Authors: Phil Shoenfelt
Finally, I broke the sob-wracked silence that had fallen between us.
“C’mon, Jimmy, let’s go get a drink — you’re gonna freeze to death if you stay out here much longer.”
“I don’t care, I don’t wanna fuckin’ drink … I just wanna crawl into a corner somewhere an’ die. An’ anyway, I couldn’t face all those pissed-up fuckers in the pub, no way.”
“Yeah, c’mon babe,” said Cissy, “can’t you see he’s sick? Here Jimmy, come with me, I’ll get you some gear — you need to get out of it tonight, forget about everythin’, then tomorrow you can start dealin’ with things, start thinkin’ about what to do. Rene’s gonna need you, so is the kid, but tonight you need to forget. Listen babe, I won’t be long, an’ I promise I won’t get high myself — but you can see what a state he’s in, an’ someone’s gotta look after him. So here, take my keys an’ wait up for me, I won’t be long, honest. I love you …”
Before I could say anything, she had planted a kiss on my lips and had disappeared into the night with Jimmy in tow. I was worried that she wouldn’t be able to resist taking a hit also, but when she returned about two-thirty in the morning, and got into bed, I could see she had been true to her word: she’d spent the last bit of money she had on getting Jimmy high, but had not taken anything herself. She had stayed up half the night talking with him, trying to calm him down until he’d finally passed out, and now she was worn out herself, pale and shaking from the emotional trauma of the last few hours. She curled up in my arms, the tears pouring silently down her face as I held her close, and I could feel the darkness inside her welling up, as if from an underground cave. Just before I fell asleep, I heard her whispering, almost to herself, “I can’t deal with it anymore, there’s just too much pain … really babe, I can’t deal with it anymore — what the fuck are we gonna do …?”
• • •
As the winter passed, I could feel Cissy starting to slip away from me. She would disappear for days at a time, only to return looking pale and wasted, and if I questioned where she
had been, she would fly into a rage and an argument would follow. I didn’t need to ask, anyhow — it was obvious what she had been doing, and the Whys? the Wheres? and the Whos? were pretty much irrelevant. I wasn’t prepared, even if it had been possible, to follow her around the streets twenty four hours a day, checking on her movements and generally acting like some kind of policeman. If someone is determined to score heroin, there is little you can do to prevent them — unless, that is, you’re prepared to lock them in a room somewhere, like the Frankie Machine character in the movie version of
The Man With The Golden Arm
. If the desire to stay clean doesn’t come from deep inside, any attempt to kick the habit will be doomed from the start: as soon as your body starts to feel good again, and your energy returns, you will be subconsciously counting the days until you feel it is possible to give yourself that “one-off” special treat. This is how addiction works — it is insidious and strange, and its secret workings turn like wheels at the back of your consciousness, providing you with all the justifications and reasons you could possibly need to indulge yourself once more.
Soon, she began to miss her shifts at the pub, coming up with the most feeble excuses, and her position there was looking increasingly tenuous. As she depended on the job for her living arrangements, and as it was the middle of a very cold and bitter winter, this was serious; and although the landlord liked her, and gave her many “second chances”, he did, after all, have a business to run. It was obvious to me that pretty soon the inevitable would happen, and she would find herself out on the street once more, together with her dog and the few meagre belongings she still possessed.
I thought about inviting her to move in with me, but she wasn’t keen on that idea. My flat was up in Muswell Hill, a leafy and pleasant, but far-flung North London suburb with no Underground station and, as Cissy said, far away from where
the action was. On the few occasions that she had stayed with me there, she’d been nervous and restless, saying that she felt like an alien in the streets, that she couldn’t stand being so cut off from all her friends and habitual haunts. What she really meant, of course, was that it was far away from all the heroin dealers she knew, who mostly lived around Camden Town and King’s Cross. I had chosen the area to live in for this very reason, so that I would be away from those streets and the drug memories I associated with them. But in any case, I sensed that living together with Cissy in Muswell Hill was not a viable option: she just wasn’t cut out for life in the suburbs. Junkies tend to form dependent relationships with the neighbourhoods they score in, as if they are attached to them by some invisible umbilical cord, and away from their home turf they feel insecure and vulnerable. It’s not even just that drugs can be bought relatively easily in these areas. It’s more to do with the atmosphere of the streets, what you might call a feeling of “drug potentiality”, and I understood perfectly. I used to feel the same way about the Lower East Side in New York, and would start to feel anxious and paranoid as soon as I left the area. I’d experience a distinct sensation of relief upon returning there from any journey, no matter how brief, outside the city limits, or even away from the neighbourhood.
One evening, while I was having a drink with some friends in a pub, one of them, Andy, happened to mention that he was intending to break a squat, and that he had found the perfect place: a large terraced house in Camden Town that had not been lived in for at least five years. He had already been inside one night to examine the property, and reckoned that although it was dirty and full of garbage, structurally it was sound: the toilets hadn’t been smashed by the council, and it should be possible to hot-wire the electricity and turn the gas and water supplies back on without too much trouble.
Cissy and I were growing ever further apart, largely because
of her re-entry into the drug world and the pressures of junkie life: the way things were going our relationship would soon fall apart altogether, unless there was some kind of radical change. She was now buying smack each day, spending all her money from the pub on it, and was forced to wear long-sleeved shirts and sweaters all the time, to conceal the track-marks that coloured the inside of each arm at the elbow. She didn’t even bother to pretend to me anymore that she wasn’t using, adopting a fatalistic “take me as I am, or leave me” kind of attitude, with a mixture of sadness and defiance that was somehow both tragic and pathetic at the same time. I could either accept this state of affairs, and let our feelings for each other die a natural death, or I could try to do something about it — try to get Cissy off smack, and pull her back from the brink of this hole that she seemed intent on digging for herself. As I couldn’t imagine my life without her now, the first alternative was simply not a choice that was open to me: I couldn’t just let her wander off into the night alone. I preferred to go with her and risk the possible consequences than return to my solitary life of meaningless work and mundane relationships, that of course was safe, but also boring and empty.
And so a plan began to grow in my mind, an idea that surely deserves filing under the heading,
GREAT, BUT MISGUIDED, AND ULTIMATELY STUPID
: I would quit my job, move into the squat with Cissy, spend the money I had saved on a half ounce of good-quality heroin and gradually wean her away from her habit by reducing the amount I gave her each day. I would support us both by selling the rest to friends and acquaintances, who would appreciate the fact that it wasn’t cut to hell like most of the street stuff that was available at that time. Then, once Cissy was clean, and the stuff had all been sold, we would get out of London: with the money saved from dealing, and from having no rent or fuel bills to pay, we would be able to afford the rent on a cottage in the West Country, maybe Devon or
Cornwall. We would stay there for six months or a year, until our battered psyches had healed and we felt strong enough to return to the city; or maybe we would take off altogether and travel around the world, visit India, Tibet, Africa and the Far East. Suddenly, the possibilities seemed endless, and I could hardly contain my enthusiasm as I broached the subject with Cissy.
“What, you’d do that for me? Spend all your money buyin’ smack, on the off-chance that you can get me to stop takin’ it? What about you? How’re you gonna handle being so close to it all again, havin’ it right there under your nose? At least now I do it on my own, well away from you — you don’t see it around you each day, an’ you’re not sittin’ on top of a huge amount like you will be if you go through with this stupid plan. Look, I really love you for dreaming this whole thing up, an’ thinkin’ about me, but I don’t want the responsibility of you gettin’ back into gear on my head, no way. I couldn’t deal with that, babe, honest. Forget it, it’s my problem, it’s a crazy idea, an’ I don’t want you gettin’ involved. You’ve been clean for a year an’ a half now — please don’t go an’ fuck it up just on my account.”
But I was all fired up, and brushed Cissy’s reservations aside — there was no way I was going to get back into using again, of that I was sure. At least we had to go and take a look at this squat, just to see what it was like; and if it wasn’t in too bad a state, then we could move in together and save on rent, if nothing else.
Reluctantly Cissy agreed. And so, one cold and windy night, we walked up Camden Road to the large terraced house that Andy had already broken into, and knocked loudly on the heavy black door with its cracked and peeling varnish.
The hallway was dark and gloomy, lit by only one bare lightbulb that Andy had hooked up to the electricity supply of another squat two doors down the street. Directly ahead of us,
at the end of the hall, stairs led up to a first-floor landing where there was a bathroom and a window looking out over a weed-infested back garden that was enclosed within three high, redbrick walls. Clouds blew across a bright winter moon, and the house was full of shadows, echoes of other times, of other unknown, gone-forever-lives that seemed to reverberate between the grimy, pock-marked walls. We climbed the stairs and explored each darkened room in turn, the shadows thrown by Andy’s candle dancing wildly around the hidden corners in a silent, ghostly pantomime. He had already claimed the large room on the first floor for himself, but so far all the others were untaken. The top floor room seemed the most attractive to me — it, too, was large and spacious, and the paintwork and plaster were in good condition. Being at the top of the house, I reckoned, it would also be the warmest room, and it had the added bonus of its own small, private kitchen that looked out from a height over the back gardens of the neighbouring houses. I turned to Cissy.
“Well, what do you think? D’you fancy moving in here, or what?”
“Yeah … well, er … it’s got possibilities, certainly, but it’d need a lot of work … it’s pretty damp downstairs, an’ there’s no gas or electric … but yeah, I think we could do somethin’ with it. An’ I kinda like the atmosphere, too, I feel comfortable here … so yeah, let’s do it, why not? I’m sick of workin’ at the pub anyway, an’ I promise I’ll try an’ clean myself up, honest.”
Cissy threw herself into my arms and gave me a big hug. As I held her close and kissed her, I really believed that this was some kind of new beginning for us, and though I could see the possible pitfalls, I felt sure that the holy and beatific light of love, that seemed to shine through the cracks in these battered old walls, would protect and guide us through any dangers during the weeks and months ahead.
• • •
With Cissy using on a daily basis, all her attempts to keep her habit a secret had long been abandoned. She would shoot up in front of me two, three, often four times a day, and she was looking pale and thin, forgetting to eat, running around the streets hustling for drugs and money at all hours of the day and night. We had moved our belongings into the squat, and I was still working at the T-shirt factory, but Cissy had given up her pub job and we were constantly short of money. I had a sizeable sum stashed for emergencies that I was trying not to break into — but the pressures of supporting both of us, and of paying for Cissy’s growing habit, were proving too much and it was beginning to dwindle. I was worried about her, too. She would disappear for hours, even days, at a time, and would return looking worn-out and depressed, either having failed to cop, or feeling cheated over the miserable amount of smack she got for her money. I had no idea where she might be during these times: there were dozens of small-time dealers dotted around the council estates and high-rise tower blocks of North London, and I feared for her safety, that she might get attacked, or busted, or worst of all that she might
OD
anonymously in some cold and draughty toilet somewhere. I decided to return to my original idea of buying a quantity of heroin, then using part of it to wean Cissy away before selling the rest. At least then she would be at home, and not out on the cold, dangerous streets.
I gave two weeks notice at work and started asking around to see where I might score a half ounce of clean smack. In spite of all my connections in the drug world, this was not an easy thing to do, and finally I had to settle for a quarter ounce. With this, I should at least have enough to stabilise Cissy’s habit and be able to recover my money by selling the remainder — I could always buy more the next time.
It was a strange feeling to re-enter the world of heroin
again after so long. In some ways it felt like I had never left, and in another way I felt distant from it all, as if I was watching myself and my actions from down the wrong end of a telescope. As I watched the dealer weighing out the smack, I felt an undeniable tingling sensation throughout my body, and I was disturbed to feel a rising excitement in the pit of my stomach, as if I was about to take a hit myself. I hadn’t counted on this and tried to ignore it; but as I walked back through the rain-soaked Camden streets, I couldn’t get rid of the nagging voice that seemed to be urging me to take a little taste, just a little, for old time’s sake.