I was due to go into a seven-week rehab. You were supposed to arrive sober. Mom had some words of advice before I went in: ‘Remember, Ruby, you are a rape victim, that’s the root of your problem. Tell them what you told the police. They’ll be able to help you, I’m sure.’ I stared at my mom, but she looked away. They wouldn’t be able to help me.
10
I was drunk on arrival at Longhurst, the exclusive treatment centre for addicts in the middle of nowhere, that Sunday evening. I had a water bottle filled with vodka, which was confiscated when I was going through registration. Nobody checked it or sniffed it. They just poured it down the drain in front of me. Mom hugged me and was then told to leave. There was to be no contact at all for the first two weeks with any of my friends or family in the outside world. I realized that I didn’t have any friends. I had numbers in my phone of party people but nobody I could call in this situation. They took my phone. They had searched my bags thoroughly, I realized that night. At least I had a room of my own.
Longhurst. There was a chain of these residential rehab clinics around the world. On their website there were testimonials from anonymous famous people.
‘Longhurst saved my life’ – twice-nominated Oscar actress
‘Longhurst gave me back the ability to work’ – Nobel Prize winner
How the hell were we supposed to know if this was true if these people were all anonymous? I smelled bullshit.
As Mom drove off down the leafy driveway, I started to cry. Sheila, a counsellor, moved to comfort me. She said the house was full of addicts of all sorts, gamblers, people with eating disorders, sex addicts, as well as ordinary alcoholics and drug addicts ‘like you’. I don’t know if she meant this to be comforting, butI found it terrifying. I wasn’t an addict. I could give up any time I wanted to. I just didn’t want to. I had only started drinking properly a few years ago, for God’s sake. It was my rite of passage.
It was bedtime. There was no lock on my bedroom door. Apart from that, it was like any bland hotel room you’d find in a three-star establishment. Without the TV or bedside clock. Or minibar. But I was on my own. I went hunting through my suitcase. They had found the vodka in the mouthwash and confiscated it (vodka mixed with tea made a convincing Listerine, I had thought to myself), they had found the wraps of coke under the insoles of my shoes, the pills in a baggie in my bottle of conditioner. It was almost as if they’d done this before.
I crawled under the duvet and into the foetal position. I cried silent tears into my pillow. Sheila knocked on my door and, entering, whispered, ‘The first night is the worst, I promise.’ I said nothing and held my breath until she left. How the hell was I supposed to sleep? I stared at the ceiling. There was a crack in the plaster that took on the shape of a devil creature under the light that streamed in from the car park through the thin curtains. I stared at it until dawn.
I had barely closed my eyes when a stocky guy knocked and entered without asking my permission. He ordered me to get showered and dressed and get down to the breakfast room immediately. He was frightening. ‘You must have slept through the bell,’ he said in a tone that was nothing less than menacing.
When I got down to the breakfast room, somebody introduced the stocky guy as Jack, one of the addicts. ‘Coke and booze,’ he said. I think he expected me to name my addiction and then we’d high-five in solidarity, but I didn’t have an addiction. His authority was strangely attractive. He told me to help myself to cereal.
The house we were in was old and beautiful. The dining-room table seated eighteen people. The others were a mix of oldand young, but mostly surprisingly young and, judging by their accents, international. No one said their last name, though a few people were open about who they were. There was an old Dutch man who was a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, a young pretty Black girl from Nigeria called Lorraine, she said, the daughter of a diplomat stationed in Washington DC, and an expensively dressed Italian woman in her late twenties perhaps, the wife of some industrialist I’d never heard of. Jack was the only Irish inmate as far as I could tell. The rest were all either famous or wealthy in their home countries, or their family members were. People chose to go to Longhurst in a country where they wouldn’t be recognized. How much had this cost Dad?
The clock on the wall said five past four. Not breakfast time. Jack said he had just started his sixth week in here. ‘None of the clocks in here tell the right time. It keeps you on your toes. The bell tells you when the next session is.’ Time would slow down to a crawl in this place. Without any distractions, I was going to go mad.
Jack insisted on taking me on a tour of the house. There was a library crammed to the rafters with self-help books. The yoga/meditation room looked out on to a frosty November lawn. We met various people along the way who introduced themselves by their first names, but I didn’t know if they were addicts or counsellors. I felt sorry for the old Dutch guy. He brought up the average age by about thirty years. Jack was thirtyish. And the hottest. Though there wasn’t much competition.
A bell rang and we were led into a large room for meditation. I was told to get rid of my thoughts. I closed my eyes. They had no idea. I was thinking that if I stayed sober for ten days, it would prove that I wasn’t an addict. Today was Monday – I could leave by Wednesday of the following week. All I had to do was play along. Then I was thinking that if Jack was leaving by the end of next week, I could probably hook up with him beforeI left. Sheila, the counsellor and meditation guide, was whispering some ‘calming’ words in our ears as she paced around the room. I could hear what she was saying to others: ‘mountains’, ‘sea’, ‘sky’. When she came to me, she whispered ‘beach’ and it reminded me of the time when a gang of us were kicked out of a nightclub at 4 a.m. and we walked down to Sandymount Strand. I woke up on the beach the next morning with some stranger’s coat thrown over me. I tried to remember when that was and who was in the gang.
Sheila tinkled a small bell. ‘Now, did anyone achieve an empty mind for any part of that half-hour?’ I shot my hand into the air, then realized that Lorraine and I were the only ones with our hands up. The other twelve in the room looked disappointed in themselves. Jack stared at me.
‘Liar,’ he said as we left the room. ‘There’s no point, you know. If you want to get clean, the only way is the truth.’
I flashed him my most angelic smile. ‘It wasn’t a lie; I already feel cleansed. Maybe some people “get it” faster than others.’
Next, there was a lecture in a room in the basement. The theme that day was shame: ‘What makes us ashamed? What does it feel like? Where in your body do you feel it? What have you done in your addiction to be ashamed of?’ Some people volunteered information. One had beaten up her child (alcohol). Another had set fire to his sister’s home when she wouldn’t give him more money (coke). A stick-thin girl had eaten an entire birthday cake during a binge on the morning of her sister’s twenty-first birthday party (bulimic?). A Canadian guy had forged his mother’s signature to mortgage their beach house to get money to pay off debts (gambler).
My parents had put me in a house with freaks. I hadn’t done anything I was ashamed of. Stealing Mom’s jewellery wasn’t that bad. She hardly wore it and could afford to replace it.
There was a break for lunch then. The food was good, simple,nutritious and healthy. It had been a while since I’d eaten healthily. My relationship with food was not good. I either ate for soakage, or it was hangover food. Mostly greasy, calorific stuff. Maybe I could drop a few pounds in here? We all ate together, though there was tension in the air as we tried not to notice Estelle, the thin girl, remove the tortilla from her wrap and spear a lettuce leaf into her mouth, chewing it endlessly until the bell rang again.
Next was group therapy. I was welcomed by Owen and asked to explain why I was here. I wasn’t expecting this. ‘I don’t want to say in front of a room full of strangers.’ I couldn’t keep the condescension out of my voice on the word ‘strangers’. A guy called Martin smiled at me. Too short, I thought.
‘By the end of this meeting we won’t be strangers,’ he said.
I was starting to get twitchy. Annoyed. And thirsty.
‘Do I have to speak?’ I said, using my scared small-child voice. I was an aspiring actress, after all.
Owen smiled. ‘Perhaps tomorrow?’
I put my head down and tried to listen to Lorraine talk about the havoc she had wreaked on her family through her cocaine addiction. I was desperately trying to contain my shaking body. I couldn’t act my way out of that.
Just as Lorraine was telling us about crashing her dad’s Mercedes on her fourteenth birthday, like a coke-fuelled Ferris Bueller, Owen stopped her and said, ‘Sorry to interrupt, Lorraine, but are you okay, Ruby? Would you be more comfortable on the sofa?’
‘No, I’m fine,’ I said. ‘This sweater was washed with a new detergent and I think I’m allergic to it. I’m tired and I didn’t sleep last night. May I go and lie down, please?’
