It felt like no one in the world had ever felt the aliveness, the untamed thrill of togetherness that we did. Everything glowed, but never more so than when we were high. Mostly we smoked weed, but now and again we’d score some pills or a bit of molly, the pink crystals glimmering like sherbet inside the wrap. We didn’t need it, although it made things more interesting. Sharpened them, opened them up. We played at being grown-ups, but we were just kids without adults.
Danny still hadn’t found another job, but we made do with the money I earned at the pub. Whenever I had a day off we’d fill up a rucksack with crisps and pop, get on a bus with the vague aim of making our way down to London, except we never got that far. It’s only now that I wonder why.
We went to plenty of other places, though. Ate chips in the rain on a beach in Whitby, walked the length of the medieval walls in York. Went to a rave in a field filled with coconut-scented gorse bushes, and made friends with a bunch of old-timers from Manchester, woke up two days later in a tiny little village somewhere over east called the Land of Nod.
We’d been too skint to go anywhere for a few weeks when Danny won twenty quid on a scratchie and announced he was taking me somewhere special. We caught a bus and then another one, but by the time we got to the third I was panicking, my palms sweating. I recognized the route. We were headed toward Denz’s house.
I sat on my hands so that Danny wouldn’t see them trembling, wondered what we would find when we got there, if we would rock up on the doorstep to see my mam and his dad standing on the welcome mat, ready to greet us both with open arms. But before we reached Denz’s stop, Danny tugged at my elbow, pulled me to my feet.
Me dad used to take me here all the time when I were a kid, he told me, leading me across the road toward the entrance to the indoor wildlife park. I slid my hand into his, knew then that he was hurting too.
We shared a jay behind the building, then spent hours floating around inside, the dreamy fug of marijuana transforming that series of interconnected greenhouses on the outskirts of Leeds into some sort of enchanted realm. I remember now so clearly the color and the heat and the taste of magic, Danny leading me past groups of squealing school kids and ducking under the elbows of mums pressing sticky-fingered toddlers up against the glass. Together we gawped at scorpions writhing in tiny cages, dodged butterflies the size of our faces, stood under a rainforest canopy, silenced by the largeness, the possibility of the world.
Look deep inside nature and then you’ll understand everythin better.
The tone of Danny’s voice cracked through my daze and I rubbed at my eyes. You what?
Einstein said that.
I followed Danny’s gaze into the plants below us, trying to make out what he was talking about, but I found nothing, just a tangle of damp and branches and leaves. What you on about, Dan?
It means, he said, that Denz were full of shit.
About what?
All of it. All that shit he were always spoutin about what drugs are good and what’s bad. Because it all comes from the earth, one way or another. You know a quarter of all medicines start off in t’rainforest? Every drug on this planet pretty much comes out the ground. You got yer coca leaves, yer agave. Penicillin. Friggin aspirin. Smack, even smack—all it is is a poppy, man. Nowt but a fragile little flower.
I pulled at the fabric of my T-shirt, the cloy of the sham forest making it cling to my skin. What you gettin at?
He looked at me then, as though only just remembering that I was there. Nowt, he said. Only that I should never have trusted him. Me dad.