Better Friends

There was no escaping the fact. It was now spring, and no longer open to interpretation. According to the weather forecasters it had been spring from the 1^st of March, what they called meteorological spring. But the fact that there were sub-zero temperatures made it easy to ignore that and say it was just some made-up date. It’s not spring at all yet, thought Karen, looking at the computerised snowflakes on the weather chart on Breakfast TV and thinking that even the forecaster seemed to think it a bit absurd. It’s three weeks until spring.

     Karen managed to combine a high degree of self-delusion with a high degree of self-awareness. I know I kick cans down the road, she said, both to herself and others. I know I could put off for England. It was almost as if saying it neutralised it. Almost. It could also, if said aloud, disarm people. Sometimes. Not that it always worked. Decades before when she had missed a deadline for an assignment at school, she had said to the relevant teacher – Miss Collins, she was called – “I know I tend to lose track of time,” and Miss Collins had informed her that she knew it too, and there were things she could do about it, and it had better not happen again. She had not been charmed nor disarmed in the slightest, and though she did give her a couple more days this once, Karen knew she wouldn’t get away with it again. 

     I don’t have to do it until spring, Karen reminded herself. And it’s definitely not spring yet. She scraped the snow from her windscreen with vigour, as if to prove the ludicrous nature of such a thought. 

     The thing was, Karen had decided to do something about her drinking. Oh, she had no intention whatsoever of dedicating herself to a life of sobriety. She also had little time for such constructs as “Dry January” and “Go sober for October”. They were even more artificial than that meteorological spring business, and people who virtue-signalled their intention of undertaking one or the other had the same effect on her as fingernails on glass. 

     Anyway, as for going sober, she had never in her life been drunk. A bit relaxed, at most. She had what she called her built-in safety mechanism, anyway. She had a good head (and stomach) for booze (a word she disliked) but also knew exactly when things were on the point of “tilting” and her stomach would be first to rebel. That could be irritating, but she supposed it was a good thing. 

     Karen was not deluding herself when she thought she wasn’t an alcoholic. She would never spend her last funds on drink instead of food, and the mere thought of drinking perfume or meths or any of the things that you read about made that stomach reflex kick in, and Karen was squeamish. 

     But it had dawned on her that though she would never, indeed, spend her last penny on wine rather than food, there were still weeks when she spent more on wine than she did on food. And they weren’t infrequent. 

     Though she felt nauseated at the thought of “substitutes”, she wasn’t a fussy drinker, nor a snobbish one. A £3.99 South African Merlot from Lidls would do fine. She generally only drunk wine, though she thought sherry was much maligned. She told people, at her most disarming, that she only liked a nip of brandy when she had a cold, which was broadly speaking true, but she was not averse to a little self-exaggeration of her symptoms. 

     As March ticked by (and the weather did a complete volte face, becoming warmer than the average, more like the weather for a crisp white than a hearty red) she had mixed feelings. Just what am I trying to prove, she thought, and why bother? I’m not into self-denial. I’ve never given anything up for Lent - the fact that it was Lent was pure coincidence. And even if I don’t go on about Dry January or Go Sober for October or whatever, I still don’t know if I want to be the one who says “Just a mineral water” or “Just a diet Coke, please,” in the pub.

     But she knew that wasn’t necessarily going to arise anyway. There wasn’t much of a “pub” culture at her workplace – not on principle or anything like that, but they were out on the industrial estate and there wasn’t one handy. And she never saw much point to paying what her mother had used to call pub prices. They had had a meal at the Miller’s Arms for Connie’s retirement party, two bottles of wine between eight of them! She had been on the point of saying that she would be more than happy to get another couple of bottles (even at pub prices) but stopped herself.

     Just why am I doing this, she wondered, as the second week in March was slipping by. I don’t want to turn into Cousin Christine. Now she liked Cousin Christine. But somehow it proved something that though, of course, she didn’t call her Cousin Christine to her face, like someone in a Victorian novel, she always tended to think of her as Cousin Christine and not just Christine. She was a much older cousin and in some ways had been more like an aunt, but somehow her mother, who was Karen’s aunt (and now lived in Australia, which proved something, she thought rather cruelly) seemed younger. She and Karen still emailed each other quite often. 

     Cousin Christine was a firm believer in the power and importance of a nice cup of tea. True, she had a jar of coffee in for Karen, but Karen suspected she even saw that as somewhat outré and suspect. She could imagine her face if she’d asked for “Something stronger”. Not that her cousin was teetotal. She’d had a bottle of port in since before Christmas and it was still three quarters full. She diluted it with lemon without asking, and though port wasn’t Karen’s drink of choice, she still thought that was an aberration. True, she occasionally made herself a spritzer in summer, but had never really developed a taste for it. She’d sooner have the fizzy mineral water to quench her thirst first and then the wine. The thing was, Karen liked non-alcoholic drinks! She liked fizzy water and lemon and ginger tea, and coffee of more or less any description.  She had once realised too late, when she was more or less halfway home, that she had forgotten to stock up on the rather delicious iced-coffee drink they had on offer at her local supermarket, and she regretted it, but did not turn round to get it. If she’d forgotten her bottle of wine (which was not likely to arise) she would have turned round. 

     True, she had her limits. Once, when Cousin Christine was almost embarrassingly apologetic about forgetting to replenish supplies of what she called your coffee she had consented with a degree of graciousness, to a nice cup of tea. 

     Except it wasn’t nice at all. Karen’s drink of choice, even her non-alcoholic drink of choice, would never be a cup of regular tea, but without milk (though oddly, she preferred coffee with milk, though made strong, and regular coffee made strong, as opposed to strong coffee) she had no issues with it, and could get it down with no great trauma. But this was the kind of tea that managed to taste weak and stewed at the same time, and though she knew the milk wasn’t really off – Cousin Christine would not have given house or fridge room to milk that had turned – it somehow seemed as if it was, and of course Cousin Christine didn’t think to ask if she wanted milk in her tea. Karen managed to get it down, and hoped that she didn’t grimace. But it was not a pleasant experience. 

     Lucky I’m not picky, she thought afterwards. She hadn’t been raised to be a picky eater, or drinker, come to that. 

     Though she always said she liked wine (though actually she didn’t  say it, or not as often or as vehemently as would have been a reflection of the truth) and said it to herself, too, it was only half-true. She often found it either too sour or too sweet, or too bland or too sharp. But she wasn’t a picky drinker.

     At times, thoughts of her health did niggle and jiggle. Not that she believed any of the direr and more dramatic warnings and she also knew perfectly well that a great many doctors felt compelled to toe the party line, but in private could drink most people under the table. Still, she did know that taken to excess, adverse effects on health were possible. And Karen had a phobia about doctors and hospitals – not particularly (and some people misunderstood this) of needles, though she didn’t exactly like them, and not even of operations, though she hoped she would never need one, but of being told things, of test results and the like. 

     But she also knew perfectly well that though some people were afflicted with illness “not unrelated” (as she phrased it) to her drinking, a great many didn’t. She didn’t have illusions about being totally immune to such matters, but she also knew that she had never had a hangover, nor even woken up with a headache or a mouth feeling (as some great writer – was it Kingsley Amis? – had said) as if a small rodent had taken up residence there. Her “safety valve” worked when it came to nausea, and she noted with satisfaction, looking at her eyes and her skin, that there was not the tiniest hint of yellowing, nor had there been any blood where, as that magazine article had tweely put it, where it shouldn’t be.

     Nor was her mind affected. Even after downing a bottle of wine, whilst she might feel that welcome sense of being more relaxed, of things being a bit less sharp round the edges, she could still polish off a crossword quicker than most people who had never touched a drop, and everyone at the call centre (which was one of the good ones, and a very pleasant and friendly workplace) agreed that she was efficient and reliable and had a lovely phone manner. 

     Her diary now told her it was spring. It was the 19^th, and they had lighted on THAT as their date of choice. 

     Karen noted it, and then ignored it, and gave her attention to a supermarket Chardonnay that for once managed not to be too sweet or too sour, but to slip down very nicely.

     The money business wasn’t quite so easy to ignore. She wasn’t poverty-stricken, far from it. She had a regular job and they paid the living wage at the call centre. Quite a few of her colleagues said they even managed to put aside a bit, though with interest rates so low, she couldn’t help wondering why they bothered. But that wasn’t the reason she didn’t save. At times her mother said she really thought she ought to put a bit aside, but that only reminded her that though she loved her mother dearly she was still glad that she didn’t live with her. She cited the low interest rate and the futility of it, which was handy, and her mother couldn’t argue, she said, worriedly, “Even so ….” Even so is one of those opening conversational gambits that tends to peter out.

     “Always the old sock under the bed, love,” her father said, winking. Without telling any lies he liked to give the joking impression he had one. He didn’t, of course. Though a tolerant lady with a sense of humour, her mother would have taken a dim view of socks under the bed (and as they had a divan, with any amount of money in the sock, it would have presented practical difficulties anyway). 

     Still, even if you only paid £4 for a bottle of wine, if you bought one every day, it came to nearly £30 a week, and even though it hardly meant she needed to go to the food bank, it was a tidy dent. That was an expression her colleague Louise had used when talking about an unexpected plumbing expense, it had made a tidy dent in the week’s wages. She had been philosophical about it. After all, you HAD to have a functioning toilet, it wasn’t a luxury, and from what you read about those insurance schemes, in 9 cases out of 10 you were better off paying for a one-off emergency than the premiums. And it was a one-off.

     It did dawn on Karen that if she required a similar domestic intervention, that would be, in her case, two tidy dents, and that would be sailing a bit close to the wind. Given a toss up between not having her loo fixed and not having her wine every day of course she’d get the loo fixed. Of course. Wouldn’t she?

     For a while (water in her area wasn’t metered) she took to flushing the toilet intermittently just for the sake of it to make sure it was functioning, but it didn’t last.

     Self-denial to prove how good you were had always struck Karen as a smug and pointless exercise. She could see no virtue in giving up wine for a while. Nothing that made her a better person or an improved version of herself. But at times she did feel something approaching a need to prove, if only to herself, that she could manage without it. But why? What she felt wasn’t exactly defiance. After all, there wasn’t much point to defiance with nobody to defy – yourself didn’t count, no matter what some said. 

     It was now the 21^st of March. The vernal equinox. And Karen knew that in anybody’s book, in the northern hemisphere, once you had reached and especially once you had passed the vernal equinox, it most definitely and irrefutably was spring, and there was no doubting it or wriggling out of it. The time of being open to interpretation was past. Strange word, equinox. Why stress equal night and not equal day. And if your finger slipped on the keyboard, you could type equiBOX – well, Karen was certainly beginning to feel as if she were boxed in.

     She gave one of those laughs that nobody else can hear and that register not the slightest amusement. Someone had once said patriotism was the last refuge of the scoundrel, maybe words could be the last refuge of someone who wanted to divert their mind from something else. 

     She had thought of all manner of tricks before setting out on the day of the spring equinox. She had more than enough food in the house and if she didn’t take her debit card out with her, and only had a couple of quid in her purse ….. but she knew that would achieve nothing and prevent even less. And she also realised that others, looking at her store cupboard, would conclude that she didn’t have enough food in the house. A couple of packets of instant noodles and a loaf of own make white bread and some spread cheese didn’t meet with most people’s idea of a balanced or even an adequate diet. Well, it proves something, she told herself, that though I might not have exactly a marvellous array of food in the house, I do have some, I wouldn’t starve, but I don’t have any drink.

     She also knew the reason she didn’t, and had at least kept to that for a couple of days, as if in preparation. Drink to spare was, allowing for her safety valve, nothing of the sort, but drink to drink. And anyway, the little convenience store just up the road from home sold wine (at inflated prices, true) and had recently started taking card payments. 

     Why bother, she thought, and the thought that had never gone away was growing in strength and intensity. Why deprive myself of a friend just to prove something that I have no wish whatsoever to prove, nor any need either. 

     She felt suddenly sick, with a different kind of sickness to the one that would come from ignoring the safety valve. Had she really just used the word friend about wine? Well, so what if she had? Was it any big deal, or just something they liked to go on about in magazine articles and heartfelt “testimonies”? I’ve been brainwashed too, she thought. But she still wished she hadn’t used that word, even to herself (for of course, she would never have used it to anyone else). 

     Get yourself together before you go into work, she thought. Don’t get yourself all in a wool about a word. 

     But she realised that her best efforts couldn’t have entirely succeeded, for as they had the “statutory pre-work gossip” as Connie had called it, Louise said, suddenly, “Karen, feel free to tell me to butt out, but you look – troubled. You know that if anything IS wrong I’d help out if I could.”

     “No – just a bit – out of sorts.”

     “Well, feel free to call me psychic, though no promises about lotto numbers, mind! I noticed they’d started doing iced coffee in that café that thinks it’s posh I go past on my way in, and remember you were narked when you forgot the iced coffee,” (that had, of course, been the acceptable part of the story!) “So thought you might like one. Not quite iced now, and sorry about the plastic cup, but it’s there if you want it!”

     Karen realised she had to blink and clear her throat.

     She still didn’t know what to do about the wine.

     But she certainly had better friends!