And whichever one I chose to be, would she be the right one? If I misjudged, I could blow the whole evening. That would be bad. But even worse would be if I picked the right Sam for the date and then had to sustain it. I tried to be all things to all people, and on enough wine I thought I really was. I had loads of luggage on the baggage carousel, bags and bags, they were all mine and they were always moving and I had to keep an eye out for every single one.
One very sweet man I dated said he wished more nineties’ women liked to cook from scratch. He said he knew a lot of people saw it as outdated, but he loved it. I don’t even know how much I liked him, but I knew how much I liked a challenge.
“Well, I know it’s not very nineties to admit it,” I said, “but I love to cook! And I cook everything from scratch.”
It was not a rare thing for words to come out of my mouth before the filter on my brain had time to edit them.
“Come round for dinner this weekend,” I said confidently. “I’ll cook something.”
And he said that sounded great.
And it did sound great. There was only one problem. I didn’t like to cook at all. And I especially didn’t like to cook anything from scratch except pasta, which I would mix with sauce I had decanted from a bottle or a carton. That counted as ‘from scratch’ for me.
Never mind. There would be wine.
I inspected the frozen ready meals in the supermarket fridge. I knew it couldn’t be a good old Woolies meal because he would know. It would have to be something he would never suspect.
So I bought a no-name-brand chicken chop suey. I made rice and put it in a steamer and then I boiled the chop suey, emptied it into a casserole dish with some cream and black pepper, and was all systems go by the time he arrived.
He loved it.
“What is this?” he asked appreciatively. “It’s delicious!”
“It’s chicken surprise!” I teased, half truthfully, because it was a surprise even to me.
“I’ve never tried celery in a casserole,” he said.
I just smiled because, until he mentioned it, I hadn’t noticed there was any celery in it at all.
He came over twice more. The next time I ‘made’ authentic Italian spaghetti bolognaise, slow cooked for six hours over a low heat. And it really was; I had bought it from the Italian restaurant up the road, where you could phone through your order and then take your own bowls and plates and they would fill them. The other time I made clam chowder with a twist. Tinned clams, tinned butternut soup, extra cream and a pinch of cayenne pepper. You can get away with almost any culinary aberration if you add the words ‘with the twist’ to the title. So I did.
We stopped seeing each other – possibly because I got bored with being Domestic Sam, or because he saw through it. I really don’t know.
When you are sober you have no choice but to be yourself. You can shut the windows and draw the curtains but you cannot change the house. You have to work with what you really are because it is all you really have. You cannot hide behind the curtain. Drinking lets you live in lots of houses, and at one point I was working a veritable Wisteria Lane. It’s exhausting though. And depressing.
“No one understands me,” I would weep into my cat’s hair.
He would say nothing of course. He was a cat.
But people have to know you to understand you, and if you don’t know yourself, how can you expect anything different from anyone else? But I was years and years away from making the connection between the two. Years and bottles and blackouts away.
I knew drinking made me feel better. I thought it made me better company and I think, even now, that I was probably right. The company I kept was mainly hard-drinking journalists and the one-upmanship at the bar was legendary. Two colleagues I drank with had hollow legs. One was famous for having lost a work car on a drunken night out, when he and another newshound had ended up in a leather bar.
“It wasn’t the branded car, was it?” thundered my boss when he found out.
It wasn’t, of course. If it had been, I think Tim would have been in much deeper water than simply on the end of a warning letter.
The other was a woman with a cast-iron liver, the one who introduced me to Long Island Iced Tea – an evil mix of vodka, rum, gin and tequila. We were at a rooftop bar in Yeoville when I had my first one. I think I had finished my fourth by the time I found myself at the foot of a flight of stairs in another part of town.
Tim was all for leaving me there.
“She’ll be fine!” he slurred, hanging on to the bannisters for support.
Rebecca refused to leave me.
“We can’t leave her here. She’s just fallen down a flight of stairs!”
“So? She’s already at the bottom! It’s not like she can fall any further.”
Rebecca dragged me up the stairs.
“We. Are. Not. Leaving. Her. Here.” Each word was a step.
That made for a great story. Sam was so funny! And such a trooper! And so bruised she could barely stand.
So, yes, drinking made me feel part of the pack and insulated me at the same time. I felt safer with a drink in me. Safe enough to be unsafe. I could stand back and watch what was going on, even as I made myself the star attraction. It was like watching a video of myself on perfect replay. As I’ve said before, it made no sense. And yet it made perfect sense.
CHAPTER 3
Memories/Blackouts
Sometimes I remembered things. Sometimes I didn’t. I had blackouts. There were many, and right up until the end, I was never afraid, although I should have been. I just thought they were funny. According to an Alcoholism Clinic and Experimental Research study, blackouts happen when a person’s blood alcohol level concentration is higher than what is considered ‘legal intoxication’. And alcoholic.org defines ‘alcohol blackout or short-term loss of memory caused by alcohol’ as ‘when the transfer of chemicals is interrupted before memories of the events leading to and during the blackout even have a chance to form’.
The problem then is that a blackout doesn’t mean only short-term memory loss and an unplanned lie-down. The person having the blackout can still walk and talk and sometimes even be lucid. I was pretty much always drinking above legal intoxication levels. And I have lost what must probably be days of my life. There are nights and days I do not remember and I’m not sure what was worse, the things I did recall or the things I didn’t. Tom Waits summed it up in his song ‘Time’, when he said that the things you can’t remember tell you what you can’t forget and that’s probably the most elegant way to describe the way it was.
There’s a process you follow when you’ve tied one loose the night before. Firstly, I would wake up and check my phone. That was long before the advent of social media. Luckily. I had to rely on SMSes and call logs to see what I’d got up to. I’d go through the latter with a feeling of sick apprehension. Who had I called in the dead of the night? Or the early hours of the evening or the late afternoon? Sometimes I’d see an ex-boyfriend’s number and wonder whether I’d got through or not, and whether I’d said anything inappropriate … or not. Or if I’d said anything at all. Sometimes I would call my brother, Nick, in London and have what I considered to be a perfectly lucid conversation with him. And sometimes, apparently, it actually was. And it would go on for hours. Those were some special phone bills, they really were. But, you know, everyone did