On addiction

‘Time stutters and reverses and it is always yesterday. Maybe the greatest miracle is memory.’ Brian Doyle.

For all the arguments time does not exist, I’m okay with the idea there’s a past, present, and future, which most experience sequentially.

Before I knew about the nature of addiction, even as in childhood my father drank himself into a stupor night after night, I reckoned it would not happen to me.

I had willpower in all matters except when it came to love.

How then to win it from my man who, in my twentieth year, was an unemployed gambler supporting us both on his winnings? 

His gambling was not an addiction, I reasoned, because he enjoyed it too much. And even when he lost, whatever money he put aside on a weekend string of mistakenly chosen losers, he reconciled himself to having another go the next week when he was sure he would win again.

There was a night when I was studying for my psychology exams the next day when the electricity was shut off and I had to study by candlelight, but mostly he kept us away from eviction and the debt collector at the door. 

I have memories as a child. My mother telling us to be quiet when there was a knock at our front door after some bill remained unpaid.

This might be a trick of memory adopted from the movies. Not being able to pay bills is a mark of that memory. One Mrs Milanova referred to as my fear of ‘running out of resources’. 

I liked this notion. The idea that money is not the only resource. There are many such resources, skills, abilities, ways of managing life that can get us through and money is only one of them. 

Get through we did. But this night after I had spent the day tidying the flat my boyfriend rented with his friend, beginning with the kitchen and bathroom – wiping down benches, mopping floors, scrubbing out the toilet, dusting, then moving into the bedrooms where I changed the bedsheets in our room – I looked forward to something better. 

I had left Paul’s house-mate Ivan’s room alone. Ivan preferred it that way. He was working as an engineer or some such and spent large chunks of his evenings driving taxis in a bid to earn as much as he could. He planned to travel overseas indefinitely in the next few months and had given up all life’s pleasures for the promise of future happiness in lands far away. 

I did not warm to Ivan, nor he to me. Perhaps because I threatened to take Paul away from him. Ivan told me once, Paul was not the type of guy who sticks with one woman only, or words to that effect. I should therefore not trust his interest in me, it would not last. But Paul and I lasted all of four years, and in the end it was not Paul who chose to leave.

Once I’d finished the housework, set a load of washing, and begun to stir onions in a pan in readiness, I was ready for the night.

I chose a chicken curry made with Maggi chicken noodle soup, Keen’s curry, a yellow spoon full, and sausages – a poor person’s dish we all found delectable when our taste buds were insufficiently advanced to appreciate the subtleties of fresh foods. 

The thought of this dish today makes my stomach squirm as if I’ve sucked in a whiff of milk gone off or the stink of vomit. But on this night I had made a dish fit for a king. And all of it without asking.

Imagine my surprise when Paul came home at six o’clock from a day at the country races in Pakenham, to tell me he planned to join his friend Roman at another race meet that evening. This time for the dogs at Olympic Park. No need for me to go. I wouldn’t enjoy it anyway. 

He was right. The sight of these sleek greyhounds streaking after a mock rabbit lure irked me almost as much as the thought of eating curried sausages today. 

I could only ever think of the poor rabbit at the end, or the way those dogs were taught to fight so fiercely for the actual meat they gave in place of pretend rabbit at the end of the race. Talk about addiction to the promise of something that never quite eventuates.

Paul offered a goodbye peck and was gone. I paced the room. How could I survive this night without him? All day I had prepared the house and dinner to the promise of a splendid evening together, in front of the television or snuggled up in bed, close to the man I loved. And he had thrown me away. How could he? 

I did not drink whiskey as a matter of course, too grainy, insufficiently sweet and the smell reminded me of my father. But I decided, given it was the only full bottle in our cupboard, I would drink the lot. I would then go into a coma and never wake up again.

I gagged at the taste, the rich malt, the kick in the back of the throat. I could not skull as I had seen people do in movies. Only sip. The more I sipped the more my gut roiled. The alcohol was numbing my senses in a way I hoped it might, but my body recoiled at the thought of getting through to the bottom. 

Then I remembered how people mixed booze and pills. So, to speed up the process, I ripped open a pack of Panadol from the bathroom cupboard and gulped down two. This I knew might help with pain. I was not in physical pain, and my emotional hurt was fading from view in a blur, but still I ached.

Paul would come home and find me slumped on the couch. He would panic when he could not wake me. He would dial triple 000 and the ambulance would come and take me to the hospital where he would spend a tortured night worrying I might die. I did not think about doctors needing to pump out my stomach. 

A third of my way through the bottle with another two Panadols sloshed between, I settled onto the couch. Restless, but unable to fade, I decided a move to our bedroom might be more Ophelia-like for when Paul found me. 

It was morning when I woke to Paul’s snoring in the bed beside me. My head groggy, my stomach empty. The drama over. 

I did not say a word to Paul. Instead, I stored my resentment along with the many other slights from our time together. When he took to training with the Commonwealth Police and left his gambling life behind, the balance of our relationship shifted.

One day, a young resident doctor at the hospital where I worked asked me out on a date. His name was Mark, tall and red headed, I liked him for his sense of humour. 

‘No,’ I said I could not accept his offer. I was in a relationship. But within an hour I told him I’d changed my mind. I would go with him. I could go with him. 

Paul was away on a training course in Sydney and did not need to know. I was a woman who could make her own choices, regardless. And with this first departure, I entered a string of infidelities that ended in the death of our relationship.

Before we separated, I found a sheet of paper on which Paul had written a list of pros and cons in our relationship. His first among the positives: I love her. 

A shock. I had not believed this in all our four years together, until then when I saw it in writing. Too late, because my love for Paul had faded to indifference and although I maintained a soft spot for this man who introduced me to the life of a sexual woman, I will never forget the way he took me for granted. 

I thank all the stars we call lucky for steering me away. If I had married Paul, what an impoverished life I might have led. 

My mother told us when we were children, before she met our father, there was a man who once proposed to her. A man whose name I remember as Martin or Hank. But my father slid into her life in his army uniform, and she was entranced. Also, the resistance from her parents – my father was not Catholic, and from a struggling family – appealed to her. Perhaps in much the way Paul’s difference from my family appealed to me. 

Our separation lasted several months into a year during which we kept up contact. Another story here. 

Years later after I had settled with my own husband, I heard Paul had married a woman, named Lucy. One night, out of the blue, she rang me. She did not understand Paul and she offered him back to me.

‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘He’s all yours.’ 

I have not heard from him or her since. 

A garden of vegetables

I want to write about silence. About the things people don’t say. The way we have conversations and our words, from one person to another reveal only a fraction of what is going on between them, and even then, their unspoken body language might say more. 

Actions are louder than words, but silence is loudest of all. The silence that falls between two people who refuse to see one another for years after an argument, the fracturing in families. 

When I was thirteen on the cusp of womanhood, though I did not know such things then, only that my body was taking shape and those things I thought might never happen for me, my breasts erupted, and I wanted both to hide and to show off. 

Especially to hide the hideous pubic hair below. I first noticed it in the change rooms in the Camberwell public baths, at a time when I freaked that anyone should see my naked body and insisted on getting into my bathers alone. Black sprouts on my pink skin and no one had forewarned me this would happen.

At first I thought there was something seriously wrong with me but then I had conversations with my older sister who warned me about more to come in the form of periods. 

Breasts were something else altogether. I took pride in those. The day my mother spoke to me quietly and handed me an old bra once owned by my sister and told me I would need to wear it, left me aglow with pleasure.

I took the sense of triumph I felt over my younger sister whose chest stayed flat given she was nearly two years behind me. She did not like the way I was growing up and away from her, I could tell.

She begged me to go on playing with dolls long after the desire to sit under the kitchen table on our boat blanket, dressing and undressing our dolls and concocting imaginary stories, had left me.

By then I preferred the company of my two older brothers. Preferred to camp out in the back yard at night under the stars, full of the magic of the open night sky. 

By then I had decided the world of adulthood, as scary as it might once have seemed, was filled with enticements. Like the boy/man up the street who lived in a house with his Mediterranean parents in a house block converted into a vegetable garden. 

This tendency to convert every ounce of available garden space into a place that was useful for vegetables and the like instead of keeping it manicured lawn bordered by bright exotics from Europe was at odds with the rest of the street. As was this dark haired, tall and to my mind, handsome young man who noticed me as I walked up the street on the other side of his house and thrust my small breasts forward snug under my older sister’s cast-off black jumper. As proud of my shape as if I was a folk singer like Judith Durham from the Seekers. Though people called her demure and I did not feel demure. I felt like a risk taker in those final days when my family still lived in Wentworth Avenue. Before we took off for Cheltenham and another life further away. To a new house where the street on which we lived was a main road and many of our new neighbours used their front gardens only for the growth of vegetables. 

One day in my letter box, I found a small note in a purple envelope which was not addressed to my parents or any of my older siblings and therefore could only – in my centrally focussed mind – be intended for me. 

I cannot figure out from the scraps of my memory how I came to this conclusion other than to know this letter was for me from the boy up the street who lived in the house whose garden afforded only vegetables and whose English was poor.

He could not spell:

‘I like to meet up with you someware, soon. You are prity.’

And my body thrilled at the prospect of a movie style romance with this young man whose body held a shine on his olive skin that I longed to touch as terrified as I was at the prospect. The fantasy was enough.

I showed the letter to my younger sister.

‘You can’t meet that boy’ she said. ‘You don’t know him.’

She was right, but I decided she was jealous. I slid my letter under my pillow for safe keeping but later that night when I went to bed and wanted to re-read his badly spelled words for the sheer thrill of my imaginings, my letter had gone.

‘I tore it up,’ my sister said when I asked her what she had done with it. Only she knew of its existence and something unspoken came between us, my sister and me. Something that has stayed between us ever since.

After the move to Cheltenham, I gave up all thought of boys. I settled into my larger body that in time became too large for comfort, while my younger sister erupted into full beauty like a Botticelli angel and the tables turned.

My turn to be jealous of her. Her dark wavy hair like our mother’s. Her oval shaped face. Her clear blue eyes and skin less tortured by the pimples that beset me. Her clean white teeth. She took care of them in a way I never managed. She cared about her appearance in a way that put me to shame. She even insisted that our mother let her go to the dentist for a check-up even as we knew our mother could not afford it. 

I stood in awe of my sister’s words: ‘Mum I need to go to the dentist’. In awe at her determination to do the right thing by her body but appalled at the idea that she should draw attention to her teeth. 

To draw attention to her teeth when she was younger than me was to draw attention to mine. The state of my mouth was my biggest secret in those days. Much as I spent many a night tossing and turning under the ache of my molars which were crumbling in the middle. I could feel the holes behind my incisors with my tongue. 

At night in throbbing pain, I tossed my head against my pillow. Earlier I smeared tooth paste into the gaps hoping the mint flavour might allay some of the pain. I did not want to take these teeth to a dentist to get the help I needed.

If a dentist looked into my mouth he would see with horror the ravages of tooth decay that I had hidden for years, and he would not keep his response a secret. ‘You have not been cleaning your teeth,’ he’d say. I was bad and should be ashamed. 

In those few months when I was on the cusp of womanhood, when my body first began to shoot into a shape desired by the world, my teeth were less of a problem, than in the years to come when the glorious shape of my body became too much, and I needed to hide it behind my school uniform or loose dresses. Cover my splotchy red face with makeup pinched from my older sister such that I looked like a patchwork of pink and barely concealed bumpy red, and my mouth kept closed to hide the yellowing teeth behind my lips.

On the cusp

While my younger sister who was once jealous of me became the one whom others admired for her beauty. Then I decided the only way forward was to hide in my school books, and learn about the world from a distance but stay out of the world as much as I could while my body became a source of unspoken shame that lingers to this day.