‘You can do it,’ I said, patting her on the shoulder. ‘I’m Electra, by the way.’
There was no reaction, which was surprising, because there usually was when I said my name.
‘Okay, I’m going to head to lunch. See you later.’
I left her curled up under the blanket, marvelling at the fact that I’d just found myself caring for her. Seeing her in the same state as I’d been in when they’d taken me out of clinical detox had obviously given me ‘empathy’.
The canteen was busy, with many of the inmates chatting quietly at the circular tables, light pouring in through the tall windows that gave a great view of the Serenity Garden beyond. The buffet spanned the whole length of the canteen, with hatted chefs serving up surprisingly delicious food. I collected my daily intake of carbs – a piping hot beef enchilada with golden cheese melted over it and a side of fries. I reckoned I would have to go on a crash diet when I left, but eating seemed to ease the craving for vodka. As I ate, I thought about the word ‘empathy’. It was one that was used a lot at The Ranch; apparently alcohol and drug abuse made you lose any of it that you had for others, cutting off the good parts of you as well as dulling the bad things you wanted to block out, which was the reason you’d taken the booze and pills in the first place. Tomorrow, I thought, I’d tell Fi that I might just have shown some empathy to the new girl in my dorm. She’d like that.
‘Hi.’
I looked up as Lizzie, my roommate whose bed was next to mine, came and sat down with her soup and plate of green stuff. Her hair was as sleek as always, blonde, perfectly highlighted and styled into a bob. She reminded me of a china doll – except that she’d had so much work done, her face looked like it was made by a psychopathic sculptor who’d studied under Picasso. She was in here for food addiction and I was amazed she came to the canteen at all; for me it would be like being in a bar with lines of coke spread across the counter.
‘How are you today?’ she asked me in her British accent.
‘I’m doing okay, thanks, Lizzie,’ I responded, wondering if she remembered me rolling her onto her side last night when she was snoring fit to wake every coyote in the neighbourhood.
‘You look a lot better. Your eyes are brighter. Not that they were ever dull,’ she added quickly. ‘You have beautiful eyes, Electra.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, feeling guilty as I munched on my enchilada, which she stared at in a way that told me she’d kill just for a taste of it. ‘How about you?’
‘Oh, I’m doing well,’ she replied. ‘I’ve lost twelve pounds since I came in – only another three weeks and Christopher will hardly recognise me!’
Christopher was Lizzie’s husband. An LA producer who, so Lizzie had confided to me at length, was the usual cliché of the married man who played around. Lizzie was convinced that if she lost twenty pounds, his shenanigans would stop. The fact was, she wasn’t even fat in the first place, and I wasn’t sure how much of her was actually real either. She’d been nipped and tucked and lifted so much that it looked like a pair of invisible hands were dragging the skin on her face upwards. Personally, I didn’t hold out much hope for Christopher’s return to fidelity. In my humble opinion, Lizzie wasn’t addicted to food, she was addicted to pleasing her husband.
‘How much longer have you got now?’ she asked.
‘A week, and then I’m out of here.’
‘You’ve done so well, Electra. I’ve seen so many who have come in here who don’t, you know. And you’re far too beautiful and bright to need all that stuff,’ she added as she forked up a leaf of rocket salad and chewed it purposefully as if it was a chunky piece of rib-eye steak. ‘I’m proud of you.’
‘Hey, thanks,’ I smiled, feeling that this was my first proper ‘good’ day and it felt great to get compliments like that. ‘There’s a new girl in our dorm, by the way,’ I added, wondering if it was okay for me to bring a slice of chocolate cheesecake back to the table in front of her.
‘Oh, yes, Vanessa.’ Lizzie raised her eyebrows – she was always the first to know anything in here and I soaked up her gossip. ‘Poor love. She’s so young – only just eighteen apparently. One of the detox nurses told me she was picked out of a gutter in New York by some wealthy person, who has sponsored the cost of getting her properly clean here. State-funded programme for juveniles do exist, but a kid gets in and by the time they’ve detoxed and are technically clean, they’re out and back to their old life. And using again within weeks,’ Lizzie sighed. ‘And if you’re legally an adult, like Vanessa is now, then forget it.’
It had only dawned on me in the past few days, as my brain had started to function properly, that we in here were the privileged few. I hadn’t had to even think about what it would cost to come in and get clean, just whether I wanted to or not. There were thousands of young American kids who were addicts like me, with no hope of getting the kind of proper treatment they needed.
‘The nurse said Vanessa’s one of the worst cases she’s had in here. She was in the detox clinic for four days. Poor little thing.’ Lizzie, despite her desperation to be beautiful and the carnage she had wreaked on her once pretty face, had a definite motherly quality to her. ‘We’ll look after her, won’t we, Electra?’
‘We’ll try, Lizzie, yes.’
That afternoon, to work off my lunch, I went for a run along the nature trail that looped around the perimeter of The Ranch. As I ran, I remembered my trek up the mountain behind Atlantis over a month ago and how much better I’d felt after it. Even though the dry, hot Arizona air burnt in my lungs and stung my nose as I breathed, I kept going.
I came to a halt near the water cooler and poured myself a cup which I drank down thirstily, and then another which I sprayed all over me. I plopped down on a bench and enjoyed the feeling of . . . well, feeling. Despite my reluctance to embrace The Ranch’s spiritual approach, just sitting here with the mountains behind me, the blue sky against the red of the earth was calming. Nature was calming. The air carried the scents of the low green shrubs that were unfurling in the sun. Incredible flowers and cacti were dotted all across the desert’s arid beauty – some over ten feet tall, their green spiky trunks filled with water to keep them sated until the next rains.
For the first time, I pictured myself back in my New York apartment and felt trapped, like an animal in a cage. Somehow, what was around me here felt like more natural territory for me, as though it suited who I was. The heat didn’t bother me like it bothered Lizzie, and the open spaces made me feel alive.
As I sat there, I felt my lips form into a smile.
‘Why?’ I asked myself.
Just because, Electra . . .
As I stood up to go inside, remembering group therapy was about to start and I’d have to go in my running gear, I suddenly realised I hadn’t thought about having a drink or doing a line for the past two hours. And that made me smile all over again.
When I got back to the dorm later, desperate for another shower, Vanessa was still curled up on her bed. She was now shaking violently and Lizzie – whose bed was sandwiched between us – was sitting there watching her.
‘She’s not in a good way, Electra,’ she sighed. ‘I’ve called the nurse and she’s given her another injection of whatever it is she needs, but . . .’
‘She doesn’t look good, no,’ I agreed, as I grabbed my towel and went in for a shower. Coming out, I dressed in a clean pair of track pants and a hoodie. ‘Are you coming to supper?’ I asked Lizzie.
‘No, I’m going to stay here and just watch Vanessa for a while. I’m worried about her.’
‘Okay, see you later.’
Feeling low, because I really didn’t want to stick around to see Vanessa going through what I had, I went into the canteen. I avoided what I called the ‘woo-woos’: those who had taken up The Ranch’s spiritual ethos and only spoke in quotes like a bunch of walking, talking self-help books – and piled my tray with steak and sides. Not wanting to go back to the dorm once I’d finished eating, I
grabbed some paper and pens from the side table and thought about what we had discussed at the AA meeting that morning. I was on step number nine, the one where I had to write an apology letter to anyone I may have hurt when my substance abuse had gotten out of control.
Okay, so who do I have to apologise to? I thought to myself. Ma?
Yes. I knew that I’d been a huge pain in the butt as a child and she had always been so patient with me. I’d definitely write her a note. But then again, I thought as I wolfed back some cheesecake, were these apologies about being a bad person, or being a bad person because of my substance abuse? I’d hardly seen Ma in the past few years, and rarely called her up.
Then she deserves an apology for me ignoring her, I thought, and gave her a tick on the list.
Maia? Yup, she definitely deserved an apology for my shitty behaviour after Pa had died and we were in Atlantis, and in Rio. If it hadn’t been for her calling Mariam, I might have died. She’d been wonderful and I really, really loved her. I gave her a big tick.
Ally: she should get one too. I stared out of the window, thinking back to when we’d been at Atlantis together last month and how rude I’d been to her. I wondered then why Ally had always irritated me, because she was such a good person. Maybe that was it: the fact that she was a good person, and so sorted and together, even though she’d lost the love of her life and had a baby. It had always made my untogetherness more obvious.
Star: my mousy little sister, who would never say boo to a goose. I had no idea if I liked her or if I didn’t, because she’d always said so little; she’d been the silence to my big noise. Ally had said that she had met some guy and was living in England with him. Maybe I’d make the effort to go see her when I got out of here. I had always felt sorry for her and the way she was overshadowed on every level by my nemesis sister, CeCe. I’d write Star a letter anyway, just to say hello, because I couldn’t think of anything bad I’d actually done to her specifically.
CeCe. I ground the nib of the pen hard into the paper. She and I had never gotten along; Ma had always said we were too similar, but I wasn’t so sure. I didn’t like the way she’d dominated Star, and sometimes when we were younger, we’d fallen out and had physical fights that Ally had to break up. I’d been glad when I’d heard that she’d moved to Australia.
‘Basically because Star dumped her for a man,’ I murmured maliciously, knowing Fi and the group therapy crowd wouldn’t like that negativity, but you couldn’t like everyone in the world, could you? Although apparently, you could get them to forgive you.
For now, I put a question mark against CeCe’s name and then moved on to Tiggy.
As an adult, she had definitely morphed into the kind of person who could probably apply for a job here. Then I metaphorically slapped myself for being bitchy about her, because she didn’t deserve it. She was sweet and gentle and just wanted to make everybody happy. We were polar opposites, yet I aspired to be like her because she could see the good in everything and everybody, whereas I was wired the opposite way around. I vaguely remembered Ally telling me at Atlantis that she’d had a health issue. To my shame, I hadn’t even dropped her an email to ask how she was. Tiggy was definitely going on my list of apologies.
I then sat back and wondered whether, if Pa were alive, I’d be wanting to write him an apology. No. I felt he should be writing me one, having died when I was still so young and leaving me to deal with all this stuff. Including Stella, my grandmother. Anyway, I didn’t want to think about all that, so I moved on to my New York life.
Mariam: MASSIVE APOLOGY, I wrote. She was by far the best PA I’d ever had, although I had no idea whether she was still my PA. I put that on my list to ask Maia when I replied to the email she’d sent me a couple of days ago. We were allowed our laptops and cell phones for an hour each day, but everything we wrote was monitored, so I hadn’t written to anyone so far.
Stella, a.k.a. ‘Granny’. I paused and chewed the end of my pen as I navigated the brain fuzz that was the last few weeks before I’d come here. Truthfully, I couldn’t remember much about our conversations, though I did remember waking up and her sitting in the easy chair by my bed. I also thought I remembered her singing, but maybe that had been a dream. Although even in the haze of my couple of meetings with her, I remembered that she was truly one of the scariest humans I’d ever met.
Before I could decide whether I should write her, my attention was caught by a super tall black guy who walked past me with a tray of food. Unlike most of the inmates who wore hoodies and track pants like me, he was dressed in a crisp white shirt and chinos. I hunched over my paper with my head down as he went to sit at the table opposite. I normally didn’t give a shit who saw me looking as rough as hell, but I glanced to my left and saw he was crazily beautiful, and had a certain elegance about him. Before he could spot me, I put my hood up, picked up my tray and the pen and paper and left the canteen.
When I arrived back at my dorm, Vanessa’s bed was empty and Lizzie was involved in her usual night-time beauty regime, her desk transformed into an expensive cosmetics counter.
‘Where’s Vanessa?’ I asked as I watched her lather cream onto her face, use a pipette to put drops of what she said contained gold flakes onto her neck, and swallow a series of pills that had been okayed by the doctor, so must contain a bunch of nothing.
‘The poor little mite started having a seizure, so I called the nurse and she’s been taken back to the clinical detox ward,’ Lizzie sighed. ‘I just hope it’s not too late.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Electra, surely you must know the effect that heroin and all those other drugs she’d taken can have on your vital organs? If you’ve been abusing them for a long time, when you try to come off them it can cause seizures. Apparently, the boyfriend who was feeding her the drugs was also her pimp and goodness knows what was in them.’
‘So she was a prostitute?’
‘So I overheard a nurse saying, yes. She’s HIV positive too,’ Lizzie commented as she began packing away her ‘shop’ into a Louis Vuitton suitcase. ‘It’s so so sad, because she is only the tip of the iceberg. My husband once produced a documentary on the drug gangs of Harlem; those are the guys who are the real criminals in all this.’
‘Right,’ I said, as I changed into my nightwear and climbed into bed. ‘It’s crazy to think that Harlem is only a few blocks uptown from where I live.’ I took my sketchbook and pencil out of my nightstand and flipped to a new page. Now that the impulse to design had returned to me, every night before bed I’d quickly dash off a couple of fashion sketches.
‘It is, yes,’ Lizzie agreed as she got into bed too. ‘Of course we have big gangs in LA too; sadly they’re everywhere these days. We don’t know how lucky we are, do we? We live such protected lives.’
‘Yes, we do,’ I agreed, feeling I was learning more about the world while cloistered in The Ranch in the middle of the desert than I’d ever learnt in New York and all my travels around the globe. And I thought how naive I must have been, believing that I was somehow above it all. Where did I think my dealers had got my cocaine from in the first place? It didn’t matter if you were doing a bump in an expensive hotel or on a street corner – it all came from the same place, from brutality and death and lust for money. I shivered at the thought.
‘So what have you got on tomorrow?’ Lizzie asked.
‘Oh, you know, the usual. A run before breakfast, an AA meeting, then therapy with Fi . . .’
‘She’s the best therapist I’ve ever had. And I’ve had a few,’ said Lizzie.
‘So have I,’ I said with feeling. ‘But I guess I’m just not very good at the whole therapy thing.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I just don’t like sitting there talking about myself.’
‘You mean you don’t like having to face up to who you are,’ she observed shrewdly. ‘Until we do that, sweetheart, none of us in here get anywhere.’
‘They seemed to do okay in the o
ld days. I’ve never heard of anyone having a therapist, like, in movies I’ve seen about the First and Second World Wars.’
‘No.’ Lizzie gave me a lopsided grimace, due to all the filler she had in her lips. ‘Well, remember, Electra, a lot of those men came home with shell shock – or PTSD as we know it today – and they sorely needed help, just like soldiers did after Vietnam, but their needs were ignored. So it’s a good thing that we’re living in a culture where it’s okay to admit you need help. I’m sure it will save many lives that would have been lost.’
‘Yup, you’re right,’ I agreed.
‘It’s also bad that we’ve lost our communities. I grew up in a little village in England where everyone knew everyone. When my father died I remember them rallying round my mum. They were all there for her, and for me, but that doesn’t seem to happen anymore. We’re all so displaced. We don’t feel we ‘belong’ anywhere. Or to anyone. One of the downsides of globalisation, I suppose. How many friends do you have that you feel you can trust?’
I thought about that question for about one second, then shrugged. ‘None. But maybe that’s just because of who I am.’
‘Yes, I’m sure it’s partly that, but the rest of us aren’t much better off either. It’s sad, because so many of us feel alone with our problems these days.’
I looked at Lizzie, with her weird face and ridiculous beauty regime and obvious snake of a husband, and wondered where it had all gone wrong. She was so thoughtful and articulate.
‘What did you do before you married Christopher?’ I asked.
‘Oh, I was a trainee lawyer. When I met Chris, I was on secondment in the firm’s New York office. I wanted to specialise in family law, but then I was swept off my feet by him and we ended up moving to LA. Then I had the kids, and then they left home and . . .’ Lizzie shrugged. ‘That’s the story.’
‘So you got a degree in law?’
The Sun Sister (The Seven Sisters) Page 25