Page 103 of Where Do We Go From Here?
Though she sweats profusely and trembles a little, though she feels utterly, utterly awful, and irritable and angry, her heart rate does not go above ninety-six. When Manon texts her, she lies, texting back that she’s ‘fine’ to avoid having to speak to her. She doesn’t have the patience for conversation.
While dozing she dreams of her mother flying like a kite, being dragged high into the sky until the string breaks, and of her father snoozing on a hammock above a precipice, and of a terrifying eight-legged spider-cat who looks a lot like Mittens, catching birds in his enormous web. When awake she fawns on the real four-legged Mittens, who, seeming to understand her need at this time, finally deigns to let himself be stroked in exchange for food – an act of generosity that makes her cry.
Unable to concentrate on the book she has been reading, she instead reads everything she can find about alcohol, addiction and getting sober.
She reads about clinical trials of new drugs to help with withdrawal and scientists who have performed brain scans, and the twelve steps used by Alcoholics Anonymous. She reads dozens of personal horror stories, and success stories, and the best advice currently available from the top American hospitals.
At one point, after a random turn in the network of rabbit holes she’s been sucked into, she stumbles upon an article which says that rats left alone in barren cages self-administer alcohol and cocaine, while rats in rich social environments do not. Lack of social connection leads to addiction, the article concludes, and this ties into her own experience in such a profound way that it feels like a lightbulb moment.
After all, didn’t her own story with alcohol start with the disappearance of her beloved mother and her rupture with her best friend and brother, only to be topped up with the lashings of isolation supplied by Covid? Her life is quite simply stuffed with severed connections these days and rather than spotting the issue and trying to deal with that in any meaningful way, she has chosen to shut herself away and drink – to shut herself awaythroughdrink. And when that failed to help, as it surely must, her decision was to come here, to a lonely mountain in France – the land of the 3 euro bottle of wine.
She pulls out her journal and rereads her previous diaryentries, written when she was snowed under, to confirm that she is re-experiencing the same symptoms. And then she writes a couple of fresh entries about the general state of her life and everything she seems to have lost or given up during the last fifteen years. Her father. Her mother. Her best friend. Her brother. Her husband. Her kids. Her workmates…
When you line it all up like that it’s a lot. And like a jigsaw puzzle at the beginning of the construction process, she senses that a picture is forming. She starts to believe that if she carries on, it may one day all make sense.
On the evening of the thirtieth, fifty-nine laggardly hours after she stopped drinking (because, yes, she’s counting the hours), she manages to watch a film in its entirety and fall asleep without taking a pill. But less than three hours later, she’s awake again, soaked in sweat and trembling from the most dreadful nightmare.
In the dream, her mother had been screaming in pain – begging for morphine, and struggling to breathe – and Wendy had been weeping herself, tears rolling down her cheeks as she pleaded with a lazy hospice nurse to summon the night doctor for her mother.
She sits up and switches on the light. She notes the wet pillow, the soaked sheets, and holds out her hand to watch it trembling. Is this the beginning of the DTs? she wonders. Or is she merely trembling in rage at that dream nurse who would not listen?
She gets up and makes her way downstairs; she plugs the kettle in for tea.
She looks outside into the darkness and tries to push the horror of the nightmare from her mind’s eye, but it won’t go away. The images from that hospital ward feel as real as here and now – more real in fact, than this strange dimly lit cabin.
She goes into the bathroom and sits down to pee. And it’s there – in the cold white bathroom with her knickers aroundher ankles – and then – at 3 a.m. on New Year’s Eve – that she realises: the nightmare was no nightmare. It was a memory, an actual memory of a very real moment – perhaps the most real, most horrific moment in her life – a memory she has somehow shut out until now.
The choking, the begging, her mother’s pain, the tears, that imbecile nurse insisting that her mum had taken all the morphine that was ‘allowed’… every detail of the nightmare is true, every sensation, every feeling something she most definitely lived through, every image intense with uncanny photographic accuracy.
And now she remembers the rest, too. She remembers how ten minutes later another nurse had finally paged the doctor and how ten minutes after that he’d sleepily sauntered in. She remembers how, when she finally managed to push him into her mother’s room – because she had quite literallypushedhim through that door – it had been too late.
He’d removed her hand from his shoulder and shot her a glare in irritation that she’d dared touch him, and then he’d said, in the most supercilious manner possible, ‘So, what’s all the fuss about then, Mrs Wilks?’
And that’s when she’d realised that her mother, the fussing Mrs Wilks, was no longer choking, no longer begging, no longer wheezing, no longer screaming in pain – that her mother was no longer experiencing anything at all. And she hadn’t even been there to hold her hand.
She stares at the tiled bathroom wall as the film plays out in her head. She realises that she’s been holding her breath and forces herself to breathe, and finally starts to pee.
And then, with a gasp of her own, with a gurgle, with a squeak, she starts to weep here in real life, fresh tears rolling down her cheeks until they drip, one after the other, onto her knees.
God knows how this is possible but she really had forgottenthis scene. Yes, she’d wept for the loss of her mother, for her absence, for the ache in her heart, for the impossible-to-comprehend fact that the most important person in her life was no longer on the planet… But that precise moment – the cinematographic horror of those thirty minutes – well, she truly had locked it away. And now, it is back, playing over and over in a high-speed loop, like a horrific best of, like the recap at the beginning of a television show. And she really doesn’t know what to do with it all. No wonder she was angry. No wonder watching all those people gasping for breath during the pandemic felt so personal. And no wonder she started to drink. If she could, if she had some alcohol in the cabin, she would drink herself into oblivion right now.
THIRTEEN
A NEW YEAR
It’s not until Wendy gets up again just after ten that she remembers it’s New Year’s Eve. As every morning since she stopped drinking eighty-two hours ago (she’s still counting them), the first thing she does is scan her body.
She has woken up feeling tired and depressed. Is the cause this newly surfaced memory, the New Year’s Eve effect, or giving up alcohol? It’s probably a unique combination of all three, she concludes. After all, New Year’s Eve alone, sober, with all ofthatto ponder… Well. That’s quite clearly going to be hell.
She gets up; she stokes the fire. She makes coffee and cradles the warm cup between her hands. It’s cold outside this morning – the thermometer says six degrees. But the sky is entirely free of clouds, so it will at least be sunny. She should probably try to take a little pleasure from that.
She feeds Mittens and manages to stroke him a couple of times before he decides that’s quite enough of that and wanders off into the bushes. She wonders where he sleeps. She wonders if feeding him is even a good idea, because, after all, what will happen when she leaves? She imagines him peering through thewindow at the empty cabin and feeling desolate, cold and hungry once she’s gone. Maybe befriending him is an act of cruelty.
She slouches around until mid-morning, reading the news on her phone (miserable but at least distracting) and checking Facebook and Instagram, too, which (as they largely feature people’s preparations for New Year’s Eve) are depressing in their own way.
It’s gone eleven by the time she manages to drag herself out the door. She walks to the car park at the base of the hiking trail, lost in thought. She doesn’t want to be here, today. She doesn’t want to be here at all.
Is she at least fitter than when she arrived? she wonders as she begins the climb. Yes. So at least there’s that.
