Then Alice
Then
Alice
It seems unfathomable to me now, four days into Jake’s drinking binge, that there could have been a time when I didn’t know him this way. We are living separate lives. In the mornings he is too deeply asleep to hear me leave for college, and I go straight to the Slade, forgoing my morning cappuccino, for I cannot bear to be in Bar Italia without him. In the evenings he is never at home and I have learned to go to bed, forcing myself into sleep if I can, waiting for the slide and scrape as he attempts to fit his key in the lock if I can’t.
He is lost to me, but I understand he is drowning in torment. I know this from the notes I come home to, the desperate scrawls in a page ripped from his notebook.
Alice. Forgive me. I’m so sorry. I hate myself. This will stop, I promise.
But it doesn’t stop. Four days turns into five. I ring Eddie and he suggests meeting for lunch. We go to a caff near college and he orders a full English: undercooked bacon, pallid sausages, beans, fried egg, tinned tomatoes and a rack of white toast. It makes me nauseous to look at it. I drink a cup of tea and try to eat my hot buttered toast, but I can’t manage more than a couple of bites.
‘You must be going out of your mind,’ Eddie says.
‘Pretty much.’
‘He does this sometimes, Alice, when it all gets on top of him.’
‘I don’t understand why it has to carry on. He made the decision not to go the funeral, why isn’t that the end of it?’
‘It’s not about the funeral any more. This is Jake’s depression. It’s a self-hate thing. A self-perpetuating thing. You might not understand this, but Jake is punishing himself.’
‘But why?’
‘Goes back to his grandparents. Jake still hears the things they said to him as a child. He still believes them.’
‘It’s like he’s avoiding me.’
‘He is avoiding you. He’s ashamed. He doesn’t want you to see him like this.’
‘When will it end?’
Eddie shrugs. ‘He’ll burn himself out sooner or later.’
‘Shouldn’t he see his doctor?’
‘He should but he won’t. What will happen now is that he’ll come to his senses and he’ll quit drinking. And for a while everything will be fine.’
I wake in the middle of the night and sense Jake’s presence even before I see him sitting with his back against the bedroom door as if he has simply slid down it, his knees pressed high against his chest.
‘Jake?’ I whisper and he says, ‘Hey.’
I can tell from this one word that he is sober. His face, lit up by the moon, seems so lovely to me and I am overwhelmed with longing for him.
‘I miss you.’
I cannot stop myself from crying.
‘Will you come to bed?’
He shakes his head.
‘You want to know about that time when I was sixteen?’ he says and his voice is so sombre I feel afraid.
‘Yes. If you want to tell me.’
He takes so long to begin that I am drifting towards sleep when his voice cuts into the darkness.
‘My grandmother knew about the beatings. And she blamed me for them. She used to say, “Your grandfather is a good man but you push him to the limit.” She resented me living with them and she told me that most days. She’d say: “Even your own mother doesn’t want you. Don’t you think you ought to try and be more lovable?”
‘I tried to change, but whatever I did it wasn’t enough. And whenever my grandfather beat me up, she would tell me: “Look what you’ve made him do now.” So I grew up thinking I was flawed. But I had an escape route and that’s what kept me going.
‘When I turned sixteen, I was going to live with my mum in London. “Just wait till you’ve left school,” my mum would tell me, “you and I will have so much fun.” I was going to get a job and earn enough money to buy myself a decent guitar. And then I could join a band.’
I know that I mustn’t talk or touch Jake or do anything to stop his story. But I move noiselessly from the bed and I sit on the floor, just a few feet away, in a pool of moonlight.
‘My mum came to stay on my sixteenth birthday, she gave me a Van Morrison record and my grandmother made a cake. And in the morning my mum said she had some news. She told me she was moving to Canada with her new boyfriend and I could join her in a year or so if I wanted. She’d bought her plane ticket and was leaving in a month. She had known for weeks but she didn’t want to spoil my birthday …’
He stops speaking for a moment and this heartless betrayal, a decade old now, lingers in the air.
‘I didn’t mean to kill myself. It was an impulse thing. I saw the kitchen knife and I was drawn to it. But the doctors thought I was suicidal. Next thing I knew I was in a secure psychiatric unit in Epsom. I was locked up there for nine months.’
‘Jake.’
I inch towards him, needing to be closer.
But he says: ‘I’m going to finish, Alice.’
His voice is determined, almost chilling, and so I stay where I am, just out of reach.
‘My mum came to see me a few times before she left for Canada, but she never stayed long. She was too scared.’
‘What was it like?’
‘Do you really want to know?’
I nod my head, unable to speak.
‘It was like hell, or worse maybe. I was so out of it to begin with, I lost my grip on who I was, I just existed in this crazy place where people banged on the walls and shouted and wept and moaned all day long. There was one young guy and he used to talk to the wall, a proper conversation with pauses, like he was addressing an invisible alien or something. There was a woman in the room next door to me who used to howl every night, these long, awful cries of anguish. The Screamer they called her. So much anger, everyone fighting and shouting and arguing, the patients, the staff. And sadness. It was like bathing in it all the time. These people had nothing and no one cared about them. And suddenly I was one of them.’
‘Did you need to be there?’
‘Not for nine months. I was depressed not dangerous. But the doctors didn’t care. They kept me pumped so full of drugs I just lay around in a ball of apathy. Those pills stopped me from feeling, from living. All I did was exist.’
He pauses.
‘Eddie saved me. He visited me every week. And he kept telling me “you don’t need to be in here.” He was only sixteen himself, but if he was scared he never showed it.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me this? Why didn’t Eddie?’
‘Because mostly I can pretend it didn’t happen. But then my grandmother died and it came rushing back, and the feelings I had, the memories, were too much …’
At last he stands up and holds out a hand and pulls me to my feet. And I am in his arms, my face buried against his neck, my tears wetting his skin.
‘Promise me you’ll never let me go back to a place like that.’
I understand so much about Jake on the strength of this one conversation. I know now why being with him has always felt so potent. He inhabits every moment of his day, from the morning cappuccino to the songs he listens to and the food he cooks at night. Jake’s terror, I realise, is blankness.
‘I lost you,’ I say when I am able to speak. ‘You left me.’
‘I’m sorry.’
His mouth against my hair, his arms holding my waist. We’ll go to bed and we’ll make love until the light begins to press against the windows and we will fall asleep, wrapped up so tightly that our faces touch and our breath becomes one.
‘Don’t ever leave me again,’ I say.
‘I won’t,’ Jake says. ‘I promise I won’t.’
And I believe him. Because I must.