Falling out of Heaven

  ‘Cathy?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘My name is Gabriel…And I am an alcoholic.’

  She squeezes my hand and I see the beginning of a tear in her eye. When she holds me I can feel the heavy patter of her breath on my neck.

  After an hour or so we leave the grounds of the hospital. Thaddeus comes to say farewell. He puts his arms around me and holds me in a tight hug. As he lets go he tells me to look after myself.

  ‘And don’t you dare forget me,’ he says.

  I nod and hold his gaze for a moment before turning to say goodbye to Alf who has joined us too.

  ‘You were a stubborn old bastard,’ he says to me.

  ‘Thanks, Alf. So are you.’

  ‘See you in the rooms.’

  ‘Yes.’

  As we walk through the gates I think of the previous few weeks and how I’ve changed, it scares me to think of how far down I went. The mind is a universe in itself. Thaddeus was right when he had said that all of the heavens and all of the hells are within us. I have been to each of them in my time.

  Some Kind of Peace

  I am on my way to Thaddeus’s funeral; I am with Greg in his car. It was he who rang me to tell me the news. We left Newry about forty minutes ago. The burial is on the outskirts of Dublin, we are in good time. In spite of everything we have both stayed sober in the last five years. Others have not been so lucky; Clive, we later found out, returned to the United States and was arrested for shoplifting in an off-licence in the small town in Arizona where he grew up. Josey ended up back in lock-up twice, the second time she slashed her wrists. She survived, just. After that she moved, some people said England, some Canada. Wherever she is I hope that she has found some kind of peace.

  Shortly after I left St Pat’s I phoned Jeff and arranged to meet him. I remember how I sat in the front room of his house unable to speak to him, maybe it was pride, maybe it was fear. Eventually I said: ‘I see the ceasefire is holding.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And it’s all because of us,’ he continued.

  I laughed and then looked down at the floor and quietly said: ‘Thank you, Jeff…Thank you.’

  ‘No need, Gabriel. The fact that you are sober is thanks enough for me.’

  Frank became my sponsor, my mentor. He steered me through my early days of sobriety when the desire to drink would rise in me like a tidal wave, so high and so sudden that I feared that I might drown. I stayed with him for a while in his small flat and we went to meeting after meeting. It took six months for my wife to take me back. I remember the feeling as I stepped over the threshold of my home, I felt as if I had come back from a war. My son John was standing in the hallway to greet me, gently hopping from foot to foot with excitement. It wasn’t easy at first; there were many wounds to heal. There were times when we both nearly called it a day but something kept us there. Words like forgiveness and goodness crept into our vocabularies. I often shook my head in disbelief when I recalled the madness that had engulfed me. I kept away from bars, in the beginning I even crossed the street to avoid walking past their doorways with their warmth and their sweet promise. My sister and I began to reclaim some of the ground we had lost when we were children. We would meet for a sandwich in the town and quietly talk of the past and the need to move on. Seamus and I even went fishing from time to time and sometimes we would remember to comment on the beauty of the world around us.

  When I was one year sober I found work in a new school that had only been open eighteen months or so. It was thrilling to teach again. Slowly but surely I became more comfortable in the skin I had been given to wear. Sometimes though the black clouds would steal across my soul like they did so many times before, except this time I knew that they would pass.

  I didn’t see Thaddeus for a long time but I thought of him often. One day shortly after my second sober birthday I was in Dublin and arranged to meet him. I smiled when he answered the phone and immediately heard the familiar authority of his voice, and the strong unwavering self-belief. We met in a small café in the centre of the city; he was already there when I arrived, sitting in a corner watching the world around him going about its day. He rose to shake my hand and said: ‘Still sober?’

  ‘Yes, Thaddeus. Still sober.’

  He made a fist with his left hand and gently punched the air.

  ‘We’re still here.’

  ‘Yes, Thaddeus, we’re still here.’

  By the same author

  Torn Water

  Copyright

  First published in Great Britain in 2010 by

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  Text copyright © John Lynch 2010

  FIRST EDITION

  The right of John Lynch to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Page 143–5, quotations from Louis MacNeice’s ‘Sunlight on the Garden’ from Collected Poems by Louis MacNeice, Faber and Faber, 2007, reproduced by permission of David Higham Associates

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