Junkie Love Read online

  “Oh that’s just great! Now we’re marooned out here in the wilderness, sick an’ dirty, an’ with no way of gettin’ back home. Trust you to buy an old wreck that’s ready for the knacker’s yard.”

  “Oh sod off, at least it got us there, didn’t it? What d’you expect for fifty quid, anyway?!”

  Fighting back the nausea, and with the sweat pouring off me, I stuck my head under the bonnet, even though I knew it would be a waste of time. With my rudimentary knowledge of mechanics, and judging by the sound the expiring engine had made, I was pretty sure that the big end had gone and that the van was now fucked beyond repair. I managed to get it into a side-street, where we abandoned it, carrying our things and hitch-hiking the remaining forty or fifty miles back to London. By the time we arrived in Camden Town, we were both suffering severe withdrawal symptoms, and Cissy was undergoing some kind of paroxysm of self-loathing over our unwashed, rancid state. The first thing we did on arriving home was to cook up a huge shot of heroin, which we shared, before falling into a deep, untroubled sleep that lasted until the afternoon of the following day.

  • • •

  Shortly after returning from this jaunt, Cissy and I both had accidents that laid us up in bed for several weeks. We had been to visit friends, and were returning to the squat on one of the old “Routemaster” buses — the type with a conductor and an open rear door — and were approaching our stop when Cissy decided that she would jump off while the bus was still in motion. She misjudged the distance to the pavement and badly twisted her ankle against the concrete kerbstone, sprawling full-length and scraping her face into the bargain. By the time I reached her, she was jumping up and down on one foot, yelling at the top of her voice.

  “Ow, ow, ow, Jesus fuckin’ Christ, I’ve busted it! Don’t just stand there, do something, get me inside for fuck’s sake — hurry up babe, please, it’s killin’ me!”

  Even before I got her indoors, her ankle had swollen to twice its normal size, and in spite of ice-packs and cold water compresses, it refused to go down. I took her to UCH in Euston, and after several hours wait she finally emerged from the casualty department with a walking-stick and a bandage up to her knee.

  “Well, at least it’s not broken …”

  “That’s alright for you to say, but a torn tendon’s almost as bad — it hurts like fuck, an’ I’m not supposed to put any weight on it for the next six weeks. Basically, it means I’m gonna be laid up for the rest of the summer — I’m gonna go mad cooped up in the room in this heat … An’ what about Rosie, who’ll take her for walks? I’m gonna be reliant on you for everything — drugs, food, cigarettes, everything, which is just bloody great! Well, you always did want to control me, so now you’ve got your wish!”

  By the time we reached home, her bad temper and paranoia had subsided, and I propped her up in bed with plenty of pillows so that she could rest her leg. As soon as she was settled, I gave her a big shot of smack to alleviate the pain.

  Then, the very next day, while I was fixing a clogged drainpipe at the rear of the house, I fell off the rickety old stepladder I was using and crashed twelve or fifteen feet onto the concrete patio below. The pipe had backed up and overflowed, leaving a pool of foul-smelling, putrefying water directly outside the back door, and as no-one else seemed to give a fuck, I had foolishly taken it upon myself to repair it. As I balanced precariously on top of the ladder, Purley Pete, one of the other occupants of the squat, shouted up instructions from below:

  “Try it from the elbow-bend first — that’s the most likely place for it to have got blocked, and you can see what’s happenin’ if you take the collar off the join an’ stick your ’and inside.”

  I undid the screws which clamped the two sections of pipe together, and pulled them carefully apart — nothing.

  “That’s odd — it must be blocked further up, in the straight section, which is pretty unusual. Try tappin’ it with an ’ammer, you should be able to tell from the sound which bit is full of water.”

  I was now on the very top step of the ladder, and the only way I could go any higher was to place my right foot on one of the stays which clamped the pipe to the edge of the house. I tapped it gently with the hammer, up and down, and listened carefully for any change of tone. And it was true: at a point just about level with the top of my head, I was pretty sure I could detect a distinct difference in the way the pipe sounded — much denser, as if there were something solid inside.

  “The only way to get in from there is to crack it open, then repair it later. There’s no collar further up, so that’s all you can do, really …”

  Luckily, the pipe was of the old-fashioned, heavy-duty porcelain variety, and I was easily able to crack a hole in it with a few well-aimed hammer blows. I reached inside, and about three inches above my eye-level I finally located the blockage. It appeared to be some kind of jagged metal, but soft and easily manipulated, the kind of metal they use in — Yes! — beer cans!

  “Some daft cunt’s dropped a can of Special Brew down inside the pipe. It must have been that party we had last month — some mates of Andy’s got out through the attic, and were sittin’ around on the roof, drinkin’ and smokin’. It must have been one of them did it for a laugh, dropped it down from where the guttering feeds into the pipe — fuckin’ typical!”

  I poked at the can with a screwdriver, trying to dislodge it, but it was wedged firmly inside the pipe. Finally, I managed to get a proper grip on it and yanked hard, so that the offending can of Special Brew, twisted and torn, was now more than halfway out of the hole.

  “Watch out for the water when you pull it through …”

  “Yeah, yeah!”

  I gave the can one final hard tug, taking care not to lose my balance, or my grip on the pipe …

  “Jesus Christ! Shit!”

  I jumped backwards off the ladder, twisting away in midair, as a huge, black water-snake shot out of the hole and came spiralling straight towards my face. It had obviously hatched in the pipe and, having been trapped there, had grown bigger and bigger until I’d unwittingly released it by breaking the pipe open and giving it an escape route. I didn’t know if it was poisonous, or not; but the thought of its slimy, black body propelling itself directly at my throat was enough — I wasn’t going to stick around to find out, and I instinctively dived backwards off the ladder to escape its spitting, snarling jaws.

  I hit the ground hard, heels first, and as the pain shot up my legs and through my body, I cried out loud in agony. But I was also laughing like a fool, as I’d realised my mistake even before I hit the ground: what I had tried to get away from was not a water-snake at all, just oozing, black mud, forced out of the hole at great speed by the pressure of the water trapped above. But now the pain was excruciating. Stupidly, I had undertaken the task wearing only soft-bottomed karate slippers on my feet, and although I’d managed to land squarely, they provided no protection at all against the impact. I tried to ignore the pain, hoping it would go away, and sat outside in the late-afternoon sun with both feet plunged in a bucket filled with ice-cold water; but when, after about an hour, I attempted to stand, I could put no weight at all on either foot and immediately fell over. Pete helped me into a taxi, and for the second time in two days I found myself in the casualty department of UCH. When I was finally attended to, and X-rays had been taken, I was told that I had fractured the heel bone of each foot; and, furthermore, that this was probably the worst bone to break in the entire human body, as a cast could not be put on it. Once fractured, it was always liable to break again if a similar accident occurred at any time in the future.

  Buoyed up by this heartening news, and equipped with a pair of crutches and a set of heel-pads, I was told to report back in three weeks for a check-up and further X-rays, then carried to a waiting taxi by Pete and a hospital orderly. I was also assured that it would be at least eight weeks before I could even think of putting any weight on my heels, and that I should spend as much of this time as possible in be
d, arranging for someone else to do all my errands and running around for me. I got no sympathy at all from Cissy.

  “You dickhead — why’d you decide to wear slippers to fix the drains? Anyone with any sense at all would have worn work-boots … An’ it’s a wonder, anyway, that old stepladder didn’t give way beneath you. You could have broken your neck, not just your heels. Fuckin’ water-snake …!”

  “Yeah, it’s almost as clever as jumping off moving buses with your eyes closed …”

  “Oh belt up, that could have happened to anyone!”

  As we lay side by side, both of us propped up on pillows on Cissy’s queen-sized bed, I looked forward to spending the next few weeks like this, immobilised and unable to escape from each other, and to all the bickering and bitching that this confinement was bound to engender. But of course, the thought that was uppermost in my mind was: “How the fuck am I gonna be able to cop and keep dealing in this state, and who can I trust to help me out?”

  • • •

  Somerstown Sammy was a friend of Cissy’s, a rat-faced little street junkie with a speech impediment and an ingratiating manner that annoyed the hell out of me. Also known as “Whisper”, because of the virtually sub-audible way in which he spoke, he was basically one of her disciples, and was content to worship her from afar whenever he came around to score. He had pale, grey eyes, and his blotchy, freckled skin was drawn tight across the bones of his face, so that in certain lights, and from certain angles, he seemed to be translucent, as if the light passed right through him. His personality, too, was somehow vaporous and ill-defined, so that if I tried to recall his appearance in detail, or his manner, when he was not actually sitting in the room right there in front of me, I found that I could not. He had a thin, wispy beard, pointed and flecked with grey, which he nervously tugged at whenever he spoke, and he always wore grey, even in the summer: a grey bomber jacket and flannel trousers when it was hot; a long, grey overcoat when it was cold. He was able to make himself invisible in a crowd, to pass amongst people unseen and unheeded, and because of this talent he was an expert thief. Quite simply, people just didn’t notice him, and he was able to glide up and down the aisles of large department stores unmolested by detectives and security guards, slipping valuable objects into the specially-sewn linings of his jackets and coats. Vapid and diminutive as he was, he would be out of the door and onto the street again before his presence had even registered in the consciousness of those employed to watch.

  Knowing him like this, I was dubious, to put it mildly, when Cissy came up with the idea of asking him to score for us while we were laid up in bed. I didn’t trust or particularly like Sammy, and while it was true that, in terms of his knowledge of the network of heroin dealers around King’s Cross and Camden, he was probably the most qualified of our acquaintances, I was also aware of the dangers of placing all our capital in the hands of such a shifty character. Cissy was convinced he was the man for the job, though, and used all her powers of persuasion to get me to agree.

  “Really, babe, he’s okay, believe me, an’ he knows the scene better than anyone else — he’s been around for years, an’ he won’t buy shit or anything that’s cut too bad. An’ you know how he worships me — he wouldn’t dream of rippin’ us off.”

  “I don’t know … I just don’t like the idea of giving all our money to somebody who basically makes a living from thievin’, even if he is a friend of yours. It’s too dangerous — if anything goes wrong, we’re gonna be up Shit Creek without a paddle … no money, no gear, and both of us laid up like cripples in bed.”

  “What’s the alternative? Can you think of anyone else who knows so many dealers, and who the dealers would trust to sell to? I can’t, I’m sure. Come on, the guy’s in love with me, he’ll do anything I ask, I’ve got him like this around my little finger — an’ he wouldn’t dare rip us off, in case I don’t let him visit us anymore.”

  Cissy appeared intent on making the situation into some kind of demonstration of her feminine power and hold over a helpless male admirer; but, at the same time, it was true that Sammy did know the heroin scene better than anyone else I could think of. Within a few days we would be out of smack again, and I needed to score soon; as it was impossible for me to hunt through the streets and estates on broken feet, it was essential to find someone who would do the running around for me. I didn’t like the idea, but Sammy did seem to be the only person with the qualifications necessary for the job, so I decided to trust Cissy’s instincts and go along with her plan. But it was with severe misgivings that I watched him walk out of the door a few days later with over nine hundred pounds of my float in his pocket.

  As the hours passed, the sinking feeling in my stomach became ever more pronounced, and though at first Cissy was dismissive, telling me to stop worrying and relax, as night drew in and Sammy had still not returned, she too began to worry and became silent and withdrawn. Finally, at around 11:30, the doorbell rang and someone downstairs let Sammy in. But I knew before he entered the room that the deal had gone wrong — his footsteps were slow and reluctant as he climbed the stairs, not at all the tread of someone who has just successfully scored a large amount of heroin and is now looking forward to sampling the goods.

  “I got taken off, man, r-r-r-really, I’m s-s-sorry, but it was a rip-off — the guy disappeared with your money and n-n-never came back,” Sammy whispered and stammered from where he stood in the doorway.

  “Who did? You mean to say you …? Why’d the fuck you give it to someone to go off with anyway?!” Cissy screamed before I had a chance to say anything. “I thought you were going to Frank’s to score, or if not then to Angie’s place. Why’d you give the money to somebody else, for Christ’s sake?!”

  “F-F-Frank was away, and Angie only had a little bit, so I went up to D-D-D-Dodgy Dave’s — I’ve scored off him before, and he’s always been straight with me. But he didn’t have anything either, there’s a real drought at the moment, l-l-lots of b-busts and people are laying low. But there was this one guy at Dave’s, claimed to know where to s-score, but he had to go alone — I mean I wasn’t happy either, but Dave told me he was okay, and I was gettin’ desperate. I’m f-f-f-fuckin’ sick as well, you know, and it was either that, or nothin’. Look, I’m s-sorry, but maybe he’ll show up tomorrow — I mean Dave’s pissed off as well, he’s a mate of his, and sooner or later he’ll track him down, he’s b-b-bound to …”

  “What, you gave all our money to some total fucking stranger, and just let him walk off with it? Are you crazy?!” I just couldn’t believe that Sammy had been so stupid. In fact, I didn’t believe him at all. His story was just about plausible, but he was an old hand at this game and shouldn’t have been taken in so easily, even allowing for his desperation and growing dope-sickness. “I think you’re full of shit — you’ve stashed the money somewhere, and you’re just covering your own tracks by coming back here with this bullshit story. You’ll leave here, and the first thing you’ll do is go back home and get high while me an’ Cissy’ll be stuck here without money, or gear.”

  “N-n-n-no way, I wouldn’t do that, you two are my friends, and I w-w-wouldn’t do something so shitty to people I c-c-care about! Look, you can check my story with D-Dodgy Dave if you don’t believe me, he’ll back me up in everything I s-s-say.” Sammy was almost in tears at this point — sweat was breaking out on his forehead, and he was shaking and trembling all over. He was obviously starting to withdraw, but I refused to believe that anyone with as much experience of the scene as he had could have been fooled so easily. If there is one cardinal rule to follow when copping, it’s never give your money to strangers, even if you are sick and desperate and they promise you the earth. Or, if you do, go with them and don’t let them out of your sight for a minute, even to go to the toilet — otherwise, they’ll be out of the window and around the corner before you know it, and you’ll be left high and dry, feeling like the idiot you truly are for trusting them in the first place.

  Ci
ssy had fallen silent during my tirade; but suddenly she spoke up from the shadows in the corner of the room, where she was sitting with her knees drawn up to her chin, watching us intently.

  “Aw, leave him alone, he’s tellin’ the truth, can’t you see? It’s too late, the money’s gone, an’ shoutin’ at Sammy ain’t gonna bring it back, is it? Yeah, he was stupid, but look, he’s sick as a dog. C’mon Sammy, I’ve got a bit of gear stashed for emergencies, enough to keep us all straight until the morning, anyway.”

  I stared at her in amazement. Usually, she was acquisitive and possessive as far as smack was concerned, and I couldn’t believe she was offering our last little bit to someone I still suspected of rippng us off. I felt more like strangling the cunt than getting high with him, but it was true what Cissy said — one way or another the money was gone, and all the yelling and shouting in the world wasn’t going to bring it back. Anyway, I was starting to believe Sammy’s story — if he had stolen the money himself, he could easily have disappeared with no fear of my coming after him, laid up as I was, and there was nothing to be gained for him by returning to us and telling a pack of lies. I began to see him as the pathetic, lost soul he truly was, realising that Cissy and I were probably the best friends he had — or at least that was how he saw us. As I injected myself with the last of the gear, I cursed Sammy’s stupidity and my own bad luck; but most of all I cursed my idiocy for trusting Cissy’s judgement, for allowing myself to get back into the situation of no money, no smack and not just one enormous habit to feed each day, but two.