Page 93 of Where Do We Go From Here?
‘Maybe. I don’t know. But no, he does worse thing.’
‘You mean drugs?’
‘Oh, no,’ Manon says. ‘No, this I do not know. But he is bad to my mother. Very bad. Worse kind of bad. But this I cannot… I’m sorry, look…’ Here she holds her hand out so that Wendy can see it trembling. ‘This is too much now. I must go.’
‘Yes, of course. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have…’
‘It’s OK,’ Manon says. ‘And you will be OK?’
‘Yes,’ Wendy says. ‘Of course.’
‘You will not…?’ Here she raises one hand and makes that French ‘drunk’ gesture around her nose. ‘Not too much, I hope?’
‘No,’ Wendy says. ‘No, I promise. There’s nothing to drink here anyway.’
‘Good,’ Manon says. ‘This is good.’
Once Manon has left, Wendy makes coffee and smokes a cigarette, followed by another cigarette, then a third which she lights from the second. She wishes she’d bought more cigarettes while she had the car because if she carries on like this she’ll be running out within days. She needs to stop chain-smoking and do something. She’s nervous, she realises. She’s nervous about facing this day without a drink, which is as absurd as it is true.
She decides to walk up to the radar. It’s the only thing she can think of to kill the next few hours and at least it will be better for her lungs than sitting here chain-smoking. She imagines stopping off at the bakery on her way home for a bottle of wine, and has to forcibly change the narrative. No, she has food – she can avoid the bakery for now.
She makes herself a packed lunch, fills a bottle with water, and even though her head is still throbbing, she heads out.
The day is delightful, the sky a gentle baby blue dotted with wispy veil-like clouds. The sunlight hurts her eyes, and she’s thankful for her dark sunglasses. The temperature is in the high teens and it feels like a beautiful late spring morning back home.
She asks herself what she means by ‘home’ these days. Does she mean England, or Maidstone, or that house she bought with Harry, the one they decorated and furnished together? She really isn’t sure.
Half an hour later she reaches the base of the walking trail. There are seven cars parked there this morning. It’s perfect hiking weather, after all.
Just as she starts the climb, she receives an incoming call from Jill which she ignores, switching her phone to silent. Just as a shop selling wine is the last place she needs to visit, Jill would be the worst person on the planet for her to speak to today.
But even though she knows this, and even though she has refused the call and slipped her phone into her pocket, she hears Jill’s voice banging around her head, as well defined and Jill-like as if she’d chosen, instead, to answer.
‘Oh, don’t be daft,’ the voice says, ‘you’re not an alcoholic!’ And, ‘If you’re an alcoholic, then everyone’s an alcoholic!’ And, ‘God, please don’t become one of those people! Please don’t become a bore!’
Wendy would certainly be bored if she stopped drinking. And she’d probably be fairly boring, as well. Is that really what she wants?
She catches herself using the conditional tense in her head. Shewouldbe boredifshe stopped.Honestly, she thinks.Ten seconds of imaginary conversation with Jill and I’m already beginning to backslide.
So, no, she will stop drinking – well, as long as she can humanly do so without dying. Seeing her son get married depends on it. And she’ll stop for… For how long? Until the wedding? But that’s months! Just long enough to prove to herself that she can, then. But how long would that be? A month? A week? Christ, even the idea of a week without a drink sounds like hell.
She crosses paths with two early-bird hikers coming back the other way. They are young (maybe thirties?), blond, fit and beautiful.
When Wendy was their age she’d believed thatif you did enough exercise you could prevent ageing altogether. She really had thought that creaky, cranky old people got that way because they hadn’t put in enough effort. But no matter what you do the aches and pains come, and no matter what creams you slap on, the wrinkles and sunspots appear.
She can remember it, though: feeling young, feeling fit, feeling almost permanently optimistic and capable – getting over a full-on party during a single night’s sleep and slapping make-up on the next morning thinking,Yeah, girl, you’re looking fine. If only she’d been aware how temporary it all was, she’d have made the most of the feeling.
She imagines herself at ninety, looking back at this very moment.Appreciate it, she tells herself, taking a deep breath and consciously looking around at the view. She’s been so lost in her mind since she started walking this morning that she has barely noticed her surroundings.
At the top she finds multiple groups of hikers picnicking noisily – chattering like magpies – so she nods and smiles and continues along the ridge until she finds a quiet hollow in which to eat her sandwich.
She thinks about what Manon said about the way her mother passed her own trauma on to her children and wonders what the nature of the original trauma might have been.
Even though it wasn’t said or even really hinted at, there had been a whiff of sexual abuse in the air. She reckons she’d realised, at least subconsciously, that this is what Manon was referring to. No wonder the poor woman turned to drink.
At least she doesn’t have any trauma of her own to deal with. After all, her own childhood had been pretty damned perfect. Well, OK, perhaps not perfect, because whose upbringing ever is? But it had been good. It had been good enough. Perhaps her father had been a little slap-happy, and her mother a bit of a hypochondriac, always laid up with one of her mystery illnesses. Which is why no one really listened whenshe really did get ill – not until it was too late to do anything about it, at any rate. Classic crying wolf scenario.
But the love had been there, too, hadn’t it? She’d received oodles and oodles of love. Particularly from her mother. Which is why losing her was so damned hard.
