Serious Sweet (19 page)

MEG WAS DIFFERENT
now.

She was different and currently at work on forcing her life to be different. She felt, for example, that it should involve more happiness.

This was all possible, because of a difference she hadn't worked on – one which appeared to choose her.

On the 28th of March 2014, Meg had woken at something like lunchtime inside the flat she had inherited from her parents. Waking was not, at that time, a good or a welcome feature of her life. It made her frightened and regretful. Her first experience of herself in any day was one of disappointment.

Not disappointed in who I was. Or that too, but more I was disappointed to feel I was still breathing. I was clinging on. Again. For more of the same.

The flat she was, by then, kind of camping inside contained what was left of her parents' choice of furniture: 1970s, often brown. The place also contained her mother's choice of decor – occasionally brown, but also cream and beige, although with a brownness about it. And then there were objects and ornaments of various types which had been somehow made existentially brown by continuing exposure to – she had to admit it – Meg.

Over time, the brown had become more powerful and convincing. It had spread. The brown grew to be this mystical
shade of bloody doom that inhabited and rambled – a visible curse.

There was something about persistent drinking – home drinking, house drinking, house everything, locked-in everything – that generated brown. The sweating and fretting and regular visits of minicabs and the bottles handed over at the door by ashamed-for-you drivers – wet hands, crumpled money, no further pretence about parties, of just running a little short on reasonable sociable supplies – there was something about each little blow and cut of damage that made everything you touched or looked at become brown.

Even the air – the not-at-all thin, but unpleasantly thickened air. Like fucking gravy, like oxtail soup with madness in it – the madness of dead spinal columns and roll-eyed livestock. It had, by then, taken a shedload of effort just to peer through the interior – brown air, brown walls, brown carpet, brown remaining furnishings and fittings – or even to find anything in what had once been a passable family home.

No, it wasn't passable, it was a good home. It was concerned, attentive, generous, with Sunday dinners and
Songs of Praise
on the telly when the hymns still had tunes and you could like and remember them, even if you didn't believe in one syllable, and there had been books and unbroken crockery and no tear in the stair carpet. A decent humanity had abounded. No brown.

I never got the hang of it on my own. Didn't feel I could belong – not until I'd spoiled it, fouled my own nest.

I suppose I was never quite in phase with it once I got beyond thirteen, but I did my best, while probably not meaning well. And I moved out in the way that people used to when children could afford to leave their parents and, fuck me, I was an accountant and that's a profession and a success story and very appropriate for the daughter of other upwardly inclined people. My parents had bettered themselves, as they say. They did it at a time when that implied you were resourceful, not that you were bad: Mum a secretary in a university geography department and Dad a chemist, in the sense of his owning and running a chemist's shop. (Maggie was another kind of chemist, I know.) And they didn't have anything handed to them. The post-war world opened up for them, sure, and showed them possibilities, but they both had to fight themselves free of jobs on production lines, or some other doomed way to earn a living, a place in manufacturing. They didn't have the hand skills or the mindsset to thrive in a trade – so they went to work clean and came back that way. No industrial illness.

Dad's shop got squeezed out, eventually, when the street around him died, but he was eager for retirement by then – would have enjoyed it, too, if Mum hadn't died.

Dad wasn't why I got the interest in chemicals – and I never involved him or the pharmacy. I didn't sink that low.

Be honest – I would have tried, but his security was too tight.

After a while, just drinking is too hard – you don't have the stamina to match your pace of need. So you intervene with other substances. It's quite logical. It's not like you're a junkie. It's only inadvertent when you find yourself sharing the junkie world, which isn't nice, isn't friendly, doesn't run at a comfortable speed for drunks.

With Mum and Dad gone – when they went … died, that's the word – when one died and broke the other's heart … when the other one was murdered by sadness … After that, I slid. Or else, I slid faster. I slid right out of my profession and out of my own home to deal with my debts and into theirs and thank Christ by then I was too disorganised to sell it, liquidate it, liquefy it – probably saw the writing being pissed up the wall.

So there I was defiling everything they'd left me and the air made of poisoned gravy and everything I looked at being wrong … I was wrong.

On that 28th of March, she had reached roughly lunchtime and the curtains were closed because that was how the curtains stayed and nothing was especially remarkable about the terribleness of the day. Nevertheless, she'd hit the point when her existence had become no longer possible.

Her life as she was running it – and life was all about running as fast as she could – that life never had been possible, but now it was, for the first time, truly, really fucking clear that she had no future.

There was this moment.

A golden moment.

Like a door that swings open, some remarkable door and it gapes, pauses, examines you and wants you to give a look back and see and see and see – that's all you need do – you see how everything is golden, and then the moment's hingeing round and it'll shut and you're going to be caught on the wrong side and you know that you either have to run – when you're good at running – and you'll get through now, get out to something new, or else you never will. That's that.

You don't know where getting out would take you, or what it might involve.

You do know that your only other choice is dying and that dying might be bad.

Real dying – not the daydreams – doing that might be hard.

And inside the gold of the moment, Meg became distant to herself in a way that was useful. This let her consider calmly that she would either have to make a phone call and ask for assistance, or else head off and fill the grey-ringed bath with the lime-corroded taps (Mum would have been ashamed) and sit down in the water and finally get around to slitting her wrists as she had often planned to, but never quite had enough time for until today. Killing herself had been like a pleasant holiday she'd not been able to arrange because of her busy schedule, what with the drinking having been a very pressing kind of occupation.

I had two professions. I let the accountancy drop – it lacked glamour.
Her realisation had meant she was facing a decision and decisions always required that she should drink.

Only in that moment, that golden moment, she didn't feel like drinking. She didn't want to – didn't fancy it.

This was not usual.

She had an idea that there was, in fact, not anything left available that could be drunk, but this did not diminish the strange reality of no longer being thirsty in her particular way and of being in a state which did not involve the burning and always asking –
pleaseGodletmegoawayagain –
the begging for drink or some chemist's replacement for drink. And strangely – bad practice for an addict – she happened to have nothing chemical to hand.

Still … decisions, decisions … They were waiting.

Meg had felt most inclined – calmly, evenly – towards the wrist thing. There had been an idea, long set in place, to make the cuts lengthwise, along the veins, and get it right and never mind the pain and mess and tediousness of putting up with herself while it happened and then finally she'd be posted out to a peaceful country, no stamp required.

Meg truly in her heart had not wanted to face the phoning-for-help thing. Speaking to someone would always be harder than death – this was obvious. And she had attempted such calls at other times, if she was being fastidious about accuracy. She had called many people up over the months and wanted help more and less truthfully and been, meanwhile, messed about by crying and horrors more or less hugely, while she attempted to say she was never sure what. There was no longer anybody who welcomed her calls, who had enough compassion. There was not enough compassion on earth.

Throw me a lifebelt and I'll tell you it's not the right colour. I'll sling it back. There has only been one moment when all of me has wanted to be helped. I think that's right. Only one golden moment.

People get bored with other people who are harming themselves and unable to stop and who want to go on about it at three in the morning over the phone. That's fair enough.

Then roughly lunchtime on the 28th of March arrived – that small place in the whole of time.

It had made Meg feel tired. Beyond any previous tiredness – and she was usually exhausted – it had yanked all the scraps of strength from her and left her simply wanting to give up and drop – be at peace.

Even the idea of the razor blades tired her – the way they were constantly ready in a stack next to the soap dish,
like a tease, like a promise, like a fire exit that leads into a furnace that is guarded by a clever dog.

She'd heard inside herself, perhaps outside, a voice like her own saying, ‘I'm not doing very well. Please. And I am so fucking tired. Please. Can you help?'

The phone call won.

It won for no reason Meg had found she could really remember since.

Gold doesn't need reasons – or it eats them up and keeps them safe from you.

Gold happens. It's not brown.

Be gratefulgratefulgrateful. Remember to be grateful.

So they tell me.

And I tell myself that they are right.

Perhaps the threat of death had seemed more convincing than at other times and final in a way that was real and could spur her on to self-defence. Nothing was clear.

Golden.

She had dialled the number listed for AA – despite feeling this would be an unhappy choice and irrelevant and wasting a stranger's afternoon. She had spoken and cried and listened and spoken – mostly cried – and felt as a person does when that person is drowning and blazing and drowning and worn out with it.

Golden.

So that was March, then.

And she'd gone back to the AA meetings and had further strangers – and near strangers – walk across echoing rooms to tell her that she was welcome in what she felt was a semi-automatic way, but a semi-automatic welcome is still a welcome and maybe some of them meant it … They didn't mean it, surely didn't mean it, when she said how many sober days she'd collected, or when people would call out, when there were these scattered voices saying that she'd done well, or that complete strangers were glad she was there – that was just some kind of courtesy thing, that was like a reflex – but when people came up and made an effort and told her to her face they were glad to see her or glad to see her again – weird – glad to keep on seeing her … That seemed real in some way. And nobody patted either of her arms.

At first, though, she liked to assume that the warmth and concern apparently offered in the meetings was drawn from habit and not kindness. Habit felt safer than kindness. Meg didn't want
anything tender happening to her, because tenderness breeds tenderness and leaves you undefended.

They started to greet me by name and ask after details. How are you? That's a detail.

AA is not exactly as advertised in that way – it isn't exactly anonymous.

And it's hard to agree that you're alcoholic because that makes you feel a failure. Not the usual kind of failure – a drunk's always a failure – it's mainly you'd rather not know that everyone else in the alcoholic club allegedly can feel the same ways you feel and think the same ways you think, but they deal with it better and happier and drier. They deal with it dry.

This meant that I had a problem with both of the As in AA.

But there was tenderness.

You can't avoid it.

They can't avoid it.

And you get thankful.

It can't be helped.

Apparently.

Allegedly.

You can be helped.

Apparently.

Allegedly.

And I spent a while clinging almost to that alone, so that I could stay sober.

Apparently.

Allegedly.

Those two golden As.

Apparently.

Allegedly.

Meg, newly sober and clean and starting again, once again, was less thankful and more in self-inflicted agony than anything.

They said the agony was self-inflicted. Sort of good news, because it means you can make it stop. Not good news, because you're not to be trusted and will not do any such thing.

But she sat tight in the meeting rooms and in the echoes of ‘Hi, Meg.' Stuck with the whole palaver, all the rest of the ways
the not very anonymous alcoholics went about things: clapping and having to listen while other people talked and having to talk while other people listened.

Fucking purgatory.

She held on.

She counted days – clean days, dry days – and announced them to others who were also collecting days as if they were valuable, transferable, pleasant. She piled them one on top of the other, or imagined herself to be laying them down like the bricks of a wall that she wouldn't climb back over again into razor blades and brown.