Saturday. Vanessa was at work, and I was sitting in the house contemplating suicide. It sounds dramatic, but there it is. Vanessa’s belly was showing a nice little bump now, and I was trying to be normal. Trying and failing. I woke up and I smoked weed, hoping that somewhere in that unpleasant, disorienting high I would at least get relief from the screaming in my head. Nothing. I was going to be a father soon. I sat in the chair and stared out the window. A father. Me?
The phone rang. It was Vanessa. She had taken to calling me every few hours to see if I was okay. She was the pregnant one, yet she felt she had to check on me to make sure I was all right. Some father I was going to be. Her sympathy had a curious dual effect on me: my heart skipped to hear her voice and to know that for now she still loved me and was tolerating me through my withdrawal. But when I put the phone down, like the crash from smoking crack, the depression kicked in worse than ever.
You’re meant to be the strong one. She’s fucking pregnant! Where are your fucking balls?
I tried to cry but there was nothing. I almost considered going through my pockets again, to try and find a bag of heroin or some methadone tablets I may have forgotten about and missed the last time I searched my pockets. It was nothing more than a trick to distract myself for the twenty minutes or so it would take to do it. But I didn’t have the energy. I thought about cutting my wrists, but my muscles ached so much I could not even imagine walking over to the kitchen counter to pick up a knife. And then, Jesus, if I am going to cut my wrists, why not just score heroin instead?
My mind circled itself in this maddening dance of despair every moment of the day.
I fled the house and rode the train to the West End, wandering the streets of Soho, eventually finding myself walking along junk lines and in the shadow of the Centre Point building. There I see Imtiaz Ali, an old twisted-up Pakistani junkie I recognized from the methadone clinic. He wore a skullcap and a filthy-looking patch over his left eye, and was huddled over in the mid-morning chill; when he met my gaze, he smiled and beckoned me over.
“I don’t see you anymore!” He laughed. “Did you move?”
“No…. I quit.”
“Quit?”
Imtiaz laughed, and his laugh turned into a coughing fit that racked his entire body. He spat out a mouthful of phlegm and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“You quit! That’s very good, my friend. I wish you the best with it.”
I had once heard through Steve Cook, who knew the story of every junkie in East London it seemed, that Imtiaz had lost his eye up in Bradford when crack dealers had beat him to within an inch of his life over some failed rip-off or other. Ever resourceful, Imtiaz used the missing eye as a prop to hustle money at mosques the length and breadth of London. Going through his routine of the fellow Muslim who had fallen on hard times, he would spin fictitious tales of his life spent in the service of Islam, and resisting Western infidels at every turn. Then, for the coup de grace, he would lean in to his victim and hiss, “You see…this eye…?” before dramatically flipping up the dirty eye patch, revealing the grisly void underneath. “Gouged out by a Russian bayonet while resisting the Godless communists in Afghanistan!”
Of course, the nearest Imtiaz had gotten to Afghanistan was the Afghan heroin he injected daily…and right on schedule, he was waiting for his connection to show. He saw the hesitation and hunger in my eyes when he told me this.
“I think I’d better go,” I said, with little conviction. I looked toward the underground station but remained rooted to the spot. Imtiaz eyed me with junkie indifference. Then he shot me a grin and said: “He’s had great rock recently. Good brown, too. It’s up to you, mate…but, well…one hit never put anyone back on, did it?”
I sat on the toilet in the Burger King on Tottenham Court Road and measured out some of the heroin into a bottle cap. Then I added a packet of citric acid. Placing the cap on the sink, I snapped off a healthy chunk of the rock and dropped it into the spoon, added a little water, and started to cook the solution down. The water fizzled, turned a murky brown color. The smell of the cocaine and the heroin filled the bathroom. I swirled the solution to check for residue. Hardly any. I dropped a tiny ball of toilet paper into the liquid and filtered the shot into an orange-top insulin needle bought from Imtiaz for a pound.
“I am a man of weak will,” I told myself, as I slid the needle into my wrist. Painful, but those veins were the ones that had always come through for me. Typically I was quite careless with the needle, sticking it through the skin and then probing violently underneath until I found a vein. Push all the way to the hilt—nothing. Retract slightly, change the angle—push.
All the way to the hilt—nothing. Retract, change the angle, push all the way—
SHIT!
Jangling pain as the needle jabs a nerve ending, sending a jolt of electricity up my left arm and one of my fingers starts tingling violently with pins and needles. FUCK!
Nothing. Retract slightly. Change the angle.
Push.
And then something. I felt it before I saw it, that junkie sixth sense. I knew I was close and then—
Pop!
The needle was in the vein and my blood was flowing, siphoned into the barrel of the syringe. Got you, you fucking bastard! I loosened the tourniquet and emptied the barrel into my aching wrist.
The whole bathroom pulsated with the intensity of the cocaine I’d injected. My head spun momentarily. My mouth felt as if it had been stuffed with wads of cotton. I could hear voices reverberating from the next room through the tiled walls. Everything sounded fuzzy and indistinct.
Everything tightened up, fell back into place. I felt alive again. I had to pack up my equipment and get out of the bathroom. Too confined. Too much bad energy. I wondered how many junkies had shot up on this toilet seat.
Fuck.
Fuck.
Head is ringing.
Too confined, but where to go? Not the street. The noises! The people—the shapes—the movement—too much! I am acutely oversensitive right now. Fuck, I wish I were at home. I hate doing coke in public. Fuck! I shouldn’t have done this. I was surely almost over the worst of the withdrawal by now. Will this put me back? I have to tell Vanessa. Will Vanessa leave me? Will she understand?
I staggered out the door. Out onto the streets. Sensory overload. Cut across Tottenham Court Road heading for the underground. A car horn comes on like a shotgun blast.
BLAM
Jump cut—
The hood of the car inches away from me—black guy behind the wheel screaming obscenities silently through the windshield.
“Fuck! Sorry!” he is saying.
No wait—
“Fuck sorry,” I am saying, staggering across the road and onto the pavement. Cold. My breath hangs suspended in the air momentarily, then it’s gone into the cosmos. I start to think about something Vanessa told me once about these things called fractals. But it’s too much—too crazy right now!
I feel like a monster, something that should be living deep, deep underground rather than up here in the unforgiving glare of the winter sun. The chatter of the crowd and the rumble of traffic sound distorted, ominous. My footsteps echo around in front—behind—beside me. Just keep walking in time to the blood in my ears.
“I want to see you bleeding,” a woman tells me, stopping in front of me.
“Huh?” I say, looking up, and obviously something about my general demeanor scares the shit out of her, because she suddenly becomes very pale and she stutters out again…
“I think you’re bleeding.”
…signaling by pointing to her upper lip and breaking eye contact, walking around me and away quickly. I touch my lip.
Red.
Fuck.
I cut myself shaving this morning, must have opened it up again. I wipe it with the back of my hand, smearing the blood around my upper lip, and carry on—half-running—to the station.
And the train pulls out with the agonized roar of a thousand children wailing in unison. My heart is slowing down somewhat. I can feel the heroin more now. Misjudged the shot, maybe. Too much coke. For once that old fucker Imtiaz was not lying about the quality of his guy’s crack.
And on the train a crazy black guy sat singing a kind of spiritual in time with the train’s clack-clacks.
Because I give it up to Jee-sus!
And people were looking round at one another, smirking, slightly embarrassed by this public display of both insanity and religion—two very taboo subjects in modern British society. He carried on in his West London–Jamaican patois:
Yes I give up to tha Lord!
Because he is the wan Lor’
Tha wan an on-ly Lor’
And I could feel my heart rattling in my rib cage and I started to wonder what would happen if I died right now, if my heart finally gave out, if Vanessa got the call that I was found dead on an underground train with my bloodstream full of cocaine and heroin and I cursed myself silently for being a weak fucking idiot.
Who you gwan call when the judg-ment come?
I say who you gwan call when the judgment come?
When Gabri-el’s trumpet sound?
Stepping off the train and into the noise and chaos of Euston. Cutting down endless corridors, looking for a way out. Every suitcase a potential bomb. Potential mass slaughter. What kind of world was this? For any of us?
And down down down the escalator.
“Oi! You! Come back!”
But I’m already away—down, down, down—no looking back, not even a glimpse of the devils on my heels, and I don’t think I’m ever gonna surface.