After four days holed up in her Willoughby Road flat, shooting speedballs – her preferred amalgamation of heroin and crack – Shelley was glad to receive a call from Tara. Tara Barnes wasn’t her first choice for company. Nicole O’Connell was. But Nicole was in Mustique. A client had flown her out there for a job ten days ago. She was due back tomorrow but for the past ten days, Shelley had no one to confide in. Although she hadn’t yet decided if she was going to tell anyone about what happened at The Lanesborough last week, she wanted to be in company where she could be herself, so she accepted Tara’s invitation to party at her flat.
‘Party’ in their terminology wasn’t meant in the conventional sense. Guests, or a reason to celebrate, were superfluous. To party for them meant taking drugs. One could just as easily have a party on their own. In fact, Shelley had been partying on her own constantly for the past ninety-six hours, minus the fifteen or so hours of GHB induced sleep. And though she wasn’t celebrating it, at some point during the party, her upper lip had returned to its non-twitching state.
On ending the call with Tara, Shelley phoned Jay to place an order for her self-prescribed medicine. She hoped he wouldn’t take much longer than the fifteen minutes he said he would, but he was rarely on time.
She cooked up the last of the heroin, mixed in the final few crumbs of crack, shot up and waited. At seven o’clock, an hour had passed, the sun had set and Jay hadn’t arrived.
“How much longer are you gonna be?” She tried to conceal the impatience in her tone.
“Soon come,” Jay said in his low, soothing voice, but Shelley wasn’t soothed.
“How soon is soon? You said fifteen minutes and that was an hour ago.”
“I’m just pulling into your road now, love.” He cut the call.
Thirty minutes passed with Shelley staring out of the lounge window of her first floor flat. Jay couldn’t use shortage of parking spaces as an excuse. Shelley had her eye on two spaces directly opposite. She called him back and told him not to bother coming because she had to go out. He insisted he was at the top of her road, and persuaded her to wait for him, which she did.
After forty minutes, he still hadn’t arrived. She called him again, and again he tried to convince her that he was at the corner of Hampstead High Street and her road.
“I’m looking out my window. If you’re not here in one minute, I’m going out.”
“Wednesday’s a busy day, love. Give me a break. I’ll be fifteen minutes.”
“Forget it. I’ve gotta go now. I’m late for a job,” she lied. Why would Wednesdays be busier? Had it been decreed the national giro day?
Although Shelley was craving the next fix and would be unable to use heroin at Tara’s, she had to leave her flat. Once it started, this waiting for Jay could go on for hours. His older brother had been the same, before he went to prison and Jay – formerly known as Turgay – took over.
Starting the process again with her other dealer, Ajay, would be insanity. His time keeping was so appalling that in comparison, Jay and his brother, Ali, were as punctual as Big Ben. She would have to make a stop at Camden on the return journey from Tara’s and score her gear on the street. Tara could at least score the crack.
***
On the drive to Tara’s, Shelley pulled up at a phone box on the Edgware Road. It was the first opportunity she’d had to make the follow-up call with The Lanesborough. The curt receptionist told her the guest in that suite had checked out and she denied knowledge of Shelley’s previous call reporting the death. Shelley insisted on speaking to another member of staff but again, she was fobbed off with the same story. They must have been briefed on what to say by the management. The discovery of a dead body wouldn’t exactly be something they’d want publicised.
When Shelley arrived at the third floor flat – on a side street off the Cromwell Road – Tara was already high. She was paler than usual, and spots had formed in clusters on her chin, cheeks and forehead. Her thin, mousy hair was loosely tied back in a bun. A failed attempt to disguise its greasiness. She had been an attractive girl but her beauty was deteriorating.
“How much do you want to get?” Tara asked as they walked through the narrow L-shaped hallway.
“A hundred,” Shelley replied, following her into the lounge.
Perching on the edge of the navy sofa, Shelley took off her jacket and lit a cigarette. At the other end of the room, Tara stood by the glass dining table, talking to her dealer on the phone.
While they waited for him to arrive, Tara made up a pipe for Shelley from the lilliputian rocks she’d saved. Shelley enjoyed the first hit but it wasn’t the same without heroin. The effects subsided rapidly. She was left with the jitters and the craving for another pipe.
In less than an hour, the dealer delivered the crack – and in less than two hours, it was smoked. At midnight, Shelley wanted to get heroin and get home. Tara, however, wanted to score the next batch of rocks.
***
“I haven’t got any more cash on me,” Shelley told her. The money she had had heroin stamped on it.
Tara insisted on walking her to the cashpoint. They left the flat and went out in the cold night. Shelley was surprised Tara hadn’t changed her clothes. She hadn’t expected her to go outside wearing the tracksuit that was also functioning as her food diary.
“I won’t get my card in,” Shelley said, staring at the hole in the wall on Earl’s Court Road. “Some idiot’s stuck matchsticks in the slot.”
“Urgh! That is so council.” Tara zipped up her shiny, black bomber jacket and walked on. “This area’s meant to be gentrified. What a load of shit.”
Shelley stopped after taking a few too many steps in the opposite direction from Tara’s flat. “I’m not going far. It’s bloody freezing.”
“It’s only five minutes. Get your car, if you want.”
Shelley wasn’t willing to walk, nor was she willing to drive. If she was going to get in her car, it would be to score heroin, but she couldn’t tell that to Tara. All the call girls she knew – Tara included – disdained smackheads and injecting users. As if snorting cocaine and smoking crack somehow elevated them to a superior plane on a hierarchal structure of drug users.
“I’ll give him my laptop for your share,” Tara said.
“You’ve got a laptop? What for?” Shelley had never even seen a laptop. No one she knew had one. She thought she was technologically advanced herself for having the internet on her computer.
“Exactly! What do I want with a laptop?” Tara started skipping along the pavement, back in the direction they’d come from. “I don’t even know how to use it.”
“You shouldn’t sell it,” Shelley said, running after her to catch up. “I’m not gonna let you. I’d never sell anything I owned for drugs.”
Tara stopped skipping and turned round. “You sell your body. What’s a laptop in the grand scheme of things?”
“I can’t believe you just said that. How could I sell my body? You can only sell something once. I rent my body and sell my time. What do you think you sell?” Shelley peered through the wide glass window of an all-night cafe, thinking about what she could be doing in their toilet right now instead of traipsing the streets. “I’ll go home. We’ll have another party when Nic’s back.”
***
While they were waiting for the dealer, Shelley sat on the navy sofa and lit three cigarettes: one to smoke and two to burn in the ashtray. They needed to stockpile clean ash for when the crack arrived.
She didn’t like the thought of smoking Tara’s laptop, even more so because it had been a gift from her parents, but Tara had persuaded her. She’d said the Toshiba was better off being traded for something she could actually use and with technology constantly changing, it was best to do it now before it became obsolete and unsaleable.
“Have a shot of vodka. Live a little.” Tara returned from the kitchen, carrying two glasses. “You can’t have it on its own – it’s a child’s drink.” The glass of lemon barley water clinked with the glass top of the coffee table as Tara set it down.
“No. It’s fine as it is.”
“How can you smoke crack and drive? It’s hypocritical,” Tara said, unscrewing the cap on the bottle of Smirnoff.
“Crack makes me more alert. It’s not the same thing.” Shelley put her palm over her glass, preventing Tara gatecrashing with the uninvited vodka. “I mean it. I don’t want any.”
Trying to ignore the smudged fingerprints sullying the glass, Shelley sipped her lemon barley sans vodka. She never drank when she was driving. She couldn’t, not after what happened to her grandparents. Even though Tara knew this, now and again, she’d try talking her into a drink, forcefully, and interestingly, only when they were alone.
“Do you see your parents often?” Shelley asked. Tara had never spoken of her parents before tonight. Shelley had thought they didn’t have contact. There were no pictures of them in her flat. There were no pictures of anyone in Tara’s flat.
“Sometimes,” Tara said, as she sank into the mountainous armchair.
Shelley slotted three cigarettes between her lips and lit them simultaneously for the same purpose as the previous three. “Do they know you work?”
“Yes, and they’re so proud – their daughter, a call girl.”
“Why did you tell them?”
“I didn’t.” Tara stole one of Shelley’s left-to-burn cigarettes from the ashtray and took a long drag. “It was one of my regulars. His wife came home and found me tied up in their bed.”
“She knew your parents?”
Tara took a gulp from her glass. “I went to the same prep school as her daughter. I hadn’t seen them in years but she was still in touch with my mother and blah-blah-blah.”
“Oh, poor you. That’s awful.”
Tara raised her left eyebrow and a half-smile spread from the right side of her mouth. “It would have been, if it’d happened... We’re going to Cafe de Paris on Friday. You should come. You won’t need any money.”
Shelley felt her cheeks warm, part in embarrassment and part in anger. “So, they don’t know, then? What do they think you do?”
Tara stood, and then walked towards the door. “Do you want a coffee?” Her voice trailed off as she left the room.
***
The buzzer rang out. Tara answered it. A tappity-tap of high heels resonated up the wooden staircase and into the flat. Shelley was expecting the dealer but unless he’d cross-dressed since his earlier visit, it wasn’t him.
Nicole O’Connell strutted into the lounge as if she’d stepped straight off the catwalk. Her runway model looks – usually pale from her Irish heritage – were transformed with a Mustique tan. Defying the British weather, she wore a flowing, strappy dress and her blonde hair cascaded half way down her back.
“You sure there’s gonna be enough crack for all that ash?” Nicole smiled. She was as beautiful to know as she was to observe. Shelley leapt from the sofa to hug her closest friend. She took a step back and held Nicole’s suntanned face in her hands. She wondered how Nicole managed to look so well when, most likely, she hadn’t been doing anything remotely good for her health while she’d been away.
Within minutes, the dealer came to exchange a quantity of crack for Tara’s two-hundred and fifty and her Toshiba. Tara brought the booty to Crack Island – the coffee table by the bay window in the front of the flat where they always smoked. Shelley and Nicole were already there waiting, sat on the carpet. Taking turns, they made up their own hits on the shared pipe – another mini Evian bottle abused.
After a few pipes, Shelley and Nicole moved to sit on the navy sofa. Shelley began to hallucinate. She could see the dead john’s face staring back at her from inside the glass top of the coffee table. Every time she looked away, she could see it again: on the wallpaper, in the carpet and on the black screen of the television. There was no body, only the head, doing a jig in front of her eyes wherever she looked.
“A punter died on me the other night.” Shelley didn’t realise she’d verbalised her thoughts until she saw Nicole and Tara gawp at her.
“Are you joking?” Nicole asked, quashing any remaining doubt that Shelley had spoken.
Had the question been posed by Tara, even in her jittery state, Shelley could have probably have mustered a lie, but not to Nicole. She never lied outright to her. “No. I need another pipe.”
Nicole made up a pipe, handed it to Shelley, and lit it for her. Shelley sucked hard on the sawn-off biro in the hope it would improve how she felt and what she saw.
“Did he have a terminal erection?” Tara asked.
“I don’t think it was his erection that killed him,” Shelley said.
“No, I mean did he have angel lust?”
“It’s not a damn joke, Tara,” Nicole said, taking the pipe back from Shelley.
The context of the conversation was lost in the aftermath of the hit. Shelley was conjuring the image of an angel fantasy in her mind. A request for an angel fantasy had never been put to her, though she’d dressed up for clients innumerable times. She tried to remember if she’d seen an angel costume in Tara’s repertoire. She envisaged a transparent, white negligee with curved angel wings of the same material. She spent a while considering how one might lie down in such a costume, or even sit down. She decided the whole job would have to be undertaken with the hooker standing.
Tara walked into the lounge carrying a book in her hand. Shelley hadn’t seen her leave the room and wondered how she’d made her exit. Did she fly?
“I wasn’t joking.” Tara brandished the paperback in front of them. “I was asking if your stiff had a stiffy.”
“You’re not funny. Can’t you see you’re upsetting her?” Nicole slipped her arm over Shelley’s shoulder. With her other hand, she angled Shelley’s face towards hers. “Ignore her. She’s smoked too much. Are you all right, love?”
“Can I talk to you later?” Shelley whispered in Nicole’s eye.
“Anytime, most precious.” Nicole blinked repeatedly.
Tara knelt on the carpet. Using the edge of the blue Rizla packet, she scooped up some fresh ash from the cigarettes Shelley had let burn for the pipe. On top of the ash, she placed the last large rock. She aimed the Clipper lighter at it and taking the deepest of draws, killed it. Only a few crumbs remained on the clingfilm for Shelley and Nicole.
Tara swivelled her body round, stretched her legs under the coffee table and leaned back against the sofa. “I’m sorry if I upset you, Shelley.” She looked over her shoulder at Shelley sat behind her on the sofa. “I’ve been reading about it, angel lust. It’s in here, ‘Naked Lunch’ ”.
Tara jumped up as if suddenly repelled by her dirty carpet. She waved the paperback in front of Shelley and Nicole. Shelley glanced at the book. So did Nicole. But they both looked away when Tara tried to hand it to them. How could they be expected to start reading now? The words would have wriggled all over the page. Surely, Tara knew that. Regardless, Shelley didn’t care for erotic tales, which is what she expected the book contained. That was Tara’s interest, for her work at least. Shelley recalled one client in particular. Nicole called him Resident Crack Wrap. Tara had told them he liked to be constrained in clingfilm while she was naked, feeding him crack pipes, and poppers on a cigarette, and reading erotica to him.
Shelley and Nicole tried to prepare their final hits with the few morsels Tara had spared them. Tara, however, distracted them. She flicked through the pages of the open book, blocking their access to the drug paraphernalia they were trying to use on the table.
The last thing Shelley wanted was to try to decipher written words. Being on crack, spoken words were hard enough to follow. With the paperback nearly pressed to her nose, she couldn’t help but look. The paragraphs floated up from the page. They flew across the room then out through the closed window. This gave Shelley a new focus – how do words pass through solid objects?
Shelley kept her eyes on the passages of words flying out the window. One sentence bounced off the glass. Perhaps it couldn’t get through. The line drifted back in the direction it had come from and paused in front of Shelley. She read the words hovering in the air: Who can hang a weak passive and catch his sperm in mouth like a vicious dog?
As quick as that line left, another flew back in. It tapped her between the eyes and back-flipped before stopping long enough for her to read: And I knew him when, dearie... I recall we was doing an Impersonation Act – very high class too – in Sodom.
Then all the passages came rushing back inside. Like a frenzied flock of birds, they were soaring round the lounge. Abruptly, they stopped and formed an airborne queue at Shelley’s eye-level.
“Enough!” Shelley yelled as she covered her now moist eyes with her hands. “I need more crack,” she repeated in between whimpers.
Nicole held Shelley in her arms and rocked her on the sofa. The motion, coupled with the apple smell of Nicole’s hair, began to calm her. Shelley leant forwards to the coffee table to make up the one pipe Tara had left her. Nicole pulled her back and told her to wait, lighting a cigarette for her instead.
The intercom sounded. Tara hauled herself up from the armchair and disappeared into the hall. Shelley heard heavy steps, most likely male. She expected the dealer to make his entrance imminently. She hadn’t heard Tara phone him but she was aware of her own inattention. The thought of more crack caused her stomach to churn and her heart to beat a racing rhythm all over her body.
***
Nonchalantly, Hugo strolled into the lounge. He didn’t deal crack or even take it. Shelley’s nervous anticipation deflated and her innards adjusted accordingly, shifting down several gears.
“What’s with the serious faces, girls?” Hugo ran his hand backwards through his blond, curly locks. The sound system in Shelley’s head played Carly Simon - You’re So Vain.
“Shelley had a punter die on her at The Lanesborough.” Did those words come from Tara’s lips or her own head? Shelley wasn’t sure.
“Did you fuck him to death, Shelley?” The cad smiled at her with his I-know-you-want-to-fuck-me eyes.
“I bet she fucked his brains out.” Tara sniggered.
“Fuck you!” Shelley raised her middle finger in Tara’s direction.
“Don’t worry, darling. I think they have a morgue in there. They can put it to use.”
Shelley was flummoxed.
“How much coke have you done tonight, love?” Nicole asked him.
“Not enough, darling.” Hugo swaggered to the dining table where he emptied a bulging wrap of cocaine on the glass top. He began chopping at it with his credit card.
Having elongated what looked like more than a dozen white lines, he bent over the table and snorted two with a fifty-pound note. He passed the note to Nicole, then she to Shelley, then Shelley to Tara.
After their hits had been hoovered, Hugo produced a half-size bottle of whiskey from an inside pocket of his navy blazer. “Get some glasses,” he told Tara. Then he stared into Shelley’s eyes and she was sure he was reading her thoughts. “So tell me about the dead guy, darling.”