The next day, we watch the Red Arrows fly past the window over the Thames, and
I feel something like hope. In the pub later on, I finally tell them about
what has been going on, and one of my friends says: “The thing is, Tania,
the truth is that life is pointless, the world is a pointless place. You
just have to make the best of it.”
After weeks of living on a diet of all-day vodka, fruit juice and slices of
salami, my blood tests start showing that my liver is affected. For the next
six months, on and off, until long after I stop drinking, I have night
sweats and my skin breaks out: one minute it is almost flaking, the next you
could use it to fry up a full English. I search high and low for a
moisturiser that works. A tiny thread vein on the side of my nose that has
been there for years suddenly grows, seemingly overnight, until it looks
like a lipstick mark, and will take electrified needles and lasers to
remove. I get a lump in my right breast and am sent to the Royal Marsden.
They have a hand-out for women suggesting that evening primrose oil might
help. Confusingly, one consultant I see there sniffs at the idea, but it
works.
Over that summer, through the blackness, light begins to come through. My lack
of money is strangely liberating. I walk for miles and miles, but the only
shops I go into are charity shops. A successful journalist friend is asked
to write a column in a magazine, but she turns it down as she has to go
abroad. At her goodbye party, she suggests I try for it. I do and succeed.
It seems like a miracle.
Since the age of 15, I have had a horror of the summer. For me, summer
represented loss, being left behind. One day, I mention this to my online
therapy group. One man suggests I do a ceremony, go out into the dawn light
and thank the sun for my life. It has given me life, he says, and I should
thank it, not avoid it. It sounds desperately hokey, but that one e-mail
changed everything. I look out of the window and think it – and it works.
I see a very attractive psychiatrist briefly, who listens to me babbling about
fancying people, and spots the drug head I still have on me when I ask about
taking Ritalin on top of the Seroxat to stop me falling asleep. He warns me
off relationships and points out my vulnerability.
I go to a festival in south London and sit on the grass with a cup of cider,
relieved to rest. Everyone else is always so drunk that nobody will notice
how shaky I still am. I tell a party friend that I haven’t done cocaine for
three weeks. “Three weeks?” he says, incredulous at my momentous achievement.
It takes me several weeks to stop drinking altogether. I almost stop going
out, which cuts my intake in half. I tackle drinking at home before dealing
with it socially. I gradually reduce from a bottle of wine to half a bottle,
to two glasses, to one, then a bottle of beer instead. And then nothing. To
be at home alone in the evening without a drink suddenly turns into no big
deal.
I take my last drink on September 11, 2002 – exactly a year after so many
things kicked off – and the following evening, I do something that I have
barely ever done in my life since I was a child. I go out to a bar and
return home sober.
First night on the town
On my first night of public sobriety, I go to a small party in a bar in
Brixton. It just feels odd, not terrifying. I know a few people there, and
it dawns on me that you can sit somewhere and just be normal. I don’t have a
panic attack, or bite my nails, or cry, or abuse people, or suddenly have to
go home. I notice a lot of things that are completely new to me.
Two months later, a friend invites me to her hen party. To my acute
embarrassment, I have to ask her in advance if it is okay to just pay for
the dinner, and that this isn’t because I have given up drinking, but in
fact because I am so broke. I arrive at an apartment full of women, most of
whom I don’t know, and bottles and bottles of alcohol. I sit quietly as the
corks pop. It is the smell of champagne that nearly tips me back: the warm,
sharp, straw-like aroma of summer days and falling back onto grass laughing.
I think about it, and think about it, and think that perhaps it might be
okay to have just one or two, because it is a party, after all, and women
together have such a laugh. Someone tells me how much she enjoyed reading a
piece I wrote for a magazine few years before, but another woman is being
oddly hostile, and keeps taking my tobacco without asking. Then the hostess
suddenly stands up, asks for silence and announces to the 15 or so women in
the room that I am only going to pay for the meal and not the alcohol. I am
floored. This gets me a snort from the tobacco-grabbing woman, and I feel an
idiot.
When you’ve been swathed in a liquid blanket your whole life, getting sober is
a chilly, bloody rebirth. People or situations that you happily tolerated in
your numbness will become intolerable. And others may, in turn, find you
intolerable. In the early days, I encounter one or two sour faces when I ask
for “just a Coke”, and overhear whispers that I have become “boring”. This
is nothing compared to what some people go through, having to deal with
their closest friends teasing them, trying to goad them into drinking again
and even starting to ignore them.
Actually, I am lucky. Very few people, bar staff aside, give me a hard time
over getting sober. I must have underestimated my friends. Thank you,
friends.
The first thing that giving up alcohol does is turn up the volume. I am still
astounded by noise. If you’ve had people in the house all night, try turning
on the music or the television when you’ve all woken up later on and see how
loud it is. Noise is the first thing I begin to find hard on a regular
basis, and still do.
Someone persuades me to do a spoken-word gig. I am desperate for cash, and I
return to the typical scene of a crowded bar and shouting oblivion in Brick
Lane. I’ve never done a gig sober. I stay safe and do oldies. Later, the
promoter says it is the best one I’ve ever done. Since my midsummer
overdose, the weight has been dropping off me like a silken veil. All those
years of booze-bloat fall away, and by Christmas, when I am three months
sober, I will be down to 8st 12lb. For a 5ft 10in person, that is not a lot.
My xylophone ribcage reflects the light along its ridges. I catch sight of
myself in shop windows and am appalled by the thin girl and pitying of her,
until I realise it’s me. But at least I’m alive.
What I miss
Unpredictable evenings. Not knowing where I’m going to end up. The wonderful,
precious loss of whole chunks of time. Getting paid in vodka. Cackling.
Intoxication in general. MiniRolls. Competitive smoking. Churning through
vast numbers of people around town and staying friends with some of them.
Not minding going out and spending all evening in high heels because the
drink numbs the pain after a bit. Spending whole days in the pub shouting.
And I know full well, even now, that one of the best – no, hell, the best –
way to spend the weekend, ever, is just the two of you, the place to
yourselves, red wine, vodka and a pile of your drug of choice. Talking, sex,
shouting, sleeping, drinking, snorting, smoking, then doing it all again,
all on our little island. I miss that.
What I don’t miss
Hangovers. Screaming, spinning head on the bus the next day. Hunting for the
missing twenty quid. Rubbish attempts at designing hangover “cures”.
Hangovers. Tolerating people others consider to be mad. Pulling crispy bacon
bits out of my nose. Being able to judge how drunk I am from how early I
start to undress (removal of my jewellery while still in a bar is not a good
sign). Sex not quite working properly. Feeling obliged to perform. Paranoia.
Line, drink, line, drink. Being so miserable that I cannot listen to music
for months on end. Exhaustion from always trying to seem okay to others.
Suicidal depressions. Hangovers.
© Tania Glyde 2008. Extracted from Cleaning Up: How I Gave up Drinking and
Lived, to be published by Serpent’s Tail on Thursday at £10.99.
To buy it for £9.89, including p&p in the UK, call The Sunday Times
BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585 or visit timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
