It always reminds me of Jim — friend of my father’s — who had a stroke a while back and they stuck him on a ward with a bunch of old men. Jim didn’t think himself old and found this a bit insulting. He also didn’t want to look at what could be his future — joining the shambling, babbling victims of their own lumpy blood supply. They scared him. They weren’t showing him a good way to be old.
Every morning, volunteers would turn up in the ward and would read to the patients — including Jim — from the Bible. This didn’t please him, not one bit. The stroke meant, at first, that he did sort of join the shamblers. But he couldn’t move one of his feet, or one arm, too well, so he couldn’t get up without help and nobody wanted to help him get clear of the readings. More importantly, he couldn’t even babble. He was completely unable to speak. And the people with Bibles kept on.
But after a week, Jim was able to utter his first words — to a Bible-reader.
He said, ‘Fuck off.’
Possibly AA works like this — it annoys the hell out of you, talks and talks, and so you find out what you think, you find what you have to say and you get better. Possibly.
Possibly, you look at the shambling and babbling when somebody first arrives and you know you aren’t like that any more. You have been spared and want to stay that way. Or else, people tell you their stories and you hear about the chaos inside, which is like your chaos inside — you have the Hindenburg burning inside you always — and that’s worse than any stumbling in the street, or dropping bad sentences, slurring, acting as if you are gravely ill when you are only self-inflicted … And you see these other types of people — brand-new people, just-in-the-door people, getting-better people — and you can believe that your trouble could be compelled to pass you by. The bullet came close, it whined at your ear and you felt its heat, but now it’s flying on without you. It didn’t hit.
Or maybe it did hit, but being here makes the time roll backwards and the lead burrows up out of you and leaves, goes and tucks itself back in the gun.
Maybe this is the place where you can keep on with being alive …
If I do have to or do want to stay alive …
Which I do, I do — I’ve got things I can be getting on with …
Meg sat at the edge of the rearmost line of chairs.
But most of the things today seem to involve plastic chairs …
She and the chairs were set out in the vestry of a Palladian church on the verge of the West End. There was musty-sweet air about that suggested sanctity, that had the flavour of thought upon human thought attempting to hold out for better things, reaching. That elevated type of straining after God left a noticeable aftertaste, it was there under every breath. It was like flowers, like honey, like old paper — it was practically religious. But thank Whoever that it wasn’t, in fact, religious.
If I had to really pray it would stop me breathing.
Tea, coffee and not bad biscuits were also available.
Meg hadn’t been here before, because attending afternoon meetings was something she associated with not really having a life.
And I do, I do. I do have a life. I matter. I can be firm about it when I say that I matter to more than just a Machiavellian dog.
It had taken her a while to find the building and there were no faces here that she recognised.
So I can nip out smartly at the end and get away, not be detained by pleasantries.
How am I? I’d rather not tell you and I don’t have a genuine interest in how you’re doing, so I won’t ask. Forgive me.
I am glad to be here, but I do also want to leave.
An older man whose name she hadn’t caught was telling the room, in a slightly mumbly way, about something or other — some custody battle with his wife — Meg couldn’t bring herself to listen. There were murmurs of sympathy, or comfort, or approval from the occupied plastic chairs and that should be enough for the guy — he didn’t need the whole world, surely, to hang on his every word.
She could let her mind be soft and wander, leave the stacks of fading hymn books, the irrelevant psalm numbers posted up and the strangers’ pains.
I will meet you.
So so sorry.
It will be seven thirty or possibly eight. Could you do eight? Dinner at eight?
So sorry.
And, as the meeting rolled and worried on, Meg knew she wasn’t going to stick her hand up like an eager student and then wait to get picked and then shout out that she’d had a recent anniversary. She wasn’t going to say a word. She didn’t feel like celebrating any more. She felt as if she was waiting for a distant point to hit her — a point which dodged away and away and away and who could tell if this was a good or a bad thing.
I will not resent him. I will resent a meeting which isn’t a meeting for making me finally finish with my anniversary.
Every delay he makes is not forever. It will feel as if it is forever, because people of my sort feel everything bad as if it will go on forever.
And we get worried by joys because we know they’re short and when they’re gone we’ll miss them.
Fun being us, isn’t it?
The older man stopped talking and there was a disjointed hubbub of thanks before a very young woman took over, tumbling into some complicated saga about her neighbours.
I don’t have to join in, if I don’t want. Those in more need can have the time — there’s only an hour in the first place … Why should I stick my oar in? I have nothing to contribute, not a word.
Speaking can be the uncommunicative option. Sometimes, instead of fretting down the night over conversations you can’t build, can’t have, can’t face, conversations you know you’ll lose — because any conversation is competitive and you never can compete — you can sit down with paper and write what your best self would say, write as someone who seems better than yourself, write to someone who seems better than yourself. That can work.
So Meg had written — letters.
Letters for Mr August.
Dear Mr August.
She set them out on that paper her mother left: good-quality stuff, lying still in its box on a wardrobe shelf in what had been her parents’ room and what was currently the ghost room, mainly empty, mainly echoes upon which the door was shut and shut and shut and had to be shut while she was drinking.
The paper was cream, heavy, serious enough to be intimidating.
The last hands to touch it had most likely been been her mother’s. It was a personal stock for responses to formal occasions like anniversaries and weddings, or notes sent after relatives had stayed. Any departure left behind what her mother would interpret as an ongoing desire for reassurance on the part of absentees. Her correspondence had wished well and made requests that whoever read it should come back as soon as possible. Her mother had liked a full house and had never been able to settle, not really, until she’d received a reply of equal vehemence, equal need — something that promised.
So it was paper with a history of wishes and determination and that was maybe no bad thing, Meg didn’t know. It was available and it was nice and it made her feel comforted, rather than guilty, and she’d used it.