The John Milton Series: Books 1-3 (77 page)

A round of warm applause was punctuated by whoops from the eager alkies in the front row.

“I know, it’s good, best thing I’ve ever done, but despite it being his cash that allowed me to stay in my place, give me somewhere to anchor myself, the stability I need to try to do all this stuff, he don’t necessarily share the sentiment. He’s not into community outreach, know what I mean? So he sent a couple of guys around yesterday. They made it clear that I’m running out of rope. He wants his money back. With the interest and ‘administration charges’ and all that shit, I’m looking at the thick end of six grand.”

He laughed at this as if it was a particularly funny joke, then put his head in his hands and started to sob. His shoulders quivered, and Milton watched him awkwardly until one of the other guys shuffled across the seats and put his arm around him.

There was silence for a moment until he recovered himself. “I got a job now, like you all know about, but even though it’s the best thing that’s happened to me for months, it still barely covers my rent and groceries, and if I can save twenty bucks a month, then I reckon I’m doing well. That don’t even cover the interest on the loan, not even close. I don’t expect any of you to have any clever ways for me to fix this. I just wanted to share it because, I gotta be honest, I’ve felt the urge to go and buy a bottle of vodka and just drink myself stupid so I can forget all about it. But I know that’d be a crazy idea, worst thing I could do, and now, especially after I’ve shared, I think maybe I can keep it behind me, at least for now. But I’ve got to get this sorted. The more it seems like a dead end, the more I want to get blasted so I can forget all about it.”

MILTON WAS STACKING the chairs at the end of the meeting, hauling them across the room to the walk-in cupboard, when he noticed that the woman he knew as Eva was waiting in the entrance hall. She was sitting against the edge of the table, her legs straight with one ankle resting against the other, with a copy of the Big Book held open before her. Milton watched her for a moment, thinking, as he usually did, that she was a good-looking woman, before gripping the bottom of the stack of chairs, heaving it into the air and carrying it into the cupboard. He took the cloth cover from the table, tracing his fingers over the embroidered A.A. symbol, and put that in the cupboard, too. He shut the cupboard, locked it, then went through. Eva had stacked all the dirty cups in the kitchen sink.

“Hello,” she said, with a wide smile.

“Hello. You all right?”

“Oh, sure. I’m great. Just thought you could do with a hand.”

“Thanks.”

She stood and nodded down at the table. “Where does that go?”

“Just over there,” Milton said. “I’ve got it.” He lifted the table, pressed the legs back into place, picked it up, and stacked it against the wall with the others. He was conscious that she was watching him, and allowed her a smile as he came back to pick up the large vat, the water inside cooling now that the element had been switched off. She returned his smile, and he found himself thinking, again, that she was very attractive. She was slim and petite, with glossy dark hair and a Latino complexion. Her eyes were her best feature: the colour of rich chocolate, smouldering with intelligence and a sense of humour that was never far from the surface. Milton didn’t know her surname, but she was a voluble sharer during the meetings, and he knew plenty about her from the things that she had said. She was a lawyer, used to work up in Century City in Los Angeles doing clearance work for the networks. Now she did medical liability work at St Francis Memorial. She was divorced with a young daughter, her husband had been an alcoholic too, and it had broken their relationship apart. She had found the rooms; he hadn’t. She shared about him sometimes. He was still out there.

“Enjoy it tonight?” she asked him.

“Enjoy might not be the right word.”

“Okay—get anything from it?”

“I think so.”

“Which other meetings do you go to?”

“Just this one. You?”

“There’s the place on Sacramento Street. Near Lafayette Park?”

Milton shook his head.

“I do a couple of meetings there. Mondays and Fridays. They’re pretty good. You should—well, you know.”

He turned the urn upside down and rested it in the sink.

“How long is it for you?” she asked.

“Since I had a drink?” He smiled ruefully. “One thousand and ninety days.”

“Not that you’re counting.”

“Not that I’m counting.”

“Let’s see.” She furrowed her brow with concentration. “If you can manage to keep the plug in the jug for another week, you’ll be three years sober.”

“There’s something to celebrate,” he said with an ironic smile.

“Are you serious?” she said, suddenly intense. “Of course it is. You want to go back to how it was before?”

He got quick flashbacks. “Of course not.”

“Fucking right. Jesus, John! You have to come to a meeting and get your chip.”

Anniversaries were called birthdays in the rooms. They handed out little embossed poker chips with the number of months or years written on them, all in different colours. Milton had checked out the chip for three years: it would be red. Birthdays were usually celebrated with cake, and then there would be a gathering afterwards, a meal or a cup of coffee.

He hadn’t planned on making a fuss about it.

He felt a little uncomfortable with her focus on him. “You’ve got more, don’t you?”

“Five years. I had my last drink the day my daughter was born. That was what really drove it home for me—I’d just given birth, and my first thought was, ‘God, I really need a gin.’ That kind of underlined that maybe, you know, maybe I had a bit of a problem with it. What about you? You’ve never said?”

He hesitated and felt his shoulders stiffen. He had to work hard to keep the frown from his brow. He remembered it very well, but it wasn’t something that he would ever be able to share in a meeting.

“Difficult memory?”

“A bit raw.”

The flashback came back. It was clear and vivid, and thinking about it again, he could almost feel the hot sun on the top of his head. Morocco. Marrakesh. There had been a cell there, laid up and well advanced with their plan to blow up a car loaded with a fertiliser bomb in the middle of the Jemma el-Fnaa square. The spooks had intercepted their communications, and Milton had gone in to put an end to the problem. It had been a clean job—three shots, three quick eliminations—but something about one of them had stayed in his head. He was just a boy, they said sixteen but Milton guessed younger, fourteen or fifteen at the outside, and he had gazed up at him and into his eyes as he levelled the gun and aimed it at his head and pulled the trigger. Milton was due to extract immediately after the job, but he had diverted to the nearest bar and had drunk himself stupidly, horribly, awfully, dangerously drunk. They had just about cashiered him for that. Thinking about it triggered the old memories, and for a moment, it felt as if he was teetering on the edge of a trapdoor that had suddenly dropped open beneath his feet.

He forced his thoughts away from it, that dark and blank pit that fell away beneath him, a conscious effort, and then realised that Eva was talking to him. He focussed on her instead.

“Sorry,” she was saying, “you don’t have to say if you’d rather not, obviously.”

“It’s not so bad.”

“No, forget I asked.”

A little brightness returned, and he felt the trapdoor close.

“It’s fear, right?” she said.

“What do you mean? Fear of what?”

“No, F.E.A.R.” She spelt it out.

He shrugged his incomprehension.

“You haven’t heard that one? It’s the old A.A. saying: Fuck Everything and Run.”

“Ah,” Milton said, relaxing a little. “Yes. That’s exactly it.”

“I’ve been running for five years.”

“You still get bad days?”

“Sure I do. Everyone does.”

“Really? Out of everyone I’ve met since I’ve been coming to meetings, you seem like one of the most settled.”

“Don’t believe it. It’s a struggle just like everyone else. It’s like a swan, you know: it looks graceful, but there’s paddling like shit going on below the surface. It’s a day-to-day thing. You take your eye off the ball and, bang, back in the gutter you go. I’m just the same as everyone.”

Milton was not surprised to hear that—it was a comment that he had heard many times, almost a refrain to ward off complacency—but it seemed especially inapposite from Eva. He had always found her to have a calming, peaceful manner. There were all sorts in the rooms: some twitchy and avid, white-knuckling it, always one bad day from falling back into the arms of booze; others, like her, had an almost Zen-like aspect, an aura of meditative serenity that he found intoxicating. He looked at them jealously.

“What are you doing now?” she asked him impulsively.

“Nothing much.”

“Want to get dinner?”

“Sure,” he said.

“Anywhere you fancy?”

“Sure,” he said. “I know a place.”

THEY WERE THE ONLY people in Top Notch. Julius took their order and set about it with a cheerful smile, and soon, the aroma of cooked meat filled the room. He brought the burgers over on paper plates and left them to get on with it, disappearing into the back. Milton smiled at his discretion; there would be wry comments when he came in tomorrow. The food was as good as ever, and the conversation was good, too, moving away from A.A. to range across work and family and life in general. Milton quickly found himself relaxing.

“How are you finding the Steps?”

“Oh, you know…” he began awkwardly.

“Which one are you on?”

“Eight and nine.”

“Can you recite them?”

He smiled a little ruefully. “‘We made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.’”

“And?”

“‘We made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except where to do so would injure them or others.’”

“Perfect,” she said. “My favourites.”

“I don’t know. They’re hard.”

“You want my advice? Do it in your own time. They’re not easy, but you do feel better afterwards. And you want to be careful. Plenty of people will be prepared to take your amends for you—”

“—and they can, too, if they’re prepared to
make
my amends.”

“You heard that one before?”

He smiled. “A few times. Where are you? Finished them?”

“First time around. I’m going back to the start again now.”

“Step Ten: ‘We continued to take a personal inventory.’”

“Exactly. It never stops. You keep doing it, it stays fresh.”

Eva was an easy talker, something she affably dismissed as one of her faults, but Milton didn’t mind at all; he was happy to listen to her, her soft West Coast drawl smoothing the edges from her words and her self-deprecating sense of humour and easy laughter drawing him in until it was just the two of them in an empty restaurant with Julius turning the chairs upside down on the tables, a hint that he was ready to call it a night and close.

“That was really nice,” she said as they stood on the sidewalk outside.

“It was.”

“You wanna, you know—you wanna do it again next time?”

“I’d love to.”

“All right, then, John.” She took a step toward him, her hand on his shoulder as she raised herself onto tiptoes and placed a kiss on his cheek. She lingered there for a moment, her lips warm against his skin, and as she stepped back, she traced her fingertips across his shoulder and down his arm to the elbow. “Take it easy, all right? I’ll see you next week.”

Milton smiled, more easily and naturally than was normal for him, and watched her turn and walk back towards where she had parked her Porsche.

PETER GLEASON was the park ranger for the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. He had held the job for twenty years, watching all the communal spaces, making sure the fishermen and water sports enthusiasts observed the local regulations, keeping an eye on the wildlife. Peter loved his job; he was an outdoorsman at heart, and there couldn’t be many places that were as beautiful as this. He liked to say that he had the best office in the world; his wife, Glenda, had heard that quip about a million times, but he still said it because it was true and it reminded him how lucky he was.

Peter had been a dog-lover all his adult life, and this was a great job to have a hound. It was practically a requirement. He had had four since he had been out here. They had all been Labradors. Good dogs, obedient and loyal; it was just like he always said, you couldn’t go far wrong with a Lab. Jethro was his current dog. He was two years old and mongrel, part Labrador and part pointer. Peter had picked him out as a puppy and was training him up himself. He had the most even temperament out of all the dogs, and the best nose.

It was an early Tuesday morning in December when Peter stopped his truck in the wide, exposed and bleak square of ground that served visitors to Headlands Lookout. It was a remote area, served by a one-track road with the waters of Bonita Cove at the foot of a sheer drop on the left. He stepped carefully; yet another dense bank of fog had rolled in overnight and visibility was down to twenty yards. It was cold and damp, the curtain of solid grey muffling the sound. The western portion of San Francisco was just on the other side of the bay, usually providing a splendid vista, but it was invisible today. The only sign that it was there was the steady, eerie boom of the foghorns, one calling and the other answering.

There were only two other cars in the lot. Fishermen still visited with reels to try to catch the fluke, bluefish, winter flounder, mackerel, porgy and weakfish that abounded just offshore, and as he checked, he noticed that a couple of them had followed the precarious path down the cliff face to get to the small beach. Oystermen came, too, even though the oyster beds, which had once been plentiful, had grown more scarce. There was still enough on the sea bed to make the trip worthwhile: hard-shelled clams, steamers, quahogs, bay scallops, blue-claw crabs and lobsters. Others came with binoculars to watch the birds and the seals. Kayakers, clad in neoprene wetsuits, cut across the waves.