Read Online The Devil I Know by Claire Kilroy - Free Book Online Page A

extremely private individual, and another that our relationship was focused from the outset exclusively on me and my sobriety, seeing as I was in dire need of saving when he found me. I did all the talking and he did all the listening – pretty much the same set-up as here, I’ve just noticed. What does that say about me? Nothing positive.
    I need hardly point out that M. Deauville would be most displeased at finding himself under such scrutiny, the chief witness being a former . . . how shall I describe myself? A former protégé. I am not of his church now. Our relationship had not always been a business one, you will have gathered. It ran far closer to the bone than that. M. Deauville was my sponsor. Everyone in the fellowship has a sponsor, someone you can talk to in your hour of need.
    I joined Alcoholics Anonymous – or first attended it, rather, since it is not a movement you can really join as such, just as it is not a movement you can really leave as such – in May 2005, three or four days after missing a flight home to attend to my mother who had been hospitalised. Nobody told me she was dying. I missed the flight because I was too drunk to board the plane. M. Deauville was the man who saved me. From what? Lord, do you really need to ask? From myself.
    The morning after I missed the flight, I did not wake up. The cleaning staff admitted themselves to my room when I failed to check out on time. I was in a Brussels airport hotel, though to put it bluntly I did not know where I was. Did not know who I was either. I had methodically popped a full month’s supply of sleeping tablets out of their blister packs and knocked them back with the contents of the minibar.
    The cleaners found me comatose and called 999, but the phone must have been upside down and 666 dialled in the panic because it was Hell that I was despatched to, and not hospital, make no mistake. Sheer hell. I had hit what is known in the trade as rock bottom.
    They loaded me into the back of an ambulance, it was explained to me later by the registrar manning the ward when I came around and demanded to know where the hell I was and how the hell I’d gotten there and who the hell had stolen my clothes. Hell, hell, hell. I couldn’t stop saying that word. Still can’t. The registrar informed me that my heart had stopped beating. The cardiac team had worked to get it going for a full half hour. Time of death was called by the duty surgeon at one minute past midnight. My body was growing cold in the harsh glare of the emergency room when the monitor detected a pulse. The instruments transmitted news of this development to the nurses’ station and the team was recalled. They had never seen anything like it before, the registrar said. Uncanny. That was the word he used.
    I checked my chart when he left the room. Temps de mort: 00.01h .
    I am somewhat hazy on the passage of time following my emergency admission. It lasted for eternity, as is the way with Hell. Days bled into nights, faces morphed into other faces and then back to the original face, monitors beat time. My back ached from the burden of lying on it, my stomach was a knot of acid. That period felt like a thousand-hour flight. The electronic atmosphere, the toxic static, the unremitting cramp. Around and around the globe we orbited, conflating time zones, cruising airspace, never touching down to get out and stretch for there is no rest for the wicked. I had woken in a foreign country with a tube in my arm, confused and gasping for a drink. I wanted my mother. She was my first thought. I needed her to comfort me. And then I remembered that she was in hospital too and needed me to comfort her. My body clenched with shame. ‘Nurse,’ I cried, ‘ Infirmière! Verpleegster!​ ’
    I attended my first meeting in the hospital itself. A porter propped me into a wheelchair and transferred me to a room upstairs in which sat a group of people who