Second Chance - Jane Green [120]
At first, she would just drink at night. Like everybody else, she told herself. She was young, in her twenties, and that’s what they did at night. When she hit thirty, she tried telling herself the same thing, while the drinking progressed and her career stopped rising to the heights that all the press had predicted.
By her early thirties, she stopped being the next big thing, started being a has-been. It was her agent who brought her into AA, and she was sober from her very first meeting, knowing there wasn’t another choice.
Ninety in ninety. Ninety meetings in ninety days. For the first time since arriving in America, she felt she had a home, had a fellowship of people who truly understood her, who listened without judgement, supported her with what felt like, extraordinarily enough, unconditional love.
She vowed, back then, never to drink again. She did exactly what she was told to do: don’t drink; get a sponsor; work the steps. She thought she was fine. Recovered? Perhaps. Others described themselves as recovering alcoholics, a process that never stopped. They talked, Saffron included, of having a progressive disease, one that didn’t go away or get better, one that would inevitably lead to death if they gave in to it.
‘I’m Saffron and I’m a grateful recovering alcoholic,’ she got used to saying. Yet at some time over the last few months, she stopped thinking of herself as recovering and started thinking of herself as recovered. Which is when the problems started.
And now, just like those days of old, Saffron finds herself wishing the evening was over so she could drink in peace. Wishing she could escape to run down to that lovely cosy pub and settle in a corner, drinking herself into oblivion.
She misses Pearce. Misses him so very much. She misses her life – the simplicity of it all. And as lovely as it should be, here in the country with the friends who have known her for ever, she’d rather be somewhere else.
She’d rather be drinking.
They get to bed by midnight. Saffron kisses everyone goodnight, distracted as she plans her return to the kitchen for a drink. She goes upstairs and listens to the sounds of the house, waiting for absolute quiet, waiting until she can sneak downstairs in secrecy and drink the bottle of wine she surreptitiously hid behind the cleaning stuff under the kitchen sink.
Every time she hears a footstep, a door creak, a toilet flushing, she wants to scream with irritation, cast a spell to send everyone into a dreamless sleep.
Eventually, at one o’clock, she is certain the house is quiet. She pads out and downstairs to the kitchen, opening the cupboard door under the kitchen sink, reaching towards the back.
‘Fuck!’ she hisses as a bottle of bleach falls over, the crash shockingly loud in the stillness.
‘What are you doing?’ Saffron jumps as Olivia stands in the doorway, rubbing the back of her neck with a cold, wet flannel.
‘I’m…’ Saffron, so good at excuses, has nothing to say, nothing to explain why she is rooting around under the sink at one o’clock in the morning. She shuts the cupboard door quickly, but Olivia moves her out of the way and sinks down herself, reaching behind the bleach and Fairy Liquid to pull the wine bottle out.
She shakes her head, disappointed, resigned, and uncorks the bottle, both of them watching in silence as the wine glugs its way slowly down the plughole.
‘Why?’ Olivia turns to look at Saffron, who is torn between wanting to either slap Olivia or burst into tears.
‘Why do you think?’ she snaps, anger getting the better of her. ‘Because I needed a drink, for God’s sake. I’m an alcoholic, aren’t I? Isn’t that what we do?’ She snorts derisively. ‘Why? What a stupid bloody question. Why not?’
‘Saffron!’ Olivia is shocked, upset, her voice rising. ‘I’m trying to help you. We’re all trying to help you. Do you think any of