Now or Never 7

If I could count to ten when I got angry and kept my mouth shut, I could get on with my recovery and eventually see my children again.
If I couldn’t, I’d be discharged and back on the road to ruin.
The hidden costs of expulsion weighed heavier and heavier as I totted up the doom. I hadn’t seen it coming, but a cloak of blank regret had slowly shrouded itself around me over days or maybe weeks. Unaware, I just kept on shrugging it off, like a cobweb, disowning the pain that my past dragged up.
In the afternoon, my care manager called on the phone so I told her what happened.
She indicated that I was on very rocky ground. ‘Look, Richard,’ she said gravely, ‘the treatment centre does things their way.’
The highway sprang to mind and I stopped pacing the empty room. A haze clouded my vision and I had to sit down. I couldn’t concentrate on the conversation and just said ‘yes’ or ‘no’.
Thinking back, I’d probably realised at that moment that I was never going to be able to complete treatment here.
Then, just as the afternoon group of ‘Feelings’ was coming to an end, all hell broke loose when I accused my Nigerian peer of gossiping. We’d had our antlers locked for a while and I couldn’t stand the way she whispered and tittered with one female peer in particular.
She denied gossiping and suggested that I was paranoid, so we babbled pent-up shit at each other from our chairs, shooting words across the circle of the group with no regard for anybody’s feelings whatsoever.
When we finally stopped going at each other, nobody would speak. I should have counted to ten.
The counsellor, bewildered by our sickening behaviour, ended the session.
‘I can’t remember the last time I took a group as unhealthy as this,’ he said, and walked out.
The entire group was ashen-white with anger.
Moments later, I was asked to go to the office immediately, and a two-and-two with the Nigerian woman and I ensued.
‘So I accused you of gossiping. Big deal. If it wasn’t true, why did you react so badly?’
‘No one wants to be called a gossip.’
‘Not if they are one, no.’
‘Which means you think I am.’
‘I’m just saying you reacted as if I’d bitten your arm off.’
Initially, I hadn’t meant to deliver any deadly blow in the group. I’d just said what I thought.
A counsellor asked me to expand, so I put it to my peer that I thought she’d withdrawn from the group over the last few days and that this may have been attributed to her head being full of idle gossip.
That’s when she leant forward and calmly informed me that I was, in her mind, a paranoid, delusional, xenophobic, homophobic racist. Her delivery was very eloquent and deemed acceptable to the counsellors. There were, after all, no swear words. These were all in the Oxford English dictionary, after all.
As I saw it, she couldn’t have been further from the truth.
I don’t consider myself xenophobic, but I am mildly patriotic, especially to The Queen. I love different cultures and have travelled the world to be a part of it. I’m not homophobic, but I do have issues with intimacy and lack male bonding skills. I’m not racist, and I’m tired of having to justify my view on this when it’s constantly being used as a means to get one over. Sadly, today, racism is a hidden culture egged on by fear and pettiness in a country marginalized by its government and the rich, who milk immigrants for their own good. I have to admit that I am mildly paranoid but I don’t think I’m delusional. In fact, I’m sure I’m not, I think.
The senior counsellors tried to allow us to resolve our differences, but we wouldn’t relent.
‘How am I supposed to cope with a bunch of women as peers if they all think I’m a racist bigot?’ I asked.
It’s known that I have issues surrounding women. The counsellors are aware that I grew up in an invisible family.
‘This may be your higher power working, put there for good reason. You could learn a lot from this if you wanted to, Richard,’ said one, urging me in a last-ditch attempt to soften to the requirements of recovery.
I knew she was right, but how could I soften? When I was one and a half, I was free to walk the streets of Cambridge with a sheepdog, going into fields and other people’s gardens all day long (my oldest sister told me this only a few weeks ago). My own family hadn’t cared for my wellbeing, so why would a group of strange women who misunderstood me to protect their own biases?
Having run so far away from my childhood, and for so long, the mere thought of accepting and coming to terms with that lost little boy scares me to death. Toxic Shame kills so many people because the thought of confronting the most terrible knowledge that it was their parents who did almost all the harm is too much to bear. Death equals peace.
When another fractious dispute broke out between my peer and I, the session was brought to an abrupt end and we left the office.
All of a sudden, my head felt giddy and my legs were like jelly. I felt like I’d been sedated.
As I walked around the house, I realised that I was alone. Everywhere I went, I found no one. I just stumbled from room to room, finding no one.
Normally, it would have been a hive of activity in the kitchen and dining room but, when I went in, there was nobody. The house became a maze.
My heart pounded.
I looked in the oven to see what was cooking and suddenly realised that my chances of finding out who I am and being happy with the knowledge, having been broken down to reset properly, staying clean and sober, were all but gone.
As I left the kitchen, I felt like fainting in the corridor and mentally fast-forwarded to lying in a heap on the floor.
I saw myself break down and cry in front of everyone on the floor. After this, I imagined being helped up and embraced into the house, allowed to stay, to complete therapy for a life of sobriety. All I had to do was break.
When I wouldn’t allow myself to faint, I quickly realised that I’d foregone my last chance of a ‘flash of light’, the moment of enlightenment, the lifting of poverty from my soul.
Clutching a wall, I almost went down again. A whirring noise resounded around my head like a smacked-out police-siren and I felt like puking.
How many like me had come this far, only to be shown the door and washed away to relapse into the three-way gutter of death, mental home or prison?
How many ghosts hung out in this section of corridor, ruing the day they stood there, belligerent and angry, hard and resolute against spiritual change, all those years or just weeks ago? It felt like maybe one of them was watching me from the other side, urging me to fall and break, but I wouldn’t go down. I just couldn’t. It felt more wrong than right, but it was probably that I was just too scared to accept the true love.
When the head counsellor came and found me in the kitchen with my hands in my shorts’ pockets, I knew the time had come. I may as well have been trying to hide a bag of loot, whistling in front of a policeman.
I entered the office and immediately saw my contract on the table. The two head counsellors sat me down and told me that I’d have to be discharged.
‘We can’t take you any further here, Richard,’ said the solemn head.
The whole room gobbled me up when she said that. I felt naked, and saw the cloak of hell snaked over my shoulders for the first time.
‘For what reason?’ I asked, for what it was worth.
‘By calling your group ‘a bunch of women’, you went against the terms of your contract, using discriminatory language for a third and final time,’ she said, as if from a script. ‘We can’t allow you to upset the group any more. I’m sorry, Richard.’
Half of me thought this was a joke and the other half told me she was deadly serious. I was half-laughing and half-scoffing, sat forward in my seat, shaking my head from side to side without saying a word.
I was asked to leave the premises immediately, so I went upstairs to my room and packed my stuff. The giddiness lifted the moment I left the office, but it was quickly substituted by a deep sense of remorse.
I was angry, yes, but I knew there was no going back. They’d decided my fate, so it was simply a case of getting on with the next chapter, taking hold of the weathered old reigns to ride back into war on my deathwish horse.
I knew only too well that people die when they’re discharged from this place or leave of their own accord. They hang themselves or overdose or put themselves in front of trains and buses after a bottle of vodka. I’d heard of three people who’d gone since I’d arrived. Two were booze and one was smack.
Once I’d packed, I went downstairs and picked up my phone from the office. There were few words. I signed a slip of paper and left, wheeling my big red bag down the driveway and onto the street.
I felt strangely free as I walked down the road towards the traffic lights, but an unsettling sensation crept up on me as I stared at my emotional homelessness.
Avoiding the fact that I was entering what could well be the final and darkest chapter of my life would have been denial. Having crossed the line of recovery, I wondered if I would ever again be given the opportunity to discover why I am who I am.
The big question sat at the front of my mind: Could I stay clean by going to AA meetings, working hard and saving money up for the maintenance and a place to crash, or would I return to the drink and smoke until I died a worthless failure, a flop, an idiot who had the world at his feet?
At a parade of shops, I ducked into the internet café to check emails and phone-messages for twenty minutes.
After that, I walked aimlessly along the pavement, half-tempting myself to go straight back to Mum’s flat without a drink or a spliff, but when I saw the pub on the corner, I ducked in without a fight.