by Nicci Cloke
The peppers and the purple tray of chicken went to bed in the bin.
By the time Fitz came out, I had put the telly on and turned off the main light and turned on the lamp. I held out ten pounds, crisp and dry in my hand, safe.
‘I think you deserve a treat,’ I said. ‘Fish and chips? Kebab? Proper pie and mash …?’
His eyes lit up and he looked at it like it was a million pounds. ‘Where’d you get that, lovely?’
‘My mum sent it to me. Think she knows I’m working hard. Here, go on. You deserve it, for looking after me when I’m being such a pain.’
I loved the way his face creased up all the way to his ears when he grinned.
Later, as we sat in front of the soaps with our feet tucked up under each other and our fingers laced up together, I tried not to smell the scent of frying fat on his skin, or feel the grease on his fingers, seeping into the edges of mine. On TV they were showing a special programme, a live show about safety in the city, a woman’s guide to avoiding crime. I leant my head against his shoulder and tried not to breathe.
When you take drugs, things that were once opposites become the same.
Too much = Never enough
Standing still = Spinning around
Feeling at ease with someone you know well = Falling head over heels in love all over again
Just one more = Please never stop
Night = Day (but day still equals day, and that’s what sends the world sideways)
It’s important not to get too hung up on drugs. They’re just a tangent to anyone’s story: at best, an accessory, just a minor character; at worst, a symptom of a deep dark that hides behind the high. To me they had become both, though I didn’t know it, not really. They were a big fat block and an opening; they shut out hunger and emptiness, and gave me ideas, thoughts, feelings. These were things that filled white pages.
I climbed the steps to the pavement and I climbed the short steps to the flat next door. I knocked on the door because I knew the bell didn’t work, and I waited.
When I first met Fitz, I realised instantly what a true high feels like. This kind of high didn’t come from inside, wasn’t affected by your mood or how much you wanted it. It just took you over, all over, in a warm, glowing fuzz, from head to toe. It could come from the smallest things, the way he pronounced a word or the way he danced around the bedroom when he was drying himself after a shower. Innocent and uninvited and always welcome. A real buzz, as he’d say. But it was a dependency all the same. A need. And life is nothing without needs.
There were footsteps in the hall, slow, confused, and the sound of a bolt unlatching, a chain undone. The door creaked open.
Rufus was tall and always walked like doors were too short for him and ceilings too low. He had curls of sandy hair that were never washed and he was always unshaven. He’d worn the same red hoody every time I’d seen him. He never remembered my name and I wasn’t sure I hadn’t made his up. He never looked surprised to see me.
‘Hiya,’ he said, and he left the door open and wandered back down the hall, leaving me to follow. It was a normal flat; bigger than ours, with new carpets and a framed poster in the hall. The kitchen always looked clean and there were blinds on the window instead of the nets everybody else had, or the bars that we did. I followed Rufus into the living room.
There were three of them. Rufus returned to his seat on the leather sofa, picking up his controller and carrying on playing whatever shooting game he was halfway through. Playing against him, in the other corner of the sofa, was Jackson, who was wearing a black leather jacket that matched the sofa and was stare-at-me beautiful, with smooth dark skin and hair shaved short. He gave me a dreamy smile, then looked back at the screen.
‘What you after today, babe?’
I shrugged and leant against the door. ‘What you got?’
‘How much you got?’
I smiled at the side of his face. ‘I get paid tomorrow. I’ll settle up then. You know I’m good for it.’
He tsked. ‘Give her some drone. No more of the good stuff.’ He turned briefly to give me another grin, a no-offence-meant flash of perfect white teeth.
‘Here you go.’ I didn’t know the third one’s name. He was sitting on the floor, back against the wall, holding a wrap out to me.
There are certain people you pass on the street or on a platform or in a shop. A sudden inexplicable shot of fear hits you, though if you looked at them again it would be gone. Sometimes you see a person glance at you as they walk past and you think of the people who kill strangers and bury them under their houses and gardens, who chain girls up in their cellars or who remove their breasts or feet. There is an electricity in those almost encounters, as if you have accidentally and unnoticed skimmed the surface of a secret underworld of evil. He was one of those people. I stepped forward and took the wrap.
‘You know,’ he said, fixing eyes with pink rims on mine so that all the noise of the game faded away. ‘There are other ways you could pay.’
He didn’t look away and I felt my skin turn to ice all over. The spell was only broken by an explosion on the screen and Jackson’s tsk.
‘Kay, man, don’t say things like that to the poor girl. Jeeeez.’
I laughed. ‘In your dreams, mate.’ I turned and left, but I felt Kay’s eyes follow me even through the wall.
‘Money tomorrow!’ someone called after me.
Inhaling white dust fills the empty space hunger makes, but it doesn’t replace the white noise inside your head. Hunger is a cavity, carefully hollowed out, but emptiness is a void, borderless and infinite. The pages remained blank.
I listened to my footsteps echo in the silent space. There were no windows, just the spotlights above, so that I was temporarily without time, though I knew that it was bright daylight outside. Time was never my friend: it stretched out away from me and then ran past too fast to keep up with. It was always waiting for me just ahead, sometimes hiding round a corner and sometimes just waving at me from far away, teasing me. Walking through the empty hall, it was both. I was alone and the clock was stopped, but once the spell was broken it would spiral wildly away again. I had nothing, blank pages still. I’d stared at the wall for hours and hours the day before and all the night, Fitz moving around me and the light changing, and there was nothing but the hole inside me and the roar of half-formed nothing thoughts buzzing and banging against my brain.
When I was small, pictures flew out of me with just a twitch of my little fingers; pictures and paintings and stories and games, all appearing out of nowhere into the air and onto paper. I didn’t know when they had abandoned me. By then I was even struggling to watch the TV for more than ten minutes. There was no peace for me anywhere.
I looked at the names pinned neatly on each of the boards. My footsteps sounded suddenly like a clock ticking, and for once it was as if I was making my own time. If I could stop, find my place, all would be silent again. Somewhere in the distance an ambulance or a police car wailed past. I found my name and stopped. Two plywood boards, painted white with emulsion and fixed to make a corner, one where my work could be mounted and pinned, where people could stand around hushed and look, some of them to point at a thing that captured their eye or their heart and whisper to their friend before moving on. I reached out a hand and ran my fingers over the smooth surface.
Earlier that day, I’d stepped into the workshop and sat without taking any work from my bag. I’d wanted to capture the anger I’d felt before, to see what the others were doing and spur myself on, light a fire in my head that would burn away the blur. There were only a couple of them there, Gennifer hunched over her sewing machine, Millie studiously guillotining backing paper. I sat and watched her hand move back and forth along the board, sliding the blade along its runner. I fished for my camera in my pocket, captured by the thin strips of the paper being sliced away, the borders brought in nearer and nearer, the edges coming closer to the centre. She turned as I raised the lens and I looked down
again, pretending to flick through pictures, hearing her neat step and hair swish behind me.
‘Whoops!’
The sheets of thick paper fluttered to the floor in their perfect squares. She had caught her foot in the strap of my bag, spilling its guts onto the dirty grey tiles. I bent to pick up the things and felt my head spin.
‘Sorry, Saffy, I didn’t see you there,’ she said, crouching down with a hair flick to gather her perfect paper. ‘Gosh, what are all these for?’
There is a time and a place for stealing cutlery. It’s mid-lunch-time on a weekday and it’s in the branch of Scoff nearest the Tube station, where the cutlery station is near the door and not the counter, and where the sets come shrink-wrapped, folded in a napkin, bedded in with a pinch of salt and a twist of pepper in their paper packets, sealed. You can slip through the door with as many as you can fit in your hands and your bag and nobody will notice.
My fear of forks, and of knives and spoons too, though that doesn’t sound half as lovely, had started in earnest a few weeks before. I’d watched Quin do the washing-up, with the cutlery left till last in the bottom of the bowl, mayonnaise and butter and sauce and potato and fat all greasy around the teeth and the handles. I’d watched him run the dirty sponge over them once, a fat fistful of them, then dump them on the smudged metal draining-board. And I’d known, right away, that I would never be able to put one in my mouth again.
I took the plastic packets from her and shoved them back into my bag.
‘They’re for a piece,’ I said. ‘About consumerism.’
‘Wow,’ she said, straightening up, hair falling back into place. ‘Sounds amazing.’
I wondered if Millie had been to see her boards, if she’d stood there in the silence and stared at the space, like I was. The wall was flimsy to touch. I could push it over if I wanted to. Push it over and make it all go away, make everything stop whirling and stop the white panels staring at me. But I didn’t. I stepped back and I stood there for a very long time, staring at my tiny printed name and the blank space beneath it.
The music is loud and I don’t know anybody here. I’ve taken all my coke and still haven’t found anybody I want to talk nothings about nothing with. I keep drinking my drink for something to do, but the ice is cold and it hurts my teeth. I came with Abby but she’s gone up to a bedroom with some guy who spilt a drink over her white dress and whom she kissed as a reward. I’m wearing a top I love, although I lose it somehow a week or so later. It’s covered with heavy sequins; not sparkly but dull, used sequins, like armour. It makes me feel small and light, like the top is the only thing holding me on the ground. I could take it off any time I want.
I lean against the bookcase, watching people dance and drinking my horrible sweet drink. A couple in front of me are dancing slowly together. He is biting her ear, she’s laughing. Her skirt has ridden up and his hand is sliding up the back of her thigh. He says something to her and she stops laughing and they leave. In the space where they were, I see him. He is sitting on the windowsill, scratching a CD case with a library card and looking around him for somebody. He sees me too, and we stare at each other as if the rest of the room has faded away into nothing. His eyes are dark and his hair curls around his ears and neck. He smiles and stands up. He has one dimple when he smiles. It makes his face look crooked in the loveliest way. He’s tall; it only takes three of his long steps to get across the room. His fingers bending around the beer bottle are crooked as well. When he gets up close he smells of beer and cigarettes, cold houses and cosy beds. I think I would like to look up at him like that for ever.
I stood and watched him at the sink, washing two mugs to make tea. His hair curled over the collar of his top by then and his elbows bent out at odd angles as he scrubbed, humming along cheerfully to a tune being played in his head. He often looked surprised or pleased at the track he found there, as if he’d just wandered into a bar and found they were playing his latest favourite album. I wanted desperately to reach out and touch him, to wrap my arms around him and bury my face in his back. I wanted, for the first time in a long time, to talk. To tell.
And then the hammering began. At first, in the strange second it takes for your brain to find the meaning of a sound, I thought it was coming from inside me. Fitz turned off the tap and turned to look at me.
‘Who’s that gonna be?’ he asked, but I couldn’t find any words. He hurried through to the hall, leaving me to trail behind him. I stopped in the doorway because suddenly I couldn’t go any further. Fitz wiped the suds off his hands and opened the door.
It slammed inwards in a movement so violent that I felt the world shake, and before I could scream, Fitz was pinned to the woodchip wallpaper by his throat.
‘Time to pay up!’ Kay’s knuckles were red against Fitz’s white neck, and the veins in his arm stuck out blue against the greying evening. His face was sweaty and his eyes had turned from pink to red. With each word he banged Fitz’s beautiful curls against the wall.
There was a terrible moment of complete still, when it seemed as if Kay’s outstretched arm had us all pinned in time, his veins pulsing, Fitz’s words gurgling and trapped at the back of his throat, my legs shaking me against the doorframe. And then Fitz managed to choke a sentence out.
‘Pay up for what, mate?’
Kay dropped him and he sagged against the wall. ‘Your tab,’ he said, and then he turned and grinned at me. Two of his teeth were pointed. ‘Pay it,’ he said, and then he grabbed Fitz’s face in his meaty fist and slammed his head back against the wall. ‘Or things are going to get nasty.’
‘We’ll pay,’ Fitz said, squeezing the words out through squashed cheeks. ‘Tomorrow. We’ll have the cash tomorrow.’
Kay let him go, his head rocking forward. Kay grunted, and left without another word, leaving the door wide open behind him. We stood there in the dying light without saying a word.
In chaos, there is often beauty. Exploding lives can be seen in a million tiny parts, each one beautiful as it passes before you, as it is violently snatched away. In the centre of a hurricane, things are still. I sat at my desk and let the music play out, and I saw my life whirling away from me and the page still blank, and everything seemed far away, like a dream.
Love:
Will Tear Us Apart
Is a Losing Game
You Always Hurt The One You
All You Need Is
And Happiness
I’d Do Anything For (But I Won’t Do That)
Is All Around
Me for a Reason
Can Build a Bridge
Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)
Fight for This
It Must Have Been
So many voices, spilling out of the speakers, telling me what love was and what love meant, how it could hurt you and how it could save you. None of them told me what to do when you were the one doing the hurting and you were beyond saving.
I sat at the wonky table and listened to the system pick songs at random for me, for hours and hours, hearing nothing, seeing nothing, lost in the lyrics. When I finally looked down at the page, there was just a fat black bleed from the paintbrush hovering in my hand. I was in the dark, in more ways than I had ever been.
I got up to turn the lights on. Fitz would be on his way home, and while I was waiting there was still the lovely possibility that things would be okay, that Cadbury would have agreed to give him another sub, that we could pay Kay and then we could find our way back.
The sound of the key in the door made all the love I’d listened to leap up into my heart. Things were possible once again.
When I saw his face, I knew I was wrong. In a fairytale or a crap film or a love song, there would be some tiny magic, some fortune, that would make things happen for us. But all our magic was gone. We were alone.
He shook his head. ‘Sorry, lovely. No more subs.’
And then he held out an arm, making a space for me to fill in the way he always did. I felt as if it was impossibl
e to get close enough to him, with my arms wrapped round his waist and his cheek resting on my head. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘don’t worry, lollipop, it’ll be okay. We’ll just tell him we’ll give it him next week. He probably won’t even remember, you know – he was wrecked.’ He kissed the top of my head. And just like that, the magic was back.
We sat on the sofa and twiddled our fingers together. As the evening wore on I let my head fall to Fitz’s shoulder, tucking myself into him. In the sixty-second news round-up between programmes, Top Idol was being accused of rigging phone lines and Fate Jones was still gone. Life was carrying on, and so would we. Fitz sleepily reached up a hand and stroked my cheek. He was reading my mind without even trying, and he was next to me. Even as things changed around us, that was true.
And then the knock came.
I felt my body go weak, and I wanted to cry out and grab Fitz by the hands, keep him in his spot and bury ourselves in Quin’s corner, but it was too late. He was standing up, straightening his jeans. He ruffled my hair. ‘It’ll be all right,’ he said. ‘Leave it to me.’ And then he was gone, and the front door was opening, and I was clinging to his words even as they were fading.
I could only hear Fitz’s side of the conversation; Kay’s was muffled by the walls into a deep, growling hum.
‘Hiya, mate.’
‘Look, about that …’
‘No, no, mate, nobody’s fucking you about!’
‘I swear, honest, I’ll get it for you!’
‘Come on, can’t we just be mates about it? Let’s have a beer, shake on it, yeah? I can get it to you next week.’