by Marian Keyes
Further dissent broke out around me because Stalin knew all the answers to the new Trivial Pursuit questions, to Vincent’s perplexity.
‘But how?’ Vincent whined over and over again. ‘But how?’
‘Dunno.’ Stalin shrugged. ‘I read the papers.’
‘But…’ Vincent said despairingly. You could see that he was dying to say, ‘But you’re working-class, you’re not supposed to know the capital of Uzbekistan.’ But that wasn’t the way he behaved anymore.
It was a glorious release to go to sleep that night, to escape my shocked, racing brain for a while. But I woke with a jump in the middle of the night, jolted into consciousness by another shift in my psyche’s plates. This time it was a horrible memory of when Brigit caught me stealing twenty dollars from her purse. I’d been stealing, I thought as I lay in bed. That was a disgusting thing to do. But at the time I hadn’t thought it was terrible. I’d felt nothing. She’d been promoted, I’d reasoned, she could afford it. I couldn’t understand how I’d ever thought that way.
And then, to my heartfelt relief, I was OK again.
On Saturday morning, before cookery, when Chris slung his arm around me and murmured ‘How are you now?’ I was able to smile and say ‘Much better.’
Of course, I still couldn’t sleep for thinking about how I’d get my revenge on Luke, but the future looked brighter, still intact. Not the broken-up disaster area it had been about to become.
Once again, I started to take enjoyment in the things that had made me happy since I’d come to the Cloisters. Namely, the rows. On Monday night there was a humdinger between Chaquie and Eddie about fruit pastilles. Black ones. Eddie roared at Chaquie ‘When I said you could have one I didn’t mean that you could have a black one.’
Chaquie was flushed and upset. ‘Well, there’s very little I can do about it now.’
She stuck out her tongue displaying the remains of the pastille. ‘Do you want this?’ she demanded, approaching Eddie with the sliver on her tongue. ‘Well, do you?’
There were shouts of ‘Good girl, yerself, Chaquie,’ and, ‘Give him black pastilles where he’ll feel it!’
‘Jesus,’ said Barry the child, admiringly. ‘I nearly like that Chaquie wan, now.’
58
Later that week it became clear that my horrors hadn’t disappeared. They had simply regrouped, before launching a fresh onslaught.
It was like playing space invaders. The memories hurtled towards me like missiles. Faster and faster, each more shaming and more painful than the last.
Initially I deflected them quite easily.
Brigit crying and begging me to stop taking drugs. I destroyed it with a POW!
Borrowing money from Gaz when I knew he was skint, then not paying him back. BAM!
Coming to on the floor of my bedroom in the dim light, not knowing if it was dawn or dusk. ZAP!
Taking a sickie on Martine’s day off so she had to come in to work. KAPOW!
Waking up in a strange bed with a strange man, not remembering whether I’d had sex with him.
Whoops, lost a life there.
The memories got bigger and more powerful, with less of a gap between them. Not so many lives left now. Harder to fight it all off.
Going to Luke’s work party off my head and embarrassing him so much he had to take me home at nine o’clock. BIFF!
Drinking the bottle of champagne Jos égave Brigit for her birthday, then lying about it. CRASH!
Telling Luke that Brigit was a slut because I was afraid he fancied her There went another life.
Going to an exhibition opening with Luke and leaving with some guy called Jerry. And another life.
Faster and faster the unwelcome thoughts came.
Calling round to Wayne’s at four in the morning, and waking his entire apartment because I was so desperate for Valium. KER-ANG!
Anna saying she didn’t want to end up like me. BAM!
Getting the sack. POW!
Getting the sack again. BIFF!
Forgetting to rebutton my body when I went to the loo at a party. And spending the evening not realizing it was hanging out over my jeans, with everyone thinking I was wearing an eighties’ bum flap. Several lives went with that one.
Thinking I was going to die from throwing up after a night on the rip. BANG!
Getting nosebleeds every second day. POW!
Waking up covered in bruises, with no idea how I’d got them. ZAP!
Waking up in hospital wired up to drips and a monitor. Lost a life.
Realizing I’d had my stomach pumped. And another.
Seeing clearly that I could have died. And another, and another and another.
Game over.
After the following Thursday’s NA meeting, when I’d been at the Cloisters nearly five weeks, my day of reckoning finally arrived.
Things started innocuously enough. We rounded up the usual suspects and off we all marched to the Library at eight o’clock.
To my disappointment, the person who’d come to talk to us was a woman. Another woman. By then I suspected that Francie was an outrageous fantasist, so I wondered if her story of ‘There’s boys in them thar NA meetings’ was just another of her inventions. The woman’s name was Jeanie and she was young, skinny and good-looking. Just as with Nola’s story, every word that came out of Jeanie’s mouth sent me reeling with recognition as I hurtled headlong towards the ground-opening, earth-yawning shock of seeing my addiction.
She opened by saying ‘By the time I came to the end of my drug-using, there was nothing in my life. I had no job, no money, no friends, no relationship, no self-respect and no dignity.’
And I was so shaken with understanding, it felt as if the ground had physically tipped and swung beneath me.
‘My drug-taking had shut down any forward impetus in me. I stayed stuck, living the life of a teenager when everyone around me was behaving like an adult.’
A bigger, more violent shock, threw me completely off balance.
‘In a way, my using fossilized me, I was surviving in suspended animation.’
With terrible dread, I began to realize that this time the shaking and upheaval wasn’t going to stop until it had reached its dreadful conclusion.
‘And the funny thing was…’ she smiled around at us as she said this ‘… I thought my life was over when I had to stop using. But I had no life!’
Take cover, this is the big one.
That night I couldn’t sleep. In the same way that an earthquake can turn a house upside down so that the kitchen table stands on the ceiling, my unwelcome insights changed the position of every emotion and memory I had. Altering their relation to each other, challenging the rightness of their original position. The universe inside my head tipped and swayed, everything upended and relocated, in places that would have once seemed wrong, illogical, impossible. But, I reluctantly admitted, they were in the places they should have been all along.
My life was a wreck.
I had nothing. No material possessions, unless debts count. Fourteen pairs of shoes that were too small for me was all I had to show after a lifetime of profligate spending. I no longer had any friends. I hadn’t a job, I hadn’t any qualifications. I’d achieved nothing with my life. I’d never been happy. I had no husband or boyfriend (even in my despair I refused to use the word ‘partner’. What am I, a cowboy?). And the thing that hurt and confused me most was that Luke, the one man who had seemed to truly care about me, had never loved me.
It was Friday, the following day, and with perfect timing Josephine started in on me in group. She knew something was up with me, everyone did.
‘Rachel,’ she began with, ‘you’re here five weeks today. Any interesting insights into yourself during that time? Perhaps you can see now that you’re suffering from addiction?’
I found it hard to answer because I was in shock, had been since the night before. I was trapped in a strange, phantasmal place where I had realized I was an addict, but sometimes I fo
und it so painful I switched back to not believing it.
I couldn’t accept that, in spite of all the defences I’d erected since I’d arrived at the Cloisters, I’d nevertheless ended up the same as every other inmate. How did it come to this?
There was that air that pervades when the dictator of a country is about to fall. Even when the rebels are at the gate, no one really believes that this invulnerable tyrant is going to crumble.
The end is nigh, I told myself.
But immediately another voice questioned – What? Do you mean right nigh?
‘Have a look at this,’ Josephine said casually, passing me a sheet of paper. ‘Read it out to us.’
I looked, but the writing was so crooked and unformed, I could barely make anything out. An occasional word –‘life’, ‘pits’ – was all that was legible.
‘What is this?’ I asked in exasperation. ‘It looks like it’s been done by a child.’
I laboured through it, until I got to a line that said ‘I can’t take anymore.’ My blood froze as I realized I was the one who’d written these incoherent ramblings. I vaguely remembered deciding that ‘I can’t take anymore’ would be the tide for my poem about the shoplifter who was going straight. I was horrified. Being brought face-to-face with something I’d done when I was off my head was deeply shocking. I stared and stared at the spidery scrawl. That’s nothing like my handwriting I must have been barely able to hold a pen.
‘You can see why Brigit thought that was a suicide note,’ Josephine said.
‘I wasn’t trying to kill myself,’ I stammered.
‘I believe you,’ Josephine said. ‘Even so, you still nearly managed to.
‘Frightening, isn’t it?’ She smiled, then forced me to pass the note round the room.
In group that afternoon, I tried a desperate last-ditch attempt to wriggle out of being an addict.
‘Nothing bad happened to me to make me into an addict,’ I said. So very hopefully.
‘One big mistake addicts and alcoholics often make is to search for a why,’ she replied, quick as a flash. ‘Demanding childhood traumas and broken homes.
‘As far as I’m concerned,’ she ploughed ahead, ‘the main reason people take drugs is that they hate reality and they hate themselves. We already know you hate yourself, we’ve looked at your low self-esteem in depth. And it’s obvious from the state you were in when you wrote that note, how much you couldn’t bear reality.’
I couldn’t think of anything to say. I didn’t want it to be that simple.
‘So, starting off from that basic position,’ she said briskly, ‘you take drugs and behave badly, right?’
‘S’pose,’ I mumbled.
‘You come to, feeling wretched and guilty, your self-loathing and fear of the reality you’ve created magnified. And how do you deal with that? By taking more drugs. Equals more bad behaviour, more self-loathing, a bigger mess to face and, naturally, more drug-using. A downward spiral.
‘But you could have stopped at any time,’ she said, cutting into my thoughts of how unavoidable, how inevitable it all was. ‘You could have taken control of your life, for example, by apologizing to the people you’d upset. Then you would have stopped contributing further to the pit of things you hate about yourself. And by forcing yourself to live through a little bit of reality, you’ll see it’s not something you need to run from. You can stop and reverse the process at any stage. You’re doing it now.
‘Call off the search for a “why”, Rachel,’ she finished on. ‘You don’t need it.’
So I was a bloody addict.
Brilliant!
There was no joy in it. No relief. It was as awful as finding out I was a serial killer.
I stumbled through the weekend and most of the next week in a state of shock. Barely able to talk to people as the words chanted in my head, You are an addict, na na na naaa naaaah! You are an add…
It was the very last thing I wanted to be, it was the worst disaster that could ever befall me.
I knew from watching the other people in my group – particularly Neil, because I’d followed him almost from his beginning – that there were distinct phases they went through until they came to terms with their addiction. First there was denial, then horrified realization, then seething anger and finally, if they were lucky, acceptance.
I’d had the denial and the horrified realization but, when undiluted, poisonous fury arrived, I wasn’t in any way prepared for it. Josephine, of course, just took the attitude ‘Ah, Mr Anger, we’ve been expecting you,’ as I went ballistic in group. I was so boilingly angry at the misfortune of being an addict that I briefly forgot about the anger I harboured for Luke.
‘I’m too young to be an addict!’ I screamed at Josephine. ‘Why has it happened to me and to no one else I know?’
‘Why not?’ Josephine asked mildly.
‘But, but, for fuck’s…’ I spluttered, insane with anger.
‘Why are some people born blind? Why are some people crippled?’ she asked. ‘It’s all random. And you were born with the propensity to become an addict. So what? It could be miles worse.’
‘No, it couldn’t!’ I yelled, crying tears of burning rage.
‘What’s the problem?’ she asked, again with that infuriating mildness. ‘So you can’t use drugs anymore? It’s not like it’s a necessity, millions of people never touch them and they live fulfilled, happy lives…’
‘You mean I can’t ever take anything ever again?’ I demanded.
‘That’s right,’ she confirmed. ‘You should know by now that once you start, you can’t stop. You’ve exposed yourself to narcotics so often that you’ve permanently upset the chemical balance in your brain. Once you ingest narcotics, your brain reacts by becoming depressed, thus setting up a craving for more drugs, more depression, more drugs, etc. You’re physically as well as psychologically addicted.
‘And the physical addiction is irreversible,’ she added casually.
‘I don’t believe you,’ I breathed in horror.
A freshly baked batch of fury arrived, straight out of the oven. I remembered how before Clarence left, he’d been told he couldn’t ever drink again, and how that had made perfect sense to me. But that was about him. I was different. I had only admitted to being an addict because I thought I could be fixed.
‘You can be fixed,’ Josephine said, and my face lit up with hope. Until the bitch added, ‘You just can’t take drugs anymore.’
‘If I’d known that, I’d never have owned up to anything,’ I screeched at her.
‘You would have,’ she said calmly. ‘You had no choice, this was inevitable.’
I flicked through a series of ‘If only’ scenarios. If only I hadn’t listened to Nola. If only Anna hadn’t said what she’d said. If only Luke hadn’t come. If only Jeanie hadn’t been so like me. If only, if only, if only… Frantically, I searched, trying to find the place where I’d crossed the line from not thinking I was an addict to thinking that perhaps I might be. I wanted to return to that particular point and reverse history.
‘You’re a chronic addict,’ Josephine said. ‘This realization was unavoidable. God knows you ducked it long enough, but it was always going to get you in the end.
‘Your anger is perfectly normal, by the way,’ she added. A last-ditch attempt to avoid facing the truth.’
‘AAAAAaaarrrrrgggghhh,’ I heard myself screech.
‘That’s right, work through that anger,’ she encouraged mildly, making me scream again. ‘Get it all out, better out than in. Then you’ll have much more acceptance.’
I put my face in my hands and in a muffled voice I exhorted her to go and fuck herself.
‘Anyway,’ she pointed out, ignoring my request, ‘you were miserable living that hopeless, drugged-up life. Without drugs you have a future, you can do anything you set your mind to. And think of how good you’ll feel when you wake up in the morning and can remember what you did the night before. And who you went home with. If you w
ent home with anyone at all.’
And that was supposed to make me feel better?
59
I had a week or more of rampaging around like an anti-christ. In that time Neil left, humble and contrite, crammed to bursting with good intentions.
John Joe also went. Out and proud, already displaying the rudiments of a handlebar moustache.
Chris left, but not before giving me his phone number and making me swear to ring him the day I got out. For about an hour after he’d gone I glowed with delight from the attention he’d paid me, then lapsed into a sudden, surly slump.
Helen didn’t come to visit me anymore. Surprise, surprise.
Vincent also came to the end of his two months, and he too was a changed man, unrecognizable from the Charles Mansonesque bully I’d met on my first day. Soft and gentle, you could imagine him standing in a forest, covered in birds. Deer, squirrels and other woodland creatures flocking to his side.
Barry the child, Peter the laughing gnome, gambling Davy, and Stalin also left. I was now one of the elder statesmen.
As each person left, we cried and hugged, swapped addresses and promised to stay in touch. I was amazed by the strength of the bonds we’d formed with each other, across age, sex and class.
I wondered if that was how POWs or hostages felt. That we’d been to hell and back together, and were united by it.
Although people were missed when they went, their departure didn’t leave a gaping hole. The rest of us swirled over the space they’d left, surrounding it, filling it up. So that soon after, say, Mike had gone, the Mike-shaped hole was filled and had flowers growing over it.
And then, as new people arrived regularly, everything was different anyway, so that you’d never know there had been a gap in the first place.
By the end of the sixth week, my group consisted of Barney, a weaselly man who looked like he stole women’s underwear from washing lines. Shaky Padraig, who’d calmed down a good bit since his first sugar-scattering day. Father Johnny, a rabid alcoholic, who’d got his housekeeper pregnant. A tabloid journalist called Mary who was fat, ugly, bitter and talentless. She’d spent the last five years drinking a bottle of brandy a day, stitching up anyone she could find to write about, and now her life was in tatters. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer woman.
