Читать книгу Life on the Edge - The true story of the hero who saved the lives of twenty-nine people at Beachy Head - Keith Lane - Страница 8
ОглавлениеI opened the cupboard under the sink. I’d been looking for my shoe polish and Maggie had told me that’s where it was. I knelt there for a second and sure enough the shoe polish was staring me right in the face. But behind it, at the back of the cupboard, there was something else. Something I knew didn’t belong under the sink. I reached in and picked it up.
It was a bottle of vodka.
A little confused, I didn’t say anything for a few moments. We had a drinks cabinet and it had a bottle of vodka in it, so what was this bottle doing here? It was three-quarters empty, and I’d never seen it – let alone drunk from it – before, so it was pretty obvious that someone had been at it – and pretty obvious it was Maggie. I was cross. Why the need for secret drinking? I asked myself. I decided to approach Maggie about it calmly. Perhaps there was a rational explanation.
‘What’s this, sweetheart?’ I asked, holding up the bottle.
‘A bottle of vodka,’ she replied.
‘Yes, but what’s it doing under the sink?’ I enquired, gently.
‘I don’t know. I’ve never seen it before,’ replied Maggie nonchalantly, as if to wave the whole subject away. Something about her manner told me she was lying and I felt myself getting angry.
‘Are you drinking behind my back?’
‘No,’ she answered, flatly. I hardly knew what to say.
‘Well, I don’t drink vodka,’ I replied. ‘I’m not drinking it, so who is – mice? Are they having parties in here? Do we have a house of drunk mice?’
‘No, no,’ she said, lightly, ‘it must have been a bottle I thought was empty and put in there to be thrown away.’
Maggie spoke as if it was a trivial matter, a mistake she had made, but I just couldn’t buy her story.
‘Come off it,’ I said, a touch of exasperation in my voice, a hint of anger. ‘Who are you kidding?’
‘No one, Keith,’ she protested, ‘I’m not kidding anyone. I love you and I wouldn’t do that to you, believe me.’
I didn’t have much choice except to try and believe her. But I couldn’t. Looking back, I suppose that moment marked the point I realised that all was not well with my beloved wife. Little did I know how bad things would get; little did I know how much trouble Maggie was already in.
From the moment we met, drinking had been part of our relationship. Social drinking, that is. Maggie and I were frequently out either with friends or each other, and more often than not we’d enjoy a good drink like anybody else. And on the weekends, we’d often get drunk and have fun together. It was all in the spirit of good fun; as far as I was concerned, alcohol was merely something that enhanced an already wonderful situation. I’m sure we would have had just as much love and fun without it, but I never questioned whether or not drinking was a problem because, for me at least, it wasn’t.
The discovery that Maggie was drinking behind my back made me question things. Why did she feel the need to hide it from me? I asked myself. How much was she drinking? And more to the point, what was driving her to it?
When I thought about it, I felt sure I knew part of the answer. Two things had happened in recent months that Maggie hadn’t taken well. Firstly, she’d started going through the menopause. The hormonal changes had affected her moods and were making her feel slightly down. Secondly, Maggie had recently lost a job. The job was great and so were most of the people she had worked with, but eventually it came to a point where she faced the choice of resigning or getting the sack. To cut a long story short, a situation had arisen where it had looked as if Maggie has mucked up when, in fact, she hadn’t. It was terrible for me to witness my beloved being made unhappy and losing the job really affected her.
Both of these events led to a noticeable change in Maggie. Before, everything had been so much fun – Maggie was always her bubbly self and we were enjoying life to the full – whereas now the woman I knew was gone. Instead of a smiling face at the end of a day, I would come home to find a long one. The Maggie who had always loved getting out, having adventures, socialising and filling a room with laughter had been replaced by someone who would opt for sitting at home on the couch. We’d always had a passionate sex life, but now that went out of the window too.
All of these things were bad, and it was obvious Maggie was having a rough time, but I thought it was merely a phase – nothing a bit of TLC and encouragement couldn’t remedy. I’d go out of my way to buy her flowers, surprise her with ideas, give her massages, talk to her and try to help her think her way out of her worries, but it all seemed in vain.
Maggie’s problems were significant – I understood that – but were they bad enough to lead her to drink in secret? Certainly she had not been herself, but until I found that vodka I hadn’t realised the extent to which she must have been feeling unhappy. Hearing her lie to me about it made me realise that she must be in a pretty bad place. After all, I knew she loved me and for someone to lie in that way means they’ve become pretty messed-up inside.
It didn’t take long before I realised Maggie wasn’t simply unhappy: she was suffering with depression and was drinking in order to try and get herself through it. The worst part is that the booze would have been making her worse – after all, alcohol is itself a depressant, so she was already in a vicious cycle. A fundamental aspect of depression is that the sufferer ceases to look at the world in a rational way. Little things get blown out of all proportion and a depressed person has no way of talking themselves out of feeling bad. Depression is an illness and often responds well to treatment, but it’s making sure people receive the treatment that’s important.
If I’d known then what I know now about depression, I would have done some things differently. I would have tried to get Maggie professional help straight away. She had been to the doctor and was already taking antidepressants; I assumed that, in addition to the pills, my help would be enough to get her back to normal.
It’s a helpless feeling watching a loved one go through any sort of pain, and I could see Maggie was enduring a lot of mental anguish. In response, I did what I thought was the best thing: in the period following the vodka incident, I thought that I would try and catch Maggie out again in order to get her to ‘own up’ to what was going on. If this happened, I reasoned, the confrontation would encourage her to stop her behaviour, or agree to seek help for it.
Maggie would often wake in the night and go downstairs for a glass of water or juice, and I’d never questioned it before – I simply wished she were a better sleeper. But now I knew about the secret drinking, I began to wonder if her trips downstairs were for alcohol. I had to find out if my suspicions were justified, so one night I crept downstairs after her. I felt like a right bastard to be doing such a thing, and to this day I still hate myself for it. After all, it’s a sad state of affairs if a man is sneaking up on his wife, especially if he loves her in the way that I loved Maggie. It broke my heart that I’d got to the point where I didn’t trust her as much as before, but I was desperate to find out the truth.
The house was silent. I tiptoed through the lounge towards the kitchen. The door between the two was open, and once I got to within a few feet of it, I froze. There was my wife, standing in the half-light, drinking vodka in the middle of the night. The real shock was the way she was drinking it – she had her head tilted back and was swigging it straight from the bottle. It was a heartbreaking sight, and confirmed my worst fears. A few moments passed as I stood there, mouth agape, in stunned silence.
Maggie became aware of my presence, for suddenly she stopped drinking and shot a guilty glance at me. ‘What?’ she said.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked incredulously, trying to remain calm and measured.
‘Nothing, sweetheart, I was just checking to see how much was in there.’
Such a bare-faced lie made me angry, yet sad at the same time. However bad it was for me to be witnessing this, Maggie’s state of mind must have been a hundred times worse – denial on that scale is a scary thing. I tried to talk reasonably.
‘You were drinking it, sweetheart,’ I said calmly. ‘It’s OK, but you were drinking it. I know you were.’
But it was no good. Maggie wouldn’t accept what I was saying and a huge argument erupted. It was the first major row of our relationship.
‘How dare you creep up on me,’ Maggie shouted, ‘You’ve no right to do that. I’m an individual and you’re invading my privacy!’
‘Yeah, well I’m an individual too and I’ve got a right to know what damage my wife is doing to herself!’ I retorted. ‘I’ve never tried to stop you drinking. We keep our drinks in the cabinet, so why the need to drink behind my back?’
We yelled back and forth at each other. It was ugly. I was on the offensive, offloading all the pain and confusion I had about Maggie’s behaviour, and she was on the defensive, telling me it was none of my business. We shouted ourselves out until, suddenly, we threw ourselves into each other’s arms and both broke down in tears. I cried because we’d been arguing, because I didn’t understand how things had come to this, because it was so terrible to see my Maggie in such a state – I still call her ‘my Maggie’ to this day – and because I was so desperate to help. I’m sure Maggie’s tears flowed for similar reasons and I’m sure she was also crying because she knew she was so lost and depressed, because she couldn’t see a way out.
Strangely, afterwards we ended up making passionate love together for the first time in quite a while. Despite the painfulness of our argument, fighting had brought us closer than we’d been in weeks. We both loved each other, after all, and for a few moments the distance that Maggie’s depression had put between us seemed smaller.
We lay in bed together afterwards, holding each other close. The shouting was over. Finally we were talking openly again.
