J'Accuse!

I can’t believe this is happening. My whole world has been turned upside down by a stranger I haven’t even met. I dread the day I do meet him because I know he’s going to get me to relapse, just like he has everyone else.
It all started three weeks ago at my home-meeting in Putney, where I have a commitment as treasurer.
I was just about to leave when Graham, my youngest, trapped his finger in the bathroom door trying to fetch Buzz Lightyear. By the time I’d calmed him down and Jenny came back from work, it was too late to go, thank God.
All I know is that this strange man with an Irish accent had everyone in stitches when he shared, after which everyone joined him down the pub.
Edna, who’s probably the oldest Aa’er in the world with forty-six years of continuous sobriety, called me up to warn me about him. She was pissed out of her mind and sounded like she was going to die at any minute, coughing and spluttering between swigs of whatever she was drinking. She couldn’t remember anything in particular about what this stranger had said or what he looked like, but she could recall his name; Jack Hughes.
It’s strange that she remembered his name, or even that he gave it, because people usually only impart their forenames at AA, being an anonymous gathering of alcoholics.
Edna ranted on about how funny he was and how everything he said seemed to make perfect sense and how everyone warmed to his laidback, slapstick humour. It was, she said, as if every tool they’d used to stay sober for all those years just went flying out the window the moment he spoke.
Apparently, he’d walked in to the meeting late and sat down quietly at the back. No one had seen him in the rooms before but Edna noticed that he possessed an air of assuredness and good health that only comes with a decent amount of sobriety. I asked her why she couldn’t remember what he looked like when she could obviously recall his general manner, but she got angry and corrosive, slurring while she lambasted me for speaking over her.
All she told me was that, after he shared, everyone went to the pub with him and got absolutely smashed.
The police were called and the local paper recorded that twenty arrests were made, but when I asked her again what he’d said to make everyone flip, she got angry again and slammed the phone down. I tried calling her back but she wouldn’t pick up so I phoned some others who I knew would have been there but none of them answered, which is usually a sign of relapse or its imminence.
Two days after the Putney meeting, this stranger struck again in Balham. I was getting ready to go to that meeting as well, but Tommy, my oldest, hadn’t come back from drama and I’ve always worried that he’s got the disease, so I called him and he told me he’d got drunk and could I pick him up from the train station because he couldn’t walk.
When I saw him slouched against a wall outside the station, my heart sank and I knew he was one of us. I’d always known, deep down. When Jenny got back from work, she tore seven strips of Satan off him and ordered him to guzzle pints of water, which I knew was a bad idea (it can give the brain too much oxygen and literally blow it up), but she wouldn’t listen. Thankfully, when she marched off to get herself a drink to calm down, I drank the water myself and told Tommy not to say anything. He was almost unconscious by then, so Jenny started laying into me.
‘I knew he’d turn out like you!’ she screamed. ‘Look at him! LOOK AT HIM! I should have listened to my mother and never married you!’
She’d tucked into a good half a bottle of Pinot Grigio by that time, which is when she’s at her most wicked, but I can’t do anything to help her any more. She just won’t look at herself and it’s always someone else’s fault, her boss, me, the kids, the council, the poor. She’ll hit rock bottom one day, and when she does I’ll be there for her.
Once she’d polished off the bottle, I noticed little Graham poke his head around the corner in the hall, having woken up with all the commotion, but Jenny wouldn’t let me console him so he came running at me, tears pouring down his face. I put my hands over his ears as Jenny went on and on at me, blaming me for Tommy’s problem. It was awful.
The next day, we shipped Tommy off to the Priory. Jenny’s insurance covered it but he discharged himself the next day and he’s been in his room ever since. It’s all about timing and acceptance, but she won’t see that. She just thinks throwing money at a problem’ll do the trick.
At the meeting in Balham that night, Jack Hughes worked his evil magic and shared. Everyone laughed their heads off and followed him down to the nearest pub, where they proceeded to drink the place dry.
Dave, who’s a serial-relapser that thinks he can drink like a gentleman and happened to be at the pub when the thirsty mob arrived, told me that Tony, my oldest friend in AA who I went to treatment with six years ago, glassed two barmen in a blackout and hasn’t been seen since. His mobile’s off and Dave seems to think he’s found a squat somewhere on the high street, nicking Kirov from the corner shop and mugging business types late at night, just like he used to in the bad old days. We thought about looking for him but decided against it, because he’d probably kill us if we found him.
Apparently, a good ten people have died after the Balham meeting and another dozen have been placed in detox at Springfield.
Of those who went to the Putney meeting, nobody’s heard a thing apart from me, but I’d say Edna’s dead by now. It’s as if they’ve all just disappeared.
This Jack Hughes character has done the same thing at meetings in Camden, Soho, Fulham, Wandsworth, Hoxton, Bow, Ealing and Hammersmith, but I haven’t been able to contact anyone from those meetings and AA’s head office aren’t manning their phones.
You must be thinking that surely people would be wise to this man by now, that some contingency plan had been put in place. But who could have imagined that the Devil himself would be interested in a room full of recovering alcoholics, huddled together in church halls?
With all the normal people out there enjoying themselves in moderation, spending easy money like water, surely they were the easy targets the devil craved power over.
I wish that the evil bastard turning AA into a laughing stock had been photographed by someone to warn meetings of him, to circulate pictures and stop him getting in, but it’s just not happened.
It seems so odd that no one can remember what he looks like or what he says.
A load of telly people, news types and admen trying to get a piece of him, are turning up to meetings but no one’s going anywhere any more.
Every single man and woman present at the meetings he’s been to has relapsed and I’d say about a hundred have already killed themselves through drink, suicide, drugs or beatings of one kind or another, if Balham’s anything to go by.
All the mental institutions are full to the brim with those saved by loved ones but the fact is that Jack Hughes is still out there, going to meetings, making everyone giggle and getting them pissed.
When I heard that Jeff had relapsed, I knew that this stranger needed to be stopped. Jeff’s recovery is so solid that he literally oozes serenity. He helps newcomers more than anyone I know in London, but he’s dead now. I heard last night from a drunk in the street that he’d killed himself.
I’ve called the police umpteen times but they won’t do anything about it because, to all intents and purposes, Hughes has done nothing wrong in the eyes of the law, plus no one can tell them what he looks like. All they know is his name, which intelligence reckon’s an alias anyway.
The Sun released a snippet about Hughes, entitled ‘Hughes The Baddy?’ but they painted him as a funny, happy-go-lucky type who’d only wanted to tell jokes and been misunderstood. There was even a cartoon drawing of him as the Pied Piper (his pipe replaced by a pint) with a bunch of dribbling drunks following behind him.
The Observer served up an equally ignorant piece entitled ‘J’accuse Jack Hughes’, written by a recovering alcoholic who, although having not attended any of the meetings Hughes had been to, had also relapsed, due, as he put it, to the stress of dealing with recovery without meetings.
A journo from Channel Four with a bit of recovery under his belt started doing a documentary last week but then he went to one of the meetings and hasn’t been to work since.
Most, if not all of the meetings have been temporarily shut down until further notice and I’ve been to little villages in Surrey and Hampshire to get a meeting in, but all they seem to share about is this Jack Hughes fellow. There’s no real recovery any more and I didn’t how I was going to stay sober until last night.
I had a really good chat with Tommy about it all last night and he sounded close to admitting he’s got a problem, but then Jenny came back and caused an upset when she noticed that I’d overlooked buying lamb for her dinner.
She skulked off to the kitchen again, presumably to get drunk, so Tommy and I decided to do a meeting together, just like Dr Bob and Bill W back in the day. We’re going to start tomorrow.