in victims that the world is full of people half or totally in love with alcoholics – charismatic, infuriating, adorable, repellent, self-sabotaging, impossible alcoholics – and this is hard, lonely, baffling, and not talked about enough.
Because although there are a million and a half alcoholics in Britain, many people don’t really know what alcoholism is.
Because alcoholics also love.
Because I don’t want to write a novel about an alcoholic and a woman; I want to write specifically about that alcoholic, Robert, and this woman, me.
Because everything I have ever written has been indirectly about Robert, and the time has come for me to address him directly.
Because the last time I tried to address it directly I told him, and he said, ‘You won’t be able to finish this until I’m dead.’
Because I have realised that for me, quite the opposite: he won’t be properly dead until I’ve finished it.
Four months after he died, I wrote this:
It can’t be surprising that I can’t write now. All I can think about is Robert and death, so that is all I could write about, but I can’t. To write Robert would be to seal him. I, who can rationalise my life into any corner of the room and out again and rewrite my every reality in any version I like, and back, twice before lunch, I cannot pin that man to the specimen paper. I cannot claim to have all of him in view at one time. I cannot slip him into aspic, drown him in Perspex, formalise him – look, there he is in that frame, that’s how he was, that’s him. No, that is not him. He is an alive thing. His subtleties and frailties are living things. I cannot bind to myself or any other place the joy that he was. It makes no sense to me for him to be dead. And when it does make sense to me, as no doubt it must at some stage, then – well then he is even deader, because I will have accepted it. And I do not accept it. I do not want to accept it. I reject it. I say to death: Fuck off.
But I am a writer, and without writing I was bereft. And God knows I was bereft enough already. I have so much and yet these have been years of loss. Each loss lost me something else as well. Losing Robert lost me writing. I wanted to talk to him about it. Instead there I was, writing about not being able to write: If I write this book, am I preventing other versions? Will making this our conversation disbar me from remembering other things we said? Am I bruising my memories by handling them? If I file them, will I ever find them again? Will their bloom be intact?
I was always terrified of losing him; I lost him a hundred times and had him back. I wanted him back yet again. His nine lives, the nadirs he specialised in. I thought: he wouldn’t really be dead. It’s so unlike him.
This is my version. Anyone who knew him will have their own version. I understand that. I’ve done my best to balance open honesty about this illness with sensitivity.
Uxbridge Road, 1990s
Beirutsbridge Road, he called it. This neighbourhood! Between charming Holland Park and its neighbour Shepherd’s Bush there is a difference in life-expectancy of eight years. A six-foot woman pushing a buggy yells ‘I’ve got my child wiv me ’ave some fuckin’ respect’ at me for no reason I can imagine, unless it’s that I’m wearing only one blue paper flipflop following a pedicure-related broken-blue-paper-flipflop incident. Then a big West Indian man comes towards me, with a tiny Thai man trying to pat his – the big man’s – back and wipe something off his – the big man’s – front at the same time, both of them giggling. A scrawny pasty-faced undertaker in his frock coat walks by, swigging Diet Coke from a bottle. A tiny pregnant person who says she’s Greek but I’m not sure she is wants some money, so I give her some and direct her to the Greek church, but I don’t think she understands. An old Spanish man informs me that he’s seventy-one; I say Happy Birthday, he howls with laughter and says ‘Happy New Year!’ There are giant yellow tubes piled up all down the middle of the road. A barefoot man goes by on crutches, his feet swollen and dry and sad; he gives me a glance of barefoot complicity, but mine are bare out of vanity, not need. I wanted to get home, but I didn’t want the nail polish to smudge. It’s Dickensian. A barefoot man on crutches.
Always, walking down this road, heading west from the Tube station to the street where I have lived for twenty-five years, to the house where he had so often pitched up over the decades, and kind of lived with me for ten years, I look for Robert: leaning in the doorway of Paolo’s cafe, beaky nose, skinny legs, having a cigarette; coming out of Jay’s newsagent, hobbling across the road from the Nepalese restaurant popularly known as the Office, in the brown velvet-collared tweed coat I gave him after he left the dark blue one on the train to Wigan; or the old leather jacket, or the new old leather jacket, in his jazz-cat hat, hunched like a grey heron at the edge of the city street, being liminal, looking about him, in the rain, or the sunshine, perhaps sitting outside a cafe, newspaper, cigarettes, espresso, pencil, sketches of a melody in the margins of the sports section. In later days, glasses, and crutches, or the two ugly black walking sticks with ergonomic handles shaped like bones.
In his youth he was beautiful like an off-duty Bowie – skinny, pale, romantic-looking, naughty, with something fugitive about him; he was always about to leave. In maturity, a craggy battered face, Northern, a big bent nose, a small chin, no eyebrows to speak of, cheekbones, a broad brow, small scar to the left, brown to grey hair tending to the fine and fluffy unless smoothed back, from which it benefitted, plenty of it, usually either too long or too short, always badly cut, because I did it, because he wouldn’t go to the barber. Widow’s peak. A bashed pale mouth, thin lips, curled in some sardonic look often enough. Big flat English ears. Beardwise, kind of bald on one side, a bit goatee-ish on the other; a wiry moustache which could have been elegant with the slightest bit of care. The odd pockmark. Glasses – whoever’s, it didn’t matter much. A bit Ted Hughes, a bit Samuel Beckett. All crag and stoop. Eyes? Yes, he had eyes. They were blue, and much clearer than they had a right to be. I may come back to them. Right now they are staring at me from various photographs, and, writing this, I see him looking at me, and my tears come up again and I need to go and rail against horrid fortune which made him as he was and not just a tiny bit different.
I see him, sometimes, in the criss-crossing currents of people. But he is not there.
Primrose Hill, Wigan, Oxford, Battersea, 1982
I know for a fact which balcony it was. It has grown mythical in my mind: the balcony on to which he invited me, where he first kissed me, though I can’t actually remember the first kiss. But I remember the thrill of him wanting me to go out there with him. First floor, overlooking the park, leaves – plane trees? A very London balcony, as seen on the first floors of many handsome white stucco London houses of the mid nineteenth century.
It was our mutual friend Emma’s party, in a first-floor sitting room with long windows. We were twenty-two, twenty-three, at the stage where you go to parties in flocks, losing and gaining companions in the course of the night. I recall it being crowded, glamorous, noisy. I recall my little thrill at the sight of him.
I’d met him before. The first time was on a staircase in an Oxford college in 1976. We were going in and he was coming out. (‘We’ was me, my childhood friend Tallulah and her calm, amiable law-student boyfriend Simon, who we were visiting, and whose new friend Robert was.) I, a born, bred and dedicated Londoner, had never met a Northerner before, never heard gravelly basso profundo Wigan profanities coming out of a skinny whiplash chips-and-lemonade body. An old cricket blazer of some kind hung off him; clearly not his. He had that romantic demeanour of consumptive turn-of-the-century sleeplessness and intense energy – what my father called ‘pale and interesting’ (I was more pink and interested). He was gorgeous, incandescent. And leaving. He may return. Please return