Mud Pie

by Emma Lee Bole

  Chapter Twelve

  Sock Drawer

  It was gone four o’clock by the time I crept into Frank’s cold bed, under the glaring eyes of Swamp Thing. An innocent warrior, from another age. I wished I lived back then, in a mythical wholesome black and white past. Restless images revolved in my head: the dead goose, my knife sticking out of the Cake, Niall and KK trading blows, my ravaged mud pie, Tamara’s tight-lipped scowl.

  And always back to the big one. Becki with blood all down her neck. I wanted to tell her to wake up and wipe it off. I wanted to rewind twenty-four hours to safety. I wanted a sleeping tablet. Back at Tzabo’s I could have borrowed one off Stef. The crew used dexies to keep flying through the long shifts, and Temazepam to get themselves back down. I tried dexies myself, but I didn’t like the way they made my heart pound, and I stopped after I began to feel spiders crawling underneath my skin on little, scratchy feet. A mazzie would be useful now, though. At home I could have gone and stolen one of my mother’s.

  Or I could have bought one off Karl.

  It was eighteen months ago that I went home to see my mother, after a long gap away. It was a fairly pointless visit: she didn’t expect or want to see me, but I ended up going out for a drink with some neighbours and slept on the sofa overnight. In the morning, I wandered into Karl’s room looking for clean socks. I always used to borrow his when I lived at home, years ago: it drove him up the wall.

  Karl was fast asleep, curled up with his thumb by his mouth as if it had just slipped out. He was twenty-two and looked about thirteen. I opened his sock drawer and there it all was. Temazepam, diazepam, dexies, a lump of hash, some wraps of what I guessed was speed, a plastic bag of white powder. I closed the drawer, went out quietly and put my dirty socks back on.

  Two hours later I took him up a cup of tea and sat on his bed to do the sisterly bit. I’m worried about something I found in your drawer, Karl. He told me to fuck off.

  “Karl, it’s not clever,” I said.

  “Well, I’m not clever, am I?” said Karl, stretching in the bed and closing his bloodshot eyes. “Two GCSE’s? That’s going to get me a long way.”

  “Come on, Karl. You can do better than this.”

  “Like that job down the warehouse, five quid a week? Give us a break.”

  “What’s the white stuff, Karl? Is it heroin?”

  He gave me a look of contempt. “I may be stupid, but I’m not that stupid. I don’t do smack and I don’t deal smack. It’s for losers. That stuff’s ketamine.”

  I winced. “You’re taking ketamine? It’ll do your head in, Karl!”

  “Bollocks. It’s good stuff.”

  “It turns people crazy! Don’t you remember that guy in Rakeshaw Street who went schizo and cut up his girlfriend with a machete and put her head in the fridge? Blood all over the place, they said.”

  “That wasn’t K. That was angel dust.”

  “It’s all the same stuff!” I said desperately. “It’s all horse medicine, it’s designed for animals, not humans!”

  “Well, I’m just an animal, aren’t I?” he said with a scowl.

  “You will be if you keep on like this! You’ll be pissing yourself, with a head full of monsters!”

  “Got plenty of monsters in my head already,” said Karl, glaring at me. “A few more won’t hurt. There’s nowt wrong with special K, and I told you, I don’t do angel dust. I’m not as stupid as you think. I don’t do class A.”

  “Yeah, sure. So you don’t do smack or angel dust.” I was getting heated. “Just speed, shit, tranx, dexies and special K? Oh well, that’s all right then.”

  “Fuck off,” said Karl.

  “Jesus, Karl, haven’t you learnt anything from her downstairs? From seeing her out of her head in a pool of sick and us living off jam sandwiches?”

  “Listen.” He sat up in bed. “Listen, Mrs Holier than thou Goody Two Shoes, who never had a smoke or a tab or a drink in her life, eh? – I bet, compared to what our old lady puts away this stuff is nothing. It’s harmless. Mostly I sell speed. What’s wrong with that? It’s just a pick-me-up for the housewives. It won’t make them fall over and puke on their shoes. And there’s nowt wrong with mazzies, or the docs wouldn’t shell ’em out to the little old ladies like fucking smarties. And shit’s good for you, everyone knows that.”

  “What about Mikey? What if Mikey finds this lot? Jesus, Karl!”

  “Mikey’s got his own gear.”

  “What?”

  “Gas. You didn’t even know that, did you? Wonderful fucking sister you are.”

  “He’s sniffing? Christ, he’s copying you, Karl!”

  Karl bounded out of bed – his hair all sticking on end, his shoulders broadened now, not tin-ribs any more, though his faded pyjama trousers were ones I remembered from years back – and shouted at me.

  “At least I tried to fucking stop Mikey! I took it off him. He’d be better off on hash than that rubbish. Much you care, you’re not even here!”

  “I’m cooking fourteen hours a day, split shifts,” I said.

  “Yeah, cooking your stupid arse off for chicken shit! Look at this, Miss Clever Clogs!” Karl flung open his wardrobe. It was full. I looked.

  “Labels,” I said.

  “Too fucking right! Labels you can’t afford! Jam sandwiches my arse!”

  “I don’t want labels.”

  “And you don’t want a car either, or nice hair, or a new nose? Yeah, right. Or your own restaurant?”

  “You don’t drive much of a car.” He had a beat-up old Fiat.

  “I’m not stupid,” said Karl angrily. “Not going to flash it around, am I?”

  “Is there a lot of money in it, then, buying mazzies off the old ladies and selling them on?”

  “Bugger off,” said Karl. “I do all right.”

  “Somebody does all right. I bet it’s not you, and it’s not the ones buying gear off you.”

  “They do all right.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “All right, look at this then!” Karl leapt furiously at the chest of drawers. Third drawer down, under a T-shirt layer. There were my old measuring spoons, a good set, stainless steel, and another plastic bag of whitish powder. Karl unravelled the top of the bag, licked a finger and poked it in, and held it out to me. “Taste.”

  “No, thanks.”

  He licked it himself. “It’s glucose. Taste.” I dipped a finger in and licked it. Sugar. I felt like a conspirator in a sweet shop.

  “Aren’t I good?” demanded Karl. “Aren’t I nice? I don’t cut with chalk or rat poison, me. I look after my customers. I’m a good guy!”

  “You’re an idiot,” I said, and he punched me in the chest.

  We hadn’t fought since I was fifteen and he was eleven and still smaller than me. He was only an inch taller than me now, but lean and strong. He can’t have been really trying, because after a minute of wrestling I got him in an armlock on the ragged bit of carpet and sat there for a while, panting, remembering his baby limbs in the bath, his toddler limbs clinging to my back, his boyhood limbs kicking footballs to me. My Karl, the thin little boy with the big eyes, the person I had loved most in all the world – the only person I had ever loved at all, apart from Dave and Charlotte.

  I loosened my grip and he twisted round and hit me again, a flat slap to the head. It didn’t hurt much. I stood up.

  “I’m going now,” I said. “And I’m taking the spoons.”

  “Yeah, fuck off,” said Karl, “back to your little job and your little life.”

  “At least I’m not hurting anybody. You can do better than this, Karl. I should turn you in.”

  “You grass on me,” he said from the mat, “and you’re dead. I’ve got friends. They’ll see to it. You crawl back to your little cockroach infested kitchen where you belong, go on, little cockroach, leave me alone.”

  “I will,” I said.

  I told Nicole first. My big sister had her own hairdressing chair by now, in a salon in Carringto
n, and a flat and a steady partner. She’d detached herself. Her flat had fleas and Jimmy spent his dole money on fags and the dogs, but in her opinion it was way better than home.

  “Karl wants to screw his life up, you let him,” she said. “Nowt to do with us. They’re all users or pushers back there. You got out. Stay out of it, Lannie.”

  “What about Karl?”

  “What about Karl? He’s a grown-up. It’s none of your business any more.”

  But it was. Karl was my business. I had made him my business when I was five and he nearly drowned in the bath while my mother was prone on the bed. I had decided there and then that I needed to look after him. He was mine. My Karl, until the age of eleven or so, when he started skipping school and twoccing with his mates and wouldn’t allow anybody near him.

  “Well, what about Mikey?” I said hopelessly.

  Nicole shook her head. “Mikey’s eighteen. He’s grown up too. He’ll learn. He’ll have to learn. Lannie, just leave it.”

  Nicole didn’t like Mikey. He hadn’t been an endearing child. Not easy to love. Easy to pity; but not to love. Not with those little blank eyes and the dribble of snot perpetually running from his snub nose down the long, glum space to his down-turned mouth. The local kids called him Monkey-boy. The teachers called him Special Needs and later on, ADHD, but I don’t think he got any special help at school apart from his daily dose of Ritalin.

  But it wasn’t Mikey that decided me. And it wasn’t entirely Karl. I think it was my mother. It was those bottles laid like mines around the house. The devastation they caused. The shrapnel.

  And now Karl had a sock drawer full of his own little mines in white wraps and plastic bags. He had turned into an urban guerrilla, going out to bomb people’s homes with them just as ours had been bombed. I wanted to scream at my mother for her dependence and stupidity and carelessness. I wanted to show her what she’d done.

  So I shopped Karl.

  And now Becki was dead meat.