Authors: Phil Shoenfelt
“Maybe you should have a rest for a few minutes, take a cigarette break, then try again. Your muscles are obviously spasming an’ going into reverse, so if you just relax for awhile they’ll start working normally again, an’ the bag’ll come out by itself.” Dave had the reputation of being a bit of a hard case, and I didn’t want to get him riled.
“How the fuck can I relax with you sittin’ there like a cunt, an’ me bollock-naked with three grammes of smack up me arse. I’m sicker than you are, at least you ’ad a little bit to keep you goin’ for awhile.”
The spider’s web tattoo that covered the right side of Dave’s neck was throbbing with indignation, or maybe with the effort of trying to force out the stubborn little package that had lodged itself somewhere in the lower reaches of his small intestine. He used to shoot up in the middle of this tattoo, right in the jugular, when he couldn’t raise a vein in his arms, hands or feet, and
reckoned it gave him a better, faster rush than anywhere else.
“Why’d you stick it up your arse anyway? Couldn’t you just have put it in your sock, or down your pants, like any normal person? I mean, if the Ol’ Bill were onto you an’ took you down the nick that’s the first place they’d look.”
I was reaching a crisis point of anxiety and impatience, and I thought for a moment that I might have pushed Dave too far. With no endorphins left in my system to cushion the pain, and no smack either, each movement was an effort — my bones grated in their sockets, my diaphragm pressed in upon my lungs and every nerve in my body was irritated and tortured to the point where I felt like screaming. But I also knew I had to tread carefully. Even though it was my money he had used to cop with, Dave was in no mood to be pressured or hustled. As he said, he was probably even sicker than I was, and though we had both been out hunting all day, with the sweat pouring off us and our skins crawling with the chills of withdrawal, it was he who had been successful and had eventually managed to score. He stood up looking very pissed-off, and for a minute I thought he might walk out on me with the smack still up his arse; but suddenly, his expression changed.
“’ang on a minute — I felt somethin’ move inside me, I think it’s comin’ out! Standin’ up just then must’ve dislodged it, or else me guts’re startin’ to work again. Tha’s funny, I didn’t think there was anything left up there to shit out …”
Dave hopped back to his copy of
The Sun
and squatted down again. Puffing and grunting, with his face almost purple from the effort, he suddenly let out an almighty fart, and with it a horrible, stinking mess of watery diarrhoea spattered onto the newspaper. The stench was truly disgusting, but this timely and heaven-sent bowel movement had done the trick. Wiping his backside on a rancid old towel that was lying around, and with his face contorted in pain, Dave probed and prodded until his questing fingers finally locked around the elusive little
package that had caused him so much anguish.
“Fuckin’ A! Party time at last!”
He held the small, round bag aloft in victory. It was tightly wrapped in cling film and, as far as I could tell, had not been impregnated by the foul-smelling discharge. Dave was rumoured to be
HIV
positive, and I wasn’t too happy about the gear having been stuffed up his backside in the first place; but as far as I knew, the virus could only be passed via blood or semen and was not able to travel through plastic, even when the plastic had been wedged far inside the carrier’s arsehole.
Besides, Dave had already cleaned and sliced open the package with a razor blade, and was carefully measuring out a shot into his spoon; and with the stuff right there on the table in front of me, and with cold, sickly sweat breaking out from every pore in my body, I was willing to take my chances. I’d been sharing needles and having unprotected sex for years, both in New York and London, long before anyone knew anything about
AIDS
, and when it was still referred to as “Gay Cancer”. Though the frequent
TV
warnings and documentaries were making me increasingly paranoid, I reckoned that this was a fairly safe bet, compared to the multifarious ways I’d already abused my body over the previous ten years.
The sense of anticipation a sick junkie feels as he cooks up his shot is almost impossible to describe. Maybe it is comparable to the sensation a man dying of thirst in the desert feels as he crawls up that final sand dune and unexpectedly sees water shimmering in the distance, a cool and welcoming oasis; or to the way a convict on Death Row might feel, suddenly and inexplicably pardoned and transported to a hotel room where the most beautiful and sexually-adept whore in the world waits to satisfy his every perverse fantasy and need. But not really. To the person who has never been in this state, no words can truly convey the sense of expectation, the knowledge that within seconds all the pain and physical suffering will magically
evaporate, like a dank river mist at sunrise. Your body, taken off the rack at last, will find itself instead floating in warm and protective amniotic waters, while your mind, tortured for days by darkness, gloom and ugly, twisted dreams, will suddenly be immune and inviolate, free from all anxiety and violent self-loathing. Artificial paradise it may well be; but in another sense, it is as real as real gets.
As I cooked up my own shot, my trembling hands became sure and precise, and I heated the spoon from below without spilling a drop. My clothes and body stank, and I was aware of the rancid discharge from my cock that was soiling the inside of my underwear. For when you are kicking, the genitals become hyper-sensitive and you tend to shoot off spontaneously, without warning, just from the pressure of your clothes against your skin. Even the air itself seems to hurt: you truly cannot stand any kind of contact upon your body at all, while friction of even the slightest and most innocuous kind is enough to send you into a shivering, quivering mass of jangled nerve endings and twitching flesh, as if plagues of insects were crawling about under your cold, clammy skin.
But all these symptoms vanish once the smack is in your veins, and you are suddenly flooded with a holy and transforming inner light. The decaying, stinking carcass that you have been forced to inhabit for days is suddenly charged with a marvellous energy, and you are awash with optimism, ideas and vague but pleasant dreams for the future. You wash the stench from your body and clothes, while the poisonous, cloying dredge in your mind is flushed out, purified by the brief alchemical glow that is King Heroin’s gift to even his most abject disciples.
I stuck the needle in, drew up the blood, booted it and repeated the procedure, before following Dave into the Land of Nod, the smack-head’s reward for all the pain, suffering and humiliation that is an essential part of his chosen way of
life. For several hours I passed in and out of dreams, losing all sense of place and time, and when I finally came to Dave was gone. So, I duly noticed, was most of the remaining gear. He’d obviously felt that his traumatised anus entitled him to an extra gramme or two and had helped himself, probably feeling perfectly justified in doing so; and though I briefly flirted with the idea of taking a baseball bat and going to look for the cunt, I soon shelved it. I figured he was much harder than me, and anyway, by the time I found him the smack would be long gone. Instead, I cooked up what was left of the gear and shot it into my arm, recognising as I did so that whichever way I looked at the situation it was now impossible to deny that I was well and truly fucked.
• • •
It was a dark night in early winter when I first ran into him, one of those typical London nights where a damp, lowering sky seems to absorb all the neon and electricity of the city, reflecting it back dully in a sick and oppressive orange glow. A fine, but cold, drizzle slanted across the street lamps and was gradually soaking through my outer layers of clothing, while the sock on my right foot was sodden and freezing from the water that leaked in through the hole in my shoe. I’d not seen Cissy for over three weeks now, and my anger at her for disappearing with the money and methadone had long since turned to worry. I’d searched all over for her, visiting the friends and acquaintances I knew she had around the North London drug scene, then trying further afield, in Brixton and Stockwell — but apparently no-one had seen or heard anything of her. I’d called Julia in Kensington, the place where Cissy usually went whenever she wanted to disappear, but if Julia knew anything of her whereabouts, she certainly wasn’t letting on. I began to imagine all the situations and predicaments she might have got
herself into — for if she had been dealing, I would have heard about it, and if she wasn’t, then the methadone and money would have run out by now. First, I reckoned, she would have bought as much smack as she could possibly lay her hands on; then, when that ran out, instead of holding onto the methadone she would have sold it on the street to buy more gear. I believed I knew her ways, and that as long as there was any chance at all of getting hold of some skag she would take it, even though the methadone would keep her straight for much longer. The more I thought about it, the more I felt sure that Julia was telling the truth about not having seen her. After all, we had blown most of the money that Cissy had been fronted, and she would be unwilling to put herself in a position where she might have to admit this to someone she looked up to and regarded as her benefactress and protector.
I turned the possibilities over in my mind. Perhaps she had met someone else, someone from outside the drug scene who could give her the support she needed to kick the habit and had moved in with him. Our last row had been pretty nasty, and she’d stormed off into the night after telling me to “Fuck off and die”; but it was no worse, really, than any of the other arguments we’d been having of late, and anyway, where would she have met such a character? All our movements were connected with drugs, and with the people who used them, and since I’d been dealing she hadn’t needed to work, or to move in circles where she might have met someone from outside the scene.
Again, if she had moved in with another dealer, or with someone else who used, I would have heard about it through the grapevine, and so far all my enquiries had drawn a blank: she seemed to have vanished into the air. No-one I knew had heard anything about her, nobody had seen her, and this gave rise to my greatest fear, one which I tried to keep at bay, but which constantly haunted me. As I twisted and turned in my sweat-soaked bed during the sleepless and feverish nights that
seemed to go on forever, I saw visions of Cissy overdosed in a room somewhere, amongst people who didn’t care, one way or the other, about the wasted little junkie girl slumped in the corner — except, maybe, as an inconvenience, a piece of human wreckage that somehow had to be disposed of. I tried to keep this image out of my mind, to think of some other explanation for her disappearance, but it kept on returning to haunt me. In my mind’s eye, I would see her body dumped in some obscure place — disused industrial land, or amongst the weeds at the edge of some river or canal — destined to be just another statistic on police files when she finally was discovered.
I telephoned all the London hospitals, but no-one answering to Cissy’s description had been brought in. I drew the same result when I checked with the police to see if she had been busted or arrested for some other offence. Pushing the most negative possibility from my mind, I tried to think rationally — where would a girl who needed at least fifty pounds each day in ready cash go to get it? I went down to Soho and traipsed around the clip-joints and peep-shows, talking to the girls in the pay-booths and the hawkers on the streets, with an old photo of Cissy from the time when she had short hair. I’d worked in one of these places myself, years before, when I first moved down to London, and I knew how cagey people were about giving out information. Consequently, I wasn’t exactly surprised when I again drew a blank. Another, less attractive, possibility was the red-light district in the backstreets behind King’s Cross station, a place where the most fucked-up and hopeless street whores in London worked, and where only punters in need of a serious sleaze fix went. It was while I was making my way towards this area one night that I first set eyes on him.
I don’t know what made me take a detour to the street where Cissy’s old flat was, or even less, what possessed me to climb the stairs of the tenement building that she used to live
in. Somehow, my feet seemed to walk there of their own accord. Maybe it was sentiment that took me there; or maybe I hoped that by visiting this scene of former good times I would pick up some psychic current that would eventually lead me to her. Whatever the case, as I climbed the dimly-lit stairway I could hear the sound of someone else’s footsteps ahead of me, echoing off the concrete flagstones and the old porcelain wall tiles, maybe two or three landings higher. Cissy’s old apartment was on the fourth floor of the five-storey building, and I was sweating and breathless from the constant state of semi-withdrawal that I always seemed to be in these days.
Suddenly, up above me, these other footsteps halted, and I heard three sharp knocks on a wooden door, the sound echoing and reverberating around the concrete and steel of the dingy stairwell. It seemed that no-one was in, as the same knock was repeated once more, and I could hear the sound of pacing feet, as if the person was angry or frustrated at finding the flat empty and was not sure whether to try again or to leave. By now, I was approaching the third floor landing, and it was obvious that the person ahead of me was trying to gain access, either to Cissy’s old flat or the one directly opposite. I heard a boot crash against the wood of the door — one, two, three times — and the sound of muttered cursing as the lock refused to yield; then, as I rounded the final bend in the stairs and reached the fourth floor, the burly figure in the dark blue padded anorak turned, and our eyes locked. I knew him immediately, and instinctively, even before I saw the old battle-scar down the left side of his face. But what was even stranger — and even more disturbing — was that he seemed to know me. Not a word was spoken as I passed by him and continued on up to the fifth floor, as if there was someone on this landing that I had come to visit; but something flashed between us, some kind of unconscious recognition, and I knew in that same moment why Cissy had disappeared: Scottish Dougie was out
of prison and back in London, either for the purposes of revenge, or to reclaim what he believed to be his.