Chapter Eleven
STUART, TEN YEARS EARLIER
I follow the woman to her child’s school. It’s up a cobbled footpath, behind a church. The tiny playground is set low beneath the path and from the railings outside you can see all the way across London to the shiny skyscrapers of the City: the Shard, the Cheesegrater, the Walkie-Talkie.
The woman is buzzed into the school building through a small black door. “Hi,” I hear her say, brightly, before the door closes, and I wonder if the school secretary will be able to smell the vodka on her breath, see the glaze on her eyes.
A moment later the woman reappears with a young girl. The girl has dark hair tied into plaits and seems to be about ten years old. She has a bandage around her wrist and looks like she’s been crying.
The girl has, I surmise from listening in to their conversation, sprained her wrist. The girl wants to go to hospital, but the woman says they can’t because she has the dog with her. “We’ll need to go home first.”
“But I want to go to hospital now. It hurts so much.”
“But we can’t, Daisy. Dogs aren’t allowed in the hospital. We have to go home.”
“Why didn’t you take him home first?” The girl called Daisy is crying again.
“Because I was panicking. I didn’t think.”
“You never think,” says the girl through her tears. “You never do.”
“Look, let’s just go home. We can give you some medicine, drop the dog off, and then I’ll get us an Uber to the hospital. OK?”
“Why can’t you drive us?”
“I just can’t, OK?”
“But why not?”
“That stupid car never starts. And anyway it’s cheaper to go by taxi than pay the parking fees. Come on. Let’s just get you home and get some painkillers in you. You might not even need to go to hospital once those have kicked in.”
The girl grumpily acquiesces with dropped shoulders and a huge sigh. “Fine,” she says. “Fine.”
I follow from a distance again until I realize that they are headed for the Vale of Health.
Nobody walks in or out of the Vale of Health unless they live there—or are walking a dog.
My presence will be obvious, and if she turns to look at me, she will recognize me from the pub, so I hold back and let them disappear.
The following day she is back at the pub.
Today she arrives at 11:55 and waits for the doors to open—and so it goes, I think to myself, the slow, incremental descent, whereby one day it’s not OK to have a drink before midday, and the next it is.
I’ve been there. I know it. I used to be like her, you see.
I used to be an alcoholic. I still am an alcoholic.
But I’ve learned to control it. I know they say you can’t do that, but I can.
Because actually, I think my alcoholism was more aligned with my hedonism, back then when I was young.
I wasn’t like this woman here, trying to keep up the pretense of a normal, decent life.
I was totally absorbed in the chaos of addiction, sucked up and away by excess of all kinds.
I was known. Oh, it’s that guy. He’s mad.
Keep away. I would shave my hair on a whim.
Piss in public. Get into fights. Get kicked out of places.
Oh, I got kicked out of so many places. It was par for the course.
I never expected to go anywhere without being kicked out.
I broke girls’ hearts and treated them like shit. I was truly appalling.
Nowadays, yes, I like to drink. I need to drink.
I like to drink every day. Probably five or six pints between midday and midnight.
Sometimes a pint more. Sometimes a pint less.
I barely touch spirits or wine. I don’t take drugs.
I walk a lot. I don’t get kicked out of places.
I’m a calm and reasonable man. And I can recognize fellow addicts when I see them, all the differing shapes and forms of them.
And this addict, right here, this addict who makes her dog sit in a pub for three hours every day, who can’t drive her injured daughter to hospital, who stumbles out of the pub while the sun is still up, she’s pathetic.
I wait until she has reached the end of her second glass and then I get to my feet and feign surprise and recognition. “Oh,” I say. “It’s you. Wait. I, er… I… hold on.”
I turn back to my table and pick up the mittens I brought back with me today. “I have these,” I say, waving them at her. “You left them yesterday. You were in a bit of a hurry.”
“Oh,” she says. “Yes. Right. Thanks.” She holds out a hand for them and I pass them to her. “You could have just left them behind the bar?”
“Yes, I know. But I went after you, thought I’d catch you up and give them to you on the street, but I lost you. So ended up taking them home.”
“Well. Thanks.”
She puts them on the table and slides them gently out of her way.
I act as if I’m about to leave her alone, but then turn back and say, “Was everything OK? Yesterday?”
“Oh, yes,” she says dismissively. “My daughter. She, er, she hurt her wrist. A sprain. Nothing serious. But she was making quite a fuss, so the school made me come and get her. She’s a bit, er…”
“Dramatic?”
“She can be. Yes. She’s a classic tweenager, I suppose.”
“Ah.” I nod. “Yeah. I’ve been there. Done that.”
“You have kids?”
“Yeah. Two. The boy, he’s twenty. Jesus.”
“You don’t look old enough to have a twenty-year-old.”
“Well, yeah. I’m not. I got kind of caught out, I guess you’d say, when I was eighteen.
I gave the girl the money to have it taken care of, but she kept the money and the baby.
I didn’t meet him until he was nearly ten.
And then, yeah, my daughter just turned seventeen.
She’s an angel. But her mum took her back to Australia when she was three, so I haven’t seen a lot of her. ”
“Oh,” says the woman, “that’s… sad.”
“Yeah. It is. It’s very sad.”
I can sense that the woman is beginning to feel comfortable with me and I make a move toward the stool on the other side of her table. “Do you mind if I…?”
She shrugs and gives her head a small firm nod.
I sit down. “So, how old is she, your girl?”
“She turned ten in October. She’s a bit of a handful.”
“And is it just you?”
“Yes,” she says, picking up her glass and taking a measured sip from it.
“Just us. I mean, Daisy—that’s my daughter—her father is in the picture, but it’s complicated.
He, er… well, he has another, er…” She bangs the glass back down on the table and I see a tremor in her hands, her wrists.
“He’s married to somebody else. Someone who doesn’t know about us.
It’s, um…” She clears her throat. “It’s not ideal. ”
I say, “No. No that sounds tough. Really tough. Messy…”
“Yes.” She nods. “Messy. He’s been saying, for years and years and years, that he’ll leave them, that he’ll come to us.
But now his other children, they’re virtually grown up, and if anything, he and his wife seem closer than ever.
It’s like they’ve fallen back in love with each other.
They keep going off on romantic holidays, mini-breaks.
Nights out at the theater. And he treats me more and more like I’m the mistake, when he used to make me feel like she was the mistake—the mistake that he got lumbered with, and I was the precious thing he could never have because of the mistake he made with her.
And frankly, I think he just wants us to disappear.
I actually do. Just disappear. Poof.” She makes a small explosion with her hands that nearly knocks her drink over and she catches it awkwardly in the nick of time.
“Urgh,” she says. “Sorry. I have no idea why I’m telling you all this. I don’t even know you.”
“No,” I say measuredly. “But I know you.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I mean—I see you.”
I narrow my eyes at her, trying to judge if I’ve pushed her away or drawn her closer. She veers away from me slightly and eyes me the same way I’m eyeing her.
“What are you talking about?”
“You are on the precipice,” I say, glancing pointedly at her vodka and tonic, “of blowing your whole life apart.”
Her eyes flash suddenly, and I notice, for the first time, that they are green, just like mine.
“It’s not too late. I can help.”
She frowns at me. The line between her brows is deep and hard.
“For a start,” I say, “I can walk your dog for you.”
I glance down at the Westie, who is lying with his chin resting on his front paws, eyeing me warily from beneath patrician eyebrows.
“No,” she says. “Thank you. I can walk my own dog.”
“Ah, but you don’t, do you?”
“Yes,” she says crisply. “I do. I walk him here. I walk him to school. I walk him back. I take him on the Heath twice a day. Plus he has a big garden at home to run around in, so thank you, but he’s fine.”
I nod unconvincedly. “OK,” I say. “Cool.”
The conversation flags for a moment while she gets over her annoyance at me for calling her out on her poor dog parenting.
Then she says, “What about you? Do you live with anyone?”
“Nope,” I say. “Definitely not.” I say this with a hint of regret, which is more than I actually feel.
I don’t get lonely. I like my existence, my days divided up into pints of lager, wanders across the Heath, nights on a futon on the attic floor of a very nice squat near the Royal Free Hospital.
I can still get sex, if I want it; there are some girls, some women, I’ve known them for years, they’re fine, I don’t have to go searching for it.
Thank God. I meditate. I read books about birds.
I go to gigs, don’t care who it is, as long as I can afford the ticket.
I cut people’s hair for free, or for a little cash in hand.
I have friends I see from time to time; I have a brother who has a wife and kids and all the accoutrements.
We get on fine. I’m welcome round there for Christmas.
So yeah, all in all, I don’t need anyone. I don’t want anyone. I’m doing good.
She raises her brow. “Sounds like there’s a backstory.”
I blow out my cheeks. “Have you got all day?”
She glances at the time on her phone. Half past one. “I’ve got ninety minutes,” she says. “Shall I get us another round?”
By the time her phone pings at 3 p.m. to remind her to collect her child from school, her eyes are glazed, her speech is slurred.
I feel bad for her kid. Who the hell wants a lush of a mother collecting them from school in that state in front of all their mates?
I help her into her coat, and make sure she doesn’t forget her mittens.
She smiles as she leaves and then she says, “Oh God, I don’t even know your name. I’m Jessamine, by the way.”
“Nice to meet you, Jessamine. My name is Stuart.”
She waves her mittens at me to show me that she hasn’t forgotten them and sets out unsteadily into the cold December afternoon.