‘Why are you so nice to me?’ I asked, a bit alarmed.

‘Sure, why wouldn’t I be?’ she exclaimed. ‘Aren’t you a dote?’

‘Why?’ I persisted.

‘Ah,’ she sighed wistfully. ‘When I saw you in the Cloisters, with your cross little face, you reminded me of me. It took me back seven years to that desperate misery. The confusion and the shocking heebie jeebies! The minute I clapped eyes on you, I thought “There but for the grace of God, go I.” ’

I bristled angrily. The cheeky bitch!

‘You’re just like I was,’ she exclaimed fondly. ‘We’re no different.’

That mollified me. I wanted to be like her.

‘I wouldn’t be off the quare stuff today if people hadn’t been nice to me back then,’ she said. ‘Now it’s my turn. And when you’re a bit better, you’ll help the new people.’

I was both touched and irritated.

‘Haven’t you a job to go to?’ I asked the following day when she arrived to take me to yet another meeting.

‘I’m my own boss,’ she said reassuringly. ‘Don’t worry about me.’

‘What do you do?’ I asked, curiously.

It turned out she ran a modelling agency, one of Ireland’s most successful. And she used to be a model herself. That cheered me up. I loved it that she could be an addict, yet have a glamorous, successful career. It ameliorated the slight residual feeling that I belonged to an underclass of losers.

‘There’s a pile of us recovering addicts, with fierce successful careers,’ she said. ‘When you’re a bit better you’ll probably have one too.’

I found that hard to believe.

68

Everytime Nola caught me talking to a man, she sabotaged it by saying to him ‘Don’t go near this one, she’s stone-mad, got herself knocked down and nearly killed, she’s only a couple of weeks off the snow,’ then whisked me away. Instead she introduced me to lots of women addicts, of whom I was initially a bit wary.

But, as the weeks passed, I found that, in the same way that I’d ended up being really fond of everyone in the Cloisters, I’d started to consider some of the NA people to be friends. I met Jeanie, the skinny, good-looking girl who’d run the NA meeting at the Cloisters the night I’d faced my addiction for the first time. And I got pally with a chain-smoking butcher (that was what she did for a living, not what she did for a hobby) who went by the unfortunate name of Gobnet.

‘No wonder I’m an addict,’ she said, when she introduced herself to me. ‘With a name like that.’ Then she dissolved into a fit of coughing.

‘Holy jayzis,’ she said, her eyes watering. ‘Give me my fags.’

After a while I found I’d fallen into a routine of going to a meeting almost every day.

‘Isn’t this a bit excessive?’ I anxiously asked Nola.

‘Arra, no,’ she said, as I should have bloody well known she would. ‘You took drugs every day, why not a meeting every day? And, sure it’s not forever, only till you get better.’

‘But,’ I shifted uncomfortably, ‘shouldn’t I get a job? I feel so guilty not working.’

‘Not at all,’ she scoffed, as if the mere suggestion was hilarious. ‘What do you want to work for? Lie out in the garden, get a tan, sure this is the life, girl.’

‘But…’

‘And what would you do? You don’t know what you want to do with your life,’ she said, as if that was something to be proud of. ‘You will eventually. Anyway, aren’t you getting the dole?’

I nodded cagily.

‘Well, then!’ she sang. ‘You’ve enough money to survive on. So think of this as a convalescence, like getting over a bad dose of the flu, a flu of your emotions. And in the meantime, get a colour on your legs!’

‘How long,’ I asked anxiously, ‘will I have to live like this?’

‘For as long as it takes,’ she said airily.

‘OK, OK!’ she said quickly to my woebegone face. ‘They said a year in the Cloisters, didn’t they? Concentrate on getting better for a year and then you’ll see how well you’ve become. Try and be patient.’

She was very convincing but, just to be on the safe side, I mentioned to Mum and Dad that I was thinking of getting a job. And the torrent of objections I got from them convinced me that it was OK, at least for a while, to be a long-haired layabout.

To my surprise, I didn’t think about drugs as often as I’d thought I would. And I was amazed to find I had as much fun with Nola, Jeanie and Gobnet as I’d ever had with Brigit. We went to meetings, to each other’s houses, to the cinema, shopping, sunbathed in each other’s gardens. Everything normal friends did together, except drink and take drugs.

I was very relaxed with them because they knew how bad I’d been, at my very, very worst, and they didn’t judge me. For every story of shame and humiliation I had, they could top it.

As well as the meetings, I had psychotherapy sessions with an addiction counsellor on Tuesdays and Fridays.

Slowly my internal landscape altered. I extricated myself from the mesh of preconceptions I had about myself, as though from barbed wire. It was a great day when I understood I didn’t have to think I was thick just because I had a very bright sister.

My view of my past also changed as my counsellor demystified childhood situations, in the same way that Josephine had pointed out that I wasn’t to blame for my mother’s misery after Anna was born. Repeatedly, it was pointed out to me that I hadn’t been a bad child, that I wasn’t a bad person.

It was like watching a photo developing, very slowly, over the course of a year, as I gradually came into focus.

And as I changed, other things fell into place. I reckoned I was always going to have a great fondness for savoury snacks and chocolate, but the wild swinging between starving myself and stuffing myself had calmed down a lot, without me even having to try.

That’s not to say that I didn’t still have bad days. I did.

Things didn’t improve in a smooth straight line. For every two steps I took forward, I took one step back. There were times when I just wanted to switch off, just check out of reality for a while, when relentless consciousness got me down. Nothing bad had to have happened, I just got tired of being sentient.