by Louisa Young
But how? How can you do all that?
Like this: you say, ‘I am here, I love you. The moment you want my help to get well I will give you all the help in the world.’
*
One evening Robert wanted to cook dinner for me. Art the jazz cat was coming over, and Robert said he’d cook for us all. Great, I said. Art came, it was 7 p.m., 8 p.m., 9 p.m. and then Robert rang from Bush Hall, saying, ‘Come out! Come up here!’
I said, ‘Art is here, you’re meant to be cooking.’
He said, ‘Get Art to babysit.’
So I cooked dinner.
When I said to Robert, the next night, ‘No don’t come over’, he fell downstairs and broke his nose. So he did come over, covered in blood.
He’d insist on coming over when I didn’t want him; he’d persuade me, then not turn up, nor ring till the next afternoon by which time I was cracked with worry. One time I turned him away and he got himself arrested.
I went into the Office after an evening out with a friend. I stumbled on the shiny floor and Robert made that ‘Oh she’s drunk’ crack that made me so mad last time. I sat, and after a bit I said, ‘You don’t mind if I have this do you?’ reaching for the complimentary Drambuie with cream on top (known as Nepalese Soldiers, for some reason), and he said, ‘Yes I do actually’, took it from my hand, and gave me a ‘so what are you going to do about it?’ sneery look. So I kissed him and said, ‘Let’s speak tomorrow’, and went home, where I found five messages from him from earlier, while I was out. I left him one in return: ‘Sorry to be so abrupt in my departure, but I don’t like to be with you when you’re like that.’ And I went to bed.
At about 2 a.m. he rang, and got me out of bed to look up Cromwell and Fairfax for him, which I did because it was about work, and read me a Dylan Thomas short story that I didn’t want to hear, and in the end I hung up. He rang back, full of strange sounds and sweet melodies, and I hung up again, and at seven he rang again, to tell me the fox cub was in his garden, and he’s been on the phone for an hour to his ex-wife’s new husband, wanting to see his son … Oh God, that’ll help … And he kept me on the line till nine. He didn’t know what time or day it was. The thing is, he was always extreme anyway. He never behaved to anybody’s rules. He always wanted more of everything. But this wasn’t sober behaviour.
When he behaved badly, I rang him, and he apologised. He was ashamed.
*
Lola hid his shoes. She said, ‘I was practising to be a pixie in the school play.’
She woke in the middle of the night, I went in and talked to her, and when I said ‘goodnight’, she said well it hasn’t been a good night. Why not? ‘I can’t sleep because of all that oohing and aahing and then all the whispering.’
‘She’s feeling left out,’ said Robert. He guessed she’d nicked his shoes when he couldn’t find them. He went home in mine. I told Lola. He’s planning revenge: hanging all her shoes on strings, or something. I told her he had a plan. She looked gleeful: let battle commence!
But if you steal someone’s shoes, you’re preventing them from leaving, aren’t you? How does that add up?
I’m overthinking.
When he was little, he’d felt unwanted by his step-parents. Now he was in a stepfather-like position, and Lola didn’t like him. And who could blame her? And his own son was at home, with a stepfather.
*
Unmistakably very drunk, Robert rang from a restaurant. More precisely, he got the waiter to ring while he (Robert) carried on talking to him (the waiter) about whether he was from Eritrea or Ethiopia, ignoring the fact that I was there on the line saying ‘Hello?’ He often made waiters and cabbies and God knows who ring me, then pass the phone to him. I hated it. I don’t much like talking on the phone, or to strangers, or being disturbed when I’m trying to work, yanked back into his chaos. He made friends everywhere, and forced inappropriate intimacies on strangers. (I didn’t know yet that this is an addict trait, a corollary to avoiding appropriate intimacies – for example being truthful with those you love.) There was not a trace of snobbery or racism in him; everybody was treated the same. The good side of this was the Czech joiner delighted to discuss the niceties of Smetana and Jánaček, knock out a few themes with him on the piano, and become a good friend. The bad side was the cabbies with very limited English bewildered and embarrassed by Robert’s complex vocabulary and idiosyncratic choice of subject matter – Georgian polyphony, Picasso’s sex life.
I said, ‘I’m working, you’re drunk.’ I hung up, and left the phone off the hook.
It’s a blip, I thought. Maybe he drank tonight, but he’s not drinking. He’s really trying. I mustn’t undermine that.
An hour or so later he was at the door, saying, ‘Don’t let me in, don’t get involved with me, it’ll only hurt you.’ His legs were corkscrewed, so skinny, so unbalanced. ‘I can’t come in, can I,’ he said.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t want Lola seeing you like this. I don’t want me seeing you like this – actually, I don’t want you seeing you like this. I don’t want you being like this.’
He was leaning in the doorway, soaking wet, lurching and out of focus.
‘And nor do you,’ I said, so calm, competent and frightened that I disliked myself.
The rain was so heavy it passed in drifts behind him. Les jardins sous la pluie, he said. I invited him in. He wouldn’t come. Then he did, and he fell into the piano stool, and he was crying, and I went to finish my article. Shut the door on him. He played the piano. Debussy, for the rain. Later he came up and sprawled sideways on my bed, talking about his admiration for Beethovenian structure but how only the French understand nature, and saying, ‘Don’t get into this, don’t do it, Lou.’ I said, ‘I’m not going without you. You are not the problem. Your problem is the problem.’ And he wanted to know why don’t I have a piano in my bedroom so he could play me the Rachmaninoff Prelude in G, and it would sound with the rain in a … what’s a good word for mixture – mélange, I gave him, he liked that – ‘But why don’t I just use the ordinary word?’ he says. ‘Why piscine aroma? Why not fishy smell?’
And he went downstairs and played the Rachmaninoff, and his Bill Evans-style extrapolations of ‘Lullaby of Broadway’, and ‘Every Time We Say Goodbye’, and ‘Cry Me a River’, with its magnificent lyrics: ‘… too plebeian / through with me an …’ Great rhyme. Yes, cry me a fucking river …
I was thinking about rolls of loo paper and the turbulent pouring splashing incessant rain on the stones and leaves of the garden.
Just before he went to sleep he said, ‘Do you love me then?’
‘What?’ I said.
‘Nothing, nothing.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I said do you love me then, at all?’
‘I love you completely,’ I said. ‘But don’t be in that state.’ He was sobering up now so it felt – what, all right? By some crazy logic, yes.
So, that night, when I let him in, was I padding out his rock bottom with pillows for him to fall on? Should I have thrown him out again, for another broken bone or arrest? Looking back, yes, I should have.
Chapter Eleven
London, 2003
I wrote him a letter, printed it out and put it in the pocket of his leather jacket.
Robert,
I’ve done a reality check for you. You may hate me for it. Please don’t. It comes with unconditional affection and respect.
I may be wrong about all this in which case forgive me, but I think I’m not.
You’re good
Kind
Generous
Funny
Loving
Talented
You work hard
You’re honest
You’re stubborn
You’re tough
You want to do the right thing
You love your son, your father, your friends,
They love you too.
All these things are there in you. They haven’t gon
e away. They’re not going away.
You’re killing yourself. Nothing new there, you’ve been doing it for years. You’re taking the scenic route, yes. But every month that passes you’re getting closer to the goal, and it’s possible that you may achieve it without having thought lately about whether it’s really what you want. (You may think about it every day, and be quite convinced. I don’t think so though.)
You can’t walk, because of the amount you’ve drunk, yet you’re still drinking.
You’re depressed, because alcohol is a depressant.
You drank through your anti-drink medication.
You say: don’t worry, I’m fine, I’ll be fine, I’m getting there.
It’s as if some part of you doesn’t believe it will affect you – it is affecting you. Either that or you want the effect – you don’t. You don’t like it. You’ve told me so.
You want: your son, your work, control over your body again, to love and be loved, to engage with your friends and the parts of life that do you good and give you pleasure. In the past weeks you’ve mentioned many things that could help you to be well and happy: sobriety, mens sana in corpore sano, therapists, exercise, Jim, routines, diet, sleep. You know exactly what you need to do. You know all about it.
Get a regular and permanent specialist doctor who can see you through the drink and its bastard cousin, depression.
It’s still ringing in my ears, when you said ‘I’m going to drink and smoke till the day I die’.
Please come out the other side and get on with your life, which is going to be lovely. That image I mentioned, me on the sofa reading and you playing the piano, and you said: ‘It’s do-able’. In it, you were well and sober.
When one thing is wrong it doesn’t mean everything is.
It doesn’t have to be perfect
This Too Will Pass
Be proud of what you’ve managed so far. Do more. Xx L
P.S. Here’s a message I had from Boots, who’s come out the other side of worse than you:
How do you deal with an alcoholic who you love? More to the point how do you successfully love an alcoholic?
Alcoholism is a twofold disease: a physical allergy and a spiritual malady. It’s a disease that persists even without the booze and dope. Taking the substances out of the system just addresses the physical allergy. The so-called ‘one was too many, and a million was never enough’ syndrome. That’s the physical aspect.
But beside that there is the aspect of spiritual bankruptcy. The feeling of total worthlessness. If anyone ever told me what I say to myself I would probably have to kill them. This is not a joke. Somehow I have been given the faith to break this vicious cycle. But if I am at the nadir my self-loathing, the grotesque self-image which I cultivate is my brutal reality. For instance: ‘You betrayed your mother and let her die’, etc. This is the self talking I now associate with the disease of alcoholism. It is very private. It was always either none of your business or something I wouldn’t want to burden you with. It was unbearable, perennial, inescapable. I held it off for as long as I could. I chanted to keep it at bay. I worked like a demon to block it off. I drank and drugged to shut it up. And the gem: I hid out in the hood – none of my white friends would drop by down there and none of my black friends had a clue where I was coming from (‘You from Paris, Boots?’ ‘No, London.’ ‘Same thing, right?’). I was in glorious self-dictated exile.
I spent ten years cutting myself off further and further from the succour of community because I was unwilling to have anyone close to me. When someone is close they see what and who I am. That external perception is not something that I wanted. It meant that I would have to acknowledge aspects of myself that I would rather disguise with bravado and enigma. My lying, cheating and manipulating others (particularly those I love, those who love me) come from the fear I suffer when they come too close: that I will be found out. And if I’m found out, then I’ll find myself.
Isn’t self-knowledge the goal of spiritual life? As an active alcoholic it was the thing I dreaded the most. Ergo, a spiritual malady – Don’t try to reach out and help me. Don’t try to understand. Those are threatening behaviours to me. I am feral.
None of your good deeds will go unpunished.
Just as there are tools and a program to deal with my addiction, there is Al-Anon to deal with the addiction to the addict. Lou, look them up, and go to five or six meetings. Keep an open mind. If what you hear there doesn’t ring true then email me about what’s going on. No. Email me anyway.
I love you long time B
It took me years to understand Boots’s letter. That the greatest fear is of self-knowledge: the fear of what you will find there, when you strip everything away. Boots’s mother died young too: depression, and suicide. I remember her in Maida Vale, 1976, making me my first ever American-style tuna mayo sandwich.
And my own letter? So sincere, so heartfelt, so humble, so damn carefully phrased, so generous in its effort to be constructive, not wanting to settle for a phrase that might harm his self-esteem if, by concentrating just a little longer, I could come up with one that was more helpful. All that energy wasted, all those words poured into the bucket with a hole in it, because the person I was writing to was too sick to listen, and had a much more balefully compelling thing to be getting on with than taking any notice of me.
*
Robert rings me at lunchtime. I’m in the tea room at the British Library.
‘Are you masticating mackerel?’ His words: aromae, sonorities, masticating, consummate ease, categorically.
‘Did you read my letter?’ I ask.
‘I’ve read what was on the other side,’ he says. ‘The book about Byron. I’m scared to read what you wrote.’
I say, ‘I’m so glad you rang because I just started getting scared too.’
‘Thank you so much for your concern,’ he said. This was where I snorted derisively.
He wants to know what I’m wearing, and says he’ll read the letter when he’s finished this track, which is going rather well. I don’t know if he ever read the letter. Mine or Boots’s.
Lola had been crying. She said, ‘I wish I didn’t exist.’ She sent me away. She said she likes him but she hates me having a boyfriend. She said, Louisa Young would not do that. I didn’t know if it was about sex, or about the whole wrongness of how Robert is. Louisa Young would not love something so wrong.
He said, ‘You’ll always love her because she’s your kid, and she’s not mine, and that’s just true, so it’ll always be, fuckin’ ’orrible word, compromise.’
I said, ‘No, not compromise – and anyway compromise is good, it’s real … it’s co-operation.’
He rang telling me to listen to some Rachmaninoff on the radio; I was already listening to it. I could tell which bits he’d grab my leg on with his incredibly strong piano-playing hands (many of his friends have dents in their knees still). He had recently nearly broken my ankle listening to Tchaikovsky. He had a game: he’d play a piece up someone’s leg, and they would have to guess what it was. One Chopin nocturne had a series of leaps to a high D and then an A that would land practically in your knickers.
Another time we rang each other; our calls collided, we each left the other a message to turn on Radio 3 NOW, Etta James is singing ‘I’d Rather Go Blind’. He rang again, and we sat together, each end of the line, in shared paroxysms at the absolute beauty. He hung up, came over, took me to bed. Back home, he says, settling in. He was his very best self in bed. Funny, open, appreciative, affectionate. When I took my shirt off he’d say, ‘Oh my God there’s two of them. Lucky I’ve got a decent span.’ Or, ‘A man needs eight hands, really, to do you justice.’
One night falling asleep I opened my eyes and smiled.
‘What,’ he said. Awake, of course.
‘I love you,’ I said. ‘Oh gosh did I say that? Well I do.’ And I fell asleep.
I’d said, earlier, ‘So what do you think, how’s it going?’
‘Don’t you start on that fucking analytical relationship crap,’ he said. ‘You’ve got my love and you’ve got my trust, all right?’
What a comfort.
His habit was to take the easy way out. To stay with women who would have him. He didn’t leave; he drove women mad until they threw him out. Where did that leave me?
The year I had given myself was well over, but I was going nowhere. I was as tightly bound to him and his bandy legs and his bloody Chopin and his exquisite capacity to take the piss as I had ever been.
From me to him:
Reality checklist again, darling:
I did this before last night’s fall from grace [I can’t remember which fall from grace this referred to] but it’s all the same stuff really. I’ve been meaning to give you the specifics of what I meant by ‘straightening up’ – here it is.
1) Looking after yourself: The booze you know I can only help you with by surrounding you with love … But there are the other things, the smaller things. If you were to go swimming instead of lying abed in the mornings you would feel much better very soon. While wet, you could wash, shave, comb the lice out of your hair and deal with your toe-nails, blackheads, ringworm etc. I really don’t want something as dull as personal hygiene to come between us, and I would really like to be able to approach your body without fear. It would be quite nice for you too.
2) If you stopped sleeping all morning and taking siestas, and instead took exercise, you would be far better prepared for a decent night’s sleep, which would contribute to your happiness and sanity. Don’t even think about sleeping pills until you have given this a go – by which I mean a couple of months, not a three-day effort and then ‘Oh it doesn’t work for me’.
