
He made an effort to clear his befuddled brain and recall where he was and how he got there. But his mind remained resolutely blank. He could remember nothing of the last few hours. Or was it more than hours? Days, even?
He looked back in the direction he had come from – and for the first time saw the house. It sat, like an exposed tooth in a well-worn gum, on the far edge of the hollow he was struggling to climb out of It looked abandoned, not quite a ruin, but with its windows broken or boarded up and tiles missing from the roof There was a strange tower at one corner, like an imitation-Gothic castle.
A Memory of Demons Page 2