You Left Early by Louisa Young

Author:Louisa Young [Louisa Young]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2018-04-23T04:00:00+00:00

I applied it to me, and I applied it to him, and then I took the line Churchill took with Hitler over the invasion of Poland in 1939: if he didn’t do what was necessary (withdraw from Poland/demonstrate sobriety), within a set timescale, then we would be over. If he couldn’t demonstrate sobriety to me within six months, I would no longer be his girlfriend.

But Robert was not Hitler. I was not Churchill. I was in love with him – not just with what he used to be or could be or what I wanted him to be, but with the actual him, battered and snarling inside the sticky web of his addiction.

His response was to lock himself away. He said I’d banned him, and refused to see me. He rang me most days, sometimes chatty and amiable as if nothing was wrong; sometimes a vitriolic slug in a puddle, miserable, vicious, drunk and hurt, rank and hissing, immobilised, interminable. I would put the phone down, and go and do something else; he’d still be there half an hour later, talking to the ether.

Three weeks in, he told me he was in a deep, deep depression. I wasn’t allowed in; he wouldn’t come out. How many reasons are there why an alcoholic locks himself away, all alone?

In his Recovery papers, he describes this as ‘Louisa threw me out’.

That summer, both my parents were in hospital.

*

Robert had not read the novel. He was willing to read it, he said. He professed to want to read it, but so far he had not, and as long as he remained locked up in his flat, chances are he wouldn’t. Feeling bad about having shown it to my agent when Robert had not seen it, I offered to post it. Robert said no, it might get lost.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ I said, down the phone, old-fashioned receiver tucked between ear and shoulder, half an hour into a long conversation. ‘I can always print out another one.’

‘You know I don’t open my post,’ he said.

This was going nowhere.

‘You can’t write it till I die,’ Robert said, with some bolshy pride. ‘You don’t know how it’s going to end so you can’t construct it.’

‘I don’t want you to die,’ I said.

‘I’m not going to,’ he said.

‘Yes you are,’ I said. ‘We all do.’

‘Not yet,’ he said.

When is ‘yet’, anyway?

I opened a new document and called it Structure. I stared at it, then saved it and went to make a cup of tea. It is still empty. Even now, every now and again, I open it, to laugh.

*

He saw nobody. He had no friends – he’d gone silent, or scared them off. Everybody still loved him as far as they knew, but he was one great big Piss Off personified. The aggression had long ago overtaken the wit, the obsessions and intrusions became unbearable. Nobody was around to see the naughty golden boy, our little genius, our sharp-tongued, foul-mouthed Orpheus, slide away, over the limits, from designated wunderkind to world-class fuck-up.

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