The Dress (33 page)

Lily was disgusted. This was a direct slap in the face from Sally. She didn't even open the link to Lucy's dress. She wouldn't give them the satisfaction. Even so, Lily could feel the panic rising up in her. She told herself that all this bitchy Internet hearsay didn't matter, it would pass by as quickly as it came. As an established blogger herself Lily knew that better than anyone, but the truth was, Lily still doubted her ability as a designer to pull this thing off. After a few days away from it, the social media barrage itself felt intrusive and unsettling. The fact that it came from Sally made it too much.

She had to get out of the house. Out of her head.

Lily decided that a hot sweet drink in the company of her friend Gareth was just what she needed to settle herself. Besides, she still had to thank him for the corset.

As she was walking up the street, Sally rang. Lily didn't pick up, and then Sally's number came up again straight away. Lily was raging and hurt. Sally had taken the gloves off now and this was, truly, unforgivable.

As Lily stepped inside Old Times she noticed that Gareth had started growing a beard again. She was about the make a comment when he looked up at her briefly with a cool, detached expression instead of his usual warm smile, then went back to flicking through his catalogue.

‘Hey,' she said, ‘do you fancy a chai?'

Gareth shook his head, without looking up. What had she done?

Lily was furious. This was all she needed right now.

‘Fine,' she said, and started towards the door. ‘I don't know what's the matter with you but I'm not in the mood right now for hanging around to find out!'

As she was about to leave Gareth looked up and said, ‘I didn't know you had a boyfriend.'

Lily stopped, then stood looking at him, open-mouthed.

‘When I was going to drop off the corset the other morning, I saw him coming out of your gaff. Got into a big fancy car looking pretty pleased with himself.'

Lily continued to gape. Was Gareth for real?

‘I didn't want to disturb you, and I couldn't just leave it there on the pavement so I got Fergus to drop it over later.'

Lily didn't know whether she was more dumbfounded that Jack had been caught leaving her house or that Gareth was behaving as if he was her boyfriend, which he wasn't.

‘Well, I haven't got a boyfriend,' she said, ‘and it's none of your business anyway whether I have or I haven't.'

Or is it? She asked inwardly, chastising herself then for being stupid.

Gareth looked as if he had been hit by a truck.
What
was going on here?

‘Oh right,' he said, finally looking up from his catalogue at anything but her face. ‘It's just I thought we might have had, you know...' He shrugged and held his arms out looking like he really wished he hadn't started this but knowing that, now that she was standing square in front of him he had to finish it, finally saying, ‘...a “thing”?'

Lily would have normally found this reluctant embarrassment sweet, but after Sally betraying her and all the Internet bad-mouthing she was feeling all riled up and confrontational.

‘What, like a romantic “thing”?' she said. ‘Like you and me, boyfriend–girlfriend, going out “thing”?'

It was not how Gareth had planned on asking Lily out but now that it was happening he had no alternative but to blush wildly and stammer, ‘Well, I guess so, yeah.'

Lily was annoyed. She needed someone to help ease the pressure on her, not cause more of it with stupid dilly dallying and hint-giving.

So she said, ‘Newsflash, Gareth, if you want a girl to go out with you, especially an old fashioned one...' She swept her hand angrily down the 1940s skirt–blouse ensemble she was wearing by way of a hint. ‘...you are
supposed
to ask her out first. Not send your mates out to spy on her.'

‘I'm sorry, I—'

‘Yes, well... Oh, forget it!' Lily shouted, no longer knowing if she was angry with Gareth or herself but knowing for sure that she had had enough upset for one day. She ran out of the shop.

As soon as Lily turned the corner she felt sick. She should go back immediately and straighten things out with Gareth, explain the whole situation with Jack and thank him for the corset properly. However, as she was turning on her heel, Lily felt the ‘coin' of lace in her pocket and had a small, but very real epiphany.

She didn't need Gareth, or Jack or even Sally right now. What she needed was The Dress and, unlike Gareth, or Jack, or Sally, The Dress needed her.

Lily did not turn back to Old Times but instead ran towards her apartment, and as she ran, she felt a surge of inspiration pump through her veins. An idea had flashed into her mind. Her hands were shaking with excitement as she opened her apartment door. Lily bolted up the stairs, plugged in her iPad and printed off the Conlons' wedding picture from their Bangor grave. Then she laid it down on a piece of silk and began to trace the image of their faces onto the cream fabric.

This was what the trip to Ireland had been telling her; it wasn't the rainbows and the lakes, nor even the beautiful lace that was linking her to The Dress, it was the people. This was the place she was from, where her grandfather had been born.

This was the couple whose daughter had made the original dress and Lily was going to honour them by embroidering their images into the train of
her
dress.

For the next three days, nothing, not Twitter, not the Scott's competition, not her love life, or her family, or her friends or making things good with Gareth, was more important than doing that.

New York, 1959

Finding Joy

Step 8: Made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.

Step 9: Made direct amends to such people, wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

(Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous)

Joy did not find getting sober easy.

The first few days were harder than she could have imagined. She had been drinking daily for some months now and the demons had taken hold of her system. She did not sleep on the night of that first meeting, shaking and shivering, as every inch of her body craved its familiar medicine. Her mind was telling her not to drink, but her body was screaming that this was
wrong
. It took every inch of resolve she had to get herself out of bed the next day, dressed and over to the AA Club for a lunchtime meeting.

‘It'll pass,' one man told her, when she complained about feeling sick, and told her to just eat plenty of sugar.

She barely made it home from the meeting before she began to vomit and sweat profusely. Joy felt so wretched that she rang her family doctor; was there something wrong with her to be running this sort of a fever? He would give her something good to calm her nerves – how stupid, stupid of her to have allowed herself to run out of Librium like that.

‘Hullo, Doctor Allen's surgery, how may I help you?'

Joy's hands were shaking so hard that she could barely hold the receiver steady; panicking, she hung up. She couldn't tell the doctor what was going on – that would be too shameful for words – or turn up at the hospital like a common bum. It hadn't been like this before, giving up drink. How had she let it get this bad?

Then it hit her. Why was she putting herself through this? One drink would sort all of these terrible symptoms out. One half bottle of whisky and she would be able to get herself steady enough to get out to a meeting that night – she would wean herself off gradually, taper out, over a few days. As she stood up to get her purse and coat, Joy felt dizzy, fell to the ground and was so overcome with nausea that she could not stand up. She crawled to the bathroom and spent the next twenty-four hours crawling between the bed and the toilet. By the following morning she was managing to hold down water and by lunchtime, when Dolores called on her to check her progress, Joy felt the worst of her withdrawals were over.

From then on, things began to improve. Joy did everything Dolly told her to do, rising early each morning and saying a prayer before she even got out of bed, asking a God she did not entirely believe in to help her. Breakfast, an entirely new concept for her, was oatmeal generously sprinkled with sugar, which was fast becoming her addiction of choice, along with cigarettes.

Joy stuck rigidly to a routine. After breakfast, she spent the next hour getting herself and her apartment cleaned up and ready for the day. She walked to the store and bought groceries for her evening meal, then went home and tidied them away, before spending an hour reading
The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous
. The rest of the afternoon was spent attending to any paperwork, or other business, before getting ready for her early evening AA meeting.

Joy was astounded at how much there was to be done, simply attending to the business of being alive and living what was called a ‘good life'. She was mystified as to how she had occupied herself for all those years, without doing any of these ordinary things, like shopping, preparing meals, cleaning out one's own toilet pan and sweeping up one's own crumbs from the kitchen floor. She was amazed to find that each one of these chores now gave her a measure of satisfaction, because of the miraculous cycle of which they were a part. Joy had been unable to complete almost any task in her life, without reaching for a drink, or at least craving a drink, or thinking about a drink.

Joy had received her two-week chip the night before, and she was eating her breakfast as usual and looking around her apartment, thinking about what groceries she might need from the store, when it just struck her that she was feeling – she searched around for a word and all she could come up with was –
bored
. It was as if there was a spring inside her, that had relaxed for a few weeks and now it was beginning to tighten. She felt restless, fidgety, as if she wanted something to happen. Is this what I really want from life, Joy thought, chugging from meal to meal, meeting to meeting? It all just seemed so pointless, so grey, so boring, so... not
her
.

Who was this dull person, who ate oatmeal for breakfast and sat in small rooms, fraternizing with reformed drunks with badly dyed hair, wearing cheap pant suits? Tighter, tighter, the spring coiled, as the addiction imp, on her shoulder, whispered to Joy that she was taking this entire sobriety lark way too seriously. No drink, whatsoever, was ridiculous; no civilized person could be expected to forego their early evening cocktail. Joy looked at her watch; it was 5.50 p.m. If she was quick, she could get to the liquor store, buy a small bottle of vodka and some tonic. The addition of a fresh lime would cement her desire to bring her drinking habits back into line with ‘normality'. She might even go along to the AA meeting later, just to prove, to herself and everyone there, that there were no hard feelings. Her new friends were well intentioned, but really, not her sort of people: she was not an alcoholic after all, just a woman unfortunate enough to have had her husband stolen from her by some devious bitch, and who had turned to the bottle, for a while, to soothe her nerves.

Joy put on some lipstick and ran down the hallway. She turned left out of the door, on an automatic route towards the liquor store, before she had the chance to change her mind.

As she was coming out, vodka bottle in the bag (they were clean out of tonic), she bumped straight into Dolores, who was on her way to call on her, for a pre-arranged supper, that Joy had forgotten about.

‘It's not what you think,' Joy said defensively. ‘I have guests coming and I thought I ought to get something in.'

It was an outright lie and they both knew it, but even so, Dolores did not react as Joy thought she would; she was neither disappointed, nor upset.

‘Whatever is in that bag, why that's up to you, honey,' she said smiling, ‘but I'm guessing it's a bottle and you ain't got no guests coming, save yourself, but there's no need to lie.'

Joy was shocked, not sure how to respond, so she just stood there. Should she be ashamed, contrite, apologetic?

‘Really,' her sponsor said. ‘If you want to drink, well then hey, there's not a person in the wide world will stop you, Joy – not me, not everyone in AA combined, not the Good Lord Himself. It's your call, Joy. You want a drink? You have it. Hell, I'll even ice the glass for you. We'll go and buy a lime, if you like...'

This was not the reaction she was hoping for. In fact, Joy had been relieved when she saw her sponsor because she did not
want
that drink. The truth was, she hadn't
wanted
a drink in a long time. It was just what she did, what her addiction compelled her to do.

As long as Dolores and Dan were around, they could keep her away from it. Joy felt sick at the idea that this was the way it was; nobody was going to save her from drinking herself to death, first not Frank, now not the kind people in AA either.

This was down to her. She looked down and the hand holding the bag was shaking almost as hard it had been during the first days of her withdrawal. Is that where she wanted to go back to? She held the bag out to Dolores.

‘Hell, sugar,' she said. ‘I don't want it – ain't no guest coming to my house got use for that, anymore.'

There was a trash-can a few yards away and Joy walked over and put the bag with the bottle into it, then she and Dolores went to the meeting.

Later that night, Joy thought of going back and retrieving her bottle from the bin; but she didn't, and for five full nights after that, she thought of going back to the same spot, just to check if it was still there. Even though she did not want a drink, even though she knew the bag would be long gone, she felt it calling to her, and every night that it called and she didn't go, Joy felt as a victory.