This is an extract from my memoir ‘Going Under.’ It’s a drinking story, and not one I am proud of. But it happened.
Edinburgh: 1991
It was a freezing night in Edinburgh and I was in my late twenties. I was out with the boys, a tight group of friends of an ex-boyfriend, Neil. Newly back in Scotland from Sydney, again, I was living in Glasgow but spending the weekend in Edinburgh. We ate at a Mexican restaurant owned by one of Neil’s friends and many margaritas gave up their lives for us. Neil and I decided to dance the Gay Gordons on Waverley Bridge and that was going fine until I tripped over. It was a very frosty night. We had carried on regardless, heading to a club for more drinks. But my ankle had started to throb and burn, so when Neil asked if I would like to go back to his place I gave the best knockback line I have ever used.
‘So sorry, I think I’ve broken my ankle and should go to Emergency.’
I actually went back to my friend Jeannie’s flat and next morning she dropped me off on the opposite side of the road from the Emergency Department of the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh. I hopped over the road and inside where I sat with other quiet souls, all of us looking sorry for ourselves. The Sunday morning in Emergency after the Saturday night before.
One bloke was as white as milk, very pasty, even by Scottish standards. His leg was clearly broken. Who were those two men in blue with him? We got chatting and it turned out he was a prisoner at Saughton Jail, Edinburgh’s finest. He’d broken his leg playing soccer.
I also met two brothers from Ormiston – one had been in Callum’s year and their sister had been in my class at primary school. Once I was seen and given a temporary plaster, they gave me a lift and I hirpled up the three flights of stairs to Jeannie’s flat where I stayed until I returned to hospital for an operation.
All right, that had been a low point. But I hadn’t drunk a single margarita since, and to be honest I had loved, loved, loved being knocked out for that operation to put a plate on my ankle bone, and had loved even more the doses of morphine I was given over the next few days. My middle of the night hamming up the pain would have made an actor proud.
And it wasn’t as if I had nearly killed myself; not like Dad had that time.
Ormiston: 1983
A spectacular example of Dad’s many marvellous escapes from peril came the night he attempted to fly out of his bedroom window. All of the bedrooms were upstairs in Marketgate so this window was five metres or more above the ground. It had been just another drunken night with an argument. Dad had locked Mum out of the bedroom. The very solid old doors of this farmhouse had large locks with proper iron keys in them. Mum had quietly toddled off to sleep in another bedroom. This was not an unusual event.
She was woken by a very hard knocking on the back door.
‘Do you know your husband is crawling down the yard dressed only in his underpants?’ asked a neighbour.
Who knows what had actually happened? This much-discussed event was agreed by most to be a genuine attempt to fly. There was never any suspicion that Dad might have been trying to harm himself. He could never tell us what was in his mind as he opened the window and made his escape. Dad remembered nothing of the fall, either because he was in deep blackout at the time or through shock.
Not for the first time an ambulance was summoned to Marketgate. Dad was taken to the Royal Infirmary. What was significant was that Mum did not go with him in the ambulance. This event had happened when I was in my first year at university and Mum was early on in her emancipation. She sent him off alone and later drove to the hospital in her own car. This became part of the village gossip.
‘And your mum sent him off to the hospital on his own, ye ken. She’s a hard wummin your mum, hen.’
Not really. She hadn’t pushed him out of that window even though many might have forgiven her if she had.
Dad’s leg was badly broken but, as Mum reported to me by phone, the surgeons had to wait until he had sobered up before they could operate.
‘He was claiming to see green fish climbing up the walls of the waiting room and they did not think that was the best time to get started on the leg.’
Dad eventually went to surgery and his shattered shinbone was pinned together. He wrote me a letter from the hospital hilariously signing off ‘love in infirmity from the Infirmary.‘ This was the only letter Dad ever sent me.
In Scotland a cast is called a ‘stookie’, from the Italian word ‘stucco’ meaning plaster. Getting his stookie in and out of his trousers was going to be difficult but a Scotsman has a national and natural sartorial advantage in these situations. Dad wore his kilt every day while his leg was in its stookie. He hirpled around on his crutches, still going down to his builder’s yard at 6 am to send all his workers off to their daily jobs.
Dad appeared completely undaunted by this accident and there seemed to be no lessons learned, no self-reflection, no quarter given to any whispers of introspection.
Naturally, his heavy drinking continued apace. I came home for the Christmas holidays and I will never forget the sight of Dad slurring his words as he crawled on his hands and knees up the staircase. Wearing his kilt, he dragged his broken leg up, yelping slightly each time the stookie banged, step by step. It was a sight to behold, pathetic but practical, Dad’s sheer bloody-mindedness.
These were the same stairs which killed him, of course, but that was decades later. Back to our tale. Weeks later the stookie was chipped off and Dad could walk again, his leg withered and scarred. The telling of this tale of Dad’s audacious but doomed attempt to fly became one of his staple drunken stories. He lauded himself and he laughed at himself for years afterwards. Until the drink made him forget that story too.
For me, it has always been a tale that told of our family’s madness. But also, that small act of marital defiance, of not going in the ambulance to hospital with Dad, was a step for Mum.
Drinking Story Follow Up
I really never did drink a margarita again until I stopped drinking alcohol and came across from alcohol-free margaritas… I do enjoy those. Find heaps of information about delicious AF drinks over on my Sober Journeys website.