‘So, who wants what?’ he asked.
‘One for me,’ said Sarah.
‘One for me – no, two, and a gramme of the coke too, please. I’ve got a family thing in Wales tomorrow,’ said Michael.
‘Two for me as well, and another one for everyone,’ said Quentin.
‘Great,’ said Dad.
We watched as Dad set to work, arranging the elephants, using his little plastic scoop to get just the right amount of powder on to the tiny bronze scale, tipping the powder into one of the small squares of paper that he had prepared, folding them up into fat rectangles and writing on the front with my green felt-tip pen: ‘S1’, ‘M2’, ‘Q2’. As he was writing on the packets everyone was getting out their wallets and purses, pulling out notes, folding them over. It would be fun to have a cash register for this bit, I thought.
Dad collected the money, handed over the little packets, and then measured out a final gramme, Quentin’s present to everyone.
I could sense their anticipation. It was like electricity. I felt it too. My heart was beating faster, even though I was sitting very still. But they were not still, they played with lighters, examined their hands, jiggled their feet. They tapped their cigarettes against the ashtrays, sometimes missing and spilling molten crumbs. I would watch as these crumbs burned out. Sometimes I would spring up and stub one out with my toe. The next day there would be another little black plastic crater in the carpet.
Dad tipped the powder on to the record cover. There was a roll of silver foil on the floor. It was so big and heavy, like a lump of actual metal, but thin sheaves of foil could be unrolled from it and torn off.
‘Dig in,’ Dad said.
They didn’t jostle, they were polite, but I could tell they were impatient. They let Sarah go first; Dad tore the foil for her, a piece not quite as long as a book, and made a crease along the middle. She filled it with a big pinch of powder and took a lighter from the table. Dad had a rolled-up fifty-pound note for her and she creaked back into the seat in her tight jeans and held the lighter under the silver foil. Soon everyone was doing this, cooking their powder as the Emotional Rescue album played. No one spoke. The powder began to melt, transforming into an oozing golden liquid which bubbled at the edges. It was viscous like hot glass and started to blacken just before the smoke rose. It smelt like burnt sugar and swimming pools. They watched, their faces intent, holding the rolled-up notes, ready to catch the thick yellow fumes as they curled up. They dragged the smoke into their lungs, like a genie being sucked into a bottle. They did this until there was no more smoke, then their hands fell to their laps, hot scraps of foil in their limp fingers. They leant their heads against the sofa and each other while I watched, worrying at my tooth. Time folded in upon itself. The air was thick and spicy with cigarette smoke, heroin fumes, the incense from the sticks which were now burnt down, the candles overflowing with molten wax. They closed their eyes, deep in their own heads. I felt drowsy too, tired because I was small and had been at school all day and it was nearly midnight. Tired because everyone in the room was so sleepy and the atmosphere snuck in behind my eyeballs and made them glassy. When I got tired like this my knees would ache, a pain that was inside the bones. I knew that if I closed my eyes the pain would go away. It would be so lovely, so comfortable, with the muffled music and the soft cushions and my skin which I couldn’t feel any more.
But I had to stay awake. I had to be vigilant. I couldn’t relax like them. We didn’t have a fire alarm or a fire escape.
The record finished, so that it was just turning and turning and making a click, click, click noise. I stood up, shaking off the spell, and turned it over. The music started again and the doorbell went.
‘Get that for me, my darling,’ Dad murmured.
I had to stand on my tiptoes to make myself tall enough to reach the intercom.
‘Hello,’ I said.
‘Is that my girl?’
‘Yes!’ I said. ‘Come up!’ and I pressed the button hard to let him in.
Andy was my favourite. He smiled and the corners of his sad, merry eyes crinkled when he saw me. He bent down to give me a kiss, dry and light on my cheek.
‘Come on through,’ I said. ‘Everyone’s in the sitting room.’
Dad and Sarah were whispering to each other, not quite ready for the full volume of their voices. The others were still zoned out.
I went back to my corner. Andy found a cushion and lowered himself down near me.
‘How are you?’ he asked.
‘I’m OK. A bit tired. I’ve got sleepy knee again.’
‘Poor thing,’ he said. ‘Shall I massage it better?’
‘Yes, please.’
I stretched out my legs, my knees scuffed with old scabs, my feet striped with dirt from wearing plastic jelly-bean sandals all day. Andy closed his hands around my right knee first, rubbing it with his thumbs, firm and gentle; and then he moved on to my left knee. He stared down at my legs as he worked, concentrating.
‘Is that better?’ he asked.
‘Yes, thank you,’ I said.
They were waking up now, their fingers twitching.
‘Hello, mate,’ said Dad, as if he had only just noticed Andy was in the room. ‘What can I do you for?’
‘Three, please, and one for everyone.’
‘Brill,’ said Dad, because what was left from the last lot would not be enough for them all to have another go, even though Michael was still passed out, so there were only four of them. Dad often chucked a bit extra in the middle but he couldn’t do this too much, he told me, because then he wouldn’t make any money at all and he wouldn’t be able to buy us new things like the roller skates we’d got the other week.
Dad measured out Andy’s heroin and handed him the little packet with ‘A3’ written on it. Andy handed him the money across the table. He tore a strip of silver foil and sprinkled it with powder, shaking the foil a little so it made a thin line. This was the signal for them to have another turn, the same routine, the burning with the lighter, the powder turning to bubbling liquid, the yellow smell that was always in my nostrils, even when I wasn’t in this room.
Their eyes fluttered shut; their heads lolled. Andy was laid out straight on the floor, his head on the carpet. He was breathing so softly, hardly at all.
‘Helloooo. Is there anyone home?’
I started up from my position, crouching by Andy, my ear to his face, making sure he was alive.
It was John. Andy must have left the door open, so he had walked straight in without knocking or buzzing. He was just as thin as the others but he looked meaner, with his thin lips and hooded eyes.
‘Some fucking party this is,’ he said, and shoved Sarah’s inert body along the sofa so he could sit down.
‘They’ve just had some,’ I said.
‘I see. Do you know if Gav’s got any coke? I’m trying to be a good boy,’ he said, his restless gaze casting around the room as though cocaine might be hanging from the walls, or on display on the mantelpiece.
‘I … I don’t know. There is just what there is there,’ I said, pointing to the plastic bags in the Egyptian-eye box.
John snatched the smaller bag from the box, twisted it open and stuck his pinky finger in, coating it with white powder. He put his finger in his mouth and sucked.
‘That’ll do,’ he said and tipped the powder on to the glass table, using a loose razor blade to neaten it into a line. He got on to his hands and knees to snort the cocaine, not using a rolled-up note or anything. I watched, trying to work out how much he had taken. One elephant’s worth? I wanted to be able to tell Dad, so he could get the right money.
‘Aghhh!’ He made a noise that was relief, pleasure and anger all combined, and then he looked at me. He didn’t get back up on to the sofa. Instead he started to move around the table, walking on his knees, shuffling along the carpet.
‘Has anyone ever given you a Chinese burn, a proper one?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I said.<
br />
‘Oh!’ he said, and he kept moving towards me. He smiled and I saw that his teeth were mouldy brown. ‘There’s a real art to giving a proper one. It hurts like hell, really feels like burning, but it doesn’t leave any sort of mark.’
I crossed my arms, tried to make myself as small and unassailable as possible. I looked at my father, his eyes closed, his mouth hanging open. I thought about school and the fun stories I told every Monday for Show and Tell. Stories about the nightclubs I went to, the models I met, the rock stars I danced with. Stories about champagne and cigarettes. ‘What an incredible imagination your daughter has!’ the teachers would say to my mother. ‘Where is she getting all this from?’ In the car home Mum would say, ‘You must never tell them what really happens.’ And she would hold my wrist so tight.
I wondered what I could say at school about tonight. Would I tell them that my dad had made friends with an aristocrat, and that he had invited us to his palace in the countryside, shown us secret rooms that normal people never got to see, with jewels and swords. Yes, maybe that was the story I would tell.
‘Good evening, Jonathan,’ said Michael, who was still lying on the carpet with his eyes closed, but, it seemed, had woken up.
John laughed. ‘I’ve been looking for you!’
‘Well, you know where to find me,’ he said. He sat up and leant back against the sofa. ‘You should really try this Afghani gear, it’s incredible.’
‘Oh fuck it, go on then.’
I didn’t understand any of it, why they came to our house to take something that sent them to sleep, why they spent so many nights on our living-room floor, why they didn’t just go to bed in their own homes, which were nicer than ours – I knew that, I’d seen them. I often went with Dad to drop packages off on a Saturday morning or a Sunday afternoon, driving over the river to their high-ceilinged flats in Chelsea and Mayfair. It didn’t make any sense to me, and when I asked Dad he couldn’t explain it either.
I was the only one awake now.
The film was finished. The television crackled with grey speckles.
The record was finished.
They were finished for tonight, I decided.
This was what I had been waiting for. I took the still-burning cigarette from between Andy’s fingertips and stubbed it out in the ashtray. I stepped between their bodies, light on my toes, and I blew out the candles, pinched the wicks with my thumb and forefinger to be sure, checked that the incense sticks were cold, took the needle off the record. I turned off the TV and the screen turned black with an electric hiss. I opened the window just a little. The fumes rushed out into the night like escaping ghosts.
I looked at them all. They did not look comfortable, their skinny limbs all at strange angles, their heads too heavy for their necks. Apart from Dad – he always looked comfortable, nose to the ceiling, mouth open, snoring, stomach rising and falling, cash in his pocket, asthma inhaler in his fist.
My bedroom smelt of toys and milky breath.
I got into bed, sat there for a moment, pushing at my tooth. It was coming. I could feel it. There was a sharp needle of pain and then plop it fell into my open palm, a shiny baby tooth and one drop of blood. I slid it deep under my pillow, wiping my bloody hand on my sheet and closing my eyes. I soothed the ragged gum with my tongue, wondering how the fairy would manage to burrow her way under there. She would have to be very small and very strong.
It was a blink sleep, close your eyes and it is morning.
The tooth was still under my pillow. I was disappointed. I must have left it too late for the fairy.
Andy and Michael were asleep on the sitting-room floor, stretched out.
The Egyptian-eye box was gone.
The scales had been packed away and were back on the shelf.
The used bits of silver foil had been rolled into sticky balls and chucked into the cupboard behind the sofa.
The sun was shining and I was going to school where I had friends and the teachers liked me.
And I was happy because everyone was alive, everyone had survived the dark night, my sister and my mum, my dad and Andy; they had all slept safely.
I had made sure of it. Me. I was small and very strong.
3
2014, London
When I was a baby my father used to blow the smoke from his joint into my face to stop me crying and put a tot of whisky in my bottle to help me sleep.
That was a long time ago. I am not that person any more. In our ground-floor flat in South London there are two fire alarms, one in the kitchen and one in the hall, both wired to mains electricity so they don’t need to be checked. My children are fed, showered, stories read and in bed by eight p.m. At night our house is dark and calm. In the morning the sitting room and kitchen are clean, ready for another bright, sunny day.
Breakfast is busy, toast and cereal, eggs fried, scrambled or dippy, getting the girls dressed, pulling up their grey woollen tights (lifting them off the ground by the waistband, swirling them round, ‘flying tights!’), brushing their blonde hair into ponytails, somehow getting myself ready for work among everything. Make-up on, make sure there is no egg yolk on my top (just scrub it off if there is), leave the house at eight twenty on the dot, walk to the station (I hate being late, it makes me panic).
In the office where I work the walls are painted white and the desks are clean and white too. I am neat and together, in control, on top of everything. I am the deputy editor of Tatler, the oldest magazine in the world. A grand and solid institution (if perhaps a little frivolous). A grand and solid job (and a nice way to pay the mortgage). I’ve had it for a year. I wish Dad were alive to see it. He would have been proud; he would have lied and told everyone I was editor.
I like to get home by seven fifteen so I can put the children to bed. But sometimes when an article goes awry or deadlines loom, I have to stay late.
This is one of those nights. I am researching a story about the eighties Sloanes, a tribe lavishly depicted in the pages of Tatler. My research involves looking through old copies of the magazine. I have a great pile of them on my desk, bound in red leather with gold writing on the spines so that they look like dictionaries or encyclopaedias, tomes containing important knowledge.
I am alone. The movement-sensitive lights in the ceiling wink off one by one until only the bulb above my head still shines.
I turn the pages, observing the strapless gowns, the ziggurats of champagne glasses, the heirloom tiaras, the uproarious and non-stop fun. Tatler is a magazine about aristocrats, royals, the rich, their houses, their pets. I am the daughter of a hairdresser from Bromley and a model from Woodford Green. My grandfather was an off-stone sub at the News of the World; my uncle was a butcher who once got into trouble for selling stolen meat; one aunt was a florist, another a waitress.
These are not my people.
But then I begin to see them. The ones who sat in my living room at night; the ones who bought heroin from my father and took it while I watched. They are all here: John, Quentin, Michael, Sarah, youthful and golden, not emaciated and nicotine-stained, not how I remember them. There are others I remember too, Jamie, Marquess of Blandford and Lady Alethea Savile. I find a portrait of her dressed in a silk ballgown, blonde hair blow-dried, lips shiny with pale gloss, seated in a beautiful blue and green tiled room. Dad cried when he discovered that she had died of a suspected drug overdose in her flat in Chelsea. Her twin brother Jonny, also a friend of Dad’s, found her body after she died.
I was making my own breakfast by the time I was three, climbing on to the kitchen work-top to pull down packets of cereal, going into the living room to eat fistfuls of Rice Krispies out of the box in front of the television, the screen too close to my nose, the room dark, wine bottles and ashtrays all around, my parents still asleep – who knew when they would wake up.
My mother once told me that she and Dad were surprised to find themselves pregnant a second time because they had been so wasted on booze and drugs that they couldn’t
remember having had sex. I would have been nearly four years old when they conceived my sister. If they couldn’t remember having sex, who was looking after me? (I don’t ask this question; I don’t want to upset her.)
They’d met late one night on the Embankment. Mum had been to a ball. She was a model, so she was probably paid to go, paid to look gorgeous. Sometimes she was paid to pretend to be the girlfriend of a person she barely knew, a European actor or film director who needed a woman on his arm for an event.
But on this night she’d had enough of pretending. She was standing on the street, waiting for a cab that never arrived, her toes numb in her high heels, her lacquered curls wilting. And along came Dad, driving his psychedelic Campervan, the Rolling Stones blaring from the stereo, his long hair dyed orange by henna and the Spanish sun. He was just back from three years in Marbella and the first person he saw in London was Mum, a gorgeous blonde in distress. He pulled over, the cars around him beeping in protest, and wound down the window. ‘Hop in, love. I’ll take you where you want to go.’
I was conceived not long afterwards. It was a hot King’s Road afternoon, perfect for love-making by an open window, a round of applause at the end from the art-school students who had gathered to watch in the halls of residence opposite. The doctors told my parents they were having a boy. They were going to call me Gavin Junior. But when I was born a girl my dad made up Gavanndra, insisting on the two ‘n’s, even though the man at the register office told him he was spelling the name wrong. My mum chose my middle name, Layla, after her favourite song by Derek and the Dominoes.
My parents married two months after I was born. It was Mum’s birthday. Dad had forgotten to buy her a present so asked her to marry him instead.
This is how my family began, chance and brazen caprice, instability that has to become solid at some point, doesn’t it, because otherwise there is nothing to build on, nothing that a child can be certain of.
The Consequences of Love Page 3
