by Lesley Kara
‘I’ve seen her buying wine,’ she whispers.
I wrinkle my nostrils. Her breath smells like an old ashtray.
‘She was probably buying it for a guest,’ I say. I’m not going to tell her about last night. It’s none of her business and, besides, it feels disloyal talking about Helen when she isn’t here.
Rosie makes a noise that’s halfway between a sigh and a laugh. ‘I can see you two get along, and that’s great. But if you’re serious about beating your addiction, Astrid, then you really need to work with someone who’s been sober for a few years. Someone who’s got experience of the Twelve Steps and can guide you through them.’
‘Someone like you, you mean.’
Rosie does her slow blink. What with that and her crinkled grey skin, she reminds me of a lizard.
She touches my arm and her voice drops to a whisper.
‘This thing could kill you, Astrid. You know that, don’t you? Let me help you.’
I shake her off. She’s gone too far. She’s being intrusive. And anyway, why is she so obsessed with helping me and not any of the others? If she’s so worried that Helen’s still drinking, why isn’t she trying to help her instead?
I’m aware of her eyes boring into the space between my shoulder blades as I leave the vestry. I don’t care how many people she’s sponsored in the past. I’m not going to be another one of her bloody projects.
30
The voice on the intercom is wary.
‘Okay. You’d better come up.’
Helen is waiting for me at her front door. Her face is pale and tired-looking, but at least she seems sober.
‘I was worried about you,’ I say. ‘Especially when you didn’t show up tonight.’
A puzzled expression distorts her face. She smacks her forehead with the palm of her hand. ‘Shit! I forgot all about it.’
‘You didn’t miss much, to be honest. Only Rosie droning on about making amends.’
I follow her into the living room.
‘I’ll make some tea,’ she says. Her voice sounds hoarser than usual and she won’t meet my eye.
‘It was just a slip-up, Helen. You can get back on track.’
She says nothing. Then, after what seems like an age, she starts to speak.
‘I’m so angry with myself. So ashamed. I feel like I’ve let us both down. I’ll tell you one thing. It’s made me absolutely determined that it won’t happen again. I’ve been reading the Big Book all day.’
‘If it’s made you stronger, then maybe it was meant to happen.’
Helen smiles at last. It feels like a cloud has lifted. She goes into the kitchen and puts the kettle on.
‘Thanks so much for coming round last night,’ she says. ‘But I really wish you hadn’t seen me like that.’
‘You weren’t so bad. You fell asleep almost as soon as I arrived.’
She hangs her head in shame.
A few minutes later she brings in the tea.
‘How are things with you?’ she says.
‘Oh, Helen, the last thing I want to do is burden you with all my troubles. You’ve got enough of your own.’
‘If we focus on each other’s problems, maybe our own won’t seem as bad.’ She gives me a sheepish smile. ‘Maybe Rosie’s right with all her little sayings. Maybe we just have to accept that this is the way it works.’
‘Maybe.’
‘So what is it? What’s happened?’
I reach for my mug, then change my mind. I’m feeling sick all of a sudden.
She leans forward. ‘Not another photo of Simon?’
‘Someone tricked their way into the house when Mum was on her own. There’s a girl who’s been following me. She left another envelope. Not a photo this time. It was a page from a newspaper. A death notice with my name on it.’ Helen covers her mouth with her hand. ‘And a note. A horrible, horrible note.’
Helen stares at me, bewildered. ‘Who is this girl?
‘I don’t know, but she’s the one who’s doing all this.’
Helen frowns. ‘What makes you say that?’
‘Because she took Simon’s juggling ball and left me that note.’ My breath catches in my throat. ‘There’s something I didn’t think anyone else except Simon knew about. I’ve never talked about it. Not even to the counsellors at rehab. It’s just too … shameful.’
‘Can you tell me?’
‘I want to, but … I’m not sure if I can.’
‘Wait,’ she says. ‘Let’s do this properly.’
‘What do you mean?’
She gets up and goes over to the bureau, opens a drawer. ‘It’s something I’ve been thinking about ever since I woke up.’
She brings over a photocopied sheet of the Twelve Steps and places it on the table between us.
‘Look, I know we’re supposed to work our way through each step in chronological order, but the way I see it, if we both have a problem with the God thing, then maybe we should just concentrate on the ones that make the most practical sense.’
Her relapse seems to have galvanized her into full-on recovery mode, but I have to admit she’s looking and sounding a whole lot better than she did the other night. And if I’m going to do this step-work with anyone, I’d rather muddle through with Helen than with Rosie.
She points to the highlighted sections on the photocopy, which, now I come to look at it more closely, is full of crossings-out – the God references, mainly – and lots of linking arrows and scribbled notes.
‘Step 4, for instance. Making a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. We could do that, couldn’t we? We could combine it with Step 8 and include all the people we’ve harmed over the years.’
I try to keep my face neutral. I’ve heard it can take months to complete Step 4 properly, but I don’t want to dampen her enthusiasm. I’m not sure Rosie and Jeremy would agree with cherry-picking only those steps we can face. Of mixing them up in this way and leaving God out of the equation altogether. Nor would some of the Twelve-Step Nazis I met in rehab.
‘And then we could do Step 5,’ she says. ‘Our own version of it, obviously – and read each other our lists. That way, we’ll have …’ She leans forward to check the wording. ‘Admitted to ourselves and another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.’
I swallow hard, because that’s what Simon must have done. That’s why I’m in this mess in the first place. And yet she does have a point. It’s got to be better than not doing it at all.
‘Think about it, Astrid. If you can conquer your demons and face up to your past, what’s left to be scared of?’
‘Well, when you put it like that …’
Helen goes over to the bureau again and returns with paper and pens.
‘No time like the present,’ she says.
For the next fifteen or twenty minutes we sit in silence, each composing our lists of shame. Is this really the way forward? Is this what I have to do to get better? Face each and every cold, hard truth about myself? Deal them out like cards on a table, picture-side up? Surely some things are best kept hidden. Then again, I’ve already told her what happened with Simon, so she might as well know the rest.
‘Okay,’ I say at last. ‘I think I’ve reached saturation point.’
‘Me too,’ she says, resting her pen on her lap and rubbing her eyes.
‘You first,’ I say, before she says the same thing to me.
She clears her throat and stares at her notepad. ‘These are in no particular order.’
I nod encouragingly.
‘So, number one. I let down my colleagues. Embarrassed them in front of an important client, lost business for the firm.’
She closes her eyes and sighs. ‘I’m mortified, looking back on it.’ She clears her throat again. ‘Number two. I told my best friend to fuck off and die when all she was trying to do was help me. Number three. I threw up in Waterstones. All over their buy-one-get-one-half-price display table. I caused a real scene when they confronted me.’
/> The corner of my mouth twitches. I can’t help it. I look down at my lap and focus on my own sordid list. This isn’t meant to be funny.
‘Number four. I told my niece and nephew a secret about their mother when I was drunk. Something I promised I’d never tell a living soul. My sister hasn’t spoken to me since.’
Just like Simon promised me, I think, and once more, the piecemeal memories of that night parade behind my eyes.
Helen looks up at the ceiling for a few seconds before continuing.
‘Number five,’ she says, and takes a deep breath. She’s saving the worst for last. It’s what I’ve done in my list too.
‘I destroyed the love of my life. He gave me another chance but I pushed him away from me.’
Her eyes swim with tears and for a few seconds she hugs her chest and rocks to and fro in her chair. My eyes fill up too. Nothing about any of this is the least bit amusing.
I don’t suppose it matters how I respond. The important thing is that she’s said these things out loud, that she’s shared them with me.
‘So have you thought about how you can make amends?’ I ask her. I know I’m skipping ahead, but I’m not ready to read my own list out yet.
Helen consults her notepad. ‘I suppose I could send a letter of apology to the partners in my old firm. Perhaps I could offer to do some unpaid work for them. They’ll probably say no, but at least I’ll have offered.’
‘Sounds like a plan.’
For the next ten minutes we come up with one action she could complete for each item on her list. Some will be trickier than others, of course. She doesn’t think her husband or her best friend or her sister will want anything more to do with her, but she can at least try.
Now the time has come to read out my own ghastly bullet points. I can’t help feeling that mine are far worse than hers, but of course everyone’s journey is different. Everyone has their own rock bottom.
As I read, I’m reminded of the nightmare I had a while back, the one where Richard Carter read out this same list in the Flinstead and Mistden community hall, and I find myself adopting a vaguely similar tone of voice. So ‘fucking a friend’s boyfriend in the back seat of his car while she was visiting her parents’ takes the form of a somewhat unorthodox liturgical chant. Although by the time I get to ‘asking my dad for help with a deposit on a new flatshare and then blowing the whole lot on a three-day bender in Bruges’, my voice has become a little more halting and awkward.
‘You know the next one because I’ve already told you. I made Simon start drinking again.’
Helen gives me a sad little smile.
And now here it is. The last one.
‘Go on,’ Helen says. ‘It won’t seem as bad when you say it out loud.’
‘Believe me, it will.’
‘Say it anyway.’
So I do. I tell her everything I can remember, try to stitch the disconnected memories together.
‘I wish I could make sense of it all, but I can’t. The only thing I know for sure is that something bad happened that night. We hurt an innocent young mother in front of her child. And for what? Thirty fucking quid, or whatever it was.’
I can’t believe I’m doing this. This secret’s been locked away for so long it’s like I’ve convinced myself it didn’t happen, that it was just a bad dream I once had. It feels like I’m betraying Simon by telling her. And yet he must have told someone too. He must have betrayed me.
Helen’s right, though. Telling her hasn’t made it any less shocking or shameful, but the tightness in my chest does seem to have loosened slightly. There’s a little more space to breathe.
My eyes swim with tears. ‘She might have been badly injured.’ I gouge my left thumb into the palm of my right hand. ‘And even if she wasn’t, who knows what psychological harm we caused, to her and the child?’
I don’t tell her what else goes through my mind in the dead of night: that she might even have died. There’s a knot in the pit of my stomach. I’m sure we’d have heard about it on the news if she had, but it’s still a possibility. I know it is.
Rosie’s voice plays over and over in my mind like a broken record. ‘It’s more than just apologizing … you have to actually do something.’
If Simon really was working the steps before he met up with me again, could he have got as far as Step 9? Could he have somehow tracked down that young mother and tried to make amends? Maybe it backfired and this is some kind of revenge for what we did to her.
Except that doesn’t make sense. Why would she have his photo? You don’t take photos like that of someone smiling into the camera unless you really, really like them. No. It has to be someone he formed a relationship with, someone connected to his recovery.
But now that the seed has been planted it won’t go away. What if his attempts to befriend her didn’t backfire? What if they succeeded only too well? Simon could be very persuasive when he wanted. Even more so when he was sober. Maybe she even fell for him. And if she did, how much would she hate me when she found out what led to his suicide?
What goes around comes around. It’s time to pay for what you’ve done.
Helen leans forward. Her mouth is moving, but I don’t hear what she’s saying.
At last, her words filter through. ‘Talk to me, Astrid. Talk to me. What are you thinking?’
I’m thinking of Mum all alone in the cottage, oblivious of the danger I’m in. Oblivious of the danger she could be in. The danger I might have put her in because of the stupid, thoughtless things I’ve done. I should have gone straight home after the meeting. I could have told Helen all this tomorrow.
‘I’m sorry, Helen, I’ve got to go.’
31
Mum’s brushing her hair when I peer round her bedroom door, my chest heaving from having run all the way home. She looks up in surprise, her face etched with concern, and I know in that instant what I’ve always known, deep down, that her love for me is fierce, protective. That she loves me as only a mother can. And I love her.
Dad’s old cardie is lying on the bed near her pillow. My eyes stumble over it and back to her face. It’s unbearable to think of her holding on to it at night, her tears melting into the woollen fibres.
‘Why are you so out of breath?’ she asks.
I rack my brain for a suitable response. ‘I fancied a run. I’m too embarrassed to do it in the day.’
Mum narrows her eyes. ‘Are you all right, Astrid? Has something upset you? You haven’t been …’
She checks herself and walks over to her dressing table, unscrews a pot of Nivea and starts applying it to her face.
‘I’m fine, honestly. Just a bit out of condition, that’s all. You have locked the back door, haven’t you?’
She gives me a look that’s a cross between amusement and surprise. ‘Yes, I’m sure I have. I don’t know why you’re so jumpy lately. This is Flinstead, remember? We’ve got one of the lowest crime rates in the country.’ She puts the lid back on the cream. ‘And since when have you cared whether I lock the back door or not?’
‘Since you started letting random strangers look round the house.’
‘Not that again.’
Her cheeks are pale and greasy in the low-energy light and the circles under her eyes look darker than ever.
‘Night, Mum.’
‘Goodnight, darling,’ she says.
Downstairs, I can’t resist trying the handle of the back door. When it opens on to the cold, black night a frisson of alarm goes through me. Anyone could have got in while Mum was upstairs, all alone. She’s always been relaxed about security. I have too. It was Dad who used to do the nightly round of locking up. Dad who looked after us.
I shut it quickly, lifting the handle up and turning the key as fast as I can. This is ridiculous. It’s a terraced cottage. The only way someone could get into the house is via the garden, and that would mean climbing over all the other garden boundaries first, and they’re not likely to risk their own safety by doing that. Not wh
en they can harm me in other, more insidious ways.
Even so, I roam the house like a restless ghost, checking I’ve pulled the bolts across the front door and that all the windows are tightly shut. I make myself a cup of coffee. I shouldn’t, not at this time of night, but the chances of me falling asleep are slim. What difference will a bit of caffeine make?
Josh sends me a text. Even the beep of my phone makes me jump. ‘Dad’s driving back tomorrow to sort the hut out, but I’m staying on here for another day with my cousins and getting the train back. Dad says feel free to drop round in the afternoon and work on the painting if you want. Xxx’
I tap out an upbeat reply. It’s stupid to feel upset that I won’t see him for another day, but I am. Things seem so much more bearable when I’m with Josh.
I take my coffee into the living room, not putting the light on until I’ve drawn the curtains across. That’s another thing Mum hardly ever does. I’ve told her that you can see right in from the street, but she never seems to care. Maybe she would if she knew that someone was stalking her daughter. Possibly stalking her too.
That girl crossed a line by coming in here under false pretences. Invading our personal space, touching our things. It took guts, though, I’ll give her that. Which makes me wonder what else she’s capable of.
The next day dawns cold and grey. I’ve been tossing and turning all night long, trying to make sense of the riot in my brain. If I slept at all, it could only have been brief snatches here and there. One thing that occurred to me as I thrashed about is that I haven’t yet spoken to the other Oxfam volunteer – the one Rosie said must have sold the Cranberries T-shirt. He probably won’t remember who donated it and, even if he does, I doubt he’ll tell me, but it’s worth a try. He may not even be there, but I need to do something.
I don’t like leaving Mum on her own, but the thought of spending the whole day cooped up with her in this cottage fills me with gloom. Besides, I’ve made her promise she’ll be on her guard. The story about the burglars doing the rounds seems to have hit home at last. She’s decided to start locking the porch door from now on.