Authors: Amy Liptrot
One morning a peer turned up wearing a Jack Daniel’s T-shirt and was told not to wear it again. He hadn’t realised that it might be inappropriate. I told him – a recovering junkie – that I’d wear my heroin T-shirt the next day.
But there were reasons why we needed to be vigilant. Somehow a pint glass got into the kitchen cupboard, with Red Stripe (one of my old drinks of choice) branding, and we were soon discussing our favourite types of beer: real ales in huge glasses or super-strength cans of lager. It was enough to get the cravings
going. In the treatment centre, saying, ‘Cheers,’ instead of ‘Thanks,’ was risky territory.
A couple of times we got to leave the centre: a visit to the City Farm and to an NA convention. It felt like a combination of a school trip and a prison break: a collection of giggling raggle fraggles set free on the London public-transport system without our keepers. I would never have joined a group like that elsewhere and, alongside the pain of quitting drink, I had moments of genuine joy. At the City Farm the sight of a former crackhead sitting calmly on a rock coaxing three lambs to join him made us all smile, and another of my addict chums showed me how the fourth knuckle on his right fist was flattened from, years before, punching a cow. I noticed that the lambs were scruffier and the fields barer than at home in Orkney and pushed away some unwanted fond thoughts of home.
Some days my thoughts wouldn’t stop and I just wanted to escape myself. I began the habit that I’ve continued of drinking masses of Coca-Cola, which, alongside cigarettes, hit some approximation of the spot. I wanted to eat my own teeth, crunched down with Coke, until I was sick. I wanted to be put into a medically induced coma. I wanted the future now. I wanted to care for other people and not live on my own any more. I wanted nothing more than to stay sober but I wanted a fucking drink.
Back in my bedsit in the evenings after the treatment centre, I was exhausted. I was trying to be honest with myself for the first time in years. I didn’t drink, although I often wanted to, and lay on my bed with the internet and the window open. On
those summer nights I couldn’t believe winter existed. In the same way, when I tried to imagine Orkney, it was nothing but Dreamland.
After ‘class’ one day, I went to visit a couple of guys who had left the treatment programme (one finished the twelve weeks, the other was asked to leave after eight) and were now in the supported housing block where they lived with twenty or so other male addicts. It was a strange place: the en-suite rooms, secure entry system and smell of stale smoke made it feel somewhere between a hotel, prison and student halls-of-residence.
Said was the same age as me and, despite the differences between us, his life over the last decade had been a similar catalogue of broken relationships and lost jobs. He’d smoked crack and heroin for years but, when I visited, it was five weeks since he had finished the programme and he had been clean for more than four months.
He told me how he had left school early after getting into trouble for fights and vandalism, then selling drugs. He’d made many attempts to get clean, including being prescribed metha-done and spending time in Bangladesh, but always relapsed. This time, he said, he wasn’t running away from his problems. After his last use of heroin in February, he had been in detox for twenty-one days before joining our treatment group. Said’s success was the exception rather than the rule. The treatment programme were unable to give me statistics, but of the ten
people who were there when I started, only two successfully graduated. One left after she decided it was too intense, one was asked to leave for ‘failing to engage with the programme’, and five were discharged (kicked out) because they relapsed (they drank or took drugs).
More people joined when I was there, with a similar relapse rate. The programme was tough. Although it had the same 100 per cent abstinence and zero-tolerance policy as a residential centre, each night and weekend we were sent back into the real world, with its pressure and temptations.
While I was visiting Said, a man who had been discharged from the programme in my second week, following a relapse, came into the kitchen. The deterioration in his appearance was shocking. He had lost weight and teeth, and his hands and face were covered with sores, which the others later told me were cigarette burns. He told me that, after leaving, he had gone on a bender culminating in a five-day stay in the psychiatric ward of Mile End Hospital. He said he was back in AA meetings, trying to stay off the drink and feeling ‘better’, but his wild eyes told a different story.
At seventy-three days since I had had a drink, more than two months into the programme, one of the main ‘feelings’ I had was a sense of luckiness. I listened all day to the others’ stories and was so sad at the places their addiction had taken them. In group therapy one day, one of the older peers was talking about
his family, from whom he had been estranged for more than a decade due to his chronic drunkenness. He said he had learned not to think about them too much, and when he went to sleep, he told himself that he should not dream about them, son, daughter or wife. ‘But then I have no one to dream of.’
Another peer, in his fifties, a former heroin user and dealer, was reading out his homework in which he talked about his childhood love of sailing, fishing and ‘open seas’, and his once-tender relationship with the wife who had divorced him in the eighties. Everyone in the circle, including the counsellors who had heard so much already, and men who had spent almost half their life in jail, was fighting back tears at wasted lives, thwarted ambitions and broken hearts.
I had never injected drugs, been a prostitute, smoked crack in front of my baby, spent eight years in a Russian prison, mugged an old man in the park, or been through six detoxes and four rehabs, painfully relapsing each time. My family still spoke to me and I had not turned yellow. I looked around the room and realised that everyone who had been married was either divorced or separated. I was glad I had stopped when I did. I didn’t want to break anyone else’s heart with my drinking.
I also felt lucky that I’d had the luxury of taking three months out of the ‘real world’ to sort my life out, publicly funded, with the support of the excellent counsellors on the programme. With the coalition government making cuts to the public sector, the future for resource-heavy programmes such as this one was unclear. The prime minister was talking tough, picking out addicts and people with weight problems (there were apparently around
80,000 addicts on incapacity benefits, including 42,360 alcoholics – my peers were surprised at how low this number was), saying that the public only wanted to pay taxes ‘for people incapacitated through no fault of their own’.
I thought about drinking all the time. It was there at the back of my mind, like tinnitus, with regular intense cravings shooting through my mind and body. And then there were the dreams, the drinking dreams. I dropped a bottle of wine on kitchen tiles and was lapping the drink like a dog, along with dirt from the floor and broken glass. I woke so relieved that it wasn’t real.
One afternoon we had acupuncture, awkwardly handling our imaginary glowing balls of
chi
, needles sticking out of our ears and third eyes, trying to take the pan-pipes music seriously. I rushed, all anti-Zen, for a cigarette, then to hoover the room (we had different ‘therapeutic duties’ each week), before jumping on my bike to power along the canal to a bench I’d found. Lightheaded, with sweet blossom swirling in the breeze around me, waving at mysterious officials in orange boats, an ice-cream van Yankee Doodling from an unknown location and aeroplane trails across east London’s sky, I thought, This is wild. I was finding that being sober could be kind of a trip and I was just riding it like a soldier.
9
DRIFTING
AT MY BEDSIT IN HACKNEY WICK
, six single people lived above the pub, on one floor divided by the landlord into the smallest individual living spaces possible so that he could squeeze the most rent from the building. The rooms were separated by thin walls but I heard very little noise from the other occupants, no conversation or laughter, just TVs. There was a shared washing-machine in the hallway but I never saw anyone else using it. We all waited until the hall was clear before scuttling into our rooms or out of the door. Migrant workers, divorcees or alcoholics, no one planning to be in that situation for very long, six lonely people so close but transient and unable to reach out to each other.
I had chosen to be there because it was the cheapest place in east London I could find to live alone. I could not risk relying on or letting down other people again. My attempts at sobriety in the past had failed and I wasn’t confident enough to count
on this one. I was just taking things day by day, sitting on the end of my bed, my possessions crammed around me, smoking out of the window, looking across the canal to the newly built Olympic stadium, anxious and frustrated.
I’d left my job to go to rehab, so when my three months in the treatment centre came to an end, I found myself unemployed again. I was treating my sobriety with great care, as if I was a delicate, newly hatched chick and I was not going to let myself be shaken or squashed. I was trying to pay attention to my needs and emotions, anxious, tired, lonely, hungry, which previously I’d usually dealt with by an unsubtle and ultimately unhelpful application of booze. I was going to AA meetings and avoiding some old places and people, while applying for jobs with a new hard-to-explain gap in my CV.
I drifted around east London on my bike, hoping that by acting as if going swimming, buying groceries, texting people from AA and drinking endless Coca-Cola was enough, then it’d gradually become so. Alcohol had been my companion for years and, although it had caused me trouble, I was missing it.
When I broke up with my boyfriend I’d spent a long time feeling it was almost futile to cook for one. What was the point of watching a film alone, or of sweeping the floor when it was only me walking on it? I still missed him – I thought of him every time a plane flew over east London – but he was gradually getting further away. I was now going through something similar with alcohol. What was the point of picnics without booze? Was I supposed to just meet a friend, not ‘for a drink’?
Aimless, jittery and jonesing, any small thing going wrong
upset me disproportionately and I was spun out. The workings of the city and my mind had been exposed, and things made even less sense than they had when they were concealed. Layers of complexity multiplied and I couldn’t hang on. I cycled around the roundabout under Canary Wharf, where there were trade entrances to the shining office blocks above, Chinese waiters smoked and I breathed in trapped traffic fumes. I cycled through Hackney Wick, where on one side of the road a storage facility was packed with people’s possessions and on the other there was a newly built empty apartment block.
I was coming around to the idea that alcoholism is a form of mental illness, rather than just a habit or lack of control. Although I knew that everything good happening in my life – regaining the trust of my family, who’d seen me promise and fail to change many times, possibilities of new work, a slight confident step – was reliant on me staying sober, as I cycled over the bridge across the Eastway in the sun, knowing I had a free afternoon, I had the thought that a couple of beers would not only be a nice idea but was the only thing that would give me satisfaction. Although I didn’t think I was crazy in general, thoughts like that were insane. I had to stay vigilant.
I kept thinking about a Bloody Mary, which I’d rarely drunk. A Bloody Mary with plenty of vodka through a straw sitting outside a bar by myself. When I was craving, I would abandon all else and just drink into oblivion. But I was learning that the thing with cravings is that they pass: I sat through it and an hour later wondered what it had been about.
In a strangely landscaped park in the middle of Canary Wharf,
under the shadow of Number One Canada Square, I drank an overpriced coffee, watching men in suits and women in wrap dresses and heels talk on phones, security passes around their necks. Just a few months earlier, I had worn smart clothes and was buzzed into corporate headquarters but now I felt removed. I was in an ill-fitting, garish dress with messy hair, shaky and tearful. I’d given it up voluntarily, and was glad I had, but there were moments when I wondered what the hell I’d done.
As well as stopping drinking, my time in rehab changed me in other ways, reconfiguring my priorities. I felt lucky to have indulged in treatment and to have met all those loopy and unpredictable people. Working with people who could barely read and write, but who often expressed themselves with eloquence that hurt my heart, made my concerns over things like grammar seem petty and obscure. Hearing about life in prisons, in hospitals, in travelling communities, in large families, in Russia and in Stepney Green showed me spheres of experience orbiting far away from media-saturated graduates bitching on Twitter. My old friends now seemed different, going round the same bars and parties, with the same topics of conversation. Excuse me while I smash up the drum kit inside my head.
I never cried when I was on my bike and, to get out of the house, I took long cycles across the city, through my past. I cycled along Regent’s Canal, past the place where I’d fallen in. I stopped at the spot in Trafalgar Square where I’d left a bag full of new clothes and make-up after a shopping trip had turned into a solitary pub crawl. I cycled through Soho, where I passed familiar doorways to clubs and all-night bars, and down Brick Lane where,
each year, a new influx of dressed-up twenty-two-year-old girls walked in groups of three.
Standing up on the pedals, with my hair blowing in my face, I felt like I had when I was a kid – uncool and undefended. The fresh air, the wind, was where I came from and, although there were buildings all around, the open landscapes of Orkney were still inside me and I was somehow always cycling towards a hidden horizon.
It was autumn but there were still some warm days, and when I passed the corner of London Fields where all the posing cool kids hung out, I got a flash of what they call in AA ‘euphoric recall’. I had to fight to remember that the good times there, the impromptu picnics, only really happened in the first couple of years. Later, it tended to be just me, some cans of Kronenbourg, my notebook and a mobile phone I began to hate for not ringing.