Down and Out on Murder Mile

by Tony O'Neill

  “I’ll leave you two to get acquainted.” Dan laughed, splitting the scene, leaving us there in the dull light, regarding each other.

  We smiled, but surprisingly there was no awkwardness. I did not feel self-conscious in the slightest. In fact, for a reason that I could not immediately fathom, I was brimming over with carefree self-confidence, as if I were eighteen and still vibrating from my first ever line of cocaine.

  “I’m sorry for the obscene phone call,” I told her. “I was drunk and feeling mischievous.”

  She smiled. “Don’t worry. I’ve heard worse. I’m from New York—you’d have to work hard to shock me.”

  The conversation flowed easily. We talked about music, art, and books. We seemed to share all of the same reference points, which was a disconcerting experience. Vanessa was a fascinating girl. She grew up surrounded by the beauty and insanity of New York City, an Ecuadorian punk-rock kid from Queens who cut her teeth on the Lower East Side’s hardcore and punk scenes…sipping Ballantine Ale and skipping homework to catch the Ramones at the Ritz, slam-dancing to the Circle Jerks at CBGB’s Sunday hardcore matinee, before graduating to Disco 2000 and the club kid scene…She eventually split the States altogether to study fashion in London.

  As we talked she astounded me with her street smarts and dry humor, and the dizzying amount of scenes that she had been involved in by such a young age. She currently lived in the East End and worked for the fashion designer Vivienne Westwood. I felt the odd sensation that I was talking to some kind of mirror of myself, or a mirror of who I would like to be. At one point I said, “I am on an Egon Schiele kick right now,” not even knowing what it meant, but it made sense to her, and I didn’t feel like a fool.

  I realized that maybe the reason that I could talk to her like this, without tripping myself up by being nervous or trying to impress her, was because I could look at the pair of us with a dispassionate eye and say that honestly, I felt that there was no reason why this woman would ever show an interest in me. I was a bad bet. A drug addict. Married. Unemployable. So I laid it out on the table and tried not to hide anything. It was a liberating feeling knowing that I could tell her about myself and not be afraid of rejection, because I was already rejected.

  But the strangest thing happened.

  She kept talking to me.

  She didn’t seem fazed by all of the bad stuff.

  And I wondered what she saw when she looked at me.

  We were oblivious as Garbage took to the stage and started playing, and the crowd at Brixton Academy began to cheer and surge to the front. It took a while before either of us even noticed the thunderous music blaring into the room. Everything had faded into the background, and we were talking about New York, and I was feeling something in my chest that I hadn’t felt for a long time. I kept asking myself, “Why is she still here? Why is she still talking to me? Why is she interested? What does she see?” because her eyes did not betray any of the things that I had become accustomed to over the past few years: the suspicious look of someone who is watching a heroin addict, the pitying looks from an old friend, the superior glare of the caseworkers and doctors, the pure, terrified need of Susan. No, she was looking at me with something else in her eyes, a look and a feeling that had not been around me for so long that it momentarily felt arcane, alien, foreign.

  I glanced over to the huge window that looked down onto the stage for a moment, and I realized for the first time that the band was playing, but more than that I caught a glimpse of myself reflected in the mirror, and what I saw made me jump.

  Like some cheap shock effect from a bad horror movie, the reflection of what was going on in the room did not match up with my mind’s perception of what should be there.

  There was Vanessa, listening intently to me as I was speaking, looking momentarily confused as the words caught in my throat the moment I realized that she was talking to me.

  But it was the me of seven years ago, it’s true, I saw what she was seeing for a moment and it terrified and liberated me, because I looked new.

  I was not broken anymore. My eyes were no longer the eyes of someone who had seen the inside of the methadone clinics and the flophouses. My arms, underneath my shirt, I instinctively knew were unscarred and unblemished, the mountain of mangled flesh and calcified veins had somehow been removed by God’s hand, and they were as smooth and untouched and unruined as they were when I first came to London a lifetime ago.

  And I stopped talking, struck dumb by this revelation.

  Thinking that I was looking over to the band, she said:

  “Do you want to go and see them play?”

  and I answered “sure” although that was not on my mind at all

  and we walked together into the crowd, making our way to the front as the band played on

  and for a moment I realized

  I was reborn.

  26

  AFTERMATH

  Coming back home could only be an ugly and depressing anticlimax. After the band was finished Vanessa had to go and so did I. Drug-need was already gnawing at the inside of me. We swapped numbers and I left. As I made my way back from Brixton to Hackney I started to feel this new excitement about my life slowly deflating from me. The streets around Murder Mile seemed as small and as cold and as lonely as ever. I slid my key into the lock and swung the metal door open, escaping from the frosty air. I walked through the concrete walkway and up the staircase leading to the flat.

  When I opened the door I saw her there, nodded out on the only chair in the place, in front of a nature documentary showing animals thousands of feet underwater moving silently, and the smell of her hit me: the smell of rot, the smell of the cigarette that had burned down to her fingers and no doubt left a scorch ring on the flesh permeated everything. The flat was suddenly smaller than before. I flicked the light on, but it did not shake her out of her nod.

  I walked past her and into the bathroom. The girl she was hanging out with before had obviously been here, as there were used needles on the sink of a different brand and gauge than either Susan or I used. And I hated it, but seeing the discarded needles and the dried brown blood spots on the sink, and even seeing Susan back there with all of the life evaporated out of her shell started to change me again, and undo all of the good-but-alien sensations I had been experiencing tonight. I started to realize that I was still here, I was still nothing more that a junkie idiot, that my situation was as fucked as ever. Dejectedly, I started to prepare a shot of heroin.

  I heard Susan rouse from her coma.

  “Hey,” she croaked.

  “Yeah.”

  I dug around, finding a new needle in the bathroom cabinet, and retrieved the bag of heroin I had hidden away from her before the tour started.

  “Your friend left her old spikes here.”

  “Oh yeah. Be careful, I think she has Hep C.”

  “What the fuck did she leave them here for, then?”

  “They’re old. I gave her some of ours.”

  “Well, can you get rid? I don’t want to touch them.”

  She turned the sound up on the TV again. I could hear David Attenborough’s familiar voice from the other room.

  “How was it?” she asked eventually.

  “Fine. I met a cool girl. She was from New York.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  It all went quiet for a moment as Susan lapsed back into the TV, and I started cooking up. The heroin fizzled in the spoon. Richard Attenborough carried on. The world was familiar and comfortable. Then Susan asked: “She use?”

  “Who?”

  “The girl from New York. Does she use?”

  “What? Heroin?”

  “Yes, heroin. What do you think I’m talking about? Caffeine?”

  It seemed like an odd question. Susan said it as if everybody used heroin. Like it was a common defining characteristic outside of our world. I drew the dope up into the syringe and said: “I don’t think so.”

  I tied the belt around my arm and flex
ed for a vein. I was going into my wrist again. My hands looked chubby and pockmarked from all of the injecting I had been doing there recently. I thought about Vanessa again. I thought about her eyes, and her lips, and the way she smelled. I thought about her outfit. I thought about her black leather boots. I thought about her voice.

  “Then why the fuck,” Susan asked suddenly, “was she talking to you? I mean really, what on earth could you possibly have in common?”

  I ignored the question. I had already been thinking about it all of the way home. The answer was too depressing. I thought of her number, written on a piece of paper and carefully folded in my pocket. I wondered about the chance of me ever calling it, and as I fixed my shot and the heroin put me back in my place, I realized that it probably would never happen.

  I cleaned myself up and tidied my stuff away. I walked back into the room. Susan was still half unconscious, her face had taken on that slack, mongoloid look people get when they are half in a nod.

  “What the fuck are we doing here?” I asked Susan, rousing her as I walked back into the room.

  “What do you mean?”

  “In London. Why the fuck did we come here in the first place?”

  “Because we couldn’t stay in LA. What kind of stupid question is that?” “Well, what kind of stupid reason is that to come someplace? Because you can’t stay in another place? It makes no sense.”

  “You make no sense.”

  We lapsed into silence again, momentarily enjoying the drugs in our blood.

  “We have no money,” Susan told me eventually. “Did you get paid for the tour tonight?”

  “No. I have to call Alex in the coming week. Dan has to do the accounts, and then we get paid.”

  “The Virgin Megastore didn’t make you wait to get paid.”

  “That’s true, Susan. You’re very perceptive.”

  “I heard from my sister today. She had twins.”

  I had to scramble for the information. She talked about her sister so rarely that I almost forgot she had one.

  “She was pregnant?”

  “Yes! She was pregnant! You knew this! I told you….”

  “Oh.”

  “Twin boys. She’s going to send pictures. It must be nice. Having a family. I don’t even have my own family around me anymore.”

  “From what you’ve told me that’s probably a good thing.”

  She turned and looked at me. “Everybody needs a family. I’m thirty-five. It’s almost too late for me. Do you think I could clean up in time to have a baby? I heard that you can carry a baby full term okay if you’re just on methadone.”

  Susan talked like this every so often. It always made me slightly nauseous to hear it. She never came right out and told me that she was talking about having my baby, so I would let her talk about it in an abstract, theoretical way. It was okay, because I knew it would never happen. But tonight, the very idea of Susan carrying a baby around in her gut repulsed me more than usual. “Anyone with a cunt, a working set of fallopian tubes, and a womb can have a baby,” I spat. “What the fuck you are going to do with that baby is a different question.”

  She went quiet, and then said: “It would just be neat to have someone who loved me.”

  Sensing this was my cue to say something, I waited a beat and told her: “Buy a fucking cat, then.”

  A day passed. And then two. I didn’t call Vanessa. Susan was right. What the fuck would she want with me? And the money situation dragged out. The accounts Dan had provided didn’t add up and had to be redone. The record label was getting their own accountants to do the books. Expect a further delay. Susan had started doing volunteer work at a local needle exchange, but of course it was unpaid. I kept on the phone with Alex every day trying to get the money owed to me. Every day he told me that tomorrow he would definitely be able to cut a check for me.

  After a week and a half, he announced that there was more work if I wanted it. A trip to Wales, to lip synch the first single on a regional television show. He promised that I would have the money before I left. Despite feeling slightly screwed over about the money situation, the chance to get out of London for even a day was too good to pass up, so I accepted.

  We drove down early the next morning. The show was called This Is It! and was hosted by someone I vaguely remembered from a children’s television show of my youth. We were to perform our song in front of an audience of twenty or so bored Welsh teenagers. We did it, and Alex finally cut our checks, handing them to us as the filming wrapped up. I was in the clear again.

  Kelly was staying on to do press on her own, and the rest of the band was to travel back by train. We drank and walked around the studio, which was out in the middle of nowhere. Again, away from the city, I started to relax and feel freer than I had before. A film crew filmed the band drinking beers and lounging around in a games room for promotional material. The cameras gave us a sense that maybe this record was really going to happen. The whole scene was surreally out of synch with what was going on in my real life.

  On the train back to London I was gripped with the familiar anxiety of returning to the flat and Susan. I opened my wallet and looked again at Vanessa’s number. Ben, the guitarist, was sitting across from me listening to music. I tapped him and asked him if he had a mobile phone. He passed it over to me and plugged his earphones back in. With a sense that if I didn’t do this now I never would, I dialed her number and held my breath until she picked up.

  “I thought that you weren’t going to call,” she said to me.

  “I had to call.”

  “Why?”

  “Because things are preordained. I had to call. What are you doing?”

  “Getting ready for a party. You want to swing by? Where are you?”

  “Coming back from filming the world’s cheesiest TV show. I’d love to come.”

  “Okay. Lets meet for drinks first….”

  I clicked off the phone and another phase of my life began.

  27

  VERSE

  It seemed that as soon as I started seeing Vanessa, London started to come alive. The nights started getting shorter, the days warmer, the worries less. We met up two nights later, hit a few East End bars, and then went back to her place. We listened to music, Loveless by My Bloody Valentine. And then we fell into bed with all of the excitement of new lovers.

  There was no nervousness. When I saw her naked for the first time all of my old feelings of sexual longing flooded back into me. It was a shocking, wonderful, electric feeling. We kissed, our tongues wrapping around each other as we fell into bed. The sex seemed to go on for hours. And when I came, I was hard again almost immediately. We fucked like horny sixteen-year-olds, discovering the opposite sex for the first time.

  Cheshire Street, 4:00 A.M. We stagger in from a warehouse party on Brick Lane. Vanessa’s breath is sharp, cutting through the still of the bedroom like glass as we have sex again. And again. And again. Her nipples are hard and I am biting at them, and I slide my cock in and out of her. Her pupils contract, locked on mine; in a flash of electric skin I reach down, rest my hands on her ass cheeks, pulling them apart, and they are slick with cum. We have been dropping pills and having sex constantly for what seems like glorious eternity. With my forefinger I rub the wetness into her asshole and withdraw my prick, repositioning, and gently ease myself into her ass instead. Her breath quickens, sharpens, then settles back into its rhythm as she reaches to her side and retrieves the vibrator, sliding it into her pussy. As I find myself all of the way in, I can feel—through my own prick—the vibrating rubber cock inside of her, parallel to my own, as we fuck ourselves into ritualized oblivion.

  One afternoon, on a whim, I stop by the boutique she works at. Vanessa closes up. She takes me downstairs and shows me a dress that Courtney Love will be wearing in a few hours at some red carpet event. I dress Vanessa in it, turn her around, hitch the skirt, and slide my prick into her. Moments after we are done there is a pounding on the door, as the couriers arr
ive to take the dress to Courtney’s hotel room. I am lost in the wonder and the glory of Vanessa’s cunt. I gaze upon it, awestruck, like it is the work of a master. I feel like I am seeing a Picasso canvas, or a Dalí sculpture rendered in pure gold that has been long lost. I feel as if my eyes are the first to behold it since the moment of its creation.

  Sometimes when we take Ecstasy it feels as if I can melt into it, melt into her. We become fluid and unstable, and for moments as brief as epileptic flashes, the laws of physics are suspended and we melt, tongue in cunt, cock in mouth, in a lightning crack of divinity. For moments we cease to be individuals.

  “I want to do this forever,” I tell her, my mouth full of her.

  And sometimes there is a kind of short circuit, and I lose moments, and everything comes to me in fragments. The soft curves of her body, a hot, stiff nipple, the roundness of her ass, her endless brown eyes, the soft brown skin of her back, red hair plastered to her forehead.