Contents
Cover
Title
Copyright
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
About the Author
Acknowledgement
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First published in the Czech Republic in 2001 by Twisted Spoon Press
First published in Great Britain in 2007 by Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing
A Random House Group Company
Copyright © Phil Schoenfelt 2001 Illustrations copyright © Jolana Izbická 2001
Phil Schoenfelt has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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ISBN 9780091899233
illustrated by jolana izbická
CISSY HAD TAKEN TO HER BED. No-one knew what to do with her anymore. Since they’d cut off her hair and blackened her eyes, she rarely left the confines of her narrow room, and when she did it was only to visit the bathroom or, with hurried furtive steps, the Greek delicatessen directly next door. Here, she would buy cigarettes and the few morsels of food her body could still accept — cake, biscuits, chocolate — then, clutching the packages close to her chest, and with hunched shoulders, she would walk quickly back through the darkened hallway and reach the bolt-hole of her room before anyone had a chance to speak to her. If you knocked on her door, the response would be something along the lines of: “Fuck off, I’m not in,” or, “Go away, I’m sleeping,” and only in the middle of the night would you hear her moving about, pacing the worn floorboards in her black, high-heeled slippers, or shifting the furniture around into new configurations. Occasionally, the French girl who lived in the basement would visit her and they’d remain cloistered together for an hour or two, talking about who knows what. But I imagine that even then Cissy would not have left her bed, preferring, as always, to hold court from there. With the dark circles of her eyes and her pale skin, and with her head propped up against the stained, rancid pillows, she could have been the portrait of some nineteenth century consumptive, fading away in a nameless and hellish garret.
The only other visitor, and then only each second or third day, was Henry, a sleazy and down-at-heel Glaswegian street junkie, who would bring Cissy the scrapings and remnants of some wrap he’d hustled; or, failing that, maybe some old cottons he’d filched from someone. Dried-up and yellow, sometimes caked with blood, these were strong enough to give a hit when mixed and cooked up together in the large, soot-blackened spoon that Cissy kept in her bedside table. It was as though she was willing herself into a state of deliberate non-existence, unable as she was to face the world outside now that everything had gone wrong and her friends had deserted her. Wrapped in her shadowy cloak of invisibility, she had no desire to communicate with anyone: the fizz and life had gone out of her and she wanted only to be left alone with her sickness, wretchedness and paranoia. And Henry, it is true, loved her in his own sweet way, she having (or not, as the case may be) allowed him to fuck her at some point in the immediate or distant past, exercising her woman’s right to bestow favours upon even the least worthy of recipients. Or perhaps she was just expressing her gratitude that he alone, out of all her multifarious former acolytes, had remained loyal to the cause, bringing her his humble offerings and ensuring that the pain and depression of withdrawal did not overwhelm her completely.
At any rate, I hardly ever saw Cissy during those days and weeks, even though we were both still living in the same illegal house. And it wasn’t the first time, during the course of a long and tortuous relationship, that she had taken herself away like this. In the past, though, it had always been to some other place — either the country, or the house of rich friends in West London, a house whose exact location was a closely-guarded secret. There, she could disappear and lie low for weeks at a time to recuperate when the pressures of existence became too much for her.
It was after one of these disappearances that we began living together, although I’d first met her about two years prior to this during the period of time when I was breaking up with my wife. We’d slept together on that particular occasion, and although she hadn’t wanted to fuck, we’d lain next to each other all through the night, talking about the chaos of our lives in the dreamy, disengaged way of people who are still strangers, but who hope to get better acquainted. She told me about her childhood and teenage years, growing up in New York, Tehran and later Switzerland; her difficult relationship with her mother (her father had left when she was thirteen); her problems with drugs; and her present relationship with a psychotic member of the Windsor chapter of the Hell’s Angels. I talked about my broken marriage; my time in New York (we shared several acquaintances); and my failed and inconsistent attempts to straighten out my own life, which at that point in time was threatening to spin out of control completely.
I remember the story she told me about smoking opium for the first time. She was thirteen or fourteen years old, then, living in Tehran with her mother — who, being half-Iranian herself, had returned there to live after she and her wealthy American husband had separated. Having spent the first part of her life growing up in the free and easy atmosphere of Downtown Manhattan, Cissy had not taken easily to the austere restrictions of Muslim society. Although it was during the latter years of the Shah’s regime, and the rigours of Fundamentalism were only expressed in infrequent proclamations from Khomeini in distant Paris, Cissy refused to settle down and soon became rebellious. She met an older boy from the American school in Tehran, and it was he who first introduced her to the pleasures of opium (and, inadvertently, sent her reeling down the crazy path to her present state of total dependency). She also told me about the “beautiful” nights they spent together on the flat, sun-baked roof of his parents’ house, gazing up at the myriad stars of the orient sky; about how they lay naked on rugs of mystical design, fucking slow and lazy, while smoking the sticky black pellets from an intricately carved hookah; about how wonderful it made her feel to escape the clutches of an over-protective mother, to experience the sense of freedom and immunity that the drug gave her. And all of this with a tone of wistfulness and regret, as if these were the days of innocence before The Fall, a paradise never to be regained — all the more haunting and powerful for being so utterly beyond her reach now.
And it was true, there had been a fall in Cissy’s life, something which shook her so deeply that she was never to recover fully: a rupture that was always present, no matter how well she concealed it behind the gaudy masks and chameleon’s skin she insisted upon wearing.
By the time
her mother finally went back to New York, Cissy had been sent to some kind of finishing school in Switzerland. She’d not become the perfect little Persian princess that her mother had dreamed of, and there had also been some kind of sexual trouble with the grandfather. (She was always a bit vague about this — depending on her mood, the interference consisted of a little light petting at bedtime; a clumsy grab from behind; or a full-blown attempt at anal intercourse, which was repulsed only after shouts, screams and the appearance on the scene of the mother and grandmother. At any rate, it seems clear that the old man couldn’t keep his hands off her and that she, in turn, was the guilty one because of her rebellious ways, pretty face, budding breasts and generally provocative nature; all of which was, of course, akin to waving a pair of scarlet knickers in the face of a particularly horny and patriarchal old bull.)
So Cissy was packed off to Switzerland, to some boring, provincial girls’ school from where she made regular and extended excursions — first to Zurich and Geneva, then further afield to Paris and Berlin. Several times they threatened to kick her out: for truancy and unruly behaviour, for bringing drugs onto the premises, for sneaking boys into her dormitory — the usual kind of spirited, teenage fun. Then, her mother would have to intervene, usually via the telephone from New York, or on one or two of the more serious occasions with personal visits. These involved meetings with the principal and a mixture of threats and bribes for Cissy, more often than not ending with an increased allowance in return for promises of good behaviour — the increase in funds, of course, only giving Cissy the wherewithal to create even more mayhem.
Finally, she jumped ship altogether and arrived in London with little more than the clothes she was standing up in. All communication with her mother ceased (and with it, the money), but Cissy hit the party and club scene with all the exuberance that years of repression had engendered: meeting people, getting drunk, taking drugs and generally having a wild and wonderful time on next to no money — something that is still just about possible in London if you have youth and wit, cunning, a personal sense of style, and don’t mind living on the margins of society. Cissy definitely had her own style and fashioned her clothes from the remnants boxes of second-hand and thrift shops, picking up on British modes of the sixties and seventies, and making them her own. She would turn up at clubs wearing a garish mixture of Hippy, Punk and Glam styles: silver space boots; dog collar and spiked S&M bracelets; orange, blond, or purple hair; long velvet dresses with stars and moons stitched on; black and white “OP-ART” plastic raincoats; thigh-length leather boots with buckles and spurs. Somehow, the force of her personality, her desperate need to make an impression and wipe out all traces of her own past life, held the whole thing together, and what might have looked a hopeless mishmash on someone else always looked great on her.
Of course, she was beautiful, and resourceful too. Soon, she was selling her own hand-made jewellery from a stall in Portobello Market, widening her ever-increasing circle of acquaintances who ranged from unwashed and ragged dole-queue kids (some of whom she shared a squat with), up to the wealthy musicians and big-time drug dealers of Kensington and Chelsea. But it wasn’t enough. Something of the Persian princess was maybe inside her after all, and the charms of living in a cold-water flat, with no heat or electricity, were beginning to wear thin, especially now that winter was approaching. She saw the riches and comforts that her West London friends enjoyed, and accustomed as she had been to having these things herself, she began to plot and scheme, to think of ways of raising herself up to their level, as she saw it. She’d won her freedom — now she wanted to enjoy the material comforts she had known before, but on her own terms, without the annoying interference of her mother and family. Maybe then they would respect her, accept her for who she was instead of what they wanted her to be. At the very least, she would be able to respect herself, to know that everything she had achieved was the result of her own efforts, not because of some handout that was always conditional upon someone else’s idea of good behaviour. She had been denied love without conditions; now she would achieve wealth and status without conditions too: she would be beholden to no-one. And so it was that Cissy made the decision to enter the dark and treacherous waters of big-time drug-dealing.
• • •
I don’t know where she met Scottish Dougie. He was a Glaswegian hard man of the old school, about thirty years of age when they met (she was then eighteen), and seemingly outside the circle of her usual acquaintances. Maybe she met him in a club, or pub; maybe somebody introduced them; maybe it was divine intervention. Whatever the case, it was a strange, unlikely pairing, but one which seemed to offer her the fast and easy route to money and material comfort that she now craved. Dougie was not cut from the same cloth as the dealers she had known so far — mainly rich kids using their parents’ money for a little private investment of their own, one which could produce dividends at least as attractive as any their fathers might hope to make in the City. He had come up the hard way, via the old Gorbals tenement blocks and borstal, and he’d already served time for a variety of offences ranging from armed robbery to GBH. A three-inch knife scar disfigured one side of his face, a memento of some long-forgotten gang war, while his nose had been broken on more than one occasion, giving him a flattened, almost ape-like appearance. This, together with his build (that of the proverbial brick shit-house), made him into the kind of character you most definitely would not wish to pick an argument with, though apparently several people did on account of some masochistic desire to prove a point to themselves, or others. (He had a younger brother, Tony, who was equally as hard, and whom I met years later when he used to buy speed off me in Camden Town. You could never refuse to sell to this guy, no matter what hour of night or day he might happen to call around. If it was three in the morning, he would bellow up from the street below demanding drugs, and if you ignored him, or pretended to be asleep, he was not averse to kicking the front door in, bawling you out for being a cunt and not letting him in in the first place. Basically, he didn’t give a fuck.)
So for Dougie, dealing smack was easy meat — there was comparatively little risk involved, and the middle-class kids he sold to were a far cry from the battle-hardened thugs he had grown up with in Glasgow. Undoubtedly, he held a powerful attraction for Cissy, adrift as she was in a cold and potentially dangerous city, and she knew that with him there would be no trouble from difficult or uncooperative customers: no-one would dare to mess with her if they knew that she was together with such a desperate character, and besides, he had the contacts and the knowledge that she needed to get started in this lucrative but lethal business.
Things started to go wrong almost from the start. Dougie had recently lost a weight of gear, worth several thousand pounds, on a deal that had turned sour when some rival from the past had informed on him to the police. The package had been discovered in a parked van at some point midway between London and Glasgow, and it was only by a mixture of luck and foresight that Dougie had avoided being caught himself. The van had been hired under a fictitious name, and with no other concrete leads available the police were powerless to act. However, they knew who was behind the deal and as far as they were concerned they could wait — it was just a matter of time before the net of their investigations closed around him.
So when Cissy arrived on the scene, Dougie was desperate to make his money back, and possibly saw her — young, fresh and plausibly innocent as she was — as some kind of decoy, a screen he could use to cover his tracks, or maybe use as a courier. She was different to his usual pulls: tough, loud-mouthed women used to sticking up for themselves and their kids against foul-tempered, drunken, often violent men. Cissy could certainly hold her own in any argument, and had an impressive command of street language that she’d picked up along the way. But she also had a sense of style, the rich kid’s assurance of her own place in the world, that held great attraction for someone of Dougie’s chequered background, and according to Cissy he always treate
d her well: beyond the occasional screaming match, their relationship never degenerated into brawls and physical violence.
The first few trips they made up to Scotland together were a success. The deliveries were made and paid for, while Dougie clawed back some of the money he had lost on the previous occasion. His intention was to accompany Cissy on the first couple of drops, to introduce her to his friends and connections in Glasgow, after which she would undertake these trips alone while he took care of the London end of the business. They would each make enough money to finance whatever side-projects they chose to pursue (Cissy dreamed of opening her own club), and it would enable them to adopt the wonderful lifestyle that she so admired in her West London friends. It would be like a fairy tale, a rags-to-riches story, with Cissy as the beautiful princess and Dougie as the ugly toad who would turn into a handsome prince under her magical and beatific influence. She really did think like this, and in spite of her sassiness and apparent “street-smarts” Cissy was, behind the facade, the original, wide-eyed, little-girl-lost alone in the big, bad world. She had no true idea of the sinister forces she was playing with, and that were about to rain down upon her dreaming, innocent head.
Of course, she knew that what they were doing was against the law and that it carried a stiff penalty too. But Dougie had such a powerful physical presence, and had so many dangerous, well-connected friends, that she found it hard to believe that any harm could come to her while he was there to protect her — he was like a talisman for her, and she had complete faith in him, as if he were the father that she’d never really had. And she saw no evil in any of this. To her, the law really was an ass, merely a concoction dreamed up by grey, old men to benefit others of their own age and social class, and if there were people, like her, who wanted to buy drugs and have a good time with their lives, then why not? She was just providing a service, after all, like a publican, or the owner of a restaurant, so why shouldn’t she make a profit as well? No-one was forcing people to buy, it was all a matter of choice and personal freedom — and besides, she quite enjoyed the notion of “living outside the law”, of being a renegade. It was an attractive image for her, and she adopted it with the same enthusiasm and whole-hearted commitment she displayed for all her masks and successive identities.
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