Last Drinks

by Andrew McGahan

  ‘You’re not talking about Lindsay, are you?’

  ‘Lindsay? I thought he went overseas? No, it was no one you know.’

  ‘I knew Marvin’s friends.’

  ‘Not all of them, you didn’t. And not this one. He wasn’t one of us, George. He was from altogether lower stock. It was bad for him to see me like that, a silly old man pissing himself on the floor. He laughed at me. He wanted to watch me die. I couldn’t have that. Not from him.’

  And there was an anger rising in his voice, a trace of the old pride.

  ‘Jeremy,’ I said, worried, ‘I don’t know who you are talking about.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ He thought some more, shook his head. ‘I sent the women away, sent away the alcohol, and came home. I went straight to St Amand’s. They fixed me up, as much as they could anyway, but that was it. That was the last time I went there. That’s what you asked, wasn’t it?’

  ‘You never needed to go back?’

  ‘I never drank again. What was the point if I couldn’t go through with it? Why carry a gun if you don’t have the nerve to use it? It’s ironic, though. After all these years, it’s not even the drinking that’s killing me.’

  ‘What is?’ I asked.

  ‘Leukaemia.’

  I stared. I’d assumed his liver was the problem, that the damage done over his lifetime was too great to be recovered. But cancer of the bone marrow? What did that have to do with Jeremy, with his decades of sin and indulgence?

  He was grinning at me. ‘You remember what we used to say?’

  And I did. We’d talked about it all the time, deep in our drinking. The way death would come, and the power that drinking gave us over death, that any addiction gave its victim. For when death came, every alcoholic and addict knew at least one precious thing—it would come in the form of the beloved. Drinkers would die by their livers, smokers by their lungs, and junkies, perhaps, by their very blood. But that was where the power lay. You chose your own end.

  ‘If only it was that simple, George.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘It’s all right. It’ll be another funeral for you to attend.’

  He turned to Louise, who had finished the wine.

  ‘Time for the red?’ he asked.

  TWENTY

  Alcohol . . .

  How much was it to blame, in the end, for the mess my life became?

  And how could I lay blame anyway, when it was my choice if I drank at all?

  It was an old mystery. I was, for instance, finally, a failure as a journalist—but did I fail because of the drinking, or drink because of the failure? Or were the two always fused, failure and alcohol, right from the start? Did the potential alcoholic, even in his youth, peer fearfully into the future and, not liking anything that he saw there, reach for the bottle?

  No one knew. It was true, I had never visited a detox ward in my life before, but I knew plenty about the treatment of alcoholism. I’d read about the medical theories and treatment regimes, I’d studied them, furtively, all throughout that long first year in Highwood. There were drugs to cope with the convulsions of detoxification, therapies to learn, behaviour patterns to avoid, self-help groups to join, but the root problem remained ephemeral. Was it a disease or not a disease? Was there a cure or was there no cure? Was there a genetic predisposition? Was it a learned response? Was it a cultural malaise? The answers were unlimited and contradictory. No one knew for sure.

  Was I even an alcoholic?

  Ah . . . that was the question. Asked in a million hearts on a thousand agonised mornings, right around the world. And always in mine.

  If you answer yes to one or more of these questions, then you may have a problem.

  They always started like that. The self-help books, the pamphlets, the warning notices. Always questions. In the dry wasteland of sobriety, they baked like rocks under the sun, and one by one, over the years, I’d turned them over and studied them bleakly, a prophet maddened by thirst, looking for signs.

  Question—Did you take to drinking from an early age?

  Answer—Yes.

  It started at fifteen. It was a bottle of Bundaberg rum one summer night, with friends from school, in someone’s back yard. I didn’t enjoy it at all, I gagged on the taste of it, was deathly sick afterwards, nor did I drink again for several months. Indeed, I never went back to rum. But there was a hint of something in there before the sickness hit, a golden promise opening in my mind. The next time I stuck with beer, and from there I didn’t look back. The promise blossomed. It was as if the pores of my brain were opening in a vast relief, coming truly alive for the first time. Within months my tolerance soared and I was sampling vodka, gin, bourbon, tequila . . . anything, as long as the rush was there. I would never know what it was exactly. But in an otherwise unremarkable youth, drinking was my chance to shine. It was my special field of achievement. I could drink more than most of my acquaintances, and drink longer, and apparently suffer less the next day. I wasn’t the hardest drinker by any means, but I was harder than most. And as a teenage male who had no great ability at sport or academic pursuits, that was something to savour. I was good at it, I received praise from my peers, and as sad as it would seem to me later, I’d discovered a talent and I was on my way.

  Question—Does the world seem better when you drink?

  Answer—Yes.

  Oh yes . . . especially in those early years. With that first flush of drunkenness, a whole new vista of possibilities would open, as if the night could go anywhere, as if all the normal rules were in abeyance. It was exciting, full of the unknown. Which was the tragedy of alcohol. After all, the possibilities were always there, drunk or not, and any night could go anywhere, drunk or not. But somehow I could never see that. Some people’s minds just didn’t flow when they were sober—it was only alcohol that could fire them up, liberate them. It was like that for me, and for the people I drank with. Sober we bored ourselves, drunk we were inspired, lifted to another realm that was hazy with truth and beauty. It didn’t matter that usually the nights went nowhere and involved nothing more than getting drunker and drunker and finally passing out. The feeling was enough. Escape. And transcendence. Jeremy wasn’t the only one who understood the word . . .

  Question—Do you drink more than forty standard drinks a week? (Or fifty drinks, or sixty, or four a day, or six a day, or whatever the current threshold was thought to be.)

  Answer—Yes.

  Yes of course, of course, but who cared? It was never how much you drank, it was how long, and in what sort of style. Three hours, six hours, all night, two days straight. And who was still standing with you after all that time. They were your real friends. The ones who never went home, the ones who shared the dream, the passion to never let a session die. A person who counted their drinks, who exercised moderation, who thought about the morning after, they were lesser beings. They were to be avoided.

  Question—Do you organise your day around drinking?

  Answer—Yes.

  I organised my whole life around drinking. Why else pick journalism as a career? Not that I was actually drunk when I chose it, but by the time I was seventeen, I knew what sort of life I wanted. Something hard-bitten and lived fast, with a drink always at hand—that’s what I thought journalism would be like. And in a way I wasn’t completely wrong. Whatever else might be said about life in the press, there was always someone to have a drink with. Always. Other reporters, the editing staff, political contacts, business contacts, entertainment contacts, they all drank. Pubs appeared like magic next to newspaper offices; they had cheap lunches, cheap dinners, happy hours set just as the paper was put down and the day’s work was done. No doubt it was different now, but in the old days the whole newspaper world was high on alcohol fumes. No one seemed to be married, not happily anyway, and no one seemed to want to go home, and there was always some issue to discuss, something to mutter over, someone to hate and abuse—and there was always a bar nearby, or our own rest
aurants, and then finally the clubs . . .

  Question—Do you need alcohol to get through the day?

  Answer—Yes.

  Though I didn’t need it to get out of bed, at least. Then again, I was seldom up before ten or eleven in the morning, and during lunch I might have a drink or two, and throughout the afternoon, if the occasion demanded, I would slip out for a beer. It was all part of the workday, but still, I was seldom drunk before nightfall. The night was where I did my drinking, the night was for the real conversations, the real friends, for Charlie and Maybellene and all the others, and I would no more spend time with them sober than I would try to write my columns without a computer terminal. It would have been possible, perhaps, but the very idea . . .

  Question—Does alcohol ever adversely affect your ability to work?

  Answer—Yes.

  But then nor could I have worked without it, and besides, I was still a success, wasn’t I? I had a photo next to my name, I was someone. I received fan mail in the letters to the editor. I was invited to theatre first nights, movie premieres, private boxes at the races. I dined with actors and government ministers and TV executives. It was all a glittering drunken haze. Failure? Failure was a dark shadow at the back of my mind, somewhere I never slowed down enough to examine.

  Question—Do you ever wish you could stop drinking?

  Answer—Yes.

  At least sometimes I did, as the years went by and I found myself suffering through deepening hangovers that never quite seemed to clear. Or when I noticed that the words did not come as fluidly as they once had, that there always seemed to be a fog in my mind, and that I was fatter, and my heart would thump wildly merely from walking up a flight of stairs. Occasionally on those hungover mornings I would lie in bed and wonder about my life and where it was headed, and the prospect would not be all that pleasing. But it was only a nagging worry, and it would pass by the time I’d had a hot shower and the first coffee of the day. And true, sometimes I’d look back at my last ten or fifteen articles and realise that every single one of them was droll and wry and utterly, utterly trivial, and a dim suspicion would form that the serious business of the newspaper was going on without me—but that too passed, if not with the shower and coffee, then with the first drink at lunch.

  Question—Do you avoid people who do not drink?

  Answer—Yes.

  Well, not exactly avoid them, perhaps, but nor did I seek them out. At the paper, for instance, I was vaguely aware that some people did not drink, didn’t automatically go from the office to the nearest pub, but then who were they? I didn’t know and didn’t care. Some of them were my fellow journalists, but I hardly even read the rest of the paper, barely knew what they wrote. True, sometimes a serious political story would be broken by the Daily Times, and once in particular I was blearily surprised to notice that an investigative journalist on staff had actually won an award for a story covering some scandal. But he was no one I knew. He was thin and dry and dull. I patted him on the back and offered him a drink and then forgot about him. Scandals came and went every day, this was Queensland after all. Besides, I already knew everyone there was to know. I drank with them all the time, didn’t I? I had all the friends I needed.

  Question—Does alcohol adversely affect your sexual activity?

  Answer—Yes.

  But if erections were harder to come by when I was dead drunk, it was no surprise to anyone. And there was still plenty of sex. Alcohol provided the bodies, for all that it hampered the actual event. I had drinking partners everywhere, and my sexual partners were my female drinking partners with their clothes off. The sex was blurred admittedly, as were the relationships themselves, starting and ending from one drinking session to the next. But so what? Later there were the nights at the brothels, the private parties where who it was didn’t matter any more, it was just bodies and noise and rolling around, skin against skin. And then finally, when Maybellene and I gave in to ourselves, alcohol and love curled together into such a dark ecstatic pleasure that we barely needed sex at all, so it didn’t matter that we were hardly ever capable.

  Question—Do you constantly seek out other heavy drinkers?

  Answer—Yes.

  Haven’t I already said? It was what brought us all together, and what held us together. Money, greed, ambition, power— those things floated around as well, for Marvin and Lindsay in particular, but still, that first step into the underworld was in search of a licence to serve alcohol, and alcohol would always remain the focus, even when prostitution and gambling came along on the side. First and foremost we did all those things because we wanted to drink. We wanted a place that never closed, where we could always go at any time of night, so that the night never needed to end. If to achieve that we had to break laws and own the clubs ourselves, it didn’t seem too high a price to pay. At the time, it didn’t seem to be any price at all.

  Question—Has alcohol destroyed any of your close relationships?

  Answer—Yes.

  But surely that was at the end, only at the end, when the world was falling apart anyway. It wasn’t just the drinking, it was the Inquiry, the trials, the convictions, it was Charlie finding out about Maybellene and me, it was Charlie taking up a gun and . . .

  Question—Do you lie to yourself about the effects of your drinking?

  All right, all right, enough.

  They never ended, the questions.

  But you could answer them all, as honestly as possible, and still . . . was I an alcoholic? Should I have stood up and declared, as the AA faithful did, that I had no power over drink? That drink, indeed, had complete power over me?

  The odd thing was that on all the questionnaires there was the one query to which I could always answer no. Maybe it was that question alone that kept the illusion intact. That convinced me that even if there was a problem, it wasn’t out of control, I could deal with it. The question was ‘Have you ever sought medical help because of your drinking?’

  Never.

  Even when I finally quit drinking, I did it on my own. I attended no AA meetings, visited no detox wards, underwent no therapy.

  Which raised yet another question. Was it possible for an alcoholic to quit drinking with no outside help at all? Indeed, did the fact that I quit drinking with no help mean that I was never really an alcoholic in the first place? What was the definition?

  It could circle in on itself infinitely.

  But at the time, even in my most wretched moments, I could never say those four simple words.

  And even after ten years of sobriety, when I knew I would never drink again, I still couldn’t say them.

  So the question remained.

  TWENTY-ONE

  At Jeremy’s dinner table, Louise was opening her third bottle.

  An hour had passed since the meal, and Jeremy himself was increasingly drifting away. The man I knew appeared only for moments, then faded again, replaced by the invalid.

  He was watching Louise, his breathing laboured.

  I watched her, too, as she worked on the cork. This bottle, like the others, had come from a cellar beneath the house. I recognised the label and the dust that encased it, and I knew what it was worth. No one spoke as she filled the glass and then downed it smoothly. The wine made dark stains on her teeth, and the room was filled with the smell of earth.

  It was perverse, but I was fascinated by her. She didn’t drink like other people I’d seen since I became sober. Not like Emily, or anyone else in Highwood. Maybe it was closer to what I was myself once. The wondering came even though I didn’t want it . . . what was the alcohol doing in her veins, in her mind? I felt echoes of it, memories. Rings of pleasure, expanding and expanding. My mouth was dry. What was going on here anyway? For whom was she drinking? Jeremy? It was his wine, and it seemed to be for his pleasure rather than hers. Replacing his withered system with one young and fresh and flung open to the wine and all it could do. But it couldn’t only be that, surely, not just prostitution in some other fo
rm. The way she took the liquid in . . . there had to be a link there of her own. Maybe that was the art of Jeremy and his women. Finding the ones in which the flaw already lay, and then merely providing them with the means.

  I didn’t know. A rich man might indeed buy a ten-dollar whore.

  But did he convince himself that she enjoyed it too?

  Louise’s glance lingered on me a moment, moved away.

  It was getting late. Jeremy seemed exhausted. And yet St Amand’s was still as elusive to me as ever. I needed to know more.

  I said, ‘I went up there, you know, to the detox ward, but they wouldn’t talk to me.’

  And Jeremy’s head inched around. ‘Of course they wouldn’t.’

  ‘You’ve been there, though. I was wondering what it’s like inside.’

  ‘Little rooms, George, lots of little rooms.’

  ‘But what about the treatment? What would Charlie have gone through?’

  He sighed, mustered strength from somewhere. ‘Don’t get any strange ideas, George. A detox ward is a detox ward. St Amand’s is very comfortable, but they don’t do anything unusual there. Charlie was electrocuted. The hospital had nothing to do with that.’

  ‘I know, but it can’t just be coincidence. Something happened in there.’

  ‘You won’t ever find out. Confidentiality is the whole point about a place like St Amand’s. That’s what you’re paying all the money for.’

  ‘Isn’t any doctor the same?’

  He was displeased. ‘How much would the average doctor have to tell? Routine diseases, that’s all. That’s not what St Amand’s is about.’

  ‘Alcoholism is routine.’

  ‘The patients aren’t. Not at St Amand’s. At St Amand’s the Queen herself could be having her stomach pumped, and no one would breathe a word.’

  ‘So they’re discreet . . .’

  ‘No, George. You say it like it’s nothing. But think about what discretion means as a therapeutic tool. Why do you think we Catholics are so ready to confess all our deep and dark sins to total strangers in a booth? Because we like the priest? No . . .’