XII.
Fliss
PEOPLE IN THE SOBER WORLDoften talk about ‘rock bottom’. They say you have to hit it before you can reclaim your life, step by 12 step, surrendering control to a higher power and all that bullshit. The problem was, Fliss kept hitting rock bottom, and each time the bottom in question was rockier and lower than the preceding one, so that after a while she realised there was simply one catastrophic spiral with no end point. Her life was like the Escher engraving that had once hung on the wall of her father’s study: a framed print of lines that went nowhere and made her eyes go funny if she looked at it for too long.
But the day she was recognised by Anna Calhoun was probably the worst rock bottom. It was the one that set everything else in motion. Fliss had been living in a squat near the Barnsbury Estate. It wasn’t bad, all things considered. She had her own mattress on one side of a large room in a Georgian terrace with cracked windows and split floorboards. The squatters referred to themselves as a commune and the overgrown back garden had been planted with herbs and vegetables. The house was filled with the scent of earthy soups and stews. It didn’t feel as dangerous as other places Fliss had found herself – the cardboard shelters under railway bridges, the shop doorways, the hostels where women screamed themselves awake. She didn’t have to sleep with her shoes on for fear of trampling across a discarded needle when she walked to the toilet at night. It wasn’t that kind of place.
Fliss had been there for three weeks and planned to stay for a couple more, just until she’d got herself straight. Her last sober stint hadstretched to six months but then she’d turned fifty and the darkness had unleashed itself again, worming its way into her head. She’d celebrated her birthday with her pal, Eric, sitting outside King’s Cross station, sinking cans of Special Brew and smoking spliffs until the police moved them on. She’d sworn at the officers and was lucky not to have been arrested, but there had been some environmental protest going on up York Way and the police had been overstretched dealing with that, which was a lucky break.
The hangover had been terrible, so obviously she drank her way through it the next day and the day after that and then the days had blurred into each other and it just made sense to be drunk all the time. The morning she ran into Anna Calhoun, she’d woken before dawn, slick with sweat. She’d dreamed of Denby Hall. In her dream the family portraits had come alive and were prodding at her ribs with bony fingers. She reached for the vodka bottle to calm herself. Just a small swig, she thought. She drank and waited for the vodka to numb her thoughts. She couldn’t shake a memory of her grandmother, austere and unsmiling, bending to look at Felicity and getting so close to her face that Fliss could smell her coffee breath and see her rheumy eyes.
‘Hello?’ her grandmother said, tapping the side of Fliss’s head with her yellowed finger. ‘Anyone home?’
She drank more vodka, then shuffled outside to light up a quick spliff. The garden was cool and foggy. Someone had found an old armchair on the street, thrown out by neighbours doing renovations, and had put it in the middle of the patio. Fliss sank into it, springs creaking. She watched the smoke from her joint dissolve into the grey strands of morning mist. A fox appeared from behind one of the dustbins filled with compost. When it saw her, it became static, alert eyes staring with caution.
‘It’s OK, love,’ Fliss said. ‘I’m not going to hurt you.’
The fox, still wary, experimented with putting one paw out in front of the other.
‘You’re OK.’
She thought of her niece, Cosima, who loved animals and had been distraught a few years ago when the family Labrador had to be put down. Fliss, on one of her sporadic visits home, had put on a ceremony of remembrance for the dog, in the centre of the Tipworth maze. She had lit candles and Palo Santo sticks and she and Cosima had written down Cosima’s favourite memories of the dog on pieces of paper that they then burned and scattered to the air. She remembered Cosima taking her hand and squeezing it.
‘Thank you, Auntie Fliss,’ her niece had said. ‘No one else understands.’
She missed Cosima. Out of all the Fitzmaurices, her eldest niece seemed the most like her. She must call her, Fliss thought, before the shame came and blotted out any warmth. She won’t want to hear from you, the shame told her. You’re pathetic. Do you think she wants to be reminded of you?
Fliss inhaled the final hit of weed, then washed the taste down with the remaining inch of vodka. The fox, reassured now that there was no threat, started nosing the undergrowth. A few moments of peace. Then it looked up again and Fliss saw her grandmother’s eyes staring back at her and she remembered, in a sickening rush, the tap-tap-tap of that long, knobbly finger, the contempt of each gesture, and she went back into the house, threw the empty bottle of vodka in the sink, put on the puffer jacket she’d nicked from a charity shop and slammed the front door behind her. She needed to be outside, walking. She needed to move. She needed to find more drink.
Of course, it wasn’t her grandmother who was the real enemy. But it was safer to remember the old woman. Fliss’s memories didn’t allow her to wander too far. In truth, it was her grandfather who had opened the door to her Denby Hall bedroom at night and insisted he tell her ‘a special bedtime story’ which, for reasons Fliss could never fully understand, required her to take off her nightdress and lie there naked while Grandpa Fitzmaurice touched her and told her she was a good girl and she wasn’t going to tell anyone about their bedtime stories was she, because if she did, she’d be sent away andlocked in a faraway school for naughty little children who didn’t do what they were told.
She told no one. Fliss had always tried her hardest to be good. She tried and tried and tried, even though she always knew, deep down, that she was bad. It was the Bad Fliss who stepped out into the north London streets in her puffer jacket that morning, the Fliss who let everyone down.
‘We can’t keep doing this,’ Ben had said to her the last time she’d gone into rehab. He’d paid for a stint at The Dormer, the most exclusive clinic in the country, famed for its insistence on daily ice baths and infrared saunas alongside the usual group therapy sessions. He drove her there in his big silver car with Fliss in the passenger seat beside him, buckled in and sad like she was the child and he was the parent.
‘I’m sorry it’s so expensive,’ Fliss said.
‘It’s not the money. It’s the self-destruction. Every time you’ve got clean, you’ve fucked it up.’
He kept his eyes on the road, his hands on the steering wheel in a precise ten to two position. It was the first time he’d levelled blame directly at her and she felt chastened.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, the words constricted by a tightness in her throat.
‘It’s embarrassing,’ Ben continued. ‘I’ve got a public profile.’
‘I’ll try harder this time,’ she said.
She had meant it. A smiling staff member dressed like a beautician had checked her into her room at The Dormer – single mattress, bedside cabinet, red alarm cord hanging from the ceiling – and Fliss had sat on the edge of the bed, making a promise to a God she didn’t believe in that this time it would work. In group therapy sessions, she had been a willing participant. She had talked and role-played and confessed. She’d admitted to all her myriad failures until, one morning, she wondered if maybe the mistakes hadn’t happenedtoher; it was that she had been the mistake all along.
Just outside King’s Cross station, Fliss stopped at an off-licence andbought another half-bottle of vodka with money Eric had shared with her from a day’s joint begging. She only ever bought halves. If she hadn’t bought a full bottle of vodka, that was something, wasn’t it?
Fliss walked up York Way, past the Costa Coffee and the squat glass building that housed the offices of theGuardiannewspaper and took the steps down to the canal path. A half-submerged shopping trolley rose out of the murky waters, its rusting silhouette stark against the stone walls. She passed joggers and mothers pushing buggies and suited men hurrying about their normal lives. She drank as she went and the sadness became less loud. The image of her grandmother’s hateful eyes receded so that she only saw it when she turned her head to the left. She determined to keep her head to the right, to ignore the ghosts. She took the stairs up to Coal Drops Yard and walked to Granary Square in this way, face twisted to the right, bottle hanging from her hand, stumbling and correcting herself as she walked.
The sun was now high in the sky and Fliss realised it was lunchtime. The square was filled with people in open-air cafés situated around a central fountain. She sat on a bench as she watched children running in and out of the spurting jets of water and listened to their delighted screams. She held the vodka bottle out in front of her, squinting to see how much was left. About two inches. She shook the bottle and the alcohol lapped lightly at the sides. Enough to get her nicely sozzled, she thought, and then she would curl up on the bench for a nap.
‘Fliss?’
She had to shield her face from the sun to make out the features of the woman standing in front of her. In the shadow cast by her hand, she dimly recognised the blonde hair and the button nose. The woman was wearing a Breton-striped top and cropped blue jeans with buckled sandals and a bright red belt. She looked otherworldly in her freshness.
