Another Love (29 page)

‘Wh… where are you? We’ve been worried sick! I got the message that you’d lost your phone, and then David said he saw you and you looked ghastly, and I said to your sisters, she might have lost her phone, but she knows our number, it’s the one we’ve always had and I learnt it to her… I learnt it to her in case she ever got lost…’ Her mum’s voice broke away in sobs. ‘I’ve been so worried.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I can’t sleep worrying about you. Dr Morrison said he’d give me something, but I don’t want to go down that route and end up like Marjorie up the road. Are you okay?’ she asked, finally.

‘I’m okay, Mum.’ It was the best she could offer. ‘And I’m working at getting myself together. I just wanted to say don’t worry. Don’t worry about me.’

‘Don’t worry about you? How can you say that? I’m your mother! Don’t worry about you? Of course I’m going to worry about you. And the girls keep asking for updates and I have nothing to tell them, because I don’t know myself. I don’t know what’s going on, I’ve hardly heard from Celeste.’

Romilly felt her chest cave, as if she’d been stabbed. The image that she’d suppressed of her beautiful girl was there in an instant. Her mum carried on.

‘I said to your dad, I feel like everything is broken and I don’t know how to put it all back together again! My family is spread all over the bloody place. I’ve got Holly in Ibiza getting up to God knows what, Carrie in Bath with Dr Whatsisname and now you, just gone!’

‘I’m not “just gone”, Mum, I’m in London and I’m trying to find my feet.’ She was still getting used to speaking without two of her teeth, the canine to the right of her mouth and the molar next to it, which had flown out of her mouth and rolled away like marbles when she’d fallen face first down some steps. Her tongue had acquired the habit of falling through the gap mid speech, making her sound drunk or stupid. At this thought she gave a small, ironic smile.

‘Oh, wait a minute, hang on! Your dad’s here, he’s coming. Hurry up, Lionel! I don’t know how long she’s got!’ There was a thud and then fumbling and crackling down the line and then the wonderful sound of her dad’s voice, his kind and soothing voice, unflustered.
My same old dad.
It was almost more than she could cope with.

‘Hello, Romilly,’ he began in his slow, singsong tone, as though they’d been catching up as they always used to, with her sitting in the kitchen of the house in Stoke Bishop, chatting over a cuppa while she planned what to make for supper and kept an eye on the clock, or during her lunch break at work, nattering to him in the lab while she ate a plastic-wrapped sandwich and he pottered in the greenhouse. He used to read her snippets of a scientific nature that he’d gleaned from magazines, as though she had an interest in all aspects of science, from space exploration to brain surgery, as though science was science, and she loved him for it.

‘Dad…’ She was overcome with emotion, which made her feel weak, and that made her feel scared.

‘I’m right here. You know you can always come home and you know that I will come to wherever you are, whenever you need me, to
bring
you home. You know that, don’t you?’ She could tell he was smiling, from the gaps in his breathing and the way he was sounding out his words. ‘You just need to say the word and I’ll be there, quicker than you can say Jack Flash. I love you, Romilly.’

This was a rare and heartfelt admission from a man who was better at saying it with the gift of tomatoes.

‘I love you too, Dad.’

*

Father Brian had been quite clear when she’d told him that she didn’t even know if she believed in God. She’d thought it best to be honest. ‘In fact I’m pretty sure there is no God. I’d say I’m ninety-nine per cent certain, with one per cent of scepticism in reserve, in case I’ve got it horribly wrong and when the time comes I have some explaining to do.’

He had thrown his head back and laughed loudly, slapping the thighs of his grey slacks. ‘Romilly, dear…’ He stroked his dense grey beard. ‘That’s the great thing about doing his work: he doesn’t specify who we help. And maybe your one per cent of scepticism is a gateway that will lead you somewhere really interesting. I mean, you’re not saying that the door is closed completely.’

She smiled at the kindly priest, licking her dry lips. Sobriety was the one condition of staying here and she was finding it challenging. Even the medication prescribed to take the edge off her cravings was only helping a little.

‘I think if it’s not closed completely, then there’s a massive boulder blocking the way,’ she levelled.

Father Brian leant forward. ‘Ah, Romilly, if that’s all it is, then we’re laughing. Might I suggest you read Luke 24:3; we do a good line in boulder removal.’ He winked. He liked her and this gave her hope that he might be able to help.

The hostel, Chandler House, was a pale brick Victorian building housing a rabbit warren of rooms that were reached via narrow corridors with concrete floors and bare light bulbs. On each corridor hung a large cork pinboard with the rules of the establishment printed out in big fat bullet points, and various leaflets for charities offering Fresh Start training, counselling or therapies for people with addictions. Each room had two bunk beds with a narrow strip of floor visible between them, and each room smelt of human misery. The ones that housed the frail and the incontinent were the worst.

The smell of the place was part of the problem. If she left her room and went out into the fresh air of the pretty little garden at the back or walked the streets and saw the sun, there was a painful period of readjustment when she came back inside. By staying put, she spared herself this. There were showers and loos on each floor and for this small comfort she was extremely grateful.

The hostel was situated a couple of streets back from the designer shops and neon signs of Covent Garden’s Long Acre. In her previous life, she too had once sauntered round these shops, brandishing heavy paper bags with fancy ribbon handles. She’d come with her sisters a couple of years back. They enjoyed a posh afternoon tea, went to see the musical
Mamma Mia
, ate noodles late night in Chinatown, bought high-heeled shoes and giggled like teens. It had been the best couple of days. Now, though, Romilly didn’t venture too far from the hostel, and she rarely went anywhere after dark. Instead, she lay in her top bunk with the window open and listened to the cabs beeping their horns, the buses with their squeaky brakes ferrying people to their homes, and the loud, drunken voices in the streets that made her own cravings pulse.

One of her roommates was Scottish Gladys, who talked incessantly to herself but avoided talking to anyone else. She occasionally called out into the darkness with some snippet of information – ‘I had them all christened, I did!’ – usually random, but enough to make Romilly wonder about the life that had gone before. The other roommate called herself T and, unlike Scottish Gladys, liked to speak a lot. Her favourite topic was Leighton, her ex-boyfriend, who was in prison, not that it was his fault. ‘No, he was fitted up by his wanker mates, and when he gets out, they’d better run, cos he’s had eighteen months to think about how he’s going to shit them up…’ Romilly refrained from jumping in with the punchline night after night.

She tried to avoid thinking about her own loved ones. It was too painful. But sometimes the least little thing triggered a memory and the tears came. Like the evening she found herself unwrapping a small packet of two fruit shortcake biscuits that someone had given her, the kind you might get on a tray in a budget hotel. As she nibbled the soft edge, dropping sugary crumbs down her nightdress, a conversation floated into her head.
‘In fact I sometimes think if I didn’t have to shop and cook for you two, I’d still live off biscuits and crisps and the odd bit of toast. I’d go back to being like a little nibbling mouse.’
She saw herself standing in her beautiful kitchen on that glorious sunny morning with the people she loved. The stream of tears made her nose run and her sobs made it almost impossible to swallow the flavourless grains.

She looked for ways to distract herself. After lights-out, she’d pull the thick grey blanket up over her shoulder, lie on her side and stare at a stain on the shiny pale green wall. She decided it was a map of the world and she spent hours looking at each country, thinking about its food and vegetation, its sea, land and mountains, its animals and insect life. She thought of all the places she had visited and those she wanted to visit, using her mind to escape from the room in which she found herself and the desperate, all-consuming desire for a drink that threatened to drive her insane.

*

Romilly had completed the first phase of the Clean Life, Clean Start programme and had managed to remain alcohol-free for two weeks. This earned her another month in the programme and today she was going to attend her first meeting, the beginning of phase two.

Father Brian smiled and nodded his encouragement as she walked into the room. He had the wonderful knack of making her feel special, and judging by other people’s reactions to him, she was not alone. There were filing cabinets and bookshelves lining the walls and she rightly figured that this dusty old place that smelt like a library was used as an office during the day. But now, with all the desks pushed to one side and the chairs placed in a circle in the middle, it was serving as a meeting room.

Romilly was quiet. She pulled her hair into a ponytail and fastened it at her neck as she took deep breaths to try and calm her flustered pulse. She was nervous, scared about so many aspects of this, not least about starting, properly starting something that she didn’t want to fail at. She couldn’t afford to fail.

Pulling out one of the chairs in the circle, she took a seat and glanced at the other ten or so people gathered around her. It was the usual cross-section – male, female, old, young, black, white. She now understood that this affliction was indiscriminate; it could get its hooks into anyone: a clever, clever girl like her or even an academic surgeon from Stuttgart.

A young woman opposite checked her phone and stretched her legs out into the circle, crossing them at the ankle as she sighed. Father Brian clapped twice, his voice calm but commanding.

‘Good evening, everyone, and thank you so much for your punctuality and your willingness to be here. I would encourage all of you to keep your hearts, eyes and minds open. We’re here to see if we can learn from the experiences of others and, more importantly, to help support each other through this difficult time. I’d like to remind you though that the hardest thing is coming here in the first place and you have all achieved that and so be proud of taking that very difficult first step and know that you are not alone. You are not alone.’

He paused and smiled at each of them and Romilly felt warmth spread through her.
I don’t want to be alone any more. I miss my little girl. I miss my David. I miss me…
She shook off the emotion that threatened, knowing she had to keep it together.

Father Brian invited a man to speak. He shuffled to the edge of his chair and told of his journey, conquering his nerves to explain how he had been a maths teacher for many years at a boys’ school in Kent but had then lost his wife and had been unable to cope. Romilly looked at the girl with the phone, sitting opposite her. She saw how her eyes rolled with impatience and how she stole glances at the large clock on the wall. She then sighed and shoved her hands into the pockets of her bomber jacket and Romilly could read her mind.
‘I’m not like these people, these poor bastards. These people have serious issues, but me? I’m different; I’ve just hit a bump in the road.’

She didn’t realise she was crying until Father Brian spoke to her. ‘Romilly? Would you like to say something?’

He smiled and stood to hand her a large box of tissues. She grabbed a few and held them to her running nose. Then she nodded and took a deep breath. She’d sat in on sessions like this so many times before, at The Pineapple and in Austria, and they’d never felt relevant or real, but this one was different.

‘I… I’ve lost my husband, my home, my job and I don’t see my little girl, my beautiful girl.’ She pictured Celeste. ‘I can’t see a future for me if I don’t stop drinking. I had it all, and that’s the hardest part for me, I really had it all… But I need some help. I do.’ She gulped her tears. ‘I need some help because… because I’m ill. I am ill. I’m… I’m an alcoholic.’ She let her head fall to her chest as she remembered waking with her head next to a bag of dog shit. Her tongue probed the hole in her gum where her tooth once lived.

‘I’m an alcoholic.’ She sobbed. ‘I know it here…’ She touched her trembling fingers to her head. ‘And I know it here…’ She laid her fingers on her heart. Sitting up straight, she looked at Father Brian, who smiled at her. ‘I’m an alcoholic.’

I guess you could say I grew less curious about my mum as I got older. I knew that she was living in London. Aunty Holly and Aunty Carrie saw her once and tried to fill me in, but it was hard for them to soft-soap what they’d seen, make it appropriate for my young teenage ears, and just as hard for me to hear it. They spoke about her with an affection that I found hard to match. It was as if they were talking about a total stranger. I didn’t have the decades of memories and closeness they did or the advantage of adult perspective that could visualise things restored. I tried to picture her with this other life and it made it seem very final. I knew then that she definitely wasn’t coming home any time soon, if ever.

Annie, who at that stage was Dad’s new friend, made it easier for me to talk about her. She was a wonderful conduit between Dad and me; still is. My life is definitely richer for having her in it.

Ironically, I still used to
imagine, sometimes, that Mum had died. I concluded that it wouldn’t feel that different if she had: I never saw her, never heard from her, and I was used to it being just Dad and me, with Granny Sylvia coming to stay every so often.

It was around this time that I went to my first grown-up party, the first party where there was snogging and smoking and not party games and cake. It was hosted by a boy called Ben, a friend of a friend who had been shoved into an expensive boarding school and whose parents were living abroad; he’d managed to get the keys for their house, which was bursting at the seams with teenagers. To be there was exciting and scary all at the same time. My friends were desperate to get drunk, swigging at anything that was passed to them. Amelia pressed a glass bottle of beer into my hand. It was open, and half-drunk, and I went to swig from it just like everybody else. But as I brought it near my mouth, the smell hit me. It was just the same as that sour smell that used to be on my mum’s breath when she tucked me in at night, that her minty chewing gum could never quite mask. I had a sudden flash of memory of my mum passed out with her pants around her ankles and covered in sick, with my dad standing over her with his sad smile, the one where he was trying to be kind and patient even though every drop of booze that touched her lips just drove him further and further away from her. My friends teased me and said I was being a baby, but I didn’t drink a mouthful that night, and I still don’t drink. I told my friends I just didn’t like the taste, and that’s the story I’ve stuck with ever since.