Along with the posh party girls from Cheshire and the Cheetham Hill crowd, other recent acquaintances included a couple of Moss Side kids with whom I would swap goofballs for hashish, and two brothers from South Manchester called Angie and Marcel. They were thieves.
Marcel was a modern-day Robin Hood; he would rob from the rich because the poor have no money. He was in on the Wilmslow wardrobe capers.
Angie meanwhile specialised in regional pharmacies. He knew the business hours of every apothecarist north of Nuneaton. His only equipment was a suitcase full of bricks and a goose-neck wrecking bar. His MO was necessarily formulaic: he’d visit during opening hours, buy a packet of razors, and case the place in order to locate the dangerous drugs cabinet. Research completed, he would return after closing time, put a window in and yank the cabinet off the wall, throw it in the back of the car and make his getaway. Like a road-agent robbing a stagecoach, he’d make an inventory of what was in the strongbox later.
One night, I think we were at the end of an all-nighter or at one of the Cheshire parties, on impulse I asked Angie to take me with him on one of these expeditions. He was glad of the company.
‘Grace . . . space . . . and pace’ all in the Jaguar Mark VII, a full-size, four-door luxury saloon car with a running board and a top speed in excess of 100 mph. It was in just such a car that we travelled to the Peak District with a suitcase full of bricks. I don’t think the Jag belonged to Angie.
We wound up in a choc-box village in Derbyshire on a sleepy Sunday afternoon, and pulled up outside a Victorian chemist with a beautiful front window. The uninterrupted acreage of ancient plate glass presented a seemingly fragile target, but you’d be surprised how hard it was, even with the strapped-up suitcase full of bricks. Time and time again our burglarious assault was denied. You could sort of see the glass bending, but it just went BOING! and the suitcase bounced off.
‘You’ve got to get hit in the bottom left-hand corner,’ advised Angie. It took about six more attempts, and then with a spectacular cascade of shards we were in, and scrunching over the splinters of broken glass to the back of the shop and the dangerous drugs cabinet. Angie quickly wrenched it from its moorings and into the Jaguar’s boot. He drove off at a stately pace and we exited the village like gentlemen.
Apart from the window and the suitcase, it had been quite easy, but I tell you, after this glimpse into the world of the career thief, I wouldn’t want to do it for a living. I mean, who doesn’t have fantasies about pulling off the perfect heist? Who isn’t on the side of Ocean’s Eleven? But the price is too high. Blimey. I was on the verge of crapping my pants for the short ten minutes of the entire operation.
Once we reached an uninhabited tranche of the Peak District, Angie pulled over so we could inspect our ill-gotten pharmacopoeia. He was in this line of work mainly for the pep pills and barbiturates – anything else went over his left shoulder, until he came to a flagon the size of an aqualung made out of green glass bearing a yellowing label with a copperplate inscription that hadn’t been read since the days of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Opium Suspended in Alcohol. Give it a name, laudanum.
Angie wasn’t interested. There was no call for that – his clients wanted to stay awake, and this wasn’t going to help them: not the milk of paradise, not the Chinaman’s nightcap, not this kind nepenthe. No, that’s going to put you in a fucking coma. But being a poet, I was like, ‘Fucking hell.’
Due to my tubercular childhood, I was familiar with opiates and their dreamy side effects, in particular the morphine-laden cough suppressants that had made my young life possible. And now, back home in the privacy of my bedroom, the inimitable bitterness of the first spoonful brought back that familiar state of inner cosiness. As far as I was concerned, it was me and my portable buffer zone from here on in.
I made that flagon last: I had it for years – I mean, years and years. It was a massive cache of the stuff, and I could only take a teaspoon at a time, plus I was always aware of driving up my tolerance level. The idea of running out was unconscionable, and when I finally reached the last few drops I started diluting it with Old Charlie, a brand of cheap dark rum available in miniatures.
It ran out eventually. The beckoning spectre of the Nervous Breakdown skulked in the shadows of my every waking hour. If ever there was a trigger, surely this was it.
Thank God for my Moss Side mates at the Wilmslow after-parties: it was hashish to the rescue.