My day of reckoning finally came.

One Saturday evening, when I was about seventeen, Mum and Dad had the Kellys and the Smiths over for drinks. Mum and Mrs. Kelly happened to be drinking vodka. Or so they thought. However, thanks to my efforts over the previous eighteen months or so, what was once Smirnoff was now more or less 100 percent purest, unadulterated water, untainted by the merest hint of alcohol.

The rest of the party had the good fortune to be drinking actual alcohol.

So, as Dad, Mr. Kelly, Mr. Smith and Mrs. Smith got louder and redder and chattier and laughed at things that weren't remotely funny, and Dad told everyone that he didn't declare all his income to the tax man and the Smiths revealed that Mr. Smith had had an affair last year and that they'd nearly split up but they were making a go of things now, Mum and Mrs.

Kelly sat stiff and poker-faced, smiling tightly as the others guffawed with laughter.

Mum found nothing even remotely amusing in Mrs. Smith's spilling her Bacardi and Coke (I didn't really like Bacardi, so its alcoholic content was pretty much intact) all over 50.the good sitting room carpet, but Dad was highly entertained by it. Mirth abounded. All except for the vodka drinkers.

The penny dropped with my mother the next day.

The bottle of vodka was sent for and subjected to several tests. (As in, "Here, smell that. What does that smell like to you?" "Nothing, Mum."

"Exactly!") Results from the makeshift forensics lab set up in the kitchen showed that the bottle of vodka had indeed been tampered with. Tampered with repeatedly, in fact.

There was a tearful scene between myself and my parents. Well, my mother, at least, was tearful. But with embarrassment and rage. "Oh, the shame of it," she wailed. "Inviting people over and offering them drinks and giving them watered-down stuff instead. I could die! How could you?

And you took the pledge and promised not to drink until you were eighteen."

I was surly and sullen and silent. I hung my head to hide my shame and my fury at being caught.

Dad was silent and sad.

A purge ensued. The alcohol was all rounded up and incarcerated. De-tained without trial in a secure cupboard that had a key. Only Mum knew where that key was kept, and as she said herself, she would rather suffer the torments of the damned than reveal its whereabouts.

Naturally it was only a matter of time before myself or one of my sisters figured out how to pick the lock.

A type of guerrilla warfare ensued, with my mother forever seeking new hiding places for the rapidly diminishing supply of alcohol. In fact, Helen swears that she heard Mum on the phone to Auntie Julia, who is an alcoholic, asking her to recommend good hiding places. But this has never been corroborated, so don't take it as gospel.

But Mum was only ever a tiny step ahead of us. No sooner had she found a new place for her cache than one of us would find it. In the same way that new antibiotics have to be constantly invented to combat new and resistant strains of bacteria, so Mum had to constantly invent new hiding places. Unfortunately for her, they never stayed new or hidden for long.

She even tried sitting down and reasoning with us. "Please 51 don't drink so much. Or at least please don't drink so much of my and your father's alcohol."

And the answer she usually got-uttered more in sorrow than in anger, I have to say-would be something like, "But Mum, we like to drink. We are poor. We are left with no choice. Do you think we enjoy enjoy behaving like common thieves?" behaving like common thieves?"

Now, even though Margaret, Rachel and I had left home and could afford to support whatever bad habits we chose, Helen and Anna were both still living at home and were bone-crunchingly poor. So the battle continued.

And what was once a proud and noble alcohol collection was now a tatty and raggedy and depleted few bottles traveling nomadically around the closets and cellars and under the beds, looking for a safe haven. Long gone were the full and sparkling bottles of spirits with recognizable brand names.

All that remained in their stead were a sticky bottle of Drambuie, covered in dust, with about an inch left in the bottom, or half an inch of Cuban vodka (honestly, there is such a thing-obviously the right drink for the ideologically sound comrade in Cuba) and the almost full bottle of banana schnapps, which Helen and Anna have both declared that they would rather die of thirst than drink.

I continued to sit on the cold floor in the dark hall. I really felt as if I needed a drink. I would even have drunk the banana schnapps if I'd known where to find it. I felt so unbearably lonely lonely. I toyed with the idea of waking my mother up and asking her to give me a drink, but I felt really guilty at that idea. She was so worried about me, if the poor woman had managed to get to sleep I couldn't in all conscience wake her.

Maybe Helen could help.

I wearily climbed the stairs to her bedroom. But when I crept into her room her bed was empty. Either she had spent the night at Linda's or else some young man had got very lucky. If she had spent the night with a man, his suicided body would probably be found in the morning with a note beside it saying something like "I have achieved everything I ever wanted to do in life. I will never be as happy as this ever again. I want to die on this note of ecstasy. PS: She is a Goddess."

52.Then, as if I wasn't feeling awful enough, I was suddenly gripped with a panicky fear that something terrible had happened to Kate.

That she'd been the victim of crib death. Or choked on vomit. Or suffocated. Or something something.

I raced back to my room and I was so relieved to find that she was still breathing.

She was just lying there, a wrinkled, pink, fragrant bundle, her eyes screwed shut.

As I waited for my breathing to return to normal and for the sweat to evaporate from my forehead I wondered how other parents coped. How did they let their children out to play with other children? Didn't they panic every time they were away from their children for more than five minutes?

I was finding it hard enough now. How the hell would I cope when she had to go to school? There was no way I could be expected to just abandon her like that. The school would have to let me sit at the back of the classroom.

Now I really really needed a drink. needed a drink.

Maybe Anna was home.

I dragged myself over to her room and quietly opened the door.

The fumes hit me instantaneously.

The alcohol fumes, that is.

Bingo!

"Thank God," I thought. I'd obviously come to the right place.

Anna was curled up in bed, her long black hair spread out all around her on the pillow.

"Anna," I whispered loudly to her, and shook her a bit.

No response.

"Anna!" I whispered, a good deal more loudly this time, and shook her shoulder vigorously.

I turned on her bedside lamp and shone it into her face, Gestapo style.

Wake up!

She opened her eyes and stared at me.

"Claire?" she croaked disbelievingly.

She looked really quite frightened, as though she thought she might be hallucinating.

And as this was Anna, it was quite possible.

53.That she was hallucinating, that is.

Fond of the mood-altering substances, if you follow me.

The poor girl. As far as she knew I was four hundred miles away, in another city, in another life. But here I was manifesting myself in her bedroom in the middle of the night.

"Anna, sorry to disturb you like this but have you anything I could drink?" I asked her.

She just stared at me.

"Why are you here?" she asked in a little frightened voice.

"Because I'm looking for a bloody drink," I said exasperatedly.

"Have you a message for me?" she asked, still staring at me wide-eyed.

"Oh Christ," I thought in annoyance.

Anna loved anything to do with the occult. There was nothing she would like more than to be possessed by the devil. Or to live in a haunted house.

Or to be able to foretell disasters. She was obviously hoping that I was some kind of paranormal phenomenon. Either that or she was drunker than usual.

"Yes, Anna," I said, deciding to humor her but at the same time feeling a bit foolish. "They have sent me. I've been sent to get the drink."

"In my backpack," she said faintly.

Her backpack was flung on the floor with one shoe (what had happened to the other one?), her coat and a can of Budweiser. I had difficulty opening the bag as two helium balloons were attached to the cord. Anna had obviously been to some kind of party.

I nearly cried with relief when I found a bottle of white wine in her bag.

"Thanks, Anna," I said. "I'll repay you tomorrow." And left.

She was still looking dazed and frightened. She nodded dumbly. "Okay,"

she managed to mumble.

I checked Kate. She was still sleeping peacefully.

I had half expected her to be sitting up with her arms folded, demanding to know where the father I had promised her was. But she was just asleep dreaming baby dreams about pink clouds and warm beds and soft people who smell nice 54.and lots to eat and lots of sleep and lots of people who love you.

And never having to line up for the bathroom.

I took the bottle of wine downstairs to the kitchen and wearily opened it. I knew I would feel better after having a drink. Just as I was pouring myself a glass of wine, Anna appeared at the kitchen door, rubbing her eyes, looking confused and anxious, her long black hair strewn around her white face.

"Oh, Claire, it really is you. So I didn't imagine it," she said, sounding half relieved, half disappointed. "I thought I might have the DTs. And then I thought you might be a vision. But I thought if you were a vision that you would appear in something nicer than Mum's awful nightgown."

"Yes, it really is me." I smiled at her. "Sorry if I gave you a fright. But I was dying for a drink." I went over to her and put my arms around her. It really was lovely to see her.

Anna looked a lot like Helen, little white face, slanty cat eyes, cute little nose.

But the resemblance ended there. For starters I didn't want to kill Anna about twenty times a day. Anna was a lot quieter, a lot sweeter. She was very kind to everyone. She was also, unfortunately, very vague and very ethereal.

Well, I suppose I had better be perfectly frank with you. There's no getting away from the fact that Anna was a bit of...well...a bit of a hippie, I suppose.

She got jobs intermittently. Usually in vegetarian restaurants. But they never seemed to last any length of time. Well, neither did the restaurants either, for some odd reason.

She went on welfare.

She, as I should have mentioned, sold drugs. But only briefly. And in the nicest possible way.

No honestly.

She never hung around school gates trying to sell high-grade heroin to eight-year-olds.

She just sold the odd bit of hash to her friends and family. And doubtless made a loss on it.

She made jewelry and occasionally even sold some.

A precarious kind of existence, but she didn't seem too bothered by the insecure nature of it.

55.Dad despaired of Anna. He called her irresponsible. And, of course, the blame for Anna's instability was laid squarely, if not particularly fairly, at my door. Dad said that I had hightailed it (his word) to London at a time when Anna was at a very impressionable age and I had given her the idea that it was perfectly acceptable to give up a good job and go off and work as a waitress. What kind of role model was I? he asked me.

Dad had desperately tried to mold Anna into a responsible, tax-paying citizen. He managed to get her a job in an office working for a construction company.

Apparently someone owed him a favor.

It must have been a very large favor.

It was a mistake to try to force Anna to work in an office. Like trying to squash a round peg into a square hole. Or wearing your shoes on the wrong feet. Unpleasant, uncomfortable and almost certainly doomed to failure.

It was a disaster.

She lost track of the time every lunch hour because she had found a swan's nest at the canal near the office and would spend ages watching the birds and cooing over the eggs. (And rolling and partaking of several joints also, if the rumormongers are to be believed.) But the day she suggested changing the filing system for the construction workers, so that instead of organizing them by their surnames, she would do it by their astrological star signs instead, Mr. Ballard, the office manager, decided that he had enough. Although Anna protested that really she had only been joking (she said, laughing, no doubt making things worse for herself, "Honestly, how could we possibly consider filing them by their star signs? I mean, we don't even know their rising signs"), she soon found herself once more without gainful employment.

Dad was furious and mortified with embarrassment. "What goes on in her bloody head?" he thundered. "I'd nearly swear she's on drugs."

Honestly, for an intelligent man, there were times when he was alarmingly naive.

Once she had established that I wasn't a psychic phenome-56 non, Anna, though disappointed, decided to make the best of the situation.

"Pour me a glass of that too," she said, gesturing at the bottle of wine, so I did, and we both sat down at the kitchen table.

It was about five AM.

Anna seemed to find nothing remotely strange at the lateness or, more accurately, the earliness of the hour.

"Cheers," she said, raising her glass to me.

"Yes, cheers," I replied hollowly. I drained the glass in one gulp. Anna looked admiringly at me.

"So what are you doing here?" she asked conversationally. "I didn't know that you were coming. No one told me...well, I think think no one told me," she said a bit doubtfully. "I haven't been home in about a week." no one told me," she said a bit doubtfully. "I haven't been home in about a week."

"Well, Anna, it was a bit of a sudden decision," I said, sighing as I geared up for a long tortuous explanation of my tragic circumstances.