Acid Lullaby (Underwood and Dexter)

by Ed O'Connor

  Max nodded. ‘You’re coming through loud and clear, Dickie!’

  Moore escorted Fallon off the trading floor. In the lift lobby, Simon Crouch hurriedly brushed past the two men. Fallon recognised the face and for a split second saw fear in Crouch’s evasive eyes.

  Memory became knowledge.

  Max Fallon was suspended from work pending the results of his blood and urine tests. Two days later, once Richard Moore had received the analysis from the company doctor, he sent Max a brief letter that explained Fogle & Moore’s uncompromising stance on drug abuse and that Max had been fired.

  Max read the letter whilst sitting naked on the floor of his Chelsea flat. He had fully expected to be fired but the attached copy of his blood and urine test results made fasci­nating reading:

  ‘Sample contains mixture of drug traces suggesting amphetamine and psycho-active stimulant abuse…lysergic acid diethylamide, 3, 4-Methylenedioxy-methamphetamine (ecstasy), mescaline, muscimol… dosage between 200–400mg based on analysis … combination of stimulants from organic and derivative sources.’

  He tried to rationalize the information in front of him. The Soma was indistinguishable from the elixir of immortality. He had become the Soma after absorbing these chemicals. He had been on an extraordinary odyssey under oceans, through the clouds and beheld the Godhead. They had put something in his drink: something that had turned him into a god. The journey had been brilliant and spectacular and yet he was struggling: struggling to forge a true understanding of what he was about to become. He wanted to go back. His mother had been waiting for him at the top of the mountain: he wanted to see her again.

  He consulted the books he had purchased at the British Museum. He found reading them difficult. He spent hours highlighting pages then had no recollection of what he had read. Max Fallon tried desperately to concentrate. He had to discover the essence of what he was becoming. He had to recreate the essence of the Soma.

  He reread the results of his drug test: ‘Mescaline, Muscimol … dosage between 200–400mg based on analysis … com­bination of stimulants from organic and derivative …’

  Max paused. ‘Muscimol’. A faint flicker of electricity sparkled across his exhausted brain like a firework illumi­nating wasteland. He had made a connection. He opened one of the books he had bought on the Soma legend and eventu­ally found the section he had been looking for. He had under­lined it. However, he had underlined the entire book.

  Max decided it would help his concentration if he read aloud:

  ‘Certain twentieth century studies, particularly Wasson’s “Soma the Divine Mushroom of Immortality” have associ­ated the Hindu plant deity Soma with the psychoactive mush­room Amanita Muscaria. There is evidence in the Rig-Veda that these mushrooms were used as part of religious services in ancient Hindu culture. It is believed that the hallucinogenic effects of their constituent chemicals including muscimol allowed the taker to experience vivid religious visions.’

  There was a photograph of a strange red and white-capped mushroom on the opposite page. He knew what he had become. He began to see what he had to do.

  14

  Simon Crouch had fallen asleep in front of his television. He woke at 11p.m. and blinked in exhaustion at a football high­lights programme. There was a knocking at his front door. He looked in surprise at his watch and turned on the hall light as he walked to the door. Max Fallon was standing under his porch light.

  ‘What do you want?’ asked Crouch, relieved that he’d put the chain on the door.

  ‘I need to talk to you,’ Fallon said, pronouncing each syllable with great care as if it caused him huge difficulty. ‘About what you did.’

  ‘I’ve got nothing to say to you. How did you get this address?’

  Max smiled. ‘Thought you’d ask that. I stole Liz’s address book. You remember Liz. Our mutual receptacle.’

  ‘Piss off.’ Crouch was tempted to open the door and finish off what he and Aldo had started a week previously.

  ‘No. Wait. Listen to me.’ Fallon leaned against the door­-frame as the world swam away from him. ‘I need to know what you gave me.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Crouch snarled, ‘now piss off.’

  ‘You and your friend. Put something in my drink and since then I’ve been becoming.’

  ‘Becoming?’

  ‘Becoming … something.’

  ‘Look. I don’t work for you anymore. You are trespassing. Now piss off before I call the police.’

  Max raised a finger and waved it admonishingly. ‘I thought you’d say that. So I’m going to call them for you. You and your friend gave me drugs in my drink and hit me with sticks. You drove me somewhere and made me bleed. I probably deserved it for shafting your girlfriend so thoroughly but I’m going to call the police now.’ He held up his mobile and made a great show of dialling:

  ‘Nine … nine … nine.’

  ‘What do you want?’ Crouch asked.

  Max smiled and nodded, cancelling the call. ‘I want to know what you put in my drink. And I want to know where I can buy some more.’

  ‘You’re sick, man. You need help.’ Crouch was beginning to become aware of an unpleasant smell about Fallon. He hoped the brown stains down Fallon’s trousers were just mud.

  ‘You sound like my father,’ Fallon spluttered. ‘He says I need professional help. He’s an idiot.’

  ‘Take his advice. I want you to leave now.’

  Fallon was unfolding a piece of paper. ‘You know what this is? This is a shopping list of all the things you put inside me.’ Max read out from the report: ‘lysergic acid diethylamide, Methy … methyl, methylenedio-something mescaline, muscimol.’

  Crouch was unrepentant. ‘You’ve got the wrong man, Max. I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  Max shook his head as the lights swam out from under his eyelids. ‘It was you. I know it was you. I need to find what you gave me. You see, it took me somewhere incredible. My mother died when I was a kid. She was there. I saw her. I fucking spoke to her. I have to go back. I only learned a little of what I am.’

  Crouch had heard enough. ‘Ok. I’m closing the door now. I want you to go. I don’t know what you want. As for Liz, you can have her. You deserve each other.’

  Crouch slammed the door, his heart beating.

  ‘I’ll be seeing you,’ came the voice from the darkness.

  Fallon looked around at the cluttered London street with its cramped little houses and double parked cars. It was claus­trophobic and beneath him. He needed space. He needed room to explore his becoming. He had time and money. He would complete the purchase of a property in Cambridgeshire. He would leave London. He no longer needed it.

  The vast black canopy of night hung over him. He studied its formless chaos as if the detritus of his imagination had been projected massively across the void. Perhaps as the god of the moon he could draw the disparate elements into order: imbue his scattering thoughts with purpose, make the planets themselves witnesses to his newfound divinity.

  But first he had to find a way back. His brain ached with the ordinariness of existence. It screamed out for beauty and understanding. He had to find a way back: capture the light­ning that had lifted him from the milky white ocean to the summit of perception. Capture it. Bottle it.

  Maybe even share it.

  The Scrambling of Brihaspati

  15

  Eight Months Later

  29th April 2002, New Bolden

  John Underwood sipped his first whisky in over a year and savoured its smoky taste. Jack Harvey watched him closely.

  ‘Taste good?’ Harvey grinned.

  ‘You must stop asking stupid questions, Jack,’ Underwood replied.

  ‘I’m a psychiatrist. I get paid to ask stupid questions.’

  ‘I thought this was a social occasion.’ Underwood placed the glass back on the table and resisted the urge to pick it straight back up again. ‘Haven’t we done with all the “did you
ever fancy your mother stuff”?’

  Harvey smiled. It was good to have Underwood back. It hadn’t been an easy year for either of them. ‘It is a social occasion, John. And I know you never fancied your mother. I suspect you might fancy my wife, though.’

  ‘Everyone fancies Rowena, Jack. I’d be mad if I didn’t.’

  Harvey nodded. He had been blessed with a beautiful wife and cursed with the perpetual terror of losing her. ‘Listen. You’ve done very well, John. You’ve worked very hard at getting back.’

  ‘Down to you really,’ Underwood said dismissively. He toyed with the keys to his new flat that he had placed on the table in front of him.

  ‘You’re still too defensive, John. I only pointed you in the right direction. You did the rest.’

  ‘Prozac and the eminent Dr Harvey did all the useful stuff. I was just a stoned spectator.’

  ‘That is utter bollocks.’

  Underwood liked winding Jack up. He’d been doing it for ten years. He was learning to treasure his friends. He didn’t have many left. Dexter maybe.

  ‘Possibly,’ said Underwood. ‘I was trying to pay you a compliment.’

  ‘Jesus. That would be a first. You must have gone mad.’ Harvey knew that you had to give as good as you got with John Underwood.

  ‘I’m serious. You kept me going. No one else bothered.’

  ‘That is not true.’

  ‘Ah, whatever.’

  ‘Look,’ Harvey leaned forward, ‘you made a right bloody mess of things. You are not out of the woods yet either. Depression is like the tide – it will keep coming back.’

  ‘Your analogies are getting predictable, Jack. I suppose I’m King Canute?’

  ‘Just remember that we don’t create and solve all of our own problems.’

  Underwood fixed Harvey for a second with a cold gaze.

  ‘Are you going to let me go back, Jack?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ll drop a line to the Chief Super. I can’t promise anything. They may not want you back.’

  Underwood nodded. Jack might be right there. His rela­tionship with Superintendent Chalmers had always been fraught. Besides, he mused, according to the rumours emanating from New Bolden CID, Inspector Alison Dexter was now doing a far better job than he ever had. Underwood noticed the dark lines around Jack Harvey’s eyes for the first time.

  ‘You look tired, Jack.’

  ‘It’s a stressful job. You know that.’

  ‘Anything else? Problems with Rowena?’

  Harvey chuckled. ‘You analysing me now? Things must be messed up!’

  ‘I’m only asking, Jack. You’ve not been yourself recently.’

  Harvey shook his head. ‘Rowena is great. Rowena is the light.’

  ‘Too good for the likes of you,’ Underwood said in mock seriousness.

  ‘Probably.’ Harvey thought for a second. ‘We all have our problems, John. You had yours. I’ve got mine.’

  ‘Erectile dysfunction?’

  Harvey laughed out loud. ‘Not yet!’

  ‘Give it time.’

  Harvey let his eyes wander around the busy little pub.

  ‘Ghosts,’ he said quietly, ending the topic.

  They stayed another hour before the Bolden Arms became too crowded and the noise became too oppressive. It got to Jack first and he suggested an early departure. Underwood agreed and finished his whisky.

  ‘I feel quite pissed,’ he said with a tired smile. ‘I’m out of practice.’

  ‘Don’t forget your keys,’ Jack called out as Underwood began to pick his way carefully through the crowd. Underwood raised a hand in acknowledgement and returned to the table. ‘Where would I be without you, Jack?’

  ‘Standing out in the street all night,’ Harvey observed.

  A minute later they were crossing the lane outside the pub to the car park opposite. Despite the soporific effects of the whisky, Underwood noticed that Jack seemed suddenly nervous.

  ‘Scared of the dark, Jack?’ he asked playfully.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘You keep looking around.’ Underwood pointed. ‘The car’s over there.’

  ‘It’s nothing.’

  Jack beeped his remote locking system and the lights flashed on his new BMW in acknowledgement. Underwood climbed inside. Harvey locked the car from the inside and started the engine.

  ‘Nice motor this,’ Underwood observed, ‘you been moon­lighting, Jack?’

  Harvey steered the car carefully onto the road and turned into the network of country lanes that unwound through Holtskill Forest down into New Bolden.

  16

  The rain was warm like spit. Stark enjoyed its touch: God was spitting on him. He was used to that.

  The station was deserted. Most of the late commuters had hurried away to their brick-box dormitories and the late night minicab drivers had long since flicked away their cigarette ends and relocated to the city centre nightclubs. Stark planned to visit the clubs later. He had a new set of imported pills that were coloured like footballs. They were called ‘66’s’ after the world cup victory. The teenage lager brigade would gobble them up. It was fucking smart marketing. The irony was that the pills were made in Germany. Stark found that amusing.

  Pills – ecstasy derivatives and speed – were his cash cows. That part of business was starting to do very well. New Bolden had a growing young population with bulging pockets and starved imaginations. The glitz of the London nightclub scene was an hour and a half away by train; too far for the average teenager seeking immediate gratification. In conse­quence, the clubs in New Bolden were teeming on Fridays and Saturdays and Stark had cornered the market. He supplied a couple of the club owners with coke and other recreationals. In consequence, he got special privileges.

  Still, if the club scene paid for the little luxuries in Stark’s life, the Car Wash was still a necessary unpleasantness. Behind the train sheds was a disused industrial estate: two hundred acres of low brick buildings with broken windows and deserted forecourts. The Car Wash was sheltered on three sides by the remains of a plastics factory and the derelict offices of a van-hire company. There was only one entrance big enough for cars. Stark liked it that way: less chance of unpleasant surprises.

  The Car Wash was well known to local drug-users. Its secluded but easily accessible location made it a favourite. There was also a wide choice of derelict buildings in which to sample Stark’s product range. Like any businessman, Stark had his regular clients and despite his developing business in the nightclubs he was too shrewd to desert his core markets. Pills paid for the little luxuries in his life but smack and weed were his bread and butter.

  Besides, he had high hopes for the new batch of heroin his supplier in London had recently delivered; top notch smack from Colombia, Jamaica or some other dope factory. Lovely stuff. Even his dead eyed, skull-faced regulars would lose their fucked-up minds over this one. He’d been tempted to try it himself after hearing the rave reviews but he wasn’t that stupid: not anymore.

  Stark approached the Car Wash through the broken down buildings that had once been RT Plastics. The machines had long since been stripped away and even the glass had been taken from the windows. The derelict premises provided a secure, invisible route to the Car Wash. Stark waited inside the building and stared out intently into the darkened court­yard. He was expecting a couple of punters but none had arrived yet. He pulled up a wooden crate and sat down.

  The rain grew heavier and rushed against the corrugated iron roof. Stark cursed quietly. Rain wouldn’t deter the smack-heads but it would definitely put off the fair-weather middle class dope fiends. A shape moved outside in the yard. Stark caught his breath and strained his eyes for some point of recognition. The shadow moved closer: it was a man, hunched against the cold and rain. The figure found shelter in a dry corner of the yard and lit a cigarette. Stark recog­nized the gaunt face that was briefly illumined by the flash of match light.

  ‘Bernie,’ he called to the burning cigarette end. The glowing
tip turned in Stark’s direction and, after a moment of evalua­tion, moved soundlessly towards him. Stark pushed open what had once been a fire exit from the plastics factory and ushered the shadow inside.

  ‘Jesus, I’m cold,’ said the figure.

  ‘You and me both, Bernie.’

  Bernie’s sunken eyes fixed him for a moment. ‘It’s different. I’m freezing from the inside out. Thank God for cigarettes.’

  ‘They’ll be the death of you, Bernie.’

  ‘Don’t make me laugh.’

  Stark watched as Bernie reached inside his duffel coat and withdrew a small roll of notes. He placed it between them on the crate. Bernie’s hand was small and scarred. It looked like a claw. Stark picked up the cash and counted.

  ‘What’s this, then?’ Stark waved the roll at Bernie.

  ‘What does it fucking look like?’

  ‘There’s forty quid here. That’s not even half a measure.’

  ‘So give me half a measure.’

  ‘I don’t deal in halves, mate. It ain’t worth my time.’

  ‘Course it is. Just cut the stuff.’

  ‘I’m a businessman, Bernie. This is not a bleedin’ soup kitchen. A measure is a hundred notes. It’s the lowest unit of currency. You’ve never heard of half of half a “p” have you?’

  ‘It’s all money isn’t it? Just take the money and give me your shit.’

  Stark thought for a second: business was quiet and he doubted whether there’d be many more paydays in Bernie. He didn’t normally make exceptions but the poor bastard was half-dead already. He might as well squeeze the last drop of blood out of the stoned.