Читать книгу From Whiskey to Water - Sam Cowen - Страница 10

You know that feeling you get when there’s a letter from SARS in the post? And even though you know you’ve paid your tax and you’re up to date on submissions and IRP5s and estimates and provisional this and value-added that, your heart sinks and your stomach twists an involuntary kitka? That, although you know absolutely nothing could be wrong, you still anticipate the worst? Well, imagine feeling like that all the time. All. The. Time. That’s how I feel.

That’s an exaggeration of course. No one feels sick all the time. Or frightened. No one’s hands shake all the time. But that’s how it feels. And at night, when I wake up and my heart is thumping so loudly I can hear it and my head hurts to touch it and my ears roar, I comfort myself with that fact. That it’s not actually all the time. Not every minute. Or even every hour. Just most of them.

It comes when you least expect it, anxiety. It’s not like fear. Fear you can see on the horizon. It’s like a pirate ship – there’s always a chance you can avoid it or fight it. Fear is rational. It comes from somewhere. Or something. It’s based in reality. Panic is not. Panic is what you feel when your entire mental processing system is overridden. It’s when you know that if you were comforting someone else, you’d be able to rationalise and maybe even joke about it. You could tell them to calm down. Tell them, it’s never as bad as you think. You could say, this too shall pass. But not when it’s happening to you. Not me.

I panic a lot. I always have. When I was little I panicked that my mother would die, even though she was perfectly healthy. I panicked that Ronald Reagan wouldn’t win the US presidential election in 1984 and there would never be an end to the Cold War. I panicked that I wouldn’t be good enough to go to heaven if I died suddenly. Now that I’m an adult I worry about different things. Some days it starts with something real, like an inexplicably high electricity bill, and then settles into its own loop. Like an old car radio where the knob to change channels has snapped off and you’re permanently stuck on one station and it’s always on because, even if you hate it, you can’t turn it off until you turn off the ignition.

And at first I have the energy to deal with the angst. I’m an intelligent woman. I tell myself all the things I would tell someone else. It’s not your issue, Sam. You can’t own this. You can’t take it on – you can only control what’s yours.

I can sort out crises for others with some well-chosen words, a non-judgemental approach and a series of hugs. But I can’t do that for myself. Because that panic has its own life force. Like some kind of drunken zombie, it lurches from real problem to imagined wrong to supposed weakness, infecting everything. All of it. So eventually, in the middle of the night or just before dawn, I’m as terrified of being late for work as I am that I won’t get my leave forms in on time or that I don’t know where my passport is and I really need to look for it. Urgently. And then I get really frightened. Why? Because I get out of bed to go and look for it. That’s what I do – go and look for it. Even though I know where it is. And it’s the act of getting up and searching that makes it worse – that if I could be worried enough to get up and look then maybe it is an issue. And now it’s a whole new issue I will have to worry about. Something else to manage. Or to control.

Control. Now that’s the Big Bad Bear. Because it’s a short-term panacea. If I can control the problem, it isn’t a problem. So if I know where the passport is, if I can be sure I’m not letting anyone down or revealing this pit of sticky black need, then it will be okay. At some point, some time, it will be okay. And that’s why I obsess over the little things, those silly poisoning little things I can manage. I can own. Because if I can get that right, surely the other stuff will follow? Won’t it?

Sometimes I wonder if I can punch in a different code. Like the combination lock you get on hotel safes where you can reset the code for every guest. Press reset, enter your own code and voila! New security. Perhaps that’s what I need – new security. If I could key in a different code, I wouldn’t be like this. So rigid. So determined to stay within the lines. So obsessed with the safety I find in the order of little, meaningless, petty things. Because I do find safety there. There’s a hysterical kind of order to it. If the house is clean, everybody is fed and there’s water in the taps and power in the light bulbs, I’ve done it. The train’s on its rails. But it’s an exhausting process.

I don’t tell people this. I don’t think many of them would believe me. I do not look anxious and I have no reason to be. I am lucky. And I make jokes about being neurotic, but very few people have an idea of the depth of the problem. And I’ve always been afraid they will find out; that they will realise I’m a liar, a fake, a fraud, an imposter. I am not brave or witty or clever; I am just a good actress. And one day everyone will know. But if I keep the little things together, oil the smaller cogs to keep the big wheels moving, I’ll scrape by. So I keep searching for boxes to tick to prove to myself I have worth.

I don’t do it to be difficult. I don’t take pleasure in finding mistakes. I am not triumphant when I find a plate with a half-eaten sandwich on Christopher’s bottom bunk. I don’t enjoy the confrontations I have with Genevieve over why she shouldn’t leave her shoes in my bathroom. Or why I feel such immense irrational sadness when I find wet towels on the floor instead of hung up on the towel rail. Or how, when I hang them up myself, I sometimes press my face into their dampness and cry and tears soak into them until I clench my fists in the cloth, willing them to stop. And eventually they do.

On energetic days, when I walk through the house and see the wet rings left on the coffee table, the crumbs on the kitchen counter, I want to scream; on other days, I want to weep. Is this my default setting, the Crumb Police? On duty 24 hours a day, seven days a week, ready and waiting to swoop on the unclean, the untidy and the disobedient. Which, of course, I don’t, because it is not their fault. I am not their fault. I have two friends who are sober now. One was sad before he became a full-blown alcoholic; now he is sober, but still sad. The other was a hyper-excitable crazy woman. She took heroin to calm down. Now she’s sober, but she is still a hyper-excitable crazy woman. This was me. I was an anxious, panicky person who drank to calm down. Now I am sober, I am not calm any more.

Some days I am a silent buzztrack of moan. “Pick up your shoes! Where are your books? Get off that computer! Get in the bath! Get out the bath!” I wonder where my factory settings went wrong. Why dry towels became my standard of calm. And yet they are, as are clean dishes, neat beds. They are important. So important, in fact, that I am more frightened by dropped towels than I am by the fact that I cannot sleep through the night and that I count to 10 more times in a day than a Grade 2.

That is how I feel when I am anxious. I know there are medications for it. And I take them religiously. Sometimes there are more and sometimes there are less. They don’t take it all away, but they insulate me. They wrap it all up in cotton wool. But that just distances it all from me – it doesn’t end or go away entirely. It will be there all the time, like a corpse in an open grave. Medication might cover it up and plant grass and put up a nice tombstone, but the body will still be there. Waiting to be dug up. So I carry on, a loop that goes around and around. I thought I could dissolve it in a glass of wine, but when the glass was empty it was still sitting at the bottom.

I drank for all the reasons I don’t drink now. When I started drinking it was for fun. To fit in. I only drank socially and really not very much. But I loved the way it made me feel. I loved being part of something. The whole point of selling beer in a sixpack is so there is something for the other five of you. A wine bottle services five or six glasses. There’s a sense of camaraderie in drinking with other people. That’s what watered the seed, I think: that a drink was a passport to a new country, with new people. A friend who has stopped smoking four or five times insists that each time she goes back to it, it happens at work.

“You see everyone standing outside on the balcony,” she says. “And you just want to be out there with them.”

I ask the question, even though I know the answer.

“Why not go out there anyway? You don’t need a cigarette to have a conversation.”

She looks at me resignedly.

“Because it’s not the same. It feels like them and me. Before, it was us.”

She says the best times were in winter because only the diehard smokers ventured outside in the cold. They would huddle together like birds on a telephone wire, blowing on their hands and taking long drags, trying to make each one count so they could get back inside quickly – only to come out again an hour later. It was a ritual.

There’s an episode of Friends in which Rachel pretends she is a smoker just to get close to her new boss. Clasping a cigarette in hand, inhaling uselessly, she tries to wheedle her way into the group, the conversation, the clique. I think that’s how many of us start drinking. It’s easier to make friends with people when you have something in common, especially if the thing you have in common makes you relax and feel confident and pretty and alive.

When I was 14 I tried smoking. A lot of my friends were doing it, but I was conflicted. It was expensive and bad for me, and it would upset my mother. She had a love-hate relationship with cigarettes. She enjoyed every single one she smoked, but spent most of her life ‘trying to cut back’. But … my friends. Eventually, I decided I would try it out in front of the bathroom mirror to see what I looked like. I waited for everyone to go out and then lit up one of my mother’s Benson & Hedges Special Mild. I took a puff and then stood and watched myself trying to exhale. I didn’t look like some mysterious fifties’ film noir Hollywood starlet. I looked dreadful. I had, and still have, very short fingers, and I looked ridiculous, like a child who had stolen a cigarette – which of course I was. My eyes watered. I stubbed it out. I didn’t end up smoking. Later I started drinking. By then I didn’t care what I looked like.

Drinking was different. It was warmth in a glass. It allowed me to be my best self. Well, let’s qualify that … It allowed me to feel like my best self and that varied depending on whom I was with. On my way out to a date once, I confided to my flatmate that I worried whether the man would like me or not.

“He’ll love you, Sam,” Zev said confidently.

“He doesn’t know me,” I said with trepidation.

“Just be yourself!” he called after me as I shut the door behind me.

Just be yourself, he had said. It sounded so simple. Just be yourself. Of course I would, but which self? Would I be the hard-drinking, hard-swearing, funny, caustic Sam, the girl who used to boast that her three favourite men were Jack Daniels, Jim Beam and Graham Beck and wear her shirts just a little too tight? Would I be soft, sweet Sam, understanding and caring and empathetic? Or cynical, worldly Sam, who produced a shit-hot current-affairs programme, the young, bright rising star?

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.