The Holiday (11 page)

Laura groaned. ‘Good heavens, what a lot of ghastly sentimental twaddle you do come up with.’

‘Twaddle?’

‘It means rubbish. Nonsense.’

‘Aha. You want me to describe her in the manner of a typical Englishman, is that it? Okay. So be it. I think she would be an excellent shag.’

He feigned a look of innocence. ‘What now? Am I too blunt for you?’

‘Is there no middle ground with you?’

He shook his head. ‘I prefer extremes. But if you want I’ll be honest with you ... but only this once. I thought she was very nice. So nice, that I promise that I will do my best not to encourage her to fall in love with me.’

‘How very thoughtful of you.’

‘I think so too.’

‘But what if
you
fall in love with
her?’

He dabbed at the sticky crumbs on his plate, then licked his finger. ‘Ah, now, that would be a fine state of affairs, would it not? It would be an interesting conundrum for me to resolve.’

‘And novel, I would imagine.’

‘Oh, highly original.’ He pushed the plate away from him, got to his feet, and walked over to a rosebush. He snapped the stem of a delicate white bloom, breathed in its scent, then handed it to Laura.

She, too, drew in its fragrance. ‘Have you never really been in love, Theo?’ she said, after he had sat down again.

He faced her, his head slightly tilted. ‘No, I don’t believe I have.’

‘Not ever?’

He paused. ‘Perhaps once or twice I have come close.’

‘But you never felt like pursuing it?’

He shrugged. ‘I have a low boredom threshold.’

‘Or maybe a fear of commitment.’ Her words, like the scent of the rose, hung between them.

Removing his sunglasses, he looked at her closely. ‘Why is it, Laura, that again and again I let you start these conversations with me?’

‘Because ...’ she hesitated ‘... because deep down you love talking about yourself.’

He laughed. ‘Ah, Laura, you know me so well. Now then, about Max and his desire to meet his hero. Let me go and find Mark and see what he has to say. I have to warn you, though, he is not very sociable just at the moment. My instinct tells me that you might have to make do with only my company for the day.’

 

Theo’s instinct was right, that and the fact that he knew his friend implicitly.

‘Oh, well,’ said Max, when Theo and Laura broke the news to him, ‘another time perhaps.’

‘I’m sorry to disappoint you,’ said Theo, ‘but Mark sends his apologies. He is keen to spend the day working. The creative soul is a single-minded and determined taskmaster.’

But Mark’s reason to stay behind had less to do with the driven artistic soul that Theo was now describing, and everything to do with fear: he was terrified of boats and water, and Theo had known all along that no invitation, however sweetly put, would have encouraged Mark to spend the day afloat.

Fear, though not actually voiced as such, had figured largely in their conversation last night about the letters Mark had received back in England. Theo had not been taken in by Mark’s attempt to make light of it, or his denial that he was on edge. ‘I’m tired, that’s all,’ he had said, ‘in need of a holiday, so please, give me a break, will you, and cut the patronising pep talk? You’re making me out to be some kind of convalescing invalid.’ He had taken the same tone just a moment ago when Theo had asked if he minded him joining Max and Laura for the day: ‘Of course I don’t. I’ve got plenty of work to occupy me here. I’d rather have the peace and quiet.’

‘Very well, I shall leave you to your writing. You will find plenty to eat in the — ’

‘Yes, I know where to look for food if I’m hungry. Just stop worrying about me.’

 

Helping Max to launch the boat, Theo untied the rope from the post on the jetty, and stepped lightly into the back of the small craft. He had offered the use of his own boat, but Max had laughed, telling him that it would do him good to rough it in theirs for a change. ‘You English,’ Theo had joked, ‘you are so hung up on the concept that size does not matter!’

There was only one seat left for him and it was next to Izzy. ‘Do you mind if I sit here with you?’ he asked.

She smiled and shifted along the bench to make room for him. As he sat down he noticed the looks that passed between Max and Laura. Ah, so they were watching his every move, were they? They were playing a little game with him. He smiled to himself. Well, he could either go along with their expectations or he could play the game his own way.

Alone on the terrace in the shade of the vine-covered pergola that stretched from one end of Theo’s house to the other, Mark was reading through the notes he had made late last night, long after Theo had gone to bed. He was underlining those he thought worthy of being added to the manuscript of his latest book, and crossing out with a single neat stroke anything he thought superfluous. The notebook was nearly full, yet there wasn’t one page of messy scribble within its pristine pages. It always amazed people that he was so orderly. They tended to regard his unimaginative dress code — faded jeans, T-shirt and CAT boots — as an indication of how he ran his life, that it would be as casual and thoughtlessly thrown together. In the chaotic mind-blown days of his addiction, this had certainly been the case, but not now. Now he was obsessively organised. His home was ruthlessly cleansed of all irrelevant clutter; his days were planned meticulously; his every hour was accounted for. ‘A tidy mind is a happy mind’ was a stupid maxim, but as trite as it was, it was a theory that held sufficient water for him to believe it. In the early days of his recovery he had been comforted by the petty rituals he had contrived for himself, using them to ground his mental state in the real world and not the hell he had inhabited previously. Now they were a matter of routine.

The desire to be so regulated and orderly was a side-effect of his brief spell in the clinic that had helped him to overcome his addiction, which had encompassed a variety of substances, but predominantly cocaine and alcohol. Hand in hand, they had been his partners in crime, partners that had taken him to the brink, convincing him, with each deadly, deceitful step they took him towards his downfall, that they were the only friends he needed, that they, and they alone, would give him the confidence and sense of worth he lacked.

By his mid-twenties he had been drinking with a determined vengeance that had nothing to do with social drinking. It was warfare. A war against himself. It wasn’t the taste he craved, it was the obliterating effect he needed: the desire to drink was as strong as the need to eat, if not stronger. Seeking refuge in sleep — and a sleep in which he wasn’t jerked awake by nightmares — he would fill himself with beer and whisky chasers until he collapsed on the bed and slept comatose for at least half the night.

Drugs came later, when desperation kicked in.

It was several months after he had married Kim, something he should never have done. He had done it primarily to annoy his parents, but also he believed that by marrying Kim he would be cutting himself off from his past, that he would be free of the destructive demons that had always plagued him. For a time it had worked and he and Kim were okay together. Not exactly happy and trouble-free with fairy-tale roses growing up the trellis of blissful matrimony — that would have been impossible in his state of severe alcohol dependency — but it had been a period of remission. Until, out of the blue, the old demons showed up. He had thought Kim was having an affair, but instead of confronting her, he put more energy into his drinking until eventually, knowing he couldn’t go on as he was, he turned to cocaine: it would slow him down and take the pressure off, he thought. But it didn’t. In no time at all, he was addicted, not so much to the drug but to the person he became when he was high. Without that buzz, he was nothing. A nobody. He got to the point where he couldn’t get out of bed or go to the local shop for a loaf of bread unless his confidence had been fuelled by a line or two. What little sense of value he had soon went, as did his money. Without a moment’s hesitation he would spend a week’s wages in a single evening. Nothing mattered to him any more.

A year later he was uttering the immortal words, ‘Hi, I’m Mark and I’m an addict.’

His first few days in the clinic had been a nightmare. He had truly believed he was going to die. His whole body had cried out for his faithful old buddies who never let him down, who boosted his self-esteem and gave him the strength he depended on to get through another day. The first day he had cursed and raged that he had ever set eyes on the traitor who had pretended he was a friend and brought him here. In his wild confusion he blamed Theo for everything wrong in his life. On his second day he tried to escape, never once thinking that his behaviour was that of a desperate madman. It had seemed so reasonable to him: he was being denied the two things that made his life worth living, so why wouldn’t he make a run for it?

But escape wasn’t on offer at the clinic. When the worst agony of the shakes and sweats of detox had passed he was given a timetable of what to do and firmly encouraged to stick to it. The hope was that it would keep his mind off the inner voice that told him all he needed was one small drink to ease him through the next hour. There was a never-ending regime of therapy to get through: group therapy of share and tell; individual therapy; even family therapy towards the end of his stay. He had never been so bloody busy. There was also time for private contemplation. This was always a low point for him. He never wanted to be alone with the person he hated so much — at least, not when he wasn’t coked-up or drunk and there was nothing to hide behind. That was another thing about the clinic he hadn’t been able to cope with initially: there was nowhere for him to hide, no quiet corners to lose himself in; the whole place was designed and run so that all was laid bare.

For some people the road to recovery starts within days of being admitted, but for Mark it was three weeks before he began to open up. The trigger had come from, of all things, the music that was played in the evenings. It was the only form of entertainment provided: no television, radio, papers, or magazines were available. The selection of music was not what he normally listened to — his taste had always been for satisfyingly aggressive rock - but here he was forced to listen to music his parents had tried to make him appreciate. And during this one evening at the clinic, when he had been eating his supper along with all the other inmates, his attention had been drawn away from the conversation he had been having with a guy who had been addicted to sex since the age of fifteen and he had listened with near mesmerised attentiveness to Mozart’s Requiem. As though hearing it for the first time, he felt himself floating out of his body, soaring on the powerful, swelling notes, experiencing the heartbreaking magic of such an uplifting and glorious piece of choral work. He had started to shiver, as though an icy cold wind had ripped through the room, and then a searing heat had exploded deep within his chest. Then his head was in his hands and his hands were wet with tears. He was sobbing, his shoulders were shaking, his chest heaving. There was a voice, not his, surely not his, saying that he was sorry. Sorry that he was so screwed up. Sorry, too, that he had screwed up so many others. People gathered round him. They held him. They cried with him. Then they took him away and he slept. Really slept.

The following morning, the man everyone called Bones - because his surname was McCoy — was assigned to talk to him. They sat in a room that had been stripped down to nothing more than two chairs and a desk, a floor of moss green carpet tiles, four walls of magnolia woodchip and a window. There was nothing to distract him — again, nothing to hide behind: no comfortable armchairs, no potted plants or soothing colour schemes designed to draw out deeply rooted fears. Slumped in his chair, his legs extended, crossed at the ankles, his hands hanging at either side of him, Mark had viewed the man before him. He was very small, not much more than five feet tall, with short, stumpy legs. He wore a cardigan with sleeves that were too long for his arms, and straight away Mark could see that his manner was annoyingly slow and thoughtful. But to an addict, who was used to his head buzzing at full tilt, everyone else always appeared to be moving at half speed. It was difficult to take him seriously, though — he looked like he would be more at home washing his car or trimming the hedge than working in a rehab clinic playing hardball with sex addicts and junkies.

First he asked Mark what had particularly moved him about the music he had heard the night before.

‘It was the beauty of it,’ he said simply, affecting an air of indifference and raising a foot to his knee to pick at a shoelace. ‘It detached me from reality. Or what I see as reality.’

‘Sounds like your average kind of trip. What exactly did it separate you from?’ Silence.

Bones stared at him, waiting patiently for an answer. In the absence of one, he got up and opened the window. He sat down again. ‘Do I need to repeat the question, or rephrase it, perhaps?’ His tone was bland.