Mariana’s father parks a can of Labatt Blue in my hand and slumps down opposite, cracks one open himself. I stare at the beer in horror. His wife and daughter are discussing the play in the kitchen and I fear I’m going to have to sit through some kind of ‘man chat’.
‘So where’d you end up then?’ he asks.
‘Just went wandering.’
He sips his beer.
‘Like Johnny Cash, eh?’
‘I guess. You don’t happen to have a soft drink, do you? I don’t actually drink alcohol.’
‘No? Why’s that?’
‘Allergic.’
‘Oh, you poor bastard. Grab yourself something from the icebox.’
He reaches for the television remote and begins chuckling at one of the late-night chat shows as I slouch to the kitchen, switch the beer for yet another soda.
‘So where’d you go?’ he asks upon my return. He doesn’t unpeel his eyes from the screen.
‘Um. I found the Flatiron. Went down to Lower Manhattan and saw a very misty Statue of Liberty. Had a Coke in a bar.’
‘Which one?’
It turns out The Old Peculiar is quite a well-known dive. Mariana’s father assures me I’m lucky ‘nothing too shady’ happened and that my drink was ‘almost undoubtedly’ spiked.
‘My drink wasn’t spiked.’ Chance would be a fine thing, I hear a deep part of myself whisper.
He swigs again. ‘I bet it was,’ he says, serious.
We watch the TV for a while, laugh at the prescribed moments. On the shelf behind the television, Mariana’s parents have the same framed photo of the peering, tired-eyed ‘uncle’ Mariana displays on her mantelpiece in Southgate. Next to it is a picture of Mariana’s school-age self, hinting at the woman this child would go on to become. Most notably in the large, acerbic eyes and wide, toothy grin.
I announce my intention to take a shower and go to bed.
‘Be my guest,’ Mariana’s father says.
On my way past a low shelving unit, I catch something with my hip and a sickening crash speeds Mariana and her mother from the kitchen, screaming their worry like opera singers. I apologise profusely and attempt to gather together the splinters of orange and blue pottery while Mariana’s mother tries hard to assure me the vase wasn’t ‘too expensive’. Her father remains in his armchair, smug and chuckling, as though proved right about the inevitable, dizzying dangers of visiting local hobo hangouts.
I’ve removed my diary from my bag and settled down into the bed, when there’s a knock on the door.
Mariana sticks her head round. ‘Decent?’
I stretch and casually push back the sheet to expose my torso, though I haven’t done so many press-ups lately. She might as well take a look. As she enters the room, she remarks how skinny I appear. I hide myself again and place the diary on the bedside.
Mariana perches on the edge of the bed and looks straight at me, something that might be mirth flinching behind her irises. She wears a darker version of the dress her mother wore, but the exposed skin is lighter, the neck smoother. She’s left the door ajar.
‘Your hair’s wet,’ she informs me. ‘You’ll get pneumonia.’
She takes the towel I’ve left on the chair by the door and starts drying my hair in short, tender tousles. She has to lean across me slightly to accomplish this and I detect her perfume, now mixed with her own scent. Sweet, strong and feminine: a nuclear core fermented in rose petals.
‘I never liked that heirloom anyway,’ she says.
‘Was it expensive? I’ll pay for it.’
She slings the towel back on the chair and pulls a small, travel hairdryer from the bottom bedside drawer. The faint smirk is still just beyond detection, hidden behind deadpan features. ‘It was about twenty-thousand dollars, last estimate.’
I consider saying that the vase shouldn’t have been put in such a foolish place in the first place but she turns the hairdryer on. Her soothing hands work their way through my hair gently as the warm air blows across my scalp and I feel myself stir beneath the sheets. All worries about the price of the ‘heirloom’ evaporate.
I never want her to stop doing this.
‘There, all finished.’ She turns the dryer off and retakes her position at the end of the bed. ‘Anything else I can do for you, Mr Marr? Hot chocolate? Bedtime story?’
‘I wouldn’t say no to a goodnight kiss.’ It doesn’t come out right. It’s hard to do jovial with this much desire between your legs.
She looks over her shoulder at the half-closed door, then leans forward and pecks me a platonic kiss, betraying the fact that her parents, in their home at least, still have considerable authority. Then, as if acknowledging my unspoken psychology, she places a hand to my freshly-shaved face and kisses me on the lips. ‘If you need anything, my room’s the other side of the lounge,’ she whispers.
I understand the inference. The ball’s in my court.
The light from midtown skyscrapers bleeds through the window, a faint blur, edgy, cinematic. The traffic on Central Park West purrs.
I’ve waited about as long as it’s humanly possible. The lights have gone off in the rest of the apartment and I’m pretty sure everybody has gone to bed. Wearing boxers and T-shirt, I gently open the bedroom door and steal my way into the hallway like some diarrhoeic secret agent.
This is ridiculous.
Hoping my eyes will soon adjust to the darkness, I creep through the lounge until the sole of my right foot is pricked by something. Fighting the urge to shriek in pain, I reach down and, with difficulty, extract a tiny thorn of pottery. After what seems like an age, in which I’ve no idea how I don’t break anything else, I eventually make it to the other side of the room and knock, very faintly, on Mariana’s door.
I wait.
She opens the door, her face knowing and suggestive. ‘What can I do for you?’ she breathes, wearing nothing but a blue T-shirt which she tugs down for modesty at the front with both hands, tightening the fabric across her chest. It’s all wonderfully calculated.
‘I was wondering if I could have that story?’
She retreats back into her low-lit room. I can almost feel my memory sharpen; I know I’ll have perfect recall of this moment in ten years. I see her in silhouette as her long legs stride her back to bed, the T-shirt forming a shelf at her hips, where it gathers above her backside. She swiftly hides herself back in bed.
Maybe invited, maybe not, I walk forward and crouch at the end of her bed. Her room is decorated with a Breakfast at Tiffany’s poster, while her shelves contain computing tomes and a modest collection of bears. I wonder how many of the grinning friends tacked onto corkboard she still speaks to. In one corner about fifteen canvasses of varying sizes are leaning against one another, all turned towards the wall.
I nod towards them. ‘Are those yours?’
‘Yep.’
‘Can I see them?’
‘Are you kidding?’
‘What’s the harm?’
‘The harm?’ Her eyebrows clench. ‘You’ll dislike them but will feel obliged to tell me they’re good. In which case, one of two things will happen. One, I’ll be able to tell you’re lying and we’ll both feel awkward. Two, I’ll believe you and a little bit of me will want to start painting all over again, even though I suck.’
She leans back in her bed. It no longer sounds like it’s worth looking at the paintings to me.
In the mirror on the back of the door I notice what appears to be bruising around my mouth. It’s lipstick, from when she kissed me goodnight.
‘What’s the matter?’ she asks.
‘I’ve got your polyethylene on my face.’
‘Gee, I love it when scientists talk dirty.’
She crawls towards me across the bed, slowly. Our bodies are perhaps a foot apart when she asks, ‘What’s that?’
She’s looking – not horrified, just interested – at the marking on my left arm.
The scars might heal eventually. Oddly, I stopped feeling much shame over them a while back. If anything, pride became the prevalent emotion. Pride that they’re just that: scars, no longer fresh wounds. But now I find them taking on a new symbolism. They’re a warning that temptation is still there, that the body doesn’t heal itself overnight.
‘Needle tracks.’
‘Oh.’
‘You were right. I mean, I didn’t lie to you. I did quit drinking, but it wasn’t the drinking that was a problem. I quit everything. I had to. I have an obsessive personality.’
She sits down in front of me, cross-legged. Again, the hands knead and pull at the hem of her T-shirt to cover herself.
I hold my arm up. ‘I’ve been clean from this for a year. The drinking… There was a lapse recently. When I heard about my father’s death my first reaction was to have a pint. I fear I made quite a fool of myself at the funeral parlour.’
‘Good. It shows you’re human. I was beginning to wonder.’
We look into each other’s faces, not saying anything, our eyes wandering over the other’s features. I’ve never sat so close to anyone for so long without saying a word; it’s an uncannily erotic experience. After a while, she picks up my left forearm and looks closely at it.
‘I’ve always felt normal after a few drinks,’ she confesses. ‘You know, like I was born two pints short or something.’
‘I know exactly what you mean. I always needed a drink to start conversations, to feel at ease. But with… diamorphine…’ A carefully chosen, safely medical term. ‘…it was about living for the moment. Feeling more than myself.’
‘Living for the moment?’
‘Posterity counts for little when you’re high. That eternal moment is all that matters. I might not be explaining myself very well. I still crave it, as I do alcohol. But I know addiction itself is the bigger picture. The diamorphine habit came from the same place, the same part of me – that part of me that was missing – that alcohol dependence did.’
‘Are we talking about the drug I think we’re talking about? You mean heroin, yeah?’
The word’s been uttered.
I nod.
‘How did you stop?’
‘With difficulty. And a lot of Suboxone from the lab.’
‘Who knew about all this?’
‘No one. Except Aaron.’
‘He was the only one?’
‘Others may have suspected. But I was good at hiding it. I had to be.’
She wriggles a little on the bed, then rotates her shoulders. ‘I can’t imagine you… You know.’
‘Burgling old women for a fix? Shooting up behind the town hall with my trousers full of piss? It’s perfectly possible to lead a healthy, normal life with a clean, regular supply. At least for a while.’
‘So… What is it?’
‘It’s a member of a class of narcotic analgesics called opioids. It is a diacetyl ester of morphine and is processed from extracts of the papaver somniferum seedpod.’
‘You what?’
‘It’s The Devil.’
‘But it’s… nice, yeah? I mean, it must be.’
My laugh is unavoidable. ‘You have no idea.’
I get the impression she’s been fishing for a description of its effects with her last few questions and I haven’t been giving her the answer she’s wanted.
‘People have used it for centuries,’ I explain. ‘The poppy was cultivated in Mesopotamia about… I don’t actually know. Three thousand years ago? But it was first processed in London at the end of the nineteenth century by a chemist working at St. Mary’s Hospital, though the drug wasn’t named heroin until a German pharmaceutical company, twenty-something years later, deemed it heroisch. People in field studies claimed, understandably, to feel “heroic”. For over ten years, in one of the medical world’s most infamous cock-ups, heroin was sold as a cough medicine for children.’
‘You’ve done your research.’
‘As have you, with your wines. It pays to know what you’re getting into bed with.’ This comment, intended innocently, suddenly feels utterly inappropriate. I doubt anything’s going to happen now. This conversation has turned me off, so I dread to think what it’s done to her.
‘So what’s it like?’ Here we go.
‘What do you mean?’
‘When you inject. What does it feel like?’
‘It wipes you clean. It’s a reset button.’ I’ve never tried to describe it before, and I’m not sure I can, accurately. ‘Time stops. The ache in your muscles and bones, your pain, your grief, goes. The mind gives up the fight. Your body too. You’re whole.’
She’s looking at me sideways as she pushes herself back towards the headboard.
‘Go on,’ she says, as though playing the part of the counsellor. But her body language has changed. She curls to one side, her body closed to me.
‘For me, it was always as much to do with the preparation as it was the penetration. The anticipation as you set up the cotton wool, the cooking can, a shiny new needle, the clear bag of white powder. It’s medicine, that’s what it is. Liquefying it, dropping in the cotton and watching it puff up like a sponge, pushing the needle into the cotton, drawing it up through the syringe and, finally, laying the needle flat across the length of the major vein at the inner elbow and injecting in small, hesitant strokes to prolong the initial rush…’
I stop, almost breathless.
‘Lucas? You okay?’
She’s looking at me sideways. Her breathing has quickened too and I can see the sheet rise and fall across her stomach. There’s a vulnerability to her, a renewed innocence – a concern – which shames me.
Hastily, I peel myself from the bed. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t realise it was quite so late. I’m… I’m pretty tired.’ I make my way to the door.
‘Lucas…’ I hear her call after me, but I’m already creeping, once again, across the black obstacle course of her parents’ living room.
I don’t sleep a wink.