by L. J. Stock
We were both sat on the couch when she handed me a needle. With her own in hand, she folded her legs under her and turned to face me with eyes full of excitement. I slid on the tourniquet, yawning before I clamped it between my teeth and pulled it tight.
"To being single!" Jessica proclaimed, tapping her needle against mine with a small, almost desperate laugh.
I ignored her at first, instead choosing to find a clean spot on my arm. Taking a deep breath in, I slipped the needle into my vein, watching as the red of my blood danced into the small space of the syringe and mingled with the already rusty liquid of the heroin. "To being single."
I knew something wasn’t right the moment I released the tourniquet. The usual warm glow escalated into fire that scolded me from the inside. My blood felt like molten lava as it ran through my body, and my hands, in total self-defense mode, clawed at my chest in some asinine attempt to save my heart. I tried to get up from the couch as the pain finally gripped the pumping muscle that had been completely vulnerable behind my rib cage, the white heat of it making my body curl in on itself. I'd never felt anything like it.
The pain consumed me. It twisted around in my body and ate me alive. My skin felt as though it were burning and falling free from me. I grappled and choked and fell to the floor at some point. Between the pain and desperation, I was losing minutes. I'd flicker from black to a consciousness filled with fire, the darkness getting longer and longer until it was all I could embrace.
**********
"Ethan, I need you to open your eyes for me." There was a flash of white light and garbled chatter before the darkness ate me alive again.
**********
“He’s coding. Get the crash team in here, now.”
**********
Somewhere above my head, there was an annoying beeping that hammered painfully in time with my heart in my chest. I was hurting everywhere, but my chest felt like there was an elephant sat on it. I tried to open my eyes and speak, but my throat was on fire. There was something down my throat, and in my arm... The panic set in immediately, and I desperately started to grab at the tube and all the wires hanging from my body.
There was a shout, followed by footsteps, and all I could do was scream around the obstruction in my throat, clawing at it, fighting, begging. Then the darkness took over again.
**********
Consciousness finally found me. I wasn't sure how long I'd been there, but the aches in my body were severe by that point. The tube that panicked me had been removed, but as I lay there, my mind slowly engaging, I found the points of pain in my arms. There was something stuck in me.
I tried to lift my arm to pull it free but there was resistance. Soft cuffs had been locked over my wrists, holding me down. My eyes flickered open, the white light stinging them with such intensity that I started blinking double time to compensate and adjust. Curtains and machines surrounded my body. There were quiet beeps and muffled voices beyond the door. In the chair by the bed, sat my best friend Scott.
What the fuck had happened? I couldn't remember much of anything. It was a blur - almost like looking down a tunnel with holes in it, the dark patches swallowing my memories and leaving nothing but more darkness in their place. The only prevalent memories were flashes of sex, a face and guilt, but that was about as much as I could recall.
"Ethan?"
"Sco–" I didn't get his whole name out. The fire in my throat and the hoarse sound of my voice shut me up. I didn't even sound like myself. Trying my hardest not to panic, I pulled at the restraints and looked at my best friend in question.
"You tried to pull the wires out, mate. It's just a safety precaution."
"W- what happened?" I asked, wincing at the pain the two small words caused me.
"You don't remember?"
I shook my head. No matter how hard I tried to put the pieces together, it was just a black hole in my mind. Trying to pick out the pieces only made a stabbing pain run across my brows. What the fuck had happened?
"You and Jess... You... Mate, you had bad drugs. They saved you, barely, but Jess... She didn't make it. She was dead before the paramedics got there. If Paul hadn't come home sick from work, you'd be dead, too."
Jessica was dead? What the hell was she doing at the house? Had I invited her? For some reason, Little Chef inexplicably popped into my head. I hadn’t particularly liked Jessica, but the sadness that clutched me in that moment was very real. She didn’t deserve to die. No one would ever deserve the pain that had cavorted around my body when the liquid had seeped into my bloodstream. Even now, it echoed like a ghost and made my arms jerk against the restraints.
I tried to find my voice and ask questions, but by the time I'd built up the courage to endure the fire, the doctor had come in. He gave me a look that clearly said "fucking junkie," before picking up my chart and flipping through it.
"You got lucky, Mr. Walker. Your girlfriend wasn't so fortunate."
She wasn't, nor had she ever been, my girlfriend, but that was irrelevant. I could already see this doctor had made up his mind about me. I was a waste of resources to him, and maybe he was right, because God only knew I was craving a hit in that moment. My body, tired and broken, still needed the shit that had apparently almost killed me.
"You're going to be tender for quite a while. You coded in the ambulance and they had to perform CPR, also once in accident and emergency. Your body will inevitably start to crave the drugs as you're taken off the meds we're giving you. You should, hopefully, be in the rehabilitation centre by then."
"Rehab?" I croaked.
The doctor sneered at me like I was shit on the sole of his shoe. If I'd been alone, I'd have thought I was imagining it, but the look Scott and I exchanged said it all. He was being an arsehole.
"Your father signed off on it before he left. Your forced admittance will last for a month and then you can leave. It's cold turkey for you, I'm afraid. If you want my advice, Ethan, I would take it to heart and use the tools they give you. You barely made it this time. Next time your ride will be to the morgue."
He signed a couple of sheets on my chart and strolled from the curtained area, as though he hadn't just done a grim reaper impression, and left Scott and me speechless.
"Fucking hell. What a twat. Nice bedside manner he's got there."
I fell back against the bed with frustration and pulled on the restraints holding me down. I needed them free because I was about to make a complete tit of myself. I could feel the tears prickling in my eyes as I tugged and fought the unrelenting material that quickly started to chafe my skin. I'd fucked up so badly. Jessica was dead, I was probably homeless, and my fucking dad had signed me up for a month’s worth of bullshit from people who obviously didn't give a fuck.
Yes, it was pretty bloody selfish to be so blubbery over a month’s stay in rehab when Jessica didn't have a chance at anything, but I couldn't process any of it. The bag plugged into my arm obviously had some kind of drug in there to kill the pain, and in my distress it began pumping shit into my veins again. My head had started getting fuzzy. The only upside was the fading of that need, which was grating under the surface of my skin.
"Ethan?" Scott asked with concern as I turned my head away from him. "Mate, you know I'm not gonna judge you. I'm here, ain't I?"
He was. Scott was there like he’d always been, but I didn’t deserve it. Maybe I never had. I sure as hell hadn't been a friend to him since Mum died. I hadn't been a brother either. The shit I'd exposed Dean to… In that moment, I could sincerely say I hated myself. For being weak. For being selfish. For being emotionally stunted, just like my fucking father. I hadn't handled my emotions at all; I'd just pushed them to the side and sought out gratification in any way I could find it. I’d walked over people to get what I wanted. I'd let people down, pushed people away, and I'd hurt the ones I loved in the process.
The tears started slowly at first, sliding from the corner of my eyes and getting caught in my ridiculously long hair. They were in
termittent to begin with, but began to flow the more the memories began to tick over in my head. Who the fuck was I? Who had I become? I wasn't anybody. I was an empty vessel, a hollow shell, going through the motions.
"Mate?"
"I'm sorry, Scott," I forced out, the swallowing coming compulsively as I fought the burning. "I... I fucked up, big time."
"You weren't yourself, E, and I... I never should have left you that night at the party."
"Don't make excuses for me, Scott. I may not have had a choice that night, but I had one the next day and the one after that. I let you down. I let Dean down. I let my mum down."
The tears started coming faster, the painful lump in my throat becoming a humiliating sob. The fat drops ran in warm tracks down to my temple. I wished I had my hands free to wipe them away, but they were still tied down at my sides.
"I hate seeing you like this."
"Self-inflicted." I sniffed, feeling like a tit. "I just can't believe my dad is making me stay in some hospital for a month."
"Maybe it's for the best?"
My head whipped to the side to look at him, and I regretted it. The pounding was so intense, I saw little white stars in my vision, little blotches of light that made my stomach roll.
"Think about it," Scott continued. "What would you do if you got out and the cravings started? How long could you put that off?"
I kept my mouth shut. He was right, and I knew it. The moment my body started demanding the drugs, I'd have been at a dealer’s house. I’d been so weak-willed. I'd been the one to do that to myself, and although I knew there was only pain to come, I'd put myself here, and I needed to face the consequences of my actions. As much as I hated my dad, and hated him for his decision, I had a feeling it would be the best thing he'd ever done for me.
Scott was thrown out of my room not long after that. The nurses and doctors all darted in and out, doing their tests and ignoring me as they scribbled in the chart. I hated every second of it, mainly because it gave my sobering mind time to think. I avoided the obvious thoughts of my mum and drugs. There was nothing down that line other than more pain and suffering, which left me with only one more thought: the fact that my almost death, and Jessica's death, wasn't an accident.
I had to assume that Tommy realized what Paris and I had done together in that bathroom. I also had to assume that he knew Jessica was skimming drugs from Eddie’s stash. She had been given a death sentence with the bad heroin, and when Tommy had seen me coming from the room after Paris, he’d decided I would be another unwanted distraction to Daggs. So Tommy asked me to take Jess home, knowing she would share the heroin with me.
Had Eddie been a party to it? It explained their constant arguing and him acting shifty around her. Had he also known about her weird attachment to me? That she wouldhave happily shared her good luck with me? It didn't really matter now it was all said and done. The message was delivered. I'd been the lucky one to make it out alive, and I wouldbe keeping my distance. Living clean was the only way I could do that.
I was moved down to the rehab building later that afternoon. The fuckers wouldn'tlet me walk, so I was forced into the humiliation of a wheelchair. My body hurt enough as it was, but the orderly took great delight in making it the roughest journey of my life.
The room I was presumably going to call home for a month was smaller than a shoebox. It had a bed, with plastic covers over the mattress and a toilet in one corner with a sink. It felt more like a prison cell if I was honest. Then again, I wasn’t there to sit around camp fires and sing. I was there to get sober.
I'd had my last dose of pain pills before I left the observation ward, and as the bastard orderly left, I crawled on the bed, hoping to get some sleep before the nightmare started.
**********
Whereas time was relative with drugs, it wasn't necessarily miserable. That vortex of hell I was in sucked time out of me in a never ending wave of pain and nausea.
It started with the usual craving - the same type I’d dealt with regularly after I left it too long. As with most things, that only lasted a while before my body revolted against me. The itch started under my skin, spreading to my limbs before it eventually gave way to pain. I'd never felt anything like it in my life. I couldn't control my basic motor functions, let alone bodily functions, and I soon became all too aware of why the mattress was covered in plastic. I was a mess, and I don't remember much of what happened during the days I was locked in that room. I can't even recall if I saw anyone. All I remember was the excruciating pain that radiated from the core of me until I was clawing at the walls, screaming and shouting for relief.
My skin crawled, a million points of pain shimmering over the surface as the stabbing in my gut took control. I hunched over in a ball in the corner, stinking of stale sweat, misfired bodily fluids, and tears. Every breath stabbed at me. Every thought that slowly came was whisked away before it had time to form. I wished for death to make it stop.
I don't know how long I was like that, lost in that cacophony of white noise that surrounded me, but my first lucid thought was filled with shame. What the hell had I become?
There had been a part of me that hadn't thought I was in as deep as I was. A naive part of me had been convinced I could stop whenever the hell I wanted to. Other than the fact that I could deal with the pain, the last however long I’d been in there had shown me that I’d been in deeper than I ever could have imagined. My body still craved that next hit. It tried to cajole me into it, my brain convincing me that one more hit, just one last one, was all I needed.
My heart was the only thing that put up more of a fight. The thought of going through all of that pain again made it slam against my ribs as a reminder. I had to find that strength in myself. I had to resist if I didn't want to waste my life away. All I'd succeeded in doing in that year, was proving to my dad I was as big a waste of space as he'd perceived me to be.
That night, I tried to wash myself in the small sink, along with everything else in the room, before turning the mattress over and attempting a full night’s sleep as I shivered and shuddered in the cold of the breeze block room. I promised myself a better future and a cleaner tomorrow. I would make Mum, Dean, and Scott proud of me.
The first step, after all, was admitting you had a problem to begin with.
Now, it was time to fix it.
As pissed off at my dad as I was for that month long stint I had to do in rehab, I began to change my opinion on the matter entirely. I was certain it wasn’t done out of love or any particular care for me, but it had saved my life. Without that intervention, I was pretty sure I would have ended up with the same fate as Jessica. I almost had.
Rehab wasn’t easy, especially not in the place I was situated. There was no sympathy, no understanding, and there was a lot of talking that needed to be done in order to prove that I'd learned my lesson. In all fairness, it was tough love and it was exactly what I needed. I’d have thought that talking about my feelings and shit would have been humiliating and emasculating, but being in a room with twenty other fuck ups in the same situation put things into perspective. You talked, you listened, and you grew from it.
By the time my month was up, there was less hostility and more companionship from everyone involved. Whether that was due to my eventual cooperation or just the way they chose to handle things, I'll never know, but I was serious about never touching drugs again. The more sober I became, the more I realised just how much I'd hurt the people I loved. For me, that was unacceptable.
I was under no illusion that it would be easy once I got out. The doctors and counsellors made sure to hammer home the fact that the cravings would always be there. It was just up to me to fight that and go on. I had to be the one to keep the good fight going, and that's exactly what I wanted.
Dean and Scott were waiting for me when I got out. I was staying with Scott in his apartment until I found somewhere of my own. I didn't even know he'd moved out of his parents’ house; that’s how much of a friend I
'd been in the past year.
It was a nice gesture, and I'd always owe him for it, but there was a part of me that knew he'd done it to keep an eye on me - that he was making sure I didn't go hunting for some shit the moment the urge hit me, and I appreciated it. My mind and body were in a constant battle of wills - my body craving drugs while my head craved this new normal I had going on.
If there was one thing that rehab had taught me, it was that I had to let go of the person I had been, from the child I'd been before my addiction and the man I'd become during. I wasn’t either of those any more. I was reborn, with scars from my past. I’d been given a second chance, a slate that had been cleaned considerably, even if it wasn’t new. All I had to do was find a distraction, keep myself clean, start my life again and actually live it.
Simple, right?
I’d learned the hard way that nothing worth having in life came easily or without having to at least work your arse off for it.
I had nothing but the money in my gym locker. I managed, by some grace, to get Scott to renew my membership while I was in rehab, which meant no one had touched it. It was a decent amount. With the fifty grand from the tournament, and the money from every fight and job I’d done for Daggs, it came to a fair sum. It was rare for a junkie to have some foresight into the future, but I wasn't questioning myself. For whatever reason, I'd done it and it had worked out. I just had to find myself and what I wanted to do with my life.
Some days were harder than others. Having money like that burning a hole in my pocket, and all the free time in the world, the temptation was too much. I’d had no idea how much my body depended on those drugs, and the battle inside me had turned into an all out war. My emotions battled with the promise the drugs brought with them, and the insufferable silence with the blinding white noise was a soundtrack in my head. There were nights that I couldn't sleep because of it. Everything seemed to agitate me, creating a yearning so deep, it felt as though I was split apart. I hated those nights. They were filled with agony.