but I wanted a fucking drink.
Back in my bedsit in the evenings after the treatment centre, I was exhausted. I was trying to be honest with myself for the first time in years. I didn’t drink, although I often wanted to, and lay on my bed with the internet and the window open. Onthose summer nights I couldn’t believe winter existed. In the same way, when I tried to imagine Orkney, it was nothing but Dreamland.
After ‘class’ one day, I went to visit a couple of guys who had left the treatment programme (one finished the twelve weeks, the other was asked to leave after eight) and were now in the supported housing block where they lived with twenty or so other male addicts. It was a strange place: the en-suite rooms, secure entry system and smell of stale smoke made it feel somewhere between a hotel, prison and student halls-of-residence.
Said was the same age as me and, despite the differences between us, his life over the last decade had been a similar catalogue of broken relationships and lost jobs. He’d smoked crack and heroin for years but, when I visited, it was five weeks since he had finished the programme and he had been clean for more than four months.
He told me how he had left school early after getting into trouble for fights and vandalism, then selling drugs. He’d made many attempts to get clean, including being prescribed metha-done and spending time in Bangladesh, but always relapsed. This time, he said, he wasn’t running away from his problems. After his last use of heroin in February, he had been in detox for twenty-one days before joining our treatment group. Said’s success was the exception rather than the rule. The treatment programme were unable to give me statistics, but of the tenpeople who were there when I started, only two successfully graduated. One left after she decided it was too intense, one was asked to leave for ‘failing to engage with the programme’, and five were discharged (kicked out) because they relapsed (they drank or took drugs).
More people joined when I was there, with a similar relapse rate. The programme was tough. Although it had the same 100 per cent abstinence and zero-tolerance policy as a residential centre, each night and weekend we were sent back into the real world, with its pressure and temptations.
While I was visiting Said, a man who had been discharged from the programme in my second week, following a relapse, came into the kitchen. The deterioration in his appearance was shocking. He had lost weight and teeth, and his hands and face were covered with sores, which the others later told me were cigarette burns. He told me that, after leaving, he had gone on a bender culminating in a five-day stay in the psychiatric ward of Mile End Hospital. He said he was back in AA meetings, trying to stay off the drink and feeling ‘better’, but his wild eyes told a different story.
At seventy-three days since I had had a drink, more than two months into the programme, one of the main ‘feelings’ I had was a sense of luckiness. I listened all day to the others’ stories and was so sad at the places their addiction had taken them. In group therapy one day, one of the older peers was talking abouthis family, from whom he had been estranged for more than a decade due to his chronic drunkenness. He said he had learned not to think about them too much, and when he went to sleep, he told himself that he should not dream about them, son, daughter or wife. ‘But then I have no one to dream of.’
Another peer, in his fifties, a former heroin user and dealer, was reading out his homework in which he talked about his childhood love of sailing, fishing and ‘open seas’, and his once-tender relationship with the wife who had divorced him in the eighties. Everyone in the circle, including the counsellors who had heard so much already, and men who had spent almost half their life in jail, was fighting back tears at wasted lives, thwarted ambitions and broken
Back in my bedsit in the evenings after the treatment centre, I was exhausted. I was trying to be honest with myself for the first time in years. I didn’t drink, although I often wanted to, and lay on my bed with the internet and the window open. Onthose summer nights I couldn’t believe winter existed. In the same way, when I tried to imagine Orkney, it was nothing but Dreamland.
After ‘class’ one day, I went to visit a couple of guys who had left the treatment programme (one finished the twelve weeks, the other was asked to leave after eight) and were now in the supported housing block where they lived with twenty or so other male addicts. It was a strange place: the en-suite rooms, secure entry system and smell of stale smoke made it feel somewhere between a hotel, prison and student halls-of-residence.
Said was the same age as me and, despite the differences between us, his life over the last decade had been a similar catalogue of broken relationships and lost jobs. He’d smoked crack and heroin for years but, when I visited, it was five weeks since he had finished the programme and he had been clean for more than four months.
He told me how he had left school early after getting into trouble for fights and vandalism, then selling drugs. He’d made many attempts to get clean, including being prescribed metha-done and spending time in Bangladesh, but always relapsed. This time, he said, he wasn’t running away from his problems. After his last use of heroin in February, he had been in detox for twenty-one days before joining our treatment group. Said’s success was the exception rather than the rule. The treatment programme were unable to give me statistics, but of the tenpeople who were there when I started, only two successfully graduated. One left after she decided it was too intense, one was asked to leave for ‘failing to engage with the programme’, and five were discharged (kicked out) because they relapsed (they drank or took drugs).
More people joined when I was there, with a similar relapse rate. The programme was tough. Although it had the same 100 per cent abstinence and zero-tolerance policy as a residential centre, each night and weekend we were sent back into the real world, with its pressure and temptations.
While I was visiting Said, a man who had been discharged from the programme in my second week, following a relapse, came into the kitchen. The deterioration in his appearance was shocking. He had lost weight and teeth, and his hands and face were covered with sores, which the others later told me were cigarette burns. He told me that, after leaving, he had gone on a bender culminating in a five-day stay in the psychiatric ward of Mile End Hospital. He said he was back in AA meetings, trying to stay off the drink and feeling ‘better’, but his wild eyes told a different story.
At seventy-three days since I had had a drink, more than two months into the programme, one of the main ‘feelings’ I had was a sense of luckiness. I listened all day to the others’ stories and was so sad at the places their addiction had taken them. In group therapy one day, one of the older peers was talking abouthis family, from whom he had been estranged for more than a decade due to his chronic drunkenness. He said he had learned not to think about them too much, and when he went to sleep, he told himself that he should not dream about them, son, daughter or wife. ‘But then I have no one to dream of.’
Another peer, in his fifties, a former heroin user and dealer, was reading out his homework in which he talked about his childhood love of sailing, fishing and ‘open seas’, and his once-tender relationship with the wife who had divorced him in the eighties. Everyone in the circle, including the counsellors who had heard so much already, and men who had spent almost half their life in jail, was fighting back tears at wasted lives, thwarted ambitions and broken
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