Life's Lottery (21 page)

Y
our bedroom window creaks. Suddenly, torn out of a dream, you are awake.

The room is darker than it should be. Something hangs outside the window, beyond the curtains, blotting out the moon. It could be a man-sized kite.

It is days before Christmas. And you don’t believe in Santa Claus.

It is days since Rag Day.

Time has passed, in a blur.

* * *

Why is your heart hammering? You’ve lost the memory of a dream, but have awoken with an erection.

Are you afraid? Or excited?

The window seems to swell inwards, as if a giant breath is gently playing on it, pushing the panes in their beds of putty, bending the wood.

There’s a scratching outside.

* * *

You get out of bed, flagpole cock stuck out of your pyjama fly, and stand in the dark.

What is outside the window?

You walk to the window, and take hold of the curtains.

Through the weave of the curtains, you sense a white, moon-like circle.

You open the curtains.

The moon has Victoria’s face.

Go on.

Y
ou cough a bit, but can hold it. Things smooth away. You don’t feel guilty about Rowena, you aren’t angry about Victoria, you aren’t uptight about anything.

‘Hey,’ announces Gully, ‘Marion’s just turned on.’

The kids applaud. You smile and smoke burps out of your mouth.

‘A first-timer,’ Graham declares. ‘You should have told me. He’ll need a special.’

‘A special, a special,’ the kids chant.

That seems like a good idea. Yes, man, a special. That’s what you need.

Graham sees it’s you. ‘Keith,’ he says, ‘welcome to enlightenment.’

He asks after Laraine but you can’t put enough facts together in your mind to give him an answer.

You hold up the joint. ‘Bobby Moore says smoking is a mug’s game,’ you announce. ‘Bubba Moron suss Nosmo King Esau mugwump,’ it comes out.

Graham is rolling a special. He fixes a dozen Rizlas together.

‘Has to be the size of Errol Flynn’s dick,’ he explains.

You laugh. That’s funny.

A whole packet of tobacco is scattered in a thick line. Then Graham roots in a tea-chest and comes up with a plastic model of Thunderbird 2.

‘Calling International Rescue,’ he says, popping the central pod. He opens the door and pulls out a lump of something. With a penknife, he scrapes flecks of the lump on to the tobacco.

‘Special, special, special,’ the kids chant.

The Rizlas are rolled round the fillings, and the ends twist-tied. It looks more like a sausage roll than Errol Flynn’s penis.

‘Open wide,’ Gully says.

You close your eyes and open your eustachian tubes, hearing the roar in your ears.

‘Mouth, drongo,’ Gully says.

You open your mouth and the special is stuck into it.

‘Light the blue touch paper and retire,’ says Gully.

Graham flicks his lighter and plays the flame against the end of the special. The twist burns.

You inhale.

An inch of loose tobacco and special mix burns at once. You suck the smoke into your lungs. And hold it.

All through the rest of your time at college and your three years at university, you smoke marijuana regularly. Mostly in sessions with other people, but sometimes at home, alone. It helps you slow down, relax. You think it makes you sharper when you’re straight. You feel the time you’re stoned is time off from thinking, from achieving. You’ve always needed that, but now you have it.

You get into the whole dope scene. You let your hair and beard grow. You make your own bong. The walls of your room in a student flat are browned with smoke, carpet ravaged by burn-marks, trodden-in tobacco shreds and other stains. You have a ‘Legalise It’ badge. You buy grow-lamps and cultivate your own plants in a cupboard.

By your second year, you have a morning joint when you wake up and get through the day with a loose chain, hanging smokes round intervals of taking in tea or beer. You become a connoisseur and can tell where dope comes from at a sniff, like an expert identifying wines.

You have the occasional paranoia spasm. Nothing heavy, but you and your friends all know kids who’ve been busted, and that makes you think about the police too much, elaborating fantasies about their fiendish schemes to entrap and undo you.

At one point, the big dealer on campus is arrested. In his flat, the pigs find a bundle of cheques, each for £25 – the cost of an ounce in 1979 – and all the signatories are raided over the next week. You’ve always paid in notes but this still makes you go to ground, finding a neutral pad and staying there until it blows over.

Your throat is dry all the time.

Even your mellows start to feel edgy.

* * *

You take another drag on the special.

You need to be further away, where the nagging doubts can’t get to you. You realise the dope is just getting you to where you used to start out from.

You try LSD. Lovely. Strange. Delight. It’s not like being Keith. It’s a three-day holiday from him. You make connections, you become part of them. You discover things about yourself and your furniture.

You trip regularly.

One time, you realise your campus is infested with shadow-parasites. Some people have transparent spider-things clamped round their heads, straw-like suckers implanted in their brains. Those with shadow-spiders are in charge.

Under the sink in your shared bathroom, you find your shadow-spider, waiting for your insight to fade, so it can fasten on you and suck your brain.

As you feel yourself coming down, you scout round your flatmates for another tab of acid. They don’t come across and you feel panic as the shadows start to fade. Straight, you won’t know who has a parasite and who hasn’t. Your own shadow-spider will be invisible, and will come for you.

You have to prolong the trip, spend your whole life outside your head.

But the cupboard is bare.

When you do come down, after a spell as a gibbering maniac under home-made restraint, you opt to slacken off.

You have a couple more trips, but they are in mono and black-and-white. The vividness has faded.

The shadow-spiders are gone.

You miss them.

* * *

You take another drag on the special.

As finals loom, you realise you have to catch up. Your grades have been hovering around the acceptable mark but you need a good degree. It hits you that you’ve burned up the last three years.

You cut down on smoking and kick acid into touch. You lose the long hair and the beard. You ponder your overdraft and wonder how much of that was caused by your – not habit: you haven’t been using habit-forming drugs – by your tastes. You’re going to need postgraduation funds to get level, or you’ll be in debt until the next century.

You hit the books. You’re doing economics and business studies. You hit the library. You attend lectures, not only for your own year but for the two years below you, going over ground you have a hazy memory of. You work, restricting stoned periods to a few hours at the weekends.

You get new friends.

Finals are near and you have so much to do. You resent the sleep that takes you away from work.

A friend suggests amphetamines.

A good friend.

You start with a few bennies and manage marathon three-day study fugues. Your brain reconfigures and sorts everything out for you.

You don’t need sleep. You need speed.

You start speeding.

This is different. It’s not avoiding reality, it’s embracing it. You are empowered. The speed jump-starts you, lets you cover three years’ work in three months.

Ka-pow!
You get an upper second.

Zap!
You are recruited by an investment firm.

Whoosh!
You zoom out of university, into the 1980s.

* * *

You take another drag on the special.

In the City, juggling unimaginable amounts of money, raking off your huge cut, speed seems tame. You shift to cocaine. It’s expensive, especially the good stuff you need, but plugs you into the big board.

Your nasal passages scab up.

But you appreciate things. Cars, sex, money.

You get your own silver spoon, like a Beverly Hills tycoon. You keep downstairs coke – cut with everything from baby laxative to chalk – for sluts; upstairs coke – almost pure flake – for clients.

You write off a Ferrari.

It’s a blast.

Maybe it’s a dependency, a crutch, but whothefuck cares? You could get through a week without coke, you just don’t want to. Would most folk be able to get through a week without, say, coffee? Most folk couldn’t imagine a whole lifetime stretching ahead of them without the blessed bean, but does that make them dependent on coffee? No fucking way, Hose A.

You turn over the odometer on your bank account. You have a million in the game. Pounds, not dollars.

You snort.

It’s all gone.

A big gamble.

You snort.

A dealer wants paying. He carries you for a while.

The money doesn’t come back.

You’re good for it. Your right nostril prolapses.

You run out of cars, sex, money.

Whappened?

* * *

You take another drag on the special.

In the late ’80s, skag is where it’s at. Heroin.

Why you ever fucked around with anything else is a mystery.

You inject yourself with liquid joy.

You’re an addict, you admit it. It’s just a word, not a brand, not a mark of Cain. Everyone’s an addict to something. With you, it’s smack. You can explain it.

The shadow-spiders come back. Now, you see them when you’re straight. You were wrong about them. They don’t become invisible when you change your perceptual relationship with reality. They are literally banished.

While you’re up, they can’t get you.

You sell stuff left over from the Rush Days. Your early-’80s circle has gone. You try to scrape consultancy gigs but fuck up. All the fucking time, you fuck up. You steal stuff from people. You rob people in the street. You sell yourself to people.

Anything to keep the shadow-spiders away.

* * *

You take another drag on the special.

Crack.

It’s better than sliced smack.

But it costs.

The shadow-spiders order you to do extreme things. Without a second thought, you obey.

To suck on the glass tit, you kill people.

It’s worth it.

People? Who needs ’em?

You don’t.

You’re not addicted to crack. How could you be? You are a part of crack. You cannot separate yourself from it. You have to get back to it.

It’s important.

* * *

You take a last drag on the special.

You die.

AIDS. Odee. Murder. Pneumonia. Whatever.

The spiders kill you.

Or maybe you pause somewhere and write a book. A romantic comedy about a smackhead in love with a crackbrain. It’s authentic and a best-seller. The movie is a hit. Everyone starts talking like your dialogue. You start a trend, become a role model.

Probably not.

Probably you rot to shit and nobody notices.

Good-bye, dead guy.

* * *

You stub out the special.

Everyone looks at you, eager, pleased, anticipating.

You shake your head, almost sad that it’s over.

‘Great shit, huh, man?’ Graham prompts.

‘Yes,’ you say, ‘but I wouldn’t want to make a habit of it or anything.’

And so on.

I
t’s awkward and unromantic. You’re in such a small place that you can’t undress. You pull up Rowena’s layers of sweaters as she takes off her bra, but that covers most of her face with wool. You can both only get your jeans and underwear down to your knees since you’re wearing boots you haven’t got the room, inclination or dexterity to get off.

She coaxes you on with breathed sex-talk that sounds fake, as if copied from some porn film. You aren’t convinced that she’s a slut.

Her stomach and breasts are goosebumped. The inside of the van is hardly protected against the elements. Wind whistles through several apertures. At least the windows are misted up.

You fumble the business of getting the condom on, which feels momentarily as if you’ve noosed a wire round the head of your penis. You (plural) have to use all four of your hands to angle your erection for penetration.

It doesn’t last long.

She bites your chest through your shirt. You’re sure she has drawn blood.

Your arse is frozen, especially when you roll against the icy metal of the wheel-housing.

Rowena hugs herself and might be crying.

You pull up your trousers and realise you are still wearing a soiled condom, which is now unpleasantly loose and squishy.

Are you happy yet?

You’ve imagined this sex business quite a lot. Somehow, though you knew it was ridiculous, you imagined a large bed, a long night of warmth and a champagne breakfast.

Rowena is definitely crying.

You hug her and she thumps you.

Whatever it was, it’s broken now.

Rowena twists around and kicks you. It might be accidental but it might not. She definitely isn’t drunk now. And neither are you.

‘Get out,’ she says. ‘Please.’

That ‘please’ is a heart-breaker.

You don’t know how to open the van from the inside and have to feel around before you find the handle. You push the doors open and unbend out of the van. You realise you’ve been steadily bleeding from where you banged your forehead. You have zips and buttons to fasten.

Victoria sits on the Corn Exchange steps, alone, freezing, smoking. She looks at her watch and at you.

‘Keith,’ she says, ‘you’re pathetic.’

You have to agree with her.

If you slink home and hide yourself in shame until the New Year, go to 54. If you brazen it out and decide to go on to the Flaming Torture show, go to 63.

J
anuary 1978. Jubilee year is over.

You don’t think about Sutton Mallet. You don’t dream.