Drink: The Deadly Relationship Between Women and Alcohol. Ann Johnston Dowsett

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СКАЧАТЬ weaving down the halls like a passenger on a bumpy train, the sound of ice cubes declaring her arrival. But that was much later, after the cottages had been split up and the cousins had scattered, a long time after Africa.

      Rural South Africa, 1963

      The birth of anxiety.

      An outdoor music festival. I am ten years old, about to sing my first solo, “All Through the Night.”

      Suddenly, the large Afrikaans woman next to me starts to slap my arm. I can’t understand a word she’s saying. (Turns out, I’m not clapping for her son, my competition, who’s taking a bow.)

      Now it’s my turn to take the stage. I freeze.

      The audience starts to mumble.

      The judge walks over to see what’s wrong. My father comes, too. He talks me into performing. Maybe after the lunch break, suggests the judge. I nod. I can do this, on one condition. I don’t think I can face the crowd. The judge smiles. No, it’s not essential to face forward.

      After lunch, I keep my promise. On uncertain legs, I climb the stage. I turn to face my teacher, Mrs. Duplessis, at the piano. My back is to the audience.

      At the end of the afternoon, I’m awarded second prize: first for voice, marks off for delivery.

      Many years later, as I wrestled with major depression and a serious case of writer’s block, the judge’s verdict would become a constant in my head: “First for voice, marks off for delivery.” Code for: you’re failing.

      For decades I forgot this incident. Then it reappeared, just as I was to deliver a cover story on teenage suicide. Frozen at my computer, I would hear the judge’s words, over and over, in my head.

      In Montreal, as my world unraveled on the fifteenth floor of the student residence, I heard it again: “First for voice, marks off for delivery.”

      What does this story have to do with my drinking?

      Everything.

      Liquor soothes. It calms anxiety. It numbs depression. Ask any serious drinker: if you want to find your off button, alcohol can seem like an excellent choice.

      But not when you’re ten.

      Back then, as I sat with my parents on sticky chairs on an unforgiving African afternoon, my confidence was deeply shaken. I was pink with humiliation. And I felt my parents’ confusion at my behavior. I had always been top of my class. I had accelerated at school. I had never blown anything this badly before.

      It was a wobbly time for me.

      For my parents, our move to Africa was their great romantic adventure. For the first time in their marriage, they had finessed their situation and were truly together in a sustaining fashion: making a home on an acre in Mount Ayliff, a village of a hundred people nestled in the hilly terrain of the Transkei. All of a sudden there was a cook, a maid, a garden boy. Each night, my father would park his Land Rover out front and saunter through the door, darkly handsome in his khaki field clothes. He would light the propane lanterns—there was no electricity—and cast a warm glow through the long-halled house. My mother was delighted.

      For me, he was our bachelor father, and everything seemed new. At dinner, when my mother’s back was turned, he’d line his peas on his knife and toss them down his gullet, pressing his finger to his lips: “Shhhh!” “What, John? What did you just do?” We’d giggle. When she wasn’t looking, he’d open the fridge and swig milk straight from the bottle. This guy didn’t seem to know the rules.

      At bedtime, he’d read to us: Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. My mother was in love with him, and we were, too: this dad was different than the person I expected, but he made the house hum. My mother was chatty, extroverted, radiant. They entertained, and there was laughter. This was an era of cinch-waisted dresses and “sundowners.”

      I knew I was meant to be happy. But for me there was a deep sense of foreboding, a shadow I could not shake. And it went deeper than the obvious disappointment that I was no longer my mother’s primary companion, the eldest with special privileges.

      More often than not, I felt like the bad fairy at the birthday party. There was a deep, subterranean rumble I could feel, although I couldn’t put my finger on it. Something was not right.

      It started with our trips to the library, back in Canada, when we were busy getting shots and passports. While the librarian was loading my sister’s arms with animal books—books full of lions and poisonous snakes—I was reading stories about violence in the Belgian Congo, murder. I was deeply skeptical about this trip, and my fears seemed justified. When our plane landed for refueling in the Congo, en route to Johannesburg, I thought that the cleaners were boarding to kill us: I ran to the washroom, burst in on a man shaving, and promptly threw up. When my father introduced us to the snakebite kit in the kitchen, my fears were confirmed: this was African Gothic.

      I had always loved school. But in Mount Ayliff’s barren two-room schoolhouse—twenty students in eight grades—I couldn’t understand a word being said. This was Afrikaans immersion, and I was lost. For the first time in my life, I was bullied on a regular basis. While two large boys would pin me to the ground, another would hold an insect close to my face, tearing its legs off, yelling at me for speaking English. I didn’t tell my parents: as far as I was concerned, there wasn’t much point. They didn’t know Afrikaans, either.

      Of course, in a very short time, my sister and I learned Afrikaans and Xhosa, too, the Bantu language spoken by our servants. I found a defender at school, a much younger English boy named Nicky Hastie, so staunchly loyal that I later named my son after him. My sister and I adopted a pet frog, named him Sam, and carried him to school in a little cardboard suitcase. He lived under my desk, and I’d peek on him when Mrs. Duplessis had her back turned.

      In other words, we adjusted. While my mother developed a close relationship with our cook, we learned that the maid had a vicious temper and hated children. When my mother was out, she would threaten us with a hot iron, chasing us down the long halls of the house. On more than one occasion, she burned a hole in my sister’s favorite blue dress.

      One Saturday night, we paid her back. Left in her care, we disappeared into our bedroom wardrobe, leading her to believe we had run away. Screaming at the sight of our empty beds, she ran to the servants’ quarters to fetch the cook. By the time she showed up, we were safe and sound. The cook left, and we hopped back in the wardrobe. Later, the maid would get even: when we headed back to Canada, we knew she was planning to chop the heads off our favorite bantam chickens to cook them for dinner. But by then our little pack of three was well established: John and Cate and I were tight as tight could be, and that fact would never change.

      On Thursdays, Cate and I would wander by the local jail on our way home from piano lessons, passing hard candies through the fence to the neighbor’s former cook. Rumor had it that she had killed a younger servant, whom she had caught sleeping with her boyfriend, the garden boy. Maybe it was the garden boy she killed. We weren’t concerned: we loved her for the corn bread she had cooked, and for the hugs she gave us when we first arrived in the village. We liked her smile (although I used to imagine her washing the blood off the knife, after she stabbed the person; I thought she must be very brave).

      There was a political undercurrent in the village. We knew we were the last whites to live in Mount Ayliff, that soon this would be the first homeland given back to the blacks. One Saturday a group decided to speed up the СКАЧАТЬ