The Two Hours Between the Last Client and the First Drink

I kept other people's accounts for twenty-six years. Small firms mostly, a panel beater, two dentists, a man who imported garden furniture and never once filed on time. I was the person they trusted with the thing they found frightening. I reconciled their statements to the cent. I phoned them before SARS did. For a long time I believed that a man who could hold other people's money straight could not possibly be coming apart in his own hands. That belief cost me nearly everything I had.

How it started, which is to say how I did not notice

It did not start with a bottle hidden in a drawer. It started with a glass of wine on a Friday because the week had been long, and then a glass on a Thursday because Thursday was nearly Friday, and then something quiet after my last appointment of the day because the house felt loud with everyone in it. I was in my early forties then. I told myself it was ordinary. Half the men I knew drank the same way, standing at a braai, laughing too loudly, driving home when they should not have.

The slide, when I look back on it now, was measured in small surrenders. A thing I used to do and then stopped doing. I stopped helping my daughter with her maths homework in the evenings because by seven I was not steady enough to be patient. I stopped going to the morning parkrun. I started keeping a bottle in the boot of the car, not because I planned to drink in the car, but because having it near me felt like insurance against a feeling I could not name. The two hours between my last client leaving and the first drink of the evening became the hardest two hours of every day. I organised my whole life around shortening them.

The bargaining nobody saw

I was very good at the private arithmetic of a drinking man. I never drank before noon, so I was fine. I only drank at home, so I was fine. I could stop for a week whenever I wanted to, and I proved it to myself every few months, which only proved how much I needed the proof. I moved the goalposts so gently that I never felt them move.

My wife noticed long before I admitted anything. She did not shout. She would just go quiet in a particular way, and the quiet would sit between us at the table like a third person. My daughter, who was fourteen by then, started closing her bedroom door in the evenings. I used to tell myself she was just being a teenager. The truth is she had learned that the father who came up the passage after eight was not quite the same man who had left for work that morning, and she had decided, sensibly, to protect herself from the difference.

The work held longest, which is the thing people like me cling to. I still got the books right. But I was slower. I began missing deadlines I had never missed. A client I had kept for eleven years moved to a bigger firm, and when he phoned to tell me, kindly, he said something I have not been able to forget. He said, "You do not seem like yourself lately." I thanked him and put the phone down and poured a drink to take the edge off the shame, which is the whole trap in a single sentence.

The morning I stopped lying to myself

It was an ordinary Tuesday. I had been up since half past three, not drinking, just lying there with my heart going like a trapped bird, doing the sums on how much I had put away the night before and how I would get through the day. I got up to make coffee and my hands were shaking so badly that I could not hold the kettle. I stood in my own kitchen, a grown man of forty seven, a man who balanced ledgers for a living, and I could not pour water into a cup.

I did not have a grand revelation. I want to be honest about that, because the films make it look like a single dramatic moment. It was smaller and worse than that. It was simply the end of my own argument. I had run out of ways to tell myself I was managing. I sat down on the kitchen floor with my back against the cupboard and I said out loud, to no one, that I could not stop on my own. I had tried. I had tried the way you try to hold your breath, with willpower and clenched teeth, and it had never once worked past a fortnight.

That was the morning I let my wife make a phone call I had refused to let her make for three years. She had quietly kept a number. She had looked into Alcohol rehab months earlier, on a night I did not know about, and had said nothing because she knew I was not ready to hear it. When I finally was, she did not say I told you so. She just made the tea and sat with me until it was late enough to phone.

Going in

I had imagined a place with bars on the windows and a kind of punishment in the air. It was not like that. It was a house, really, with a garden and other men who looked as ordinary and as frightened as I did. The first few days of a man coming off alcohol are not dignified, and I will not pretend otherwise. There is sweating and shaking and a doctor keeping a close eye on your blood pressure. There is a lot of sitting with feelings you have spent years drowning. When people talk about going to a residential programme, when they look for Drug rehab for someone they love, I think they picture the medical part. The harder part came after, when my body was clear and there was nothing left between me and the plain facts of my own life.

I was there for a little over three months. The days had a shape, which I had not realised I was starving for. There was a time to get up and a time to eat and a group every morning where men far braver than me said things out loud that I had only ever thought in the dark. I learned that I was not uniquely broken, which is both humbling and enormously freeing. I had believed my drinking was a secret moral failure. I came to understand it as something closer to an illness that had been quietly feeding on my loneliness.

The small returns

Recovery, for me, has not been a single triumphant line. It has been the slow return of small things. The first was my handwriting. About three weeks in, I wrote a letter to my daughter, and my hand did not shake, and the letters sat on the line the way they used to. I sat looking at that page for a long time. A man who has balanced books all his life knows what it means for the numbers to line up again.

Then it was sleep, real sleep, the kind that comes without a drink to knock you out and leaves you in the morning instead of leaving you wrecked. Then it was appetite. Then, hardest and best of all, it was my daughter. She came to visit on a Sunday near the end. We sat in the garden and she told me about a boy she liked and a subject she hated, and she did not close any door against me, because there was no door to close. I was simply there, present, the whole of me in the chair beside her. I had not given her that in years.

I do not say the name of the place often, and I will not dress it up here. People sometimes ask me whether it was the best rehab in South Africa, as though there were a league table, and I tell them that the question misses the point. It was not the building that did the work. It was the fact that I finally stopped and let people help me, in a place built to make that possible. If it matters to anyone reading this, it was a house called Freeman House, and I was not special there, and that ordinariness was the medicine.

Where I am now

I am home. I am back at my desk, and my clients are slowly coming back too, and I treat each returned one as a small undeserved grace. I go to a meeting on Wednesday evenings and I do not miss it for anything. I still find the early evening hard, that old two hour gap, so I have learned to fill it deliberately, with a walk, with cooking, with phoning another man who understands.

My daughter is seventeen now. The other week she asked me to help her with her tax, of all things, a holiday job and her first little return. We sat at the kitchen table, the same table, and I showed her how it all fits together. My hands were steady. That is the whole of it, really. A steady hand, a daughter beside me, and a quiet that is mine again rather than something I had to run from.