Down and Out on Murder Mile (15 page)

After moving into
Vanessa's bedroom in Cheshire Street for a month or so, we decided to get our own place. She shared her old place with a few girls who seemed slightly annoyed by an uninvited lodger showing up and holding up the line to the communal shower. We found a decrepit artist loft above a fried chicken joint on Kingsland Road, so I changed my pickup to a new pharmacy, ten minutes down the road. The pharmacy sat on a nondescript row of shops, surrounded by a video store and a Greek bakery. The old woman behind the counter regarded me sourly but did not treat me too badly.

 

The loft in Dalston was an unmitigated disaster. Upon moving in we had discovered that it was infested with mice and cockroaches. Also, the electricity did not work properly and most nights
the place felt like a walk-in refrigerator. When we complained to the landlord he claimed that since the place was technically a commercial property and not a residential one, he did not have to do a thing about it.

 

To compound the problem, a month after we moved in, Vanessa discovered that she was pregnant. We had stopped using protection after we moved in together. Our connection was so immediate and so profound that I thought nothing of doing this. One week her period was late, so she bought a home test from the pharmacy and the results came back positive. My first reaction was complete terror. I assumed that Vanessa's would be the same. But when she saw my face turn white she seemed hurt.

 

“Is this really such a bad thing?” she asked. “I mean, if this was such a bad thing why didn't we take precautions?”

 

I thought about it. Was it a bad thing? I had never even entertained the thought of children before. But I had never entertained the thought of quitting dope before either. I looked at Vanessa and realized that maybe we did have a chance to make it in this world. Maybe it was time to take risks and think the unthinkable. “No.” I said finally, “Not such a bad thing at all.”

 

The band's activity following the TV show in Wales ground to a halt. The release date on the album was put back. The single from the album was decided upon and changed at least a dozen
times. Throughout all of this, Alex proved himself to be possibly the most ineffectual manager of all time.

 

The check from the Garbage tour bounced, and I took a job working in a music shop in the West End to supplement my income. I was on the phone to Alex begging him and then demanding that he pay me my money so often that he started screening my calls. What kept me going was the idea that soon the call would come to announce that our album was being released and that we could go back on the road. Only the call never came. Other calls came. The news that a DJ had been paid fifteen thousand pounds to remix the single, and soon after that the song had been dropped from the album altogether. The news that the A&R guy representing the band had been fired and replaced by someone who thought that our album sounded “outdated.” The news that our European label was suing our UK label over the lack of activity. The final straw came over an argument about underarm hair.

 

A new single was decided upon, and a video was shot with Kelly to promote it. The song stank. The label demanded that Kelly record a poppier-sounding single to launch the album with and she did, without the band knowing. The first I heard of it was when a CD of the song landed in my mailbox. It sounded insipid, desperate. Of course, the label loved it. Despite not finding their way to pay me the money they still owed me for rehearsals, and for the Garbage tour that had happened almost a year previously, they suddenly
found fifty thousand pounds to shoot a new promotional video.

 

All was apparently going well. Until the day when I spoke to Kelly over the phone to find out the state of play, and she told me the latest piece of shitty luck to befall the project.

 

“The single isn't being released,” she said.

 

“What? Why?”

 

“Well, when the label saw the finished product they freaked because in two of the shots I raised my arms and they could see underarm hair.”

 

I sat down.

 

“The exact word they used was
disgusting
. Can you believe that?”

 

“That's crazy.”

 

“They wanted to reshoot the video, but I said no. There've been too many delays already.”

 

“Right.”

 

“And I told them Patti Smith had underarm hair. It didn't ruin her career!”

 

“Right. And Nena.”

 

“Nena?”

 

“Yeah, ‘99 Red Balloons,' remember?”

 

“Oh yeah.”

 

“So what happened?”

 

“Well, they went behind my back and spent fifteen grand digitally touching up the video to remove the hair.”

 

“Jesus Christ.”

 

“I know. I freaked when Alex told me. So I told the label that I would not promote the single or the album unless they put the underarm hair back in.”

 

“And what did they say?”

 

“They're threatening to sue me. But I have to stick to my guns, don't you think?”

 

The flat was particularly cold that day. I detected some movement from the corner of my eye, and saw a monstrous cockroach making a break across the kitchen floor.

Vanessa was at work, and there wasn't enough food in the fridge to eat.

“Oh yeah,” I told her, “you have to stick to your guns.”

 

Sickened and disappointed, I walked to the newsagent to pick up a copy of
NME
. When I picked up the new issue, a familiar face was staring back at me from the front cover. It was Elektra's
husband, Tom, with a big smug grin on his face. The headline read: “The Ones: Say Hello to Your New Favorite Band!” I put the paper back in disgust and stormed out into the filth and chaos of Dalston High Street.

 

Vanessa started bleeding the following Friday night, and by Saturday evening the pain in her belly was so bad that we were in the emergency room at 10:00
P.M.
with the first round of the East End's weekend casualties. Red-faced drunks nursing broken noses and picking chunks of glass out of their mangled faces. Old women who didn't have the sense to just die before they hit seventy, silently fretting about strokes or heart attacks. Screaming infants with tired, worried-looking parents.

 

The doctors rushed Vanessa in to a cold little examining room, lifted her shirt, probed her belly with latex-clad hands, and announced that she was miscarrying and there was nothing to do but wait it out. Since the pregnancy was in the first trimester it would, as the doctor said, make its own way out without need for medical intervention. They sent us home with a prescription for codeine and a couple of leaflets about dealing with the loss of an unborn child.

 

The flat in Dalston seemed more empty and colder than ever. We walked in and I heard the frenzied squealing of a mouse stuck to one of the glue traps we left around the place. The doctor told us that there was no specific reason why we lost the baby, and that many pregnancies ended
in miscarriage this early on. So with no one else to blame, I took it out on the mouse. I smashed its skull in with a ball hammer, ending its life with a little more venom than usual. Tonight the blood seemed almost too red, counterfeit, like something from a joke shop. The skin held together, the shape of its head elongated, and crimson poured from its mouth as it kicked spastically with a back leg, before becoming still. I threw it out in the bins around the back, still stuck to the trap.

 

We sat on the edge of the bed in silence. I wanted to cry, but I stopped myself. Somehow, Vanessa wasn't crying and I couldn't bear it if she did. If I cried, then we would both have to cry and that would be the worst thing in the world that could happen. I looked at the box of codeine that the doctors had prescribed. They were over-the-counter strength—eight milligrams codeine to five hundred milligrams paracetamol. Vanessa groaned and held her stomach.

 

“How bad does it feel?”

 

“Horrible. I can feel my stomach contracting. It's the most horrible feeling.”

“Fucking assholes,” I hissed, throwing the box of codeine on the floor. “This shite wouldn't shift a fucking toothache. Do you want something that's going to take the pain away for real?”

 

Vanessa nodded silently. I rummaged around in my pockets and produced a wrap of heroin. In all the time we had been together she had never so much as expressed an interest in trying smack. In
the club scenes of New York she had seen heroin so often that I suppose my lifestyle was not particularly shocking to her. She had never had a drug problem in the sense that I had a drug problem, so I felt somewhat reassured about giving her some under these circumstances. I placed a small amount of it on aluminum foil and showed her how to smoke it.

 

We had almost bought a crib last week from the Egyptian man who had helped us move from Cheshire Street. All I could think was how relieved I was that we hadn't bought it. I imaged us both, sitting in this roach and mouse-infested hole, smoking heroin, waiting for Vanessa to finish miscarrying with an empty crib in the middle of it all like an accusing finger. Maybe that would have been the final straw.

 

Vanessa smoked a little. It eased her pain. I injected a little and it eased mine also. I said to her: “We could always try again, you know.”

 

“I know.”

“Maybe it would be better this way. We'd be prepared for the baby instead of just dealing with it because it happened.”

 

“I suppose.”

 

We smoked more, silently. There was nothing more to say. Vanessa went back to the bathroom, the blood kept coming, and so did the pain.

 

In three days the bleeding stopped, and Vanessa stopped smoking heroin. Her self-control astounded me. She seemed utterly disinterested in the drug and its effects, beyond its usefulness as a pain reliever. She was some kind of miracle, I thought. When we started having sex again, we did not use protection. Having a child snatched away from us had awakened something in us that we couldn't quite articulate. It felt as if something were wrong in the universe, and it was our job to put it right. That the loss of the child was not what was meant to happen. This child was meant to be born, was meant to be in this world, was meant to have us as its parents.

 

Three weeks after the miscarriage we found out that, again, Vanessa was pregnant. She made an appointment with her GP and he confirmed what the home test had told us. We were going to be parents.

In the end
I left the custody of Dr. Ira without any of the fireworks that I had imagined. He did not die on the end of a blade wielded by me or burn up in a guzzling fire that I started in the clinic. No, I simply walked out of the hospital one day and never came back.

 

I had no intentions of doing it that day.

 

We had fled Dalston for a one-bedroom flat in Stamford Hill. Since the landlord had refused to fix up the place, we stopped paying rent, fitted the doors with padlocks, and started looking for a new place to live. We used the withheld rent to put the down payment on the new flat.

 

I was heading down to the pharmacy to get my methadone and then I was due to sign the lease
and pick up the keys for the new place that same afternoon. Lingering by a pay phone on the edges of a housing estate was a tall, thin woman whose dirty-blond hair fell about her face in filthy clumps.

 

“You got some change?” she asked, pulling on a cigarette with shaking hands and looking at me pleadingly. Her skin was pitted and scarred with acne. She had a trace of a Scottish accent and wore only a thin white T-shirt and jeans, despite the brutal cold. I handed her some coins, scraped out of my pocket.

 

“Aw shit, thanks,” she said. “I need to make a call. I've been up all night.”

 

“Oh yeah?”

 

“Yeah. It's been a long one.” She twitched slightly. “This is shit, isn't it?”

 

“Yes, it is,” I told her before carrying on to get my methadone.

 

I walked toward the pharmacy. Approaching the street I noticed
POLICE LINE—DO NOT CROSS
tape blocking my way. The traffic had been building steadily as I approached and I soon realized why. Police directed traffic away from the street, and drivers sat nullified by frustration or cursed silently behind rolled-up windows. I approached the nearest cop, a sour-faced woman with gray skin and dead, light-blue eyes, and asked what was happening.

 

“Gas leak,” she replied, with a voice like shaved glass. “The street's been sealed off.”

 

“But I need to get to the chemist's over there.”

 

“Closed. It's all closed. There's another chemist back up that way on Dalston High Street.”

 

“I need to go to this chemist.”

 

“It's closed. Gas leak.”

 

I walked back to the housing estate where I had seen the woman. She was long gone. A fish and chips shop on the edge of the estate was opening up for the day. I called the clinic and got through on the second ring.

 

“Homerton DDU.”

“I need to speak to Dr. Ira. I'm one of his clients.”

 

“He's busy. Is this because of the gas leak by any chance?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“We're doing an emergency dispensing service at the clinic. Come in and we'll take care of it.”

 

“I can't come in. I have a really important appointment in an hour. Can't I go to another chemist?”

 

“No. You have to come in.”

 

“Then I'll have to do without today. I can't come in.”

 

“Wait a minute.”

 

They placed me on hold. I found myself listening to Musak momentarily. Kenny G plays the hits of Celine Dion. I wondered if that would be playing when I die. The phone box stank of stale döner kebabs and vomit.

 

“Hello?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“I just spoke to Dr. Ira. He said that if you miss a dose it will be considered an infraction and you will be placed back on a supervised consumption program until your case can be reevaluated.”

 

“Can I speak to Dr. Ira please?”

 

“Dr. Ira is busy. We close at four o'clock. See you soon.”

 

I hung up the phone. They had me. Again they had me. Cursing, I headed toward the tube.

 

In the waiting room junkies sprawled on chairs and squatted against the wall and coughed and spat phlegm into Kleenexes, watching the clock agitatedly. I took my number and waited. Within minutes one of the male nurses appeared and called my name. Surprised, I walked over.

 

“That was quick,” I said. “You have a full house today.”

 

“Well this is just for your urine test.”

 

“Urine test?”

 

“Yup. You don't have a problem with that, do you?”

 

“Oh no. Not me.”

 

Bastards.

 

Since Vanessa fell pregnant we had stopped partying altogether, but this weekend I had cracked and scored a bag of heroin from RJ. I knew that Dr. Ira would think it was his fucking birthday when my urine lit up the test like a fucking Christmas tree. I would be back on supervised consumption for months.

 

There was no way out. I considered pretending that I couldn't piss as I stood, dick in hand, staring at the little bottle that was about to ruin my life. The nurse waited behind me, the cubicle door open so he could observe. Then, deciding against any more delays, I filled the bottle up with heroin-laced piss and handed it to the nurse.

 

“Thanks,” he said. “You can wait outside.”

 

I could feel the old fear and helplessness rising in me. I needed to get out of the methadone clinics. They were killing me. This was no way to live.
Again I was having to keep my change of address a secret for fear of being stuck at yet another clinic as a newcomer, with an even more uncaring and fucked-up prescribing regime than Dr. Ira's. It was perfectly obvious that while I remained addicted to state-mandated opiates, I was no longer in control of my own destiny. Every decision I made would have to be approved by a room full of shit-eating soulless fucks like Dr. Ira. I was a helpless fucking pawn. A laboratory rat. I was worth less than the shit on the sole of Dr. Ira's boot.

 

I looked at my watch. It was thirty minutes before I was due to meet with my new landlord to sign the lease. If I walked out right now I would be cutting it fine. But they hadn't even called me yet. There still seemed to be at least a dozen junkies ahead of me waiting to get dosed. I pulled out my mobile phone and frantically started to dial the landlord's number.

 

Out of nowhere I found myself grabbed by the collar and spun around. I was looking into the twisted face of one of the slack-jawed security guards they sometimes had on duty in this place. They all wore these terrible-looking polyester uniforms, and all had the same kind of lobotomized look about their faces. This one could have been no more than twenty and spoke with an almost incomprehensible West Indian patois.

 

“Geddafuck out wi'da phone!” he yelled at me.

 

“What?

 

“No phone! Geddafuckout wi'da phone, man!”

 

He pointed to a sign on the wall, an illustration of a mobile phone with a red line through it. Normally I would have apologized to this prick and left the clinic to make the call, but, finally, today, I had had my limit of what I was taking.

 

“Get your fucking hands off me,” I warned him.

 

“Shutup man! Don' talk smart, boy! Now geddafuck out, yeah?”

 

Suddenly we were the center of attention. I snarled and pressed my face close to his.

“Why don't you go fuck yourself! If you don't get your fucking hand off my collar, this phone is going right up your useless fucking asshole!”

 

I landed on the concrete outside with a thud. The security guard brushed himself off and stood there, looking down on me. He laughed, “Dickhead!” before spitting and walking back into the clinic. I got up, brushed myself off, and started to walk away. As I walked past a pay phone I lifted the receiver and smashed it back down with a crunch, cracking the plastic open. Walking back I called Vanessa, who could sense by the hysterical tone of my voice that something had happened.

 

“I'm done,” I told her. “I'm out of the clinics. I'm finished.”

“Really?”

 

“Really. That's it. I got to find a doctor who will detox me, and then I'm done.”

 

“Are you sure?”

 

”Believe me,” I said, glancing back toward the hospital that had caused me so much humiliation and pain in the past, “I'm fucking sure.”