It’s OK, the stuff doesn’t jump out and grab you, it doesn’t get forced down your throat — lots and lots of grown-ups have told me that.
And there were too many theatres around here. Maybe it was the theatres that gave the place its unreliable vibe. Theatres wanted nothing to do with you most of the day and then they lit themselves bright and liked to be all straggled round by dressed-up crowds and queues. Then every trace of that got tidied away, shut in behind doors. And the same crowds were leaving, out again, two or three hours later and you’d no idea what went on in between, except that it made them seem smug and overheated. And the people who worked for the theatres leaned about across interesting doorways and looked purposeful near trucks full of equipment and mysteries and they kept odd hours and encouraged odd hours in others: late eating, early eating. They kept to an alcoholic’s schedule: late drinking, early drinking. That was maybe why Meg hadn’t been this way in a while.
There was a greasy-spoon place just off Leicester Square where she used to get breakfast in the tiny hours of semi-regular, irregular mornings. If you’d had to make a night of it and wanted propping up — there it was.
Charing Cross Road was built for visitors in ideas of their Sunday Best, for pickpockets and lost sheep and bookworms and the people who acted as warnings against the risks of eating through your lifestyle. Asleep in doorways, ill in doorways, can’t-tell-if-they’re-dead-already in doorways — they were your examples to learn from, the sketches from your future. You see the other options — the ones on the way to soup kitchens and shelters, theatrical about their misery, wearing it out loud. Charing Cross Road was always there but for the grace of God.
Whoever that is.
This evening she was glad when she could get herself down in the Underground and away.
Where no one can call me. I don’t really want another call.
I mean, I do. But I don’t want be waiting for it, or waiting for another failure, or …
There are things that I can’t manage in my thinking. Not today.
Maybe forever.
The subway hadn’t been a friend to Meg when she was drinking: the inescapable white passageways, bowing out as if she had been Jonahed, taken deep inside the whale. It had made her sweat.
Jon wrote about being Jonahed — I never thought of it before as a word.
She hadn’t enjoyed the branching muddle of directions, the sudden lock of crowds around you, the delays and the fuggy trapped air — or the unexplained sudden assaults of feral pressure, gusts from nowhere which might be normal, or a sign of accidents and collapses. The roar of the tunnels once she’d got aboard a carriage could be unbearable — so much velocity, so much unnatural submersion, so many people to peer at you and find you wanting and shaking and damp.
I don’t mind it now, though. Not so much.
Meg could stand on the platform and wait for a Piccadilly Line westbound train without much considering how remarkably easy it would be to step off in front of the next one that pulled in and solve herself.
Everyone thinks that a bit, though. Everyone. It lets them feel extra-comfortable, once the idea has gone past and they don’t need to and won’t scare the driver, won’t cause delays and tutting amongst strangers. That’s all you get for killing yourself in London — tutting. There’s been a lot of tutting lately. We live in peculiar times.
I’m all right, though. I am. My name is Meg and I’m an alcoholic and it’s not like how you see it in the movies when you say that, not like on TV, the whole room doesn’t gasp and weep and stare at you like you’re a unicorn and you’ve just started speaking French. You’re in an AA meeting — it’s the one thing that everybody thinks you’ll say.
And my name is Meg and I’m an alcoholic and I have a plan because I am better than not having one, than what might happen if I try to improvise.
I am going to have a nice dinner later, that’s all that’s going on.
My shoes are the wrong shoes for all of this walking about, but otherwise I’m in promising shape.
And I have a medallion with me and it has ‘To Thine Own Self Be True’ on it, along with a great big fuck-off Roman numeral —
I
— for one year, because sober years are so important, you get them in Latin, and I can take it out and look at it and it will prove that I’m all right and it has that bloody prayer embossed on the other side and I can’t pray — not exactly — but I can have a loud think and the words I might use are written down in any case and I choose to believe — because it’s a nice idea — that having written the words down will now mean they are permanently reciting. It’s like an open channel, and the words are saying themselves in my pocket the whole time.
Like a letter to Nowhere.
She put her hand in her jacket pocket and ran her thumb over the metal disc, the raised letters, let her nail read what she knew by heart, having heard it spoken so many times, by so many people.
Myself being one of those people. I can have faith in words. I like words. I like them more and fucking more. The Universe I can have my doubts about, but words can be proper and sweet.
GOD GRANT ME THE
SERENITY TO ACCEPT THE
THINGS I CANNOT
CHANGE, COURAGE
TO CHANGE THE THINGS
I CAN AND WISDOM TO KNOW
THE DIFFERENCE.
It says that without me, right in my hand. I don’t have to do a thing.
And I’m wearing a not nice jacket. But it’s the best that I can do. I have to accept my jacket because it can’t be changed. I don’t think I need drag a God in to assist. My clothes don’t fit well, but I’d have no respect for a deity who cared. Why should it?
With the booze, you gain weight and then you lose it and you stop being sure of which shape you are at any given time and you also stop caring — which makes you resemble the high and finer type of God.
I do care now, though — about the jacket. I accept that: not the jacket, just the caring.
I am wearing the jacket as if I do not accept it. I think that’s what would show to an observer, but that’s also the best that I can do.
And the caring makes me feel sick, so I would rather change that. And looking bad and ugly and pathetic makes me feel sick, too. One thorough glance at me and you’d see: there’s a struck-off accountant forever in a jacket and skirt that nobody could trust — which also makes me feel sick.
I would rather change the fact that I feel sick.
And I would rather not feel sick about tonight and about the meeting, or the maybe not meeting, because it does seem unlikely to me that it will happen — it does seem already too far away.