EPISODE 18

 

Twelve Steps To Rehab

 

Months dragged on, me turning up at the drug service, constantly reporting relapse, skin blotchy and spotty, fridge and cupboard empty, and many calls being made to my mum requesting twenty quid, or maybe an internet food order.  Two phones were thrown at the wall, and leads pulled from handsets, with me raging in my boxers in my cell.  One afternoon, I picked up my acoustic guitar by the neck, smashed it on the floor, repeatedly, until it broke in two with a twang.  Then I took it out and chucked it in a wheelybin.  Soon after, I was dragging my keyboard (on loan from a friend) down the road to that shrine of iniquity and stolen goods, Cash Converters.  It was heavy and unwieldy, but somehow I heaved and cajoled it onto the bus, over the road, and into the reinforced doorway of the esteemed high-street name.  It cost my friend £800.  I got £100 for it, and went straight round the corner to score.  The next morning, I woke to see a void where guitar and piano had been.  My dreamed-of recording career was spiralling down, in freefall, blowing in the breeze with other random crumbs.  I was running out of options.

 

Sipping herbal tea at the drug service one morning, someone sitting by me said they went to Narcotics Anonymous meetings, and found them helpful.  Born of Alcoholics Anonymous, there are NA meetings in community centres and church cellars all over the world.  There were several in my neighbourhood, some of them unnervingly close to places I’d used.  But one Monday evening, I slipped into a meeting, untempted by the adjacent hostel, where I’d used only weeks before.  All human life was there, street-geezers, social-workers, teachers, builders, an auctioneer, and a person off the telly.  We sat round in a circle by candlelight, with a tank of tropical fish tranquilly, though discreetly, observing proceedings.

 

After a few readings, people began talking, and I could identify with a lot of what I heard.  Come the end, I felt encouraged, energised, and almost hopeful.  I went home and played ‘Irish Blood, English Heart’ by Morrissey, in a spirit of utter defiance at my seemingly bottomless decline.

 

I rose the next morning with hope in my heart, and money in the bank, which I blew in the afternoon after spiralling back into disarray as the day dragged on.  Not the best start, but I returned to meetings, and tried to listen to other people’s experiences, and readily dished up many theories and thoughts on the nature of addiction, whilst doing precious little off the back of my observations.  I felt like an astronomer, seeing the universe about me, coming to an understanding of it, able to convey with enthusiasm how amazing and fabulous it was, but unable to reach out and touch or tweak it.  I felt lights years from myself.

 

But the meetings were a lifeline, human contact and support from people who were going through, or who’d been through, something similar to myself.  They were a cup of tea or coffee, and biscuits too, which were a rarity in my life at the time.  One night, I loaded up my coat with malted milks, as my kitchen-cupboard contained one can of chickpeas and a squeezy ketchup, which, even in my emaciated state, didn’t throw up many recipe ideas.

 

One of the founding principles of NA is that addiction is a ‘disease’, and that the sufferer is ‘powerless’ over it, but following the twelve steps offers a path to ‘recovery’, a better life.  At first, I leapt at these words like a wolf who’d suddenly found his pack.  Yes, it was a disease, and I was powerless over it, my record proved it, and now I’d found people, and a framework, to put the drugs down and move on.  But sometimes I would hear people, months or even years clean, talking about their disease, and how they were still powerless over it, and meanings seemed to become so vague, and unpinned from their origins, that I began to feel I was just swishing around in a huge linguistic melting-pot.  What did it all really mean?  I witnessed the word ‘disease’ suddenly developing a hyphen, to imply a state of ‘dis-ease’, rather than anything medically observable.  A few months in, it seemed to me that all desire, if not life itself, was a form of disease, which I didn’t buy, and this nebulousness could end up with someone blaming their ‘disease’ for wanting a new Mercedes, which really just meant they were an overpaid twot.

 

I don’t find it helpful to think of addiction as a disease, with or without a hyphen.  Nor do I believe that anyone is powerless over it – in fact, I feel it can be dangerous to use the word ‘powerless’, which can undermine the notion of personal choice.  As for the promised recovery, well, how can one recover from a disease that doesn’t exist?

 

The twelve steps offer a ‘spiritual program’ of ‘complete abstinence from all drugs’.  I didn’t much like the sound of complete abstinence.  Much as I wanted to quit crack, and the heroin that was now becoming its compulsory sidekick, I had no desire to stop having the odd drink or spliff.  As for the spiritual aspect, though no religion is promoted, sometimes I feel the framework itself becomes a kind of religion - for example, if one says, ‘I’ve put down the crack, but I still like the odd drink,’ the ethos of complete abstinence has been transgressed, and fundamentalist brows may furrow, as often I think they did when I spoke.

 

Once I said I’d had a glass of wine at a friend’s, but felt that was very different from smoking crack and crawling home to isolation and hunger.  Someone after the meeting warned me that wine today would be crack tomorrow, laying out before me the slippery slope to self-destruction.  I didn’t find this helpful, because my experience of alcohol has always been very different from my run-ins with crack.  Also, if there’s one thing an addict likes, it’s an excuse to relapse, and this seemed to be setting up a self-fulfilling prophesy I could use to rationalise further falls from grace.  But equally, another person said that if I was able to drink, I shouldn’t feel compelled to emulate others, whose circumstances may be different.  Could it be that one size doesn’t fit all?  Could it be that everyone is different?  Could it be that fundamentalists are pests?  Could it be that twelve-step fellowships are a way, not the way?  I don’t belong easily.  Even if there were a club for outsiders, I don’t think I’d join.  But what would I have done without this, sometimes troubling, human contact?  The osmosis of experience can be powerful, keeping alive people who might otherwise not be.  Sometimes, someone would disappear from a meeting, having been a regular for weeks, maybe because they were using again, or gone to rehab, but often it was because they’d died, as addiction, however you define it, can kill you with your own hand.  So far, I hadn’t assassinated myself, and had no desire to return to Morrissey’s warehouse any time soon.

 

I stuck around for months, and I think I was trying my best, even though my views were mostly heresy.  I turned up, spoke, made friends, took numbers, got a sponsor (someone to help me through the steps), answered the questions in the step-working guide, wrote a load of claptrap to back up the claptrap I’d verbalised in meetings, but something wasn’t taking, the shoe wasn’t fitting, and I was still going down, just slightly slower than before.  Then a combination of apathy, intellectual differences, and embarrassment, meant that meetings faded away, at least as a daily, or weekly, ritual.  I’d show up occasionally, say I was fine, and dash away before anyone, zealot or not, could collar me.  I only had a message of failure, humiliating for me, and probably very boring for everyone else.  So it was back to the drug service, to my still-smiling counsellor, with a resigned request to be sent to residential rehab, but preferably not a twelve-step one.  There’s only so long you can live on biscuits.

 

and here's a bonus track for you...

 

 

 

 

 

TUNE INTO THE NEXT EPISODE THIS TIME TOMORROW...

 

EPISODE 19

 

Rehab on Sea

 

In the run-up to rehab (prehab), I made some headway with my counsellor at the drug service, began talking more honestly...

EPISODE 17

 

Just A Little Prick

 

I returned to Spike and Suzie’s the next time the good taxpayers of Britain put money in my account.  I’d been experiencing experience-envy since witnessing Faith inject crack’n’heroin a few months earlier.  I couldn’t see the exact detail of how she did it, nor could I see enough to do it myself, but I could perhaps get someone else to.

 

Vaguely knowledgeable by now, I stopped off at a chemist to get new needles, and made my way to Spike and Suzie’s.  I figured they’d be more willing than Faith, having only just met me, and turning up with clean works, coupled with some knowing needle-talk, would surely be enough to get one of them to do the honours, especially seeing that I’d be bankrolling proceedings.

 

Back past the BBC, pharmacist’s bag swinging at my side, I disappeared down a White City side-street, finding Spike and Suzie’s red door with ease.  I rang, and moments later an upstairs window opened and Suzie’s voice said, ‘Oh hi, Dan, I’ll come down.’  I didn’t mind being called Dan, as long as I got what I wanted.

 

Upstairs, Spike was in his normal chair, clutching a can and stubbly, and Poppet, the in-house puppy, began leaping all over me, almost like it wanted to escape.  I made out I’d got the fresh needles for myself, and was just dropping by on my way back from the chemist, but if they needed any, they were more than welcome.  I asked if we could get something, and soon Suzie was ringing around.  I gave her the money and off she went to meet the guy, somewhere near KFC on Uxbridge Road. 

 

She returned, and we all had an inaugural pipe.  Then, party started, I gave them some more blather.  ‘I was planning to go home and have a hit, but my flatmate wasn’t answering the phone, so how on Earth would I get my hit?’  Then Suzie said those special words.  ‘I can help with that, love.’

 

The doorbell went, and Spike was left to organise three syringes’ worth of finest White City crack and heroin.  I had a pipe as he went about his work with needle, spoon and lighter.  He asked me how much heroin I usually had in a hit.  I told him about a fiver’s worth, not really knowing what I was saying.  Minutes later, he was placing each finished article on the coffee-table before him, one for him, one for Suzie, and one for me.  Then Suzie returned with her guests.  It was a couple they knew, she a lumbering ogre of a woman, called Mo, and he a curly-haired scamp of a man, who looked like he could do with a meal, or a lifestyle overhaul, called Sam.  They were users too, and delighted to find a supply of fresh needles with which to cook up what they’d arrived with.

 

Then it was time.  Spike explained which syringe was whose, and Suzie took up the bayonet of destiny earmarked for me.  She asked me whereabouts I usually did it.  I admitted to being early in my injecting career, so I still had sufficiently prominent veins left in my arm.  I rolled up my sleeve, using a donated belt as a tourniquet on my upper arm, both to bring veins closer to the surface, and to hold the chemicals in place until the moment of release when the tourniquet was pulled away, and the ingredients could coarse through my whole being, rendering me the monkish equivalent of Faith’s ‘nun kissing God’.  I was on the brink of revelation.  Poppet was locked in the hall, because he was jumping around, getting in the way.

 

The tiny press of the needle was painless, as I sat there on the sofa, peers around me.  It was like keyhole surgery with a kick.  I could feel something entering my bloodstream, asking directions to my brain.  ‘There you go,’ said Suzie, ‘you can pull the tourniquet away now.’  I let the belt fall and sat there, waiting to see what it was I was going to feel.  Initially, I felt a bit blank, numbed, queasy.  Then Mo, troll-like on the floor before me, said, ‘Are you ok, Dan?’

 

The next thing I remember is waking up on the floor, shirt torn open, with two paramedics above me.  ‘Can you hear me Dan?’ one of them asked.  I soon realised I’d overdosed, and began apologising repeatedly, as I was helped to my feet, and down the stairs where an ambulance and a police car were waiting.  My plan had gone awry.  I think I was relieved to be alive, even though my name was now apparently Dan.

 

I was helped into the ambulance, and a blanket put around me.  I felt quite shaky, and the woman looking after me was so attractive that my sense of being damaged goods felt heightened to a point of pivotal self-loathing.  I said, ‘I don’t usually do this kind of thing, I’m sorry to waste your time, thank you so much for being there.’  I looked at her like one scowling from hell at a soul in heaven.  I asked if I could have a glass of water, but she wasn’t allowed to, or maybe that was the closest I could get to asking her if she wanted to go for a coffee.

 

I arrived in the ward, where a nurse wanted to put my possessions in a locker.  I gave her my white cane.  Then, after a preliminary interview, in which I said sorry several more times, I sat on a bed, curtains drawn around me, crying.  Then, when a doctor came in, I apologised some more, and continued crying, and answered his questions as best I could.  He was very calm and sympathetic, and gently recommended I tried to exercise some harm reduction.  When he went away, I sat there some more, still weeping, not sure what to do.  Then, a rustle of the curtain, and Sam appeared.  He’d seen fit to come and see if I was ok.  He offered to walk me home, which wasn’t so far, so we asked a nurse for my cane.  The nurse who’d dealt with me before had gone, and this nurse didn’t speak great English, and as I tried to explain that my stick had been put in a locker, she eventually returned with two walking-sticks, which I kindly declined.

 

Sam walked home with me, I got in, called a friend, distraught, and went to bed.  The next day, I went back to Spike and Suzie’s to apologise.  Apparently I’d slumped over, and even though they stretched me out on the floor and tried to slap me back to consciousness, they ended up ringing the ambulance.  I was grateful they had, cos I’ve heard of people overdosing, dying, and their bodies being left out with the rubbish.  The police and paramedics had asked a few questions, but no accusations were lodged, and I guess it was just put down as a regulation overdose, maybe making a brief cameo appearance a while later in a Town Hall spreadsheet.  So, apologies made, and accepted, and after I promised not to inject again, we all three scored, and this time Poppet could stay in the living-room.

 

I don’t know when it came back to me, but at some point I recalled something of what I experienced during my overdose.  Maybe I wasn’t so far gone, or perhaps I was nearer to leaving than I knew, but when I was out on Spike and Suzie’s floor I had the vaguest, quietest of dreams.  I was looking in on a darkened room, from the side, as if in an empty warehouse.  There were people standing there, in profile, silent, as far as I could tell, as if waiting.  Reader, one of them was Morrissey.  I know not why.

 

 

TUNE INTO THE NEXT EPISODE THIS TIME TOMORROW...

 

 

 

and here's a song for you...

EPISODE 18

 

Twelve Steps To Rehab

 

Months dragged on and on, me turning up at the drug service, reporting relapse repeatedly, skin blotchy, spotty, fridge’n’cupboard mostly empty...

EPISODE 16

 

White City

 

I spent the next three days in bed, brain flatter than a leaking battery, torn red t-shirt on the floor, and one of the Discovery channels burbling away as I drifted in and out of sleep, occasionally raiding the cupboard for whatever was left to eat, which was never much at this time.  When I rose, in a bout of desperation, I wrote a handwritten letter to my doctor, asking to be sent to rehab, or a psychiatric ward, or wherever there was a vacancy.

 

A few days later, I made an emergency appointment, and my doctor, almost impotent to help, sent me to my local drug service.  I made an appointment and went in for an assessment.  I was assigned a counsellor, who I saw for about six months.  She was very good, knowledgeable, honest, and patient, but she couldn’t stop me using week after week, and coming in with tales of increasing dissolution.  By this point, the compulsion to use crack, with a heroin chaser, felt like something separate from what I considered to be myself.  It was as if the decision was made in me, but not by me.  ‘It’s happened again,’ I’d say, time after time, and she would say, ‘You mean you’ve used again.’  Whilst this was true, I had used, none of the complementary tools and therapies offered me had any effect on my using.  I just became a more literate addict, and could talk at severe length, week after week, month after month, sometimes quite engagingly, about the same thing – I’d used.  Truth is, at this time, I wanted my coke and smoke it – I wanted to use, but didn’t want to consider the expense and consequences, and heroin, sneaking up on the rails, had only made the whole cycle seem slightly less unmanageable, softening, as it did, the harsh comedown from the crack. 

 

Ear acupuncture, shiatsu, reflexology, cupping, body acupuncture, hypnotherapy, and various relaxation CDs, all made a minimal indentation on my pattern of use.  I even wrote a few worthy articles for the drug service newsletter, all teacher’s pet stuff, saying how wonderful the therapies were, and how I found the service so very valuable as a community hub, but they were all just words, worthy, placatory, hollow words.  The drug service subscribed to a magazine called Black Poppy, a health and lifestyle magazine written by users and ex-users alike.  Over the months, I wrote a few articles for it, even compiled a cryptic crossword, with mostly drug-related answers, but even this, coupled with volunteering at the magazine’s office, and the new friends it afforded me, made no difference to my using.

 

So far, the most successful path I’d found to getting a period free from crack was going to my parents’ by the sea, which I did many times at this point, in various states of disrepair.  There, I’d be spoken to frankly, in a spirit of concern, and bewilderment, by both parents.  Then, having had another good think about my predicament, I’d return to London and relapse.  The hypnotherapy, dispensed by a chap in a shack in Ealing, and paid for by my parents, seemed to work for a few days.  Hypnotised on a Monday, I managed to abstain from crack, with money in my pocket, ‘til Friday.  But then, when I blew it, it was back to scoring at every opportunity, regardless of the time of day, or the danger.

 

By now, I was firm friends with Faith, especially when I arrived at hers fresh from the cashpoint.  It was kind of unfortunate that she lived on the same street as the drug service.  In fact, it was probably possible to see the drug service from her window.  Often I’d have an appointment that I simply wouldn’t show for, because I’d stumble into Faith’s place literally yards from safety, like a rugby-player with a knack for tackling himself.

 

One afternoon, I was marching to an appointment, knowing full well I wouldn’t get there, because I’d already decided to trip myself up at Faith’s place.  Torn at her door, half hoping she was out, half wishing she’d hurry up and answer, I was surprised when my old chum Dennis appeared before me.  Butler-like, he ushered me into the living-room.  He’d already scored, and furnished me with a pipe, which led to a flurry of notes being pulled from my pocket, accompanied by the request, ‘Can we get something?’  He was happy to oblige, and called down the hall to Faith to let her know he was popping out.  She came into the living-room, and was equally delighted to see me, and the notes I was by now scrunching into Dennis’s palm.  She returned to whoever she was entertaining out the back.  Dennis and I were negotiating what we wanted, and who we should get it from, when another figure appeared in the doorway.  It was Jacob, and he didn’t seem very happy.

 

He said a cool hello, and reminded me of a previous warning, given some days before, not to hang out with Dennis.  According to Jacob, Dennis would con me, keep drugs back, was a known criminal, in fact was everything Jacob was himself.  Then he addressed Dennis directly.  ‘Ben is my associate.  I look after him.’  ‘He just wants to score,’ Dennis said lamely.  ‘Ben, come with me,’ Jacob instructed, ‘I’m taking you home.’  I didn’t want to go home.  I wanted to score.  ‘I’m ok,’ I said, trying to appease the now approaching figure of Jacob, ‘I’m happy to share whatever we get.’  ‘You won’t be getting anything,’ he replied, ‘I’m taking you home.’  I didn’t believe this for a minute – he just wanted me away from Dennis, so he could take control.  ‘I don’t want to have to slap you,’ he warned.  His crazed yet cold eyes were up against me, and I thought I’d better go along with things.  Then I was being escorted down the road, with Jacob saying, ‘Ben, I know if I let you go, you’ll find someone to score through, so if you want to get something, tell me now.’  So my protector and I went round the corner to this couple’s place in White City, just off Wood Lane, near the BBC.  I’d kind of dreamed of going in there, having established myself as a known comedian, or some such.  Now I was skulking past, at pace, desperate to top up the pipe I’d had courtesy of Dennis, some half an hour ago – not much of a party-piece.

 

We arrived in some dive, a flat that even the How Clean Is Your House team would have had to touch up before filming.  It was inhabited by a guy who looked like a cross between Wayne Slob and Mr Sneeze, haggard’n’gaunt, hair an explosion.  His partner, who it turned out he beat (no doubt the bond that brought him and Jacob together), seemed quite friendly and normal, even made me a cup of tea, and took an interest in my various aborted dreams and aspirations.  She’d had them too.  Somewhere in the undergrowth of their living-room, there was a puppy skulking, apparently acquired from someone at the very same drug service I’d been fruitlessly attending for some months.  Formalities over, Jacob popped out with my clutch of twenties, and I took tea with my hosts.  My host, Spike, had been a postman, until he got sacked for intercepting chequebooks, and allegedly gardened for a well-known 80s singer.  My hostess, Suzie, showed me pictures of her children of whom she was very proud – they were scattered about the globe, and seemingly quite happy.

 

I faked conversation until Jacob’s return with the crack.  Unwrapping the bits, he went first, of course, then me, then our hosts, on a variety of hastily constructed pipes.  Then Spike and Suzie began discussing something discreetly, and it soon became clear they were injectors, of which Jacob roundly disapproved.  He would smoke crack, but not heroin, and he certain wouldn’t inject anything.  I, however, hell bent on experiencing all I could experience, made a mental note of where I was, and to call back some time when Jacob wasn’t around.  Spike and Suzie disappeared into the bedroom and bathroom, respectively, to inject in peace, leaving me and Jacob smoking just the crack in the living-room.  When they returned, Spike moaning he couldn’t find a vein, and Suzie talking so fast it was hard to keep up, Jacob popped out to the cashpoint.  I managed to cajole a heroin spliff in his absence, which helped with the crack cravings.  Then, after an agonising wait, Jacob returned, and we all four smoked away until the money ran out.  The heroin hadn’t really been enough to calm me down, but, somehow, having said our goodbyes, we left, and Jacob and I parted on the street with a handshake, as if having just sealed a small business deal, and later, there I was in bed, sweating, and desperately trying to get to sleep, cursing every second, wracked with regret that one, I’d ever touched crack, and two, I couldn’t go on smoking forever, if necessary to death, cos it seemed there was no way out of this slow nosedive my life had become.

TUNE INTO THE NEXT EPISODE THIS TIME TOMORROW...

 

 

EPISODE  17

 

Just A Little Prick

 

I returned to Spike and Suzie’s the next time the good taxpayers of Britain put money in my account...

EPISODE 15

 

Crackhouse Rules

 

It was around this time that the beauty of a chap called Dennis was unveiled to me.  I can’t actually remember where I met him.  I just recall our paths crossing frequently around this time.  Although I couldn’t decipher his strong Grenadian accent too well at first, we soon found that we were speaking the same language when phrases like ‘do you want to get something’ or ‘where’s the nearest cashpoint’ were being employed.  He was quite a spectacle, in his loafing, lugubrious way.  It didn’t take me long to notice that his teeth were smashed to shards, as if some kind of dental iconoclast had wreaked havoc in his mouth.  They were nice and white, but that only helped to highlight their plight.  The front two had clearly been knocked for six, but there were jagged bits of white poking from the gum.  It looked like someone had taken a set of pliers to the bottom row.  This, coupled with a couple of weeks of stubble, and a look of having just got up, meant that the shambling Dennis cut quite a caper around the Green.  He was a friendly guy though, and, although he ripped me off once or twice, was never threatening or violent, and didn’t hold back on the drugs like my new owner, Jacob, was making a habit of doing.

 

Dennis’s usual bolthole, having scored, was a house not far from Faith’s.  For some weeks, it was my regular haunt, and most of my using would occur or at least pass through there.  It belonged to a guy called David, who had mental health issues.  Apparently he was schizophrenic, but there seemed to be more to it than that.  Whatever the time of day or night, there would always be some scallywag on that bed, in that chair, asleep on that patch of floor.  In addition, there’d nearly always be another band of bit players, just to add fluidity to proceedings, sleeping, sitting around, going from room to room, looking for a smoke.  Stepping through the net-curtained door into David’s, uninitiated, it was hard to know whose place it actually was.

 

David himself seemed to spend much of his time lounging, or languishing, on his bed, encircled by a coterie of spongers, all waiting, like so many sea-urchins, to see what bits of plankton were going to drop their way today.  I was an urchin, yet less well-rooted.  There’d be a knock at the door, a general tramping into the hall would ensue, to see who it was, what they had, if a pipe could be charmed out of them.  Maybe even David would emerge, to claim what was rightfully his, a pipe for ‘the house’.  Normally, if you visit someone, you might take a bottle of wine, a bunch of flowers, box of chocolates.  Abnormally, crack-etiquette dictates that you’re obliged to cough up a smoke for the homeowner, if you can tell who it is.

 

The bathroom in a crackhouse is perhaps the most sought-after room.  Certainly this was the case at David’s.  Usually there were two or more people crammed in there, smoking, or receiving or giving a blowjob.  If you were one of them, you wouldn’t remain undisturbed for long.  There would always be someone wanting to have a sneaky pipe in there, away from all the prying, greedy eyes elsewhere in the house.  If you wanted to get in there, though, your chances were slim.  Either it would be locked, or, if the lock was broken, the door would get shoved backatcha with the urgency of a guy with a pipe in one hand and his cock in the other.  But if you were one of those odd people who actually wanted to use the loo, there might be a local paper on the cistern, if you were lucky, an absence of loo-roll being a key feature of any crackhouse worth the name.

 

The kitchen, you’ll be unsurprised to hear, was pretty light on food, and mostly used by people who couldn’t get into the bathroom.  Even though it was overlooked from outside, there would often be half a dozen people clustering in there, some smoking, some blagging, some begging for a smoke.  Standing in there one morning, around five I think, I found myself in the privileged position of buying the stuff direct from the dealer, and having it placed into my closing hand, rather than Jacob’s or Dennis’s.  As with any product, the more middlemen, the more you get ripped off.  One or two girls who were hanging around were swift to offer to ‘help me unwrap it’, because ‘that cling-film can be fiddly, can’t it hun?’

 

News of my elevated status spread, and moments later some guy with ill-fitting dentures was standing by me, telling me it was his birthday, presumably to coax a gift of crack from me.  He failed, but I wished him many happy returns.  A net-curtain hung vaguely in the window, which was one way of telling roughly what time of day it was, and through it the next wave of visitors could be inspected.  Many came and went, until, about dawn, when I realised I only had a tenner left.  I was determined this should go on some heroin, to soften party’s end.

 

There were about five of us left in the flat, including David on his bed.  I went into the bedroom, putting feelers out regarding the purchase of some heroin.  No one had, or knew anyone who had.  The woman sat on the bed said, ‘Oh look, Prince Charles wants to get something.’  Gauche in adversity, I’d obviously used a turn of phrase that set me apart from my peers.  A fairly calm guy by the wardrobe offered me a cigarette, as if consoling a child who’d lost his parents.  I asked David if he knew someone I could ring.  He was too drunk, or drugged, to answer.  Then a fidgety guy, on his haunches on the carpet, said, ‘Oy, blind man, gimme that fag.’  I fended him off with a word of two, but my approach was too soft.  ‘Come on, blind man, gissa lug.’  I tried again to placate, but in the end he got so animated I thought I’d better give it him.  He took a few lugs, then threw it on the carpet between us, half-smoked.

 

I thought I should make my way.  But this was easier said than done, as the tenner in my pocket, which I’d declared in my attempt to barter for heroin, was a magnet for badness.  I slipped out into the hall and into the bathroom, surprisingly unhindered.  From there, I would slip out into the darkness, and away.  However, as I pulled shut the front-door, it swung open with a violent tug.  Fag-thrower didn’t want me to go.  Sight, plus the darkness, didn’t allow me to run, and I didn’t especially want to argue or fight, so out came my elementary diplomatic talents.  ‘Now, look here,’ I began, ‘I’m not looking for any trouble, I just want to make my way, I’ve no axe to grind.’  He did, however, and pushed me against the wall and held what looked like two old knives to my face.  Diplomacy had failed.  I tried to gently ease his hands away, like some amateurish dog-whisperer trying to get the creature to respond in a new way to old dilemmas.  This too failed.  ‘Get off me, blind man,’ he explained.  I tried to assure him I meant him no harm, perhaps as Jean Luc Picard might when presented with a volatile, but essentially frightened alien.  But even the values of Next Generation Star Trek fell short of resolving things.  ‘Don’t touch me,’ he warned again, and I could feel old metal on my face.  ‘Gimme that tenner, blind man,’ he said.  Either I was still hoping I’d stumble on someone with heroin, or I just didn’t think I should reward his force with financial gain, so the tenner remained in my pocket.  I called help into the still flapping front-door, but no one came.  Meanwhile, my attacker was mauling me like a lion, with knives, and each time I tried to fend him off he warned me not to touch him, and reacquainted my face with his blades.  I wanted to run, but couldn’t see to.  I didn’t want to fight, cos violence breeds violence, innit?  I was determined to diffuse the situation with decency, reason, and fair play.  However, having exhausted all diplomatic channels, and concerned I might come away with my cheek slashed or throat cut, I yielded up the tenner.  He took it like a pushy child might a present, snatching it from my clutches almost before I’d extended my hand.  Then, as if off to the sweetshop, he scampered into the night, pocketing his blades, and bounding up the stone steps into the backwaters of Shepherd’s Bush.

 

I gave it a few minutes, made a mental note of the dangerous people I was now meeting daily, brushed myself down, and made my way home in squally rain.  Red t-shirt ripped, and hanging from my shoulder, I trudged down Goldhawk Road, increasingly revealed by the light of a new day dawning, and very wet.

TUNE INTO THE NEXT EPISODE THIS TIME TOMORROW...

 

EPISODE 16

White City

 

I spent the next three days in bed, brain flatter than a leaking battery, torn red t-shirt on the floor, and one of the Discovery channels burbling away as I drifted in and out of sleep...

EPISODE 14

 

This Charming Madman

 

Having located likeminded suicidals in my own area, I now had no excuse not to be scoring at every opportunity.  I honoured this obligation.  Faith’s was a popular haunt for anyone who needed a place to smoke.  If you’d scored at the Shepherd’s Bush end of Uxbridge Road, as so many did, it was no more than a short stroll.  Even if Faith was out, or entertaining in the bathroom, there’d always be someone to let you in.

 

One night I turned up about one.  Faith was in the bathroom.  On hearing activity in the hallway, she poked a gummy head round the door, but my arrival failed to excite.  I was surprised at this, until I realised she had company in there, a bloke, who obviously had what she needed, i.e. enough crack to keep their dalliance alive for, what, half an hour?  It was probably a classic crack-cock alliance.  He was crack-high, in sex-fiend mode, and wanted to know that Caesar-like power of having a woman kneel before him, sexually supplicate herself in the classic style, her gaping mouth plugged, both open and shut, like a silent gasp.

 

Analysis of such encounters always throws up a grimly pared-down example of the eternal tussle between supply and demand.  Each has what the other wants.  He wants his cock sucked, and is offering crack as an enticement.  She wants crack, and her words imply she’ll do anything for it.  But he won’t cough up until he’s got what he wants.  She won’t give him what he wants until he’s coughed up.  ‘Come on, gissa blowjob,’ implores the emperor.  ‘I will,’ she promises, ‘but gissa pipe first…then I’ll be nice’n’horny for you.’  Stalemate.  It’s just a case of who breaks first, like a mini Cuban missile crisis.  You’re left hoping that somehow, in the end, it just blows over.

 

The guy who opened the door to me seemed quite calm and sane, even cordial and charming, in a slightly balking way.  We chatted in the hall for a while, then he led me into the bedroom, where the withered Gerald languished on a bed like an aborted experiment.  Jacob, that being the name of my new guardian, offered me a pipe, which I eagerly and greedily sucked up.  That was that.  I was now the arrogant yet impotent letch that the hapless me was apparently so keen to become.  I could hear female voices in the front-room.  The crack had kick-started the usual lasciviousness in me, but Jacob, employing his inimitable brand of gutter-suave, assured me there’d be plenty of time for that later, and plied me with another pipe.  I had it, appreciated it, and was now his plaything.  ‘So what was it you were looking for, friend?’ he enquired with consummate self-interest.  ‘Well, I was just looking to get, what, forty?’ I replied, throwing out a random number and hoping it made sense to him.  I was drug-hungry and gullible, scoring through go-betweens who’d then dish it out like fish at the feeding of the five thousand, i.e. messianically, and in small bits, and not very often to the poor fucker who’s bankrolling proceedings.  Jacob was far from illiterate – he could see the word ‘sucker’ etched into my cheek like a fencing-scar.

 

So off we went to score.  Deed done, it was decided we should go to Jacob’s place, not back to Faith’s.  She was too much of a liability, apparently.  Besides, that place was hot, could get raided any minute.  That I believed.  Even on the few times I’d been there, at various times of the day or night, people would come knocking at the door, and, if they weren’t let in, start banging on the window, clamouring for access.  Sometimes, Faith would have a crafty look through the net-curtain.  If she thought they had something, or would want to get something, they’d be granted an audience.  If not, they’d be turned away…nastily, if necessarily.  What’s more, the person in the flat above had aroused general suspicion.  More than once, it was suggested they were a police-plant, staking out the place until it was time to strike.  There were even paranoid whispers of boreholes in the ceiling through which they could spy activity below.

 

Jacob assured me that his place was safe.  He was flat-sitting for a bloke in prison, with his girlfriend, that’s to say Jacob, knowing the guy was away, had broken in and made the place his own.  It was in some anonymous tower-block round the back of Loftus Road.  It was the usual porn-strewn shell of a place, a portable telly on a chair, clothes everywhere, kitchen with a kettle in but clearly no food, and stretched out on a mattress, Gushka, Jacob’s Latvian girlfriend, gawping at the telly, skinnily.

 

So the drugs were distributed, Jacob first, naturally.  Then me, then his brittle, sticklike lover.  Apparently they’d been together several years, since she’d come over from Latvia and started working in a beautician’s in Acton.

 

Then, as we introduced what was left of ourselves, Jacob made a request of me.  ‘Gimme five minutes with my woman,’ he said.  I presumed his motives were sexual, and panicked in case he wanted me to leave the room, and so the drugs.  But no, the drugs were leaving me.  Jacob got up and went into the hallway, adding, ‘Gushka, come,’ like a loveless trainer summoning a dog.  Meekly, she rose to follow him.  Moments later, I heard the bathroom door close, and tried to kill time by flicking through some well-worn porn.  Anyone leaving the room with the drugs was someone I didn’t want to see leaving, but I sensed that Jacob was the kind of man one didn’t cross.  I was right.  Like most bullies, he had a knack for sniffing out the ones who wouldn’t fight back.  It wasn’t long before I heard a whimper emit from the bathroom.  I wondered if they were having sex, or something resembling it.  Then there was another sound, this time palpably anguished.  It sounded like he was torturing her.  Even in my cracked-up state, I still had access to at least the bare bones of a moral code, and wondered if I should try to intervene, even knock politely on the door and ask, ‘Is everything ok?’  But it struck me that any intervention could end in disaster.  I didn’t know to what psychotic lengths Jacob would go.  He reminded me of the patient in the mental ward who befriends you, with the intention of trying to convince you he’s sane, and asks you to have a word with the authorities on his behalf.  Then, when you’re about to leave, he rugby-tackles you, pins you to the floor with his hands around your neck, crying, ‘Don’t forget to tell them I’m sane!’  No, to interrupt Jacob’s brutalities could have ended up with me getting a dose of it, and Gushka getting an extra helping for having provoked the interruption in the first place.

 

About half an hour later, as I was languishing in a state of crashing anxiety, Jacob re-emerged, and came back into the living-room.  ‘Sorry about that,’ he said.  I thought for a moment he was apologising for his own actions, but how foolish I was.  ‘She doesn’t seem to understand the meaning of the word “respect”,’ he explained.  ‘Did you see the way she was, in here?’  I wasn’t quite sure what he meant, but, because he had the drugs, I thought I’d better keep him sweet.  ‘Yeah,’ I said, vaguely.  ‘I introduce her to someone new, and she behaves like that.’  I still wasn’t sure what it was she was supposed to have done.  ‘You mean like her being kind of indifferent?’ I guessed.  ‘I ask her to put the kettle on, cos I want a coffee, and she just lies there, and that’s in front of someone.  How does that make me look?’  ‘Yeah, I know what you mean,’ I said, selling my soul with every syllable.  ‘Then she starts making all that noise,’ he continued, explaining, ‘There’s a Muslim guy downstairs, with young daughters.  She’s going to end up embarrassing not just herself, but me as well.’  I now knew that I was in the presence of a skewed mind.  And quite why Muslims were any more susceptible to the sounds of domestic violence than anyone else, I had no clue.  ‘Doesn’t she realise that making those kind of noises could end up reflecting back on me?’  Then he sat back down and loaded up a pipe.  That done, he picked up one of the tattered magazines that lay around, turning to a page with a girl with breasts like balloons.  ‘Bet she had tits when she was twelve,’ he said, handing me the page to see.

 

Then Gushka came back, seemingly intact.  ‘You’ve got to learn some respect, Gush,’ he said, ‘Ben’s a guest, and you don’t disrespect me in front of guests.’  ‘Ok, Jacob,’ she said, as if she’d heard it many times before.  ‘You’ve got to realise, you’d be nothing without me.  People would rob you, rape you, screw you into the ground if it wasn’t for me.  You do realise that, don’t you Gush?’  ‘Yes, Jacob.’  He was very confident of the moral low-ground he monopolised, and his free-thinking credentials were again flagged up.  ‘What do you think, Ben?’ he asked.  ‘Do you think I should put her on the game?’  I smiled in such a way that he would feel endorsed, but she wouldn’t see.  My soul was now completely in flames.  ‘Could I have a pipe, please?’ I asked, not wishing to dwell on the twelve-year-old me, twitching like a phoenix in a stone-cold hearth.

 

There was a hole in a floorboard.  Jacob said he’d lost a bit of crack down there a few weeks before.  I found myself foraging about in the dust, like James Herriot feeling around inside an empty cow.  No crack found, the money gone, and not even any heroin to come down with, I eventually made my way home, midmorning, bitter, beaten, and broke.

 

The pattern of my using was beginning to take shape, as my network of contacts grew.  When the government slung a couple of hundred quid in my account, I’d be down the road like a shot. Wednesdays were the day.  I might go to bed on Tuesday night, but I’d be counting the minutes until two, when the money appeared in my account.  I’d leave my flat at quarter-to, to give me time to get down the road and unearth, or be unearthed by, a suitable person to score through, which rarely took more than half an hour, if I walked at the right pace, along the right stretch of road, in the right style.  Then, another nocturnal whirlwind blown out, I’d crawl home to an empty fridge and a daybed, where I’d remain for anything from two to four days, eeking out a half-life by foraging in the cupboard for instant noodles or cereal, which I’d almost certainly have with water, due to having lost the ability to shop for food some weeks before.  The last vestiges of my social life had also gone.  No more pub quiz on a Tuesday night with old schoolmates.  No more spots in bottom-of-the-ladder comedy-clubs.  No, I was either not answering the phone, or broke, or both, and getting very cagey about making arrangements with anyone, because I probably wouldn’t honour them anyway.  No more a social butterfly, I was now an antisocial moth, chaotically spiralling round an invisible, yet voracious flame.

TUNE INTO THE NEXT EPISODE THIS TIME TOMORROW...

 

 

EPISODE 15

 

Crackhouse Rules

 

It was around this time that the beauty of a chap called Dennis was unveiled to me...

EPISODE 13

 

Walkabout

 

For the next few months, I relied on Westbourne Park to fuel my iniquity, and Layla and I became if not friends, acquaintances, if not acquaintances, associates.  But when the drugs had gone, she’d get surly and start mumbling insults.  I’d just sit there, regretting, occasionally trying to fashion a roll-up from the charred remnants of six other roll-ups, which in turn were the remnants of thirty-six previous roll-ups, and she’d criticise my ashen fumblings in the already heaving ashtray as unseemly.

 

But a Rubicon had been if not crossed, waded into.  Crack with a heroin chaser was now the order of the day.  Ah, those comforting heroin-spliffs, that allowed me to smoke crack with seeming impunity.  I was like an acrobat using a bed of nails as a safety-net, but then I had no plans to let go of the trapeze.

 

If I called on Layla to find her out, I’d fall back on the nearly-always-in Mr Bingo, who’d faithfully summon up Sandra for me, for the usual fee of fags and a fiver.  But Sandra wouldn’t let me score heroin.  She didn’t do that shit, and because she was the middleman between me and the dealer, there was no point asking.  Besides, the promise of ‘crack soon’ overrode the possibility of ‘heroin later’.  Once I was thrusting those scrunched-up notes into her waiting mitt, I was in the business of making sure she came back just as soon as possible.  If that was with just white, so be it…I wouldn’t care about the brown once I’d got that first pipe down my throat…well, not until the white had gone.  No, the white was Sandra’s thing, and she’d sneer at those who even touched the other.  Heroin, even if just smoked in a spliff, or on foil, was the preserve of scumbags.  As for people who injected, they were dropouts.  She’d do the Lady of the Manor turning-up-of-the-nose at those losers, leer down like a mangy Margot Ledbetter at the needle-crew.

 

Some nights, I’d arrive in Westbourne Park, on the corner by the 24-hour shop, and a loose collection of brethren would already be clustered in its light, hoping for a break in the context of ongoing despair.  But some of them seemed so shady that even I, in my rapacity, found myself talking my way out of their midst.  They were usually male, but sometimes a female would fall among them, and they’d gather about like dung-beetles under a jackal, a strange cross between scavenger and serenader, asking who’s she with, where’s she going, does she want to ‘come for a smoke’, but most offers were hollow, and the lady would shake ‘em awf like dandruff.

 

One night, as I lay there lamenting the lover-shaped hole in my bed, on the brink of booking my passage to Westbourne Park, it occurred to me it might be worth trying to score closer to home.  My encounter with the reptilian pimp, only a few months before, was proof that drugs existed in Shepherd’s Bush as well as Westbourne Park, and the Bronx.  It was now my mission to find them.  All I had to do was wander down the right street, let myself be spotted by the right person.  I might not be able to see them, but they would be able to spot, and accost, me.  ‘Shepherd’s Bush has 24-hour shops too,’ I mused, and felt myself becoming more London-savvy with every breath.  Like a pig foraging for truffles, this time I’d root out the desired delicacy, even if it meant snuffling in the undergrowth half the night.  So I got up, dressed, discreetly exited, discreetly excited, and made my way to the Green, which lives up to its name inasmuch as parts of it are green.

 

It’s odd being a partially-sighted spy.  You go out in search of your quarry, knowing that contact won’t depend on you spotting them, but them spotting you.  It’s more a putting-yourself-out-there exercise, a blurred reconnaissance, a fact-finding mission, but one where the facts find you.

 

Ten minutes later, I was trawling the broad pavements outside the Walkabout pub, by the Shepherd’s Bush Empire.  Like most trawlers, my net went wide and deep.  I pity the dolphins, those ever-smiling intellectuals in brine, getting all tangled up in dredge-nets, because Josh the geography student can’t think of anything but tuna to put in his bap.  Even though I was the one doing the trawling, I felt like I’d been caught myself, some four years before, by Sandra, the fishwife.  Her net was so holey you’d think even krill would get through.  But if you’re looking to get hooked, it’s possible to become enmeshed in a threadbare net that’s barely there.

 

I spied activity, portside.  A drifting silhouette put out a mild distress call.  It wanted a cigarette.  Her sail was surely battered, and her hull well-punctured.  But even though I couldn’t get a clear look at the spook, my cracked and fuzzy telescope told me this was contact.  I dropped anchor, and she hailed me.  'What are you doing out this time of night?' she asked, probably prompted by the white cane I was hanging out like a fishing-rod before me.  Less cagey in my old age, I replied, 'I was just looking to get something.'  She leapt at this.  'What is it you want?'  You could almost hear her adrenal gland kick in.  ‘I was thinking of getting a smoke.’  'What, white?'  The strange game of reveal was over, and she'd declared first.  Now we were on the same wavelength, talking the same language.  No fear among plague-ships.

 

There was a cashpoint nearby, although it was the kind I couldn’t read so well, pale, with spindly blue lettering.  But for the addict, delay-intolerant, a cashpoint, whether it be embedded in the wall of a bank, a shopping-mall, or jammed in a nook of a Budgens, is a thing of hope, a facilitator of dreams.  When those notes are poured into that little metal tray, it’s as if the establishment itself wants you to get wrecked.  ‘Yes,’ gleams the oracle, ‘you go and score, seize the day, or night...mind you, if you incur any charges while you’re at it, we’ll punish you, of course.’

 

So there we stood, at the oracle.  We would have knelt, but for the gum and spit on the ground.  My co-worshipper read aloud with reverence the sacred text, the blessèd buttons pressed at my behest.  We petitioned it for eighty pounds, which it granted.  This was the conduit, the tunnel to a new universe that we would never actually arrive in, but we didn’t care, for transfigurèd we were, sore fucking transfigurèd.

 

I stuffed the notes in my pocket and turned to my new associate.  'Who shall we try?' I asked, wanting her to think I knew a few dealers, which I thought might dilute her compulsion to fleece me.  ‘This way,’ she said, and led me round the corner onto Uxbridge Road.  Having established that neither of us had a mobile, she said she’d use a callbox.  I’d just given her some change, when a skinny figure came scuttling across the road towards us, and Martha, my associate, called out to it.  ‘Is Billy around?’ she asked.  ‘Ring Colonel,’ the stranger delicately crowed, ‘he’s just on Loftus.’  Martha made the call.  The phantom, now standing before me, introduced herself as Faith, and warned me to be careful of Martha (or Mel, as she knew her).  She was bad news.  But the world of crack is a backbiting one – when someone tells you someone’s a thief, they’re usually thinking about robbing you themselves.  See, I told you I was London-savvy.  Martha emerged with urgent instructions for us to be on the corner of Loftus.  Mid-flight, I transplanted the notes into Faith’s waiting grasp, who’d by now convinced me that she was the one I could trust, and that we could go back to hers just as soon as she’d picked up the crack.  Discovering I’d entrusted Faith with the money put Martha’s nose out of joint, or back in, I couldn’t tell.  But, by now, all we could both do was hope that Faith, having disappeared down Loftus Road, would return with the relevant drugs.

 

As we stood there on the corner, me feeling like we were sure to get arrested, another of Martha's nocturnal playmates turned up, a girl called Belinda whose tits were on obvious show, for obvious reasons.  Suddenly they were all coming out of the woodwork.  I'd no idea I was living in such a hotbed.  When Faith returned, all four of us went back to her place.  She had the ground-floor flat of a house no more than a few minutes away.  It couldn’t have been easier.

 

The living-room, for want of a better name, was dingy and cluttered, and felt like years of dust and grease had caked into every surface there, apart from, of course, the shiny bathroom tile onto which Faith spat the saliva-clad parcels she’d just got from the elusive Colonel.  Opening a tiny cling-film package that's covered in phlegm is a pretty slippery business, but I eventually managed to do it, and off we went again.  It was all becoming dangerously easy, and dangerously close to home.

 

Martha seemed to have a lighter-fuel habit.  She had a canister lodged in the inside-pocket of her crabby denim-jacket.  Every so often, she’d stick her head down at forty-five degrees and bite down on the nozzle, thus releasing a blast of butane into her mouth, which she'd suck down into eager, perhaps bleeding lungs.

 

Belinda just sat there, wafting a really tangy BO around the place.  It smelt like someone had lifted the lid of a saucepan with three-day-old stew in it.  She didn’t say much, but whenever someone put crack on a pipe she’d be sitting there drooling.  After a while, though, she began to get paranoid, and started accusing Faith of hiding drugs in parts of the room she hadn’t even been in, under the bed, on the windowsill, on top of the curtain-rail.  Faith didn’t like this, and started getting nasty, threatening to take a knife to her if she carried on.  When Belinda gave as good as she got, Faith called out for backup.  ‘Gerald,’ she bellowed.  Moments later, a bearded mental guy lumbered in.  He didn’t look like he could follow even the simplest instruction, but she ordered him about like a dog, all the same.  ‘Get that out,’ she sneered, as if pointing at a dead rat on the carpet.  Belinda, though, jittery by now, and clearly not quite the ticket, was already making tracks.  Gerald swivelled slowly as if to grab her as she passed, but he was too late, and she was out the door before his pincer-like arms even came together.  Belinda gone, Faith was satisfied, and she sent Gerald back into his lair.

 

It wasn’t long before Martha left, too.  Don’t know why…maybe Faith convinced her the drugs had all gone, threatened her with Gerald, or perhaps she ran out of butane, went to the shop and got serenaded by a local dung-beetle.

 

It allowed Faith and I to have a little get-to-know-each-other session, to bond in the dinginess.  To me, she didn’t seem like a typical crack-smoker.  She was about fifty-five, and spoke like an old-fashioned school-ma’am, clipped and oversure.  She had a take on everyone and everything, and none of her opinions was good, like so many scalding school-reports from an establishment where corporal punishment was not a last resort, but a relished ritual.  There was something sadistic about her, and it wasn’t long before stories of childhood maltreatment came up.  She played the ‘it never did me any harm’ card to the hilt.  Apparently she was grateful that her mother, a dissolute of sorts, had locked her in the cupboard under the stairs for hours on end when she was four.  She was equally thankful that one of her mother’s fleeting boyfriends had taken a far keener interest in her, aged nine, than he ever seemed to take in her mother.  These things had made her stronger, taught her about the foibles of human interaction, how to get ahead of the game, and on it, as soon as she left home, when fourteen.

 

Then, when it was light, and the white, along with all my money, had gone, it was time to resort to that arch-comforter, the brown.  We’d been out a few times during the night, but I’d been bashful of asking for heroin, for fear of Sandra-style admonishments, but Faith had broached the subject early on, declaring herself to be a keen injector of both, with many a sunken vein and abscess to show for it.

 

We’d been talking about my sight-condition when it was time for her to cook up (i.e. prepare the heroin for injection).  I gave her the usual spiel about getting ill when I was nine, that affecting my sight, but one adapts, especially when one’s a child, how things had been up and down over the years, but quite stable for about the last ten.  It was a story I’d grown fairly tired of telling, and mostly lazy spin.  But the upshot was, at least, helpful to Faith.  Having gained an impression of what I could and couldn’t see, she decided it would be ok to do her hit there in the living-room.  ‘I usually go into the bathroom to do it,’ she explained, ‘but if you can’t see me anyway, well, what’s the point?’  I didn’t really care what she did.  ‘Fine,’ I replied, with my usual passivity.

 

I tried not to fixate on the ritual unfolding before me, even though my curiosity was growing.  Although I couldn’t see exactly what cooking up involved, this was maybe no bad thing.  There was a spoon with a bit of liquid in it, then a flame under the spoon.  Then you’d draw the stuff up from the spoon into the barrel of the syringe.  But it was like watching an alchemist turn lead into gold through frosted glass.  I got the gist, but not the know-how.

 

I’d forgotten to buy tobacco and cigarette-papers to make those, by now, very necessary post-crack heroin-spliffs.  Faith, having drawn the elixir into the syringe, placed it down for a moment to help me in my hour of need, suggesting that I snort the stuff instead.  She endorsed this method because it meant I wasn’t wasting any, whereas putting it in a spliff meant that most of it went, quite literally, up in smoke.  ‘Drugs are expensive,’ she pointed out.  ‘You’ve got to make the most of them when you’ve got them.  You can’t let people fuck you around, like that Belinda bitch.  People will take the piss if you let them.’  It was a moving motivational speech, and left me in no doubt that I was in the presence of an old, and somewhat withered, hand.  She was kind enough to chop me out a little brown line, then fashion a tube for me to snort it through, from a leaflet that fell from a nearby TV guide.  Positioning myself above the platter, being careful not to exhale and so blow it in every direction, I sucked up the bitter powder into a nostril, sniffing with gusto a few times more to knock it back into the recesses of my sinuses.

 

Then, it was Faith’s go.  Stepping carefully over clutter, she found a spot a little way across the room.  I could still see her, but not in detail.  Down went her jeans, revealing skinny limbs.  Her lamentations regarding the state of her legs brought to mind claylike flesh, flecked with scars and scratches, pocked with scabs and cysts, and the odd ripe boil on a rank, necrotic stretch of shin, all testimony to her decades-long commitment to the cause.  She then began telling me how her legs were in such a bad way that she’d thought of offering herself up to schools to give talks to the children about the perils of drugs, using her legs as a visual prop to drive the point home…an ambition that seemed both worthy and macabre.

 

A fleeting question entered my mind as to what I might do if she had an overdose.  I knew virtually no first aid, and wasn’t even sure if it applied in this setting.  I felt like a toddler thrown in the deep end, except I hadn’t been thrown, I’d leapt in of my own accord.  Then I realised that I didn’t even know what an overdose looked like.  It was just a word I’d heard.  Did the patient keel over and flop into a kind of coma?  Did they quiver on their back, their limbs all fidgety like a dying fly?  Would I call an ambulance?  What would I tell them?  ‘Oh, we were just having some crack, and then she injected some heroin, and now she won’t say anything.’  What would my fate be in such an entanglement?  Would the police be involved?  Would I, the semi-innocent bystander, be drawn into the fray?

 

By the light of a precariously positioned lamp, and the few shreds of daylight that were seeping in from the street, she braced for revelation.  Legs awkwardly akimbo, she twisted the snake-neck of the anglepoise to illuminate the relevant crater, to be located in the region of the groin.

 

‘I suppose you get a different kind of rush doing it that way,’ I surmised, hoping she’d offer me a hit, so I could blame her for any pleasure or pain that followed.  But instead she said, peering at my forearms, ‘You haven’t got the veins for it.’  I wondered if this was her way of heightening my curiosity, challenging me to find a vein that she could inspect, and inject, and then say, ‘Oh well, if you insist,’ thus exonerating herself from any accusations of enticement.  Or maybe this scenario was being played out solely within the confines of my own needy, and possibly seedy head.

 

By now, she was in, and let out the quietest of sighs, the kind you’d maybe get from pressing a freshly dead corpse in the ribcage.  I was still in the business of trying to seduce her into seducing me into having a hit, but she just wouldn’t be coaxed.  Half of me was glad of this, but the crack-addled half, still striving for a yet higher high, was resentful, and quietly vowed to make it happen, somehow, at some point.  But, for now, all I could do was watch her swoon, a dirty kind of envy swilling in my gut.

 

Jeans up, she picked her way through the mess and sat back on the sofa, leaning back into the upholstery as if pushed by a sense of relief as irresistible as gravity.  ‘Nice?’ I asked, colluding with the confidence-trick being played on us both.  ‘Like a nun kissing God,’ she replied.  Ghoulish though the interlude had been, my monkish aspirations to attain the serenity she had found, remained untarnished.

 

TUNE INTO THE NEXT EPISODE THIS TIME TOMORROW...

 

Episode 14

 

This Charming Madman

Having located likeminded suicidals in my own area, I now had no excuse not to be scoring at every opportunity...