Tuesday, 28th May 2019
In the beginning, Simon thought the group meetings were pointless.
He’d sat in an uncomfortable plastic chair, silent, staring. Well not sat, slouched. None of the prisoners ever sat up straight. They lolled, leaned, or huddled. Defeated, disgraced. There were no ring-fenced resources for helping addicts in prison, so the idea of a therapist coming to run the meetings was impossible. The busy prison chaplain, Billy, stood in. He didn’t wear his collar; he wanted to be approachable so he played down his association with God. He knew that it upset as many prisoners as it attracted. There were different denominations and faiths to consider, there were atheists and agnostics to include. Billy welcomed them all. To him, one lost soul was the same as the next.
Simon was told to go to the meetings and he’d done so because he thought it was compulsory, like making hairnets or showering when instructed. His response to attending meetings led by a person of the cloth was complex. He’d assumed the chaplain probably had a low IQ or was simply unbearably naïve. However, over time, Simon found that he grudgingly admired the chaplain, who had something most people didn’t. A sense of hope. Or resolve. Peace. Simon had never felt any of those things securely. Billy seemed to understand that men who drank, stuck needles in their arms, or gambled away their homes were all suffering from the same thing; they yearned, they were hungry, incomplete. They lacked something vital. It might simply have been self-discipline or self-esteem. It might have been a god. What did Simon know? The chaplain could at least provide them with a room, twice a week, to talk about the gap, the space, the lack.
Simon had been forced into going cold turkey in custody in the months he’d awaited his trial. It had been agony. A new level of pain that he hadn’t believed possible. Every muscle, bone and nerve in his body had screamed out in objection. He felt raw and threatened. The world was hostile. The clang of a door, the turn of a key in a lock, the shove of a shoulder, all intimidated him. He felt perpetually vulnerable; sick and shivering with terror and paranoia. His body folded in on itself. His mind too. It was all he could do to breathe. He concentrated on listening to that sound, the sound of his breathing and the throb of his heart thumping, better to concentrate on that rather than the sound of other men laughing. Were they laughing at him? Other men shouting. Were they coming for him?
By the time he arrived in prison, he was dry. Dry, but still an alcoholic. Always an alcoholic.
Officially, there was no alcohol permitted, obviously, but the ingenious and desperate found a way to home brew. ‘Where there’s a will there’s a way,’ his first cellmate had assured him with a sly nod and a wink. Simon had laughed hysterically at that comment because he was scared, because he was excited. He remembered his mother often used that exact expression, along with, ‘Necessity is the mother of invention’. Expressions that Elsie had were always positive, full of determination and resolve. When his cellmate used the optimistic little idiom, Simon saw the exhilaration and promise behind it. He’d also recognised the danger and threat, but he didn’t care. He knew alcohol abuse ruined stuff – even motivational idioms – but on another level, it solved everything. Or had for a while. On the outside, he’d lived in hope that the answers lay at the bottom of the glass, and then the bottom of the bottle, and then the next bottle and the next. And if they didn’t, it didn’t matter because he’d drank until he’d forgotten what the questions were. The idea that rules could be broken, even in here, that he’d sniff out alcohol somewhere, appealed to him.
However, despite his initial excitement, the opportunity to home brew had never presented itself to Simon. In all the time he’d been locked up, no one offered him anything. He would have to approach someone if he wanted in on the illegal brewing, the Dales probably. Slowly, it dawned on him that, yes, he wanted a drink, but for the first time in as long as he could remember, he wanted something more. He wanted to stay safe and alive. Hunting out the right people, the people who dared break the rules, and then owing them, would threaten that.
So he stayed sober.
For the first few weeks that he attended the meetings he did not say a word. He wanted to draw as little attention to himself as possible, speaking would confirm attendance, draw notice. Prison was scary as fuck. Group therapy was perilous, possibly suicidal. In prison people didn’t often talk about their crimes; confessions were dangerous. He could easily say the wrong thing, something someone could take objection to. Hell, the thought of laying himself bare, exposing himself in a one-on-one private therapy session in North London, with an earnest, bearded, vegetarian liberal had always horrified him. How could this be a good idea? He’d slouched as far back on his chair as he could, looked nowhere other than at his shoes. Countless tales were told about drink and drugs, hate and fear. What it did to a person. What addiction could strip someone down to – our snarling, animal selves. Faces smashed, knuckles bloodied. He’d pretended he wasn’t there. And anyway, he wasn’t. Not really. He let the meetings happen over his head.
After about a month, Billy had tried to draw him in. He’d asked, ‘Simon, do you have anything you want to say?’
They’d been talking about cravings. There was a new guy. He had scratched himself raw. His arms and legs were bleeding. He was jittery, agitated. High on something, coming down, despairing he’d never have a hit again. Despairing about that, more than the fact he was banged up, Simon suspected.
‘No,’ replied Simon.
At the next meeting there was a guy who was as thin as a reed but could talk for England. ‘You wake up with a hangover, but what really ruins the next day is the shame. Even if you were drinking alone, not kicking off, causing no trouble whatsoever, you are still filled with shame because it’s starts to become obvious that you’re just not able to get your shit together. You’re a fucking loser.’ Then with more honesty, he added, ‘I’m a fucking loser.’ No one bothered to contradict him. ‘I wonder how much more I might have done with my life had I not spent it drunk,’ he mused.
‘You’d have robbed a bank, maybe. Not just a couple of poxy corner shops,’ replied another con. This got a laugh. They were all glad of the joke, it eased things. Honesty was a downer. Billy mumbled something about change being in everyone’s grasp.
Another one of the inmates upped the ante. He’d decided to take this opportunity to shock or maybe scare. Certainly, to be the centre of attention. He described beating an old lady, half to death, for twenty-four pounds. He’d owed his supplier. He’d thought the old bird kept more money in her house. He’d been beaten in turn when he didn’t pay up.
The inmate admitted, ‘Now, I see I was owed that. You know. Karma or some such fuck. At the time, when they were kicking the shit out of me, I just remember hating the old bitch for not having enough cash for me to rob.’
The man who had scratched himself raw had cried when he heard the story, but Simon didn’t know if the response was genuine emotion or simply chemically induced.
Once again, Billy asked, ‘Have you anything to add, Simon?’
Simon thought about scrabbling through his mother’s bedside cupboard, looking for spirits. He thought about Daisy’s face when she caught him. But he’d never beaten up an old woman. He told himself that he wasn’t like these people. These criminals, these addicts.
‘Nothing to add,’ Simon had replied.
He kept going to the meetings, though. He was drawn, with a horrified sense of awe, to these tales about the last gasps. What people did to themselves. What the human body could endure.
The group meetings were… endless.
And part of the deal, part of the process. It took him months to work that out. One day Billy was making them talk about loss. Loss of self, loss of dignity and the loss of family support. Big stuff. Everyone watched Jeremy Kyle. Everyone knew the vocabulary of divulgence and revelation. Even cons.
‘I lost my way, right.’
‘I lost sight of, you know, like what matters.’
‘I lost everything, man. Everything.’
The things they said were so familiar that Simon wasn’t sure if he believed them and related, or if he’d simply read them in a tabloid. He was trying to decide, when Billy interrupted his thoughts.
‘Simon, anything to add?’
‘I lost my shoes once. On a bender.’
He hadn’t meant to be funny but one or two of the others laughed, then caught Billy’s eye and swallowed their laughter. Simon wasn’t sure how he’d lost his shoes. Had he kicked them off? Thrown them away? From time to time, throughout his life, he had sometimes seen a lone sneaker in the middle of the road or a shoe stranded in the hedgerow. He’d always assumed these abandoned pieces of footwear were the result of a bunch of blokes messing about; possibly a stag party, stripping a mate, throwing away his shoe, or schoolkids bullying the class swot because he was going places and they were not, maybe throwing his shoes away would slow him down. But when Simon had lost his shoes – not one but both – he’d been alone. He’d taken off his socks too. He couldn’t remember doing so but when he got home he was barefoot. His feet were cut, and he’d stood in some dog shit. He walked it right into the house, smearing the crap on the carpet. Daisy had cried whilst she washed his feet. He knew about loss.
‘Your shoes?’ Billy prompted.
‘Yeah, I lost my shoes and my wife’s respect.’
Once he’d started talking, he found the meetings were the places he most wanted to be. As his body got used to the fact he could no longer feed his craving, the physical agony began to recede, but it was replaced by mental pain. Regret, anger, depression, self-disgust, universal loathing. All the bad ones. The days were too long, his mind too dark. The yard, the showers, even the library were still full of menace and peril, the small group meetings were as near to safe as he could get in this place. He found that, contrary to his initial fears, the dozen or so cons that attended seemed to abide by the rule of non-disclosure outside the room. Maybe they were equally needy of the space, terrified of being barred, or maybe equally ashamed of their stories, therefore willing to trade silence. It was most likely some sort of self-preservation. Cons were selfish. Addicts were selfish. It stood to reason that the men who fell into both camps saw the advantages of staying silent.
Simon continued to listen to the strangers’ stories. The more he heard, the more he recognised. He was shocked, disconcerted, to learn that he wasn’t a unique little snowflake, with a private and special relationship with alcohol. He began to understand that addiction was a player, loose. She got around.
‘Do you think there’s like an alcoholic gene, that you can inherit?’ someone once asked. Simon didn’t know his name. His hair was long, he wore it in a ponytail. He was overweight by about forty pounds.
‘There is evidence that might be the case,’ Billy replied carefully.
‘My family are always talking about that shit. By the time I was ten or something, they said I had that gene. Like having brown eyes. Something I couldn’t change. So why would I even try? They knew I was fucked, even when I was still playing with Lego. My mum, she used to carry around a flask of tea wherever she went. The supermarket, school pick-up, the park. Except it wasn’t tea.’
‘My whole clan drink, man. Blacking out is nothing to any of us. It’s like a rite of passage. Yeah?’ This came from a man who had a Scottish accent. His use of the word clan wasn’t entirely ironic.
What was it Simon’s mother had said? Not that she could be relied upon for an accurate account, since half the time she didn’t know her own name, but she had said his father drank, hadn’t she? That it was best to ignore the matter. Thinking about it, Simon realised something he’d always known, but had indeed tried to ignore: his gentle father – who Simon had admired as a boy – was a binger. Sometimes so generous and available and there. Other times absent, closed, even cruel. When it came to booze, his father had always hopped and lolloped along the path between craving and revulsion. Simon had followed after him.
Eventually, Simon had admitted to himself that maybe he should have done this on the outside. Gone to a meeting. Maybe it would have helped. Part of his brain registered that the thought was borderline optimistic. A thought still distilled with a sense of familiar regret, but there was an undeniable hint that things could change, could be improved. That was entirely new.
‘Simon, do you have anything to contribute?’ Billy had coaxed him.
So, he told them about missing Millie’s ballet recital. He told them about the hours she’d practiced, how excited she was to be performing a solo. He admitted that he’d promised her that he wouldn’t miss it for the world, that she had in fact elicited this promise three times and got him to seal the deal by clasping pinkie fingers and pinkie promising. Then he explained. ‘I was in a bar. One of those really cool ones. Full of young people.’ He hoped but doubted the longing stayed out of his voice.
‘Young women you mean?’ someone interrupted, Simon could hear the snigger.
‘I suppose,’ Simon shrugged. Other women had never interested him. He knew drunks that needed to fight or fuck once they were legless. He only ever needed another drink. And then another. The longing he was trying to hide was for the bar. ‘It was a cocktail bar. I’m not a cocktail man,’ he added hastily.
‘Is there such a thing?’ someone chipped in. There was a smattering of laughter.
‘No,’ Simon admitted with a small smile. ‘I suppose not. But, you know, sometimes cocktails are just the answer.’
‘Fast.’
‘Exactly. It was dark, with music playing, dozens of bottles were lined up. Overpriced and therefore desirable. The bartenders took pride in what they were doing. They painstakingly poured out each measure into metal shakers, added chunks of ice, and swished.’
Nobody minded that he took his time, set this scene. They were happy to be transported there. There was nowhere they would rather be.
‘The bartender shook, poured, garnished. I swallowed, gulped, re-ordered.’ Simon sighed. ‘I knew I didn’t have time to linger but it just seemed like more fun being there than being at a kid’s ballet recital.’
No one disagreed. No one said anything for a few moments.
‘So, your little girl is a ballet dancer?’ asked the guy with a ponytail. Simon didn’t like the way his man boobs shuddered as he suddenly, keenly, sat up in his chair to ask the question. Ponytail man licked his lips, coughed. It might have been polite interest, it might have been something much uglier. Simon regretted bringing Millie into the room. She didn’t belong here. Even the idea of her didn’t belong here. Fuck prison. He’d transported himself for a few moments, but it was hopeless, it was delusional. He was stuck here. Here amongst the depraved and disgusting. This is where he belonged.
‘Is she any good?’ asked Billy. ‘Your daughter? Is she any good at ballet?’
‘She was,’ Simon replied. ‘She used to be.’
No one asked anything more. They all knew his family didn’t visit him.