Chapter Three
This is not going to be fun, thinks Keera, as she stands in the huge queue at Corfu airport passport control and decides that if hell is a place, it’s here.
The line is five people wide and has no end in sight. Fractious children are crying, there’s a low rumble of discontent from the queues and if the airport air-con is on, it’s at its lowest setting.
Keera’s head is sweating from the sheer weight of her long blonde hair, currently tied up into a pony with a baseball cap on top. A marl-grey sweatshirt hides the tattoos on her right arm – there’s one that says ‘Keera ’n’ Cat for ever’ and another one with a full-colour Irish tricolour flag rippling over a full-colour American flag.
If anything symbolises the moment when drinking and drugging got the better of her, it’s the flags.
They took six hours to ink in a tattoo parlour in the Tenderloin where there was a sign that said clients could not get inked if they were tripping.
‘Not tripping!’ Keera had said triumphantly, weavingthrough the ink shop into one of the big leather-and-chrome tattoo chairs and sinking into it.
‘It’s your arm, baby,’ shrugged a guy with a handlebar moustache. ‘But we don’t do discounts or compensate for people’s dumb choices.’
‘I never make dumb choices,’ Keera had declared, sitting on the chair, laying her arm out and displaying the picture of the flags. That was a lie for sure.
She had a water bottle full of tequila with a bit of orange juice in it for extra Vit C and by the time her flags were done, she was entirely numb pain-wise.
She’d relived the experience six months ago in rehab.
‘What were you feeling when you said that?’ asked Sasha, the toughest counsellor in Little Rock’s Haven Clinic.
‘I was feeling on top of the world,’ Keera said. ‘I always felt on top of the world when I was early on in the drinking or drugging experience.’
‘And later?’
‘Later I felt either sexy—’
Someone in the group sniggered and Sasha shot them a filthy look.
‘—or really sad.’
‘What did you do when you felt really sad?’ Sasha asked.
‘Drink more and do more coke, have something to take me down when I got too high, a little kiddie coke to straighten me out.’
After six weeks in Little Rock, Keera now knows that this is not the correct answer to future clean and sober living.
Six weeks in rehab has battered her into shape.
When she feels really sad now, she has to live with it, andit hurts.So much.Living without substances means she has to feel everything.
To distract from these thoughts, Keera thinks about getting her tattoos lasered off as she stands in the Corfu airport passport queue.
Some things make people very recognisable.
The hair and the tats were the trappings of the old Keera, the one who was on gossip magazine covers when she was ‘dating’ fashionable guys. Her mom, Dr Bobbi, had come up with the boyfriends for times when Keera needed a photogenic date.
The ‘dates’ were generally shy or awkward and both parties knew it was a business relationship.
‘Cool DJ or upcoming actor seen with singer Keera’.
‘IS IT LOVE?’ the supermarket tabloids would ask in giant letters.
It was never love, and Keera is astonished that any website even gave these dates the barest of credence.
It was just business.
