by Ruth Jacobs
As she turned off Hampstead High Street and onto Willoughby Road, she drove slowly, looking for a space to park. There was none. Sundays, at this time, were always busier. Shelley suspected it was due to a local evening class, and a few times, she’d considered exploring it in case she might be interested in attending, but because of the junk that hijacked her time and her life, it had never progressed past consideration.
She drove up and down the street, hoping someone would move their car so she could nab their space. On nearing the junction with Hampstead High Street for the umpteenth time, among what looked like a congregation of druggies, she saw Len. He’d been over yesterday with a delivery of heroin and crack and hadn’t mentioned coming back today. He was only ever willing to come to Hampstead if she paid his cab fare. He’d never mentioned knowing anyone who lived there.
***
Dried, and dressed in her thermal pyjamas, Shelley wrapped herself in the special duvet. She waddled out of her bedroom to have a hit in the lounge. As she passed though the hallway, a director insisted she check the front door because she might not have locked it properly when she’d come in.
Even though she could see a section of the gold bar between the lock and the doorframe – which would indicate the door was locked – she didn’t trust her eyes alone, and neither did the board. She began the checking, but her skin was irritated from wearing wet clothes and she was compelled to scratch it. Every time an itch interrupted her counting, she had to start over. Although her anxiety was increasing after standing at the door for several minutes, the craving for a hit was stronger than the compulsion to check and she withdrew from the hall.
She switched on the television, then lay sideways on the sofa and prepared the heroin required for a speedball. She hoped Len hadn’t seen her. She wasn’t in the mood for company but for a few minutes, at the junction, she’d been stuck in traffic feet away from him and had he seen her, she wouldn’t have known because she’d kept her head turned in the opposite direction. So as not to increase the risk further, she’d made her re-entrance to Willoughby Road through the back streets and parked at the far end.
She added a rock of crack to the heroin she’d cooked in the spoon. As she picked up the syringe to grind it in, she glanced at the changing patterns moving on the walls. With the sun streaming in, the white walls looked alive.
Inside Shelley felt nearly dead. She wondered if she was wrong wishing Jim not to be her father – because if he was, then Will would be her full blood brother. Surely, she should want that. But she didn’t think she did, and she didn’t know if it mattered; it wouldn’t change her love for Will.
She pushed back the long sleeve of her pastel-pink pyjama top and scanned her arm for a vein. The damage wreaked on her limb was severe. There were bruised and reddened lumps of varying sizes. One, she worried, could be an abscess – the one she’d had to stretch her sleeve for. It was growing in size rather than shrinking as they usually did, and it had been causing her more pain than the others.
With her right hand, she grasped her left wrist and stopped the blood flow. On finding a thin vein near the base of her thumb, she removed the orange cap of the syringe with her teeth and then slid in the needle.
As she pulled back on the plunger, she told herself that after this hit she’d go back out and drive herself to the accident and emergency department of the Royal Free. She’d been denying it to herself, but now the lump was half the size of a golf ball, she had to admit it. If left much longer, and if it was an abscess as she suspected it might be, it could burst leading to septicaemia and death. However convenient that would be for her, she couldn’t leave her mother.
***
When Shelley heard the buzzer, she was filled with dread. She wasn’t sure if it had sounded in her head or in her flat. If it was the flat, it could be the police. Maybe they’d found the body.
She checked the time on her phone. The buzzer went off again. It was nearly midnight. She’d had a few hits during the course of the past few hours, and it had been a while since she’d crossed that invisible line with crack - the one where rather than building up over time, psychosis was able to kick in after one hit, picking up from where it had left off the last time.
Being paranoid, it was with difficulty that she talked herself into answering the intercom. “Who is it?” she said, trying to sound normal.
“It’s me, Len,” said a meeker version of his voice over the intercom.
Shelley pressed the button to open the street door. She heard his clambering footsteps. It sounded like he was running up the stairs. His footsteps didn’t usually sound this heavy. In case it wasn’t him, she kept her front door closed, waiting for the knock before opening it.
“Who is it?” she asked. She needed to hear him speak for confirmation that it was his voice she’d heard over the intercom and not someone else or something in her imagination.
“It’s me, Len. Let me in.”
The voice sounded similar to Len’s, but she wasn’t absolutely sure it was him. Perhaps someone else was pretending to be him and was outside her door waiting to hurt her. She sprinted into the kitchen then returned to the front door carrying a bread knife. She attached the chain before opening the door a fraction.
“Are you gonna invite me in or what?”
“I was just checking it was you.” Shelley removed the chain, letting Len through the door. She pinched his arm as he walked into the lounge.
“What the fuck are you doing?” He turned back to look at her. “My God, Shelley, what the— put the fucking knife down!”
“I’m not gonna hurt you. Not if you’re real.” Shelley held the wooden handle of the knife tightly in her hand.
“Can I sit down?” he asked, hovering by the sofa.
“Have you got ID?”
“Of course I ain’t got I-fucking-D. Generally, I don’t get asked to show it when I visit my mates.” Len sat on the sofa. “Put that knife down. For fuck’s sake, you’re losing it, love. How much of that crack have you done?”
With the knife in her hand, Shelley took a seat on the couch next to Len. She studied the ‘L-U-C-K’ and ‘F-A-T-E’ tattoos on his fingers. Surely, her mind couldn’t be projecting the image of eight tattoos onto someone’s hands. And if the man next to her was entirely an hallucination, then in reality, she was safe.
He laid his long, black wallet on the table. She picked it up and opened it. She rubbed her fingers over the elastic loops that held the syringes in place. Feeling the elastic and watching it move in response to her touch, she was sure – as sure as she could be – that the man sat next to her was indeed Len and that he was there in person rather than in projection.
Having returned the knife to the kitchen, she sat down next to him and prepared her fix. Her anxiety over him faded. She remembered that she didn’t know why he was there. He must have come to see her for a reason. He’d never turned up uninvited to her flat. He’d only been there a handful of times previously and the last visit was only yesterday.
“Is something wrong?” she asked, believing the question was neutral without appearing rude. What she meant was: What the fuck are you doing here?
“I need a favour.” Len balanced his spoon of brown liquid on the coffee table. He turned to face Shelley. His eyes were sad. She suddenly noticed they were red, as if he’d been crying. They must have been like that when he arrived. She’d not heard or seen him cry since he’d been in the flat.
“What’s the matter? What do you need?” She felt her forehead crinkle. She wasn’t used to being in the company of a man showing any emotions other than lust or anger, or both.
“It’s a big one this, Shell.”
“Don’t worry about that. I owe you now, big time, after what you did.”
“No, Shell, you don’t. I owe you. I’ve been trying to tell you.”
“Not any more you don’t. As long as that cunt’s body doesn’t float.” Shelley grinned. “What do you need?”
“Can I stay h
ere?”
“How long for?”
“I don’t know yet... a while I think.”
“That’s all right. You can stay in the spare room. Has something happened to your house?”
“My gaff ain’t the issue, but I can’t stay there no more,” he said. “There’s something you need to know... I’m not gonna blame you if you chuck me out.”
“I’m not gonna do that.” Shelley dropped a bitten off segment of cigarette filter into her spoon. Through it she drew up her fix into the syringe. With her hit ready in the barrel, she turned to face Len. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
She heard the television, which had remained on, but gone unnoticed for hours. “...If you recognise the gunman from this CCTV picture, you can call anonymously on the number below. He’s a white male, mid to late thirties, five-foot eight with short, brown hair. On the night of the shooting, he was wearing pale blue jeans with a brown leather jacket...”
Len turned off the television. He stood, frozen, looking at Shelley. Mentally, she compared the image of the man’s face she’d seen on the television to the face she saw in front of her eyes.
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, Shell. It’s my fault your friends were held up. It’s my fault they didn’t get to you in time. It was my fault you were—”
“Don’t say it!” With shaking hands, Shelley put a cigarette in her mouth and lit it. She took a rapid succession of pulls to stop the tears she felt rising from spilling over her lower lids.
“It was me, Shell. I’m scared they’re gonna find me.”
“He was child-murdering scum. He fucking had it coming.”
“She was my sister... Kim was my big sister.” Len fell to his knees, covering his face with his hands.
Shelley dropped her syringe on the coffee table. She rushed over and knelt down next to him on the floor. She held him in her arms. “You did the right thing,” she told him, as Nicole had told her.
She thought about Nicole – what she’d said and how she’d acted last Sunday evening in Len’s house. Nicole had known Len was in the cellar when she was looking for the gun. Maybe she knew about the shooting as well.
He pulled back from her and rested his hands heavily on her shoulders. “You sure you still want me to stay?”
“You can stay as long as you need.” Shelley stood and outstretched her hand. She took his and pulled him up.
They sat down on the sofa. Shelley pushed back her sleeve and placed her hand in Len’s lap. “Can you find a vein for me please?” she asked.
“What the fuck have you done to yourself?” Len leapt from the sofa. He threw on his jacket. “We need to get you to A and E. You need to get that lanced.”
Shelley looked up at him. “Let me have a hit first.” She waved her works in the air.
“When did that rash come up?” he asked, ignoring her advance with the syringe.
“I’m not going anywhere without a hit.”
“Have you got it anywhere else?”
“No, it’s nothing to do with that. I got wet in the sea.”
He darted out of the lounge and returned with her fake-fur coat. “Get up and put this on.”
“I don’t need a coat. It’s too hot. I just need this, then I’ll get dressed and I’ll go, I promise.” Again, she held out her works to him, but her request was disregarded.
“Where’s your keys?”
She picked up her handbag and threw it at him. Grabbing her wrist, he pulled her off the couch. He wrapped her in the warm coat as he dragged her out the flat.
“I need to lock the door.” She tried to turn back, but he was holding her hand, pulling her towards the staircase. “I need to go back. It’s not the gear. I need to lock up properly.”
He didn’t reply with words. He held her hand tighter and galloped down the stairs, towing her behind.
“We can’t go yet.” She looked at the syringe in her free hand as they walked out onto the street. “I wanna go back. Please. The door’s not locked and I can’t go without a hit.”
He didn’t talk. He hauled her towards her Mercedes at the end of the street. Using the key fob, he released the central locking and let himself in the driver’s side.
Stood on the pavement, Shelley was shivering in her thermal pyjamas. She fastened the hook eyes on her coat. In her particular manner, she sat sideways on the passenger seat, keeping both TNs on the pavement. She raised her legs then rotated her body ninety degrees, swinging her feet into the footwell.
He revved the engine. She squeezed his arm, trying to prevent him from driving. “I need to have this.” She held her filled syringe in his line of vision. “Just one. That’s all I’m asking.”
He swerved out of the tight space and accelerated onto Willow Road towards the Royal Free Hospital. The velocity hurled Shelley back in the passenger seat. Her skull collided with the headrest and the ruby from her necklace smacked her centrally in the forehead. She lost her grip on the syringe, which went flying from her hand and disappeared into the darkness.
Don't miss out!
Click the button below and you can sign up to receive emails whenever Ruth Jacobs publishes a new book. There's no charge and no obligation.
https://books2read.com/r/B-A-RHD-WLL
Connecting independent readers to independent writers.
Did you love Soul Destruction: Unforgivable? Then you should read Life by Ruth Jacobs!
Max’s criminal career has been going downhill since it began when he was sixteen on an armed robbery job with his father. Now in his mid-forties, he’s spent more time in jail than on criminal endeavours and he’s back inside again. It wasn’t another getaway driver driving away prematurely that’s landed him in jail this time though. No, this time it wasn’t someone else’s mistake. This time it was his...well, the crack. He can’t actually remember doing what they said he did last week or why he did it and for that he could go down for life.
Read more at Ruth Jacobs’s site.
Also by Ruth Jacobs
Caffeine Nights Short Shots
Life
Soul Destruction
Soul Destruction: Unforgivable
Watch for more at Ruth Jacobs’s site.
About the Author
Ruth Jacobs lives a quiet life in a small village in Hertfordshire, England, which is quite a contrast from her teens and early twenties spent rather waywardly in London. She has two sons, two rescue cats, and a rescue Lurcher who follows her around like a shadow.
Inspired by her maternal grandmother, Clara Ellis, who was also a writer, Ruth had been writing since the age of thirteen. However, during the years that she wrote sporadically, Ruth had never completed a novel.
Since studying prostitution in the late 1990s, Ruth had an idea for a novel in her mind. At the age of thirty-six, in 2010, she began writing and a little under a year later, Soul Destruction: Unforgivable, the first novel in a series, was complete.
In July 2012, Ruth published In Her Own Words... Interview with a London Call Girl, which is the transcription of a video interview she undertook in 1998 with a woman who worked as a London call girl. All the royalties from this short publication are being donated to Beyond the Streets, a charity working to end sexual exploitation. Between the UK and US Amazon websites, In Her Own Words... Interview with a London Call Girl has received numerous five star reviews.
Maintaining contact with women who have exited prostitution is essential to Ruth as a writer and campaigner. On her Soul Destruction website www.soul-destruction.com, she has collated a number of their stories on a page named Voices of Prostitution Survivors.
As well as drawing on her research, Ruth has firsthand experience of many of the topics she writes about such as posttraumatic stress disorder, rape, and drug and alcohol addiction.
Ruth also has an author website at www.ruthjacobs.co.uk.
Read more at Ruth Jacobs’s site.
About the Publisher
Based in Kent, England. Caffeine Nights Publishing was formed in April 2007.
We produce crime and contemporary fiction in paperback, eBook, CD, mobile phone and other digital platforms. Our goal is to provide a new business model for publishing and for authors that is greener, more sustainable and profitable for authors.
We cannot and do not try to compete with large publishing houses, but we want to provide a service which differs from many small POD publishers. We have high standards and our acceptance rate is low. We do not apologise for this as we have a brand to care about as well as the authors who we sign. We want to change the industry's perception of POD publishers and we can only do this by publishing high quality, exciting and engaging titles.
Our output may be small but our ambition is not.
Caffeine Nights Publishing has one goal and that is to produce fiction to keep the reader entertained. Reading should be a pleasurable experience. We want to make you laugh, cry, keep you on the edge of your seat, we want to frighten you and sometimes make you look into the darkest corner of your heart, but most of all we want to challenge your emotions and make you turn the page.