A few times he strolled as far as the road, then turned back and paced the corridor. He stood and studied the hospital clock. Sat in the empty dining room and watched the cooks make the dinner. He listened to the clash of cutlery, and smoked. Other patients came and sat at the empty tables and watched those working in the kitchen with a quiet, transfixed curiosity. He returned to watch them make the evening meal. It did not seem possible that he could last out the day. That it would pass like others did. But it did. And he was still there in that place when it was too late to have gone. As the hour came for the curtain to go up he fought the desire to lift the phone and ring the theatre. As the minutes dwindled he grew euphoric. He imagined the crowd sitting in the dark and he not among them, and was filled with wonder. The minute passed. Relief flooded through him. I’ve stayed away.

I didn’t go.

It has started.

He stood in the corridor outside the room of the man who had buried his bottles of gin in a Greek garden. Out came the Cole Porter song “Every Time We Say Goodbye”. Jack grew to love those words. Especially the refrain – the change from major to minor.

He wished Catherine well.

Then he began pacing the corridors like a popular song.

Corrloch. Belmullet. Aghadoon.

7. The Love Object

7

The Love Object

“So, you’ve lost your love object,” said the psychiatrist.

To hear Catherine reduced to such a crude nonentity was a comic blow to Jack’s pride. He stared at the man defensively.

“I’m thinking of letting you go,” the psychiatrist continued. “Stay off the drink for a while, and then, if you want, begin again. Start with a couple of pints. You are the only one will know if you are an alcoholic.”

Jack, in a panic, asked: “When do I have to go?”

“In a few days. It’s up to you. The main thing is there’s nothing chemically wrong with you.”

Jack walked the hospital pondering the words love object. Then he pondered the words letting you go. And after that chemically wrong. But, as yet, he did not begin to ponder the word alcoholic. From it grew all the strands of unreason and fanaticism and hopelessness that terrified him.

He sat among the friendly alcoholics on a Sunday morning in a small wooden room in the basement of the asylum. They shook his hand and he sat down and waited. A ray of cold sunlight came though the single window onto clouds of cigarette smoke.

“I can see you’ve suffered,” said the man beside him.