‘FUCK, FUCK, FUCK,’ he screeched. ‘FUCKING BITCH IS TRYING TO POISON ME. IT’S YOU THAT’S THE VILLAIN ROUND HERE.’ Only a really big bar of Fruit and Nut went even half the way in convincing him that I was innocent.
In a rehabilitation centre, the currency is cigarettes and milk chocolate. Bizarrely, I met no regular user of heroin who didn’t inveigh against putting white sugar in your tea or coffee, explaining that brown was much healthier. Nor was this an in-joke; it was in deadly earnest. Same with bread.
We slept in dormitories, rose to and were run by shaken hand-bells, and were allocated chores according to the length of our trembly new sobriety. To a person who hasn’t washed for months, the sense of achievement in being promoted from dusting to cleaning up the hot drinks room is extraordinary. The first real faculty to return seems to be vanity and in its wake, not far afterwards, the instinct to, if not have sex, flirt a bit and find someone special among the crowd. This is entirely forbidden; when people are seen to be fraternising too much solely with one another it is systematically broken up, even at the level of friendship. During my time there were a few lightning conductors for all this loose lust, including a thrillingly tattooed Irish traveller who looked like a silver wolf, and a lap dancer whose loveliness was vitiated by the low price she put on herself. Hardly ever have I known a girl so in need of love and so incapable of understanding it save through the giving of sexual services. She could not remember a time before penetrative paternal abuse. She would sit at a table and one would wonder why all the boys were clustered round the table. She was, as it were, doing phone sex so that they could all then rush out of the room and wank. She had the face of a singing angel or a sex doll, mouth always open. She could not get my name right so she made me new ones every day, which pleased me. She was obviously used to the notion of confected names since her own was Benice, pronounced to rhyme with Denise; goodness alone knows what it was in fact.
She and I went together to church on the last Sunday in Lent. She asked me the meaning of many of the pictures in the stained glass. She had not heard the story of the crucifixion or of the resurrection. How had she avoided them? It was easy to imagine her in the garden, astonished by the man who was not the gardener. She had such space for belief and intelligence in her neglected life. She had a craving to be a mother because she had so much love to give and so much redress, she felt, to take; it was she who felt guilty at the abuse she’d suffered. She would plan how she would knit little outfits for her child — always a daughter — and she cooed over all the pictures of our children that those among us lucky enough to be mothers whipped out at any opportunity.
It was impossible not to be chuffed by attention from such a lovely being. She was being visited at weekends by an individual pretending to be a relation who was actually taking from her, repeatedly among the trees after Sunday tea, the thing she was used to giving. She hated him, but she gave him what he wanted: ‘I went around the world, Italian, French, fucking Russian, the lot. Who cares?’ she’d ask. He sent her children’s clothes to wear while he was doing it. Crystal meth was her drug.
Only two of us didn’t smoke and I am embarrassed to say that sometimes I took up smoking just to escape my fellow middle-class, healthy-lunged goody-goody. I think that what I could not bear in him is what I possessed so much of myself: the element of hysterical control. He was a high-achieving professional whose recourse to spirits had driven him to shove a knife through his wife. Each of us in that place was trying to find the reason why and how not to, not ever again. To deny the metaphysical aspect of this would be to deny the subconscious.
I’m trying to think what questions people ask about rehabilitation centres that I can usefully answer. If they are considering going to one the questions are all about what you are allowed to take in with you. I can only speak for myself. I was allowed to take no books, no personal sound system (not that I have one), no radio, no aerosols, no razor blades, no nail clippers, no scissors, and had to surrender to the nurses my scent and lotions in case I was moved to drink them. After a few weeks, I was allowed a squirt every morning of my scent and this luxury, having been withheld, became the morning’s grand bouquet.
When you arrive at a rehabilitation clinic a photograph is taken of you, for which you prepare to pose by, on the whole, being completely blootered, off your face, since it is the addict’s logic that if you are going to get clean, you might as well get truly dirty first. As it happened, I was only half intoxicated in my mugshot because of the good work my family had done, but I was still incapable of sitting still, incapable of walking, and drinking litres and litres of Diet Coke and water, and I was seeing things, scuttling, swarming, inbreeding. Five days after having had a drink, when my blood was taken, it was still well over the limit where it is legal to drive. I could have been used to start a fire.
There is nothing amateurish about the medical care at Clouds, and it is to the doctor there that I owe a blessed clarification he made for me. For years, doctors had been telling me that I was depressed and ‘self-medicating’ with alcohol. I knew I was not depressed. I was sad. Sad things had happened, one after the other. I did not fail to respond to beauty, I did not hate life, I did not want to be dead. Or, and it is the crucial golden ‘or’, I did not feel depressed unless I had been drinking. It was drinking that made me depressed, not drinking that ‘cured’ my depression. I was pleased that the doctor realised that matters were this way round because he could see that I was in good faith when I said that I could no longer drink and stay alive and that I wanted, more than anything, to be sober.
In my dormitory were a gorgeous pregnant crack-head, a sad girl who didn’t think there was anything wrong with her, and a methadone addict who later duped me into lending her ten quid, which was an expellable offence, but the Board of Trustees agreed that I was so dopey that I was hardly culpable and had probably really just been doing her a kindness, as I thought. Clouds is not smart. It is run by a charitable foundation. Many of its inmates are not paying for themselves.
The beds are just beyond camp beds, the blankets are nylon, the sheets polycotton, the rooms are stuffed with addicts and there are never enough beds. Talking after lights out is discouraged. Fraternisation between the sexes is forbidden. The nursing station and the smoking room and the room where hot drinks are made remain open all night. Hot drinks acquire fetishistic significance. When you enter a rehabilitation facility you are given a mug on which, with your shaky hand and some nail varnish, you write your name. For us, this was perhaps to be the seed of a future responsibility for our own lives, looking after a single mug. Hot drinks become all that drugs and drink were. People try new combinations and on the coveted Saturday afternoon shopping hour in Shaftesbury that is allowed at the end of your stay, you see your peers looking crazily for new ginseng, apricot, strawberry, redcurrant and vanilla teas. My own great discovery was high-fat Horlicks with extra milk. I broke a rule and took it to bed with me. In order to encourage healthy eating, there was a bowl of fruit out at all times in the main room. The only fruit my peers liked was bananas. They did diverting rude dances with them and didn’t think they were as disgusting as normal fruit, so I got my pick every week of apples, pithy oranges and tall, woody pears. The hero in the daily life of such a place is the cook. Day after day, with the help of whoever was on kitchen duty that day, the cook produced four or five options because, of course, there’s nothing like an addict for saying he’s allergic to gluten, nuts, chilli or what have you. As in, ‘The smack never done me no harm, it was all the take-aways. I can’t take rice.’