The Pain of Painkilling

It didn't hurt at all at first; or I just enjoyed the pain. Whatever, the mythical damage supposedly caused by the needle was so disappointing in those early days that during my first two years of intravenous drug use I took to jabbing myself with empty needles so as I had at least some bruises and track marks to show for my suffering. That's something that is never quite dealt with in any drug therapy, something most users would keep to themselves. But regardless of what anyone says, the marks left behind and the beauty of the damage done is an important part of the allure of the needle. It was for me. I'd never felt so sexual. 

15 years on, 60,000 plus intravenous injections later, things have changed. Those early years of easy to harpoon surface veins, being done in minutes, often not even a pin-prick of blood to show for the injection, are a thing of the past. It's the body: it falls to fucking pieces. Veins collapse and disappear. They get burnt out from the citric acid used to cook the heroin up with. They cower and flatten out when constantly pierced and prodded by sharp points. It happens to the prominent surface veins at first, those in the arms and hands and then the legs and feet. Soon there are no big veins left at all and you are obliged to go in the body blind and deep. That's frightening to begin with. Different gauge needles come into play, some two inches long and as thick as valve adapters used to pump up footballs. These things hurt and leave holes in the body that are big enough to become sorely infected. It becomes easier and more frequent that shots miss the vein. The citric acid seeps into the muscle or sits under the skin for months, severely damaging the surrounding tissue. With the main veins all gone the blood circulation must take a different route around the body. It now uses the smaller vessels, which as a consequence stretch and inflate. Veins which were never visible before suddenly appear at the surface and so the IV drug user thanks his lucky stars and then proceeds to blow them out too. Once all the main veins are burnt out and collapsed the junkie next attacks the small capillary veins in the wrist, hands, fingers and feet. The capillary veins are the small dark purple and blue thread like ones. It's often painful shooting into such small veins but not as dangerous as going into the deep blind veins alongside the main arterial system where fatal blood clots and infections and ulcers so easily occur. If the junkie decides on arterial shooting he will probably get enough years use out of them to ensure he dies before ever needing to shoot into his capillary system. But many, like me, will not take to the femoral vein or jugular before having exhausted every other single possibility, before seeking out every working vein and capillary in the body. Injections for such veteran addicts can take anywhere up to four hours and are always sufficiently bloody. 

- - -

Today I'll be using a standard 1ml orange capped insulin needle. Whereas before I'd have had no qualms about drawing up a diluted 0.7ml shot, now I cook the same amount of smack down to 0.4ml to allow me more control over the needle and have more room to thin the shot down and possibly save it from congealing in the event that I draw too much blood and cannot make the injection. For now my needle is up on the side of the sink with the cap removed. It's a needle I've used at least a half a dozen times before. It's blunt but not jagged. A vein will be a little harder to spike but not impossible. Before attempting to stick myself I remove my trousers and socks and sling my foot up on the edge of the sink. I start by fingering all over my leg, thigh and calf, searching out any soft springy areas in the flesh which could mean a vein lying deep below. I go from my left leg to my right, marking out any possible injection sites with a biro pen. I inspect both feet, along the instep, the inner heel and the arch. The outer ankle I no longer check as I know I've not a working vein remaining that side. In my inner foot I spot a couple of prospective injection sites and jab myself a few times with the needle. I don't mark these sites as they're tiny capillary veins which I can see and I will either get them or damage them. It pains sliding the needle in this part of the foot. I try four times before giving up. I don't draw a single drop of blood. Not drawing blood can get insanely frustrating after some time as it means one is not even close to getting a vein, but it's better drawing no blood than to keep drawing only to not make the shot. There are two good reasons to avoid any unnecessary blood in the syringe: 

1: blood congeals and congealed blood in the barrel of the syringe equals a ruined fix. 
2: blood darkens. One is left with a black shot which makes it  difficult to see if a small vein is giving blood or not. 

For the moment there is nothing working in my legs or feet. With my foot still up on the sink I strip off my jumper and shirt and twist my body taut in various directions so as to spot any veins which are showing up in my sides or belly or chest. I have a few jabs in my flanks, at veins which resemble flat linguine spaghetti. These flank veins always appear very promising but are notoriously difficult to spike. As soon as I hit one it bursts and leaves a spreading bruise up that side. It's a no go, but I did draw blood. I remove the needle and holding it up I draw the plunger back a little. I shake the blood into the shot so as the aperture of the syringe doesn't become blocked at a crucial moment. For the sake of at least trying I take a few pot shots in my chest, inserting the needle almost flat before slightly withdrawing it and re-inserting it at different angles. I don't tap any blood. I place the needle back down on the side and recommence with the visual inspection of my body. I examine my face in the mirror. I check around and under the eye, along the temple. Injecting in the face is a real last-chance-saloon shot. The only three times I've shot in my face was to save a fix on the point of congealing. I'm no where near that stage just now, but I know that if I find a face vein that I'd at least have a banker to go in if I'm really up against it. I find no vein in my face. I check my shoulders, my armpits and finger all over my biceps. I twist my arms around and crane my head trying to spot any veins running up the backside of my arms. I spot a couple and mark lines along either side of them. Veins in the backs of arms are only possible to get with the use of a mirror, yet in the mirror it's difficult to see the vein and so the penned guides help, knowing that if you cast the needle between the guides then you are fishing where the vein is. It's awkward positioning to get these back arm veins. The risk is that even if I hit the vein I won't have sufficient control over the needle to manage the fix without the syringe slipping back out. This is where having cooked up a 0.4ml shot could pay dividends. Looking in the mirror, with my right arm bent flat back and raised, I insert the needle and pull back on the plunger. Nothing. I let the plunger suck back down, twist the needle around and try again. Zilch. On maybe the 8th attempt I draw blood, not a lot but enough to know I'm in a small but good vein. I try to manoeuvre my body so as I can keep the needle steady and inject. As soon as I unload some of the heroin a small lump begins rising under the skin. It stings. I pull back on the plunger to see if I'm still in the vein. There is no blood. As I feared the needle has slipped out the vein and now I have damaged and bruised the surrounding area and the vein will not be hittable again. 

With the blood I've taken my shot is now up to 0.5ml. That's half the maximum volume of liquid the needle can hold. I shake the new blood into the fix. It makes the shot darker and will make it that much more difficult to get. I go back downstairs, to my legs. I take a few pops in my inner thigh where sometimes I get lucky on old veins which have risen for one last hurrah. Nothing doing. I badly bruise the inside of my thigh. At one of the attempted injection sites, dark blood, almost black, streams out and will not stop. I wipe the blood away, over my leg and then lick my hand clean. The injecting addict gets used to tasting his own blood. There's rarely tissue at hand and so the blood gets wiped and sucked and licked clean. Next I check to see if my left foot is still swollen from a failed injection three days ago. If it's not still swollen there is a deep thick vein that is hittable right at the top of the foot, a vein which seems to disappear somewhere deep, up along the shin bone. It's a big vein, only accessible from that sole point, but is extremely difficult to hit as it is not bedded on anything and moves and pushes away when the needle tries to puncture it. My foot is still very slightly swollen but I can feel the vein. It squidges and moves out the way even as I finger it. Due to the bluntness of the syringe I have to force it in, almost screw it in through the skin down there. It hurts like hell. I twist the needle a little more and a terrible pain shoots up my shin and makes me tear the needle out and scream. I have hit the bone or gone into tendon or something. The crux of my foot swells up like a pensioner's with water retention. The skin and flesh is so tough there now that I couldn't get a needle through it if I wanted to. If I'd had been using a new, sharp, clean needle I'd have made that shot. I curse my blunt needle and want to dash it into the wall. I won't do it with a blunt works today. I need new spikes. 

 I interrupt my injection to run to the pharmacy. I quickly dress, wash the blood off my hands and fingers and rush out. I buy three steriboxes which contain two needles a piece. As soon as I get back I transfer the contents of the blunt syringe into a new one. Normally I'd remove the plunger from the new needle and squirt the liquid from the older one straight into the barrel. But today, because my hit has taken blood, I want to dilute it a little and so I squeeze the mixture back into my spoon. I add 0.2ml of fresh water to thin it down with, give it a quick stir with the cap from a syringe and then filter it back up into the new needle. With a fresh spike I am feeling optimistic. Tiny veins I could not even contemplate trying earlier are now possibilities. I strip back naked, get my right foot back up on the sink and inspect the inside of my heel. I find a cluster of weak spidery veins but nothing remotely bold enough to withstand a full shot. They're strange those filo-veins. Often they'll continue to draw blood even when damaged, even when the syringe is obviously no longer inside. Sometimes it'll take the shot at the site of injection only to blow out somewhere else along its course. Whenever injecting into such delicate veins it's necessary to release the shot real slowly, sometimes as slowly as a degree every ten seconds or so. The problem with slow release drip-shots is that the heroin reaches the brain just as gradually, and although you get the full effect eventually you do not get the initial shock of the hit. Ignoring the cluster veins I inspect the back of my foot; the heel. There is one vein, small but not a capillary, running across the back of my achilles heel. In my entire 15 years of shooting junk I've only ever hit this vein once. Every other attempt, just the mere fact of inserting the needle there, had left me literally weeping in pain, whipping the needle out and furiously rubbing warmth into the site to alleviate the soreness. I eye the vein suspiciously, run my finger over it to judge its worth. The room is cold and the vein is flat. I couldn't hit it without sticking my achilles tendon and bone. I decide against inserting the needle there just now but make a mental note of it as a possibility if I get desperate. 

Desperate? If the needle takes too much blood and is risking to congeal. When that happens it's surprising what veins suddenly become an option and how little regard one has for pain or injury. In fact, at that point, one rebels against the pain, screaming at it and telling it to fuck off while driving the needle in again and cursing and hollering. I give up on my legs once more and instead search all over my hands. I find a possible hit in the far side of my left hand. It's a small, delicate vein and so I change the needle again before trying. I load the new syringe, push out the air, and slide it into the side of my hand. It is extremely sore inserting the syringe, but once in the pain subsides. I pull back gently on the plunger. Nothing doing. I withdraw the needle a couple of millimetres, pull for blood again and draw nothing again. I slightly withdraw the needle a final time, so as now it is no more than a few millimetres under the skin. I pull. Home! Blood pulls back into the needle and not just a trickle. Before pressing the shot home I must steady my hand so as the needle does not flap about and fall out. I reposition my hand and manage to support the needle with my thumb while getting to the the plunger with my middle finger. It's an awkward and tentative hold as the needle is now up to 0.7ml. I put pressure on the plunger. I can feel resistance due to the thickness of the liquid and the plunger doesn't budge. I increase slightly the pressure and one of my fears when going into such a delicate vein is realized: the blockage suddenly clears making the pressure on the plunger all too much. Before I can stop, the plunger shudders down a full step and unloads a good point of the thick liquid into the site. Where I panic I push the syringe deep into the flesh. Instantly my hand burns up and becomes lumpy and white and numb. I'm through the vein, I know it. I'm so sure I don't even try drawing blood. I withdraw the needle and now I do have trouble as I took too much blood. Once again I shake the blood into the fix and push the air out. I huff and brace myself to try some more. 

The shot is now black and thick and the clock is against me. I have no longer than 15 minutes to get the shot. Now my search for veins intensifies. I look over my body and have a pop with the needle at any and every possible injection site I can find. I figure that at least if I'm sticking the needle into myself then I am actively doing something. 

On the index finger of my left hand is a small intestinal coloured vein. It's the last blatantly visible vein I have left in either of my hands. It's still there because it seems to be attached, or extremely close, to a nerve. The twice I've managed to hit it in the past, the moment I squeezed even the weeniest drop of liquid into it, it had sent a burning shock of what felt like fire shooting all throughout my hand and up my arm to my neck. I don't try the vein but add it to my emergency ten-second-countdown list. I turn my hands over and stretch my fingers so as my palms turn white. I hold my hand up to the light but the only veins I can see are too small and too deep into the palm. A needle in the underside of the palm is excruciatingly painful, and the deeper one must go the more painful it is. You can sense you could do an awful lot of damage prodding about inside that part of your body. Through experience you know it is a hotbed of nerves that deep down. The only place which is more painful than the palm is the underside of the foot. Even my successful injections there had left me limping for a week. 

The fix in the needle is now dark black and as thick as syrup. It's hard to even pull the plunger back to allow blood in. To get the shot I'll need a half decent vein as I'll never be able to see if a small vein is giving blood or not. At the base of my belly, descending into the groin area, there are two long veins each side. They're the same kind of long flat veins which run up my flanks. I carefully insert the needle into my lower belly. It stings but the pain is just a nuisance now. I try in all four veins. One I think gives blood but as soon as I push a small blue lump rises at the point of injection. I remove the needle and the site bleeds profusely. Blood streams down my body, runs down my legs, and collects in a small pool on the tiled floor. I decide to change needle again. I will also dilute the fix some more in an effort to try and buy some more time. I squirt the thick, partly congealed liquid back into the spoon and dilute it with 0.5ml of water. I now have more liquid than can be sucked up in the syringe. I will have to take the shot over two injections. I suck up half the fix. It's still thick and almost just as dark. With a fresh needle and now almost out of time I begin poking recklessly about in my calf, the front and back. It doesn't hurt so much here and so I can be quite brutal with the needle. Each time I give up and remove the syringe dark blood now flows. I smear it away and continue. I'm getting annoyed and cursing, making growling frustrated noises every time I fail. And then, just like that, it happens. It's so easy that even I'm surprised. The needle is pushed deep into the inner side of the calf and takes instant blood. I'm so taken aback that I pull the plunger back twice to make sure it's real. Each time I pull back blood begins filling the syringe. Without further hesitation I unload the shot at good pace. I feel the heroin travelling, itching up my leg, my sides, my shoulder: and then the taste of it in my mouth and sinuses. I begin feeling good, like a cloud has uncovered the sun. I let the empty needle dangle in my leg. It's a deep hidden vein, a good vein and I must mark it. I mark lines either side of the dangling jack and draw an arrow at the bottom to indicate the exact angle to insert the second needle. I've been lucky. The vein is well up to taking multiple shots. If I thought it couldn't take even the second fix I would piggyback the next shot: leave the original syringe in the vein but remove the plunger. With the needle acting as an in-line I'd fill the barrel with the contents of another needle. It's a hazardous practice due to the amount of air you can accidentally inject, but once you've piggybacked a few times you learn quite proficiently how not to kill yourself in the process. But there is no piggybacking today. I remove the needle, suck up the remaining half of my fix and with the vein already marked out the second shot takes less than ten seconds to administer. Now the cloud moves back across the sun, and in this low hum-drum afternoon, marinated in my own blood, I sit down to write, and I'm full of incredible words, but not a single one will get written.

- - -
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A Test of Time

While awaiting the results of an HIV test a young addict gets to discussing junk, disease, harm-reduction and the pitfalls of intravenous drug use with an older, dying in-patient. 

(A fictional article written for the Australian harm-reduction magazine BLAST! )

*
The old clock in the hospital hung high up on the wall opposite. It made an audible tock with each second. 11.45 came and went and Pierre sat there, with a hollow feeling in his gut, looking at and listening to time.

"I'll tell you something now," said the in-patient who sat alongside him, his finger wagging with each syllable, "when history really looks back at the spread of HIV in the West the blame will not fall on the queers or the whores, it will be shown that it stemmed from the IV drug using community... That that group was more at risk, took fewer precautions to stem the spread, and was the real nucleus at the heart of this epidemic. You mark my words!"

Pierre watched the wagging finger, eyed the pale, bony veinless hand it was attached to. It scared him. The words scared him. The marks and the moles and the dry skin scared him. The clock looking down on them scared him. He wished he'd never heard what Jean-Paul had said. He wanted to argue against it, felt that Jean-Paul had no right or basis to say such a thing. But in his empty gut, in his communal memory of all the vile rooms and needles and stupidness he had seen and done, he heard in Jean-Paul’s words something he had often thought himself but had never dared mouth out aloud.

Jean-Paul carried on. He was a tall, junk worn man, no teeth, skull visible under his skin, cheeks pinched, the space around his bottom lip fatty like it had been injected with botox. Up top his torso was thin yet broad, his chest abnormally large like it was packed full of straw. Draped around his shoulders was an itchy looking red hospital blanket. He had lung and chest problems and the blanket rose and fell with each intake of breath.

"I don't know when or where I picked up the virus, nor the Hep C," Jean-Paul said. "It could've been any number of a thousand shots… Fuck knows! Not even any one to blame... And I can't really even blame myself, 'coz back in the day it was impossible not to share. There were no free needles like today. The best we could do was boil ours sterile, and that mostly entailed just flushing them through a few times with tepid water.And anyway, we were junkies not queers... Well, not all of us, so it wasn't really our nightmare. At least we didn't think so then."

Pierre could not conceive of a life of addiction without free clean sharp needles on tap. That would change everything. It would mean you couldn't manage an addiction alone without recourse to the junkie brotherhood. He also couldn't conceive of how anyone could risk their life for a hit, even though he was here for doing just that himself. He didn't want to speak, not of this, not now, but there was something lingering open in the wake of Jean-Paul's silence, something lingering open within himself.

"So how did you get needles?" He asked after a moment.

The older junkie laughed, as if remembering good times. "How did we get needles?" He repeated. "God...

...You could buy them.... But they weren't cheap. Mostly you'd buy singles or doubles, so you can imagine how far they went! We stole them from hospitals. I used to do that. Pretend I was visiting someone and then slip off into a room or ward somewhere and grab a handful. In Paris, when I was there, there was one charity you could get them from, but nothing major... Nothing national or greatly known in any case. And when the police began laying in wait and arresting addicts on leaving, paraphernalia charges, we were wary about going there. Works were highly prized back then. You looked after them, and tragically, only shared them with your nearest and dearest. Maybe the reason why we've all ended up alone."

Pierre looked to the clock. He listened for the ticking to make sure time hadn't stopped altogether. It hadn't. What it was doing was going by incredibly slowly. Pierre felt sad, felt that sitting in the HIV unit of the hospital, waiting on the results of blood tests, among sick people, with that smell, wasn't what drug addiction was promised to be about. Somehow it robbed smack injecting of all its dark romance and glory, brought it down to a clinical act, the focus on the blood not the gear, on the dangers of a slow viral death rather than the Russian roulette of a life blown out by the big bang of the overdose. More than ever he was now conscious of where he had ended up and why, his young life hanging in the balance. He was 24 and he figured this was a major point in his life. He looked around at the posters on the wall: campaigns urging addicts to get tested; others selling hope for those testing positive:

Living with HIV!

Life with HEP C!

It's not the end of the world.

5 reasons to keep hope!

Pierre felt antsy, his stomach empty. These were the posters which had disturbed his dreams after he'd first entered rehab. It was almost science fiction how he saw them, happy reformed getting on with life/work/family, looking all too healthy, like those people they airbrush into posters of new soon-to-be building complexes, smiling back as if they are already in paradise and suicide isn't the way to go with positive results.

"I'm going kill myself if I test positive," Pierre suddenly said, not really to Jean-Paul. "I wouldn't want to live with that!

"Ha! I've heard that before," said Jean-Paul, casual as if he'd been waiting for it. "But you'll come round... everyone does."

"Not me. You don't know me. I couldn't live with that, scared shitless of being taken out by a cold each day... waking up paranoid about skin or lymphatic cancer... Not being able to take a lover. I'd rather be dead already!"

"Well, let's hope it doesn't come to that. Though once.. IF you’re diagnosed you'll find that after a while HIV/AIDS no longer has the same impact: it loses its teeth, becomes just a disease that your body is at war against. And nowadays it's not the death sentence it once was, many live out full lifespans. I'd much rather be told I was HIV+ than be diagnosed with lung cancer... Or ANY cancer! It's hard to explain how your perception changes once you have it. I guess it's like HEROIN, how dangerous and illegal that all seemed the first times and then how normal it becomes once your well-being depends on it. But kill yourself? What the hell for? You've done all this to live just to kill yourself?"

Those last words got Pierre’s back up, though he didn’t quite know why. He felt belittled by something in them, like they weren’t at all true or relevant to him. It also prickled him that this dinosaur of the junk world, this dying junkie, had planted himself alongside him and during the most tenuous wait of his life was haunting his mind with such talk.

"What d'you fucking mean?" he quizzed, irate. "'All this to live’? All what to live? I didn't want to live... That was the fucking point! You think I'd have done this (rolling up his sleeves) because I wanted to embrace life?"

Pierre's arms were marked, scarred, bruised, carved, though nothing too extreme... No greater than almost any other injecting addict.

Jean-Paul didn't look. He didn't want to see Pierre's arms. He had junk arms of his own. "Think about it," he said, "you never used heroin to die! If you wanted to die: you’d be dead! You use heroin to live... To make life more acceptable, no?"

"Acceptable? I use heroin like a fucking sledgehammer to the head. I use to kill the pain... I use coz I don't give a fuck if I live or die!"

"Well, I don't buy that. I peddled that line for years too. But the truth is, if you want to ease the pain then it's another way of saying you want to make life more bearable, which means you use heroin because you want to live. You said it yourself: if you test positive you'll kill yourself, if not you'll carry on living. This is myth about self-destruction... It's a huge fucking myth which no-one wants to admit. Though I guess it's more cool to want to die... better to have people trying to save you than not have them acknowledge you at all. At the end of it, when the veins are blown and the smack is shot, all there is at the end of the fabled rainbow is a bucket load of golden shit. One day you’ll understand. It doesn't get better it gets worse."

The young addict didn't answer. That pissed him off. Preaching! He was too early into his addiction for such talk. His heroin fanaticism was still young. He still thought, believed it was about death, that he was rebelling against life, that whacking junk up into his veins, marking his body, was advertising total abandon. The truth was, like most of us, Pierre wasn't rebelling against life, but against death. Kidding himself on that he wanted to die so that for some moments he could live freely, in peace, without the fear of mortality impeding his every move.

The sound of the clock ticked in and then disappeared again. Pierre felt like a ghost in his own time.

"How much fuckin' longer is this gonna take?" he said. "My appointment was 25 minutes ago. My mum's waiting down in the cafeteria. She'll be out her mind with worry."

For a moment Pierre looked pensive, reflective, like how he did when scheming hard for junk. Then he said: "Maybe it's a good sign, huh? What d'you think? It's a good sign I'm being left waiting? There's no way they'd leave me to wait like this if I'm positive?"

Jean-Paul's reply was a not-so-sure downward turn of his mouth. They were in a part of the hospital connected with the drug substitution unit and logic had never played much of a role here. Maybe the patient before has had a bad result and cracked up, he thought. Maybe the doctor arrived late. It could be any number of things.

Pierre sat under the spectre of the clock, his feet parted, his hands clasped, looking at the space of floor between his legs. He took his phone out his pocket, rapidly
tapped a few buttons with his thumb then clicked it closed and let out a sigh.

Jean-Paul looked at him, a discreet sideways glance. He would never admit it but he felt a strange delight in this young man's predicament, sitting there tormented as he was. It wasn't his choice to feel like that, he just did. And worse, there was something inside of him that would take even greater pleasure if the young man were to be diagnosed positive. He had been here before, sat right besides others who had gotten lucky, and though he had acted pleased and relieved, beneath he had always felt a sharp stab of bitterness that they'd got the break he never had. He wanted to be the young addict, right down to the bone, that's what he really wanted: to have his time again. His voice changed, became harsher, cynical.

"So with all your free needles, your aluminium Cups, your vit C, alcohol swipes, sterile water, how come you're even here? Shouldn't you be circulating unpolluted blood?"

Pierre stopped what he was doing and stared at the floor in thought. He nodded slowly.
"You'd hope so," he said, sadly, "but the always having everything, all the time, isn't easy, even if it is free! Sometimes I think it'd be better, in some ways, if it wasn't free. At least then we would have the power of the consumer. When things are free we are left at another's whim and must be thankful for what's there not what's lacking. It's like you can't complain there's no vegetables in the broth at the soup kitchen, they'll say 'well it's free innit, so what you complaining about?' That's the attitude which prevails. There was this one day, I'd been working. I arrived 5 minutes late at the needle exchange and was refused needles. The exchange was still open as they had acupuncture classes that evening but they refused to open the needle cupboard and give me fresh works. They said that the recovering addicts upstairs - sat there with needles all stuck in their fucking faces - could fall off the wagon hearing the syringe cupboard opened. They knew all the chemists were closed and that without fresh spikes I either had to not use or share... And not using ain't gonna happen. The cunts sent me on my merry way! And that's just one example of many. There's a spitefullness which often prevails through many of the drug services, where insidiously you are made to pay."

"Spiteful, yeah. But get real about paying for needles.You should be bloody thankful, seriously. I saw what it was like before, am a victim of it. I only wish I'd have had free needles and maybe I'd not be here right now."

"I’m just saying is all. Not that we should pay but that there can be improvements. You asked me why I'm here despite all the free services nowadays and I’m trying to tell you."

"Yeah, but you're not here because needles are free! Come on."

"No, but it could be in part because of the consequences of how the user is treated because a certain service is free. But that’s a side issue, really. The real problem, from what I see, is getting word out about the dangers of injecting and safer practices to potential IV users before they've taken up the needle. Do you know, I didn't even know what hep C was until I was asked one day if I had it! My next visit at the needle exchange I asked and had a real scare learning about it and that we shouldn't even share a spoon. From then on I didn't, but those weeks prior I had, water too…. and had let other addicts whack me up. That there, nowadays, is the place where I think the disease thrives, around new IV'ers in those first few weeks. It's like myself, I'm a clean user. I still pick up new needles, still use safely, but there's been too many occasions where it wasn't possible... Where we had to share spoons, water... even a needle once, and the only precaution you can take when up against that is asking the other person if they're diseased or not... And noone's ever gonna own up, at least not in that moment there."

Jean-Paul knew that was true. He had never owned up, not while he was well anyway. Now he had moved into a circle of addicts who were all HIV+, people he'd met at the hospital, support group, or who lived in the same hostel. They'd all come together with the same ailments and concerns, the same worries which plagued their nights.

"But you can't blame others," said Jean-Paul, “you should use heroin as if EVERYONE has HIV. That way, whether they do or not, it becomes irrelevant. You have to take final responsibility if you've caught a disease, the onus isn't on anyone else to prevent you catching one. That's too easy!"

"Oh, I will take responsibility... You'll see alright! I'll make sure if I'm dying I'll not have the chance to help spread this disease. You watch..."

"But maybe you already have? Here you are talking about those who know they're positive putting others at risk, but that also goes for those who haven't been tested but know they may have been exposed... Like you. So these occasions where you talk about others maybe putting you at risk, maybe it was the other way around, you who was positive and putting them at risk?"

"Yes, but that's my point, I unintentionally took risk and risked others by not knowing just how dangerous sharing equipment was. I've only ever once intentionally shared a needle. And anyway, I don’t think the problem is actually sharing needles - most addicts I know wouldn’t do that anyway - it’s more the equipment, or needles getting muddled up when all using and living together. Fuck knows. All I know is that if the world was even a little more just we'd not need to use in any case! We'd maybe care a little more about ourselves, about life."

"Bullshit!" exclaimed Jean-Paul. “Bull-fucking-shit! Addiction is to do with so much more than just misery. That's not the problem. Why are you here? Answer that?"

"Here??? You mean in the hospital? Needing a blood test?"

"Well yeah, how you’ve risked maybe being exposed?"

"Well, I suppose it was through desperation, through a need to have my fix, to be well and because that was often out of my control it pushed me into the junkie fraternity, and it's there where the risks are. It's using in groups, even if you're not directly sharing needles."

"But why integrate into that lifestyle if you think it's so hazardous? What on earth would push you there?"

"I'll tell you why, quite simply because you don't know it's hazardous just then. As for why you need that fraternity, there are many different reasons. Sometimes it's financial: we must pool our money; sometimes it's because of supply; housing problems. Sometimes you just can't get needles, like on a Sunday or when you get gear unexpectedly... You can get caught short. In times like that you need the help of others to make it work. You know it: I have 25 euros; you have 25 euros. We can get nothing each with that and both be sick or we can pool our funds and score a gram. And imagine that with 5 addicts. You end up with a fix each, and the fairest way to divide that is to cook up a single 100ml shot and everyone draws up 20ml. It's simple: you can't contract hep C or HIV from yourself. We're exposed to disease the moment we use in groups... Even if we think we're using safely."

"Well that's most addicts isn't it?"

"I don't know about that. It’s me and most I know... We do rely on each other most days. But then a lot of us are clean... Most of us don't have HIV or hepatitis."

Jean-Paul looked at the younger addict, so naive, still so unaware of the truth of IV'ing drugs even if he now knew how contagious certain illnesses were. He thought of all the deaths he had seen, not ODs, hospital deaths, people suddenly wasting away, deaths from strange cancers, pneumonia, septacaemia, liver failure... They were all HIV deaths, some hepatitis.

"Mostly clean? You're fucking joking int ya? Give me an injecting addict over 45 in France and I'll give you someone with HIV, hep C (if not both), a liar, or someone very fucking lucky! And the future isn’t looking too hot for your generation when you really delve into it. Ask the nurse when you see her. Your statistics for coming out that room there with good news, on all scores, is slight. What is it? Something like 1 in 3 of every IV drug user is HIV+ and 7 outta 10 with hep C. That's fucking serious! I'm telling you, this is a hidden epidemic and everyone helps hide it. You’re sitting there like the odds are on your side, but they’re not… the moment syringes start going in the veins the only odds greatly on your side is that you’ll be dead before you’re 50... And not from an overdose!"

The young addict pulled a face. He didn't really believe the statistics Jean-Paul had rattled off, thought he was just bitter and trying to scare him. He squinted out the corner of his eye, down at Jean-Paul's white cotton in-patient trousers, the hems rolled up so when he sat they raised up past his bare ankles. His legs looked silver and he had what looked like an inline in his inside ankle, an ankle so bony and sharp it hurt the young addict to look at. He shivered in feeling, like the emphatic response to nails pulled down a chalkboard. Jean-Paul eyed him, with a look like he wanted eat him.

"You've had a lot to say for an apprentice," Said Jean-Paul, "now it's my turn. I'll tell you why addicts are so careless about contracting disease. It stems from the portrayal of heroin itself, how it's treated in the media and all the fear-mongering than goes on - us addicts as guilty of perpetrating it as anyone. But what happens, because of this myth that heroin is so deadly, that it destroys the user and fucks up lives regardless, that there's 'no way back from smack' it encourages addicts to use in careless ways, to risk their lives, because what they believe is that they're fucked anyway. So the addict has no conscious thoughts of his life after heroin because it's sold to us that their is no future after. So we use in a very negative, immediate and volatile way. So what if we risk hepatitis/HIV/heart or lung problems? Coz we'll be dead of the heroin long before we must suffer the health consequences left in its wake... Only we won't. And that's a huge problem. You don't see marijuana smokers or even coke heads taking the risks we do. No, because for all the bad press about those drugs they are still not peddled as hopeless... Users are sold a major hope of recovery and so subconsciously conserve themselves for the future, for a life after addiction. Not so for smackheads. We are sold and sell hopelessness and don't think past the tenure of our addictions. That's how it comes to me anyway, tell me if I'm wrong."

Pierre nodded, in a way that said it was an interesting new thought to him, something to think about... or not. He looked up at the clock, then down at nothing, then stared at nothing some more.

Jean-Paul looked frail and bony. He was sat there with his right leg folded flimsily over his left, slightly reclined, turned towards Pierre. Illness had somehow made him sprightly and flexible once more. From down the corridor another in-patient was walked past them helped by a nurse. The man walked slowly like he was in prison shackles. He held a transparent oxygen mask to his face. Jean-Paul nodded a greeting. The patient put his eyes to Jean-Paul but gave no other sign back. Jean-Paul looked away, like he didn’t want to see something. Immediately Pierre's eyes followed the patient from behind, staring dejectedly at the blood or shit stains in the back of his pants. He thought he didn't want to end up here, like that, but that it felt a lot nearer to the truth of heroin addiction than the street scoring points, the shooting galleries or the crazy days of desperation and illness. Somehow he had landed in the real dark heart of addiction, the final place of stay for many addicts. Pierre was suddenly gripped by fear and panic. He felt it: he felt this was his first visit of many to this hospital, that somehow it was already decided that this was his fate, that Jean-Paul would be a regular feature in his life. He thought of his mother downstairs, how worried she must be. Then Pierre stood up and strode about in thought. From out a nearby room a nurse arrived holding a clipboard.

"Mr Chevalier?" she asked. Pierre nodded. She ticked his presence. "The doctor will see you soon," she said softly.

Pierre looked at her, horrified. He was convinced he had seen something pitiful in her expression, and it was sure to him she had avoided eye contact. In his mind he went over every muscle which had moved in her face, the tone and cadence of her words, and without being aware of it he was then pacing back and forth, in front of Jean-Paul, weating an intense expression like a man half out his mind.

"Nervous?" asked the older addict.

"I'm gonna test positive," he suddenly said, panicked. "Did you hear the way she told me about the doctor? See her face? She knows the results. I'm gonna fucking test positive. It'll be that time with Alexandre, putting me on, insisting he had the first shot! It'd be that time, alright. I saw him walking around the clinic all wasted and fucked with a cane a couple of years later. Fuck!!!"

"The nurse doesn’t know!" spat Jean-Paul. "And what’s more she doesn't want to know, and even if she did, the doctor wouldn't tell her. You're imagining things. That's the fear that is. That's the fear of death right there. Try to calm down. You'll know soon enough, but you don't know now... You don't!"

Pierre paced around. He pulled his hand down his face and after he had done so he looked 20 years older. Drained. Ill.

"It was those first weeks," he said, still pacing. “Those first fucking weeks when I couldn't even inject myself. I didn't know you could pick up viruses from spoons or filters or water. I thought as long as u didn't share u was pretty much safe. And you know the worst thing? Not one veteran injecting addict warned me of the dangers... Not one! Oh they couldn't be shut up telling me about citric to smack ratios, hitting veins, cooking the perfect hit, not wasting the gear! But as regards to making sure I didn't catch the diseases they probably had they said nothing! Not a word. Not a single piece of useful fucking advice."

The veteran addict didn't get dragged in. It was as if Pierre was accusing him - or something he represented - of being to blame.

"Maybe go and get your mother," was all he said, "it can help having someone in there with you."

"My mother? Have her in the room with me? No chance. I've caused her enough pain. She doesn't need that as well. And I don't need the support. What good did moral support ever fucking do?"

Jean-Paul pulled the blanket down over his shoulders and clasped it closed like a shawl. He looked cold. He looked like he was dying. He watched Pierre's shoes moving about and then cast a look up to the wall. After a few seconds an inquisitive look came over him and he peered in more closely.

"Clocks stopped," he said, "The clock's stopped."

"I know," said Pierre, "yet before the fucking thing couldn't turn fast enough!"

"No, I mean it's really stopped. Look!"

And sure enough the old clock high on the wall had stopped and a weird timeless feeling now permeated the corridor, the hospital. It felt like a storm had moved in, like the sky outside had darkened, like that prickling, beautiful, terrifying sensation of nature taking flight, of dogs whimpering, before all hell breaks loose in the world. There was no doubt about it: history was upon them.

The two men sat in silence now. Not thinking, not doing anything, passive, at the mercy of things which had already been done. If he'd have had time Pierre would have well liked a shot, to push some calm through his veins. But he hadn't the time, as down the corridor there came the nurse, and playing nothing but her historical role, and as grave as she must be remembered, she told Pierre that the doctor was ready to see him.

...

The doctor seemed abnormally cheerful for such a moment. He was a large man, well groomed, who seemed to offer safety in the very stiffness and quality of his shirt cuffs and links. There was a cup of coffee on his desk and Pierre could smell the warm nutty odour from his mouth.

"Mr Chevalier, sit down and keep your hands away from my prescription pads," he said as an ice breaker. "Would you like a glass of water?" Pierre shook his head.
"Chevalier, hmm, now... where are you...." And he went through a small pile of letters and referrals on his desk.

Pierre's anxiety was barely under control. He wanted to stand, to move, to leave. He wanted a Get Out Of Jail Free card, to rejoin his life with no receipt for living.

"What's the news, Doctor?" he asked "What is it? Am I fucked?"

The doctor opened an initial envelope from the heptology unit. He unfolded the paper inside, lowered his glasses and peered at it, his eyes scanning for what was relevant. Not looking up he said:
"Mr. Chevalier, unfortunately you have tested positive for the hepatitis C virus. Now before ypu panic we'll discuss after exactly what that means and what the next steps will be. But you have tested positive."

Pierre didn't say anything. From what he had heard about how highly contagious hepC was he had half expected it. Just then it didnt seem so bad, his concerns were on the results of the HIV test. That seemed what he was really there for. Pierre sat there feeling culpable and nervous. He hadn't done much to contract the virus but in this moment he felt it'd be a let off if he tested negative . He could feel his flushed face, how young 24 years really was, how little he had done with his life. He suddenly wanted to live, wanted to grab the doctor and rattle the help right out off him. He could feel tears, they were ready to flow.

The doctor looked at him. "You're a young man, Mr Chevalier... You shouldn't even be here." Then he opened a further letter, looked over it, handed it over to Pierre and said. "You've tested positive for the HIV virus."

Pierre looked at the results but saw nothing, he couldnt make out a single word. It was as if the letter was in some language he had never learnt.

"What's going through your mind?" asked the doctor. "A counsellor will be on hand in a moment to talk you through and help with the diagnosis. What are you thinking?"

But Pierre wasn't thinking anything. He was up and gone, without taking the letter, without a word, out the door, past Jean-Paul, past the dead clock, down the corridor, through the swing doors, past the janitor's trolley, past the lift and out into the open stone staircase of the old hospital. The daylight now hit him like flash-blast, piercing in through his lashes. Pierre made a sound like an exhausted animal and then bashed himself in the side of the head with the clenched palm of his hand. The world didn't seem real for a moment. He breathed heavy and stood in the bright light of day trying to unscramble his mind. Instinctively he patted the little secret pocket of his jeans, felt for the couple of bumps he knew were there, and then went off in search of the toilets.

In the toilet, Pierre collapsed over the sink, his head bowed into the bowl. He stared at a line of cream and green limescale which had built up on the ceramic. Then he slowly raised his eyes to the mirror. He stared suspiciously at himself, at his face and into his eyes. Then he studied his hands, turned them over and stood in blank yet profound thought.

In the cubicle Pierre hurriedly ripped open his Steribox, set up the little metallic cup, emptied a bag of heroin out into it, and got to cooking up a shot. He drew up, tied his wrist off, and clenched and released his fist before sliding the syringe into a vein in the topside of his hand. "Work you bastard!" he seethed, "work!" And it did work. The smack coursed up his arm, through his shoulder, through his heart and then to his brain. His body closed down, his emotions numbed, the sounds and brightness off the day dulled and his heart calmed. It was like a star collapsing into itself.

Pierre withdrew the needle. For a moment he stared at the blood which came from his hand. He felt he should be scared of it, that somehow he should have a new relationship with his body. But he didn't. He looked at the blood and then like always licked it clean and rubbed the spot dry on his trousers. Straightened up he left the toilet and made his way down, slowly, to the canteen.

He saw his mother from a distance. She was sat there chatting to some old woman like she didn't have anything to do ever again. When she saw Pierre she said to the old woman "here he is". The old lady heaved herself up and left. Pierre forced a smile as she passed.

Pierre's mother stood up. She seemed small to Pierre. He could hardly look at her. She had given him this life and he had squandered it.

"Good? Bad? What?" she asked, nervously.

"It's good," said Pierre, through tears, "I got lucky, mum... I got fucking lucky." And he fell into her arms and wept into the maternal safety of her neck.

"So all this nonsense is over now, son?" She asked. "You'll quit all this?"

Pierre held on tight. She felt something scared in him, something she hadn't felt in her boy for many years. She clutched him tighter too. Pierre nodded and sobbed. "Mum... Mum," he said, but never finished.

He wished it was over, he wanted it to be over, but it wasn't over. In the hospital, in the canteen, on an afternoon like spring turned bad, the day blew hard and the day blew fast, and the clock had stopped and the clock ticked on, and son held mother like mother held son, and this wasn't the end, not by a long shot, this was only just, the beginning.

- - -

Thanks as ever for reading... One day we'll all be rewarded properly. Shane...X

Four to the Power of Zero

.
 I'll tell you now how heartless the world had become: I put powdered cat litter in his dope and sat and watched in delight as he chased his first toot, almost choked and said: There's something fuckin' weird in this!

Mine looks fine, I Said, And a nice big bag to boot.

Big??? You fucking kiddin' me?

I scooped out a fix worth of smack and poured it in my spoon. Sitting up, atop the duvet on the double bed, he measured out another dose too. I heard his hit the foil, the crinkle as he manoeuvred it into place, his lighter lighting, then a kind of sputtering cough as he inhaled the smoke and struggled to keep it down. I didn't look at him. Just listened.

Nah, there's fucking brick dust or summin' in this... It dont run jus' burns up black! There's B in it ... there's definitely B, but there's some other shit too.

I heard him ripping off a fresh piece of tin foil and emptying the content of his bag onto it. He had a pen or something and was pushing the smack around, sorting through it, segregating the small harder rocks and saying all the while : Not evn the same fuckin'colour... not fuckin' gear! Then he screamed like someone who would be violent if the right weakling were sat in front of him: It's a third of the fucking bag... Wot the FuuuucK !!! Finishing by letting out a coarse, barbarous sound of rage, back-heeling the wooden base of the bed and screaming “fuuuuck!!!” once again.

I ignored him. I was sat cross-legged on the floor. I cooked my dope and carefully placed the spoon down on a book in front of me. My first two injections would be on that Cunt. Kinda. Kinda as two nights previous my morning bag had mysteriously disappeared and even more mysteriously reappeared, three hours later, with barely anything in it. After having turned the room inside out multiple times it was finally the Cunt who found it: sat there on the table under our gaze all the while.

Found it!!! He cried. Panic over!

W-what??? Where?

Right there, on the fucking table, he pointed, his mouth hung open in mock disbelief. How the fuck did we miss that?

I stared at him with a hatred in me that I could not and did not want to veil – his cool, insincere friendly face, the flushed guilty demeanour manifest in his eyes and mouth and oozing out of every filthy pore in his deceitful fucking head. It was the look which had outed every thieving junkie since the dawn of time. It was more than circumstantial evidence; it was the embodiment of guilt itself. And it wasn't even with the honesty of primal greed. This wasn't tearing a strip of meat off the carcass first. It was a manufactured selfishness, a Frankenstein behaviour, something that doesn't exist in the wild.

Neither of us had 'missed' the bag. The Cunt surely couldn't be stupid enough to have forgotten we'd already cleared and upended the table thrice (me first and then him and then me again). It was all but impossible the bag had remained there, defying gravity and the scrutiny of four keen junkie eyes. No. Stupidity had nothing to do with it. The Cunt's motivation for returning my heroin was borne from the exact same impetus that had had him steal it in the first place. He'd already tried giving me the slip once that evening, halfway down the stairs and almost out the door when I shouted: "Er, Sean.... have you seen my bag that was on the table?"

The Cunt must have froze in terror, knowing that if only I'd realized seconds later he'd have been out the door and away. Instead he traipsed back up, looking way too innocent for anyone with a foothold in this junk life, and said: "Well, if it was really there then it can't be far... it'll turn up. It can only be in the room! Let me know tomorrow where you find it.

What dyou mean IF it was really there? You fucking know it was!

Um, was, he said, smiling. You sure you din't do it? You was pretty well gone for a while!?

Fuck off! I snarled incredulously. And in that moment I knew, without a degree of doubt, that my bag of heroin was sitting in one of his pockets or inside his sock. I also knew that if I allowed him the opportunity to worm his way out of mine that evening then my gear and morning well-being would be leaving with him.

Used accidently!!! I repeated. When was the last time you or any other fucking addict 'accidentally' used their morning bag? Acci-fuckin-dently!!! No, it’s not been used. It’s fucking here somewhere, and if you're any kind of a friend you’ll not want me getting sick either so will help search for it until it’s found…. Even if it takes all fucking night! Bags are not gonna start fucking disappearing here!

I said that with just enough of a hint of violence about it that he understood the situation had the potential to get ugly. The problem now was that after having been so close to slipping out and away with my smack he'd then taken mental possession of it, had envisaged a morning free from the rigours of shoplifting and even now still held onto the hope that he could help search for the missing bag for a while before throwing his hands up in the air, flummoxed, and then leaving. But tonight he was trying it on with someone who knew the ropes a little too well, who knew every move light-fingered addicts like him were fixing to make. I knew it would take a while for him to mentally unclench from the idea that the bag was his, and so we both played for time and I knew I had more than him.

It took three hours, the both of us searching, the both of us aware we'd not find it as it was sitting in the bottom of one of his pockets. It was only when he was in need of a hit himself, after he had realized that searching till it was found was no joke, that he disappeared into the kitchen and then the bathroom searching out a workable solution. That solution was splitting the bag 70/30 in his favour then arriving straight out the toilet, without the slightest care for credibility, exclaiming: Found it!!! I settled for being partially robbed, content my ploy had been successful enough to keep me well until the following morning when the dealers phones would start switching on.

70/30... So, in a way, now, I wasn't getting anything free just getting something even: having today what I was robbed of yesterday.

Back to the cunt on the bed, moaning like his world is gonna totally collapse, miserably separating what he thinks is brick dust out his gear.

Look, he said, look at all this weird shit in the dope! You gonna shoot that?

He asked that in a strange way, like he wasn't really expecting me to say no, like he was beginning to question something else. I didn't reply just sucked my smack up out the spoon and flicked the air to the top of the syringe. I felt him looking at me. That was obvious. I concentrated on looking as guilty as hell.

Giv'us a sprinkle of yours, he asked, with a slight arrogance attached to his words. I wanna see if the same shit's in it.

Fuck off! I'm not wasting my gear burning it... you crazy or what?

You'll not fuckin' waste it! I'll give ya a trace of mine in return!

And what if mines not like yours? I'll have swapped good dope for bad and you'll still be left with yours anyway. How does the quality of my gear help you? All it can do is make you feel even worse.

You're not worried what you may be shooting, no?

Fuck knows what I shoot, I said, what anyone shoots. Even clean dope's cut dirty. I'm more scared of what I've already shot... The shit which cooked up but wasn't dope. If its brick like you say it won't cook down so on that score it's safer.

Well you seem pretty fuckin' cool about it s'all I'm sayin'. I know you, if you seriously thought there was summin in the gear, even a suspicion, you'd be all over it... studying it, shitting yaself of getting a dirty hit!

Then maybe that tells you something, I said. Mine cooked up clean, not a trace left in the spoon... actually looks like a pretty decent bit of kit. I could even smell it during the cook... and it's not often that happens.

The Cunt visibly smarted with anger. He cast a look down at his pathetic measure of heroin which would barely last him even if he quit. He looked like he was going to cry. I could see him going through his options, making the fated decision:

1) wrap the gear up now and pass a mildly uncomfortable night thinking of it until he could smoke the remainder in the morning.
2) smoke what's left immediately and at least get a nod and pass a sleepless night of mild withdrawal dreading having to go out grafting in the morning half sick.

Of course the logical decision, the one that would affect him the least was the former, having one evening of restriction so as the cycle of physical addiction was kept up. But junkies think short term, they take the immediate relief and deal with tomorrow only when it's there. The Cunt struck his lighter, gave one last cursory thought to what he shouldn't do and then did it anyway: his deplorable face chasing around what was already the last of his bag, secretly disgusted by my presence and driven crazy by the amount of heroin I still had left and which I had purposely left open to his full view. He blew the smoke out like it was the last of the air in his lungs.

Out the corner of my eye I saw the Cunt's neck and arms relax and his upper body collapse half a foot forward. I heard the foil touching down on the bed and crinkling up. For a moment he'd nodded out. I waited just until he was on the precipice of his nod, his body bent over in an impossible way, all his anguish and worries left in the world he had momentarily vacated, the smoking tube fall from his lips.

Can't be that BADLY CUT, I said, raising my voice to wake him, to cut short the only nod he was good for.

He came to with a start, looking angry, annoyed with me for waking him yet even more annoyed with himself for nodding off and losing any sympathy he'd built up about how useless his smack was and what a hellish evening and night he was in for.

Just tired, he said. This fucking life is beginning to exhaust me! I'm bored with it all. Everything! This shit fucking gear and these CUNTS ripping you off!

'These cunts' meant me. That's why he'd stressed it. But he knew it was pointless accusing me out right, same as I knew it would have been useless accusing him two days ago. The junkie rule of plea is you only ever admit a crime when caught absolutely bang-to-rights, and often not even then. Regardless of damning evidence, logic, probabilities, lack of any other possible culprit or alibi all must be denied with a passion: "I don't know how it happened... I know I was the only one here, but I it wasn't me... It wasn't fucking me!"

For the first time since robbing him I now looked him square in the eye. I gave him my smug face to hate, I needed him to hate me, to see himself in me and despise what he saw.

Tired? Ha! You was having a right good nod more like it, I said, trying to further wind him up.

It's not the quality of the heroin that's the problem... it's the fuckin' quantity!!! All that other shit crushed into it!

Maybe it was his last bag or something and he was trying to stretch it out? I suggested knowing it was implausible.

Yeah, right! Said the Cunt. And it was just my bad luck to get THAT bag?

Well one of us had to get it. 50/50 isn't bad luck, its equal chance. 1 in 50 would be bad luck.

Hmm... Even fucking chance!He said. When a junkie comes straight in from scoring holding his stomach, desperate to shit, and bolts himself in the toilet with the bags, it's not fifty-fucking-fifty... Its odds-on!

I did need the fucking toilet, I said, what you trying to say?

It's cat litter, he said.

What's cat litter? What are you talking about?

In my gear, it's not brick dust it's cat litter. He wasn't angry. He said it in a fatigued, doleful way as if he was always on the shit end of everything, like I had done this many times before and had now completely and finally broken his spirit.

There's cat litter in my gear, he repeated, quietly and then he lay down, looking at the wall and silently crying, pretending his tears were derived from healthy emotions and not the abandoned and hideous self-pity which he knew they were of.

I pretended I hadn't noticed his sadness and sticking the knife in further I said, Oh well, if you're gonna have a lie down I may as well take an extra shot and join you. At that point he sat himself up and looked over at me, at my heroin as I scooped another fix out. He watched for a moment and then flopped back down, supine, staring off at the ceiling.

As I prepared my second injection I could sense the Cunt eyeing me. The room was heavy with his being, his conniving thought processes, his anger and self-pitying sadness. He was battling with himself, I could tell, wanting to keep his self-respect, hating me, hating heroin, blaming just about everyone but himself as to why he was laying their so morally weak and on the point of degrading himself even further. To him this was about power, his weakness as an adult male under my dominance, my superior strength and success: having heroin when he had none. It was a disadvantage you can't help hating the other fellow for. The Cunt didn't last out long. He swallowed his pride, prepared some murderous plans in case I refused him, then looked my way once more.

D'ya think you could spare me a trace until tomorrow? He asked, as if to no-one, as if it wasn't even a question.

I ignored him though we both knew the words had been said. He waited a while, squirming, impatient, until the reverberation of his words had stopped sounding and all that was left was an uncomfortable silence, playing more on me than on him.

So whadj'ya say? He asked. Have ya?

I shouldn't have but I felt sorry for him. His words, and the emotions which fuelled them, seemed so genuine. They reminded me of a humanity I had once known, a suffering I couldn't fail to respond to. And I would have responded if it would have come from any other heart but a junk filled one. In the Cunt's request was a self-centredness and a weeping self-pity that sickened me, that made me despise him more for even asking. Come on, don't ask me that, I implored, it's not fair and you know it! I've just another four fixes here myself and am lucky I even have that as my bag was so BIG.

The cunt didn't reply in words but I felt him flush pale at my words before his heart found itself again and began furiously thumping litres of blood through his body until his head throbbed in shame and humiliation and murderous hatred. I was almost out-of-breath just sensing his deflated disappointment. Now on his face was a spiteful dejected look, the Cunt driven half crazy by the number four as it echoed around in his head: four to the power of ZERO; how much better four was to nothing; how four was a lot; how four wasn't fair; how four was just crushingly sad and overpowering; how four was what his existence had come to; how four was my advantage over him; how four and why and therefore.... and then he was on the bed, looking at the wall, trembling and blubbering and wailing like a small child, like he'd had his life and dreams and heart smashed to pieces. He boohooed on about life and what hell it had been and how he didn't want to live and never had. He cursed out every one from dealers to junkies to his own mother. He cursed his cousin for first introducing him heroin and bawled out something about his social security money not having been paid. It all came out in an almost incomprehensible tirade of tears and bubbles and snot and dribble. And when he was finished the only clear thing was that he was the victim, that he'd ALWAYS been the victim and it just wasn't fair!

I took immense joy listening to the cunts performance, and delighted further knowing that once he'd had a fix and straightened up that he would never feel comfortable in my company again, that he' would always know that his reckless junkie demeanour had cracked wide open in front of me and revealed a sobbing and pathetic man of 35 who had become so ruthless in life that he was totally alone and despised by the one person who would still sit in the same room as him. He was a ruined and spent force who would naturally evade my company once this was over, go off alone again until he found a new junk buddy he could recreate his myth to. I think in that moment, from the pleasure I took in his distress, that I’d never despised anyone quite as much. I wrapped my gear up, put it in the tight little pocket of my jeans and stuffed tissue in on top to protect against crafty fingers while I nodded.

When I next came around it was to the crinkling of foil and a lighter flicking anew. I looked across at the Cunt briefly thinking he'd somehow got my gear out my pocket. Sitting on the side of the bed he was now trying to smoke the cat litter, saying “there's maybe some gear in it after all”. Of course there wasn't and the powdered grain either just smoked or did nothing at all. When he realized he was just as sober as he was before he started he gave up and tossed the foil and its contents down on the floor. He looked over at me. I stared him square in the eye and let the faintest of smiles break out across my lips. He saw it and nodded in acknowledgement.

Well basically that's me fuck'd, innit? He asked.

Like I was the yesterday morning, I replied

Oh, so that's what this is all about.... Revenge?

Revenge? For what?

You fucking tell me, he said, I've never stole from you or done bad by you.... EVER. Whether you believe me or not that's the truth... I never did anything!

I didn't believe him. HE didn't believe HIM!. He was still trying to save himself only now in another way. And he would save himself.... just. He had but another two hours to wait first, another two hours of punishment, sentenced to his own company, to himself and who he had become and was.

I watched him through the evening, his distress at being fully conscious and having to deal with his own thoughts. He sat there in a kind of sulk, constantly shaking his legs so as his tormented existence didn't go unnoticed for a second. It was well after 10pm when I finally put him out his misery.

Sean.. give me your foil, I said.

At that he was up and alive, all the misery and contempt leaving him in an instant. I put enough smack on his foil to give him a smoke through the night and a good boot to get him up and out in the morning. He thanked me mercilessly and said he'd never forget it. He said that apart from himself I was the only other junkie who still had a heart. Not affording himself time to become any more emotional he heated and chased the heroin down the foil and sucked up the smoke. The night had come down and he'd survived. For a moment there was a peaceful silence, the silence of junk fiends having blocked out the world. The TV was on and the voices it emitted seemed homely and cosy and warm. In our downed mood we both watched the box, our eyelids getting heavy and sometimes closing over completely. I was glad I had gotten the Cunt well and I was even kinda glad he was there, if only as a presence in the room.

You know, it wasn't me who stole your gear, he said after a while. Honestly, it wasn't me.

I heard his words, nodded, but didn't reply.

You don't believe me do you? He asked. I'd never leave another addict sick, know too well what its like myself. I'd never put someone else through that! Fuck knows what happened to your bag the other night but I swear to you, on my life, it wasn't me!

And for the last time that night I heard his words and didn't reply again.

_ _ _ _

Thanks as ever for reading, Shane. X

Don't forget ---> BOOK LAUNCH: Reading and performance

A Modern History of Rotten Teeth

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It was the summer of the year before last. In a bar in Paris, in the early afternoon heat, Tony O'neill and I were swapping books, scars, track marks and missing teeth. Tony gave up his arms and narrated furiously their scar history, recalling marks where great veins had been blown out and where abscesses had once tried to eat him alive. I followed suit, showing off the purple tracks running down the centre of each hand and a few fresh needle welts from recently missed fixes. At one point I had my trouser leg hitched up and my sock down, showing Tony the pen marks for where I'd marked off a sure fire vein so as there'd be no fucking around if we were holed up in a toilet somewhere with no more than shitting time to get hit up. It was a circle around the entry site and an arrow pointing in the direction that the needle needed to go. Above the arrow I had marked the letter 'T' - my Tony vein. O'Neill lounged back in his chair, right hand around his beer, dark shades hiding an important strip of his life beating. He'd not been using for 9 nine years and was mostly all healed up and out of shape. But some things never heal nor can be scrubbed clean, and hands hit repetitively with needles over many years become addicts hands – chunky, swollen, corn-beefed.

Come on then, let's see ya teeth? I said

Tony opened his mouth and pulled his gums up at each side showing gaps and pointing out dental work and screw in teeth. I watched, smoking, one eye squinted over like a man who is about to lay down a hand of aces. With Tony done I didn't wait for him to ask to see my teeth. I sucked the last bit of death out my cigarette, and scrunching the butt in the ashtray, I raised my head flashing him a gritted smile, turning in profile so as he could see all the hideous carnage of 35 years of dying. O'neill raised his shades as if they weren't helping him to see. He peered into the rotten, rusted, fortress of my mouth. I only had 10 teeth left, and of them just two were undamaged, and one of them was false. Mostly my mouth was a jagged trap of broken busted and missing teeth, black and brown bits of stained enamel sticking out my gums. My bottom front teeth were the only ones with any neighbours. It was an honesty that gets you deputised immediately in this game.

And how d'you feel about that? Tony asked

Well I'm not proud of it, I said. And I don't like it. I don't smile or laugh anymore and try to speak without opening my mouth. I've never been into junkie chic... could never afford it. And of course, when it's free, when you are it, when you can no longer put it on or take it off, it's not so much fun. Still, if nothing else, my mouth's at least honest: a true reflection of the life I've led. My body, covered in half decent clothes, isn't honest at all.

It was a truthful answer. It would have been easy to say I'm proud of the decay and hold it up as some kind of success, especially to Tony who would understand either response. But I never got into this to look like death. I got into heroin to look more like one of the living. So on that hot summer day, outside a Parisian bar, Tony sat looking over my shoulder and I sat looking over his, him with a view of the street behind me and me watching the waiter dance between the afternoon clientèle with trays of drinks and salads and bottles of wine and water. To my left and right tall, narrow streets littered with bistros and restaurants broke off and run like sewage into the rest of the capital. People sat around smoking and watching and being watched, and tapping messages into their phones. That was Paris then, and it was right in the middle of the last days of our lives.

I left Tony that day by kissing his daughter on the top of her head and watching his little family walk away in one direction as I headed off in the other. But as I kissed his little girl's head, and felt the lightness of her being, I was overcome by a great sadness. It came up off her scalp and entered me like a spirit; a sadness of innocence, of people going away to lives and joys and comforts which I've always wanted but never had. I walked away holding in tears, trying not to think of anything, trying to lose myself in a labyrinth of streets and footsteps. But my existence was present and inescapable - a sadness drifting six foot off the ground, completely conscious of its loneliness. Feeling detached and nervy with emotion I phoned my girlfriend:

Well, I've made it to Paris, I said, and I've sent you two postcards and I Love You!
 Why two postcards? she asked, surprised I'd even bothered to call
 In case one gets lost, I said.

When she put the phone down I found a shop, and really did buy two postcards and send them. And it was in that moment, scribbling out poor poetry on a two euro postcard, that I became aware of a lower side tooth, throbbing away, a heart beat of pain, forcing me to exist even more.
*
I had a few hours to kill in the capital before my train back to Lyon departed. I had wanted to meet up with another friend but finally I preferred to be alone with myself rather than be alone in company, put out even more by my inability to express myself orally in the flesh. As I wandered around the same small quarter of the French capital I tongued and pressed on my tooth, sometimes purposely annoying the pain further by sucking cold air onto it. The sun was just the other side of its highest point now and the heat was burnt into the day proper. Sweat had seeped through my shirt and dampened my jumper, making me feel dirty and irritable. I must have walked around the same set of streets 15 times, not wanting to get too close to the metro for fear of bumping back into Tony and his family, and have them catch me wandering around alone, with nothing to do and nowhere to go. I pressed on the almost full bag of heroin that was in my little pocket, a comforting bump, an emergency exit for days like this. I thought of the relief of arriving home, just as the evening light faded out, of tying off the rest of the day and forcing along tomorrow. With still over three hours before my train departed I sat on the cool stone steps of the church St Michel. I closed my eyes and thought of the train journey home, willing time to hurry up. I thought of the innocence of Tony's little girl and the sudden and immense sadness I had been struck with after kissing her goodbye – playing and sucking on my tooth all the while.
* *
On the train I stole somebody else's seat. One with more space and near the window, and positioned so as I could look back on the things which passed and not see what was coming from up ahead. As we moved off I watched Paris's long goodbye, the city shrinking into the hub of the central station. The ghettos on the outskirts, a Manhattan of tower blocks, was my last view of the capital and then we were speeding at 200mph through countryside, and then through nothing much at all.

My tooth twinged again. This time a long, sharp pain which levelled out with the speeding train. I pressed around the outside of my mouth and could feel the beginnings of a swelling right below the tooth. I pushed on it hard, hoping I could force it down, but it just made the tooth throb ever more and left me massaging the same spot of mouth and pressing my warm palm against it which seemed to help. I was out of sorts, a burrowing sadness then deep within me, many things converging at once and meeting at the apex of that exact point in time. With my hand still on my mouth I thought back to when I'd lost my first tooth, 16 years ago, that horrendous wintry morning after I'd been up all weekend rocking and crying in pain and overdosing on aspirin and paracetamol. How the only thing that'd ease the pain, for seconds at a time, was filling my mouth with cold water and swilling it around. How I'd staggered into the hospital A&E at 5am in the morning, white as a ghost, my head floating in and out of reality due to all the painkillers, how I'd threatened to smash my skull in if I couldn't see the emergency dentist. The receptionist told me he'd be there at 7.30am, but it'd be much quicker for me to go along to my own dentist who opened at 8. I remembered how I vomited warm water in the bin in the waiting room and again outside in the icy car park, and how the morning didn't feel real and I thought I would die in the street.

I pressed up around the tooth that had given me so much pain that day, all those years ago. Just gum now. Good! A tooth I'm still relieved is no longer in my head. A tooth that had me collapse into my sister's flat, with the morning light not even up, groaning and pleading for help. Then, in pain induced psychosis, how I'd stripped down to just my pants and lay down on the ice cold bathroom tiles, shaking and humming and waiting for 8am. How I half ran and half staggered down to my dentists, and after more than two hours of waiting and four local anaesthetics I was finally in the dentists chair with my mouth open and my eyes streaming tears of agony.

I can save it and cap it or take it out, she said. What would you prefer?
Get the fucker out, I said. I just want it gone!

And so my first tooth was drilled and pulled and wrenched out, dropped into a little plastic container and given to me. I learned on that day that pain is the most exhausting thing that anyone can experience. That pain and its relentless assault on the central nervous system wears you down like nothing else is able. With the tooth out, my gum stitched up, and the hurt gone, for the first time I felt the pleasure of post-pain fatigue. Back home, on that winter's afternoon, with the fire murmuring and the TV humdrum in the room, I slipped into a deep, pure sleep and recovered from the exertions of chronic pain.

On the train I woke up. I'd been daydreaming, falling forward and drifting off as the french countryside flashed by. It was just that period of summer where the temperature really drops in the evening, and just that hour in the evening where the sun saturatess the countryside in dark gold, like everything has found God and belongs to the light. I shuffled up in my chair, tight against the soft felt seat, wondering how far away Lyon was and thinking of the injection I'd have once home.

My second tooth was the last innocent one I lost. Again it was a top right molar. I had chipped it opening a beer bottle and almost a year later, decaying from the inside out, cold air was snaking in and I was back on deadly doses of painkillers. A week later I was once again sitting in my dentists, with no appointment, and in just as much agony as before. She removed it in pretty much the same fashion as the first one, though this time replaced it with an artificial screw in replacement. She told me that if I didn't start brushing my teeth regularly that by thirty I'd have none left. I explained that toothpaste and powder makes me gag as my step-father used to sometimes shove a spoonful of powder or paste in my mouth and made me chew it around, froth it up and spit it out. She said: Well, if it's just the taste of mint you can't bear??? And then flogged me a strawberry dental toothpaste, three times as small and three times the price. As I've never let any woman rob me twice, it was the last time I saw her.

For a while I looked after my teeth. I brushed them at least three times a week, which was a mighty improvement from once every six months. The brushing lasted about a month, just long enough to forget the agonizing pain and for the strawberry toothpaste to finish, and then it was a story of neglect and toothbrushes being used for other things, growing bald and mouldy, and never being replaced. The nearest I came to brushing my teeth was rubbing my index finger back and forth across them, and sometimes, wiping over them with cheap toilet paper.

The sun was balanced on the horizon as we hurtled through central France. Small flocks of birds were heading off west and in the fields the cows were gathering for the night and the last tractors were turning out and chugging slowly away. The low golden light hit upon rocks and grass and fence and bushes and cast long shadows that split up the light. Way over, there were streaks of bubblegum pink in the sky. The evening was sat just waiting to come in. I thought of Tony and his family, back in the hotel and all settled down, working off the exertions of their day. I thought again of his little girl Nico and remembered back when I was that age, how the coming evening felt as it wafted in, in that fantastic period between light and dark when the day is done and the magic of all young fantasies and dreams arrive. Then in the window I saw a darkness. It hung like a spectre of death over my far shoulder. Monsieur, it said, Ticket, please. I gave the controller my ticket and turned away as he stamped it. My tooth gave a buzz of pain. Have a nice journey, he said handing the ticket back and smiling. I took the ticket, nodded at his teeth and said, Merci.

I had good teeth like that once, I thought, even after the first two losses. I ran my tongue over all the sharp and broken teeth in my my head, trying to work out in which order I had lost them. It wasn't easy. It's rare whole teeth fall out. They normally come away in bits over months or years. I had lost so many that it'd become nothing, just something that happened while eating or kissing too hard. I'd spit the pieces out like melon pips. What I did know however is that it wasn't heroin which had lost me my teeth. It maybe hadn't helped, and the negligence to dental hygiene through them years had probably helped set up the conditions, but on arriving in France, after seven years of unbroken heroin addiction, I was only four teeth down and a bottom incisor rotted in half. That wasn't bad. Still, during the last 18 months in England I had suffered from chronic toothache and had become something of an aficionado on how to relieve dental pain. Over the next seven years, as I lost more teeth, I would live with extreme toothache on a daily basis and pass months on end swallowing, what to most would be, fatal doses of paracetamol, aspirin and ibuprofen. Only once more in my life would I need to visit a dentist, finally indulging in self-surgery to relieve myself of even the most chronic of pains.

When I first started proper, high doses of daily methadone the doctor warned me to pay extreme attention to dental hygiene, advising that I rinse then brush my teeth thoroughly for three minutes after taking my dose. Of course I reassured him I would and as soon as I had my script he became just about the least important person on the planet and his words about as memorable as a morning shit. Rather than brushing my teeth after drinking my methadone I let the sugary syrup fill my mouth and run over my teeth and lips, taking pleasure up to an hour later from the sweet spots my tongue would find, a reassurance that I had at least taken something. A year later, a year too late, I learnt that methadone often destroys even the best kept teeth, it's ultra sweetness somehow penetrating all that it comes into contact with, marinating teeth and bone. After just over a year on methadone my teeth were stained a yellowish grey colour and there was hardly a tooth which wasn't either decaying from the base or from the top in. This was the period before any had fallen out and was the start of four years of intensive toothache.

On the train I held my mouth and rested there like that with my eyes closed. I heard snippets of the other passengers conversations and them ordering coffees and sandwiches. But the world, when filtered through pain, seems so bland and drab. In such times none of the artificial or commercial things matter. All that matters is a pain-free existence, and you realise that that is the greatest joy... living without hurt or suffering. That's what we should settle for. Fashion, high cuisine, fantastic ways to waste time, new computer games, what the cousin or sister or brother has done are not important. Just to be pain free is enough. It's why a painful death isn't as bad as it may at first seem. In fact, a painful death is probably the best death one could hope for, because finally death/unconsciousness comes as a welcome and wanted relief from the pain. A long slow painless death on the other hand gives us time to reflect, to see how unfair it is that we're dying yet not even hurting, making us begrudge death and wanting to live more than ever.

I stared at the wall, my eyes streaming tears. Not sad tears, tears from an unbelievable pain that had been raging in my gob for weeks and had over the last three holiday days become intolerable. I was going to do it: smash my head furiously off the brick wall, really putting in fast, hard cracks with all my body weight behind it, to knock my brain into nowhere so the agony would stop. Death really isn't a concern at that point of suffering. My last piece of logic on that bank holiday Monday involved a small steak knife and a pair of wire snippers. I'd only the previous month had a tooth removed by students at the the free university dental practice, which again, for the third time, had been a pressure pain. I'd learnt that unbearable toothache is always pressure pain. All other tooth ache is manageable. Even exposed nerves can be calmed with pain killers and the hurt masked until the nerve is accustomed to the raw life around it. But combustible pressure inside the tooth, where the pain shoots up into your brain and twitches around your face, and doesn't come in throbs but is omnipresent and constant, when the tooth feels like the inside is packed to bursting point with ice, and the pain makes your eyes sear... that pressure there can ONLY be relieved by surgery: by relieving the pressure. I had learnt that. And as no dentist was open, and nowhere free to go, I opened my mouth and trembling, worked the sharp point of the steak knife into the small cavity at the bottom of my tooth. I'd thought about doing it for two days but was petrified that I'd make an insupportable pain worse – and if that happened I'd have become insane. Now I could take it no more. With the tip of the knife in the tooth, and the icy tapped pain feeling like the universe before it imploded, I worked on opening up my tooth. It was a slow procedure as I gingerly twisting the knife around to chip off layers of rotted and weak enamel. Now and again sharp pains would shoot out so violently from the tooth that I'd instinctively sling the knife away as if I'd been hit by a sudden bolt of electricity. When I had worked a big enough hole I closed my mouth and tried sucking out the build up in my tooth. Nothing. Back in with the knife. I worked the tip up and down in the cavity until the hole was big enough to receive the underside pincer of the wire snippers. I positioned the snippers on the tooth, got a firm grip, and with three hard crunches I cracked the tooth in half. An enormous pain shot though my jaw. Barely had I jolted back and tensed up than it was gone and in its wake was calm. I stood staring in the mirror, still holding the cutters, thick stringy black blood drowning my gums and running out my mouth from where I'd accidentally sliced a huge cut in the gum with the knife. I stared inquisitively at my reflection, making sure the pain had really stopped. And it had. Just like that it was gone and the world seemed to shrink back inside me. With the pain gone I became insanely hungry. I was ecstatic on relief alone. Opening my mouth once more I wriggled out a good half of the broken tooth and washed it with the blood down the sink. Then the post-pain fatigue crept in. I felt like I'd taken some extra-strong sleeping pill. With the morning on low, I ate and then slept for 14hrs straight.

Pain makes you sad. It does. I thought that as I stared at the other passengers on the train, as I held my mouth and pressed against the latest toothache. It's not really the pain which gets you though, it's that it forces you to fully exist. It wakes you up and leaves you somehow feeling as if this is deja vu, as if you've experienced it before. It also make you realise that maybe existence isn't fun for everyone. I thought of physical and mental pain and for the first time in my life kinda understood the suicidal... realised what a burning hole of shit suffering is and finally, if it goes on long enough, leaves you looking for the nearest exit . But it wasn't just the toothache which had me thinking over such morose thoughts. I was still reeling from the sadness that had came from Tony's little girl, a multi-layered gloom comprised of physical suffering, longing, wanting, regret, hopes, dreams, nostalgia, loneliness, exile . They all somehow drifted along those tracks with me that day, all of it condensed and concentrated and shoved deep inside a rotten tooth.

The countryside wasn't so dispersed or cut off anymore. Now we'd pass little groups of houses and small towns and factories and electrical plants. The sky was mauve and street and station lights flicked on. Passengers were getting irritable in their seats and some began putting their magazines aside and slowly clearing away all trace of their presence. We were getting near the city. I could sense it: an awakening: something in the air which said that there was a huge dirty bustling sprawl of life not far off. The light was almost done for now. The ticket man was sat alone down the end of the carriage counting his ticket stubs and tapping something into an electronic machine which hung around his neck. Reflections now joined the window, ghostly apparitions superimposed over the world outside. I looked at myself in the glass, my eyes, my mouth which wasn't as wide or as full as it should be. The ache in my tooth throbbed a little more intense but it was hard to understand pain in my reflection.

After being on methadone some years my teeth rapidly deteriorated. It was no longer one tooth here and there; they all began to rot at once. Some turned black and others became brown and soft and porous like wet tree bark. Often (and without exaggeration) when the tooth finally snapped away I could actually chew it down and eat it. Some teeth rotted extremely fast and others very slowly, starting off a small arch of plaque at the base until finally it ate through the enamel and left a little cave entrance into the tender inners. It's at that point there, where there is a small one-way cavity, that you are most vulnerable to come down with severe and debilitating toothache. Food and liquid seep in, weigh down on the nerve, and have no way of getting back out. During those mid years of methadone decay my mouth would seem to me like a big dirty rotten hole of pain. I remember through one sustained bout of toothache how I'd tried to paint the pain, and could only smash black paint onto a canvass and then scratch all thin red lines into it. Chronic toothache is one of those rare pains that can drive a man clear out his mind. After a while the agony becomes so taxing you're no longer even sure what tooth hurts. The pain loses origin and is everywhere: in your head, and up your nose, and shooting through your eyeballs. There was one four month period where I was using 36 ibuprofens a day, everyday, and still squirming around in agony most the time. Every 3 hours I'd swallow six tablets, they'd fully relieve the pain for 30 mins and then it would wear back in. An hour later I'd wake up with my mouth roaring again and have to count down two hours and pace around with my eyes watering before I could re-dose.

Those years, inbetween having teeth and not having teeth, were horrendous times with barely a week passing pain free. Of course, to get toothache you need to have teeth, and as each tooth rotted and crumbled down to the gum it was a degree of beauty lost but also one less place where I could hurt. Now, today, I only have eight full teeth left. Of those eight only one is undamaged and that's a screw-in molar from a previous paragraph. If the downside of this rotten history is losing my Hollywood smile, the upside is that today severe toothache is a rarity. But toothache isn't the only discomfort or consequence of of life-styled teeth.. Rotting teeth means rotting gums, and unsterilised self-surgery means infections and swellings and root and gum abscesses. In conjunction with the tooth ache I also, and still do, suffer regular gum, mouth and throat infections, sometimes the entire side of my mouth swelling up so badly that it affects my vision. Other times the swelling would affect my jaw, a huge burning sensation prickling on for days and leading to throat and gland problems. The gums themselves, at one point, became a huge sore problem. Liquids and food would get down through the missing teeth and pop out as little spots on the gums. Each morning, and after eating or drinking, I had to go through the ritual of pressing along the spots until they popped and then wiping the liquid pus away. Often the food residue just sat trapped along the gum, and when it finally found a way out it smelled of putrid, ulcerated flesh. On other occasions the gum itself will grow over a shard of broken tooth and become torn, swollen and tender and prevent my lips from closing over. Apart from multiple times I've self-operated and cracked open and extracted pressurized teeth, I've also cut and sliced through gum and bled out litres of rotten build up. But more than gum and mouth swellings and sores, the greatest secondary consequence arriving from the years of dental decay was the cosmetic problem it posed. After not even four years of methadone use my teeth were in such awful shape that I had to be careful how I spoke and pronounced words for fear of people seeing. Soon they could catch glimpses no matter what, and sometimes, when I laughed, I'd see people suddenly change and become horrified, wondering what sordid secret life I was leading. Finally I stooped laughing al all and began speaking like a ventriloquist to all but a few very close people in my life.

When the announcement came across the Tannoy that we'd be arriving at Lyon Part-Dieu in two minutes, and hoping that we'd had a pleasant travel, it was dark outside. People began standing up, stretching and yawning and pulling down their bags and cases from the overhead compartments. The controller, now stood up near the far end of the carriage, looked done in as he prepared for his last 30 minutes of shift. I imagined I looked like him, only a little paler. With the toothache annoying me something rotten, and thinking of the bag of heroin in my pocket and the relief it would afford me, I was first one off the train. As I stepped down onto the dark platform, back on familiar terrain, Tony O'neill seemed so far away and I wondered had I really travelled to Paris and back or was it some weird daydream I'd had. The memory was already fading and the emotions of the day trailing off with so many others. In the night, as I walk the length of the platform to the exit, I smoked a cigarette. The smoke drifted up through the light chill in the air, mingled with the night, and then, like rolling mist, was gone.

Sometimes you put so much onto what a fix of heroin will do, that when you finally get your shot it's a disappointment. Naked on my bed, after having emptied almost a bag of gear into my 'Tony vein', I felt next to nothing. There was no gouch, no artificial closing of the day, no magic escape from the sadness or pain that the trip had left me with, no end to the toothache, just a creeping feeling of nausea where my system had slowed down. To get anywhere near the relief I had imagined I’d need at least another two shots. But there were no two shots – I was all out and shot through. For a moment I wallowed in disappointment and then rose and swallowed a good dose of methadone and four painkillers. It had been a long day and returning home to a dark, quiet apartment had made the loneliness seem even more pronounced. In that atmosphere, I closed the light and got in bed with one of my last few teeth a beacon of pain in the dark

And as the night finally killed the city and left just a whirring silence and a few drunken shouts, I lay in my bed, thinking of the day and Paris and how busy and rotten the capital would be just about now. I thought of miles and miles of train tracks and countryside and weird journeys across the heart of America. Sleep was coming and the pain was dulling down. Tonight I couldn't escape myself but tomorrow would be here soon enough. I thought of history and sounds and old legends and stories. I imagined laughter and trips to the moon, childish things as the dark played tricks on my eyes. And soon the pain must have gone, finally been beaten back, as for a moment, in the last days of my life, I thought nor hurt no more.

- - -
 Thanks for your patience... Thoughts and Wishes as Ever,