by Howard Marks
‘What are they?’ Varnish jumped in, his eyes lighting up at the sight of class-A drugs.
‘It’s methadone,’ she replied, ‘ten of them. You see, it’s my script but I’d rather have ten quid’s worth of hash, it does a better job keeping me away from the smack, and doesn’t mong me out as much.’
I turned to Varnish, ‘What do you think?’ After all, it was his money behind it all.
‘I say go for it.’ Varnish never took his eyes off the small silver packet of pills.
‘Looks like you got yourself a deal,’ I said. ‘Ten quid’s worth?’
‘Yeah, if that’s okay with you.’
‘Believe me, it’s fine with us,’ I said. ‘We got something to do tonight, now. Fancy a trip out on the skateboards, Varnish?’
Varnish replied but the words were lost trying to hold down the vast amount of hash he’d just inhaled through a glass bong.
I cut the hash up for the woman. As she left she warned us not to take more than four each. ‘. . . You’ll end up puking your guts up.’ With that, she left; she said she had something waiting.
We sat and ate five methadone pills each and sat smoking for a while, listening to Ween blasting out of top-range speakers with no regard for the neighbours whatsoever. Pure Guava, a damn fine album. Nothing happened after an hour so we cracked open a few beers; besides, it had started raining, so we figured the skateboard trip was out the question. I had gotten into skateboards and narcotics back in ’91, spending most Saturday nights high on LSD skating the deserted streets of Derby, always ending up in the haunts of Markeaton Park around dawn.
No, there was nothing for it; we’d just have to sit it out in the time capsule, a ten-by-eight-foot room with a sloping roof and no windows. The floors were covered in hairy rugs, empty beer cans and bottles, and overloaded ashtrays. Varnish had two of his paintings on the non-sloping wall. One look at those and you knew he was a drug fiend. They were good too. One thing that I never understood about Varnish, he was a damn good artist, a little mutated by his intake of narcotics, but good all the same. Yet he never really used his talents to do anything, as far as I know. The last I heard he was a nightwatch security guard, on the gates of some factory or industrial estate.
But I’m being sidetracked here; I should be talking about the time-capsule room. The bottom end of the room was completely filled with Varnish’s stereo equipment, laid out on a long flat coffee table. Unknown to Varnish at this point in his life was how wrecked everything in this room would get over such a short space of time. So wrecked that he would end up retreating all his belongings to the safety of his bedroom. I’d already managed to set fire to his sofa with a Zippo lighter while loading a bong. Thinking I’d snapped the lid on the Zippo lighter shut, I laid it on the sofa next to me. There it burned for several minutes until I noticed the flames lapping my leg. After that, a fat speed freak sat back on the sofa, breaking the back supports. The sofa moved to lean against the wall.
I was vegged out on the floor. At some point the methadone had kicked in real heavy, fuelled along with the beers we’d sunk earlier.
‘Hey, it’s stopped raining,’ I said.
‘I feel sick.’
‘Don’t worry about it, everyone gets that, it’ll pass.’
‘Is that normal then, to feel sick like that?’
‘Well, sometimes, I guess, yeah.’
‘Oh, that’s fucked, that is, who would want that? Pay for a drug and it makes you sick. It’s wrong, there should be a goddamn law against it.’
‘Just calm down, you’ll be okay in a minute, everyone gets it.’
This was the first time Varnish had taken methadone; I had failed to mention how dirty it makes you feel, or the waves of nausea that hit you. I got the feeling Varnish wasn’t handling his first hit of it too well.
‘Listen, it’s stopped raining,’ I said. ‘Let’s go out on the skateboards, the streets will be empty this time of night, easy skating.’
‘Will it stop me feeling ill?’
‘It might work, worth a try I guess.’
‘Okay, let’s go.’
It was late, I had no idea how long we had been stood on the top of the hill, in the middle of the road, arguing about board speeds and wet roads and what could possibly happen to you if you came off at that speed.
‘I still don’t know. How fast will we be when we hit the bottom?’ Varnish was still uncertain about the downhill skate.
‘Hell, I don’t know. Look, when you get close to that kerb kick the back of your board and you’ll go over the kerb.’ The impatience in my voice was very apparent, well, to me anyway. I needed to be somewhere, but where that place was I wasn’t too sure. Just any place but here, we stood out like sore thumbs under a bright orange street light in the middle of the junction. The police were everywhere on this street and we were carrying enough smoking implements, hash and joints to be hauled straight into a cold cell. Then they’d set on us, knowing damn well that we were on something and try to extract some piece of information before the drugs wore off.
‘What’s that?’ Varnish was looking back up the main road into town. I could hear something too. It was coming closer. From the scrambled mess I could make out distant voices, loud, abusive, drunk.
‘Come on, let’s get out of here,’ said Varnish.
Walking towards us were five brutish pub types, they’d seen us and were shouting something at us. I could make out, ‘. . . eh, skateboarder . . .’ – it sounded like that looping every two seconds.
‘Why?’ I replied. ‘We’ve just as much right to be here as anyone else. I’m not moving just because of them.’
‘Then you stay, I’m going.’
‘Well, if they want to get funny, remember we’ve got skateboards. Have you ever felt what it’s like getting one of those in the head?’ Of course he hadn’t and neither had I, for that matter.
‘Look, there’s five of them and there’s only two of us. They look really big and mean to me from here and drunk too. Fuck it, I’m going.’
Varnish scooted off down the hill, accelerating faster than I had expected. He shot down the wet road, soon reaching twenty miles per hour.
‘Hey, this road may be steeper than I thought,’ I shouted after him. He didn’t hear but it was too late for him anyway. The five gorillas in white shirts were about fifty feet away. I could still hear them shouting ‘skateboarder’, but now I could also hear what Varnish must have heard: ‘WANKER!’
‘Oh shit.’
I stepped on the board and accelerated down the steep slope, parked cars rushing by, I felt like I was stationary and the whole world had speeded up around me, everything becoming a blurred motion, a time lapse. I could see Varnish ahead of me; he had one foot trailing on the floor, trying to decelerate his board. The drunks were somewhere at the top of the hill, we were well out of their range by now. The melodic shouted abuse had stopped. I had nearly caught up with Varnish; he brought his trailing foot back on to the board, glanced back at me, grinning insanely and hurtled towards the kerb. He kicked the tail of the board, the rear trucks clipped the kerb, but he was over. He fought to keep on the board, his arms and legs flailing everywhere.
The kerb was rushing towards me at a terrible rate; I kicked up the tail, and hurtled over the kerb. I remember thinking ‘No way, you did it,’ but as that thought left my mind I landed, instantly realising I had left my board back at the kerb. I landed and fell into a twenty-mile-an-hour run, my legs were trying to fold under me, I could see the broken collarbone hurtling towards me like a freight train. I kept up and even managed to slow down a bit before collapsing in a heap at the other end of the alleyway. Varnish stood under a street light, in his usual subtle manner, lighting a massive cone that could have been spotted at two hundred metres.
‘Come on, let’s get out of here before those geezers come after us. Where’s your board?’
‘I think it left me at the kerb.’
‘Well, go and get it, before they come
and get us.’
‘Relax,’ I stood up and brushed the grit and gravel off my hands. ‘They’re not after us, they’re probably pissing up a tree somewhere by now.’
I went and got my skateboard, it was still intact. This skateboard was indestructible, one of the old wide boards. We walked awhile smoking the cone, then continued on our boards through quiet council estates and subways, ending up down on the embankment by the River Derwent. The embankment was made of concrete and stepped down to the river. Not a bad place to skate, but we were in no fit state by then to even stand on a board. The methadone hung thick in our veins. Movement seemed almost impossible. We sat by the river and smoked a couple of pipes, then I lit a joint, this time a non-conspicuous size. Water rushed over a weir nearby, creating a hypnotic sound. I don’t know how long we sat there just staring off across the water watching what looked like random images and short clips of eight-millimetre film being projected on to the darkness on the other side of the river.
Something shocked me from the first peace I had felt in a long time. I looked around; everything seemed really dark and blurred. I couldn’t see Varnish. My eyes began to readjust. Then there came a voice.
‘Can you help me?’ I looked around; it seemed to be coming from everywhere. My head started spinning. I stood up, Get a grip, goddammit, I thought, where’s Varnish?
‘Varnish?’
There was silence. Then: ‘Yeah.’
‘Where are you?’ My vision was filling with black spots that seemed to have solidity and depth.
‘I’m here having a piss. Shut up, will you, there’s someone up there.’ My vision began to clear; I could see a bright orange glowing stone bridge in front of me. The voice came again.
‘Excuse me, please could you help me?’
I spotted a figure standing on the bridge to the left of us. He was looking straight at us. Varnish stepped out of the darkness by the river edge, zipping up his fly.
‘What’s up, Doc?’ he said. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Up there,’ I said. ‘We’ve been made.’
‘Excuse me, can you please help me?’
‘What’s the matter, man?’ shouted Varnish. I instantly knew this was the wrong thing for us to do, my instincts were saying cut and run, just get the hell out of there. This was going to be bad and we were in no state to deal with it at all.
The figure walked across the bridge and down the steps towards us. ‘Are you good people? Can you help me?’
Varnish said again: ‘What’s the matter, man?’
‘It’s my head, look. Look what he did to it.’ By this time he was stood in front of us, he tipped his head forward, he’d been holding his head since we first saw him, but only now did it register it why. His head was split open on the top, at least ten centimetres long. It was a gaping soggy wound and he was losing quite a lot of blood from it.
‘Holy shit, what the fuck happened to you?’ I asked.
‘This man, he hit me in the head with a tyre thing, you know a thing for the wheel.’ The man looked up; he was only a boy, sixteen maybe seventeen. His face was covered in glistening thick black blood. Some had dried, he’d had this wound a while, I remember thinking.
There was something about this boy I instantly felt uneasy about. He didn’t seem right, I mean in the way he seemed to be. His general calmness after being smashed in the head with a tyre wrench. Something had put me on edge and I didn’t know what.
‘Holy Jesus!’ I exclaimed, ‘you need to go to a hospital, man.’
‘Or the police,’ said Varnish. ‘Hell, we’ll take you up there, they gotta catch this guy. You can’t just go around hitting people in the head when you feel like it, there’d be anarchy. Where would we be then, eh?’
‘Maybe the police wouldn’t be such a good idea, Varnish,’ I said.
He looked at me puzzled. I gave a you-know-why nod. He seemed to realise.
‘No, I can’t go to the cops,’ said the boy.
‘Why not?’ we both asked simultaneously.
‘Because I’m on a curfew. I’m supposed to be in by ten every night. If they catch me out here now they’ll put me away.’
‘Why are you on a curfew?’ asked Varnish. ‘What you done?’
‘I, err . . . burgled a few houses a few years ago, when I was younger, but I’ve done my time, I just want the chance to get on with my own life, but they keep harassing me. They won’t leave me alone and now they’ve put me on this curfew.’
‘That’s some hard shit, man,’ I said.
‘Don’t worry, kid,’ said Varnish. Oh no, please don’t, but before I could finish that thought he already said it. ‘We’ll help you. We won’t leave you out here on your own. We’re good people. Honest citizens.’
Varnish put his arm around the boy and was already walking up the street.
‘Varnish,’ I called after him. He carried on walking, talking to the boy.
‘Well, err . . . what about the skateboarding? Are we just gonna forget that then?’
There was no talking to him; he was on a mission. His mind locked on to a certain point in time where he now knew he had to be. In my experiences of the drug culture this was common practice.
‘We’ll take him back to the flat with us,’ Varnish said as I caught up to him. We turned left and walked up St Peter’s Street, past shops and travel agencies, the orange light illuminating the red brick street. The clock on the weird concrete erection in front of us said 4.47. Great, I thought, it’ll be daylight soon and we can get rid of this freak. I lit a cigarette.
‘So, tell us again, what happened to you?’ asked Varnish.
The boy told us he had asked this man for the time and the guy smashed him in the head with the tyre wrench.
‘So this guy was in the street when he hit you?’
‘No.’ The boy looked at Varnish like he was an idiot. ‘He was in his house.’
Varnish looked at me full of confusion. I shrugged and dragged on the cigarette.
‘What do you mean he was in his house? Were you in his house?’
‘No, I just knocked on his door to ask him the time, then he hit me in the head with the wheel . . .’
I cut in. ‘Tyre wrench.’ This character was starting to annoy me.
‘Yes, the tyre wrench. He hit me in the head here.’ He pointed to his head again. Then it hit me: this boy was simple, backward.
‘You knocked on someone’s door to ask them the time?’ asked Varnish.
‘Yes.’
‘Did he tell you?’ I asked.
‘No, he hit me in the head with a tyre wrench.’ The boy scowled at me, I hopped on my board and skated off up ahead.
‘Might as well get some in, seeing as we’re going home,’ I called back. I headed up the hill towards the concrete structure then turned it and flew back down the hill towards Varnish and the boy, lurching all over the road. As we headed home the only thing open was a massage parlour, a gigantic red-and-blue neon sign flashing on and off outside. This area of the street was constantly filled with parked Mercedes, BMWs and Jaguars.
The sky was starting to lighten by the time we got back to the flat. You could see distant clouds rolling across purple skies over the flats facing us across the square.
We went up to the top-floor flat and I made tea. Varnish and the boy went to his bedroom. I remember Varnish saying he was going to clean the boy’s head. I went into the bedroom and entered a conversation I wasn’t sure I was hearing. The vibrations in this room were very unusual and definitely not friendly.
‘. . . Okay, I’ll go and run you a bath and I’ll call you when it’s ready,’ Varnish said. He turned to leave the room.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked.
‘His head’s a right old mess. I’m gonna run him a bath so he can clean it properly.’ Varnish smiled, but there was something unnerving in it. Was he keeping something from me? He turned and headed to the bathroom.
I handed the boy his tea, he said thank you. He was grinning
insanely at me, I felt like I was in the ‘We’re gonna get ya!’ scene in The Evil Dead, a possessed character sat cross-legged on the bed in front of me, but when would he start singing those terrible rhymes at me? I had to keep my cool; this guy was starting to get to me. Remain calm, if this kid thinks he’s getting to you there is a distinct possibility he’ll take advantage of the situation. It seemed like he had the mind of a ten-year-old but the deviance of a habitual criminal. He wasn’t to be trusted.
I went and sat on the sofa in the left-hand corner of the room and put some music on. I heard the taps start running in the bathroom. I lay back on the sofa and drifted off into an uneasy silence. Everything I looked at looked black, even the lights. I felt like I was being swallowed into the sofa, slowly being sucked in. I could still hear the music but it seemed really far away. This sensation was familiar to me; I’d felt this type of drug many times before, sucking me in.
Varnish walked back in the room.
‘Okay, the bath’s ready. Come with me and I’ll show you what towel to use.’
The boy got up and followed Varnish out of the room. He still had the same stupid grin on his face as he left.
I sat up and started to paste a joint together. Varnish came back into the room a few minutes later and sat down on the bed. He started to load one of the many home-made bongs that were laid around the room.
‘He says he can’t wash himself,’ Varnish said after a minute or so.
‘You what?’ I couldn’t believe I was hearing this.
‘He says he can’t wash himself. He can’t even get himself undressed, I had to do it for him.’ My eyes darted to Varnish in shock; he looked straight at the blank television screen not two feet in front of him, no expression in his eyes.
‘Well, count me out,’ I said finally. Varnish snapped out of whatever world he was in. ‘No way, I’m not doing it. There’s something about this character, I don’t know what it is, but I don’t like it. Do you really believe that story he told us about the curfew?’
‘I don’t know,’ replied Varnish in a bilge of hash smoke. ‘He’s just not all there, you know, he’s a bit simple. Don’t worry, I wasn’t asking you when I said that. I’ll do it. I don’t mind.’
