Claire Kilroy: The Devil I Know

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 were blatantly not part of the medical corps. ‘What the fuck is this?’ I wanted to know, because I used to curse a lot back then. I used to do a great many bad things back then. I am paying for it now. The nurses had kitted me out in a pair of geriatric pyjamas and a maroon dressing gown since my luggage hadn’t accompanied me to the hospital. I wouldn’t accompany me either, given the option. The porter rolled my wheelchair into the circle and made a song and dance of applying the brake, letting me know in no uncertain terms that I was parked.

The group turned to me and smiled the meek, apologetic smile. I scowled, wondering what their game was. They would have registered that I was a hard case. You soon learn to recognise the signs. I wasn’t there of my own volition and they knew it. All I knew was that I could murder a pint.

The meeting was conducted in French. Salut, je m’appelle Marcel. Je suis un alcoolique. Salut Marcel , let’s hear it for Marcel,a big hand for Marcel. I stared at him with open hostility. What had he ever done that was so great? Then Marcel started speaking. The meek smiling stopped and the earnest listening began.

The woman beside me leaned in and took to translating Marcel’s story into English, making a fair fist of it too. Marcel knew it was time to knock his drinking on the head when he woke up in the North Sea one freezing November dawn clinging to a rock. He rolled up his sleeves to show us the scars of the wounds he had sustained, and the stump where his ring finger used to be, at which sight I looked away and stared at my feet. They were clad in another man’s slippers, old brown things that smelled a little ripe. Then one of them slid off and landed with a slap on the linoleum floor. Marcel broke off his narration to glare at the slipper as if I’d laid a turd. No one stooped to pick it up and replace it on my bare foot. And me in a wheelchair. Marcel re-embarked on his story. When he was finished, he wiped away a tear and everyone clapped except me. Then they chanted some class of prayer.

The meeting ended, but there was no sign of the porter coming to rescue me. The lot of them tramped out, leaving me alone in an empty circle of seats with my back to the door. There is nothing so atmospheric as a recently vacated room. I extended my foot to the floor and hooked the slipper with my big toe, flipped it back onto my foot. Why the staff had installed me in a wheelchair, I could not say. I still had the use of my legs. Fuck this, I thought, and got up and headed out for a smoke.

That was my first meeting. It was a beginning.

*

They discharged me a few days later, and I was standing on the hospital steps looking up and down the street in search of the nearest bar when my mobile phone rang. I took it out and frowned. Last I’d looked, the battery had been dead. Unknown , read the screen.

‘Hello, Tristram.’ The voice was a cultured one, grave and authoritative. ‘My name is Monsieur Deauville,’ the caller continued. ‘I realise that you are dying for a drink, and I am ringing to inform you that if you pursue this course of action, you most certainly will die for it.’

For a lurid moment, I saw my death certificate. Temps de mort, 00.01h . I reached for the handrail to steady myself, blinking to drive out the sight of those words, but the pulsing letters had seared my retina and were superimposed on the street, and the hospital and the sky, and anywhere else that I cared to look.

‘Do you wish to die?’ M. Deauville asked.

I was having trouble breathing. A man came up offering assistance but I waved him away because what help could he possibly have given me? My heart had stopped and I had been pronounced dead, during which time a signal had been triggered and my death certificate retrieved from whatever vault it had been stored in. It had been loaded onto a trolley just as my body had been loaded onto a trolley, and wheeled to some senior functionary’s desk, where it was stacked with the certificates of the other souls awaiting the authorisation to be dispatched. I was dying for a drink.

When I did not answer, M. Deauville repeated his question. ‘Do you wish to die?’

‘No,’ I wheezed down the line. ‘No, I don’t wish to die.’

Tocka tocka in the background — what was that strange noise? ‘Good. Go back to your hotel room,’ he instructed me. ‘I have called you a car. You will find it waiting by the hospital entrance.’

I wheeled around. A man in a suit was standing by a black Mercedes, holding a sign which bore my name.

‘I will call back when you have checked in.’

‘Wait.’ I didn’t have M. Deauville’s number, but he had already hung up.

*

I have been here before. That was my first thought when I entered the hotel room. I took off my jacket and shoes and lay on my back on the bed. Was this the room? I couldn’t tell if it was the same room in which I had almost killed myself because they are all the same room. They are all hell. You cannot imagine the depth of the hole into which I had dug myself. At least, I hope you can’t. I leapt up and sprang across the room and wrenched open the minibar. It was empty. Everything was empty. I looked at the ceiling and moaned. And then M. Deauville called.

*

We were like lovers. We were holed up in that one room together for days on end like lovers, talking the long hours away. We shut the rest of the world out since the equilibrium we had chanced upon was so very fragile. At least, it was so very fragile to me. I was terrified of upsetting the balance, having spent my life upsetting the balance. But M. Deauville assured me that there was no such thing as a pattern that could not be broken.

I had my meals sent up and I deposited the emptied trays out in the corridor. Housekeeping exchanged old towels for new at the door and replenished my stock of sparkling water. I did crunches and press-ups in front of the window and kept to my fourteen-by-twelve cell. For the first time since hitting his teens, Tristram St Lawrence was sober. I had broken my mother’s heart. With a racing pulse I picked up the phone. ‘Tristram,’ she gasped, ‘the Guards told me you were dead!’ I had not heard her voice in years. Too ashamed to call or show my face. ‘It’s okay, Mummy, I’m still alive!’ I was crying. So was she. I promised to come home but the connection went dead and my pledges vanished into the ether. I later discovered that she passed away the following day. It was probably for the best that I did not know this at the time. The news would have finished me.