Authors: Phil Shoenfelt
“So, did Dougie tell you all this before you let him fuck you, or afterwards?”
Cissy looked at me in disbelief for a moment, then her face
twisted in contempt. I saw the punch coming, but made no attempt to dodge it, and her tiny fist slammed into my mouth, actually drawing blood. All the uncertainty, pain and frustration of the previous few weeks welled up inside me, and without stopping to think, I punched her right back.
“You fucking bastard! I used to think you were different from all the other psychos I seem to attract, that you had a soul, an’ that you really cared about me. Well more fool me — you’re even more of a cunt than the rest. At least I could see it coming with them, it was all upfront — whereas you’ve kept it back until I’m down on my knees, then hit me with everything you’ve got, you rotten scum-bag! Well, in answer to your question, that’s for me to know an’ for you to find out. Jesus, I wish I had fucked you the last couple of nights, then you’d really have something to think about! Yeah, underneath you’re just like all the other twisted, junkie psychos I’ve had the pleasure to know and love, it’s just sex an’ drugs to you, that’s all that matters! Well, you’ve taken plenty of sex from me, fucked me up well an’ truly, so you might as well take the last bit of drugs, as well. Here, take it, it’s yours!”
With that, she flung what was left of the bag of heroin onto the floor at my feet, then stood up and walked out of the room. For a few minutes I sat staring into space, in shock, unable to believe what had been said, and what had come to pass. Then I reached down, picked up the packet of gear from the floor and emptied a good-sized shot into the spoon which lay waiting on the table. My hands were shaking, and I badly needed a hit to steady my nerves.
DURING THE LAST FOUR MONTHS
, since my big bust-up with Cissy, the situation in the house has been sliding increasingly out of control. For the first few days after she left, I stayed as high as possible, not wanting to face up to the fact that our relationship was over, and grateful for the emotional numbness that the methadone and smack bestowed upon me. Even so, I could feel the emptiness, the pain of loss throbbing away beneath the drugs, and I dreaded the time when I would have to deal with it unaided and alone.
I’d figured that I wouldn’t see her again, other than when she came to collect her possessions, but about a week after the row she walked in, just as I was about to get high with about half a dozen other people. Gradually, through hustling and selling most of my methadone, I’d started to deal smack again, although on a much-reduced scale; and once more, our room was home to a constant procession of assorted characters waiting to cop, or trying to get rid of stolen goods of one kind or another.
Her manner was brusque and businesslike, and she completely ignored the others, addressing only me when she spoke.
“I’ve come to get my things. I’m moving in downstairs, into Pete’s old room, so I’ll need my bed an’ the dressing table. I’d appreciate it if you could help me carry ’em downstairs, please.”
“What, right now? Do you mind if I take my shot first?” I wasn’t only being sarcastic. Cissy’s unexpected appearance, and her announcement that she intended to move back into the squat, had totally floored me; I was also annoyed that she had walked in on a roomful of my friends and was putting a dampener on everybody’s high with her proud and arrogant attitude. To be fair, she probably felt awkward too and was maybe just over-compensating. I took my shot and felt a little better, but it was hard and unnatural to be nonchalant as we manoeuvered Cissy’s queen-sized bed down the narrow, twisting stairway. Too
many feelings were welling up inside me, and I didn’t trust myself to speak. We moved the heavier articles of furniture in silence, then Cissy came back up and carried the lighter things, her jewellery, clothes and records, by herself.
I returned to my room, where Steve, Eddy and the others sat waiting, and we continued to get high for the rest of the afternoon. We all thought it was a strange move on Cissy’s part, wanting to come back to the squat, and we discussed it briefly — what it could mean, and what it would lead to — while a few jokes were made at my expense about needing a new bed. But then we forgot about it (or at least they did), and we carried on drinking the bottle of Scotch that someone had brought along, getting high until the early hours of the morning.
I bumped into Cissy a few times over the following days, on the staircase or coming in the front door from the street, but neither of us spoke, and it was as if we had never known each other at all. It was an absurd situation, but there was no getting around it — too much had happened and too many things had been said to go back now, even if we had wanted to.
I learned from some friends that Cissy had fallen out with Ali and had nowhere to stay — that was why she had moved back into the squat — and not only that: Julia had somehow discovered that the money she’d loaned to her had all been blown on gear, and had thrown a fit. No doubt, in her mind, Cissy blamed me for this latter misfortune, for destroying her wonderful friendship with Julia, and this further compounded the growing feeling of enmity between us. Even though I would have liked to re-establish contact, there seemed to be no way — the same pride, or stubbornness, in each of us prevented any softening of heart, and we both put up a wall of silence whenever we met by chance or necessity.
I soon found out the way things were going to go, and the way they have been going ever since. More and more crazed-looking people began to arrive at the house, and it didn’t take
me long to realise that Cissy had gone into direct competition with me, selling smack, cocaine and speed from her room downstairs. That actually didn’t bother me so much — she had her customers and I had mine, and anyhow there was no way I could realistically compete with her: she had a large amount of capital at her disposal that she had made one way or another, while I was still surviving on a day-to-day, shot-by-shot basis.
It was the amount of traffic coming to the house that worried me. I had always tried to limit the number of people passing through by keeping strict hours, refusing to deal at night unless it was a special favour to a friend who was sick. Now, there were people arriving and leaving twenty four hours a day, while there was always some kind of party going on in one of the rooms — drugs, sex, or both — full of strange, unknown characters, any one of whom could have been a stoolie or police informer. I was getting more and more paranoid, convinced that we were about to be busted. The cops would have a field day: they could lock us all up on any number of counts, from the use and sale of illegal substances, through being knowledgeable receivers of stolen goods, to less serious offences such as underage sex and freely tapping into the municipal gas and electricity supplies. It was a sledgehammer-through-the-door, sniffer-dogs-and-handcuffs situation waiting to happen, and I wasn’t happy about it at all.
The trouble was, I was as much to blame as anyone. The pale, sleazy, vampirical creatures who visited me were hardly less noticeable, in their own way, than the variously deranged and intense-looking characters who visited other parts of the house, often staying for days at a time. As Cissy appeared determined to run some kind of non-stop, twenty-four-hours-a-day drugs supermarket, I decided to go along with the general flow of things, and completely gave up trying to preserve any kind of anonymity. I basically accepted that we were going to be busted in the not too distant future, and in my darker moods
I would almost welcome the prospect as a way out of the blind alley that my life had become. But amazingly, it never happened; and even though it must have been obvious to anyone who was half awake that this was no ordinary squat, and that strange things were happening within, the anticipated police raid never arrived.
The most interesting transformation, though, has been in Cissy herself. I always knew that she had a streak of selfishness and greed in her; but in the past this was always balanced by her warmth and energy, her infectious sense of enthusiasm that could sweep people along, making life with her unpredictable and interesting, if nothing else. Now, this lighter side has disappeared completely. Something cold and grasping has begun to emerge, something in her that is almost insect-like in the way she stays in her room all day, dealing from her bed and holding court to her customers like a skagged-out version of decrepit old Miss Havisham from
Great Expectations
. She hoards and protects her gear like some dark, underworld creature with its eggs, doling it out in obsessively weighed and measured amounts to her customers, who seem to be more like disciples, or drones around a queen bee, rather than normal run-of-the-mill junkie types. Many dealers get on power trips, it’s true, and take an active enjoyment in making people wait, or watching them crawl; but Cissy has elevated this tendency to an art form. Sometimes I walk past her half-open door and I catch her image reflected in the large, oval mirror on top of the dressing table, sat up in bed with her scales, packets of gear, spoons and syringes scattered about, surrounded by six or seven pale-faced young guys. Junkie castratos in the court of Queen Cissy, they hang on her every word and are only too willing to run errands for her, to flatter her in every way possible. A couple of months back, she had long, blond hair-extensions fitted that hang in braids almost to her arse, the type that are all the rage in the London clubs right now. With her pale
skin and false hair, dressed in a white shift and propped up on pillows, she really does look like some twisted version of a Victorian child’s doll, translucent and ageless, but with an undertone of disease and malice behind the ivory smoothness of her flawless, junkie skin.
I don’t know why, but some people, especially young girls, seem to thrive for a time on heroin. It wastes them, sure, but it also increases their beauty in some alien or waif-like way, and Cissy is undoubtedly of this type, her pretty looks now having reached some kind of apotheosis of weird, strung-out beauty. Of course, what is given is also taken back later, and with interest. Heroin seems to act almost like a preservative, holding back time and allowing the user to remain young and ageless, as if in suspended animation, and a junkie who is thirty five, or even forty years old, can easily be mistaken for someone in their early twenties. The problem actually comes when you stop taking the drug. In the same way that years of blocked emotions suddenly bubble to the surface in a mixed up mess of pain, remorse and confusion, so the aging process will attack your body with a vengeance, as your metabolism struggles to readjust and years of chemically-induced imbalance must be paid for. In the first year after kicking, many ex-users become fat and bloated, while on an almost daily basis you will notice new lines appearing on your face, a map wherein can be read all your previous sins and transgressions; and although this doesn’t always happen, the appearance of some ex-junkies does bring to mind the picture of Dorian Gray in the attic, or the face of some Hollywood vampire who has been unexpectedly delayed and caught by the rays of the rising sun.
The trouble is, that as much as I loathe this new insect-like Cissy and her fucked-up, bitchy ways, I still want her. I’ve been seeing other girls lately, but the feeling I get with them just isn’t the same as what I had with Cissy, and as much as I fight it, the truth is that I’m still obsessed with her.
First, there was the French girl who moved into the basement, a damp and stinking wreck of a room that she cleaned up with the help of some anonymous old man. In the beginning, I thought he was her father; later that he was a trick who she fucked for money. At any rate, I haven’t seen him for a long time now, not since he finished redecorating her room. One night a few months back she came upstairs to buy some speed off me and we ended up spending the night together. It was okay, as casual sex goes, but I soon found out that she was into leather and
S&M
, and what really turned her on was to be fucked in the arse while she masturbated her clitoris, or rubbed it against some piece of furniture, a wooden chair-arm or the rounded end of a bedpost. Of course, this was interesting, and I went along with it all quite happily, but the trouble was she couldn’t have an orgasm any other way — when I fucked her in the cunt, she wanted me to come as quickly as possible (pretty difficult when you’re loaded on gear), saying that my cock made her sore and that she had never been able to orgasm this way. Yet she was quite content to have me fuck her hard up the arse for as long as I wanted, while she masturbated and watched our reflection in the mirror. She especially enjoyed wearing a tight leather corset with a dog collar and chain around her neck, and as she began to climax she liked me to pull hard on this while I fucked her from behind, so that at the peak of her orgasm she felt that she was being strangled to death. She also liked to be hit hard on the bare arse with a wooden paddle or a leather belt, or gagged with a ball and chain device while I slapped her face and called her all the sexually derogatory names I could think of — something that made me want to laugh, but which really seemed to turn her on. I must admit that I enjoyed these scenes too, and participated enthusiastically — people are strange, and I long ago gave up on the idea that there is any such thing as “normal” sex. But to be truthful, she irritated the hell out of me when we weren’t in bed together, and without any love or
deeper feeling on either side this lustful but limited affair soon burned itself out and became an empty ritual, repetitious and ultimately boring.
There were a couple of other one night stands, but for the last two months now I’ve been seeing Vikki, a beautiful young English-Chinese girl from Bristol who has aspirations to be a photographer and film-maker. She’s a lovely fuck, and for some unknown reason appears to be crazy about me; and, compared to most of the girls I attract, she seems incredibly well-organised and together, cooking meals for me when I forget to eat, and making sure I don’t use someone else’s dirty old syringe that has been left lying around. She’s very conscious of the risk of
HIV
and even makes me wear a condom when we fuck — which is, I suppose, a sensible move on her part, me being in a particularly high-risk group, after all.