The waiter reappears. ‘Ready to order?’
‘I’ll have a vegetarian pizza and a mixed salad,’ I say, as there are no other options.
‘Just give me a minute,’ David says as he reads with intent, his finger running beneath the text. ‘I’ll have a steak au poivre, rare.’ His voice booming in the confined space.
‘Anything to drink?’
‘We’re fine with waters, thank you,’ he says.
‘Actually, I’ll have a Coke.’
‘Right so.’ The waiter leaves.
‘Are you really eating beef? Hardly humanely reared cows in here, I imagine.’
He looks down at his fingers, which continue to fidget and shred. ‘I’ll eat what I like.’ I let that hang. He sounds so childish.
‘David, have you ever been married?’
‘I’m not sure what relevance that has to anything,’ he says.
‘We’re not in a therapy session here. Simple question.’
‘Yes, Sonya. Briefly. You?’
‘You know I haven’t.’
And I think how unbalanced this all is; how much this man knows about me, and how little I know about him. He seemed very uncomfortable at the mention of his marriage.
‘Are you still working as a solicitor?’
‘What is this? The bloody Inquisition?’ he says, smiling, trying to flirt a little.
The food arrives. It’s as bland and tasteless as this place. I look at his steak with some disgust. David can’t seem to manage to swallow more than three mouthfuls, my comments about the cow’s dubious lineage still ringing. I shake my head, looking to create a clearing. I’m ruining a perfectly good evening. ‘You’re always looking to destroy something good’ – one of Howard’s refrains. He was right, and he was wrong: there was no conscious decision on my part, it just happened, the voices happened, the images spilled, the creatures awoke. I’m well on my way to furrowing that same groove now; I know I’m making that face.
David studies me. ‘I wonder why you feel the need to be so prickly, Sonya.’
‘Sorry,’ I say, sounding anything but. ‘I guess we’re just not compatible.’
He laughs.
I’m shocked out of my dramatic interior musings. ‘What’s so funny?’
‘You are: Just. Not. Compatible. Why? Because I called you prickly? Is that the best you can do?’
This isn’t a tactic I’ve encountered before, and I feel as if I’ve been manhandled and thrown to the floor, all bets on me, now an unexpected loser. Why is he bothering? Why doesn’t he just piss off and leave me alone, like the rest of them?
‘Well, I’m just not into this, just not into you. How’s that?’ I say, obeying a director who’s pushing for a Liz Taylor moment from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
‘You’re so see-through. Not going to get rid of me that easily.’
Go, stay, go, stay, go, stay, go, stay, go, go, go, much easier if you just go… ‘Classic Groucho Marx shit, Sonya.’ I can hear Howard’s voice.
‘Think you may have underestimated my staying power,’ David adds quietly, smiling.
I want to place his hand between my legs. I want to rest my head on his shoulder.
36
Three weeks pass, punctuated by my visits with Tommy and my conflicted toying with David, that familiar push-me-pull-you routine, which doesn’t seem to faze him, and which makes me think I may finally have found my match. He doesn’t give much of himself away, except in bed. I ask about his childhood, his work, his ex, but he deflects all my questions all the time. Funny how I’m constantly revising my opinion of him: Mr Sober, Mr Solid, Mr Safe, Mr Slippery, Mr Sexy. He is the perfect candidate for my naming game. Mr S. He is very serious （Mr Serious!） about my recovery, monitoring my attendance at meetings.
As there’s no way I’m going to jeopardise getting Tommy back, I turn up at the meetings, zoning in and out. ‘Take what you like and leave the rest’ – I hear Jimmy’s voice in my head. Sometimes something touches me, pierces my self-absorption, makes me feel part of the human race. Sometimes somebody says something, and I feel that rarest of things: kinship. Usually this relates to the voices in the head, the hypnotic instructions, the addiction to danger, the fuck-you-world attitude. Although no one directly says they see their embodied sidekick, their demented imp, I know they do. I also know this is something there is no shared language for.
As for solutions? The whole ‘I can’t, God can: let him’ thing still feels like a cop-out. Some part of me still believes in willpower, the need for it, to exercise it. And yet I know it’s bigger than weakness, this addiction, it’s bigger than any human force of will. Prayer? I quite like the whole ‘transformational current’ thing Sister Anne floated to me, but I can’t feel the charge, no matter how hard I try. What was the other thing she said? – something about prayer being a link or a bridge between longing and belonging? That’s good too. One to try to grapple with. And God likes good manners. My prayer is that I will never get pissed around my child again. Please and thank you. That is not flippant: I am wrestling with what it means to be a good mother. David says parenting self has to come first. Sister Anne said finding a sense of a loving parent is the only way to be one. God the loving father, the kind mother.