chapter 8. The last survivor
I long ago learned that what Lou Reed had sung, ten years before I would come to understand as a pearl of wisdom, as accurate and succinct now as it had been in 1967 where his band, a collective of misfits, arranged together like a collage, a piece of art by Andy Warhol spearheading a counter culture to the counter culture, the Velvet Underground, when waiting for your man you always have to wait. I’d rung her (here my man was a woman) half an hour ago and spoken to her where, impatiently she’d informed me it would be ten minutes. I knew that this meant at least twenty minutes. She told me she’d be out as soon as she was reloaded. This meant she had to pop upstairs to the flat above where her man lived. This was a secret that every punter who scored there knew. I pictured her, back home, returning from her short journey with the goods and perhaps some hanger on in tow as she boiled up the cocaine and sodium bicarbonate in a soot stained desert spoon. Is there a junky musician who hasn’t thought of naming their new album The Dark side of the Spoon? Surely some fashionable dandy, a Pete Doherty or Kurt Cobain had used such an obvious yet beautifully simple album title.
Sorting me out would come as a low priority until she’d had her pipe. Crack is prioritised before everything else for a crackhead. A rock star.
Quite why I’d fallen back in to my addiction that I thought I had long left behind I couldn’t tell you. Following the long journey home after our assembly of witches, Druids, Shamen and the messiah had done the dirty on the super rich I’d made my way back to England. I was the sole survivor. No one could have survived the explosion. It just wasn’t possible. A crazed ex policeman had ultimately proved pivotal to our success in taking out Rupert Bunsens Noah project. Had it been worth it? The loss of so many beautiful people. But I couldn’t think about it now. People I’d loved dearly. Stop! I crumbled each time I thought about it.
Parked up always looks bait and I’ve never understood why drug dealers leave their punters waiting. It looks bad. It brings it on top. I tried to look nonchalant. At ease with myself. A guy on a tea break who never felt one of the boys and chose instead to savour their fifteen minutes of freedom alone, in their car.
The steady flow of traffic stopped for a couple of minutes and piercing the silence it left came the bark of a crow. ‘Car, car, car!’ It shouted. Even the urban wildlife was illuminating any surveiling copper that might be studying the coming and going of bedraggled, unemployed, chemically dependant individuals who made their way to her flat, to check out the dodgy looking bloke sat doing nothing in his car. Drug dealing can be invisible to the untrained eye. The street can appear normal. Junkies have the super power of the chameleon. Blending in to the background wallpaper as they waited on benches and bus stops. Or sat like myself, in cars waiting.
“Alright if I jump in? Won’t look so bad if any filth are on the prowl.” Simon, a long term smack head I’d known for years interrupted my anxiety zen. I hadn’t seen him coming. Perhaps he’d been in the bushes that grew alongside the entrance to the stairwell. Biding his time. Much like myself.
“Eh yup Si! Get in. How’s life treating you?”
“Shite. Same old. Didn’t know you were still doing it Skree. I thought you packed it in long ago.”
“You and me both! I had a long break from it. Went travelling with Lipton to get some distance.”
“Lipton! How’s he doing? Owes me 20 quid he does.”
“I think he died. We were down the Caribbean islands and there was a bit of trouble. Pretty sure he’s dead anyway. Long story but I think he drowned.”
“Fuck! Sorry to hear that. Did he give you the 20 quid for me by any chance. Before he croaked, obviously.”
I didn’t answer him. I’d just told him that I’d lost my best mate and all he’s worried about is a 20 spot he’d lost. This is the mentality of the crack and smack head. A complex game of burning people to see if they’ll react and if they don’t they quickly go down the food chain. Irvine Welsh once said that all junkies had the same personality. This is completely untrue and perhaps illustrative of the relatively small period of time and the singularity of location that he took part in the game. I’ve met people from the whole spread of society from the homeless beggar smackhead through tradesmen through it workers through architects, lawyers and into the class that doesn’t need to work being born in to families that hobnob with the most wealthy and royalty. And within each of those layers I’ve met people of incredible intellect, amazing creativity who have fascinating minds. The match of any who choose the straight path. It really is no measure of a man or woman. Granted most of low income are continually on the hustle and solely focused on making the money to score. But once they’ve scored and settled often reveal amazing character. There is a common need there. And the fact it is a shared affliction can mean that an alliance where two work in tandem in the understanding that it is a temporary arrangement that could dissolve if a better situation becomes possible that one can’t bring a second. There is also a lot of lying and bullshit. This charade takes place in all of society where equal dirt is ubiquitous. I was with a middle class girl with money for a while. I moved down south to renovate a derelict cottage I assumed that we would be living in. She never came, sold the cottage the renovation of which had taken a year. Of course I never thought of pay. A years labour was what I was able to contribute. Then she moved to a small town in Somerset and I followed her down there. I developed freinds of my own class and she had a circle of which I believed I was a part. And then she dumped me. Ok, I had developed a heroin habit and needed £30 a day which was nothing, I was successful in my business at the time. And also about an hour a day when I was out scoring. Following our split I assumed that the freinds I had in our circle would still be my friends. But no. She turned the entire group against me. Spread lies about me. She was still visiting me and we discussed everything; all aspects of her life. But she had told them that I was a bad person who was stalking her. And bar a couple they all turned away from me and never asked me my side of the story. I have never seen a junky lie that was so destructive of a persons world. So get this right. Junkies might lie to get a hit but it’s over then. It was just business. There was no intent to destroy a persons friendship circle, just some bullshit to get a tenner. It isn’t personal. It isn’t done to destroy a person’s world and claim all the players as their own.
I have never gotten over losing my second wife. Only once in any humans life do they fall in love to the extent that they open their souls completely and in the movies it is reciprocated and they live happily ever after. In my case I exposed myself completely and fully expected that we would be together for life. Take this and the emotional and spiritual pure exposure that you experience in heroin withdrawal once the bits that films show you, climbing the walls and wailing in pain. Heroin stops the emotional suffering. Morphine is used for pain but it doesn’t exactly stop pain, it lessens the emotional relationship you have to pain. It nullifies all emotional responses that, of course combine with our reason and learning. Once this is taken away the ex junky finds himself with the pure emotional rawness felt by babies. Hence the suffering I was delivered by my ex wife filled me during this kind of emotional rawness. The pain and disillusionment from that is a horrible twisted mass I am past yet I haven’t overcome it. Merely thinking about it like this hurts to the point of psychosis if I linger. So I can only try refocus. I am sat in my car waiting to score with Simon at my side.
“Are you ok Skree. You just drifted off and began crying! Have I done something wrong? Lipton can keep that 20. I know you’re close and it was ages ago.”
“No Si. I’m sorry. I just got thinking about a life I once had. Me and my ex wife had a house just up the hill from here. You might remember. I think I remember you scouting through the gardens, looking for stuff to chore. I was fitting a front door if made, remember?”
“Aye I do. I’d only ever seen you scoring over in Radstock, at Woofy’s, and Rosie’s ! Both dead now.”
So looked down thinking of the lost freinds they had in common.
“I remember that bird you had too. Fit as fuck she was. Straight gower though, wasn’t she?”
“She was mate. Both. In the end she couldn’t do with me having this hobby.”
“Which hobby is that Skree?” Si asked looking genuinely confused.
“The gear….and the white. She’d have her truck load of coke and pills and we’d come back after we’d been raving and fuck for hours. You can’t have both though. The straight bird and the gear”
“You’re not wrong. I got my Mrs in to it and kept her that way.”
Having pretty much exhausted all we had in common we fell in to a silence, waiting for our connect to turn up.
I shouldn’t have got back into this. A habit I felt sure I’d beaten. But you never truly beat it. Only hold it at bay. Once you’ve had a heroin habit your biology is changed. And it only takes a couple or three days, just soothing yourself, and it’s got you again. After all the gang we’d put together did? I doubt I’ll ever feel that camaraderie again.
Lanya had walked up and got into the back of my car without me even noticing her approach. “Drive” she told me and I complied.
“It’s been crawling with filth down here since that young twat died.”
I’d not heard this bit of gossip so I asked who it was and how.
“Johnno, you know that young gypsy lad. Hangs around with big Donald.”
Surely not the teenager he’d had in his car no more than a week ago.
“It’s this gear. Fentanyl in there. I told him to smoke it and not use a pin but him and Donald cooked up a hit. In my fucking stairwell! Anyone could have seen them. They under that bit where the stairs hit the ground floor and there’s a sort of triangular space. I’d served them but I told them to get out. I didn’t want them in my flat in the first place. Donald said he had his hit and went unconscious for half an hour or so. When he came round he found Johnno dead! The cunt only goes and leaves him there. Makes an anonymous call for an ambulance and fucks off! Didn’t think to tell me what had happened. Said he didn’t think they’d connect him to me. He’s only three floors down and he’s got the audacity to have a hit on my stairs. Anyway there’s been coppers everywhere. Knocked on my door. Asking if I’d heard or seen anything. The gypos have put a hit out on whoever tells him where he was buying drugs. Five grand!”
That clearly wasn’t true as Big Donald would have been first in line to dob her in. He’d have done it for 500. A fiver probably. Poor kid though I thought. He was barely out of his teens. I understand why some people who have suffered severe trauma use heroin but the kids who grow up in these posh southern towns have such a great life that I don’t get it. I suppose it’s not that. Who knows what the kid has been through.
“Have you got anywhere you can go stay for a bit. I’d get out of town until things settle down.”
“I’ve only just got to see Rocky again. It’s only a couple of hours every fortnight but it’s something. I have to be here. Have to prove I’ve got a clean flat he can come stay in.”
She’d had her young boy taken off her by social services. She’d already lost a girl she’d had in her teens and now was the other side of the country and she had no interest in getting to know her junky mother who she couldn’t even remember the name of.
“Aye. You don’t want to fuck that up now you’re finally allowed to see him again.”
It begged the question, if her priority was being able to see her son again why was she selling crack and smack to scumbags like Si and Donald…..and me.
Lanya wasn’t a bad kid really. We’d all fallen into it for our own reasons. I honestly felt for her. Must hurt having a child taken off you, for a second time. As smackheads went she was fairly together. Selling it to her small circle of punters meant she was seldom caught short. She made enough to buy decent clothes. Nike trainers, adidas tracky bottoms. Black with the three white stripes. The most popular at the moment. Of course she could be as shifty as any of them. And her apparent complete lack of remorse for the young Johnno who had drifted off to a bliss he never returned from. I couldn’t help but think that the heroin overdose deaths were the easiest of deaths possible. I’d brought a couple of friends back from going over. They never thanked you for saving their lives. Only moaned at how you’d spoiled their hit. Fortunately fentanyl and nitazines were very rare despite the scare posters that were always on the wall of the drug services. The trouble with these new, synthetic opioids was that being so powerful only experts were able to bash it well. All drugs are cut before they get to the likes of us and a crystal the size of a single grain of sugar was enough to kill. Lanya had been given a batch and a couple of people had gone over though this was the first death.
“My phone hasn’t stopped ringing since the kiddie died.”
It was a fact there was no better advert for your product than someone dying from it. Every junky in town would be ringing her.
“You’re lucky you caught me. I’m going to be off for a while. Until the coppers are done round here.”
It was the least painful death possible. Just floating off into a cloud of bliss. I thought of how I had seen Christ blown into a number of pieces. Surely no one could have survived what that mad copper had fired at them. I was deeply tripped out at the time the mass of conger eels had entered the hole the coppers torpedos had created. I saw the boat pulled under by the riptide the demon had created in its hunger for the wealthy bastards inside Bunsens Noah spaceship. The team we had put together were pulled under too and I couldn’t see how anyone could survive that. I’d found myself clinging to a pallet that had been thrown my way from the deck of the stolen boat. In my state I was able only to hold tight and hope that the current would take me towards land. Fortune favoured me and as the chaos unfolded I somehow found myself close to the shore. What followed was one of the most cruel twists of fate that life has ever presented to me. A figure was floundering in the water. Clearly unable to swim the man was flapping his arms and was losing his battle to survive. Rupert Bunsen was about to drown before my eyes. I had seen the people who I loved more than any others on the planet die in the whirlpool created by the eel demon. We had set out to stop the hideous project and certainly the witches and Druids wanted to kill the rich elite who were ready to leave the planet for good. Now the man whose dream it was now despite his fight was sinking. Instinct took over. Laying flat on the palet as it bobbed and rocked I reached down deep and I grabbed the super rich architect of darkness hand and pulled him up. Conscious that if he guessed that I had been amongst the pagan band who collectively had succeeded in ruining his life’s work I put on the most plummy accent I could summon and through the psychedelic shamanic powers I pulled it off. Once safely on sure I managed to pass myself off as a public school boy. I knew Bunsen was an old Etonion so I spun the story that I’d gone to Shrewsbury, a lesser rung of the tower but still a respectable past. I explained that I was one of his clients and due to the funds I’d amassed in the IT boom had been rich enough and more to the point within the most secret of social circles that had been privy to the Noah project. I’d lost my fellow astronauts in the chaos. There were very few who did survive. Most were already aboard and ready for takeoff and only the last few who were still making their way down had come out of the wreckage alive. I felt a sense of guilt in losing those I loved and rescued this most evil of men. Perhaps I should have let him drown. But our mission had never been to kill the rich passengers, only to destroy the project. Of course I knew we would be causing the deaths of many people and I recall the Druids relishing the thought but for me and Lipton, the two shamans whose plan it had been, their deaths were a side effect of the destruction of the spacecraft.
In the days that followed I found myself a guest on Bunsens island. His gratitude in my saving his life found him offering me the run of the place for as long as it would take me to recover and the flight back to England aboard one of his private jets.
For the first few days there I just slept and ate when meals were served. I did not see all of the survivors though I gathered there were over a dozen, perhaps as many as twenty. The mood was dark. I kept my secret well hidden in the full knowledge that were I to be identified as one of the ‘terrorists’ who had ‘murdered’ the friends and associates of the elite super rich my death would have been certain and not quick. A dictator from an African country I had never heard of was unable to contain his anger and four of Bunsens security team who were assembled from ex SAS and similar backgrounds. He was taken away forcibly and no one spoke of him again. Any further complaints were kept quiet. It was not, after all Bunsens fault though I could sense that there would be no refunds.
Most kept to their rooms and only at mealtimes did they gather as a group. They really were a bunch of cunts. A Russian oligarch sat next to an aging rock star. I heard them talk about what had happened but no one really knew what had happened other than some crazy bunch of nutters had come close on a boat followed by another boat piloted by a single highly armed lunatic. In his attempt to torpedo the first boat he had blown a hole into the Noah craft. What took place next no one could describe. As if forming a single creature a vast mass of conger eels powered through the hole consuming the human flesh within. It was as though the eels formed a single slimy mass creature that had a single mind or no mind and just the hunger for flesh.
Weirdest for me was that Bunsen was forming a fondness for me having been the person who saved his life. Despite my reticence he would not leave me alone. So I went to my room. I had lost a girl who I was falling in love with, her friends, the Druid lads from Clun who had become like brothers to us. And Lipton. My best friend. My fellow shaman. We all knew that we might not, further, we were unlikely to survive. And during these quiet moments, despite their loss, I thought “Fucking yes! We fucking did it.” We had pulled off the near impossible. Luck had played a hand. But was it luck? Through a mystical anomaly me and Lipton had been blessed briefly and become the archangels of Poseidon. The gods of old were surely there. Tweaking reality to allow our mission to succeed. And there I lay. Caught up in the ambivalence. Morning my lost friends yet in the full knowledge not one of them would have had it any other way. If I was the only survivor then I must engage with the glory, for all of them. Each had played their part.
When I was sufficiently recovered to be able to travel I bid my goodbye to Bunsen. He implored me to remain in touch. I bid the cunt farewell and boarded his private jet and was soon back on English soil. I had nowhere to go so after hot wiring a van in Surrey where Bunsens plane had landed I returned to Somerset. Here I found the only people I knew were the addicts and street people and was soon back on heroin. I could blame my relapse on the grief for the people I had lost. But deep down, if I’m honest I just like drugs.
“Can you drop me by the train station?”
Si brought me back to earth.
“Course mate. What about you Lanya? Where do you want to be?”
She looked around and for a moment I thought she was going to ask to come with me but she directed me round a loop of roads and I dropped her off close to where I’d picked her up.
“Take care of yourself.”
She said nothing, just smiled and wandered off with her phone ringing. Another punter after the strong gear that had done for young Johnno.
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