Down and Out on Murder Mile (13 page)

The final show.
We walked offstage and into the dressing room, the yells of the crowd bouncing off the walls like the bloody yelps of spectators at a cockfight. The show was a success. You could hear a hush descend slightly as the audience realized that now that we had vacated the stage Garbage was preparing to make their appearance. Kelly hugged each member of the band in turn.

 

“Well done, mate,” she told each of us.

 

There was a twinge of sadness that it was over. It seemed so anticlimactic to go back to my flat after a week of carefree living on a bus. Even being in the little bunk bed above our drummer, Chris, sleeping in a little darkened coffin-space as we drove all night from city to city, seemed much more appealing than another night in my
own bed. I opened a beer, took a last look around the dressing room, and said to Chris: “Let's go check what's happening in the audience.”

 

We walked through the back tunnels of Brixton Academy and made our way to the VIP area, which was a room above the audience with TV monitors to show the performance in close-up and a huge glass window looking down on the stage. I looked around. There was Susan, with some girl from the methadone clinic she had obviously started hanging around with. The pair of them looked like they had wandered in from the street. I walked over and said hey.

 

“Hey,” Susan said, pointing to her friend, “this is Julie.”

 

“Hi, Julie.”

 

“Nice show. Well done.”

 

“Thanks.”

 

Then the three of us sank into silence for a moment.

 

“We were just saying,” Julie said, breaking in, “I know a geezer round here called Ahmed who's had some pretty good gear recently. You want to come over to his place? He's close by, like.”

 

“Well, maybe later. I have to speak to people, you know.”

 

“Oh yeah, right. No worries.”

 

“D'you want to go now, and we can come back?” Susan asked Julie.

 

“Well…if you don't mind. Before it gets too late….”

 

I felt a flood of relief. I had never felt it before, and as it happened I immediately felt like an asshole, but I suddenly became embarrassed by being seen around Susan. I silently cursed her! She hadn't even made the effort to clean herself up. Her hair was unwashed and sticking up in clumps on her head. She looked like she had just rolled out of bed so she could head out to score. Although I had managed to downplay my drug dependence to everyone in the band, I realized that as soon as they got a look at Susan they would have to know that something was up. The girl had junkie written all over her. Her face was sunken in, her pupils barely there. She had obviously bathed herself in thick, pungent perfume to cover up her stink rather than subject herself to a shower. Since becoming an addict, I had become something of a stranger to personal hygiene myself, but when I was in close proximity to straight people I at least made the effort to try and wash some of the stench off me. I hurried the pair of them toward the exit and told Susan I would call her to tell her where the after-party would be.

 

Walking back into the VIP room I saw Dan deep in conversation with a girl. Well, I noticed the girl first. She was olive-skinned and beautiful, with
striking cheekbones and full, red lips. She seemed somehow apart from everyone else in the room. It was in the way she stood, the way she dressed. It was as if everyone else in the place were in black and white and she was the only one in color. Suddenly, I felt nervous. It was the kind of nervousness that I hadn't felt in a long time and it took me by surprise. Dan saw me staring at them and beckoned me over.

 

He smiled at me broadly as I walked over to them. I stared at her face as I approached. I couldn't help it. I had never seen anyone like her. She had the most beautiful lips, and perfect, dark eyes. She looked like she was inwardly laughing at me.

 

“You finally get to meet!” Dan grinned as I walked over and said hello. I didn't understand.

 

“Finally?”

 

“Oh, you remember,” the girl said, and as soon as she opened her mouth to speak I knew. I knew immediately who it was and there was embarrassment for sure, but also a curious kind of sexual thrill that this girl was the one…“I believe you were going to bend me over and stick it into me from behind?”

 

“I'll leave you two to get acquainted.” Dan laughed, splitting the scene, leaving us there in the dull light, regarding each other.

 

We smiled, but surprisingly there was no awkwardness. I did not feel self-conscious in the
slightest. In fact, for a reason that I could not immediately fathom, I was brimming over with carefree self-confidence, as if I were eighteen and still vibrating from my first ever line of cocaine.

 

“I'm sorry for the obscene phone call,” I told her. “I was drunk and feeling mischievous.”

 

She smiled. “Don't worry. I've heard worse. I'm from New York—you'd have to work hard to shock me.”

 

The conversation flowed easily. We talked about music, art, and books. We seemed to share all of the same reference points, which was a disconcerting experience. Vanessa was a fascinating girl. She grew up surrounded by the beauty and insanity of New York City, an Ecuadorian punk-rock kid from Queens who cut her teeth on the Lower East Side's hardcore and punk scenes…sipping Ballantine Ale and skipping homework to catch the Ramones at the Ritz, slam-dancing to the Circle Jerks at CBGB's Sunday hardcore matinee, before graduating to Disco 2000 and the club kid scene…She eventually split the States altogether to study fashion in London.

 

As we talked she astounded me with her street smarts and dry humor, and the dizzying amount of scenes that she had been involved in by such a young age. She currently lived in the East End and worked for the fashion designer Vivienne Westwood. I felt the odd sensation that I was talking to some kind of mirror of myself, or a mirror of who I would like to be. At one point I said, “I
am on an Egon Schiele kick right now,” not even knowing what it meant, but it made sense to her, and I didn't feel like a fool.

 

I realized that maybe the reason that I could talk to her like this, without tripping myself up by being nervous or trying to impress her, was because I could look at the pair of us with a dispassionate eye and say that honestly, I felt that there was no reason why this woman would ever show an interest in me. I was a bad bet. A drug addict. Married. Unemployable. So I laid it out on the table and tried not to hide anything. It was a liberating feeling knowing that I could tell her about myself and not be afraid of rejection, because I was already rejected.

 

But the strangest thing happened.

 

She kept talking to me.

 

She didn't seem fazed by all of the bad stuff.

 

And I wondered what she saw when she looked at me.

 

We were oblivious as Garbage took to the stage and started playing, and the crowd at Brixton Academy began to cheer and surge to the front. It took a while before either of us even noticed the thunderous music blaring into the room. Everything had faded into the background, and we were talking about New York, and I was feeling something in my chest that I hadn't felt for a long time. I kept asking myself, “Why is she still
here? Why is she still talking to me? Why is she interested? What does she see?” because her eyes did not betray any of the things that I had become accustomed to over the past few years: the suspicious look of someone who is watching a heroin addict, the pitying looks from an old friend, the superior glare of the caseworkers and doctors, the pure, terrified need of Susan. No, she was looking at me with something else in her eyes, a look and a feeling that had not been around me for so long that it momentarily felt arcane, alien, foreign.

 

I glanced over to the huge window that looked down onto the stage for a moment, and I realized for the first time that the band was playing, but more than that I caught a glimpse of myself reflected in the mirror, and what I saw made me jump.

 

Like some cheap shock effect from a bad horror movie, the reflection of what was going on in the room did not match up with my mind's perception of what should be there.

 

There was Vanessa, listening intently to me as I was speaking, looking momentarily confused as the words caught in my throat the moment I realized that she was talking to me.

 

But it was the me of seven years ago, it's true, I saw what she was seeing for a moment and it terrified and liberated me, because I looked new.

 

I was not broken anymore. My eyes were no longer the eyes of someone who had seen the inside
of the methadone clinics and the flophouses. My arms, underneath my shirt, I instinctively knew were unscarred and unblemished, the mountain of mangled flesh and calcified veins had somehow been removed by God's hand, and they were as smooth and untouched and unruined as they were when I first came to London a lifetime ago.

 

And I stopped talking, struck dumb by this revelation.

 

Thinking that I was looking over to the band, she said:

“Do you want to go and see them play?”

and I answered “sure” although that was not on my mind at all

and we walked together into the crowd, making our way to the front as the band played on

and for a moment I realized

I was reborn.

Coming back home
could only be an ugly and depressing anticlimax. After the band was finished Vanessa had to go and so did I. Drug-need was already gnawing at the inside of me. We swapped numbers and I left. As I made my way back from Brixton to Hackney I started to feel this new excitement about my life slowly deflating from me. The streets around Murder Mile seemed as small and as cold and as lonely as ever. I slid my key into the lock and swung the metal door open, escaping from the frosty air. I walked through the concrete walkway and up the staircase leading to the flat.

 

When I opened the door I saw her there, nodded out on the only chair in the place, in front of a nature documentary showing animals thousands of feet underwater moving silently, and the smell
of her hit me: the smell of rot, the smell of the cigarette that had burned down to her fingers and no doubt left a scorch ring on the flesh permeated everything. The flat was suddenly smaller than before. I flicked the light on, but it did not shake her out of her nod.

 

I walked past her and into the bathroom. The girl she was hanging out with before had obviously been here, as there were used needles on the sink of a different brand and gauge than either Susan or I used. And I hated it, but seeing the discarded needles and the dried brown blood spots on the sink, and even seeing Susan back there with all of the life evaporated out of her shell started to change me again, and undo all of the good-but-alien sensations I had been experiencing tonight. I started to realize that I was still here, I was still nothing more that a junkie idiot, that my situation was as fucked as ever. Dejectedly, I started to prepare a shot of heroin.

 

I heard Susan rouse from her coma.

 

“Hey,” she croaked.

 

“Yeah.”

 

I dug around, finding a new needle in the bathroom cabinet, and retrieved the bag of heroin I had hidden away from her before the tour started.

 

“Your friend left her old spikes here.”

 

“Oh yeah. Be careful, I think she has Hep C.”

 

“What the fuck did she leave them here for, then?”

 

“They're old. I gave her some of ours.”

 

“Well, can you get rid? I don't want to touch them.”

 

She turned the sound up on the TV again. I could hear David Attenborough's familiar voice from the other room.

 

“How was it?” she asked eventually.

“Fine. I met a cool girl. She was from New York.”

 

“Oh yeah?”

 

It all went quiet for a moment as Susan lapsed back into the TV, and I started cooking up. The heroin fizzled in the spoon. Richard Attenborough carried on. The world was familiar and comfortable. Then Susan asked: “She use?”

 

“Who?”

 

“The girl from New York. Does she use?”

 

“What? Heroin?”

 

“Yes, heroin. What do you think I'm talking about? Caffeine?”

 

It seemed like an odd question. Susan said it as if everybody used heroin. Like it was a common defining characteristic outside of our world. I drew the dope up into the syringe and said: “I don't think so.”

 

I tied the belt around my arm and flexed for a vein. I was going into my wrist again. My hands looked chubby and pockmarked from all of the injecting I had been doing there recently. I thought about Vanessa again. I thought about her eyes, and her lips, and the way she smelled. I thought about her outfit. I thought about her black leather boots. I thought about her voice.

 

“Then why the fuck,” Susan asked suddenly, “was she talking to you? I mean really, what on earth could you possibly have in common?”

 

I ignored the question. I had already been thinking about it all of the way home. The answer was too depressing. I thought of her number, written on a piece of paper and carefully folded in my pocket. I wondered about the chance of me ever calling it, and as I fixed my shot and the heroin put me back in my place, I realized that it probably would never happen.

 

I cleaned myself up and tidied my stuff away. I walked back into the room. Susan was still half unconscious, her face had taken on that slack, mongoloid look people get when they are half in a nod.

 

“What the fuck are we doing here?” I asked Susan, rousing her as I walked back into the room.

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“In London. Why the fuck did we come here in the first place?”

 

“Because we couldn't stay in LA. What kind of stupid question is that?” “Well, what kind of stupid reason is that to come someplace? Because you can't stay in another place? It makes no sense.”

 

“You make no sense.”

 

We lapsed into silence again, momentarily enjoying the drugs in our blood.

 

“We have no money,” Susan told me eventually. “Did you get paid for the tour tonight?”

 

“No. I have to call Alex in the coming week. Dan has to do the accounts, and then we get paid.”

 

“The Virgin Megastore didn't make you wait to get paid.”

 

“That's true, Susan. You're very perceptive.”

 

“I heard from my sister today. She had twins.”

 

I had to scramble for the information. She talked about her sister so rarely that I almost forgot she had one.

 

“She was pregnant?”

 

“Yes! She was pregnant! You knew this! I told you….”

“Oh.”

 

“Twin boys. She's going to send pictures. It must be nice. Having a family. I don't even have my own family around me anymore.”

 

“From what you've told me that's probably a good thing.”

 

She turned and looked at me. “Everybody needs a family. I'm thirty-five. It's almost too late for me. Do you think I could clean up in time to have a baby? I heard that you can carry a baby full term okay if you're just on methadone.”

 

Susan talked like this every so often. It always made me slightly nauseous to hear it. She never came right out and told me that she was talking about having
my
baby, so I would let her talk about it in an abstract, theoretical way. It was okay, because I knew it would never happen. But tonight, the very idea of Susan carrying a baby around in her gut repulsed me more than usual. “Anyone with a cunt, a working set of fallopian tubes, and a womb can have a baby,” I spat. “What the fuck you are going to
do
with that baby is a different question.”

 

She went quiet, and then said: “It would just be neat to have someone who loved me.”

 

Sensing this was my cue to say something, I waited a beat and told her: “Buy a fucking cat, then.”

 

A day passed. And then two. I didn't call Vanessa. Susan was right. What the fuck would she want with me? And the money situation dragged out. The accounts Dan had provided didn't add up and had to be redone. The record label was getting their own accountants to do the books. Expect a further delay. Susan had started doing volunteer work at a local needle exchange, but of course it was unpaid. I kept on the phone with Alex every day trying to get the money owed to me. Every day he told me that tomorrow he would definitely be able to cut a check for me.

 

After a week and a half, he announced that there was more work if I wanted it. A trip to Wales, to lip synch the first single on a regional television show. He promised that I would have the money before I left. Despite feeling slightly screwed over about the money situation, the chance to get out of London for even a day was too good to pass up, so I accepted.

 

We drove down early the next morning. The show was called
This Is It!
and was hosted by someone I vaguely remembered from a children's television show of my youth. We were to perform our song in front of an audience of twenty or so bored Welsh teenagers. We did it, and Alex finally cut our checks, handing them to us as the filming wrapped up. I was in the clear again.

 

Kelly was staying on to do press on her own, and the rest of the band was to travel back by train. We drank and walked around the studio, which was out in the middle of nowhere. Again, away from the city, I started to relax and feel freer than I had before. A film crew filmed the band drinking beers and lounging around in a games room for promotional material. The cameras gave us a sense that maybe this record was really going to happen. The whole scene was surreally out of synch with what was going on in my real life.

 

On the train back to London I was gripped with the familiar anxiety of returning to the flat and Susan. I opened my wallet and looked again at Vanessa's number. Ben, the guitarist, was sitting across from me listening to music. I tapped him and asked him if he had a mobile phone. He passed it over to me and plugged his earphones back in. With a sense that if I didn't do this now I never would, I dialed her number and held my breath until she picked up.

 

“I thought that you weren't going to call,” she said to me.

 

“I had to call.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Because things are preordained. I had to call. What are you doing?”

 

“Getting ready for a party. You want to swing by? Where are you?”

 

“Coming back from filming the world's cheesiest TV show. I'd love to come.”

 

“Okay. Lets meet for drinks first….”

 

I clicked off the phone and another phase of my life began.