Flick (19 page)

HOW NOT TO CLIMAX

We're suddenly all fucked. Not literally (I wish) but we're fucked as in all the energy goes out of us. I realize that in Mark's place I was still as a rock but now, outside in the cold and the dark, my shoulders are going like a pneumatic drill (i.e., shaking violently). We're walking away from the house and it seems we all decide at the same time to start laughing.

“FUCK!” shouts Danny. “That was FUCKING ridiculous! Did you see that slapper?”

“She was OFF her FU-cking tits, mate, and what the fuck was with Mark? What kind of name is fuckin' MARK for a dealer?” Kyle snorts.

Dildo joins in to be companionable. “The guy we saw first looked like something out of
Shaun of the Dead
.”

Kyle passes round the bag and we all wet our fingers, dip them in, and lick up the blow like sherbet. I just laugh along, really loudly. We all do, and we don't stop. None of us want to stop.

We end up at Fez's, whether by accident or design I'll never know, and Kyle busts into Fez's bedroom, interrupting him having another go at Hannah, and throws the cash down. He is followed closely by Danny, who holds the bag.

“There you go, we got your nine hundred, and the packet's worth another three. You've made a hundred. Job done.”

Danny nods in agreement, meaning “That's your lot, Fez.”

“Two hundred!” I yell from the landing.

“Sorry—two hundred. Flick, come in, you tossbag,” says Kyle's voice. I enter. Fez looks totally out of it. Kyle is saying, “Look, I can do some other deals for you. How about we take it to Sandford—”

“Nah.” Fez waves at him, half-conscious. “No fucking way, police are all over it. That's good.” He nods to the blow. “I'll do that, and take the money. I'm thinking of lending Hannah out for cash anyway.”

Hannah hits him and laughs. She sounds like Janice from
Friends
and we all, including Fez, visibly recoil.

“But, but I can do more!” Kyle looks put out. His days as a movie-star-cum-coke-dealer cut short before they have truly begun. Me and Danny roll our eyes at each other. Fez does the same to himself.

“Enough. Me and Hannah'll try the first line, why don't you guys make yourself comfortable downstairs and I'll chuck you down the bag when we're done?”

Well, well. We've made it into the Fez inner circle. Danny and I are now raising eyebrows at each other.

“All right then,” Danny says, and we turn for the door while Kyle stands dejected in the middle of the room. “Come on, Kyle. I think I saw a PlayStation in the living room, you can deal to hos and black guys on Grand Theft Auto.”

I snort and we leap the stairs downwards.

PART V

IN FOR A PENNY

“FUCKING NOTHING HAPPENS AROUND HERE.”

It's an hour later and the five of us are sitting about feeling pissed off round Fez's, still waiting for him and Hannah to finish the “first go,” when Kyle lets out a frustrated shout and slams his open palm into the banister.

We all look up at him from our various slouched positions and I murmur, “That's very insightful of you, Kyle.”

“Fucking
nothing
. Fucking nothing ever happens.” Kyle throws his cigarette out the open door and gestures to us with a shrug of his shoulder. We head up the stairs to Fez's room, his hallowed space in this three-bed semi that he shares with Tylo, another dealer, and a blond university graduate called Lara, who left for Leeds five years ago, came back with a degree in English and music and has done nothing since but get stoned, work at Morrisons and talk about her band, which none of us have ever heard play. Rock on, Lara.

Kyle walks into Fez's room first, banging the door open. It promptly falls off the hinges. “What the fuck is this? We've been waiting an hour!”

“Hey!” Fez stands up angrily. Hannah is sprawled on the bed, sniffing and wiping her nostrils. Fez stares at us, stoned, pissed, coked out of his mind. “Hey,” he says again. Then he neatly passes out, falling back onto the bed.

Kyle takes the bag of blow off a pile of underwear by the foot of the bed. He looks at me. I look at myself in the mirror. I've been smoking steadily for an hour and am perhaps more stoned now than I've ever been. Kyle shakes the little clear plastic bag at me. I giggle, shrug, and he saunters up to me, all happy, and lands a smacker on my cheek. Ah well. In for a penny, in for a pound.

RAMBLINGS OF A COKED-UP CRITIC

“It's like how all these social commentary films have the antihero dying at the end. Because the message is that failure and self-destruction are not sustainable. But who d'you think pays taxes on these, like, luxury goods designed to distract us from our lives or make 'em better, who works in the factories that make our economy so amazing, who buys into all that shit? The common man, on a downward spiral from bliss and innocence to degradation and poverty—us, that's who—me and you, Flick! Because genius is a temporary state; bright sparks burn out; bitter experience deadens hope for improvement.
Failure
, self-destruction, is the only thing that is truly sustainable, Flick. That's why
Trainspotting
was so brilliant. The antihero, the fucking lanky junkie, prevails. Whether he takes drugs again or not is irrelevant. He's still a fuckup.” Kyle says all this lying on his back with a joint in one hand and a coke-lined Clyde County library card in the other. I sniff over the coffee table and white powder flies up my nose, making it tingle so hard I poke it to see if it's okay.

“It feels like it's melting.”

“Oh, don't worry about that, mate, it's not.” Kyle waves smoke at me dismissively.

I wipe my nostrils self-consciously. “So what references would you cite for that opinion?”

“References?”

“Don't tell me you've forgotten everything you learnt in English literature
already
, Kyle Craig.” I parody our Scottish Eng. lit. teacher, Ms. Clarkson, to perfection and Kyle snorts a laugh, fine white dust escaping his nostrils.

“Oh aye, laddie, well, I would have to cite Irvine Welsh's essay on the inside cover of the Definitive Edition of
Trainspotting
, erm . . .”

“Only
one
reference! You'll have to do better than
that
, Mr. Craig, or it's a
D
fer
you
!”

“All right, hang on! Err . . . also
Fight Club
, for the ‘masturbation is' speech, George Orwell's 1984 speech about the need for a continuing state of war . . . and Michael Moore's
Fahrenheit 9/11
for introducing me to said speech.”

“The former or the latter of the two aforementioned speeches?”

“Oh the latter, Mrs. Craig.”

“Why thank you, Kyle.”

WHAT IS LOVE?

I get a text from Rainbow halfway through our little pile of joy and in my excited bleariness, I decide to call her, stumble into the hallway and slump on the doorstep, pressing my mobile to my ear. As the phone begins to ring, I suddenly remember my paranoid invasion of her privacy, the revelation of the circumstances of her adoption and how I acted, the way she looked at me when I ate those space cakes, and the fact that I'm wrist-deep in blow. The animal thing, the screaming, the comparison to her parents didn't mean a thing. She was just frightened and upset and I was the one who had frightened and upset her. She didn't want to lose me and was throwing everything she had at it. I see it clearly now, I think, and then it suddenly blurs into a haze again and all I'm left with is the feeling that my heart is sinking to my gut and my knowledge that I was and am totally in the wrong, and Rainbow is the pinnacle of everything that's right in the world. Shit. I feel hollow, sick and panicked. The coke seems to be acting like a truth serum. I can't lie to her, I think, feeling my heartbeat in my throat.

“Hello? . . . Hello?”

I swallow and my lips tremble. “Hi, Rainbow.”

“Hello, sweetheart!”

I'm a bastard. I'm a bastard. I'm a big sodding twat . . . I'm a cocked-up coke . . . no . . . coked-up cock bastard. And she's going to leave me. She's going to leave me here alone without Rainbow in my life. I love her so much. “I love you so much,” I say. And then suddenly everything blurs again and my mind changes, like switching from Jekyll to Hyde.

“I love you too.”

She doesn't know it
, the voice says—back again but this time it's a queer tinny twisted voice—
but she's saying that to us with coke everywhere around the room
.

Everything is fucking up. Everything is fucking up at the same time, and I feel myself falling down a long black tunnel (
Like Alice through the rabbit hole
, says the voice) and somehow . . . without the inclination to make myself stop . . . It's weird but this falling feels good, it feels good to be knowing that it will end, even if it will end badly and everything will fuck up, because at least that knowledge is definite. They say if you never try you'll never know, but I think as well if you try you'll never know how things are going to turn out, and I don't want to never know. The uncertainty kills me.
Wasn't it all just simpler
, I hear in a tinny rant,
when there was nothing to look forward to, no future with Rainbow to protect? When we knew where we would live and who we would know forever? Don't you just want to give up on making this huge effort to get out and change things? Change isn't necessarily for the better. Life's all right, isn't it? You're not an African baby with flies on your face.

Stupid racist voice, I say. It seems my brain is not my brain entirely at the moment. It is running on coke and smoke and JD and the other kind of Coke and, more importantly, the massive release of pain-numbing adrenaline you get when everything is fucking up at the same time.

—
I'm ready for this to fuck up, it says. Don't worry, I can deal, I'm
prepped.
She's gonna leave you and we're gonna move on. No fucking problem.

—Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Rainbow. I love you.

—
Huh!
my brain exclaims.
What is love? A firing of synapses in your head
! A chemical surge! Two people gazing stupidly at each other! Whatever. It's not specific to this one girl. There will always be someone else. Yeah, it could be Rainbow, but it could be anybody. You don't need Rainbow. What kind of fucking stupid name is “Rainbow”?

—Rainbow . . . Rainbow . . . fuck . . . fuuuuck . . .

The thing about other people leaving you is that it's cathartic, especially if you part on bad terms. You cut them off, you don't see them, you don't need to hurt at all. You can go dead inside, and the simplicity of this feels amazing. Maybe, as well, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy: you always think you'll be dumped and when you are, it's satisfying to know you were right. You were right about the world—it
is
a load of shit, she
was
just a bitch who would eventually stop caring about you! Good for
you
, brother! The problem is that, right now, I'm so high I want that cathartic simplicity, honesty, to get it all out and have my sins absolved. So my brain is thinking, Fuck it—better to have her dump me over the letter than dump me over the mound of white stuff I've just snorted.

Am I thinking clearly? I think to me, to myself, to my own brain. Which is strangely throbbing, though not in a painful way. I can't lie to her. I never did deserve her.
You're a fucking waster, Flick
, my head says.
You're not on her level, she's out of your league. She always was.
I swallow. I leave a pause. My pulse beats loudly in my right cranium.

“Flick?”

“Fuck.”

PUNISHING CONSCIOUSNESS

I tell Rainbow about reading the letter. She doesn't shout or scream or want to hit me or leave me. She sounds more pissed off at me than I've ever known her to be, now that I've done this coupled with the fight the other day, but she still doesn't sound very pissed off. She says she's angry but she understands. She kept the letter because it was deeply felt by the person who wrote it and she didn't have the heart to throw it away. She has no feelings for Raphael, or any of her exes. They didn't speak every night, and Rainbow doesn't remember any big conversation.

“Sometimes people see things how they want to see them,” Rainbow tells me quietly. No they didn't have phone sex, they only spoke on MSN. Rainbow talked to a lot of people on MSN, do I want their names and backgrounds too? The fact that I didn't trust her or respect her privacy makes her angry, not particularly the fact that I read the letter. She sometimes wants to snoop around my place or read my texts. No, she hasn't. I'm not a twat, it's okay. I do deserve her, “stop saying that, Flick.” I tell her that I'm sorry about her adoption, that I'm going to stop using, that the deal is over and that everything is over and that I hope she will be able to forgive me and that I'll do anything to make it up to her, because she is my best friend and she's beautiful inside and out and because she means more to me than anything in the world. It feels like we're saying good-bye.

“I wish you were here,” she says sadly. “I wish I could hug you.” We talk for twenty minutes and then she has to go and pick up Tim from his friend's house. Her mums don't like him walking back alone. She thinks I've been drinking and tells me to stop. And that she loves me. I feel like the most worthless piece of dirty, disgusting shit in the whole fucking world.

I hang up miserably and plod through to rejoin Danny, Dildo and Kyle, who hands me back the straw sympathetically. I look at Kyle. He blows me a kiss. I am so depressed I could kill everyone else. I lean forward, wishing I could be unconscious, wishing I was dead, wishing I could snort my whole fucking existence away. I watch Danny KO Dildo on Tekken.

I want to float into insignificance, I think in a dull, matter-of-fact way. I want to embrace the dark black hole. Be it K hole or coke hole. At this moment I am willing to take anything to make everything go away. Scratch that. To make me go away from everything else, so I can stop tainting it and turning pure things into shitty, hollow, lifeless wrecks. There is no point in being present. Consciousness hurts like a physical wound. I am a bad person. I am hurting the person I love the most, a person who is blameless and vulnerable and honest and who tries to be good, not in a pious way but in a soulful, kind, caring way. A person who has already been hurt enough, who was unloved and let down and discarded by the people who were supposed to care for her the most and I'm doing it to her again. And I'm lying to her about it. Ergo, it would be better if I was not here, and she could move on with her life. Oh take me, self-pity, drag me down into your sweet nothingness. I imagine a high like a Galaxy advert—sweet, smooth . . . chocolaty. Come on, I think impatiently, sucking up another line, and then taking a toke of pot, then necking a pill Kyle proffers. Come on, take me the fuck away. FUCK! Even this fucking shit isn't working. I do another line. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck Rainbow, fuck me, fuck Montauk, fuck animation, fuck it all, because this is starting to feel good. Weird tingly, orgasmic good, with a sort of side dish of melting, fizzing that feels like the kind of good that's bad for you, the kind of good that has a lot of calories. I'm on the slide, the slide into being not here. Come on, you beauty, I think. Drown me in this black sea of blow. I laugh suddenly. With glee I realize I'm going to black out. I know, because I always think like a right poet slash twat when I'm on the way under. And then I see the light very brightly and it sends some sort of shooting feeling through my skull. I feel panicked, and at the same time, utterly calm.

Kyle lights up a smoke. “The thing about Almodóvar is that his earlier films were—”

“SHUT THE FUCK UP, KYLE.”

“What?”

I open my mouth wide, with no knowledge of what is to come out, and find myself screaming. “CRITICISM IS NEVER AS VALUABLE AS CREATIVITY.”

And with that, as my legs give way beneath me, I get my wish—unconsciousness.