Last One at the Party Page 17

  And by then it’s too late to go back and clarify exactly what it is you love and what you want.

  You just have to hope that, by some miracle, you both want the same things at the same time.

  I thought that if I made James happy then he would magically know how to make me happy in return, like in the movies, like how my parents were. So, I never explained to James what my expectations were, and therefore, can’t blame him for not living up to them. He never knew that I thought moving in together so quickly would mean that we would get engaged, get married, and have kids at the same pace.

  He couldn’t have known that I needed these things to happen, and happen quickly, so that there wouldn’t be space in my life or mind for me to dwell on the fact that maybe, just maybe I wasn’t as happy as I had hoped, living my mum’s romantic ideal.

  But here I was, thirty-one years old, five years into a mature adult relationship, and no marriage or kids in sight. Not even an engagement ring.

  We, like many others, were on the treadmill of life. Work, food, sleep, booze, going out, holidays, birthdays, Christmas, New Year. An endless wheel of endless small moments of joy and sadness that make up a life. A good life. A normal life. A safe life.

  But I wanted more. I needed more. I needed proof that this had been the right decision. I needed to be able to go to my mum and tell her I had done it, I had found the true love she had always wanted for me. I needed to wave my engagement ring at Xav and tell him he was wrong: James wasn’t boring, he wasn’t the wrong choice for me, he was right, we were right, and we were happy and we were going to be together for ever.

  It was like a video game; do well at one level and then move to the next. I just needed to try harder, be better at my job, be thinner, be funnier, be a better girlfriend, make James happier.

  Then I would level up to wife.

  February 11th 2024

  I have been at the cottage for seventeen days and I have written the entire contents of this diary, up to this point, in the last four.

  The last two and a half months of my life.

  I am writing this diary for the reasons I mentioned at the beginning – I do think someone should record the end of the world and, as potentially the only person left alive, the burden obviously falls to me.

  I am using writing as a form of therapy because, for the first time since arriving at Xav’s house, I am *drum roll please* drug-free.

  And the crowd goes wild.

  I am also writing this because, now that I am drug-free …

  I

  Am

  So

  Very

  VERY!

  Bored.

  I spent the first two days in the cottage dealing with basic needs: warmth, food, water, somewhere to wee, somewhere to sleep. I also spent far too much time gazing out of the window at the nearest cottage, willing someone to appear at the window or for smoke to begin to rise from the chimney. Of course, they didn’t and it didn’t.

  Apart from the conspicuous lack of signs of any other survivor, keeping warm was my biggest worry and took the most time. The first morning at the cottage the fire had gone out by the time I woke up. It was bone-chillingly freezing once more and I had to spend another miserable hour and nearly another box of matches getting the fire started again. For the next few days, every time the fire went out, I would be plunged into yet another clumsy-fingered, match- and wood-wasting fight for warmth until I eventually realised this couldn’t go on and, through experimentation and a process of elimination, I learnt how to efficiently light the fire. I now have a pre-prepared supply of ripped-up newspaper, a collection of smaller twigs, and piles of small, medium, and large logs to feed my hungry fire god with. I am also proficient in coaxing fire back from the smallest ashy glow – it is infinitely preferable to starting from scratch. I try not to let the fire go out in the day and dread the mornings where there isn’t even the smallest ember for me to blow back to life.

  I have discovered that the other best way to keep warm is to stay dressed. All the time. I haven’t changed my underwear or clothing in five days. I am pretty ripe. But it is too cold to wash anyway, so what’s the point? Plus, I only brought three changes of clothes with me from the Defender, so everything I have has already been worn … for at least five days. I have had to ban Lucky from sleeping with me as I was beginning to smell of both sweat and dog, which is a very unpleasant combination. I have made him his own bed out of the log basket and a duvet and he seems pretty happy there. He is less happy that I still make him go out in the snow to wee and crap. I feel weirdly guilty that I don’t go out and pick up his faeces, but then I reason that the only person who will step in it is me.

  The final warmth lesson that I have learnt is to live in one room. On the first day I had the fire going for about six hours and it was still freezing. I couldn’t work out why. Then I realised I had left the door to the living room open, and while I had made a cursory attempt to repair the kitchen window I broke using cardboard, it was still completely freezing in the kitchen and everywhere else in the house. So, I shut the living-room door and used a spare duvet to stop the draught coming in under it, stuffed newspaper in the window cracks, shut all the curtains, and within half an hour I was toasty warm. Now I go to the kitchen each morning for food and water and bring them back to the living room, and that is where I stay. All day. Every day. I live in constant gloom and, mostly, in one room. Poetry.

  Apart from when I need to go to the toilet, which is a hell all of its own making.

  I still have water in the taps, and the loo still flushes, but if I don’t use it for four or five hours a thin layer of ice forms on the water at the bottom of the system. Normally my urine melts the ice (weirdly satisfying), but if I need to poo it’s best to break the ice beforehand. All this was learnt by trial and error. I have learnt to hover over the toilet and, if I have to sit down, to warm the seat first. I left a significant amount of my skin on the seat before I learnt that trick. Also, being cold is not conducive to having a ‘quick wee’; it seems that when you are literally freezing your arse off your bladder has the ability to retract in on itself and refuse to let go of its contents, no matter how badly you want it to.

  To be honest, after the first couple of days of toilet visit trauma, I found a large mixing bowl in the kitchen, and now I just wee into that in the corner of the sitting room and throw it out of the window.

  Every time I do it Lucky stares at me reproachfully.

  I did an inventory of the food I had brought and that was in the cottage cupboards on the first day I was here. I had four tins of beans, two tins of soup, one tin of chopped tomatoes, two tins of sausages and spaghetti, two cans of beef stew, eight bags of crisps, three packets of biscuits, two packets of chocolate biscuits, one pack of tomato Cup A Soup, three cans of Pepsi, one box of tea bags, half a pack of sugar, one jar of black olives, three Mars bars and five tins of dog food. The cooker, kettle, and toaster don’t work, but I found some old pans and an old tin kettle in the cupboards that I am using to cook and heat water over the fire with. There is actually a hook above the fire to hang the kettle on and, after the first few times that I burnt myself, I learnt to wait for the flames to die back and to always use an oven glove before attempting to get the kettle back off the hook.

  The three cans of Pepsi, two of the bags of crisps, the Mars bars, and one of the packets of biscuits went into my tummy the morning that I arrived. This was before I thought about checking how much food there was. Once I had done my inventory and looked out of the kitchen window to confirm that going anywhere before the snow melted was going to be impossible, I started to ration my food. I have a cup of tea (no milk) and a biscuit for breakfast, half a can of something for lunch, and a Cup A Soup and the other half can for dinner, along with another two biscuits.

  So far, I have fed Lucky all the dog food plus the two cans of stew and one of the cans of spaghetti and sausages. He whines a lot and is obviously hungry, but I am very, very resentful that I have
to give him anything from my stash so he is definitely not getting more. Okay, I give him two biscuits at night, but that is it.

  Even when I was still taking the drugs I was hungry, and now that I am off them I am absolutely starving. Constantly. I am leaving the tomatoes, kidney beans, and olives (or evil grapes as they were known when I was growing up) until last and if the worst comes to the worst I will be able to survive on the sugar for a few days. But I am not sure what will happen to Lucky; he can’t hunt in the snow, and I don’t think he’ll eat olives, so at best he has two days of food left. I think I may have a week.

  I sometimes dream of the three Mars bars.

  I discovered I was running out of Tramadol on my third day at the cottage.

  I had been so busy sorting things that I was happily popping pills as normal until I took the packet out of the box and realised to my horror that I only had twenty tablets left. I had been taking two (okay, sometimes three) roughly every four hours. That meant I had a maximum of three days left.

  To begin with I wept and moaned to myself and paced the front room of the cottage muttering meaningless repetitions of ‘Shit, what will I do, what will I do, I can’t cope, shit, help me, someone help me.’ Until I was verging on full-blown panic, had several misery-inducing visits to the toilet to shit valuable calories out as watery diarrhoea, and Lucky was whining and pacing with me in more distress than I was.

  Not for the first, or last, time it was Lucky that saved me.

  In an effort to stop me pacing and get me to pet him he manoeuvred himself in front of me and I fell over him, smacking my face on the stone floor. He went to lick my face and I swatted him away with the back of my hand, causing him to yelp and cower back into the corner.

  I snapped out of my panic and started to weep. Lucky rushed over from his corner and licked away my tears. His complete lack of selfishness made me cry even more and I clung to his neck, soaking his fur with my tears until tears turned to sniffles, and half an hour later I had cried the worst of it out and was simply feeling sorry for myself.

  I was stuck. The snow was still falling and was now halfway up to the windowsill. There was no way I was getting more drugs, so I either detoxed or took the twenty in one go and hoped that was enough to overdose.

  I didn’t think it was.

  Plus, as I am sure you are starting to be aware, I am a massive fucking coward. I couldn’t even take T600, let alone kill myself by overdosing.

  I halved my dose each day in an effort to make the detox process less miserable.

  It didn’t work.

  It was still bloody miserable.

  Xav once told me that all detox stories are boring. He said that they were the drug-takers’ equivalent of the old vegan joke – How do you know if someone is vegan? They’ll tell you. ‘The basic premise of a detox story is that you were once having fun … and now you’re not,’ he said, ‘and no one wants to hear the grim tale of how you went from one to the other, so just keep it to yourself.’

  And if anyone should know about depressing detox stories then it is Xav.

  Xav was, is, and always will be, my best friend.

  He was my confidant, sounding board, adviser, court jester and the one with whom I have shared the most fun in my entire life.

  I loved him as much as and, at points, maybe even more than James.

  However, he was not my rock. He was never my emotional support or the person I ran to when I needed help or strength.

  He would have given it to me in an instant. But, unfortunately, I could never be sure that he would be around when I needed him.

  It is probably understandable why I didn’t go to my parents when I first started suffering from panic attacks and depression; I was embarrassed and scared and didn’t know what they would think. For the record they would have been, and were when they eventually did find out, perfectly wonderful.

  But, you are probably wondering, why didn’t I run to Xav for help and support?

  Xav wasn’t there.

  Xav was in rehab.

  Xav was in rehab from the day before I received the first rejection letter for my novel until a week before we left for Thailand.

  I could still have rung him and told him about my fragile mental health.

  But I didn’t.

  Instead I rang him to see if he wanted to leave rehab and a week later go and spend three months in a place bursting with drugs.

  Because, of course, it was always all about me.

  Just one of many examples where I was too busy thinking about my needs to think about his.

  We were as bad as each other.

  Xav and I had much more in common than we ever truly admitted. He would always be an addict and I would always be a sufferer of panic attacks and depression. Neither of us would ever get the professional help required to deal with our issues in the long-term and therefore neither of us would ever be able to give the other the full amount of support they needed.

  So, when mature, sensible, solid James appeared on the scene is it any wonder that I clung to him like the emotional rock he would prove to be?

  Xav went to rehab three times. His first stint was when he was fifteen, at boarding school, and they realised he was drunk most days. The second was when he was twenty-five, and Rupert caught him smoking crack. The third was two days after I got married.

  Rupert was dead by then, and it was my parents who drove him to rehab and checked him in.

  It should have been me.

  So, I am going to take Xav’s advice and not repeat the misery of the ten days that it took me to get the Tramadol out of my system.

  Suffice to say that the cottage was an efficient but not at all comfortable place to do it (I had extreme diarrhoea and left many layers of skin on the toilet seat). I was sick, my stomach was churning, I had stomach aches, bouts of shivering, headaches, muscle spasms and I was, and still am, sad, emotional and prone to outbursts of random tears and rage that cannot be entirely attributed to my lone survival of the apocalypse.

  I found an ancient, three-quarters-full bottle of sherry in the front room cabinet and at the end of every day I successfully made it through I would take a massive gulp from the bottle. To begin with the taste made me grimace, but the fiery warmth that spread through my body and the very, very gentle buzz that calmed my brain was something I looked forward to all day. By day five I had even started to enjoy the taste.

  I knew that I was coming out of the other side of my detox when, one night, I misjudged my gulp and spilled some of the sherry onto my arm. Lucky, not wanting to miss the chance of free vittles, rushed over to lick it off and his immediate grimace of revulsion at the taste made me laugh out loud. I knew then that I was going to be okay. Well, maybe not okay, but I was going to live.

  I have now been completely Tramadol-free for twelve days. I still crave it, but I have no possible way to relapse at the moment so I am mostly able to ignore my cravings.

  In fact, to my surprise, the cravings were not the worst thing about not being on drugs any more. The cravings I could handle and cope with.

  No, the worst thing about being clean and sober was far, far more difficult to solve.

  I was absolutely, completely and utterly dying of boredom.

  Now that I had detoxed and had a routine for food and fire there wasn’t anything else for me to do at the cottage.

  Literally nothing.

  I tried reading the old newspapers stacked by the fire, but most of them were too faded or mouldy. I normally masturbated two or three times a day, but could only do it when Lucky was asleep as it was too weird when he was watching me.

  I tried playing games with Lucky, but I didn’t have anything to throw for him other than small twigs ripped from the logs, and he tended to just sit down and chew them once he got them. Plus, it was hard to have a good game of fetch in a room ten foot square. I started to teach him tricks like giving me his paw and rolling over, but without the biscuits as a reward he was a pretty reluctant student.
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  Eight days after my last ever Tramadol I remembered the three books upstairs and bounded up to get them.

  They were: This Charming Man by Marian Keyes, Riders by Jilly Cooper, and Trump: The Art of the Deal by Donald J. Trump.

  Donald fucking Trump?! Jesus.

  I read the Marian Keyes during the rest of that day, devouring it in a way that was wholly greedy, not bothering to try to pace myself. I stretched out Riders for as long as possible and read it over the next three days, rationing myself to a chapter an hour, or maybe two (three) at the most. I loved them both and vowed to read everything else the authors had written as soon as I left the cottage … if I left the cottage.

  I promised myself I wouldn’t read the Trump book.

  On the morning of day thirteen I opened the front cover and started to read the Trump book.

  I think I read the first three lines and got to the bit where he talks about deals being his art form before I yelled, ‘FUCK YOU!’, dramatically slammed the book shut, opened the sitting-room window, and threw it out. I spent a satisfying thirty minutes watching the blizzard bury it in snow.

  Twenty minutes after that I was getting my boots on in the hall to go to retrieve Trump when I noticed the hallway table drawer. I opened it and to my utter joy found a visitor’s book.

  I bloody love a good visitor’s book! All those different people, different opinions, different recommendations – it is normally the first thing I looked for when we visited a holiday home.

  I pulled my boots off, went back into the sitting room, and settled on the sofa to read it.

  There were three entries.

  ‘Had a fab stay, thanks.’ Ethel and Derek Jones, March 2023.

  ‘Lovely cottage and brilliant views. Try the fish at The Old Trout Inn – absolutely delicious.’ The Sanderson family, June 2023.

  ‘The cottage was absolutely lovely and the setting is gorgeous. We very much enjoyed exploring the beautiful countryside. BUT, our stay was ruined when I found you had a book by Donald Trump in the cottage. I very nearly left immediately and checked into a hotel but my wife persuaded me to stay. I have, however, removed a random page and used it to wipe my ass. That is all that book will ever be good for.’ Jed and Sarah Bookthwaite, Minnesota, United States of America.