It took a while to notice that, keeping time with our breaths, he’d been rocking us gently. A fire had built in me, unexpectedly hot.
This was different.
‘Okay?’ he murmured.
‘Yes.’ My voice was high with surprise. ‘Maybe we could …？’
‘Don’t do anything you don’t want to do,’ he repeated.
‘I think I want to.’
‘Maybe not today.’
‘Yes, today.’
He laughed softly and as he slid into me and our bodies slotted together, his pupils flared. All that eye contact became suddenly too much and my gaze moved sidewards.
‘Come back to me,’ he whispered.
Several seconds passed before I was able to face him again – then there he was.
Over time the speed of our bodies increased and my breaths became shorter. Still I kept my eyes on his and it was intense.
As I began to lose myself, he said, ‘Stay with me.’
But the wildness in my body made me feel vulnerable.
‘Rachel, stay with me,’ he repeated. ‘I love you, it’s all okay.’
I felt exposed and shy, but he held me tight, he held me so tight and all I had to do was take a breath, then the next breath, then the next. There were moments when the sensations in my body became almost too much to bear.
But I stayed.
26
‘Like, I wasn’t banging up every day,’ Chalkie said. ‘It was more in binges. I’d be clean for months – twice I nearly managed a whole year – but both times I started again just before I got my chip from NA. I think I thought I was cured. But guess what? I was still a junkie.’ He shot a veiled smile at me. ‘Sorry, Rachel, I mean addict.’ Then, with more animation, ‘Have you ever noticed middle-class kids are never “junkies”？ Right? But poor fuckers, brought up in the flats –’
I cleared my throat. ‘Chalkie, stay on track … So you decided to get clean? Why?’
‘I dunno, really. There I was in some manky sitting room with three other heads, all of us on the nod, and I just knew I didn’t want to do it. Not any more. A new path to the waterfall, amirite?’
‘What was different about that day, Chalkie?’
He shrugged, his eyes burning blue. ‘Hard to say, Rachel. Nothing I can think of. Just, I was done. Other times would have made more sense. After Maarit died …’
Maarit had been the mother of Chalkie’s second child, a daughter, Vida. Maarit had struggled with addiction and about two years earlier had taken her own life.
‘When I stole Rixer’s bail money and stuck it in my arm … the shame of that will be with me till my dying day … But it wasn’t enough to make me stop. And then I just … decided.’
Even though we knew the outcome of this story, we were barely breathing.
‘Was it hope?’ Ella breathed.
He fixed her with his blue stare as he considered. ‘I dunno exactly if I’d call it hope. But I wondered if I tried a new way, if things would be different?’
‘If nothing changes, nothing changes,’ said Trassa – and received a number of startled looks.
‘What’s up with you?’ Dennis squeaked.
Trassa looked confused, as if she didn’t know she’d spoken.
‘I knew what I was facing … withdrawal, like, it’s no joke.’ Chalkie’s short laugh turned into a grimace. ‘“Let this cup pass from my lips.” But I was doing it.’
‘It’s called “a moment of clarity”，’ Giles supplied. ‘Priya talked about it in a lecture.’
Giles was right. Usually a crisis was what shocked an addict into recovery – a job loss, a relationship breakdown, a brush with the law. Sometimes even the threat was enough.
But there were times when, without any immediate drama, addicts just decided to stop, when a rare break in their clouds of denial illuminated how exhausting it was to maintain a habit, how gruelling it was to hurt themselves and others, over and over.
However, moments of clarity were usually preceded by months, maybe even years, of people begging them to stop.
Either way, it was to be seized upon – moments of clarity didn’t usually last long before the window closed up and it was once again Denial City.
Unexpectedly, I was flung back in time, to a morning long ago, in New York. I’d woken early and alone – and I felt different. Inexplicably calm.
Something had shifted and my soul was quiet.
I opened my bedroom curtains. Outside the window, the first hint of dawn hazed the horizon. As I watched, the sun peeped out and light began to spangle over the city. My window was wet – it must have been pelting down earlier. As the sun continued to rise, a ray caught on a raindrop on the glass and broke into the seven different colours of the rainbow, becoming smudged stripes of transparent colour on the wooden floor, right before me.