TO HER HEALTH

 This story was from my second collection, Anomaly, (really don't like that title but too late now), and it covers a subject that I realise now is prevalent in most of my work: addiction. For a little while, it put me off drinking. 

TO HER HEALTH

Lizzie Price saw in her thirties exactly the way she wanted to: buzzed. She had spent most of her twenties, and the better part of her teens, pursuing Nirvana at the bottom of a glass, and this night was no different. The one flammable beverage she had never tried was a delightful little ice shatterer called Madregusan. 

‘You’ve never heard of it?’ 

‘Nope.’ 

‘How the hell is that possible?’ 

Lizzie shrugged. Tina Green, Lizzie’s supervisor, decided there was nothing else for it. She leaned over the bar and whispered into the smiling barkeep’s ear. He was a good deal more solemn when he put the shot glass down in front of Lizzie. 

‘What’d I ever do to him?’ 

‘Some of these guys take their job very seriously. Drinking this stuff is meant to be some sort of honour or something; that’s why you don’t see regular Jill’s like us slamming ‘em down too often.’ 

‘So what’d you have to promise to get him to give it to me?’ 

‘That, my love, is for me, him, and the internet to know.’ 

Lizzie picked up the glass and sniffed. 

’Shit! ’There’s something floating in it, and it smells like window cleaner!’ 

‘You’ve had worse smelling things than that in your mouth, I’m sure. Just drink the damn thing!’ 

Lizzie held the glass aloft, blessed herself, closed her eyes and downed the shot. It burned like formaldehyde travelling down her throat, and didn’t cool down any on the journey south. 

‘I may have just ingested napalm.’ 

Tina grinned and slapped her on the back. 

’Wait about an hour, then tell me how you feel.’ 

Tina was right. On the dance floor an hour later, at just the point where Lizzie thought she might combust, the burning came to an abrupt and welcome end, and ushered in a completely different sensation. She hadn’t been what her mother called “Morally Intact” since the night of her Junior Prom, and had experienced her fair share of nocturnal bliss since then, but it was never like this. 

Tina observed the sweaty brow, the glazed eyes, and finally the impossible calmness, with a knowing look. Lizzie gave her a dopey smile. Tina nodded and shouted over the music. 

‘WELCOME TO THE CLUB!’ 

One of the reasons Lizzie was able to drink so often was that she had never suffered a hangover. In sixteen increasingly fuzzy years, she had never once woken up with a sore head or dry mouth, or spent a Saturday or Sunday morning with her head in the toilet bowl. This Saturday morning was different. Despite enjoying what she was certain was the longest sleep of her life, Lizzie woke up feeling like a sphincter had grown in her brain overnight, and was now clenching so furiously that her eyeballs appeared to be dancing along to the syncopated rhythm. 

She raised herself to a sitting position, waited for the room to stop spinning, then swung her legs over to the side of the bed. A wave of nausea hit when she was halfway to her feet and despite using all the will power she could muster, she was forced to use a fluffy rainbow ugg boot as a makeshift emesis basin. The sickness continued throughout the afternoon and well into the evening, until at ten thirty-five, precisely twenty four hours after consuming the liquid that caused this mess, the gurgling and retching and rumination ceased. 

Looking around her apartment, Lizzie had an epiphany; she was a pig. There were benefits to leading a domestically sedentary lifestyle – chief among them being that her mother refused to come near the place – but for the first time in her life, Lizzie was ashamed of her home. Once she remembered where her cleaning implements – some still in their packaging – were, she went through the house like a bomb. Parts of the architecture not even the daddy long legs saw were given a thorough scrub down, and after three hours she stood and appraised her work. 

‘Lovely.’ 

She was running her finger down the refrigerator to see if she missed a spot when she had an overwhelming urge to peruse its contents. Milk, Brie, butter, Diet Pepsi, and a weeks worth of leftover Indian, Chinese and Thai food were all that was on offer. She demolished them in the space of an hour. Placated, she put the plastic container that had been home to three day old Chicken Khorma down on the floor between her crossed calves, leaned back, and cried. 

‘I’M FUCKING DISGUSTING!’ 

There seemed only one cure for such a sudden and inexplicable surge of depression. 

‘Hi Mummy.’ 

‘Who is this?’ 

‘It’s your daughter, silly.’ 

Pat Price gasped audibly. 

’Elizabeth?’ 

‘Yeah,’ Lizzie choked down a sob, ‘I’m not happy, Mummy.’ 

‘And you called me. Jesus, how drunk are you?’ 

‘I’m not DRUNK! I’m…I’m…I’m just lonely. I’m fat and I’m ugly and I”m useless. My life doesn’t mean anything. I need you.’ 

To the best of her knowledge, Pat had raised a child who was in every way her complete antithesis, one who had decided she didn’t require mothering at about the same time she learned to talk, so a phone call pleading for maternal guidance was a gift she received with relish. She ordered Lizzie, as gently as possible, to go to bed and get some sleep, and promised to pay her a visit in the morning. 

Expecting her daughter’s home to look like the abandoned heroine nest she had encountered when she visited three years before, Pat was almost literally knocked off her feet to find that she could see her reflection in the entryway floor tiles. More astonishing still was the tray of tea and macaroons on a table whose surface she had never laid eyes on. The tea was dreadful, and the macaroons tasted like sugared Barbie camper wheels, but Pat said nothing. Positive reinforcement was what was needed in order for her daughter to make a permanent change. 

‘The place looks lovely, darling.’ 

‘Thanks, but I’m kind of bored with the look of it.’ 

‘I know some great decorators, if you’re interested.’ 

‘Actually, I thought it’d be fun if we fixed it up together.’ 

Pat choked on a macaroon crumb. 

’Pardon?’ 

‘There’s a sale on at Wicker & Rose. Wanna come shopping with me?’ 

After a day spent debating wallpaper patterns, drinking latte’s and plumping cushions the Price women made plans for another shopping excursion, this one to make over Lizzie’s wardrobe, and bid each other a gushy farewell. Having finally been rewarded with the daughter she had prayed for, Pat Price went home and slept on a cloud. 

Equally elated at the change in her relationship with her mother, Lizzie lay her head down on her ridiculously fat pillow with a smile on her face, and woke up to find her apartment buzzing with giggling high school girls whom she hadn’t seen since the day she climbed into her ancient Celica and left her childhood home to flunk university. 

She managed to plant one foot onto the new living room rug before she was accosted by Amy Werner, decked out in a pastel pink suit that, back in her school days, she would’ve verbally pulverized anyone else for wearing. 

‘Here she is! Give her a seat, girls.’ 

Lizzie was ushered onto the buttercup yellow sofa that her mother had zeroed in on as soon as she got in the door at Laura Ashley the day before and, after a mauve chintz cushion was pounded within an inch of its life and forced against her lower back, she was served a weak lemon tea and given a gender-neutral green teddy bear with a question mark on its belly. 

‘What the hell is this?’ 

‘We’ve had this planned for ages…aw, someone’s experiencing pregger-brain,’ Amy patted her on the head, ‘never mind; you’ll feel better once you drink your tea.’ 

‘I’d prefer coffee, thanks.’ 

Amy and the other twin-setters looked at Lizzie as though she had just suggested they go kitten culling. 

‘In your condition? I don’t think so. Don’t you know what caffeine does to the unborn? You might as well just reach in there with a pair of garden clippers and yank the thing out! What’s wrong with you?’ 

Lizzie sank back as far as she could into the couch as the damning faces loomed over her. 

‘Monster!’ 

‘Murderer!’ 

‘Deviant!’ 

‘Demon!’ 

Then they joined together in a chorus of judgement and disapproval. 

‘KILLER! KILLER! KILLER! KILLER! KILLER! KILLER! KILLER! KILLER!’ 

The women’s voices bored into her skull, and all at once the sphincter was back inside her brain and clenching away madly. Her head seemed ready to explode. 

‘Oh my gosh! She’s ready! Hand me my gloves!’ 

In a flash, Amy Werner went from socialite Barbie to Doctor Barbie, snapping on a mask and a gown and a matching pair of pink latex gloves that stopped at her shoulders. She forced Lizzie down sideways and pinned down her head by planting a knee into her cheek. She peered into Lizzie’s right ear hole. 

‘Yup, we’re fully dialated.’ 

She peered again. 

‘I can see the head.’ 

She shoved her hand into Lizzie’s ear hole and pushed down into the canal. It was a sensation akin to piercing a thin sheet of rubber with a hot, gigantic needle. A loud “Pfft” sound emitted from the area, and was quickly followed by a pain so excruciating that Lizzie truly thought she would welcome death. Then Amy’s hand got hold of something, gripped it firmly and started to pull. Warm blood trickled down Lizzie’s cheek and dripped down over her bottom lip. 

‘It’s coming, Liz!’ 

Lizzie woke up with a scream and put her hand to her ear to check for blood. Finding none, she sighed. The feeling of being hung-over had returned with a vengeance, and her throbbing head, which seemed to weigh roughly thirty-five pounds, was not easily parted from the pillow. She navigated her way through the sea of dark red spots floating in front of her face and into the bathroom. 

The head that greeted her in the mirror was as red as a pomegranate and roughly the width of a horizontal watermelon. Lizzie gaped at her reflection for a few seconds before she picked up a pair of nail scissors and jabbed the back of her hand, so as to wake herself up. Then she opened her eyes and found that the nightmare was not over, and had just gotten worse. Something red was making its way out of her ear hole, and it took her two seconds to realise that it wasn’t a blood clot. 

What brought her to this conclusion was its size which, give or take, was that of a Kranski sausage. The length of the thing was something else entirely, and it had to coil itself around her face three times before its tail end was finally released. Lizzie’s head reverted back to its regular size once the birth was over, and her complexion went from red to pink to deathly white. 

The foreign baby wiggled its tail, shaking off the last of the tacky, treakle-coloured substance it was covered in, and inched up over her chin and along the bridge of her nose and reared back its head. It gazed at her with its pin-prick eyes, nodded, slithered off her head and into the sink before disappearing down the drain. At that point, Lizzie shuffled noiselessly into the kitchen, opened the fridge and did what she always did when she was scared shitless – poured herself a drink. 

With a trembling hand, she raised the glass to her lips, took a swig, then promptly sprayed the curtains with it before emptying three thousand dollars worth of alcohol down the sink. She went to work the following morning feeling a little down, mourning as she was the loss of a friend who had been with her for half of her life. 

She got to work a half hour later than usual and was immediately called into Tina’s office. Tina motioned for her to take a seat and the two women silently stared at each other for several minutes until the overseer got up and pinned a round badge with a triangle and twin A’s in the centre onto her lapel. 

‘Congratulations.’