Authors: Phil Shoenfelt
“Oh Jesus, he’s not gonna make it, is he?” I said, more to myself than to anyone else. Sid was still trying artificial respiration, and every once in a while he got me to help him lift Roy into a sitting position so that he could hit him hard on the back, clearing the phlegm and vomit from his mouth to prevent it from going into his lungs and choking him.
By now Roy had been out for at least fifteen minutes, apart from the short time when he had seemed to come around, and I’d more or less given up hope. I began to collect all my gear and paraphernalia together, ready to ditch it over the back wall before the ambulance and cops arrived. Jenny was weeping quietly to herself in one corner of the room; but Sid, trooper that he was, refused to accept defeat and was still crouched down low over Roy, forcing air into his lungs. In between each breath, while he pressed down on Roy’s chest to expel the air and maintain circulation, he was muttering to himself, as if it were a prayer or mantra, “Come on you fucker, breathe! Come on you fucker, breathe!” But I had totally given up hope by now and was in shock, not even panicking anymore as I walked to and fro collecting bits and pieces from the table and the floor. The whole situation seemed unreal: Jenny crying in one corner; me walking around tidying up the room; and Sid still working away, muttering to himself over the piece of dead meat in the other corner next to the door. It was as if time had slowed right down and we were all moving in a dream, or underwater, and lethargically I drifted back to where Sid was kneeling to help him lift Roy into a sitting position for one last, half-hearted try.
As we thumped him hard on the back, all at once a yellow spray of vomit came chundering out of his mouth, and almost simultaneously he began to cough, splutter and breathe again,
this time on his own. His eyes opened briefly, and though it was obvious that he hadn’t a clue where he was, or what had happened, at least he was alive. Even if the cunt had irreversible brain damage, we could at least get him out of the house and back to his own place, and in the morning no-one would be any the wiser about what had happened — least of all Roy who, I figured, would probably be a total vegetable from now on, due to prolonged oxygen starvation of the brain while he was out cold, dying on the carpet.
Miraculously, though, he gradually came to his senses. But he was still nodding out, and we had to keep slapping his face and making him walk around the room to prevent him from slipping back into a coma. Thanks to Sid’s refusal to admit defeat, oxygen had continued to reach Roy’s brain, and as he began to recover he seemed more embarrassed about his little “faux pas” than anything else and wanted to leave the house quickly, so badly did he feel about nearly stiffing out in front of us. A lot of old junkies have this strange kind of pride about knowing what their limits are, a little like the heavy beer-drinker who will pace himself all night until he has drunk his friends under the table, and I guess Roy felt a little bad about overdosing in the presence of us younger “pups”. But I wouldn’t let him leave until I was sure that he wasn’t going to nod out again once he got home and into his bed — it really would have been a tragedy if he’d died in his sleep after all Sid’s hard work getting him back to the land of the living. When he did eventually leave I went with him, and we walked together around the midnight streets so that he could get some fresh air into his lungs, allowing the smack to work its way out of his system.
I’ve only seen him once since that night, and though it’s true he did seem a little more spaced-out and distant than I remember him being before, it could be that he just feels embarrassed about the whole affair and doesn’t want to talk or think about it, or even acknowledge that it ever happened. I don’t think
he realises just how close he came to snuffing it, or how much he owes to Sid — but that’s a junkie for you: proud, arrogant, selfish and fucking ungrateful.
• • •
This morning, I got a real shock when I went downstairs to use the bathroom. All through the night Cissy had been having some kind of wild party in her room, the first time in weeks that I’d heard any signs of life coming from inside there at all, and I’d passed a couple of her guests on the stairway as I was going out and they were coming in. The girl, Carol, I vaguely knew as some friend or acquaintance of Cissy’s from King’s Cross, a dire and fucked-up street prostitute who wouldn’t hesitate to rip you off, or stick a knife in your back, if she believed there was anything in the deal for her. I thought of her as a repository for every germ and infestation that the human body was capable of carrying, a walking virus in fact, and that she was hanging out partying with Cissy right now could mean only one thing: she had come across a large sum of money, probably stolen from some trick, had used it to buy gear, and now needed somewhere quick and convenient where she could shoot up and where no questions would be asked. The guy she was with was a tall, muscular, black man who I knew to be her pimp.
Some more people arrived later, but I didn’t see who they were — I just heard a lot of laughter and shouting, and I jealously imagined all the heroin and cocaine that was being consumed while I was again down to my last fifty mls. of methadone. When I went to bed at around three a.m. the party was still in full swing, and occasionally I’d hear loud music or gales of rabid laughter whenever someone opened the door of Cissy’s room to go to the toilet next door. It was as if she’d been resurrected from the dead after weeks of cold abstinence in her bolted and shuttered burrow, and I imagined her regal now,
sitting up in her bed directing the proceedings, dressed all in white and with her rudely severed hair starting to grow back, at last, in tufts and spikes that stuck out at crazy angles from her head. Above all the noise and mayhem, I’d occasionally hear her raucous cackle, or her voice declaiming excitedly, “Listen, listen to me, will you?!” as she attempted to elucidate a point, or tell some amusing story to her assembled company of cohorts.
At around ten a.m. I awoke with the sickness already upon me. Cold and shivering, yet covered in pungent sweat, I finished off the methadone then shakily made my way downstairs to the bathroom to take a piss. At first I thought I’d walked in on the big black guy taking a bath, and I stepped backwards quickly, my hasty apologies hanging in the silent air like a swarm of hovering flies. But then the split-second glimpse I had caught of him registered itself in my brain: something wasn’t quite right — the bathwater was a murky brown colour, while the man was motionless, apparently floating, just beneath the surface of the water.
I opened the door again and peeked inside, and this time I was sure. If a black man can be blue, then he was blue, almost dead in the water, with only a faint bubbling around the nose and lips where they broke the surface to indicate that he was still alive. He’d shit himself while he was unconscious, and the yellow-brown water had left a tide mark of scum around the sides of the tub as the level rose and fell slightly with the
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victim’s unanchored body. I stood there in shock looking down at him, unable to move or act, a prisoner in a frozen, but fleeting, moment of time. The house was silent — no-one was awake yet — and as I stared, I found myself focusing on the froth around his nose and mouth, the sunlight shining on the bubbles that occasionally burst there. Despite his build, and the massive bone plates of his shaven skull, he reminded me of a runny-nosed child who has been crying, blubbering through the snot and tears, waiting to be coddled and comforted for some
unjustified wrong that he feels has been inflicted upon him. Big as he was, he looked oddly vulnerable, naked and afloat in his own diluted shit; also younger now that the hard facial lines had relaxed and softened with his unconscious state — almost as if he were the innocent kid brother of his own streetwise and brutal self. And I experienced some kind of vision, a synaptic flash that exploded in a rapid succession of images, revealing to me, in tortuous and precise detail, all the stages of his life so far: the pain and everyday humiliations of childhood; his first sexual encounters; the confusion and anxiety of teenage love; later, the women he had fucked, beaten and exploited; his time in prison; the thefts, robberies and murders he had committed. It was as though our wires had somehow become crossed and, as his physical life trickled slowly away, that one part of his soul, or spirit, had jumped across the intervening space and invaded me, like a parasite or virus abandoning the host body it has corrupted and consumed, homing in unswervingly on some new, relatively untapped source of nourishment. Suddenly, I seemed to possess, or was possessed by, an entire catalogue of images that were not mine: a host of memories and sensations that came from the inside of someone else’s skull, that raged within me like a swarm of angry wasps or some random electrical charge that I had unconsciously attracted. Just for one moment, I understood everything perfectly, and as I turned to go I looked down for one last time on this poor, abandoned carcass, floating in its sea of execration. And I realised, with a sudden, total and illuminative clarity, that this other was also me, that just as surely as I was playing host to his past lives, he too had welcomed me into the flickering and dying light of his own unconscious brain. And in that same instant, I forgave myself for all my sins and transgressions, as I forgave those who had sinned and transgressed against me, and for one fractured, blinding moment I knew what love was, both for myself and for the other. Reaching down into the stinking brown mess, in
which traces of shit and vomit now floated to the surface, I pulled the plug from its hole and allowed the foul water to drain away with a horribly evocative gurgling sound.
I lifted the man up as best I could, sliding his body along the residue of slime that coated the bottom of the porcelain tub. At least now he was in a sitting position, with his arms draped over each side of the bath to prevent him from sliding back down again. I tried to bring him round by slapping his face, but he was too far gone for this to work. As it was impossible for me to lift him alone, I decided to go for help, and crossing the first floor landing I banged loudly on Cissy’s door. This was her work, after all, and the least she could do was to clean up her own mess.
After several loud knocks, I heard signs of life coming from within the room and eventually the door was opened — just enough to reveal Cissy’s fogged and befuddled eyes, her crazy fright-wig of hair and the shoulders of the long, white nightdress she seemed always to be wearing these days.
“What the fuck do you want? It’s not even ten thirty yet … an’ anyway, I haven’t got any gear to sell, we did it all last night. So just piss off, can’t you, an’ let me get some kip.”
Her cold and fucked-up manner sucked the light right out of me, and all the old hatred and poisons came flooding right back in. I struggled to control the rising tide of rage and violence that threatened to overwhelm me at any moment.
“There’s a friend of yours has been blowin’ bubbles in the bathtub all night. He’s just about snuffed it, but if you call an ambulance quick you might still save him. That’s if you’re in the least bit interested …”
Cissy looked totally confused for a moment, then she opened the door wider, stepped across the landing and went into the bathroom. Behind her, in the room, I could see four or five tangled bodies, laid out at various angles across the floor and bed, with an assortment of spoons, syringes, soot-blackened silver
foil and overflowing ashtrays lying on every available surface. I heard Cissy’s sharp intake of breath from the bathroom, and a whispered, “Oh Jesus, Brian …;” then she was running back across the landing, screaming at the top of her voice, “Carol, Carol, wake up for fuck’s sake, it’s Brian, he’s
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’d, we’ve got to get help, quick!” She pushed past me into the room and shook Carol roughly to wake her.
“Come on, come on, wake up you dozy cow — Brian’s
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’d, we’ve got to call an ambulance!”
Carol groggily raised her head. She didn’t seem to know where she was or what was happening at all; but Cissy slapped her around the face a few times, then pulled her protesting and uncomprehending out of the door and into the bathroom, where the sight of her half-dead boyfriend had the desired effect of bringing her to her senses.
“Oh my Gawd, Brian, Brian,” she wailed in a piercing cockney lament, her voice cracked and shrill, her hands clutching at the air as if there were some invisible enemy, or demon, she was battling with.
“Brian, Brian, oh Brian, wake up please … oh fuck, what am I gonna do, oh Jesus, Jesus, Jesus …”
“Shut up, you stupid bitch, you’ll wake the whole bloody street! Listen, we’ve got to call an ambulance, but I’ve got to ditch my things first, otherwise we’ll all get busted. No, you go and call the ambulance, I’ll tidy up an’ try to keep Brian alive — no, I’ll go, fuck all the stuff, he’s gonna die if we’re not quick …” And with that, Cissy dashed back into her room, pulled on a coat and was out of the door in seconds. Carol was holding onto Brian’s wrist, still keening and wailing hopelessly, while gradually the other people in Cissy’s room were beginning to come around, and were starting to realise that something was seriously amiss. Quickly, two of them were down the stairs and out of the front door; but a third did stay with Carol and began to massage Brian’s heart, while all the time she continued to moan
and cry. Obviously, after he’d
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’d, someone had put Brian into a bath full of cold water to try and revive him, before either leaving the premises or going back into Cissy’s room and passing out. They must all have been so loaded when it happened that things had got confused — possibly Cissy and Carol were already unconscious, and if they had woken at any point they probably thought that Brian had just gone to the toilet, or maybe to the all-night garage for cigarettes, and had simply forgotten about him. Now Carol was wailing and weeping for her lost love, a blood-chilling, desolate sound, and as I made my way slowly back up the stairs, I wasn’t sure if what I’d just witnessed was low tragedy or high farce.