“Wow, they’ve done a great job on your hair haven’t they?” Ash.
“D’you think I should get some done?” Ella.
“Definitely, I am, we should all go!” Daisy.
“I’m going to put them on MySpace and see how many comments I get! Heeheehee!!” Trix. What kind of stupid fucking twatty name is “Trixie”? I can feel my blood boiling. The clock chimes eight.
“Oooh, wow, your highlights look pretty!”
“Jesus,” I mutter.
Fucking hell. Fucking hell. Fucking hell.
“Look, Flick, don’t she look great?”
“Yeah.” I swig some water. “Airbrushing is a beautiful thing, now can we get to my problems, please?”
“Huh?” Trixie says, staring at the photos, wondering what airbrushing is.
“What’s so wrong with this that it’s such a crime to you, Flick?” Ash rolls her eyes at me.
“Nothing, nothing at all, it’s just a massive stereotype and utterly pointless, vain, boring and pathetic.” I mimic Trix to perfection. “ ‘I’m going to be a model because basically I have no GCSEs and no other choice,’ it’s a beautiful, beautiful thing and I’m glad your lives are so full, but you’ll all get knocked up next year anyway so it doesn’t matter right now! Can we move on to something important, like how I’m going to do this deal and get out of this shithole without getting killed by Fez?”
“FUCK, Flick!” A sudden, and completely unexpected, outburst from Ashley. She stands up to her full height, which is actually quite impressive when you include her hair. “No we can’t!” She glares at me like I’m the Antichrist, there is a stony silence, and when I start to speak again she cuts in angrily. “I’m fucking fed up of you coming round here looking down on us all as if you’re fucking deigning to spend time with us and refusing to fuck us as if we’re beneath you.”
“What the fuck—?” I say, outraged, but she cuts me off, waving her Smirnoff Ice in the air.
“You don’t want to be a stereotype, Flick, but you play your own games to replace the ones you avoid and you fill a role and a place in the grand scheme of things, just like everyone else does. I’m sick and fucking tired of you thinking you’re better than us. You might not be a slag, Flick, and you might not treat women like shit, but you’re a stoner and a druggie and a cock when you’re drunk and you throw up everywhere just like the rest of us so fuck you, Will Flicker.”
She gestures at Daisy, Ella and Trix, all sitting on the crummy sofa trying not to look at me but unable to take their eyes off us, me and Ash, facing each other down like bulls.
“At least Trix is trying to make a go of it. What are you doing with your life, ay? Pissing and whining over a deal. If you weren’t a coward, you’d tell Fez no and take the beating. But you won’t, and not ’cause there’s no way out, but because without the fucking drama of this fucking deal there’s nothing really in your life, Flick. You FUCKING WASTER.” Ash pounds the floor across the flat, and, with her last words, exits into the bathroom. She slams the door and we hear sounds of her rolling a joint and bursting out crying. I leap over to the door, kicking bottles out my way, and yell through it.
“Ashley! ASHLEY! You FUCKING open this door!” All the heat and muscle that there is in my body feels fucking angry, like a fire that’s been poked into life, the coals turned over ’til the flames lick up through the chimney. I beat on the door with a fist. “FUCKING OPEN IT!”
“FUCK OFF!” she screams, choking on something—tears, smoke, pills, who the fuck knows.
“WILL!” A deep voice yells from behind me. I turn around, staring at the group, Trix, Daisy, Ella, Josh, Jamie and Mike, dotted over the living room. I stare wildly at the three guys.
“What?” I spit murderously from between curled lips. Silence. I measure in at about six foot, same as the other guys, but I’m broader than most of my friends. I look older than them, my shoulders and frame wider than most, in a good way. I’m muscular, my eyes are so dark they’re almost black, and my face is meaner and rougher looking. I look like your stereotypical fucking rough ’un, narrow eyed and old before his time. Maybe I’m soft underneath, but you wouldn’t try it to see. At least, Josh, Jamie and Mike don’t. No one says anything.
Ashley screams again from the bathroom, in between scarcely disguised sobs: “FUCK OFF!”
I punch the door one last time, flinging my right arm carelessly at the wood.
“Upset ’cause I wouldn’t fuck you, Ash?” She bursts out with fresh tears and I shake my head and articulate disgust to the ceiling: “Fucking slag.”
I walk over to where Ash’s wallet is and spitefully, half unaware of what I’m doing, take out a small handful of notes. Josh moves as if to stop me and I stare coldly into his eyes. His hand falters midair and drops back to his side. He looks down, eyes flickering away from my own. It’s at this point that I have more power over any of my mates in the room, and, ironically, the least over myself. I have lost it. I am taking thirty quid from a friend for no reason whatsoever, other than to get her back for being a bitch. I’m not even sure if she was being a bitch. Sentences from her outburst start to make sense, and I block them out my head by frowning, the simplicity of me being right and Ashley being wrong that much easier to deal with than the reverse. I nod at Josh, narrowing my eyes for just a second.
“That’s right.” I feel like I’m watching myself from above, as if I’m a character in a film. The mean one, the one that gets shot towards the end. Shit, I think abstractedly, I hope I don’t get shot. Then, Nah, you won’t, you’ve thought of it now. I walk out the apartment to silence from the main room and, in the background as if on a loop, Ash shouting, “FUCK YOU, FLICK, FUCK YOU!” Extremely cinematic, I think. I call Kyle and he meets me with Dildo and Danny in the square.
SCUM
“Fucking bitch deserves all she gets,” is Kyle’s evaluation of the Ashley situation. Kyle seems to have become a meaner fucker in days. He stands head stuck out, hands on hips as if ready for battle, and his speech flows between serious Snatch-style thug and a complete parody of the same character.
We’re standing in a dim fucking alleyway, shit all about us. Danny kicks a takeaway carton away from him. The windows of the flat in front of us are boarded up, and according to Kyle, a clapped-out fucking junkie lives inside. We’re going to try and sell him the coke. I’m not exactly looking forward to it. But I think, Fuck it, if a twathead like Fez can make a deal so can I. I can be fucking scary too. I can be the big cock in the room, as the incident at Ash’s proved. I light up a joint and we pass it about.
Kyle taps out a code on the door, but it swings open, already unlocked.
“OI!” he shouts. “Anyone in?”
We hear a moan in the back and kick our way through bits of old cardboard boxes and newspaper to a dingy living room. The whole place reeks of piss. We hear coughing coming from the stairs, and a lanky guy, with limp brown hair, wearing a vest and gray cord trousers, practically falls into the room with us. He looks familiar but I can’t place from where. We move closer in the dingy light. This is when I notice his veins. They stick out on his pale yellow skin like someone has drawn them in blue Biro down his arms. There is a massive bruise on the inside of each elbow, golden brown underneath, with a fresh blue-purple ring in the center. Worse than these fresh track marks are scars, where his skin makes tiny whorls, like burst blisters in a row on his forearm. The veins protrude, so these little marks are thrust at us. He stares at us, confused, zombified. He looks sweaty, which is probably the most trivial thing I could note right now.
We all look to Kyle, who has gone suddenly quiet. Fucking hell. Wimp. I shake my head, push past him and walk forward decisively.
“We have some coke to sell,” I say. “You want in?”
The zombie looks at us. “How much you got?”
I shrug, and because in reality I have no idea I simply pull the package out of Kyle’s hands and show him. “That much.”
The zombie leans fo
rward like an inquisitive bird, his eyes lighting up. I’m reminded of kids on their birthdays. “That’s a lot.” He looks back at us. We exchange glances and wait for something a little more concrete. “I think I’ll have to ask Mark.” He turns around unsteadily and, holding the banister, stumbles back up the stairs. We hear a muted conversation.
Danny looks at me incredulously and mouths, “Mark? Ooh, how posh!”
“Come on up!” A deeper voice, not the zombie’s, shouts to us from above. We climb the stairs. The stairwell is tiny and we have to go one by one. No one wants to go first, so I do. At the top of the stairs there are three doors. A green light emanates from one of them.
I retch as soon as I’m through the door. The room reeks of BO and piss. A skinny blond girl, with the same lank hair as Zombie, who I swear to God cannot be older than thirteen, lies naked, except for a pair of dirty gray knickers and square black sunglasses, on a large beanbag. She has abscesses all over her body, and her nose is bleeding. An older guy steps off of her and zips up his fly. This is Mark.
“How do, lads?” He pulls on a T-shirt that says “Monkey See Monkey Do” in yellow letters on blue. He looks about twenty-nine and in slightly better shape than the others. Still, he doesn’t have any meat on his bones. His face is ratty, his nose pointy and eyes dark and hooded. He looks like Josh Hartnett on smack. To be fair, he’s weirdly attractive.
He grins. “Heard you’ve got something for me?”
I hear Danny whisper behind me, “Just do it and let’s get out.” So I watch my hand pull the packet out of my jacket. Mark darts in towards me and takes it instantly.
“Who mashed it up?” He holds it up to the light.
“I don’t know.” I frown, trying not to show on my face that I don’t know what “mashed it up” means. “Fezzer?”
“Fez? He’s a dick.” Mark chuckles darkly. I get the feeling we could be friends if it weren’t for the fact that Mark’s supposed to be the most fucked-up guy this side of Sandford. “It doesn’t look quality.” He tosses it back to us. “I’ll give you seven fifty.”
“Bollocks!” Luckily Kyle pipes up. “I cut it myself. It’s good shit. There’s eight eight balls there. Twelve hundred quid for the lot.”
“What the fuck am I going to do with this much coke, ay?” Mark suddenly gets aggressive. “I hope you little shits aren’t wasting my time.”
“Don’t call me a little shit,” says Dildo, slowly and hesitantly. He stands a foot above Mark.
“All right, mate.” Mark grins, suddenly overly friendly again. “Just a question, did you know you can get life for dealing?”
“No you can’t,” says Kyle. “You can get fourteen years but not life.”
“Erm, no.” Mark laughs, and then his face drops. “You can get life.” We are suddenly all nervous. We look at each other. Mark bursts out with what I can only describe as a guffaw. “Didn’t you know that? Fucking hell!” He makes a noise like he’s choking, wheezing, having an asthma attack or something, and I’m in half a mind to make him sit down and put his head in between his legs, but then the wheezing slows and he stand upright and pats his chest. “I’ll tell you what . . .”
The blond girl spits up behind him. Seriously. It happened. This occurs on my periphery as my pupils are rooted to Mark, this oddly charismatic bundle of energy in the middle of the room.
“I’ll tell you what. I’ll take three-quarters of it then, for nine hundred pound, all right?” Everyone looks at me. Kyle shrugs.
“All right,” I say quietly.
“All right!” Mark jovially scoops the coke back from me and weighs it on some scales, overlooked by Kyle and myself. He gives us the leftovers in the bag and grins at us. “See? I’ve more than halved your troubles. Aren’t we mates now?”
Zombie stands up in the background and gets a beer out of a small Coca-Cola fridge. I knew not to trust Coca-Cola. He leans against Mark, who puts his arm ’round poor Zombie, licks a finger and sticks it in the coke. He smiles widely. “I like it.”
We turn to go. “Thanks, Mark,” I say.
As I get to the door—first in, last to leave—I feel a rough hand on my shoulder.
“Hey,” Mark’s big dark pupils ask me innocently, almost pleading with me. “Aren’t we mates now, yeah?”
We hold eyes for a moment. I try to work out whether he’s serious. He looks almost concerned. Poor bastard. He’s as fucked as Fez and maybe more. I wonder if the real Mark is just a shadow to him now, someone that used to exist before he bought his emotions off some scummy dealer. I pat him on the arm.
“Yeah, Mark, we’re mates.” I nod sincerely.
As I follow Dildo’s silhouetted frame out the front door I finally realize where I know Zombie from: he was two years above me in school, the blond girl on the beanbag his younger sister.
HOW NOT TO CLIMAX
We’re suddenly all fucked. Not literally (I wish) but we’re fucked as in all the energy goes out of us. I realize that in Mark’s place I was still as a rock but now, outside in the cold and the dark, my shoulders are going like a pneumatic drill (i.e., shaking violently). We’re walking away from the house and it seems we all decide at the same time to start laughing.
“FUCK!” shouts Danny. “That was FUCKING ridiculous! Did you see that slapper?”
“She was OFF her FU-cking tits, mate, and what the fuck was with Mark? What kind of name is fuckin’ MARK for a dealer?” Kyle snorts.
Dildo joins in to be companionable. “The guy we saw first looked like something out of Shaun of the Dead.”
Kyle passes round the bag and we all wet our fingers, dip them in, and lick up the blow like sherbet. I just laugh along, really loudly. We all do, and we don’t stop. None of us want to stop.
We end up at Fez’s, whether by accident or design I’ll never know, and Kyle busts into Fez’s bedroom, interrupting him having another go at Hannah, and throws the cash down. He is followed closely by Danny, who holds the bag.
“There you go, we got your nine hundred, and the packet’s worth another three. You’ve made a hundred. Job done.”
Danny nods in agreement, meaning “That’s your lot, Fez.”
“Two hundred!” I yell from the landing.
“Sorry—two hundred. Flick, come in, you tossbag,” says Kyle’s voice. I enter. Fez looks totally out of it. Kyle is saying, “Look, I can do some other deals for you. How about we take it to Sandford—”
“Nah.” Fez waves at him, half-conscious. “No fucking way, police are all over it. That’s good.” He nods to the blow. “I’ll do that, and take the money. I’m thinking of lending Hannah out for cash anyway.”
Hannah hits him and laughs. She sounds like Janice from Friends and we all, including Fez, visibly recoil.
“But, but I can do more!” Kyle looks put out. His days as a movie-star-cum-coke-dealer cut short before they have truly begun. Me and Danny roll our eyes at each other. Fez does the same to himself.
“Enough. Me and Hannah’ll try the first line, why don’t you guys make yourself comfortable downstairs and I’ll chuck you down the bag when we’re done?”
Well, well. We’ve made it into the Fez inner circle. Danny and I are now raising eyebrows at each other.
“All right then,” Danny says, and we turn for the door while Kyle stands dejected in the middle of the room. “Come on, Kyle. I think I saw a PlayStation in the living room, you can deal to hos and black guys on Grand Theft Auto.”
I snort and we leap the stairs downwards.
PART V
* * *
IN FOR A PENNY
“FUCKING NOTHING HAPPENS AROUND HERE.”
It’s an hour later and the five of us are sitting about feeling pissed off round Fez’s, still waiting for him and Hannah to finish the “first go,” when Kyle lets out a frustrated shout and slams his open palm into the banister.
We all look up at him from our various slouched positions and I murmur, “That’s very insightful of you, Kyle.”
/> “Fucking nothing. Fucking nothing ever happens.” Kyle throws his cigarette out the open door and gestures to us with a shrug of his shoulder. We head up the stairs to Fez’s room, his hallowed space in this three-bed semi that he shares with Tylo, another dealer, and a blond university graduate called Lara, who left for Leeds five years ago, came back with a degree in English and music and has done nothing since but get stoned, work at Morrisons and talk about her band, which none of us have ever heard play. Rock on, Lara.
Kyle walks into Fez’s room first, banging the door open. It promptly falls off the hinges. “What the fuck is this? We’ve been waiting an hour!”
“Hey!” Fez stands up angrily. Hannah is sprawled on the bed, sniffing and wiping her nostrils. Fez stares at us, stoned, pissed, coked out of his mind. “Hey,” he says again. Then he neatly passes out, falling back onto the bed.
Kyle takes the bag of blow off a pile of underwear by the foot of the bed. He looks at me. I look at myself in the mirror. I’ve been smoking steadily for an hour and am perhaps more stoned now than I’ve ever been. Kyle shakes the little clear plastic bag at me. I giggle, shrug, and he saunters up to me, all happy, and lands a smacker on my cheek. Ah well. In for a penny, in for a pound.
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