‘To chuck Bridget at this … it’s bound to be … but one does feel some responsibility towards…’ Interference drowned the conversation again. A prickling wave of heat rushed over her body. She must hear what they were saying, what monstrous plan they were hatching. Who was Sonny talking to? It must be Peter. But what if it wasn’t? What if he talked like this to everyone, everyone except her?
‘All the things are in trust,’ she heard, and then another voice saying: ‘Lunch … next week.’ Yes, it was Peter. There was more crackling, and then, ‘Happy birthday.’
Bridget sank down in the window seat. She raised her arm and almost flung the walkie-talkie against the wall, but then lowered it again slowly until it hung loosely by her side.
4
JOHNNY HALL HAD BEEN going to Narcotics Anonymous meetings for over a year. In a fit of enthusiasm and humility he found hard to explain, he had volunteered to make the tea and coffee at the Saturday three o’clock meeting. He recognized many of the people who took one of the white plastic cups he had filled with a tea bag or a few granules of instant coffee, and struggled to remember their names, embarrassed that so many of them remembered his.
After making the tea Johnny took a seat in the back row, as usual, although he knew that it would make it harder for him to speak, or ‘share’, as he was urged to say in meetings. He enjoyed the obscurity of sitting as far away as possible from the addict who was ‘giving the chair’. The ‘preamble’ – a ritual reading of selections from ‘the literature’, explaining the nature of addiction and NA – washed over Johnny almost unnoticed. He tried to see if the girl sitting in the front row was pretty, but couldn’t see enough of her profile to judge.
A woman called Angie had been asked by the secretary to do the chair. Her stumpy legs were clad in a black leotard, and her hair hid two-thirds of her raddled and exhausted face. She had been invited down from Kilburn to add a touch of grit to a Chelsea meeting which dwelt all too often on the shame of burgling one’s parents’ house, or the difficulty of finding a parking space.
Angie said she had started ‘using’, by which she meant taking drugs, in the sixties, because it was ‘a gas’. She didn’t want to dwell on the ‘bad old days’, but she had to tell the group a little bit about her using to put them in the picture. Half an hour later, she was still describing her wild twenties, and yet there was clearly some time to go before her listeners could enjoy the insight that she had gleaned from her regular attendance of meetings over the last two years. She rounded off her chair with some self-deprecating remarks about still being ‘riddled with defects’. Thanks to the meetings she had discovered that she was totally insane and completely addicted to everything. She was also ‘rampantly co-dependent’, and urgently needed individual counselling in order to deal with lots of ‘childhood stuff’, Her ‘relationship’, by which she meant her boyfriend, had discovered that living with an addict could create a lot of extra hassles, and so the two of them had decided to attend ‘couples counselling’. This was the latest excitement in a life already packed with therapeutic drama, and she was very hopeful about the benefits.
The secretary was very grateful to Angie. A lot of what she had shared, he said, was relevant for him too. He’d ‘identified one hundred per cent’, not with her using because his had been very different – he had never used needles or been addicted to heroin or cocaine – but with ‘the feelings’. Johnny could not remember Angie describing any feelings, but tried to silence the scepticism which made it so difficult for him to participate in the meetings, even after the breakthrough of volunteering to make the tea. The secretary went on to say that a lot of childhood stuff had been coming up for him too, and he had recently discovered that although nothing unpleasant had happened to him in childhood, he’d found himself smothered by his parents’ kindness and that breaking away from their understanding and generosity had become a real issue for him.
With these resonant words the secretary threw the meeting open, a moment that Johnny always found upsetting because it put him under pressure to ‘share’. The problem, apart from his acute self-consciousness and his resistance to the language of ‘recovery’, was that sharing was supposed to be based on ‘identification’ with something that the person who was doing the chair had said, and it was very rare for Johnny to have any clear recollection of what had been said. He decided to wait until somebody else’s identification identified for him the details of Angie’s chair. This was a hazardous procedure because most of the time people identified with something that had not in fact been said in the chair.
The first person to speak from the floor said that he’d had to nurture himself by ‘parenting the child within’. He hoped that with God’s help – a reference that always made Johnny wince – and the help of the Fellowship, the child within would grow up in a ‘safe environment’. He said that he too was having problems with his relationship, by which he meant his girlfriend, but that hopefully, if he worked his Step Three and ‘handed it over’, everything would be all right in the end. He wasn’t in charge of the results, only the ‘footwork’.
The second speaker identified one hundred per cent with what Angie had said about her veins being ‘the envy of Kilburn’, because his veins had been the envy of Wimbledon. There was general merriment. And yet, the speaker went on to say, when he had to go to the doctor nowadays for a proper medical reason, they couldn’t find a vein anywhere on his body. He had been doing a Step Four, ‘a fearless and searching moral inventory’, and it had brought up a lot of stuff that needed looking at. He had heard someone in a meeting saying that she had a fear of success and he thought that maybe this was his problem too. He was in a lot of pain at the moment because he was realizing that a lot of his ‘relationship problems’ were the result of his ‘dysfunctional family’. He felt unlovable and consequently he was unloving, he concluded, and his neighbour, who recognized that he was in the presence of feelings, rubbed his back consolingly.
Johnny looked up at the fluorescent lights and the white polystyrene ceiling of the dingy church-hall basement. He longed to hear someone talk about their experiences in ordinary language, and not in this obscure and fatuous slang. He was entering the stage of the meeting when he gave up daydreaming and became increasingly anxious about whether to speak. He constructed opening sentences, imagined elegant ways of linking what had been said to what he wanted to say, and then, with a thumping heart, failed to announce his name quickly enough to win the right to speak. He was particularly restless after the show of coolness he always felt he had to put on in front of Patrick. Talking to Patrick had exacerbated his rebellion against the foolish vocabulary of NA, while increasing his need for the peace of mind that others seemed to glean from using it. He regretted agreeing to have dinner alone with Patrick, whose corrosive criticism and drug nostalgia and stylized despair often left Johnny feeling agitated and confused.
The current speaker was saying that he’d read somewhere in the literature that the difference between ‘being willing’ and ‘being ready’ was that you could sit in an armchair and be willing to leave the house, but you weren’t entirely ready until you had on your hat and overcoat. Johnny knew that the speaker must be finishing, because he was using Fellowship platitudes, trying to finish on a ‘positive’ note, as was the custom of the obedient recovering addict, who always claimed to bear in mind ‘newcomers’ and their need to hear positive notes.
He must do it, he must break in now, and say his piece.
‘My name’s Johnny,’ he blurted out, almost before the previous speaker had finished. ‘I’m an addict.’
‘Hi, Johnny,’ chorused the rest of the group.
‘I have to speak,’ he said boldly, ‘because I’m going to a party this evening, and I know there’ll be a lot of drugs around. It’s a big party and I just feel under threat, I suppose. I just wanted to come to this meeting to reaffirm my desire to stay clean today. Thanks.’
‘Thanks, Johnny,’ the group echoed.
> He’d done it, he’d said what was really troubling him. He hadn’t managed to say anything funny, clever, or interesting, but he knew that somehow, however ridiculous and boring these meetings were, having taken part in one would give him the strength not to take drugs at the party tonight and that he would be able to enjoy himself a little bit more.
Glowing with goodwill after speaking, Johnny listened to Pete, the next speaker, with more sympathy than he’d been able to muster at the beginning of the meeting.
Someone had described recovery to Pete as ‘putting your tie around your neck instead of your arm’. There was subdued laughter. When he was using, Pete had found it easy to cross the road because he didn’t care whether he was run over or not, but in early recovery he’d become fucking terrified of the traffic (subdued laughter) and walked for miles and miles to find a zebra crossing. He’d also spent his early recovery making lines out of Coleman’s mustard powder and wondering if he’d put too much in the spoon (one isolated cackle). He was ‘in bits’ at the moment because he had broken up with his relationship. She’d wanted him to be some kind of trout fisherman, and he’d wanted her to be a psychiatric nurse. When she’d left she’d said that she still thought he was the ‘best thing on two legs’. It had worried him that she’d fallen in love with a pig (laughter). Or a centipede (more laughter). Talk about pushing his shame buttons! He’d been on a ‘Step Twelve Call’ the other day, by which he meant a visit to an active addict who had rung the NA office, and the guy was in a dreadful state, but frankly, Pete admitted, he had wanted what the other guy had more than the other guy wanted what he had. That was the insanity of the disease! ‘I came to this programme on my knees,’ concluded Pete in a more pious tone, ‘and it’s been suggested that I remain on them’ (knowing grunts, and an appreciative, ‘Thanks, Pete’).
The American girl who spoke after Pete was called Sally. ‘Sleeping at night and staying awake during the day’ had been ‘a real concept’ for her when she ‘first came round’. What she wanted from the programme was ‘wall-to-wall freedom’, and she knew she could achieve that with the help of a ‘Loving Higher Power’. At Christmas she’d been to a pantomime to ‘celebrate her inner child’. Since then she’d been travelling with another member of the Fellowship because, like they said in the States, ‘When you’re sick together, you stick together.’
After the group had thanked Sally, the secretary said that they were in ‘Newcomer’s Time’ and that he would appreciate it if people would respect that. This announcement was almost always followed by a brief silence for the Newcomer who either didn’t exist, or was too terrified to speak. The last five minutes would then be hogged by some old hand who was ‘in bits’ or ‘just wanted to feel part of the meeting’. On this occasion, however, there was a genuine Newcomer in the room, and he dared to open his mouth.
Dave, as he was called, was at his first meeting and he didn’t see how it was supposed to stop him taking drugs. He’d been about to go, actually, and then someone had said about the mustard and the spoon and making lines, and like he’d thought he was the only person to have ever done that, and it was funny hearing someone else say it. He didn’t have any money, and he couldn’t go out because he owed money everywhere: the only reason he wasn’t stoned was that he didn’t have the energy to steal anymore. He still had his TV, but he had this thing that he was controlling it, and he was afraid of watching it now because last night he’d been worried that he’d been putting the bloke on TV off by staring at him. He couldn’t think what else to say.
The secretary thanked him in the especially coaxing voice he used for Newcomers whose distress formed his own spiritual nourishment, an invaluable opportunity to ‘give it away’ and ‘pass on the message’. He advised Dave to stick around after the meeting and get some phone numbers. Dave said his phone had been cut off. The secretary, afraid that magical ‘sharing’ might degenerate into mere conversation, smiled firmly at Dave and asked if there were any more Newcomers.
Johnny, somewhat to his surprise, found himself caring about what happened to Dave. In fact, he really hoped that these people, people like him who had been hopelessly dependent on drugs, obsessed with them, and unable to think about anything else for years, would get their lives together. If they had to use this obscure slang in order to do so, then that was a pity but not a reason to hope that they would fail.
The secretary said that unless there was somebody who urgently needed to share, they were out of time. Nobody spoke, and so he stood up and asked Angie to help him close the meeting. Everybody else stood up as well and held hands.
‘Will you join me in the Serenity Prayer,’ asked Angie, ‘using the word “God” as you understand him, her, or it. God,’ she said to kickstart the prayer, and then when everyone was ready to join in, repeated, ‘God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, The courage to change the things I can, And the wisdom to know the difference.’
Johnny wondered as usual to whom he was addressing this prayer. Sometimes when he got chatting to his ‘fellow addicts’ he would admit to being ‘stuck on Step Three’. Step Three made the bold suggestion that he hand his will and his life over to God ‘as he understood him’.
At the end of the meeting, Amanda Pratt, whom he hadn’t noticed until then, came up to him. Amanda was the twenty-two-year-old daughter of Nicholas Pratt by his most sensible wife, the general’s daughter with the blue woolly and the simple string of pearls he used to dream gloomily of marrying when he was going out with Bridget.
Johnny did not know Amanda well, but he somehow knew this story about her parents. She was eight years younger than him, and to Johnny she was not a drug addict at all, just one of those neurotic girls who had taken a bit of coke or speed to help her dieting, and a few sleeping pills to help her sleep, and, worst of all, when these pitiful abuses had started to become unpleasant, she had stopped them. Johnny, who had wasted his entire twenties repeating the same mistakes, took a very condescending view of anybody who came to the end of their tether before him, or for less good reasons.
‘It was so funny,’ Amanda was saying rather louder than Johnny would have liked, ‘when you were sharing about going to a big party tonight, I knew it was Cheatley.’
‘Are you going?’ asked Johnny, already knowing the answer.
‘Oh, ya,’ said Amanda. ‘Bridget’s practically a stepmother, because she went out with Daddy just before he married Mummy.’
Johnny looked at Amanda and marvelled again at the phenomenon of pretty girls who were not at all sexy. Something empty and clinging about her, a missing centre, prevented her from being attractive.
‘Well, we’ll see each other tonight,’ said Johnny, hoping to end the conversation.
‘You’re a friend of Patrick Melrose, aren’t you?’ asked Amanda, immune to the finality of his tone.
‘Yes,’ said Johnny.
‘Well, I gather he spends a lot of time slagging off the Fellowship,’ said Amanda indignantly.
‘Can you blame him?’ sighed Johnny, looking over Amanda’s shoulder to see if Dave was still in the room.
‘Yes, I do blame him,’ said Amanda. ‘I think it’s rather pathetic, actually, and it just shows how sick he is: if he wasn’t sick, he wouldn’t need to slag off the Fellowship.’
‘You’re probably right,’ said Johnny, resigned to the familiar tautologies of ‘recovery’. ‘But listen, I have to go now, or I’ll miss my lift down to the country.’
‘See you tonight,’ said Amanda cheerfully. ‘I may need you for an emergency meeting!’
‘Umm,’ said Johnny. ‘It’s nice to know you’ll be there.’
5
ROBIN PARKER WAS HORRIFIED to see, through the pebble spectacles which helped him to distinguish fake Poussins from real ones, but could not, alas, make him a safe driver, that an old woman had moved into ‘his’ compartment during the ordeal he had just undergone of fetching a miniature gin and tonic from the squalid buffet. Everything about the t
rain offended him: the plastic ‘glass’, the purple-and-turquoise upholstery, the smell of diesel and dead skin, and now the invasion of his compartment by an unglamorous personage wearing an overcoat that only the Queen could have hoped to get away with. He pursed his lips as he squeezed past an impossible pale-blue nanny’s suitcase that the old woman had left cluttering the floor. Picking up his copy of the Spectator, a Perseus’s shield against the Medusa of modernity, as he’d said more than once, he lapsed into a daydream in which he was flown privately into Gloucestershire from Zurich or possibly Deauville, with someone really glamorous. And as he pretended to read, passing through Charlbury and Moreton-in-Marsh, he imagined the clever and subtle things he would have said about the Ben Nicholsons on the wall of the cabin.
Virginia Watson-Scott glanced nervously at her suitcase, knowing it was in everybody’s way. The last time she’d been on a train, a kind young man had hoisted it into the luggage rack without sparing a thought for how she was going to get it down again. She’d been too polite to say anything, but she could remember tottering under the weight as the train drew in to Paddington. Even so, the funny-looking gentleman opposite might at least have offered.
In the end she’d decided not to pack the burgundy velvet dress she’d bought for the party. She had lost her nerve, something that would never have happened when Roddy was alive, and fallen back on an old favourite that Sonny and Bridget had seen a hundred times before, or would have seen a hundred times if they asked her to Cheatley more often.
She knew what it was, of course: Bridget was embarrassed by her. Sonny was somehow gallant and rude at the same time, full of old-fashioned courtesies that failed to disguise his underlying contempt. She didn’t care about him, but it did hurt to think that her daughter didn’t want her around. Old people were always saying that they didn’t want to be a burden. Well, she did want to be a burden. It wasn’t as if she would be taking the last spare room, just one of Sonny’s cottages. He was always boasting about how many he had and what a terrible responsibility they were.
The Patrick Melrose Novels Page 31
