by Marian Keyes
I reckoned my chances of procuring drugs were highest around the few trendy, well-dressed youths I saw. But, when I tried to make meaningful eye-contact, they all turned away with a snigger and a blush.
I don’t fancy you, I wanted to scream. I only want to buy cocaine. All that talk about Dublin’s terrible drug problem, I thought in fury. The terrible problem is getting the fucking drugs!
Eventually, after I’d been scurrying up and down for a full hour, I forced myself to stop and wait. Just wait. Simply idle on a corner and look desperate with need.
People looked at me suspiciously. It was horrible. Everyone knew why I was there and their disgust was palpable.
To be less conspicuous, I sat down on a filthy flight of concrete steps outside a block of flats that looked like a war zone. But then a woman came out with several children and grimly told me ‘Get up.’ I did. Fear broke through the madness of my craving. The woman was hard, bitter and frightening and there were probably more like her. I’d heard about the vigilante groups they had in areas like this. And they did lots more than paint crooked syringes with red crosses through them on every gable end. People had been hospitalized after drug-related beatings. Not to mention the annual shootings.
A voice in my head urged me to leave, to go home. I felt dirty, embarrassed, ashamed and scalp-crawlingly scared. But frightened and all as I was to stay, I was more afraid to leave.
I stood up again, leant against a wall, looked needily at passers-by and quailed as one by one they threw filthy expressions at me.
I don’t know how long I loitered for, cringing and desperate, when finally a boy came up to me. In a few short sentences, in language we both understood, I conveyed to him that I wanted an awful lot of cocaine, and he seemed to be in a position to help me.
‘And I need some downers,’ I added.
‘Temazepam?’
‘Fine.’
‘The coke’ll take a while.’
‘How long?’ I asked anxiously.
‘Maybe a couple of hours.’
‘OK,’ I said reluctantly.
‘And I get a hit of it,’ he added.
‘OK,’ I mumbled again.
‘Wait in the pub at the end of the road.’
He relieved me of eighty pounds, which was daylight extortion, but I was in no position to negotiate.
As he hared off I was gripped with the conviction that I’d never see him, the coke or the money again.
I fucking hate this.
I went to the pub. There was nothing I could do but wait.
There were a few people – all men – in the pub. The atmosphere was macho and hostile and I had a strong sense of how unwelcome I was. Conversation entirely ceased as I ordered a brandy. For a horrible moment I thought the barman was going to refuse to serve me.
Nervously, I sat in the furthest corner. I hoped the brandy would calm my frantic agitation. But when I finished it, I still felt terrible, so I had another. And another.
Avoiding eye-contact, willing time to pass, I sat, sick and edgy, drumming my fingers on the brown formica table. But every now and then, like the sun breaking through the clouds, I remembered I was only a short time away from being the proud owner of a lot of cocaine. Maybe. That warmed me, before I was pitched back into the hell of my racing head.
Whenever I remembered my awful night with Chris or what my mother had said, I took another swig of brandy and concentrated on what it would be like when I’d got my hands on the coke.
After I’d been there ages a man approached me, wondering if I’d like to buy some methadone. Keen and all as I was to achieve oblivion, I knew that methadone could be fatal to the uninitiated. I wasn’t that desperate. Yet.
‘Thanks, but someone is already getting me some stuff,’ I explained, terrified of offending.
‘Ah, that’d be Tiernan,’ the man said.
‘I don’t know his name,’ I said.
‘It’s Tiernan.’
Over the next hour, every person in the pub tried to interest me in buying methadone. Clearly they’d had a bumper harvest that year.
My eyes were constantly trained on the door, as I waited for Tiernan to reappear. But he didn’t.
Despite the brandy, my panic picked up again. What would I do? How would I get drugs now that I’d given away so much money?
Another possibility broke through into my consciousness. It suddenly seemed like a merciful rescue that Tiernan had done a bunk with the money. You could get up and go now, go home, sort things out with your mother. This isn’t irreversible.
But then my thoughts swung back again. I couldn’t imagine anything being all right, ever again. I was too far down the path I was on to be able to make my way back. I ordered yet another brandy.
So that I didn’t have to be alone with my own head, I eavesdropped on the conversations around me.
They were mostly extremely dull, all about machinery and involving the sentence ‘… So I took it up to the brother-in-law for him to have a look at it…’
Occasionally, though, they were interesting. There was a nice one about ecstasy.
‘I’ll swap you two Mad Bastards for one Holy Ghost,’ a tattooed man offered a raw youth.
‘No.’ The raw youth shook his head adamantly. ‘I’m happy with my Holy Ghost.’
‘So you won’t swap?’
‘I won’t swap.’
‘Not even for two Bastards?’
‘Not even for two Bastards.’
‘You see,’ the tattooed man turned to the other tattooed man beside him, ‘people everywhere are saying they’d rather have one Holy Ghost instead of two Mad Bastards. Holy Ghosts give a cleaner, whiter buzz.’
At least, I thought that’s what he’d said.
At about two o’clock – although time had ceased to have any meaning between the trauma and the brandy – Tiernan returned. I had almost entirely given up on him, so I thought I was hallucinating. I could have kissed him I was so ecstatic.
Quite drunk, also.
‘Did you get…?’ I asked anxiously. My breath shortened when he waved a small bag of whitish powder at me.
My heart gave a great hop and I itched to hold it in my own hands, like a mother wanting to hold her newborn baby. But Tiernan was very proprietorial.
‘I get a line,’ he reminded me, swinging the bag out of my grasp.
‘OK,’ I gasped, fizzing with rush-lust.
Hurry up.
In full view of everyone in the pub, he chopped two gorgeous, fat lines on the formica table.
Fearfully, I looked around to see if anyone minded, but they didn’t seem to.
He rolled up a tenner and neatly hoovered up one of the lines. The bigger, I noticed angrily.
And then it was my turn. My heart was already pounding and my head already lifting in joyous anticipation. I bent over the coke. It felt like a mystic moment.
But just as I was on the verge of sniffing, I suddenly heard Josephine’s voice. ‘You were killing yourself with drugs. The Cloisters has shown you another way of living. You can be happy without drugs.’
I wavered. Tiernan looked at me quizzically.
You don’t have to do this.
You can stop right now and no harm will have been done.
I hesitated. I’d learnt so much in the Cloisters, made such progress with myself, admitted I was an addict and looked forward to a better, brighter, healthier, happier future. Did I want to throw it all away? Well, did I?
Well, did I?
I stared at the innocent-looking white powder, arrayed in a wobbly little line on the table in front of me. I had nearly died because of it. Was it worth continuing?
Was it?
Yes!
I bent over my cocaine, my best friend, my saviour, my protector. And I inhaled deeply.
66
I woke up in hospital.
Except I didn’t know it was a hospital when I first came to. I struggled to swim out of sleep and up to the surface. I could have been anywh
ere. In any stranger’s bed. Until I opened my eyes I could have been in any of the millions of beds that exist all over the globe.
When I saw the drip going into my arm and smelt the funny disinfectant smell, I understood where I was. I had no idea how I’d got there. Or what was supposed to be wrong with me.
But I had the bleakest feeling of comedown I’d ever had. Like I was standing right on the most desolate edge of the universe, staring into the abyss. Emptiness all around me, emptiness deep within me. All so horribly familiar.
I hadn’t felt like that for over two months. I’d forgotten how really, truly unbearable it was. And of course the first thing I craved, to make it go away, was more drugs.
What happened? I wondered.
I had a vague memory of lurching through the bright, evening streets with my new best friend, Tiernan. And going to another pub and drinking more and snorting more. Taking a handful of my Temazepam when slight paranoia kicked in. I remembered dancing in the new pub and thinking I was the most brilliant dancer in the whole world. Kerr-ist, how mortifying.
Then I’d gone with Tiernan to another pub where we’d got more coke. Then another pub. Then maybe another, I had a vague memory, but I wasn’t sure. And after that we’d gone with three – or was it four? – of his mates to someone’s flat. It had been dark by then. And we’d taken a couple of Es each. Apart from a flash of a nightclub-type scene, that may have been real or imagined, I remembered absolutely nothing else.
I could hear someone crying, sobbing their eyes out. My mother. Reluctantly I opened my eyes, and it just added to the feelings of overall weirdness when I saw that it was Dad who was in floods.
‘Don’t,’ I croaked. ‘I won’t do it again.’
‘You said that before,’ he heaved, his face in his hands.
‘I promise,’ I managed. ‘It’ll be different this time.’
Apparently I’d been knocked down. According to the driver I’d rushed right out in front of her and she’d had no way of avoiding me. The police report described me as ‘crazed’. The people I’d been with had run away and left me lying on the road. I was told that I was extremely lucky – apart from a huge bruise on my thigh, there wasn’t anything wrong with me.
Except that I was losing my mind, of course.
I wished, longed, yearned to be dead. More than all the other times I’d wished I was dead.
A rock-heavy slab of despair flattened me. A cocktail of depression made up of the terrible things my mother had screeched at me, my shame at relapsing and Chris’s rejection of me.
I lay in my hospital bed, tears trickling down the side of my face and onto the pillow, loathing myself with a dull, heavy passion. I was such an utter failure, the biggest loser ever created. No one loved me. I’d been thrown out of my home because I was stupid and useless. I couldn’t ever go back there again, and frankly I didn’t blame my mother. Because, as well as all my other terrible faults, I’d relapsed.
That was killing me. I’d ruined everything, totally destroyed my chance of a happy, drug-free life. I despised myself for all the money Dad shelled out on me going to the Cloisters, for all the good it had done me. I’d let everyone down. Josephine, the other inmates, my parents, my family, even me. I was racked with fierce guilt, shame and mortification. I wanted to disappear off the face of the earth, to die and dissolve.
I went to sleep, grateful to check out of the living hell my life had become. When I woke up Helen and Anna were sitting by my bed, eating the grapes someone had brought me.
‘Fucking pips,’ Helen complained, spitting something into her hand. ‘Haven’t they heard of seedless grapes, welcome to the twentieth century. Oh, you’re awake.’
I nodded, too depressed to speak.
‘Jesus, you’re really bad,’ she commented cheerfully. ‘Ending up in hospital again from taking drugs. Next time you might die.’
‘Stop.’ Anna elbowed her.
‘Well, you needn’t worry,’ I managed to drag the words out. ‘It won’t be your concern anymore. As soon as I’m well enough to get out of here, I’m going far, far away where you’ll never have to see me again.’
I planned to disappear. To punish myself with an empty, lonely half-life away from family and friends. I would wander the earth, welcome nowhere, because I didn’t deserve any other form of existence.
‘Listen to the drama queen,’ Helen mocked.
‘Stop,’ Anna wailed, distraught.
‘You don’t understand,’ I informed Helen, my heart breaking from my almost-orphan status. ‘Mum told me to get out and never come back. She hates me, she’s always hated me.’
‘Who, Mum?’ Helen asked in surprise.
‘Yes, she always makes me feel like I’m useless,’ I managed to say, even though the pain nearly killed me.
There was much mirth and scoffing from the pair of them.
‘You?’ derided Helen. ‘But she’s always telling me I’m hopeless. For failing my exams twice and having a poxy job. Every second day she tells me to get out and never come back. At this stage, I worry when she doesn’t.
‘It’s true, I swear.’ She nodded at my disbelieving face.
‘No, it’s me she really hates,’ Anna said. If I hadn’t known better I’d have thought she was boasting.
‘And she can’t stand Shane. She’s always asking why he doesn’t have a company car.’
‘Why doesn’t he have a company car?’ Helen asked. ‘Just out of curiosity.’
‘Because he doesn’t have a job, stupid!’ Anna said, rolling her eyes.
My spirits lifted an atom or two. I tentatively began to think that maybe I wouldn’t commit suicide or run away to sea just yet. That perhaps all wasn’t entirely lost.
‘Is she really mean to you?’ I croaked. ‘Or are you only trying to be nice.’
‘I don’t do nice,’ Helen said scornfully. ‘And, yes, she’s horrible to both of us.’
It was glorious for that terrible apocalyptic depression to lift, even momentarily.
Helen awkwardly pawed at my hand and I was so touched by her attempt at affection that tears came to my eyes, for the eighty-ninth time that day.
‘She’s a mother,’ Helen told me wisely. ‘It’s her job to shout at us. She’d be stripped of her badge if she didn’t.’
‘It’s nothing personal,’ Anna agreed. ‘She thinks if she gives out shite to us that we’ll make something of ourselves. Not just you. She does it to all of us!’
‘Except Margaret,’ the three of us said in unison.
I was feeling better enough to call Margaret a lickarse twenty or thirty times. ‘Lickarse,’ we all agreed. ‘Yeah, lickarse. The big lickarse.’
‘So you mean you got wrecked just because Mum told you to get out and never come back?’ Helen endeavoured to understand.
‘I suppose,’ I shrugged, embarrassed at how puerile that sounded.
‘You thick-looking wuss,’ she said kindly. ‘Just tell her to feck off like I always do. Or ask her who’s going to mind her in her old age.’
‘I’m not like you,’ I pointed out.
‘You’d better learn to be,’ Helen suggested. ‘Toughen up, you’re too much of a baba. You can’t go round nearly getting killed every time Mum – or anyone – shouts at you, you won’t last five minutes.’
That was the warning Josephine had given me. My head clanged as I suddenly understood what she’d been on about when she said I had unresolved tension with Mum. I’d nodded and agreed with her, but I’d forgotten all the advice she’d given me the minute some of said unresolved tensions raised their heads.
I’d failed my first test in the real world.
I’d know better the next time.
‘When she goes mad at you again, ignore her.’ Helen beamed encouragingly, reading my thoughts. ‘So what if she tells you you’re crap? You’ve got to believe in yourself.’
‘Anyway, she doesn’t even mean it,’ Anna chipped in.
‘Only with you,’ Helen said to her.
I felt the black, smoggy cloud of misery lift from me. It was a wonderful revelation to find out that my sisters felt as picked on by Mum as I always had. That the only difference between us was in our attitudes. They regarded it as amusing sparring, but I’d taken it far too much to heart. And I’d better stop.
‘Do you feel better now about Mum?’ Anna asked gently. ‘She only lost the head because she was afraid when you didn’t come home. That night she was hysterical thinking you might take drugs with that Chris. People say things they don’t mean when they’re worried.’
She added sheepishly ‘I was worried myself.’
‘Clean and serene, that’s you, isn’t it Anna?’ Helen stretched and yawned. ‘How long is it since you’ve had a drug?’
‘Never you mind,’ Anna said haughtily. And a squabble broke out, but I hardly heard them, because I was suddenly assailed by guilt and shame. Different guilt and shame from the ones that had been torturing me since I’d come to. Guilt and shame about what I’d done to Mum. Of course she’d been worried, I realized, with horrible clarity. I’d only been out of the Cloisters less than a week. I was an addict, it had been my first trip to the outside world, with a person who was a well-known bad influence, and I hadn’t come home. If she’d thought the worst, she had been well within her rights. I deserved to be roared at.
She’d accused me of being selfish. And she was right. I’d been really selfish. I was so wrapped up in myself and Chris that I couldn’t see how frightened for me she’d been. I resolved to humbly apologize as soon as I saw her.
I was starting to feel quite good until I remembered that my fight with Mum wasn’t the only thing that was weighing heavy on my brain.
‘I’m a failure,’ I reminded Helen and Anna. ‘I took drugs.’
‘So what?’ they clamoured.
So what? I thought in disgust. They clearly had no idea how serious the situation was.
‘Don’t take them again.’ Helen shrugged. ‘It’s like being on a diet. Just because you go mental and eat seven Mars bars one day doesn’t mean that you can’t start your diet again the next day. All the more reason to, in fact.’
