Free The Thing Itself by Adam Roberts Page B

lunch I often went back into class under the influence. It grew more noticeable. The kids laughed about it and told their parents. The parents, when they complained to the head, were not laughing. The head had no option but to suspend me.
    The three months’ suspension passed in a haze. I checked the papers for jobs, and applied for several teaching positions, but didn’t even get to interview. This at a time when the news assured me there was a national shortage of school teachers, especially in the sciences. A double blow to my ego. I signed on (you were still able to do that, back then) and lived for another six months on the dole. Eventually the dole people made my benefit conditional on me working at a series of low-grade employments: cleaning offices; working in a petrol station. So I did that. I applied for a job as a bus driver, and got as far as the sponsored HGV training, when the instructor smelt booze on my breath and dismissed me. He promised me my name would be blacklisted, and advised me not to apply for any more professional driving jobs. I accepted his scorn with as much downbeaten grace as I could muster. Eventually I found work with the council: two weeks on the dust carts, two weeks manning the Bracknell recycling station, where the public drove up to unload cardboard boxes and old toilet cisterns and bags of garden waste into the huge concrete-walled bays. The main downside (apart from the smell, and the low pay) was having to get up at 4 am every working day. I minded this less than some of the others, since sleep was an intermittent and turbulent business for me. The main upside was my gaffer was tolerant of his people taking the occasional snifter on the job. Then again, as the only middle-class, university-educated member of an otherwise solidly working-class, left-school-at-sixteen crew, I cannot pretend that I ever really fitted in.
    I would drive to the depot in my old Vauxhall Astra, through pre-dawn streets and the carroty illumination of street lamps. I rarely saw another vehicle. I was often intoxicated. One time I misjudged a corner, side-swiped a parked van and drove through a hedge into the backlot of a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet, causing – the subsequent court case established – £7,477 worth of damage. I was banned from driving for three years. The car was written off. Since I had been driving under the influence insurers refused to pay out for a new car. I was landed with a monthly instalment plan to pay the fine, the damages, the court fees.
    I eventually got a handle on the drinking. It happens as you get older. It happens, or you don’t get older. Drink hard in your twenties and you’re a regular, fun guy. Keep drinking hard through your thirties and you start to separate yourself from fun, health and indeed other people. If you’re still doing it in your forties it’s probably because you have unresolved stresses and problems which you are clumsily and destructively self-medicating. Drinking hard into your fifties means that you’re blowing hot and cold on ever seeing your sixties. I woke up a week after my fiftieth birthday unable to remember the previous three days, and decided to stop. I could say ‘simple as that’, except that it really wasn’t simple at all. There was a clincher, though, and it was this: my main rationale for drinking was to calm myself in the face of my night terrors. But although I drank a lot, the nightmares refused to go away. I tried a few weeks of facing them without the alcohol, and though the terrors were no better they were certainly not worse. So I quit drinking.
    Without booze jangling my nerves, and without needing to get up at 2 am every night to piss, I actually started sleeping better. Most nights the nightmares were still there, but every now and again I would sleep right through without disturbance. The oddest thing about that was the nights in which I was unterrified left me not with repose, but with a kind of blankness. Habit