Coming back home could only be an ugly and depressing anticlimax. After the band was finished Vanessa had to go and so did I. Drug-need was already gnawing at the inside of me. We swapped numbers and I left. As I made my way back from Brixton to Hackney I started to feel this new excitement about my life slowly deflating from me. The streets around Murder Mile seemed as small and as cold and as lonely as ever. I slid my key into the lock and swung the metal door open, escaping from the frosty air. I walked through the concrete walkway and up the staircase leading to the flat.
When I opened the door I saw her there, nodded out on the only chair in the place, in front of a nature documentary showing animals thousands of feet underwater moving silently, and the smell of her hit me: the smell of rot, the smell of the cigarette that had burned down to her fingers and no doubt left a scorch ring on the flesh permeated everything. The flat was suddenly smaller than before. I flicked the light on, but it did not shake her out of her nod.
I walked past her and into the bathroom. The girl she was hanging out with before had obviously been here, as there were used needles on the sink of a different brand and gauge than either Susan or I used. And I hated it, but seeing the discarded needles and the dried brown blood spots on the sink, and even seeing Susan back there with all of the life evaporated out of her shell started to change me again, and undo all of the good-but-alien sensations I had been experiencing tonight. I started to realize that I was still here, I was still nothing more that a junkie idiot, that my situation was as fucked as ever. Dejectedly, I started to prepare a shot of heroin.
I heard Susan rouse from her coma.
“Hey,” she croaked.
“Yeah.”
I dug around, finding a new needle in the bathroom cabinet, and retrieved the bag of heroin I had hidden away from her before the tour started.
“Your friend left her old spikes here.”
“Oh yeah. Be careful, I think she has Hep C.”
“What the fuck did she leave them here for, then?”
“They’re old. I gave her some of ours.”
“Well, can you get rid? I don’t want to touch them.”
She turned the sound up on the TV again. I could hear David Attenborough’s familiar voice from the other room.
“How was it?” she asked eventually.
“Fine. I met a cool girl. She was from New York.”
“Oh yeah?”
It all went quiet for a moment as Susan lapsed back into the TV, and I started cooking up. The heroin fizzled in the spoon. Richard Attenborough carried on. The world was familiar and comfortable. Then Susan asked: “She use?”
“Who?”
“The girl from New York. Does she use?”
“What? Heroin?”
“Yes, heroin. What do you think I’m talking about? Caffeine?”
It seemed like an odd question. Susan said it as if everybody used heroin. Like it was a common defining characteristic outside of our world. I drew the dope up into the syringe and said: “I don’t think so.”
I tied the belt around my arm and flexed for a vein. I was going into my wrist again. My hands looked chubby and pockmarked from all of the injecting I had been doing there recently. I thought about Vanessa again. I thought about her eyes, and her lips, and the way she smelled. I thought about her outfit. I thought about her black leather boots. I thought about her voice.
“Then why the fuck,” Susan asked suddenly, “was she talking to you? I mean really, what on earth could you possibly have in common?”
I ignored the question. I had already been thinking about it all of the way home. The answer was too depressing. I thought of her number, written on a piece of paper and carefully folded in my pocket. I wondered about the chance of me ever calling it, and as I fixed my shot and the heroin put me back in my place, I realized that it probably would never happen.
I cleaned myself up and tidied my stuff away. I walked back into the room. Susan was still half unconscious, her face had taken on that slack, mongoloid look people get when they are half in a nod.
“What the fuck are we doing here?” I asked Susan, rousing her as I walked back into the room.
“What do you mean?”
“In London. Why the fuck did we come here in the first place?”
“Because we couldn’t stay in LA. What kind of stupid question is that?” “Well, what kind of stupid reason is that to come someplace? Because you can’t stay in another place? It makes no sense.”
“You make no sense.”
We lapsed into silence again, momentarily enjoying the drugs in our blood.
“We have no money,” Susan told me eventually. “Did you get paid for the tour tonight?”
“No. I have to call Alex in the coming week. Dan has to do the accounts, and then we get paid.”
“The Virgin Megastore didn’t make you wait to get paid.”
“That’s true, Susan. You’re very perceptive.”
“I heard from my sister today. She had twins.”
I had to scramble for the information. She talked about her sister so rarely that I almost forgot she had one.
“She was pregnant?”
“Yes! She was pregnant! You knew this! I told you….”
“Oh.”
“Twin boys. She’s going to send pictures. It must be nice. Having a family. I don’t even have my own family around me anymore.”
“From what you’ve told me that’s probably a good thing.”
She turned and looked at me. “Everybody needs a family. I’m thirty-five. It’s almost too late for me. Do you think I could clean up in time to have a baby? I heard that you can carry a baby full term okay if you’re just on methadone.”
Susan talked like this every so often. It always made me slightly nauseous to hear it. She never came right out and told me that she was talking about having my baby, so I would let her talk about it in an abstract, theoretical way. It was okay, because I knew it would never happen. But tonight, the very idea of Susan carrying a baby around in her gut repulsed me more than usual. “Anyone with a cunt, a working set of fallopian tubes, and a womb can have a baby,” I spat. “What the fuck you are going to do with that baby is a different question.”
She went quiet, and then said: “It would just be neat to have someone who loved me.”
Sensing this was my cue to say something, I waited a beat and told her: “Buy a fucking cat, then.”
A day passed. And then two. I didn’t call Vanessa. Susan was right. What the fuck would she want with me? And the money situation dragged out. The accounts Dan had provided didn’t add up and had to be redone. The record label was getting their own accountants to do the books. Expect a further delay. Susan had started doing volunteer work at a local needle exchange, but of course it was unpaid. I kept on the phone with Alex every day trying to get the money owed to me. Every day he told me that tomorrow he would definitely be able to cut a check for me.
After a week and a half, he announced that there was more work if I wanted it. A trip to Wales, to lip synch the first single on a regional television show. He promised that I would have the money before I left. Despite feeling slightly screwed over about the money situation, the chance to get out of London for even a day was too good to pass up, so I accepted.
We drove down early the next morning. The show was called This Is It! and was hosted by someone I vaguely remembered from a children’s television show of my youth. We were to perform our song in front of an audience of twenty or so bored Welsh teenagers. We did it, and Alex finally cut our checks, handing them to us as the filming wrapped up. I was in the clear again.
Kelly was staying on to do press on her own, and the rest of the band was to travel back by train. We drank and walked around the studio, which was out in the middle of nowhere. Again, away from the city, I started to relax and feel freer than I had before. A film crew filmed the band drinking beers and lounging around in a games room for promotional material. The cameras gave us a sense that maybe this record was really going to happen. The whole scene was surreally out of synch with what was going on in my real life.
On the train back to London I was gripped with the familiar anxiety of returning to the flat and Susan. I opened my wallet and looked again at Vanessa’s number. Ben, the guitarist, was sitting across from me listening to music. I tapped him and asked him if he had a mobile phone. He passed it over to me and plugged his earphones back in. With a sense that if I didn’t do this now I never would, I dialed her number and held my breath until she picked up.
“I thought that you weren’t going to call,” she said to me.
“I had to call.”
“Why?”
“Because things are preordained. I had to call. What are you doing?”
“Getting ready for a party. You want to swing by? Where are you?”
“Coming back from filming the world’s cheesiest TV show. I’d love to come.”
“Okay. Lets meet for drinks first….”
I clicked off the phone and another phase of my life began.