Day Thirteen Sober
From: Charlie Jones
To: Charlie Jones
I don’t know if I’m strong enough to do this.
I’m inside the Isle of Ormer pub, the Pirate’s Den. I’ve got a lime and soda and my laptop.
I underestimated how challenging this would be.
It’s the sound, that warm pub hubbub. And the smell…
lager sourness, the hint of old woodsmoke…
fuck, it’s genuinely agonizing resisting the urge to buy a drink.
When did I get this bad? How did it happen?
I thought these emails were a weird idea to start with, but right now typing this out is pretty much the only reason I’m not at the bar.
The pub door just swung open. The fresh air was a relief. The breeze here smells different from the breeze on the mainland—a hint of the sea, maybe, a kind of sharp, bright cleanness. Writing stuff down all the time is changing how I see the world—I’m always looking for words for things these days.
I should leave. But where would I go? I came to the pub because I didn’t want to be at the stables. Charlie’s there, and we had this strange intense…moment, I guess, at the shop earlier, and now our constant proximity feels more unmanageable than ever.
The truth is, as much as I try to give her space, if she’s there I just seem to drift in her direction, as though there’s a constant current running her way.
I know way more than I should, too. I know she’s been struggling lately.
I’m pretty sure she had a panic attack the night of the pig.
Yes, we have a door between our bedrooms now, but it’s not a very good one.
They’re still essentially interconnecting rooms, and when somebody is struggling to breathe, you can definitely hear it.
I’d stood by the door, hand raised to knock, for an embarrassingly long time.
She’s made it so clear she doesn’t want my help. I really understand that feeling. But…sometimes a person does need a bit of help, even if they don’t want it.
Should I be doing more for her? Pushing harder, asking more questions? Was I right to walk out of there tonight and leave her on her own even when I knew she was having a hard time?
I guess I’m having difficulty figuring out where the line is between being a hermit and just being a dick, you know?
CJ
From: Charlie Jones
To: Charlie Jones
Subject: Day thirteen sober (cont.)
Home now. I didn’t have a drink. I did have a slightly surprising evening, though.
Part of the reason I wanted this job so badly was the remoteness. The isolation. Five hundred people, I thought. That’s hardly any. A farm on a place like that, it’ll be beautiful—and there’ll be no shortage of solitude.
But I got that bit wrong. It turns out I’m actually never alone here.
Someone is always about, whether it’s Rog in his cart, or Marly half-visible behind whatever she’s carrying—a huge stack of crates, a tower of loaves and, once, an actual sheep—or one of the committee members advising me on how to do my job, expertise unknown.
Tonight, at the pub, it was Red, wearing a Pirate’s Den T-shirt and carrying a tray of beers.
“You need to get out of this pub,” she said cheerfully, distributing the drinks among the tourists at the next table.
I questioned this, obviously—was she kicking me out? Then her eyes flicked to the pub door, held open by a guy waiting for his friend. I followed Red’s gaze just as Charlie turned her head away, too late to hide the fact she’d been looking at me through the door.
I got up and moved past Red. It was more of a relief than I’d like to admit when I stepped outside. Charlie was in running gear and jogging away down the Rue, her heels kicking up dust.
“So you’ve told everyone, then?” I called down the track.
She slowed, then swiveled to look at me.
“Excuse me?”
“That I’m an alcoholic.”
I think that was the first time I’ve said that phrase out loud. It tasted wrong in my mouth. I wanted to take it back immediately.
She smoothed her ponytail, walking back to me. “Actually, I’ve told nobody, though you did tell Rosie and Marly, and this is the sort of place where news really travels, so I doubt it’s still a secret.”
“And what did you think getting me kicked out of the one pub on this island would achieve, exactly?”
Her cheeks were pink. “You think I got you kicked out of the pub? You think that’s why I’m here?”
“What, it’s a coincidence I spot you outside the pub just when Red tells me I have to leave?”
“Yes, I think on this tiny island with about five walkable roads it is a coincidence that you spotted me outside the pub.”
“You were looking at me,” I said. “When I looked out.”
She blustered for a moment, then said, “OK, yeah, I was looking at you. I spotted you as I ran by and I thought, ‘Oh no, Jones is in the pub. I wonder if he’s having a drink.’ ”
“I really don’t need you to look out for me.”
“I wasn’t looking out for you. I was looking at you.”
She flushed the instant she realized what she’d said.
I thought of the moment this morning, in the shop.
I keep going over and over it. I don’t even know how to write what happened, because it was nothing—we were having a bit of an argument, she turned away from me, ignored me and got on with cleaning. That was it.
But it wasn’t it. Something in the way she turned, the way she shrugged off her jumper, the way she moved her body…She’d known I was staring. She’d liked it.
I’d liked it.
If Charlie and I are so determined to ignore each other, then why do we keep catching each other looking?
“I wasn’t interfering, I wasn’t trying to get you kicked out of the pub, I’m just slightly invested, I guess, in you staying sober,” she said.
Even now I’m still not sure I believe her. Red looks up to Charlie. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d been able to persuade Red to kick me out.
“If we’re done here, I’d like to get on with my run,” she said. “As someone mentioned, I could do with getting out more.”
The sun had already set. I didn’t love the idea of Charlie jogging after dark, given there are no streetlights here.
There’s only one constable on the island, and it’s Jerry from the dairy, who looks like a child’s drawing of a constable—smiley and rosy cheeked.
He doesn’t give the impression that he has much experience fighting crime.
This place does feel incredibly safe in the daytime, but there is a lawlessness to the Isle of Ormer, too. It feels like anything is possible here, and that goes both ways. A nasty drunk might see it as a different kind of opportunity.
“Did I say that you don’t get out enough?” I asked. I was pretty sure I hadn’t, or at least, not like that. “You’re very quick to read everything I say in the worst possible way.”
“Says the man who decided I’d conspired to have him removed from the pub because I happened to be passing by.”
Red poked her head around the door of the pub.
“This looks a little tense!” she said. “Can I make a suggestion?”
She waved a napkin at us both. Charlie reached for it first. There was a map drawn on it in wobbly pen.
“If you want a place to be that isn’t the pub”—Red pointed at the napkin—“try here.”
She handed me my laptop and satchel—I’d left everything at the table. As the door swung shut again behind Red, Charlie and I stood in silence, looking down at the scrawled lines on the napkin.
“Well,” Charlie said, “this is perfect. I was looking for somewhere new to explore.”
She pocketed the napkin and started moving away. Like she was going there right now, in the darkness. I thought of that table of drunk tourists in the pub.
“I’ll come,” I said.
“What, now? With me? On my run?”
“You said the other day we should chat. And walk. Would you be up for making it a walk? I’m not really in the right footwear.”
“I thought you said you weren’t here to make friends.”
Yeah, that hadn’t been my finest hour.
“I’m not. I’m not trying to be your friend.”
“What are you trying to do, then?”
I sensed that if I told her I didn’t like her running around the island in the dark on her own, she’d send me straight back to the stables.
She clearly felt safe enough to be out and about at night, and it definitely wasn’t my place to query whether she was right.
I should be getting away from this woman.
Not staring at her. Not spending time with her.
Not thinking about her in the rare moments she wasn’t there.
But…I looked down the dim track ahead of us.
“Red says this place is a good alternative to the pub,” I said. “And I shouldn’t go back in there.”
I can’t believe I played the alcoholic card, or, indeed, that the alcoholic card could ever be useful.
Charlie’s expression softened. She reached into the pocket on the side of her leggings, pulled out a headlamp, and told me to keep up.
Red’s map sent us down a track into a wood, dense with ferns.
It was dark enough between the trees that I kept stumbling and grazed a palm, not helped by the fact that only Charlie had a light, and every time she looked around she’d send the beam shooting off in random directions, e.g. , directly in my eyes.
We crossed a stream—I heard it rather than saw it, the undergrowth was that thick—and then the path seemed to hug its way around the curve of a cliff.
The only hint I had that we were near the sea was the sound of waves, and the fact that the ground to my left dropped away so sharply I’d only need to take one wrong step to go tumbling.
Then, suddenly, the woods opened out to reveal a beach below us.
It was a tiny cove, with the stream that had run through the woods dissecting the sand in a dark line, reaching for the sea. There were a few groups gathered on blankets or camping chairs with lanterns, and plenty of people on their own, too, everyone looking out to the water.