Again, Rachel, page 18
Over time the speed of our bodies increased and my breaths became shorter. Still I kept my eyes on his and it was intense.
As I began to lose myself, he said, ‘Stay with me.’
But the wildness in my body made me feel vulnerable.
‘Rachel, stay with me,’ he repeated. ‘I love you, it’s all okay.’
I felt exposed and shy, but he held me tight, he held me so tight and all I had to do was take a breath, then the next breath, then the next. There were moments when the sensations in my body became almost too much to bear.
But I stayed.
26
‘Like, I wasn’t banging up every day,’ Chalkie said. ‘It was more in binges. I’d be clean for months – twice I nearly managed a whole year – but both times I started again just before I got my chip from NA. I think I thought I was cured. But guess what? I was still a junkie.’ He shot a veiled smile at me. ‘Sorry, Rachel, I mean addict.’ Then, with more animation, ‘Have you ever noticed middle-class kids are never “junkies”? Right? But poor fuckers, brought up in the flats –’
I cleared my throat. ‘Chalkie, stay on track … So you decided to get clean? Why?’
‘I dunno, really. There I was in some manky sitting room with three other heads, all of us on the nod, and I just knew I didn’t want to do it. Not any more. A new path to the waterfall, amirite?’
‘What was different about that day, Chalkie?’
He shrugged, his eyes burning blue. ‘Hard to say, Rachel. Nothing I can think of. Just, I was done. Other times would have made more sense. After Maarit died …’
Maarit had been the mother of Chalkie’s second child, a daughter, Vida. Maarit had struggled with addiction and about two years earlier had taken her own life.
‘When I stole Rixer’s bail money and stuck it in my arm … the shame of that will be with me till my dying day … But it wasn’t enough to make me stop. And then I just … decided.’
Even though we knew the outcome of this story, we were barely breathing.
‘Was it hope?’ Ella breathed.
He fixed her with his blue stare as he considered. ‘I dunno exactly if I’d call it hope. But I wondered if I tried a new way, if things would be different?’
‘If nothing changes, nothing changes,’ said Trassa – and received a number of startled looks.
‘What’s up with you?’ Dennis squeaked.
Trassa looked confused, as if she didn’t know she’d spoken.
‘I knew what I was facing … withdrawal, like, it’s no joke.’ Chalkie’s short laugh turned into a grimace. ‘“Let this cup pass from my lips.” But I was doing it.’
‘It’s called “a moment of clarity”,’ Giles supplied. ‘Priya talked about it in a lecture.’
Giles was right. Usually a crisis was what shocked an addict into recovery – a job loss, a relationship breakdown, a brush with the law. Sometimes even the threat was enough.
But there were times when, without any immediate drama, addicts just decided to stop, when a rare break in their clouds of denial illuminated how exhausting it was to maintain a habit, how gruelling it was to hurt themselves and others, over and over.
However, moments of clarity were usually preceded by months, maybe even years, of people begging them to stop.
Either way, it was to be seized upon – moments of clarity didn’t usually last long before the window closed up and it was once again Denial City.
Unexpectedly, I was flung back in time, to a morning long ago, in New York. I’d woken early and alone – and I felt different. Inexplicably calm.
Something had shifted and my soul was quiet.
I opened my bedroom curtains. Outside the window, the first hint of dawn hazed the horizon. As I watched, the sun peeped out and light began to spangle over the city. My window was wet – it must have been pelting down earlier. As the sun continued to rise, a ray caught on a raindrop on the glass and broke into the seven different colours of the rainbow, becoming smudged stripes of transparent colour on the wooden floor, right before me.
Seeing ‘signs’ had never been my thing but the same strange calm I’d woken up with was insisting that my personal rainbow was a very clear message: Be brave. Say goodbye. You’ll be fine.
Chalkie was still talking and hastily I tuned back in.
‘I was going to give NA another go,’ Chalkie said. ‘I’d done lots of stints there.’
But he’d never stayed long enough to do any healing – and there was so much for him to heal from. Born to a single mother, an addict, he wasn’t even three years old when she overdosed and died in their home. For seventy-two hours, he sat by her side, trying to wake her up. He’d even attempted to feed her, putting a saucepan on the hob and trying to open cans of soup by tearing off the paper labels.
His father had never been in his life so he lived with his grandmother. Sadly, she died when he was fifteen.
‘Then Skye tells me I’m on her health insurance.’
It was hard to know precisely what to call Skye’s relationship with Chalkie. She was the mother of his eight-year-old son, Tito. After Maarit died, Chalkie had asked Skye to adopt Vida. Now Vida lived with Skye full-time, but Chalkie came and went.
Skye was a social worker and a community activist. Chalkie had said – with warm admiration – she was ‘a working-class woman trapped in a middle-class body’.
‘The health insurance meant I could come in here.’ Chalkie gave me a bold smile. ‘Be the beneficiary of Rachel’s considerable wisdom, get three meals a day, a warm bed at night. But spare a thought for the poor scumbags nodding out on stairwells in the fla–’ He saw my face. ‘Soz. Yeah. You know, I think that it was just my time to stop. You don’t see till you see, you don’t hear till you hear. “The truth must dazzle gradually, Or every man be blind.” Emily Dickinson.’
Ella took in a short, gaspy breath. Her chin trembled as she stared, lovestruck, at Chalkie.
‘Yeh.’ Chalkie slanted a look at Giles. ‘What would someone like me know about poetry?’
‘Well, I –’
‘Ah, you’re all right, Gilesy man.’ Chalkie grinned. ‘I’m just fucking with you.’
Call me delusional, but I was sure there was affection in there somewhere.
Ella’s tears were now in full spate and Harlie was watching, her contempt visible.
I was concerned about Harlie – she seemed to have got bogged down in anger.
Usually, when the truth dawned on addicts, anger was one of the reactions. But people tended to move through it and on to grief, back-and-forthing between the two, often throwing some bargaining into the mix while they were at it. Harlie, however, had landed on anger, liked it and decided to stay.
Since her arrival, I hadn’t made her cry once, a failure that I felt keenly. What if I couldn’t get any further with her? Sometimes – very rarely, mind, but it had happened – people withstood everything I flung at them during their six weeks and left, still in the tight grip of their addiction. It was the worst. Obviously, I felt for the addict and all the people who loved them but – and this was shallow and shameful – I felt like a failure.
I wondered about trying again to get her friend Tegan’s parents to come in. Maybe if they talked to Harlie about their dead daughter, something would shift?
Meanwhile, Ella was still sobbing.
‘What’s up?’ I asked.
‘Nothing,’ she gasped. ‘Just happy that Chalkie is here. That he’s going to be okay.’
‘What about you? Are you happy you’re here? Happy you’re going to be okay?’
‘But I am okay.’
As they filed out at the end of group, Trassa, looking haunted, hung back.
‘Rachel. Would you know if …?’ She clutched my arm. ‘I’m thinking about Ronan.’
I waited. Her grip on my arm tightened and she leant close to me.
‘I’d be afraid’ – her voice was hoarse – ‘that Collie Byrne might hurt him.’
Still I waited.
‘He’s not really a violent type, Collie Byrne. He’ll probably just take some of Ronan’s machinery for the debt. But I was lying awake and I couldn’t stop thinking of …’ Her jaw clenched and her skin was as white as paper. ‘Ronan’s not tough,’ she said. ‘He’s a gentle sort of a lad, he wouldn’t be able to defend himself and – can you help me, Rachel?’
‘What would you like to do?’
‘I could maybe talk to Collie Byrne? Make a plan to pay back the money?’
‘As I understand it,’ I said, carefully, ‘you had already made promises to Collie Byrne. In the past.’
‘But this time I mean it. I meant it the other time too,’ she added quickly. ‘But it’s different now.’
‘What way? You always knew that Collie operated outside the law.’
‘I never really thought about it.’ She looked lost and frightened. ‘I just … knew I’d get the money from somewhere. But tomorrow is Friday, the day Collie Byrne said he’d … I don’t want anything bad to happen to Ronan.’
At long last, she broke down. Fat tears sprang from her eyes and a storm of sobs shook her. ‘He’s my little boy,’ she gasped. ‘I don’t want anyone to hurt him.’
27
‘So! When I first got here I thought you were all insane!’ Roxy was up on a dining chair, giving her farewell speech. ‘And I wasn’t wrong!’ The room erupted into laughter.
The twenty other clients and four of the therapists had come along, as well as Brianna, Nurse Hector, Starling who taught art, Florian the groundsman and Karlin the cook. Karlin had made a special farewell Gateau Diane, Roxy’s favourite. Most people got fobbed off with a preservatives-riddled thing from the garage. No doubt about it, Roxy had been a big hit.
‘I came in here to save my job.’ Roxy beamed around the room. ‘Then discovered I was an alcoholic and drug addict. Fuck my life!’ Radiant with gratitude and optimism, she was a very different woman to the resistant, surly creature who had arrived here six weeks ago.
The one off-note here was poor Trassa. Planked on a chair, with Giles and Chalkie hovering protectively, she looked catatonic. One of her two permitted weekly phone calls had been used to speak to Ronan, to discover that heaven and earth were being moved to get Collie Byrne his twenty grand by tomorrow. That immediate worry had gone but there were much bigger rearrangements taking place in her.
‘Six long weeks ago,’ Roxy declared, ‘I thought an addict was one of those people sleeping in shop doorways! Imagine my shock when I got it – even though I had a job and an apartment I was an alkie.’ She grinned. ‘Let me tell you, I was not happy! I was very, very not happy. Next, I decided I could keep drinking and using, I just needed to be careful.’
‘Bargaining!’ someone yelled.
‘Yep, bargaining. Didn’t last long though. Rachel, over there’ – she pointed to me, leaning against the doorway – ‘said I’d never drink or drug normally again. Ouch! Gurl, you need to learn how to break bad news! Then I cried for eight days solid.’
‘How are you feeling about going Back Out There?’ Chalkie called up to her.
‘Sad, you know? Which is weird. Six weeks ago, I hated this place, hated everyone here.’ Ruefully, she shook her head. ‘Especially Rachel, not gonna lie.’ Then, ‘Sorry.’
‘No need.’ Sort of true. It wasn’t the real me she’d hated.
‘Wow, though!’ She widened her eyes. ‘You knew my bullshit up and down! You are really good at your job. Times even I didn’t know I was lying – but you did. That’s some training you got!’
I allowed myself a little smile.
‘Until I got here, I had no clue how exhausted I was. All. The. Time!’ Roxy said. ‘All the planning … where my next drink was coming from, where I’d get the money to score, having to keep track of all my lies. So let me hear your suggestions for staying clean and sober.’
‘Meetings,’ someone called. ‘Lots of meetings! Get phone numbers from the other women there. Go to your aftercare, every week.’
‘Never forget you’re an addict! Never think you’re cured!’
‘Can’t believe I’m saying this,’ Roxy exclaimed, ‘but I’m relieved everything caught up with me. I was so ashamed all the time. You know?’ She laughed as she scanned the semi-circle of faces. ‘Yeah, you do.’
‘When are we getting the cake?’ Ella muttered.
Confused and uncomfortable, Ella wasn’t enjoying this. And Dennis even less so. Despite me getting it so wrong with Patch, Dennis was wobbling. Plucking him from his everyday life, bombarding him with lectures and AA meetings, removing any access to alcohol and surrounding him with other addicts who’d once been just as resistant, was starting to work. I could see it on his face – a terrible suspicion that he wasn’t that different to Roxy.
‘Some of you here don’t want to stop.’ Roxy said. ‘And I get it, it’s like saying goodbye to the love of your life.’
At her words, something squeezed in me, something I hadn’t felt in a while – the agony, the grief of turning away from the thing I loved the most. It had been excruciating. I’d been clean for a long time but it was good to be reminded that I was still an addict, that I’d never be cured.
‘But addiction is a killer disease, so if you want to stay alive, you’ve no choice. So do it! Now, take one last look at me because in ten minutes’ time, when I walk out that door, no offence, guys, I am never coming back.’
Amid rowdy applause, she climbed down from the chair and embarked on a bout of enthusiastic hugging. I waited till everyone had dispersed, then collared her.
‘I’m very fond of you, Roxy,’ I said, ‘but I do not want to see you in here again.’
‘Got it. Thank you, Rachel. Thank you for everything.’
It didn’t always feel right to hug a departing client but with Roxy there was no way I couldn’t. I held her tight and hoped she’d be happy, and when we pulled away from each other, we both had tears in our eyes.
28
I needed a T-shirt from the hot press so, in my sturdy pyjamas, I zipped from my bedroom onto the landing – at the very moment that the lock on the bathroom door clicked and Devin Costello, wearing only a towel wrapped low around his hips, emerged, in a cloud of steam.
We took one startled look at each other and speedily I retreated to my bedroom, where I raged at the terrible timing. I’d deliberately waited until I’d thought there was no chance of meeting him! The water was still running! What was he doing leaving the bathroom when the shower was still on?
Devin and Kate had shown up late last night. Giggling and sweet, they’d tumbled into the living room to say hello, then commandeered the kitchen, where they did stuff with halloumi. Even with the door shut, I could hear them exclaiming, ‘Squeaky. It’s so squeaky.’ Then laughing like drains.
Young love.
Very young.
Devin seemed very child-like to me, much younger than Luke had been when he’d been only a few years older. Maybe because all kids were more cosseted these days? Or maybe because his parents weren’t short of money?
… Or maybe I was just old …?
They’d gone to bed shortly after I had. For a while the low murmur of their voices and occasional laughter was audible from Kate’s room, then it all went very quiet and I drifted off. Until the sound of a stifled groan – a male one – reached me in my sleep.
Suddenly I was wide awake, assailed by catastrophic thinking. No way could I keep living in this house if I had to listen on the regular to a Costello man doing sex noises in the room next door. I’d have to move out. Or Kate would.
… But poor Kate, that brutal commute from Claire’s. No, it would have to be me. I’d move in with Quin and find someone to help pay my mortgage by sharing with Kate. A young, easy-going type, who didn’t mind a home with inadequate sound insulation.
But I couldn’t take things with Quin to the next level just to escape Luke Costello’s nephew.
Or could I?
It had taken me hours to get back to sleep, only to land right into a nightmare. It was New York, more than twenty years ago, and Luke was yelling, ‘You’re lying.’
‘I’m not, I’m not, Luke, I’m not,’ I stuttered with fear.
‘But I’ve found your hiding places! See!’ Dramatically, he ripped a strip of paper from the wall and hundreds of tablets tumbled out, bouncing to the floor and around the room. ‘Why did you lie? You know that’s worse than taking drugs.’
At the start of the dream, we were both in our twenties, then, as happens in dreams, we changed and looked like we do now, him with his shorter hair and unfamiliar coat, me with my smooth Botoxy forehead and new trainers.
When I woke up, I was shaking. God, that had been awful. Since that phone call from Joey Armstrong, so many long-buried feelings had been flung to the surface.
It was 7 a.m., anyway, nearly time to get up. Then I heard, ‘It’s so squeaky!’
So, they were awake.
Moments later, one of them (Devin, it transpired) went into the bathroom and shut the door. Then opened it again and called, ‘Which shower gel do I use?’
‘The Origins one. Guess why?’
‘Because it’s so squeaky?’
‘Yeah!’
He laughed, she laughed, they probably laughed next door in Benigno and Jasline’s, Crunchie was doubtless in convulsions downstairs in the kitchen. Good job I was already awake, I wanted to yell.
Then it occurred to me that I’d have to wait until Devin finished because the heating system couldn’t handle two hot showers simultaneously. Breathing angrily, I stomped about, organizing my clothes, only to remember that all of my T-shirts were in the airing cupboard.
The shower was still running. Good stuff, I thought, I was safe. So, out I went – and disaster struck.
During her time living here, other boyfriends of Kate’s had stayed over – twice or three times the infamous Isaac (an arse), and there was some other one-off randomer she’d found somewhere. I couldn’t have cared less what they’d thought about me, but there was a real fear that Devin might suddenly drop some disparaging remark at the dinner conversation, with Luke present. You know the way young men carry on about any woman over the age of sixteen? The utter scorn they pour on us? ‘Ew, the state of Kate’s auntie. I saw her in her literal pyjamas! Imma poke myself in the eyes with a rusty compass before I’d go through that again!’
