Lefty Loosy. Righty Tighty

It was a tap that tipped him over the edge.
Having to turn it right and not left like all the other taps in his flat had been a reliable source of annoyance for Jim, but the thought of replacing it never even crossed his mind. As far as he could see, it was a fault that he’d have to live with, a worldly error.
In that his own world, computer repairs, was littered with programmed error and rebooted compromise, to which resolution seemed hopelessly temporary, there was nothing that could be done to fully eliminate the elementary defect of this tap.
On bad days, he’d turn the tap the wrong way and curse plumbers and builders, or attribute blame to wily DIY shops with the bargain buckets and clearance sales marked down in price for easy targets.
On better days, he saw the tap as a tool of temperance, rejigging the well-known children’s phrase ‘Lefty Loosy, Righty Tighty’ with ‘Lefty Tighty, Righty Loosy’ in a half-hearted attempt to reprogram his mind, but it hardly ever made a difference.
Jim, as stubborn as the next bachelor, was indifferent to change.
The tap was good for his tolerance, for the most part, but his days of battling difficulty had petered out to a groan.
In the end, and there was always going to be one of those, it could have been anything; lack of loo-paper, an unexpected surge of cold bathwater, a questionable bank charge, even a missed call.
The fact was, he’d given in.
Four years of constant sobriety had completely changed this man almost beyond recognition. Old fair-weather friends from the various watering holes he used to frequent would have to look twice in the street to register him as the same person who shadowed his body in the ‘good old days’. Some might stop and tell him how well he looked, while others would scurry past with their heads firmly fixed to the pavement.
He couldn’t have done it without AA, Jim would tell those who stopped to chat, but chance meetings like these had dried up recently, or maybe it was that Jim just didn’t notice anyone anymore.
A month or so ago, he stopped going to meetings and quickly found himself in Drydrunkdom. It was a sad, lonely place where self-absorbed resentment could nestle in to the plump cushion of self-pity that ruled his every thought.
As time ground him down, he unwittingly started to walk away from himself and towards the pub. Drink was still king.
The meetings had worked fine for the first three years, but then a few of the people started to annoy him. As sure as he was that they were lying through their teeth (how he hated the expression ‘faking it to make it’), he was equally sure that they’d relapse. It was just a matter of time, but as time wore on and they remained sober, he couldn’t work out for the life of him why and how they seemed to be getting better in mind and body while he squelched around behind them.
But it wasn’t just that. While he remained a loner, they had friends and went out to clubs and parties. They were younger and happier in spirit.
Once he’d got himself started on them, there was no holding back.
The old timers never bothered with newcomers, the newcomers hardly ever stayed, those who spoke of gratitude never put their hands up to wash the mugs or pick up the butts, the women talked about trivial things like cats and the blokes all had different rock bottoms. Not many were as bad as his, so he imagined that they weren’t really alcoholic, or they were far worse, and therefore had ‘extra problems’.
In the end, they were just arseholes sat on seats taking up his time and judging him for being angry all the time.
Whenever the group’s secretary held up the yellow card to remind everyone that gossip kills, he’d cough loudly in an attempt to distance himself from those he saw as hypocrites plaguing the rooms with their flippant double-standards, but the mean fact was that he was well and truly alone, apart in all ways, judging the entire group for the smallest infringement of the AA traditions.
When one of the more decent ones asked him why he’d stopped sharing, he took it the wrong way and stormed off, vowing never to return.
I’ll do it on my own, he thought, mincing his teeth.
Having been immune to conscious thoughts of drinking for a while without cottoning on, he surprised himself when, after only a few days, he started to become fascinated in the revellers sipping ice-cold pints in the pubs’ beer gardens on the way back from work. He couldn’t get their laughter out of his mind, so he decided to take the long way round to avoid them.
But every time he walked the long way round, he could think of nothing else but the revellers. He blamed them for taking him the long way round. They, like the people of AA, were now responsible for his anger, he decided.
When he got home, the telly played with him. Every beer advert was a cruel stab in the gut, every innocuous drinking scene at the Vic or the Rovers a game designed to make him drink.
At the kitchen sink, the bubbles of washing-up liquid looked like lager froth and when he pulled the plug out, it sounded like a wine bottle being uncorked. The taps looked like beer taps in a pub. The night sky reminded him of being smashed in a park.
In bed, unable to sleep, he’d listen out for groups of people walking home drunk. Police sirens started to sound glamorous and exciting.
At work, those with the slightest sign of a hangover were treated with disgust. If he smelt booze on anyone’s breath after lunch-time, his nostrils inflamed to take in the awful aroma of spent alcohol.
One night, after walking back from work and seeing a bottle of lager next to a large pile of puke on the pavement, he realised that his resolve not to drink had been drained.
‘Why can’t I drink?’ was processed as ‘when shall I have a drink?’
He’d certainly forgotten where he’d come from. Four years of abstinence does that if you’re not careful.
Leaking blood from every orifice after not being able to eat for three weeks, he’d crawled to A+E, from where a two-week detox, three months of rehab and constant returns to hospital for bloods had restored him to life.
His liver had been so grossly inflamed that his doctor thought he’d never make it through detox.
The varices in his stomach and throat had healed, so there was no need to reconstruct anything, but his pancreas had suffered beyond its call of duty and could never abide another drink.
‘I should tell you that if you drink again, you’ll die,’ the doctor had told him.
That one sentence had worked for four years.

That morning, when he entered the bathroom and turned the tap the wrong way, he decided that the time had come to have a drink.
Calling in sick to work, Jim was amazed by how well he felt now that he’d made up his mind. The thought of drinking like a gentleman seemed plausible, if not excusable.
As he approached his long-suffering local pub, which he assumed had missed him for his banter and stupidity, he was joined by an overwhelming feeling of happiness.
Once inside, he looked around the place, thinking that it would be different in some way, but it wasn’t. Nothing had changed, apart from maybe a lick of paint, not that he’d have remembered what colour it was before. All in all, it was as if he’d never stopped drinking for even a day.
‘Long time, Jim. Where you been hiding?’
The landlord was glad to see him looking so well, but then quickly remembered what he was like the last time he’d been there. The mayhem, the fight, the ambulance and then, as he wondered where he’d been, the lost revenue.
‘Nowhere much. Been sober for four years.’
‘So what you doing here, then?’
‘Come for a drink, haven’t I.’
The landlord leant forward slightly and breathed in quietly. ‘You sure you want one?’
Jim nodded with a wry smile. ‘What do you think?’
The landlord sighed and relaxed his posture. ‘Kronenborg?’
‘Yes please.’
Five pints and two hours later, Jim made his way into town with a spring in his step and a wonky grin.
Strolling into the King’s Head like he owned the place, Jim thought he might see some old faces, but those he did encounter paid him little attention. A few of the older lot tightened their eyed as they looked his way but no words were spoken until the landlady, who Jim didn’t recognise, approached him at the bar.
‘What can I get you?’ she asked, scratching her arse surreptiously.
‘I shall have a pint of your best Heineken, thank you.’
The landlady took a glass and held it up to pour off the drink in silence.
Jim groaned just as the landlady sighed, and an atmosphere of discontent fell upon him. The walk into town had allowed his sugar-level to decrease and the craving for more alcohol was hitting him hard in the chest.
‘Someone died or something?’
‘Actually, yes,’ said the landlady, ‘my husband died last night in hospital.’
‘Shit, sorry,’ said Jim as she passed his pint to him.
‘Four-fifty, please.’
‘Jesus, it’s gone up a bit, hasn’t it?’
‘I don’t make the prices up. The brewery does that,’ she said, swiping the fiver from the bar as he took a large swig of his pint.
‘Sorry about your husband,’ he said, taking the change.
The landlady huff-laughed. ‘I was only joking, love. He’s down in the cellar,’ she said, walking off to dress a stale ham sandwich.
This hideous conversation had a nasty effect on Jim. For the first time since taking a drink, he was reminded of what he was doing.
He looked around at the inhabitants of the bar and shook his head in dismay.
‘God’s fucking waiting-room,’ he whispered with a finger over his mouth, staring at his pint.
From there on in, the day turned into night as Jim drifted further and further into the abyss.
When he woke up the next morning, his head felt as if it would explode.
Filled with remorse, he made his way to the bathroom to throw up and, as he dry-heaved into the bowl, he started to piece together the loosely encrypted information gathered from the events of the day before.
With each hopeless body-wrench calling for food that hadn’t entered his system, his stomach lining took a severe pounding.
Jim’s mind, however, had other things to worry about, having slowly reconfigured information from the jumbled data.
Above all, he remembered bumping into his boss and being given the sack.
Or did he?
He wasn’t quite sure.
Had he dreamt it?
He’d learnt from AA that he never dreamt when he was pissed. In fact, he never even slept when he was pissed. He was just unconscious.
With the dry-heaves out of the way, he made his way to the tap to get some water inside him and wash his face.
Turning the tap, the wrong way, of course, it suddenly dawned on him as he looked deep into the mirror of his eyes that he would die in weeks if he carried on drinking.
Still holding the tap, he cried for a minute or two, and then slowly turned it the right way.
He took in a good pint of water and returned to bed, where he went back to sleep.
When he woke up again, some five hours later, he forced down some corn flakes and got dressed.
Stepping into the night air, Jim walked back into town.
As he approached the throng of happy smokers stood chatting outside the church building, he smiled apologetically.
‘I’ve relapsed.’
Jim called in a plumber and replaced the tap the next day.