Cold Turkey 2

Yesterday I copped a parking ticket and an infringement notice for going through a red light.

It’s a serious offence says my husband and he’s right. I shall be more wary in future. It’s not so much the $299.00 fine that irks me as the three lost demerit points. Not lost but gained. Three demerit points that will stay with me for three whole years on my otherwise almost unblemished record. I copped a speeding fine over twenty years ago and that is all.

‘Don’t beat up on yourself,’ my husband says, but I do. I feel terrible, as if I cannot wash this sin from my hands, not so much the sin, as the fact of getting caught. Have I such a feeble conscience?

Similarly with my blog, with my most recent post, Cold Turkey, which almost every one has interpreted as a straightforward statement of my decision to give up smoking. I wrote it in the present tense as though it were happening now and they all almost to a person sent their best wishes and encouragement for giving up smoking.

I gave up smoking in 1981. That’s a long time ago now.

How do my fellow bloggers see me? An old girl with a fag hanging from her mouth. The smell of cigarettes infusing her hair, her clothes and her house.

I can remember the years building up to my decision to stop smoking were years filled with guilt. It was guilt almost more than health and other considerations that pushed me off the cigarettes. Guilt that I should so publicly flaunt a hated habit in front of everyone.

By the time I gave up smoking – largely propelled by the fact of discovering I was pregnant with our first daughter – it came as such a relief.

No longer did I feel unclean, like one of the great untouchables. Coupled with the decision to give up smoking I also decided to demonstrate to my husband and myself how much money we would save from not smoking.

Every week I put aside the money we would otherwise spend on cigarettes and after some six months when I had accumulated a pretty packet, my husband and I invited two of our close friends to go out for dinner to Stephanie’s Restaurant, a leading restaurant in Melbourne at the time.

The dinner costs hundreds of dollars and would not have been something we could never have afforded, let alone pay for another couple as well, but I wanted to mark the occasion of our giving up smoking and I wanted to thank our friends, these two who had given up smoking several months ahead of us and whose inspiration had also inspired us to try to give up, too.

By the time we went for this dinner I was very pregnant, the food was too rich and I could not enjoy the wine, though I vaguely remember allowing myself half a glass of champagne in honour of the occasion.

A few years later I was surprised to learn that one of my two friends had taken up smoking again. They had travelled overseas and were living far from home. Whether it was the loneliness or the work pressures in a hard-boiled advertising agency that drove her to it, I do not know, but my friend still smokes. It could have been she who wrote the previous post or me of thirty years ago. In any case, I am troubled by the whole notion of having to write to truth in the blogosphere again.

Have I betrayed my followers by leading them up a false path or is it okay to write as I have and then when they respond as though my writing were a statement of a present experience to then tell them the truth?

Should I have gone along with the charade? Made out that yes, I am in the throes of going cold turkey. What are the rules?

My good blogger friend, Jim Murdoch says I should have signposted my intention. Why? To alert the reader into reading the post with a different eye, a prepared eye. Why can the reader not tolerate what comes her/his way and make whatever sense he/she makes of it without feeling like they’re foolish, as Jim suggests, because they read it as a statement of present fact rather than a reflection of a past experience written in the present.

I belong to a writing group in which I declare myself to be an autobiographer and the woman who facilitates this group tells me that I am a fiction writer, whether I like it or not. And certainly there are times when I find it easy to slip away from the truth of an experience into something that becomes an extension into a fantasy of that experience, but as I have written elsewhere I am too close to the surface of my experience for it ever to equate with fiction.

Helen Garner says there are fiction writers who write close to life and others who write further away, who make things up completely. But even as they make things up they have to come from somewhere within. Imagination comes in many forms.

I talked to someone recently about her synaesthesia. She described in vivid detail the colour of all the numbers and how they appeared in her imagination. She had always believed that this was the way others experienced numbers. She could not imagine it otherwise. Then one day, well into her adulthood she heard a radio program on synaesthesia and she realised she was unusual. Most people see numbers as distinct black outlines, they do not ascribe colours to them.

It seems such a joyous thing to do. I wish I too were able to see numbers through the prism of a rainbow. I wish I were able to paint colours around each distinct numeral, but I cannot. I am too earth bound. Similarly I wish I could write fiction. If I could I would tell you all in my profile, I am a fiction writer but I am not.

I write from life, I write it as I see it, and like Emily Dickinson I ‘tell all the truth but’ I ‘tell it slant’.

Cold turkey

When I step out of the shower and feel the first chill of air against my wet skin, I wake up for the day. Only then can I make plans: shopping to buy, errands to run, housework.
Ideas tumble through my mind but I cannot settle on one. There’s a crack in the ceiling I had not noticed before and beyond it a fine spider’s web pearled with water droplets from the steam. It is winter. The bathroom mirror is fogged. The extractor fan has lost any ability to do its job. I flick it on at the switch and it grinds noisily but has no effect.
I cannot see my image in the mirror, which is just as well. I could not see anyhow. My glasses on the bench have fogged up, too. Without them the world is a fuzzy ball. Yet in my mind I see it all clearly now, the thought unbidden like an apple falling from a tree.
Those cigarettes will kill me. I have to stop smoking.
I have had this thought before but today it feels different. Today it will not go away. Today is the day, I tell myself. Today is the last day. After today I will never smoke another cigarette again. Without the fan the left over smell of my own cigarettes even through the fug of the warm wet bathroom reminds me of the stench of my childhood home.
My throat constricts. I cannot stop coughing and mucus rises into my mouth.
My father died of emphysema, did you know? He died for want of breath. He died when he was sixty-five years old, when his body could not go on against the wretched struggles of his heart to pump blood around his body, and his lungs could no longer take in fresh air and use it to purify his blood.
One day soon the bathroom fan will collapse. My father’s lungs were like the extractor fan in my bathroom. They collapsed. The noise the fan makes now is like the sound of my father’s catarrh. The sound of his hacking cough as it rattles through the hallways of my memory.
And did you know I took up smoking when I was well into adulthood? I cannot plead the excuse of the young, those keen to prove themselves. I had, I thought then, already proved myself. But I took up smoking almost to the day that my father stopped.
I know it pained him to see me drag in the sweet cigarette smoke while he could scarcely breathe under the weight of his own now passive smoking. I should have left the room, but I wanted him to suffer. A cruel punishment to inflict on my father; something of what he had inflicted on me, as if to say to him, there you see, you did it, you taught me and now you must suffer. Reap the benefits.
Do you know I am now officially addicted. I cannot give up smoking without suffering the pain of withdrawal. I know this now. It is an unhappy thought. How will I endure the next few days, the next few weeks without the comfort of my cigarettes?
My body is dry. The towel is wet. I hang it out along the rack. I step into my dressing gown and slippers, then make my way to the bedroom to dress for the day. Sandals, a t-shirt and jeans. My cigarettes lie on the mantelpiece where I last left them. I pick up the packet ready for that first cigarette of the day. My body rises to greet the first rush.
No, I say. Today is the day, not tomorrow. I throw the packet outside my window into the teeming rain where the cigarettes will grow soggy and incapable of offering solace to anyone. I go cold turkey.