Obviously, no one sane would even attempt to answer that, but Gregory has to, because those are the rules and giving no reply is the worst of many negative and revealing possibilities.
Roll on lunch. More fruit.
Then, in the afternoon, if we don’t have a one-to-one consultation, we’re allowed out into the sulphur-scented air. There really is a thermal spring at Clear Spring, channelled off and grimly collected in a green-tiled concrete tank where those of us with permission and no history of suicide can slip into sepia-stained gowns and submerge ourselves in the fizzing, stinking water until the heat makes our eyes ache and our skins turn silky and develop a permanent, mineral reek. At least nobody asks you questions in the tank.
And, from whichever underwater bench you’ve picked, you can sit and squint up at the valley’s slope and the late, shallow snow still shining, because we are high here and in the shade of even higher, cooler mountains. The silvered wood of the central villa hangs in the sunlight like smoke and reminds you of how much this place is costing every hour and of the rules which say that you must go and be with other dried-out drinkers there and conceal what might be misinterpreted as psychopathic traits as you mingle in a social setting. No TV to ease the tension: there’s no signal.
Dispersed around the villa on the cosy incline are self-consciously winding paths, various mature trees, some of them budding, and the six clapboard Houses where each of the six groups lives and cooks its evening meals and bickers about cleaning rotas and screams in the night. I live in Thoreau House, which is beside Milton.
“Ish dihicult. I’m no’ shuw . . . dhere sho many peopdhe here an I don know dhem.” Gregory talking to the floor, his lowered eyelids faintly blue, as if some tiny hurt is bruising them, and his lashes thick, feminine. “I shupposhe isholadhed, ash hoe I feedh.”
If they wanted to name our Houses after writers, why not pick people we could like? Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Thomas, Behan, Parker, Reese— the kind we could take to, good examples. Or Shakespeare: killed himself with a final, birthday bender: the man had style.
Behind Seneca House, there’s a thin path of layered bark; I wandered on to it yesterday. It led into a further, closer fold of the valley floor where there are aspens, bark pale and clean as flesh, and at their heart a narrow lake. When I drew near it, a line of ducks clattered over the surface and up, necks craning into thin air, wings flickering. The border of the water was soft, leeching into mud, and so I stayed back from it, from the cream and blue reflections and the silk light. I started to make a circuit of the margin, here and there, a grind of wet snow underfoot.
And then the swan came. Labouring out of a thicket on the far side of the pool, there he was: and I realised I’d never seen one before, not live, not stamping out over an uneven thaw, throat flexed like a snake, grinding straight for me with a wallowing, rolling pivot from hip to hip that might have been comic if it wasn’t so intent. Because he was fixed on me now: bowing and launching down into the dark, letting his wings peak and threaten above his back, pushing forward in long, hard kicks to crumple the water at his breast, head switching, side to side, as each black eye got its look at me and the feathers bristled, swelled on the tight lash of his neck.
“He doesn’t know you, that’s all.”
I’d been too surprised by the bird to notice a grey man, worrying through the trees. Tweed cap and coat, good trousers and zip-up galoshes: he might have been a banker, an executive, out for a break in the park. “I’m Hitt.”
“What?”
Blurry voice, barely calling ahead of him as he walked up to face me. “I’m Mr. Hitt. I come here often.”
“Okay. Saves me asking.”
“Asking what?”
“If you come here often.”
He wasn’t listening, scanning washed-out glances beyond me to the swan. There was also a lightness about him, a clarity in his expression that suggested his attention was too delicate to divide.
“I’m Hannah. Hannah Luckraft.”
“Oh, I’m Mr. Hitt.” His head switched round to me, quick as the swan’s, and he reached for my hand, shook it once before letting it drop. He was wearing knitted gloves, red, the wool too soft to be anything other than cashmere. “I had an accident.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s all right.” He was watching the swan again—it had stalled at the bank closest to us and was patrolling back and forth, sipping at the water occasionally and then glaring at me with a bubbling cough. “The accident I had was a long time ago . . . He doesn’t know you and so he’s afraid and you seem very tall to him. A tall swan would be dangerous. That’s how he understands us—as swans.”
“I see.”
“You should come back and be introduced. I’m here every day at this time. We all are.” Hitt drifted away then, plodding gently into the mud, crouching down to a squat and ignoring me completely, smiling out at the swan.
Drink—it really can do damage. Poor sod’s probably rolling in it, but he ends up here. With a swan.
“Hannah.”
And I end up here with Nurse Ogilvie and Nurse Forbes.
I’m staring at the Session Room’s cerise walls, trying to find irregularities in the plaster.
Funny feeling you get from a swan—from that swan. You want him to like you, purely because you know he won’t.
“Hannah. Do you mean to avoid speaking?” Nurse Ogilvie asking me this and I know that I should answer, but I’m running a touch slow this morning, I can’t quite climb out of the daydream and into the day.
There are no human beings in Clear Spring I could give a toss about. And they won’t let me call Robert. They won’t let me call anyone.
Nurse Forbes taking charge. “Hannah, you’re checking the clock again. Does that mean you were bored by what others have shared? Do you think they’ll be bored by you?”
Beside me, Debbie is glowering at my upper arm, as if I have just sat beside her while she has bravely and honestly and far too fucking quickly poured out the required fluid ounces of heart and I haven’t heard a syllable, not a word since Gregory mumbled into life. And this is, in fact, the case.
“I . . . ah . . . I was thinking about the swan.”
Why should feeling as if I’m in primary school be an aid to sobriety?
“What swan?” This from Forbes in the minorly turned-on voice he uses only when something Freudian may be slithering into view.
“There’s one on the little lake.”
“No, there’s a pair of swans, Hannah.”
“I only saw one.”
“The male?”
“I don’t know . . . I thought so.” I know where you’re going with this. “Somebody said . . . It was a nice swan. I was going to go—”
“You assumed it was male.”
“I suppose so.”
“Why did you do that?”
And I laugh, because that will prove I’m relaxed and that I have no intention of talking about my sex life, or promiscuity, breaking up couples, relating better to males than females, being occasionally perverse— things that every woman does, or thinks of, and that don’t do any harm.
What the fuck does this have to do with drinking, anyway?
“Why are you laughing?” Ogilvie peering at me as if I’ve hurt myself, his whole face this suffocating wedge of pity.
“Why is that, Hannah? . . .” Forbes at me again. “And why are you wearing your name badge upside down? Don’t you want us to know who you are? Or do you think that we’re a joke?”
Fuck you. I see what you’re up to. Think I couldn’t do your job? I could fucking do it in my sleep.
Still, if in doubt, apologise.
“I’m sorry.”
“What are you sorry about, Hannah?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do, Hannah.”
Fuckyouallofyoufuckinglookingatmewhenyouknowfuckall
Fuck you
“I don’t know.”
And the clock on th
e wall is sliding gently, stretching when I blink and Gregory tipping his head, watching me, tender as something I’ve misplaced and the air is twisting and thickening in my mouth.
“I don’t know.”
“Hannah.”
“I don’t know.”
Everything, irretrievably salt.
Fuckyou
And it is plain, even to me, that the group has what it wants now— today I’m the one—head in hands and sucking breath and reduced to childhood noises and crying and crying and crying until I have never been.
Or almost.
Fuckyou
Under the tongue, where I keep myself, there’s still something left— because no one gets away that easily. And while the group looks forward to its biscuits and the nurses smile wisely at a job well done and the tissue box is banged against my hand, I am utterly sure in my blood and bone that I let them do this, they haven’t won. I haven’t broken. I haven’t changed. I’ve simply seen how they’re trying to fuck me and I’m going to fuck them back.
VII
We’re allowed this—a real wood fire in the Main Lounge before lights out. Closed in with peace and comforts, we can’t say that we’re suffering, not exactly. Apart from the daytime prying, the insinuations, the relentless search for dirt, and this resultant tension: our sense of the faults that are waiting beyond the door, of postponed but still inevitable hurt.
And there are other ills out there: hungry threats that are larger than us and our personal harms. Things are not quite well with us, we can’t deny it—but they are very much worse in the world. We can almost remember how but do not say.
Instead, we delight in the safety any prison will provide: the absence of choices or disorder and our new selves clarified, fixed by confinement. We are already verifiably different from our bad old selves, although perhaps not powerfully altered, not yet.
And we have our inviting hearth, lit to sustain us. It serves multiple high purposes and therefore conforms to the Ultra-Puritan ethic of Clear Spring—“Get all the blood that you can from this stone and then throw it at two of these edible birds before building it into a wall.” Patients who are practical and over-energetic are led outside to hew and fell themselves into a coma. Supplying us with fuel is intentionally labour-intensive, because no one has ever been trusted with a chainsaw—I did ask—so every bit of the hacking and sawing is done by hand. We currently seem an apathetic lot, but some of us are occasionally persuaded to split logs and experience the thrill of being trusted with an obviously deadly, although low-tech, weapon. The fire itself is the main thing, though—at a loss in company, we can stare at it and not seem introspective. It gives us a ghost of privacy and makes our silences less awkward.
“Decongestant inhalers.”
Not that we’re being silent this evening: myself and Tom and Eddie hogging the fireside sofa and Gregory reading in a chair, but still with us, still listening, I can tell. And I am aware that I’m in male company again, but I didn’t seek it out. I might just as easily be bonding with other women. I have no sexual agenda, despite what Nurses Ogilvie and Forbes may say.
“What about inhalers?” We’re going through things we’ve heard of, but never tried. Inhalers are a new one on me.
“You eat them, yeah—what else? Eat the sponge part with the chemical in—makes you fucking insane.” This is Eddie—a man I understand to have been grotesquely insane in his time. None of us actually knows him, of course, we’ve only heard him recite his life, just as he’s heard us recite ours. Obviously, we expect everyone to be lying as they reminisce— whether a nurse is taking notes or not—but lies are never less than revealing and Eddie’s mark him out to be a total lunatic. So he’s a stranger, but an intimate one, the way we all are to each other—no hope of returning to small talk when we’re being hauled, en masse, through a daily, public Third Degree. I have what may be a good grip on Eddie’s major crimes, his styles of infidelity, his childhood fears, but his second wife sounds very unconvincing and I couldn’t come up with his surname if you paid me.
Tom mumbles a contribution, trying to impress. “Whipped cream.” Tom who smells of talcum powder, who has admitted no startling crimes.
“For what—a cholesterol high?” I’m not making fun of him, but he is trying to tell us something old and unremarkable.
“No, the gas—”
Eddie is also unimpressed. “Yeah, the fucking gas, the propellant for the cream-in-a-can. I know that. But how much could you ever inhale before you were just pushing whipped cream into your fucking brains . . . I fucking hate cream. It’s bullshit.” He’s been asked to restrain his foul language in the sessions, but he doesn’t bother elsewhere—it makes his sweating worse. Rings tattooed on three fingers, a Maori effort on his arm, always in T-shirts, always visibly damp. I made sure he sat furthest from me, so now he’s soaking into Tom.
“Well, I have the best one.” This is true, I do. “I’m not sure how it works, but it’s the best.”
“So? Give it up.”
“Foam.”
“Foam? What fucking foam?”
“Foam—foam-rubber foam—like you get in seats. The gas that makes the bubbles in the foam—it makes you high.”
“So you chew on the foam?”
“So you chew on the foam.”
“That’s the sickest fucking thing I ever heard. Who the fuck would even think of it?”
Gregory is smiling at his book. He hasn’t turned a page in hours. We haven’t talked much, for obvious reasons, but he listens with a sort of fury—you can feel the clasp of it. Then the almond eyes sliding a look at you, a brush of contact before he sinks himself away.
“Foam. I’m telling you. You get completely ripped, apparently. And think about how easy it would be—if you wanted to go on a bender, you could just eat your furniture—you’d never need to leave the house. Or, I suppose, in the end, you’d run out, but then all you’d have to do is go to some upholstery place and order more.”
“Need sm more a’ them scatter cushions, dude . . .” Eddie lapses into a fake slur. “Ah’m throwing a par-dee . . .” We can do this now, call up our old voices and laugh at them, make cartoons of our former selves, as if they won’t be back.
I join in, playing the witless drunk. “Isss my birthday, so I thought I’d make a chair.” The happy bumbler—the act that I always did use, not because I was really sober: but because I never was that kind of drunk. I wasn’t lovable, or harmless—I just knew what other people want to see. “No . . . make it two chairs . . . never know when you’ll have folk popping in. Need to be on the safe side . . . ’void disappointment. And now, my good man, show me your range of adhesives, juss while I’m here. D’you have any raspberry flavour . . . ?”
To be tolerated, that’s what you aim for. Lurches of apology and concern, pre-emptive laughter, calculated minor clumsiness to cover the mishaps you can’t help: the big, soft hands you’ve grown by the end of the evening paddling out ahead of you to prevent offence.
And I do see this is how a man drinks and, therefore, inappropriate for me. I should have been at home behind my curtains with the methylated gin, the Tia Maria and Blue Nun. I should have been an early-morning shame at the off-licence: make-up uneven, hands trembling into my bag for the greasy purse and then flitting over the counter to snatch up a genteel quarter-bottle, requested with a quiet excuse, even slight surprise, and back to sneak it down mixed with my tea—in the cup, not the pot—nobody there to see me, but female drinking is a sin and should be made invisible. Further downhill, I could have been a regular call to the local minicabs, asking them to fetch my bottles for me, so I could avoid the challenge of a walk, pay the premium to keep in hiding.
That’s how you really do go insane. That’s how you die alone.
So I stay with the men, because then I’m not alone and because they do their best to be happy. This is the only sensible choice. No pegging out with my face in the three-bar fire and being food for the obligatory poodle, or Pekine
se. No tarting around in miniskirts and squealing, sucking up bubble gum–flavoured vodka and flashing my tits at cars. A modicum of dignity, that’s not too much to ask.
And how else would I have met Robert? I’ve got to be with the boys. How else would I meet anyone?
The fire has sunk to a bed of embers, a kind of breathing fluid full of dark and cherry lights, scuttling heat. No point pitching on another log: we have to be snug in our respective Houses by ten sharp. And there’s a urine test in Thoreau tonight. What larks.
I leave my boys gently, tell them goodnight. The usual drunk’s vocabulary of affection: arm-tapping, hair-ruffling, back-punching, hand-squeezing, the swollen kiss: it’s withered away, out of bounds. We’ve discovered we can’t control it any more—it makes cartoons of us, full-blown Looney Tunes. Emotions overshadow and then crush us like falling Acme safes, chasms open, cliffs slide by and dynamite fizzes in every rabbit hole and apple pie the nurses can locate. At every contact our big, round, animal feet will bicycle pointlessly in place on the slick curve of our brain pans, while the world opens trapdoors too vicious and too arousing to be borne and bulldogs and coyotes chase us and our defences go astray and we end up grinning, sickly, at one horror or another, while something bad keeps screeling in our skin. This chaos is rarely visible, naturally.
A woman—Belinda?—penned me into a hug when I cried in the group this morning. I stood against her, almost disabled by the catastrophes she was creating behind my eyes, the torments for my animated inner self: the certainty that bastards like her are drawn to suffering, the simultaneous oily wash of her possible kindness, the sudden thought of my mother and claustrophobia and fear and the need to hold Robert, to be held, the want of that solid scale you measure yourself against when you touch a man and only a man.
In the end I had to push her off and then apologise and then say it once more with feeling for the benefit of everyone. As if the whole situation hadn’t been her fault. Belinda—that was her name. She won’t stay sober. Hysterics like that, they can’t manage the real world.
Me, I can do this, I’ve got the hang of sobriety. I’ve been here eight days without a drop of anything. That’s the longest I haven’t drunk since I was at school. If I can do eight days, I can do forever. Ambling back to Thoreau through the lamplight and patchy snowshine, I have to admit the whole process has not been as hard as I’d have thought. Other inmates have told me about luxury drying-out facilities with soothing artificial waterfalls, room service, hair care, and I could be annoyed with my brother when I consider where I’ve ended up: when I sit down in the communal clamour of another massive, ranch-style meal, or rummage in the laundry basket of abandoned airport paperbacks which is our library, or suffer inside Thoreau’s canary paintwork, but I can accept that the Spartan approach may have benefits. I feel clean here, for example: bleached-in-the-blood-of-the-lamb, you-could-eat-off-me clean. There’s something going on inside my soul, a sense—at still moments—that it’s shining, thriving in the mountain air.
Paradise Page 17
