*****
Nine months later and things have moved on. I have forsaken alcohol entirely and am now addicted to Early Grey tea and chocolate hob nobs. I have put on two stone but I was too thin before anyway, and at least my liver has stopped squeaking in protest.
My memory has largely recovered but there are things I still can't remember, but I think that is because I don't want or need to. It turns out, so I am told, that I was being put under a great deal of stress at work by a manager who used me to cover his own tardiness and neglect. Some of the examples of bullying uncovered during the inquiry that followed my abrupt departure sounded horrendous so I choose not to work to recover those memories. In exchange for keeping quiet and sweeping the whole affair under the carpet I was offered voluntary redundancy on health grounds and a generous pension. With the mortgage paid off and Carla in a great job and the kids now more or less independent, though they still both live at home, we have enough money to live on so that I don't have to work. Not that I could go back to office work anyway. The stroke (or more accurately, series of increasingly large strokes) may have left my cognitive abilities relatively unaffected but my physical responses have been affected. I can no longer type or turn the pages of a book without considerable difficulty and some pain and I have to have my food cut up for me, which is humiliating. I attend physical therapy three times a week and walk, quite slowly, for half an hour twice a day while the dog runs ahead and looks back at me with thinly veiled contempt. I don't know what I am going to do with the rest of my life except the old cliché of trying to look forward and not backwards. I keep my mind occupied with audio books and the radio and fill my days as best I can.
The best thing is that my family seem to have accepted that I was running away from the situation at work and not from them, and that I was literally out of my mind when I did it. The official line is that I have retired on health grounds and am working to combat the effects of a stroke. That is all anybody needs to know and it is all that I want to think about.
Unfortunately that is not all I have to think about. While my wife had been more than understanding she has insisted that I have long term psychotherapy, although neither her nor the therapist have specified exactly how long that term may be. I go once a week on my own and once a fortnight with Carla. I don't like it and I think it's a total waste of time but I can't say that and I have to go along with the whole charade in order to keep the peace at home. The shrink obviously has a deeply vested interest in stringing it out for as long as possible and I'm trying not to be uncharitable and think that Carla is going to make me do this for the rest of my life as some form of punishment.
However, today, after a typically futile and irritating exchange, I have finally been forced into putting my foot down.
“So, Brian,” said the shrink, a man who calls himself Zeb, which is obviously a name he's made up to try and make himself sound more exotic but actually makes him sound even more of a tosser than does everything else about him, “have you had any cravings for alcohol lately?”
This is his standard opening question, to which I usually just sigh to myself and reply in the negative, trying to ignore the feeling that he's going to pat me on the head and give me a lollipop. For some reason, probably just a cumulative build up of eight months of his bullshit, on this occasion I snapped.
“I have not had a drink since I left hospital nine months ago, I have no desire to drink, the after effects of the stroke are bad enough without having to deal with a hangover as well, I will never, ever, ever touch alcohol again.” My temper and volume increased, hard as I was trying to keep myself in check. “I don't think about drinking from one day to the next, the only reason I ever think about it is because you keep fucking banging on about it every week like some spoilt child demanding ice cream. It would help me greatly if you kept your facile, pointless enquiries to yourself.”
The look on his face was infuriatingly calm and I cringed as he leaned forward earnestly, his voice dripping with saccharine sympathy.
“I'm sensing a lot of hostility from you, Brian. What do you think that is about?”
I totally lost it. I would agree to see anyone else Carla chose but this twat was making everything worse for me.
“My anger is about you, you fucking moron. You've taken my money for eight months and all you've done is wind me up. This is more like punishment than therapy.” I stood up, hoping that he would accept the slight shaking as a symptom of the strokes rather than psychotic, sectionable rage. “You are making me worse not better and I shall be complaining to your professional body, if you're even a member of one. Now wipe that smug look of your supercilious face before I punch you. Use this extra free time to get ready for your next gullible victim.”
I stormed out to the extent that my physical condition allows, already beginning to rehearse the conversation I would have to have with Carla that evening. For the first time in nine months I actually fancied a drink but that would prove the smug fucker right so I kicked his front door a few times on the way out to dissipate my anger.
When I got home I felt much better about everything. If I could survive eight months with that prick, especially today, and still not have a drink then I could deal with anything. It was all going to be fine. Whether this whole mess was brought about by my drinking or whether that was a symptom of an underlying depression or mental illness of some other undiagnosed kind I neither know nor care. What caused it all is irrelevant now – it's happened, it won't happen again, and so now I move on, hopefully with the continuing love and support of my wife and children. I have found lots of documentaries and information online about both strokes and mental illness but have thus far chosen to ignore all of it. Whether that will one day change and I choose to go down that rabbit hole and try to figure out my life and how I ended up here is still open to question. Reliving all this for the therapy sessions has not proved especially useful, and so now I try to keep in mind the quote from Kierkegaard: “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards”.
marcusfreestone.com
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marcus Freestone has been publishing novels and non-fiction since 2013. This thing that you have just finished reading (or are unwisely looking at the end of before you've started, tut tut, do people do that with e-books?) is his fifteenth published book. Before that he worked in journalism, a variety of tedious office jobs, completely failed to build a career in stand up comedy and was once paid £250 for a script for a TV series that was never made for reasons that were nothing to do with him or the quality of the script. His biggest success to date has been the 70,000 plus downloads of the free version of the e-book 'Positive Thinking And The Meaning Of Life' (though he is probably prouder of the time he stole the register from the school library, as is detailed in this very book). He will continue writing books until he is too old and tired to do so.
CONTACT THE AUTHOR
Marcus Freestone can be contacted via the electronic telegraph service at
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Facebook
He does not do twitter because his mind is too hyperactive to cram anything into 140 characters. He tried it once for a few weeks and couldn't see the point of it, and anyway all the #'s and @'s gave him a headache.
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Brian: Mental Book 1 Page 13