To begin with, it felt like everyone was drinking. Falling off the wagon, busting, slipping. They went to so many meetings and for a while it seemed like there was always someone who had a look in their eye and a story to tell. They knew what drinking looked like. Or they thought they did. Really, they had no idea. Lots of things looked like drinking – breaking up, losing a kid, getting a bad diagnosis – but really they had no idea. Some people said they could tell, but then one day they’d look in the mirror and see it – the loss of light – but they hadn’t been drinking and they’d realise there was no way of telling except to yourself. Except in your own skin. Except when you lay down in bed and the world fell away and you were by yourself and you thought, ‘I have to lie down by myself,’ and at the same time, ‘In the end, when I take my last breath it will be me and whatever semblance of a spirit I have.’

There was an energy around any discussion of Heidi, a push and a pull, a tension between caring – or maybe even just wanting to appear to care – and being intrigued and wanting the problem to get worse. For the situation to become even more intense. Partly it was about wanting to be in the middle of something. When people asked them ‘How’s Heidi?’ Peggy and Greta loved it. Their faces would make a certain type of shape – one that looked like they were so worried, like they didn’t really want to say, but they so wanted to say. They would talk in hushed voices about the terrible things that were happening to Heidi. Dress it all up as concern, as wanting to help, but inside they loved to gossip. It put them on a high horse. By confessing Heidi’s sins they were trying to show they didn’t have any. That they were above the pull of some human kind of wanting. That they could stand on their own feet. That they were committed to staying sober above everything else, but perhaps without realising it they were actually showing that they too would love a door that led to a drink – some way of taking an understandable drink, a justified drink, a drink they could get away with. When people asked, they would tell them exactly how they thought Heidi was and sometimes the people who’d asked would love it. Sometimes they were as interested in this higher ground as Peggy and Greta were. But most of the time their eyes would start to wander, they would say something about Heidi’s life being Heidi’s, or that maybe it was okay for Peggy and Greta to just say ‘I haven’t seen her’ or ‘Not sure’.