Ice and a Slice Read Free

without thinking. “I mean, half a bottle is nothing, is it? Everyone has half a bottle of wine with dinner.”
    He smiled. “Three quarters?”
    “Yes, I’d say it was usually three quarters, occasionally the whole bottle, but not always. Maybe if I’d had a particularly stressful day, or if I was up late.”
    “Do you drink on your own or with a husband or partner?”
    She was ready for this one; it was the same thing they asked on the Are you an alcoholic? questionnaire she’d found on the net. If you drank alone you were a saddo alky, but if you were sharing the wine with someone else you were okay. Not that she exactly shared the wine because Tom didn’t like white much – luckily – but he did quite often have a glass of red.
    “My husband’s usually around,” she said firmly.
    “But not always?”
    “No, he sometimes works late, so I might have the odd glass before he gets in.”
    “But not the whole three quarters of a bottle?”
    “Well, possibly I might – if he was working very late.” How had she fallen into that one? “I mean, if I didn’t I wouldn’t have a drink at all, would I?”
    “And would that bother you, not having a drink at all?”
    “No, I don’t think so.” Her hands felt slippy on the leather of her bag – she didn’t remember picking it up, but it was on her lap and she could feel sweat dripping down the back of her neck. Flustered, she stared at a paperclip on the grey carpet just in front of Kit’s trainer.
    The truth was she couldn’t remember the last day she hadn’t had a few glasses of wine – so she didn’t actually know whether not having it would bother her. After a slight pause she told him this. After all, she wasn’t in denial about how much she drank. If she was an alcoholic she would have been in denial. That was a big part of the illness – it was almost the definition. If you thought you were an alcoholic then you probably weren’t. She’d been clinging to that little truth for a while now.
    But instead of condemning her as an alcoholic Kit changed tack. “Do you ever drink anything else besides wine, Sarah?”
    The fact he’d called her Sarah reminded her that whatever she told him would be attributed to someone else and, feeling a strange sense of liberation, she told him she drank gin and tonic, too – not much – a litre or two of gin every couple of weeks. She knew this because she put at least one empty bottle in the green recycling bin every fortnight. Never any more than two bottles. She was quite proud of that, although occasionally she put the recycling bin that contained innocuous plastic shampoo bottles and milk containers over the one that contained glass - in case the neighbours took more than a passing interest.
    “So you’re mixing your drinks?” he asked unexpectedly, and she stared at him.
    “Is that bad?”
    He paused, and suddenly she’d had enough. In the cold light of day listing all her drinks like this sounded a lot worse than it felt. It wasn’t as though she ever got drunk – well, very occasionally she did, but hardly ever. Not one of her friends had ever commented on how much she drank, although, come to think of it, she’d had an awful lot of jokey drink-related birthday cards this year. Not even Tom had commented. Mind you, he didn’t comment on much she did; he was too tied up with his job to notice.
    She wanted to get out of here – she’d only come to reassure herself her drinking habits were normal. For heaven’s sake, if you were French you drank gallons of wine, didn’t you – not just the odd bottle. The French had the stuff with every meal. A ten-year-old French child probably drank more than she did. But before she left she really needed to establish she was fine and didn’t have a problem. Otherwise the whole embarrassing experience would be a waste of time.
    “Am I drinking too much?” she asked, glad her voice sounded perfectly calm. “I mean, I know I’m not teetotal, but I’m not