Читать книгу From Whiskey to Water - Sam Cowen - Страница 12

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 it, didn’t they? And actually lots of people did. Those early nineties were times of very hard drinking for a lot of people. Well, at least, the people I drank with. The more you drink, the lower you go.

One morning, after a particularly energetic foray into the wonderful world of Shiraz with my friend Sue, I woke up to find a McDonald’s receipt on the bedside table. It was for a sizeable amount too. Over R200. My stomach felt raw, like someone had sandpapered it from the inside. That wasn’t the usual feeling I had after consuming a truckload of fat and sugar. I crawled through to the kitchen and rummaged for the packaging to see what I’d eaten, but there were no cartons anywhere. I looked at the receipt and I couldn’t understand it. According to the bill, we had ordered one of practically everything. There were burgers of every type, from Big Macs to Quarter Pounders. There were drinks and chips and nuggets with sweet-and-sour and barbeque sauce. There was even one of each sundae: caramel, chocolate and strawberry. So where was everything?

I got dressed. Well, more dressed. As usual, I’d passed out in half my clothes. I seemed to do that often; perhaps I lost interest halfway through or perhaps I felt I’d disrobed enough. Either way, I would often wake up in a bra and jeans or T-shirt and socks. Charming and classy. Said no one ever. I went to check the outside bin. Perhaps I’d chucked all the empty packaging in there. But, no, that was empty too. I called Sue.

“Hey hey!”

“Yeah, fuck you a lot. I’m dying. How much did we drink last night?”

I glanced over at the table. Four empty wine bottles and two glasses, one lying on its side in a puddle of wine, as though it had just given up. I knew how it felt.

“Four bottles.”

“Holy crap.”

I had to know.

“Listen, what happened to the stuff we bought last night at McDonald’s? Did we go to your place to eat it?”

Silence.

“You don’t remember?”

“Going to your place? Nope.”

“We didn’t go to my place. We got back to yours and had a fight and I went home.”

I didn’t remember that. I dimly remembered driving home. Emphasis on dimly.

“What did I do?”

I asked because she was cross. So whatever had happened was probably my fault. Or I had at least started it.

“You gave all the food to a beggar.”

I looked at the receipt again. That was a lot of food.

“All of it?”

“Yes, Sam, all of it. From the milkshakes to the burgers to the chips to the ice cream.”

Dear God.

“And he didn’t even want it all. You just forced it on him.”

“How did I force food onto a beggar?”

“You got out of the car and put it all on the pavement next to him. All of it. All of it.”

I didn’t remember that either, but I wished I had. It must have looked hilarious, this poor man surrounded by more food than he’d probably seen in a week, not knowing whether to laugh, cry or run away.

“Sorry.”

“Yes, we went out hungry and came home hungrier.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. Even while small men with hammers worked very hard on mining inside my head, I laughed.

“How cross are you really?”

She laughed reluctantly.

“Yeah, okay, it was funny. But I was starving! And the next time we drink like that we’re ordering in!”

The next time we drink like that. We knew there would be a next time. It was inconceivable that there wouldn’t. And it was funny. So many things are funny afterwards. I would laugh along with others when they said, “Do you remember when …?” and I’d try not to think too hard about the fact that they were laughing because they remembered some hilarious occurrence and I was laughing because it was the first time I had ever heard the story. That memory was gone. My brain was like Swiss cheese when it came to drinking. I’d had the blackouts from early on in what I thought of as my drinking career. It was worrying occasionally, but I didn’t let myself think about it too often. Instead I would comfort myself with what quickly became something of a mantra for me: “This sort of thing happens to everyone.”

But it didn’t. Not to everyone. Not to very many people. Just to me.

I became a bit of a Sherlock Holmes when it came to my own missing pieces. One morning I woke up clutching a toy duck – a big yellow fluffy one. How had I got this duck? I was a little worried, not because I was clutching an unfamiliar toy that had not been there the day before, or that it had obviously come into my possession during a bender, but more because I hoped I hadn’t taken it from a child. That would be bad. I had visions of wrestling a soft toy from a toddler. I was 23, I could drink and vote. Please don’t let me have relinquished my adulthood to bitchslap a child out of his or her snuggly. That might mean I Had A Drinking Problem. No one who just likes an occasional glass of wine or whiskey or vodka would snatch a toy from a child. I hoped against hope. With a sick feeling of dread, I phoned Sue, whose party it had been. Was it a party? Actually, maybe it was lunch. A lunch that evolved into a party. Or maybe it was only me who had seen the party side of the lunch.

“Uhm … how did I end up with a duck?”

“That was the witblits.”

The best definition for the term ‘witblits’ I’ve managed to find is that it’s sorta kinda the equivalent of American ‘moonshine’, an illegally distilled liquor that can be up 50% proof or more, except moonshine is made from corn and witblits from grapes. But don’t let soft fruit fool you. Not for nothing does it translate as ‘white lightning’. That stuff is lethal.

But Sue’s mention of witblits had jogged my memory. I remembered a little more about the day; there was a very annoying man at the lunch/party/mess. He was loud and overbearing and brought a bottle of the murky stuff he’d filched off someone at a hotel in Polokwane where a group of what sounded like equally irritating men had been playing a drinking game. This I remembered clearly. Just not how I ended up drinking it. Or going home with a toy duck.

“He dared you to match him shot for shot. And you did. Which we all thought was mad.”

Yeah, that was mad. He was huge and I was not. And when it comes to holding your alcohol, the bigger you are, the better you are at it. What was I thinking? Obvious answer: I wasn’t.

“And then you said you had to leave so you wouldn’t have to drive home drunk. And you took my sister’s duck.”

So what part of that sentence should I have latched on to? The first bit where I drink loads of illegal spirit and then drive? Or the second where I experience relief that her sister is 27 years old and therefore couldn’t possibly have spent the evening sobbing brokenheartedly over a stolen duck.

“Why did I take her duck?”

Sue laughed.

“Because you said you didn’t want to drive home alone!”

I laughed too. Made perfect sense. Mystery solved.

I can’t remember now whether, at that point, I knew this was weird. I don’t think I did. The stories were good, even the one where I drank alone at home and woke up on the floor of the study, clutching the computer mouse. When I pulled myself up onto the chair I discovered I had tried to order a French maid’s outfit from some American website. Luckily, I had forgotten my credit card number, or couldn’t find my purse, or thought I had submitted it correctly but hadn’t, which – considering that even 20 years ago it was nearly $60 – was a good thing …

And, besides, I could tell a good story! I still can; I can take a tiny, insignificant event and turn it into a narrative masterpiece. Ever the comedienne. Ever hiding.

Some stories weren’t so funny, though. During one in particular I wished for a blackout.

I did the odd bit of freelance work. One client in particular was incredibly tardy with paying my invoice. Every time I asked for my money there was another excuse, quickly followed by a dinner invitation. I didn’t want to have dinner with him, but I seldom turned down a drink. So we had a few drinks. He was a fat, friendly, funny guy. But something was off. He looked like a teddy bear, but every now and again there would be a story that didn’t sit right. He once told me how he’d met a prominent actor who he had a lot of dark secrets he couldn’t possibly repeat. But I knew the actor and his past was about as dark as a fluorescent light bulb. Fatman didn’t know I knew him. Fatman liked telling stories in which he was the hero. But after six beers, who cares? Each time we met, either he had forgotten my cheque – yes, in those days we were still paid via cheque – or he was going to do a direct deposit. He always had a reason for us to see each other again. But this time he had it in hand, or so he said.

In hindsight, what I did next was stupid. I didn’t want to spend time alone with him any more. My mild ill ease with him had grown and I’d already decided I wasn’t going to see him again, cheque or no cheque. So I invited him to a drinks party at my flat. There would be at least 10 people there; I wouldn’t have to spend much one-on-one time with him and he’d pay me and go. That would be the end of it. Yes, he would know where I lived, but I wouldn’t invite him around again, and I lived in a secure complex anyway.

When I asked him if he’d like to join the party he jumped at the invitation. But he didn’t arrive. There were drinks, obviously; there was food, luckily; and there was great company. And secretly I was pleased that he hadn’t turned up. I wrote the money off. It had been months of waiting and it wasn’t worth it any more. I also had a growing suspicion he had been holding out on purpose, keen for a drinking partner with breasts.

We drank a lot that night, as usual. And one by one my friends peeled off home and I decided to have an emergency lie-down on the couch and a cup of black coffee. An emergency lie-down and a cup of black coffee often warded off that unpleasant session on the bathroom floor, hugging the toilet bowl. I don’t know how long I’d been prostrate on the couch when I heard knocking on the front door. I guessed it was probably about an hour after everyone had left because my coffee was ice cold. I struggled to my feet and somehow managed to reach the door. And, without asking who was there, I opened it.

The complex in which I lived was populated with young professionals. All the units were the same, differing by a few square metres at most. One-bedroom/one-bathroom apartments, perfect for people who worked hard and played hard and really just wanted somewhere to sleep and occasionally hold a braai. We all knew each other and it wasn’t uncommon for us to wander in and out of each other’s places. Most of us never locked the doors when we were home. I loved it there; I never had any fear of who might pop in or of when. That night was the last time I ever felt that way. Fatman stood in the doorway. He was swaying slightly. It’s amazing what you remember when you do recall a drunken evening. It’s like a series of unplanned Instagram filters, some of it in sharp relief in which you capture every detail; some of it in soft focus, maybe clear in the middle and blurred around the edges. Lo-fi vs Brannen.

I stood and looked at him. This was all wrong. The party was over ages ago – what was he doing here? How had he got through the gate without calling me?

“You’re late,” I said stupidly.

“Better late than never,” he muttered, pushing his way past me into my home.

“Everyone’s left, so there’s really no point in you coming in,” I said, feeling distinctly uneasy.

“But I brought your money,” he said, shoving an envelope into my hand. “And you invited me for drinks.”

If you’re a vampire folklore follower – which is a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine – you might have read the urban legend that says a vampire can only enter your home if you invite it in. Until then, you are safe. But once you’ve let it in, it can stay as long as it likes. Sometimes a vampire will trick you into letting it in. I thought this at the time. He tricked me. But I did invite him in.

And then he was pushing me up against the wall and trying to kiss me and I was frozen. I didn’t cry out and I didn’t scream. I kept thinking, this isn’t happening, this isn’t happening. And if it is, then what have I done to provoke it? And that little sober voice in my head kept saying, “You let him in, Sam. You let him in.”

We ended up in the bedroom. I don’t know how long we were in there. It could have been just minutes, but it felt like hours. Panic set in and I fought and fought but he was over six feet and built to match, and he pulled my clothes off, piece by piece. He was drunk too, but he was still strong and I was not. I didn’t have a game plan for being attacked at home. I’d never thought about what I would do if something like this happened. I never thought it would happen. I never thought about it at all.

The oddest thoughts raced through my mind. Does my underwear match and, if so, what a waste, because I will never be able to wear it again. I will never wear any of these clothes again. Do I fight him? Do I just let him do it me so I don’t get hurt? Well, even more hurt. If I fight harder, will he give up or will he get rough? And the thought that now makes the least sense: I wished I was more drunk, much more drunk; then I might not remember this and, if I don’t remember it, how bad could it be? A dreadful, never-to-be-repeated one-night stand?

And all the time he was muttering, “We both want this, we both want this.” But I didn’t want this. I knew I didn’t want this.

And yet … I’d invited him in.

I resigned myself to it. I went limp. There was no way I could win a physical battle. I was little and drunk and weak. And he was big and drunk and strong.

And just at that moment of surrender he passed out. Just like that. I was naked and he was stripped down to the ugliest pair of Y-fronts I had ever seen. Suddenly his body went slack, his head dropped onto my shoulder and within seconds he was snoring. I couldn’t believe my luck. I lay there stunned. And then I tried to get out from under him. It was the first time I understood the term ‘dead weight’. I couldn’t shift him, and I started to panic. If I woke him, the whole thing would start again, I was sure of it. And, again, he’d be strong and I wouldn’t.

I couldn’t lift him off me, so I started trying to ease myself out from underneath. It wasn’t easy; he was sweaty, and it was like trying to slip out of wet jeans. And every time I felt as though I was making progress he would half wake and pull me into him and the Great Escape would have to begin again. By the time I got out from under him I was sober – not breathalyser, blood-test sober, but sober enough to understand what had happened and sober enough to know my problems were far from over. He was still there, face down on my bed, and there was no physical way I could make him leave.

I grabbed my bathrobe, tiptoed out of the bedroom and locked him in. And then I sat down on the couch and cried and cried and cried. The front door was still open. I didn’t get up to close it. What was the point? The bogeyman wasn’t outside any more – he was prostrate on my bed.

So, why didn’t I call the police? I’d been attacked in my home. I was almost raped. And the almost-rapist was asleep on my bed. He was still there. That’s all I could think: he’s on my bed. He’s still here.

But I didn’t call the police. I didn’t call because I was drunk. Because I was drunk when he had arrived and would still be drunk by the time they got to my flat. Because my make-up was halfway down my face and I looked like a frightened panda. Because I had invited him for drinks. Because I had let him in. Because there was a cheque in an envelope on the kitchen counter. Because, if I wanted a couple of overworked cops to take me seriously, I had done everything wrong. Because I didn’t think they would take me seriously at all. Because I knew I would battle to believe my own story.

So I didn’t call the police. I didn’t call anyone. I was embarrassed and ashamed. I sat up all night in my bathrobe, cuddling my cat, who must have known how upset I was because he let me hold him for ages. And he wasn’t that type of cat.

The next morning Fatman knocked on the bedroom door and asked to be let out. I opened the door to a sheepish, sweaty, dishevelled man, dressed and ready to leave. Almost as ready as I was for him to go.

“I don’t remember what happened last night,” he said.

“We must have been very drunk,” he said.

And then he left, through the front door that was still open. And we never spoke to each other again.

And I drank for five more years.