Page 61 of Where Do We Go From Here?
‘Oh, I don’t drink that much,’ Wendy says with a fake laugh. She can feel herself blushing. ‘I couldn’t do two whole bottles of wine!I’d be on the floor!’
‘You do,’ Manon says flatly. ‘I bring these boxes. I take the bottles to the… therecyclage?’
‘Yes, but my friend Jill?—’
‘And I see you. Every time I come. One glass, two glass, three glass… First you are funny, like my mother. And then you are… how you say? Noisy.’
‘Noisy?’
‘You speak noisy. Because you drink.’
‘Really, um… this is making me a little—’ Wendy can sense beads of sweat forming on her brow. She chews the inside of her mouth and tries to remain calm.
‘I see this with my mother. This you must understand. Then she crash the car, because she drinks too much wine. We are in the car, me, my brother, but we’re OK. Then she crashes new car and loses herpermis. So she makes us to go to the shop. We are too young, but she tells the shop man it’s OK. And we do this every day. We bring new bottles, and we take away old. Because if we say “no” she will go crazy.’
‘I’m really sorry, Manon. That sounds horrific.’
‘And then one day, she is dead, you know? I am nine.’
‘Oh, you poor things,’ Wendy says, tears welling up in response to the tremble in Manon’s voice. ‘I’m so, so sorry. That’s a terrible thing to have to live through.’
‘And I am sorry, too, my friend. I cannot do this for you. You are too much like Maman. And I cannot do this same thing twice. Your delivery make me feel sick.’ Manon touches her chest, shakes her head and stands before, after a tiny, strange, Japanese-style nod, she turns and walks out the door leaving Wendy wide-eyed, trying to work out what just happened.
She feels numb. She sits staring at the front door, observing Manon’s absence as she tries to think some kind of coherentthought. But there are so many different ideas vying for attention that for a while it’s all a blur.
There’s a dose of resentful ‘how dare she’, and a dash of ‘damn! I’ve lost my only French friend’. There’s a hefty layer of ‘poor Manon’ dampening her resentment, and a touch of reasonable ‘it’s not her fault’ because she’s dealing with the trauma of losing her mother. There’s shame of course, too, because for the first time in her life she has been accused of being an alcoholic. There’s even a sense of confusion about why that might be, because, yes, Manon may have just delivered three boxes containing ten bottles of wine and enough food for a week, and yes, there perhaps were an embarrassing number of empties to be recycled a few days ago, but though Manon may have seen her sipping a glass or two during their sessions, certainly she has never seen her drunk.
Repeatedly Wendy reaches for her glass but interrupts the gesture every time and returns her hand to her lap until, once she has catalogued all these different thoughts and decided – her most reassuring thought – that Manon is clearly projecting her traumatic past on the situation, she consciously reaches for it, takes a sip and phones Jill.
Jill: Honey! I was just talking about you, with Bern. It’s been ages!
Wendy: Yes, we haven’t spoken since you left, have we?You forgot about me the second you walked out the door!
J: So how have you been? Did you get all that nonsense with the car sorted out?
W: Sort of. Actually no, not really. But Jill, the reason I’m phoning: do you think I’m an alcoholic?
J: I’m sorry?
W: The post lady. She’s been giving me French lessons and she just accused me of being an alcoholic!
J: Alcoholic? You? What a cheek! Though Bern pulls my leg about that all the time. He says we both are.
W: But are we? Do you think we really might be?
J: Honey, if we’re alcoholics then half the population of Britain are. Everyone I know has a glass of wine at the end of the day, and I do mean everyone. I don’t think modern life is possible otherwise. Everything’s just too awful.
W: You really think that?
J: Of course. Listen, you hold down a job, don’t you? Well, you did. For years. You’ve organised this whole sabbatical thing brilliantly, and paid for it. You’re not exactly sleeping under a bridge, honey, are you?
W: No, I suppose not.
J: I think you’re bloody reasonable, to be honest. Compared with me you are, anyway. Why on earth did… you said it was the post lady? The post lady’s told her she’s an alcoholic! Just telling Bern… Believe it or not he’s in the process of fixing two G&Ts!
W: Do you remember the girl who picked us up when we broke down? Well, it was her.
J: Right. And how did the subject even come up? Because you weren’t that drunk when we?—
