“MY DAD’S AN alkie,” said the moptop, brightly.
I’d got back home to find her still there, dressed now, bustling around my kitchen and reducing the creeping entropy that seemed to defeat all my attempts to live like your typical prissy bachelor. My heart sank at first, there was so much work to be done to retrieve something from the day, and while I needed some kind of consolation, I rather doubted if this young woman – Jenny was her name, wasn’t it? – could supply the necessary ingredient.
What I wanted was a mum, and she was long dead and buried. And when had I ever been able to weep on her bony bosom, even when she was alive? I couldn’t remember the last time.
“Alkie?”
“You know, an alcoholic. My mum used to take me with her to Al-Anon and I even went to Ala-Teen. It helped, a bit.”
“Yeah?”
What had this to do with me?
OK I drank more than most, I might even have a problem, though not like some I’d seen, half a bottle of Scotch ready by the bedside for when the alarm went? Not me.
“There’s a group for people who’ve got an addict in the family, I think,” she said. “It might be useful. Take that ex-wife of yours, what’s her name, Kay?”
Just what I needed, a cosy evening sharing my troubles with my ex-wife and a bunch of strangers. Great!
“I dunno, love. It doesn’t sound like me.”
“How d’you know? My mum and I found it very helpful, like I said. It helps you get things straightened out.”
“I don’t need straightening out. It’s my son’s the junkie, remember. If they’ll tell me how to stop him shooting junk in his arm, fine. Listen, I’ve had it up to here with do-gooders, helpers, social workers. When the chips are down, nobody can help you but yourself.”
“I’m sorry you feel like that, Jack,” she said rather quietly, “because I’m a kind of a do-gooder, myself.”
Trust me to put my foot in it. Gradually pieces of the previous night were reassembling themselves in my mind, and I remembered her telling me something about her work, sheltering battered wives or something.
“Yeah, well, I’m not talking about you, necessarily. But I’m no frightened woman hiding from a man threatening to kill her.”
“No,” she said, “you’re the one doing the threatening.
“Look, you bust into your son’s bedroom, smash a window before he’s barely awake, get in a fight with all his friends, and you say you don’t need straightening out. If he’s taking heroin, then he’s sick, but you don’t strike me as having a particularly healthy attitude, either. You ever think about that?”
“All the time, love, I hear it all the time. I went to a marriage counsellor when my marriage with Kay was breaking up and all she wanted to talk about was my hang-ups. I tell you that woman was crazy and she was driving me insane, but I suppose you’ll say I had that arse-backwards, too.”
“Who knows, she seemed sane enough to me, a bit frosty, but that’s understandable, given the circumstances. You love her a lot, don’t you?”
“Listen, I can’t stand the bitch. Her whole family’s crazy and she’s the sanest of ’em all, but that ain’t saying much. OK, we had some good times together, and of course she’s an important part of my life: eleven years, for God’s sake. She was the first woman I ever screwed – well, almost. I don’t count the first one. I was kind of seduced by my cousin.”
“I bet you were a lovely teenager.”
“I hated myself. I used to look down at my body in the swimming pool with a kind of loathing. That’s something I’ve learnt in the past ten years, to like myself. So no bunch of do-gooding old ladies of both sexes is going to tell me it’s all my fault my son’s a junkie.”
“But that’s just what they won’t tell you. If your son’s a junkie it’s because he’s sick. You’ve got nothing to feel guilty about, because it’s all in the past. But if you’re going to see him again you’ve got to be able to say I know you’re a junkie and I love you.”
“I can’t see me saying that. There’s nothing to love in my son sticking smack up his arm.”
“You don’t have to love the smack. Remember the old adage, hate the sin, love the sinner.”
Religion, yet. It’s getting so you can’t get yourself laid without having the gospel thrown in as a bonus.
“What are you, one of these Whores for Jesus I’ve been reading about?”
I’ll never know what she would have replied to that, because the phone rang.
“Hey man,” said a friendly voice, “I thought you were coming over this pm. What’s happening?”
Shit! The events of the day had driven it entirely out of my mind. An interview with perhaps my favourite musician, and I’d nearly blown it.
“No,” I said, hurriedly, “I was just coming. A few problems came up, family stuff, but I’ve got it sorted now. Be right with you.”
“No problem,” he said, amiably. “But I’ve been looking forward to talking to you, rather than those other arse-holes on the music comics.”
Nice to see someone loves me at least.
No comments:
Post a Comment