They had seemed a necessity, not a luxury or a risk.
They had seemed like a genuine sign that reality grew out along a grain and that Meg was travelling with it, following a less obstructed path.
Accepting the offer of letters, chancing that her application wouldn’t be refused — that had seemed right.
And I know how it feels to do right — it’s entirely unfamiliar, that’s how it feels.
She had applied to the PO box listed — her heartbeat making her fingers jump as she posted the envelope — and had then received a polite and prompt request for more information. It had taken two weeks for her to reply. Creating an answer had seemed to need courage she didn’t have. Although what it asked was not unreasonable.
While I can write to you without your assistance, offering the truth you deserve and perhaps do not know, my letters will suit you and perhaps please you better if you are willing to tell me about yourself.
I drink. I fall over. I lie down.
I drank. I fell over. I lay down.
I can’t say that.
I am good at falling, but currently floating.
I’m Meg and I’m suspended. I think I might be empty now and that’s why I can float.
But I can’t say that.
Whatever you say will be held in confidence.
Yes, but that still doesn’t mean I can tell you that I would like to be somebody else. I can’t ask if you’d write to somebody else.
I mean, maybe — I’d guess — you do write to somebody else, lots of somebody elses.
And I want to say I’d like you to stop and just write to me. As somebody else.
I mean, I can’t even fucking reply and do you need to know me, really? Can’t I be an anonymous alcoholic?
You need not reply to the letters, although replies are welcome. This is, however, not a correspondence.
Meg had stared at the accusing notepaper she’d found in the spare room — probably her mother’s paper. I can’t even start to do this, I can’t say one word to you. She’d been dumbfounded. That had been her feeling, right on cue.
Thinking about it makes me sick.
But I have been told to do things that I like, because having a life that’s sweeter than before will help to keep me sober. Everything being kinder will make the effort of not drinking worthwhile. This means that I can and must have and do the things I like.
But I don’t know any things I like.
And before she’d cranked out a word, her hands had been weighted down by this clear sense of someone being there at the other end of the process, this waiting mind, judging mind, stern mind.
I know what I used to like: drinking and the drugs which make drinking longer and browner and I liked being turned out the way that a final light would be. And inside my dark flat, I liked when the booze taxis came.
And what I’d like now … would be if a stranger might forgive me for all of these things he doesn’t know about.
He was already strangely clear, judgementally clear, on the page — this man she quite literally couldn’t afford.
What I liked was what terrified me — so I like what terrifies me. You terrify me. I think I like you. I might already like you.
But I can’t tell if you’re to do with the way I used to be and have to stop, or the way I might end up. What are you? What are you going to be? Will you be something I like that ought to scare me? Will you be someone I need to be frightened of?
Will you hurt?
Would you tell me?
You may call me Corwynn, or Corey, or Mr August, whatever you would prefer, and I will address you as you would wish. I will aim to ensure that everything is as you wish.
In the end, the only reply she could offer to his request for information had seemed very small and lonely, toiling out across the whole of a page in her twisted handwriting. She had to use handwriting — her mother had always taught her: handwriting for personal letters, typing for things that you don’t really care about.
Please write what you think I would enjoy. And thank you. And please call me Sophia.
Which was pathetic in general and especially the Sophia part. Particularly that. If you turned round and asked yourself about that, you would find it laughable — wanting to be called a word that suggested wisdom and tasted of class, sophistication, maturity. All this, when she was a dim, big kid lost in this misleading body and couldn’t even manage common sense.
She still was a kid who would leg it, scarper, before intimacy even got threatened.
Well, I do have my reasons.
But Mr August was too far away to touch her and too far away to be bad news. And he was polite.
He was unforgivable and lovely and being lovely is unforgivable and also it made her not run.
I will begin by saying that nothing bad will happen while we’re in here together. And please do call me Corwynn, or Corey, or Mr August, whichever you would prefer. Please don’t worry about the choices. If you would prefer, you can pick them all. We will be safe together. I can promise you that.
Meeting alcoholics, your tribe, you get used to strangers who still know you, understand. They sit in the echoes with you and talk you through the turns and tunnels, the mine workings in yourself. You get used to that.
This means that someone who guesses you need to be safe, only from reading a note you sent him — he doesn’t seem impossible. That good kind of man does not seem entirely unlikely. You try and guess, you try and feel what he’d be like: a man who writes lots of letters? A man who makes his living out of letters? A man who’s used to noticing, guessing? A man who reads closely? Lawyer? Therapist? Adulterer? Someone who lies in wait?
But he didn’t feel like that, didn’t seem like that. And, after we’d properly started, once he was writing by hand and not typing — who types any more? It was lovely that he typed, had a typewriter, was in some place where things were like that: slower, painstaking, private — when I saw the way he wrote by hand … I could find him better in his words, in the shapes of them, in the lines and dips and dots across his pages, the places where it seemed he might have paused, the paper he’d touched.
And I sent him paper to touch. My mother’s paper. My best inheritance.
I knew it would be with him. It would feel his breath.
Please write what you think I would enjoy. And thank you. And please call me Sophia. And thank you again. You are very kind.
There was something about that he understood.
Dear Mr August.
Be very kind.
That’s all I would have needed to say, Mr August. Not even that — you were being kind already.
15:47
MEG STOOD AT her kitchen window — Meg, still having her birthday and wishing it might have gone better so far. Meg sober and sober and wholly sober, Meg with the evening still ahead.
She saw the afternoon light colouring the flagstones, the ones she had scrubbed last year when she felt weird and harried one Sunday — they’d given her something to do. They had filled hours and hours with a nice mindlessness. She liked them. They’d been laid out nearest the back door, so you could sit in the sun if there was some. Her mother’s idea.