Larry Harrison
GLIMPSES OF A FLOATING WORLD
© Larry Harrison, 2009
The right of Larry Harrison to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved.
Cover art © Larry Harrison, 2009
All characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Larry Harrison is a member of the Year Zero writers’ collective.
Year Zero Writers
http://yearzerowriters.wordpress.com
Acknowledgements
Thanks are due to my wife, Mary, to Dan Holloway and Oliver Johns, and my colleagues in the Year Zero Writers group, and to all of my supporters on the Authonomy website. I also benefited from the advice of John Murray, Martyn Bedford and the Arvon group of 2007. Special thanks are due to my first readers: Andy Alaszewski, Hannah Davis, Bill Downs, David Fernbach and Robert Harris.
About the author
Larry Harrison started life as a cowman and yak keeper for the Tibetan Buddhist community at Karma Kagyu Samye Ling, in Dumfriesshire. After working his way up to the post of assistant dairyman on a commercial Ayrshire herd, he left Scotland in 1975 to work with disadvantaged children at London’s Clapham Junction. Larry became surprisingly good at persuading children not to stand on the railway tracks at Earlsfield Station, and he was able to talk them down from rooftops in Battersea, without them bombarding passers-by with slates. To this day, Larry is relieved that he was able to negotiate the release of everyone held hostage by Barry in the school unit. The Parks Department should not have left an axe unattended within sight of the building, and had Barry not been so amenable, the outcome could have been a good deal worse. (Thanks, Baz. What fun we had! Sorry to hear you were done last year for kidnapping that Assistant Governor on D Wing.) During Larry’s subsequent career, as a university researcher on alcohol and drug problems, he wrote Tobacco Battered, a BBC Radio 4 feature, and over fifty journal articles, academic books and book chapters. He was appointed Reader in Addiction Studies at the University of Hull, long a centre of excellence in problem drinking, before retiring to the East Yorkshire countryside to make cider and write fiction. Glimpses of a Floating World is his first novel.
Chapter One
The Sandman leaned against the balustrade and punched the stone until bright spots of blood appeared on his knuckles.
‘This is turning out to be a bloody awful year.’ He stared out across a rain-swept Trafalgar Square, as if searching for someone to blame. ‘The beginning of June? More like non-stop bloody winter.’
‘Yeah, and you’re bringing me down,’ Ronnie Jarvis said. It was bad enough having to wait all evening for a fix, without having to listen to some cunt moaning all the time. He took several short, impatient drags at his cigarette. A shred of tobacco found its way onto his tongue, and he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. The act was hasty and ill-judged. His umbrella tilted and raindrops cascaded down, soaking the cigarette. Ronnie gazed at the sodden Woodbine in disgust, then hurled it into the gutter.
‘Things are falling apart,’ the Sandman whined. ‘Weeks of snow, and then continual bloody rain. It’s unnatural.’ He looked distraught. ‘Did you know that Nostradamus predicted the world would end this year?’ Ronnie waved his hands dismissively, as if shooing pigeons, and the Sandman became insistent. ‘It’s true, man. Nostradamus predicted the world would end in 1963. In the year of Our Lord One Thousand Nine Hundred and Sixty-three, the world by ice will cease to be. They reckon it means there’s going to be a new Ice Age.’
‘You’re junk-sick,’ Ronnie said. ‘You’d feel cold in the Turkish Baths.’
Ronnie looked at his watch and counted the minutes. As usual, he was conducting a mental countdown until the midnight hour, when the next day’s prescriptions would be dispensed at the all-night chemist’s in Piccadilly Circus. ‘Not long to go,’ Ronnie said, trying to sound upbeat. ‘Twenty minutes to the witching hour.’
‘Gypsy Dave owes me four fucking jacks.’
‘How does it go?’ Ronnie said. ‘The witching time of night, when something-something? When graveyards yawn?’
‘No idea!’
For fuck’s sake, Ronnie thought, you’re only nineteen. Only three years older than me, and you’re whining like an old man. ‘Don’t you ever read Classic Comics?’ Ronnie sighed. ‘The world’s greatest authors meet its finest cartoonists? When graveyards yawn is from number 99. Hamlet, by William Shakespeare. Artwork by Steve Grant.’
‘Gypsy Dave sneaked out of the Three Tuns yesterday and thought I hadn’t seen him,’ the Sandman mumbled, from underneath his umbrella. His flat, nasal voice hardly varied in tone; it made a low droning sound, like an engine stuck in first gear. ‘People are always taking liberties.’
The Sandman had been pestering Ronnie since lunchtime, trying to score some H. The berk wasn’t interested in a two quid ball of opium, he wanted to hold out for heroin. He would wait, he said, until Ronnie got his script at midnight. Then he fastened onto Ronnie like one of those toothless catfish that suck the life out of their prey.
Ronnie began walking slowly towards Pall Mall, and the Sandman lurched after him. ‘You still in that Marshall Street squat?’ the Sandman called out. ‘I need to crash there tonight.’
‘It was closed down weeks ago. I’m staying up in Archway, with Samantha and Guido. A Black chick I know from Swindon, and her feller.’
‘Oh yes, I forgot. You’re a country boy.’
‘You keep saying that!’ Ronnie snapped. ‘I’m a Londoner, like you.’
‘Nothing to be ashamed about, being from the sticks.’
‘For fuck’s sake!’
Eighteen minutes left. Ronnie hated these last few minutes when he was waiting for his script. If there was a God, you could offer Him a deal. God, take away the next eighteen minutes. Let it be midnight now. Take a quarter of an hour off the end of my life. I don’t mind dying a bit earlier, if I can have my fix right now.
‘Gypsy Dave’s turned a lot of people over,’ the Sandman was saying. ‘I know exactly how I’m going to get even with him—’
‘Can’t you walk a bit faster?’ Ronnie said. ‘It’s a long way up the Haymarket.’
Ronnie was aware that they looked an odd pair as they left Trafalgar Square. He was tall enough to be a guardsman, while the Sandman was only five foot four inches. Ronnie was proud of his classy walk: he bounced on the balls of his feet, ready to move in any direction, like a tennis player. The Sandman kicked his feet forward, sullenly, like a squaddie engaged on a route march. And Ronnie’s blond hair reached his shoulders in ringlets, while the Sandman had his hair cropped short.
Growing his hair long had been one of Ronnie’s big accomplishments in life. When he first saw a man with long hair, at the Anarchist Ball in 1962, the level of public hostility fascinated him. People stood in the street and stared; men’s faces were contorted with rage. From that moment, Ronnie knew he had to grow his hair long. It was an act of defiance, and he often paid a heavy price. Sometimes, shop assistants refused to serve him, or bus conductors wouldn’t allow him onboard. Once, as he walked along Brighton beach, the preacher at an open-air evangelical meeting interrupted his sermon to condemn longhaired men.
Today had been free of incident, but as they headed up the Haymarket, an ex-soldier screamed out, ‘Get your hair cut!’ The man was pacing to and fro, on the opposite side of the road, outside Her Majesty’s Theatre. One sleeve of his regimental blazer was empty, pinned back across his chest, surplus to requirements since the day he’d lost his arm. His thin face was pink with anger.
‘Get your throat cut!’ Ronnie shouted back. He noticed disapproval in the Sandman’s expression and grinned. ‘That usually shuts them up,’ he explained. ‘You can’t let the buggers get the upper hand.’
The Sandman frowned. ‘You ought to get rid of your barnet. Long hair attracts too much attention.’
Ronnie shook his head, so that his hair spread out over his shoulders and could be seen to best effect. They turned into Piccadilly Circus, and Ronnie stood and stared across at the statue of Eros, silhouetted against the neon advertising displays behind: Coca Cola, Wrigley’s Chewing Gum, Gordon’s Gin. ‘During the war,’ Ronnie said, ‘the Yanks called Piccadilly Circus the biggest open-air whorehouse in the world.’
‘It still is,’ the Sandman sniffed.
Ronnie thought of the wartime poster his doctor had never bothered to remove from the surgery wall. A woman was wearing a pink orchid on her hat, only her face was dissolving into a skull. Hello boys, coming my way? Venereal disease. She may look clean, but she’s a carrier. She’s as dangerous as a Panzer division. Doing Hitler’s work for him.
Ronnie checked his watch. Seven minutes to go. Time seemed to slow down when he was waiting for a fix, each minute stretching, until the last few moments lasted for hours. Then, when he shot up, time ceased to have any importance. He would get up late tomorrow, have his morning fix, and watch children’s telly, or take an hour or more over coffee and biscuits. But time always reasserted itself, gradually, and he ended every evening like this, waiting for the minute hand on his watch to edge forward.
Leaving the Sandman to wait on the corner, Ronnie walked back to the all-night chemist’s. When the minute hand reached midnight, the pharmacist would begin calling out the names of people whose prescriptions carried the next day’s date. Most were junkies, claiming a new day’s supply. Like Ronnie, they were registered with one of a handful of private and NHS doctors who treated addicts.
Ronnie was prescribed four grains of heroin and two of cocaine every day. Last week he’d told his doctor it wasn’t enough.
‘Your tolerance is increasing, that’s why,’ the doctor said, peering over his half-moon glasses. ‘We’re going to have to get you in for a Cure.’
Better shut up. That’s what they say when you start to hassle them. Gypsy Dave told him that private doctors like Lady Frankau were worse: they sent you for a detox if you didn’t pay your bill. When Dave hadn’t paid for a while Lady Frankau said, ‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to start cutting you down’. Dave took out his wallet and said, ‘I’d like to settle my account’. (That’s what you had to say, nothing crude like ‘Do you want some loot?’ or ‘Here’s some bread, man’. You had to keep up appearances with private doctors.) Dave said the doctor smiled as she wrote out the usual script: ‘Pay the receptionist on your way out.’
Ronnie reckoned he could manage on four grains of Horse for now, even if it wasn’t giving him the buzz it used to. Cocaine helped, but he didn’t think of himself as a coke-head, even though he’d hassled to get coke on his script. He mainly used it to get out of bed in the mornings. When you had a big heroin habit you could get a bit lethargic. Coke helped kick-start the day. Fucked the brain into action. Made it move. He wasn’t like the coke-heads, people who were mainly hooked on cocaine, who only used heroin for a soft landing. They almost always picked up their script at midnight, and injected coke continually, until it ran out in the wee small hours. You could often sell them some of your surplus coke, if you managed to hold some back.
Rain started to drip through a tear on one side of Ronnie’s umbrella and he decided to wait inside the chemist’s. Mr Spear, the Home Office civil servant responsible for inspecting the Dangerous Drugs Register, was standing near the pharmacy counter, chatting to three Canadian junkies. Ronnie met Spear’s gaze, and felt uncomfortable. Although he had a genial manner, Spear kept every customer under surveillance; he had a mind like a card index, able to retrieve current intelligence about most addicts on the list. The Sandman reckoned that Spear knew every junky by name—all 360 of them. That may have been an exaggeration, but Spear knew all the big names, the old guys Ronnie respected because of their single-minded commitment to heroin, like Barry One-Leg and Tony Moss.
Spear joined the night-duty pharmacist, and started going through recent entries in the Dangerous Drugs Register, holding the book up at chest height, to make maximum use of the florescent light. Ronnie looked up at the clock, prominently sited on the wall above the dispensary counter, so that every customer could watch the minute hand crawl forward. Three minutes to midnight. Not much longer. Soon straighten out. Have a fag, and, by the time you’ve finished, it should be time.
As he lit up, he distinctly heard Spear say, ‘You know, I’m a little concerned that Our Mutual Friend has taken on a youngster who’s under seventeen.’ They both looked in his direction. Bad news: they were talking about him. Although he refused to cut his hair, Ronnie hated attracting attention at times like this. He opened his paper and pretended to read, while observing Spear surreptitiously. The man glanced over several times. Then all eyes turned towards him. The name Ronald Jarvis had been called, and he hadn’t even noticed. The pharmacist was holding his prescription at arm’s length, as though obliged to handle a parcel of dog shit.
Ronnie collected a paper bag containing two small medicine bottles—one with the pure white crystals of cocaine hydrochloride BP, the other with twenty-four white tablets of diacetyl-morphine hydrochloride BP. Spear was watching from his vantage point beside the counter as Ronnie rushed out, heading for the underground public toilets in Piccadilly, the Sandman in close pursuit. The Sandman handed over a ten shilling note as they trotted down the stairs, and Ronnie slipped half a grain of heroin into his friend’s outstretched hand. Ronnie almost ran into the karzi and found the first available cubicle. Rather than risk attracting attention by taking water from a washbasin, he flushed the toilet and caught some water in a spare medicine bottle as it swirled around the lavatory pan. Then he cooked it up over a match, making sure it came to the boil. He added nearly a grain of heroin and half a grain of cocaine, and cooked the mixture again. That should give a nice rush. In just a few seconds that raw feeling would cease, and he would be flying high again.
As soon as he made the hit he knew that it was a dirty fix. The water hadn’t boiled enough. Unsterile. He’d injected some nasty bug. Could do without that, he’d had a run of dirty fixes. Almost immediately, his stomach went into a spasm, and he started to retch. He knelt down and spewed into the toilet bowl, a thin, yellow, acidic jet, all that remained of the bacon sarney he’d had for lunch.
Still feeling queasy, Ronnie came out of the cubicle and washed his face at one of the sinks. The smell of carbolic soap always helped, he thought. Bloody witching hour. It’s an unhealthy time. Fatal overdoses always happen at midnight.
Ronnie reached for a clean roller towel and started to dry his face, but the newly starched towel wouldn’t absorb water easily. Bloodshot eyes stared back from the mirror as he patted his wet cheeks. Baron Samedhi prowling the graveyards, in Tales from the Crypt. Best comic ever. Artwork by Wally Wood.
‘You scum!’
A searing pain flushed tears from Ronnie’s eyes. It shot from his hair-roots, at the base of his skull, to the crown of his head. It tore at his scalp. His face was forced down into the sink, as someone seized his hair, wrapped it around their fist, and pulled.
‘Cut my throat would you? Eh? Eh?’ Each word was expelled through gritted teeth, like scraps forced through a meat grinder. ‘Not-so-cocky-now!’
Ronnie forced his head up and saw the mirror image of the old git from the Haymarket. He had Ronnie’s hair in a vice-like grip with his only hand.
‘What? Get the fuck off!’ Ronnie yelped like a dog, and tugged against the man’s fist. ‘You’re mad!’
Pulled off balance, Ronnie was forced down on one knee, into a puddle. Dirty water soaked through the knee of his jeans. He held onto the washbasin to stop being dragged to the ground. He could see the ex-soldier looming above him in the mirror, the empty sleeve of the man’s blazer pinned back across his chest with a safety pin, the regimental badge on his pocket, showing what looked like a lion and a crown above a red rose, and a motto that said something about Loyalty.
The man rammed Ronnie’s head against the washbasin, opening a deep cut above his left eyebrow. Blood gushed out, running into his eyes and down his cheek, before dripping onto his green cord jacket.
‘I’m sick!’ Ronnie yelled. ‘Let go!’
‘Long hair? I’ll pull the bugger out!’
A long shadow passed across the mirror, and then the Sandman came into view with an eight-inch lock knife, pointed at the assailant’s back.
‘Let the boy go or I’ll fucking do you.’
‘Want a fair fight?’ the ex-serviceman shouted. ‘I’ll give you one! Only cowards use knives.’ He pulled harder on the hair, forcing Ronnie to squeal.
‘Let go,’ the Sandman said, holding the man’s shoulder and pressing the knife against his backbone. ‘You started this. I’ll do you!’
‘You’re dragging this country down, you scum!’ The man’s shoulders began to shake with convulsive sobs. ‘This poor country. It’s losing everything.’ He let go of Ronnie’s hair and knelt down in front of the washbasins, crying without restraint. ‘Poor England! We gave our lives.’
Ronnie flushed with embarrassment. The man who had assaulted him looked pathetic, crouched on the floor, so frail that a breeze could knock him sideways, and hardly strong enough to threaten anyone. Ronnie exchanged a glance with the Sandman, and then walked backwards towards the exit.
‘Scum!’ the man called after him. ‘Giving everything away. First India and now Kenya!’
The Sandman closed his lock knife and slipped it back into his pocket with one smooth hand movement, indicating, with a jerk of his head, that they should scarper. They climbed the stairs to the street level hurriedly, and then paused, gulping in the night air like men who had been confined underground for weeks.
‘You are extremely lucky I was with you,’ the Sandman said, putting an arm around Ronnie’s shoulder, a gesture that would have been reassuring in a more trustworthy person. ‘That could’ve been very nasty. What you got yourself into, back there.’
‘Sure.’
‘Well, don’t get overcome with gratitude.’ The Sandman displayed his narrow, crooked teeth in a sneer.
‘I won’t, man.’
‘Only, I probably saved you from a real beating.’
Ronnie had no intention of thanking the Sandman for his assistance. Gratitude would encourage the Sandman to try to blag more junk. Besides, Ronnie didn’t feel grateful; he felt resentment, because he’d been caught offguard, and the Sandman had seen him looking vulnerable, like a child.
Ronnie Fizz was on his knees in the bogs, the Sandman would say. He was crying ‘Oh! Don’t touch my barnet!’—Just some old cripple! A one armed tosser! I put the frighteners on him. Fizz was shaking like a leaf, couldn’t do nothing. Lost his bottle!
Ronnie didn’t want a story like that doing the rounds. Too many people on the scene treated him like a kid. People went by appearances, like the fact that he was unable to grow a beard yet. They underestimated him. Ronnie considered he’d grown-up at the age of twelve, when he stopped going to school. In the last few years, he’d gathered more worldly experience than others had in a lifetime. Ronnie had gone out and collected extreme experiences, in a conscious attempt to destroy childishness. Now, he felt so much older and wiser than the Sandman that he was almost sorry for him. The berk didn’t understand that no one on the scene believed in violence. If anyone asked about the incident, Ronnie decided, he would say, ‘The Sandman freaked out and started waving a chiv around.’
The Sandman was pretty uncool, actually. He was always running out of junk. Ronnie reckoned the idiot was too generous, insisting on sharing smack with every novice he met. That’s how the Sandman, whose real name was Paul Alfred Spackman, acquired his nickname: he once initiated a roomful of kids, and every one of them went on the nod.
Funny how you got stuck with a nickname, Ronnie thought. He was known as Ronnie Fizz, because when he was fourteen he’d broken into the wine cellar of a country club, and only managed to come away with a single bottle of champagne. He’d hitched down the M1, trying to sell the bottle to lorry drivers along the way. When he received no takers, he drank the fizz on a street corner in Soho. This was before the Sandman turned him on to junk.
The one-armed man came into view at the foot of the stairs, and pointed them out to one of the lavatory attendants, an old bugger with bushy eyebrows like Rudolph Hess, who nodded his head continually, as if it was on springs. Both men started up the stairs towards them. Without saying goodbye, the Sandman dodged through the traffic and was soon lost in the crowds around Eros. Ronnie tucked his hair under his jacket collar and walked swiftly in the opposite direction, along Shaftesbury Avenue, until he felt that he, too, must be invisible in the late night throng.
Ronnie wondered whether to head for Leicester Square Tube. He needed to speak to Samantha urgently, tell her that Guido suspected they were screwing. Maybe they should cool it for a bit. Didn’t want Guido getting heavy. He might start throwing his weight around. This wasn’t cowardice, just common sense. Never put yourself in the firing line. If people accused him of being a coward, that’s what he’d say: ‘never put yourself in the firing line’.
If he was to be sure of getting to Samantha before Guido, he needed to catch the last Tube to Archway. On the other hand, he needed to get rid of the opium he’d been carrying all day. It was worth a couple of quid, and he wouldn’t need to sell anything off his prescription for the rest of the week. Ronnie decided to go up Soho, to see if anyone wanted to score. He could skipper somewhere tonight, and speak to Samantha tomorrow. Surely she’d keep schtum if Guido confronted her?
Ronnie turned left into Dean Street, and then right into Old Compton Street. He hadn’t gone more than twenty yards when he noticed that he was being followed. He walked faster. It wasn’t the ex-serviceman. It was a woman, and whenever the crowd was particularly dense, she was there. He first noticed her on the same side of the street, some thirty yards away. She wore a black suit, the skirt just below knee length, and a black pillbox hat that belonged at Ascot, with a pink organza flower that seemed to float above the hat, like a halo.
He slowed down until she was almost close enough to touch. A silver grey fox fur stole was draped around her shoulders, the kind that looked as though it had been produced by a taxidermist, complete with dangling legs and a preserved fox head. The fox’s beady eyes stared back at him, like a stuffed animal in a display case, frozen in a moment of rage. The woman’s own eyes were lustrous, thick-lined with kohl, jet black behind the veil that half-covered her face. She was pale and aloof, aged about sixty, with her face heavily powdered and rouged to hide the decay.
Ronnie knew the woman from somewhere, but where? He could hear a loud humming sound, as if his ear was jammed up against a beehive. The noise burrowed down into the pit of his stomach, making him nauseous. The woman stood still and gazed at him. His breath stopped in his throat and he felt suffocated. She was choking the life out of him.
He had to get away.
Chapter Two
Ronnie cut through into Charing Cross Road, but she was still behind him. Who would tail him, he wondered. Guido? That was absurd, Guido couldn’t afford a private eye. It must be the Old Bill. Was it because of the one-armed man? Or had Spear put the word out, told the law to go after him? No, if it was the law they would pull him over, give him some hassle. Just relax, stay cool. Easy to get paranoid.
Halfway up Charing Cross Road, Ronnie stopped and looked at his reflection in a music publisher’s window, waiting for the image of her face to appear behind his shoulder. From the shop doorway came the smell of London dust: old mortar, soot, crumbling bones, dog-ends. His own pale face stared back from the dark glass, his pupils so small they were like two pinholes. The cut inflicted by the ex-serviceman had left a smear of blood across his forehead. He couldn’t see any sign of the woman. He walked on slowly until he reached the public toilets at the junction with Tottenham Court Road, and stood surveying the crossroads, as though she might appear from any direction. Time for another fix. His mission to sell opium could wait for a few minutes, while he straightened himself out. And if she was still on his tail, she couldn’t follow him into the bogs.
He let himself into a karzi, found a vein on the first attempt, and shot up. There was too much coke in the mix and, as the minutes ticked by, he sat looking at the toilet door, disinclined to move. His works remained lodged in his vein, and a thin trickle of blood reached down to his wrist.
Someone had carved a life-sized female nude in the paintwork, with a disembodied dick pointing towards her pubic hair, like a guided missile. The artist had added drops of dark-coloured blood, and the title, ‘I shagged my brother’s wife when she had the rags up.’
The artist’s bold, angular strokes, and fury of execution, reminded him of an illustration he’d seen in National Geographic, a magazine he sometimes pinched from his doctor’s waiting room. It was a carving called The Sacrifice of Blood, made in a country called Axtec, or Aztec, or something. One of the ancient Aztec gods extracted blood from a wound in his dick, and used it to give life to humanity. Maybe that’s what this drawing was really about? There was the heavenly dick, and there was the sacred blood.
What would some future archaeologist make of it all, if London was overtaken by a catastrophe, as Pompeii had been? He imagined archaeologists digging out this underground cell, his own body perfectly preserved in volcanic ash, sat upright on the toilet seat, facing the artwork. A man ritually letting his own blood, contemplating the sacrifice of God.
An avalanche of sound descended, shaking the walls of his cubicle, and forcing his heart to thump wildly in his chest. He thought the catastrophe had begun, until he realised it was just someone hammering on a toilet door.
‘Come on out. Now!’
A drunken baritone launched into song, and the words Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam rang out across the public convenience. The singer had locked himself in the next cubicle. As Ronnie looked up, a boot came over the top of his toilet door, and there was the Old Bill gazing down on him.
‘What’s this then, lad? Get this door open!’
‘It’s okay, I’m registered. It’s all legit.’
They dragged Ronnie out and went through his pockets. The opium was found, squashed into a Swan Vestas matchbox. Plod’s face lit up. He held the matchbox under Ronnie’s nose, forcing his head back.
‘What’s this then, lad? This is Hemp!’
Indian Hemp. They’re as thick as pig shit. Going to get away with it. They haven’t seen opium or cannabis before. Make out it’s a lump of toffee. It’s brown and chewy, it’s toffee. I’m saving it for later, my toffee. They’re looking unsure. Going to walk away from this.
‘Better take him down the nick for questioning,’ said the second cop.
One cop held onto the drunk and marched him across the road, with Ronnie’s syringe held aloft like a trophy; the other dragged Ronnie along. The drunk wrestled the cop to a halt in the middle of Charing Cross Road, extending his free arm towards the street crowd, like Sinatra singing an encore.
A sunbeam, a sunbeam,
I’ll be a sunbeam for Him.
The crowd stared back accusingly. They thought the old guy was a junky. Ronnie had an odd feeling, as if he was acting in a film in which the script had been abandoned, and every scene improvised. Any outcome was possible.
At West End Central, a young Detective Constable led Ronnie into an interview room. The DC, whose name was Andrews, had a lumpy face, which meant he found it difficult to shave without nicking himself. There were several recent cuts, and from the powdery deposit on his cheeks they’d been treated with an alum pencil. Ronnie stared at the lumps and bumps on Andrews’ neck and chin. Maybe they were cysts, or maybe it was a skin disease.
The detective’s auburn hair swept straight back from his forehead, but because it was naturally wavy it had been flattened with Brylcream, to form a stiff, corrugated sheet. This gave him a dated, pre-war appearance, like the young Jerry Lee Lewis. It was out of keeping with his modern Italian suit, with its bum freezer jacket, as though a country boy had come down to London and been kitted out by fashion-following cousins. They hadn’t been able to persuade him to style his hair, so he still looked like a hick from the Midlands.
‘What were you doing with Indian Hemp in your pocket?’ Andrews asked, in a broad Black Country accent. Ronnie repeated the story about toffee, and for a long time things seemed to be going his way. He was led from his cell towards the street door and was convinced, from the disappointed faces around him, that they were about to let him go. Then Andrews came down the corridor from the opposite direction, carrying a sheaf of papers. He reached the charge desk ahead of them and called out, ‘It’s okay—you can charge him! Opium prepared for smoking.’
Ronnie could hardly believe what he was hearing. He was going to be charged with possession of a dangerous drug—one that wasn’t on his script. He was going to be banged up. The bastards looked jubilant. The thick Brummy had managed to identify opium. Sent it to a forensic lab or something. Ronnie wondered how Samantha would know what had happened. She might be standing at Archway station, waiting for him to arrive on the last Tube. He had to be there; he couldn’t afford to spend a night in the cells.
‘Tell us who’s giving you this stuff, Ronald,’ Andrews said. ‘We’re not interested in people like you. We’re after Mr Big. If you help us out …’
Everyone on the scene knew there was no Mr Big. There were just a few junkies doing small deals to keep themselves going. But Ronnie knew the Old Bill would never believe that. They were convinced that the rise in drug use was due to organised crime. Then he thought of a Greek cafe near the Middlesex Hospital. He’d asked for a Turkish coffee, but this waiter started shouting something about only selling Greek coffee. When Ronnie made a little joke about Cyprus they threw him out. So he gave DC Andrews a detailed description of the waiter. In a moment of improvisation, he described him as Maltese. Wore a little pork pie hat. Scar on his boat. It was if an alarm had gone off in West End Central. Two more detectives joined them.
‘This Maltese geezer who sold you the drugs, what was he called?’ Andrews asked. ‘What do you know about the Mejlak brothers? Are the Mejlak firm dealing in drugs now?’
‘Are they? Everyone knows the Mejlaks are behind all the dope in the West End.’
DC Andrews consulted the others in the corridor. Ronnie could hear an older guy saying ‘Well done,’ and ‘It’s worth a punt’. Andrews came back looking pleased with himself.
‘You can give yourself an injection out of your own prescription tonight. We just have to wait for the police surgeon to arrive, to supervise it.’
When the police surgeon arrived, they handed Ronnie his shit and allowed him to make up his own fix. He couldn’t believe his luck, and shot up a really big fix of H&C, to last as long as possible. He almost floated back to the Flowery Dell, and decided he was going to walk straight out of court, once they realised he was a registered addict. And he’d helped the police; that must count in his favour.
In the morning there were no more smiles. DC Andrews was nowhere to be seen. The police surgeon said, ‘I’ll give you the injection this time.’ It wasn’t heroin. Some kind of sedative. Intra-muscular. By the time he got to Marlborough Street Magistrates’ Court, he could hardly stand up in the dock. This made a bad impression, as the stipendiary magistrate assumed he was intoxicated.
‘How do you plead?’
‘Technically guilty, like, but not really, because I’m registered on heroin and cocaine. I’m a registered addict, you see, so it’s all legit.’
‘Three drugs!’ The beak stared accusingly at the arresting officer, as though this was evidence that should have been presented in court. ‘Remanded to Ashford for medical reports.’
And that was how it all began. They had him, bang to rights.
They ran Ronnie backwards along the dark corridor, a screw holding each arm, and reversed him into the padded cell. That way he couldn’t drag his feet or brace them up against the doorjamb.
They made him wear a grey woollen dressing gown, but had taken away the cord, so that he wouldn’t be able to hang himself. The gown fell open as they rushed him along, and he looked down at his own emaciated body. Each rib could be seen, as clearly as a chicken’s when you ripped the meat off the bone. His long blond hair hung down in rats’ tails. His cock and balls looked small, shrunken in the cold. He wanted to cover himself up, but couldn’t, and he realised how defenceless he was. That was the first thing the screws had told him: ‘You’re in prison now, lad, and we can do anything we like to you!’
Ronnie was pinned face down on the padded floor, one screw kneeling on his back. His breath came in ragged gasps as he shouted at them to get off. Then, changing tack, he tried pleading with them.
‘I just need my fix! Please!’
This seemed to provoke the man restraining him. The knee pressed harder into his back. He felt the warmth of the man’s breath, first on the nape his neck, and then in his ear.
‘We’ll give you an injection, lad: a ruddy meat injection!’
‘Right up your fucking arse,’ added the second screw.
A third screw, who wore a white jacket, entered the cell, carrying a syringe in one of those kidney-shaped bowls, the kind made of white enamel, with a blue line painted around the rim.
‘400 milligrams of Largactil,’ White Jacket announced, ‘equals one quiet night, for Yours Truly.’ He said it with satisfaction, as though he’d just won an argument.
Ronnie fought to throw off his persecutors.
‘He’s getting his dander up now!’ laughed the first screw.
‘Oh dearie, dearie me!’ said White Jacket. ‘Should I be worried?’
Ronnie smelt an alcohol swab, and felt a large needle stab into his buttocks, the muscle slowly forced apart by the injection. Above him in the ceiling was a red light, behind a steel mesh. It would stay on night and day, so that he would soon lose all sense of time.
His jailors paused to look at him as they departed, swinging the heavy padded door closed. Ronnie heard the jangle of a key turning in the lock. He’d not had a fix for over fourteen hours. His feet felt as if they were immersed in icy water, and the chill was seeping up his legs, poised to invade the core of his body. His strength was ebbing away. Every limb felt flimsy, too weak to support his weight. He forced himself to stand. It was hard to walk on the padded floor; it bounced like a mattress and pitched him sideways, so that he swayed around like a gale-struck sapling, and lurched from one wall to another.
The ceiling and four walls were padded with the same material as the floor. Some kind of cream-coloured plastic had been used to cover dense foam rubber, so that you could throw yourself against a wall and simply rebound. And yet the cell didn’t feel like a safe space. It had the aura of a death chamber, something to do with its airlessness, its red light, and its all-seeing spy-hole, squatting in the centre of the door. The cell felt like a pit into which animals were thrown, to fight to the death; a sleazy, night-time venue for badger baiting, or dog fighting.
Ronnie gave up trying to walk, and curled up in the corner. For nearly twelve months, ever since his sixteenth birthday, he’d lived with an uninterrupted supply of heroin. Every four hours or so, throughout the waking day, he’d been able to shoot up. The only withdrawal sickness he’d experienced was when he couldn’t get to see his doctor, who prescribed heroin and cocaine for him, or when he’d over-slept, so that he was late for his morning fix. That had been a slight sickness, a bit like the onset of flu. He was scared that he was in for a complete physical breakdown this time.
The padded cell smelt like the inside of a car tyre. He longed for fresh air, and tried to stand up. The Largactil hit him, like a blow to the back of the skull. He was walking into the dentist’s surgery as a child, the dentist and his nurse standing behind the chair, both very tall. They held his wrists down and the rubber mask enveloped his face. The surgery was near a railway goods yard and he could hear a train being shunted, see billowing steam through dim, grime-obscured window panes. The stench of rubber was blown down his nose by the dry, cold gas; his teeth clenched on a leather bit. A train whistle was blowing somewhere in the distance, while chilled blood rolled around his body. He heard the sound of the door banging in the dental surgery, and echoing again and again as he fought against unconsciousness.
Standing in a red, boulder-strewn desert under a hazy pink sky. He recognised it from the cards in tea packets that he’d collected as a child, a Brooke Bond series on the solar system. It was Mars, the Red Planet. Fourth planet from the sun. There are probably no canals on Mars—Oh shit!—Mars has two moons called Phobos and Demos—Oh shit! The sweat was rolling down his brow in the intense Martian heat. He couldn’t walk. He looked down and his feet had grown roots that were reaching out into the sand. There were knobbly protrusions growing from his shoulders and elbows. His limbs ached; he was growing branches. He was turning into a plant. A cactus or something.
His heart skipped a beat. Why did it do that? It was as if it couldn’t decide whether to carry on. His stomach was fucked too. Diarrhoea. And only a plastic piss pot in the cell. His bowels ached; his guts were knotted into tight strings. He stretched out, as far away from the spy-hole as possible. There was a crash of bolts, and a rattle of keys, and the cell door sprang open. White Jacket entered, carrying a stethoscope. Without speaking, he applied it to Ronnie’s chest. And then the smell of surgical spirit as a swab sterilised the skin on Ronnie’s buttocks. The fat hypodermic syringe was brought out of its kidney-shaped bowl, the thick needle pierced the muscle, and the foul liquid was squirted into his body. Another injection of Largactil.
Ronnie asked what day it was, but White Jacket walked out without speaking. It was like being trapped inside a soundproof bubble: no one could hear him.
The red light in the cell reminded him of the cellar in the Swindon Communist Party headquarters. The cellar had been fitted out with red and blue light bulbs in the 1950s, so that it could be used as a folk club. A lot of the singers were from the North East. They sang unaccompanied, finger in ear. And there was an Irish group, the Rebel Lads. Tu-ra-lu-ra-lu.
He filled his lungs and sang out against the suffocating silence:
Tu-ra-lu-ra-lu-ra-lu,
They’re looking for monkeys in the zoo,
And if I had a face like you,
I’d join the Prison Service!
No reaction. No one could hear him. It was so quiet that it must be the middle of the night. But he’d thought that once before, and then a screw came in with his cocoa, which meant it was about six in the evening.
His eyes slowly closed. Hundreds of giant spiders were descending from the sky, on silver threads. ‘The Daughters of Grace,’ said a figure, just outside of his field of vision. ‘They come to pick flesh off the bones of men. Then they return to the Great Mother. She is waiting in Her web at the centre of the Tree of Life, for them to return with your juices. She uses your lifeblood to weave the matrix that holds the stars in place. See, they come for you now.’ Ronnie struggled to climb a slippery bank, but the Daughters of Grace were gaining on him.
What was that? His breakfast was on a tray by the cell door. Who’d brought it? How long had it been there? It was porridge, in a yellow plastic bowl. Cold. So was the tea. Tea in a soft blue plastic cup, weak as piss. No spoon: was he supposed to eat porridge with his fingers?
He forced himself awake. Although he felt cold, he was sweating as though lying in a sauna, and his nose and eyes were running, so that it was hard to see. There was something else wrong. His sweat didn’t smell right. It wasn’t his own smell. Must be the Largactil, giving him an acrid kind of smell. And it didn’t work, didn’t stop the dreams that lurked, waiting for his eyes to close. The dreams started when he needed a fix. Only an opiate would stop them. Morphine would help. Or opium. What about that patent medicine, Dr J. Collis Browne’s Chlorodyne? It contained tincture of opium, morphine and chloroform. That would damp it all down, if you swallowed the whole bottle. A couple of bottles, anyway. Buy it over the counter, at the chemist’s. Tell them you’ve got the runs, and ask for a couple of bottles.
Chlorodyne acts like a charm in diarrhoea, and is the only specific in cholera and dysentery. Beware of piracy and imitations.
That’s weird: piracy and imitations. The pirate flag, the skull and crossbones, the Jolly Roger. Beware of imitations, sailing under false colours, running up the Jolly Roger at the last minute, unleashing the terror. La Jolie Rouge. Beware of methadone hydrochloride, fool’s gold. His doctor, screwing up his nose in distaste: ‘The Germans invented methadone when they couldn’t get the opium to produce morphine, during the war. They had a lot of deaths with it.’ No deadly imitations for me. Give me J. Collis Browne’s.
A crash of bolts. They’d sent a prisoner to empty his piss-pot. Without moving from his crouched position, Ronnie called out, ‘I can’t get warm! It’s freezing in here. Get us another cup of tea, mate? This one’s cold.’
‘What do you think this is, the bleeding Ritz?’
The prisoner spoke in a whisper, a finger held to his lips to indicate that talking was not allowed. A single scar made a long, white line across his shaven head, like a slug’s trail, but it was the sunken eyes that made him look like a concentration camp victim: the darkness of their sockets resembled bruised fruit.
‘Wish it was the Ritz. I’d get sugar with the sodding porridge,’ Ronnie replied.
‘If we gave you sugar with your porridge, or with your cocoa, there wouldn’t be enough sugar for all your puddings, and all your jam tarts. We work to a budget.’
‘Who’s we?’
‘The prison service.’
‘So you’re part of the prison service, are you?’
‘I’m the Red Band in this hospital. See this red armband? That tells you I’m a trusted prisoner. That says I’ve got all the fucking privileges round here, and you’ve got none.’
The Red Band was the kind of idiot who identified with the screws. A collaborator. Stoolie, fink, squealer. James Cagney, pointing his gun at the Red Band: ‘Come out and take it, you dirty yellow-bellied rat!’ That rat with a swollen belly he’d seen on a bombsite once, and a bloke killed it with a brick. No animal should die like that. The bloke said, ‘So what, they carry the plague.’
Ronnie asked what day it was. The Red Band answered, without moving his lips. Not the day Ronnie expected. He’d lost a day. How had that happened?
‘Why won’t the screws tell me what day it is?’
‘Because you’re down the Block, sunshine. They never speak when you’re down the Block, except to give you an order.’ The Red Band moved to the door, the piss-pot held at arm’s length. ‘You don’t half pen and ink. Can’t you bung a cork up your arse for a couple of days?’
The heavy padded door banged shut. Somewhere in the prison he could hear an altercation. When he was a child, he would lie in bed and listen to his parents argue; he could tell by the rhythm of the quarrel whether it was going to get nasty, or just peter out. Sometimes he could hear the warning signs long before his mother, could tell that she was going to say something foolhardy.
His father was a policeman. It was always a bad sign if his father came into his bedroom at night, especially if he was in uniform. The light snapped on, and Dad perched on the edge of the bed. He brought the friendly, public house smell of beer and cigarettes into the room, and he radiated good humour, but that could change in seconds if Ronnie said the wrong thing. Then it was a slapping.
‘Bought you a present.’
His Dad never bought him presents but, after digging deep in his trouser pocket, he produced a toy spaceman and tossed it onto the counterpane. The figure was about two inches tall, grey plastic, with a Perspex helmet, and oxygen bottles worn on the back, like a diver.
‘I want you to do something for me. You know how you’re interested in police work?’ His father put a comforting arm around Ronnie’s shoulder. ‘Well, I want you to help me out with an investigation. Observe someone for me. Tell me what you see. You’re going to watch your mother for me.’
So that’s why he’d been bought a spaceman. It was his prize for informing. You had to keep a secret from your Mum, that you were spying on her. That was the deal; that was the way you kept out of trouble. You had to show your loyalty to one side or the other. That’s why he’d cried when a neighbour asked, ‘Are you a Daddy’s boy or a Mummy’s boy’? He didn’t want to take sides.
Ronnie gazed up at the red light in the ceiling, and could hear the distant rumble of the early morning traffic. The wind was gusting up to gale force, threatening to uproot the neighbourhood trees. Some strange god was concealed in the eye of the storm, lurking behind the tempest. Ronnie couldn’t look into the light. The cold air was drilling holes in his body. His flesh was falling from his bones, like a waterlogged loaf of bread, dissolving in a lake. He screamed, but there was no sound.
Now he was sat in a pharmacy somewhere, preparing a fix. They’d left the drugs cupboard open, and it was full of morphine sulphate ampoules. Too mucking futch! All he had to do was break open a box of amps and draw the liquid into a large syringe, and he would be feeling good again. Everything would be peaceful. But somehow he couldn’t open the amps. They were slipping through his fingers and breaking on the floor. There were tight manacles on his legs, deforming his knee joints, crippling him so that he could hardly stand. Then, when he finally got the shit into the works, and made a hit, the needle blocked. He pressed harder, but the needle exploded off the end of the syringe. Blood and morphine sprayed everywhere. He tried frantically to mop it up.
The rattle of a key in the cell door. He was not standing in the pharmacy; he had no morphine; he was still in prison. HMP Ashford Remand Centre, to be precise. In a YP nick. Down the block. In the pads. White lights flared on in the cell, and two boots marched across the padded floor towards his face. Then the order was shouted: ‘Stand up for the doctor, lad!’ He tried to comply but was incapable. He sprawled, naked before them.
Two medical practitioners stood in the doorway: the prison doctor, a woman in her fifties in a tweed suit, which made her look as though she was judging pedigree Labradors at a dog show, and a man he understood later to be an NHS consultant. He heard the words cardiac dysrhythmia. The man asked the woman why she hadn’t at least prescribed the synthetic opiate, methadone.
The woman replied slowly, enunciating each syllable with exaggerated care. She had the cold, impersonal tones of an executioner. Or maybe of a taxidermist—Ronnie could imagine she spent her days immersing dead animals in embalming fluid.
‘They like drugs and they are not going to get them in prison.’
I’m going to have my say, he thought, but he remained in the crouching dog posture. He’d seen his father, in that posture, years before, when he was eight. Ronnie heard him fall over in the toilet when there was no one else in the house, and went to see if he needed help. Dad was drunk again. His body blocked the door, but Ronnie managed to push it open a few inches. Four of his father’s expensive fountain pens, the ones with gold-plated nibs, had fallen from his jacket pocket, and were lying on the toilet floor.
‘Do you need help, Dad?’ he asked. ‘Shall I get someone to help?’
‘Get back to bed, you silly little sod!’ His father punched the door shut.
An hour later, Ronnie woke when his bedroom light came on and his father, now friendly and jovial, asked if he fancied some liver casserole. Some banging around in the kitchen ensued, and then he appeared in the doorway with a tray.
‘Sit up! Look at this! Better bloody grub than your mother makes.’
Dad went to sit on the edge of the bed. In a horrifying misjudgement, he missed and fell on the floor, the tray crashing down on top of him, food spilling over his copper’s uniform. He had his mouth open, as though he couldn’t understand what was happening.
‘Who moved the bloody bed?’ Dad asked, after what seemed like a long interval.
He wanted to help his father. He volunteered the information freely.
‘Mum did, when she was cleaning this morning.’
‘Bloody cow!’
It must have been after midnight when his mother came home, but his father was waiting for her. He was hiding behind the front door, so that when she stepped into the dark hallway he was able to hit her, before she had a chance to switch on the lights. She was knocked across the hall, and then kicked while she lay screaming on the floor.
Ronnie listened from his bedroom, and felt that he had betrayed his mother. He’d informed on her. Even now, he could hear Mum’s screams. He tried to stand up in the cell. There really were screams. It wasn’t his mother. It was in the next cell. He heard the sound of slapping, and then raised voices.
‘Are you going to shut it? Are you?’
The doctors had gone, and the screws were beating someone in the neighbouring cell. Was he next? Would they give him a slapping? But he heard the cell door bang shut, and their footsteps fade down the corridor.
At home, he was sitting on the carpet, looking up at his Dad, who was wearing civvies. The radio was playing a familiar signature tune: Ray’s a Laugh.
Come on and meet Ted Ray,
He’ll chase your troubles away,
And raise a laugh!
‘Thank you, good evening, and hello, boys and girls. My solicitor’s just called me. He said: “Your mother-in-law’s just passed away in her sleep. Shall we order burial, embalming or cremation?” I said, take no chances—order all three!’
Prolonged applause. Dad smirked.
‘My wife’s mother was a very greedy woman. She was so greedy that when she had body lice, she made all the little fleas pay rent! My wife’s just the same. My friend called round the other night, while I was out. My wife answered the door wearing just a towel. He said ten quid to drop that towel! My wife’s so greedy, she dropped the towel and took the cash! When I came home I asked if my friend had called. She said yes. Then I asked her if he’d left the ten quid he owed me!’
Laughter. Dad was chuckling, and cradling a large tumbler of whisky in his hands. ‘Just like a bloody woman,’ he mused.
‘What do you call a woman who has just lost 95 per cent of her intelligence? A divorcee!’
Dad roared with laughter. He looked very pleased with himself.
‘ … He said, “What do you tell a woman with two black eyes?” I said “Nothing. You’ve already told her twice!” ‘
‘I don’t get it, Daddy.’
‘You don’t want to bloody bother!’ Dad said. He always said that.
On the radio, the dance band played a music hall song:
I’m following in father’s footsteps,
Following my dear old Dad!
‘I’ll teach you how to bloody dance,’ Dad said, leaping up from the armchair.
He let Ronnie stand on his feet, and held his hands, so that they glided around the room like ballroom professionals. Both of them laughed, as they whirled around the room, faster and faster. Then he flew off his father’s feet and fell backwards, hitting his head against the sideboard.
‘Watch out, you stupid little sod!’ Dad shouted.
Ronnie cried. Dad picked him up, sat him on his knee, and jigged him up and down, saying comforting things. When he stopped crying, Dad moved the bottle of Scotch next to the chair, poured himself a large measure, and said in his ear: