Free Kissing Through a Pane of Glass by Peter Michael Rosenberg

of a surprise when on our second evening together, Liana produced a packet of cigarettes over dinner and lit up.
     
    ‘I didn’t know you smoked?’ I said, no disapproval in my tone, just surprise.
     
    ‘Just occasionally,’ said Liana. ‘I like to watch the smoke curling up into the air. There’s something so transient about it, the uncertainty of the spirals. It makes me think about the passing of time.’
     
    This seemed the least likely excuse for smoking I had ever heard, but from Liana’s lips it had the ring of authenticity. I did not discover until much later that Liana was a confirmed twenty-a-day addict, and that at the time she met me she had been trying to give up. By the time we arrived in Pushkar, I too was smoking like a fool. It didn’t seem to matter; it was just a part of the whole, a fancy, a game. It was as irrelevant as tapping one’s fingers on a table top.
     
    The drinking, however, was another matter altogether.
     

Chapter 17
     
    I come from a family of teetotallers. Neither my parents nor my older sisters drink; not so much as a glass of wine with a meal. This is not, as one might suspect, for any moral or ethical reasons. They do not disapprove of alcohol; they simply don’t like the taste. Consequently I was brought up in a booze-free home, and it was not until I was sixteen that I discovered the potent effect of fermented vegetable matter.
     
    At sixteen I became a hardened cider drinker. I have, it seems, a low threshold to intoxicating substances, and I discovered in these formative years that a pint of Strongbow was enough to reduce me to a gibbering idiot. Alcohol made me popular: I was the best value entertainment in town. If you wanted an amusing evening, all you had to do was take me to the pub, pour cider down my throat, and after half an hour I would sing, dance and tell ludicrous stories for the rest of the night. Friends would happily stand me the price of a pint. While this may sound a bit demeaning, at the time I revelled in it. If girls did not fancy me for my looks, they at least liked me for my sense of humour.
     
    I remained faithful to the sweet, sickly, gassy liquid until I attended Sussex where, as cider was considered “a girl’s drink”, I switched to real ale. In an effort to prove I was a real man, I would drink pint after pint of the disgusting stuff in the vain hope that I would, one day, get to like it. I succeeded only in making myself very sick.
     
    It was sweet, innocent little Jo who introduced me to the pleasures of Scotch and American Dry. It was love at first sight. At last, here was a drink that was sophisti- cated, pleasing in taste, easy to drink, and could get you really pissed if you so desired. Not that I liked getting drunk too often. But there were occasions when I took to the bottle with a sort of madness, determined to wipe myself out. I loved that light, carefree feeling that came at around about the fourth drink, when the tongue was loose but still in control, when everything seemed easy and amusing, and you were under the impression that everyone loved you.
     
    My mistake, like so many drinkers, was in believing that to sustain these feelings one merely had to continue drinking, and I don’t suppose, for all the throwing up I did or for all those dreadful hangovers, that I ever appreciated the fallacy of that particular theory.
     
    There comes a point, as anyone who has ever tried this knows, when reason no longer enters the picture. You are no longer in control, you no longer care. You are drunk and a potential danger to yourself and anyone who dares to come too close. The morning that I woke up to find myself in a crouched position in a strange bathroom, my knees locked, my head lodged in the toilet bowl, I realised I had a problem. Not a drink problem; drink was just the catalyst, the medium - drink was just an excuse. No, my problem was much more serious, and was to do with excess.
     
    I seemed to need more of everything