‘No, I don’t mess with any of that stuff in here. The cold-turkey approach is best. These sisters know what they’re doing.’
There doesn’t seem to be a sniff of irony in how he delivers this. And yet, how many times has he been back in? The rumours go: dozens. He is the most common reoffender.
14
At the meeting that evening Linda surprises everyone, including herself, by speaking out. ‘I know he’s my heroin, but at least he doesn’t make all my teeth fall out.’ She laughs, over-bright and shrill. No one takes the bait. ‘I’m not me when he’s in my life, but I’m not me when he’s out of it either. Know what I mean?’
The rest of the room falls silent; a few of the men look shame-faced, knowing this is exactly the effect they have on their women. A few of them look angry. Why would you go throwing your love at idiots like that? She deserves what’s coming to her. The women look away. The silence is heavy and loaded, a latent violence clinging to its contours.
Another voice claims the space, making no allusion to Linda’s comment. The conversation is steered expertly back to comfortable territory: ‘It had me in its grip, every waking moment obsessed.’ This is Linda’s story too, only the ‘it’ in her case is a ‘he’。 Her sunken cheeks are puffed up and purple-puce, like little plums.
I wait until the last speaker rounds off his familiar tale with ‘but God has me in his hands and in his sights now. God knows what’s good for me.’ There is a sanctimonious piety to this statement that infuriates me and prods my sleeping creatures. I can feel their wings beat against my ribcage, desperate to be let out. Disturb and disrupt.
‘This is my first time sharing.’ So far, so polite. A big clap erupts. I breathe deeply. ‘I often wonder at our capacity for self-delusion.’ The perfect pitch, the lowered voice: come into my orbit. All my acting skills are coming into play, and a rush is released. I am holding the space, my audience entranced. ‘I’ve heard a lot of honesty around substance abuse and our pasts forming us, yet very little about the havoc we wreak on other people’s lives.’ The swarm flies free from my mouth: ‘The stuff our parents did to us we’re repeating. It’s not all about what was done to us, it’s what we’re doing to those around us, particularly our children.’ The air is sucked from the room. Noisy thoughts float and collide, clogging the airwaves. A static hum reverberates in the silence. I have done it, poked all their darkest places.
I don’t like how exposed I feel. That was not all about performance.
‘Thank God I’m not a parent,’ one auld fella pipes up, blessing himself. ‘Thank God this will all stop with me.’
Another guy says, ‘Speak for yourself, missus. Enough of the “we”！’
At the end of the meeting Linda finds her way through the hugging men and stands in front of me. ‘Brave.’ She blows on her own hot cheeks, flapping the stale air in front of her face with an ineffectual tiny hand.
‘You too, Linda. You too. Not sure it’s entirely true, though, when you said yer man Mark couldn’t make you lose all your teeth.’
She snorts. ‘Did anyone come for you today?’
‘Nope.’
‘Probably for the best. Early days.’
I bite down on the inside of my cheek, taste the metallic tang.
I feel a wallop of a clap on my shoulder. I wince, turn to see Jimmy beaming at me. ‘Good on you. All this self-congratulatory whingeing. We’re a downright ugly bunch, when it comes to it. Needed that dose of honesty.’
Linda smiles at me. ‘Big J is a fan!’
I smile back. It doesn’t hurt.
15
Another visiting day comes and goes and no news, not even a message. Almost a month now. How have I stuck it? Perhaps a tiny inkling of what it is to be sober, the beginnings of a reckoning, a grappling with honesty, a delicate, burgeoning connecting. And now it’s time for yet another unrequited phone call home.
There is, of course, a long clacking queue in front of me. I plant my feet, root them firmly to the ground and breathe deeply, as Jimmy told me to do when surges of rage pulse through me. Apparently this creates a moment of pause, enough to interrupt the reactivity, which in some people is so turbocharged it can lead to murder. ‘It’s called grounding. Or a sacred pause. Something as simple as that could’ve saved me from prison.’ I doubt that. From the moment he was conceived his life was one big trauma, involving social services and state ‘care’。 No one ever hugged him as a child. When I heard him share this in a meeting it had truth all over it. My airways constricted, and I had a job staying upright. Was I overcome with sorrow for him, the little boy he was, or was it for myself? I can’t remember anyone holding me either, which is why I overloaded on the hugs with Tommy. But was it for him – or for me? I wonder what those hugs will come to mean to him in later life. Those suffocating hugs.