Junkie Love (10 page)

It took us about seven hours to cover the one hundred and twenty miles between London and Glastonbury, and it was early evening when we finally arrived. We’d decided to split the cost of one ticket between us, and that the rest of us would try to get in without paying and meet up later, so I drove around the lanes that circled the huge festival site, looking for a weak spot in the perimeter fence. Finally, in the headlights, I saw several people scrambling through a hole that someone had scraped in the earth beneath the high metal fence, and I dropped the others off to make their own way in. Then, I drove around to the main gate, paid my entrance fee, parked the van in one of the allotted fields and made my way to the pre-arranged meeting place to rendezvous with the others.

I don’t remember a lot about the festival, and I certainly don’t remember seeing any bands. We pitched our tent in the Greenfield, amongst the “New Age” travellers, and spent most
of the four days we were there wandering around in a chemical, drug-induced haze. The weather was scorching, and the members of some London-based art group had erected a huge “Car Henge” circle of wrecked automobiles, upended and placed on top of each other, dolmen-like, presumably in celebration of the coming end of mechanised civilisation. Cissy disappeared early on, and my main recollection is of fucking Rachel for most of the second night, after we had both taken speed and acid. Outside the tent, about a hundred drunk, stoned revellers beat out a crazy rhythm on the cars and metal sculptures, with sticks, stones, hammers, cans and bottles, as they welcomed the rising sun on midsummer’s day.

When Cissy finally showed up on the fourth day, she was sick and in need of methadone, and as there was only a little left, we drank it together and decided to drive back to London that night. The others wanted to stay, but the thought of the stash of heroin waiting for us back at the squat, and the knowledge that by the following morning we would both be sick, was enough to dissuade us from doing likewise. And so, around dusk, we set off in the now seriously unreliable minibus, leaving our friends to make their own way back over the course of the next few days.

After about thirty miles, the headlights went off and refused to work again, and though I continued to drive along the white line in the middle of the road for awhile, the after-effects of the acid were playing havoc with my vision. I kept imagining shadows and shape-shifters jumping out of the darkened trees into our path, and coloured lights were still exploding behind my eyes. It was too dangerous, and after nearly running the van off the road a couple of times I decided to stop for the night, parking up some way along a deserted forest track. There, Cissy and I bedded down for the night in our sleeping bags, outside beneath the whispering, overarching trees.

My idea was to wake up with the sun, and drive the rest
of the way to London before the methadone wore off and we began to get sick. However, I’d reckoned without the effects of four nights without sleep, and when we finally woke the sun was way past the zenith, and both of us were soaked in clammy, cold sweat inside our sleeping bags. Hurriedly, we gathered our things together and drove off at top speed, trying to ignore the chills, blurred vision and other manifestations of severe opiate depletion; but in our haste I pushed the van too hard, and as we hit the suburbs just west of Reading the engine finally seized, the vehicle coasting to a stop after a series of shuddering jolts.

“Oh that’s just great! Now we’re marooned out here in the wilderness, sick an’ dirty, an’ with no way of gettin’ back home. Trust you to buy an old wreck that’s ready for the knacker’s yard.”

“Oh sod off, at least it got us there, didn’t it? What d’you expect for fifty quid, anyway?!”

Fighting back the nausea, and with the sweat pouring off me, I stuck my head under the bonnet, even though I knew it would be a waste of time. With my rudimentary knowledge of mechanics, and judging by the sound the expiring engine had made, I was pretty sure that the big end had gone and that the van was now fucked beyond repair. I managed to get it into a side-street, where we abandoned it, carrying our things and hitch-hiking the remaining forty or fifty miles back to London. By the time we arrived in Camden Town, we were both suffering severe withdrawal symptoms, and Cissy was undergoing some kind of paroxysm of self-loathing over our unwashed, rancid state. The first thing we did on arriving home was to cook up a huge shot of heroin, which we shared, before falling into a deep, untroubled sleep that lasted until the afternoon of the following day.

• • •

Shortly after returning from this jaunt, Cissy and I both had accidents that laid us up in bed for several weeks. We had been to visit friends, and were returning to the squat on one of the old “Routemaster” buses — the type with a conductor and an open rear door — and were approaching our stop when Cissy decided that she would jump off while the bus was still in motion. She misjudged the distance to the pavement and badly twisted her ankle against the concrete kerbstone, sprawling full-length and scraping her face into the bargain. By the time I reached her, she was jumping up and down on one foot, yelling at the top of her voice.

“Ow, ow, ow, Jesus fuckin’ Christ, I’ve busted it! Don’t just stand there, do something, get me inside for fuck’s sake — hurry up babe, please, it’s killin’ me!”

Even before I got her indoors, her ankle had swollen to twice its normal size, and in spite of ice-packs and cold water compresses, it refused to go down. I took her to
UCH
in Euston, and after several hours wait she finally emerged from the casualty department with a walking-stick and a bandage up to her knee.

“Well, at least it’s not broken …”

“That’s alright for you to say, but a torn tendon’s almost as bad — it hurts like fuck, an’ I’m not supposed to put any weight on it for the next six weeks. Basically, it means I’m gonna be laid up for the rest of the summer — I’m gonna go mad cooped up in the room in this heat … An’ what about Rosie, who’ll take her for walks? I’m gonna be reliant on you for everything — drugs, food, cigarettes, everything, which is just bloody great! Well, you always did want to control me, so now you’ve got your wish!”

By the time we reached home, her bad temper and paranoia had subsided, and I propped her up in bed with plenty of pillows so that she could rest her leg. As soon as she was settled, I gave her a big shot of smack to alleviate the pain.

Then, the very next day, while I was fixing a clogged drainpipe at the rear of the house, I fell off the rickety old stepladder I was using and crashed twelve or fifteen feet onto the concrete patio below. The pipe had backed up and overflowed, leaving a pool of foul-smelling, putrefying water directly outside the back door, and as no-one else seemed to give a fuck, I had foolishly taken it upon myself to repair it. As I balanced precariously on top of the ladder, Purley Pete, one of the other occupants of the squat, shouted up instructions from below:

“Try it from the elbow-bend first — that’s the most likely place for it to have got blocked, and you can see what’s happenin’ if you take the collar off the join an’ stick your ’and inside.”

I undid the screws which clamped the two sections of pipe together, and pulled them carefully apart — nothing.

“That’s odd — it must be blocked further up, in the straight section, which is pretty unusual. Try tappin’ it with an ’ammer, you should be able to tell from the sound which bit is full of water.”

I was now on the very top step of the ladder, and the only way I could go any higher was to place my right foot on one of the stays which clamped the pipe to the edge of the house. I tapped it gently with the hammer, up and down, and listened carefully for any change of tone. And it was true: at a point just about level with the top of my head, I was pretty sure I could detect a distinct difference in the way the pipe sounded — much denser, as if there were something solid inside.

“The only way to get in from there is to crack it open, then repair it later. There’s no collar further up, so that’s all you can do, really …”

Luckily, the pipe was of the old-fashioned, heavy-duty porcelain variety, and I was easily able to crack a hole in it with a few well-aimed hammer blows. I reached inside, and about three inches above my eye-level I finally located the blockage.
It appeared to be some kind of jagged metal, but soft and easily manipulated, the kind of metal they use in — Yes! — beer cans!

“Some daft cunt’s dropped a can of Special Brew down inside the pipe. It must have been that party we had last month — some mates of Andy’s got out through the attic, and were sittin’ around on the roof, drinkin’ and smokin’. It must have been one of them did it for a laugh, dropped it down from where the guttering feeds into the pipe — fuckin’ typical!”

I poked at the can with a screwdriver, trying to dislodge it, but it was wedged firmly inside the pipe. Finally, I managed to get a proper grip on it and yanked hard, so that the offending can of Special Brew, twisted and torn, was now more than halfway out of the hole.

“Watch out for the water when you pull it through …”

“Yeah, yeah!”

I gave the can one final hard tug, taking care not to lose my balance, or my grip on the pipe …

“Jesus Christ! Shit!”

I jumped backwards off the ladder, twisting away in midair, as a huge, black water-snake shot out of the hole and came spiralling straight towards my face. It had obviously hatched in the pipe and, having been trapped there, had grown bigger and bigger until I’d unwittingly released it by breaking the pipe open and giving it an escape route. I didn’t know if it was poisonous, or not; but the thought of its slimy, black body propelling itself directly at my throat was enough — I wasn’t going to stick around to find out, and I instinctively dived backwards off the ladder to escape its spitting, snarling jaws.

I hit the ground hard, heels first, and as the pain shot up my legs and through my body, I cried out loud in agony. But I was also laughing like a fool, as I’d realised my mistake even before I hit the ground: what I had tried to get away from was not a water-snake at all, just oozing, black mud, forced out of
the hole at great speed by the pressure of the water trapped above. But now the pain was excruciating. Stupidly, I had undertaken the task wearing only soft-bottomed karate slippers on my feet, and although I’d managed to land squarely, they provided no protection at all against the impact. I tried to ignore the pain, hoping it would go away, and sat outside in the late-afternoon sun with both feet plunged in a bucket filled with ice-cold water; but when, after about an hour, I attempted to stand, I could put no weight at all on either foot and immediately fell over. Pete helped me into a taxi, and for the second time in two days I found myself in the casualty department of
UCH
. When I was finally attended to, and X-rays had been taken, I was told that I had fractured the heel bone of each foot; and, furthermore, that this was probably the worst bone to break in the entire human body, as a cast could not be put on it. Once fractured, it was always liable to break again if a similar accident occurred at any time in the future.

Buoyed up by this heartening news, and equipped with a pair of crutches and a set of heel-pads, I was told to report back in three weeks for a check-up and further X-rays, then carried to a waiting taxi by Pete and a hospital orderly. I was also assured that it would be at least eight weeks before I could even think of putting any weight on my heels, and that I should spend as much of this time as possible in bed, arranging for someone else to do all my errands and running around for me. I got no sympathy at all from Cissy.

“You dickhead — why’d you decide to wear slippers to fix the drains? Anyone with any sense at all would have worn work-boots … An’ it’s a wonder, anyway, that old stepladder didn’t give way beneath you. You could have broken your neck, not just your heels. Fuckin’ water-snake …!”

“Yeah, it’s almost as clever as jumping off moving buses with your eyes closed …”

“Oh belt up, that could have happened to anyone!”

As we lay side by side, both of us propped up on pillows on Cissy’s queen-sized bed, I looked forward to spending the next few weeks like this, immobilised and unable to escape from each other, and to all the bickering and bitching that this confinement was bound to engender. But of course, the thought that was uppermost in my mind was: “How the fuck am I gonna be able to cop and keep dealing in this state, and who can I trust to help me out?”

• • •

Somerstown Sammy was a friend of Cissy’s, a rat-faced little street junkie with a speech impediment and an ingratiating manner that annoyed the hell out of me. Also known as “Whisper”, because of the virtually sub-audible way in which he spoke, he was basically one of her disciples, and was content to worship her from afar whenever he came around to score. He had pale, grey eyes, and his blotchy, freckled skin was drawn tight across the bones of his face, so that in certain lights, and from certain angles, he seemed to be translucent, as if the light passed right through him. His personality, too, was somehow vaporous and ill-defined, so that if I tried to recall his appearance in detail, or his manner, when he was not actually sitting in the room right there in front of me, I found that I could not. He had a thin, wispy beard, pointed and flecked with grey, which he nervously tugged at whenever he spoke, and he always wore grey, even in the summer: a grey bomber jacket and flannel trousers when it was hot; a long, grey overcoat when it was cold. He was able to make himself invisible in a crowd, to pass amongst people unseen and unheeded, and because of this talent he was an expert thief. Quite simply, people just didn’t notice him, and he was able to glide up and down the aisles of large department stores unmolested by detectives and security guards, slipping valuable objects into the specially-sewn
linings of his jackets and coats. Vapid and diminutive as he was, he would be out of the door and onto the street again before his presence had even registered in the consciousness of those employed to watch.