“I just can’t, OK?”
“But why not?”
“That stupid car never starts. And anyway it’s cheaper to go by taxi than pay the parking fees. Come on. Let’s just get you home and get some painkillers in you. You might not even need to go to hospital once those have kicked in.”
The girl grumpily acquiesces with dropped shoulders and a huge sigh. “Fine,” she says. “Fine.”
I follow from a distance again until I realize that they are headed for the Vale of Health. Nobody walks in or out of the Vale of Health unless they live there—or are walking a dog. My presence will be obvious, and if she turns to look at me, she will recognize me from the pub, so I hold back and let them disappear.
The following day she is back at the pub. Today she arrives at 11:55 and waits for the doors to open—and so it goes, I think to myself, the slow, incremental descent, whereby one day it’s not OK to have a drink before midday, and the next it is. I’ve been there. I know it. I used to be like her, you see. I used to be an alcoholic. I still am an alcoholic. But I’ve learned to control it. I know they say you can’t do that, but I can. Because actually, I think my alcoholism was more aligned with my hedonism, back then when I was young. I wasn’t like this woman here, trying to keep up the pretense of a normal, decent life. I was totally absorbed in the chaos of addiction, sucked up and away by excess of all kinds. I was known. Oh, it’s that guy. He’s mad. Keep away. I would shave my hair on a whim. Piss in public. Get into fights. Get kicked out of places. Oh, I got kicked out of so manyplaces. It was par for the course. I never expected to go anywhere without being kicked out. I broke girls’ hearts and treated them like shit. I was truly appalling.
Nowadays, yes, I like to drink. I need to drink. I like to drink every day. Probably five or six pints between midday and midnight. Sometimes a pint more. Sometimes a pint less. I barely touch spirits or wine. I don’t take drugs. I walk a lot. I don’t get kicked out of places. I’m a calm and reasonable man. And I can recognize fellow addicts when I see them, all the differing shapes and forms of them. And this addict, right here, this addict who makes her dog sit in a pub for three hours every day, who can’t drive her injured daughter to hospital, who stumbles out of the pub while the sun is still up, she’s pathetic.
I wait until she has reached the end of her second glass and then I get to my feet and feign surprise and recognition. “Oh,” I say. “It’s you. Wait. I, er… I… hold on.”
I turn back to my table and pick up the mittens I brought back with me today. “I have these,” I say, waving them at her. “You left them yesterday. You were in a bit of a hurry.”
“Oh,” she says. “Yes. Right. Thanks.” She holds out a hand for them and I pass them to her. “You could have just left them behind the bar?”
“Yes, I know. But I went after you, thought I’d catch you up and give them to you on the street, but I lost you. So ended up taking them home.”
“Well. Thanks.”
She puts them on the table and slides them gently out of her way.
I act as if I’m about to leave her alone, but then turn back and say, “Was everything OK? Yesterday?”
“Oh, yes,” she says dismissively. “My daughter. She, er, she hurt her wrist. A sprain. Nothing serious. But she was making quite a fuss, so the school made me come and get her. She’s a bit, er…”
“Dramatic?”
“She can be. Yes. She’s a classic tweenager, I suppose.”
“Ah.” I nod. “Yeah. I’ve been there. Done that.”
“You have kids?”
“Yeah. Two. The boy, he’s twenty. Jesus.”
“You don’t look old enough to have a twenty-year-old.”
“Well, yeah. I’m not. I got kind ofcaught out, I guess you’d say, when I was eighteen. I gave the girl the money to have it taken care of, but she kept the money and the baby. I didn’t meet him until he was nearly ten. And then, yeah, my daughter just turned seventeen. She’s an angel. But her mum took her back to Australia when she was three, so I haven’t seen a lot of her.”
“Oh,” says the woman, “that’s… sad.”
“Yeah. It is. It’s very sad.”
I can sense that the woman is beginning to feel comfortable with me and I make a move toward the stool on the other side of her table. “Do you mind if I…?”
She shrugs and gives her head a small firm nod.
I sit down. “So, how old is she, your girl?”
“She turned ten in October. She’s a bit of a handful.”
“And is it just you?”
“Yes,” she says, picking up her glass and taking a measured sip from it. “Just us. I mean, Daisy—that’s my daughter—her father is in the picture, but it’s complicated. He, er… well, he has another, er…” She bangs the glass back down on the table and I see a tremor in her hands, her wrists. “He’s married to somebody else. Someone who doesn’t know about us. It’s, um…” She clears her throat. “It’s not ideal.”
