Free The Outrun by Amy Liptrot Page A

avoiding some old places and people, while applying for jobs with a new hard-to-explain gap in my CV.
    I drifted around east London on my bike, hoping that by acting as if going swimming, buying groceries, texting people from AA and drinking endless Coca-Cola was enough, then it’d gradually become so. Alcohol had been my companion for years and, although it had caused me trouble, I was missing it.
    When I broke up with my boyfriend I’d spent a long time feeling it was almost futile to cook for one. What was the point of watching a film alone, or of sweeping the floor when it was only me walking on it? I still missed him – I thought of him every time a plane flew over east London – but he was gradually getting further away. I was now going through something similar with alcohol. What was the point of picnics without booze? Was I supposed to just meet a friend, not ‘for a drink’?
    Aimless, jittery and jonesing, any small thing going wrongupset me disproportionately and I was spun out. The workings of the city and my mind had been exposed, and things made even less sense than they had when they were concealed. Layers of complexity multiplied and I couldn’t hang on. I cycled around the roundabout under Canary Wharf, where there were trade entrances to the shining office blocks above, Chinese waiters smoked and I breathed in trapped traffic fumes. I cycled through Hackney Wick, where on one side of the road a storage facility was packed with people’s possessions and on the other there was a newly built empty apartment block.
    I was coming around to the idea that alcoholism is a form of mental illness, rather than just a habit or lack of control. Although I knew that everything good happening in my life – regaining the trust of my family, who’d seen me promise and fail to change many times, possibilities of new work, a slight confident step – was reliant on me staying sober, as I cycled over the bridge across the Eastway in the sun, knowing I had a free afternoon, I had the thought that a couple of beers would not only be a nice idea but was the only thing that would give me satisfaction. Although I didn’t think I was crazy in general, thoughts like that were insane. I had to stay vigilant.
    I kept thinking about a Bloody Mary, which I’d rarely drunk. A Bloody Mary with plenty of vodka through a straw sitting outside a bar by myself. When I was craving, I would abandon all else and just drink into oblivion. But I was learning that the thing with cravings is that they pass: I sat through it and an hour later wondered what it had been about.
    In a strangely landscaped park in the middle of Canary Wharf,under the shadow of Number One Canada Square, I drank an overpriced coffee, watching men in suits and women in wrap dresses and heels talk on phones, security passes around their necks. Just a few months earlier, I had worn smart clothes and was buzzed into corporate headquarters but now I felt removed. I was in an ill-fitting, garish dress with messy hair, shaky and tearful. I’d given it up voluntarily, and was glad I had, but there were moments when I wondered what the hell I’d done.
    As well as stopping drinking, my time in rehab changed me in other ways, reconfiguring my priorities. I felt lucky to have indulged in treatment and to have met all those loopy and unpredictable people. Working with people who could barely read and write, but who often expressed themselves with eloquence that hurt my heart, made my concerns over things like grammar seem petty and obscure. Hearing about life in prisons, in hospitals, in travelling communities, in large families, in Russia and in Stepney Green showed me spheres of experience orbiting far away from media-saturated graduates bitching on Twitter. My old friends now seemed different, going round the same bars and parties, with the same topics of conversation. Excuse me while I smash up the drum kit inside my head.
    I never cried when I was on my bike and, to get