With a constant supply of heroin and a batch of new works, Shelley was nearly back to her normal state of mind. Sensibly, she’d laid off the crack since the episode at Tara’s the week before and stayed close only to her saviour, heroin.
None of the changes she’d planned to make had happened, and she hadn’t been to visit her mother or her aunt. She’d been unable to leave her flat. Apart from calling Angel when she eventually got back from Tara’s last Thursday, nothing had been done. She’d been telling herself, just one more hit and then she’d visit her mother to make up for missing last Friday, just one more hit and then she’d call in on Aunt Elsie, get her hair dyed, check the newspapers, terminate the lease on her working flat. But the one more hit had turned into the next, then the next and the next after that.
Lying sideways on the sofa in her lounge, with the curtains still drawn as they had been for days, she cooked up her shot. Again, she convinced herself it would be the last one before making a start on her to-do list. She examined her arms. They were marked with bruises, lumps and scabs. She couldn’t work until they healed, and when would that be, if she carried on?
A vein behind her knee was the one she selected. Not out of choice, but necessity. It was cumbersome to manoeuvre her body into such a position that she could see the vein and simultaneously reach it with the needle. Just before her head hit the cushion on the sofa, she realised she’d overloaded the brown powder on the spoon.
When she came to, light was spidering through the edges of the closed curtains. She wasn’t sure if it was morning, afternoon or early evening. She looked at the time on the video player – 1.17 p.m. She couldn’t remember if it had been day or night when she’d taken the hit. Whether she’d been out for minutes or hours, she didn’t know. She’d been at her non-stop solitary party for days and in that world, time didn’t count.
The poisonous smell of heroin was emanating from every pore in her body. Reluctantly, she dragged herself into the bathroom. She showered and cleaned out her birdcage mouth. Once she’d prepared her outward appearance to contradict her inner self, she ignored the voice telling her to have a fix and got ready for the final stage of leaving. She took her jean jacket from the hook in the bedroom and went straight to the window.
Essential for completing a round of checks was a quiet mind, devoid of any other thoughts. That was something Shelley didn’t have. The bombardment from the board meant she kept losing count. After a few minutes stuck on the same first window, she realised a chase of heroin was essential – it wasn’t really a hit. Her mind had to be empty to do the checks. If the act of checking itself didn’t instigate the emptying, something else had to be added to the mix.
***
Wrapped in heroin-laced cotton wool, she’d been able to check and leave the flat in less than five minutes. Before she knew it, she was walking past the local newsagent’s. She didn’t go inside. Instead, she scowled at the cantankerous man through the open door. He might not have been aware of it, but she was boycotting his shop. No longer a source of amusement, he’d begun to rile her. He was unreasonable in taking issue with her reading the papers; she bought her cigarettes from his shop; she was a paying customer. The other two newsagents she used housed equally ill-natured staff, so she took her business out of Hampstead.
In a little shop in Belsize Park, the cotton wool protecting Shelley unravelled. Picking up the first newspaper, she saw that it was Friday. Now it was too late to make up for her missed visit last week, and she couldn’t miss another.
She leafed through the papers, finding nothing until she came across a headline tucked away in the middle of the Guardian. Initially, she panicked on seeing the words ‘murder’ and ‘London’ but reading on, she realised it was unrelated to her situation.
Although relieved for her own selfish concerns, she was raging at what she’d read. How could the government consider releasing a man who had murdered a child back into society? According to the article, the subhuman could be out as early as next month. What moron made these laws? she wondered, and clearly so did many other people who were pictured on a march to Downing Street. He’d murdered the schoolgirl in 1975 and was being shown leniency a little over twenty years later because he was terminally ill with cancer.
Shelley was sickened. Whether he had seconds to live, or years, it was immaterial. It didn’t eradicate what he had done. No longer in the mood for running errands, she used a restaurant lavatory to take a chase of heroin. Calmer, she carried on to the chemist’s farther along the road.
She purchased the blackest of black hair dye, which from the back of the box promised to disguise her blonde hair. She wasn’t sure if she was being paranoid, but she knew that just because she worried the police were after her, it didn’t mean they weren’t. Marianne hadn’t been in contact since she was taken away in the panda car last week, and that further fuelled Shelley’s fear.
Continuing on Haverstock Hill, she turned off a side street lined with white, terraced houses. A few yards up, she entered one and traipsed up the winding staircase to the converted loft at the top.
Her working flat was bare. Some of her clients had called it minimalist. Shelley called it cold. It wasn’t somewhere she spent time unless she was with a client, and as Marianne knew she had it, she wouldn’t ever be spending time there again. She’d have to use her own flat or rent a new place somewhere else.
From a white envelope in her handbag, she took out one-thousand five-hundred pounds in cash, bound in her uniform style: in groupings of one-hundred pounds, Queen’s head sideways on each note folded over securing a pile, and upright on all the others. Although the sum of every group of notes had been verified previously, she recounted the fifteen piles, which consisted of tens and twenties because she’d used the opportunity to rid the cold bank of most of the non-fifties that had made it in. Fifties were best in the freezer as they took up less space.
She addressed the envelope to the landlord and put the money back inside. On a sheet of notepaper, she wrote:
Dear Mr Davis,
I have been called away on urgent business abroad. I do not know when or if I will be returning to London. I hope the enclosed £1,500 together with the deposit you are holding will cover the notice I hereby give.
Yours sincerely,
Mrs Whyte
***
By the time Shelley had trudged all the way up the hill to the corner of Willoughby Road, she realised she didn’t have the bag from the chemist’s containing the hair dye. She turned the corner into her road and not long after, she was in her car, taking another chase.
She headed north, stopping at Hair on Broadway in Mill Hill to have her hair professionally disguised before going to see her mother. When Shelley arrived at the maisonette in Hammers Lane, she could see the curtains were open. She knocked on the door and heard her mother coming down the stairs.
“Aren’t they letting you go early on a— Oh my goodness! You look like that actress from Pulp Fiction. What’ve you done to your beautiful hair?”
“I just wanted to try something different,” Shelley said. “When have you seen Pulp Fiction?”
“I didn’t see it, dear. She was on This Morning with Richard and Judy. Something thermal...”
“Uma Thurman.” Shelley followed her mother up the stairs. Her head felt lighter. Not surprisingly as she’d lost about seven or eight inches of blonde before the black dye had been applied. She hoped her new style didn’t look too much like Uma Thurman’s. She’d always thought her black bob looked slightly wig-like.
Rita put the kettle on for tea. She told Shelley that she’d been out shopping with the help of Aunt Elsie. Shelley was delighted. Her mother was the brightest she’d seen her in ages. It had been months since Rita had come to the door without being called, or made the tea.
After an hour, Shelley made her excuses to leave. She still had more to-dos to tick off her nagging list. And most importantly, the sooner she completed the list, the sooner she could have a proper hit. It was the needle she needed.
***
On returning to her flat, she decided what could be put off until the next day, and what couldn’t. It was late to be calling Aunt Elsie, so that could wait. But there was one thing she could do now. She compromised with herself to take a little chase. Although she wanted to inject, she knew if she did, this final task wouldn’t get done.
She took out her mobile and, leaning on the coffee table, she wrote down the phone numbers of her contacts on an A4 pad. Not many friends, she thought glumly. Even though she hadn’t spoken to most of them in years, she still copied out their numbers. On a separate sheet of paper, she wrote out the phone numbers she used more often: her two dealers – Jay and Ajay; the clients she dealt with directly; the five madams she worked for; and the numerous girls she worked with. She consoled herself that three of those working girls were her friends, as was Hugo, to a degree. He didn’t fall into any of her categories. As the son of one of Nicole’s ex-clients, he was something else entirely.
Once she’d crosschecked the names and phone numbers on paper against the contacts in her phone, she replaced her old SIM card with a new one. Later on, she’d transfer the numbers and contact the people she wanted to know her new number.
Nearly ready for her fix, she filled a glass under the tap in the kitchen. She returned to the lounge, placing the glass on the coffee table and taking her place on the sofa. With her syringe, she drew up the water for her hit and squirted it over the heroin in her spoon. Before cooking up, she dropped her old SIM card into the glass. Marianne could sink on her own.