Then Alice
Then
Alice
Jake’s deterioration is easily measured through his phone calls: the ones he makes, then the ones he doesn’t. I can always pick out the alcohol in his voice, even if I don’t hear it at first. At the start of the tour he seems mildly drunk, high after his shows and a late dinner with the band. But within a week the drinking has accelerated into something else. Night after night, his voice is so slurred and indistinct it’s hard to understand at times. He tells me he loves me, that he misses me, that it’s so hard being away. I lie awake long into the night after these calls, while our baby wriggles and shifts inside me, heels and elbows erupting alien-like from my stretched stomach, and I worry. Is this it, the start of his decline? Is he going to become ill again? I am counting down the days until the tour finishes.
When Jake calls, I often ask him to put Eddie on the line, but he never does.
‘You’re not looking after yourself,’ I say one night when I’ve woken up at three to take the call. ‘You’re drinking too much. You need a break. Remember how depressed it made you last time? You have to stop.’
But Jake rarely listens on these phone calls.
‘Love you,’ he says, his voice thick with booze. ‘No need to worry ’bout me.’
He hangs up without saying goodbye, too drunk, it seems, to remember he’s in the middle of a phone call. My demons are at their peak in the middle of the night, my brain a cinematic projection of all the things that might go wrong. Jake staggering into the middle of the road, where he is mowed down by a truck. Jake overdosing on sleeping pills like Jimi Hendrix. Jake choking on his own vomit while he sleeps.
Eddie sounds the alarm just a few days before the band are due back.
‘Alice, it’s Eddie.’
My heart freezes over.
‘Oh God, please tell me he’s OK.’
‘He’s a mess. We’ve had to cancel tonight’s show. He’s been off his face for the past two weeks. We’ve been telling him to cut it out, but he won’t listen. He’s ruining the tour. But it’s his mental health I’m worried about. He’s a bloody fool.’
‘Come back, Eddie. Cut the rest of the shows. Please. Do it for me. Do it for the baby. We need to get him home.’ I realise I am crying, but it’s painless, unconnected, just a wetting of my cheeks.
‘I think you’re probably right. I’ll talk to Tom.’
Jake’s call comes in much later the same night. It’s three in the morning, but that doesn’t matter, I’m instantly awake on the second ring, waddling into the sitting room and snatching up the phone by the fourth.
‘Hey.’
How can one short syllable contain such profundity? I know from this greeting just how far Jake has fallen.
‘I’ve been so worried about you.’
‘Alice …’ He breaks off; is he crying?
‘Jake? Are you there?’
Nothing.
‘Please talk to me. I’ve missed you so much.’
There’s a gasp, that’s all, and then his voice, so weak and stilted I find I am crying myself.
‘I’m fucked, I think. So scared. Scared of everything.’
‘What things? Try to tell me.’
‘The trip home. Talking. Thinking. Going to sleep. Waking up. Having a shower. None of it seems … possible.’
‘Are you on your own? Where are the others?’ My voice sounds frantic even though I’m trying to stay calm.
‘In the hotel.’
‘Jake, go to bed. Please promise me you’ll do that. Everything will seem better when you wake up. And as soon as you get home, I’ll look after you. You’re going to be OK.’
‘Am I?’ he says, his last words before the line goes dead.
Sleep is an impossibility; instead, I lie on the sofa waiting for the pitch black of 3.30 in the morning to move towards dawn’s pale-grey sludge. The rattle of taxis, I long to hear that. Stallholders shouting out to one another a couple of streets away. The Bar Italia opening up for morning custom. In Soho’s silence I hear nothing but gloom.
A telegram arrives at nine in the morning and I’m almost too frightened to open it. I sit on the sofa, Jake’s sofa, our sofa, a sofa with so many memories, holding the envelope between hands that shake.
We’ve cut the tour. Arriving home tonight. Eddie.
Half an hour later, telegram still clutched in my hand, I realise with an energy my heavily pregnant self has almost forgotten that I need to get the flat ready for him. Oh, the relief of having a purpose, as I haul my bulk from one room to the next, changing sheets, cleaning the bath, plumping cushions, replacing candles. In the afternoon, I walk to the Iranian shop on Beak Street and buy tins of soup, bread and two bottles of Lucozade, invalid food. I think of my mother, briefly, as I unload the Heinz tomato soup into the cupboard, sliced Mother’s Pride into the bread bin. As a child, with recurring tonsillitis, all I ever wanted was tomato soup. I remember how my mother sat by my bed, right through the night when the pain was at its worst, and I wonder how we have got to here.
The doorbell rings at six o’clock and I find both Jake and Eddie on the doorstep. Jake looks like a ghost, that’s the first thing. His skin is blue-white and his eyes slither from side to side, unfocused.
‘Jake!’ I say, reaching out to embrace him, but he takes a step back.
Eddie, I realise now, has been supporting him with one arm around his back, and he says, ‘Let’s get him to bed. Then we’ll talk.’
How I have longed to see this man, this thin, gaunt ghost, and now, as he and Eddie climb the stairs ahead of me, one step at a time, I do not know how to feel. They stagger past the sparkling sitting room with its brand-new orange candles just waiting for a match, past the record player with The Dark Side of the Moon ready on the turntable. At the bedroom door, Eddie says, ‘Best to stay there, Alice, while I settle him. I’ll only be a minute.’
How can this be happening? How can he have fallen so far in less than twenty-four hours? He sounded desperate last night on the phone, but today he is catatonic.
‘Heavy dose of Valium,’ Eddie says, sitting down next to me and taking my hand. ‘They had to sedate him to get him on the bus. He’s a mess, the worst I’ve ever seen him. Did you know he’d stopped taking his medication?’
There is no tone of accusation in his voice, but that’s what I hear, and I plant my face into my palms. All I can see is Jake popping out his sachet of pills into the lavatory.
‘Yes, I knew. He hates it so much. I should have made him take it. I didn’t understand.’
‘Alice?’ Eddie’s voice is sharp; he has picked up my remorse. ‘This is no one’s fault except Jake’s, and not even his. He’s a manic depressive and he has to keep taking his medication to avoid extreme episodes, or whatever this is. The doctor in Paris called it psychosis.’
‘What’s going to happen?’
Eddie sighs. He keeps hold of my hand.
‘When’s the baby due?’ he says.
‘Ten days.’
‘His timing’s really off, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t care. I’m just glad he’s home.’
Eddie nods, several times. I can tell he’s trying to choose his words.
‘Alice,’ he begins, and then he stops himself.
‘What is it?’
‘You do understand what this means, don’t you?’
‘He’s depressed. He needs medication. He needs peace and quiet. Of course I understand.’
It seems to me that the look on Eddie’s face is one of unutterable sadness, and this time he takes both of my hands between his.
‘He won’t be allowed to stay here.’
‘But why not? I love him. I’m going to look after him. We’ll be fine.’
Eddie shakes his head. ‘They’ll make him go to hospital. And he won’t want to go. You know as well as I do how he feels about hospital.’
‘Then he won’t have to go. Why are you looking at me like that? I don’t know what you’re saying.’
‘I think you do. Tomorrow they’ll probably section him. You have to be prepared for that. Tomorrow they will take him away.’