A few months before Peggy and Greta got sober, their friend Shay had stopped drinking. They’d hated him for it. He was a wowzer, they said. ‘My dad says there’s nothing worse than a reformed anything,’ Peggy said to Greta, leaning on her in a drunken way, too close, breathing all over her face. Greta’s eyes were closed. She was standing and holding a cigarette close to her mouth but not smoking it. ‘Mine too,’ she said, smiling, and shook her head, and they both laughed like they wouldn’t stop. It wasn’t until they went to their first meetings that they realised Shay had been going to meetings. He was drinking again now. They’d seen him just after they got out of rehab. He was on the street, out of it, just in town for the weekend. He was living at a camping ground miles from anywhere. Did they have any money? Peggy? Greta? Surely, they had some money? Then, ‘The light in your eyes.’ And a sadness took him over, then anger. ‘Fuck you,’ he yelled, and spat in their direction. ‘Fuck you.’ They hadn’t helped at all when he’d tried to stop drinking. They’d called him a loser and talked about him behind his back. They told people where he was if anyone was looking for him. They drank and smoked in front of him and bought him drinks and got angry when he wouldn’t drink.

‘He’s not wrong,’ Greta had said as he walked away, shouting and flinging his arms at them.

Peggy shook her head. ‘Fuck us,’ she had said. And Greta nodded. They had mentioned it in passing to Diane. Not out of any concern for Shay, but to lift themselves, to look good, like they had this and he never would, and Diane shook her head and made a clicking noise. ‘You,’ she said. ‘Come on.’ And, of course, she was right. They were eligible for it all. There was nothing special about them.

Neither of them understood it. People explained to them over and over that it was a disease. Neither of them completely believed that, but then, one by one, people they knew drank and people they knew died and people they knew with everything to lose lost everything and they started to suspect maybe they really were drinking despite themselves. That maybe there was something physically different between them and people who could drink half a glass of wine. It seemed like a cop-out. They had done terrible things. Drunk like pigs. To say they were sick was such a fucking cop-out.