‘A Taste Of Freedom’ by Carla Pearce
I looked around the circle in the community centre on Linacre Lane. So, these are my people. Andy, the chair, smiled too much. One man was drinking straight from a family-sized tub of yoghurt. I assumed I hadn't accidentally wandered into Probiotics Anonymous and stayed put. I decided I’d call him ‘Dairy Man’ in the interest of the group’s strict code of discretion.
My daughter found the receipts first. Miniatures of gin tucked between Tesco meal deals and birthday cards. My husband found the dwindling bottle hidden in my knickers drawer - a place he'd seldom ventured until there was something there I didn't want him to find.
Apparently that gave them all the evidence they needed. I agreed to go to therapy.
After one therapist suggested we spend less time talking about the drinking and more time being honest about my marriage, I decided he wasn't for me. A quick ‘I think he’s flirting with me’ and my husband couldn’t have agreed more. So, here I am. Surrounded by a bunch of other people probably pretending they weren’t exactly where they needed to be.
"Anyone here for the first time?" Andy asked.
I lifted a hand.
"Hi, I'm Sharon."
"Hi, Sharon," they chorused. It landed somewhere between comforting and cultish.
Andy smiled. "Tonight's topic is surrender. What does that word mean to you?"
I looked at the empty yoghurt tub rolling gently across the floor. "I've been surrendering for as long as I can remember," I said. "When I met my husband at seventeen, everyone said I was lucky. He adored me. That's what it looked like. Really, he adored the version of me he was slowly inventing. He had a favourite sentence. 'Why would you say that?' always with a puzzled laugh, as if I’d embarrassed us all. It could be over anything - a story, an opinion, a harmless comment. Our children would stare at their plates. Friends would laugh awkwardly. After a while, I stopped offering opinions at all. It was easier.”
Nobody interrupted. I took that as my cue to carry on.
"Thirty years later I couldn't have told you my favourite colour. I could've told you his. The only thing he never really got to choose was what I put in my own body. And he can’t bear gin. So I drank gin."
A few people nodded. Not because they approved of the gin. Because they understood why.
"I wasn’t surrendering anymore - I was choosing. I never hid it from him, in fact I came to enjoy the nightly arguments about how much he noticed I was drinking. Every mouthful tasted like freedom. Like shutting one door in a house where every other door stood open. It was the only decision that still belonged to me."
I looked around the room. Nobody looked shocked. Nobody looked away.
“But one day I realised I wasn't choosing the gin anymore. The gin was choosing me. Freedom had quietly become escape. My husband thought the bottle was the problem. For a while, so did I.”
The room stayed quiet.
“But I don't want to escape anymore," I said. "I want to know what I'd say if nobody had spent thirty years asking me, why would you say that?"
Carla Pearce wrote this story in response to the prompt A Taste Of Freedom as part of July’s Just Write! short story competition.
