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“Are you drinking again?”
That’s all Robert said to cause the argument. Their worst one for a while, to the point that Aaron has gone scuttling off to Mackenzie’s house for a few tinnies to calm down. He’s refusing to see the irony in that.
Mackenzie’s asked him at least six times what happened but Aaron won’t share. He’s not thick, he knows he doesn’t come off well in this situation.
Aaron grew up in pubs. Neither his mum or dad shied away from a Thursday, Friday, Saturday night out at their local watering hole - The Queen’s Head, just a few streets away from their house in Hotten - and their underage child wasn’t an obstacle. He got dragged out and sat down at the table in the corner, told that if he moved he’d earn himself a slap, with a colouring book and Fruit Shoots and crisps to keep him quiet. He’d watch his mum flirt with other men while his dad pretended not to notice and he learnt how relationships work. The old men, the regulars, would sometimes chat to him and one, Toby, a man with a round face and wispy grey hair and very few teeth, would always offer Aaron a sip from his pint. Every time, Aaron took it. He swallowed the lager and then swallowed again against the gag reflex that inevitably kicked in. He only did it because Toby would tell his mum and she’d come over to yell at him. Scraps of attention that Aaron was desperate for.
Then, his mum left.
Aaron hadn’t known it could get worse. Bartenders in at least six different pubs knew him by name. They didn’t go to The Queen’s Head anymore. Gordon made new friends, big blokes who ignored Aaron for the most part and terrified him when they didn’t. Aaron had taken his Furby, the one his mum bought him for Christmas less than two months before she abandoned him, with him to one of the new pubs and one of the blokes got hold of it and broke it. Gordon had sent him outside for crying about it. That night was the first time Aaron had gotten a chat about being a man. In the interest of being a man, Aaron started stealing sips of everyone’s drinks while they were playing on the pool table. Gordon wasn’t like Chas, he had thought it was funny when Aaron drank from Toby’s glass, he’d say It’s good for him. Puts hairs on his chest. So when he caught him with his lager or his mate’s scotch and coke in hand, he’d just ruffle his hair and laugh. Anything that made his dad jovial was better than the alternative.
When he had to spend Christmas with his mum and her family in Emmerdale, he thought it’d be better until he realised that she worked in the village’s local and he’d be staying the night in that place. The Woolpack, he hated when he was a kid; it represented everything wrong with his mum and dad’s relationship. Drinking was one of the reasons Chas walked out (Aaron had been listening at the top of the stairs every time they argued with his arms wrapped around his knees and tears running down his face so he knew the ins and outs of the devolution of their relationship) so Aaron got snappy and defensive and begged to go home because at least with Gordon the pub was sometimes, not always. The entire Dingle clan drank like it was their job; pint after pint sloshing down their throats between one blink and the next. They’d arrived at Wishing Well cottage before noon on Christmas day and there were already open bottles and crushed empty cans everywhere. Uncle Zak had slurred Welcome to the clan while shaking his hand with palms still wet from the condensation on his beer can and in the pub later, where the party continued obviously, Grandad Shadrach - who reminded him of Toby and smelt permanently like stale beer which made Aaron’s nose wrinkle when he got too close - offered him a pint and dismissed his age with I was on three pints o’ mild and twenty untipped a day when I were your age and Aaron started drinking from his glass when Chas weren’t looking.
His first time being tipsy was when he was eleven-years-old and it made him almost do Shadrach’s bidding and nick sommat from the family while they were all distracted warbling drunken songs at the piano in the bar. Luckily, he realised that drinking and stealing would make him a proper Dingle and he couldn’t think of anything worse at that age and he escaped to the backroom before his mum smelt the beer on his breath.
He’d called his dad from the pub phone to pick him up early and the first thing Gordon said as they started the drive back to Hotten was that he wasn’t cancelling his New Year’s plans (getting wrecked with his scary mates) just ‘cause Aaron was back, so he’d have to come with.
Aaron was back in the village two months later and watched the best man at Andy and Katie’s wedding knocking back double whiskeys to prepare for his speech (so it’s a little hypocritical of him to even bring up the issue now) and his mum slag it about with any bloke who’d have her. Gordon refused to pick him up the next day and Chas told him that he’d basically ruined her life for nine months at least and she’d slapped him. Not the first slap he’d ever received from either of his parents but the first to his face. So he’d done what any twelve-year-old would do and gone to share some cans with his grandad. It made his face hurt less and kind of made what happened funny instead of devastating. Drinking helps, Aaron learnt, still at the age where kids soak information up like a sponge.
There’s an age that kids reach, around fourteen or fifteen, when they decide as a collective that drinking alcohol is the coolest thing they can possibly do and they do it at every given opportunity. Aaron gets really good at nicking booze which means he gets invited to all the ragers, and that means he gets really good at drinking booze as well. Partying is fun and it gets him more mates and he kisses a few girls that he feels nothing for but at least he can say he kissed ‘em. He doesn’t get blackout, he doesn’t throw up that often, and he’s doing what everyone else is doing. He’s fine.
He’s back in the village when he turns eighteen and he’s working with Cain at the garage and his life falls into a routine that he’s never had before. Wake up early, work, pub after work, dinner, bed, and repeat. And repeat. And repeat.
Then, Jackson crash-landed into his life and kicked off a spiral of terrible circumstances that made Aaron finally hate himself enough to do something about it. The suicide didn’t work but the blades never failed to cut him as deep as he dared press. He rallied against his mum and Paddy when they found out and they rallied right back. To get his hand off the tools of self-destruction, they encouraged him out with Adam and didn’t say a word when he came home bladdered. They didn’t lecture him when he drank enough in the Woolpack on a weeknight for his vision to get blurry and to stumble into bed with his breath stinking like lager and fags because, Aaron knows, they preferred him to drink than to cut himself to shreds. It was an easier self-harm for them to digest so they let him go overboard as long as they counted all the knives still in the block at the end of the day. The drink all tasted the same to Aaron back then; like assisted suicide and close calls with the police. It tasted like an escape that was wrought with regret.
In France, everyone drinks all the time. Aaron got used to wine, usually red, sometimes white, in restaurants where he’d order a bottle and Ed would order a glass. They kissed with the taste of grapes on both their lips and Aaron enjoyed drinking again. He got over the worst of Jackson by plastering over his memory with Ed and when Ed made him blind taste-test some bottles he bought home for cheap Aaron was able to identify the spirits with relative ease. Drinking became synonymous with a content life.
He and Ed went all domestic; they had home-cooked dinners (not cooked by Aaron) with a bottle of beer and conversed around cognac glasses as they hosted the team (rally or rugby, both were equally likely) at their flat which they were getting overcharged every month for.
Ed bought a bottle of absinthe that they reserved for special, happy occasions. A victory, birthdays, Christmas, and the like. Ed would pour them a shot and they’d be transported to a place where nothing bad ever happened. The first few times, Aaron assumed they would have another but Ed would gently pull him away from the bottle and distract him with heightened senses and a wicked tongue. Aaron didn’t make a fuss about that. One is enough Ed told him and Aaron let himself believe he was right.
Aaron was stone-cold sober when he burnt down everything he and Ed had built.
Living at the pub, drinking at the pub, shagging a married man. They come hand in hand in immoral hand for Aaron when he returns to Emmerdale. As soon as he steps foot in the building, there’s a pint in his hand. And when that married man arrives in the bar, the pint is abandoned in favour of the cubicle in the men’s bogs.
Aaron finds brief reprieve at the bottom of a pint glass. Moments when it washes away the thoughts of Katie and then of Gordon in between running himself into the ground and letting blood like he’s got an infinite supply. Robert worried about him, sniped at him, argued with him, took care of him. He never hated him. Aaron did. Aaron hated both of them a lot of the time.
Until he didn’t.
Suddenly they’re engaged and married and in prison and broken up and married again and there’s Liv. Liv with the alcohol problem.
She filled up water bottles with vodka to take to school with her, she stole bottles from the pub and drank them straight, she would binge-drink and hide it. That’s what a problem looks like. It’s the lying and the secrecy and the over-indulgence. Aaron never did that.
He and Robert had had an ugly argument when it all came to light and Aaron refused to make the house dry;
“Your sixteen-year-old sister is an alcoholic and you won’t get rid of a few cans of lager? Keep them at the scrapyard if you’re that worried about it.”
“She doesn’t drink beer. We’ll put them in a high cupboard and lock it, I don’t see the issue. We’re not going teetotal, are we?”
“Maybe we should, as a show of support.”
“My mum lives at the pub, Robert, she’s always going to be around alcohol. It’s best she gets used to it.”
“I can’t believe you’re being so…”
“What?”
“Laid-back about it,”
“I’m not laid-back but she’s banged up right now, anyway. She’s not even here and you want to start throwing away perfectly good beer!”
They’d gone on for a while and it ended in Aaron saying something cutting about Liv not being Robert’s real sister and Robert storming out.
He’d come back home the next day and cleared up the empty bottles Aaron had left on the coffee table and conceded to Aaron’s wishes: You’re right. It’s your sister, and your house. We should probably stop buying vodka, though.
It had felt like Aaron won, at the time.
Aaron could handle it when Robert got taken away in handcuffs. It was when the divorce papers came through that everything came crashing down around him.
Italy, much like France, is a country that loves drinking. Any spare land is a vineyard, it’s the home of Aperol and vermouth. Aaron doesn’t drink any more than anyone else in Italy does.
His only reason to go home is a funeral, then Liv dies and Aaron takes a leaf out of hers and Robert’s book and makes his turmoil everyone else’s problem instead of his own. He finds that people don’t like that either, but very politely doesn’t remind them that the alternative is self-harm. The Dingles decide he’s no good and he can’t even hear them because there’s blood on his hands and lager in his head.
He doesn’t care to think about more recent events. He poured himself the extra glasses of whiskey, ignorant to the fact it was drugged, so it was his own fault John got the upper hand on him. The cottage is not the first time he’s been held hostage by a Sugden brother. Given his luck, it won’t be the last.
Robert bought him a flask for Christmas, for god’s sake, what was he meant to fill it up with? Water?
“Aaron.”
He jolts back into the present at the sound of the man himself. Mack must have texted him while Aaron was zoned out, the traitor. Aaron glares over at Mackenzie who holds his hands up in surrender as he makes his escape.
“I’m sorry,” Robert continues.
Aaron looks to him now that the other person in the room has disappeared and sees the genuine apology in his expression, big sorrowful eyes and downturned lips, but there’s something else there too. Something too much like fear for Aaron to be comfortable with.
Aaron would love to say that the apologies come easier to Robert because of prison and time wearing him down but he knows that even before, back when their relationship was push-pull-push-harder, Robert was the one who was ready to grovel once Aaron was done ignoring the issue over a few pints in the Woolpack with Adam or Paddy or his mum. The fear, though, that’s prison all over.
Upon reflection, Aaron might be able to see a pattern in himself that he’s never acknowledged before. He looks at the can in his hand like it’s personally offended him. He doesn’t want to be one of the things that makes Robert, this new vulnerable easily-shaken version of him, scared. He blows out a long breath and places the can on the coffee table with a definitive thump. It’s empty but he thinks the symbolism of the gesture works anyway.
“You don’t have to be sorry,” he says because he’s older and mature and he knows how to let things go when he’s the one at fault (pay no mind to how he says it through gritted teeth, there’s always room for improvement).
“But I-”
“No, Robert. Don’t say sorry to me.”
Robert looks uncertain,
“I didn’t mean to annoy you,” he says, voice so tiny that Aaron wouldn’t have heard him if they weren’t in complete silence.
“For god’s- Robert, come ‘ere.”
Aaron stands and pulls Robert into a hug, letting him tuck his face into Aaron’s shoulder which is his favourite hiding spot since returning to the village.
“You haven’t annoyed me,” Aaron murmurs, “You… brought up something that I may have been ignoring. For years.”
Because it’s easier to ignore it than confront it, with his whole host of other issues. If he’d acknowledged the role alcohol plays in his life, and has played since he was a pre-teen, then what coping mechanisms would he be left with? Using his fists gets people mad at him or gets him in the back of a police car, and turning it on himself makes people worked-up about his mental state and he ends up smothered by those who love him. Drinking flies under the radar. He’s a Dingle. Drinking is what they do.
Aaron hasn’t had a counsellor since before he jetted off to Italy and he knows he’s been through a lot, by any normal person’s standards, recently. He remembers how reassuring it was to have a constant person to help him out when he needs them. He was able to forgive the one-night-stand because he had that person. It might be time to look into a new one. Robert probably needs one too but he’s tired and that’s another argument he doesn’t want to have today.
“Hey,” Aaron pats Robert on the back, dislodging him from where he’s plastered to his front. He makes Robert sit next to him instead, taking his hand and intertwining their fingers. “Don’t have a heart attack when I say this; I think you were right.” Robert graciously keeps his reaction to a minimum, just a smug smile that grows on his lips when he processes what Aaron’s said, “I’ll try and cut back a bit, alright?”
“You don’t have to-”
“Robert, take the victory.”
“Alright,” Robert says softly, squeezing Aaron’s hand,
“I don’t want to become like Grandad Shadrach. I hated him. If Harry or Seb see me like I saw him, I’d be disgusted.”
Robert shuffles closer and kisses Aaron’s shoulder through the black cotton of his t-shirt.
“I love you.”
Aaron’s unoccupied hand comes up to pet Robert’s hair like a dog.
“I want to be better for you,” which is a statement more powerful than I love you too for them.
Robert pushes his head into Aaron’s touch, not helping the dog comparisons, and they both know it’s going to be another battle they’re both unprepared for. As long as they’ve got each other, they can handle it. No matter what.