Chapter 12 #6
H: But that’s why this conversation is going the way it is… It’s reasonable, isn’t it? It’s a proper conversation between adults. Do you see?
W: Is it?
H: Yes. It is. And compare it with the one we had on Boxing Day when you were drunk.
W: Look, I’ve apologised about that. I was upset. You know I was. Because of Todd.
H: You were. But you were also drunk.
W: …
H: Can you at least admit that?
W: OK. Fine. I’d had a few.
H: And it made the whole conversation unreasonable. That’s my point.
W: You hung up on me. You actually hung up on me.
H: Yep. I did. But not today. Today I’m still here. See the difference?
W: OK. Yes, I see the difference.
H: Drinking makes you angry. That’s the thing, Wendy. And being angry makes you drink. You think it helps, but it doesn’t.
W: …
H: You still there?
W: Yes. Still here.
H: You’re crying. Honey… God. Please don’t cry. I hate it when you cry.
W: It’s OK. I’m fine. I’m just… You know… A bit brittle, today. But I’m fine.
H: Good. Because I really want that. I really want you to be fine again.
W: I’ve been trying to think about it all, you know. I really have. About the drinking, I mean, and us, and everything else. I think I’ve worked out when it started, at least. I think it was the damned pandemic.
H: OK.
W: I think the pandemic made me so angry. Because of my job. And I didn’t know how to deal with all that… anger. You know? So I started drinking just so I could breathe again. Because otherwise I thought I might explode.
H: …
W: You’ve gone quiet now. What’s that about?
H: Do you really want to know what I think?
W: Yes. You know I do.
H: No, I’m not sure that I do know that. Because I’ve tried to talk to you about this countless times, Wens. And that conversation has never gone well.
W: You have?
H: Hundreds of times. Well, tens, at any rate.
W: Well, I don’t… I mean… OK, if you say so. But that doesn’t really… match… my experience, if that makes any sense. But, go on.
H: It didn’t start with the pandemic. You’re wrong.
W: It didn’t?
H: No. It got worse during the pandemic. But Covid wasn’t the start.
W: But—
H: It started when your mum died, Wens. I’m sorry, but I’m absolutely certain of that.
W: …
H: Really. Think about it and you’ll see I’m right.
W: …
H: Wendy? You’re not crying again, are you?
W: No, no… I’m trying to remember. Honestly, I am. But… I mean, are you sure? Was I drinking when Mum died? Because I don’t think—
H: Not the drinking, so much, Wendy. I didn’t really mean the drinking. I’m talking about the anger.
W: The anger?
H: Yeah. You changed when your mum died, Wendy. And you’ve been angry ever since.
She has just put her phone down when Manon bangs on the window making her jump.
‘Bonjour,’ she says quietly. She’s raw from her conversation with Harry, and if possible she would have hidden in the bathroom all over again, but she’s been caught in broad daylight. ‘I don’t usually see you at this time,’ she says.
‘Yes, I am working!’ Manon replies. ‘You have mail!’’
She takes the envelope from Manon’s outstretched hand and immediately recognises the weight and shape of the envelope – a Christmas card. The handwriting she knows well enough, too. It’s from Harry.
‘Thank you,’ she says, forcing a smile and waving the envelope like a fan.
‘You are OK?’ Manon asks.
‘Yes, I think so. I didn’t sleep well, so I’m tired. Very tired, actually. But I’m fine.’
‘You look… I don’t know…’ Manon says.
‘I’m trying not to drink,’ Wendy announces. ‘Everyone seems to agree I have a drink problem, so I’m trying to find out if they’re right.’
Manon nods. ‘I think you are very brave.’
‘Or very stupid.’
‘No,’ Manon says, reaching out to touch Wendy’s shoulder. ‘Never this. I can phone you? To see you are OK?’
Wendy feels suddenly tearful at this young girl’s concern for her wellbeing. ‘That’s very sweet of you. So yes. Please do. And thank you!’
Manon glances at her phone. ‘You know, I don’t have your number?’
‘Oh gosh, yes, that’s true.’
‘You put in?’ Manon says, handing Wendy her phone.
‘Yes, of course.’
Once Manon has left, she sits in the sunshine and takes stock of the sensations in her body.
She’s feeling anxious – which strikes her as fairly normal, all things considered, but also clammy, and a bit slow of thought, as if suffering from the beginnings of a fever.
She’s also still shell-shocked from her conversation with Harry, but more hopeful about the future, too.
She remembers the flu she had when she was snowed in and ran out of wine. Perhaps that wasn’t viral after all. Could it just have been lack of booze? Either way, she got through it, she thinks. So she’ll get through it again this time. She’ll be fine.
She is not fine.
She is not fine at all.
But the worse she feels the more convinced she becomes that what everyone has been saying is true: she really is dependent on alcohol. It’s madness that she has never allowed herself to realise this before, but now she has, she’s determined to push through to the other side.
She barely sleeps that night and when she does manage to doze off, she wakes up feeling panicky a couple of hours later.
Even when asleep, she has terrifying nightmares that are so vivid they’re more like hallucinations.
These are bad enough sometimes to make her doubt that this is humanly achievable without help.
But when she imagines returning home as the new, sober Wendy and compares this mental image with the alternative in which she has to admit that she tried and failed, and that her addiction – something she hadn’t even accepted as existing – turned out to be more powerful than the sum total of her willpower, she steels herself to push through.
She will simply attack the problem like the medical professional she is.
So she takes half a tab of Oxazepam from time to time – enough to calm herself down when her anxiety starts to feel unmanageable.
And whenever she feels particularly agitated or restless she checks her heart rate, promising herself that if it ever goes over 110 she’ll get help.
She’s not sure quite what kind of help that would be, but she reckons Manon or Madame Blanchard could get a doctor to her if things get bad.
At worst, they could always bring her some wine!
Though she sweats profusely and trembles a little, though she feels utterly, utterly awful, and irritable and angry, her heart rate does not go above ninety-six.
When Manon texts her, she lies, texting back that she’s ‘fine’ to avoid having to speak to her.
She doesn’t have the patience for conversation.
While dozing she dreams of her mother flying like a kite, being dragged high into the sky until the string breaks, and of her father snoozing on a hammock above a precipice, and of a terrifying eight-legged spider-cat who looks a lot like Mittens, catching birds in his enormous web.
When awake she fawns on the real four-legged Mittens, who, seeming to understand her need at this time, finally deigns to let himself be stroked in exchange for food – an act of generosity that makes her cry.
Unable to concentrate on the book she has been reading, she instead reads everything she can find about alcohol, addiction and getting sober.
She reads about clinical trials of new drugs to help with withdrawal and scientists who have performed brain scans, and the twelve steps used by Alcoholics Anonymous.
She reads dozens of personal horror stories, and success stories, and the best advice currently available from the top American hospitals.
At one point, after a random turn in the network of rabbit holes she’s been sucked into, she stumbles upon an article which says that rats left alone in barren cages self-administer alcohol and cocaine, while rats in rich social environments do not.
Lack of social connection leads to addiction, the article concludes, and this ties into her own experience in such a profound way that it feels like a lightbulb moment.
After all, didn’t her own story with alcohol start with the disappearance of her beloved mother and her rupture with her best friend and brother, only to be topped up with the lashings of isolation supplied by Covid?
Her life is quite simply stuffed with severed connections these days and rather than spotting the issue and trying to deal with that in any meaningful way, she has chosen to shut herself away and drink – to shut herself away through drink.
And when that failed to help, as it surely must, her decision was to come here, to a lonely mountain in France – the land of the 3 euro bottle of wine.
She pulls out her journal and rereads her previous diary entries, written when she was snowed under, to confirm that she is re-experiencing the same symptoms. And then she writes a couple of fresh entries about the general state of her life and everything she seems to have lost or given up during the last fifteen years.
Her father. Her mother. Her best friend.
Her brother. Her husband. Her kids. Her workmates…
When you line it all up like that it’s a lot. And like a jigsaw puzzle at the beginning of the construction process, she senses that a picture is forming. She starts to believe that if she carries on, it may one day all make sense.
On the evening of the thirtieth, fifty-nine laggardly hours after she stopped drinking (because, yes, she’s counting the hours), she manages to watch a film in its entirety and fall asleep without taking a pill.
But less than three hours later, she’s awake again, soaked in sweat and trembling from the most dreadful nightmare.
In the dream, her mother had been screaming in pain – begging for morphine, and struggling to breathe – and Wendy had been weeping herself, tears rolling down her cheeks as she pleaded with a lazy hospice nurse to summon the night doctor for her mother.
She sits up and switches on the light. She notes the wet pillow, the soaked sheets, and holds out her hand to watch it trembling. Is this the beginning of the DTs? she wonders. Or is she merely trembling in rage at that dream nurse who would not listen?
She gets up and makes her way downstairs; she plugs the kettle in for tea.
She looks outside into the darkness and tries to push the horror of the nightmare from her mind’s eye, but it won’t go away. The images from that hospital ward feel as real as here and now – more real in fact, than this strange dimly lit cabin.
She goes into the bathroom and sits down to pee.
And it’s there – in the cold white bathroom with her knickers around her ankles – and then – at 3 a.m. on New Year’s Eve – that she realises: the nightmare was no nightmare.
It was a memory, an actual memory of a very real moment – perhaps the most real, most horrific moment in her life – a memory she has somehow shut out until now.
The choking, the begging, her mother’s pain, the tears, that imbecile nurse insisting that her mum had taken all the morphine that was ‘allowed’…
every detail of the nightmare is true, every sensation, every feeling something she most definitely lived through, every image intense with uncanny photographic accuracy.
And now she remembers the rest, too. She remembers how ten minutes later another nurse had finally paged the doctor and how ten minutes after that he’d sleepily sauntered in.
She remembers how, when she finally managed to push him into her mother’s room – because she had quite literally pushed him through that door – it had been too late.
He’d removed her hand from his shoulder and shot her a glare in irritation that she’d dared touch him, and then he’d said, in the most supercilious manner possible, ‘So, what’s all the fuss about then, Mrs Wilks?’
And that’s when she’d realised that her mother, the fussing Mrs Wilks, was no longer choking, no longer begging, no longer wheezing, no longer screaming in pain – that her mother was no longer experiencing anything at all. And she hadn’t even been there to hold her hand.
She stares at the tiled bathroom wall as the film plays out in her head. She realises that she’s been holding her breath and forces herself to breathe, and finally starts to pee.
And then, with a gasp of her own, with a gurgle, with a squeak, she starts to weep here in real life, fresh tears rolling down her cheeks until they drip, one after the other, onto her knees.
God knows how this is possible but she really had forgotten this scene.
Yes, she’d wept for the loss of her mother, for her absence, for the ache in her heart, for the impossible-to-comprehend fact that the most important person in her life was no longer on the planet…
But that precise moment – the cinematographic horror of those thirty minutes – well, she truly had locked it away.
And now, it is back, playing over and over in a high-speed loop, like a horrific best of, like the recap at the beginning of a television show.
And she really doesn’t know what to do with it all.
No wonder she was angry. No wonder watching all those people gasping for breath during the pandemic felt so personal.
And no wonder she started to drink. If she could, if she had some alcohol in the cabin, she would drink herself into oblivion right now.