Further Under the Duvet (22 page)

Right from the start, I was waking up with razor blades of dread in my stomach, dying at the memory of something I’d said or done the night before, praying it was only a dream. Shamefaced morning-after phone calls became a feature of my life, a feature that would continue for sixteen years.

But despite all that, I was a conscientious student (too much of a scaredy-cat not to be) and when I left school I went to university and got a law degree. Something I should have been proud of, but I wasn’t; as soon as something was
associated with me, it became tainted and when everyone else in my class went off to become high-powered lawyers, I showed what a free spirit I was by going to London and becoming a waitress.

Bizarre? Certainly. The act of a person with no self-esteem? Without a doubt. But this was Ireland in the mid-eighties, concepts such as ‘self-esteem’ hadn’t yet been invented.

Eventually I ended up getting a job in a small accounts office, where I radiated resentment for every second of the eight years I was there. Part of my job description was to give out petty cash and I behaved as if it was my own money I was giving away. Clearly I wasn’t fulfilled but, where a normal person would just go and get another job, when it came to doing good things for myself, I was paralysed. Besides, I wasn’t interested in a career (so I told myself; I told myself this a lot, especially when my flatmates got pay rises and promotions). I was interested in Having A Good Time. And for a long time it was a lot of fun; I was in London, I was young, free and single, there were bars and clubs and parties, there was always someone up for A Good Time and alcohol was a punctuation point to every aspect of my life. Sorrows to drown? Have a drink! Celebrating? Have a drink! Neighbour’s dog has died? Have a drink!

All social events were simply excuses to facilitate drinking. There are many, many plays whose second half I haven’t seen; I’d get someone in a headlock at the interval and persuade them that it would be much more fun just to stay at the bar.

I drank fast. But so did everyone else. Like most alcoholics,
I’d tried (subconsciously) to surround myself with people who drank as much as I did, so that my drinking wouldn’t stand out. In the name of Having A Good Time, there were many nights when I couldn’t remember how I’d got home, I’d started waking up covered with unidentifiable bruises (or men), frequently I was too sick to go to work, but I honestly thought that was how it was for everyone.

All the boxes in my life were ticked: I had flatmates, gym membership, a hair-serum obsession, food issues, boyfriends. Okay, so my relationships never worked out. But wasn’t that all part of it too? Nights in with my flatmates, drinking Chardonnay, bemoaning the crapness of men.

However, around my late twenties, things started to go very wrong. My behaviour when drunk had started to become ever more extreme and unpredictable; I’d be aggressive or maudlin or in dancing-on-tables, drink-spilling high spirits. I could never tell in advance who I was going to be, but they were all horrible people I didn’t recognize.

‘I’m sorry’ became my most overused phrase and most Monday mornings began with me making fervent promises to my flatmates and my friends and my colleagues and, most of all, myself that I’d never drink again. This was
it
: no more drinking. I’d start going to the gym again, eating healthily, maybe even do a nightclass in something. But sooner or later – and it started to become sooner and sooner – I’d cave in and have a drink and then I was back on the merry-go-round. Once I started I couldn’t stop. And once I stopped, I couldn’t stay stopped.

Around then the people I had partied with for years began to behave strangely – starting to get married, buy new
couches, have children; in short, settling down. Everything was changing and it frightened me – especially as they’d begun to use the word ‘alcoholic’ about me. Defensively, I bristled that just because I hadn’t bought a new couch didn’t give them any right to call me an alcoholic. And I really didn’t think I was: denial is a massive component of the condition, always one step ahead of me, obscuring the truth, growing as the disease grew, always slightly bigger.

I simply didn’t think it was possible for a young woman in her twenties, with a job and a flat and nice shoes, to be an alcoholic. Alcoholics were other people, marginalized people, who had involuntary dreadlocks and shouted at invisible enemies in the street.

But when my friends continued to insist that I was an alcoholic and that I needed help, I cut off contact. I stopped going out and began to drink on my own where there was no one to judge me, and thus began my final descent into full-blown alcoholism. Every weekend I drank around the clock, even waking in the middle of the night to drink. But weekends were starting on Thursday or even Wednesday and spilling over into Monday and Tuesday; I had become – although I wouldn’t have known the phrase – a binge drinker.

More and more I was sick and missing work, I’d all but stopped eating and washing myself. I would wake up in the half-light, not knowing if it was dawn or dusk and thoughts of suicide surrounded me like wraiths. Wretched with depression and paranoia, I found the world was a hostile place and I hated leaving my flat because I felt everyone in the street was staring at me. (Which, in fairness, they probably were. I wasn’t big on personal grooming at the time.)

At this stage I was down to one flatmate and she’d stopped coming home, too afraid of the state she’d find me in. Occasionally I rang my sister in New York, slurring that I was going to kill myself. Self-centred beyond belief, I was prepared to lose everything; I’d hitched my star to alcohol, my best friend, my lover and I would go wherever it took me.

Incredibly, thanks to a concerned, understanding boss, I still had a job, but other than that, my life was like a blank piece of white paper which was folding in on itself, halving itself again, then again, so that there was almost nothing left.

My depression got blacker and bleaker, my suicidal thoughts got more and more graphic. I used to pray to a God that I didn’t believe in that I wouldn’t wake up in the morning. And when I did wake, it was as though the jaws of hell had opened.

Throughout this time, I was desperately grateful for alcohol. It seemed like the only good thing in my life, all that stood between me and total misery. I never made the connection that I was miserable because of alcohol.

Then one afternoon, in September 1993, two weeks after I’d turned thirty, when I should have been at work, but instead was at home waiting out the aftermath of yet another binge, killing time until the shaking, nausea and terror had passed, I read a short story in a magazine. It was funny and quirky and something in me responded, ‘I’d like to do that.’ (People often ask me who wrote the short story, but I don’t know, I didn’t keep it. I had no clue that a life-altering shift was taking place.)

It was very out of character for me to feel like doing anything other than drinking, but I hunted around my bare little flat, found an A4 notepad and a pen, then sat down and, without stopping from start to finish, wrote a short story. (A sweet little piece about an angel who loses a bet and comes to earth. I was ridiculously proud of it.)

I’d had no idea that I wanted to write but, in retrospect, the timing made sense: my life had become reduced to almost nothing, it was as if I was standing on a piece of land that was getting smaller and smaller, eroded by alcohol, and the crisis had cracked open something buried deep inside me in a last-ditch attempt to stop me disappearing entirely. (Not a route I would recommend for any aspiring writers, but we get what we get.)

Over the next four months I wrote four more short stories, all of them a reflection of my state of mind at the time. One was about a woman who has died and hasn’t yet realized; she wanders around in her own life wondering why no one can see her. Another was about a credit card who falls in love with his owner.

I was thrilled with them. I wasn’t one of those secretive writers who would die if anyone stumbled across their work – I was practically stopping strangers in the street and pressing my pages on them. But even the writing wasn’t enough to stop the drinking and in January 1994, I crashed and burnt quite spectacularly. After a suicide attempt I ended up in a rehabilitation centre in Ireland, being treated for chronic alcoholism.

A case of mistaken identity, I thought. No way was I an alcoholic. Although appalled at the turn my ‘life’ had taken,
I must admit I was almost excited at the thought of seeing lots of alcoholics up-close in captivity. And there was always the chance there might be a famous face or two.

But rehab was nothing like I expected; after being there for about ten days, the cogs suddenly clicked into place and I was nearly blinded by what I saw. Looking back over my life, it was clear that everything bad in it had been a result of alcohol abuse and every time I had had a drink it had lit an inferno which had annihilated all in its path. The game was up and the only way forward was a life without alcohol.
How had this happened? To me? How would I survive?
The grief was intense. It was like the end of a huge passionate love affair and I raged against it.

And then, six weeks later, I was out. The sun was too bright, noises were too loud, even getting on a bus was frightening. It was as if I was doing everything for the first time and I felt as vulnerable and as raw as a newborn.

But, amazingly, I didn’t want to drink. The appalling compulsion which used to sweep over me and frogmarch me into the off-licence, had gone. And there was something else – a tiny glimmer of pride. (A first-time visitor in my life.) I’d had enough of being other people’s unpaid floorshow.

I returned to London where, thanks to the extreme generosity of my boss and my colleagues, I still had a job. I also had my flat and being able to slot back into those familiar things was a big help. All my energy was needed to get through a normal day. I was told in the treatment centre that when I had bonded with alcohol in my teens, my emotional development had stopped. It meant that every time I had a
disappointment or a row with someone, I didn’t live through it and mature from the experience; instead I sidestepped it, either by drinking immediately or by reminding myself that I’d be able to drink at some later stage.

Now that there was no escape, for the first time ever I was having to live life on life’s terms. I went to twelve-step meetings, I ate a lot of chocolate, I disappeared into shopping and sleep and Jacqueline Susann novels, but I didn’t drink.

And I began writing again. I’d been terrified that I wouldn’t be able to write if I wasn’t drinking. (That whole tormented artist thing; I’d really liked that version of myself.) But no alcohol was required: someone at a meeting promised me it was perfectly possible to still be a tormented artist without the drink.

Full of positivity I decided I’d send my short stories off to a small Irish publisher, accompanied by a letter saying I’d started work on a novel. However, there was no novel – they took way too long to write, I’d decided. The instant gratification of short stories was far more
me
. But the publishers wrote back; they wanted to see my alleged novel.

I was mortified. In a blind panic, I started to write. I had no plot or character, all I had, was the desire to avoid being caught out in a lie. In under a week, I managed four chapters and, still trying to catch my breath, posted them off. A couple of weeks later they replied – they were offering me a three-book deal.

Six months earlier I’d tried to kill myself; now I had a publishing deal. How weird was that? For the first time ever I had to celebrate without alcohol. (I bought a pair of shoes instead. Nearly as enjoyable.)

But fantasies of being able to waltz out of my day job and into a life of glamour were unfounded. My advance was an un-life-altering six-hundred quid a book, so I fitted my writing around work, writing morning and evening.

In September 1995, my first novel (
Watermelon
) was published in Ireland and did very well. People talked about how funny it was. Even about sad things. In fact,
especially
about the sad things. But I also got a couple of bad reviews, which totally knocked me off balance. I had no coping mechanisms for such public humiliation and immediately – like every time I got upset – I was desperate to drink. But I didn’t. Instead I went to bed with two slices of Marks and Spencer chocolate cheesecake and waited for the shame to pass. (A solution which works well to this day.)

In the meantime I’d started work on my second novel, a cheery little comedy about depression. And I’d met a man. A very different kind of man from the ones I’d pursued while I was drinking. Even now I’m afraid to talk about how great he is in case I get nobbled by the Curse of the Smug Girl.

Then in September 1996, things moved up several gears. One afternoon I was at work, trying to balance the sales ledger, when a fax whined out of the machine beside me. It was for me, but it wasn’t a copy of an invoice or some other work thing; it was from my agent, saying that a big UK publishing house had just offered lots of money (ten times my annual salary, as it transpired) to publish me. I sat at my desk, my hands shaking, hitting the wrong buttons on my calculator – I still had to balance the sales ledger – wondering if it could be true.

It was and shortly afterwards foreign rights were sold to
Germany, Holland, Sweden and the US. Suddenly I could afford to give up my day job and – above and beyond my wildest dreams – become a full-time writer.

I’d been given a charmed life. But while the outside of my life had been transformed, it was taking a lot longer for my feelings to catch up with the facts. The insecurity and immaturity which had characterized my drinking were still alive and kicking and I felt confused and unworthy.

Like every other time when I’d been knocked off balance, a drink seemed deliciously attractive, but I resisted. At some very deep level I understood that my sobriety was the foundation stone for every other part of my life and if I protected it by going to meetings and sticking close to recovering alcoholics, I’d be okay.