nights was slipping. The cracks were showing. The worry about keeping my cover left my back aching and my hands fidgeting, rolling cigarettes. I was in a dangerous loop, now consciously drinking to ease the shame of what I’d done while drinking the night before.
The things I did in shared flats were usually not so much bad or dramatic as stupid and annoying: making a mess when trying to cook drunk late at night; eating flatmates’ food as I never had enough of my own; their alcohol drunk and replaced, drunk and replaced; asking to borrow ten or twenty pounds to see me over until payday, then going to the off-licence, slipping back into my room with the door closed and the window open.
I would put a token number of bottles and cans in the recycling, then tie up the rest in carrier bags and push them into dustbins on the street. I left the house chinking and smelling of stale booze. There were empty bottles in the bottom of my wardrobe and empty cans lined up along my bedroom skirting board.
My behaviour brought tension into the household: unpredictable noise levels; Tuesday-night parties with strangers, men I brought home; leaving my handbag outside the front door and possessions trailing up the stairs. These episodes were followed by the depressive shadow of my hung-over days in bed.
I was always getting into horrible states but what other people perhaps didn’t realise was that I didn’t want to get into horrible states. I remember and respect the people who had the courage to try to talk to me about my drinking. I would nod and cry but after the break-up I was self-pitying and self-justifying. ‘You’re quite right to be worried about me,’ I’d say. ‘I’m in pain.’ He’d left me because of my drinking so now I was free to drink.
It wasn’t the break-up that tipped my drinking out of control, although I used it as an excuse. While I was still living with my boyfriend, I went to a friend’s birthday party in a bar in central London. I left after an hour or so and a couple of drinks, saying I was tired or ill or going home to write when in fact I was going home to drink alone at a faster pace than the drinks were coming there. That evening I chose alcohol over friends and had crossed a line. After this, I crossed lines quicker and quicker, choosing to drink despite warnings from work, doctors, family and the law.
I wished there was a reset button on my emotions, history and compulsions so I could forget about what I had lost as I lay awake listening to shrieks and bass from the street below. I made plans to be out there, getting it back, jolting emails from daybreak, getting fit, having a radical haircut and typing the words that would save me, but it didn’t happen and I kept ending up in the same place.
Half cut in bed I wanted to speak to him and whispered out loud, ‘I am shining a light over the city for you. Stay warm, keep safe, wherever you are.’
Everyone began to know that I was trouble. I didn’t get invited to so many parties. I was a burden, the girl who always cried. I knew I was in trouble after that Saturday. I hadn’t thrown the bottle at the girl’s head although that was what it had looked like to everyone in the pub whose eyes turned at the crash and scream. Instead I threw the bottle down towards the table and it ricocheted upwards to hit the innocent, now-screaming girl. I realised the differentiation did not matter.
There were many times I recognised I had a problem and resolved to change. I went to some AA meetings. On a concrete step outside a church after a meeting in Holborn, drinking a milkshake, watching Boris Bikes pass me, I had an unexpected feeling of calm but that weekend I was in a mess again, drinking from two p.m. until two a.m., climbing over walls. To show my distress one night I stripped naked in a stranger’s flat.
Over the course of a month I was involved in events that meant I appeared in court twice, first as a criminal, second as a victim. I’d only ever been into a courtroom as a newspaper reporter before.
Referred by a doctor, I started going to a counsellor on Friday afternoons; she made me write a ‘drink diary’ and I promised to limit my intake. Later that day I was in the off-licence, buying just two cans but going back half an hour later for more. It was never just two cans although I told myself, on hundreds of occasions, it would be. I spent my nights drinking alone in my bedroom, increasingly few people inclined to talk to me, in another undistinguished job. I thought, now I was single, it would be a good time to ‘have dinner parties’ and ‘take my portfolio to editors’ but I found myself crying in doctors’ surgeries, waking lower and lower each morning with more mysterious bruises.
Part of me enjoyed the wildness of running across London, alone on the top deck of a bus with a can of lager, but it was rarely fun at the end of the night, drooling and lonely. I never gave myself up completely – I always tried to function at work, eat well, stay social and afloat – but it was a painful and exhausting cycle, trying to maintain a hold on balance, always trying desperately to smooth my rough edges.
In another new house, a flat in an ex-council block in Tower Hamlets, my flatmates began to understand that I was drinking alone in my room, then coming out in wildly different moods, and confronted me about it. I got a by-now-familiar ‘We need to talk’ email, followed by the sickening drop in my stomach. I’d let people down before and couldn’t bear to fuck up again. Broke and borrowing money to buy booze or convincing the local shopkeeper to give me some cans on tick, I avoided bumping into my flatmates and neighbours in the corridor because I knew they could hear me crying at night.
It was not the outer chaos – the problems with other people and money, the lost and broken possessions – that was the worst thing. The worst thing was the state inside my head. The suicidal feelings were increasing in frequency and strength. I was not in control of my emotions. My thoughts and behaviour were swirling and unstoppable. He doesn’t love me any more. I miss him. I don’t know what to do with myself. I can’t see how I can go forward or how I can get over this. ‘You have to tackle the alcohol problem,’ they said, but how could I when I felt like that? I felt like a sheep stuck on its back: I knew I’d suffocate but it was easier just to stay lying in the hollow.
Months passed: a winter, a disastrous trip to Orkney, where I spent time in a police cell, another under-employed summer. I couldn’t believe the sadness had gone on for so long. The searing panic was something beyond me and I ignored all rules and safety measures to follow it, a slave to the habit of pain. Eyes always brimming with tears, I had fortnight-long headaches, bad dreams I couldn’t wake from. I had gone beyond and didn’t know how to get back. I saw the pattern from the curtains of my farmhouse bedroom. I could feel the tremors, and the wind of memory was flowing through me too fast to hang on.
Everything had been speeding up during the years I had been in London until I was out of control. The city required me to filter so much out – faces, advertisements, events, poverty – and my mind had been making the filter ever tighter until all that I was left with was whirring space. I was dumbfounded and unable to make decisions about where to go, whom to see or what opinion to hold, filling the void with alcohol and anxiety.
And I cried that I was adrift, helpless to the irrational need, the desire. I was falling, swirling, trying to find a point to hold on to, but as I grasped, any target moved further away.
I was running out of options. Although there was lower I could fall – more trouble, further to be cast out – for me, this was enough. One night I had a moment, just a glimpse but it was expansive and ambitious, as if the blinkers were temporarily lifted and my view was flooded with the light, when I saw a sober life could be not only possible but full of hope, dazzling. I held on to that vision and told myself this was my last chance. If I didn’t change, there was nowhere else for me to go but into more pain.
8
TREATMENT
ON MY BELLY ON THE floor, back arched, arms stretched behind, fingers locked, I was trying to hold
