‘Ha, yes,’ I say. And then making a big effort to keep things light, I say, ‘So I’ll look forward to when you stop wearing them.’
‘Ha, in your dreams.’
We both smile.
And then we go back to the singing.
When we arrive in Florence, we go straight to the hotel and park.
We meet in the hotel reception twenty minutes after being shown to our rooms, during which time I have a fifteen-minute call with Thea, and then Emma and I begin the walk into town.
It’s a lovely, leafy area, near the Boboli Gardens, and Emma’s still making me laugh a lot, and, other than the fact that I never wanted to see her again and now I’m doing nothingbutseeing her, I can’t criticise the walk. It’s just… nice. Very nice.
As is Florence, of course. We wander round looking at some of the many beautiful buildings and squares, before going to the restaurant that I booked for ninep.m.
When the waiter comes to take our drinks orders, I see Emma hesitate and then say, ‘I’m very happy with tap water.’
‘You sure you don’t want a glass or two of wine?’ I ask. ‘I’d more than happily have some red.’
‘Oh! I thought… Please don’t feel…’
I look up at the waiter. ‘Could we have some tap water for now and we’ll probably order some wine in a minute?’
Then I turn to Emma. ‘I think you might have the impression that I don’t – can’t – drink any more. I wasn’t an alcoholic; I wasn’t addicted. I was just… stupid. I drank too much a lot of the time but I was lucky enough to be able to stop. It wasn’t a physical addiction. It was just… stupidity.’ And maybe a self-destruct thing because of my family situation, but I’m not going to talk about that with Emma.
Emma nods slowly. She opens her mouth, closes it again, tilts her head, blatantly thinks for a few moments and then says, ‘You know you don’t have to answer this question. But recently I’ve wondered whether you drank – did all those stupid things – because of your… home life? Your… family? I think I might have been too young to understand that at the time.’
Oh, okay, yes, Emma obviously knew about my family and she can obviously add two and two correctly.
There’s a lot to unpick in what she just said. Not least that she says that she’s thought recently about me. I had no idea that either of us was going to admit that we still might think about the other.
Also: yep, of course she’s right.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘And I think I was too young to understand that myself.’
Emma nods. She looks as though she’s thinking hard again. She repeats the mouth opening and closing thing, and then this time stops and doesn’t say anything else, for ages.
The waiter puts a jug of water and two glasses on the table and I tell him that we still haven’t chosen anything. He givesEmma a big smile. Everyone always smiles at Emma, and I don’t blame them.
And then I say, ‘I can, and do, drink without being drunk. I haven’t been drunk since that evening.’
I immediately regret my words.Whywould I bring that up?
That eveningwas the one with the ultimatum. Our last evening together.
It was the day after I passed my driving test. We’d been together for three years then. I was twenty-four; Emma was twenty-two. Back then, I would often get really drunk. We used to have a lot of fun together and with friends (or just random strangers we’d met. It was usually me who got talking to them first back then). Sometimes I was drunk; sometimes I wasn’t. I was, very often, completely off my face. Always alcohol, never anything else, which was something I suppose.
At the end of the evening on the day I passed my test, I said I was going for a drive. Really drunk. In all seriousness. And I took someone else’s keys (someone I hardly knew – he’d left them lying on the bar while he went to the pub toilets).
Emma got the keys off me before I got anywhere near the car and we had a big argument (even though I clearly didn’t have a leg to stand on) and then the next evening I insanely proposed. I’d been intending to do it but straight after demonstrating what a dickhead you can be is not the time for it. It led to a really big conversation – not an argument because I was too stunned to reply really – the crux of which was her ultimatum. She said she needed us to take a break until I stopped being so wild. And I knew she meant it. And then she walked away from me.
So… moron that I was, I went on a big bender, with some complete strangers.
And at the end of it, I actually got into the driving seat of my car and tried to put the keys in the ignition. And then, thank God, because who knows what might have happened, the policeturned up because someone had called them. I spent the night in a cell and lost my licence. The shock of losing Emma and the close shave with driving when drunk had a huge effect on me.
I just stopped getting drunk. I was incredibly lucky in that I wasn’t physically addicted to alcohol. I’d just been trying to escape reality I suppose, and it had become a habit.
I stopped doing that and faced up to my life, made all the changes I needed to and basically have been a lot wiser ever since.
