The next day I opened my eyes.
Fuck.
The fear was on me already, sitting heavy and dark on my sallow chest. My throat felt swollen, painful. This was a new symptom. The beginnings of a cold or maybe the flu. I thought absently of the cocksucker who sneezed on me the day before on the northern line and cursed silently.
Vanessa was in the bathroom, getting ready to go to work. She had been a rock to me throughout this. We did not have an easy time in the weeks since I quit Subutex. When she returned from work I would usually be perched on the sofa, smoking a joint, on the verge of or in tears. I kept promising her that this would be over soon. Every morning I woke up with a dread feeling in my soul.
She stood there, impossibly beautiful in the bedroom doorway. She was smiling. I managed a weak smile back at her.
“Will you be okay today?”
“Yeah. Thanks, baby. I’ll be okay.”
“Well, I got to go. I’m late again. I’ll call you, okay?”
“Okay.”
I looked at the clock: 8:30 A.M. The day stretched out in front of me, daunting and infinite. How to fill the time before I could retreat back into our bed, swallow Valium, and be unconscious again? My muscles ached and my sinuses hurt. Motherfucker. My first cold in years.
Heroin somehow prevents the body from contracting colds and the flu. You’ll never see a junkie with a cold, unless of course he is in withdrawal. Once the heroin is removed, though, the weakened immune system is particularly susceptible to colds and other viruses. I coughed and sat up. I realized that I had two options: score some heroin or get out of the flat and pass the next twelve hours any way I could.
Later, I was wandering the Warren Street tube station with my hand buried in my jacket pocket, clutching a small knife. The blade was retracted, and I was scanning the blank crowd for the correct face. The bastard must be around here: he was rushing to meet the train yesterday afternoon. He must work close by. Maybe I’ve already missed him. I knew somewhere in the back of my mind that what I was doing was patently ridiculous. But I carried on, grimly determined.
I did not aim to kill or even seriously injure him. Just slash the germ-spreading bastard a little. The leg, the buttock, somewhere painful but not dangerous. I pictured the scene as I stalked the platform: there the bastard would be, rushing, late for the office…. I’d shadow him off the platform and as he stepped onto the escalator I’d quickly sink the blade into his soft, fat, useless ass cheek, vanishing before the pain even hit…before the red started to soak through the seat of his pants.
But the faces that surrounded me—beaten down, rushing, furrowed in concentration, laughing, frowning—simply exhausted me. I could feel the heat rising off my body. My legs felt weak and shaky.
“This is ludicrous,” a voice told me. “You are out of your fucking mind.”
Finally I sat on the platform and rested my head in my hands. My mind was screaming like some endless horror movie jump cut. It is at this point in the withdrawal process—when the smack is almost all out of your system—that the brain makes its final all-out attempt to get drugs. It wants junk. It needs it. It pleads and begs and cajoles. And sitting alone on a train platform having just spent an hour trying to find a man who sneezed on me yesterday so I could take revenge by stabbing him in the ass, I began to concede. Why was I even bothering to go through with this charade? I could be at Kings Cross in fifteen minutes and high within thirty.
On the next bench sat two drunken Australians drinking lager and eating like pigs from a greasy Burger King bag. The smell of the food and their whining accents was making me feel sicker than I already was. They noticed me bristle in discomfort.
“Oi mate,” one yelled over to me. “Cheer up—it might never happen! Argh! Ha ha ha!”
The guy who yelled—a red-faced inbred in a U2 T-shirt—cracked up at his own witticism. I did not dignify him with a response. The train was due to arrive in four minutes, and I would soon be on my way to some heroin, which—even though it will be of mediocre quality at best—would still transform my day from the wreck it was right now.
“He don’t wanna talk to you, mate,” his friend chimed in, a pig-fucking retard with a grimy, sweaty-looking beard. “Strong silent type, eh?”
I gripped the knife in my pocket, blood-red murderous rage building in my chest. They had no idea how close they were to dying. I kept looking at my feet, focusing my thoughts on getting on the next train and getting the fuck out of there. No distractions.
Then the platform’s PA system buzzed into life to announce that “due to a person under a train at Kings Cross,” trains would no longer be stopping at this station. All around me people cursed, sighed in frustration, and stomped away to alternate platforms. Consumed by hopelessness, I finally relented. Submitting, I let my head fall into my hands, and I began to sob quietly.