The Patrick Melrose Novels (23 page)

‘What ju wan, man? What ju looking for?'

‘Clear tape … red tape … yellow tape. What you want?'

‘Smack,' said Patrick.

‘Shit, man, you from the police. You're a policeman.'

‘No, I'm not. I'm an Englishman,' Patrick protested.

‘Get out the cab, man, we don't sell you nothin' in the cab.'

‘Wait here,' said Patrick to the driver. He got out of the taxi. One of the dealers took him by the arm and started to march him round the corner.

‘I'm not going any further,' said Patrick as they were about to lose sight of the taxi.

‘How much you want?'

‘Give me four dime-bags of clear tape,' said Patrick carefully unpeeling two twenty-dollar bills. He kept the twenties in the left trouser pocket, tens in the right trouser pocket, fives and ones in the overcoat pockets. The hundreds remained in their envelope in the inside coat pocket. This way he never tempted anybody with a show of cash.

‘I'll give you six for fifty, man. You git one extra bag.'

‘No, four is fine.'

Patrick pocketed the four little bags of greaseproof paper, turned around and climbed back into the cab.

‘We go hotel now,' said the Chinaman eagerly.

‘No, just drive me round the block for a bit. Take me to Sixth and B.'

‘What you go lound block for?' The driver mumbled a Chinese curse, but moved off in the right direction.

Patrick had to test the smack he had just bought before he left the area altogether. He tore open one of the bags and poured the powder into the hollow formed in the back of his hand by the tendon of his raised thumb. He raised the tiny quantity of white powder to his nose and sniffed it up.

Oh, God! It was vile. Patrick clutched his stinging nose. Fuck, wank, blast, shit, damn.

It was a hideous cocktail of Vim and barbs. The scouring powder gave that touch of genuine bitterness to the mix, and the barbiturates provided a small thud of sedation. There were some advantages, of course. You could take ten of these bags a day and never become a junkie. You could be arrested with them and not be charged with possession of heroin. Thank God he hadn't shot it up, the Vim afterburn would have scorched his veins. What was he doing scoring off the street? He must be mad. He should have tried to get hold of Chilly Willy and sent him round to Loretta's. At least there were some traces of heroin in her little greaseproof packages.

Still, he wouldn't throw away this rubbish until he knew he could get something better. The cab had arrived at Sixth and C.

‘Stop here,' said Patrick.

‘I no wai' here,' shouted the driver in a sudden burst of vexation.

‘Oh, well, fuck off then,' said Patrick, tossing a ten-dollar bill into the passenger seat and getting out of the cab. He slammed the door and stalked off towards Seventh Street. The taxi screeched away from the kerb. When it had gone, Patrick was conscious of a hush in which his footsteps seemed to ring loudly on the pavement. He was alone. But not for long. On the next corner, a group of about a dozen dealers were standing around outside the Bargain Grocery Store.

Patrick slowed down, and one of the men, spotting him first, detached himself from the group and sauntered across the street with a buoyant and muscular gait. An exceptionally tall black man, he wore a shiny red jacket.

‘How you doing?' he asked Patrick. His face was completely smooth, his cheekbones high, and his wide eyes seemingly saturated with indolence.

‘Fine,' said Patrick. ‘How about you?'

‘I'm good. What you looking for?'

‘Can you take me to Loretta's?'

‘Loretta,' said the black man lazily.

‘Sure.' Patrick was frustrated by his slowness and, feeling the book in his overcoat pocket, he imagined whipping it out like a pistol and gunning the dealer down with its ambitious first sentence, ‘There is only one really serious philosophical problem: it is suicide.'

‘How much you lookin' for?' asked the dealer, reaching nonchalantly behind his back.

‘Just fifty dollars' worth,' said Patrick.

There was a sudden commotion on the other side of the street and he saw a half-familiar figure hobbling towards them in an agitated way.

‘Don't stick him, don't stick him,' the new character shouted.

Patrick recognized him now: it was Chilly, clutching his trousers. He arrived, stumbling and out of breath. ‘Don't stick him,' he repeated, ‘he's my man.'

The tall black man smiled as if this was a truly hilarious incident. ‘I was going to stick you,' he said, proudly showing Patrick a small knife. ‘I didn't know yuz knew Chilly!'

‘What a small world,' said Patrick wearily. He felt totally detached from the threat that this man claimed to represent, and impatient to get on with his business.

‘That's right,' said the tall man, ever more ebullient. He offered his hand to Patrick, after removing the knife. ‘My name's Mark,' he said. ‘You ever need anything, ask for Mark.'

Patrick shook his hand and smiled at him faintly. ‘Hello, Chilly,' he said.

‘Where you been?' asked Chilly reproachfully.

‘Oh, over to England. Let's go to Loretta's.'

Mark waved goodbye and lolloped back across the street. Patrick and Chilly headed downtown.

‘Extraordinary man,' drawled Patrick. ‘Does he always stab people when he first meets them?'

‘He's a bad man,' said Chilly. ‘You don't wanna hang around him. Why din't you ask for me?'

‘I did,' Patrick lied, ‘but of course he said you weren't around. I guess he wanted a free hand to stab me.'

‘Yeah, he's a bad man,' repeated Chilly.

The two men turned the corner of Sixth Street and Chilly almost immediately led Patrick down a short flight of steps into the basement of a dilapidated brownstone building. Patrick was quietly pleased that Chilly was taking him to Loretta's, instead of leaving him to wait on a street corner.

There was only one door in the basement, reinforced with steel and equipped with a brass flap and a small spyglass. Chilly rang the bell and soon after a voice called out suspiciously, ‘Who's that?'

‘It's Chilly.'

‘How much you want?'

Patrick handed Chilly fifty dollars. Chilly counted the money, opened the brass flap and stuffed it inside. The flap retracted quickly and remained closed for what seemed like a long time.

‘You got a bag for me?' asked Chilly, shifting from leg to leg.

‘Of course,' replied Patrick magnificently, taking a ten-dollar bill out of his trouser pocket.

‘Thanks, man.'

The flap reopened and Patrick clawed out the five little bags. Chilly got one for himself, and the two men left the building with a sense of achievement, counterbalanced by desire.

‘Have you got any clean works?' asked Patrick.

‘My ole lady got some. You wanna come back to my place?'

‘Thanks,' said Patrick, flattered by these multiplying signs of trust and intimacy.

Chilly's place was a room on the second floor of a fire-gutted building. Its walls were blackened by smoke, and the unreliable staircase littered with empty matchbooks, liquor bottles, brown-paper bags, heaps of cornered dust, and balls of old hair. The room itself, only contained one piece of furniture, a mustard-coloured armchair covered in burns, with a spring bursting from the centre of the seat, like an obscene tongue.

Mrs Chilly Willy – if that was her correct title, mused Patrick – was sitting on the arm of this chair when the two men came in. She was a large woman, more masculine in build than her skeletal husband.

‘Hi, Chilly,' she said dozily, obviously further from withdrawal than he was.

‘Hi,' he said, ‘you know my man.'

‘Hi, honey.'

‘Hello,' beamed Patrick charmingly. ‘Chilly said you might have a spare syringe.'

‘I might,' she said playfully.

‘Is it new?'

‘Well, it ain't exactly noo, but I boiled it and everythin'.'

Patrick raised one eyebrow with deadly scepticism. ‘Is it
very
blunt?' he asked.

She fished a bundle of loo paper out of her voluminous bra and carefully unwrapped the precious package. At its centre was a threateningly large syringe which a zookeeper would have hesitated to use on a sick elephant.

‘That's not a needle, it's a bicycle pump,' Patrick protested, holding out his hand.

Intended for intramuscular use, the spike was worryingly thick, and when Patrick detached the green plastic head that held it he could not help noticing a ring of old blood inside. ‘Oh, all right,' he said. ‘How much do you want for it?'

‘Gimme two bags,' urged Mrs Chilly, wrinkling up her nose endearingly.

It was an absurd price, but Patrick never argued about prices. He tossed two bags into her lap. If the stuff was any good he could always get more. Right now he had to shoot up. He asked Chilly to lend him a spoon and a cigarette filter. Since the light in the main room had failed, Chilly offered him the bathroom, a room without a bath in it, but with a black mark on the floor where there might once have been one. A naked bulb cast a dim yellow light on the insanely cracked basin and the seatless old loo.

Patrick trickled some water into the spoon and rested it at the back of the basin. Tearing open the three remaining packages, he wondered what sort of gear it was. Nobody could claim that Chilly looked well on a diet of Loretta's smack, but at least he wasn't dead. If Mr and Mrs Chilly were planning to shoot it up, there was no reason why he shouldn't. He could hear them whispering next door. Chilly was saying something about ‘hurting' and was obviously trying to get the second bag out of his wife. Patrick emptied the three packets into the spoon and heated the solution, the flame from his lighter licking the already blackened underside of the spoon. As soon as it started to bubble, he cut off the heat and put the steaming liquid down again. He tore a thin strip off the cigarette filter, dropped it in the spoon, removed the spike from the syringe, and sucked the liquid up through the filter. The barrel was so thick that the solution barely rose a quarter of an inch.

Dropping his overcoat and jacket on the floor, Patrick rolled up his sleeve and tried to make out his veins in the faint light which gave a hepatic glow to every object that was not already black. Luckily, his track marks formed brown and purple threads, as if his veins were gunpowder trails burned along his arm.

Patrick rolled the sleeve of his shirt tight around his bicep and pumped his forearm up and down several times, clenching and unclenching his fist at the same time. He had good veins and, despite a certain shyness that resulted from his savage treatment of them, he was in a better position than many people whose daily search for a vein sometimes took up to an hour of exploratory digging.

He picked up the syringe and rested its point on the widest section of his track marks, slightly sideways to the scar. With such a long spike there was always a danger that it would go through the vein altogether and into the muscle on the other side, a painful experience, and so he approached the arm at a fairly low angle. At this crucial moment the syringe slipped from his hand and landed on a wet patch of the floor beside the loo. He could hardly believe what had happened. He felt vertiginous with horror and disappointment. There was a conspiracy against his having any fun today. He leaned over, desperate with longing, and picked up the works from the damp patch. The spike wasn't bent. Thank God for that. Everything was all right. He quickly wiped the syringe on his trousers.

By now his heart was beating fast and he felt that visceral excitement, a combination of dread and desire, which always preceded a fix. He pushed the painfully blunt tip of the needle under his skin and thought he saw, miracle of miracles, a globule of blood shoot into the barrel. Not wanting to waste any time with such an unwieldy instrument, he put his thumb on the plunger and pushed it straight down.

He felt a violent and alarming swelling in his arm and recognized immediately that the spike had slipped out of his vein and he had squirted the solution under his skin.

‘Shit,' he shouted.

Chilly came shuffling through. ‘What's happening, man?'

‘I missed,' said Patrick through clenched teeth, pushing the hand of his wounded arm up against his shoulder.

‘Oh, man,' croaked Chilly sympathetically.

‘Can I suggest you invest in a stronger light bulb?' said Patrick pompously, holding his arm as if it had been broken.

‘You shoulda used the flashlight,' said Chilly, scratching himself.

‘Oh, thanks for telling me about it,' snapped Patrick.

‘You wanna go back and score some more?' asked Chilly.

‘No,' said Patrick curtly, putting his coat back on. ‘I'm leaving.'

By the time he hit the street Patrick was wondering why he hadn't taken up Chilly's offer. ‘Temper, temper,' he muttered sarcastically. He felt weary, but too frustrated to sleep. It was eleven thirty; perhaps Pierre had woken up by now. He had better go back to the hotel.

Patrick hailed a cab.

‘You live around here?' asked the driver.

‘No, I was just trying to score,' Patrick sighed, posting the bags of Vim and barbs out of the window.

‘You wanna score?'

‘That's right,' sighed Patrick.

‘Shee-eet, I know a better place than this.'

‘Really?' said Patrick, all ears.

‘Yeah, in the South Bronx.'

‘Well, let's go.'

‘All right,' laughed the driver.

At last a cab driver who was helpful. An experience like this might put him in a good mood. Perhaps he should write a letter to the Yellow Cab Company. ‘Dear sir,' murmured Patrick under his breath, ‘I wish to commend in the highest possible terms the initiative and courtesy of your splendid young driver, Jefferson E. Parker. After a fruitless and, to be perfectly frank, infuriating expedition to Alphabet City, this knight errant, this, if I may put it thus, Jefferson Nightingale, rescued me from a very tiresome predicament, and took me to score in the South Bronx. If only more of your drivers displayed the same old-fashioned desire to serve. Yours, et cetera, Colonel Melrose.'