Brief Encounter
Vanessa was admitted to Homerton Hospital at three o’clock this morning. It seems that the little girl she has been carrying about in her belly is ready to make her appearance. We have decided to wait to name her until we see her face. We picked out all kinds of names but decided that it was unfair to choose before she has even had a chance to draw breath in the outside world. She will tell us her name.
There is a certain irony in the fact that my daughter will be born in the same hospital where I once received my methadone. Vanessa and I have talked and talked and we have come to the decision that it would be best for us to leave London. I hope that London will not become poisoned to me, as Los Angles became. We are considering a move to New York, once our daughter is a little older. But for now, for certain, we have to leave London. It just feels like the right thing to do. Earlier I picked up some things for Vanessa in the city, before getting back on the train and heading to the hospital.
RJ boarded the train at Kings Cross, his phantomlike presence filling the carriage with old memories, tastes, smells: standing in his kitchen in Hammersmith while he weighed out the junk in the bathroom and his daughter absently watched cartoons in the next room and talked to friends on the phone…“Darren? He’s a fuckin’ arsehole…I ain’t fuckin’ desperate, you know?”…and having to split from his flat with the gear and find somewhere else to fix, despite the sweat running off me in torrents and the puke and the shit all about to vacate my body violently, because his family thinks he is off the gear and dealing weed instead.
“Jesus, RJ, how are you?” I ask him. He jumps and turns—his placid old junky’s face has filled out a little in the intervening year.
“What the fuck? Fuckin’ hell long time no see, mate…. What the fuck happened to you?”
“Ah you know, I kicked a little while back, and then…” I raise my palms and shrug.
“You off now?”
I laugh a little. “Yeah. For the time being. You still dealing?”
“Nah…I’m off the gear right now, too. Coming up to six months. Just got out a meeting at the Cross.”
“How is it?”
“Shit. But what are you gonna do?”
RJ has been in the game for a long time. When I first met him he was already fucked up. A ghost. An earthbound phantom. His patient junkie walk. His arms, white and thin, veins long since retreated under mounds of old hardened scar tissue. He told me he used to have to soak them in scalding water for twenty minutes before he could even attempt to hit a vein.
“How’s your brother doing?”
RJ’s face darkened. He made a motion with his hands and took a sharp inhalation of breath, which suggested that Mike had started using crack. “The coke bugs got ’im,” he said quietly, “ate the flesh off him. He died screaming.”
And in a scream of gray metal, tinny voices chattering from the PA system and echoing through black tunnels, RJ is vanished again, lost to God, and I think, He’ll be back. They always come back. And it’s true. The only cure is death. I am convinced of that. But everyone is sick in one way or another, and the only cure for that is death, also. “Life can be considered a terminal illness.” Who said that? Well fuck…what does it matter?
Everybody is fading out. The signal is getting weak. Sometimes people vanish in front of my eyes as if they had never been there. Then in a burst of static they are back. I am eating pills every morning to keep the ghosts away. When things start to get too clear, too focused, it hurts my head.
There is business to take care of now. There are lives that depend on me, as terrifying and strange as that concept might be. The birth of my daughter is rattling to the foundations my long-held assumption that everybody is essentially alone in this world.
The train keeps moving.
I keep moving too.
Destination, anywhere.
Amen.