Howard Marks' Book of Dope Stories (25 page)

Godfrey swam. He swam in brackish oily water and then, it seemed, he was deep in soup. He paddled past florets of cauliflower, dived under broccoli bombs, breasted logs of carrots, stinking shreds of chicken and lamb. He moved not in water but in stuff he really had to fin through. Gazpacho. The air flowered with stock. Godfrey gave little shivery, fastidious leaps. Mum, stirring, leaped too. Leaning, trying to talk sense into Mum, one day, yelling above the radio blah-blah of LBC, I saw Godfrey take a leap at the edge. But the walls of the terrapin tank were too high. He leapt but a stray
calamaro
ringed his neck, winched it back, cut his arrow-like route to the floor. My heart flipped. Godfrey’s battered, swollen, mottled, white-veined mouth glugged each time, sank to blank – down among the greasy olives, baggy purple prunes, hairy anchovies swishing by like unshaved legs: the assorted mucus beneath the murk. I’d mumble above his surface: ‘Leeds . . . Aberystwyth . . . Godfrey, you hang on.’ I changed Godfrey’s water but Mum souped it straight back up. I tried putting Godfrey in my bedroom near my computer and neat stacks of homework but Mum kept bringing him down, sloshing, bashing his delicate lips brown. I tried to keep Godfrey on the up.

But I failed. I failed my mocks. An (unpredicted) D, D, E. When I told Godfrey he flickered away. I looked for him in the grey TV screen of his tank. ‘I’m sorry, Godfrey,’ I said. I turned to Mum. She stirred away.

I tried to stay focused, stay head-down, but . . .

I thought Majella was now heavily into the drug scene, was like a suburban drug queen, and I was worried.

I saw adverts in the papers for people to appear and confess personal family information on
Esther
or on
Vanessa
and I was thinking of appearing. I’d snitch Majella up for her own good. I’d get her into rehab. Write to her from my tidy room. I circled the adverts with red biro and left them on Majella’s littered grey bed, as a warning, a hint for her to pull
herself together
. I tapped Mum’s arm in the kitchen. ‘Mum?’ Godfrey paused. ‘Godfrey?’ I said. ‘Newcastle Polytechnic? Brighton FE?’ Godfrey swam away.

Majella started clubbing it four times a week, five. She’d come home at around four o’clock in the morning, with Mr Marv. (She’d sleep maybe two hours, then speed off to work. Her eyes were like slots.) I’d wait up, reassuring Godfrey there’d be no game-playing tonight whatsoever, watching as his sides bulged at the scrape of a key . . . Mr Marv swung in first: smirked, picked up a dirty fork, toyed with its crusty prong, slid it up his sleeve. Majella doubled behind him: they were thin, shiny, daisy-topped. They’d sloppy-kiss, edge to the tank; rub each other up, but I was on guard, stayed solid, watched for the sudden lunge, the stabbing fork. They’d kiss out. Then, without warning, double back,
crash
into the kitchen tooled up to play, in between licks and despite my protestations, the Get Godfrey Game. They forked but Godfrey dived under the blue pagoda. They stabbed but Godfrey ducked into the hide’n’seek boot. He whizzed rapidly around a roast spud. Watching his dive I
felt
the full surge of his life force: he’d leap back from a death wish; got firmly back
into
the swim; he swam away. Majella and Marv forked up sodden Cocoa-Pops, fried clumps of wire wool, crumbless stiff blue fingers of fish. Godfrey lived to flicker away. Godfrey survived all through Majella’s Marv stage, her Darren & speed stage, her LSD-plus-E stage. His stroke became really butch, determined. His nose grew blunt from speeding U-ies against the glass. Majella went clubbing six times a week. She looked thin-skinned. I could see the blood network through her face. She’d come home haggard in her NatWest uniform looking forty years old and emerge from her room, hours later, remarkably refreshed; showing tight arse-cleavage, her cheeks sparkly like two just-peeled spuds, her hair with a wide road of centre-parting, looking
just
eleven years old. In a rare burst of sisterhood, once, she showed me the three moves I’d need should I ever give up being a ‘snitchy-bitch’ and take up clubbing instead:

Our other pets went funny,
funnier
, in the head: showed acute symptoms of distress, neuroses, when they heard the squeal of a taxi. They bounced up and down on the grass, paced two steps forward, two steps back.

Summer was awful. I failed my A levels and then I failed my resits (Fs). Tiny died in the sheds (she was all loose inside, really awful, like a bag of curds), and then Twinkle got run over. The tortoise fell into a coma and died. Suzi developed some kind of tumour on her neck and started going for Dad as he stepped in through the door from work. Really for his neck. Like
flying
through the air, like hiding under the stairs or crouched in the airing cupboard like Patience on a stack of dank sheets . . . the vet said a tumour-removal operation would cost about forty pounds. One day I came in from signing on and Suzi wasn’t there. Dad said she’d gone: ‘Doggone.’ He’d probably let her loose on the motorway, the bastard.

So we only had Godfrey left.

And Godfrey was getting bigger. He lived on juicy blue flies that fell from the ceiling and cod in butter sauce. He really liked chips. If you plopped a chip in the tank Godfrey gobbled it down in one, like a piranha. Godfrey was so fat now he could barely turn around in his tank. He swam on though. He only paused in his heavy front crawl to listen to Mum’s long radio monologues or watch her manic hands chop the air. He still blew her kiss and kiss kiss. Mum gleamed. She poured old cups of sugary sun-warmed tea on his back to keep his water level up, pulled a few rubbery fish faces; flipped in chips. With each look-in Godfrey swam with extra verve; blew out kiss and . . . kiss and . . . kiss. Sometimes, Mum kissed back. As the kitchen boiled up, Godfrey’s tank became just like another steaming bowl of soup: he smelt, sometimes, really tasty.

I wasn’t so happy then. I tried to keep my spirits up by writing an epic novel slowly by computer in the morning and swimming slowly in the swimming pool down the road in the afternoon. I was quite good at breaststroke and, as I breasted the clear blue water, I thought about Godfrey: his immense powers of endurance, his selflessness. I admired the sheer
purity
of his direction. His staying power. I would, I told myself, now eschew all Lemsips and paracetamol. I would be as Godfrey, and simply
endure
.

Dad started coming home late, becalmed, with rust marks like vicious love bites on his neck. I noted his clothes no longer billowed their usual bluey-grey cloud of concrete dust. Had he shaken it elsewhere? I thought: Yes. (I imagined a bottle-blonde in a nylon cream cardigan donned like a cloak . . . I drew a picture of her in my notebook, stabbed big juicy blackheads into her chin.) His boots also had new bootlaces on them. I swam and listed clues like that. I was even more worried about Majella. I could smell her rotting flesh. It smelt light green. I’d be up guarding Godfrey, watching late-night Hindu films on the telly, waiting for dawn to crack light across the old chicken tikka cartons on the still black lawns: I’d wait for Majella to come home. Majella staggered from her cab. I’d smell her first: rot. She’d come up daisies in the hall, push straight through me, sneer, throw the drug literature I’d got from Dr Trang back in my face, push me off. Her forehead and temples were glossed with sweat; above her hipsters the belly button rose from its punctured hood like a lump of red, still-cooking, bread. ‘Majella?’ I called. I had Dettol on hand, TCP ready. Majella staggered past me, zigzagged up the stairs, shook the light fittings, and slammed a heavy screen of dust from her door frame.

Godfrey swam in his tank. Gulped, slowly, round.

Mum’s medications went haywire. She was talking more or less out loud: answering all the voices chanting in her head. Under Dr Trang’s direction she had to swallow his pills and lift her flabby grey tongue for his inspection. Mum swallowed. The muscles in her throat rippled. Dr Trang shook his head perplexed, and wrinkled his nose.

Mum talked back to LBC on the radio, nodded vigorously at whichever other airwave was tuning her in . . . fuzzing her out. A new pet-fan squeaked from the bread bin: a pet mouse. The mouse begged at her heels as she stirred the soup. Or it climbed on to the beige stubble plains of her worn-out carpet slippers, shiny pink mouse marigolds signing up supplications; squeak plaintive. Mum stirred the soup. The mouse scampered up her leg, her sleeve, her muscled arm, on to her shoulder, turned somersaults, squivelled, squeaked for attention, its cute black persistent eyes gleaming. Mum stirred on. The mouse cut a squeak through her airways. Godfrey, in his tank, splished up distraction: whacked up prawns, corn on the cob . . . splashed. The mouse tricked on. Wandering into the kitchen one hot afternoon, chewing my hand, I heard a different squeak. Human: ‘A carrot is essential, mango chut . . .’ The mouse was poised up on Mum’s thumb, paws in beg mode, raised so its whiskers could tickle her own. Mum was squeaking, in a squeaky Nice-Aunty voice, the secret of her secret-recipe soups. She roared: ‘
Vanilla essence obviously, stupid mouse, ha, ha, ha, fluff! One cornflake, leather thong
 . . .’

Godfrey broke surface. Red-eyed. Slowly dived. He no longer got a look-in.

Then one day I came home from a dole recall interview, chewing my lip. I thought I’d just look in on old Godfrey and start a really pure and positive Zen afternoon: Go on. Just
get
on. Chapter 200. Chapter 201 . . . I caught Mum leaning over Godfrey’s tank. She was sly-faced, hugely pored. Her mouse-fan was boxing with excitement, shrieking squeaks from the bowl of her collarbone; it leapt at her stiff ponytailed head, climbed her ponytail scaffold. Wheeeeed round. The mouse grinned as Mum, gum frilled, tippled and dribbled the contents out of her brown pill bag.

The little white pills slid on a slide through Godfrey’s murk, became, I noted, with their powdery star tails, like ultra-white planets in flux. I saw Godfrey buoyed up by half a cheese’n’viscous roll, by a boiled egg, pickled and embryonic like new baby skin – pause. The Plants glazed his right sideeye, shock-waved, rearranged. You . . . good Godfrey, I urged, ignore. Just swim on . . . Godfrey. You
swim
on! Godfrey swam on, swam and swam on, till, with a flash of tail rudder, a shiver, a final soup-thwacking U-ie he – gulped. His throat rippled and he gulped again.

I went into the garden and, lying out among the stale pizza crusts, with big raindrops splashing on my forehead, I began to cry.

Godfrey lay at the bottom of the tank, slowly burbling, like a miniature ginger whale.

Doctor Trang gave me pills. I had growing pains, he said. He patted my hand kindly and suggested I wash more. I smelt a bit fishy. I was a pretty little thing underneath all those eyebrows. I wandered the high streets, up and down, as the drugs made me march, and thought about a new novel I would write by hand, using pencil. No more computers. I’d get back into the raw.

In the kitchen, Mum shouted at the mouse-fan and the mouse-fan ran to fetch a friend. The two mice looked up and nervously conferred as Mum ranted and confused them, sent a pea-green football flying off her wooden spoon. They chased.

I bent my knees to the tank and looked, with my slow-motion blink rate, into the thunderous grey matter where something large and orange glowed. ‘I forgive you, Godfrey,’ I said, reaching for a fork. ‘I’m . . .’ I stabbed, stammering, ‘o-out of it ta-too.’ I smelt light green: saw, on my periphery, luminous daisies bloom. ‘Godfrey,’ I said, ‘the ga-game is o-o-ver.’ Godfrey bellied up. Beside me, I heard Majella sob.

From:
Intoxication: An Anthology of Stimulant-Based Writing
, ed. Toni Davidson, 1998

I
WAS IN
Israel for a few days promoting the Hebrew translation of my book,
Mr Nice; Every Jewish Mamma’s Nightmare (But He’s All Right Really)
, and had absolutely no desire to get bollocksed by any aspect of the Arab-Israeli dispute. It’s all the same, all the time, everywhere, from Genesis to CNN, and it’s got too boring. All right, some of the ancient history is quite intriguing: Jews being originally enslaved because they shagged too much; Solomon, the wise geezer, shagging Sheba, Queen of the Rastas, and letting her scarper to Ethiopia with the Ark of the Convenant. But the only bit I had ever found either funny or really interesting was the plethora of religious conflicts saturating the issue, and I’d sorted that lot out long ago. I did not want the top of my dick cut off, definitely wanted to get pissed on booze, liked miniskirts, got bored by Sabbaths, totally avoided any kind of truthful confessions, did not fancy any angels or virgins, loved bacon sandwiches, got turned on by adultery, didn’t want to cover some women’s faces, preferred hers to hymns, and only wanted to meet God if he could dance. I freely admit, however, that I like a few religious traditions like having four wives and a harem, covering some women’s faces, and segregating menstruaters. Also, I enjoy eating turkey balls and falafel, really fancy Mary Magdalene, would like to know how to turn water into wine, approve of banning cheeseburgers and banning girls wearing sexless shorts, and wouldn’t mind living for ever as long as I could take drugs, have sex and dance.

We were on the air.

‘So what do you think of Israel, Mr Marks?’

‘It’s great. Fantastic weather, amazing women.’

‘And of the Israeli character?’

This was an interview taking place in Tel Aviv, going out live on prime-time Israeli national television. I had to be careful. Sad Adam Hussein was still in the Garden of Eden, ready with his scuds and non-psychoactive chemicals. Armed ex-soldiers (every Israeli has been one) were surrounding me. The interviewer was terrified. He’d been told I was always stoned and more than capable of suddenly skinning up without any four-minute warning. And that I liked taking risks and tasting adrenalin.