I’m thinking of getting another one who might turn out to be a better sort of companion.”
“How do you know what they’re going to turn out to be like?”
“That’s the problem, you don’t. Not when they’re kittens. I thought if I rescued an adult cat that would probably be the best way of knowing.”
“So now I have two things that are starting to indicate you may be the perfect man. What’s the third?”
“I’m a recovering alcoholic,” he says, taking a bite of bacon and reaching for a sip of coffee as if it were the most normal thing in the whole world, having no idea that my ears have started to buzz.
Why did he have to ruin the most perfect morning I have had in years?
* * *
“I’ve been sober three years, eight months, and sixty-eight, no, sixty-nine days,” he says, not an ounce of shame about it. “Best thing that ever happened to me.”
“Do you think I have a drinking problem?” I say, my voice as cold as steel, because I know exactly why he brought this up. I have no idea how he knows, but seeing me shitfaced last night must be why he brought me home. He’s not interested in me, other than because I remind him of how he used to be and presumably he knows the answer to all my problems. I feel a flash of anger and put down the knife and fork, am about to pick up my bag and walk out, because I really don’t need this shit. Not from my mother, and certainly not from this guy I don’t even know.
No matter how cute he may be.
He looks at me, bemused. “I don’t know anything about you. I have no idea whether you have a drinking problem or not. I, on the other hand”—he grins, and the tension disappears—“have a serious drinking problem. Note that I said recovering,” he explains. “I’m never actually going to be recovered. The only thing I know for sure is that it never stops at one drink. And I was bad.” He shakes his head at the memory. “When I got into recovery I’d been kicked off two television shows, and I was almost entirely yellow, my liver was so fucked. Seriously, they said if I’d have carried on I would have been dead within a year.”
I look at him, this picture of health, and I feel slight disbelief, coupled with relief. I’ve held the same job for eight years, and I’m not the slightest bit yellow. Clearly I’m absolutely fine. Although … the bit about not being able to stop at one drink … that certainly resonates. But just because I happened not to stop at one drink last night, after I said I would, doesn’t mean I can’t. It just means I didn’t last night. Tonight will be different. Today I’m going to start again, and particularly given I’ve just met this guy. If he’s not drinking, all the better. How much easier will it be for me?
“Did you go to rehab?”
He nods. “And now I go to meetings every day. During the week I go before work, but on Saturdays the meeting’s at noon. AA, obviously.”
“Obviously. So you knew you had a problem?” I say.
He shakes his head. “I didn’t think it was a problem. I was convinced I could stop at one drink, except I never could. I’d wake up in the morning and have no idea where I was or how I got there.”
Oh shit.
“Like me,” I mutter, eventually, and he just looks at me, with a look of such understanding and compassion I almost burst into tears.
* * *
I have never felt more self-conscious in my life than I do right now, in this room full of people, milling round, helping themselves to coffee from the machine on the trestle table in the corner of this room in the basement of a church in Paddington.
I don’t want to be here. Except I do. I wouldn’t be here had Jason not mentioned that he was coming, and I didn’t want to leave him. He has an exuberance and happiness that are infectious, and I figured either I’d have to go home and see my mum at some point later in the day or I could spend the day with Jason.
But I didn’t really think about what it meant, coming with him to an AA meeting. We climbed in his old Citroen and drove through the park as he told me his