by Zoë Folbigg
‘I’m not allowed to stay, darling. You have a good day. Love you.’
Olivia tried to disentangle herself from her daughter’s tight grasp.
‘Shall we go find my magic glue?’ asked Miss Cave. ‘See if we can fix that head.’ Sofia’s tears stopped at her cheeks and she nodded a subdued yes.
‘Wanna coffee?’ asked Olivia’s friend Henrietta, as she handed her son Albie the PE kit he’d forgotten.
‘Shit yes!’ Olivia muttered, as they both stepped out into the refreshing morning air, as Ethan’s mum Vicky, The One Who Was Always Late, rushed into the playground with Ethan’s little sister in a buggy.
‘Olivia hiiiiiiiiiii!’
Twenty-Five
December 1999
London
Daniel stood on the deck of the party boat and looked at the golden glow of the Houses of Parliament, lit beautifully at night. He was surprised by how close he was to the building; how close a corporate party boat full of drunks and mischief-makers could get to a chamber of such importance as it glimmered and flirted with its reflection on the Thames. Or was it an optical illusion? Was the building really much further away? Terrorist acts and gunpowder plotters felt like a thing of the past, The Troubles consigned to history since the Good Friday Agreement, IRA Christmas campaigns and bomb scares in schools left behind in Daniel’s childhood. Maybe the world was a safer place now.
It felt calming to be so close to something so solid, a place of such grandeur. Daniel had wrestled with a feeling of discord and fear for much of the evening, but the icy air was refreshing and restorative as he looked at the beauty of the Palace of Westminster and the new skyline springing up along the river around it.
In October, Daniel had been despatched to the South Bank to cover the raising of the Millennium Wheel for the Echo. An Elmworth engineer was part of the team charged with lifting it after a failed attempt had caused it to suddenly slip. Derrick Tilbury had been the hero of the hour, his team of engineers finally managing to raise the wheel successfully, and Daniel had covered the story in his hard hat and hi-vis yellow coat for the paper.
It was now December, and Daniel looked between the Houses of Parliament on one side and the new ‘London Eye’, further away on the other, fully upright now and ready for its official big reveal in two weeks’ time on Millennium Eve. He breathed in the chill and appreciated a moment of calm while the DJ inside the Silver Sturgeon played ‘1999’ by Prince for the fourth time that evening, as revellers danced under a purple starsheet.
The Elmworth Echo Christmas party hadn’t started well. The coach to take the staff into London had no heating and no way of clearing its steamy windows, so Viv Hart had to wipe the windscreen with a chamois all the way down the A1 to The Strand, pretending that she didn’t mind, knowing that she should have stumped up a bit more for a better coach. At the back of the bus, the advertising and editorial staff were drinking Archers miniatures and playing ‘I Have Never’. One of the salesgirls Becca had already fallen out with her boyfriend Gavin, mainly because she didn’t want Gavin to be there because that quashed her chances of getting off with Duncan who covered the obituaries. Duncan was single, so didn’t have a significant other with him. In fact, all the staff were shocked when Viv said partners were invited too. Daniel didn’t know why he regretted telling Kelly that, even before she started puking on Savoy Pier.
‘I’m just not good with boats, am I?’ she said, on her knees, her burgundy faux-fur box coat riding up her back, her new neat bob skew-whiff. A streetlamp on Embankment lit the patchy fake tan on Kelly’s bare legs as she leaned over the jetty and vomited.
‘We haven’t even boarded,’ said Daniel, as he rubbed her back.
*
In September, Kelly had turned up at the Echo’s top-floor offices with two packs of sandwiches, two cans of Dr Pepper and a selection box of miniature Scotch eggs, pork pies and cocktail sausages, to ask Daniel if he’d like to go for a picnic lunch by the river.
Daniel was shocked. He hadn’t heard from Kelly in the three years since he had last seen her scrunched-up face in a nightclub in Sydney. He didn’t even know where she lived now, though he knew her parents and sister were still in Elmworth – he would sometimes see her mum in the library, or her dad in the Post Office or the Red Hart.
‘Erm, I guess,’ Daniel shrugged, looking around the office, relieved to see Viv was out. Lee sat awkwardly at his desk while the girl with the bob and the matter-of-fact voice stood wielding snack foods and determination, and gave Daniel a supportive smile as he grabbed his coat to use it as a blanket by the river.
‘I called your house,’ Kelly said as they watched ducks turn in a circle. ‘Matt answered.’
‘Oh, did he? He didn’t say!’
‘He said you worked at the Echo. I felt so proud of you.’
Really?
‘Don’t you remember, I had an interview before we went travelling?’
‘Yeah but I didn’t think you’d actually get the job.’
‘Oh.’
‘But you did! You’re a proper journalist now.’
‘Thanks,’ Daniel said.
Kelly went on to explain that it hadn’t worked out with Ian. They’d had the best time travelling – they stayed two years in the end – but Ian wanted to move back to Brighton, do a year’s teacher training, and she didn’t. She wanted to put her speech and language therapy degree to good use. Get a job. Buy a car. Start earning some ‘bucks’ as she called them. She explained how she had moved back in with her mum, dad and sister, and was starting her own business as a private speech therapist. She spoke with a slight Australian twang, ending her sentences as if they were questions, and told Daniel that the quarter-life crisis was very real, and it had woken her up to the fact that letting go of him might have been her biggest mistake.
‘Really?’ he asked, in utter astonishment.
‘For sure,’ she said, like a character in Neighbours, putting down a Scotch egg and taking Daniel’s hand in her crumb-strewn palm. She stroked the back of it with her free fingers.
Daniel looked at Kelly in the sunlight of the riverbank under the gaze of the church and was touched. That she had never stopped holding a flame for him. He thought of everything they had been through together, through A levels and uni – how their families knew each other, how easily they slotted into each other’s lives. That maybe his crazy obsession with the spoilt Italian was just that – an obsession he needed to cure himself of. He didn’t really know anything about Olivia anyway, not the way he knew Kelly: the childhood photos that adorned the walls of her parents’ home; that she had watched Dirty Dancing more than two hundred times; that her favourite curry was a chicken korma; and that she cried happy tears every time he made her come. It had been well over a year since he had last seen Olivia, her spine facing him as she said a violent farewell to London. Maybe, at 25, he was ready. Maybe the whole Ian debacle was just a blip he could forgive her.
And Kelly looked good. Self-assured. Like she had a plan, and that was attractive. Her swishy pony was now cut into a bob and she looked like she was going to be a success.
*
Standing on the deck of the Silver Sturgeon, while Kelly was passed out on a banquette indoors, Daniel wiped soft snowflakes from his suit shoulders, inhaled the air, looked at the Houses of Parliament and thought about a new millennium ahead. What hopes and dreams Kelly had for them – she already had six clients – what his own hopes and dreams might be. Kelly had been talking about moving in together; she had suggested looking at flats in Elmworth, Cherry Hinton, or even Cambridge. Perhaps Daniel could get a job on the Evening News. ‘You don’t need Viv Hart and her tinpot job! You could move to the city and write about so much more.’ It had only taken a couple of months for Kelly to change her tune; for Daniel to need to up his game. For the confidence he had unlocked on his travels, the confidence he had discovered while soaring over a shipwreck on a surfboard, to start to diminish.
‘All right mate?�
� asked Gavin, Becca’s South African boyfriend. ‘You haven’t seen my girl up on deck, have you?’
‘No man, sorry,’ Daniel shrugged, although he suspected Becca might be with Duncan on the starboard side.
‘Your little lady is a bit worse for wear, yah? I think I saw her passed out in there!’
‘She’ll sleep it off,’ Daniel assured Gavin.
‘OK fella, catch you on the dancefloor, I’m freezing my tits off here. If you see Becca…’
‘I will.’
As the boat passed Somerset House and Daniel watched couples ice skating arm in arm under a sparkling Tiffany tree, he saw a woman, with hair like Aphrodite, and wondered what Christmas in Milan might look like.
Twenty-Six
Millennium Eve 1999
Milan
‘My darling, I think you could be a chef as well as an atelier!’ said a man with neat white hair and bronze skin.
Olivia blushed.
He raised his glass and said ‘Cin cin!’ to the gathering and a collection of glasses clinked while friends said, ‘Saluti!’, ‘Cheers!’ and ‘Kanpai!’
It was the second New Year’s Eve in a decade in which Olivia hadn’t been drunk, stoned, or both, but the first in which she felt OK about it.
At the relaxed and refined table in the Messina dining room, the detritus of a meal at which friends had reflected on a year, a decade, a century and a millennium, looked satisfyingly dishevelled.
Maria’s closest friend, her former boss and studio director Bernardo, was there with his partner Haruki, who had spent most of Millennium Eve teaching Olivia to roll sushi and onigiri, before an Italian/Japanese fusion feast was presented to their guests. Nancy had joined them as usual, with her sometime boyfriend Angelo and his pet Pomeranian called Maro. And Mimi, boyfriend Tate and his brother Nik, the drummer in The Horizontals who had hooked them up, called in for dinner. Mimi hadn’t gone to Australia this year for a BBQ on the beach at St Kilda – she’d spent Christmas in Amalfi with Tate and distant relatives, and had stopped by Milan for a few days to show Tate her old haunts. It was a new relationship Olivia suspected wouldn’t last, because Tate kept rowing with both Mimi and Nik, who spent most of the evening drumming his fingers on the table, happily, rhythmically, annoyingly, while Olivia, Haruki and Maria served up dinner.
‘Well, you’ll have to choose one or the other,’ advised Nancy in a friendly, schoolmarm tone. ‘You don’t want nori sheets anywhere near those delicate fabrics you and Maria favour…’
At 11 p.m. Mimi, Tate and Nik left to go to an old schoolfriend’s party, which Olivia was happy to eschew.
‘Sure you want to stay here with the olds?’ Mimi had asked, while Nik looked on with puppy-dog eyes. He had always had a thing for Olivia. ‘It won’t be old-school crazy – and I’ll have your back.’
‘No, I’m sure, thanks,’ Olivia answered contentedly.
*
The morning after her lowest ebb, Olivia had woken up to pained confusion and a throbbing in her temples. The bathroom of her Lexington Street flat smelled sterile, of bleach, but she could tell from the remnants of vomit in her hair and the bloodstains on her slip dress that it had been another filthy and bleak night.
Who cleaned it up?
She remembered being fired.
She remembered bumping into Daniel from New Zealand.
She remembered Vaani’s disapproving eyes in the basement bar.
She remembered being taken by the hand, by a guy she had got high with before, and following him to the bathroom. But she couldn’t remember anything else. Which cocktail of drugs she had taken this time. Whether she had slept with the man whose name she didn’t even know. How she had got home. She couldn’t remember why a plastic bag full of precious fabrics she had bought earlier in the day from Broadwick Silks was next to her bed, filled with watery bile. She couldn’t even remember what her father’s kindly face looked like.
As she sat on the toilet and tried to decipher whether the blood on her dress was a result of sex, the cut on her head, or something else, she could only picture her father’s face of disapproval. Of shame.
Olivia suspected Daniel from New Zealand had gotten her home, but she couldn’t remember him being in the flat. As she cried in the bath and scrubbed her body, she smashed all the empty bottles secreted behind it until her hands bled and she was sitting in a bath tinged pink with blood and slashed skin. So she cried and scrubbed her body all over again.
When she hosed herself and the tub down, she got on the phone to Maria, and said she wanted to come home.
Nancy didn’t believe Olivia had a drink problem – getting drunk and kissing boys was just something students did. But her daughter hadn’t told her the whole story. She hadn’t told her that what had started innocently – staying at school with the boarders so she could drink in the dorms and kiss Mimi’s brother Mike – evolved into having to drink, to take the edge off her nerves, so she could talk to the boys, or seem cool and calm. Which had in turn evolved into increasingly blacking out.
In London, if she ever popped out to Tesco Metro to get some food, she invariably came home with just vodka. Vodka that made her feel great and forget how much she missed her father.
Back in Milan she lay in bed for weeks, in some kind of malaise, too scared to meet up with schoolfriends because she didn’t know how to be with them if there wasn’t a drink in her hand.
‘I think I have a problem, Mamma,’ she told Nancy one evening, watching a film in Nancy’s apartment on the leafy Via Eschilo.
‘Darling, are you sure? It’s not like you’re addicted. When was the last time you had a drink?’
Olivia thought back to that hideous night in London and faces she never wanted to see again. Vaani had called her a few times since, just to check she was OK, but Vaani wasn’t the sort of friend for confessionals or chitchat, so Olivia vaguely said she would see her in September.
Nancy talked to Maria at length about it, as they walked Angelo’s Pomeranian around Parco Guido Vergani.
‘She talks as if she’s an alcoholic, but it’s been weeks, months even, since her last drink. It’s not like she’s snaffling mouthwash… is she?!’
Maria pondered it. She had been keeping an eye on the drinks cabinet since Olivia had confessed the shame she felt, but she couldn’t see any signs of it being touched.
‘If she sees it as a problem, it’s a problem.’ Maria was softer than Nancy, more understanding.
‘Yes but she’s not an addict.’
‘Is it not better go through life sober, believing you have a problem, than drink drink drink and convince yourself it’s OK?’ Maria asked, as she alerted Nancy to Maro’s poo that needed picking up.
‘But what if it is OK? What if she’s overreacting? She does have a tendency to be melodramatic.’ Nancy walked over with a little bag in hand.
‘I think she hasn’t told us the whole story,’ said Maria sagely. ‘And maybe we are not the right people to tell.’
As they continued their walk they both felt the wrench in their hearts, their lives, their evening strolls, caused by their worry about Olivia. Caused by the absence of Alessandro.
*
Tension rose when it became apparent to Olivia’s mothers that she wasn’t going back to London to finish her third and final year in the autumn.
‘Why wouldn’t you?’ Nancy asked incredulously.
‘It would be such a waste of your talent to give it all up now, tesora,’ pleaded Maria.
But the final year started, and Olivia didn’t go back. So Maria insisted that if Olivia weren’t finishing her studies, she must help cutting patterns, toiles and fabrics, in the spare-room studio.
In October, Olivia tentatively tiptoed down the hall and sat down at the spare Necchi. Soon she was cutting, sewing and stitching, sometimes driving samples and swatches across town to deliver to whichever fashion house they belonged to. Maria Messina’s daughter, entrusted with Bernardo and the other studios’ secrets.
As 1999 rang in, and Olivia stayed home for the first New Year’s Eve in a decade, through fear of going out, she resolved to find a new way to live. She had shunned parties and socialising for six months, but missed the excitement and attention of friends. Olivia the extrovert. Olivia who loved being in school plays. Olivia who liked going dancing and talking to people.
She researched local AA meetings and went to church halls and old theatres to listen to other people’s stories, surprised that not many of the addicts she met looked like alcohol would be a problem for them, either. There were other young women there. Mothers of young children. School teachers and high-functioning businesswomen, all among the haggard-looking men. Not all of them had dramatic stories either; some were like her and just wanted to stop – although some were horrific and Olivia cried when they shared their narratives.
The people she met were all so different, but one thing unified them: the desire to not drink again. Soon Olivia trusted in this common ground and got the confidence to speak, to tell her story. At first she was embarrassed, the privileged principessa. But some meetings were attended by people who were far more privileged than Olivia, all struggling with the same desire. Pop stars would pass through on their way to the Forum di Assago, Scala or San Siro; supermodels would drop in during Fashion Week; rich and bored housewives would share their stories of addiction and self-loathing. And they were all treated with the same compassion as the homeless man, the woman whose children had been taken away from her, or the ex-convict. Olivia made a few friends among the regulars and the characters, and would drink coffee and eat ice cream with them, helping each other with new strategies for living with the bereavement of alcohol, of turning life on its head and reshaping recovery as something exciting.
*
With Mimi, Tate and Nik drinking Olivia’s fair share of vodka, whisky and rum across town at a party, and Toscanini playing on Alessandro’s beloved record player, Olivia drank sparkling water with her mothers and their friends and felt a contentedness she hadn’t experienced since leaving London. Since her dad died. Since she could remember. Having made and eaten sushi, having enjoyed her own company and the company of others, Olivia felt there were things she was good at, and none of them involved alcohol.