You think you have the monopoly on mire. I get up every day, and I can’t wait until it’s afternoon, and I can have my first drink. I dream about it all day.
That first sip: I suck it through my teeth so I taste every molecule, make it go further. I can’t write unless my head is that little bit fuzzy.
I have another drink. I forget about dinner – you may laugh at that bit, given what you think about my thighs – and all I want is another drink.
The thought of going to a bar and not having a drink, well, I might as well not go. I feel it burn my throat and I know I am doing damage.
I wake in the middle of the night – as you do – now the drink has worn off, and I want another one. I can smell alcohol on my skin, like the air inside an empty bottle. I wake the next morning feeling dizzy, parched, ill-tempered; you wonder why I never phone you in the morning, why I fall asleep on the sofa when I’m supposed to be seeing you. Well, that’s why.
‘You wonder why we sometimes don’t have sex. Do you want to live with that? I still drink, before I get to you, after I leave. I see your shiny optimism [I thought at first he’d been about to type ‘face’!], your rigid lines, your extreme sense of right and wrong, and I think, she doesn’t want this.
She wants to be perfect for me in six months’ time, she never lets me even buy dinner without wanting to go halves.
I know moments before I arrive she has been Hoovering, because if I touch it, it’s still warm, but if she only knew what I was really like. She only wants a man like her dad: trousers pressed, lawn mowed, dogs walked. A poster on a wall secured with Blu-Tack. She is superhuman. I’m not kind when I’m drunk, I’m just like my old man: I even have his grey stubble.
‘It started through nerves, shyness. I drank a wee bit before I went on stage. I come from Scotland, for chrissake. I drank at my weddings. I drank when I got divorced. I drink when I get an alimony bill. I drink because I never made it exactly where I wanted to be, not quite. I drink because it’s all over for me. I never became John Lennon or Mick Jagger or even Sid Vicious. I never died young, so now I am old.’
‘I drink because it’s all over for me,’ he wrote. ‘I never died young, so now I am old’
I got this email at the weekend. We had had a small argument, on the Bat Phone, about what I no longer remember. Probably about him not paying sufficient attention to me. When I read his email, I felt stupid, and selfish, and intolerant.
I believe I am the only one with the problems, I am the only one who has been slighted and let down. I am the only one who is completely alone, harbouring secrets about how much I owe, how little I eat.
And do you know the really horrible thing that flitted through my mind when I read this email (and I had to get permission from him to publish it, here, bar two sentences he made me excise, which is why I filed this column perilously late)?
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How I would not be able to stand the mess, not the psychological mess, but of him, with empty bottles everywhere, shuffling, not washing, not brushing his tongue.
That was my first thought. I think the only reason I chose anorexia as my addiction of choice over bulimia is that the latter was more messy, and wasteful. Too many speckles.
The second thought that flitted as I read, and reread, and read again, was, ‘Oh, this will make a good column.’ I swear that is what I thought, second.
Not sympathy, or empathy, or shame. What sort of person does that make me? God, writers are horrible, horrible people. I’d even been wondering what to tell you about this week, as I haven’t seen him, have not had any guests or traumas or abscesses or colic or bailiffs; I have merely watched daffodils and crocuses unfurl their heads, so fluorescent they might have been designed by Christopher Kane.
The third was how on earth to write a reply.