Marian Keyes - Lucy Sullivan Is Getting Married (43 page)

it, just to look at a little bit of my life at a time, to dole out the unpleasantness in easy-to-manage, bite-size pieces. I tried to protect myself, not to over- whelm myself with the loss of it all.

But I couldn't stop seeing him differently.

He no longer seemed lovable and cute and cuddly and great fun. But drunk and lopsided and slurred and incapable and selfish.

I didn't want to think that way about my father, it was unbearable. He was the person I'd loved most, maybe the only person I'd ever really loved. And now I found that the person I had adored didn't even exist.

No wonder he was always such fun when I was young. It's easy to be playful if you're drunk. No wonder he sang so much. No wonder he cried so much.

The one thing that stopped me from really going crazy was the hope that maybe I could change him. I could reluctantly admit that he had a drinking problem, only if I could say that it was a solvable problem. I'd heard that people with drinking problems got better. All I had to do was find out how to go about it. I'd fix him. My father would be back and everyone would be happy.

71 So I made another appointment to see Dr. Thornton. I was full of hope, convinced that there would be a way to save Dad.

"Can you prescribe something for him so that he won't 512 / marian keyes

want to drink?" I asked, confident that there would be something on the market for that.

"Lucy," he said. "I can't prescribe anything for you to give to him."

"Okay," I said eagerly. "I'll get him down here in person and then you can give him a prescription."

"No," he said annoyed. "You don't understand. There's no cure for alco- holism."

"Don't call it that."

"Why not, Lucy? That's what it is."

"So what's going to happen?"

"He'll die if he doesn't stop drinking," he said.

Fear made me dizzy.

"But we've got to make him stop," I said desperately. "I'm sure I've heard of heavy drinkers who've managed to stop. How have they done it?"

"The only thing that sometimes seems to work is AA," he said.

"What's tha...? Oh, you mean Alcoholics Anonymous," I said, under- standing. "Well, I don't think he needs to go there. I mean, it's full of...of...alcoholics."

"Exactly."

"But seriously." I almost laughed. "Smelly old men, with strings around their coats and plastic bags around their feet? Come on now, my father is nothing like that."

Although on second thought, he was fairly smelly, he never seemed to actually have the numerous baths that he ran, but I wasn't going to tell Dr. Thornton that.

"Lucy," he said. "Alcoholics come in all shapes and sizes, men and wo- men, young and old, smelly and fragrant."

"Really?" I asked with skepticism.

"Yes." lucy sullivan is getting married / 513

"Even women?"

"Yes. Women with homes and husbands and jobs and children and nice clothes and high heels and perfume and pretty hair...." he trailed off sadly. He seemed to be thinking of someone in particular.

"So they go to this AA place and what happens?"

"They don't drink."

"Ever?"

"Never."

"Not even at Christmas and at weddings and on holidays and things like that?"

"No."

"I'm not sure he'd go for that," I said doubtfully.

"It's all or nothing," said the doctor. "And with your father, it'll be nothing."

"Okay," I sighed, "if it's our only option, let's tell him about this Alcohol- ics Anonymous thing."

"Lucy," said Dr. Thornton, sounding annoyed again. "He knows. He's known for years."

I broached the subject that evening. Eventually. I kept putting it off and in the end Dad was drunk before I brought it up.

"Dad," I quavered nervously. "Did you ever think that maybe you were drinking too much?"

He narrowed his eyes at me. I'd never seen him like that before. He looked different. Like a nasty, vicious, drunk old man, one you'd see on the street, flailing about, shouting slurred insults and trying to hit someone, but being too drunk to do any real damage.

He was watchful, eyeing me as if I was the enemy. "My wife has just left me," he said aggressively. "Are you going to deny me a drink?"

"No," I said. "Of course not." 514 / marian keyes

I wasn't very good at this.

"You see, Dad," I went on cautiously, hating every second of it. I wasn't his parent, I was his daughter. He was supposed to tell me off, not the other way around.

"It's a question of money," I forged ahead, wimpily.

"I see, I see," he said in a raised voice. "Money, money, money. Always whining about money. You're just like your mother. Well, why don't you leave me too. Go on, get out. Go on, there's the door."

That put an end to that conversation.

"Of course I won't leave you," I whispered. "I'll never leave you."

I was damned if I was going to admit that my mother had been right.

But shortly after that Dad seemed to get far worse. Or maybe it was just that I was aware of it now. That he drank in the mornings became obvious. And that he caused fights in the local pub. And a couple of times the police brought him home in the middle of the night.

But still I held myself together. I couldn't go to pieces because I had no one to help me pick them up.

I went to Dr. Thornton again and he just shook his head abruptly when he saw me and said, "Sorry, no miracle cures have been invented. Unless it's happened since ten o'clock this morning."

"No, wait," I said eagerly. "I've been reading about hypnosis--couldn't Dad be hypnotized to stop drinking? You know, the way people are hyp- notized to stop smoking or eating chocolate?"

"No, Lucy," he said, sounding annoyed. "There's no proof that hypnosis works and, even if there was, the person being hypnotized has to want to give up the cigarettes or whatever. Your father won't even admit that he drinks to excess so there's no chance that he'll decide that he lucy sullivan is getting married / 515

wants to give up.... And if he says he wants to give up, then he's ready for AA," he added smugly.

I rolled my eyes. Him and his damn AA.

"Okay." I wasn't disheartened. "Never mind hypnosis. What about acupuncture?"

"What about it?" he asked wearily.

"Couldn't he have that done? Couldn't he have a little pin stuck in his ear? Or someplace?"

"Someplace indeed," he muttered. Quite nastily, actually. "No, Lucy."

So, as a last resort, I found the number for Alcoholics Anonymous in the phone book and called to ask them what I should do with Dad. And al- though they were very nice and sympathetic, they told me that I could do nothing for him, until he himself admitted that he had a problem. That rang a vague bell with me, I'd picked that up from popular culture at some stage. And something else. If the person admits they have a problem, that's half the battle. But I didn't believe it.

"Come on," I said annoyed. "You people are supposed to stop people drinking, so stop him drinking."

"I'm sorry," said the woman I was speaking to. "No one can do it except him."

"But he's an alcoholic," I burst out. "Alcoholics aren't supposed to be able to stop by themselves."

"No," she said. "But they must want to stop for themselves."

"Look, I don't think you understand," I said. "He's had a very hard life and his wife has just left him and, in a way, he has to drink."

"No, he doesn't," she said. Nicely.

"This is ridiculous," I said. "Can I speak to your boss? I need to speak to an expert here. He's a very special case." 516 / marian keyes

She laughed. And that made me even more annoyed.

"We all thought that we were special cases," she said. "If I had a pound for every alcoholic who said that to me, I'd be a rich woman."

"What are you talking about?" I asked coldly.

"Well, I'm an alcoholic," she said.

"Are you?" I asked in surprise. "You don't sound like one."

"What did you think I'd sound like?" she asked.

"Well,...drunk, I suppose."

"I haven't had a drink for nearly two years," she said.

"Nothing?"

"Nothing."

"I mean, nothing at all?"

"No, nothing at all."

She can't have drunk very much, I thought, if she's been able to abstain for two years. She was probably a two-spritzers-on-a-Friday-night type of person.

"Oh, well, thank you," I said, getting ready to hang up. "But I don't think Dad is anything like you. He drinks whiskey and he drinks it in the mornings." I said it almost boastfully. "He'd find it very hard to stop. He'd never be able to go without a drink for two years."

"I drank in the mornings," said the woman.

I swallowed. I didn't believe her.

"And my favorite drink was neat brandy," she went on.

"A bottle a day," she added when I still didn't say anything. "I was no different from your dad."

"But he's old..." I said desperately. "You don't sound old."

"There's people of all ages in AA. Lots of old people."

"I can send someone by to talk to him," she suggested.

But I thought of how angry he'd be, how humiliating he would find it and thought better of it. lucy sullivan is getting married / 517

Then she gave me the phone number of another group of people called Al-Anon and said that it was for friends and families of alcoholics and that they might be able to help me. So, as a last resort, I called them. I even went to one of their meetings, expecting to be given all kinds of tips to help Dad stop drinking--how to hide the booze in the house, how to water the drinks, how to persuade him not to drink until after eight in the evening--that sort of thing.

And I was outraged to find that it was nothing like that.

Everyone there talked about how they were trying to leave their alcoholic husband or boyfriend or wife or daughter or friend or whatever to their own devices and simply get on with their own lives. One man talked about his mother being a drunk and how he always fell in love with helpless women who had drinking problems.

They were all talking about something called "codependency," which I knew about, because I'd read so many self-help books, but I couldn't see how it applied to me and my father.

"You can't change your dad," one woman said to me. "And by trying to, you're just avoiding your own problems."

"My dad is my problem," I said huffily.

"No, he isn't," she said.

"How can you be so heartless?" I asked. "I love my father."

"Don't you think that you're entitled to a nice life?" she asked.

"I couldn't just abandon him," I said stiffly.

"It might be the best thing that you ever did," she said.

"The guilt would kill me," I said self-righteously.

"Guilt is a self-indulgence," she said. 518 / marian keyes

"How dare you," I said. "You haven't a clue what you're talking about."

"I was married to an alcoholic," she said. "I know exactly what you're going through."

"I'm just a normal person who happens to have a father with a drinking problem. I'm not like you...losers who have to come to these stupid meet- ings and talk about how you're managing to detach from the alcoholic in your lives."

"That's what I said in the beginning too," she said.

"God!" I said, angrily. "I just want to help him to stop drinking. What's so wrong with that?"

"Because you can't help," she said. "You are powerless over him and his alcohol. But you're not powerless over your own life."

"I have responsibilities."

"To yourself. And it's never as simple as getting the other person to stop drinking and then you'll suddenly be fine."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, what kind of relationships do you have with other men?"

I didn't answer.

"Lots of women like us have a really hard time having successful rela- tionships," she said.

"I'm not a woman like you," I said scornfully.

"You'd be amazed how many of us have the wrong kind of relationships with the wrong kind of men," she said gently. "Because our expectations of the relationship is based on what we learned from dealing with the alco- holic in our lives."

"Here's my phone number," she said. "Ring me if you ever need to talk. Any time."

I walked away before she gave it to me.

Another avenue explored. Another dead end.

Now what was I going to do?

I tried to give him less money. But he begged and cried and the guilt was so awful that I gave it to him, even though I really didn't have the money to spare.

I swung from feeling furious to feeling so sad I thought my heart would break. Sometimes I hated him and sometimes I loved him.

But I felt increasingly trapped and desperate.

72 Christmas was horrible. I couldn't go to any of the hundreds of parties. While everyone else was putting on short, black, glittery dresses (and that was just the men) I was on a train home to Uxbridge. While everyone else was puking or making out with their boss, I was begging Dad to go back to sleep, telling him it really didn't matter that he'd wet his bed again.

Even if there had been someone else to take care of Dad, I still couldn't have gone because I was too broke to buy a round of drinks.

Dad's drinking got even worse in The Festive Season. I didn't know why--it wasn't as if he needed an excuse to drink. To compound my self- pity, I only got two Christmas cards. One from Daniel and one from Adrian in the video shop.

Christmas Day itself was truly awful. Chris and Peter didn't even come to see Dad and me.

"I don't want it to look as if I'm taking sides," was Chris's excuse.

"I don't want to upset Mammy," was Peter's.

It was a horrible day. The best thing about it was that Dad was comatose by eleven in the morning.

I was so desperate for someone else to talk to, anything to dilute Dad's presence, that I almost looked forward to going back to work.

73 Because Christmas had been so awful, I foolishly approached the new year with hope.

But on the fourth of January, Dad went on a massive bender. He had obviously planned it because when I tried to buy a pack of gum at the sta- tion on my way to work, all my cash had disappeared. I could have run home and tried to stop him, but somehow I just couldn't be bothered.

When I got to town, I tried to get money from an ATM and it swallowed my card. "You are heinously overdrawn, contact your bank," the flashing message advised. I will not, I thought. If they want me, they'll have to come and get me. (They'll never take me alive, etc., etc.)

I had to borrow money from Megan.

When I got home from work, there was a scary-looking official letter just inside the front door. It was from my bank instructing me to return my checkbook. lucy sullivan is getting married / 521

Things were out of control. I tried to suppress the icy fear. Where would it all end?

As I made for the kitchen, something crunched under my foot. I looked down and saw that the hall carpet was covered in broken glass. And so was the kitchen floor. The kitchen table was scattered with broken plates and saucers and bowls. In the front room, the smoked-glass coffee table was in smithereens, books and tapes scattered all over the floor. The whole downstairs was in a shambles.

Dad's handiwork.

He'd done some drunken breaking and smashing in the past, but nothing as spectacular as this.

Naturally, he was nowhere to be found.

I went from the kitchen to the front room and back again, unable to be- lieve the extent of the damage. If it was breakable, he had broken it. Even if it wasn't breakable, he had tried to break it. There was a yellow plastic bucket in the kitchen that he had obviously attempted to smash the living daylights out of, judging by the number of dents in it. In the front room there was a whole shelf of disgusting china boys and dogs and bells that my mother had doted on, that he had wiped out. I felt a spasm of sadness for my mother. He knew what they had meant to her.

I didn't even cry. I just began to clean it up.

While I was on my knees picking shards of broken china boy out of the carpet, the phone rang. It was the police calling to say that Dad had been arrested. I was cordially invited to come to the police station and bail him out.

I had no money and no more energy.

I finally decided to cry.

Then I decided to call Daniel.

Miraculously he was in--I don't know what I would have done if he hadn't been. 522 / marian keyes

I was crying so much he couldn't really understand what I was saying.

"It's Dad," I wailed.

"What's dead?"

"Nothing's dead, it's Dad."

"Lucy, either it's dead or it's not, it can't be both at once."

"Oh, for God's sake, just get over here, will you?"

"I'll be with you as soon as I can," he promised.

"Bring lots of money," I added.

He arrived two china dogs, a china bell and half a coffee table later.

"Sorry, Lucy," he said, as soon as I opened the front door. "I figured it out. It's your Dad?"

He went to put his arms around me but I skipped nimbly away. The last thing my melting pot of emotions needed was sexual attraction.

"Yes," I said, as tears poured down my face. "But he's not..."

"Dead," he finished for me. "Yes, I'd gathered that much. Sorry, I couldn't hear you very well. Christ, has there been an earthquake out here?"

"No, it's..."

"You've been burgled! Don't touch a thing, Lucy."

"We haven't been fucking well burgled," I wept. "My stupid, drunk bastard of a father has done all this."

"Oh no, Lucy." He looked genuinely horrified, which made me feel even worse. "But why?" he asked, running his hands through his hair.

"I don't know. But it gets worse. He's been arrested."

"Since when can they arrest you for breaking things in your own house? God, this country becomes more and more like a police state every day. Next it'll be illegal lucy sullivan is getting married / 523

to burn the toast and to eat ice cream straight from the carton and..."

"Shut up, you bleeding-heart liberal." I laughed despite myself. "He hasn't been arrested for breaking his own dishes. I don't know why he's been arrested."

"So he needs to be bailed out?"

"He does."

"Okay, Lucy, to the chick-mobile. Let's go and rescue him!"

Dad had been charged with about a million things--being drunk and dis- orderly, causing a public nuisance, causing damage to property, intention to cause actual bodily harm, obscene behavior and on and on. It was hor- rific. I had never imagined that the day would come when I'd have to bail my father out of jail.

When Dad was led from the cells, he was as meek as a lamb--the fight had gone out of him. Daniel and I took him home and put him to bed.

Then I made Daniel a cup of tea.

"Okay, Lucy, what are we going to do about this?" he asked.

"Who's `we'?" I asked defensively.

"You and me."

"What's it got to do with you?"

"For once, Lucy, just for once, Lucy, could you try not to fight with me? I'm only trying to help."

"I don't want your help."

"You do," he said. "You wouldn't have called me if you didn't. There's no shame in it," he added. "Lucy, there's no need to be so touchy."

"You'd be touchy if your Dad was an alcoholic," I said, as tears splashed down my face--again. "Well, maybe he's not an alcoholic..." 524 / marian keyes

"He's an alcoholic." Daniel was grim.

"Call him what you bloody well like," I sobbed. "I don't give a shit whether he's an alcoholic or not. All I care about is he's a drunk and it's ruining my life."

I sobbed a good bit more, the burden of months of worry spilled down my cheeks.

"Did you know?" I asked. "You know, about Dad?"

"Er, yes."

"But how?"

"Chris told me."

"Why didn't anyone tell me?"

"They did," he said.

"Well, why didn't anyone help me?"

"They tried. You wouldn't let them."

"What am I going to do now?"

"How about moving out and letting someone else take care of him?"

"Oh no," I said in fear.

"Fine, if you don't want to move out, you don't have to, but there's lots of people who can help you. Apart from your brothers, there's live-in helpers and social workers and all kinds of people. You'll still be able to take care of him, but you won't have to do it on your own."

"Let me think about it."

At midnight, while Daniel and I were still sitting gloomily at the kitchen table, the phone rang.

"What now?" I asked in fear.

"Hello?"

"Might I have a word with Lucy Sullivan?" roared a familiar voice.

"Gus?" I asked, as joy flooded through me.

"The very fella," he shouted. lucy sullivan is getting married / 525

"Hello," I wanted to dance. "Where did you get my number?"

"I met the scary, blond woman in McMullens and she said you were living out in the middle of nowhere. I'd been thinking about you and missing you anyway."

"Had you?" I was almost in tears with joy.

"Indeed I had, Lucy. So I says to her, `give me the phone number, I'll call her and take her out.' So here I am, Lucy, calling you and asking to take you out."

"Great!" I said in delight. "I'd love to see you."

"Okay, give me the address and I'll be right out to get you."

"You mean, now?"

"When else?"

"Oh, now isn't a good time, Gus." I felt very ungrateful.

"Well, when is?"

"The day after tomorrow?"

"Right you are. Thursday, after your work, I'll come and get you."

"Great."

I turned back to Daniel with shining eyes.

"That was Gus," I said breathlessly.

"I gathered."

"He was thinking about me."

"Was he?"

"He wants to see me."

"He's very lucky that you're so obliging."

"What are you pissed off about?"

"Couldn't you have made him work a bit harder, Lucy? I wish you hadn't given in so easily."

"Daniel, Gus calling me is the nicest thing that's happened in months and months. And I don't have the energy to play games with him."

He gave a tight little smile.