‘All of them.’ She laughed. ‘I’m addicted to everything. Booze, pills, food, sex…’

The dining-room almost combusted from the light that sprang into the eyes of every man present at Francie’s last word.

In all the excitement of Francie, the other new inmate barely got noticed. It was only after Francie and Misty swanned off to rebond that he came into focus. He was an elderly man called Padraig who shook so badly he couldn’t even get the sugar into his tea. While I watched, horror-struck, it all juddered off the spoon before it got to his cup. ‘Confetti,’ Padraig said, with an attempt at humour.

I smiled, unable to hide my pity.

‘What are you in for?’ he asked me.

‘Drugs.’

‘You know,’ he pulled himself close to me, and I tried not to recoil from the smell, ‘I shouldn’t be here at all. I only came in to get the wife off my back.’

I looked at him: shaking, smelly, unshaven, dissipated. In shock, I wondered, are we all mistaken when we say there’s nothing wrong with us? All of us?

57

It took two full weeks for my world to cave in after Luke’s and Brigit’s visit.

In that time there were a couple of warning shudders, seismic messengers sent ahead to warn of the approaching upheaval.

But at no stage did I identify a pattern. I wouldn’t see the massive earthquake that was coming.

But it came anyway.

What Francie had told me about all the young men at NA made me approach Thursday night’s meeting with far more interest than I ever had before. Just in case things didn’t work out for me and Chris, it would be nice to know where to find a storeroom of fellas, and what the correct protocol was there.

Off we all trooped: me, Chris, Neil, a couple of others and, of course, Francie. That night she was wearing a straw hat and a long button-through flowery frock, the buttons almost open to her stomach in both directions, revealing, respectively, a pimpled bosom and cellulitey thighs. Even though she’d only been at the Cloisters just over a day, I’d already seen her in about twenty different outfits. At breakfast she’d worn a leather waistcoat and really tight jeans tucked into terrible stiletto boots. For morning group, an orange, eighties power suit, the shoulder pads like American footballers’. For afternoon group, a PVC miniskirt and a pink sheepskin halter-neck top. Many different garments, but all shared the common characteristics of looking cheap, badly-fitting and alarmingly unflattering.

‘I’ve millions of clothes,’ she boasted to me.

‘But what’s the point if they’re all hideous?’ I yearned to ask.

As we proceeded up the stairs to the Library, spirits were high among us, far higher than they deserved to be considering where we were going.

Despite Francie’s wild talk, the person sent from NA wasn’t a man. It was Nola, the beautiful blonde woman with the Cork accent – the one I’d thought was an actress – who’d been at my first meeting.

‘Hi Rachel.’ She gave a dazzling smile. ‘How’ve you been?’

‘OK,’ I mumbled, flattered that she remembered me.

‘How are you?’ I wanted to keep talking because I was strangely drawn to her.

‘Great, thanks,’ she said, with another smile that warmed the pit of my stomach.

‘Don’t mind her,’ Francie murmured. ‘The meetings in the real world are packed with lads.’

‘Sorry,’ Nola apologized, when we’d all taken our seats. ‘I know some of you have heard my story before, but the woman who was supposed to be coming tonight relapsed on Tuesday and died.’

I went rigid with shock and frantically looked around for comfort. Neil looked at me with concern. Are you OK?’ he mouthed and I was surprised to find he didn’t seem angry any more. Not only that, but I no longer hated him. I nodded gratefully at him, my heart no longer trying to jump out of my chest.

Then Nola began to tell us about her addiction. When I’d first heard her three weeks previously, I’d been certain she was reading a script. I simply hadn’t believed her. She was too beautiful and groomed to convince me she’d ever done anything cool. But this time was different. Her words rang with quiet conviction and I was riveted by her life. How she’d never thought she was any good at anything, how she loved heroin and the way it made her feel, how it was her best friend, how she’d have preferred to be with it than with any human being.

I was with her, I was there with her all the way.

‘… until eventually my entire life centred around heroin,’ she explained. ‘Trying to get the money to buy it, actually purchasing it, obsessing about when I could next get stoned, hiding it from my boyfriend, lying about it when I was out of my skull. It was a terribly draining way to be, yet it filled my life so much that it seemed totally normal to live in this obsessive state…’

The serious look on her beautiful face, the hypnotic earnestness of her words, conveyed the horror of the treadmill she’d been on, the hell of being in thrall to a force outside oneself. Out of nowhere I was assailed by the first mini-shock, as the thought jumped into my head, I was like that.

My head tightened with denial and I sat well back into my chair. But the words picked me up and shook me again. I was like that.

Fighting to regain steadiness, I firmly told myself I’d been nothing of the sort.

But an even louder voice pointed out that I had been. And my defence mechanisms, weakened by more than a month of continual bombardment, lulled into a false sense of security by Nola’s story, began to crumble.

To my alarm, I found myself on a head-on collision course with some very unpleasant realizations. In an instant it had become impossible to avoid the crystal-clear knowledge that I’d thought about cocaine and Valium and speed and sleeping tablets constantly; about getting the money for them, about tracking down Wayne or Digby to buy whatever I could afford, then finding the time to take them, finding the secrecy to take them. Constantly having to hide my purchases from Brigit, hide them from Luke, trying to pretend I wasn’t off my face at work, trying to do my job when my head was adrift.

Horrified, I remembered what Luke had said on the questionnaire – what exactly was it? – ‘If it’s a drug, Rachel has taken it. She’s probably taken drugs that haven’t even been invented yet.’ I filled with rage, as I did whenever I thought of him and what he’d done to me. I didn’t want a single word of what he’d said to be true.