‘Good,’ beams Tyrone. ‘Still dunno why I’m here but I’ll go along.’
Keera winces.
Sasha will murder him. But Sasha makes no more comments to Tyrone. Instead she turns to Keera.
‘Keera, do you know what day today is?’
Keera shakes her head.
‘Your rock-bottom story.’
Keera’s heart feels like a solid lump of ice has been dropped on it. She feels rather than sees Oliver and Jordy pulling their chairs away from her.
‘Fourteenth day’s the killer,’ mutters Oliver.
Keera glares at him. He could have told her.
She pulls her feet up from the floor and curls them under her.
‘Stop cocooning, Keera,’ says Sasha. ‘We need the story. You’ve been here fourteen days and you’re playing along nicely, but we haven’t got all of your story yet.’
‘Yeah, we haven’t,’ says Hank, angry and young: alcohol, steroids and drugs.
‘I drink,’ says Keera in desperation. ‘I drink when I’m sad and when I’m happy and no matter what, it can always becelebrated with a drink. I do drugs too. Mainly prescription but sometimes coke if it’s around.’
Sasha looks unimpressed. ‘Why do you drink and do drugs?’
‘Numbing, I suppose.’
‘What’s it been like being here and not having any substance to take you away from yourself?’
Without thinking about it, Keera exhales long and deeply. ‘Strange,’ she says. ‘I have nothing to make things feel better. I can’t sleep at night because my mind won’t stop …’
‘Ah,’ says Sasha. ‘What goes round and round in your mind at night? Your rock bottom?’
And Keera tells them. The day of the interview appearing inEmpress, drinks and lunch with one of her mother’s friends.
Keera had sneaked off to a nearby bar and ordered tequila shots when the friend was paying the bill. Dr Bobbi arrived as the taxi pulled up to drive them all to a drinks party.
‘My mother was angry with me,’ she says. ‘I felt so low. She’d said I should have stuck to a diet.’
‘What happened at the party?’ asks Sasha.
Keera has talked about so much in rehab: she’s told drinking stories, drugs stories and about that time she was so hungover she licked the inside of her cosmetics purse to get at any cocaine remnants left there in order to go onstage.
She feels that she has already been laid bare – yet she’s always kept something back.
It shames her so much that she can feel the sweat on her back at the thought of saying this out loud.
She doesn’t want to be judged.
Yet, in here, people are more judgy when inmates lie.
Not facing the truth is the big sin in rehab.
‘It’s horrible to think about it now because I’m clean and sober – really sober,’ Keera says, wincing.
Most of the group grin.
