This Charming Madman
Having located likeminded suicidals in
my own area, I now had no excuse not to be scoring at every opportunity. I honoured this obligation. Faith’s was a popular haunt for anyone who
needed a place to smoke. If you’d scored
at the Shepherd’s Bush end of Uxbridge Road, as so many did, it was no more
than a short stroll. Even if Faith was
out, or entertaining in the bathroom, there’d always be someone to let you in.
One night I turned up about one. Faith was in the bathroom. On hearing activity in the hallway, she poked
a gummy head round the door, but my arrival failed to excite. I was surprised at this, until I realised she
had company in there, a bloke, who obviously had what she needed, i.e. enough
crack to keep their dalliance alive for, what, half an hour? It was probably a classic crack-cock
alliance. He was crack-high, in
sex-fiend mode, and wanted to know that Caesar-like power of having a woman
kneel before him, sexually supplicate herself in the classic style, her gaping
mouth plugged, both open and shut, like a silent gasp.
Analysis of such encounters always
throws up a grimly pared-down example of the eternal tussle between supply and
demand. Each has what the other
wants. He wants his cock sucked, and is
offering crack as an enticement. She
wants crack, and her words imply she’ll do anything for it. But he won’t cough up until he’s got what he
wants. She won’t give him what he wants
until he’s coughed up. ‘Come on, gissa
blowjob,’ implores the emperor. ‘I
will,’ she promises, ‘but gissa pipe first…then I’ll be nice’n’horny for
you.’ Stalemate. It’s just a case of who breaks first, like a
mini Cuban missile crisis. You’re left
hoping that somehow, in the end, it just blows over.
The guy who opened the door to me
seemed quite calm and sane, even cordial and charming, in a slightly balking
way. We chatted in the hall for a while,
then he led me into the bedroom, where the withered Gerald languished like an
aborted experiment. Jacob, that being
the name of my new guardian, offered me a pipe, which I eagerly and greedily
sucked up. That was that. I was now the arrogant yet impotent letch
that the hapless me was apparently so keen to become. I could hear female voices in the
front-room. The crack had kick-started
the usual lasciviousness, but Jacob, employing his inimitable brand of
gutter-suave, assured me there’d be plenty of time for that later, and plied me
with another pipe. I had it, appreciated
it, and was now his plaything. ‘So what
was it you were looking for, friend?’ he enquired with consummate
self-interest. ‘I was just looking to
get, what, forty?’ I said, throwing out a multiple of ten, hoping to sound
seasoned. I was drug-hungry and gullible,
scoring through go-betweens who’d dish it out like fish at the feeding of the
five thousand, i.e. messianically, in small pieces, and hardly ever to the poor
sap that’s bankrolling the do. Jacob was
far from illiterate – he could see the word ‘sucker’ etched into my cheek like
a fencing-scar.
So off we went to score. Deed done, it was decided we should go to
Jacob’s place, not back to Faith’s. She
was too much of a liability, apparently.
Besides, that place was hot, could get raided any minute. That I believed. On the few times I’d been there, day or
night, people would often be ringing, knocking on the window, or in some way
clamouring for access. Sometimes, Faith
would have a crafty look through the net-curtain. If she thought they had something, or would
want to get something, they’d be granted an audience. If not, they’d be turned away…nastily, if
necessary. What’s more, the man in the
flat above had aroused general suspicion.
More than once, it was suggested he was a police-plant, staking out the
place until it was time to pounce. There
were even paranoid whispers of boreholes in the ceiling through which they were
being observed.
Jacob assured me that his place was
safe. He was flat-sitting for a bloke in
prison, with his girlfriend, that’s to say Jacob, knowing the guy was away, had
broken in and made the place his own. It
was in some anonymous tower-block round the back of Loftus Road, the usual
porn-strewn shell, portable on chair, clothes everywhere, kitchen with a kettle
in but clearly no food, and stretched out on a mattress, Gushka, Jacob’s
Latvian girlfriend, gawping at the telly, skinnily.
The drugs were dispensed…Jacob first,
naturally, then me, then his brittle, sticklike lover. We introduced what was left of
ourselves. They’d met in Superdrug, been
together seven years. She worked in a
beautician’s in Acton. But pretty
quickly, Jacob eased me to one side, saying, ‘Gimme five minutes with my woman,
friend.’ I presumed his motives were
sexual, and panicked in case he wanted me to leave the room, and so the
drugs. But no, the drugs were leaving me. Jacob got up and went into the hallway,
adding, ‘Gushka, come.’ Meekly, she rose
to follow. Moments later, I heard the
bathroom door close, and tried to kill time by flicking through some well-worn
porn. Anyone leaving the room with drugs
was someone I didn’t want to see leaving, but I sensed Jacob was not the kind
of man I should question. I was
right. Like most bullies, he had a knack
for sniffing out the ones who wouldn’t fight back. It wasn’t long before I heard a whimpering
down the hall. I wondered if they were
having sex, or something resembling it.
There was another noise, this time palpably anguished. It sounded like he was torturing her. Even in my cracked-up state, I still had
access to at least the bare bones of a moral code, and wondered if I should
intervene, even knock politely on the door and ask, ‘Is everything ok?’ But it struck me that any intervention could
end in disaster. I didn’t know to what psychotic
lengths Jacob would go. He reminded me
of the patient in the mental ward who befriends you, tries to convince you he’s
sane, asks you to have a word with the authorities on his behalf, and then,
when you’re about to leave, rugby-tackles and pins you to the floor, crying,
‘Don’t forget to tell them I’m sane!’
No, to interrupt Jacob’s brutality might have led to him dispensing me a
dose, then Gushka getting another helping just for having provoked things. So I just sat there, bitter I had no crack,
Ceefax in one ear, domestic abuse in the other.
After a while, appetite sated, Jacob
came back into the living-room. ‘Sorry
about that,’ he said, in a tone that sounded genuinely sincere. I thought for a moment he was apologising for
his own actions, but how foolish I was.
‘She doesn’t seem to understand the meaning of the word “respect”. Did you see the way she was?’ I wasn’t quite sure what he meant, but,
because he had the drugs, I thought I’d better keep him sweet. ‘Yeah,’ I said, vaguely. ‘I introduce her to someone new, and she
behaves like that.’ I still wasn’t sure
what she was meant to have done. ‘You
mean like her being kind of indifferent?’ I guessed. ‘I ask her to put the kettle on, cos I want a
coffee, and she just lies there, and that’s in front of someone. How does that make me look?’ ‘Yeah, I know what you mean,’ I said, selling
my soul with every syllable. ‘Then she
starts making all that noise,’ he continued.
‘There’s a Muslim couple downstairs, with young daughters. She’s going to end up embarrassing not just
herself, but me as well.’ I now knew that
I was in the presence of a skewed mind.
And quite why Muslims were any more susceptible to the sounds of
domestic violence than anyone else, I had no clue. ‘Doesn’t she realise that making those kind
of noises could end up reflecting back on me?’
Then he sat back down and loaded up a pipe. That done, he picked up one of the tattered
magazines that lay around, turning to a page with a girl with breasts like
balloons. ‘Bet she had tits when she was
twelve,’ he said, handing me the page.
Then Gushka returned, seemingly
intact. ‘You’ve got to learn some
respect, Gush,’ he said, ‘Ben’s a guest, and you don’t disrespect me in front
of guests.’ ‘Ok, Jacob,’ she said, as if
she’d heard it many times before.
‘You’ve got to realise, you’d be nothing without me. People would rob you, rape you, screw you
into the ground if it wasn’t for me. You
do realise that, don’t you Gush?’ ‘Yes,
Jacob.’ He was very confident of the
moral low-ground he monopolised, and his free-thinking credentials were again
flagged up. ‘What do you think, Ben?’ he
asked. ‘Do you think I should put her on
the game?’ I smiled in such a way that
he would feel endorsed, but she wouldn’t see.
My soul was now completely in flames.
‘Could I have a pipe, please?’ I asked, not wishing to dwell on the
twelve-year-old me, twitching like a phoenix in a stone-cold hearth.
There was a hole in a floorboard, and
Jacob said he’d lost a bit of crack down there a few weeks before, on his
birthday. I found myself foraging about
in the dust, like James Herriot feeling around inside an empty cow. Meanwhile, Ceefax turned to weather, to
breakfast telly, to utter despair. Then,
no more crack, the money gone, and not even any heroin to come down with, I
eventually made my way home, midmorning, bitter, beaten, and broke.
The pattern of my using was beginning
to take shape, and it wasn’t pretty. My
web of associates was growing, so when the government slung a couple of hundred
quid in my account, I’d be down the road like a shot. Wednesdays were the day. I might go to bed on Tuesday night, but I’d
be counting the minutes until two, when the money appeared in my account. I’d leave my flat at quarter-to, to give me
time to get down the road and unearth, or be unearthed by, a suitable person to
score through, which rarely took more than half an hour, if I walked at the
right pace, along the right stretch of road, in the right style. Then, another nocturnal whirlwind blown out,
I’d crawl home to an empty fridge and a daybed, where I’d remain for anything
from two to four days, eeking out a half-life by foraging in the cupboard for
instant noodles or cereal, which I’d almost certainly have with water, due to
having lost the ability to shop some weeks ago.
The last vestiges of my social life
had also gone. No more pub quiz on a
Tuesday night with old schoolmates. No
more spots in bottom-of-the-ladder comedy-clubs. No, I was either not answering the phone, or
broke, or both, and getting very cagey about making arrangements with anyone,
because I probably wouldn’t honour them anyway.
No more a social butterfly, I was now an antisocial moth, chaotically
spiralling round an invisible, yet voracious, flame.
And here is a link to my music channel, should you wish to dance in your desk-chair for a minute or two: Benjamin Lo-Fi's Music Channel
See you in a day or two...
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