Hi, ummm… I had a whiney wine habit, you know? Too many feelings. Oh, and I almost suffocated my son. A surfeit of love, you understand? Too much love. Too much everything, which was kind of fine when I could play a character, you know…？
‘No thanks, I’ll just listen this time.’ Failed actress, failed mother. And my alcohol consumption sounds so pathetic compared to these guys, who’d start their day on an empty stomach, a packet of Rothmans and a naggin of vodka.
Immediately another voice clamours for attention and fills the space. The meeting ends with another prayer: Serenity/Acceptance/Courage/Change/Wisdom. Words that land, though I try to bat them away, words that stir a part of me I did not know existed.
After, coffee is served, and Marietta biscuits waved under my nose.
‘No thanks. Coffee hurts my stomach and keeps me up all night.’
Miss No Thanks. Tommy is laughing at me, his teeny little finger poking me in my stomach. How I long to inhale him and pretend-gobble him up.
After tea and biscuits, we meditate. Breathing exercises. In, out, in, out, like a bellows. Empty, soften, fill. I am panicked, overtired, wired. I want to go home to my babies. I don’t belong I don’t belong I don’t belong.
Bedtime. Linda’s snores are rocking the walls, reverberating in the headboard, through the mattress and my body. My jaw is clamped shut, grinding back and forth, reminding me of that time when I turned thirteen and had to wear a mouth shield, otherwise, as the dentist said, ‘You’ll worry all your teeth away’ – which of course set up further worry in my overactive mind. I run my swollen tongue over my teeth and start to count, pushing against the top back, the top front, the bottom back, the bottom front. A tang of metallic fills my mouth. Brushing has been a kind of torture these last few months, so I’ve taken to rubbing my gums with a finger and paste. Blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus… Nod. Gas, that nod to the word ‘Jesus’。 I try it out, try to remember the whole prayer, but end up back on Ophelia’s speech instead: … Blasted with ecstasy. O, woe is me, to have seen what I have seen, see what I see… I can taste the smack of acid and cold and citrus and sweet; my whole body can taste it.
The darkness and the expectation of sleep and the inability to sleep: eyes full of sand, heart hammering, body needing to run, muscles bunched, tensed against all possible threat, the greatest of which comes from my own mind. Herbie in a cage, Tommy in a narrow bed, sparrow chest rising and falling in rapid successive half-breaths, never catching enough air.
I open the window as far as it will go, which is really only a crack. The meeting, although it stirred something like compassion in me, had the effect of being profoundly alienating. Impostor syndrome – something I seem to have been born with, a sensation that became particularly pronounced during my days of being lauded in London, and now here, in this place, where others seem to find their ‘true selves’。 Would I even know what that was if it slapped me in the face?
The thought of what I did to Herbie that night, and what I was on the verge of doing to Tommy… What? What was I trying to do? – no one spoke of impulses like that in the meeting. One man spoke of driving his car into a tree and almost killing his son, but it wasn’t because he wanted to stuff his son back inside himself, possess him.
These men, their lives seemed inevitable, their destinies charted from the moment they were born to their crackhead fathers, criminal mothers, junkies, alcos, selfish, stunted, addled parents. Like me. These men were born to mothers like me.
12
Work, prayer and crafts: a kind of therapy I’d have thought belonged to another era, but then everything about this place seems out of tune, out of step. The fact of me being a vegetarian is met with: ‘No one else in here eats only that stuff, love.’ I stick to desserts, a sugar overload building in my system.
One hundred and ninety-two hours （I keep count, obsessively） pass in a haze of rosary, meetings, woodwork, work assignments, rosary, meetings, woodwork, work assignments – and appalling headaches that affect my vision and my balance. My fingertips are needling, the skin on the soles of my feet prickling. I’m not allowed anything for these, not even a Panadol, nothing that will interfere with the natural detoxification process of the body, now I’m out of the detox unit. Seems kind of draconian and ridiculous, this puritanical abstinence after years of pouring God knows what chemical in.
My work duty is to feed the chickens and clean the coop, which is both brilliant and horrifying. Part of my job is to collect their eggs, which doesn’t seem to cause them too much consternation, and which means they are not killed for food, right? They really stink, but it’s better than being around people. The clucking cartoon chickens become my sanctuary.