by Jon McGregor
Fucking, every day like this, trying to keep our heads above the water. Or more like trying to keep our heads above like boiling tar or something and some cunt always trying to push us back under the
Last time he’d seen Laura had been in her room at the hostel. Tiny room with a single bed and not much else. Two of them lying there on the bed and it was warm and dry at least. First time he’d managed to score for a few days, and she’d offered to sneak him in the room in return for a share. Seemed like a good deal to him. Got in through the fire escape and she said she weren’t bothered about trouble off the staff because she was leaving soon anyway. They’d cooked up as soon as they got in the room, and done each other, and there weren’t many things better than when she dug it in him. She was all frantic and fidgety most of the time, like both of them were, but when she got that needle in her hands and found a vein for him she went all still and slow and tender. Looked him in the eye as it went in. Was something else. A little piece of something like he wanted. Good gear as well, better gear than they’d had for a while, they tested out a small hit first and didn’t need to go back for no more. Near enough gouching and felt good like back in the days. She asked him where he’d got it from, told him to make sure he told the others how good it was. Tell them to be careful and that. Lying there smoking, and each time he rolled one for her she said Cheers mate you’re a diamond you’re a star. Turned out she said that to everyone not just him. So that was something else that didn’t mean nothing. To go with the rest. Her keyworker had got her the room because she was going for a rehab place in the New Year, it was all lined up and her keyworker had said she should try and keep away from the usual crowd over Christmas. You’ve been so strong to get this far, he’d told her. That was the way they talked. You don’t want people talking you out of it, he’d said. She hadn’t told no one but she was telling him now, on that narrow bed. That was something. They were lying close together but it weren’t like that, he’d thought it would be for a while but it weren’t. None of them had the energy or the time for that, not when it took all day just getting the money together to score. Lying on the bed and she said Danny believe, I’m going through with it this time. Which he’d heard before. I’ve had enough, she said, I never wanted to get into it this far, I want to be clean again, you get me, I’m going to be clean. Turning to him with her hazel-green eyes too close to focus, her voice all warm and blurred and her saying Danny you do believe me don’t you? And for a minute he’d seen the two of them somewhere else, somewhere clean, a brief and lonely vision of them lying clean and healthy in a big wide bed of their own, a car in the driveway, two cars in the driveway, jobs to go to, his contact lenses in a little case on the bedside table, the smell of coffee and bread drifting in from a spotless kitchen at the other end of the house and the two of them clean and naked in bed beneath soft white sheets, without fear or shame, without scars or sores or bruises or scabs, nothing to hide as they woke to the open window of a clear new day, the breeze blowing in from outside and carrying with it the smell of cut grass, the postman whistling, the warmth of spring and all that bollocks. She looked at him, her mouth scabbed and cracked, her bitten fingers pulling at her greasy hair, and she went Danny believe this time it’ll be different, this time I’m going through with it all. Which made him laugh because she’d asked him to believe that before, just about everyone he knew had asked him to believe that before. Spent his life being asked to believe things that turned out to be bollocks. I’m going clean. I’ll pay you back next week. This is only a temporary situation. You’ll see your parents soon. If you keep your mouth shut and keep still this won’t
Went to the new winter shelter like Maureen had said but weren’t no one there. Sign on the door saying it was only open after seven and even then you had to be referred. Didn’t seem like anyone he was after was likely to have got themselves referred. Went round the back of the old timber warehouse near the shelter, he’d slept there a few times but it kept getting burnt out and they kept fencing it off. Weren’t even worth the trouble of sleeping there, it got too busy and there were too many people you wouldn’t want to turn your back on let alone sleep in the same place. Always fights and worse going off in there. Saw Ant there one time taking a bloke down with a half-brick in the face. Kept hold of it for about an hour afterwards and kept saying the miserable twat should be happy I couldn’t find a whole one but, the kid shouldn’t have opened his
About a million things in his life he regretted, but laughing at Laura like that was top of the list. If he could take it back. If he could go back and tell her. If he could say Laura, mate, of course I believe you. Things will be different this time. Which was bollocks but it wouldn’t have been hard to say it instead of laughing, instead of still laughing even while she was pushing him off the bed, sitting up and throwing her fag at him, pushing him and punching him and telling him to Fuck off fuck off fuck off get the fuck out of it. They’d still be lying there now if he hadn’t laughed. Would they. But what. So what. If ifs and buts were ten-pound bags he’d have gone way over by now. And he’d laugh all over again because the way she said it, the way she went This time it’s going to be different with her eyes all wide and nodding like she was a little girl telling him about Father Christmas, it would still make him laugh. It was funny. It was too funny. Five years he’d been using and just about every user he knew came out with it eventually. Fuck this Danny I’ve had enough I’m going to get clean I’m going
Came out on Barford Street and back to the junction where he’d seen Sammy before, where he always saw Sammy and he was still there now. Sat on his bench working his way through those cans. Sammy mate, I’m looking for Laura, I’m looking for Mike. Have you seen them? Sammy? Sammy looking up at him slower than that woman at the benefits office. His eyes all screwed up, like the failing light was giving him pain. Looked like he’d forgotten the question by the time he’d looked up so Danny asked him again. Still had to wait for the answer and it came out one word at a time.
Notseen
no cunt
for
Two of them laid out together on the narrow bed but it weren’t never going to be like that. And where was she now. What would she say when he told her. Would she
Mike would know what to do. Danny thought. Mike would be at the Parkside squats and would know what was going on, what had happened, what to do. Might even have some gear or know where to get some where to
Didn’t even need to be like that anyway sometimes, with Laura. Sometimes just, it was like being mates, like they were ten or fifteen years younger and still bunking off school and having a laugh. Like that time he needed to get Einstein some decent food and they planned it all out like a bank job, left her outside Tesco’s as a four-legged lookout, three-and-a-half-legged, but then once they were in there they didn’t do nothing clever just grabbed an armful of tins each and ran. Got halfway up the street, laughing so much they kept dropping the tins, and realised she was still sitting all to attention outside the shop. Fucking, ears pricked up and everything. Had to sneak back and call her and it still took her a while to come, and Laura going She’s not the smartest fucking dog on the block is she, she’s not exactly a genius or nothing. Things like that and it kept him going but it didn’t mean
Fucking Sammy. Sitting there all day like the lord of the manor, like a watchman or something, and no one ever gets a straight answer out of his mouth. Never goes in the day centres or nothing, never see him in the benefits office or none of that. Must have like a keyworker sorting it all out. Lives in one of those supported-housing places on The Green, one of the ones for the old blokes who the keyworkers call what is it entrenched and everyone else calls fucked. Old blokes who’ve been drinking for years and can’t hardly remember why they started. They’ve probably got stories and that. But we aint got the time for
Rattles trying to catch up all the time, and every day gets harder to keep ahead. Like that time the police had some big day of action with all cameras and batteri
ng rams and whatever and for about two and a half days no one could score a thing. Ended up riding it out in some old caravan he’d broken into down the allotments, laid out on this mildew-rotten mattress that might as well have been a bed of fucking nails and needles and pins. Couldn’t get no rest, couldn’t get comfortable or keep still for the cramps and the pains shooting through him, the sickness and the diarrhoea pouring out long after it felt like there was nothing left. Scoring the new gear after that though, that was something, that was a lifesaver, like a, fucking, a parachute opening or
When it’s been on you once you don’t want it on you again. People talk about detox and if that’s what it means they can go to fuck. Hear that rattle dragging along behind you all day when you’re blagging and scoring and cooking and fixing and it’s all you can do to keep it
Funny thing with Laura was she always made out like she weren’t even an addict at all. That was a laugh. That was one of the first things they’d hit her with if she really did go to the rehab, before they even let her upstairs to unpack her bags and that they’d be giving it all There’s no room for denial here, Laura, the first stage is acceptance, Laura. She always made out that she’d got in to gear by mistake and now she was only taking enough to keep her going, just like to hold her while she sorted one or two other things out. While she sorted her entire life out. Just enough to keep me well, she said. Talking about applying for college courses and access courses and all that, talking about getting some housing sorted out but maybe some housing in another town because maybe she needed to move away from all the influences here. Just enough to maintain me while I sort
But still if he hadn’t laughed, she wouldn’t. Don’t bother talking to me again, she said. Don’t even come looking for me. I don’t want to see your four-eyed face again. I need people around me who can support my fucking choices, she said, and that was mostly something her keyworker had said and she was just saying it again like a parrot. So he’d called her a bitch and a slag, he’d taken his works and his gear and he’d told her to fuck herself, and he’d slammed the door so hard that more plaster came off the wall around the frame. It was automatic. It was part of the script. Never occurred to him to
Or if we lived in a hot country we would more or less just roll him in sheets of sackcloth and put him on a funeral pyre made of olive branches and packing crates and old car tyres and fold him up in the middle of it, all of us stood around saying like prayers and that while we watch the flames lick and tease around his body and the sackcloth glowing and sparking as it fell from off him, raking up the embers and stacking them over his cooking flesh to make sure he burnt completely, fucking praying and singing as his skull opened out with a soft pop and his bones cracked and splintered into ash. Instead of this. Instead of hiding him away in a van and sneaking him out through the deserted
Through the darkened windows we watch him. Danny. Desperate now in a way only we can know, his ragged trousers catching under his feet and his blankets sodden, Einstein leaping and barking as she climbs through a gap in the fence which straggles around the emptied streets and maisonettes of the old Parkside Estate, the last of the tenants cleared out two years ago now and the demolition still hardly begun. Unless you count what the kids have done already, the windows all smashed, the doors torn from their hinges and sent sprawling across the streets and yards. Bathtubs and wash-basins thrown from fourth-floor landings and sinking into shrubberies grown wild on human manure. Black scorch-marks like smudged mascara around the gaping windows of burnt-out flats. And a great red X painted on the front of every flat to tell the contractors that the services have been safely cut off, and to tell the squatters and junkies and dealers that they can settle in for a while without fear of being disturbed. The van moves off along the road again, down into the underpass beneath the railway sidings, and we lose sight of Danny as he steps into a dark abandoned stairwell with Einstein still chasing at his
Mike weren’t even there though. Got up to the flat where the two of them had been staying for near enough a month but he weren’t there. Would have been crashed out on a pile of blankets or standing at the window or even cooking up but he weren’t there. Weren’t no one there. Weren’t nowhere else Mike could be he should have been there if he weren’t at Robert’s, if he weren’t at the centre, but he’d gone off somewhere it looked like so that’s one more cunt letting him
Stairs all slipping with ice and piss and the handrails ripped out from the walls and the sickness coming on bad. Voices coming out of darkened doorways, mutters and murmurs and moans. Shouts from another block across the courtyard, splintering wood and a silenced scream. Dogs barking and being told to stop and barking some more and the flickering orange light of flames against the dark evening sky and the sparks flying upwards into the clouds
Thought Mike had maybe gone in a different flat for some reason but he tried a few and he weren’t in there and the cramping and the aching and the rattling was so bad that he couldn’t hardly stand up straight couldn’t hardly walk and nothing now he needed he
Mike had never ripped him off on a deal except one time or two times and that was different that didn’t
Kids coming up the stairwell shouting and breaking bottles so he went back the other
He’d had a reason those times, Mike had, he’d told him, his voice low and fierce in his ear going I’m sorry and that la but I thought you weren’t coming back. The kid Benny boy said you’d gone off with Laura an that so I thought you were sorted, an I heard these blokes you know those blokes I told you about what I saw down the centre them ones what have been after me since that kid told them I grassed them up, I heard they was on their way round to tax us so I thought safest bet was to use all the gear so they couldn’t take it off us, plus that way if I did get a kicking it wouldn’t hardly hurt anyhow you know what I mean la. So that’s all it was I wasn’t trying to shaft you, you know that la, you know I wouldn’t do that, it was just a pure out-of-necessity thing you know what I’m saying it was just, only it turned out Benny boy was wrong and them blokes didn’t turn up neither, but still like it was I had the best of intentions it was out of necessity it was the mother of what is it like you know what I’m saying la
Been sleeping in any old place before they found the Parkside flats. Doorways and alleyways. A tunnel down by the incinerator where these huge heating pipes go under the shopping centre, it was warm enough in there but there were too many rats, big fierce cunts that even Einstein was smart enough to leave alone, so they gave up staying in there. Tried sleeping in the toilets sometimes but they mostly got kicked out. Sleep weren’t even the right word for it. One last fix to get their heads down and then it was like no more than a blink before they were awake again and cold and sick and crawling around looking for the next score. Might have been a few hours but it never felt more than a minute. Woke in some yard one morning and found a whole bunch of dead mice about the place, frozen solid. Lucky they woke up at all that time. Some cunts don’t. Easy to get too cold and not wake up, easy to get damp and stay damp and not do any fucking thing about it, numbed out by the gear and it don’t feel no different anyway. End up frozen solid like them mice. Take a last dig and curl up and go to sleep and never fucking wake up. Some bloke looks like he’s still snoozing in the morning only he’s gone milky-blue and he’s stone cold to the touch. It happens. There’s worse ways to go. But the Parkside flats was better than that. Four walls and a roof and no one to bother them. They could even leave it and come back, there were plenty to go round and they didn’t have nothing to nick. Made a change. Made the days easier when they knew where they were going to sleep. Sometimes seemed like he’d spent half his life looking for a bed. All the running and breaking and shouting and arguing and stealing and it was all about getting somewhere warm and dry to cook up and get some rest. Somewhere safe and quiet and it weren’t never easy to find. Don’t matter how many blankets there are if it’s in the wrong place. Don’t matter if it’s cotton sheets and feather duvets when the
re’s no lock on the door and a mean bastard in the house. Don’t matter if there’s a lock when someone
Jesus but it aint much to ask
Went down the other stairwell and found a kid standing there like he was waiting for someone, like he was waiting to do business. Cap on and hood up and one trouser-leg rolled, bike leaning up against the wall. Seen him around a few times and bought off him once or twice so asked if he was selling, if he knew anyone who was selling. Kid didn’t say nothing for a minute, just looked at him. Asked him if he was a mate of Ben’s, and when Danny said yes he gave him a number to call. Said to call it from the phonebox by the Miller’s Arms and ask for Michelle. Said it was difficult at the moment, said he’d heard there’d been a few accidents and it was all a bit on top. Danny was off across the courtyard, past all the doorways marked with a red painted X, back to the gap in the fence and off up the main road towards the roundabout and the Miller’s Arms and the phonebox