Ice and a Slice (16 page)

Chapter Eighteen

After the drunken dinner party with her parents SJ had rebooked her Tuesday appointment with Kit. He hadn’t seemed surprised to see her. Neither had he given any indication that he thought she was mad, or unreliable, or any of the other things that SJ was beginning to suspect she was becoming.

He’d been wearing his usual faded jeans with a black T-shirt, which had a small brown mark on the front just below his right breastbone. A burn mark maybe, or spilt food. Somehow it had made him seem more human. And his questions had been gentle.

He’d asked her if she could remember any other specific occasions when she hadn’t been able to control her drinking – and she’d told him that she sometimes drank when she was afraid, or when she was alone, or when she felt worthless – which, to her surprise, seemed to happen a great deal more often than she’d ever previously acknowledged.

She hadn’t told Kit or Tanya or anyone else the full story behind why she’d made her first appointment with S.A.A.D. The memories were still too raw and too painful. But as she got the bus back on Tuesday lunchtime after her latest appointment, the memories had crawled back, unbidden.

Tom had been working away that weekend. He’d phoned earlier to tell her he’d be a day or so later than planned and, disappointed to be spending yet another evening alone, SJ had decided to unwind with a glass or two of wine. It was easy to drink too much when you were watching television and she hadn’t bothered with dinner – there didn’t seem much point in even cooking a ready meal for one.

As she’d told Tanya she’d opened a second bottle and then things had got rather fuzzy and hazy, although bizarrely there were parts of the evening that were as sharp and as clear as the stills on a DVD:

Herself – staggering through the hall to let Ash into the garden, fiddling with the catch on the back door, cursing because it wouldn’t open quickly enough and she was dying to go to the loo; Ash, standing beside her, wagging his tail patiently.

Then there was a chunk of blankness, empty as the blue screen on a television when the channels aren’t tuned in.

Another picture: herself again, prostrate on the hall floor, aware of the hardness of the wooden floor against her cheek and the sour taste in her mouth; opening her eyes to see a glint of gold on blackness – one of her gold hoop earrings, not far from her face, coming in and out of focus as she blinked; a hand, her own hand, scrabbling around to reach it.

Another blue blank.

The sound of frantic knocking on the front door – and the awareness that their musical doorbell was chiming softly.

Another blue blank.

Their next door neighbour’s anxious pale face looming in and out of focus.

“Oh, SJ, love. I’m sorry to disturb you, but your dog’s been out on the road. He’s been hit by a car. He’s okay. Don’t panic. I think the car just clipped him.”

“Where is he?” SJ gulped, the coldness of shock knifing through the alcohol fuzz in her head.

“I put him in the back of my car. I couldn’t get you to answer the door, you see.” She tailed off, worried brown eyes quizzical, and SJ wondered if she could smell the drink. There were several feet between them and she had her hand over her mouth, but she must reek of it.

Her neighbour was already turning away. SJ followed her, barefoot – goodness knows what had happened to her shoes – to where her car was parked outside the house.

“He’s scraped his front leg, but he seems fine apart from that. You never can tell with dogs though; he might have internal injuries. If he were mine I’d nip him down the emergency vets and get him checked over. Just to be on the safe side.”

The neighbour smiled uncertainly and as the coldness of the pavement chilled SJ’s feet, she wondered if it was obvious that she was in no fit state to drive anywhere.

Ash sat in the hatchback, panting. When he saw her, he wagged his tail and held out his injured paw, which looked grazed and bloodied. He’d cut his muzzle too, and flecks of blood spattered his chest.

SJ buried her head in his soft fur, imagining him being hit by some callous driver who hadn’t even bothered to stop. He was trembling and she felt guilt tighten around her heart. Tears gritted her eyes as she coaxed him gently onto the pavement.

How had he got out anyway? Their gate should have been shut. Calling out a husky thanks to her neighbour, who didn’t respond, she led Ash slowly back to their house. As they approached the front door, SJ saw that the side gate, which was normally shut, was wide open, and the bins were this side of it. She had no memory of putting them out, but she must have done. So it was her fault he’d gone wandering.

She was as bad as the people who’d dumped him on the motorway. No, she wasn’t as bad as them. She was worse. Ten times worse, twenty times worse because she loved Ash and she hadn’t kept him safe.

She remembered being sick again when they got inside. Then she’d switched on her laptop and tried to find an emergency vet but she couldn’t type properly and Google kept throwing up irrelevant websites. And the next thing she recalled after that was waking up on the floor of the lounge and seeing Ash on the rug. The memories of what had happened flicked into her head like the mixed up pieces of a jigsaw, and she’d crawled across to check he wasn’t dead. The utter relief that he seemed to be breathing normally had tipped her back into oblivion.

It was only when the dawn light stabbed through the undrawn curtains that she’d woken up again. Stiff and sore, with a pneumatic drill going off in her head and a foul taste in her mouth, she’d shuffled into the kitchen and downed two pints of water and some Nurofen. Ash was okay, he was fine, hardly even limping when she’d persuaded him to come into the kitchen and had sponged the dried blood off his chest. But it was no thanks to her. The remorse and self pity had kicked in big time.

She would never drink again. She would go one step further than that. She would make an appointment with someone to talk about her drinking – just in case it was becoming a problem. Frantically she’d scrolled through the list of alcohol advice websites on the internet; she’d ignored the number for AA, which she already knew didn’t work, and that’s when she had phoned S.A.A.D.

Chapter Nineteen

“Tom, I’ve decided to give up drinking,” SJ announced, a few days after her fourth appointment with Kit. She moved the plates from where they’d been warming on the oven and hunted for a tea towel to get out the ready meals. She’d done a lot of thinking before she’d come to this conclusion. Not just about Alison and Derek, but about the time that had passed since, and she’d discovered quite a few uneasy little skeletons that she’d like to examine through the clear lenses of sobriety.

One of them was her marriage to Tom, which she was beginning to suspect might not be the perfect union she’d always told herself it was. Especially since he’d refused to backtrack on the arrangements they’d made to go to her parents’ anniversary party, which they’d discussed heatedly the previous night.

She glanced at him and saw he was smiling benignly – probably still trying to wheedle his way back into her good books. Neither of them had mentioned the first real row of their marriage and he certainly didn’t seem concerned about it now.

Last night he’d suggested that perhaps Alison could give the anniversary party a miss, which proved to SJ that either he a) hadn’t grasped the facts – she’d explained several times that their parents insisted they both be there, or b) he just didn’t bother listening to her at all.

Judging by that silly smile on his face, he probably wasn’t listening properly to her now either.

“Did you hear what I just said, Tom? I’m going to give up drinking.”

“Yes, sweetie. Is that forever or just for today?”

SJ frowned. She’d expected him to treat this momentous piece of news with slightly more gravity than that, but then she hadn’t told him about Ash either. Despite Kit’s insistence that she talk to her husband, she still hadn’t told Tom how it really was for her. Putting it into words would have made it far too real. She could cope better if it was locked in her head.

Something had changed in her since that terrible hungover Sunday when she’d had that conversation in her head with some imaginary opponent. She’d thought about that voice a lot since. She’d even given it a name:
Alco
– the Demon King. She imagined him as an all-powerful ruler of the alcohol kingdom, sitting on a black throne on the edge of an endless black abyss, his drunken subjects crawling submissively around his feet, holding up their empty hip flasks to be refilled while he beckoned them closer, tempting them towards the edge with one more glass. ‘
Just a teensy weensy little glass, SJ, what harm can it do?’

Picturing some crazy demon lord felt slightly less absurd than the idea that she was talking to herself.

“I felt really awful the night after Mum and Dad came round.”

“It’s called a hangover. Caused by too much
al-co-hol.
” He exaggerated each syllable as if he was talking to a child.

“Tom, I don’t just mean in the morning. I mean all day. In the evening too. I – well – I thought I might be going mad.” She couldn’t tell him about
Alco
in case he agreed with her. “I was really depressed and I was tired and ashamed, but I still had another drink on Sunday night – I couldn’t stop myself.”

“Uh huh.” He wasn’t looking at her. He was busy opening the bottle of red he’d just brought in from the bar. She wasn’t quite sure why, as they patently weren’t going to need it now. She sighed. “I don’t suppose I’ll give up forever – but I’m definitely having a few days off.”

“You won’t mind if I don’t join you?” he queried, raising one eyebrow and pausing from unpeeling the foil around the top of the bottle.

“Of course not – you carry on.” How virtuous was that? Obviously your run- of-the-mill alcoholic wouldn’t be able to casually sit back and watch someone else drinking themselves silly, while they sat beside them dry as a drum – it went without saying.

“So you won’t want any of this then?”

“No thanks.”

“Not even a teensy weensy little glass?” He was beginning to sound like
Alco
.

“I just said no, didn’t I?”

“Okay – keep your hair on. I was only asking. So what would you like to drink with your dinner? I think we’ve got some Coke in the fridge.”

“Is it diet?”

“No, it’s normal.”

“Then I’ll have water,” SJ snapped, because she could see no point at all in drinking a calorie-laden drink, unless it was also laden with alcohol. If she had to suffer, then at the very least she expected to lose half a stone in the process.

They ate dinner in strained silence and then she escaped to the garden for a fag, which helped to ease some of the aching tension in her shoulders. Ash joined her, wagging his tail joyfully as she bent to fondle his soft grey ears.

“We’ll show them, boy, won’t we?” she crooned. “We’ll show that silly counsellor that he doesn’t know the first thing about unresolved issues.” She would show Tanya, too, who had taken to texting her each morning to see if she had a hangover, which actually was quite touching because she knew Tanya cared.

She hadn’t told anyone how it really was for her – although Tanya knew quite a bit. It struck her suddenly that she didn’t have any other close friends to tell. How had that happened? Until her marriage to Tom, she’d kept in touch with a few people from college and uni. A couple of them now had families and were too busy to socialise; Joanne had moved to London and they’d lost touch; and the rest had just drifted away.

Tom hadn’t been keen on socialising with her friends – he wasn’t very comfortable around groups of women, he was good on a one-to-one basis, and he was good at certain subjects, particularly sport or breweriana or his work, but he didn’t really do small talk.

She could still have kept in touch with her friends via Facebook, which was what a lot of her work colleagues did. Tanya spent a fair bit of her spare time on Twitter and Facebook too. But social networking sites didn’t really appeal to SJ. She’d
let
her friends drift away, she realised with a small shock. As her drinking had increased she’d become more isolated, and as she’d become more isolated her drinking had increased even more. It was a vicious little circle that she hadn’t even spotted, and yet now, as she stared out across the yellowing August lawn to the sunlit trees beyond, the truth was impossible to avoid. Her friends – all but Tanya, who was more tenacious than most – had slowly been replaced by a glass of gin and tonic, complete with ice and a slice.

The next two days were hell. Up until that point, SJ hadn’t seriously considered she might have a drink problem. She certainly hadn’t expected going without alcohol for a couple of days would present any difficulties. But suddenly her mind, which was normally in a fairly scatty but comfortable and familiar place, no longer felt as if it belonged to her. For a start she couldn’t sleep – it wouldn’t let her – it raced with unpleasant thoughts and emotions, all sorts of crawling little demons that wouldn’t be quietened.

For some reason Tom featured in many of these thoughts. Tossing and turning, she lay beside his quietly snoring body, hoping against hope he wouldn’t wake up and want to make love. She didn’t know why this was, because Tom was a skilled and considerate lover. He did all the right things. His idea of foreplay wasn’t just a quick poke in the back with his erection which, according to the problem pages she’d read in magazines, happened to a lot of ‘happily marrieds’ and would definitely have been cause for complaint. He always took his time and made sure she was ready before he clambered on.

‘Ready’ – for SJ – meant she was in that happy fuzzy half-world of inebriation when he finally entered her. And this took a fair bit of co-ordination. Too much alcohol and she wasn’t interested. Too little and she was like a dry and terrified virgin. She knew from previous experience that no alcohol at all turned her into a nun – her sex drive simply disappeared. She’d rather have done anything else instead – even iron shirts or wash the floor on her hands and knees, both of which she did as little as possible in the normal scheme of things.

At four a.m. on the second sleepless night, SJ came to the conclusion that there must be something seriously wrong with her. Tom was her husband, her soul mate. She loved him. Okay, she knew their marriage wasn’t quite the amazing rollercoaster of joy and pain she’d had with Derek. It was far more your dodgem car ride – mostly on the level with the odd bump, which suited her much better. Everyone knew rollercoasters made you feel sick if you spent too much time on them.

SJ sat up in bed wondering why on earth she was thinking about fairground rides. Scared she would wake Tom with her restlessness, she went on a sleeping pill foray to the bathroom cabinet. She’d bought some at the pharmacy for her last bout of insomnia which, oddly enough, had happened when she’d been prescribed antibiotics for toothache. The bottle had said ‘Strictly No Alcohol’. SJ had blithely ignored the warning – as she always ignored ‘no alcohol’ warnings – but had then found herself throwing up repeatedly when she’d had her usual pre-dinner gin and tonic. She’d later discovered the antibiotics the dentist had given her were also known as Antabuse and prescribed to alcoholics who wanted to quit.

After two awful drink-free nights she’d abandoned the antibiotics and had the offending tooth removed instead, which had been a huge relief – in more ways than one. 

This time there was no such respite. Although the sleeping pills knocked her out there was no escape from the demons, who crawled into her dreams instead. So when she woke up she was more tired than when she’d fallen asleep.

By late Sunday afternoon, two more endless days until her next appointment with Kit, her hands were so shaky she could hardly type out her notes for her poetry and pint class.

By early evening she was ready to crack. She abandoned her notes and looked up alcohol withdrawal symptoms on the Internet.

Mild shakiness

Inability to concentrate

Insomnia

A feeling of dread

Restlessness

Mood changes

As she scanned through the list, SJ felt an increasing sense of panic. She had every symptom. The shakiness wasn’t particularly mild either. It wasn’t just in her hands; it was in her stomach and her legs too. However she sat at her PC she couldn’t get comfortable. She was also besieged with mood swings like the kind she had before her period, when she usually stepped up her alcohol levels to compensate – for medicinal purposes, obviously. 

Her period. Of course – that was it. It was due in three days. So this was what Tanya was talking about when she said she had bad PMT. It was such a relief to discover she only had PMT that she leapt out of her chair and charged down to the kitchen for a packet of Nurofen.

It would have been nice to wash them down with a glass of white wine but, quite apart from the fact she’d given up, it was only just gone five. She had water instead, went back upstairs, but still felt too restless to work. Perhaps she’d picked up the 200mg strength tablet instead of the 400mg. They must have changed the packet colour.

Twenty agonizingly long minutes later she still felt exactly the same. She got some more pills and, on autopilot, she opened a bottle of Chardonnay and poured a large glass to wash them down with. The relief was instantaneous. She could feel the pills being washed to the furthest corners of her body. Her hands stopped shaking. Her legs took a little longer to feel normal. But amazingly, wondrously, her mind came back on line.

It was such a good feeling she had another glass of wine. Then another. Now her fingers were flying across the keys. Thank goodness she’d discovered she had PMT and not withdrawal symptoms. She was reaching for a fourth glass of wine when she noticed the bottle was empty. They must be making wine bottles smaller too – she knew perfectly well you got more than three glasses out of a bottle. And she certainly hadn’t drunk much. She didn’t feel remotely light headed.

Humming to herself, she went downstairs to find another bottle. There wasn’t one. Oh well, she’d stop there. Three glasses was well within her limit anyway. She prowled around the bar – on second thoughts, there must be something else she could drink. She really did fancy another one. Only one more – four glasses wasn’t too bad. Tom would probably appreciate a nice unwinding glass of red when he got in. She could put a bottle on the side to breathe. Pleased with herself for being such a considerate wife, she opened one of his special bottles. Fourteen per cent – oo-er, better be careful with this one.

It tasted like blackberries and she was also getting notes of chocolate and wood – just as the label promised. It didn’t taste that alcoholic either – certainly not fourteen per cent. It was more like upmarket Ribena. Very easy drinking. Too easy. She really should take the bottle into the kitchen to breathe. Or there wouldn’t be any left for Tom. He’d be in soon. It was just after six.