The Swan Song of Doctor Malloy

by Robert Power

  He looks back to the wide and glorious sweep of Ocean Grove, breathes and breathes again the sweet crisp air.

  ‘It ain’t no skipping,’ he says, for the third time, for luck, ‘but it’ll more than do.’

  I turn John’s card around between my fingers and then put it back down by the phone.

  ‘I can, Tommo, I can,’ I say out loud, so that I can hear my own words.

  I almost gag at the sight of the food and realize I have barely eaten for days. The beer attracts me like a beacon. I pick it up and hold it to the light. The amber liquid glistens in the late afternoon light. Then a thought comes to me, from somewhere deep in the back of my mind. ‘It’s the first drink does the damage’. And it’s as if I’ve never heard it before. I finally understand. I always thought it was the tenth beer, or the whiskey that followed, or the crack cocaine that caused me all the problems. But if I don’t take the first drink then I can’t get to the tenth, and if I don’t take the tenth I won’t get to the cocaine. What else was it? If you don’t drink you can’t get drunk. Something shifts in me, like a spiral from the head to the heart. I put down the beer and pick up John’s card. I manage to get the codes right and listen as the ringing tone connects me to John’s number. For once I pray it won’t be the answering machine. Dear God, I need to speak to this man. After a few rings he answers.

  ‘Hello, this is John.’

  ‘John, it’s Anthony. I’m calling from Bogotá. It is all a mess. I can’t go into details. My life, my work. My syringe. The drug users. Warren. I thought I could do it all. But an old drug user in Chicago told me it won’t work. He’s right, he’s right. It’s all in such a terrible state. Everything.’

  ‘Okay. Don’t worry. Remember, you’re doing your best. It’s not all lost. Your work will still be of great value. Now and in the future. But you need to look after yourself. You’ll help no one if you self-destruct. You don’t need to tell me anything more. Are you drinking?’

  ‘Well, not now,’ I say, looking over at the beer and whiskey on the tray.

  ‘Good, just remember, whatever’s going on in your life a drink won’t make it any better. More likely it will make it all much worse. Forget your work for a while. You are not responsible for the whole world. So your syringe won’t work for drug users. That’s not your fault. Just do the next right thing. You are not in control of everything. Just accept that. Acceptance is the answer to all our problems. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. You are not responsible for everyone and everything. What are you doing now?’

  ‘I’ve just ordered a beer from room service.’

  ‘Okay, pour it down the sink. Now.’

  ‘And a whiskey.’

  ‘Both of them.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Down the sink,’ says John, authoritatively. ‘In the meantime I’ll get you a number to phone. I take it you haven’t contacted anyone from the Aftercare Meetings in Bogotá.’

  ‘No, I haven’t.’

  ‘Okay, give me your number. Hang up and I’ll call you back in five minutes. In the meantime, pour the booze away.’

  So I give John my hotel and room number and then take the drinks and, like someone performing a sacrificial rite, sigh and pour the liquid down the bathroom sink. I watch it circle and glug down the plughole. And then it is gone. I sit on the bed and wonder how I have gotten myself into this strange state of affairs, where I pour drink down the sink and wait for a man I barely know in London to phone me with a stranger’s number in South America.

  When John calls back he tells me the office in London has a contact number in Bogotá and there are Meetings in the city every night.

  ‘Just don’t drink and get to a Meeting,’ he says. ‘It really is as simple as that.’

  It is Sunday morning on the Heath. The sun has not yet burnt off the mist that lies as a soft shroud on the Ponds. The swans and their cygnets are close to the nest, dipping their majestic heads in and out of the water in search of food. The resident heron stands as a statue in the shallow water of the opposite bank, his eyes eager, his sword-like beak poised to spear a passing fish. The day is beginning to take on a quality of calm. The sun is kindly warm and the breeze is gentle. The trees are flush with leaves and the grass in the dip of the meadow is long and lovely and lush. The recent rains have freshened the air, sharpened the light.

  Lottie and Trixie walk along the gravel path skirting the pond, then scramble up the small grass verge that overlooks the swan’s nest.

  ‘Here they are,’ says Lottie, leaning against the fence, pointing to the pen and cob and their brood of cygnets.

  ‘Whoa, they’re magnificent,’ breathes Trixie.

  She searches inside the pocket of her heavy black trench coat and pulls out a hardened baguette. She breaks it in half and passes one piece to her friend. The swans swim close to the two girls in anticipation of an early breakfast. Lottie and Trixie laugh as they do their best to aim chunks of bread in the general direction of each swan.

  ‘Do you know it’s a fallacy about swans mating for life?’ says Lottie as she lobs a hunk of bread in the air.

  ‘No,’ says Trixie, ‘you sure?’

  ‘Sure,’ says Lottie, watching two cygnets tussle and tug over the bread. ‘No one should be made to feel that responsible for someone else.’

  ‘No, no one,’ says Trixie. ‘It’s enough to do to look after yourself.’

  There is a splash and they look up. At the end of the jetty the blue diving board is quivering; the water beneath it heaving and bubbling. Then the head of a man breaks the surface: the first swimmer of the day.

  The concierge at the Novotel is not impressed by the look of Wayne Dyer. Not only does he leave his ancient pick-up truck (dangling fender, pushed-out headlight and all) smack outside the plush hotel entrance, he’s also wearing a pair of paint-splattered dungarees and dusty boots. To top it all, he’s unshaven and doesn’t seem at all intimidated by his surroundings. So the concierge is doubly suspicious when the American speaks in perfect Spanish to announce he is here to meet Senor Anthony Malloy in room 253.

  When I phoned him, Wayne told me he’d be happy to take me to a Meeting. He would be coming straight from work, as the site he was managing was close to the hotel. So when the lift doors open onto the lobby and I see a tall American in builder’s clothes, I know it must be him.

  ‘Hey, buddy,’ he says, reaching out an extra large and weathered hand, ‘good to see you.’

  I shake his hand, notice the strength and confidence of the grip and tell him I’m glad to see him too. The concierge looks on with an expression teetering between disdain and confusion.

  As Wayne’s battered truck weaves its way through Bogotá’s early evening traffic I sit back and watch the city scenes move across the windscreen. A woman argues with her husband outside a food store, her arms flailing above her head as if she’s troubled by more than the flies. A horse lies collapsed in the street, still fettered to the cart it has pulled up and down the thoroughfare from the vegetable market every day for fourteen years. His owner, an old man in a stained T-shirt advertising holidays to Havana, scratches his head and wonders where on earth he will find money to buy a new horse. A young boy, dressed in no more than a pair of torn apple-green shorts, sits crying by a water hydrant as a group of older boys stand around him, jeering, poking fingers at his scabby head.

  I once again ponder the strange twists and turns of my own life that have led me to this point: sitting in a battered pick-up truck with a curly-haired American who tells me he once stuck a knife in the back of his brother-in-law, at his second wife’s third marriage in Champaign, Illinois.

  ‘Anyway,’ he says, as the sun is covered by a blanket of black cloud and a sudden downpour of rain hits the streets, ‘it was the best thing to ever happen to me. I told the judge it was all in a blackout. It was. Nothing like that ever happened unless I was full of drink. Luckily I missed John Junior’s lung by a blade’s width. So they get my records. The judge is
a liberal and I get six months conditional in rehab. Can’t believe my luck. So I decide to be good and keep my head down. But then all this Aftercare stuff gets to me. Before I know it I’m out and going to a Meeting a day, sometimes two, and next thing I’m a year sober and feeling good.’

  A dog scuttles across the street; Wayne swerves, misses it by a hair’s breadth, sending up a sheet of water to soak a crowd huddled by a bus stop. He looks over at me and laughs.

  ‘There’s a moral there, but search me,’ he says and beeps his horn for fun. ‘So how long have you been clean?’ he asks, just as the rain stops as suddenly as it had started and the sun beams down once more.

  ‘There you are,’ he adds before I can answer, ‘that crowd at the bus stop’ll be glad of the soaking, now the sun’s blazing again. Cause and effect. Action and reaction.’ He beeps the horn again for good measure. ‘And the dog lives to fart another day.’

  We drive on a block or so and he still seems to be mulling over the moral of his story. Then he looks over at me as if he’s trying to remember who I am. As if I’m a hitch-hiker he’s picked up somewhere back along the highway. He slams on the brakes as he notices a red light.

  ‘So how long did you say you’d been clean?’ he asks, as if the sudden jolt freed up his brain.

  ‘Well, I was at a treatment centre for a couple of weeks,’ I tell him, ‘but I’ve not quite got the hang of all this yet.’

  ‘Hey, that’s okay, just take it easy and keep it simple,’ he says, leaning out the window and swearing in Spanish at a bus driver who’s too close in the next lane. ‘We’re all clean just one day at a time,’ he says to me in one breath, continuing his Spanish diatribe in the next. ‘Whoever got up earliest this morning is soberest the longest,’ he adds, smiling at the red-faced bus driver, who looks like he’s about to burst a blood vessel. Wayne’s Spanish vernacular must be about as good as his driving’s bad.

  After leaving the pond and the swans, the two friends walk up the South Meadow, past the huge umbrella of the copper beech and into the woods. By taking an unmarked path they end up at Trixie’s secret place, a copse of pine trees enclosing a small area of grassland.

  ‘This is my special spot,’ says Trixie. ‘It’s always been that for me. Special, I mean, this place.’

  She takes in the whole panorama with a sweep of her hand as if she is offering it to Lottie.

  ‘You’re the only person I’ve ever brought here, Lottie. You’re the only person I’ve ever trusted with anything.’

  Then she beckons Lottie to follow her.

  In a corner, beneath some undergrowth, Trixie bends down and parts the long grass to reveal a small mound of recently dug earth.

  ‘I’ve buried it here.’

  ‘What?’ asks Lottie.

  ‘I’ll show you,’ she says, sifting through the soil with her hands.

  She digs down about a foot, then pulls a small object from the soil. As she cleans the earth from its surface, Lottie recognizes the small porcelain mermaid with the sharpened edge. They both look at each other as Trixie kisses the mermaid’s cold smooth lips and rubs the figurine.

  ‘The other night. We were together, you and me. Talking, laughing. Something changed in me. I realized I don’t need to do it anymore. Not now I’ve got you, Lottie,’ says Trixie, holding the mermaid lovingly to her cheek. ‘I’ve got you and that’s all I need. All I’ve been looking for.’

  A slight breeze rustles through the upper branches of the larch trees nearby. Out of view, a kestrel hovers above, alerted by the slightest movement below, focusing intently. Lottie puts her arm around her friend and kisses her neck.

  ‘I’ll bring my shepherd boy to keep her company,’ says Lottie. ‘So they needn’t be lonely.’

  ‘We’ll do it soon,’ says Trixie, ‘then they can look after each other.’

  ‘Just like you and me,’ says Lottie, holding her friend close.

  Then Trixie puts the mermaid back in the hole and covers it up with the soil.

  The Meeting place is in a nursery school. The chairs are tiny and the walls are a mixture of children’s paintings with Aftercare slogans and banners hung between them. Wayne tells me to sit down and disappears to the kitchen to get us some coffee. We’re a bit early, so I’m alone. On the table in front of me are some brightly coloured building bricks. I put a yellow one on top of a green one, then a blue and a red one on top of these. There’s a little toy cow on the floor by my foot, so I pick it up and place it on top of my tower. The cow looks up at me as if to ask me why I’d put it in such a precarious spot. Then I hear footsteps in the corridor and turn to see a really thin man enter the room. He is wearing shorts, sandals and a sleeveless vest, so he seems extra thin. He must be about sixty, but his flop of white hair and deeply tanned skin give him a youthful appearance.

  ‘You must be Wayne,’ says the man as he pulls up a tiny chair to sit opposite me.

  ‘No, I’m Anthony,’ I say. ‘It’s my first time here. Wayne’s in the kitchen making coffee.’

  ‘You British?’ he asks.

  ‘No, Australian-Irish,’ I reply. ‘You American?’

  ‘Canadian. I’m Stuart. I’ve only been in town a couple of weeks. Phil told me Wayne ran the Meetings on Tuesdays.’

  On cue, Wayne enters the room with a pot of coffee on a tray, along with an assortment of mugs, milk, sugar and a pile of biscuits.

  ‘Stuart,’ he says, putting the tray down and shaking the Canadian by the hand. ‘Phil told me you might make the Meeting. He’s up in Cartagena on business for a week or two, or else he’d be here himself. Me and him are the regulars, so it’s nice when people pass through. Freshens things up. You’ve met Anthony. So it looks like it’ll be just us three, unless someone turns up in the next five minutes.’

  He pours out the coffee and then takes out some laminated sheets from a folder.

  ‘We usually have a Topic Meeting on Tuesday,’ says Wayne, waving one of the sheets. ‘So, Anthony, would you like to choose?’

  He hands me the sheet and I look at the list.

  Relationships.

  Pain as the touchstone to spiritual progress.

  Fear.

  A bridge to normal living.

  Responsibility.

  I need read no further. It’s as if the word was in neon, especially for me.

  ‘Responsibility,’ I say.

  ‘A great topic,’ says Wayne, and Stuart nods in approval.

  So we three sit around a tiny table on the tiniest of chairs, only an hour or so after Henrico, the Benedictine monk and Louis, his young helper, sat with their eight four- and five-year-old charges and helped them paint the beautiful pictures now hanging on the walls, barely dry.

  Wayne opens the Meeting with much the same statements and short readings I remember from an ocean away in a church hall in Hande Street, London.

  ‘Our topic for this evening is “responsibility”,’ says Wayne. ‘Stuart, maybe you’d like to open the sharing.’

  ‘Thanks, Wayne. My name’s Stuart and I’m an addict and alcoholic. Good to meet you guys. I need a Meeting like I need food. A few days without and I begin to feel bad, unsettled, undernourished. Without the Meetings my head goes and I’m in a bad place. It’s like leaving a child in the attic with no adult supervision. I end up on my own and that’s bad company. But when I’m in a Meeting I settle. There’s nowhere else like it for me. I’m in a place where I am understood. If I told you I skinned a cat in a blackout, which I don’t think I ever did, then I know you’d understand. You’d nod your heads, because you know it’s possible. I’ve heard of alcoholics who killed their wives in blackout and had no recollection at all. Powerful stuff. So that’s why I’m here. To remember who I am.’

  Stuart pauses for a moment, clicks his fingers one by one, and then continues.

  ‘Yeah, responsibility. That’s a really good topic. I guess I felt responsible for stuff around me from way before I picked up a drink or a drug. Just like I guess I was an addict f
rom day one. I always felt different. As if I never fitted in. I lived in this mad house. Well, my mother was mad, had the certificates to prove it. And the house was mad. Full of strange men who didn’t care if Ma was mad or not. My old man disappeared before I could get to know him. A drunken oil rigger by all accounts. Used to work the ice floes north of Nova Scotia. Anyways, the house was full of craziness and we kids grew up thinking it was all normal.’

  As Stuart goes on to tell us about his childhood I start to see him in a different way. I look into his face and recognize something shared, almost as if it is etched into the lines around his eyes. Listening to his stories of violence witnessed, tears hidden and sights seen, I come to know more and more of this man and more and more of myself. His features soften as he talks and I begin to see him as a long-time friend and not a stranger. He is someone I can identify with; a man whose experiences and emotions mirror my own. When Stuart tells how as a ten-year-old he felt it to be his duty, his responsibility, to save his mother from herself, I recall the overwhelming, suffocating childhood belief that I was the only one in the house who could make it all alright.

  ‘So it’s not surprising,’ says Stuart, ‘at least not surprising after ten years’ sobriety, to finally realize that when I became an adult I felt responsible for everyone around me. I’d tried counsellors, therapists, psychiatrists, all manner of trick cyclists, but it took a room of drunks and junkies and the stories they had to tell to show me what I was doing. I was trying to control everything around me, everyone around me. But the reality was by that time, back then, I was a crazy drunk myself, just like my Pa. Yet I had this grandiose, crippling belief that I was responsible for everyone else’s life. Wife, kids, brothers, sisters, mother. I had an ego the size of a house and zero self-esteem. The old alcoholic paradox. Yet I felt I was responsible for how all those lives turned out. That what I did, and could do, would matter. Now I know it was all about being in control, thinking the universe revolved around me. Then I’d get drunk and smash everything up. I realized that until I took some responsibility for myself then I couldn’t be responsible for anyone else. Since I got clean and sober I’ve come to realize I am powerless over other people and I can only really be responsible for myself. They have their own lives to live, their own mistakes to make.’