Junkie Love Read online

  And yet each day I would wake up, sniff a line of speed and set off to work again, happy as a bird, all the shadows of the previous night’s debauch chased away by the morning sun and the thought of another day to be spent cruising the leafy avenues of the capital. I had several girlfriends during this period, who I would see on a more or less regular basis, and with one in particular I could probably have built something more serious and longer-lasting, if that was what I’d really wanted. She was a nice girl, sexy and warm, a stylist whose work appeared regularly in several well-known fashion magazines; and, for reasons of her own, she was quite devoted to me, taking it upon herself to look after me with regular meals and trips to the theatre, which I hadn’t visited in years. But something in me still yearned after the old life: I was restless and dissatisfied all the time, and it soon became obvious that it was not going to work out. Undeniably, I still had an unquenchable desire to fuck up my life, and it was around this time that I ran into Cissy again.

  IT WAS AT A ROCK CONCERT in Finsbury Park, North London, and I had just dropped a tab of acid when a bizarre figure appeared out of the crowd of pale faced, darkly-dressed Goths. This small figure, by contrast, had shoulder length blond hair, a deep suntan, and was dressed in what appeared to be some kind of sailor suit: a striped blue and white T-shirt, denim jacket and jeans, with a straw hat pulled down over her ears — which, together with the blond hair, made you think of fields of ripening corn under a clear blue summer sky. The LSD was beginning to work and my first irrational thought was “Drug Squad!”, so totally did this figure clash with those around her, and I instinctively began to walk away in the direction of the beer tent. She, however, had caught sight of me, and suddenly I heard a piercing cockney voice calling my name over the heads of the surrounding people.

  “Hey, Phil, where ya goin’?! Wait a minute, for fuck’s sake!”

  It was Cissy, and she quickly made her way towards me, waving and tripping over the legs of those who were seated on the grass, heads turning in all directions at the sight of this incongruous but beautiful girl. As she came closer, I could see that the straw shopping basket over her shoulder contained a small dog, a Yorkshire terrier, just the face and ears of which peeped over the rim, and that Cissy appeared to be in the best of health, positively glowing in fact. She finally reached me and grabbed onto my arm, looking straight into my face with her huge, brown eyes.

  “Why were you runnin’ away from me, you bastard? I nearly bust a gut getting over here, an’ as soon as you see me you start walkin’ away. Are you trying to avoid me, or what?”

  “No, no, I didn’t recognise you. You look different to before, an’ I just did a tab of acid — I thought you were DS or something …”

  “Me?! You must be joking! Nah, I just got back from the country, this beautiful house with a swimmin’ pool, down in Hampshire. I had to go there to get away from Jed, he went crazy an’ smashed up my flat. I ’aven’t been back there for six weeks — I’m scared he’s still around an’ might take me apart next time. Hey, you got any more of that acid? I really wanna trip with you, then maybe we can hang out together later.”

  When I said that I didn’t, Cissy immediately began to shout out at the top of her voice, “Anybody got any acid to sell?!” People around us began to edge away, scared off by such uncool behaviour and probably worried that she was some kind of stoolie for the cops, trying to trick them into selling drugs then getting them busted. At the very least she was drawing heat, and seeing as she had spent two years in prison for drugs, I was surprised at her “don’t give a fuck” attitude. But her recklessness and wildness were also funny and appealing, dressed as she was in the midst of this self-consciously gloomy crowd, and within five minutes she had managed to score.

  “Oh, this is Rosie, by the way,” said Cissy as she swallowed the LSD, pointing to the small, sniffling dog in her shopping-basket. “She’s the youngest of her litter, an’ she comes from a very distinguished family of Yorkies — she’s got a pedigree as long as your arm. Julia gave her to me when I was stayin’ with her.” The dog sniffed harder and became excited as our attention fell upon it, pushing its cold nose into my hand when I patted its head. “But c’mon, let’s get down the front an’ see the bands before the acid starts to work.”

  We spent the rest of the afternoon dancing wildly and laughing uncontrollably — at the bands, at other members of the audience and, most of all, at each other. As the acid began to wear off a little, we left the park and I went with Cissy back to her flat in King’s Cross. She wanted to examine the extent of the damage and was scared to go there alone. It seemed that her boyfriend, the biker, always wired and ready for violence at the slightest provocation, had finally flipped over some incident or other and had gone on the rampage with an axe. He had broken every window and piece of furniture in the place, before disappearing into the night seeking revenge for whatever it was that had happened. Cissy had also fled, worried in case her crazy boyfriend returned, and scared, too, of how the landlord would react when he saw the damage.

  It was clear as soon as she opened the door that no-one had visited the place since this night of wilful destruction: pieces of broken furniture and glass were scattered all around, while the axe was buried handle-deep in the crumbling plaster of one of the walls. Cissy’s face fell as she surveyed the scene, and she became depressed. All her personal things, like ornaments and jewellery, had also been smashed, and her clothes lay in a pile on the floor, damp and stained from the rain that had blown in through the broken windows.

  I helped her clean the mess up, and taped plastic over the windows, salvaging as many unbroken pieces of furniture as possible from this chaos, then throwing the rest out on the street. As the room regained some kind of order, Cissy brightened a little and, suddenly full of energy, she decided that she would scrub the wooden floors with soap and water. I’d been eyeing the bed, which was amongst the undamaged articles of furniture, hoping that I could coax her in that general direction and get her onto it somehow. But now the bucket and scrubbing brush were out of the cupboard and Cissy was down on her hands and knees, working with a kind of manic energy, so I resigned myself to tidying up the kitchen which had also been damaged in the whirlwind, though not to the same extent as the bedroom.

  Finally, she was finished — and as night was drawing in by this time, and as there was not a lightbulb remaining in the place, Cissy lit some perfumed candles she had, placing them at various points across the freshly scrubbed floor. The effect was pleasing — the shadows they threw across the walls helped to conceal the remaining traces of destruction, while the candlelight softened everything with a rich, yellow glow.

  “C’mon, let’s go get something to eat — I’m starvin’, an’ I know this great little Italian restaurant just down the road. C’mon, I’ll treat you, it’s your reward for helping me clean this mess up … and don’t worry, I’ve got loads of money right now — Julia fronted me some until I get things sorted out.”

  I didn’t mention that I’d had some other type of reward in mind, but as we walked down the stone steps of the crumbling old terrace block, I tried putting my arm around her waist in such a way that the gesture could be interpreted as either romantic, or as a sign of protective and caring friendship. At any rate she didn’t resist, and as we continued down the street she drew closer to me and soon put her arm around my waist also.

  We spent a couple of hours in this restaurant, getting quietly drunk on red wine and talking, once again, about everything that had happened to us since the last time we’d met. With her skin bathed in soft colours from the candlelight, and with her eyes shining, Cissy began to get sentimental about her ex-boyfriend, pleading his case and making excuses for his craziness.

  “He’s not a bad guy, really, just a bit fucked-up — but then so am I, so are you, it just comes out in different ways with him, that’s all. It’s to do with his mother — she went off with some other bloke when he was a kid an’ left him with his grandmother f
or her to bring up, more or less abandoned him. He’s even told me, sometimes, that no woman could ever hurt him as much as his mother did, an’ it’s really hard to get through to his feelings, he’s so closed. But I managed to, an’ really, underneath it all he’s a sweetheart, honest.”

  The thought that this wreaker of chaos was a “sweetheart” with a sensitive soul was faintly comical to me (especially when I thought of the axe embedded in the wall), but I managed to keep a straight face, and nodded understandingly. I didn’t want to spoil the mood by being cynical, or getting into a pointless argument over some guy that I hoped was off the scene for good. But I was feeling more and more protective towards Cissy, and undeniably jealous whenever she mentioned her ex. I changed the subject each time she did, and endeavoured to keep her talking for as long as possible so that I could miss the last train home and hopefully get an invitation to stay the night.

  As we walked back together, through the streets and alleys of Bloomsbury and King’s Cross, with the high Victorian towers of St. Pancras silhouetted against a full orange moon, I put my arm around her once again, allowing my fingers to brush lightly against the smooth skin of her exposed midriff. This time, she pressed up really close to me, and I was more than pleased when she invited me back to the flat for coffee and to smoke a joint. I certainly wasn’t going to let her escape a second time; and although I didn’t exactly jump on her the minute we got through the door, I soon had my tongue down her throat, my hands on her arse and was guiding her inexorably towards the bed, where we collapsed giggling in a heap, tearing the clothes off each other as quickly as we could. We fucked for most of the night, with the huge summer moon shining in through what was left of the windows, and towards dawn we finally fell asleep, worn out from the acid, the wine and hours of fucking each other senseless.

  For the next few days, we were never apart. I called in sick to work, and we’d spend each morning in bed — sometimes the afternoons too — before going down the street to a small French coffee-shop for a late breakfast, or lunch. In the evenings, we’d go to a pub or a club together, drinking with friends until the early hours of the morning, then take an all-night bus, or a taxi, back to King’s Cross. There, we’d buy a takeaway kebab, or pizza, and eat it as we walked back to her flat, past the whores, junkies and hustlers who always hung around the station and its environs, no matter what time of night or day it might happen to be. It felt so good to be together — finally, I felt like I was coming alive again after a long, death-like sleep, and I knew that Cissy felt the same way too: I could see it in her eyes, her face, the way her skin glowed, I could feel it in her touch and hear it in her voice. It felt like two long-lost friends who had suddenly and unexpectedly found one another after years of separation, and I was determined not to let this precious feeling slip away through stupid, self-destructive behaviour. We were both clean of heroin, and in these early days the love that we felt for each other seemed to be enough.

  It turned out, however, that Cissy had been using until quite recently, until her bust-up with the biker, in fact, and her subsequent escape to the country. That was what the argument had been about in the first place: Jed was into speed, and with the peculiar ethics of people in the drug world, thoroughly disapproved of smack. Speed was okay because it kept you awake and made you do things (no matter how psychotic some of those things might happen to be); but smack was bad because it made you dopey and apathetic, and it was addictive. Cissy had tried to keep her little vice a secret. But Jed had walked in on her one day while she was shooting up and had gone berserk, destroying the flat before roaring off into the night on his Triumph, looking for the dealer who had sold her the stuff behind his back.

  “But I’m away from all that now, honest, I’ve had enough of that scene — an’ I wanna do something, get a new club started, put on exciting bands and fashion shows, an’ I can’t do any of that while I’m on gear. I would have done it before, but Jed always got jealous whenever I started doin’ somethin’ an’ we’d get in a fight, an’ anyway I never had the cash before. But now I’ve got this money stashed that Julia gave me — she’s gonna be my backer, my financier … it’s gonna be great, baby, just wait an’ see.”

  Such grandiose schemes and ideas were always flashing through Cissy’s brain; but her belief and enthusiasm were infectious, and I really did think that she had the talent and the energy to do something out of the ordinary. Her ideas were original, full of creativity, and when she got excited she was like a tiny whirlwind of activity, hustling and working away as if possessed by some demon.

  Julia was Cissy’s guru, a West London dealer with connections in the worlds of entertainment and business, and to hear Cissy talk of her, you would imagine that she was some kind of saint, rather than a drug pusher. She was older than Cissy, in her thirties now, and very “hip” to everything that was happening behind the scenes of the circles she moved in. Her clients were lawyers, bankers, media whizz-kids and successful designers, people who had money to burn and who liked to free-base cocaine at the weekends. They were a real status-hungry crowd who saw the drug as a vital fashion accessory, essential for proving to the world that as well as being literate, creative, rich and successful, you were also anti-bourgeois and in tune with “the street”. When I was finally allowed into the presence of Julia and her friends, we clashed immediately. I had an instinctive aversion to anyone who made large amounts of money out of drugs — out of other people’s weakness and stupidity in other words — whilst remaining detached and relatively unscathed themselves. Julia would free-base on rare occasions, but to have a habit was considered uncool: she and her friends talked about cocaine the way connoisseurs talk about vintage wine, and their drug snobbery annoyed me. Whenever I dealt drugs myself, or got them for other people, I was never interested in making a huge profit out of the deal, other than what I needed for my own immediate requirements. And, right or wrong, I justified my actions to myself on the grounds that I was more addicted and fucked-up than any of the friends I was selling to or scoring for. As I said, people in the drug world have a curious system of ethics. But as far as I was concerned, it was a matter of survival, not of profit, and I disliked Julia and her crowd of “sophisticated” friends. Everything was “darling this” and “darling that”, and I couldn’t prevent myself from playing the uncouth street yob, so thoroughly did they annoy me. After this little episode, Cissy wouldn’t talk to me for two or three days, beyond calling me an arsehole and a shithead.

  But we were mad for each other, and this argument was soon forgotten as the summer passed in a haze of colours, sounds, concerts, clubs and restaurants. We went out together all the time, and were rarely apart, except during working hours as I endeavoured to keep my job at the T-shirt factory. Cissy herself had moved out of her flat and had taken a job as a barmaid in a local pub, which provided a large and comfortable room for her above the premises. It turned out that the flat had not been hers after all. The lease was in Jed’s name, and since the night of the argument no-one had seen him, or had any knowledge of his whereabouts. Even though we had repaired all the broken windows and bought new furniture the landlord had somehow got wind of what had happened, and was unwilling to continue renting the flat, either to Jed or Cissy, and so it had been necessary for her to find alternative accommodation. The pub job came along at just the right time, and each night after work I would go there for free drinks and food, courtesy of Cissy. I’d stay there until closing time, after which we would go on to a club or an after-hours bar to meet with some friends and continue drinking until the early hours of the morning. I slept mostly in Cissy’s room above the pub, returning to my own place only occasionally for a change of clothes, or to pick up something I needed, and as I wasn’t getting a lot of sleep, I found myself doing more and more speed in order to keep awake whilst driving around London. However, I wasn’t shooting the stuff, only sniffing it, and I still considered myself to be clean and relatively drug-free.

  It was during the Reading
Music Festival, at the end of the summer, that I realised Cissy had begun to use smack again. She had travelled there alone, on the Thursday, in order to see all the bands, and as I was needed at work to make deliveries before the weekend, I decided to go up on the Saturday, and had agreed to meet her at a pre-arranged spot.

  The weather had turned cold and grey, and it was beginning to rain as I entered the grounds of the festival. I’d been stopped and searched by the police as I left the train station in Reading, but luckily they hadn’t found the packet of speed that I’d hidden in one of my socks. Now, I was looking forward to being with Cissy again, and watching the bands together, as even a separation of a day or two drove me crazy. She herself was like a drug for me, and I had a physical hunger to touch and hold her that ate away until she was in my arms once again. She was such a tiny girl, almost doll-like in the perfection of her beauty, but fiercely independent, with a restless, rebellious energy that would not accept any interference in her plans. As possessive as I might feel about her, she would not allow me to stifle her: if I believed that a particular course of action she was taking was stupid, or wrong, she would go off and do it anyway, just to prove that she was right, that she was strong and free enough to look after herself. She could be a pain in the neck at times, but I also admired this stubborn streak in her, this insistence on freedom at whatever the cost. The fact that I could never wholly possess her, or control her, made me want her all the more.

  I finally caught sight of Cissy, not in the place we had agreed to meet, but at a spot towards the back of the crowd where there were few people. She was standing alone, looking dejected and bored, watching the distant band without enthusiasm or apparent enjoyment. The long, black velvet cloak she wore reached almost to the ground, and she was holding herself with folded arms, shivering as if cold. She looked especially vulnerable, and as I came up from behind I put my arms around her, hoping to give her a surprise.