Further Under the Duvet (23 page)

Time passed and my third novel got published, then my fourth, all comedies about dark issues, and their reception humbled me deeply. Paradoxically, writing about feeling disconnected has connected me: I received hundreds of letters, the gist of which was, ‘Your books describe exactly how I feel.’ This, to the person who once felt she barely belonged to the human race.

Readers told me how well I’d captured their bleakest feelings – and how I’d made them howl with laughter. And for the first time I saw that all those horrible years, mired in alcoholism, hadn’t been a complete waste.

And still I didn’t drink. I had thought that my sober life would be akin to crawling through a desert for the next forty years, or however long I lived, fixated on alcohol. I thought that I would devote every day to Not Drinking, that it would be a full-time job. But, oddly, it’s not an issue. I’ve
disassociated from it entirely – knowing that I can’t have
any
, not a single drop, makes it easier.

Mind you, it’s very interesting being sober in a world sodden with alcohol. In my early days of recovery I went to the cinema a lot and for the first time noticed that nearly all the ads were for alcohol.

Not everyone understands why I don’t drink. After I stopped, I was visiting a friend who hadn’t seen me at my worst and she was baffled that I didn’t drink any more. Carefully I explained that my body was so sensitized to alcohol that I couldn’t take even one mouthful without triggering a blazing desire, that it made me crazy and sick and that I was much better off without it. She listened, nodding carefully, and when I finished she said, ‘Of course, of course. But you’ll have a glass of wine with dinner, won’t you?’

There are other people who don’t want to understand – people who probably suspect they might have a problem themselves; fighting off their offers of drink is the hardest.

But in so many ways, life is normal. I had thought I wouldn’t be able to be around drinkers, that, green with envy, I’d be watching every mouthful of alcohol that they took and wondering how it was for them. But actually I enjoy it – at least, up until the point when people are telling me the same story for the third time or when they have me hemmed into a corner, telling me glassily that I’m their best friend and that they love me.

Because alcohol was the centre of my life for so long, I couldn’t imagine ever having such freedom.

It doesn’t mean that I don’t crave escape. There are times
when I’m upset or angry or simply would like a night off from myself and half a bottle of wine would unwind me nicely – and it’s simply not possible. I’m also sorry that there’re all these new-fangled drinks for sale now that I never got to try, like Bacardi Breezers. (I’m told they’re not so great, but nevertheless…)

And I seem to need more sleep than non-alcoholics. I think I must find full-on reality exhausting because at a certain point every evening I kind of hit a wall and think: that’s enough life for one day, now, thanks.

But it’s a small price to pay.

Over ten years later, I still haven’t had a drink.

It’s been an incredible journey. More than ten million copies of my books have been sold worldwide, they’re published in thirty-two different languages, I’ve travelled the globe in the course of my work – but my sobriety is still the most important thing in my life. I know that if I drink again, I might never be able to stop. I got one chance and I treasure it. It’s the greatest gift I’ve ever been given.

A version of this was first published in
Marie Claire,
November 2004
.

After I expressed interest in their work, the Irish charity Concern, who work in the developing world, invited me to see some of the projects they’re carrying out in Ethiopia. I visited with Himself in September 2002
.

Himself and myself visit Concern’s Dublin office for final briefing. Suddenly I realize how tough this trip is going to be, wish I wasn’t going and curse myself for ever saying I would. Despite their assurances that we’ll have a great time, and that there’s a lovely market just outside Concern’s Addis compound, I’m not convinced. Himself also has The Fear.

9.00 a.m.
Leave for airport, to fly to London, then to Alexandria, then on to Addis Ababa. Delays in London, more delays in Egypt.

3.30 a.m.
(two and a half hours late) we land at Addis Ababa airport, then hang around the carousel for a very long time until it becomes clear that our suitcase hasn’t made the journey with us. But it’ll be on the next flight, the nice man tells us.
Which is on Friday. But today is Monday, I protest. Tuesday actually, he says.

All we have are the clothes we stand up in, a copy of
Vanity Fair
(read) and a selection of snacks purloined from an airport lounge. Nothing for it but to go and meet our poor driver who has been waiting outside since one-thirty.

4.45 a.m.
Arrive at the Concern compound.

5.00 a.m.
Head hits pillow.

5.01 a.m.
Cock crows.

5.02 a.m.
Another cock crows. Then four hundred of his closest friends get in on the act. A sound system kicks into life blasting Ethiopian pop. Ah yes, the market just beyond the wall.

9.30 a.m.
Wake up, put on our dirty clothes and go to introduce ourselves to the Concern staff. It’s a gorgeous morning, with blue, blue skies. In the distance I see lush green hills – surely some mistake? Where are the sun-bleached deserts?

Concern staff vair nice, offer to loan us clothes and suggest the market beyond the wall would be a good place to buy underwear, etc. A mixture of fear and curiosity propels Himself and myself through the gates and into downtown Addis and I swear to God, it was like going back to biblical times. A dusty red-earth road teeming with life – tall, elegant men in robes and wellingtons, women with babies tied to their
backs, a man wearing a sheep around his neck like a scarf, donkeys laden with enormous bundles of firewood, mad quavery music coming from somewhere. The only non-biblical note was the mini-buses, beeping like mad as they struggled through the packed street, trying to disperse the herds of goats which were loitering in their path. Blankets spread on the roadside were offering all kinds of things for sale: onions, tomatoes, batteries, lengths of twine, chickens (live and unplucked), firewood and – oh great! – socks and knickers. The socks were fine, the knickers less so – baggy and funny-looking. But what the hell! When in Rome. The price for two pairs of socks and two pairs of funny pink knickers? Twenty birr – about two euro. Excellent value. We’d been told to haggle but how could you? On to the next stall where we purchased two pairs of underpants for Himself, a T-shirt for fifty birr and a pair of plastic sandals for me for eighty birr.

12.30 p.m.
Decked out in our new and borrowed finery, we set off to see some of the Concern projects. Addis is a city at first sight constructed almost entirely of corrugated iron; miles and miles of shanty town, holes in the rotting iron patched pitifully with rush matting and polythene bags. Almost all roads are untarmacked: just bare lumpy earth like boreens, which I’ve never before seen in a city. And everywhere there are people – it’s incredibly densely populated. An estimated five million people live in Addis.

Our first stop was at a community-based urban development programme, where Concern are working with the poorest of the poor – women-headed households and households
with more than ten members – to construct houses, communal kitchens, water points, latrines and roadways. Concern provide most of the funding but the community provide the labour and become responsible for maintaining the common areas.

One of the many people I met was a beautiful woman called Darma – by and large the Ethiopians are extremely good-looking. Darma has nine children, her husband is ‘gone’ and she’s younger than me. With great pride she ushered us into her new house, a ten-by-ten room with a packed-earth floor, no electricity and no running water. With a smile she indicated the roof – ‘no holes so no rain gets in’. Which would turn the mud floor into a quagmire. I was beginning to understand. The sturdy walls provoked another smile – ‘secure against rats’. Gotcha.

Darma’s day begins at six when she prepares breakfast for herself and her children. This is harder than it sounds. The staple diet is injera: a bread that’s made from a grass called teff, which has to be pounded into a paste – which takes up to two hours – and then cooked. Before Concern funded the communal kitchens – one between three households – Darma had to light a fire in her chimney-less home, filling it with choking smoke and upsetting her children.

After breakfast, Darma sets off on the half-hour walk to the wholesale market, buys potatoes and onions, then returns and sells them in her own neighbourhood. At six she comes home and once again pounds teff until her hands blister. She goes to bed at about midnight.

But life is so much better, she says. She has the kitchen, the communal water point – which saves an hour a day walking to buy water – and most of all, her house. I was
humbled by her positivity and I hoped I’d think twice the next time I wanted to say, ‘I’ve had a hard day.’

Before I left I was invited to admire the latrines, which I did as best I could – I mean, what do you
say
? – and then it was on to a clinic which feeds and treats thirty-six malnourished children. By the time we arrived, they’d left, which I was shamefully glad about. I didn’t think I was able for the sight of three dozen malnourished babas.

Back in the Concern house I suddenly remembered that today was my birthday. Himself’s present for me was in the awol suitcase. However, he gave me a celebratory Club Milk that he’d nicked from the Aer Lingus lounge in Dublin. I was very happy.

New Year’s Day. And 1995, no less. Something to do with a dispute over the date of the birth of Christ. Great hilarity (at least on my part) as Himself dons his Ethiopian knickers – very little and snug, Bruce Lee circa 1977. Great hilarity (at least on his part) as I don mine – baggy and mad, like a granny’s.

11.00 a.m.
Visit a Concern-funded project which aims to educate and train girls. This is a very macho society and I’d been told that Ethiopian women would have a better life if they’d been born a donkey. They have much less chance of receiving an education than a man yet often end up being the main breadwinner as well as doing the ‘invisible’ work like childcare, taking care of sick relatives, cooking, carrying water and tending the animals.

This project nails its colours firmly to the mast with the sign on the office wall: ‘God created man before woman. The reason why? Every artist does a rough draft before creating a masterpiece.’ Right on, sisters!

We visit a girls’ school they’re building; it will provide education for 200 pupils when it opens in late September. Dozens of amber-eyed children appear from nowhere, to shake hands (even the toddlers do it) and have their photo taken.

3.30 p.m.
On to a vocational skills training project for street children. There are an estimated 60,000 children and young mothers living permanently on Addis Ababa’s streets, where they’re at the mercy of anyone and everyone, including the police. This project aims to train them in all kinds of disciplines – from driving to metalwork to office skills – and make them employable.

I was introduced to a twenty-year-old girl, a graduate of the programme. She looked like Lauryn Hill – like,
exquisite
– and asked me not to use her name. Her story is that both her parents died when she was sixteen and she had to take care of her three sisters and two brothers by washing clothes and gathering and selling firewood. Her income was so low that prostitution was the next step, either for herself or for her younger sisters. But instead she managed to get a place on a training course. Now she earns 340 birr a month as a cook (good money, honestly), is able to rent a house for herself and her siblings and is going for lessons in computers and paying for herself.

When I asked her what her parents had died of, she bowed
her head, began to cry and didn’t answer. Later the director of the programme told me that she has never said, but he suspects they died of Aids. Despite at least one in ten and maybe as many as one in six adult Ethiopians being infected with HIV, there’s such a stigma that few will admit to being affected by it.

Among the many other success stories of the project is that two ex-street children are working for Ethiopia’s previous president as a cook and a housekeeper.

It was an uplifting and energizing day. Back at the ranch, we watched
The Young and the Restless
, a spectacularly awful American daytime soap, and spent a happy hour trying to figure out which ones were the young and which ones were the restless. It was strangely compelling.

5.30 a.m.
Several of us left in a packed four-wheel drive for Damot Weyde, a six-hour drive to the south. This area was the scene of a famine in 2000 and this year the rains didn’t come so the maize harvest has failed and once again the people are facing a famine.

On the drive down we passed field after field of burnt dead maize. But other than that, the countryside was spectacularly beautiful: ranges of huge mountains layered against the blue sky and, apart from the dead maize, it was surprisingly green; lots of trees. When I asked why they didn’t cut the trees down to use the land for food, I was told that the trees were necessary to prevent soil erosion, already a huge problem which further exacerbates drought.

Also contributing to the look of lush vegetation is a plant
called insett or ‘false banana’. It’s a slow-growing but drought-resistant plant which has the huge wax leaves of the banana plant but only the roots are edible. (After being pounded for three hours.) So although the area is facing a famine, it’s called a ‘green famine’.