Bright Burning Things(25)

My breathing is shallow and sharp and concentrating on it in meditation just makes it worse. I don’t share in the meetings. Everyone else seems to find a connection, but this place makes me lonelier than I have ever been. Or perhaps I am facing that loneliness for the first time. It’s strange to think I really might have been addicted. My body tells me I was; my mind tells me I was not, I am not, I am not the same as the people in here. I just drank too much because I missed my former life of excitement and colour and attention. No one could possibly understand that high. And the ferocious comedown in its absence.

But exactly when did I start drinking ‘too much’? A few drinks after I’d come off stage, certainly. Only normal, everyone did that. The time of my pregnancy? Did I? I was so conflicted, never sure I had made the right decision, so alone in that decision, which seemed so out of character, so like I was out to prove a point to Howard, to the world. I am capable of motherhood and I will be brilliant and beautiful. Romantic notions, always.

Is your alcohol abuse linked to becoming a mother, Sonya? Answers, justifications, denials rush in. Of course not of course not of course not.





13


The day finally comes. Fourteen days in and it’s time for my first phone call home. The craving for my boys has taken over any other, the worst of the effects of the chemical addiction having left my body, the tremors over, except for today. With shaking hands – the most severe since day one – I try calling my father’s mobile straight after jelly-for-dinner, and it rings out and out, the unanswered dialling tone sounding like a kind of keening. The winged creatures start to push their way into my throat. ‘Fucking answer, please answer.’ A line of people stand waiting for their turn. ‘Not there, love,’ the man directly behind me says. I slam the phone into its cradle and wonder if my father is avoiding me and what I will do if he never answers.

The following day my anxiety is so high I almost rouse her, my high-kicking sidekick. She hasn’t come anywhere near me in this place, disgusted, I think, by its dullness, its routine, its grey sobriety. Perversely, I miss her.

Visiting hours are two to five, and family members and loved ones can come at any stage between these times. If it’s a minute past five they won’t be let in. He may be a cold bastard but he wouldn’t do that to us; he only enforced this situation for our good. I tell myself this even as the hours slip by, trying to push away the knowledge that he abandoned us before, when I really wasn’t coping on any level. I pace between the front desk and the patch of gravel in front of the main door, not wanting to go far. For the first time since I arrived, the rain has dried up and a few intense rays of sunshine penetrate the thick blanket of cloud. Mr Sunshine has come out to play, Yaya. I lift my face towards the sky, staring directly at the concentration of light, until black spots form and spin. Wheee! Spinnies. My body aches.

I check in at reception every five minutes. ‘You’ll call me on the loudspeaker when they arrive? I can hear it outside.’

The girl nods. ‘That’s the fifth time.’ She picks up her book and covers her face with it. The Secret. That whole ‘you can be anyone you want to be, have anything you want to have’ reductive crap. Doesn’t it directly contradict the whole concept of twelve-step ‘surrender’ and trusting in a Higher Power’s divine plan? A familiar scratchy contempt builds up as I watch the girl’s impassive face soak it all in.

A gravelly voice pipes up behind me: ‘It’s ten to five. Unlikely at this stage.’

I turn around to see Big J, or Jimmy – who I recognise from the meetings, though I’ve never spoken to him before – with bowls of stolen milk stacked in both hands. This is the man who apparently spent eight years behind bars for no one knows what. I’ve become fascinated with him, his air of danger and, by extension, glamour. He’s small and burly, perhaps in his late sixties, arms covered in tattoos, a Celtic cross and the word ‘SAOIRSE’ above a fist within a star inked on his forearm. He tells the best stories ever, but I never know if he’s lying or simply exaggerating. Impossible to tell with anyone in here. A brain that’s been pickled in booze is a tricksy, slippery thing, prone to bouts of grandiosity and fantasy. Which, I guess, if I’m honest (if I’m capable of being honest), I can relate to. I think of all the tall tales I spun in school – my stepmother is a swinger, I’m adopted, my sister died of cot death, my mother died giving birth to me, my baby brother died in a house fire – each one contradicting the last; I never could remember who I told what to and inevitably got tangled up and caught out.

Was I, even then, destined for this?

‘Want to come see the kittens?’

I follow, like a child being lured by a stranger with a promise of sweeties. They’re not coming.

The shed where the kittens are housed doubles up as the smoking shed.

‘Alright?’ The men outside, puffing on their Marlboros or Rothmans.

Jimmy goes inside and kneels, croons at the creatures sleeping in a fleece-lined box under a bench. ‘Come on, little fellas, come to Dadda.’ He lifts them gently by the scruff of the neck and places them at the lips of the bowls. ‘Little buggers can hardly see.’

‘Where’s their mum?’

‘She hasn’t taken to the role. Wild, like the women in here.’

He’s pretty funny.