by Louisa Young
But when they say that the person who loves the alcoholic must also say, I am powerless in the face of alcohol – well, I thought, I’m not. I drink, but not vastly. I’d rather not drink than go up the road in the rain to buy drink. I’d rather not drink than have anyone say ‘you’re drunk’ to me. I’d certainly rather not drink than upset my child, my true love, my friends, my workmates. Or did they mean us to declare that we were powerless in the face of the alcoholic? That we were addicted to that person? I thought this interpretation inhuman, bleak and unloving. In the end, I needed a leap of perspective. When the person who loves the alcoholic declares their powerlessness, it is not about their own relationship with alcohol, nor necessarily about their own relationship with the alcoholic: it is about the alcoholic’s relationship with alcohol. What I was powerless in the face of was Robert’s relationship with alcohol.
He didn’t like the shirt, and told me so, in words of piss and vinegar. I left him there on his sticks, not knowing how he’d get home, sod it, he’s an adult. Here, be responsible. Go on, on your sticks, rejecting the clean and the nice, the hopeful, the new – all in a shirt. You’ve said you’ll go to fucking rehab. So buy a decent shirt.
He turned up on the doorstep later that day, clean, shaven, apologetic, and wearing the shirt. It looked good on him, and he looked good in it. He was sorry.
*
On 2 November I drove him down to the West Country. He wasn’t kicking and screaming, but he wasn’t happy. The house was solid and prosperous-looking among wet green English fields. Never mind him, I wanted to check in myself. It was a year almost to the day after Max Glatt; a very tender time. I dropped him off and my heart floated, because I felt again that he was somewhere safe. He was with people who knew about this; people to whom his tragedies were everyday occurrences, people who would help. We walked around the dripping garden; looked at cows, moss, black branches against the grey sky; rooks cawing away, wood pigeons crooning their five-note song of security and comfort. He couldn’t get away. Six whole weeks. No visits to start with. I could relax. At least, apropos him.
The day after dropping him off, I flew to Ghana with Lola and Louis. Osei, Louis’s big, handsome, teasing brother, had been killed. The aeroplane he was in had exploded, mid-air, in the hot blue sky over Nigeria. Louis had been at Abuja, waiting for the flight that never arrived. So now there was the memorial, in Accra. His beautiful children and his kind wife, his mother and father, his brothers and his sister, their children, Lola, me, all standing for hours in a line for people to shake our hands and say, ‘I’m sorry, he is with God now’. When you are obsessed with a long, slow danger to one person, you do not imagine some other swift and deadly danger will suddenly swipe somebody else entirely from the very sky, and never even give back his body.
*
Each day, as part of the therapy, Robert and his compadres filled in a Significant Events Sheet. I didn’t see these at the time, of course. I found them under the piano, in a mass of rehab papers. God, the power of reading, years later, personal papers that were not meant for your eyes! Fat files of his writing, in which truth and time do their dance. Things that happened long ago; the understanding of them that emerged only years later, and here I was reading them and trying to understand them years after that. This is the fabric of a lifetime. And drunkenness at Robert’s level is its own dimension of blindness. ‘Blind drunk’ is not a nonsense phrase, nor one necessarily describing a temporary state. Robert’s sober accounts of what he did in the drunk past were quite different to how he had represented himself at the time. Reading them, I understood him better and better. They were relentless though. Recovery is relentless. (I don’t want to misrepresent that. I haven’t included all their relentlessness here: I quote from them, and I include some fuller accounts, in Robert’s own words, in the appendix on p. 383.)
On his first sheet, Robert announced that there were ‘no “significant events” as such’. Dear God, I thought, what on earth counts as significant if this doesn’t? But then he allowed ‘except for the fact that I eventually got here’. A tiny acknowledgement.
The first weeks were bad sleep, not liking to wake early, eating lots, wanting to be given drugs for anxiety and getting instead an interesting lecture and the doctor’s insistence that anxiety comes from the brain to the body so therefore no calming drugs, ‘which would make things easier. However one would have to get off them at some time’. His counsellor is perceptive and sympathetic. The meetings are exhilarating; sometimes too much so – ‘combustive’; ‘stomach-turning aggression’; ‘but I suppose that is the nature of the process’. The Life Stories recounted by his companions touch him deeply; he begins work on his own, and on the First Step of recovery, admitting that he was powerless over his addiction, that his life had become unmanageable. Like 99 per cent of newcomers, he doesn’t take to the God/higher power/spiritual concept. He gets bored with all the drug talk and repetitiveness. He’d like more one-to-one counselling. He is knackered.
He finds people to play backgammon with. He goes walking, and sees a greater spotted woodpecker, a badger, goldcrests. He likes ‘the crows, wood pigeons, jays, cows and lovely deer. Fields, trees, sky, rain – simple but powerful stuff – ideal for contemplation’. He’s amused by someone’s snoring during the relaxation class. He starts writing a song with one of the others: ‘I’ll buy Clouds a better keyboard (if my music royalties pour in).’
His fellow recoverers report that he ‘beats around the bush’, is not ‘pacific’, ‘reads the paper too much’, and ‘plays too much backgammon’ but also that he was ‘integrating really well after just five days’. There is a ‘hilarious’ acting workshop: ‘Acting (except in life – not any more!) is not one of my talents.’ A TV celebrity with a famous haircut was exposed, and Robert was ‘not sure if he’d be elated or distressed if his picture appeared on the front page of the News of the World’. He is becoming involved: ‘Backgammon tournament off with a bang … Funny mixed day – busy enough to occasionally forget anxiety – walking, eating, listening, talking, reading, not drinking – it’s a cinch (not).’ Someone suggests that the ‘God as you understand him’ could be the sense of community felt in AA meetings: a Group Of Drunks.
They all have to write their life story: ‘The Life and Times of Robert Lockhart’, he calls it (see p. 383). And his sweetness suddenly shines through: ‘Have a nice weekend to whoever has the dubious privilege of reading this.’
I learned a lot from ‘The Life and Times’ about those parts and periods of his life when I hadn’t been around. ‘I have caused trouble courtesy of the booze,’ he wrote, with maddening simplicity. ‘I would go to the shops for supposedly fags and newspaper but in a phone-box would pour a 1/4 of vodka into a half-full bottle of 7-Up, fully equipped with the tools of the trade: extra-strong mints, chewing gum, toothbrush, toothpaste. It must have been a strange sight seeing someone clean their teeth whilst pretending to listen to someone on the phone. The booze antics I got away with for a while but when I broke my ankle in 3 places Louisa got keys to my flat which she had never visited. This was no bachelor pad. It was a disgusting shit-hole …’
It was impossible to read it, years later, without a cloud of old regrets and resentments swarming up, as useless and painful as a cloud of midges. There I was, looking for nice things he’d written about me. I wanted to see ‘I love Louisa she saved my life’ in his handwriting so I could get it tattooed across my heart. I found: ‘My old friend Louisa’. And, ‘Biggest mistake of my life’, he says, of breaking up with someone else. I decided to suppose he was not writing for my eyes, saving time, trying to keep things simple, and to bear that in mind as I read through. Or – here’s a later interpretation. Virtually from the moment Robert began having sex, he was already simultaneously being unfaithful and feeling nostalgic for the beautiful relationship that might have saved him if cruel circumstance hadn’t robbed him of it. ‘Alcohol destroyed us,’ he wrote of one. ‘She would criticise my drinking while dr
unk which is no way to conduct a relationship.’ Each woman, once lost, became the lovely thing without which he was bereft – while he continued to behave in ways which made it impossible for any woman to stay with him. Only I, the ‘old friend’, failed to earn that romantic halo. Because I didn’t leave.
‘The booze antics’ – what a phrase! ‘Louisa said if I started again that was it.’ ‘I don’t think that was quite it …’ He refers to my child as ‘an equally big problem’.
‘Not so, not so,’ I murmured as I read. And ‘Really? Oh!’ But addicts, while active, can’t hear you.
I was touched that Robert, sensitive to the snobbery at Oxford, used the basic inverted-snobbery technique of referring to university – and that particular university – as ‘college’. And I was amazed to learn that his parents had both remarried on the same day. How – careless?
He read his Life Story aloud, ‘nervous, sweating and shaking (never thought I’d get that again!). Everyone said “You must feel better, feel relieved”. I didn’t feel that. Just emotionally totally drained.’
‘Nervous about seeing Louisa tomorrow,’ he wrote. ‘After all I’ve only known her for 29 years.’
*
On the eleventh day, I cruised down the A303 in white frosty mist, listening to the Sunday morning love-song show on Radio Two, iced-up cow parsley skeletons all along the hedgerow, Stonehenge, so tiny in its field. After that I went every Sunday, the light and mist and rain and frost different each week. There was a hill where the reception always failed in the middle of Snow Patrol singing ‘If I just lay here, would you lie with me and just forget the world?’, or Coldplay ‘Fix You’; or ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’; the Athlete song ‘Wires’; and ‘How to Save a Life’ – 2005 was full of dirgey songs to make an addict’s girlfriend weep. Turning to Radio 4, the civilised world was still a circle of hell and confusion. Out there, everything still existed: politics and poverty and art and war and love and space and terrorism and fashion and babies and knowledge and murder and Ken Livingstone and TV and climate change and dying animals and the sales were all going on. The whole human race, addicted to its comforts, poisoning itself, rank with fear and violence, self-destructing. It didn’t need my attention, to continue to exist. My boyfriend is a microcosm, I thought, and laughed and immediately cried, which was how it was in those days.
That first time, we sat delicately in the big reception room with its sofas, fruit cake and cups of tea, alongside other people’s tragic parents, fearful mothers and angry girlfriends, wide-eyed children, boys with eyebrow-rings and tight T-shirts, smeary babes of a certain age. The fireplaces were blocked up, the coffee tables bore the Sunday papers and the dried rings of mugs of instant coffee and depression. Robert was sharing a room with a convicted murderer, and feeding bananas to the badgers who came up on the lawn late at night. He told me who had dropped out or run away since the week before, who was coming in. The tabloids had now stopped hiding in the woods; the TV presenter was upset because he’d only made page five. Wednesday night was music night, because let’s face it half of them were musicians of one sort or another. Robert played the piano and made friends with a heavy-metal bassist. They called him Professor again.
So much sadness. Semi-literate people writing their life stories on lined paper in biro; washing-up rotas, desperation.
‘Two out of three of the people who come in are dead within three years,’ he said.
‘Well you’ve only got a year left on the last three years they gave you, so that’s an improvement,’ I said.
‘I’m not fucking dying,’ he said. ‘I’m not. Don’t you worry.’
I was very proud of him.
We walked around the grounds. We had a session with his counsellor where I said the same things I had always said, and it seemed possible that he was hearing them, possibly for the first time. Later he was rude about her; he said she looked like a horse, and neighed when her name was mentioned. Afterwards I sat in the car park and cried because I was so happy; though whether that was because I could go home to bed whenever I wanted and sleep undisturbed, or because he was safe in professional hands, I didn’t consider. I ate chocolate while I drove and felt safe because I felt he was safe.
*
I had entered worlds which I never intended to enter. Self-help world, which previously I had scorned, as a righteous virgin and an intellectual. Addiction world, which I found alien, controlling, pathetic, tragic. Drug world, which I had first noticed at thirteen, when some people started to think it was a good idea to take pills that strangers gave them, and put powders up their noses, and stick needles in their veins, and the lives of my generation began to divide inexorably into those who found that exciting, and those who thought it insane. Once or twice, I had tried to follow the drug-takers as they went round the back of the pub, to the other pub, to dark and dirty places where I didn’t want to be. They came back weird and moody, scrawny and spotty, violent and mad, half asleep with their pinpoint eyes rolling in their heads. Or talking nineteen to the dozen, dripping dirty glamour. I minded enormously my friends falling away. I didn’t want to play this game, but that put me among the dull ones, and I didn’t want to be one of the dull ones. I was always aware of the injustice of this. It was the same everywhere. Drink was healthy and clear-eyed and normal and a bit unimaginative: drugs were wild and free and romantic and creative. And now here they all are in the clinic together, and it turns out that it wasn’t drink v drugs, it was whether or not you had the killer streak of self-hatred. And it was sad, and boring, and it killed you.
Is it genetic? I asked the counsellor.
That is certainly a factor.
What causes it?
We don’t know.
What can be done about it?
They have to stop using.
Using! Using alcohol. Abusing alcohol. No longer an amusing turn of phrase (picture a guy yelling ‘fathead!’ at a pint of beer).
How long does it take?
Long as a piece of string.
How can I help?
You can’t.
Can you give me answers?
No.
Why not?
There are no answers. You have to work it out for yourself. He has to work it out for himself.
Work what out?
You’ll see when you do.
Have you seen a million people go through this?
Yup.
Does it get better?
Sometimes.
Are children damaged by it?
Sometimes.
Do couples survive?
Sometimes.
By the time I was sixteen I knew four dead people: one who drowned, opiated, in a bath in Chelsea; one who couldn’t tell cocaine from Ajax, two in drug-influenced car crashes. Alcohol had been my drug of choice. Cheap, legal and so many flavours, plus you know what you’re getting. Nobody thought of alcohol as a drug. Nobody seemed to have noticed that Britain has basically been drunk for a thousand years. Or longer – who knows? It’s so normal no one would record it.
*
It is a big pile of papers here: Self-Esteem, Unmanageability, What Does Sanity Mean to You? Through his notes, I can check what happened on any particular day, revisit any poignant moment, eavesdrop on him and the past. The evening after my first visit he wrote: ‘Very sad when Louisa left. Emma, if you read this I need to go into detail (big detail) with you face to face. The issues feelings etc would be many sides of A4.’ And the next day: ‘Still frail after yesterday. Bollocked aggressively for using my hand to sprinkle cheese on my ragu. Totally habit. Subconscious. Apologised profusely and got the chef who very kindly brought more out. Tiny thing – but for that to make me hot and trembly proves what a delicate condition I am in. I am facing up to a lot of things. I found hurtful that “arrogance” was a term applied to me. I am more than willing to accept this when given more detailed explanations (there wasn’t enough time).’
Another day he wrote to his counsellor: ‘Thanks for the
family meeting. Revelatory. I’ve heard all that Louisa has said before, but in this context, in this atmosphere, in your presence, it made me think and react in a very different fashion. Very valuable—’
I remember that day clearly. This time, I saw it in his face, in the eye contact, that he heard me. It made me glad – and sad, too, that alcoholics need so much help before they can hear the people who love them. What space is there for an actual, progressing relationship of equals, when someone is this compromised? Where can the love be?
‘Talk about things you did, drunk, that you shouldn’t have done,’ the counsellor had said.
‘How long have you got?’
‘All the time you need,’ she said.
‘In chronological order, or in order of importance?’
He no longer said she looked like a horse, or neighed.
These were the lines that made me cry in the British Library where I was typing them out: ‘Looking forward to church, chair-moving, guest-tea preparations, Louisa, Patrick, mini-group. Hope you’ve had a good weekend.’
*
One winter Sunday, I went down with Will who, having cordially disliked Robert for years, indeed thought him ‘a sleaze-bag’, was now offering to be his sponsor in AA. We sat outside on the damp, slimy wooden bench, the soles of our boots wet from walking, wet brown leaves on wet grey paving stones, dark by 4 p.m.
Robert was wearing the flowery shirt. His Best of Tommy Cooper DVD had been missing for four days, and I was hit by a surge of poignant protectiveness. Had someone nicked it? To stop him putting it on? ‘I’m sure it’ll turn up,’ he said.
He used the weekly visits to show his improvement and his determination, and used our acknowledgement of it as fuel for the following week. Other friends had visited: ‘Oh God it’s like getting him back again. Oh God it’s fantastic.’
The turnover was constant. A girl of nineteen whose father had agreed to pay for her to have the breast enlargement she wanted if she agreed to go to rehab. (Later I saw her in a tabloid, on the arm of her footballer.) The guitarist from a Goth band: the week he came there were photographers in the shrubbery again. A very nicely spoken boy with a sweet and fragrant mother; we were in family sessions together, she was worried because it was Christmas, the neighbours would be coming, should she not have any drinks in for them after all? I loved her. I loved everybody. I longed to spend my time in sessions. For the first time, as well, I realised that my knowledge and experience of Robert’s alcoholism could – maybe – be useful, to someone to whom it was all new. This idea amazed me.
