Good Company and Laughter, Chairs Breaking Against the Walls


The shakes. The coping strategies. The ‘finding other ways to relax’. The trying to fool it with sugar. That thing inside me, using my bloodstream as a running track, screaming for its hit. It’s still there, that mad searching greedy thing. It’s in a sick-bed, no longer strong enough to make me rattle. All it can do now is think resentful thoughts, tell me it hates me.

So. I’m dried out. Clean. Clean and dry and warm, wrapped up safely in fresh clothing and alone with reality. Reality is more interesting with a few drinks added. More than a few. Drink makes the world go round, literally. I loved that. Rooms lapping like tides. Sofas washing gently towards doors.

I went to see Mikey today. Mikey on the fifth floor, with the view over North London rooftops. The view that always looked glamorous at night, through the alcohol haze. This afternoon his flat was only semi-familiar, like a place I hadn’t visited since childhood. Yellowed paintwork, furniture-abuse and carpet burns. Yeah, it’s pretty run down, I thought. It didn’t seem tatty at all yesterday’s parties, but then, there were a lot of obscuring waves breaking against Mikey’s walls.

The thing was, in the grey daylight Mikey and I hadn’t got much to say to each other. It was too still in there, too quiet. We needed the wash and crash of the sea.

This was going to be my new life. It isn’t a new life; it’s a return to the very old one. It’s like setting off for Australia and finding yourself, after what you thought was a long-haul flight, back in the airport terminal.

This is an opportunity, a chance to build something new, to have other experiences apart from finding everyone funny and interesting and special; apart from thinking, every night at least, that everything was all fine with the world; apart from feeling wanted and cared for in the company of friends. Apart from living for the next evening, the next time I’d make them laugh, and love me all over again.

This is an opportunity, this stillness, this greyness, this lack of contact with people that I don’t have much to say to when I’m sober. With people who don’t really care. It’s a chance to be somewhere else, this return to exactly where I was ten years ago. Thinking about that, about ten years ago, makes me realise what was so wonderful about getting on the boat to Party Island.

I’ll just have to keep saying it to myself: I don’t even like the taste any more.


* Nemone Thornes won The Whittaker Prize in 2008. Her short stories have been published by Leaf Books and The Yorkshire Post.