by Ruth Jacobs
“He’ll be five minutes. He’s just down the road,” Tara said, laying her mobile back down on the coffee table.
The minutes amounted to an hour and still he hadn’t arrived. The thought of shooting heroin fought in Shelley’s head with the thought of smoking crack. The battle would normally be won by heroin. However, this evening was different: she’d tasted a pipe already; had no heroin with her; was stuck on the other side of London with two members, who were currently warring factions, of the AHF; and one of those Anti-Heroin Front members was her means of getting home and so back to heroin.
Shelley coaxed Tara into calling the dealer a third time.
“He’s nearly here. He said he’ll be no more than five minutes,” Tara told them after making the call. Shelley knew the score though. Five minutes could be translated into anything up to, and well beyond, five hours. Yet, she waited.
The coffee, which Tara had kept on constant supply for her guests while she drank the vodka, did not allay Nicole’s weariness. Slightly before five o’clock in the morning, Nicole took her cash from the dining table and reunited it with the roll from which it was earlier separated. Then she fell asleep next to Shelley on the sofa.
Shelley was effectively stranded. There was no excuse she could think of to split from her closest friend while they were on other side of London – not one that could be constructed from the truth.
Tara pushed herself up from the armchair. She plodded to the dining table and picked up the pile of notes. “I don’t think he’s coming,” she slurred, handing the money back to Shelley.
With a stop-sign hand, Shelley refused the cash. “Call him one more time.”
For the fourth time, Tara phoned the dealer and for the third time he maintained he was just down the road. What a long road it must’ve been.
“I’m going to bed. Do you want a duvet?”
Shelley declined the offer. She cringed at the thought of using a duvet from Tara’s flat. It would undoubtedly be unclean, and possibly inflicted with the same off-white and brown stains that were present on Tara’s pyjamas. Having stubbed out her cigarette in the overflowing ashtray, Shelley curled up on the sofa with Nicole and closed her eyes.
***
In the afternoon, Shelley was woken by Tara holding a mug of steaming coffee under her nose. Tara told her the dealer was on his way but judging by his poor performance the previous evening, Shelley didn’t think it was likely.
The buzzer sounded on Tara’s intercom. Still not convinced it was him, Shelley continued in her endeavour of talking Nicole into taking her home. “If we leave now, I’ll have time to get over to my mum’s later.” It wasn’t a lie – she tried to convince herself. She’d only withheld what she planned to do before visiting her mother.
“I need to take the money?” Tara came back into the lounge and held out her empty palm to Nicole. More than twelve hours later than his initial estimation, the no-show dealer had eventually shown. With her camcorder, and Shelley and Nicole’s cash, Tara went into the hall to make the trade.
Watching Tara slink back into the lounge, what she had in her hand didn’t look enough for five-hundred pounds, let alone five-hundred and a Sony camcorder. “Is that it?” Shelley asked, her tone divulging her disappointment.
“It’s good stuff, that’s why it’s smaller.” Tara put the crack on the coffee table and sat down on the carpet.
Shelley looked at Nicole and saw the concern on her face. She knew as with her own concern, it wasn’t just that their friend had done them over by either stealing some of their money or holding back some of their crack. Tara may have appeared composed last night while they were waiting for the dealer, but she could disguise her desperation for a pipe. What she couldn’t hide, what was undeniable now, was that she was a degenerated crackhead.
Even though Shelley and Nicole had most likely paid for the majority, if not all, of the crack, Tara was controlling the pipe and managing the rocks for their hits. Perhaps she thought she’d get away with it because they were smoking the crack in her flat. Shelley observed her closely as she measured out their hits. Tara’s were always more generous.
After smoking yet another of Tara’s not-for-Tara sized hits, Shelley’s agitation increased. Tara’s grip on the pipe was a rock of contention, though at the same time, Shelley sympathised; she could see the grip the pipe had on Tara.
Shelley wasn’t far behind her and she knew it. Once she started on the crack, she found it nearly impossible to stop. Some sessions would last for days. She didn’t understand what drove her to do it. She didn’t much like the feeling it produced, with the exception of the initial high from the first pipe but that was preposterously short-lived. She supposed it might be a matter of not wanting to feel normal, even if it meant feeling worse than she might do otherwise. It was still not her natural state. If she was high on crack and fully focused on thinking about the next pipe, then she didn’t have to think about her mother, her brother, the dead client at The Lanesborough, the rapist, Marianne, her mother’s ex-boyfriend, her fucked up life.
Shelley felt restless. Her legs were twitching. She felt the need to do something with her hands. The crack was finished, so she lit a cigarette. “Can you call the dealer back?”
“I thought you wanted to get going,” Nicole said.
“He’s on his way.” Tara flashed Shelley a mischievous glance. Her left eyebrow was raised and she did that weird smile thing that spanned only the right side of her mouth.
“But you haven’t got any money,” Nicole reminded Tara.
“No, but you have.” Tara tapped Nicole on the shoulder then took a couple of steps towards the door.
Nicole shook her head. “You fucking—”
“You do want some more, don’t you?” Tara leant against the lounge door. Her stained pyjama bottoms hid the foot-sized dent a quarter of the way up in the centre of the door, which Shelley had only realised was there a moment before it was concealed.
Tara explained that she was trying to be helpful by calling the dealer in advance of them running out. She’d known they’d want more and had done it with the best intentions.
“I’ll give him the television. I don’t watch it anyway,” Tara piped in while Shelley and Nicole debated her intent as if she wasn’t present.
However cross Nicole might have been with Tara, she sided with Shelley in refusing to allow her to exchange her television for crack. They would both contribute three-hundred pounds each and Tara could buy the crack on another occasion when she was flusher.
When the crack came, Shelley knelt at the coffee table, stealing Tara’s position as pipe-master. She made sure they all had equal-looking hits by stashing an additional rock or two deeper in the pile of ash when it was time for her own. Tara had done the same, she told herself, attempting to justify her dishonest behaviour.
Moving to sit on the sofa, she turned her head towards the window. It was night. When did that happen? The last time she’d looked, it was daylight.
Hours must have passed and yet it felt like no time at all. Every second was the same on the pipe, possessed by the thought of the next hit. Even when she was preparing or smoking a pipe, there was no let-up; she was still thinking about the next.
Sirens wailed in Shelley’s ears. Her chest felt tight and her breath was short. The police had tracked her down. The hospital DNA database, or Marianne, had led them to her. It must be Marianne. That’s how they knew to find her at Tara’s. They must have followed her from Marianne’s place last night and been staking her out ever since.
She staggered over to the bay window that overlooked the front of Tara’s block. Down on the street, she saw police in riot gear. They were lined up directly underneath Tara’s flat.
“Nicole! Nicole! We’re under siege!”
Nicole rushed over to the window and looked out. “What are you talking about?”
“Look at all the police out there.” Shelley banged on the window then ducked down, kneeling below it, mindful her
head was lower than the sill. “Oh my God, what are we gonna do?”
“There’s no one there, love.” Nicole took Shelley’s hands and pulled upwards. Shelley resisted the force. Instead, she managed to pull Nicole down on the carpet with her.
“Where are the police?” Tara’s voice quavered.
“Outside. There’s an army of them. They’ve come for me.”
Tara crept towards the window. “I can’t see anyone. Why would they come for you?”
“Don’t be stupid. There isn’t a reason,” Nicole said, standing up. “She’s paranoid, can’t you tell?”
“Stop fucking around. I saw them. They’re bloody there.”
“They must have gone, then.” Tara chewed a strand of her mousy hair. “They’re not there now.”
“There’s a fucking row of them on the street.” Shelley stood up and pointed out the window. “There— Oh my God, there’s one in that tree. Get down! He’s got a rifle.” She threw her arms around Nicole and Tara’s shoulders and plunged them all onto the floor.
Crawling on the unhoovered carpet, Shelley hid behind the armchair. Accompanying her fear was the contaminated feeling on the centre of her forehead. She’d touched the skin with her fingers that had become sticky and collected dirt during the journey on her hands and knees. Although she was in the brace position, she felt the imprint as if her fingers still marked the spot.
“There’s no one out there. Get up and sit down. I’ll make you a cuppa.” Nicole outstretched her hand to Shelley.
Shelley shivered. She looked up at Tara who was also standing above her. “Can you honestly not see them? Swear on your life.”
“The street’s empty, Shell.” Tara bent down and took Shelley’s hand. “I think it’s the crack.”
17. Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes
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 deposi
t 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.