Rachel's Holiday
Page 115

Telling Luke that Brigit was a slut because I was afraid he fancied her There went another life.
Going to an exhibition opening with Luke and leaving with some guy called Jerry. And another life.
Faster and faster the unwelcome thoughts came.
Calling round to Wayne’s at four in the morning, and waking his entire apartment because I was so desperate for Valium. KER-ANG!
Anna saying she didn’t want to end up like me. BAM!
Getting the sack. POW!
Getting the sack again. BIFF!
Forgetting to rebutton my body when I went to the loo at a party. And spending the evening not realizing it was hanging out over my jeans, with everyone thinking I was wearing an eighties’ bum flap. Several lives went with that one.
Thinking I was going to die from throwing up after a night on the rip. BANG!
Getting nosebleeds every second day. POW!
Waking up covered in bruises, with no idea how I’d got them. ZAP!
Waking up in hospital wired up to drips and a monitor. Lost a life.
Realizing I’d had my stomach pumped. And another.
Seeing clearly that I could have died. And another, and another and another.
Game over.
After the following Thursday’s NA meeting, when I’d been at the Cloisters nearly five weeks, my day of reckoning finally arrived.
Things started innocuously enough. We rounded up the usual suspects and off we all marched to the Library at eight o’clock.
To my disappointment, the person who’d come to talk to us was a woman. Another woman. By then I suspected that Francie was an outrageous fantasist, so I wondered if her story of ‘There’s boys in them thar NA meetings’ was just another of her inventions. The woman’s name was Jeanie and she was young, skinny and good-looking. Just as with Nola’s story, every word that came out of Jeanie’s mouth sent me reeling with recognition as I hurtled headlong towards the ground-opening, earth-yawning shock of seeing my addiction.
She opened by saying ‘By the time I came to the end of my drug-using, there was nothing in my life. I had no job, no money, no friends, no relationship, no self-respect and no dignity.’
And I was so shaken with understanding, it felt as if the ground had physically tipped and swung beneath me.
‘My drug-taking had shut down any forward impetus in me. I stayed stuck, living the life of a teenager when everyone around me was behaving like an adult.’
A bigger, more violent shock, threw me completely off balance.
‘In a way, my using fossilized me, I was surviving in suspended animation.’
With terrible dread, I began to realize that this time the shaking and upheaval wasn’t going to stop until it had reached its dreadful conclusion.
‘And the funny thing was…’ she smiled around at us as she said this ‘… I thought my life was over when I had to stop using. But I had no life!’
Take cover, this is the big one.
That night I couldn’t sleep. In the same way that an earthquake can turn a house upside down so that the kitchen table stands on the ceiling, my unwelcome insights changed the position of every emotion and memory I had. Altering their relation to each other, challenging the rightness of their original position. The universe inside my head tipped and swayed, everything upended and relocated, in places that would have once seemed wrong, illogical, impossible. But, I reluctantly admitted, they were in the places they should have been all along.
My life was a wreck.
I had nothing. No material possessions, unless debts count. Fourteen pairs of shoes that were too small for me was all I had to show after a lifetime of profligate spending. I no longer had any friends. I hadn’t a job, I hadn’t any qualifications. I’d achieved nothing with my life. I’d never been happy. I had no husband or boyfriend (even in my despair I refused to use the word ‘partner’. What am I, a cowboy?). And the thing that hurt and confused me most was that Luke, the one man who had seemed to truly care about me, had never loved me.
It was Friday, the following day, and with perfect timing Josephine started in on me in group. She knew something was up with me, everyone did.
‘Rachel,’ she began with, ‘you’re here five weeks today. Any interesting insights into yourself during that time? Perhaps you can see now that you’re suffering from addiction?’
I found it hard to answer because I was in shock, had been since the night before. I was trapped in a strange, phantasmal place where I had realized I was an addict, but sometimes I found it so painful I switched back to not believing it.
I couldn’t accept that, in spite of all the defences I’d erected since I’d arrived at the Cloisters, I’d nevertheless ended up the same as every other inmate. How did it come to this?
There was that air that pervades when the dictator of a country is about to fall. Even when the rebels are at the gate, no one really believes that this invulnerable tyrant is going to crumble.
The end is nigh, I told myself.
But immediately another voice questioned – What? Do you mean right nigh?
‘Have a look at this,’ Josephine said casually, passing me a sheet of paper. ‘Read it out to us.’
I looked, but the writing was so crooked and unformed, I could barely make anything out. An occasional word –‘life’, ‘pits’ – was all that was legible.
‘What is this?’ I asked in exasperation. ‘It looks like it’s been done by a child.’
I laboured through it, until I got to a line that said ‘I can’t take anymore.’ My blood froze as I realized I was the one who’d written these incoherent ramblings. I vaguely remembered deciding that ‘I can’t take anymore’ would be the tide for my poem about the shoplifter who was going straight. I was horrified. Being brought face-to-face with something I’d done when I was off my head was deeply shocking. I stared and stared at the spidery scrawl. That’s nothing like my handwriting I must have been barely able to hold a pen.
‘You can see why Brigit thought that was a suicide note,’ Josephine said.
‘I wasn’t trying to kill myself,’ I stammered.
‘I believe you,’ Josephine said. ‘Even so, you still nearly managed to.
‘Frightening, isn’t it?’ She smiled, then forced me to pass the note round the room.
In group that afternoon, I tried a desperate last-ditch attempt to wriggle out of being an addict.