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to go.

      “I don’t remember what happened last night,” he said.

      “We must have been very drunk,” he said.

      And then he left, through the front door that was still open. And we never spoke to each other again.

      And I drank for five more years.

      CHAPTER 4

      Knowing

      “But how do you know you’re an alcoholic?”

      That’s a good question, and it’s one I am asked as soon as people find out I’m an alcoholic and that I’ve been sober for 14 years. Surely, if I’ve been sober for 14 years I can’t possibly be an alcoholic. Perhaps it was just when I was young? And sometimes I smile and shrug and say, “Well, I just know.” Like I know the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Like I know I’m a woman. Like I know I have blue eyes and blonde hair. Well, it might be blonde – it’s been so long since I started bleaching it, I’m not really sure any more. But of everything else I am sure.

      “But are you sure you’re an alcoholic?” they ask. Am I sure? Yes, I’m sure. I’m sure with every fibre of my being. It’s not a phase. It’s not ‘something I’m going through at the moment.’ I’m an alcoholic. I cannot drink responsibly. I don’t know how.

      How do I know? I know because people who are not alcoholics do not ever ask themselves that question, not seriously. Not during the day after the night before, not when they wake up in the night gasping for water with their tongue plastered to the roof of their mouths, wishing they hadn’t had so much to drink during the rugby or the braai or the dinner. Not even when they go to work the next day feeling tender. For the last two of my drinking years I asked myself that question a lot – first weekly, I think, and then daily, and then daily and nightly.

      I know because people who are not alcoholics wake up the day after a boozy dinner and take two Panado and then tell their office mates about the night before and they don’t worry about what those people think about them. Because it’s funny. Because it isn’t a regular thing. I never told anyone about the night before. I was paranoid that they would guess the truth. That the night before wasn’t an isolated event like a birthday or a farewell or a hen’s party. The night before was just like the night before that and the night before that. That wherever I was, whether at my home or someone else’s home or at a bar or a club or a party, I would have been drunk and I would have had a hangover the next day. It wasn’t funny. It was normal.

      I know because people who are not alcoholics accept that they can’t drink while they are pregnant because it’s bad for the baby, and gloomily – or not so gloomily – resign themselves to a sober nine months, with maybe a glass or two of champagne at their baby shower. They don’t decide, as I did, that they can never have children because they know they are physically and mentally incapable of staying sober for that length of time. Nine months without a drink? It may as well have been nine years. It may as well have been 90 years.

      I know because people who are not alcoholics never have conversations like this over lunch. I think I’d been sober for 12 years when the following conversation unfolded.

      “So, if you found out you had two weeks to live, what would you do?”

      There were about five of us at the table, I think. The other four were drinking, but I didn’t mind. I don’t mind generally. My problem was never with what other people drank. My problem was what I drank and how much.

      Someone in the group had recounted a story about someone who had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and been given two weeks to live. It made all of us examine our own mortality.

      I rushed in. That ‘angels fear to tread’ thing? Yeah, I’m one of the fools.

      “I’d go straight to the bottle store.” It was a relief just thinking about it actually. With two weeks to live, I wouldn’t have to try any more. There would be no more tough evenings, desperate for a glass of wine, no more long lunches watching everyone else get boringly blotto and having to pretend to be interested the third time they told the same old story. But, even deeper than that, no more having to be vigilant all the time. I could let down the guard against potential triggers. Two glorious weeks of oblivion before the end. I wouldn’t have to feel bad; it wouldn’t be like a real relapse – I’d be guilt free! I’d have fought the good fight; it would be a very peaceful surrender.

      “I’d buy a case or 10 of Shiraz and a dozen bottles of Jack Daniels and then I’d lie on the couch and watch old series reruns until the end.”

      It sounded amazing. Then I became aware of the silence. Four frozen faces looked at me across the table. Someone cleared her throat and said, “But, Sam, what about your kids? And Martin?”

      I hadn’t thought about them. I hadn’t thought about them at all. And when she said that, my first reaction wasn’t one of guilt or shame – it was resentment. I’d been a good person for years, hadn’t I? I’d been sober for them for a fucking long time. And now I was expected to give them the last two weeks of my life? Why couldn’t those be for me? Why couldn’t I have what I wanted? I wanted numbness. An end to anxiety. To be so gone, so inebriated, so many miles down the rabbit hole that it might be weeks before I realised I’d died.

      But that feeling is not normal. Normal people don’t think of how great it would be to be able to embalm yourself while you’re still alive. Normal people think of how they would spend time with their nearest and dearest.

      And that’s how I know I’m an alcoholic. Because until the day I die, my body will still see its nearest and dearest in the bottom of a bottle of wine.

      I know because I understand and relate to stories like this.

      One man, also an alcoholic, tells the story of his own journey from blissful shame to uncomfortable sobriety. He was part of a group of men and women with whom I got together sometimes after AA meetings. For some people, the official meetings provide a place to unburden and offload and question, but for us they were a place to listen and to learn and to find mercy and understanding. Especially understanding.

      “So for a while I thought I was a whiskey alcoholic,” he said cheerfully. He was a big man, a ‘boet’. Afrikaans and no nonsense. You’d never guess he had spent years waking up on the kitchen floor because to go to bed meant having to climb the stairs. We all nodded sagely when he told us that. No drunk likes stairs. Stairs come with a wealth of ways to fall down and then have to explain inexplicable bruises.

      “I would drink scotch until I passed out. But when I had wine I was fine.”

      I laughed at that. This big Afrikaner – let’s call him Boet – drinking wine. So unlikely. So like me.

      “So then I thought I was a wine and whiskey alcoholic. Because I really got into wine, you know?”

      Oh God, did I know.

      “At first I thought, I could totally do this, this wine lark. Especially red wine. I even joined a Wine of the Month club.”

      And we all laughed at that. How we laughed! Wine of the Month? More like Wine of the Day.

      “And it was cool. I drank it all. And I could talk about it. Like, I really knew my stuff in the end! I could tell you all about the different flavours and what the ‘nose’ was on a wine and all that shit.”

      And it was shit. It is shit. We all knew it. But he also knew it. That’s how we all became so close. There was an old lady who used to carry a bottle of gin in her handbag wherever she went. On a good week, that would last her two days. She said she had joined Alcoholics Anonymous so she could learn to drink like a lady. Even before her first meeting was over she realised she would never drink like the lady she wanted to be, ever again. One of her ways of dealing with the day-to-day wobbles and fear and sobriety was to buy a tiny handbag. No room for gin in her bag; less room to fall down.

      There was a

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