Down and Out on Murder Mile (14 page)

It seemed that
as soon as I started seeing Vanessa, London started to come alive. The nights started getting shorter, the days warmer, the worries less. We met up two nights later, hit a few East End bars, and then went back to her place. We listened to music,
Loveless
by My Bloody Valentine. And then we fell into bed with all of the excitement of new lovers.

 

There was no nervousness. When I saw her naked for the first time all of my old feelings of sexual longing flooded back into me. It was a shocking, wonderful, electric feeling. We kissed, our tongues wrapping around each other as we fell into bed. The sex seemed to go on for hours. And when I came, I was hard again almost immediately. We fucked like horny sixteen-year-olds, discovering the opposite sex for the first time.

 

Cheshire Street, 4:00
A.M.
We stagger in from a warehouse party on Brick Lane. Vanessa's breath is sharp, cutting through the still of the bedroom like glass as we have sex again. And again. And again. Her nipples are hard and I am biting at them, and I slide my cock in and out of her. Her pupils contract, locked on mine; in a flash of electric skin I reach down, rest my hands on her ass cheeks, pulling them apart, and they are slick with cum. We have been dropping pills and having sex constantly for what seems like glorious eternity. With my forefinger I rub the wetness into her asshole and withdraw my prick, repositioning, and gently ease myself into her ass instead. Her breath quickens, sharpens, then settles back into its rhythm as she reaches to her side and retrieves the vibrator, sliding it into her pussy. As I find myself all of the way in, I can feel—through my own prick—the vibrating rubber cock inside of her, parallel to my own, as we fuck ourselves into ritualized oblivion.

 

One afternoon, on a whim, I stop by the boutique she works at. Vanessa closes up. She takes me downstairs and shows me a dress that Courtney Love will be wearing in a few hours at some red carpet event. I dress Vanessa in it, turn her around, hitch the skirt, and slide my prick into her. Moments after we are done there is a pounding on the door, as the couriers arrive to take the dress to Courtney's hotel room. I am lost in the wonder and the glory of Vanessa's cunt. I gaze upon it, awestruck, like it is the work of a master. I feel like I am seeing a Picasso canvas, or a Dalí
sculpture rendered in pure gold that has been long lost. I feel as if my eyes are the first to behold it since the moment of its creation.

 

Sometimes when we take Ecstasy it feels as if I can melt into it, melt into her. We become fluid and unstable, and for moments as brief as epileptic flashes, the laws of physics are suspended and we melt, tongue in cunt, cock in mouth, in a lightning crack of divinity. For moments we cease to be individuals.

 

“I want to do this forever,” I tell her, my mouth full of her.

 

And sometimes there is a kind of short circuit, and I lose moments, and everything comes to me in fragments. The soft curves of her body, a hot, stiff nipple, the roundness of her ass, her endless brown eyes, the soft brown skin of her back, red hair plastered to her forehead.

 

My cock in her hands, her mouth, her pussy, her asshole, and it feels as if I am undergoing a religious conversion of sorts, with my mouth on her clit, crushed against her lips. I have a sense of God that I have never felt in my whole time on this earth.

 

Oh Christ I am in love I am in love, and it is flowing from me, I cannot stop it, and when we are lying naked, listening to music, play fighting, laughing, I never want to leave this room. This is real. Oh God help me, this is real.

After weeks of
seeing Vanessa, I know that tonight I am coming as close to ruining everything as is possible. I have decided to leave Susan. I am trying to do it the best way I can. I have been spending all of my free time with Vanessa. When she is not around I am sad and withdrawn, and the only way I can cope with that is to get high. And getting high is the only hold that Susan has on me anymore.

 

Tonight an old Scottish junkie called Jimmy who works with Susan at the needle exchange dropped over to Murder Mile with a large quantity of pharmaceutical grade cocaine. I cannot even begin to fathom how these ampoules of liquid cocaine found their way onto the black market, but of course I cannot resist having just one shot of coke, and before I even realized where I was, it
was four hours later and all of the coke was gone, and my arms were raw and bloody from at least fifty separate injections. Crashing hard from the coke, I tried to wash the blood off my arms, but my flesh looked like raw hamburger meat, so I threw on a leather jacket and split, leaving Susan and Jimmy to carry on with whatever else he had brought over with him.

 

By the time I arrived at Vanessa's flat, I was almost in tears from the mind-bending effects of the coke crash, and suddenly I was completely aware of the hopelessness of my situation. When I arrived, Vanessa seemed shocked at my appearance, and when I took my jacket off and she saw what I had done to my arms she was almost in tears as well. We just sat there on her bed, I rested my head on her, and she cradled me like a child until I started trying to talk to her, but everything came out as a sob. All I could say was “I'm sorry…” over and over, because I knew that there was no conceivable reason that she should have to listen to this or to put up with this from me. The beauty of what went on when we were together, the innocence of it, the carefree and joyous nature of it, was suddenly destroyed when I walked in that night. I had brought with me all of the destruction and negative energy that shaped my life, and I think that it scared her badly because for the first time she saw me as ugly, and as worn down, and as scared as I have ever been.

 

She kept asking me: “Do you want to go?”

 

And I kept saying “no” because I felt that if I went tonight, that I might never be allowed to return.

 

Vanessa has never told me that I need to stop using. It is something that has endeared her to me more than anything. Usually people find it impossible not to talk in clichés when they are around an addict, and the biggest cliché of the lot is the faux concern and the assurances that “you really need to get help.” No, Vanessa in the whole time I have known her has never said any of that to me. In New York's music scene she had seen enough of addicts to understand that no one could make me quit. And sitting here on her bed, with her gently cradling my head, I realized that I had been taking advantage of her good grace and her consideration of my feelings.

 

How dare I walk in here with the blood not yet dried on my arms, weeping and paranoid and suicidal?

 

It is now that I realize that I am running out of time, and I need to make a decision. If I leave here tonight without making a decision, I may never get the opportunity to come back. So I amaze myself by being the one who first broaches the subject.

 

“I think I need to quit,” I say. “I think that this is it. I really need to stop doing this.”

 

Vanessa doesn't say anything for a while. Then she says: “I think you're right.”

 

We sit there. I can feel some of the horror receding a little. I have done this many times. I know the stages of the cocaine crash. It will be a while
before I feel anything close to normal, and as the cocaine wears off I start to feel the pain in my arms and hands from the repeated, frenzied injecting I had been doing earlier in the night. “I don't want to go back there,” I say eventually.

 

“Where?”

 

“The flat. I have to tell Susan. I have to do it now.”

 

We lapse back into silence for a while.

 

“Would you like to stay here?” Vanessa asks, eventually.

 

“Yes. Are you inviting me to move in with you?”

 

“Yes. But were you serious about stopping doing this?”

 

“Yes.”

 

There is of course a huge fear about leaving Susan and moving in with Vanessa. In fact, Susan and Vanessa are almost side players to the real drama that was unfolding in my head. If I move in with Vanessa, one of two things will have to happen: either I would have to get clean or Vanessa would have to start using heroin. The situation could not resolve any other way. So my choice is not between Susan and Vanessa, which would really be no choice at all. My choice is between the status quo of my existence as it is or an attempt to live another kind of life.

Walking from Murder Mile
with a bag of my clothes in a holdall, I stop to call Vanessa from a pay phone.

 

“It's me,” I tell her. “Is it cool to come over?”

 

“Sure. What's going on?”

 

“I left Susan. It's done.”

 

“What happened?”

 

“I don't want to talk about it. Maybe later, but not now.”

 

It is curious, because the relationship that I have had with Susan would be unfathomable to Vanessa—indeed, sometimes it is unfathomable to even me—and I feel like I am talking in riddles
when I try to explain it. I have been through breakups before. Some extremely messy, some protracted, but none as oddly noneventful as this one.

 

I started the conversation by telling Susan that Vanessa and I had been sleeping together. I had spent most nights over at her place since that first time. I expected that she already had assumed this, and Susan seemed entirely nonplussed by the information. She said something along the lines of “Well, if that's what you need to do.”

“It is what I need to do.”

 

“Well, fine. What are you telling me for? Is this supposed to turn me on?”

 

We lapsed into silence again. I had waited until Susan was high on dope, because I had seen her completely break down about the smallest thing—from a phone call from her father to a charity appeal on television—if she wasn't sufficiently insulated from reality with drugs. But so far, so good.

 

“I am telling you, because I am going to move in with her. I think we have a future together, and I don't think that you and I have a future together.”

 

Susan lit a cigarette, and I noticed her hands were shaking. I was struck again by how much like a little old lady she was beginning to look. Her eyes betrayed fear, despite the opiates in her. She sucked in a lungful of smoke.

 

“What about my paperwork? I'm illegal here. You're abandoning me and now I will never be legal here.”

 

“You won't be legal even if I stay. We didn't even begin to file your papers in the whole time that we've been here.”

 

“But what am I going to do?”

 

I could hear that old hysterical note creeping into her voice. This was it. I had to do it now. “I can't help you anymore. My life doesn't lie here. You knew this wouldn't last. We never got married thinking that we would grow old together. I've found something else I want.”

 

There was silence again.

 

“Then go,” she said, quietly. “Just go.”

 

And that was it. No tears, no screaming, no begging to stay. I packed my things and walked out. What do you do, when you make a suicide pact but both of you survive? Was I a coward for not trying again?

 

As I walked toward the train station, I realized for the first time in years I was walking with purpose. I walked Murder Mile, past the Jamaican patty stand, and the fried chicken and halal kebab signs, past the junk shops and the kids lurking by the pay phones hawking crack and stolen mobile phones. I felt my chest loosening, as if I were really breathing for the first time in
years. I walked into the sodium glow and train rumble of Clapton station and I realized that for the first time in recent memory I was not afraid.

We are in
a warehouse party in Hackney. An old band mate from Los Angeles was in town doing the lighting for a Black Rebel Motorcycle Club show with the Libertines headlining. He called me out of the blue to tell me he was in town.

 

Vanessa and I walk in there around midnight on the tail end of a forty-eight-hour cocaine, Ecstasy, and sex bender that has taken us to a variety of bars, clubs, flats, and houses all over the city. As we stagger into the place, all eyes turn to us. We are on fire, radiating an aura of invincibility that everybody is picking up on. A man walks up to us and asks, “Can I take your photo?” and we say yes, so he does, temporarily blinding us with the flash. He hands us his card and says, “E-mail me and I will send you the picture!” and we walk away as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

 

The DJ is spinning Primal Scream at a thunderous volume, and we dance and kiss to “Swastika Eyes” furiously. Love and empathy is radiating out from us in great telepathic waves. I am swimming in Vanessa's eyes, lost in them for a moment.

 

Somebody bumps into me, and it is the guy from the Libertines, Pete Doherty, and he looks as if he is about to collapse onto the floor. His skin is ashen, and he is barely standing really, his eyes fuzzy and unfocussed.

 

“Sorry mate,” he slurs, rocking on unsteady heels.

 

“No problem.”

 

And then he staggers away, careening into someone else.

 

“He's gonna play tonight?” Vanessa laughs. “He looks like he won't make it.”

 

A guy comes onstage and is joined by a DJ, who starts to blast abrasive metallic noise. The singer, a tall, spastic-looking skinhead, obviously half-deranged on Ecstasy, starts to rap over the top of the music in lunatic yelps. The place is suddenly packed, shoulder to shoulder, and we are drawn toward the front of the stage by the swell of people and the heat is brutal and the noise is almost terrifying and it feels like we are at the end of the world and my eyes catch Vanessa's and I never want this to stop, never never want it to stop.

 

Spilling out into the night air. The Ecstasy has come on so strong we both looked at each other at the same time as Black Rebel Motorcycle played and we decided—without speaking—“Home. Bed,” because we could no longer be contained by clothes.

 

And in the taxi home I rest my head on her lap and look up at her face as the streetlights bounce from her cheeks and I say: “My God. The scene is so incredible right now…. It feels as if there is fucking revolution in the air…. When did London wake up all of a sudden?”

 

And Vanessa laughs, telling me: “London wasn't asleep. You were.”

 

She is right, of course. And we laugh, as the taxi speeds us home so we can fuck frenziedly until the sun rises again.

 

Shoreditch. The weekend of the Queen's Golden Jubilee, and all of London it seems is staggering from one party to another, blissfully drunk and wasted. Wherever you go, carefree hedonism is the order of the day. The days are endless, warm, and infused with the surreal logic of dreams. We are drinking beers and people-watching from a sun-drunk table outside of the Barley Mow, enjoying the bustle of Curtain Road. It seems as if the whole population of the city is emerging into the light for the first time, blinking molelike into the mid-morning sun.

 

“Do you know something?” I tell her.

 

“What?”

 

“It's been three months since we met.”

 

She laughs.

 

“I have something for you.” She smiles and looks over. I reach into my pocket and take out one of my old AA sobriety chips. It is red, and on one side is inscribed “90
DAYS
” and on the other “
ONE DAY AT A TIME.
” She looks at it and smiles. I smile too.

 

“This is so cool,” she says. “Thank you!”

 

She places it on her key ring, and we pick up our beers, clanking them together.

 

“One day at a time,” we toast, as we drink. Vanessa is so beautiful today. She makes the sun on my face feel warmer. She makes the beer I am drinking seem colder. We are free.