Now or Never 6

A week before this unsavoury incident, the German and I had had a similar altercation concerning etiquette when I slyly stole a piece of smoked salmon offered to him by another peer, right from under his blotchy, red nose.
In fairness to Terminator’s grandad, he had been offered the salmon, but when he took two of the three tranches and I saw his knife going back for the third, I couldn’t resist swooping for it with my fork.
Without movement, he held his table knife at me across the table, about a foot from my throat, and told me what he thought of my behaviour. Some sort of tempered quarrel ensued, but I didn’t call him ‘German’.
Although the knives were used menacingly both times, wielded a foot or two from my face and stomach, they weren’t used threateningly (he didn’t lunge or intimate action), but the glint of the blades rested in my mind.
The last time someone had held a knife against me in such a way was when an insane crackhead nearly stabbed me in Peckham thirteen years ago.
This guy had been lazily picking away at his teeth with a bread-knife in the squalid kitchen of a doorless squat. When he urged me to make the first move after I realised that he’d stolen two hundred quid from me while I slept, I thankfully walked away.
Soon after that incident, I found myself in rehab for the first time and stayed clean for fifteen months.
This time, in rehab for the second time, I’d spoken. I’d used discriminatory language against my aggressor.
When I walked out of the kitchen, I realised that there were a few people present to have heard me call him German in an offensive way, and, as I sat outside smoking/fuming, alone in the garden, I knew that I’d pay for my words.
Sure enough, a counsellor came to fetch me and took me into the office.
Once there, I was issued with a contract. The counsellor asked me if I’d used the word ‘German’ in a derogatory way and I said ‘yes’.
‘For the safety of the environment, I have to do this. We just can’t allow this sort of behaviour, Richard,’ he said. ‘It’s totally unacceptable and will result in your discharge.’
I didn’t mention the knife incidents. For whatever reason (probably a mixture of false pride and twisted self-denunciation), the glint of the blades went clean out of my mind. As I walked out of the office, I felt like a self-righteous fool.
In my third week, my big mouth got the better of me again and I was ordered back into the office.
Two counsellors sat me down and warned me about infringing the terms of the contract.
This time, I’d used ‘potentially harmful language’ during group earlier that day.
‘Racist comments are totally unacceptable, Richard. We’ve warned you about this already,’ said one of them.
But I honestly couldn’t remember what I’d said to cause upset in the group and baulked at the accusation.
‘Tell me what I said, then.’
The counsellor in charge of the earlier group told me.
‘At one stage,’ he said, ‘do you remember me asking the group whether or not you thought it possible that people could be born evil?’
‘Yeah, during the talk on ‘Disease Concept’,’ I barked back.
He nodded. ‘Well, you said something that we think may have caused harm to one peer in particular,’ said the counsellor, rubbing his chin at me.
I thought back to the instant.
Having seen a documentary on the issue of children-killing, I recalled wading in with my two-penn’orth during group.
‘That African tribesman kills babies and children because he reckons they’re evil. How the hell does he get away with that?’ I’d said.
Bad idea.
‘Surely it wasn’t for saying ‘African tribesman’?’ I asked, bewildered, perhaps ignorantly, that this may have caused offence to my Somalian peer.
‘These words contravene the terms of your contract,’ said the counsellor, ‘and may well have offended one member of the group in particular.
Can you tell us who this person is, Richard?’ he asked, leaning forward with his legs still crossed.
‘Of course I can, but surely that wouldn’t have offended..(her),’ I replied, referring to the peer in question. ‘Saying African tribesman’s no different to British industrialist or Welsh farmer or District nurse. Where’s the harm in it, for God’s sake?’
The counsellors eyed me with patronising indifference.
I hadn’t thought this through at all well. They seemed to be playing a ridiculous game of cat and mouse with me, so I snapped and became what I now know to be ‘angry, in a ‘passive/aggressive’ way.
‘This is political correctness gone mad! Fifty years from now, people’ll laugh at this.’ Fuming like a steam-engine, I added coal to my fire. ‘What if swedes are on the menu and I say what lovely swedes they are, or what’ll happen if I mention that the washing powder’s Finish? Oops, is that Norwegian wood? What about the American Dream? Is that a racist comment? Will I be vilified for uttering these heinous words?’
Once the counsellors had stopped tittering at my Meldrew impersonation, they straightened their faces and leant forward. It seemed they meant only business.
‘We can’t see any real effort in you to look at yourself and accept the contract’s relevance for the good of your recovery, so we’re issuing you with another warning. It’s three shots and out here, Richard,’ the more senior counsellor told me. I left the office baffled and dejected.
That afternoon in group, I again shot myself in the foot in defiance of now being labelled not only a racist, but a bigot to boot.
The same counsellor that had taken the earlier group brought up the topic of Aids, so I stupidly tangled myself up in an inane game skirting around the name of the continent from which the disease supposedly came. It was a silly game of childish indifference to my contract, an act of non-compliance to the staff’s authority.
How could I learn from these mamby-pamby dorks when they concentrated all their energy on being respected. Respect, in my book, needs to be earned, and as far as I could see, they were miles away, happily placing me in a box of their own making to see if I could get out.
It felt as if they were going out of their way to distract me from my primary purpose; staying sober and keeping my nose clean.
Come to think of it, their attitude reminded me of Piggy Haigh, my awful housemaster at school in Colwyn Bay, who always treated me with contempt.
(Here’s a story you’ll like. I was a bit of a lad at boarding school but Piggy Haigh couldn’t catch me out for any of the many misdemeanours I prided myself on. One day, his son’s slippers went missing and he naturally assumed that I’d taken them as a joke. When I told him I hadn’t, he made everyone in the house look for them. When that failed, he called in the CID, who came with sniffer-dogs in tow. The slippers were found buried close to the tennis-court. Piggy’s dog, a sheepdog that I loved like my own, had buried them! The fat old bastard never lived it down.)
Anyway, that night in treatment, I was at a loose end and decided to sit down with a bunch of peers who were watching telly. It took a while to sink in that they were all glued to Big Brother.
‘You don’t honestly like this, do you?’ I asked. I hadn’t meant to question the intellectual capacity of my peers, but it probably sounded like I was doing just that.
‘I like it,’ said one peer.
‘What?’ I replied. ‘We’re in treatment and we’re watching a bunch of people stuck in a building talking bollocks? Doesn’t that say something?’
‘Yeah, but the difference between us and them is that we can leave whenever we like,’ said the same peer.
‘They can leave whenever they like, can’t they?’ I asked, remembering a tabloid-snippet about Leo Sayer.
Nobody bothered answering.
‘This is like watching the Poseidon Adventure on a boat in the middle of a storm,’ I said. No one pleaded for me to stay when I left to go to bed.
The day after, I felt completely lost and alone.
Sat with my cereal, the glint of cleavers past flickered in my mind’s eye.
I think I knew that my time was up but I so wanted to stay and get well. I hadn’t told staff about the German and the knives because I thought he’d come a cropper after a while, but things hadn’t changed one bit. I realised that my last chance of being able to stay was to get the knives off my chest. I had to get selfish.
Unhappy about having to yield to this drastic measure, I went to the office to see a counsellor and explained what happened.
From there, the German and I were swept into the office for a ‘two-and-two’ (a session in which two counsellors sit with two peers to settle a brewing, ailing dispute).
The German initially denied any use of knives, but when I brought to his attention that the salmon-giving peer had seen him hold firm with the table-knife, he quickly changed tack and admitted that his behaviour had been unacceptable.
One part of me felt relieved that it had come out into the open and the other part felt as if I’d let myself down.
‘Why didn’t you tell us about this when it happened?’ one of the counsellors asked me.
‘It went clean out of my mind to say anything. Probably pride, I don’t know. Anyway, I didn’t want to grass. I thought it’d all come out in the wash. That’s what you say, isn’t it? That nothing goes under the radar here.’
‘We aren’t perfect, Richard, and it’s not grassing,’ one of the counsellors told me. ‘We need to be told about things like this.’
The German leant forward, holding his hands as if in prayer. ‘I’m doing my Step Three at the moment and I suppose this is a good way of handing my will over to God,’ he said. The counsellors nodded their approval to him. Couldn’t they see his cold, calculating brain playing tricks on them? Hadn’t they heard what he’d just said?
He was talking the talk, but he certainly wasn’t walking.
The counsellors seemed happy enough.
Even with the German admitting what he’d done, I could see that they didn’t really believe that the knives were of much significance. They probably thought that I’d blown it all out of proportion to buy myself some time and that the holy German was just going along with my story to make light of the situation for me.
‘You can see how difficult it is for us to believe you when it’s taken so long to come out,’ one of them said to me.
‘I don’t grass,’ I replied.
‘I’ve told you before, Richard, it’s not grassing.’
‘OK, informing. It’s the same thing.’
It was clear that the counsellors didn’t like my attitude, and brought the session to a close.
The German went to shake my hand, so I offered mine and shook half-heartedly, knowing that things would get a lot worse better they could get better.
If we’d met on the outside, I’d have never had time for this man, but there, in treatment, he was crucial to my recovery.