A Summer on the Cours Gambetta

In the summer when the trees are full the sunlight falls in mottled dabs upon the Cours Gambetta. The Cours Gambetta is a long straight road which runs the length of two entire boroughs. For some way along it is lined on both sides with tall Plane trees which branch out and meet in the middle overhead. Beneath this leafy canopy, cafés, patisseries and fabric stores lay open in the dank shade of day. If one walks far enough down the Cours Gambetta the road transforms: the ornate architecture of the 6 storey apartment buildings modernises; the cafes drop away; the people become less chic on less money, and the trees spare out until, after a moment, they are not there at all. Here the sun is always high and blisters down so fiercely that the further distance ripples through the waves of heat and looks like the white dusty home-front of a desert town. It was that walk I made, most days, to score heroin during my first summer in Lyon.

To enter you had to push forward the loose wooden hoardings and slip in through the scissored gap. There inside was another world: a forgotten courtyard strewn with debris under the husk of a condemned and partly demolished building. It looked like Nuremberg just after the second world war; like you could find body parts poking out the rubble. The air stank of ulcerated dogs and dried excrement. Just outside the back entrance of the building, where the shade kept the moisture, clouds of black midges hung about in the stagnant air. 

It was Mamms who first pushed me through into that hidden world. He was a smack sculpted beggar I'd collared one afternoon as he left the Devil's Rest needle exchange with a rucksack full of clean works on his naked back. Abdomen scooped out, round military cap on his head and a rag out his back pocket I followed, the musty smell of stale body odour drifting back my way. He pushed the boarding open and shoved me through so suddenly that I thought he was up to robbing me. Biscuit, his mongrel street hound, wriggled through behind, its large face and body emerging like it was materialising out a time-warp. 

“Voilà!” said Mamms, throwing his arms out to present the derelict skeleton of the building in front of us. "La REAL France." 

"I hope so," I said, looking up and nodding in approval, half an eye still on Mamms. But Mamms wasn't out to rob me; he was too far below the poverty line for that to have helped any. Of greater significance, his shot of choice was subutex not heroin, and subutex came free, courtesy of the French state. Mamms beckoned me on, bouncing over a discarded mattress colonized by black spores. From the building two male junkies, both in their early twenties, came trundling out. They shoved and jostled one another in fun, getting rid of the surplus energy that flagrantly breaking laws and moral codes excites. They had just scored; I could tell. On seeing me they stopped. They were street addicts like Mamms - hair shaved and grown and coloured randomly, cut-down military bottoms, boots held together by various straps and laces and anarcho political messages on their t-Shirts. The first had arms covered in a thousand fresh needle marks and cutting tattoos. They slapped hands with Mamms and calmed down to a serious stance. They spoke words I didn't understand but knew were against me. I'd been around the junk scene for so long that I didn't need Mamms' lies to convince me afterwards that it was nothing. They suspected me of being a cop, and if not a cop, certainly someone there under false pretences. As they left they shot me a squinted hostile look. 

"Cest bon!" said Mamms, once they had gone. "It is good, my friend. Alors, one gram?"

"Oui... and une gram for toi, " I said. 

Mamms repositioned his rucksack on his back, slapped the outside of his thigh and whistled. Biscuit pulled its nose from out a bag of rubbish and shot up the stairs ahead of him. I was left to wait in what was once the back entrance, but had since been turned into a communal toilet. The space to the left of the staircase was full of turds in various stages of dehydration. Sticking out of random shits were old syringes. Flies buzzed around. I stared at the turds and the needles, and in my first French summer, so far away from the rotting bedsits and hostels and junkies of London, I waited for my score and knew that drugs and blood were back on the agenda

I woke in a panic. I had momentarily lost all notion of time and thought the half light outside was that of a new morning. God, Mary must be frantic with worry, I thought. The last thing I could remember was sitting on Mamms girlfriend's sofa and unloading a shot into my ankle. After five months clean it had laid me out good. I squinted the room into focus. Mamms was across from me, on his knees, shooting his girlfriend in the crux of her arm as she sat on a wooden chair turned away from the table. Her face was gritted in a mixture of apprehension and fear. It told me she was new to the needle. On the wall was a clock. It was almost 9pm. The second hand ticked on incredibly slowly. 

Mamms said something which I didn't understand. Then he made a gesture of his eyes closing over and let his head slump forward. It meant I had gone out like that. It made him happy. His girl stirred besides him, itching the side of her face. The shot had worked its magic; she had acquired a delayed response to the world. She looked quizzically at Mamms, her eyes imploring him to understand what was going on. Then she somehow understood and turned slowly and gave me a weak smile. Where her pupils had shrunk I got the impression I was staring into a deep tunnel, at the distant point of a vanishing soul. Her smile flattened out and now her face looked traumatised, like she was trying to communicate an unspeakable horror. Her eyes closed over. Mamms stroked her back tenderly. I knew then that she had a huge tragedy lying host within her.

“Is that the correct time?” I asked, pointing to the clock. She tried to open her eyes but the heroin was too strong in her. She gave up and nodded, made some kind of a sound. 

“I must go,” I said, “my girlfriend will be dying with worry.” I collected my affairs, slipped my shoe on and left.

When the evening comes down on the city and shadows stretch and fall in every direction it's a beautiful thing. Some roads are a blur of red and blue and white neon signs, and others are tall and narrow and run along with tall, Haussmannesque style apartment buildings. There are smaller roads too with maisonettes and antique streetlamps and still others which turn and crawl off into holes of impenetrable blackness. To a dark sky and history's echo I walked my way home, through the fragrances of the urban sprawl, back down the Cours Gambetta. On this return journey the world was suddenly alive. I once again felt the strong, unmistakeable presence of existence. In a foreign town, shot full of heroin, the streets were awash with drama and danger and sinister, toothless criminality. 

The stairwell of my apartment block seemed lonely in its artificial light, like a cave with a single stalactite dripping water. I knew what likely awaited me. As I entered the apartment Mary came out the salon with a frantic look on her face and her phone to her ear. "Yes, yes it's him," she said, closing the phone. I lowered my head, so my eyes were hidden, and guided her back into the salon. 

"Where have you been?" she asked. “I was worried and didn't know what to do." I laid my cards out straight, placing what was left of the smack on the table in front of her. It was in a bag much larger than what she was used to seeing in London. It took her a few seconds to realise what it was. She looked at me like it was a joke; hoping I'd save her. But I'm no saviour. I looked into her eyes and she looked at mine. What she saw was the conspicuous regard of heroin, the pinprick pupils and distraught look of love that sometimes creeps into the mask of heavy sedation. She put her hand over her mouth and her eyes widened. 

I wasn't going to fight. I had told her that this would happen. The only help I could give her now was to make the nightmare real. I sat down, my emotions steeled against hers. I took out my syringes and, like she had seen hundreds of times before, I cooked up a shot. 

“Do you want one?” I asked.

She didn't reply. Not in words anyway. She sat down besides me, looked at the heroin in the bag, then unpacked a little aluminium cooking cup, measured out a dose and cooked a hit up too. And like that the summer darkened over and our days took on a vitality that had been missing since we arrived. 

We ended up on the Cours Gambetta most days, making the 30 minute walk from the mottled sunlight into the derelict end of town. Mary became friends with Mamms' girlfriend, Céline, a young first year philosophy student. She had met Mamms during the fortnight he had spent begging outside her student lodgings. From a family with money, she spoke good English and in that first month was still going horse-riding in the country every weekend. Her father was American. He wrote cheques in place of love. Mamms was obviously her very real rebellion against that superficial way of life which had left her with everything yet wanting so much. What she was to him I have no idea. All I know is that he loved his dog and gave himself wholly to his canine confidante like I never saw him give to any human being. 

As the summer wore on so the Cours Gambetta wore on through our lives. We woke and showered the sticky night from off our skins and fresh and spright we hit the streets, winding our way on to the Cours. For me there was an attachment to it that was more than just heroin. It was a road which called me, made me want to rise and be out on it as soon as possible. I felt at home on the Cours Gambetta, felt like it spanned nations and culture and language. It was one road that I needed no direction or translation on; a road in a foreign country which I knew more integrally than the locals themselves. And as the Cours Gambetta cut through my days so too it came boring through my dream world. In deep sleep I would have hallucinatory visions of it, a letterbox view of my feet, walking through a night that wriggled like a Van Gogh painting, all the people of the junk life coming and going, hanging about in dark doorways, coughing up black blood into handkerchiefs and laughing, having found some deeper understanding of the human condition through the sheer horror of it, through the harshness and the struggle for survival needed to sustain chronic addiction. It was a road where death and life shimmered atop of one another, where the two were quite indistinguishable. In the quiet hours of the night I would wake and see the moon out the window. I could feel the Cours Gambetta in the milky light, nothing going on, the sleeping squat and the dogs in the dark, curled up with their jaws on their haunches, ears pricked, eyes open to the static silence of the night.

Mamms became less reliable as his relationship with Céline deteriorated. She would no longer allow him to stay over and so we'd turn up at hers in the afternoon and wait for Mamms to put in a show. Céline would shoot a shot and become manic, enter into a strange fantasy world of theatre and personas, in and out her bedroom changing into different outfits. One moment she'd appear as a hippy chick in dress and bandanna, then as a cowgirl in tan suede skirt and jacket, then in ultra small denim shorts and a top cut just below her breasts, galloping around the room like a ballet dancer with coloured ribbons of fabric flailing from her wrists. It wasn't madness, just another way of being somebody else for a while. When Mamms finally arrived she would greet him in the character of whoever she was dressed as. She thought that getting high and acting completely deranged was what drug people did. 

Leaving Mary and Céline in the safety of the apartment, Mamms and I would head over to the squat. Scoring was rarely quick anymore. If we returned within an hour we were lucky. Most days we'd arrive to be told that the dealer (Julien) was out, somewhere across town reloading supplies. Mamms and I would divide our time between sitting in the shade of the stairwell, alongside the basement of excrement, or slowly circling the dusty yard like prisoners. We could be there for anything up to 6 hours and sometimes Julien never came back at all. On such occasions Mamms and I would return to Céline's and inform the girls that we had nothing. Where the girls had shown a burst of excitement on our entrance we then had to slunk down, feeling guilty, as it registered in them that there would be no fix that night. Everyone's nerves and patience would be exhausted. We'd sit around in the gloom of the bad news, staring at the floor and knowing it would be a long night into tomorrow. As this happened more and more Mary and I began heading into the city centre where I'd go junkie spotting amongst the homeless and find a score for some ridiculous price. Often we'd miss the last metro and have to walk 5 miles home. 

After not even three months on the Cours Gambetta our finances were in ruins. The payments I'd been receiving from London got stopped and the small amount of money we had arrived in France with had dwindled away to nothing. My bank card hit zero and then minus 500 and then stopped working at all. I tossed it in the river like an old playing card. Mary took out a bank loan. To keep as much cash as possible for heroin we walked the roads poor, scrimped on food and tobacco and in just about every way imaginable. We began spacing the heroin out, limiting ourselves to just three shots per day. Sometimes, halfway through another long wait, knowing we didn't have the finances to carry this on much longer anyway, we'd make a sudden and brash decision to cancel our order. With the money we had saved we'd buy fabulous cups of crushed ice drinks, bubblegum and raspberry flavour, and sit in the evening square sucking and munching on the sharp crystals so as our tongues turned bright blue and pink. Then we'd slope off home, proud of ourselves and feeling safe in the knowledge that we still had our bedtime shot to get us into tomorrow. 

October. Trees still full; days shorter. With the evenings came fresh winds that cooled the colour out of the leaves. From all the heroin activity in the squat news started circling of an imminent police raid. We took such murmurs as overly cautious fears until one evening when the anti-crime police stopped and searched Mamms as he left the squat. Mamms had felt something untoward in the air and managed to dump the heroin. When he returned and told us what had happened I was highly suspicious, especially as it had occurred on one of the rare occasions I had not been with him. We waited an hour and then deemed it safe to go out and search for the smack. I was sure it would not be found. To my surprise we recovered it just where Mamms said he had dumped it. It was a relief but it proved to be the last. That evening the squat cleared out, a group of 15 new age punks with dogs and stereos and boxes of CDs, traipsing across town in search of a new place to set up. We watched them go, Julien tall and stooped, weighed down by multiple bags slung over each shoulder, a shredded armless t-shirt and silver bangles hanging loose around his heroin scarred arms. As he crossed the road he lowered his head to the side, pressed a thumb against his inner nostril and blew out a thick slob of mucus from the other. Where he stumbled doing that his dog got caught up around and under him and let out a wild yelp in through the dying evening. We stood watching the troupe cross the road and continue on straight, taking a little through road and leaving the Cours Gambetta behind. 

"Where will they go?" I asked Mary to ask Mamms. 

"They'll find somewhere," he said, "they always do." 

Far far down and away we could still make out the punks. It made me think of a scene from The Grapes of Wrath, the Joad family with their loaded truck heading off to California. We watched the punks for a good few minutes more until suddenly they were out of sight and gone. “Voilà!” said Mamms like it was the end of an era. “Voilà!” 

On the walk home that night the Cours Gambetta seemed sad and quiet. We walked without talking. The night was in and the cold breeze gave us skin bumps. As we approached the oncoming mottled end of the road and readied to turn left onto the Rue Marseille I turned and gave a look back down the Cours. "It's goodbye to an old friend," I said, sadly.

"Who? Mamms?" 

"No... The road." 

"The road? It's just a dirty old road. There's many more." 

"It's autumn," I said. "Can you feel it? Oh God." 

Mary looked up and around. It was like she was looking for autumn. But all she would have seen were the bright and gaudy lights of the Rue Marseille, the red signs of the Kebab houses, the flickering white windows of the five Euro Chinese buffet places and various small shops and neon lights advertising internet cafes and cheap international phone calls. It's true, they are many and all over these dirty roads and none are as filthy as those full of commerce. I breathed in a lungful of poisonous air and lingering two steps behind, reeling on the fumes, I followed Mary home. 

- - -

Thanks as ever for reading, Shane. X

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The Dark Part of the Night

It had been raining, but by then it had stopped. The night was in. Across the sky were vast expanse of cloud, smokey mauve on the deep purple of outer space. Along the damp walls snails slithered away in the dark. It was early summer, and aggravated by the wet, the concentrated scent of leaves and plants was thick in the air. The trees in front gardens were black silhouettes. The sound of dripping water and grit crunching underfoot were all that could be heard. There was noone on the road but me and but for the odd light, in the odd top floor room, the houses sat dead and still and stuffed full of creeping darkness. The road ahead was slick black; the street lights shimmering in the wet ground. Up ahead a traffic light rested on green and there the hightstreet, deserted, ran through. Nothing could possibly be going on now. These were the deathly hours. From over a high wall a pink drooping blossom hung. The garden smelled of rose and the next one along of cat's piss. It was getting on for 3am and I had sneaked out of bed and out the house to score my last three rocks of crack, leaving Mary sound asleep and none-the-wiser that I'd gone. 

Turning onto the high street, heading for the old church, I could make out two figures up ahead. One was a man with his right leg locked straight and shot outwards at a 45 degree angle. He walked with a cane and in the effort to avoid his disabled leg his upper body was twisted and bent like John Merrick's. Besides him was a small woman with a ponytail and wearing a cheap matching sport's tracksuit a size too large. Her neck was sunken into her back and her arms swung stiffly, capped by forward facing clenched fists the weight of which seemed to help propel her forward. They crossed the high street, turned left and then disappeared down the side of the church. 

I followed fifty metres behind. As I walked I discretely clocked everything on both sides of the road. At a lit up bus-stop, across from the church turning, was a man. There were no night buses on this route; he could be only one of two things: a junkie or a cop. I wandered casually passed him. Junkie - no doubt about it. I did a u-turn. As I repassed him again I checked my phone, letting him know I was on the score too. 

"Oi, mate, dya just phone Ace? How longs he saying?" 

"Said he's on his way. Sounded like he'd just woke up!" 

"He dint say how long?" 

"Nah." 

"Cunt!" he said, jabbing his face forward and stopping bluntly before it'd even gone an inch, the force expelling the word with a seething violence. 

"You shouldn't wait here," I said, "he doesn't like it." 

"Fuck what he likes. I'm not his fucking slave. It's less suss here than down that fucking alley." I didn't try to convince him. 

Across the road, from the opposite direction I'd arrived, a longhaired junkie known as Steggs was making his way down. He wore cut down military trousers and sandals and walked with a huge lumbering gait as though he was returning from 30 years of headbanging. The rain hadn't only brought the snails and slugs out. 

"Ok, I'm off same place as him," I said, to the stranger at the bus-stop. "You staying here?" He nodded, looked annoyed and said, "Lanky black cunt!" I left. He would eventually come to his senses. He's not gonna wait 45 minutes and then fuck his score up by pissing off the dealer. 

I didn't like the alley myself. One side was the church wall and the other was the high backwalls of residential gardens. The alley was just wide enough to allow a car to pass down. I entered. It was pitch black. 

"Steggs," I whispered. "Steggs?" After a moment I hit an outstretched arm and Steggs pulled me in. That was the deal. The residential backwalls all had long wooden yard doors set a foot back in them and the church wall was pitted along with shallow alcoves. So as the alley appeared empty to any passers-by or cruising police cars everyone sidled into these recesses and stood as still as the Queen's guards. As we waited we whispered. Now and again the screen from a phone would light up as someone checked how long Ace had been or phoned him afresh.

"What you after, mate?" Asked Steggs. It's never a good idea to divulge that, especially concerning crack. A junkie scoring would never dream ask for a pinch of heroin, but crack is a different game and because it's not physically addictive is looked upon in a whole new light. It's seen as a luxury... a privilege.. a something you can score only once your heroin habit is secured. It's an extravagance someone could beg you a small rock of, especially someone with a crack habit as voracious as Stegg's. 

"Just a couple of brown," I said. "Would love a white though." 

"Me too," said Steggs. The lying cunt. It's 3am. You only ever score crack at 3am. If you've the cash your heroin addiction is taken care of well in advance of such criminal hours. The only users who may honestly be scoring smack at such a time are the prostitutes, returning home from their last punter and clucking. We stood silent for a while. Steggs pulled his hair back and banded it in a ponytail. 

"Give him a bell," he said. 

"No point, mate. It won't change anything. If we're the last ones he's waiting on he'll be here soon enough. He'll not come out multiple times at this hour. If he's still waiting for others to confirm their presence he'll not arrive until they do. " 

"Yeah, but he don't know I'm here yet mate... Phone him and tell him Steggas has arrived!" 

I phoned. Before I could tell Ace the quite ridiculous news that 'Steggas' was here he said, "Ten mins, bro," and closed the phone. 

"Ten," I said to Steggs. 

"Wots' E sayin?" asked a voice out the dark. "Ten," hissed Steggs from his toothless mouth. 

A little way down I could see someone smoking. Each time the cigarette seared I could just about make out who it was. It was the woman in the tracksuit and pony tail, moving about in the centre of the alley as if desperate for the toilet. She wasn't desperate for the toilet. If it were the case she'd squat and piss without the slightest hesitation. What she was desperate for was crack cocaine, dancing through her comedown - pacing, fidgeting, turning in circles, keeping up rhythms which passed time and gave the jittery mind something to concentrate on. 

"Wouldya look at her!" said John. "She'll av us all shook up carrying on like that." 

She could, it was true. But there's always one and they're often a lot worse than that. And, if anyone thought for a second that the residents really didn't know what was going on behind their walls, then more fool them. They all knew. Had probably each phoned the police a half dozen times and learnt nothing gets done - nothing can be done. As long as we made an effort and didn't litter the place with needles and excrement they no longer bothered. Probably took some comfort from the fact that we were carrying out our debauchery directly under the wrathful and vengeful watch of God, delighting in the thought that we'd at least get punished once the drugs had taken their ultimate toll. Fatal OD or death from some blood born virus was neither the end nor an escape: it was merely the beginning: our real torture would begin only after we were dead. Fortunately, not many using addicts believe in such fairytales. For us the church is just the place where we score and the only saviour is a black West Indian yardie who snatches your money and spits bags of drugs at you in disgust. Our Jesus doesn't give a fuck and it's just the way we like it. 

I could smell his cheap supermarket sports aftershave even though I couldn't see him. It was Adidas or some crap that he'd splashed on and was surely doing him more damage than the drugs. A new user. Young. Many start out like that. Using their high time to shower and mess about with their hair and skin, keeping up appearances. Slapping on some cheap splash and jumping into freshly pressed clothes just to go to score. That'll all soon stop. In a year he'll be like me, or worse, like Steggs - if he really lets himself go. 

The young perfumed addict hung about alone. I could see his form but no more. The alley smelled like the shower gel aisle in a supermarket. Somene told him to get himself put away. New on the scene he apologised and thanked the anonymous junkie for the help and struck up a conversation with him, speaking too loudly and relating outrageous tales of the junkie life, of a thousand things which never happened. A natural born bullshitter - he was in good company here. 

When Ace still hadn't arrived 20 minutes later I phoned him. 

"I'm fuckin d'ere bro," he said, curtly. If he was here I'd be ale to see him and the only things I could see were Steggs and one or two cigarettes burning away in the distance. 

"Steggs, did you see the fella I was with at the bus-stop when you arrived?" 

"Glimpsed him. Seen him around a few times. He often gets off T's lot round the flats. Don't know him though." 

"I'm gonna go and give him a shout. You know what Ace is like, he'll refuse to serve him for hotting the place up waiting there." 

I left Steggs and exited the alley, making sure no-one was happening to be passing as I stole out. Up on the high street the junkie at the bus-stop was now with two other addicts - two middle aged women, one white and the other a golden colour. The fool! He was collaring people and telling them to wait there. I crossed the road and advised them to get in the alley, that Ace would refuse to serve them for waiting there. 

"Serious?" Said the white woman. She was chewing gum. 

"Serious," I said, "and he's on his way." The two women had no qualms about where to wait and were now with me ready to return. "You coming mate?" I said to the man. He cast his eyes up and gave a disinterested look around at the deserted highstreet. "Fuck it. If the cunts that funny about where we wait I'll come. It's him who'll be nabbed with all the gear when it comes on top." Together, the four of us headed the short distance back to the alley. I rejoined Steggs and the other three backed up church side into one of the alcoves. There were now at least 8 addicts waiting on Ace, at least, because I'd seen glowing cigarettes in the distance too which were from others who must have arrived before us. 

"What the fucks that?" Steggs suddenly said, looking down the alley. I followed his gaze. At the top end a car had turned in, the headlights glaring in the distance. 

"On top!" A voice cried. No-one budged. 

"Is it moving?" Steggs asked. 

"Can't tell," I said. 

"If anyone's holding get rid of it," another unseen person said to everyone. A couple of sniggers broke out at that suggestion. I'm not sure if they found it humourous that anyone would drop their gear amongst an alley full of addicts, or funny the idea that any of us had any gear to offload. The best thing to do in any case would be for anyone holding to leave the alley and lurk about at a safe distance until sure if the car was friend or foe. No-one dumped anything and no-one left. The reason why no-one left was because it could very well be Ace in the car, the car which was clearly moving now, slowly so as not to scrape along either wall, the headlights getting bigger and brighter as it crawled its way down. 

We were all tense. For most of us the police would be nothing but an inconvenience but there would be some amongst us who would have had warrants or been caught out on curfew. My biggest concern was that if it were the police then our meeting with Ace was buggered and there'd be no gear of any kind or colour for anyone. I was also thinking of what time I'd then finally make it home, and after the delay of a police stop Mary would surely have roused at some time in the night, figured I was not there and be sat, crying at my shooting table by the window when I returned. She was possibly already there. It was over an hour I'd been gone and I'd estimated on leaving that I'd have been back and sorted within forty five minutes. We stood as thin as we could in our recesses. All talking had stopped as the car now approached close enough to illuminate our world. 

Good God! There must have been 20 plus addicts in the alley. As the car inched further along more junkies were lit up and picked out on either side, mostly in couples, men and women of varying unhealthy hues, stood like grotesque statues in their carrels, breath held and mouths closed as if in ready preparation to say nothing to the police. What the driver must have thought as his headlights picked out this secret life of vice, the dead and dying with widestruck eyes and missing limbs, scooped out junkie features, human sized praying mantis' dressed in an array of bizarre and mismatched clothes, each person a sight in their own right but looking twice as debauched and desperate alongside their scoring cohort. I watched the line of junkie faces. Steggs and I were in the last recess, nearest the entrance, but far enough down to be out of sight from the street. 

"Fuck me, would ya take a look at the state of us lot!" Steggs said, laughing. "Talk about not wanting to meet us down a dark alley. Fuck." And that's when I saw her, stood there in her large black coat over her pyjama bottoms, cheap comfy trainers with Velcro straps across the fronts. I was startled and did a double take, the light reflecting off her large pale face, her lips devoured by her mouth where she didn't have her false teeth in, the huge granny gut and the slop of loose hung breasts. Her hair was brushed back and down and she wore a screwed up expression of annoyance as if pissed off the car had lit her up. 

"MUM?" I cried, astonished, looking across at her in surprise. She turned and saw me and just shook her head obviously in a mood. Whoever was in the car had seen us now regardless. I rushed across its lights, over to my mother. 

"What the fuck you doing here?" I asked. "Thought you had no cash?" 

"Yeah, I thought you didnt!" She said, throwing the suggestion back at me in the petty way she had done all her life when caught out. "It's why ya left earlier innit?" 

"That and to get home... You know how Mary is." 

"Yeah, ya seem to care a lot about that Shane!" Then she looked over at the car. "Who the fuck is this in this car?" She said. We both looked down at the vehicle. It had come to a stop and Steggs was lit up blinded in the headlights. Whoever was inside was fixing to get out. 

"Oi Oi... Eyes down for a full house!" someone shouted out the dark. But the car was not the police, it was a mini cab. The back door opened, crashed into the wall and Chelsea John got out. 

"Fuck me, what do you lot fucking look like standing there doing ya best fucking impressions of death. They've buried healthier life in the fucking church graveyard!" 

A concerted groan took up around the alley. A groan born out of everyone having held their breath, anti-climax but relief it wasn't the police and commiserations that of all the people it could have been it was Chelsea John who had stepped out. He was a well known addict on the scene, had robbed or cheated just about all of us at one time or another but was a generous enough fella when he had a touch. 

"Alright Les," he said to my mum. 

"Yeah, alright, John, " she replied not with the same warmth. 

"John, tell that cunt to kill the lights!" Steggs said. 

"Chill out, matey... We're only scoring. No-one gives a fuck. Anyway, we're straight off... Ace is on his way, passed the fucka as he peddled like a cunt along the high street. Gave him a blast of the horn... almost sent him into a fucking storefront window!" 

A little buzz went through the junkies followed by a hive of activity as everyone got their money out and ready. At the near end of the alley a bike flashed by and stopped just out of distance. I could hear the peddles still spinning. Ace, well over 6ft, turned into the entrance backlit by the jaundiced lighting of the street behind him. He wore a summer sports top with the hood over his head. Chelsea John, last to arrive, was the first to push his way to him. 

"Four W, Ace mate," he said. 

"Bro, don't ever fucking whistle an beep me in the street, ya'ere, " Ace said, rifling through the notes John had handed him. Satisfied the cash wasn't short he pulled a clear bag from his tracksuit pocket and turned his back as he sorted out four rocks of crack for John. He gave John the rocks and came to his senses at the same time, banging on the windscreen of the car with the flat palm of his hand. 

"Turn your fucking lights off!" he said. 

"It's cool, boss .. It's cool," said Chelsea John, we're leaving." He slipped back into the back of the mini-cab and the car turned its engine over and gradually inched forward and away, the beautiful sound of gravel crunching under its tyres as it went. 

"One and one," Steggs said, giving Ace his cash. He left without acknowledging me or saying goodbye. Lumbered out the alley with his head slightly stooped, shapeshifting into a socially moral member of the community as he hit the street and plodded docilely away into the night, looking like a man who liked a certain kind of music but no more. 

Ace was now besieged by the waiting addicts. There were numbers and letters being thrown at him from all around and hands pushing cash his way. It was like watching a bookie at the racetrack taking last second bets just before the off. Every few seconds a new person or couple exited the alley and turned off to either direction. I stood with my mum, waiting for our opening to step in and get served. 

"What you getting," she asked as we stood there. Ha! That again. Well, we know it's never a good thing to divulge such information but this was my mother asking... An even less incentive to do so. 

"Three white," I said, "and you?" 

"Can only afford one... And for that the poor cats have to go with no litter." I could feel her looking at me, hoping... Waiting. When I didn't respond, she said: "Give us one of ya rocks, Shane... We'll have two each then." 

"Fuck off!" 

"Oh, go on!" 

"No! If he's holding extra I'll buy you one. With so many people he's sure to have surplus. He's a capitalist... It's how it works." 

Ace was holding extra. I was almost the last to be served. With our rocks of white clenched in our fists I walked my mother down the length of the alley and out into the dark quiet of the night at the other end. Out in the street she cast a look down the deserted road, the town all locked up and still and shadowy. "Hope I get home alright," she said. She had just spent an hour lingering about in a dark out-of-the-way alley with supposedly some of the boroughs most depraved souls and now she was worried about walking home along the sleeping residential streets. Of course, she was right. People who are out to cause harm don't hang about down dark uninhabited places; they linger around familiar and well lit streets. If you want to get home safely you should travel the darkest route. I looked down into the ghosttown of the walk home she had. An empty tin can rattled about in the gutter. "I'll walk you back," I said, "But if Mary's awake when I return you're getting the blame." She pulled a face but didn't say a thing. 

With rocks of crack burning a hole in our palms, and on the wind of energy that the thought of the first pipe of a new rock gave us, our pace was at good speed, walking down the shiny wet road home. We made it to my mother's in no time. I followed her up the stairs, took a good lick of rock on her crack pipe, and prickling with existence and nervous energy I gathered myself up and left, leaving my mother alone with her rocks and pipe, hers the last light on in her street. 

My journey home was now a good half hour trot at fair pace. I listened to my own footsteps and played counting games until I lost count. Oh, the loneliness of the city is a beautiful one. I couldn't get over thoughts of all the lives that were taking peace in sleep all around. Great trees reminded me of mysteries from childhood and the moon was a lonesome figure of light in the sky. My thoughts turned to Mary. She had recently blown up about my addiction and had forced me to lie to her about cutting down and weaning myself clean. I purposely told her it would be easy and I'd be drug-free in three weeks. The deal since then was she held my heroin and portioned it out to me three times a day. It allowed her some involvement in my addiction and gave her a modicum of active control in our life. She didn't have the slightest idea that I was also in the midst of a huge crack addiction -- that news would have cooked her clean off the bone.To have woken and found me missing would have meant one thing to her: heroin. And that betrayal, that crack in her dream of getting me clean, would have had her up and sobbing rivers by the window as she waited for me to appear out the dark. 

"Don't let the light be on... Please, please, please!" I repeated over to myself turning onto my road. I kept my head down and on the count of five I looked up. Blackness... Beautiful-lucky-sleepytown-dreamy blackness. The light was off and the window looked like nothing could be living beyond it at all. It was gone 4am and the first birdcalls were ringing out through the fresh morning. I sucked in a last gulp of the fragrant night air, opened the front-door and crept up the unlit stairs. Outside the bedroom I undressed. I didn't want to risk all that good fortune only to wake Mary falling over while trying to pull a sock off. I removed all my clothes and naked, but for three rocks of crack, I entered the room. 

Poor girl. Asleep to the world, her eyes closed over ever so gently, completely oblivious to the nightmare which was raging through her life as she slept. I felt terribly sad and guilty and kissed her and said sorry. I slipped in the bed besides her. She made a little noise of sleepy acknowledgement and turned and put her arm around me. I waited still for a moment. On her first snore I relaxed and felt under my side of the mattress for my crack pipe. In the dark I loaded it up and on my elbow, leaning off over the side of the bed, I lit my lighter, held the flame to the pipe and sucked. The room sparked and crackled and then died down. I inhaled and held and then blew out. The world and my mind came alive in the dark, my eyes pricked wide open and every hair on my body sensitive to life. I took Mary's hand and lowered it down on my cock. She gripped me lightly and I moved gently. And like that, dark and light, happy sad, wanted lonely, white brown, limp hard, soft erect, breathing in and blowing out, l lived through another turbulent night of life. I was there and if she woke and opened her eyes she would see me, a trick straight out the illusionist's handbook, for really, on this dark night into morning, I hadn't made it home at all.
- - -

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The Oedipus Fix

When my mother quit drinking and became a crack and heroin addict those were the start of the good times. Finally we had some common ground, a common plight, something which drew us together in a shared effort to feed the beast of addiction, adapt with what we had and survive. Through heroin and crack cocaine we were to suck and shoot and chase out the ghosts of the past, come full circle in our relationship and return to each other what had been lost through a bizarre and tragic event in our lives. In the midst of those days of addiction, what was gone or had happened in the past became unimportant. All we cared about was the present and maybe tomorrow. But yesterdays were out. Yesterdays were redundant. Nothing will ever happen yesterday.

A family tragedy can have one of two effects: it can blown a family wide apart or it can bind one together for life. Our family tragedy resulted in the former, in my mother going off the rails and becoming a chronic alcoholic and suicidalist. We lost her at that point. And although it was a family tragedy – it affected my brother and two sisters and stepfather – a small matter of biology, that which had not been so significant before, suddenly took on grave proportions and sent my mother and I careering off on converging orbits around twenty years of time.

It was the disappearance of my father which started it. He left one night after an argument with my mother when she refused to lend him money for heroin and never returned. And although this was not the first time he had disappeared, it was the first time he had done so without soon making some kind of contact – even if just to say he was once again in prison. After weeks and then months of receiving no news, my mother conceded to the inevitable that something tragic must have happened to him. She would later say that she imagined he had quietly overdosed and died somewhere, been marked down as one of the many unidentified young deaths in the capital each year.

It was some months after my father's disappearance, in the first half of the new year, that news started breaking across the country of a “House of Horrors” in north London. A man had been arrested after human remains were found clogging up the drains outside the house in which he resided. It transpired that over a five year period, between two houses, 16 young, mostly homosexual men, had been murdered, dismembered, and disposed of in various ways. As with the entire country my mother was gripped by this story and followed in shocked interest as the gruesome tale unfolded. The news broke, went from the front pages to the second, from the second to the third, and then faded away completely awaiting the big trial. It was one afternoon during this quiet period that my mother opened the door to two uniformed police officers and two detectives. Her life would never be the same again. On that humdrum day, with nothing going on but what was on the stove, my mother was informed that my father's skull had been discovered in the flat of Dennis Nilsen: The House of Horrors. My mother's world went silent. She did not hear her own screaming. I heard it, and it did not stop.

My mother changed after that; life changed. Post-murder she would lock herself away in her room, sobbing, drinking and threatening suicide. She became sexually promiscuous, taking lovers of the lowest order, of both sexes and all colours, shapes and sizes. The murder also had a great impact on my life: it greatly magnified my significance of being. I was no longer just my father's son (the only child of four born of him) but I was now the only physical thing left of him. As a consequence, I became my mother's favourite child, the one she would call on for everything and keep always by her side. 

“You have your father's chest,” she would say, crying while fingering the indent below my sternum. Then she would lay her head on me and her tears would collect in the little well of my pectus excavatum. I would stare at the top of her head, at the dark roots which she no longer bothered to bleach. Her hair smelled of vomit. I was terrified to touch her.

My mother's slobbering and drunken affection was one thing, but there was something else going on below, something altogether darker and contradictory and all the more difficult to understand. As often as she would hold and bathe me in tears and alcohol fumes, she just as often rejected me – seemed to despise me. It was as if I were being punished for something. She would constantly call on me, only for me to find her sitting on the floor holding a carving knife and sporting cut and slashed wrists. On other occasions she would screech my name and sobbing, tell me she had cancer and was dying. Through evenings of drunken sex with multiple lovers she would have me remain in her room. At night I would be beckoned to sleep with her. Through the blackest hours, the dystopian hollow of late night radio crackling through the dark, she'd sit naked and sobbing on the edge of the bed, hurting herself and saying she wanted to die and that this life is a rotten life. I'd listen to the top being unscrewed from her bottle of vodka, the chink of glass against glass and the gulping sound of neat alcohol pouring free. Far from being a treasured remnant of my father it seemed that I was a constant reminder of him, never allowing my mother to forget him, or the murder, for a second. And so, with a special kind of hatred reserved in her face, my mother would tell me that she loved me, all the while glaring at me as if I were the murderer himself,

* * *
The feeling of love and hate was mutual: my mother was two different people. Her spectre after the murder attracted and repelled me; beguiled and haunted me. From behind – mid-length blonde hair, slim punkish figure – she held all the promise of the love, comfort and protection that I craved, only for her to turn around to be wearing the hideous made-up mask of chronic alcoholism. It hung lopsided over her real self, covering all my dreams and yearnings. It was in trying to prise away that mask, to get to the woman underneath, that I first began down the road in life I did.

Between that mental longing for my mother, being saddened by the carnage of her sexual life and yet conscious of the types of wild men she admired, a certain path of history was marked out for me. By the age of ten I was going to school with a mock tourniquet tied around my bicep. I'd sit at the back of class acting like I was drugged. My role models became the kind of men who could fuck my own mother, and more than just fuck her: keep her. I realised in that time that we are not only ourselves in life, that we have an historical destiny of being other people as well. I began head-butting brick walls and cast iron doors, cutting words into myself, emulating the psychotic behaviour of the Alan Bleasedale character Yosser Hughes who was so in vogue at the time and my mother's latest hero. I studied these people, incorporated them into my character. They were all leading to one person, a man I was destined to rival and replace: my father.

In the years that followed, as I grew and matured, I became ever more rebellious. I romanced my mother with a progressive descent into wild reckless living, passionate behaviours and self-harm. By the age of 12 I was smoking and from 14 I was a regular drug user – using in front of my mother as she filled her glass with vodka. She would condemn my behaviour, but in the way she spoke of me to friends and neighbours -  or in the way she looked at me as I chopped up lines of speed - I could tell that in some ways it secretly thrilled her, reminded her of someone she had lost. For my part I guess I wanted to impress and hurt her. I was duelling for her heart but also pushing into her face the damage I felt she had caused. I was young and had not yet learnt that adulthood does not make one responsible, and even if it did, there are certain events which occur in life which make your own survival a matter of the greatest importance. And sometimes, to survive, it is necessary not to exist for a while, to block out the trauma and subdue the body to the point of being anaesthetized. In time I would learn that for myself. It would be the point where I understood my mother and where all blame and hatred began to disappear.

Soft, class C and B drugs were one thing, but the real spectre that had forever been in my life, romancing me, was that of heroin. It came from my father, from all the stories which existed of him:, from the memory of having found him after an overdose,  waiting with my mother in the dark street while looking to the distance for the swirling lights of the ambulance to appear. It was a route I was someday sure to take, maybe even a route I needed to take. From the age of 15 on I began seriously enquiring about heroin amongst friends and other drug users I knew. But heroin was not part of their vocabulary and they all, without exception, damned the drug and told me to never touch that shit. It was finally, and quite surreptitiously, that a heroin-like opiate first entered our lives. It came via my mother's latest partner, Geoff, who she had met while he was serving a fifteen year prison sentence for firearms charges and hostage taking. He was up for parole and my mother had agreed that he could be bound over to our abode. He arrived one Friday with a single black Adidas sports bag, pin-prick pupils and strips of small white prescription pills called Temgesic. He said that they were morphine based, an active drug called buprenorphine. He crushed these pills, snorted them and would then sleep. Not long after his arrival my mother began sleeping inordinate amounts as well.

“Geoff, give us a couple of them pills,“ I asked him one afternoon. He gave a cautious look around  and, satisfied that my mother wasn't coming down the hallway,  popped two little pills free from the strip and gave them to me. “Half at a time,” he said. “And for Christ's sake don't tell ya fucking  mother!” I did as Geoff had said. Within an hour I felt like a hero, like my body and soul were finally united. Instantaneously, all other drugs became irrelevant and obsolete. 

Within months of Geoff's arrival we were all psychologically hooked on these pills. As our usage increased, so our immunity built up and we needed ever more for the same ends. We were soon in the position where we could no longer score enough to last us even a week. Each time we had to wait to the end of the month for our contact's prescription to be renewed. We would pass those dry weeks using amphetamines. As the speed dealer was my contact so I began not only scoring for myself but for my mother too. In a joint effort to subdue the opiate cravings we were starting to come together, use together and pass the days high together. It was the beginning of us transgressing the mother/son relationship. From there it was only a matter of time that I would one day arrive home with heroin and use it in front of my mother. And that's what was soon to happen... almost.

* * *

Buprenorphine was a dead duck. Our contact's mother finally died from the cancer which had been eating her alive during the past 18 months. In a single flat we now had three people with psychological opiate addictions and no opiates. For a while Geoff and I hit the streets and homeless shelters looking for a new contact. Buprenorphine was a very rare drug in them days, not yet used to treat heroin addiction. Our search was always fruitless. On occasion we managed to score methadone and a wide range of tranquillizers and anti-psychotics, but they either did nothing, or not enough, or just were not the same. Our collective attention now turned to heroin. We enquired about scoring at every opportunity. Geoff and I would take evening walk-throughs of what we thought were likely places we could score. Heroin is rampant in London, but it is a hidden, secretive world and not at all easy to find that first swing-door in. As complete novices to the scene we looked for it in all the wrong places, asked all the wrong people. We had no idea of the few obvious signs which cut heroin users out. Finding ones way into the world of smack is akin to one of those magic eye puzzles. You stare at the confusion of pattern and see nothing, but once you've cracked the code, revealed the image lying beneath, you can thereafter see nothing else. The world of heroin is like that. It is invisible until you are a part of it, and then it is everywhere and inescapable. It hangs about on every street corner; sits inauspiciously along the bench in the park. It stands waiting at bus-stops and takes no bus, is found pushed up, two at a time, in public telephone booths. It is the man with the army jacket and the limp and the swollen hands, is in the couple down the road who you think are mentally ill. It is the neighbour who begs to borrow five pounds, repays it and borrows it once more. It runs rampant through the old toothless woman who has nothing but a stinking husband with a missing leg. It is in the young man who walks hurriedly past your window six times a day, yabbering into his phone while quickening his pace some more. It is in the emaciated woman in cheap shapeless denim jeans with bloodstains down the inner thigh. It is the beggar who sits alongside the cash machine with two blankets, a bag and a dog, in the transvestite who waits outside the fruit market on warm summer nights like he's touting for last business. It is in 30 year old men with walking canes and crumbling bones and something grey and lost in the face and eyes. It comes hunched and snivelling out of the local hostels at 8am, hobbling off to methadone clinic in a commotion of disputes and disorder and stale smells. It is in the skeletal woman with pink shades and flip-flops, pulled down the high-street by five mongrel dogs off a single leash. It is everywhere and all around. And that is only the start, the illusion that comes forth out the puzzle. For the epidemic is worse than that. Heroin is in that man who just passed you by, in those who have nothing of which to be described. It is in the desk sergeant who books you in and in the lawyer who takes your case. It's in the good Samaritan's other life, the one where he is going under fast himself. It's in the shopkeeper and the taxi-driver and the sober television presenter. It is in the secretary and dental assistant and in the gynaecologist peering between your legs. It's in mansions and terraced houses and the family home, well fed and stable and without the slightest sign of malnutrition or disease. Domesticated and camouflaged, peeping out from behind white nets like any other dying neighbour on civvy street. It passed from the father to the son and now was in the mother too. The holy trinity of the nuclear family. Silver spoons and citric acid and 1ml insulin syringes. Filtering life and shooting away the ghosts of the past, heads bowed between the knees, supple spines and dribble hanging from the mouth. And just like that she came, Our Lady of the Flowers, heroin – brought home to exaltation: the cure to modern life.
'
It was Geoff who found the first dealer. His name was Mark,  a white guy  who served up across the other side of town. What began as a weekend thing soon progressed to us having a mid-week break out too. Three months further on and we were using every other evening. The fishy scent of smoked heroin gradually replaced the smell of the evening dinner, my mother and I anxiously awaiting Geoff's return home and then all of us rattling around squares of tin foil before slowly retracting into ourselves. It remained like that for some time and then one day, for no reason I can explain, it felt right to smoke what I had left from the previous evening on waking. And my crinkling foil and sparking lighter were soon not the only ones piercing the quiet of the still dark morning. Geoff and my mother were now doing the same. Once that started heroin then became a daily thing. And if for any reason we did not have our waking fix then we would take the morning off work, score, get ourselves mended and turn in for a half day with some fantastic excuse as to why we were so late. Then, one evening, after less than five months into the heroin scene, the first bizarre tragedy occurred: the police knocked us up and took Geoff away for questioning after the dealer Mark had been shot dead 25 minutes after serving him. Nothing came off it, but we had lost our main dealer and now the onus fell on me to supply the household.

By now my mother had not drank for the best part of  a year. It was the longest she had been sober in almost 20 years. Alcohol had been replaced by heroin. Yet heroin was different. Under its influence my mother was not a nasty person, nor did it make her want to harm herself. She was as stable and caring as when she was sober. Finally, without her drunken binges blowing up and destroying any headway we had made during drink-free days, we were spending proper time together. But still, even with heroin as common denominator between us, we had not bonded. We soon would. Something would happen which would heighten the stakes, ensure that from then on we prioritized heroin and worked together to ensure that we were never without it.

It was sickness. It came creeping in like a poisoned, dying rat and shook us all to the core. Until then neither of us had understood what addiction really was. We thought that like the buprenorphine, when the drugs or cash ran out, we could just leave it until whenever and try in whatever way we could to pass the days. But heroin was  different beast; one we hadn't encountered before. By the evening of the first day we were all bedridden and my mother was vomiting and crying and saying she couldn't take it. For three days we lay on our backs, sick through to the marrow of our bones, with all the poisons of the world breaking out through the pores in our skin. The clock ticked by in hour length seconds. We groaned and swore at invisible pains and cursed the day we were born and the world we born into. We damned the rich and the fortunate and we bellyached about not having a pittance between us. We cursed our employers and bemoaned the banking system that makes one wait four days for a cheque to either clear or bounce. We cursed almost everything, but we never cursed heroin: we prayed for that - each of us sending out silent messages to a God that none of us believed in. On the fourth day I managed to get hold of a friend who had been out of town. She bailed us out and sat and watched with tears in her eyes as a whole family recovered from heroin sickness within 2 minutes of ripping open our bags. From that day forward heroin changed and our relationships changed. For the first time in our lives my mother and I had the same agenda and were living an extreme life experience together - both in need of heroin to survive. Our relationship tightened. With debilitating junk sickness we found empathy with one another. From a single event years ago, for our own distinct reasons, we now suffered the same consequences and were fighting life together. And the bond would tighten further still. Firstly due to crack cocaine, and then grace to the syringe and finally from the departure of Geoff.

A year into our drug addictions and many things had changed. Geoff was taking on extra private work and I had landed myself a top paying job with a huge annual budget which could only get me into trouble. By now we were not only doing heroin but crack cocaine and my habit had evolved to the needle. I really had become my father, could feel his presence in myself as I lived his life. I took a strange delight in stabbing those first few weeks of injections into myself in front of my mother. She watched and it made her think of the man she had lost, and now here was his son, the same age as the father was when murdered, continuing on with exactly the same thing. With Geoff and I out working to earn the cash to supply our habits,  my mother's job each day was to score the heroin and crack so as it would be waiting for us when we arrived home. My mother also had the added chores of picking me up fresh syringes and dropping my old ones off at the exchange, along with ensuring I always had Vit C and fresh filters.

As our drug use mounted Geoff,  single-handedly trying to supply his and my mother's habit, ran into financial problems. I, on the other hand, for the most part, had only my own habit to supply and could cope quite well. This led to tensions within the house. On the nights where Geoff could not afford any crack (which was more and more often) I'd secretly supply my mother with rocks. Not that it was much of a secret. It's quite obvious when someone is bug-eyed and cracked up, and so Geoff was often left alone in the adjacent room, knowing what was going on, craving crack himself and becoming frustrated and angry. My mother had become a kind of drug whore, rushing between the two of us with her crack pipe and getting what she could from each. When Geoff's financial problems escalated further, and then after he fell 75ft from a roof and broke both ankles, his time besides my mother was coming to an end. Laid up in hospital following his operation, Geoff caught a superbug infection which eventually led to him having both legs amputated at the knee. Two months after the amputation he returned home, but in his absence things had changed and so had he. With no legs he used  mum as a housemaid and nurse, and began shouted orders for crack cocaine at me from the bedroom, threatening to chuck me out the house if I didn't comply. Finally, we had all had enough... Geoff too. My mother was in no position to look after a disabled and demanding crack-head, and after months of incessant arguing and fighting, Geoff left. I carried him downstairs and wheeled him to the Social Security offices. I rolled him to the reception desk and left, putting two rocks of heroin and 100 pounds in his top pocket. With no handshake and no goodbye I left - though in all honesty I expected to see him later, hear some half-arsed story as to why he couldn't be re-housed and was back. But he never did come back. I, nor my mother would ever see him again. 

Now it was just my mother and I. Our crack problem was enormous and getting worse and I had began pilfering money from the work budget to support our habits. Now we spent all our evenings together. We scored together, used together, rattled through the jitters and sickness together. When funds got low we concocted schemes together and pawned our belongings. It all made for a life of the intimacy that only drug fiends ever know, a total honesty of the condition amongst one another. We would get cracked up and speak of the past and of my father and growing up. But without alcohol violating her emotions my mother now seemed a victim and not the victimiser. I had by then experienced a tragic love-split myself and understood the great trauma that losing someone so important can bring. I understood my mother and I loved her. I expressed that love in rocks of crack and in ensuring that she didn't get ill. When she thought we were all out of gear for the night I'd call her and surprise her with bags I had bought and hidden just for that very moment. For her part she loved me through her total acceptance of my habit. She would not only ensure I always had clean needles and a safe place to use, but would extract dangling needles from my body as I nodded out and help with tricky injections when my venal system began fucking up. She almost certainly kept me alive and healthy. Even when she quit heroin herself she still allowed me to use in the house, in front of her, and still scored for me so as I could get to work. Not once did she bemoan my continued addiction and not once did she relapse herself. By living together through over 5 years of chronic heroin and crack addiction we gradually found ourselves in that oblivion of smack and smoke and dream states, helped one another through it and made the hardest times as least wearing on our bodies as possible. I've no doubt some will see it as perverse, will condemn and immoralize both our behaviours, but for me they were the greatest days of our lives and I look back on those desperate times with a fondness that rips my heart in two by the sheer fact that they are over now.

In 2014, having left London for France ten years earlier, my mother finally made the travel over. It was the first time I had seen her in nine years. By then she was 65, clean of all substances and doing remarkably well for the life she had led. On the second day I took her along with me as I scored and introduced her to my dealer. Back home I said to her:

“One for old times sake, mum?”

She looked at me, screweed her face up and shook her head: “I'm done with all that, Shane... I don't wanna start down that road again.”

I nodded and then excused myself and went in the bathroom and cried. It wasn't that she was done with it, nor that there was any real chance of her falling back into addiction. The truth was that she had gotten old and soon she would not be here at all. It was the cruelness of time, the terrible fate of ageing. Our joint heroin and crack days were over, lost to another time and gone forever. My mother was just my mother now, a little less wild, a lot less young but as beautiful as ever. I composed myself, dried my eyes and returned to the room. I cooked a fix and took an injection and lay down besides her. From behind me I could feel her breath and the heaving of her chest as she watched television. I watched the images too and after only moments felt a calmness descend upon me that I had not felt for many years. Soon  my cigarette was being lightly lifted from my fingers.

"Shane, you're fucking burning yourself,” she said, chiding me. But before I could reply I was off again, my eyelids closing over on another evening of life, drifting off heavy now and dreaming of nothing in my graceless heroin state.

- - - -
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A Syllabus of Deceit: Part2 - The Bigger Half

The Bigger Half

I stood behind, just off over his left shoulder, my eyes on his stubby, nail-bitten fingers and those surprisingly deft, sleight-of-hand, hands. The only time I took my watch off his ever deceitful ready paws was when studying the side of his face, that babyish but bloated looking head he had, the hair which looked like it was wearing bald but wasn't . There he was, hunched over the gear like a dark force, his body evolved to cloak what he was doing, using his long-dead bank card to crush and chop and flatten the heroin and divide it into two even lines. I studied him. I had the distinct feeling that his predatory little junkie eyes were watching me, cast down at the toes of my shoes or my lower leg, looking out for any sign of a slip in concentration so as he could shuffle off and squirrel away one of the uncrushed rocks of gear. Oh, how I despised him. He looked like a weasel or a shrew, something you'd find hiding out in a dripping wet hole along the river, like the heroin had such a pull on him that it had sucked his face into a pointed snout-like feature which contained all his sensory organs and twitched and wriggled before it.

“Come on, man!” I said, increasingly incensed at his deliberation over the two halves. His eyes slid across and down to me.
“Not as fucking easy as it looks,” he said. “You do it if you want, bro.”
“After what happened last time? No chance. You divide and I'll choose... That way there's no fucking arguments.”

I remained watching as he continuously moved tiny slivers of heroin from one pile across to the other, absolutely terrified that one half would end bigger than the other. In fact, that was part of his dilemma: he wanted one half to be bigger: his half. He wanted to somehow find a way to make the bigger half appear smaller so as I'd choose the optically larger looking deal and he'd gain. So he fucked around dividing up the gram, arranging the halves into various different shapes, playing out a thousand cuts in his mind, until he must have decided that it was best just to halve it fairly and be done with it. When he thought he was done he pulled one last sceptical face and then stepped back, presenting me with the choice. Looking over the halves I could sense him besides me, still scrutinizing the divide, barely able to contain himself from jumping in and meddling some more.

“Now, you're sure you're happy with the cut?” I asked, pausing, my eyes on him. He gave a shrug,
“Well, you sure or not?”
“I guess so,” he replied with a kind of pained expression on his face, like he was not sure at all.
“OK, I'll take the left,” I said, with absolutely no deliberation and wearing the slightest of smiles. As I knew it would, the haste of my choice startled him. His body jerked to attention and he lurched forward, over the two halves, with a quizzical look on his face like he had missed a trick. The blacks of his eyes widened and in them I could see his half shrinking in size. To allow his brain time to process what it thought it was thinking, and to also leave himself with a hand of control over events, he reached across for his bank card and began siding my half out the way, over towards me. Normally I'd have paid no mind, but there was something awkward in the way he was separating my half: holding his bank card low down at a flat angle so as much of its surface area as possible touched my heroin.

“Hey hey hey... fucking stop that!" I said. "Slide yours to you, not mine to me!”
“Huh? Why? What does it matter?” he said, innocently.
“Give me the fucking card, here....”

I carefully extracted the card from him. When it was safely out his possession I tapped it down lightly on the CD case we had divided the heroin on. A fine line of smack and a little showering of dust fell down: a small fix worth.
“That's why,” I said, sweeping it back into my half. As I prepared to scoop my deal into a wrap he suddenly stopped me.

“Hang on hang on...,” he said, “... it doesn't look right. Your half's twice as big as mine, LOOK!”
“Fuck off! It's just yours is piled and mines now dislodged. Now get yours covered before it gets knocked over... or gets any smaller! ” He looked like he as going to cry, like he was caught reverberating between the adult pressure of behaving honourably and with a semblance of pride and his illogical junkie instinct of believing he was always being hard done by.

“Man, come on...” he said.
“Trey, You divided it.”
“I know I divided it... but it looked even until it was moved. Come on, man, even you must admit yours is much bigger?”

I shook my head. His distraught self-pitying junkie face made me hate him. I wanted to punch him, and not just once.
“It's OK,” he then said, in a low voice like his entire world had crumbled to pieces, “it's my own stupid fault. I split it. I did.” I didn't look at him. I didn't need to to know what kind of a miserable hard-done-by sulk his face was collapsed into.

“Fucking divide it again!” I said, tossing the bank card at him. He collected the card and his pitiful little expression left him. Immediately he returned to normal, hope alight in his eyes, like a man who has gotten an unexpected reprieve. He was hyper with it.

“I swear it looked even but it was the way I had piled it. And the end of my half was tapered and not built up... just wasn't paying attention, dude.”
“It's in your fucking head, Trey. There was nothing wrong with the cut. It's psychological. Every fucking junkie imagines the same fucking thing: that they're getting the smaller half. You watch, you'll cut it again and still be convinced that somehow I've tricked you, that somehow you're not getting as much. I've seen it a million times over!”

“Nah, it's not like that. You'll see.”

Trey swept the gear back together. This time he sorted it into a finger, squared off both ends and then used the bank card to level the top down. When it was a perfect oblong he laid a piece of paper besides it, marked on the paper how long it was, tore the paper off to that length, folded it in half and then laid it back down alongside the finger of heroin so as the crease in the middle showed up its exact centre. At that point he put the thin edge of the bank card through it and dissected the gear in half. He looked at me and gave a subtle nod.

“Now you're sure it's evenly split this time? You're positive?” He said he was. I looked over the halves. Once again I showed absolutely no hesitation.
“I'll still take the left;” I said. As had happened before Trey leant forward with a ruffled look on his brow. He looked at the two halves like they were fucking with him. Then he leaned back in with the card, about to disturb them once more.

“Fucking leave it!” I cried. “You said you was happy with the split, now fucking leave it.... they're even!” They were even. Trey just couldn't accept it. He tossed his bank card into the wall and flopped down into a pitiful childish blob on his bed, sat sulking and staring off somewhere out across the floor.

“What? You think yours is smaller again? Jesus! I fucking told you this would happen... I fucking knew it. I'll tell ya what: take the fucking left half if you think it's bigger... you can have it!” Trey remained where he was on his bed. He shook his head in stubborn refusal but I could tell my offer had piqued his interest, that his eyes were no longer lost in a world of woe but pricked and primed like dogs' ears.
“Your last fucking chance, Trey... I won't offer again: do you want the left half or not?”
Trey looked at me apologetically and then slowly rose and went over to inspect the two halves. I could feel his shame, his embarrassment for the childish way he had earned this second reprieve; for the way he had wangled having first choice.

“OK,” he said, “I'll take the left.”

I reached over, turned around the CD case and pulled what was the right half over my way. I saw Trey looking, then saw him straighten himself up and that questioning look come to him once more. His brow lowered heavy over his eyes as he watched what I was sliding across my way and what was left for him. I knew what he was thinking... he was caught in that vicious circle, but even he was too embarrassed to remonstrate a third time. Instead his whole demeanour deflated and a lost, woeful expression hijacked his face. He sunk down into himself like his whole body had given up and was silently weeping. To tease it out of him, to further provoke his suffering, I looked at his deal and said:

“Is it just me or does my half seem so much bigger?” He looked at me, his regard a melange of envy and hate.
“Hmmm... that's what I was thinking too,” he said in a half sulk, like he didn't want to be heard but needed to say the words.

I stared at him and shook my head and told him there he had lost his fucking soul.


What Happened The Last Time

Now, this was a story of thirds. He had spent so much time shooting a speedball and then trying to figure out where the hell he was that we were being pushed out the dealer's house as his wife was pissed off at our presence.

“We gotta go,” I said.
“Hmmm. Yeah bro I hear ya,” he said, sitting there jittering away and rolling a cigarette in a way only crack fiends can do.
“Like now, Trey!”
“Yeah, yeah... just getting my shit together, dude. Rolling this cigarette. I'm good.”
“OK, well I'm gonna divide the gear as there's no time to go to yours.”
“Cool, man. Go for it.”

I opened the two grams. The dealer thought I was about to measure out another fix and told me no more, that his wife was about to blow. I assured him I was just dividing it. I quickly arranged the two grams into a straight even line, split it in three and asked Trey to OK it was a fair divide. He gave a jittery look at the gear, his mind skittish and his face twitching like it was full of spiders. He was in that silent world of hyper alert crack prickles – nothing being able to hold his concentration long before his mind was off on something else. He nodded while looking at the gear, his mind completely wired. I could feel the static electricity in his hair. The split was two to one in his favour. Once he had given the nod I scooped my third up and wrapped it in an oblong of aluminium foil. Trey's deal was left on the table. I told him to wrap as we had to get the hell out of there.

I saw the soberness come over him like a changeling. Any man who sobers up that quickly has either had a huge shock or has just died.

“Is that mine or yours?” Trey asked, staring ghostly at what was on the table. He damn well knew it was his. It was his sly way of saying it looked more like a third.
“It's yours. Now get it wrapped, we gotta go.”
“Man, that's two thirds?”
“It's two thirds of what we got, yes. Minus what we've used.”

Trey pulled an ugly face. I knew then that he had slipped into his real guise, that that was the skeleton expression on which his skin was hung and would always revert to in moments of instinctive honesty. Not wanting to lose me as his contact, just as he quickly as he had found me, Trey swallowed the doubt he felt over the fairness of the divide and said: “It's cool, man. Just don't look two thirds, that's all. Not used to grams an shit.”
“Well it is two thirds. Though, even if it were slightly light, you've nothing to grumble over. You've had a speedball and a shot of brown on the fuckin' house.”
“Yeah man, no... that was appreciated, bro. Fuck! I'm in France and I got high! Fuuuck!!!”

In the lift down to ground Trey purposely took out his little wrap of heroin and observed it again. He didn't say anything but made a point of letting me see him deliberating over it in his mind.

“Fucking put that away! You wanna get us arrested? It's hot here doing that shit. Fucking serious business here in France.”
“For real, man? For a gram?”
“Yes, now put it away.” Trey closed his fingers over the wrap and then put his clenched fist inside his front pocket of his hooded top. Walking down towards the metro, the night settled in good and this stretch of city all closed up and deserted, I could feel Trey still playing around with the wrap of heroin in his pocket, feeling out the size and thinking that he'd been half-robbed and that the thief was there walking besides him. I could sense his squinted eyes, bejewelled with a special kind of hatred that only junkies reliant upon each other can feel. Trey needed me, and even supposing that I had robbed him, he was obliged to smile, speak to me graciously, even thank me for it. It was evident he wanted to say something, there was that feeling in the air in the way he was walking and thinking, not saying a word and subtly dragging his feet so as I wasn't gone too quickly. As we approached the metro station where I'd leave Trey for the evening I said my goodbye.
“OK, Bro, laters,” he said. I looked at him. He had said goodbye but was still standing there in front of me as if the night wasn't over.
“Trey?”
“Man, you sure that's two thirds what I got? This is expensive shit and it just don't look like it's two thirds of what we got.”
“Trey, don't do it, mate... I'm warning ya... Don't.”

He knew I was serious and he also understood that I would not suggest finding a place where he could inspect my cut against his. It was the end of the night and it was ending like this regardless of anything he thought.

“OK, man,” he said, “no biggie.” And with that he kinda wriggled more comfortably into the rucksack that was on his back, pulled his jeans up a notch, and going on, alone, he held up a hand. I watched him from behind as he gradually trudged on and I didn't like what I was seeing. This young man, an American, disappearing into the dark of a continental night with tragedy stamped all over him. I felt a cold, timeless wind on my face and for just a moment I felt terribly sad. Not for him; not for me. Just something in this world which is indescribable. As I descended the stairs to the metro a warm air came up to meet me. It carried the familiar smell of carbon dust and electricity, something musty and deep and damp. Standing alone on the deserted platform I stared down the tracks, deep into the dark of the tunnel, waiting for two lights to appear from nowhere and come and take me home.


The Scales of Justice

By now I despised the very shape of his body, his stocky pumped up torso, those rounded shoulders ready-made to sink in despair and swallow his neck, legs a little too short; thighs all too muscular, and that arse, God, the way it popped out an inch too far, self-publicizing the fact that it would be all accommodating for the almighty dollar and yet was closed for any kind of business in his private life.
Over months I scrutinized him, a weird kind of hatred having built up in me from witnessing all his little scams, his superficial facial expressions, how he'd pat down his pockets as he said he'd lost money, the way he had of balancing his phone up on the side when taking a shot, a depressing, grungy, American rock song drifting out of it as he dug for a vein, how when he'd struck home he'd close his eyes over and stand there swaying to the dirge filtering around the room; then the immediate retreat he'd make into himself and that utter coldness he showed towards anything living when he finally had what he wanted/needed. He was still romancing this life. He worshipped the needle. I didn't hate him for that, maybe I even envied him for it. My romance was gone. It went with my lungs and my lover. Nothing left of it at all.

But as Trey annoyed me, so the anger and dislike I showed towards him must have been reciprocated. I never hid my contempt of him or his schemes. I shouted him down in the street and made him look a fool in front of my dealer. I subconsciously abused the power I had over him, knowing he would have to accept anything I said if he wanted me to continue scoring for him. As a consequence to that power Trey must have had a natural and festering dislike for me too, his building up in trying to restrain himself from blowing or biting back. And not only that, after everything he was also required to bow to me and keep me cool and also give me a share of his smack every time he scored. So as he annoyed me so I and his own fashion of living, the reliance he had on others, annoyed him. His life style was too far out of his own control to not be embittered by it. He often cursed heroin, but just as often as he cursed it he embraced it and sung jubilantly of its qualities of sedation and psychological pain relief. It's a love hate romance most debutante addicts go through before either dying, quitting or learning how to control and supply ones habit on the way to long term and chronic drug addiction. At what stop Trey would eventually alight is anyone's guess. Personally, I think he will continue to live a parasitic life of addiction until he can suffer it no more, go on to prostitution to gain financial independence, learn he caught HIV in his younger more desperate days of addiction, and having an existence so bleak at that point will look back to these days in Europe, as dire and as frustrating as they were, and see them as some of the better days of his life. Its a tragedy and one is allowed to feel sorry for him at this point... at least until the end of the sentence.

Sympathy over! The little shit. A quarter split this time. Three for him; one for me. We were in the dealer's apartment, sat staring at the floor awaiting him to return with his main stash of smack. As soon as the dealer's key turned in the lock Trey straightened up in his wooden chair at the dining table, his chest poking out like a bimbos and his biceps ripping out through his t-shirt.

The dealer – who now also disliked Trey – made a point of fingering him up out the chair he was in so as he could sit down in his place. It wasn't the dealer's chair or his usual cutting up spot: it was a power thing – a way to let Trey know it was his house and his rules, that he had the heroin and thus he had the power. Trey got up but didn't take another seat. He lingered around the dealer, his nose poking right into the his affairs. Even as the dealer was measuring and weighing up the four grams Trey was there with his bank card asking if he could take a small measure to cook up. The dealer looked at him like he was a retard, not being able to restrain himself for even a minute. He warned him off from touching anything until it was weighed and bagged and told him to stay away. Trey paced around the room. As he passed me he said: “What the fucks his problem, man!”

The dealer looked up from weighing out the smack. He didn't speak English but he understood tonality and he understood the word FUCK.

“What did he say?” he asked me in French.
“He's just desperate for a fix,” I replied, “never mind him.”

The dealer nodded and pulled a face like he was tonguing a loose tooth.

“You want, er... shoot shoot?” he said to Trey, mimicking the act of injecting.
Trey nodded enthusiastically... too enthusiastically. “Yes, a shot... yes, please! I need a shoot shoot of your beautiful heroin, Monsieur!”

Trey was unaware that the dealer was being sarcastic and he also didn't seem to realise that his utterly false comment about “beautiful gear” meant nothing in French. Trey seemed to think that his manufactured charm was so sweet and endearing that it transcended language itself.

The dealer, just nodded. He was hatching something. This was his house. He called Trey over to see the heroin on the scales. I joined them. Three grams to the point. That was Trey's deal. The dealer pointed to the weight on the digital screen. “Threeeee,” he said. Trey gave a thumbs up, literally. The dealer lifted the little square of plastic with Trey's three grams on it up from off the scales and put it down to one side. Next he took another little cut of plastic, placed it on the scales and measured out my gram. He asked us to OK the weight. I nodded. Trey kinda deliberated and then took out his bank card and mimicked scooping a little corner of the gram and putting it to the three grams. He saw the dealer wasn't quite sure what he meant and so he made a tiny size with his thumb and forefinger and said “just a pinch, man.. uh puhti puhti pew.”

I asked Trey what the hell he was on about. He said that the weights were fine but that my deal was a bit larger than one third of his and he wanted the dealer to take a tiny scoop from mine and add it to his three grams.

“Are you for fucking real? I asked him, “they're weighed! Mine is exactly a third of yours.”

“Oh man, come on. There's no way I've three times your worth. Serious, Man! And them scales.... those little electronic ones, they can weigh up a point or two either way. And DID you see what he did? He weighed the gear on the plastic... probably another point lost there.”

The dealer asked me what Trey's problem was, if he was disputing the accuracy of his scales. When I explained Trey's gripe the dealer closed his bag of unweighed heroin, put it in his inside jacket pocket and then got up from the table leaving both our deals and the scales there for us to sort out between ourselves.

The way Trey hot-footed into the dealer's seat was like a game of musical chairs when the music stops. I had no intention of taking the chair myself but by the way Trey bundled past me and slammed himself down at the table I felt I had lost. Trey lifted my gram off the scales and put it on the table. He cast a quick glance to the dealer who was now sat over on the sofa flicking through foreign TV stations. On seeing that the dealer wasn't taking any notice of us Trey started going through the options on the little scales. He didn't say what he was doing but it was obvious he was checking that the dealer had them calibrated to 0 and hadn't weighed us up short. After a moment Trey's face changed, he looked pissed off and began pushing and holding buttons until it was clear he had entered some parameter he couldn't get out of. The dealer noticed. Trey was then hitting the buttons in such a way with his stubby fingers that he could damage them.

“Man, what-the-fuck!” he said. “These things have got the fucking time and everything on them!”

The dealer came over and snatched the scales out of Trey's hands. He stared at Trey and Trey said “Sorry, Dude... was just checking them out.” The dealer told me to tell Trey not to touch any of the buttons. When he gave the scales back to Trey they were set to 0.

“Man, do you mind if we put the four grams together, re-weigh them and then split from a whole?” Trey asked me.
“Do what you want... just be fucking quick about it.”

Trey placed his three grams on the scale. It weighed to 3.2. His deal wasn't under it was over. Then he added my gram to it. 4.2.

“What did I tell ya, man.... these scales are never accurate.”
“Maybe they're not accurate now? Maybe the first reading was correct and this one is false?”

Trey didn't answer. He didn't hear. His brain had stuck on pause the moment he had convinced himself that his guile had made him a petty gain. Objective truth held no importance to him: he wanted fuck all to do with it. Trey was all about subjective truth and subjective reality. In that way there were no lies, no theft, no games or dishonesty. And whenever justice was served, it was always – in his mind – completely unjust, life kicking him in the ribs again.

Trey, now in the dealer's chair, with the dealer's scales, with four measly grams of heroin, did the job of dividing the cut himself. He lifted the four grams off the scale, put my empty wrap on the platform, and then weighed up my gram. As the dealer had done he asked me to check the reading. I didn't check but said it was fine. He gave me the gram and alongside him I bagged it and tied it secure. As I was doing that Trey reweighed what was left.

“3 point 1 this time, dude,” he said. “You need to tell your dealer to get some new fucking weights.”

I wasn't watching Trey. I had seen his face too often lit up from the glow of sitting in front of his heroin, knowing that the next few days would be peaceful no matter what atrocities were to happen in the world. But then, suddenly, I was watching him: his face frozen in terror and his mouth caught in the word “NOOOoooooo.....”, a high-pitched beeping noise coming out the scales in front of him.

…ooooo!!!! What-the-fuuuck!!! DUDE... HELP!!” Trey, startled by the beeping, had somehow managed to spill his heroin. It must have been an involuntary reflex while lifting his deal off the scales. He hadn't spilled it all. The actual square of plastic was tilted off the edge of the scales with a good gram still on it. The rest was strewn across the table, to the edge and over. Trey was sat there frozen, his hands raised like he was being held at gun point. His eyes were strained down, passed his air-filled chest, down to where his lap was and where the heroin would have fallen. When he was sure everything had settled down he ever so carefully inched backwards, away from the table, his eyes strained down all the while.

“Quick, there's some on my jeans... bud, help get it up.”

Over at Trey I used an old metro ticket to collect what powder I could from off his thigh. I salvaged a good bit but some had dispersed into the fabric of his jeans and more had cascaded over his thigh and sprinkled down the outside of his calf and onto the floor.

“How much on the floor?” he asked, panicked.
“Not a lot, but it's hard to see.” When I had salvaged all I could Trey stood up, stepped back and knelt to inspect the ground himself. He kept saying: “Man!! Man! I can't fucking believe it! What the fuck, dude!” When Trey rose he was red and flustered and angry. In silence he scraped together what was on the table and collected it back on his wrap. During all that activity we hadn't noticed that the beeping had stopped. The dealer was stood there with his little black electronic scales.

“What the fuck was that,” I asked.
“The alarm! Your friend somehow set the fucking countdown timer!”

When Trey weighed the heroin he had left there remained not even two grams. An entire gram was somewhere within his jeans, on the floor and between the joint of the table. He sat there just staring at what was left, utterly distraught but lost for anything he could say. Slowly he went into his rucksack and took out a needle and a little aluminium cooking cup. Usually the dealer would turn you on to a free fix for business but today there was no chance of that, not for Trey anyhow. Trey sat at the table with his empty cup, reluctant to put a measure of his own stuff in before knowing if the dealer would give him a freebie. When the dealer didn't look over Trey made deliberate noises and fidgeted looking around the table for something until he had the dealers attention. The dealer looked over, saw what Trey was doing and then seemed to come over irate.

“No no no...” he said, wagging a finger. “Tell him he's not shooting here!”
Trey understood but thought it was a joke. He continued on. The dealer walked over to the table and with his index finger flicked the metal cup off the table and against the wall.
“No shoot here!”
“Huh?” went Trey, shocked.
“You tell him he must ask before doing that in my house... In front of my wife... His blood on my table! He fucking asks in future!”
He was right. You always ask a non-injecting user permission to bang up in their presence and certainly in their apartment. I had known the dealer for over five years and I still asked before pulling out a spike. Trey seemed to have no concept of the horror of the syringe or what it was associated with. He had barely known the dealer a month and here he was blatantly taking out his old syringes and getting ready to cook up without even the good grace to ask. I told Trey that he wasn't allowed to shoot in the apartment today, that he must ask before doing. I can't explain Trey's reaction, but I understood it... I understood that drained, grief-stricken appearance, the sudden welling up of pain in his eyes and his total desperation to get out of their and relieve himself of the horror he had lived in the past half an hour. I felt sorry for him. After any shock the junkie needs a fix. Not five or ten or thirty minutes later but immediately.

“Get your works. Go to the toilet. Get your shot but be fucking quick about it!”

Trey gave a cast across to the dealer wondering if he should follow my advice, what could be the potential consequences if the dealer cottoned on to him in there shooting. Whatever he concluded he must have thought it was worth it. He gathered up his kit, put it in his bag, made every appearance like getting ready to leave and then excused himself for the toilet. As I waited for him the dealer gave me half a gram for what Trey had spilled. I put it in my pocket for myself. That's when we heard the music. Floating out the toilet and down the hallway and into the living room. Trey, so into his habit, so utterly selfish in his needs, could not manage even a single shot without his choice music on and swaying away to the dirge of some gruff singer growling on about the horror of addiction and the sweetness of death. Of course, I knew what the music signified but the dealer didn't.

“What the fuck?” he asked. “Does your friend shit to music?”

I thought over the words, thought of Trey, swaying there like having a cosmic orgasm, the syringe embedded in the fat of his arm, the pastures of heaven across his face for a while.


“Yes, that's exactly what he does,” I said, “he shits to fucking music.”

The dealer grunted, shook his head, then holding the remote control, pointed it at the TV and began flicking through the channels, not staying on one for a second, the blur of a continent all hissed and merged together, nothing of interest anywhere to be found. After a moment his eyes closed over and the TV settled to a stop. Trey flushed the toilet; all business was done. One and a half grams, the price for such a life.

- - -