by Marian Keyes
‘ “… And one morning after I’d left my apartment to go to work I had to come back. I’d forgotten I had to wake Joey because his clock radio was broken. I found Rachel doing a line of coke in bed. She’d taken it from Joey’s stash.”
‘So she’d stolen it?’ Josephine interrupted herself, looking up from the page to question Luke.
‘Yeah, she’d stolen it.’
I wanted the ground to open up and swallow me whole. I burned and cringed with shame. I hated being in the wrong. Worse again, I hated people knowing about it. Luke hadn’t said much to me that morning. Well, he’d shouted a fair bit, said he was worried about me and told me never to do it again. But I thought I’d got away with it, that he was so into me he’d decided he didn’t mind. I felt deeply betrayed that that wasn’t the case. And why did he have to tell everyone about it?
‘I started watching her after that and, once I knew what I was looking for, I saw things were bad. She was always on something. She was never straight.’
He stared right at me as he said that. My head swam. Luke and I belonged in New York. Happy, in love. Him being in the Cloisters, trashing me, was just too surreal, like seeing cows flying.
‘Right then,’ Josephine said. ‘Next question: “How did drugs affect Rachel’s behaviour?” And Luke has answered “It’s hard to say because as far as I know she was always off her head when she was with me. Sometimes she was affectionate and cute. But a lot of the time she was confused and made arrangements and then forgot about them. Often we had conversations that she didn’t remember when I mentioned them afterwards. I reckon her vagueness was Valium-related. She was different when she took coke. An embarrassing pain. Loud and rude and she thought she was gorgeous. The part I found roughest was that she became an over-the-top flirt when she was in that state. If there was any man there who looked her version of cool…” ‘Josephine paused, swallowed, then continued ‘ “… she threw herself at him.” ’
I was appalled, hurt, ashamed, furious. ‘How dare you?’ I screeched at him. ‘You were lucky I ever had anything to do with you. How dare you insult me like this!’
‘How would you like me to insult you?’ he drawled icily.
My heart nearly stopped beating in fear. Luke never used to be nasty to me. Who was this big, grim, angry, cruel man? I didn’t know him. But he seemed to know me.
‘You did throw yourself at them,’ Luke insisted, tight-lipped, grown-up and intimidating. I didn’t know how I could ever have thought he was a joke figure.
‘Come on, Rachel,’ he sneered. ‘What about the time I took you to François’s exhibition opening. And you went off, went home, with that art dealer dude.’
My face burned with shame. I might have known he’d bring that up. I’d never heard the end of it then.
‘I didn’t sleep with him,’ I mumbled.
‘And, anyway,’ I added belligerently, ‘it was only because we’d had a row.’
‘A row that you manufactured after you clapped eyes on the guy,’ Luke coolly threw back at me. I was horrified. I’d thought I’d successfully pulled the wool over his eyes. It was catastrophic to realize that he’d known exactly what I’d been up to.
‘Which brings us neatly to our next question,’ Josephine interjected. ‘Which is “In what aberrant ways did Rachel behave as a result of her drug-taking?” And Luke has written: “Her behaviour got more and more weird. She almost never ate. And she got badly paranoid. Accused me of fancying her friends and looking at them like I wanted to sleep with them. She took a lot of sickies from work. Except she wasn’t sick, she just stayed home to get wrecked off her head. She hardly ever went out, except to score drugs. She borrowed cash from everyone which she never paid back. When people wouldn’t loan her any more she stole it…” ’
Did I? I wondered.
It wasn’t stealing, I thought dismissively. They could afford it and anyway, it was their fault for not lending it to me in the first place.
A short while later, Josephine paused. ‘OK, that’s the questionnaire read. Now, as Brigit is feeling too upset to answer any further questions today, perhaps you wouldn’t mind, Luke?’
‘OK,’ he nodded.
‘As Rachel… er… put to you earlier, what were you doing with her?’
‘What was I doing with her?’ Luke almost laughed. ‘I was crazy about her.’
Thank you, God, thank you, God, thank you, God. I exhaled with massive relief. He had come to his senses. About time! Now he’d take back all those awful lies he’d told about me. Maybe… maybe we might even make up with each other.
‘Why were you crazy about her?’
Luke paused. It was a while before he spoke.
‘In lots of ways, Rachel was great.’
Past tense, I noticed. Wasn’t so keen on that.
‘She had a great way of looking at the world,’ he said. ‘She was a blast and really made me laugh.
‘Except sometimes,’ he added doubtfully. ‘Especially when she was out of it, she tried too hard and wasn’t funny anymore, and that wrecked my buzz.’
I wanted to violently remind him that we were looking at my good points.
‘I never really bought that sophisticated girl-about-town act she put on,’ Luke confided.
That alarmed me. If he’d seen through me, who else had?
‘Because when she was just herself,’ he sounded as if he’d just discovered the secret of the universe, ‘then she was, like, amazing.’
Good, we were back on track.
Josephine nodded encouragingly.
‘We could talk about anything,’ he said. ‘On a good day there wasn’t enough time in the world for all the things we wanted to talk about.’
That was true, I thought, yearning for the past, for Luke.
‘She wasn’t like any of the other girls I knew, she was far smarter. She was the only woman I knew who could quote from Fear and Loathing in has Vegas.’
‘And she called it, Fear and Clothing in Las Vegas,’ he added.
‘What point are you making?’ Josephine asked in confusion.
‘That she’s funny.’ He smiled. ‘Sometimes we were so close I felt like we were each other,’ he said, wistfully. He looked up and for a moment our eyes were locked together. Briefly, I saw the Luke I used to know. It was excruciatingly sad.
‘OK, that’s fine,’ Josephine interrupted, impatiently cutting into Luke’s dreamy introspection. ‘I presume you tried to help Rachel when you found out how bad her drug addiction was.’
‘Of course,’ Luke said. ‘But first she hid it from me, then she lied about it. She wouldn’t admit what she took, or how much, even though I knew and I told her I knew. It did my head in. I tried to get her to talk about things. Then I tried to get her to go to a trick cyclist but she told me to fuck off.’
He blushed. ‘Scuse my language, Sister.’
She accepted his apology with a gracious nod of her head. ‘And then what happened?’
‘She took her overdose and left New York.’
‘Were you sorry when the relationship ended?’ Josephine asked him.
‘By then it wasn’t much of a relationship,’ he said.
My heart sank. It didn’t sound like he wanted to get back with me. ‘It was as good as over,’ he went on.
My heart sank further. He kept talking about me in the past tense.
‘I don’t know why she bothered with me because nothing I did made her happy,’ he said. ‘She wanted to change everything, my clothes, my mates, where I lived, what I spent my money on. Even the music I listened to.’
Josephine nodded sympathetically.
‘I knew she laughed at the gear myself and my mates wore, and no real problem there. We were used to it. But then she started ignoring me in public, like, pretending she wasn’t with me. And that wasn’t funny, no way.’
I looked at his open, honest expression and for a second, as I had with Brigit, I felt compassion for him. Poor Luke, I thought, to be treated like that. T
hen I remembered I was the one who’d been mean to him, and that actually, I hadn’t been mean at all. The big whinger.
‘The first time Rachel ignored me,’ he continued, ‘I thought “OK, she’s a bit absent-minded, could happen to anyone.” But after a while I had to face it. It was definitely deliberate. Definitely, man! When she met up with any of those dudes who worked in those designer clothes shops, she went all weird on me, left me standing on my own like a thick. Once she left a party without saying goodbye to me. A party I’d taken her to, but she met those stupid bitches – sorry! – Helenka and Jessica there and they invited her back to their apartment.’
‘So how did you feel?’ Josephine asked.
‘Lousy,’ Luke said huskily. ‘I felt lousy. She was ashamed of me. I was disposable, a throw-away person, you know? It was the pits.’
For a moment I felt wretched. Then I looked at him scornfully, and thought, Grow up. I’m the one who should be feeling sorry for herself, not you.
To my surprise, Josephine said baldly to Luke ‘Did you love Rachel?’ My guts clenched.
He didn’t reply. Just sat very still, looking at the floor.
There was a long, tense unbearable pause. I held my breath. Did he love me?
I desperately wanted him to. He sat up and ran his hands through his long hair. I tensed for his answer and he took a breath before he spoke.
‘No,’ he said. And a part deep within me withered and died.
I shut my eyes from the pain.
It’s not true, I forcefully reminded myself. He was mad about you, still is.
‘No,’ he said again.
All right, I thought, we heard you the first time, you don’t have to rub it in.
‘If she was the nice Rachel, the one who wasn’t always off her face and smarming over those fashion assholes,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘then I would have loved her, no problem. No better woman.
‘But that wasn’t the case,’ he added, ‘and it’s too late now.’
I stared at him. I could feel grief stamped on my face. He wouldn’t look at me.
Josephine paused and looked at Luke. ‘Coming here and doing what you’ve done today, it must have been very painful for you?’
‘Yeah,’ he mumbled. ‘I am very…’ he paused for a long time, ‘sad.’
The word resonated in the air.
My mouth and throat felt full of something. Below my chest, I had a burning feeling, but my skin was goose-pimpled and cold.
Josephine announced the end of the session. Brigit turned and left without looking at me. Before Luke left he held my eyes for a very long time. I tried to read something in his. Contrition? Shame?
But there was nothing.
As the door closed behind them, the other inmates stampeded to my side, to comfort and protect me. I recognized the way they looked at me – a mixture of pity and curiosity – because I’d used it on them often enough after their ISOs had come acalling. And I couldn’t bear it.
54
My half-packed bag, lying on the floor, reproached me. Mocking me for how close I thought I’d been to leaving.
I’d thought I’d be able to race out the door as soon as the clock pinged my three weeks. But Luke and Brigit’s visit put paid to that. On Wednesday evening, they had barely left the premises, when I was summoned to Dr Billings’s office.
Tall and peculiar, he greeted me with an appalling attempt at a smile and I sensed the news he was about to deliver wasn’t good.
‘After what we’ve heard about you today in group, I hope you weren’t thinking of leaving on Friday,’ he said.
‘Of course not,’ I forced myself to say. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.
‘Good.’ He bared his teeth. ‘I’m glad we didn’t have to get an injunction to make you stay.
‘Which we would have done,’ he added.
Somehow, I believed him.
‘It’s for your good,’ he advised.
I managed to contain my fury by fantasizing about splitting his skull with an axe.
At least, I consoled myself on my way out of Billings’s office, while I was stuck there, I could set the record straight with the other inmates. It did my head in, as I wondered what they all thought of me in the wake of Luke’s and Brigit’s revelations.
I felt worst of all around Chris. Even though he wasn’t in my group, there were very few secrets at the Cloisters. When I’d staggered back to the dining-room after group, he was over like a shot. ‘I heard you were given the this-is-your-life treatment today,’ he grinned.
I usually blossomed like a flower in the sun when I was with him, but this time I wanted to run away. I was deeply ashamed. But when I tried to tell him that it was all lies he’d heard about me, he just laughed and said ‘It’s OK, Rachel, I still love you.’
When I went to bed that night, I re-ran tapes of the two sessions over and over again in my head. I’d been devastated with sadness about Luke, about it being over. But as I remembered the terrible, vicious, hurtful things both he and Brigit had said, my grief mutated into anger. My fury burgeoned and bubbled, festered and spat. I couldn’t sleep because I kept having imaginary conversations in which I floored both of them with scathing, pithy remarks. In the end, even though I was terrified of her temper, I woke Chaquie. I had to talk to someone. Luckily she was too dazed to give vent to her recent narkiness. As she sat, blinking like a rabbit, I screeched at her about how humiliated I’d been. I promised her that I’d get my revenge on Luke and Brigit, no matter how long it took.
‘When Dermot came as your ISO, how did you cope?’ I demanded, wild-eyed.
‘I was raging,’ she yawned. ‘Then Josephine told me I was using my anger to avoid accepting any responsibility for the situation. Now please can I go back to sleep?’
I knew I’d be interrogated by Josephine in group the next day.
I’d seen her do it to Neil, John Joe, Mike, Misty, Vincent and Chaquie. She wouldn’t treat me any differently. Even though I was different.
Sure enough, Josephine launched straight into me.
‘It wasn’t a pretty picture Luke and Brigit painted yesterday, of you and your life, was it?’ she began.
‘Luke Costello isn’t the person to give an objective picture of me,’ I said wearily. ‘You know how it is when romances end.’
‘It’s just as well Brigit came in that case,’ Josephine interjected smoothly. ‘You didn’t have a romance with her, did you?’
‘Brigit was talking crap as well.’ I irritably geared up for the story of Brigit’s ambition and promotion.
‘Shut up.’ Josephine silenced me with a glitteringly angry look.
‘I never said I didn’t take drugs.’ I changed tack.
‘Drugs aside,’ she said. ‘It still wasn’t a pretty picture.’
I wasn’t sure what she meant.
‘Your dishonesty, selfishness, disloyalty, shallowness and fickleness,’ she explained.
Oh, that.
‘Your drug use is just the tip of the iceberg, Rachel,’ she said. ‘I’m more interested in the person they described. You know – someone with no loyalty, who would ignore her boyfriend when people she wants to impress are present. A person so shallow she judges everyone on their outward appearance, with no regard to whether or not they’re decent human beings. So selfish that she steals without any thought as to how it affects the person she steals from. Who lets down her co-workers and employers at a moment’s notice. A person with a distorted, warped value system. With so little sense of who she is that she affects a different accent with different people…’
On and on she went. Every time she finished a sentence, I thought she’d come to the end of her speech, but no.
I tried to stop listening.
‘That’s you, Rachel,’ she finally wrapped it up. ‘You are that amorphous, shapeless human being. No loyalty, no integrity, nothing.’
I shrugged. For some reason she hadn’t got to me. I felt a throb of triumph.
Josep
hine looked at me scornfully. ‘I know you’re pouring all your energy into not cracking in front of me.’
How does she know? I wondered, gripped with anxiety.
‘But I’m not your enemy, Rachel,’ she continued. ‘Your real enemy is yourself and that’s not going to go away. You’ll walk out of this room today thinking you’re great for not having opened up to me. But that’s not a victory, it’s a failure.’
Suddenly I felt terribly tired.
‘I’ll tell you why you’re such a horrible person, shall I?’ she asked.
‘Shall I?’ she asked again, when I didn’t answer.
‘Yes.’ The word was dragged out of me.
‘You have cripplingly low self-esteem,’ she said. ‘You count for nothing in your own estimation. And you don’t like feeling worthless, who does? So you seek endorsement from people you admire. Like this Helenka that Brigit told us about. Isn’t that right?’
I nodded feebly. After all, Helenka was worthy, I agreed with that bit.
‘But it’s very uncomfortable,’ she pressed on, ‘when you’ve no belief in yourself. You just float, waiting for someone else to anchor you.’
Whatever you say.
‘Which is why you couldn’t trust your decision to be with Luke,’ she confided. ‘Torn between wanting him but feeling you shouldn’t, because the only person telling you he was OK was you. And you wouldn’t believe you. What an exhausting way to live!’
It had been exhausting, I realized with a flash of memory. There were times when I felt I was losing my mind as I tried to juggle everyone’s approval versus Luke’s company.
I remembered going to a party with Luke, safe in the knowledge that no one I knew would be there. But, to my horror, the first person I saw was Chloë, one of Helenka’s acolytes. In a rush of mad panic, I’d turned on my heel and left the room, while Luke went after me in bewilderment. ‘What’s wrong, babe?’ he asked worriedly. ‘Nothing,’ I muttered. I forced myself to go back in, but I spent the night teetering on a knife edge, trying to hide in corners, not standing too close to Luke in case anyone (Chloë) realized I was with him, furious anytime he put his arm around me or tried to snog me, then feeling totally wretched at the hurt look in his eyes when I pushed him away. Eventually, I got really out of it because I felt I’d go bonkers otherwise.
