‘Feeling your feelings is horrible. I can’t believe I can never drink again or never use anything.’
‘Youcan,’ says Sasha with a shrug. ‘But it’ll kill you. Addiction is a progressive disease.’
‘I know.’
Keera looks at the floor and then forces herself to lift her head and look at everyone in the room, apart from Sketch.
She has no idea how Sketch particularly will stay clean when he leaves.
He’s been in rehab four times already, Oliver had told her.
Keera does not want to come back here if she can help it.
‘I had sex in a back hallway with the son of my mother’s friend, someone I’d only met in passing a few times before. We were both wasted. I am not sure how we were able to remain vertical.’
She can almost feel as if she’s back there. It had been the day thatEmpressmagazine had published her interview. Bobbi had been so angry with her for things that Keera felt were not her fault!
So Keera had done what she always did to avoid her mother’s anger. She’d started drinking. By evening, when she and Bobbi arrived at Bobbi’s friend’s house in a convoy of taxis after leaving the restaurant, everyone was buzzing after a successful lunch.
The party was whisked through to the garden room which was jammed with orchids and jungle foliage.
There was music, more drinks, laughter and gossip.
Keera hadn’t been buzzing, though.
She’d been nursing her bruised heart and was so drunk that she almost couldn’t remember why she’d been so sad.
All she knew was that she needed more.
The skinny shy guy with the bad shag haircut would never have been on Keera’s ‘must-date’ list but, same as the last time they’d met, he had drugs. Cocaine and a lot of some downer he called ‘La La Land’ which they were saving for afters.
‘I wasn’t thinking at all,’ Keera says now. ‘The thinking part of me went out the window when I was drinking and with coke, I became this horrible person. I thought I was funny and clever, yeah, sexy too.’
Beside her, Jordy nods.
‘Nothing else mattered but getting more stuff, more not-thinking juice. I kept taking it and taking it and I was jammed up against this guy when his mother found us. She screamed and he ran. She called my mother, who turned up and I was giggling because I’d taken my boots off and couldn’t get them back on—’
She feels the familiar wave of self-disgust at this story, at the thought of herself standing with her jeans lying on the floor along with skinny Bad-Haircut’s tee and his yellow Gucci slides.
Today, for the first time, the wave isn’t as intense.
Nobody’s pushing chairs back and saying they can’t be in the same room as her.
An older woman with grey curls and a broken arm in a sling is nodding in sympathy with Keera, tears flowing down her face.
‘Been there,’ she mutters, to Keera’s astonishment.
Jordy speaks up: ‘Me too,’ she says sadly.
‘Bet you were hot, though,’ mumbles Sketch, instantly ruining the feeling of shared experience.
This time, revulsion sweeps over Keera.
‘Not helpful, Sketch,’ says Sasha icily. ‘We need to talk about how you left your twelve-year-old daughter having chemo because you needed a hit.’
Everyone gapes and, for the first time, Sketch’s gaunt face looks human.
Human and bleak with shame.
