Chapter 19
‘Tom, I’ve decided to give up drinking,’ SJ announced, a few days after her fourth appointment with Kit. She moved the plates from where they’d been warming on the oven and hunted for a tea towel to get out the lasagne.
She’d done a lot of thinking before she’d come to this conclusion. Not just about Alison and Jacob, but about the time that had passed since, and she’d discovered quite a few uneasy little skeletons that she’d like to examine through the clear lenses of sobriety.
One of them was her marriage to Tom, which she was beginning to suspect might not be the perfect union she’d always told herself it was.
Especially since he’d refused to backtrack on the arrangements they’d made to go to her parents’ anniversary party, which they’d discussed heatedly the previous night.
She glanced at him and saw he was smiling benignly – probably still trying to wheedle his way back into her good books. Neither of them had mentioned the first real row of their marriage and he certainly didn’t seem concerned about it now.
Last night he’d suggested that perhaps Alison could give the anniversary party a miss, which proved to SJ that either he (a) hadn’t grasped the facts – she’d explained several times that their parents insisted they both be there, or (b) he just didn’t bother listening to her at all.
Judging by that silly smile on his face, he probably wasn’t listening now either.
‘Did you hear what I just said, Tom? I’m going to give up drinking.’
‘Yes, sweetie. Is that forever or just for today?’
SJ frowned. She’d expected him to treat this momentous piece of news with more gravity, but then she hadn’t told him about Ash either.
Despite Kit’s insistence that she talk to her husband, she still hadn’t told Tom how bad she felt.
Putting it into words would have made it far too real.
She could cope better if it was locked in her head.
Something had changed in her since that terrible hungover Sunday, after dinner with her parents, when she’d had that conversation in her head with some imaginary opponent.
She’d thought about that voice a lot since.
She’d even given it a name: Alco – the Demon King.
She imagined him as an all-powerful ruler of the alcohol kingdom, sitting on a black throne on the edge of an endless black abyss, his drunken subjects crawling submissively around his feet, holding up their empty hip flasks to be refilled while he beckoned them closer, tempting them towards the edge with one more glass.
Just a teensy-weensy little glass, SJ, what harm can it do?
Picturing some crazy demon lord felt slightly less absurd than the idea that she was talking to herself.
But maybe Kit was right. She decided to try again with Tom. ‘I felt really awful the night after Mum and Dad came round.’
‘It’s called a hangover. Caused by too much al-co-hol.’ Tom exaggerated each syllable as if he was talking to a child.
‘Tom, I felt terrible all day. I – well – I thought I might be going mad…’ She couldn’t tell him about Alco in case he agreed with her. ‘…But I still had another drink on Sunday night – I couldn’t stop myself.’
Now he did pay attention. He glanced at her. ‘It’s just a question of moderation. Maybe we should get some smaller glasses.’
She knew he didn’t get it. He had no problem stopping, and if smaller glasses were going to solve the problem she’d have bought some. She tried again.
‘I don’t suppose I’ll give up forever – but I’m definitely having a few days off.’
‘Do you mind if I have a glass?’ He paused from unpeeling the foil around the top of the wine bottle he’d just opened.
‘Of course not – you carry on.’ How virtuous was that? Obviously your run-of-the-mill alcoholic wouldn’t be able to casually sit back and watch someone else drinking themselves silly, while they sat beside them dry as a drum.
‘So you won’t want any of this then?’
‘No, thanks.’
‘Not even a teensy-weensy little glass?’ He was beginning to sound like Alco.
‘I just said no, didn’t I?’
‘Okay – sorry. I was only asking. So what would you like to drink? I think we’ve got some Coke in the fridge.’
‘Is it diet?’
‘No, it’s normal.’
‘Then I’ll have water,’ SJ snapped, because she could see no point at all in drinking a calorie-laden drink, unless it was also laden with alcohol. If she had to suffer, then at the very least she expected to lose half a stone in the process.
They ate dinner in strained silence and then she escaped to the garden for a fag, which helped to ease some of the aching tension in her shoulders. Ash joined her, wagging his tail joyfully as she bent to fondle his soft grey ears.
‘We’ll show them, boy, won’t we?’ she crooned.
‘We’ll show that silly counsellor that he doesn’t know the first thing about unresolved issues.
’ She would show Tanya, too, who had taken to texting her each morning to see if she had a hangover, which actually was quite touching because she knew Tanya cared.
She hadn’t told anyone how it really was for her – although Tanya knew quite a bit.
It struck her suddenly that she didn’t have any other close friends to tell.
How had that happened? Until her marriage to Tom, she’d kept in touch with a few people from college and uni.
A couple of them now had families and were too busy to socialise; Joanne had moved to London and they’d lost touch; and the rest had just drifted away.
Tom hadn’t been keen on socialising with her friends – he wasn’t very comfortable around groups of women, he was good on a one-to-one basis, and he was good at certain subjects, particularly sport or breweriana or his work, but he didn’t really do small talk.
She could still have kept in touch with her friends via social media, which was what a lot of her work colleagues did. But social media didn’t really appeal to SJ, unless it meant watching clips on YouTube. She was happier with her nose in a book, which she pretended was work.
She’d let her friends drift away, she realised with a small shock.
As her drinking had increased she’d become more isolated, and as she’d become more isolated her drinking had increased even more.
It was a vicious little circle that she hadn’t even spotted, and yet now, as she stared out across the yellowing lawn to the sunlit trees beyond, the truth was impossible to avoid.
Her friends – all but Tanya, who was more tenacious than most – had slowly been replaced by a glass of gin and tonic, complete with ice and a slice.