Page 89 of Where Do We Go From Here?
W: Now you’re being?—
H: Listen. There are circumstances, Wendy, and?—
W: Circumstances?
H: Yes. For one, they’re very much in love.
W: Love? Huh! Love won’t get them far. It didn’t do much for us, did it?
H: I’m going to do my best to ignore that one, because you’re clearly drunk. But listen: Amanda’s dad?—
W: Yes, I know all about her bloody dad. I couldn’t give a shit about her dad.
H: Wow. That’s one of the worst things you’ve ever said, Wen. And there have been some pretty bad ones… But that? Right there?
W: Oh, don’t get on your teacher high horse with me. I’m immune to that, Harry. Have been for years.
H:. You know, you’re horrible when you’re like this? And you are drunk. I can hear it in your voice. So I’m going to hang up now.
W: Don’t you dare, Harry! Don’t you dare hang up on me.
H: Call me back when you’re sober, Wendy, if you ever are these days. Call me back when you’re sober enough to apologise.
The line goes dead.
She tries to refill her glass, but the bottle onthe table is empty.
‘Yes, yes, yes, I’m drunk,’ she says out loud. ‘So hang me!’
She crosses to the kitchen and pulls a fresh bottle of wine – red, this time – from the cupboard. She’s shocked to discover that it has a screw top, the first time she has seen this in France.
‘Well, that certainly makes things a bit easier,’ she says to no one in particular.
It’s Boxing Day evening and, with her daughter gone, Wendy’s feeling miserable and lonely. So she drinks until she loses consciousness and then carries on the moment she wakes up the next morning, drinking like she has never drunk before.
She drinks white wine and red wine and then rosé. Occasionally, when the hunger pangs get too much, she eats crisps or lumps of bread with cheese.
Sometimes she tries to watch something on Netflix, but half the time she can’t concentrate on the plot and the other half she falls asleep. So mostly, she just drinks and dozes and stares at the changing light beyond the window. She runs snippets of conversations around her head, revelling in the righteous fury they provoke.Can’t be trusted. You know what you’re like. You’re horrible when you’re like this.
How dare he call her horrible! How dare they plot to keep her from her own son’s wedding!
And when all that fury gets overwhelming – which regularly it does – she drinks more. She drinks until the fury stops and she can slip into not thinking anything at all.
She does not shower, change her clothes, or brush her teeth. At some point – she forgets exactly when – Manon drops by for a French lesson, so she hides out of sight in the bathroom. Mittens visits, too, and despite being too drunk to see straight she manages to give him food.
On the twenty-eighth, she wakes up with the worsthangover she has ever had. The pain of her headache is excruciating, like a pile-driver ramming into her temple just behind her right eye.
She drags herself downstairs. She’s wobbly on her feet this morning and misses the last step, stumbling into the coffee table and bruising her shin.
She searches the bathroom for paracetamol but she can’t seem to find it anywhere, which is unsurprising really because her headache is so bad she can barely see.
She returns to the kitchen and hunts through the debris of yesterday’s binge, but she can’t find the damned paracetamol there either.
What she does find is a half-finished bottle of Fitou, and thinking ‘hair of the dog’ she raises it to her lips and takes a swig. But something unexpected enters her mouth – something solid, something alive. She gags and spits the wine into the sink where she sees a bluebottle, still wriggling, drag its hairy body from the red mess onto a teaspoon.
She heaves and runs to the bathroom where she kneels before the toilet bowl. She thinks she’s going to vomit and in fact wants to vomit. Instead, she merely retches repeatedly. There’s nothing in her stomach to come out.
Eventually, once the retching is over, she stands and washes her face at the washbasin.
