Junkie Love Read online

  • • •

  I always used to keep a few hundred milligrammes of methadone hidden under the floorboards of our room, in case of busts or general heroin shortages, and I figured this would be enough to keep us straight, at least for a week or so. Once this ran out, though, I had no idea where I was going to get enough capital together to start dealing again. It had taken me over a year working at the factory to save just the small amount of money I had begun with, and I had no rich parents or fairy godmothers to fall back upon. So when Cissy suggested using the money that Julia had lent her months before, supposedly to start a club with, I wasn’t exactly reluctant to go along with the idea. I had forgotten all about this loan, and though it meant that Cissy would now be in control of the money supply, I didn’t foresee any particular problems with this: I had shared everything with her, treating her as an equal partner, and I expected that she would now do the same with me. For her part, Cissy was worried in case Julia suddenly asked her to return the money, or got wind that she had spent it all on drugs. But as they had not seen each other for a couple of months now, and as Julia was a rich bitch and not exactly hard up for cash, I managed to calm her fears, persuading her that she could always pay the money back in installments in the unlikely event that the loan was suddenly called in.

  After about ten days, the constant throbbing in my heels had subsided a little, and I had taught myself how to get around quite effectively by swinging between the two crutches, landing on the toes of both feet together so that my heels never had to touch the ground. I could project myself forward quite rapidly like this, and soon I was hurtling around the streets and council estates as quickly as if the accident had never happened. Life returned to its normal pattern of scoring, dealing and getting high and, as my business grew, I was able to increase the amount I was buying each time from a half to three quarters of an ounce — not exactly big-time dealing, but enough to ensure that we could survive quite comfortably, both in terms of the drugs we needed and for everyday necessities such as food and travel. We didn’t lead much of a social life anyway. Everything revolved around the squat, our friends were the people who bought from us and it was always they who visited, rarely vice-versa. My happiest times were when I was returning from scoring, a small plastic bag of junk stuffed inside my pants, and the anticipation of sampling this new batch uppermost in my mind as I climbed the shadowy stairways of our house. I rarely thought about the future, not in terms of plans and ambitions anyhow. As long as I had enough smack to last a week or ten days ahead, that was enough for me, while the thought of a nice little stash hidden away beneath the floorboards filled me with a warm, rosy glow — I felt safe, secure and at ease with life.

  Such apathy towards the future is common enough amongst junkies — it is, after all, one of the most dead-end forms of existence you could hope to choose — and on the rare occasions that I did think about it, I realised that, for me, it was so out of reach, so beyond my ability to control or influence, that it really didn’t seem worth the effort. Easier, by far, just to take another shot and wallow in the slough of negativity and self-obliteration that is the natural element of the long-term user. In fact, I took such a perverse pleasure in not having a future that I elevated it to the position of a philosophy, some kind of code to live by, which fully satisfied all my deepest and most intense antisocial tendencies. For the act of shooting smack is like a one-fingered salute to society, a rejection of all the values we are taught to revere, respect and admire: patience; hard work; self-denial; the postponement of pleasure as a reward for labour; in other words, the whole Puritan ethic. And I felt more in tune with criminals and sociopaths than I ever did with the worker who finds his niche in the system and, by all his effort and striving, only helps to perpetuate the machine that is strangling us all. Never mind that I was destroying myself in the process. This, too, afforded me a grim pleasure; and whenever I temporarily stopped using, and felt my natural energies returning, I would feel compelled to dissipate and obliterate them by a quick return to junkiedom, so thoroughly uncomfortable did this sensation make me feel. I distrusted all manifestations of so-called natural love and affection, and the relationships I chose were always based more on strategies of mental and emotional abuse than upon what is usually understood by the word “love”. Unless the person I was with was causing me intense pain, I simply wasn’t happy, and I actively sought out relationships that were hopeless, doomed, fucked-up and twisted.

  My most treasured moments were those I spent alone, though, or in the company of a few like-minded friends, gouched-out and oblivious with the smack coursing through my veins. I didn’t care that Cissy and I were growing further apart, or that my original reason for starting to deal — namely, to get her away from junk — had disappeared along the way. I was too fucked-up myself, now, to give much thought to anything apart from dealing and scoring, and I was shooting either speed or smack from the moment I woke in the early afternoon until I eventually crashed out, usually around dawn.

  • • •

  “Push harder, for fuck’s sake, can’t you?!”

  I was sick and perched on the edge of my chair, and as my guts went into spasm I fought to keep down the rising tide of vomit that threatened to engulf me at any moment. Ten days without a decent hit, and now this …

  “Shut up, for Christ’s sake, you sound like a fuckin’ midwife. You’re puttin’ me off, an’ it’s just goin’ deeper inside.”

  Dodgy Dave was crouched in the middle of the floor, his pants around his ankles and an old copy of The Sun spread out beneath him. After one of the longest droughts in living memory, that had seen all the local dealers out desperately tramping the streets, Dave had finally managed to score a few grammes. The only problem was that he’d suffered an attack of the jitters and had hidden it so far up his own arse that he was now having severe problems finding it again.

  “Look, it must be in there somewhere, it can’t have disappeared completely. Can’t you locate it with your fingers?”

  “That’s alright for you to say, you callous cunt … I’ve ’ad the shits for a week and me arse is like a baboon’s. I could get me whole fist up there, and still not find it!”

  Normally, I’d have had enough methadone to see me through times like this, but Cissy and I had had another of our increasingly frequent rows, and she’d disappeared with three hundred mls. of ’done and about half our float. Never mind that it was, in theory, her money — I couldn’t believe her treachery, and I was ready to kill her when she eventually showed up.

  “Maybe you should have a rest for a few minutes, take a cigarette break, then try again. Your muscles are obviously spasming an’ going into reverse, so if you just relax for awhile they’ll start working normally again, an’ the bag’ll come out by itself.” Dave had the reputation of being a bit of a hard case, and I didn’t want to get him riled.

  “How the fuck can I relax with you sittin’ there like a cunt, an’ me bollock-naked with three grammes of smack up me arse. I’m sicker than you are, at least you ’ad a little bit to keep you goin’ for awhile.”

  The spider’s web tattoo that covered the right side of Dave’s neck was throbbing with indignation, or maybe with the effort of trying to force out the stubborn little package that had lodged itself somewhere in the lower reaches of his small intestine. He used to shoot up in the middle of this tattoo, right in the jugular, when he couldn’t raise a vein in his arms, hands or feet, and reckoned it gave him a better, faster rush than anywhere else.

  “Why’d you stick it up your arse anyway? Couldn’t you just have put it in your sock, or down your pants, like any normal person? I mean, if the Ol’ Bill were onto you an’ took you down the nick that’s the first place they’d look.”

  I was reaching a crisis point of anxiety and impatience, and I thought for a moment that I might have pushed Dave too far. With no endorphins left in my system to cushion the pain, and no smack either, each movement was an effort — my bones grated in their socke
ts, my diaphragm pressed in upon my lungs and every nerve in my body was irritated and tortured to the point where I felt like screaming. But I also knew I had to tread carefully. Even though it was my money he had used to cop with, Dave was in no mood to be pressured or hustled. As he said, he was probably even sicker than I was, and though we had both been out hunting all day, with the sweat pouring off us and our skins crawling with the chills of withdrawal, it was he who had been successful and had eventually managed to score. He stood up looking very pissed-off, and for a minute I thought he might walk out on me with the smack still up his arse; but suddenly, his expression changed.

  “’ang on a minute — I felt somethin’ move inside me, I think it’s comin’ out! Standin’ up just then must’ve dislodged it, or else me guts’re startin’ to work again. Tha’s funny, I didn’t think there was anything left up there to shit out …”

  Dave hopped back to his copy of The Sun and squatted down again. Puffing and grunting, with his face almost purple from the effort, he suddenly let out an almighty fart, and with it a horrible, stinking mess of watery diarrhoea spattered onto the newspaper. The stench was truly disgusting, but this timely and heaven-sent bowel movement had done the trick. Wiping his backside on a rancid old towel that was lying around, and with his face contorted in pain, Dave probed and prodded until his questing fingers finally locked around the elusive little package that had caused him so much anguish.

  “Fuckin’ A! Party time at last!”

  He held the small, round bag aloft in victory. It was tightly wrapped in cling film and, as far as I could tell, had not been impregnated by the foul-smelling discharge. Dave was rumoured to be HIV positive, and I wasn’t too happy about the gear having been stuffed up his backside in the first place; but as far as I knew, the virus could only be passed via blood or semen and was not able to travel through plastic, even when the plastic had been wedged far inside the carrier’s arsehole.

  Besides, Dave had already cleaned and sliced open the package with a razor blade, and was carefully measuring out a shot into his spoon; and with the stuff right there on the table in front of me, and with cold, sickly sweat breaking out from every pore in my body, I was willing to take my chances. I’d been sharing needles and having unprotected sex for years, both in New York and London, long before anyone knew anything about AIDS, and when it was still referred to as “Gay Cancer”. Though the frequent TV warnings and documentaries were making me increasingly paranoid, I reckoned that this was a fairly safe bet, compared to the multifarious ways I’d already abused my body over the previous ten years.

  The sense of anticipation a sick junkie feels as he cooks up his shot is almost impossible to describe. Maybe it is comparable to the sensation a man dying of thirst in the desert feels as he crawls up that final sand dune and unexpectedly sees water shimmering in the distance, a cool and welcoming oasis; or to the way a convict on Death Row might feel, suddenly and inexplicably pardoned and transported to a hotel room where the most beautiful and sexually-adept whore in the world waits to satisfy his every perverse fantasy and need. But not really. To the person who has never been in this state, no words can truly convey the sense of expectation, the knowledge that within seconds all the pain and physical suffering will magically evaporate, like a dank river mist at sunrise. Your body, taken off the rack at last, will find itself instead floating in warm and protective amniotic waters, while your mind, tortured for days by darkness, gloom and ugly, twisted dreams, will suddenly be immune and inviolate, free from all anxiety and violent self-loathing. Artificial paradise it may well be; but in another sense, it is as real as real gets.

  As I cooked up my own shot, my trembling hands became sure and precise, and I heated the spoon from below without spilling a drop. My clothes and body stank, and I was aware of the rancid discharge from my cock that was soiling the inside of my underwear. For when you are kicking, the genitals become hyper-sensitive and you tend to shoot off spontaneously, without warning, just from the pressure of your clothes against your skin. Even the air itself seems to hurt: you truly cannot stand any kind of contact upon your body at all, while friction of even the slightest and most innocuous kind is enough to send you into a shivering, quivering mass of jangled nerve endings and twitching flesh, as if plagues of insects were crawling about under your cold, clammy skin.

  But all these symptoms vanish once the smack is in your veins, and you are suddenly flooded with a holy and transforming inner light. The decaying, stinking carcass that you have been forced to inhabit for days is suddenly charged with a marvellous energy, and you are awash with optimism, ideas and vague but pleasant dreams for the future. You wash the stench from your body and clothes, while the poisonous, cloying dredge in your mind is flushed out, purified by the brief alchemical glow that is King Heroin’s gift to even his most abject disciples.

  I stuck the needle in, drew up the blood, booted it and repeated the procedure, before following Dave into the Land of Nod, the smack-head’s reward for all the pain, suffering and humiliation that is an essential part of his chosen way of life. For several hours I passed in and out of dreams, losing all sense of place and time, and when I finally came to Dave was gone. So, I duly noticed, was most of the remaining gear. He’d obviously felt that his traumatised anus entitled him to an extra gramme or two and had helped himself, probably feeling perfectly justified in doing so; and though I briefly flirted with the idea of taking a baseball bat and going to look for the cunt, I soon shelved it. I figured he was much harder than me, and anyway, by the time I found him the smack would be long gone. Instead, I cooked up what was left of the gear and shot it into my arm, recognising as I did so that whichever way I looked at the situation it was now impossible to deny that I was well and truly fucked.

  • • •

  It was a dark night in early winter when I first ran into him, one of those typical London nights where a damp, lowering sky seems to absorb all the neon and electricity of the city, reflecting it back dully in a sick and oppressive orange glow. A fine, but cold, drizzle slanted across the street lamps and was gradually soaking through my outer layers of clothing, while the sock on my right foot was sodden and freezing from the water that leaked in through the hole in my shoe. I’d not seen Cissy for over three weeks now, and my anger at her for disappearing with the money and methadone had long since turned to worry. I’d searched all over for her, visiting the friends and acquaintances I knew she had around the North London drug scene, then trying further afield, in Brixton and Stockwell — but apparently no-one had seen or heard anything of her. I’d called Julia in Kensington, the place where Cissy usually went whenever she wanted to disappear, but if Julia knew anything of her whereabouts, she certainly wasn’t letting on. I began to imagine all the situations and predicaments she might have got herself into — for if she had been dealing, I would have heard about it, and if she wasn’t, then the methadone and money would have run out by now. First, I reckoned, she would have bought as much smack as she could possibly lay her hands on; then, when that ran out, instead of holding onto the methadone she would have sold it on the street to buy more gear. I believed I knew her ways, and that as long as there was any chance at all of getting hold of some skag she would take it, even though the methadone would keep her straight for much longer. The more I thought about it, the more I felt sure that Julia was telling the truth about not having seen her. After all, we had blown most of the money that Cissy had been fronted, and she would be unwilling to put herself in a position where she might have to admit this to someone she looked up to and regarded as her benefactress and protector.

  I turned the possibilities over in my mind. Perhaps she had met someone else, someone from outside the drug scene who could give her the support she needed to kick the habit and had moved in with him. Our last row had been pretty nasty, and she’d stormed off into the night after telling me to “Fuck off and die”; but it was no worse, really, than any of the other arguments we’d been having of late, and anyway,
where would she have met such a character? All our movements were connected with drugs, and with the people who used them, and since I’d been dealing she hadn’t needed to work, or to move in circles where she might have met someone from outside the scene.

  Again, if she had moved in with another dealer, or with someone else who used, I would have heard about it through the grapevine, and so far all my enquiries had drawn a blank: she seemed to have vanished into the air. No-one I knew had heard anything about her, nobody had seen her, and this gave rise to my greatest fear, one which I tried to keep at bay, but which constantly haunted me. As I twisted and turned in my sweat-soaked bed during the sleepless and feverish nights that seemed to go on forever, I saw visions of Cissy overdosed in a room somewhere, amongst people who didn’t care, one way or the other, about the wasted little junkie girl slumped in the corner — except, maybe, as an inconvenience, a piece of human wreckage that somehow had to be disposed of. I tried to keep this image out of my mind, to think of some other explanation for her disappearance, but it kept on returning to haunt me. In my mind’s eye, I would see her body dumped in some obscure place — disused industrial land, or amongst the weeds at the edge of some river or canal — destined to be just another statistic on police files when she finally was discovered.

  I telephoned all the London hospitals, but no-one answering to Cissy’s description had been brought in. I drew the same result when I checked with the police to see if she had been busted or arrested for some other offence. Pushing the most negative possibility from my mind, I tried to think rationally — where would a girl who needed at least fifty pounds each day in ready cash go to get it? I went down to Soho and traipsed around the clip-joints and peep-shows, talking to the girls in the pay-booths and the hawkers on the streets, with an old photo of Cissy from the time when she had short hair. I’d worked in one of these places myself, years before, when I first moved down to London, and I knew how cagey people were about giving out information. Consequently, I wasn’t exactly surprised when I again drew a blank. Another, less attractive, possibility was the red-light district in the backstreets behind King’s Cross station, a place where the most fucked-up and hopeless street whores in London worked, and where only punters in need of a serious sleaze fix went. It was while I was making my way towards this area one night that I first set eyes on him.