We laughed tearfully. And I made a solemn vow never to french-kiss a woman in full view of our neighbours. It was the least I could do for my mother.

67

As soon as I was liberated from hospital, Dad said that someone called Nola had rung me. Blonde, glamorous, beautiful Nola, who’d come into the Cloisters for the NA meetings. Thank you, God, I thought with shaky, heartfelt relief. I had to start going to my support groups but I didn’t want to go on my own.

I rang her back and, mortified, told her about my relapse. She didn’t give out to me. Just like the two times I’d seen her in the Cloisters, she was really nice, if a bit scatty. I soon found out that Nola was always really nice, if a bit scatty.

She said that maybe I’d needed to relapse to find out I didn’t want to anymore. It was a bit complicated but, as it didn’t involve me being pilloried, I was happy to go along with it.

‘Forgive yourself, but don’t forget,’ she urged.

She took me to an NA meeting in a church hall. I was wobbly and paranoid. It was my first trip to the outside world since that terrible day with Tiernan. And I was petrified that I’d run into Chris, still smarting, as I was, from the memory of the humiliating night I’d had with him. Luckily he was nowhere to be seen.

The meeting was quite different from the ones I’d gone to in the Cloisters. There were a lot more people, all of them friendly and welcoming. And instead of just one person describing their drug-taking past, several people spoke about what was happening in their current day-today lives. How they were managing to cope with jobs and boyfriends and mothers without taking drugs. And they were coping. I got great hope from it. And sometimes when people were talking, they could have been describing me. I knew exactly what they were getting at when they said things like ‘I compared my insides with everyone else’s outsides.’ I felt like I belonged and I was surprised that that made me happy.

Not to mention that mad Francie had been right about the ridey lads. There were loads there.

Marvellous, I thought. One of these fine young men will assist me to get over Chris.

‘Don’t even think about it,’ Nola said with a warm smile when she caught me looking sidelong at one of them.

After the meeting, she interrogated me in the next-door café. ‘What were you up to, giving all the boys the hairy eyeball?’

So, with longed-for relief, I spilled my guts about my awful experience with Chris. The dreadful inconclusive sex, the suspicion that he hadn’t even fancied me, the fear that he fancied Helen, the humiliation, the feelings of inadequacy. ‘And I think the best thing for me to do is get back in the saddle,’ I finished hopefully.

‘Ah no,’ Nola said with a mildness that briefly fooled me. ‘Sure, what would you want to do that for? Relationships in early recovery are a big mistake. You’ll only make yourself miserable.’

I couldn’t have disagreed more.

‘You’re too young and immature to make the correct choices!’ She made it sound like a compliment.

‘I’m twenty-seven,’ I objected sulkily.

‘Aren’t you lucky to be so lovely and young?’ she beamed, missing the point. Deliberately, I later found out.

‘All the same,’ she said jovially, ‘leave the boys for a while. You’re only just out of a treatment centre.’

That really frustrated me, but she was so nice I couldn’t complain.

‘D’you know something?’ she chattered. ‘This’ll give you a good laugh, now, but lots of people make the mistake of thinking that NA is like a dating agency.’

Francie, you lying wagon!

‘Isn’t that a scream? Sure, look at the disaster it was when you went out with an addict who’d only just stopped.’ Nola looked at me fondly. ‘It made you relapse! Ah, you wouldn’t want that to happen again, would you? You’ve too much respect for yourself.’

I hadn’t, but I liked her so much I couldn’t bring myself to disagree.

‘The whole Chris thing was awful,’ I was forced to admit.

‘It was, of course!’ Nola exclaimed, as if someone had been trying to suggest otherwise. ‘But forget him.’

It struck me that every conversation that ever took place between two women, whatever the context, had those exact words in it, at some stage.

‘I think it hurts more to be rejected by someone I kind of hero-worshipped,’ I struggled to explain. ‘He was always giving me advice in the Cloisters. He was so wise.’

‘But he wasn’t wise,’ Nola said, with innocent surprise. ‘He was full of shit.’

I was shocked. I’d thought she was too sweet to say such a thing.

‘But he was, though,’ she said, with a little giggle. ‘Full of it. I’m not saying it’s the poor craythur’s fault, but he didn’t behave wisely, despite giving you a rake of advice. Talk is cheap, but look at how people behave, not at what they say.’

‘But he was really nice to me in the laughing house,’ I felt obliged to protest.

‘I’d say he was indeed,’ Nola agreed sympathetically. ‘Especially when you were upset?’

‘Yes,’ I said, wondering how she knew.

‘Sure, a lot of addicts are very manipulative,’ Nola said with great compassion. ‘They can’t help picking on people when they’re at their most vulnerable. I’d say you weren’t the only woman the poor divil was nice to.’ She said everything in such a mild, vague voice that it took me a minute to understand just how scathing she was. And she was right to be, I realized as I was blasted with an unwelcome memory. Of the time Chris had wiped away Misty’s tears with his thumbs, the way he’d done to me a short time previously. The way he’d looked at me to make sure I saw. That had undeniably been some sort of gameplaying. Haltingly, I told Nola about it.

‘You see?’ she said, triumphantly. ‘So get over him. He doesn’t sound a bit well, the poor boy. Making you think he knows it all, when he’s no better than you. And so insecure, God love him, that he had to seduce you just to prove to himself you fancy him.’

Then I remembered the walk he’d taken me for in the garden at the Cloisters. The provocative things he’d said. That had been deliberate, I realized in shock. He’d said those things on purpose. The manipulative bastard.

In an instant I was raging. To think I’d blamed myself for the crappy sex with him! What a joke. He was far too focused on himself for me to have mattered in any way.