smooth my rough edges.
In another new house, a flat in an ex-council block in Tower Hamlets, my flatmates began to understand that I was drinking alone in my room, then coming out in wildly different moods, and confronted me about it. I got a by-now-familiar ‘We need to talk’ email, followed by the sickening drop in my stomach. I’d let people down before and couldn’t bear to fuck up again. Broke and borrowing money to buy booze or convincing the local shopkeeper to give me some cans on tick, I avoided bumping into my flatmates and neighbours in the corridor because I knew they could hear me crying at night.
It was not the outer chaos – the problems with other people and money, the lost and broken possessions – that was the worst thing. The worst thing was the state inside my head. The suicidal feelings were increasing in frequency and strength. I was not in control of my emotions. My thoughts and behaviour were swirling and unstoppable. He doesn’t love me any more. I miss him. I don’t know what to do with myself. I can’t see how I can go forward or how I can get over this. ‘You have to tackle the alcohol problem,’ they said, but how could I when I felt like that? I felt like a sheep stuck on its back: I knew I’d suffocate but it was easier just to stay lying in the hollow.
Months passed: a winter, a disastrous trip to Orkney, where I spent time in a police cell, another under-employed summer. I couldn’t believe the sadness had gone on for so long. The searing panic was something beyond me and I ignored all rules and safety measures to follow it, a slave to the habit of pain. Eyes always brimming with tears, I had fortnight-long headaches, bad dreams I couldn’t wake from. I had gone beyond and didn’t know how to get back. I saw the pattern from the curtains of my farmhouse bedroom. I could feel the tremors, and the wind of memory was flowing through me too fast to hang on.
Everything had been speeding up during the years I had been in London until I was out of control. The city required me to filter so much out – faces, advertisements, events, poverty – and my mind had been making the filter ever tighter until all that I was left with was whirring space. I was dumbfounded and unable to make decisions about where to go, whom to see or what opinion to hold, filling the void with alcohol and anxiety.
And I cried that I was adrift, helpless to the irrational need, the desire. I was falling, swirling, trying to find a point to hold on to, but as I grasped, any target moved further away.
I was running out of options. Although there was lower I could fall – more trouble, further to be cast out – for me, this was enough. One night I had a moment, just a glimpse but it was expansive and ambitious, as if the blinkers were temporarily lifted and my view was flooded with the light, when I saw a sober life could be not only possible but full of hope, dazzling. I held on to that vision and told myself this was my last chance. If I didn’t change, there was nowhere else for me to go but into more pain.
8
TREATMENT
ON MY BELLY ON THE floor, back arched, arms stretched behind, fingers locked, I was trying to hold my breath. The teacher, attempting to put us in touch with our primal selves, said, ‘You were born to do this,’ and my pose collapsed in laughter with everyone else.
Had all my life been leading up to doing Kundalini yoga with a bunch of pissheads and junkies in various states of physical disrepair and mental anguish on an institutional carpet? A particularly difficult move had to be repeated thirty times but the teacher promised, ‘By the end you’ll be flying.’ Addicts all, we chased that high.
In the catalogue of my hangovers it was not spectacular but one morning a month or so earlier I’d decided to accept whatever help was on offer to deal once and for all with my dipsomania. I was running late for work, desperately trying to claw myself together, dehydrated and panicky, as I was on so many mornings, but that day my will just broke. I couldn’t do it any more. I remembered the sensation of the night I’d been struck by the dazzling glimpse of possible sobriety. I called my boss from the bus and said I needed to talk.
It had taken a long time to get there and to accept that this was my situation. When I was younger, it was not my plan to be in rehab when I turned thirty. The fact that I’d only just realised life did not work out how you expect or want showed I had been lucky until then.
I’d been reading some old diaries. Just before I’d left Orkney at eighteen, I’d written an arrogant list of all the things I wanted to achieve but also, perceptively: ‘This world of art/fashion/ literature/rock and roll that so attracts me could be my downfall.’ A decade later I’d had a lot of fun and had a lot of stories but had also, year by year, day by day, developed a damaging compulsion alongside dissatisfaction and loneliness.
For years, I had occasional insight into my problems but was somehow unable to take the action I needed to deal with them. Drunk, I’d talk fluently about my drinking problem. The day after a dreadful binge, I would resolve again and again to make a fresh start.
I made three serious attempts to stop drinking and managed about one month each time: once, in a failed attempt to stop my boyfriend leaving me; once, trying to keep my job, on Antabuse medication that provokes an allergic response to alcohol (didn’t work); and the previous summer, in a failed attempt to prevent my flatmates kicking me out. This time, I’d lost the boyfriend, the flat and the job and was faced with the reality of doing it for myself, which is really the only way. This time I decided to put sobriety first. I quit my new job, saw my doctor and was referred to the council’s drugs and alcohol advisory service.
It wasn’t the out-of-the-way location, the tatty seats or the blank bureaucratic dealings that made me sob while I was in the waiting room at the addiction clinic: it was the smell. It was the same sour odour that had filled my London bedrooms, the smell from an ill sheep you are going to have to spray with a red X and send to the mart. Not the same as the smell of booze, it is a sickly fragrance emitted from the pores of a creature whose internal organs, liver and kidneys, are struggling to process toxins and push the poison out though the skin, fingernails and eyeballs.
I remembered that acetone smell from when I was a child and sheep lay dying. One morning Dad went into a field and found more than twenty ewes on their sides or backs, blown up like balloons, others stumbling around as if they were drunk. They had been put into a new field the night before and gorged on chickweed in the grass. Fungal blooms in the plants had produced froth, causing them to bloat and stopped them burping. Gases were building inside them and their tubes were blocked. In a desperate attempt to save them, Mum and Dad moved between the stricken animals, pouring vegetable oil into the throats of some to break down the froth, and plunging spiked tubes directly into the stomachs of others to release the gases. Tom and I watched in horror as they worked. Many sheep were saved but five died in the field and a couple more over the next few days.
* * *
I asked to be referred to a residential rehab – I wanted to be locked up – but instead the advisory service decided that as I was classified somewhere between a dependent and a harmful drinker it would be more suitable, and cheaper, for me to go to a ‘day programme’ and remain living at home, which was by this point a single bedsit above a pub in Hackney Wick. I drank heavily in the fortnight leading up to starting the programme – my last chance – and called my doubtful family while half cut to explain my plans. When I told Dad I was doing this for three months, he was sympathetic and said, ‘I’ve spent three years of my life in psychiatric care. I hope it’s less for you.’
After a week of ‘community detox’, in which I went each day to the centre and was given sedative Librium to help with any withdrawal symptoms, a breathalyser test and more tablets to take at home, I started the twelve-week programme. It was, and still is, 100 per cent local-authority-funded, staffed by full-time counsellors and admits up to twenty clients. When I joined, it had, despite a very high drop-out rate, produced more than a hundred ‘graduates’ – people completing the twelve weeks while remaining abstinent from all drugs and alcohol – since 2006.
The first day at the treatment centre was strange. I had to give a urine test, with the toilet door open. It didn’t take long to undo my shyness as we had to pass a piss and breathalyser test twice a week. There was no coffee allowed in the centre,