High society

by Ben Elton

  ‘Right, that’s it. Turn round, take me to fookin’ Heathrow! Get me on a fookin’ plane. I’m going to give that bastard a smack in the mouth. I’ll whack ‘im, I’ll twat ‘im, I will ‘it ‘im wi’ me knob. The sweaty little fookin’ mushroom.’

  ‘Can’t turn round, Tom. Can’t go forward, can’t go back.’

  ‘Well, what are we gonna do?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  Tommy did what he always did in such circumstances. On this occasion his choice of stimulant was a couple of nosefuls of amphetamines.

  BEHIND THE ASTORIA THEATRE, SOHO SQUARE

  In Sutton Row, just round the corner from where Tommy’s car was stuck, a difficult social situation had developed.

  Peter Paget was in the process of conducting a small group of MPs, including a Home Office minister, around the backs of various London theatres. It is an accident of architecture that these stage-door areas have become one of the prime locations of choice for the injection of heroin and the associated activities of whoring, pimping, slumping out unconscious, urinating on walls, fighting and dying. If you are a homeless and hopeless addict it is actually quite difficult to find a relative degree of privacy to satisfy your cravings. The fast-food outlets have become increasingly wise to the fact that their toilets were being adopted as shooting galleries and have made efforts to prevent the practice, in some cases installing blue lighting that prevents people from being able to see their veins. The backs of theatres, however, are no-man’s-land. Nobody seems to have responsibility for them, and the mainstream of life passes them by in the glamorous streets out front. Normally these dingy stage-door areas open on to alleyways, their walls indented with emergency exit crash door alcoves, while large dustbins often provide further cover. The only legitimate population of these places is the nicotine-addicted actors who are no longer allowed to smoke in their dressing rooms. This makes these areas reasonably attractive to those whose options for rest and privacy are severely limited. Not as good as a Burger King toilet, but a lot better than down by the river under some stinking, dripping bridge.

  If the matinee audiences of the latest Ayckbourn revival or fascinating transfer from the Almeida had X-ray vision and could see beyond the actors and through the back wall of the theatre they were sitting in, they would very likely see the real human drama of people with their trousers round their ankles and their skirts hitched up around their waists poking dirty needles into their genitals. Were Hogarth to drop in to such a place from the gin-soaked alleys of the eighteenth century, he would find little that surprised him.

  It was in order to view this unedifying offshoot of the West End’s glamorous theatreland that Peter Pa get had led his little cross-party group from the stage door of the Dominion Theatre across St Giles Circus and up Sutton Row to the rear of the Astoria. It had been his intention to then take his fellow MPs to the back of the Apollo on Shaftesbury Avenue, a place where the ageing brickwork is so soaked in urine that the actors inside refuse to take ground-floor dressing rooms because of the stink.

  Unfortunately, Peter had reckoned without Tommy Hanson’s ‘secret’ gig. As they stood speaking to a heroin addict named Robert, who had been seeking privacy in a crash door alcove, it was as if half the teenagers in London had descended upon them, along with every shop assistant on Oxford Street, who, having finished work, had wandered down to catch a glimpse of Tommy.

  Trapped as he and his colleagues were with this dirty junkie, conversation was beginning to flag. Having established at some length that if Westminster Council were to provide a pkce where Robert could use clean needles and dispose of them in a socially responsible way he would go there, they had little else to discuss. Strangely, at this moment, Robert felt slightly socially responsible himself. In a way, he was the host, and now his guests were trapped with him after they clearly wished to leave. It was like an awful end-of-dinner party moment when the taxi fails to arrive despite repeated telephone calls and host and guest sit staring at each other over empty coffee cups, longing for the evening to finally end.

  ‘Sorry about this, dude. It’s normally pretty quiet at this time of day,’ Robert said.

  ‘That’s all right,’ Peter replied. ‘It’s astonishingly crowded, isn’t it? Somebody’s going to get hurt.’

  All four Members of Parliament were being pushed closer and closer towards Robert as the ebb and flow of people seeped into every available space. It was not long before Peter was horrified to find himself actually physically forced against this filthy person. Peter was the taller and so his nose was hovering in the vicinity of Robert’s lank, greasy hair. He struggled to master the heaving nausea in his stomach. The smell of piss and sweat and grease and ancient clothing that emanated from the addict was overwhelming. Peter’s discomfort was increased by the fact that Robert was beginning to twitch.

  ‘Look, man, I’ve got a problem now, right?’

  Peter stared into the space above Robert’s head. He could not answer.

  ‘You see, that shooting gallery you want to build ain’t built, is it?’

  Once more Peter could only grunt.

  ‘Which is why I came here to jack up…’

  A pause.

  ‘But, you see, I didn’t jack up because you lot came along and started chatting…Well, you don’t like to jack up when you’re chatting, do you? So I thought to myself, I’ll just sit on it, you know, man, sweat it out, control my cravings till you lot have found out enough facts, right? Then you’ll go and I’ll hit myself up…’

  Peter and his colleagues were beginning to understand where this was going, although they prayed that it was not so. ‘But of course you lot haven’t gone, have you? Because we’ve got all crushed in. I mean, this has never happened before, all these girls filling up the street. It’s really, really unusual. But the fact is, I’m getting really quite strung out now…So what I’m basically saying is I hope you won’t think me, you know, rude or ignorant or anything, but I’m going to have to shoot some scag into my cock.’

  And so Peter Paget’s fact-finding mission got more facts than it had either bargained for or desired. Jam-packed though they were, Robert squirmed and wriggled until he was able to reach into his pocket and produce the wherewithal to prepare a needleful of heroin, the tin foil, the cigarette lighter, the twist of dirty brown powder.

  ‘Would you mind holding the foil while I cook it up? It’s just I’ve no room to squat down and do it on the ground.’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t do that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I’m a Member of Parliament and it’s not appropriate.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Peter’s colleagues felt the same way, although the Liberal Democrat thought about it for slightly longer before refusing.

  Forced to act alone, Robert held the foil between his lips while f using one hand to pour the brown powder into it and the other to hold the lighter under it. The foil soon glowed red and it clearly must have been burning Robert’s lips, but a combination of necessity and the drug addict’s increased pain threshold meant that he did not flinch. Peter wished that he had had the courage to offer to help. It would have been a powerful political gesture, but he did not offer now. Very carefully, Robert removed the little foil bowl of liquid from his mouth. The foil had burnt itself onto his lower lip and so he tore it, leaving a smoky scrap of tin stuck to his mouth. Then, with the concentration of a brain surgeon, he was able to produce a syringe from his pocket and using only one hand dip the needle into the liquid and draw back the plunger with his thumb. Then, having expelled the air from the body of the syringe while taking care not to expel any of its precious contents, Robert reached down and, unbuttoning the fly of his filthy combat trousers, dug out his penis from its dark recess.

  Suddenly, everything went so horribly wrong that Peter’s nightmares would be haunted by the moment that followed for the rest of his life. Never ever would he be free from the memory of the agonizing horror of what then occurred.


  There was a scream. It came from three teenaged girls who were crushed up behind the MPs and had been watching with utter fascination as this creature from Mars surrounded by what appeared to be four bank managers prepared what they knew to be heroin. These girls had so far been privately congratulating themselves on their level of sophistication. They knew all about drugs. Heroin was no big deal to them; they knew its nicknames and called it scag or smack. Of course they knew that they would never take it themselves, but there were always rumours about bad girls at school, girls who ‘jacked up’. Oh yes, these girls, like all kids their age, considered themselves entirely hip to the drug scene. They giggled when their earnest teachers tried falteringly to explain to them that which they already knew…But now, suddenly, innocence was lost. Seeing Robert’s choice of inlet, the girls’ happy air of sophistication and sangfroid evaporated completely. The appearance of Robert’s dirty, veiny, bent and slightly knobbly penis, and the vicious, gleaming needle that hovered above it, quite simply horrified these not-quite-as-tough-as-they thought-they-were girls, and together they had let out a single, involuntary, piercing scream.

  Three teenaged girls screaming at once and in perfect unison is a big noise.

  Robert jumped. Well, he did not so much jump as jerk. There was no room to jump, crammed in as he was by a four-member cross-party fact-finding committee from the House of Commons, but there was room to violently twitch, room to jerk, room for Robert’s hand to fly sideways and in so doing plunge the needle he held a good inch and a half into Peter Paget’s thigh.

  AN OXFAM SHOP, WEST BROMWICH

  There were nine girls in our attic. We crashed out mornin’s, mostly, when business was slow, that’s where they fed us as well and where we smoked our bit of smack or crack. We rarely got given a needle. Jacking up soon ruins your skin even if it’s good stuff, an’ before ye know it, ye start tae look like a pizza. Goldie was aware o’ that. So he worked hard tae keep us nice. Still, there was plenty tae smoke an’ any amount o’ pills tae pop. Well, there’ll always be pills if you’re working. He wanted us awake, didn’t he? An’ docile, o’ course. Ah don’t know what most brothels are like, but Goldie certainly thought it were worth the cash tae keep us out of it most o’ the time. Ah was the only English-speaking girl there, or at least the only girl who had English as a first language. The others were all Eastern European. Slaves, basically. No passport, no ID and absolutely no chance. The boss, Goldie, had three houses an’ he liked tae move us around, always at night, half conscious on the back seat of a Merc. It didn’t make any difference to us. All three houses were the same, a gangroom in the basement and reception on the ground floor, wi’ us all sittin’ there in our miniskirts an’ stilettos, sometimes wi’ our tits out, sometimes starkers. The punter’d take his pick an’ up we’d go tae the shaggin’ rooms.

  ‘It didn’t take me long tae realize the sort o’ hellhole Ah’d gone an sold maseP into. There was one girl, her name was Maria. Ah knew that because she was shouting it the day they took her out o’ the house for ever. Always on about her name, that girl was, whenever the boys called her babe or sugar or whatever, she would say, ‘My name is Maria’. It was her thing, the thing she wanted tae hang on taste. Everybody knew she had attitude. Even when she was completely high she’d be demanding her passport and asking for the money she’d been promised tae come taste England. So one day she just flipped, stormed out of her cubicle refusing tae service a client, downed tools, so to speak. Ah think he wanted somethin’ she were no prepared to provide an’ she’d just had enough. Anal, Ah imagine, that was a big problem wi’ all us girls. We didnae like that at all. Believe it or not, some of the idiots we serviced reckoned it represented safer sex for them. Can ye believe the pig ignorance? Anyway, whatever it was, Maria just flipped an’ started screamin’ tae get out an’ go home. ‘My name is Maria! My name is Maria!’ she kept shoutin’, so they took her out an’ that was the last we ever heard of her. She was from Chechnya. Ah’d spoken to her once or twice because her English was no’ bad. She’d got very unlucky in the war, wrong place, wrong time, et cetera. Stolen from her house by the Russian army for mobile R and R, sold on to a drug baron when they was sick o’ her, shipped across Europe on the drugs mainline, an’ whored all the way tae fuckin’ Birmingham of all places. Can ye believe it? Chechnya tae Birmingham! I mean, how big a mind fuck would that be? Anyway, what happened tae Maria turned ma mind tae thinkin’…No easy thing tae do when ye’re smacked out o’ your head an’ getting serial banged every wakin’ hour, but thinkin’ is what Ah did. It suddenly dawned upon me, loud as thunder, that all of us girls was goin’ tae die, an’ die quite soon. Either through disease, or through violence or maybe an overdose or maybe bad shite or whatever, but we were all definitely doomed. Maria was just our advance guard. She’d be there waitin’ for us on the other side. Funny thought, really, knowin’ you’re goin’ tae die.

  ‘Did Ah tell ye about ma other self? The girl who used tae float above the cars when Ah was workin’ the kerb for Francois? Ah hadnae seen her for a while, that other self, the one that liked music. We certainly never heard any music in Goldie’s houses, except the boomin’ o’ drum an’ bass from the passing cars. Well, Ah was lyin’ on ma bunk thinkin’ about Maria, an’ for some reason Ah’m wonderin’ how old she’d been an’ suddenly Ah’m lookin’ intae ma own face and ma face is sayin’ tae me, ‘How old are you, Jessie? Are ye seventeen or are ye eighteen? Ye don’t know, do ye?’ An’ Ah realize that Ah don’t know how old Ah am any more. Ah don’t know what the date is, what the month is, even.

  ‘An’ then one o’ the boys comes in an’ tells me it’s ma shift an’ would Ah like a nice pipe o’ crack tae get me in the mood, an’ Ah’m just reachin’ out for it an’ suddenly the girl on the ceiling that used to be me screams. Ah swear she screamed at me. It’s ringing roun’ ma brain while ma man’s grinnin’ at me over the pipe no’ hearin’ a thing. An’ the old Jessie shouts…‘No! Don’t take it, ye stupid cow!’

  ‘An’ then Ah’m seeing Maria before ma eyes getting dragged off shoutin’ out her name, which was all she had left, an’ Ah realize that ma name is just about all Ah have left masel’, because Ah don’t even know how fuckin’ old Ah am any more!

  ‘So Ah grins at ma man all sheepish an’ tells him thanks very much but Ah’m totally monged already an Ah’ll have it later. So he shrugs and pisses off and the next thing Ah’m goin’ intae one o’ the cubicles with a punta an’ ma other self, ma floatin’ girl has come intae the cubicle wi’ us, an’ as I pull ma knickers down she’s speakin’ tae me an’ she’s sayin’…‘Jessie! Get out o’ there before ye forget your own name!’ an’ then this bloke’s on top of me, trying to push his dick intae me while Ah try tae finger an’ thumb a johnny ontae it, an’ all the while Ah’m saying tae my girl ‘How? How?’ but it’s OK, ‘cos the punta thinks Ah’m groanin’ or some thin’, an’ my girl on the ceilin’ says, ‘Get yourseP fuckin’ straight, Jessie! Get straight…Get fuckin’ straight!’’

  BEHIND THE ASTORIA THEATRE, SOHO

  For a moment all human life seemed suspended as Peter, his colleagues, Robert and the three teenaged onlookers absorbed the full horror of the situation. Robert recovered first. He was a decent man beneath his crust and he knew exactly what Peter Paget was thinking.

  ‘I’m clean, man,’ he said. ‘No sweat. That’s my personal works stuck in your leg there. Honest, geezer, I don’t share my works with nobody, very rarely anyway, that’s for sure, and then I’m real careful. It’s clean. I use white spirit. You’ll be fine.’

  Peter could only stare at what had so suddenly and so catastrophically come to pass — this needle, this steely rapier of death buried deep within his flesh, a fast-track, mainline, infiltration super-highway carrying incurable infection directly to the fast-pumping veins and arteries of his defenceless adrenalin charged system.

  ‘Take it out.’ Peter’s voice was no longer his own. It came from far away.

  ‘For God�
�s sake, be careful with that plunger!’ This was the voice of a colleague who had noted that Robert’s grimy, blackened thumb still rested on the top of the poisoned pump.

  ‘Don’t worry, dude. It’s my only hit.’ Carefully, Robert withdrew the needle. There was a tiny shading of red about its tip.

  ‘Eeeeuugh.’ The teenaged girls were almost in shock with the horror of it all, but their object lesson in the seamy side of drug addiction was not over yet. Robert may have been concerned for the mental health of his new acquaintance, but like all addicts he was most concerned with his own mental health, which was becoming further strung out by the minute. Driven by a craving which entirely dwarfed and engulfed all other personal and social issues, he now returned to his original agenda.

  ’

  ‘Scuse me, everybody, but I’m gagging for it.’

  And so while the girls hovered between nauseous revulsion and rapt fascination, Robert set to the task of getting his weakened, scabby, limp and useless penis into shape to receive its delayed shot. He slapped it and squeezed it and fiddled with it until he had persuaded a vein of sufficient stature for his purposes to rise up out of the filthy, sickly skin.

  Meanwhile, Peter was in a waking nightmare of such intensity that he could neither speak nor think. All he knew was that he could feel infection running through his system like a greyhound on a track, furious, straining, desperate to complete its course.

  Robert was on the verge of injecting. Once more the needle hovered at his groin, but then a thought occurred to him. Even in his increasingly desperate state he was aware that the risk of infection cut both ways.

  ‘Here. Sorry to ask this, but you ain’t HIV or nothing, are you? I mean, anyone can have it, not just us users…You gay?’

  Peter did not answer. His tongue was infected now, grown swollen and useless by the viruses he knew were destroying it.