Chapter 65
Jack knows you’re not with Sinéad and me. Have you relapsed? We’re worried about you. Hope you’re only having an affair
The earlier messages from Jack displayed fondness.
Hey Rubes, want me to pick you up? I can zip into town around midnight. Lucy is upset again
read the first. But the later they got, the more the tone turned to concern and then to anger.
There were messages from Lucy after midnight, saying
Where are you Mum?
Her last one, at 2 a.m., was all in caps.
The final message from Jack:
I called Jane and Sinéad. I know you lied. I called the Trocadero too. You’ve relapsed. If you were having an affair, you wouldn’t be this stupid about it. Lucy cried herself to sleep again. We can’t go on like this.
I had been stupid. My plan had been to drink until about midnight and then make an excuse to hop in the shower when I got home and sleep in the spare room.
Nothing had changed since I was sixteen years old.
I did not think things through. Never looked at the consequences.
What did he mean by We can’t go on like this?
Would he insist on couples therapy? Surely not now, when Lucy was going through her fake crisis.
The taxi driver watched me like a hawk. I wished he’d keep his eyes on the road.
As we bumped over Charlemont Bridge, I asked the driver to pull over.
I needed fresh air and I needed a straightener.
From practice, I knew there was only one way to quell the nausea.
I wondered where I would get booze at that hour on a Tuesday morning.
I walked back towards the bridge and looked underneath it.
Sure enough, some of the tented community were awake, one of them shuffling like a zombie around a gas stove.
I clambered down the grassy embankment to be confronted by a woman clad in filthy jeans and a black polo-neck sweater.
She looked about sixty, but her face was destroyed by broken veins and dark shadows under her eyes.
Maybe she was the same age as me. A small terrier mongrel ran around her feet, barking at me.
‘What do you want?’ she rasped in a cross between an Eastern European accent and a Dublin one, and the voice of someone who had smoked forty a day for forty years.
‘Could you spare a can?’ I said. ‘I have money.’
‘I don’t want your money.’ She looked me up and down. ‘The shoes,’ she said.
‘What? I can’t give you my shoes. I don’t have anything –’
As I spoke, she ducked her head back into the tent and re-emerged a moment later with a cheap pair of trainers.
They were clean at least. She turned them over in her hands and nodded towards my stilettos.
‘Size six? I’ll take your shoes for a can.
’ My head was pounding and I could smell the perspiration pooling in my armpits.
I needed the can more than I needed the shoes.
‘Fine,’ I said, grabbing the can out of her hands. I could have bought five hundred cans for the price of the shoes, but needs must. She eyed me with … was that pity?
‘I can give you a number,’ she said.
‘For a dealer? I’m not a junkie,’ I snapped at her. My relapse had been alcohol. No coke or pills.
‘Yes, you are,’ she said, ‘your drug happens to be legal. I have a number for a treatment centre. You should call them.’
I resorted to sarcasm. ‘That treatment centre clearly worked wonders for you.’
‘You think I’m an addict? I’m homeless, love, but my son is an addict. They helped him there.’ Her voice softened. ‘He’s doing great now. Got a job in a coffee bar.’
I was taken aback. I had always assumed that all these tent dwellers were addicts, asylum seekers or both.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, and then, grasping for conversation, ‘Are you safe down here?’
‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘most of the time, but we’re not all clean. Depends on who’s around. You could be knifed for a can sometimes.’
I sat on the canal bank and drank the lukewarm lager, feeling the alcohol lacing itself around my synapses, restoring order to my stomach.
I was pissed off about the shoes. How was I going to explain that to Jack?
And the Guinness stains on my dress. As I drained the can and rose to my feet, I began to feel normal again.
Traffic on the bridge was now heavy. It would soon be time for Jack to go to work.
Maybe he’d have left before I got home. I hoped so.