Julie

Richard’s attack that night in early 2006 left me traumatized, but it had one silver lining. For a little while after, I was the sole focus of Harry’s attention. Not even the bank could compete. He reacted like some kid had tried to take his favourite toy from him.

Every night, he’d rush home from work with a gift for me. He’d make dinner, tell me about his day, and then we’d go to bed and make love. He was gentle and tender. It was like how we’d been at the start, the only two people in the world.

I told him that later in the year, when I felt back to myself, I wanted to begin the IVF process. Our fresh start would include a baby. It was time to settle down and put somebody else first. Lay all our problems to rest. I wanted him to pull back in work and be there for us more.

‘You have enough money, Harry,’ I said. ‘What’s the point in working all the time when you’re not even enjoying the rewards? I want this child to have two parents. And I don’t want it growing up in some sort of fantasy world, where you can have everything at a click of the fingers. I want my baby to live normally.’

He laughed and put a hand on my stomach like there was already a baby there.

‘We’ll see how normal you want everything to be when your little prince or princess arrives and you realize you only want the absolute best for them.’

It was a while before I could ask Harry what he’d done about Richard.

We were cuddled together on the sofa one night, his arm draped lazily over my shoulders, my body relaxed into his.

‘What do you mean?’ he said, and I felt him stiffen. He was obviously still furious at Richard for what he’d done.

I twisted around so we were looking at each other.

‘You haven’t mentioned him at all. Did you fire him?’

Harry sat up straight, forcing me to rearrange myself beside him.

‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘We can talk about this, Harry. I’m ready. I need to know what happened. I presume you fired him, but did you do anything else I should know about?’

Harry’s jaw fell slack.

‘Fire him? Julie, I told you that night. He knows too much. About the bank … about me. I had to be more strategic.’

I blinked and slowly my hand came to my mouth. Had my husband been working alongside that man day in, day out since he’d tried to rape me?

‘I thought you understood,’ he protested, as I began to edge away from him on the sofa, horrified. ‘I beat the living daylights out of him. But Julie, I’ve put him into the CEO role. I have to step back anyway, and he’s perfect for it. With everything that’s coming … it fits. And it means we can spend more time together. Isn’t that what you said you wanted?’

‘I–I … What the fuck, Harry? I can’t believe this. Jesus Christ. I’m going to vomit. Get away from me.’ I pushed him away and ran from the room.

I could see no logic to Harry promoting Richard to the CEO role. Harry, at his utmost stupid, hadn’t told me about his fears for the bank. All I saw was a betrayal of the highest order. And when he tried to explain, I thought he was just spinning it because he’d been caught. The bank was doing fine. It was soaring, in fact. He was claiming to be preparing for a doomsday scenario but it wasn’t coming.

I couldn’t bear to hear his lies, whatever he was telling himself to excuse what he’d done. I shut him out.

Still, he persisted, trying to fix things with weaselly words.

‘Julie, please, listen to me,’ he’d whine. ‘The promo— Shit, it’s not a promotion, even. You must understand, it’s a long-term plan. The bank is going to be investigated at some point and—’

‘Stop saying that. I don’t believe you, and I don’t care! I don’t care what you think will or won’t happen to Richard. I don’t care what’s going on in your head. All that matters is that you used what happened to me in some sick, twisted way. You and Richard Hendricks – I know what you both are. You live in a world where money matters more than wives, isn’t that right? I’ll never forgive you, Harry. Never.’

So he stopped trying to tell me.

I was heartbroken. I’d thought I meant more to my husband than anybody else. To be proved wrong in such a horrible way … it did terrible things to my head. I turned to drink.

Months later, I drank myself to the miscarriage.

All those nights when we’d been happy, when we’d made love – I’d conceived. A miracle, ten years in the making. And I hadn’t even realized until it was too late.

Fifteen weeks of wine every day.

And after, my drinking escalated even more.

By 2007, if you’d tapped my veins you’d have found alcohol. You know what I realized later? Nobody decides to be an alcoholic. And you can drink for a long, long time before you accept you are one.

The biggest problem for me in the years leading up to that 2006, 2007 period was that I had a mental image of what constituted a proper drinker. In our village in Leitrim there’d been an old man who used to wait for the pubs to open in the morning, drink in one of them until he was thrown out, and then sit down by the river with a naggin of whiskey, arguing with himself, singing and trying to get passers-by to give him money. He was a pitiful sight, with a fat whiskey nose and a yellow tinge to his skin.

That was my idea of an alcoholic. Anything short of that (short of cirrhosis) was just somebody enjoying themselves. Living in Ireland didn’t help. Here, you can throw a stone and hit at least five alcoholics in seconds, because there’s a level of drinking that’s just deemed acceptable.

While I definitely drank more than average, I’d always had a job or was studying. I had no real health problems, unless you counted a barren, dried-up fucking womb.

I was functioning.

We’re the really problematic drunks. We keep telling ourselves we’re just like everybody else, even while our trips to the bottle bank run to two or three times a week.

And then, suddenly, drink owns you. You’re no longer drinking a few times a week. You’re drinking every day, all day. Because it’s insidious, alcohol. It waits until you’re weak and it takes over.

For a short time after I went back on the booze, Harry did try to reach out to me. I pushed him away. And he grew distant – staying out at night, doing God knows what. Which, in turn, made me drink more. I should have left him. Any self-respecting person would have. And I think, had I not immediately turned to drink and got locked into that cycle, I would have. But we were well and truly in mutually assured destruction mode at that stage.

We exchanged words about the house – the weather, the news. But we didn’t talk.

Sometimes I would think back to those months in spring 2006 and how happy we’d been. I’d resolve to find my way back there, to rebuild my life. But I couldn’t. I was drowning.

People always say that you have to hit rock bottom before you can start to climb out from the pit that is alcoholism. That’s true. But it’s not as comforting as it sounds.

For a start, where the hell exactly is rock bottom? There’s no benchmark.

For me, you might have thought it would be the miscarriage.

Or maybe that Christmas, when I rang up half my family and spewed vitriol down the phone like a woman possessed (well, there were spirits involved), summoning up every historic perceived slight and offence. Mam later told me that Dad had threatened to disown me if I ever upset them like that again. My poor parents.

The list of mortifying fuck-ups in my life over that period is too long to recount, even if I could recall the detail, which I can’t. What I do remember, crystal clear, is waking up on many a morning with a deep sense of shame and regret and stomach-churning humiliation, and addressing that despair with a fresh glass of wine.

I don’t know how I didn’t kill myself, especially as I was starting to feel that’s what I wanted to do.

But I didn’t learn what ‘rock bottom’ was until the summer of 2007.