Down and Out on Murder Mile (7 page)

On the Hammersmith
and City line nodding—peaceful, all the way back to Kings Cross. It is Christmastime. I am waiting for RJ to show with the drugs—my breath hangs in the frosty air—and he appears from the blizzard like the monster in Shelley's
Frankenstein,
when the doctor chases his creation through the windswept landscape of Antarctica, and then I cut through to the toilet of the Kings Mall, where I fix with ice-cold, numb, and shaking hands, all the while, Frank Sinatra singing something festive like “The Little Drummer Boy” or “Silver Bells” is being piped into the filthy toilet.

 

And as the dope hits I know it is good shit—maybe a Christmas gift from RJ to me—and I fucked up my arm a little, and the black blood drips onto my shoes but I sit there—stupefied by
the heroin—as Frank's voice takes on a different tonality—spacing out dramatically—like the record is
slooooowwwwiiinnggg doooooowwwww-nnnnn
, and the music sounds like it being piped through a swimming pool filled with jelly.

 

On the train I think that maybe right here, right now, I am the most beautiful man alive, because everyone is beautiful when they are high: I start to realize that the war on drugs is a war on beauty—a war on perfection, because everything is perfect on heroin—it is a war against the simple human aspiration of complete contentment, and the thought makes me sad—that we are waging such a pointless and spiteful war against the noblest part our own nature.

 

The train clatters into darkened tunnels, turning the carriage black for a moment, and the thoughts bubble and then fizzle—
Pop!
—like a thousand Christmas lights burning out in unison—they turn to stone and sink to the bottom of a

 

vast

inky

pool.

I soon found
out that the move from Stoker's house to the garage had happened because Stoker had brought on a new staff member. She was from Newcastle; a thin pale girl who was supposedly there to lay out the magazine editorials. I had little to do with her. She seemed sad and a little beaten up. She smelled too, of thick heavy perfume seemingly to cover up for a lack of bathing. I recognized something in her and instinctively knew that she was an addict too. One day, after taking my mid-morning shot in the bathroom, I went to walk into the main office, stoned and forgetting about the move. Through the door I heard Stoker's hushed, wheezing voice:

 

“Do it…like that…keep going…”

 

She gurgled, her mouth obviously full of the old man's cock, and I could hear a wet noise beating faster and faster.

 

“Right there…faster…”

 

I got the fuck away from there and listened to a report on the opium farmers of Afghanistan, passing out upright in my old office chair.

 

I owed the bank money. So every time Stoker cut me a check I had to bring it to a check-cashing place. I found one place on Fortress Road that would let me write checks to myself and cash them for 7 percent of the total. I had a book full of blank checks with a limit of a hundred pounds on them, so three, four times a week I would convert one into ninety-three pounds.

 

Temporarily at least our situation was fixed. I knew that the checks would run out one day soon and then I'd have to find another way to get by. But in the meantime there was money and long winter evenings and nothing but time. I caught up on reading. I ghosted around Soho at night when I was feeling rootless and energized. The neon lights bathed me and the dark strip clubs and doorways leading up to beaten old whores gave me a sense that I was among my own kind here. Occasionally I would score crack in the Soho alleyways from the black dealers ensconced in the shadows and hit the pipe in empty doorways, while the sound of the city carried on all around me.

 

I'd sit there, looking out over the city I had left four years ago, a city I had once been a productive member of, and I would think that life could not get any more perfect, unless perhaps I was to wake up tomorrow and all that was left would be the night stretching from one end of the land till the other, and the neon would be on 24/7, and the city noise would be nothing but yells and raucous laughter and music blasting from bars and clubs.

 

After two weeks or so of being late to work because of picking up my methadone in Hackney I switched my methadone pickup to the Boots chemist in Tufnell Park, around the corner from Stoker's house. I did not like the new spot, despite its convenience for work. The old bitch that ran the joint would make me drink the methadone on-site. This was the rule for all new attendees. Despite the time I had under my belt at my old pharmacy, I was treated like I had wandered in off the street for the first time. There is no reasoning with pharmacists when the issue at hand is narcotics. In their eyes they are talking to you from a morally superior standpoint, so no words can be persuasive enough to make them relent.

 

At work one day, while I was doodling idly in my notebook, the new employee knocked and came in.

 

“Hi,” she said.

 

“Hello.”

 

“You busy?”

 

I shrugged and put the notebook down.

 

“Brian is out for a bit. I was bored.” She smiled, perching on the desk.

 

“Oh yeah? There's nothing much happening in here.”

 

“You're on stuff too, right?”

 

I eyed her suspiciously. “Stuff?”

 

“It's cool,” she insisted. “I saw you at the chemist taking your dose. You didn't see me. I was buying tampons.”

 

“Well,” I said, at a loss for the right words. “That's nice.”

 

“My boyfriend uses too. I mean, he's on a script too. He don't do the gear anymore. I made him stop. It was killing him.”

 

Her name was Amy, it turned out. She seemed okay, a little slow, but okay. Two kids, a boyfriend out of work and on a script, and both of them hitting the crack pipe. She was working illegally—cash in hand—for Stoker to supplement their benefits. I didn't ask if the blow jobs were a part of the deal. I figured it would be best to keep my mouth shut.

 

Once she started talking it was hard to get her to stop. She had a crackhead's machine-gun mouth
all right. She talked to me about anything, everything. That first day I stared off into space as she riffed on her kids, on her boyfriend, on reality television, on how bad Stoker smelled. I tried to listen to the World Service over her monologue, but found it was impossible to focus on anything else—her voice had a nightmarish quality about it, whiny and grating, and it seemed to reverberate from within your own head. Maybe that's why Stoker insisted that she put his penis in her mouth once a day.

 

I garnered all kinds of useless information about this woman. Where she lived (around the corner, across the road from the video store), what medication she and her boyfriend took regularly (Lustral—an antidepressant—and a blood-thinning medication for the boyfriend's deep vein thrombosis in his leg), her kids behavior (“Steve…come to think of it Steve and Jackie…They're both little shits”), and, her favorite topic, the fact that she had to drive to Kings Cross every night after work to score rocks.

 

“Why aren't there any decent crack dealers around here?” she would moan, repeatedly. “I hate having to drive all the way to the Cross to buy. I've never found a source for decent stuff around here. Why is that?”

 

“It's a mystery, I suppose,” I would tell her.

 

The visits became more and more regular. I'm sure Stoker had the good sense to ignore her, but ever since Amy had discovered my “secret” I
suppose she now thought of us as friends, and I became her unwilling confidant. She continually found excuses to come into the garage and bore me stupid with the minutiae of her life. After a week of this I started giving serious consideration to leaving the job.

 

I lasted another month. The job was easy, and the money was useful. But the main reason I had for liking the job—not having to deal with other people—was now irreconcilably ruined. One day after drinking my methadone in the chemist's I walked out onto the street and turned right instead of left. I went to McDonald's instead of Stoker's house and bought breakfast. Once I was half an hour late for work I left the restaurant and called RJ and set up a meet to buy some coke and heroin.

 

My time of being an employed citizen was, for now at least, over.

 

The kicker was that a month or so later I was watching the local news. The police raided the video shop right across from where Amy lived with her idiot boyfriend and her little shit children, after a tip off that people were selling crack cocaine out of there. What they found was a sophisticated operation where crack was on sale for bulk purchases. The bundles where stashed away in VHS copies of the latest movies. In the back room they were producing the rocks from powder cocaine in a mini production line. I laughed to myself, wondering if Amy had seen this yet.

 

Poor, dumb Amy.

Jack was an
eighteen-year-old kid with a shaved head that I thought at first was because of an affiliation to skinhead culture, but which I later discovered was because he was deeply ashamed of his natural, bright ginger locks. The first time I heard him speak was quite typical: it was during the Tuesday-night Narcotics Anonymous meeting in Camden. It took place in a filthy, cold room above a community center that everybody referred to as “the crack house.” He shared a long, meandering story in which he came across as a rather buffoonish, comical character. In this story, some friends set him up on a blind date. As he was “sober” he had assumed his friends would be decent enough to set him up with a similarly sober girl. I remember at this point wondering if there was such a thing as a sober eighteen-year-old in London. It seemed entirely possible that
Jack was the only one—a kind of twelve-step Omega Man.

 

Anyway, the story continued. Of course the girl, Louise, was not sober. In fact, she showed up piss drunk to meet Jack. When he told her that he didn't drink or do drugs, she just smiled and said, “That's okay mate—all the more for me!”

 

I smiled. Nobody else did. What was it with fucking NA meetings? Nobody had a sense of humor.

 

The story continued and at one point featured a stone-cold sober Jack holding the girl's hair as she vomited twelve Bacardi Breezers and a döner kebab into the piss-stinking toilets of the Intrepid Fox on Wardour Street. The tale culminated on a night bus at two in the morning, with the obliterated Louise throwing strawberries (I can't remember where the strawberries came from) at the assorted drunks, psychos, hard men, and yardies riding the N87 to Wandsworth that night.

 

“What the fuck are you doing?” Jack whined, trying to grab her wrists before somebody beat the living shit out of him.

 

“I'm sharing the strawberries, dickhead!” came the reply.

 

I laughed. Everybody looked at me, Jack included. I held up my hands in a kind of
I'm sorry but it was funny!
way. He seemed genuinely aggrieved. I talked to him afterward, and that was when I
realized that Jack wasn't even an addict. He was attending NA meetings because he thought he smoked too much weed. I shook my head sadly at him.

 

“You're eighteen,” I said as gently as possible. “You're
meant
to smoke too much weed!”

 

I had offended Jack for the second time that night. He frowned and shot me an expression that only overly serious eighteen-year-olds can give.

 

“My addiction,” he said, completely seriously, “Deserves as much respect as yours!”

 

So I filed Jack away mentally as just another asshole kid who needed to define himself through his problems—real or perceived. I thought it was cynical how the NA meetings embraced him, despite how obvious it was that he didn't have a problem. Now Jack was interacting with real-life addicts—crackheads, prostitutes, junkies—people he would never have had any contact with in the real world. For someone as guileless and naive as he seemed, this probably wouldn't be a good thing. Little did I know that in a matter of weeks I would be living with Jack, and everything would fall apart.

 

The meetings were now superfluous to my needs. I didn't have any friends in the program. But I did have some people I thought I could use to my advantage, and that kept me coming back.

 

Michael, the guy I knew from the Narcotics Anonymous meeting that I attended on Tuesday
nights, still had the illegal sublet available on his old council flat in White Hart Lane. I asked around because I was informed that the lease was coming up on the flat share in Batman Close and we would all have to be out at the end of the month. The beer belly and the South African were going to take the opportunity to go backpacking. Susan and I were too high to make any adequate provisions for this event, so I decided it would be prudent to keep attending NA meetings to secure Michael's sublet. Susan stopped showing up with me, content instead to sit around the flat shooting heroin, watching daytime television, and smoking cigarettes.

 

But, of course, secrets do not last long in NA meetings and suddenly Jack was sniffing around Michael, wanting to get in on the action. One day Michael took Susan and I out to see his place. We took the tube to Seven Sisters, and then an aboveground train out to White Hart Lane. The area was run-down, nothing but high-rise council flats, shabby-looking semi-detached houses, low-end supermarkets, and corner shops. All they had out there was the football ground. To Michael, this was a selling point of Herculean proportions.

 

“You're just dahn the road from the ground, mate. It's fuckin' ace. You can hear 'em cheer whenever Tottenham score! Blinding!”

 

Michael obviously fancied himself as a wide boy. He looked like he would be handy with his fists. He was always in a Fila tracksuit and pristine
trainers. He made his money as a ticket tout, now that he was out of the drug game.

 

“Fackin' Madonna's coming to play London soon! I 'ave five of us gonna get in the line for tickets. They'll 'ave a limit, but these fuckers are gonna go for a couple hundred each, mate! Nice little profit, yer know?”

 

The flat was on the seventeenth floor of a piss-stinking council rabbit warren. The elevator was literally sopping with urine and garbage. Susan made a disgusted face at me, but I just shrugged and told her to get in. Michael seemed entirely oblivious to it. He just seemed happily surprised that it was working. Inside, the place was a shambles. Dirty clothes lay all over the floor, and the air was stale. It had two bedrooms and a small bathroom. The main bedroom was at the back and had balconies where you could walk out and enjoy the view of the gray skies and the countless other high-rises. It was one of the most singularly depressing panoramas I have ever seen.

 

“I've not been back since I quit the brown, you know? I had to get out of here to get clean. Too many memories. Too hard to stay clean here, you know? I've been in this flat ten years, using for all of them. You see down there?”

 

Michael pointed to a muddy patch of grass, seventeen floors down.

 

“Yeah.”

 

“A mate of mine jumped out my window and landed there. Broke both of his legs and his hips too. 'E's in a fuckin' chair now, the fuckin' cabbage.”

 

“Why did he jump?”

 

“We was smoking rocks. I dunno. I s'pose he thought he heard something, you know what I mean?”

 

The deal was that the flat would be free in two weeks, and Susan and I could move in. The flat in Hammersmith had to be vacated in a week and a half. I asked Michael if there was any way he could clean out sooner than two weeks. He just shrugged and didn't answer.

 

“There's something else,” he said. “I promised the other room to Jack. Do you mind?”

 

Michael saw the look on my face.

“'E's all right. He's just young is all. He won't be any trouble!”

 

Susan was livid, and we had an argument on the way home. She was already complaining about having to share the flat with Jack.

 

“You got a better idea, Susan? Maybe we should put a fucking down payment on our own place? I hear Chelsea's nice!”

 

“Fuck off. You should have told Michael no when he brought up Jack's name.”

 

“You were there. Why didn't you tell him?”

 

“You're the man!”

 

“Yeah. That's why I've been out twice a fucking week praying with these cunts, picking up fucking key rings for making it nine months clean and fucking serene and having to listen to their fucking bullshit, and everybody asking me ‘Oh, why don't you have a sponsor?' and all the rest of it! I've done my part. If this place ain't good enough, go get a fucking paper and start looking for another place yourself.”

 

“Fuck that. Let's just call RJ.”

 

“All right. That's more like it.”