Rachel's Holiday

by Marian Keyes

  ‘Try, babe,’ he urged. ‘You need your fluids and your glucose.’

  Luke took Thursday and Friday off work to look after me. Whenever I came to, he was nearby. Either sitting on a chair in my room, watching me. Or sometimes he was in the next room, on the phone to his mates. ‘Proper flu,’ I heard him boast repeatedly. ‘Real flu. Not just a bad cold. No, nothing they can prescribe for her.’

  On Saturday night, I felt better enough to be wrapped in the duvet and carried, carried, into the sitting-room. Where he lay me on the couch. I attempted to watch telly for about ten minutes, before it got too much for me. Never had I felt so cherished.

  And now look at us. Best of enemies. Where had it all gone so wrong?

  Assorted members of my family came to visit on Sunday. With narrowed eyes I greeted Mum and Dad, as they approached, bent double from the weight of the confectionery they’d brought. Look at them, the bastards, I thought. Trying to buy me off with chocolate. So I’m thick, am I? So I’m too tall, am I?

  They didn’t seem to notice the nasty vibes I sent them. After all, conversation was usually stilted and that day was no exception.

  Helen had also elected to visit me again. I was extremely suspicious of her motives and I kept a close eye on both her and Chris, in case they were looking at each other too often. Even though he’d been attentive to me since the night I’d caught him comforting Misty, I was always edgy and insecure around him.

  Sunday’s surprise guest was Anna! I was thrilled to see her. Not just because she was nice, of course, but because she’d give me some yearned-for drugs.

  We gave each other tight hugs, then she stood on the hem of her skirt and tripped. Even though she looked very like Helen, tiny, green-eyed and with long black hair, she had none of Helen’s confidence. She was a great one for tripping and falling over and banging into things. The vast quantities of recreational drugs she habitually ingested might have had something to do with her unsteadiness on her pins.

  Helen was in great form, regaling all and sundry with a story about how an entire party of clerical officers hadn’t been able to attend work the day after a visit to Club Mexxx. Allegedly suffering from food poisoning.

  ‘They’re threatening to sue,’ she said gleefully. And I hope Mr stingy-arse, crappy-wage-payer Club Mexxx goes bust.’

  ‘Of course,’ she added, ‘we all know that the clerical officers were just sick as dogs from hangovers. Food poisoning is so obvious a hangover excuse it’s embarrassing. Anna there always uses it. So would’ve I, except I’ve never had a job before.’

  I finally got Anna on her own. ‘Have you any blem on you?’ I asked quietly.

  ‘No,’ she whispered and blushed.

  ‘Well, what have you, so?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Nothing?’ I echoed, stunned. ‘But why?’

  ‘I’ve given up,’ she said quietly, not meeting my look.

  ‘Given up what?’

  ‘You know… drugs.’

  ‘But why?’ I demanded. ‘Is it Lent?’

  ‘I don’t know, it might be, but that’s not why.’

  ‘Well, what is the why?’ I was appalled.

  ‘Because, I don’t want to end up like you,’ she said. ‘I mean, in somewhere like this!’ she corrected herself frantically. ‘That’s what I meant, I don’t want to end up in here!’

  I was devastated. Totally devastated. Even Luke hadn’t hurt me as much. I tried to compose my face so that she couldn’t see my pain, but I was in bits.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, a picture of misery. ‘I don’t want to do your head in, but when you nearly died it gave me an awful fright…’

  ‘It’s fine,’ I said curtly.

  ‘Oh Rachel,’ she wailed quietly, trying to hold my hand, to keep me from moving away. ‘Don’t hate me, I’m only trying to explain…’

  This time I shook her off, and shaking like a leaf, I went to the bathroom to calm down.

  I couldn’t believe it! Anna, of all people, had turned on me. She thought I had a problem. Anna, the one person I could always compare myself to and say ‘Well, at least I’m not as bad as her.’

  56

  The days passed.

  People came and went. Clarence and Frederick left. So did poor, catatonic Nancy, the tranquillizer-addicted housewife. Even up to her last day, people were holding a mirror to her face to check she was still breathing. And there was joking talk among the rest of us about buying her a survival kit for the outside world. To wit: a Walkman and a tape with the words ‘Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out,’ recorded over and over again on it. I somehow suspected Nancy wouldn’t be appearing in the brochure as one of the Cloisters’ success stories.

  Mike left, but not before Josephine managed to make him cry about the death of his father. The look on her face was something to behold – she smiled like the man used to at the end of The A Team. In another dimension I heard her triumph ‘I love it when a plan comes together.’

  Over the next ten days or so space-cadet Fergus and fatso Eamonn left too.

  Nearly a week after Luke’s and Brigit’s visit, we got a couple of new inmates, which, as always, generated great excitement.

  One was a dumpy young woman called Francie who talked loudly and incessantly, running all her words into each other. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She had shoulder-length blonde hair with two inches of dark roots on show, a gap in her front teeth that you could drive a truck through and cheap foundation several shades too dark, badly smeared onto her face. She was overweight, her hem was hanging and her skirt was red and way too tight.

  My first thought was what a mess she was. But within seconds she knew everyone, was throwing cigarettes at them and had in-jokes and intimacy up and running. To my great anxiety, I saw that she was undeniably, if inexplicably, sexy. I got that familiar sick fear that Chris would shift his attention away from me.

  She stood and carried herself as if she was a goddess. She didn’t even seem to notice the round bulge of her stomach through her awful pencil skirt. It would’ve had me suicidal. Jealously I watched her, and watched Chris watching her.

  When she saw Misty she let out a little screech and yelled ‘O’Malley, what’re you doing here, you alco?’

  ‘Francie, you big pisshead,’ Misty reparteed, all delighted, smiling for the first time in almost a week. ‘Same as you.’

  It turned out that they had been in the Cloisters together the previous year. The class of ninety-six.

  ‘You’ve been here before?’ someone asked, in shock.

  ‘Sure, I’ve been in every treatment centre, mental hospital and jail in Ireland.’ Francie roared with laughter.

  ‘Why?’ I asked, strangely drawn to her.

  ‘Cos I’m a looper. Schizophrenic, manic, deluded, traumatized, take your pick. Look,’ she ordered, rolling up her sleeves, ‘look at them for lacerations! All my own work.’

  Her arms were a mass of cuts and scars. ‘There’s a cigarette burn,’ she pointed out conversationally. ‘And another one.’

  ‘So what happened to you, this time?’ Misty asked.

  ‘What didn’t happen!’ Francie declared, rolling her eyes. ‘I’d nothing to drink, all there was at home was meths for the greyhound’s feet, so I drank that. Next thing I knew it was a week later – I’dlostawholeweek, cany’believeit? I’veneverdonethatbefore – and I came to, being gang-banged by a crowd of fellas somewhereoutsideLiverpool!’

  She paused for breath before launching into the tale again. ‘Left fordead, hospitalized, got given the morning after, arrested, deported, packed off back home, minute I get there they send me here. And here I am!’

  The entire room had fallen silent, the look on each man’s face a picture as, no doubt, they yearned to be one of the boys outside Liverpool.

  ‘What are you in for?’ she gaily demanded of me.

  ‘Drugs,’ I said, dazzled by her.

  ‘Ooooh, the best,’ she nodded, her mouth bunched in appr
oval. ‘D’ you go to any NA meetings?’ she asked.

  ‘Narcotics Anonymous,’ she explained impatiently to my momentarily puzzled face. ‘God, you cadets!’

  ‘Just the meetings here,’ I said, almost apologetically.

  ‘Ah no! They’re no good. Wait till you go to the ones outside.’

  She leant closer to me and chattered on. ‘Full of fellas. Fullofthem! NA is packed to the gills with men, none of them a day over thirty, and they’re all mad into hugging. You’ll have your pick of them. AA isn’t half as good. Too many women and oul’ lads.’

  Up until then, the Narcotics Anonymous meetings had made very little impression on me. I usually fell asleep. But I was delighted with what Francie had told me.

  ‘Which do you go to? AA or NA?’ I asked, bandying about the abbreviations.

  ‘All of them.’ She laughed. ‘I’m addicted to everything. Booze, pills, food, sex…’

  The dining-room almost combusted from the light that sprang into the eyes of every man present at Francie’s last word.

  In all the excitement of Francie, the other new inmate barely got noticed. It was only after Francie and Misty swanned off to rebond that he came into focus. He was an elderly man called Padraig who shook so badly he couldn’t even get the sugar into his tea. While I watched, horror-struck, it all juddered off the spoon before it got to his cup. ‘Confetti,’ Padraig said, with an attempt at humour.

  I smiled, unable to hide my pity.

  ‘What are you in for?’ he asked me.

  ‘Drugs.’

  ‘You know,’ he pulled himself close to me, and I tried not to recoil from the smell, ‘I shouldn’t be here at all. I only came in to get the wife off my back.’

  I looked at him: shaking, smelly, unshaven, dissipated. In shock, I wondered, are we all mistaken when we say there’s nothing wrong with us? All of us?

  57

  It took two full weeks for my world to cave in after Luke’s and Brigit’s visit.

  In that time there were a couple of warning shudders, seismic messengers sent ahead to warn of the approaching upheaval.

  But at no stage did I identify a pattern. I wouldn’t see the massive earthquake that was coming.

  But it came anyway.

  What Francie had told me about all the young men at NA made me approach Thursday night’s meeting with far more interest than I ever had before. Just in case things didn’t work out for me and Chris, it would be nice to know where to find a storeroom of fellas, and what the correct protocol was there.

  Off we all trooped: me, Chris, Neil, a couple of others and, of course, Francie. That night she was wearing a straw hat and a long button-through flowery frock, the buttons almost open to her stomach in both directions, revealing, respectively, a pimpled bosom and cellulitey thighs. Even though she’d only been at the Cloisters just over a day, I’d already seen her in about twenty different outfits. At breakfast she’d worn a leather waistcoat and really tight jeans tucked into terrible stiletto boots. For morning group, an orange, eighties power suit, the shoulder pads like American footballers’. For afternoon group, a PVC miniskirt and a pink sheepskin halter-neck top. Many different garments, but all shared the common characteristics of looking cheap, badly-fitting and alarmingly unflattering.

  ‘I’ve millions of clothes,’ she boasted to me.

  ‘But what’s the point if they’re all hideous?’ I yearned to ask.

  As we proceeded up the stairs to the Library, spirits were high among us, far higher than they deserved to be considering where we were going.

  Despite Francie’s wild talk, the person sent from NA wasn’t a man. It was Nola, the beautiful blonde woman with the Cork accent – the one I’d thought was an actress – who’d been at my first meeting.

  ‘Hi Rachel.’ She gave a dazzling smile. ‘How’ve you been?’

  ‘OK,’ I mumbled, flattered that she remembered me.

  ‘How are you?’ I wanted to keep talking because I was strangely drawn to her.

  ‘Great, thanks,’ she said, with another smile that warmed the pit of my stomach.

  ‘Don’t mind her,’ Francie murmured. ‘The meetings in the real world are packed with lads.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Nola apologized, when we’d all taken our seats. ‘I know some of you have heard my story before, but the woman who was supposed to be coming tonight relapsed on Tuesday and died.’

  I went rigid with shock and frantically looked around for comfort. Neil looked at me with concern. Are you OK?’ he mouthed and I was surprised to find he didn’t seem angry any more. Not only that, but I no longer hated him. I nodded gratefully at him, my heart no longer trying to jump out of my chest.

  Then Nola began to tell us about her addiction. When I’d first heard her three weeks previously, I’d been certain she was reading a script. I simply hadn’t believed her. She was too beautiful and groomed to convince me she’d ever done anything cool. But this time was different. Her words rang with quiet conviction and I was riveted by her life. How she’d never thought she was any good at anything, how she loved heroin and the way it made her feel, how it was her best friend, how she’d have preferred to be with it than with any human being.

  I was with her, I was there with her all the way.

  ‘… until eventually my entire life centred around heroin,’ she explained. ‘Trying to get the money to buy it, actually purchasing it, obsessing about when I could next get stoned, hiding it from my boyfriend, lying about it when I was out of my skull. It was a terribly draining way to be, yet it filled my life so much that it seemed totally normal to live in this obsessive state…’

  The serious look on her beautiful face, the hypnotic earnestness of her words, conveyed the horror of the treadmill she’d been on, the hell of being in thrall to a force outside oneself. Out of nowhere I was assailed by the first mini-shock, as the thought jumped into my head, I was like that.

  My head tightened with denial and I sat well back into my chair. But the words picked me up and shook me again. I was like that.

  Fighting to regain steadiness, I firmly told myself I’d been nothing of the sort.

  But an even louder voice pointed out that I had been. And my defence mechanisms, weakened by more than a month of continual bombardment, lulled into a false sense of security by Nola’s story, began to crumble.

  To my alarm, I found myself on a head-on collision course with some very unpleasant realizations. In an instant it had become impossible to avoid the crystal-clear knowledge that I’d thought about cocaine and Valium and speed and sleeping tablets constantly; about getting the money for them, about tracking down Wayne or Digby to buy whatever I could afford, then finding the time to take them, finding the secrecy to take them. Constantly having to hide my purchases from Brigit, hide them from Luke, trying to pretend I wasn’t off my face at work, trying to do my job when my head was adrift.

  Horrified, I remembered what Luke had said on the questionnaire – what exactly was it? – ‘If it’s a drug, Rachel has taken it. She’s probably taken drugs that haven’t even been invented yet.’ I filled with rage, as I did whenever I thought of him and what he’d done to me. I didn’t want a single word of what he’d said to be true.

  I felt furious, sick and frightened. Panicky, almost. So when Nola said, ‘Are you OK, Rachel? You look a bit…’ it was a relief to blurt out, ‘I was like that too, always thinking about it.’

  ‘I’m not happy,’ I said, sounding slightly hysterical. ‘I’m not happy at all. I don’t want to be this way.’

  I could feel the others looking at me and I wished they weren’t there. Especially Chris. I didn’t want him to be a witness to my weakness, but I was too frightened to hide it. Beseechingly, I looked at Nola, desperate to be told that everything would be OK.

  In fairness to her, she tried.

  ‘Look at me now,’ she smiled gently. ‘I never think about drugs. I’m free from all that.

  ‘And look at you,’ she added. ‘You’ve been in here �
�� how long? – four weeks. You haven’t used drugs in any of that time.’

  I hadn’t. In fact, an awful lot of the time I hadn’t thought about drugs at all. Of course, some of the time I had. But not all the time, not the way I had five weeks previously.

  With that, I had a small glimpse of freedom, a picture of a different life zipped through me before I was cast back into fear and confusion.

  As Nola was leaving, she tore a page out of her diary and wrote something on it. ‘My number,’ she said, giving it to me. ‘When you get out, give me a ring. Any time you want to chat, just give me a shout.’

  Dazedly, I found myself giving her my number, it seemed the polite thing to do. Then I dragged myself to the dining-room where Eddie had spread the contents of a bag of wine gums out on the table. ‘I knew it,’ he shouted, making me jump. ‘I just knew it.’

  ‘What did you know?’ someone asked. I listened with half an ear. Don’t let Luke be right.

  ‘That there’s more yellow ones than any other colour,’ Eddie declared. ‘And fewer black ones. Look! Two black ones. Five red ones. Five green ones. Eight orange ones. And eight… nine… ten… twelve, no fewer than twelve yellow ones. It’s not right. Everyone buys them for the black ones and instead we’re being fobbed off with manky, horrible yellow ones.’

  ‘I don’t mind yellow ones,’ another voice chipped in.

  ‘You sick bastard,’ yet another person said.

  A rowdy argument broke out about the yellow wine gums, but I had no interest. I was too busy trying to assess the damage to my life. Wondering, if I had to give up drugs for a while – and it was a big if, mind – how I would cope. What would I do? I’d never have fun, that was for sure. Not that I’d been having much fun anyway, it had to be admitted. But, as far as I could see, my life would be over. I might as well be dead.

  There was always the option of cutting down, I thought, grasping at straws. But I’d tried to cut down in the past and I hadn’t. Hadn’t been able to, I realized, dread piling on fear. Once I started I could never get enough.