Loretta

It was seven years before I realised I was an alcoholic. You’d think you’d guess before that amount of time had passed – have a notion, at least. Phenomenal abdominal pains, memory loss, waking up and drinking red wine for breakfast – some sort of signifier. Your wife leaving you, your mates avoiding you, boss after boss firing you – but no. The first time I had any inkling was when the pain in my gut wouldn’t go away and Loretta fell to her knees in the street and vomited blood.

“Shit,” I said.

“Shit,” she spat, looking at the sticky red mess on the pavement.

“You done?”

“Yeah,” she said, and we went home.

That was the first time we thought maybe we were out of control, when Loretta’s vomit wasn’t really vomit, but blood. She’d had cramps, but then, we’ve all had cramps. She’d had blood in there before, but it wasn’t that there was blood in there this time: this time, all there was was blood.

When you’re sick and blood comes out it isn’t like normal sick – or like normal blood. It’s still warm, but it doesn’t have the tooth-rotting acid tang that normal sick has. It feels smooth. Then you look down and see the red splatter and you realise, finally, that you’re in trouble.

When I was twenty, maybe twenty-one, I tried the idea of having drink-free nights. At most I managed two a week. Then one. Then, on my one drink-free night one week I got to half past seven, realised I didn’t like sitting in any of the chairs in my flat, sank three quarters of a bottle of wine while dancing round my kitchen and hit the pub. I was home again at half midnight, drank the rest of the wine, before starting in on a bottle of martini I found tucked away in the back of some cupboard. I didn’t have anything to go with the martini so I mixed it with milk. It tasted horrendous but better than it did neat. I woke up the next morning on my living room floor, the carpet beneath my head wet again. That was my last night off drinking and that was seven years ago. I met her the next night.

Loretta is black. I’m white. That’s caused more problems than I care to talk about, but that’s not what this is about. It’s about drinking and pancreatitis and haemorrhages and the shakes. And Ray Charles.

Georgia on my Mind was playing when we met. We were just two strangers drinking separately at a bar, completely unconnected to each other. Then it came on, slow and thick and lustrous, with the strings sweeping you along like a warm thermal slowly lifting a kite before his voice kicks in and it’s all pain, and love and longing. She was taking a swig from a beer bottle, looking seductive as hell, the way some women can when they put an object anywhere near their mouth. In that moment I knew I’d never have her, so I made some ridiculous and totally uncharacteristic crack about her cotton picking and she slashed at my face with the bottle but missed. I apologised, she relented, and we were together for the next seven years.

One night she goes to me, “I fucking hate you, Jim, you drag me down.” Then she sucked me off so good my face looked like I was drinking vinegar. I know: I saw my reflection in the window of the florists on the high street. That’s what it was like.

A couple of years after we met, Loretta showed me some pictures of her when she was a kid. She was smiling in them – her big, buck teeth hadn’t been fixed in those days and her hair hadn’t felt the touch of GHDs by then either. She was seven, maybe nine. She was smiling. A couple of weeks later her dad was burned to death in their house while she, her mum and her three sisters hid in the hills. Her dad was a jail warden. Some rebels escaped. She’s from Sierra Leone. That’s how it goes.

I have no idea how old she is. Mainly because she doesn’t either. She looks younger than me, in many ways. In other ways, she looks older. It’s hard to explain. I’m 28.

Drinking’s so easy to fall into. Talking to people, watching the telly, listening to music – what could be easier? Especially as everyone is so much easier to listen to when you’re drunk and the telly and music become so much more absorbing than they were before.

Drinking’s not like drugs either – it’s easier to get into and easier to keep up. I’ve never really tried drugs, but from what I’ve seen it’s true – I’ve seen druggies and I’ve seen piss heads and there’s a massive difference. Threat, for one thing. People in bars don’t look like they’re going to mug or kill you for their next drink – they welcome you in, buy you your first pint and the next thing you know you don’t leave. The door closes on the outside world and you don’t even need it any more – the TV becomes the only outside world you’ll ever need.

People talk about love affairs with drink or drugs, but I don’t buy it. You don’t fall in love with the drink: it’s the place, the atmosphere, the people – I would have gone anywhere with her, it just happened that we went to bars. It’s not like it was shot, shot, shot. It was conversation, music, football, pool, beer gardens and sun – every now and then we went all out but those times were generally weekends. I had a job then, after all. And she had her kids.

Ray Charles had kids too. I wonder if he ever questioned whether they looked like him or not. I sometimes used to look at Loretta’s kids and see if I could see their father in them, but not too closely – everyone has a past, after all. The weird thing was, the bad parts of her life: her dad being murdered, being separated from her mum, racism, hurt and civil war, I could empathise with. The good, solid, normal parts: her kids, her husband, I couldn’t. Maybe it’s because she put her body through all that – the having kids thing, I mean, maybe it’s because that’s what love is all about, and she did it for someone else, maybe that’s why I had the problem. She went through a lot for men, for her dad, for her sons, I don’t even like thinking about her husband. I suppose I wish I’d met her earlier, that she’d done those things for me. It’s hard to explain – I loved her, and even though I’d been in love before I’d never made the sacrifices for love that she had in the past. I felt like I’d missed out.

Her accent got stronger when she drank. Thicker. I could never tell half the time whether she was talking in English or her own language. Words, English words, would pop in from time to time and I couldn’t tell if her slurring or her accent was messing up the others or whether she was talking in a different language altogether.

We were in a bar and she said to me “I’d give up my whole life for what I have with you now.” That’s what I understood her to have said anyway, straight away, my initial reaction, with my senses dulled and everything. But I couldn’t tell what she meant. Whether she meant she’d sacrifice every previous minute of her life, burn it all, so long as she could be with me, right there, right then. Or, if she simply meant that what she had with me was better than the kind of life she’d experienced before. We’d drunk so much by that time that, not only had her accent gone somewhere incomprehensible, my eyes were so heavy I fell asleep at the bar almost as soon as she’d said it.

There was this one time when she bit me on the arse. She bit me so hard she punctured my skin and I bled. I remember trying to jump away, like a baby from a pit bull, and not being able to break free. Her jaw stayed locked shut until she decided to let go. I shouted at her at the time, smacked her around the face to get her to release me. We never really talked about it afterwards, but I’ve since thought it was the only way she could think of to make me understand the pain inside her. The blood stains on my boxers never came out no matter how many times I washed them, but that was the only outward evidence that anything had happened.

I don’t know why I didn’t wake up. I usually woke up when we were at home for almost anything - if birds were singing, when the sun came through the blinds, if the rubbish men turned up. I didn’t wake up when she started choking and slumped off her high bar stool. I had bruises on my arms, scratches, from where she’d grabbed at me. It was the barman who shook me awake. Her head cracked wide open when it hit the tiled floor. Violence followed here everywhere.

What’s worse – never seeing, or having your sight taken from you? I wonder what Ray thought about that – whether he felt blessed for having once been able to see, or cursed because he started losing his sight from the age of seven. Places I’ve never seen I don’t miss, places I have, I do, sometimes.

What surprised me the most was when I found out Ray Charles was a drug addict, and a total womaniser. I suppose I should have guessed, the man could sing after all, he was good looking, famous and rich – what woman wouldn’t want him? But it did make me wonder what was going on inside his head when he was high – what did he see? People become more attractive when I’m drunk, more interesting, including me – what point of reference did he have?

When my vomit wasn’t really vomit anymore, but blood, Loretta took me to see a doctor. She made me go – I wasn’t so keen on the idea myself. The pain in my gut had been with me for a few days but I thought I’d just been hungry. When I was hungry I drank to take the pain away. It turned out the pain was pancreatitis and the blood was due to a gastrointestinal haemorrhage. I was in hospital for ten days. I begged Loretta to bring me a hip flask, anything, but she wouldn’t. I cried. She cried. But she never gave in.

The day I was set to leave, another doctor, a different doctor this time, told me I should never drink again, that it would happen again, the pain, and next time, my odds of survival would be much, much lower. But by now I’d lost my job, my friends, was on the verge of losing my house – my wife had walked out years ago. I woke up with the shakes and they only went away when I drank. Two hours after checking out of the hospital we were in a bar. My shakes had finally gone. I’d been shaking, really shaking, shaking so much I couldn’t hold a glass of water to my mouth without tipping it all over myself, for days. Loretta said we should stop, that what the doctor had said had scared her too much – that I was now potentially only a few more drinks away from death. I couldn’t stop though – I needed to drink to stop shaking, needed her to keep living, needed Ray to remember what had been.

Loretta’s words came to me one night when Georgia on my Mind was playing in a bar. The words came back suddenly, potentially blurred, potentially clarified, as “I’d give up my whole life for you.” They hit me when I thought again about what I’d been told at the hospital - after she had collapsed, after I woke up, realised what was happening and screamed at her semi-conscious body, after the ambulance ride – when I’d been told she’d swallowed two whole bottles of sleeping pills in the bar when I wasn’t looking, whenever that may have been.

I know, not just because she told me about things that had happened to her, but because it was there, in her eyes, in her voice, her face, the way she held herself even, that Loretta went through a lot of shit for men – for her dad, her sons, her husband, even me. And now she’s gone. Some things remain though. I’m with a new girl now. Her name is Sandra. The fact is, life goes on, with all its pain, and love and longing.