The Liberty Tree

Drunk to Sober via Love, Death, Disintegration & Freedom

Suzanne Harrington

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780857899439
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857899422
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Suzanne Harrington did all the things that adults do, long before she'd grown up: met Leo, married, had babies. She also partied, was homeless for a while, and drank - and drank. She headed towards disintegration, with Leo at her side, locked deep in himself. Then, waking to the wreckage of yet another lost weekend, she stopped drinking - and Leo, her companion and enabler, became a stranger. They separated. Newly sober, and freed from her demons, Suzanne embraced life. Leo chose escape. Early one morning the police arrived. A body had been found hanging from a tree. When it was all over, and Suzanne had buried Leo, and helped her children to grieve, she sat down and wrote the story of their father's life. This is for them. It is for the memory of Leo. It is also for anyone who has partied too hard, found life unbearable, avoided the truth. It is like nothing you have read before, or will read again. It is touching, hilarious, brutally honest and utterly compelling.

CONTENTS

7 September 2006

PART ONE

Seven years, two months, seventeen days

1 London

2 Halloween

3 Brighton

4 India

Intermission

5 Brighton

6 Birth

7 ‘Not signed to avoid delay’

8 Christmas

PART TWO

7 September 2011 – five years later

9 Sober

10 Full Moon Lunar Eclipse

11 The Memory Box

Epilogue

7 SEPTEMBER 2006

It’s one of those early summer mornings when the sun and the moon are in the sky together, the moon’s fullness fading to a thin silver sliver as the strong light rises. The sea is flat and calm and glittering. Everything is fresh. Along the seafront, the white houses stand grandly like wedding cakes, blinding white in the sunlight. The empty beach stretches west, deserted except for the solitary dots of dog walkers, their faraway dogs leaping into the rush and suck of the tide, chasing tiny sticks. A lone truck collects rubbish from the beachfront bins.

From the top of the hill you can see the pier jutting into the glitter, its fairground hovering on tiny black metal matchsticks over the water. The helter skelter, the ghost train, and the roller-coaster are all still and silent in the distance, the lights and music off, the wooden boardwalk empty. Everything is pale blue, gold and silver. The whole morning is illuminated with fresh, clean light. Its newness dazzles.

A mile or so east of the pier, the town ends where the soft hills roll down to the sea. You can see miles of coast from up here, the town laid out below like an architect’s model, spreading west and blurring into the next town. Up here, there is nothing except wind and air and huge sky. A few trees hunch like old women caught in a gale, their leaves and branches angled permanently inland by the sea winds. The grass is short and soft, and bright with wild flowers.

There is a dip in the hills where some trees have grown straight and tall, protected by the side of the hill; it is a place to hunch down and smoke a cigarette away from the wind. There are a few old cider bottles amongst the brambles, their labels faded, and a blackened patch on the ground where fires have been lit. A plastic crisp wrapper flaps in the tangle of thorns.

And hanging from a tree in this sheltered dip, up here on the windswept hill, is a body. It swings very gently in the breeze, feet not far from the ground, a blue nylon rope cutting into the neck. The head is at an unnatural angle, the tongue bulging and blue. The face is bluish too, blue like Lord Shiva. A small rucksack has been kicked away, and a mobile phone lies switched off, face down in the earth. The body has been hanging here for a while now, since the moon was at its highest and brightest last night. It is already stiff.

Nobody has found it yet. No dog has come bounding through the dip, in a frenzy of sniffing and barking. No rider has cantered up the hill and wheeled their horse around after seeing the sway of its silhouette. No lone morning runner has glanced this way and seen its terrible stillness. Not yet. It’s still too early. In another few hours, police will be knocking on a door, watching impassively as faces collapse. But for now, the body is just hanging there, stiff and silent and alone in the soft bright morning.

PART ONE

‘You can only write what you know, even if you don’t know that you know it.’

WILLIAM BURROUGHS

SEVEN YEARS, TWO MONTHS, SEVENTEEN DAYS

Since your father liberated himself on that sorry tree branch, he has faded away. There is a photograph of him in each of your bedrooms – in a Stetson and red and black fringed cowboy shirt at Gay Pride, and in a swirly psychedelic shirt, necklace and Lennon glasses walking behind two women dressed as Blue Meanies at the Children’s Parade, at the start of the Brighton Festival. He looks great in those photos – bright and alive. He was always good at dressing up. In that respect he was a bit of a show-off, a bit fabulous, which I always found attractive. He wasn’t the kind of man who would slob out in knobbly grey tracksuit bottoms and a baggy top. Not until nearer the end, but that’s still some way off.

There’s another photo of him in a tight sparkly silver t-shirt and a horned devil’s hat handmade from red cotton, pushing one of you through the mud another year at Pride, with Petula Clark singing in the background and me posing next to him, fat from pregnancy in a bright blue African muumuu, clutching a parasol. There’s a jacket of his in your wardrobe – outrageous pink plush, a girl’s jacket that he used to wear clubbing with his big chunky boots and black snakeskin jeans. He was a bit of a disco king, your dad. He loved it.

But we don’t really talk about him so much anymore, do we? It’s hard to know just how gaping the dad-sized hole in your lives is. It’s hard to know how it will all turn out.

Yesterday you were complaining, high on pick’n’mix, after some garish 3D Disney film at the cinema, how predictable the story always is – a princess, a hero on a horse, a quest, a castle, a happy ever after. Why can’t it be more realistic? you said. Why can’t they die in the end? Or at least one of them? Because, I said, people think that kids can’t handle stuff like that. And the two of you scoffed and said rubbish, of course they can. You’re right, of course. It’s the adults who can’t.

Anyway. You’ve dealt with a dead dad, but you still don’t know the full story. Neither do I, other than how and when he died. I still don’t really know why, but I knew him a bit longer than you – although not that much longer. You were five and three when he died, but I only knew him for seven years, two months and seventeen days. Even if I had known him longer, I doubt I would ever have really known him, because he was like a magic mirror: he reflected back to you only what you wanted to see.

He was the kind of man who would have brought a suitcase on a camping trip. He knew how to eat lobster, but not how to pitch a tent. He had been on lots of holidays, but never travelled. He could link up a network of computers, but had not the faintest idea how to ride a bike or drive a car. He could cook, but only with a cookery book, and only certain dishes – so he could make a splendid lemon drizzle cake, but could never just throw a meal together. If fenugreek was a listed ingredient and he didn’t have any, the curry remained unmade. He was not big on improvisation or thinking on his feet. He was a whizz with wires, but had no idea how to do anything with wood. He had great skin, and fabulous teeth.

So although I don’t know his story, this is the story of me and him, and our seven years. You may not like it much, because it will tell you things you may not want to know, and neither he nor I may come across terribly well, although how you read it is really none of my business. But better honesty than a pretty story. It would be lovely to write you a heart-stirring tale of heroes and bravery, of selflessness and compassion, but instead you’ll be reading the story of a suicide written by a drunk. Only you can make your own happy ending.

Just remember – this is a story that is filtered through me. His version would have been different, but he’s not here, so this is the only version you’re going to get. It is my truth, which is not necessarily the truth. But is there ever any such thing as the truth? I doubt it.

1 LONDON

We met at a party in New North Road in Islington in June 1998. Not the kind of party you’re thinking of – there wasn’t any food, and nobody brought a present. It was a big house that seemed like a squat even though it wasn’t – big dark rooms empty of furniture and full of people and noise. Staircases crowded, strobe lights in the basement, bodies everywhere. It was all very minimal and functional, the music semi industrial. The doof-doof-doof of techno. Gabber drilling in the basement – that mutant strain of dance music that made your ears bleed, undanceable at 160 bpm, like a kanga hammer inside your head. I was never a handbag house kind of girl – I liked my music fast and hard – but gabber was ridiculous. Your dad loved it.

That night was my first night out in the city for ages. In any city. For three months I had been moving between remote beaches around South East Asia, where the drugs were few and mellow (apart from at the end, on Koh Phangan where we had acid and tooth-splintering Thai speed pills at a full moon party on the beach at Haad Rin), and so I believed myself to be shiny and clean of brain and body after my three months away from London parties. I wasn’t at all – my brain chemistry was extremely precarious, like a dodgy lab experiment just waiting to blow, although I didn’t know that at the time. I had no idea that years of cumulative hedonism was doing my head in. How could I have? Besides, I was feeling really good. This meant good on the surface, because the surface was tanned and backpacker-slim and bleached on top. The night I met your dad, I was a blonde, with an orange bindi on my forehead, wearing an orange furry bikini top with a zip down the front, and orange Thai fisherman’s trousers that made peeing complicated. I looked like a traffic cone with a tan. In a good way, of course.

I suppose I might have been on the pull. It wasn’t conscious. Nothing ever was with me. It happened when I was lying on a giant floor cushion, being softly swallowed and devoured by my first pill in months. It dissolved me into benign mush and I was breathing in and out, in and out, eyes half closed, lost in the huge pleasure of it. It’s not called ecstasy for nothing. I was inside a huge, beautiful softness.

Someone was saying ‘This is Leo,’ and I was smiling at him and he had the most beautiful eyes, dark brown melty sparkly, dark brown skin, jet black hair, perfect features. Small faced. He was hunching down and chatting easily and naturally and I was chatting back even as my veins expanded and my blood turned to air. His pupils were big, but mine were bigger.

And then he said, ‘I wish my surname was Nine, because then I would be Leo Nine. You know. Like feline,’ and even in my marsh-mallow bliss, I knew that this was a terrible line. But he said it straight faced. Was he being ironic, or were his drugs stronger than mine? He didn’t seem particularly out of it, but then in a houseful of a hundred people off their heads, it was all relative. We kept talking. I remember feeling surprised and flattered by the fact that he stayed talking to me for ages, rather than extricating himself as soon as was proper. Back then I was all big ego and small self esteem: there must have been something wrong with this good looking, charming bloke to be scrunched down chatting, rather than looking over his shoulder at the fitter, cooler party girls.

When the blood returned to my legs and we eventually stood up, I saw immediately what was wrong with him. He was short. Very short. Even in those New Rock boots that were briefly fashionable in the nineties, and which added a few inches to his height, he was still eye level with me. And I am not tall. Damn, I remember thinking. Why couldn’t he have been a foot taller? But we kept talking. Later, there was a floaty kiss in an empty room, the walls juddering from the sound system, the ecstasy rushing though our veins and our brains. He moved in a few weeks later.

Why did we do that? Was it love at first sight? You are our children. I want to tell you that it was, so I will. Yes, it was love at first sight – if love means two unformed people collapsing towards each other in the hope that each will catch the other and prop them up. If love at first sight is a mistaken belief that each will rescue the other. Then yes, it was love at first sight.

‘I love you,’ he would say, as we lay around staring at each other.

‘I love you too,’ I would say back, crumbling hash into a king-size Rizla.

‘You’re perfect,’ he’d say.

‘No, you are,’ I’d reply.

Because in those first few weeks and months, he was. And I was, and we were.

So what was it that attracted me to your dad, apart from his looks? He was posh, for a start. You have to remember that I was living in East London and had been for quite some time, much longer than I had ever planned. Not the cool arty bits around Whitechapel and Shoreditch and Brick Lane, or the groovy ethnic bit around Green Street, but the grim nowhere bits that are never mentioned anywhere except in government statistics on poverty: Forest Gate, Plaistow, East Ham, Manor Park. This was a long time before the Olympics and giant shopping centres and posh supermarkets. My East London was rows of grimy terraced brick, plastic-fronted curry houses, chewing gummed bus stops, steamy greasy caffs, crowded pound shops and shabby charity shops, Kwiksaves and kebab shops, cavernous pubs called the Prince This and the Queen That that smelled of ashtrays and Harpic, warehouses, tower blocks, DSS hostels, squats, broken windows, boarded up doors; dirty streets that formed a great grey sprawl stretching from the Bow flyover along the Romford Road to the nothingness of Ilford. You got around on the 86 and the 25, or in cheap minicabs, swerving between the white van psychos and the carefree drivers from Karachi and Dhaka and Delhi and Accra and Lagos, for whom the Highway Code was as foreign as jellied eels. I’ve never taken you there because it’s not worth the journey. There’s nothing to see.

Your dad, on the other hand, was living in Little Venice in West London. While I was a twenty minute trudge east of East Ham tube station, he was overlooking Regent’s Canal and seconds from Warwick Road Station in dapper, accessible Zone 2. The first time I went to his flat, which he shared with a bunch of people in their early twenties, even though he was already in his mid-thirties, it struck me that he was not like the men I knew out east. There was moisturizer in his bedroom, and his clothes were on hangers. There were proper pots and pans in the kitchen, and even though there was almost no furniture in the flat – the twenty something flatmates were suits by day, stoners by night, and seemed never to have lived away from home before – it felt studenty, rather than just poor, a world away from the cracked plates and damp walls I was used to.

‘I love you,’ he said, that first time I visited his place.

‘I love you too,’ I said, staring at his hair product and hand cream.

Leo was posh in that minor public schoolboy kind of way, which appealed to my unconscious desire to escape East London, my stint there as accidental tourist having gone on far too long. I was thirty, and I needed to get out, needed to stop living like an extra from some druggy version of EastEnders; but when I first met your dad, I had no idea that I even wanted to escape, until I made the decision a bit later and scarpered within a fortnight. I was not big on conscious thought back then. I knew I didn’t I want to hook up with some middle class white boy, though; the idea of having a boyfriend called Tom or Giles or Freddy filled me with horror. Not that Tom or Giles or Freddy would have been beating a path to my grotty East Ham door. Not unless they had become extremely disoriented from too much acid.

What I liked about your dad was his otherness – he was black Asian, with the very dark skin of Sri Lanka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, and he had English cut glass vowels. Being common or garden white Irish, I was determined to outswim my gene pool; the further the better. What’s more, he had a job, a proper one that paid a salary rather than cash in hand. Something in an office to do with computers. This meant that he could pay for his own pints, were he the kind of man who drank pints, which of course he wasn’t. He knew what to do with a fish fork, though. He could read a wine list, and work a room. Although I had been reared with such skills, they had been largely eroded after years of feral living. The first time he took me to his flat, we stopped for sushi somewhere near the Westway, somewhere which was nothing fancier than a Yo Sushi, but back then, after all those kebab shops and chip shops, it felt like an afternoon in Nobu. ‘Wow,’ I said, wondering what I had done to deserve this. ‘Thank you.’

‘It’s my great pleasure,’ he said, and he was beaming.

I did wonder if he was gay, such was his dedication to grooming and fashion. I looked like a storm-tossed haystack in comparison. I remember asking him, as we snuggled up to each other, ‘Are you sure you’re not gay?’ and he laughed and said I had spent so long in East London that I was mistaking civilized for queer. Maybe he was just ahead of his time. On his second visit to my place, he brought me a V05 Hot Oil treatment for my hair. He said he had noticed that it was ‘a bit dry’ after my travels – he was being polite, as always; my grooming regime, other than soap and water, was non-existent, as was my hair care – and so he thought my hair might ‘need some help’. There he was, this short muscular guy in a tight t-shirt, advising me on hair product. My only references were gay friends in Barcelona: muscular guys in tight t-shirts with shiny hair; the East End blokes all wore baggy t-shirts – emblazoned either with Om or Motorhead, depending where their heads were at, and wouldn’t have known hair product if they were drowning in a vat of it. I remember wrapping a towel around my hot oiled head, and wondering about this new boyfriend who had suddenly appeared out of nowhere and moved into my life overnight. Who was he?

He told everyone I was the woman of his dreams. Everything about me: my accent, my orange furry top with the zip, my fondness for Earl Grey tea, my appetite for chemicals, my face, my love of animals, my vegetarianism, my devil-may-care attitude – he loved it all. I didn’t really have a devil-may-care attitude, I was just less uptight than him, less English. Less polite. More fuck-it, more impulsive. Less considered or considerate. When your auntie River met him later that summer, she said he was the politest man she had ever met. And with that level of politeness comes inscrutability.

So there he was. Small, polite, trendy, middle class. A ‘pocket sized Adonis,’ one of his friends called him. Meterosexual to a fault. A Leo, the same as me, but a few years older – he was born in 1963, I was born in 1967. Much later, in Brighton, I interviewed a psychic for work (I was a journalist by then – well, kind of), and she told me lots of things about myself that went beyond guesswork. The only thing she seemed to get wrong was about my ‘other half’, as she called him. ‘He’s quite a bit younger than you, isn’t he?’ she said. When I shook my head, she looked puzzled. ‘Yes, he is much,’ she insisted. ‘Much younger.’

Looking back on it, she was right. Just not in calendar years.

The things that I liked about him were as superficial as the things he liked about me: his face, his eyes, his clothes, his accent, his love of animals, particularly cats, his kindness, his middle class social skills, the fact that he was not on the dole. Like a high quality hair product, he was soft and gentle and smelled lovely; he worshipped me unreservedly, while telling me how selective he was when choosing women. After the teenage-style warfare of my last relationship, he was a dream. He would make me cards by cutting out pictures of fifties pin-ups and sticking them on coloured paper, then write me lovely messages in his distinctive all-capitals writing; he always signed himself ‘Luv Me.’ He was extremely dyslexic – l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Epigraph page
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR