Down and Out on Murder Mile

by Tony O'Neill

  “Right. And Nena.”

  “Nena?”

  “Yeah, ‘99 Red Balloons,’ remember?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Well, they went behind my back and spent fifteen grand digitally touching up the video to remove the hair.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “I know. I freaked when Alex told me. So I told the label that I would not promote the single or the album unless they put the underarm hair back in.”

  “And what did they say?”

  “They’re threatening to sue me. But I have to stick to my guns, don’t you think?”

  The flat was particularly cold that day. I detected some movement from the corner of my eye, and saw a monstrous cockroach making a break across the kitchen floor.

  Vanessa was at work, and there wasn’t enough food in the fridge to eat.

  “Oh yeah,” I told her, “you have to stick to your guns.”

  Sickened and disappointed, I walked to the newsagent to pick up a copy of NME. When I picked up the new issue, a familiar face was staring back at me from the front cover. It was Elektra’s husband, Tom, with a big smug grin on his face. The headline read: “The Ones: Say Hello to Your New Favorite Band!” I put the paper back in disgust and stormed out into the filth and chaos of Dalston High Street.

  Vanessa started bleeding the following Friday night, and by Saturday evening the pain in her belly was so bad that we were in the emergency room at 10:00 P.M. with the first round of the East End’s weekend casualties. Red-faced drunks nursing broken noses and picking chunks of glass out of their mangled faces. Old women who didn’t have the sense to just die before they hit seventy, silently fretting about strokes or heart attacks. Screaming infants with tired, worried-looking parents.

  The doctors rushed Vanessa in to a cold little examining room, lifted her shirt, probed her belly with latex-clad hands, and announced that she was miscarrying and there was nothing to do but wait it out. Since the pregnancy was in the first trimester it would, as the doctor said, make its own way out without need for medical intervention. They sent us home with a prescription for codeine and a couple of leaflets about dealing with the loss of an unborn child.

  The flat in Dalston seemed more empty and colder than ever. We walked in and I heard the frenzied squealing of a mouse stuck to one of the glue traps we left around the place. The doctor told us that there was no specific reason why we lost the baby, and that many pregnancies ended in miscarriage this early on. So with no one else to blame, I took it out on the mouse. I smashed its skull in with a ball hammer, ending its life with a little more venom than usual. Tonight the blood seemed almost too red, counterfeit, like something from a joke shop. The skin held together, the shape of its head elongated, and crimson poured from its mouth as it kicked spastically with a back leg, before becoming still. I threw it out in the bins around the back, still stuck to the trap.

  We sat on the edge of the bed in silence. I wanted to cry, but I stopped myself. Somehow, Vanessa wasn’t crying and I couldn’t bear it if she did. If I cried, then we would both have to cry and that would be the worst thing in the world that could happen. I looked at the box of codeine that the doctors had prescribed. They were over-the-counter strength—eight milligrams codeine to five hundred milligrams paracetamol. Vanessa groaned and held her stomach.

  “How bad does it feel?”

  “Horrible. I can feel my stomach contracting. It’s the most horrible feeling.”

  “Fucking assholes,” I hissed, throwing the box of codeine on the floor. “This shite wouldn’t shift a fucking toothache. Do you want something that’s going to take the pain away for real?”

  Vanessa nodded silently. I rummaged around in my pockets and produced a wrap of heroin. In all the time we had been together she had never so much as expressed an interest in trying smack. In the club scenes of New York she had seen heroin so often that I suppose my lifestyle was not particularly shocking to her. She had never had a drug problem in the sense that I had a drug problem, so I felt somewhat reassured about giving her some under these circumstances. I placed a small amount of it on aluminum foil and showed her how to smoke it.

  We had almost bought a crib last week from the Egyptian man who had helped us move from Cheshire Street. All I could think was how relieved I was that we hadn’t bought it. I imaged us both, sitting in this roach and mouse-infested hole, smoking heroin, waiting for Vanessa to finish miscarrying with an empty crib in the middle of it all like an accusing finger. Maybe that would have been the final straw.

  Vanessa smoked a little. It eased her pain. I injected a little and it eased mine also. I said to her: “We could always try again, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Maybe it would be better this way. We’d be prepared for the baby instead of just dealing with it because it happened.”

  “I suppose.”

  We smoked more, silently. There was nothing more to say. Vanessa went back to the bathroom, the blood kept coming, and so did the pain.

  In three days the bleeding stopped, and Vanessa stopped smoking heroin. Her self-control astounded me. She seemed utterly disinterested in the drug and its effects, beyond its usefulness as a pain reliever. She was some kind of miracle, I thought. When we started having sex again, we did not use protection. Having a child snatched away from us had awakened something in us that we couldn’t quite articulate. It felt as if something were wrong in the universe, and it was our job to put it right. That the loss of the child was not what was meant to happen. This child was meant to be born, was meant to be in this world, was meant to have us as its parents.

  Three weeks after the miscarriage we found out that, again, Vanessa was pregnant. She made an appointment with her GP and he confirmed what the home test had told us. We were going to be parents.

  32

  ON THE STREET

  In the end I left the custody of Dr. Ira without any of the fireworks that I had imagined. He did not die on the end of a blade wielded by me or burn up in a guzzling fire that I started in the clinic. No, I simply walked out of the hospital one day and never came back.

  I had no intentions of doing it that day.

  We had fled Dalston for a one-bedroom flat in Stamford Hill. Since the landlord had refused to fix up the place, we stopped paying rent, fitted the doors with padlocks, and started looking for a new place to live. We used the withheld rent to put the down payment on the new flat.

  I was heading down to the pharmacy to get my methadone and then I was due to sign the lease and pick up the keys for the new place that same afternoon. Lingering by a pay phone on the edges of a housing estate was a tall, thin woman whose dirty-blond hair fell about her face in filthy clumps.

  “You got some change?” she asked, pulling on a cigarette with shaking hands and looking at me pleadingly. Her skin was pitted and scarred with acne. She had a trace of a Scottish accent and wore only a thin white T-shirt and jeans, despite the brutal cold. I handed her some coins, scraped out of my pocket.

  “Aw shit, thanks,” she said. “I need to make a call. I’ve been up all night.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah. It’s been a long one.” She twitched slightly. “This is shit, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is,” I told her before carrying on to get my methadone.

  I walked toward the pharmacy. Approaching the street I noticed POLICE LINE—DO NOT CROSS tape blocking my way. The traffic had been building steadily as I approached and I soon realized why. Police directed traffic away from the street, and drivers sat nullified by frustration or cursed silently behind rolled-up windows. I approached the nearest cop, a sour-faced woman with gray skin and dead, light-blue eyes, and asked what was happening.

  “Gas leak,” she replied, with a voice like shaved glass. “The street’s been sealed off.”

  “But I need to get to the chemist’s over there.”

  “Closed. It’s all closed. There’s another chemist back
up that way on Dalston High Street.”

  “I need to go to this chemist.”

  “It’s closed. Gas leak.”

  I walked back to the housing estate where I had seen the woman. She was long gone. A fish and chips shop on the edge of the estate was opening up for the day. I called the clinic and got through on the second ring.

  “Homerton DDU.”

  “I need to speak to Dr. Ira. I’m one of his clients.”

  “He’s busy. Is this because of the gas leak by any chance?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We’re doing an emergency dispensing service at the clinic. Come in and we’ll take care of it.”

  “I can’t come in. I have a really important appointment in an hour. Can’t I go to another chemist?”

  “No. You have to come in.”

  “Then I’ll have to do without today. I can’t come in.”

  “Wait a minute.”

  They placed me on hold. I found myself listening to Musak momentarily. Kenny G plays the hits of Celine Dion. I wondered if that would be playing when I die. The phone box stank of stale döner kebabs and vomit.

  “Hello?”

  “Yes.”

  “I just spoke to Dr. Ira. He said that if you miss a dose it will be considered an infraction and you will be placed back on a supervised consumption program until your case can be reevaluated.”

  “Can I speak to Dr. Ira please?”

  “Dr. Ira is busy. We close at four o’clock. See you soon.”

  I hung up the phone. They had me. Again they had me. Cursing, I headed toward the tube.

  In the waiting room junkies sprawled on chairs and squatted against the wall and coughed and spat phlegm into Kleenexes, watching the clock agitatedly. I took my number and waited. Within minutes one of the male nurses appeared and called my name. Surprised, I walked over.

  “That was quick,” I said. “You have a full house today.”

  “Well this is just for your urine test.”

  “Urine test?”

  “Yup. You don’t have a problem with that, do you?”

  “Oh no. Not me.”

  Bastards.

  Since Vanessa fell pregnant we had stopped partying altogether, but this weekend I had cracked and scored a bag of heroin from RJ. I knew that Dr. Ira would think it was his fucking birthday when my urine lit up the test like a fucking Christmas tree. I would be back on supervised consumption for months.

  There was no way out. I considered pretending that I couldn’t piss as I stood, dick in hand, staring at the little bottle that was about to ruin my life. The nurse waited behind me, the cubicle door open so he could observe. Then, deciding against any more delays, I filled the bottle up with heroin-laced piss and handed it to the nurse.

  “Thanks,” he said. “You can wait outside.”

  I could feel the old fear and helplessness rising in me. I needed to get out of the methadone clinics. They were killing me. This was no way to live. Again I was having to keep my change of address a secret for fear of being stuck at yet another clinic as a newcomer, with an even more uncaring and fucked-up prescribing regime than Dr. Ira’s. It was perfectly obvious that while I remained addicted to state-mandated opiates, I was no longer in control of my own destiny. Every decision I made would have to be approved by a room full of shit-eating soulless fucks like Dr. Ira. I was a helpless fucking pawn. A laboratory rat. I was worth less than the shit on the sole of Dr. Ira’s boot.

  I looked at my watch. It was thirty minutes before I was due to meet with my new landlord to sign the lease. If I walked out right now I would be cutting it fine. But they hadn’t even called me yet. There still seemed to be at least a dozen junkies ahead of me waiting to get dosed. I pulled out my mobile phone and frantically started to dial the landlord’s number.

  Out of nowhere I found myself grabbed by the collar and spun around. I was looking into the twisted face of one of the slack-jawed security guards they sometimes had on duty in this place. They all wore these terrible-looking polyester uniforms, and all had the same kind of lobotomized look about their faces. This one could have been no more than twenty and spoke with an almost incomprehensible West Indian patois.

  “Geddafuck out wi’da phone!” he yelled at me.

  “What?

  “No phone! Geddafuckout wi’da phone, man!”

  He pointed to a sign on the wall, an illustration of a mobile phone with a red line through it. Normally I would have apologized to this prick and left the clinic to make the call, but, finally, today, I had had my limit of what I was taking.

  “Get your fucking hands off me,” I warned him.

  “Shutup man! Don’ talk smart, boy! Now geddafuck out, yeah?”

  Suddenly we were the center of attention. I snarled and pressed my face close to his.

  “Why don’t you go fuck yourself! If you don’t get your fucking hand off my collar, this phone is going right up your useless fucking asshole!”

  I landed on the concrete outside with a thud. The security guard brushed himself off and stood there, looking down on me. He laughed, “Dickhead!” before spitting and walking back into the clinic. I got up, brushed myself off, and started to walk away. As I walked past a pay phone I lifted the receiver and smashed it back down with a crunch, cracking the plastic open. Walking back I called Vanessa, who could sense by the hysterical tone of my voice that something had happened.

  “I’m done,” I told her. “I’m out of the clinics. I’m finished.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. That’s it. I got to find a doctor who will detox me, and then I’m done.”

  “Are you sure?”

  ”Believe me,” I said, glancing back toward the hospital that had caused me so much humiliation and pain in the past, “I’m fucking sure.”

  33

  DR. CASH

  Ugh.

  Clean again.

  The lie at the heart of treatment centers, the recovery industry, and self-help groups is that life off drugs is any better than life on them. A preposterous idea. The two states coexist in a parallel sense—to say that one is preferable to the other is to miss the point entirely.

  And here I was—clean again. I could pass a urine test. If a car hit me, the meager amounts of morphine the hospital would allow me would actually work to ease my suffering. I could buy a ticket, step on a plane, and go anywhere I liked. But sitting in the doctor’s office, with my head in my hands, I wondered what the sense in that could be. If there were no drugs waiting for me at the other side, why would I even bother making the trip?

  Since coming off opiates I felt that I was hanging on to my sanity with slipping fingers. I was gripped by murderous rages and bouts of severe, suicidal depression. Riding the underground: the rush of the stale air pushed through ancient black tunnels—without drugs in my blood the ugliness and venality of humanity exposed in all of its sickening glory—the scum and the human flotsam floated by, thoughtlessly consuming my oxygen.

  On the platform, an obnoxious bastard in a business suit blocked my way as I rushed to make the train. As I approached, he sneezed a wet, theatrical sneeze right in my face without covering his mouth—spraying me with moisture—and I froze, momentarily stunned, before lashing out at the fucking pig’s head with my fist—thud!—connecting only with the train’s door as it slid shut, separating us. The cunt just stared at me with a sardonic grin, mouthing “Fuck you, mate” through the window, and the rage, uncontrollable and building in me like an atomic flash—screaming incoherent red-faced manias at him—startled commuters starting to give me a wide berth—GETOUTHEREYOUDISTGUSTINGFAT FUCKI’LLCUTYOURFUCKINGTHROAT YAFUCKIN’CUNT—the engine revving and the train slowly—PIECEOFSHITI’LLDROWN YOUINYOUROWNFUCKIN’BLOOD—pulling out of the station and the gloating bastard is allowing himself a smirk as I trot after the train for a—FAGGOTCOCKSUCKINGCHICKENSHITBASTARD—moment, halfheartedly punching the door again BAM again BAM again BAM—CUUUUNT!—and the fucker actually smirks and flicks the V’s
before disappearing off, off into the murky underground gloom.

  In his office, Dr. Cash is polite and respectful as always. He has the airbrushed look of an American newscaster, a Madame Tussauds waxwork figure, or a presidential candidate. He is flushed and pink with good living. Private doctors are a different breed from the types you find yourself stuck with on the NHS when you are a junkie. If I could only afford it, I would remain under the care of croakers like Cash for the rest of my long, strung-out life. Unfortunately, I have to reserve my use of the good doctor for occasions like this—detoxification. I found Dr. Cash on the junkie grapevine. He prescribed injectable methadone to an old junkie I occasionally bought off and was one of the few private doctors in the city who was still willing to take on new clients after the government started cracking down on such practices.