Deep Lies, Dark Truths

I’d walked this path over and over in my dreams but this time it was for real. The fragrance from the flower borders was intoxicating. Lavender, roses, jasmine, gardenias and many others I couldn't name. The path stretched out into the distance as if to touch the future. My mind wandered back to the past.

Six years earlier, a bar, another boyfriend lost, glass in hand, tears already dried on my cheeks. No friends, alone again. Alcohol was of no interest to me, never had been, but I'd been dumped so many times now I’d thought it might help. Gritting my teeth against the taste, sipping or gulping made no difference. I put the glass down. I couldn't drink any more of it. 

The Moods Bar. A converted barge on the river but not as peaceful and tranquil a setting as it sounded. It was right in the centre of the city where I worked. Not me at all. I never went in bars, wherever they happened to be.

I idly wondered where the barge had been in its working life. Further than me. I’d never left the country. Water moved beneath me, slowly, gently, lapping against the sides, the summer’s evening light glinting on it like crushed diamonds. The water's calming effect and the tiny amount of alcohol I had consumed was making me sleepy. I stared at the half full glass of Chardonnay in front of me as if it contained strychnine. The bar was quiet. There had been far too many raised voices in my life lately but it was time to go.

My exit was blocked by seven women coming in. Being stuck in the midst of them was hellish. The bar’s atmosphere changed in that split second. Shouting, screeching at each other so loudly I wanted to cover my ears. Let me out!!! my inner voice screamed, but too polite to say anything I just smiled as I forced my way to the door. Faces thick with makeup made their ages hard to guess. Their hair was coiffed to death, their uniform was short, short skirts and low cut tops with ridiculously high heeled platform shoes they were already wobbling on. Clearly the barge had not been their first bar that night.  

Next day in the lift at work Ella, a co-worker I only vaguely knew, was eyeballing me. The penny dropped. The screeching throng the previous night. Unrecognisable then, with the thick, makeup mask. Smiley and jolly, she invited me to join the other girls. How could she be so bright and cheerful with a monstrous hangover? I politely declined and got out on the wrong floor to get away from her.

Fast forward five months and I was a serious party girl. Ella had worn me down. Beer, tequila, vodka, gin. I despised it all but held my nose and drank it. It was like a dose of cod liver oil at first but I soon stopped noticing the taste. Ella became my best friend and it was as if I had finally found my tribe. Polly's Posse. Next! Another bar, then another and another, screeching, tottering as we walked. Morphing into the crowds of other girls, looking, sounding the same. Just as drunk.

Mascara and lipstick smeared, hair a rat’s nest, skirts riding up even shorter, we staggered on our ridiculously high heels to the taxi rank after the last bar closed at three a.m. Once home I would collapse across the quilt with even my shoes still on.

On waking, every morning was the same. A banging headache after only a few hours sleep, the flashbacks, loud music, dancing, singing. Drinking, lots of drinking. Shorts or cocktails followed by lots of Tequila shots. Being felt up by strange men, kissing them or going further in dark places. I suppressed the memories as best I could and tried to make myself look presentable, then I mixed up and swallowed a glass of Ella's hangover cure as I headed for the door. I couldn't hold down any food before work.

Three years of partying life passed, mostly a blur as we got drunker each night. I was an alcoholic now. We all were. At work I retreated to my office whenever I could. Concentration was nearly impossible and my eyelids drooped. My department head had found me asleep at my desk three times. I was running out of chances to keep my job.

Then I met someone who made me want to give up the booze and the one night stands. Adam owned a tech company and was visiting where I worked trying to get some business. I met him during my lunch break. The queue as always went right round the huge cafeteria but once we got chatting neither of us noticed whether it was moving or not. Adam was so warm and funny and………what was the point of dreaming? He’d never be interested in me. I was stunned when he asked if he could see me again. Tentatively I accepted, managing somehow to go on a few dates whilst remaining sober.

I fell for Adam hard and it was the push I’d needed to try and stop drinking. I toned it down as much as I could, making sure our dates were spaced out so I could still drink when I wasn't with him. I parted company with the girls. Good friends but so bad for me. 

I wanted a normal life so much, a relationship with Adam, not nightly hook-ups with complete strangers. He knew nothing about me except what I told him, so I recreated myself. I showed Adam the good parts of me, but I was still an alcoholic. I just drank at home alone now instead of in bars. It never occurred to me that our relationship was built on lies. My lies.

I had to get clean for real so I booked myself into rehab. So far as Adam knew I was going on a five week training course in Devon. The Devon part was true. There had been a rehab centre there since before I was born in the county. I was fairly sure my phone would be taken away so I lied and said that mobile reception in that part of Devon was appalling to explain why he wouldn’t hear from me. The truth? I’d taken forced unpaid leave. My department head was crystal clear. Come back clean or don’t come back at all. 

Detox was even worse than I’d expected but I deserved it. By the end of the third week I was starting to feel better. By week five I felt healthier than I had in years. On discharge I was assigned a counsellor and AA group back home. I had to attend both of them weekly if I wanted to stay sober. I could finally look forward to being normal again.

I kept my job and three months later Adam asked me to move in with him. I was on cloud nine. I accepted in a heartbeat. Then, when he asked me to marry him, almost a year to the day since we’d met, I was so relieved that I’d done the rehab and carried on religiously with my counselling and the AA. 

However there was one part of the after rehab plan that I couldn't do and that was to tell my friends and family the truth and spend quality time with them. I had nobody to tell. 

The relationship with my parents, which had been tenuous for some time, broke down altogether when I was in my last year of school so I chose a University as far away from Devon as possible. I never spoke to them again. My friends had melted away when I moved north. Suffering from deep depression after leaving home I struggled to keep boyfriends and to make new friends, hence the attraction to Polly's Posse.

Adam arranged for our wedding to be in the Seychelles to compensate for my lack of foreign travel. We wrote our own wedding vows and were married barefoot on the beach. The guests were Adam's. I had nobody to invite so yet more lies but I made a promise to myself that they would be my last. I loved him so much I would stay sober and be honest from that moment on, though I thought it wise not to include my past in my honesty. I dismissed it as unimportant. I was a new woman now. 

We were a good match and I was so glad that the end had justified the means. Then Adam started taking me with him to flashy dinners to schmooze his clients. Everything went well for months and I drank only mineral water. Then I received some really bad news. Ella had died. Liver failure at twenty eight, the same age as me. Instead of making me grateful that I had escaped the same fate it nearly pushed me over the edge. The pull of the alcohol as a means to forget felt too strong to ignore. All those bottles behind the bar in the restaurants started screaming, “Drink me, drink me!”. It was pure agony. Like sending a child into a sweet shop without any money.

I knew I had two choices, either tell Adam the truth or stop going to meet his clients. The first choice was the most sensible one but my mouth wouldn’t form the words. To just tell him out of the blue that I was a recovering alcoholic horrified me and it might horrify him and then he would leave me. So instead I said I had a new project to do for work and so I would have to stay home in future. The promise to stop lying hadn't lasted long.

I was on the slippery slope to relapse after Ella’s death. I'd stupidly stopped the counselling and the AA meetings after the wedding, even though my sponsor told me how reckless I was being. The more I tried not to think about drinking, the more I thought about drinking, until finally I could resist the pull no longer. 

Adam was out and wouldn’t be back for at least two hours. I realised what a precarious situation I was in. I paced the lounge up and down, up and down, whilst biting my fingernails away to nothing. I tried breathing exercises but to no avail. I rang my AA sponsor. No answer. I desperately needed a distraction. I was trying so hard not to give in to my need for alcohol. 

I wished Adam would come home although I didn't really want him to see me like this. I was going out of my mind then I forged a plan. It would be a one-off, just to get me through this bad night. I could drive to the Off Licence, buy a bottle of vodka, find somewhere to park up for the night and drink myself senseless. I’d gone without for so long that I was past the point of rational thinking. All I wanted was oblivion. 

I left a note to say that I’d gone to visit Ella’s sister who was struggling with her grief. I also wrote that I would be staying overnight and going straight to work in the morning. Ella didn’t even have a sister but Adam didn’t know that. All he knew was that I had told him Ella was a friend who had died suddenly and I couldn’t face going to the funeral. The note didn’t give an address so he couldn’t come looking for me.

I had to really concentrate on the road as the ten minutes it took to drive to the Off Licence were purgatory. It felt surreal to see my hand reaching out to the bottle of vodka on the shelf. It was as if the hand wasn’t mine. I quickly found somewhere close by that I could park up for the night and not attract any attention then I reached for the bottle on the passenger seat. Like some precious artifact that I had just discovered, I held it up to my face, savouring the coolness of the glass against my skin. Then, holding the bottle in both hands in front of me, my right hand reached for the bottle cap but no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t find it within myself to turn it. A myriad of thoughts tormented me but the more I fought with them the less I wanted to actually open the bottle. It was Adam. I couldn’t let go of all the progress that I’d made, drag him even deeper into my web of lies and lose him in the process. For the first time in my life I knew what love meant. I promised myself that I would tell him about my alcoholism, beg for forgiveness for having kept so much from him for so long and hope that he would choose to stay with me.

I tossed the bottle of vodka out of the window into a waste bin and started on the road back home. Whilst I’d been parked up it had started to rain heavily and I had to turn the windscreen wipers on fully to get any visibility at all. It made more sense to pull over for a while until the rain lessened but I knew Adam would be home by now and I wanted to have our most difficult conversation as soon as possible before I lost my nerve. On a sharp bend I didn’t notice that I’d drifted onto the wrong side of the road until I side swiped an oncoming car, felt unbearable pain and passed out.

I was lucky to be alive as the injuries down my right side were substantial. I spent many months in the hospital. I was in an induced coma at first to allow the swelling on my brain to disappear. Even when woken up I was disorientated for months with substantial lapses in my memory. Other serious injuries were a broken right hip and shattered bones in my right shin which meant I had to wear a cage for five months. The police didn't charge me as I was stone cold sober, so they put it down to the rain, poor visibility and a slippery road causing a freak accident.

Eight months passed and I was back in the present, still sober, on the beautifully scented path. This was a quiet, some might say lonely place. The path made a turn into a copse of trees. In the distance I saw it and almost turned back, but I knew that I must force myself onwards. The piece of marble was small, and only big enough for the words carved on it: Vos Debet Esse Vivum Non Me. Not only did I want it as hidden as possible but I hoped that even if anyone did find it, they would not speak Latin. I was a Latin teacher so I knew only too well what the words meant. 

The impact, which had caused his car to flip over and over, killed Adam instantly. My phone had smashed apart during the crash and the police found a tracker inside it made by Adam's company. He'd seen my car was stationary near the Off Licence and must have set off to try and stop me drinking. He'd known I was both a liar and an alcoholic, yet he'd stayed! 

"Vos Debet Esse Vivum Non Me. You should be alive, not me.” I struggled to get the words out as, with the aid of my walking stick, I slowly lay down on top of Adam's ashes and cried for my lost love. He'd loved me despite who I was. Now, in his memory, I had to learn to love myself.