Junkie Love (17 page)

He wasn’t there to protect her, though, a few weeks ago, when some shady deal she had got herself involved in went horribly wrong. It was a typical kind of Cissy business venture, full of misunderstandings, bad judgement, betrayals, dubious characters, panic and sheer, unadulterated greed. Ever since
JC
had left with half of her gear, she had been looking for an opportunity to make up the deficit. So when some obscurely connected acquaintances of people she vaguely knew came up from the West Country — with over two thousand pounds in cash — looking to buy speed and an ounce of high-quality heroin, they were put into contact with Cissy, who jumped at the chance to make something out of the deal. The deal was, if she scored the ounce she could use the remaining money to buy herself two or three grammes — worth up to four hundred pounds when cut was added and the smack divided into quarter-gramme packets, each selling for twenty five pounds a throw. Of course, she also intended to cream off a couple of grammes from the full ounce and add a little cut to make up the difference (not so much that anyone would notice …); so that altogether she stood to make about six hundred pounds on the venture, just for picking up the gear and handing it over to the buyers — a task that she promised would be accomplished within three or four days at the most.

The problem was that although these people weren’t big-time dealers, they were fairly heavy characters, and you could tell by their appearance that they were not the type who would
take kindly to being fucked around. I didn’t know what was happening, or what Cissy was planning to do, until afterwards; I just saw these three tough-looking guys, not her usual type of customer at all, coming out of her room one day as I passed them on my way up the stairs.

Anyway, it seems that Cissy wasn’t able to cop a full ounce anywhere, only a half at maximum. But instead of doing the sensible thing and being straight with the buyers — giving them the choice of having their money back and going elsewhere, or waiting for her until one of her dealers came up with the goods — she decided to go ahead and buy the half, with the intention of making up the full amount later when she could find somewhere else to cop. The disadvantage was, of course, that buying it this way, in two separate deals, she would have to pay a higher price, and so her profit margin would be that much smaller. Consequently, she would have to cut the gear that much more if she still wanted to make the same amount of money out of the deal as she’d originally intended.

Another problem was that having a half ounce of such high-quality smack lying around for a few days was just too much of a temptation. She began to dip into it herself, reasoning that it was such good gear she could easily add quite a large cut later — after she’d scored the other half, that is — and nobody would be any the wiser. It would still be better stuff than anything these “hicks from the sticks” had ever laid their hands on before, of that she was convinced. Somehow, though, word filtered back to these guys that Cissy had copped, and they sent a message that they would be up from the country the next evening to collect; and with this news, Cissy went into panic mode, sending out scouts and hunters to search for another half ounce, then foolishly entrusting one of them with the money when he successfully located a dealer with the requisite amount to sell.

Whether this guy was genuinely ripped off, or did the dirty
on Cissy himself, is open to conjecture: she and her friends were all so loaded on this first batch of particularly good smack that none of them really knew what they were doing during the whole of this time. But the upshot was that he returned with half an ounce of what was basically cut mixed with a little heroin: the kind of stuff which, if you tried to smoke it off silver foil, would crackle and burn black like sugar or baking soda — which, in reality, was what it mostly consisted of.

Cissy’s panic increased even more when she weighed out the good stuff and found out that there was just over ten grammes of it remaining. She had been so stoned that she simply hadn’t noticed how much was being used — either that, or else one of her friends had been helping himself while she wasn’t looking. Her first impulse was to mix the high-quality gear with the crap to produce three quarters of an ounce of passable stuff, and to reimburse the buyers for the missing quarter out of her own capital, admitting that she had been unable to score the full amount. She might just have got away with this strategy if she hadn’t been so greedy; but the thought of having to pay back the buyers out of her own money, while having nothing to show for all her efforts, was just too much for her to bear. So she decided upon a second plan of action: she would cut the high-grade stuff 50/50 to produce twenty grammes of reasonably good-quality street gear, then sell it off in weighed quarter-gramme deals to pay back the buyers — or at least show them that she still had their cash and hadn’t yet managed to score. At the worst, she would have got herself out of a sticky situation, and if she could convince them that she was only waiting until some prime gear became available, she might still be able to make money on the venture.

The only problem was time: she had less than twenty four hours to sell about eighty quarter-gramme wraps of street gear, a virtual impossibility, even though she put the word out that she was holding excellent stuff, and more than the usual amount
of customers did, in fact, show up to score. She tried to stall for more time; but by now the buyers were highly suspicious, and when they arrived the following evening Cissy had only managed to offload about seven or eight grammes. So what they found was half an ounce of unsellable crap; about eight grammes of street-standard gear that couldn’t realistically be cut anymore (a few grammes had somehow gone missing in the general panic); and something like seven or eight hundred pounds in cash from the stuff that Cissy had managed to push. Even after they had taken the money and sold the remaining gear, they would still be short of their initial investment, and as they had hoped to make at least two and a half thousand pounds profit on the deal, they were understandably pissed off. These were working-class guys, garage mechanics or something similar, and had probably been saving for months to get the necessary capital together to start dealing in their home town. Now they were furious at being fucked around and, as they saw it, taken for fools and totally ripped off by some skagged-out little junkie girl.

It could have been much worse, but they limited their revenge to taking whatever cash and valuables they could lay their hands on, and to roughing up Cissy and a couple of her customers who happened to be present at the time. They sat them on chairs, tied their hands behind their backs and held knives to their throats, then went through their pockets and through Cissy’s bedside table, for cash, gear and jewellery, before slapping them around a bit more and giving Cissy two black eyes. As a parting gesture, one of them took his knife and made as if to slice her face, but instead cut off her prized hair-extensions, throwing them in a pile at her feet. Then all three of them totally trashed her room. Cissy and her friends eventually managed to free themselves, but for her it was all over. Everything, including her self-respect, had gone, and all she had left to look forward to was a long, painful period of withdrawal and to hustling around like a street junkie for the odd bit of gear that she could manage to buy or scrounge.

• • •

Since then, she seems to have pretty much given up — she doesn’t go out anymore, hardly anyone comes to visit, and she just stays in her room the whole day long with the curtains drawn. She doesn’t even have the dog to keep her company anymore: Dougie came and took it away because Cissy can hardly look after herself, let alone the dog, which was skin and bone and hadn’t been washed or taken for a good walk in months. It seems kind of sad, I know, and I sometimes wonder if the fun-loving, energetic spirit that Cissy used to have is still there, trapped inside the hard insect shell, and whether it will emerge again one day if she ever gets herself off smack and away from the scene. But I have my own problems to worry about, and Cissy and I are just so far apart now that there’s no way I could help her anyway.

Last week, someone
OD
’d badly in my room, very nearly snuffed it in fact, and it really made me stop and think. Of course, I’ve seen people overdose before and I’ve been there several times myself, but this was a particularly bad one, plus I also happened to know the guy personally. I mean, it’s bad enough watching someone stiff out if you don’t know them: it’s horrible to watch life slip away, even from a stranger that you don’t know or particularly care about. But in this case it was a friend — and not only that, I’d sold him the gear, so there was a certain amount of personal responsibility involved. It’s true that everyone in this scene takes their own chances every time they shoot up; and, if you sell heroin, then of course there’s always the possibility that someone is going to die from it. But to have it happen right under your nose, and to someone you know and care for, does bring it home to you with a certain amount of force. Maybe the difference is comparable,
in some ways, to dropping incendiary bombs on a town full of people you can’t see, as opposed to having to strangle each one of them to death with your own bare hands.

Anyway, Roy was an older guy of around thirty eight or forty who had been clean for years and had recently, for some unknown reason, begun to use again. He ran a construction company under the railway arches near Camden Road train station and was normally a customer of Cissy’s, though we both knew him well. He used to help us out with materials and tools whenever repairs needed doing on the squat, and when we first moved in there, he and a couple of his employees came over to remove the antique cast-iron fireplaces that were in the downstairs rooms. He gave us a good price for them — they were much in demand by the middle-class homeowners he used to do work for up in Hampstead and Highgate, and he was only too willing to take them off our hands.

On this particular occasion he had come to me to score, Cissy being out of business and steadfastly refusing to open her door to anyone; and when he asked if he could use my room to get off in, I agreed, figuring that he was an old hand at the game and knew what he was doing. The stuff I was holding was good, but not exceptionally so; yet the moment Roy took the needle out of his arm, his eyeballs rolled back inside his skull and he buckled at the knees, collapsing onto the floor like a hundredweight sack of coal. It wasn’t a particularly large shot he had taken either, but smack sometimes gets you like that, especially if you only use it occasionally: maybe the stuff is just a little stronger than your body is used to; or perhaps your metabolism is running more slowly than normal, leaving you feeling depressed and not quite up to par that day. But whatever the reason, it was obvious that Roy was out for the count; and not only that — as I ran over to where his crumpled body lay and knelt beside him, I could hear a horrible gurgling noise coming from his throat, while his lips were beginning to turn
a definite shade of pale, pale blue.

A couple of other friends, Sid and Jenny, were in the room with me, and we tried everything we could to bring Roy around, but without success. If I’d been a good Boy Scout, alert and well-prepared, I’d have had a few shots of Naltrexone or some other opiate antagonist ready for such emergencies. But I wasn’t. I was just a fucked-up small-time junkie loser trying to survive from day to day, and all three of us were freaking now at the prospect of Roy’s imminent death. First we tried ice-cubes down the front of his pants (shock therapy if you like), then lifted him up by his arms, trying to make him walk around to keep his blood circulation going. But he was a big guy, and dead weight, and even though there were three of us we could hardly move him, let alone get him to walk. He crumpled again and lay slumped against an armchair, while I slapped his face hard and shouted at the fucker not to die; but by now he was really turning blue, and a long line of drool was dripping from one corner of his mouth. As far as I could see he wasn’t breathing at all.

Jenny was crying, and I was feeling pretty close to total panic myself; Sid, though, who knew something about first aid, pulled Roy’s legs out from beneath him, so that he was now lying on his back full-length on the floor, then put an ear to his chest, listening for any heartbeat.

“He’s still alive, but only just … Quick, get a salt shot together and stick it into his mainline, it might just do the trick — I’ll give him mouth-to-mouth to get his breathing going again.”

I couldn’t believe that Sid was being so calm and collected about the whole affair. I was totally losing it at this point, while Jenny was in hysterics, begging Roy not to die; but I did as I was told and prepared the shot, sticking it into the big vein in his left arm, while Sid continued to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and
CPR
. Suddenly, Roy’s eyelids flickered and he coughed, or rather spluttered, and Jenny cried out in joy as he twitched a little then moved his head to one side. But
sadly the celebration was premature, a bit like watching Frankenstein’s first unsuccessful experiment, and a moment later Roy’s breathing faltered once again, leaving him lying corpse-like on the floor.