by Louisa Young
This story confirmed to me, very clearly, that it is addiction itself before which we are powerless. If a person can’t even kill themself because their addiction wants them alive to drink more, then what could I ever hope to achieve by trying to punch Robert’s alcoholism on the nose?
Chapter Twenty-Two
London, Wigan, 2008–9
Sobriety clears the air – and then there are all the other things, plain as day, needing to be dealt with. Quietly and carefully, he did so. Officially, he lived in Wigan; half the time he was with me. There, he rented a room from his good friend Patrick the prison tutor, in a trad red-brick terraced house with the backyard and the alley behind. There Robert relaxed into the loving, piss-taking affection of the old friends he had neglected for years: his cousins, old school-friends, Gary the headmaster and his wife Julie, GFW, the cleverest man he ever knew, who delivers vegetables. He’d head off down the platform at Euston or Wigan North Western on his two sticks with his carry-all slung round him Sam Browne style, slowly and with a polite ‘No thanks, I’m all right.’ He had regular AA meetings in both locations. I wasn’t looking them up for him, or encouraging him to go. He went on his own. I was saying ‘I’ll give you a lift!’ and he had already booked a cab.
He was amazed that his friends still wanted to be his friends. He thought we wouldn’t like him when he was sober. He thought he would be boring. We mentioned how boring his being drunk had been. I remembered Lisette saying years before: ‘He’s really boring when you’re not in love with him.’ He wasn’t boring now.
He sat on the doorstep at home, or among the pretty flowerpots in the backyard at Patrick’s, smoking in the sun, listening to birds singing, smiling. I’d go and stay, and he’d take me round the scenes of his childhood, pointing things out. We visited John and Kath, went to Southport; to Haigh Hall where we saw grebes dancing on the lake; up to White Coppice where you could get very easily on to a bit of moorland. He learned to text and started sending me sweet messages. Snatches of music started to reappear in the margins of the Telegraph sports pages. Guests took to visiting, at both houses. Songs reappeared on the piano. I’d been trying to write a funny feminist young adult book about a band called the Rodeo Dodos: it hadn’t gone down well. I came back to an elegant melody on the piano stand, and these lyrics: ‘On the day that your book was rejected, try not to be so dejected, don’t retire to a farm, [Note Cole Porter reference, from ‘Get Out of Town’] just remain really calm, for a publisher can’t be too far awaaayy …’ I’d written a song called ‘Goldhawk Road’; he wrote out a piano arrangement for me, and did it in two keys, because he wasn’t sure how I would want to sing it, or which guitar chords I could play. I didn’t find it until later.
And best of all, he was now able to reconnect with his son, and the sweet loving friendliness between them rekindled.
His higher power, as required by AA, changed frequently. Group Of Drunks, his dad, music, nature, Black-tailed Godwit. He was a life force of the first order. People came to warm their hands on him, because he was a survivor.
He left Lola and me a note:
Dearest Audrey and Dearest Adders,
I would like to thank you both for making me feel so welcome here, so I will. Thank you. Don’t forget to invoice (with VAT) the Kennet Trust for your services. [There was a long-running joke that my dad paid Robert to keep me happy. And possibly vice versa as well.] Additional rewards will include an autobiographical first edition of Enid Blyton’s ‘Two Don’t Do the Washing Up and One Sleeps in his Clothes’, and a hydraulic smoke remover.
I realise that the next three weeks will be very tough for you without Count Coccium bestowing his love, warmth, wit and tautologous humour upon you, but the Northern Star will be watching over you both as you sleep with your aristocratic hot water bottles.
Love from Robert XX
N.B. No drawings
(said John Thomas to Willy and Dick)
The tail of the S on drawings does stray perilously close to a phallic/bollock twirl.
Will, who had offered at Clouds two years before, now became Robert’s sponsor. He lent him his ‘Narcotics Anonymous Step Working Guide’, a green plastic-bound A4 book, and together they went to meetings. Under Will’s aegis, Robert set out on the task of Doing the Steps (the steps/questions of Narcotics Anonymous are effectively the same as those of Alcoholics Anonymous). This is a complex process of self-investigation, an incipient lifetime’s habit, manifested in Robert’s case by answering, at length in a ring-bound orange notebook, the series of intimate and demanding questions that each Step brings (see p.393 for more).
I didn’t know he was doing it. I never even saw the notebook, and when I found it after his death, I read it with a potent combination of greed, fear and shame. I try to be a respecter of privacy, but by nature I always want to know. And when your beloved dies, you just want more of them – and here it was: a big, fat, engrossing, detailed, file of him. The steps are repetitive, banging home the messages of recovery in order to counteract the equally repetitive voices of addiction saying, ‘Go on, have a drink.’ (The same repetitiveness is why meetings work. You need to hear, think about, and do recovery, every day. Otherwise you will be back to drinking, every day. It’s like the repetitiveness of taking prescribed medicine, eating meals, breathing. It’s what you need.)
Above all, for me, the file was a tremendous gift: a tall clean window into the depths of what he had been trying to do, both without me and for me, in excruciating honesty. It was a conversation we started in his sobriety but had not got round to having in detail. We were going carefully there, because we had all the time in the world.
The first of the Twelve Steps is: ‘We admitted that we were powerless over our addiction, that our lives had become unmanageable’. It’s a considerable concept, and many addicts either never get past it, or return to it over and over. The first question, ‘What does the disease of addiction mean to me?’, brings up another of the great points of dispute: the word ‘disease’.
Whether or not you think of addiction itself as an illness, it is always a secondary condition, arising from self-medicating for some previous damage or mental-health issue. Robert doubted it himself. He felt that addicts are greedy, self-obsessed people, always wanting more of a good thing, always wanting the good thing to be better, always trying to mollify or nullify the bad things; always trying to change the overwhelming cocktail of fear and self-disgust, to become more ambitious and hence successful, to improve relationships. The opposite happened.
‘Many believe we are born addicts. This may be true,’ he wrote. But he acknowledged that he repeatedly heightened the moment and blocked out emotional issues for years, ‘until alcohol became the most important thing in my life. The love for my son, my girlfriend, friends was there but I could not demonstrate that love. Oblivion seemed to be the most conducive option. I went into an oblivion from which I very nearly did not emerge. I am an extremely fortunate, grateful person.’
‘The healthier I become,’ he wrote, ‘the more I physically desire a drink. I have the desire now as I write; 9.30 pm, Monday 20th July. For me, there is little point reading or, ironically, writing about this. I need to hear it, see it, smell the suffering. [I have been] severely upset and shocked by what drink has done to those who have gone back out [resumed drinking], and it gives me a great sense of guilt to realise that I am getting better by seeing this suffering. However one of the most crucial aspects of AA is that aspect of fellowship – most members are happy that divulgence of their pain can help others.’
He had to look at how the self-centred aspect affected him, learning to differentiate between self-centredness and self-protectiveness. In a way, putting not drinking first is self-centred, but it is absolutely essential. He had learned that without sobriety he would be incapable of helping others, loving others, loving anything. ‘As an active alcoholic,’ he wrote, ‘I loved too much, hated too much, and finally became almost totally numb. Now I have the ability
to love a lot and the ability to tolerate. Of course there are many nasty sadistic selfish people around. Unlike Jesus, I do not forgive them for they know not what they do, but I try at least to understand what has led them to behave in such a fashion. Fear, I believe, answers many questions. It’s always fear or desire. Or both.’
And soon the equally contentious ‘spirituality’ aspect comes up: ‘How has my disease affected me spiritually?’ Robert was the kind to snort at spirituality, but, made to think about it, he decided that music counted, ‘which though written by man sometimes acquires a significance that transcends the human condition, with a directness and an almost mystical impenetrability’. Nature, too: ‘the extraordinary powers of certain birds. No one can as yet understand why or how the arctic tern migrates from pole to pole or why a strand of the black-tailed godwit flies from Ottowa to Auckland’. Simon’s farm in Somerset: ‘Fields, trees, and of course birds. A beautiful place which provokes a sense of nostalgia for an emotion I’ve never felt before, a sense of balance, of rhythm, the place where I get a sense almost of a God as I do not understand him.’ And he did carry with him a prayer Granny Annie had written out: ‘Courage for the great sorrows of life, patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake.’ (I borrowed this prayer, and gave it to my character Jack Ainsworth.)
The Step questions touch on aspects which had been part of his – and perhaps every addict’s? – character forever. Obsession, for example. ‘Have I recently been obsessed with a person place or thing?’ the Step asks. ‘Being obsessive,’ Robert wrote, ‘I’m obsessed by the fear of becoming obsessive. I know we should apply ourselves as rigorously to recovery as we did to drink. But I need to control my almost addictive attitudes – perfectionism for example. A piece of my music, a plate of my food, my relationships will never be perfect. When they disappoint, either myself or others, my senses of futility, underachievement + failure are so intense that I think I might as well have a drink.’
This too it would have been useful for me to know earlier. I find the idea of perfection nauseating, insane and somehow hilarious. But this does explain how I ended up being a negative, why he couldn’t handle my needing reassurance.
And he wrote about being obsessed with two ‘ridiculous quasi-adolescent “crushes” in AA’. He was ‘shocked and confused, humiliated and amused by how I could have succumbed to this. The sick nervous tingle, the heavy breathing anticipating her arrival, the despair if she didn’t appear. It seems risible now but at the time it was quite alarming, like being in my early teens again. I love and fancy my girlfriend, so why did this happen? Perhaps my sponsor had the answer – I’m “alive” again.’
That was a kick in the guts when I first read it. Much as he loved me, some lingering insecure bit of me never felt he was ‘in love’ with me. We had a fight about that once. Again, I was asking for reassurance, and he responded with anger at me for finding him wanting. Neither of us recognised the pattern, and I had to comfort him. Here, the sad romantic in me was jealous for the sick nervous tingle. Like being in my early teens again. However, Will was right. Sign of life. Suck it up, chopped liver.
But here he was, on paper learning and acknowledging that it was absurd to think he was better than ‘an old former friend who would need to go to the off licence before going to the pub, to the pub before a restaurant, a pub after the restaurant, and an off-licence after the pub before home’, or another who ‘smoked weed, sometimes in the morning. I would comment on this, often with a drink in my hand. It didn’t occur to me that my habit was just as bad if not worse.’ It wasn’t, in hindsight, ‘fussy and obsessive’ of me to mind his ‘lack of cleanliness, lack of clean clothes’; and his ex-wife was not to blame for divorcing him. ‘What I didn’t realise,’ he wrote, ‘was that the behaviour, moodswings and illness caused by alcoholism are basically unhandleable.’
*
In spring, Robert went to stay with friends in France. It was so normal and yet at the same time so ambitious. I thought I would be in a state of constant alert and terror. But I wasn’t. It was just … normal. A kind of normality that made me want to sing and dance and buy normality a crown of flowers. He took a nightie of mine to wear – an Egyptian galabeya – because he had no pyjamas. One evening I had come home to find that galabeya and my own nightie lying on the bed with their sleeves wrapped round each other in an embrace, and I had to sit on the bed, my heart full. Sweet Twin.
And I was working. My Book of the Heart had inspired a curious music performance piece involving early music, Hank Williams, Frida Kahlo, dance, surgery and high religious symbolism in the National Gallery in Dublin, so I was spending time over there. I was writer-in-residence running creative writing courses at two local secondary schools, through the charity First Story. And bits of journalism; an experimental radio drama for the BBC co-written with students; and my new novel: My Dear I Wanted to Tell You, set during the First World War, about love and truth and pioneering maxillo-facial reconstructive surgery.
*
And Robert’s work on himself continued. ‘Over what exactly am I powerless?’ the book asked. ‘I was totally powerless over alcohol,’ he wrote. ‘I could not talk to people, work, eat, without having a drink first. I thought I became alive, receptive, appreciative. In these early stages, alcohol is very effective, a good social creative drug. I envy people who can keep it like that. I couldn’t. It gave me a purpose in life. That purpose, I see now, was to drink more.’
‘I’ve done things while acting out on my addiction that I would never do when focusing on recovery,’ the book says, unforgivingly. ‘What were they?’
‘Insulting people,’ Robert wrote. ‘Principally to show my verbal superiority, my sharp cutting sarcastic wit and my boldness. Pathetic. Succumbing to masochistic obsessions: drinking straight out of a vodka bottle knowing that more would merely rot my guts. Sticking fingers down my throat to wretch [sic] even more, knowing that I had wretched more than enough.
‘I felt I must go through with it, because the initial feeling, I believed, was not only intuitive but honest, and had to be honoured, and anyway, being a masochist I would enjoy the guilt and relish the sordid memories. This is what I deserve. I am worthless. Or so I tell myself.’
‘Do I become arrogant?’ asks the relentless book.
‘Yes,’ he wrote. ‘I thought that I was a better film, theatre + T.V. composer than most … I convinced myself and tried to convince others that something was their fault when it was often obviously mine. I assumed I was clever and sexy when I most probably came over as a drunk arrogant wanker.’
‘Do I manipulate people to maintain my addiction? How?’
‘Yes – convincing my girlfriend that I was sober. It has, in recovery, transpired that she knew I was still drinking—’
Not as such, darling.
‘—but didn’t want to admit it to herself never mind anyone else.’
Really, that wasn’t it. Was it?
‘A classic case of co-dependency I assume …’
Or denial? God I could scream. Reading this, I wondered which of us had more to learn on those topics, co-dependency and denial.
‘How has my addiction caused me to hurt myself or others?’
‘I think I may have hurt quite a few women – I’ll never know about many of them due to loss of contact. I presume I hurt my ex-wife but it’s hard to tell. I was often drunk enough not to notice or care. I really don’t know about my son. Perhaps I’ll never know. Perhaps he’ll never know or never want to know. My ex-girlfriend Anna. Daughter of an alcoholic who died of the illness and a heavy drinker herself. We were fine for a while. She loved me. But one day – sudden coldness. I hope I didn’t hurt her but I think I must have done. Perhaps I might, however, in the long run, have done her some good. Louisa. I loved her but I loved alcohol more. I love her a lot more now. She put up with it for a long time—’
Put up with it …
&
nbsp; ‘—but eventually to protect herself and her daughter I was thrown out. She loves me enormously but then perhaps loved what she wanted me to be, or rather what she remembered me as being. I hurt her a lot. However I now feel that I should be wary of succumbing to the notion of “compensatory love”. Not to love in an apologetic way.’
I would have quite liked some compensatory love, actually.
On Boxing Day that year, he wrote me a letter. I found it nine years later, unfinished and unsent, in a box under the piano.
Coccium, Lancs
26/12/07
7.10am
Dear Hon. Audrey L. Young MA. Cantab, F.C.B [This M is underlined ten times, and surrounded with a charming circle of asterisks. I think this may be a reference to the Oxbridge habit of giving you an MA free (well, for a small fee) with your BA.]
Thank you so much for your incisive article in the National Geographic magazine ‘The Girth of the Kennet’. I could not but help associating the fertile flow of the aforementioned river with the resulting ornithological progeny (Thoby the Twite and Easter the Egret to name but two) [This string of jokes is about the names of members of my family, starting with my father, Wayland Kennet, and following up with some siblings.] from these fecund loins. (Excuse the protracted tautology – I must correct, find fault with, improve and ameliorate my literary style with more semantic élan.)
To change the subject, I love you. You’ve seen nothing yet. Many tenets are beginning to surface. I am not a ‘new’ person. Not ‘born again’. But …
