Room Empty

by Sarah Mussi

  Tony hasn’t finished, but he is winding down. ‘I don’t even know how I got to the point I did. How my disease got so bad. How it was ever going to stop. Then I got involved with a twelve-step programme. I started walking the path to recovery. Really, it’s very simple. And this is it: first you must accept you have lost your way. Then you must allow The Twelve Steps to guide you. You start following their map. You find a way through all the shit. Until you hit the light. The journey is long, and before you can settle into recovering for ever, you have to find somebody else who is lost and hand the map on to them. It’s really that simple. The lost get found. The sick get healed. And that’s how tender and kind the programme is.’

  39

  Tony is done with his life history. He’s now on to reviewing the Steps.

  ‘The First Step is about honesty. I’m not talking about the kind of honesty which means that when you find a five-pound note you hand it in. It’s when you say, “I’m going to stop using tomorrow.” You gotta come clean. No more lying. You have to knock it off. BE HONEST. Got it?

  ‘Then the Second Step is about your Higher Power. It’s about your Belief System. Perhaps you have issues with the word “God”. You might think, Oh, yeah, that God, the one who got me into this shit to begin with. The one who rules over this messed-up planet. But it’s not about that.

  ‘It’s like when you sit out on the grass with a friend, feeling warm and comfortable, or when you read a good book that’s totally gripping. You see, it’s about something outside of yourself that gives you the strength to feel good about yourself. That’s what the Higher Power is. It just means you’re not the whole blasted centre of your entire blasted universe.’

  We’re halfway through CT, and still no Fletcher.

  I don’t know if I can make it to the end. I want to get up and rush out of the room, race up the stairs, kick his door open, shake him, slap him, punch, scratch, scream, knock some sense into him. I want to shout to his face, ‘YOU CAN’T DO THIS.’

  But I don’t.

  Instead, I listen to Atticus, who’s sharing his encounter with the Second Step. Right now in his story he has shot so much heroin into himself, he doesn’t care about anything. He’s back there, anchored in his story. He’s as high as a kite on his own memory. There are two spots of colour on his cheeks. And his eyeballs are rolled upwards.

  What is Fletcher thinking of?

  Is he mad?

  Is this his last stand?

  The ultimate Dani guilt trip?

  It’s a cry for help. Isn’t it always? A siren from a distant galaxy saying SOS. But even if I go to him now, and I force myself to ram a three-course meal inside my poor shrunken stomach, it’ll be no good. Fletcher has gone too far. I know. I saw that emptiness in his eyes. I felt a thousand antennae stretching and waving around out there in Outer Space. Aliens are like that. They’re like vultures that instinctively circle when you’re dying. They can smell despair.

  At long last, Atticus shuts up.

  Tony passes round the aphorisms card.

  And the session ends.

  We all stand and chant the Serenity Prayer. We join hands and pump out together how we’re going to work it because we’re worth it.

  Only I am not worth it.

  And Fletcher is worth it.

  I run from the room.

  Immediately I feel dizzy. I have to stop at the stairwell. With one hand I grasp hold of Carmen’s foot and with the other the old wooden banisters. Steady.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say.

  The smooth wood slips beneath the palms of my hand. Carmen’s foot is still damp. I stagger across to the wall and bend over an old cast-iron radiator. Its chill touch refreshes. I press my cheek against the cold iron.

  ‘Easy does it,’ she says. ‘This too will pass.’

  I look up at her. She smiles down at me and winks one eye from her canted-over head.

  ‘My neck is broken,’ she says. ‘In case you’re wondering why I’m winking like this.’

  I’m not sure I can get up the stairs. All the male state-funded clients have their rooms on the far end of the fifth floor. I am so weak. In the attics. Beyond the library. That’s ten sets of stairs. I have to see Fletcher. It’s where they store the stuff that’s unmended or no longer needed. I have to see him now. Iggy used to joke about that. Fletcher has to go and talk to Tony right now. Joke about how we were the attic-dwellers, the flotsam of mankind. If Fletcher can catch Tony while he’s still in the meeting room perhaps he can just be put down as a late, not as a no-show. Tony likes him. Attics that still house the discarded, broken lumber of society.

  I look up the staircase. My breathing is shallow. My heartbeat rapid. I feel dizzy. A jelly-like numbness has spread down my legs.

  I pass the next landing.

  The Alien sits on the landing above me.

  ‘I can help,’ it says.

  It reaches down one long, electric-blue tentacle and gently wraps it around my waist. I can’t fight the Alien any more.

  ‘OK,’ I whisper. And I let it haul me up the last few steps.

  Sometimes you have to accept whatever help you can. Even if it means defeat.

  ‘You really can’t manage without me,’ smirks the Alien. ‘However hard you try.’

  On the landing I stop to catch my breath. I bend over another old, cold radiator. My heart isn’t beating in any regular way. It runs patterns. It plays out a frantic offbeat rhythm. Weak heartbeats softly punch my chest. For one terrible minute, I think I’m going to have some sort of seizure.

  I try to remember the days when I ran up and down the school staircase, six times every break; how I pretended I’d left a pencil at the top, or my bag at the bottom. How nobody ever suspected.

  I look at the next flight of stairs. They seem to stretch for ever in front of me, every step as difficult as the North Face of Everest. And the Alien is there again. So I rest on the stairs where the shadow of Carmen is at its darkest, and my heart beats and skips.

  I lean on the radiator again, but now its coldness is not refreshing. Its icy touch is reaching into my mind. I feel a freezing sweat break out on my forehead. It travels round the crown of my head in a circlet of ice, down the centre of my spine, through the marrow of each rib, until it forms an ice cave over my heart.

  I hear voices. Someone is shouting. It’s coming from way above me. I don’t mean to listen. I have no choice.

  It’s coming from way above Carmen’s landing.

  ‘You just don’t understand, do you?’ It’s Tony.

  ‘I understand everything.’ Fletcher’s voice. I vaguely wonder how Tony got up to Fletcher’s room before me.

  ‘No, you don’t,’ says Tony. ‘You don’t understand without recovery there is no future for you, Fletcher. You’ve been out there on the streets before – you know it’s a one-way road to hell.’

  ‘I’m not going out there to look for a future,’ says Fletcher. ‘I’m trying to lose one.’

  ‘I did mental hospital, jail, years inside; I nearly smoked and drank myself into the grave. You know what the streets have to offer better than anyone here.’ Tony’s Scouse accent is thick with anger.

  There’s a thumping going on.

  ‘Do you know how hard I have to fight to get these places funded for people like you and Lee?’ screams Tony. He sounds more like Fletcher’s dad than his therapist.

  ‘Can we leave Lee out of this?’ says Fletcher.

  Except Fletcher never had a dad.

  ‘Do you know how many benevolent, patronizing bastards I have to grovel to?’ shouts Tony. ‘Do you know how many times I’ve got to show them the scars of my track marks just to get them to listen? How I have to sick up my past and go over and over and over my humiliation so that they’ll sign the cheques that let you be here? Do you know all that?’

  There’s a silence.

  Fletcher says, ‘I didn’t ask you to.’

  ‘Oh great,’ says Tony. ‘Is that what you’ve learned after all the
hours I’ve sat with you? To spit my own words back at me? What you don’t understand, Fletcher, is that I will go on doing it. I’ll go on licking arse and being the ignorant, uneducated, jailbird moron, and dancing my flappy, little, sickening dance in front of Big Money – and I will do it for a thousand years. I will do it until I drop dead. Why? Because I don’t want another underprivileged, undervalued by this effing Capitalist stupid system, misguided, trauma-damaged, annoying, heartbroken, diseased young man to do what I had to do in order to survive.’

  There’s a pause.

  ‘Do you think, when I go and tell my life history at Circle Time, that’s the real story?’ There’s a break in Tony’s voice. ‘I’ve seen you looking at me, Fletcher. I know you know the truth. I haven’t fooled you. I know you see right through me. You understand how much I’ve cleaned up everything.’

  There is a pause. I hear a gulping sound.

  Tony’s voice is completely broken now. ‘You’re like my own kid, Fletch. Yeah, the one that won’t talk to me any more. And I want to save you. I know it shouldn’t be like that – I shouldn’t make any personal investment in you, you’ve got to do it for yourself. But I see something in you, Fletcher. I see that you can be OK – you can heal, you really can. You can recover and it totally breaks me to see you throwing it away.’

  There’s a very long pause.

  ‘So you think about it.’ The crack in his voice is still there: straight from the back of his throat down to the shadow of Carmen. ‘Just effing think about it.’

  The door on the landing above slams. Someone stamps on to the floorboards. I hear a punching noise and bits of plaster land around me. I press myself against the wall. There’s the fast beat of footfall. They crash down the wooden stairway. They reach the landing and come round it.

  And I see Tony, red-faced, bleary-eyed. He pauses, draws the back of his hand across his nose and stares at me.

  ‘I hope you’re effing happy now,’ he mutters. There is a salty, blaming bitterness in his voice, unlike anything I’ve ever heard from him before.

  I press myself back against the wall. I want to dissolve. I want to erase myself. I want all this to stop. I want to scream, ‘THIS HAS TO STOP.’ I can’t stand it any more. I can’t swallow. I try positive talk. Affirmations. I am awesome. I am trying. I am lovable. I am loved. I am kind. I am truthful. I am trustworthy. I am kind.

  I press the tips of my fingers over my eyebrows. I try to take myself into a semi-hypnotic state. I repeat: I am happy. I am happy. I am fulfilled. I am fulfilled. I am happy. I am happy. I am happy.

  I remove my fingertips. I can’t stop the negative talk. It creeps back, like weeds in a garden. Strangling.

  You’re nothing. You’re useless. You’re cruel. You could have eaten that biscuit. This is your fault. You’re evil. No wonder your mother tried to kill you. Fletcher will leave. You’ve broken Tony’s heart. He will use on the streets and die, and it’s your fault. It’s all your fault.

  The sunlight streams in through the landing window. It catches the side of the stairs. It falls short of catching me.

  I stand in the shadows. I hear Tony’s crunching step turn on the next landing, continue on down the stairs, kick open the swing doors at the bottom. I hear them slam shut. The footsteps fade.

  I am alone on the landing in the shadows.

  The ray of sunlight flickers. I look at the stairs ahead of me. I must climb them. I must find a way to put things right. It feels like I am standing on an empty shore on a tiny island.

  I climb the stairs. No breath. No muscles left to pull me forward. I have to.

  I reach the next landing and hang on to the balcony. I feel weak. I think I’m going to collapse. My heartbeat fades in and out, and stops and patters.

  Step by step.

  Just the next step.

  I start to count them.

  Step One: accept you are powerless.

  Step Two: believe in your Higher Power.

  The wood of the banister is hard and the palms of my hands sweaty.

  I make it to the next landing. A finger of sunlight has crept through the blinds and is lighting a stripe of lemon-yellow up the staircase ahead of me. It touches the bottom of Fletcher’s door.

  I want to call out. I want him to open up and bounce down the stairs and, with all the strength of those amazing shoulders, pick me up and carry me up the next flight and into his room.

  I imagine his arms cradling me. But I can’t cry out.

  On what basis can I call to him now? It’s my turn to help him.

  On the third stair, I sit and rest. The sweat on my palms, my wrists, is sticky on my forehead.

  Seconds tick. The sound of an aeroplane far away grows louder, passes, dies out. And behind the silence that the aircraft leaves in its wake, a great, unheard stillness seems to be bulging down, pressing into the jet stream of the plane.

  I think of coming into existence, budding, blossoming, fruiting, changing, fading, dying. I hear the great silence of the before and the after. What does it all mean anyway, this little life? This irregular beating heart, these sweaty palms? What is it all for?

  And who cares?

  Except that it won’t go away.

  My heartbeat comes back, tries to beat in a regular pattern again. My armpits sweat. My breathing continues even when I try to hold it. I can’t hold it. Life will not be dismissed. It will not.

  And the finger of light is still lying up the stairs, pointing the way to Fletcher’s room. And I realize suddenly I want to walk in the light. I am tired of the cold of Outer Space. I’m tired of its darkness. I want to go into the light and feel its heat. I don’t want some goddamn parasitic, Alien planet.

  I crawl up the steps, and sit and lean my forehead against Fletcher’s door.

  40

  Fletcher hears me. He swings the door open. I nearly fall in. He stands there. I can feel tornadoes of energy whirling around him.

  ‘So you’ve come to shout at me too?’

  It starts.

  I smile. A tiny, wry smile. I wish. I wish I had the energy to shout. If I had the energy to shout, I’d blast him with a hurricane of words. I’d send a torrent of vocabulary all over him; he would gasp for breath and try to swim in its flood.

  ‘Just help me into your room,’ I say.

  He picks me up. I feel the power of his shoulders. He places me on his bed. It’s unmade. It smells of boy. I don’t care. I want to find the plughole to the ocean of words. I want to drown him with them; drown together.

  ‘Well?’ he says.

  ‘Stop it.’

  ‘You started this,’ he says.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. It’s probably the hardest thing I’ve ever said, and I am not sorry for my Thinness. My Thinness has been my friend. It has seen me through the years. When Fletcher is thrown out of rehab, my Thinness will be there to comfort me. How can I be sorry about that? But I am. I truly am.

  ‘So you can stop it?’ he says.

  I take in tiny breaths. Everything in me wants to shout out, blame him, to say: Why didn’t you come to Circle Time? You’re punishing me? Do you want to fail the programme? Do you love being a crackhead that much? All that finding and searching and promising to be there for me, all of it just rubbish?

  ‘What do I have to do to stop it?’ I say.

  He sighs. And in his eyes there’s something so massive that I’m afraid.

  ‘You could have chased up your mate and found out more about your past.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘But nothing came of it. It was all just me, trying to fix you.’

  ‘I want to be fixed,’ I say. ‘I just don’t know how to do it.’

  ‘The answer to that is simple,’ he says. ‘You eat.’

  I laugh at that. If only the answer was so simple. If that was all it took, I would not even be sitting here now.

  And Fletcher knows that. In that massive hole in his eyes, I can see that he understands about the Thinness and the Alien and the
need for a loving mother; understands about the body and me and the love that never existed; and the desolate landscape where you sit alone and the wind blows and you’re so cold and tired and it never stops, even though you think you’re crying out loud for help, ‘For God’s sake, somebody must understand, somebody must rescue me. Isn’t there somebody out there who’s in charge of all this?’

  But there isn’t anybody in charge.

  No knight in shining armour.

  I’ve placed all my power outside myself, into the hands of the cold empty universe, where only one opportunist Alien has noticed.

  Simply having a meal would be delicious and wonderful, and I ache for it. Oh, to sit down – even on this unmade and stinky boy bed – and bite into a sandwich with the full-bloodedness of the hunger that has been raging inside me for over a decade. To bite down on tomato and bacon and butter and bread. I long for it. I dream of it.

  But until I can get my ten points I’m not allowed to have any of it: no happiness, no food, no love.

  I’ve been working so hard. Every day. I can’t just cheat now and pick the sandwich up, can I?

  I search for an answer in Fletcher’s eyes.

  What would that mean about all the other days, when I arrived first at every mealtime and ate nothing until the last person left? When I didn’t even dare to have one leftover crust on somebody’s plate though I longed for it?

  He knows the answer is not so simple. ‘Just let all that go,’ says Fletcher. ‘Kiss it goodbye. It’s always the same – over and over.’

  And I realize he’s right. I’m obsessing and going over and over the same thoughts, rolling myself tight into every double bind I can find. And I never get any further.

  ‘And oh dear, I don’t frankly give a damn.’ Fletcher puts on a Southern drawl. ‘It’s all over.’

  All over?

  ‘It’s not up to me to care about your games or your strategies or your points or anything any more.’

  What does he mean?

  He pulls out his smartphone. He puts it into selfie mode and pushes it into my face. ‘Look at yourself. You’re dying. I’m surprised you didn’t die on the stairs out there. I love you, but if you’ve crawled up here to save me, you’ve wasted your energy. I can’t help me. You can’t help me. You can’t even help yourself.’