by Marian Keyes
“You. Your mother. Your mother is almost a permanent fixture here.”
“Really?” I hooted with surprise.
“Well, actually, now that you mention it, she hasn’t been here in a while. Sent you instead, has she?”
“Er, no…”
“Why not?” he asked. “What’s happened?”
“She’s left Dad,” I said, expecting sympathy.
Instead he laughed. Kind of. He really was behaving oddly.
“So she finally did it,” he chuckled, while I stared at him, my head on one side, wondering what was wrong with him.
And what was he talking about, saying that Dad was drinking himself to death? Why did everything come back to Dad and drinking?
Somewhere in my head, something had started its slow descent into place and I was frightened.
“And now you’ve taken over where your mother left off?” asked Dr. Thornton.
“If you mean, am I taking care of him, then, yes,” I said.
“Lucy, go home,” he sighed. “There’s nothing you can do for your father; we’ve tried everything. Until he decides to stop drinking, nobody can do anything for him.”
More things slotted into place in my head.
“Look, you’ve got it all wrong,” I said, fighting against what I knew to be true. “I’m not here about his drinking. I’m here because there is something wrong with him and it’s got nothing to do with drinking.”
“Well, what is it?” he asked impatiently.
“He wets his bed.”
There was a silence. That’s shut him up, I thought, nervously, hoping that it really had.
“Bedwetting’s an emotional thing,” I went on, hopefully. “It’s nothing to do with drinking.”
“Lucy,” he said grimly. “It’s got everything to do with drinking.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said, feeling sick with apprehension. “I don’t understand why you’re saying all these things.”
“Don’t you?” he frowned. “But you must know, of course you know. How can you live with him and not know?”
“I don’t live with him,” I said. “At least I haven’t for years, I’ve just moved back.”
“But hasn’t your mother told you all about…?” he asked, looking at my sick, anxious face. “Oh. Oh. I see. She hasn’t.”
I could feel a trembling in my lower thighs, I knew what he was about to tell me. This was the disaster that I’d been avoiding all my life and now here I was face to face with it. This was the big one. There was almost a sense of relief, I could stop evading and avoiding now.
“Well,” sighed Dr. Thornton. “Your father is a chronic alcoholic.”
My stomach lurched. I had known and yet I hadn’t known.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“You really didn’t know, did you?” he asked, a little more kindly.
“No,” I said. “But now that you tell me, I can’t understand how I didn’t know until now.”
“It happens a lot,” he said, wearily. “I see it over and over again, where there’s something very amiss in a home and everyone acts as if there’s nothing wrong.”
“Oh,” I said.
“It’s as if they have an elephant in their living room and they all tiptoe around pretending not to see it.”
“Oh,” I said again. “Well, what can I do?”
“To be quite frank, Lucy,” he said, “this isn’t really my area. I only know about physical ailments. If you father had, let’s say, an ingrowing toenail or maybe an irritable bowel, I could suggest all kinds of treatment. But this family therapy, psychodrama, confrontation kind of stuff isn’t something I’m familiar with. It came after my time.”
“Oh.”
“But are you feeling all right?” he asked hopefully. “Has all of this come as a shock? Because I can do shock, that’s something I do know about.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said, getting up to leave. I had to get away to deal with what he’d told me, I couldn’t get out fast enough.
“No wait,” he said urgently. “I could give you a prescription.”
“What for?” I asked. “A new father? One that isn’t an alcoholic?”
“Don’t be like that,” he said. “Sleeping tablets? Tranquilizers? Antidepressants?”
“No thanks.”
“Well, I’ve another suggestion that might be of help,” he said thoughtfully.
Hope ricocheted in my chest.
“Yes?” I asked breathlessly.
“Plastic sheets.”
“Plastic sheets?” I asked faintly.
“Yes, you know, to protect the mattress from…”
I left.
I went away in a state of shock. When I got home, Dad had fallen asleep in his chair, leaving a cigarette burning into the armrest. He jerked awake when I came in.
“Will you run down to the liquor store for me, Lucy?” he asked.
“Okay,” I said, too shell-shocked to argue. “What do you want?”
“Whatever you can afford,” he said humbly.
“Oh,” I said coldly. “You want me to pay for it?”
“Weeelll,” he said vaguely.
“But you got your check only two days ago,” I said. “What did you do with it?”
“Oh Lucy,” he laughed, kind of nastily. “But you’re your mother’s daughter and no mistake.”
I left the house, subdued, feeling sick. Was I just like my mother? I wondered. At the liquor store I bought him a bottle of real whiskey instead of the funny cheap stuff from Eastern Europe that he usually got. But I was still edgy, still desperate to spend money on him, so I bought cigarettes and four bars of chocolate and two bags of tortilla chips.
When my expenditure hovered around the twenty-pound mark, I was able to breathe easy again, secure in the knowledge that my extravagance had destroyed any similarity to my mother.
I couldn’t stop thinking about what Dr. Thornton had told me. I didn’t want to believe him, but I couldn’t help it. I tried looking at Dad in the old way and then in the light of him being an alcoholic. The alcoholic light fitted better. Fitted perfectly.
Dr. Thornton’s revelation had knocked down the first domino, the rest were hitting the deck at high speed. Like red wine spilled on a white tablecloth, the knowledge poured through my life, back to my earliest memory, tainting everything.
And it should be tainted. It was tainted.
I had been looking at my life, my father, my family from upside-down, and suddenly it had come upright. I couldn’t cope with the way everything really was.
The worst thing was that Dad looked different to me. Like someone I’d never met before. I tried not to let it happen. I didn’t want the man I loved to waver and disappear right before my eyes. I had to love him. He was all I had.
That evening, I kept sneaking looks at him, at all the things that had happened, all the signs. I tried to control
it, just to look at a little bit of my life at a time, to dole out the unpleasantness in easy-to-manage, bite-size pieces. I tried to protect myself, not to overwhelm myself with the loss of it all.
But I couldn’t stop seeing him differently.
He no longer seemed lovable and cute and cuddly and great fun. But drunk and lopsided and slurred and incapable and selfish. I didn’t want to think that way about my father, it was unbearable. He was the person I’d loved most, maybe the only person I’d ever really loved. And now I found that the person I had adored didn’t even exist.
No wonder he was always such fun when I was young. It’s easy to be playful if you’re drunk. No wonder he sang so much. No wonder he cried so much.
The one thing that stopped me from really going crazy was the hope that maybe I could change him. I could reluctantly admit that he had a drinking problem, only if I could say that it was a solvable problem. I’d heard that people with drinking problems got better. All I had to do was find out how to go about it. I’d fix him. My father would be back and everyone would be happy
.
Chapter 71
So I made another appointment to see Dr. Thornton. I was full of hope, convinced that there would be a way to save Dad.
“Can you prescribe something for him so that he won’t want to drink?” I asked, confident that there would be something on the market for that.
“Lucy,” he said. “I can’t prescribe anything for you to give to him.”
“Okay,” I said eagerly. “I’ll get him down here in person and then you can give him a prescription.”
“No,” he said annoyed. “You don’t understand. There’s no cure for alcoholism.”
“Don’t call it that.”
“Why not, Lucy? That’s what it is.”
“So what’s going to happen?”
“He’ll die if he doesn’t stop drinking,” he said.
Fear made me dizzy.
“But we’ve got to make him stop,” I said desperately. “I’m sure I’ve heard of heavy drinkers who’ve managed to stop. How have they done it?”
“The only thing that sometimes seems to work is AA,” he said.
“What’s tha…? Oh, you mean Alcoholics Anonymous,” I said, understanding. “Well, I don’t think he needs to go there. I mean, it’s full of…of…alcoholics.”
“Exactly.”
“But seriously.” I almost laughed. “Smelly old men, with strings around their coats and plastic bags around their feet? Come on now, my father is nothing like that.”
Although on second thought, he was fairly smelly, he never seemed to actually have the numerous baths that he ran, but I wasn’t going to tell Dr. Thornton that.
“Lucy,” he said. “Alcoholics come in all shapes and sizes, men and women, young and old, smelly and fragrant.”
“Really?” I asked with scepticism.
“Yes.”
“Even women?”
“Yes. Women with homes and husbands and jobs and children and nice clothes and high heels and perfume and pretty hair….” he trailed off sadly. He seemed to be thinking of someone in particular.
“So they go to this AA place and what happens?”
“They don’t drink.”
“Ever?”
“Never.”
“Not even at Christmas and at weddings and on holidays and things like that?”
“No.”
“I’m not sure he’d go for that,” I said doubtfully.
“It’s all or nothing,” said the doctor. “And with your father, it’ll be nothing.”
“Okay,” I sighed, “if it’s our only option, let’s tell him about this Alcoholics Anonymous thing.”
“Lucy,” said Dr. Thornton, sounding annoyed again. “He knows. He’s known for years.”
I broached the subject that evening. Eventually. I kept putting it off and in the end Dad was drunk before I brought it up.
“Dad,” I quavered nervously. “Did you ever think that maybe you were drinking too much?”
He narrowed his eyes at me. I’d never seen him like that before. He looked different. Like a nasty, vicious, drunk old man, one you’d see on the street, flailing about, shouting slurred insults and trying to hit someone, but being too drunk to do any real damage.
He was watchful, eyeing me as if I was the enemy. “My wife has just left me,” he said aggressively. “Are you going to deny me a drink?”
“No,” I said. “Of course not.”
I wasn’t very good at this.
“You see, Dad,” I went on cautiously, hating every second of it. I wasn’t his parent, I was his daughter. He was supposed to tell me off, not the other way around.
“It’s a question of money,” I forged ahead, wimpily.
“I see, I see,” he said in a raised voice. “Money, money, money. Always whining about money. You’re just like your mother. Well, why don’t you leave me too. Go on, get out. Go on, there’s the door.”
That put an end to that conversation.
“Of course I won’t leave you,” I whispered. “I’ll never leave you.”
I was damned if I was going to admit that my mother had been right.
But shortly after that Dad seemed to get far worse. Or maybe it was just that I was aware of it now. That he drank in the mornings became obvious. And that he caused fights in the local pub. And a couple of times the police brought him home in the middle of the night.
But still I held myself together. I couldn’t go to pieces because I had no one to help me pick them up.
I went to Dr. Thornton again and he just shook his head abruptly when he saw me and said, “Sorry, no miracle cures have been invented. Unless it’s happened since ten o’clock this morning.”
“No, wait,” I said eagerly. “I’ve been reading about hypnosis—couldn’t Dad be hypnotized to stop drinking? You know, the way people are hypnotized to stop smoking or eating chocolate?”
“No, Lucy,” he said, sounding annoyed. “There’s no proof that hypnosis works and, even if there was, the person being hypnotized has to want to give up the cigarettes or whatever. Your father won’t even admit that he drinks to excess so there’s no chance that he’ll decide that he wants to give up…. And if he says he wants to give up, then he’s ready for AA,” he added smugly.
I rolled my eyes. Him and his damn AA.
“Okay.” I wasn’t disheartened. “Never mind hypnosis. What about acupuncture?”
“What about it?” he asked wearily.
“Couldn’t he have that done? Couldn’t he have a little pin stuck in his ear? Or someplace?”
“Someplace indeed,” he muttered. Quite nastily, actually. “No, Lucy.”
So, as a last resort, I found the number for Alcoholics Anonymous in the phone book and called to ask them what I should do with Dad. And although they were very nice and sympathetic, they told me that I could do nothing for him, until he himself admitted that he had a problem. That rang a vague bell with me, I’d picked that up from popular culture at some stage. And something else. If the person admits they have a problem, that’s half the battle. But I didn’t believe it.
“Come on,” I said annoyed. “You people are supposed to stop people drinking, so stop him drinking.”
“I’m sorry,” said the woman I was speaking to. “No one can do it except him.”
“But he’s an alcoholic,” I burst out. “Alcoholics aren’t supposed to be able to stop by themselves.”
“No,” she said. “But they must want to stop for themselves.”
“Look, I don’t think you understand,” I said. “He’s had a very hard life and his wife has just left him and, in a way, he has to drink.”
“No, he doesn’t,” she said. Nicely.
“This is ridiculous,” I said. “Can I speak to your boss? I need to speak to an expert here. He’s a very special case.”
She laughed. And that made me even more annoyed.
“We all thought that we were special cases,” she said. “If I had a pound for every alcoholic who said that to me, I’d be a rich woman.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked coldly.
“Well, I’m an alcoholic,” she said.
“Are you?” I asked in surprise. “You don’t sound like one.”
“What did you think I’d sound like?” she asked.
“Well…drunk, I suppose.”
“I haven’t had a drink for nearly two years,” she said.
“Nothing?”
“Nothing.”
“I mean, nothing at all?”
“No, nothing at all.”
She can’t have drunk very much, I thought, if she’s been able to abstain for two years. She was probably a two-spritzers-on-a-Friday-night type of person.
“Oh, well, thank you,” I said, getting ready to hang up. “But I don’t think Dad is anything like you. He drinks whiskey and he drinks it in the mornings.” I said it almost boastfully. “He’d find it very hard to stop. He’d never be able to go without a drink for two years.”
“I drank in the mornings,” said
the woman.
I swallowed. I didn’t believe her.
“And my favourite drink was neat brandy,” she went on.
“A bottle a day,” she added when I still didn’t say anything. “I was no different from your dad.”
“But he’s old…” I said desperately. “You don’t sound old.”
“There’s people of all ages in AA. Lots of old people.”
“I can send someone by to talk to him,” she suggested.
But I thought of how angry he’d be, how humiliating he would find it and thought better of it.
Then she gave me the phone number of another group of people called Al-Anon and said that it was for friends and families of alcoholics and that they might be able to help me. So, as a last resort, I called them. I even went to one of their meetings, expecting to be given all kinds of tips to help Dad stop drinking—how to hide the booze in the house, how to water the drinks, how to persuade him not to drink until after eight in the evening—that sort of thing.
And I was outraged to find that it was nothing like that.
Everyone there talked about how they were trying to leave their alcoholic husband or boyfriend or wife or daughter or friend or whatever to their own devices and simply get on with their own lives. One man talked about his mother being a drunk and how he always fell in love with helpless women who had drinking problems.
They were all talking about something called “codependency,” which I knew about, because I’d read so many self-help books, but I couldn’t see how it applied to me and my father.
“You can’t change your dad,” one woman said to me. “And by trying to, you’re just avoiding your own problems.”
“My dad is my problem,” I said huffily.
“No, he isn’t,” she said.
“How can you be so heartless?” I asked. “I love my father.”
“Don’t you think that you’re entitled to a nice life?” she asked.
“I couldn’t just abandon him,” I said stiffly.
“It might be the best thing that you ever did,” she said.
“The guilt would kill me,” I said self-righteously.
“Guilt is a self-indulgence,” she said.
“How dare you,” I said. “You haven’t a clue what you’re talking about.”
