* * *
When the following Friday came and it was my job to ring him, I kicked myself for mentioning him in the first place. Now it was my job to score the drugs and no one need ever have known.
“Hello mate, it’s Luke. I met you last Saturday.”
“Yes mate, I remember from the foyer at Club Z. What you after?” Fucking hell he was good. I suppose it was his job to remember details like these, he probably went out clubbing to work and not to play. I was in such a state the morning after I wouldn’t have been able to remember his name were it not saved on my phone.
“Forty little fellas if you’ve got them.”
“One-sixty. Drive down to the St. Michaels roundabout in Carlton and then ring me again.”
Kyle, James and Al all gave me their money, then Kyle navigated the long twisting country lanes that would bring us out at the roundabout. By the time I rang him the second time I was really wishing he’d approached one of the others in the club.
“Turn right at the roundabout, towards Canchester, left just before the chip shop on the corner then left again. I’ll be standing on the path.”
I shook his hand as I got out of the car on the cold dark street.
“This is Ky-”
He interrupted me before I had a chance to introduce the people I was with.
“Next time,” he said, using his hand on my shoulder to usher me away. “Come on let’s go inside.”
“Two minutes,” I mouthed to my mates through the car window.
Rick led me to the end of the road where we cut through one of those narrow alley ways that has two different people’s garden fences either side. We came out onto a road of forgettable terraced houses. I was taken into one roughly in the middle.
“Have a seat.” Rick pointed me to a beige armchair by the front door. “Do you want a coffee? Tea?”
“No thanks mate, I’m good.”
“How about a beer? Come on have a beer, I’ve got a few different ones. I don’t really drink, you might as well have one.”
I wandered over and found a couple of Stellas in the door of the immaculate fridge. The clear trays in the bottom were filled with beer, lager and bitter in bottles and cans. The shelf above was filled with packets of ham and cheese. Then at the top of the fridge the final shelf was covered in carrots and tomatoes and vegetables I didn’t have time to identify because they were just green.
“Have a seat again,” he said. “I’ve just got to go upstairs.”
Taking the time to look around the room properly now, I was aware of how tidy it was. The fridge had been spotless, but everything within sight was equally tidy. From the small kitchen in its door-less alcove through to the lounge/diner I was in it was all perfect. It could have been a show home, if the council had show homes. To the right of me a widescreen television sat on a light coloured wooden unit. As I flicked my eyes through the vast array of DVDs underneath I noticed they were in alphabetical order: Armageddon; Beetlejuice; Biodome; Caddyshack; Dangerous Minds.... What sort of person has their DVDs lined up in alphabetical order? Maybe a psychopath? Or maybe someone who just doesn’t like not being able to find a particular DVD.
On the opposite side of the lounge to me was a beige sofa. The two contrasting brown cushions on top of it sat perfectly straight, just as the actual cushions of the sofa were plumped up. The way the cushion had been on my chair before I sat down. Rick had either not been sitting in the lounge before he came out or had taken the time to make sure the seating area looked perfect before I got there. Not what I expected for a drug dealer.
“Right.” Rick came quickly down the stairs. “These are on the house.” He handed me a couple of tiny little white pills which as I rolled them around in my hand, didn’t appear to have a logo on them.
“Snowballs. I don’t know where you’ve been getting yours but I guarantee you these are better, I know the bloke who makes them, they’re spot on.”
I assumed he wanted me to take both so washed them down with the last of my drink.
“I’ll get you another beer mate.”
“Do you take pills?” I asked him.
“No, more into my acid. Have you done acid?”
“Er, not yet mate.”
“You’re probably better off on E if you like it then,” he laughed.
I sat back in my chair a bit. “Can I get the pills off you Rick?”
“Oh yeah I’d nearly forgotten. One hundred and sixty yeah?”
I took the wad of cash from my back pocket then drank some more of my beer, it tasted metallic now as I sipped it from the can.
“There you go.” He passed me a small plastic food bag full of ecstasy tablets and I passed him the money, neither of us counted anything.
“I was watching Terminator 2 when you called, it’s nearly at the end. Have you seen it?” he asked.
“Yeah mate,” I replied, “it’s one of my favourite films.”
He put the television back on. It was at one of my favourite points- right before the melty terminator jumps the motorbike into the window of the helicopter. I sat there watching while he got frozen in liquid nitrogen then shattered. Past the bit where Arnie gets impaled on the spike and you think he’s dead, then the red light in his eye comes back on and a lump always wells up in my throat. All the way until right at the end when both terminators are melted and everyone else is in tears. I was beginning to feel somewhat abstract by this point.
“So what’s acid like?” I asked him, feeling the strong waves of ecstasy flowing through me.
“It’s something else mate,” Rick replied. “It can get a bit heavy but there’s nothing like it, I’ll tell you properly if you’re not in a hurry.”
“I’m in no rush.” I suddenly felt very comfortable sitting where I was. The thought of going back out into the cold of night didn’t appeal. Those three will be alright in the car.
“You remember that big storm we had last week?”
“Yeah. We had some pretty mental lightning down in Kirk-Leigh.”
“It was my brother’s birthday so we took a tent out into the woods round the corner from here and took some tabs.”
“Right.”
“We had a big bottle of Jack Daniels with us and were sitting there in the tent under the trees. The door was unzipped and you could see the rain absolutely pouring down outside, hammering on the roof of the tent it was like sitting in a drum. In the distance you could hear thunder coming.”
I shimmied forward on my seat. “Yeah?”
“So the acid we’ve done kicks in and everything starts getting a bit soft round the edges; you know, like shapes moving in the dark. When suddenly there’s a massive flash in the sky above us, literally right above us. I look over at my brother Dale and he’s shaking and dribbling so I was like fuck this.”
“What did you do then?” I wanted to know what had happened to them, but even more I wanted to know what possesses someone to camp out in a thunderstorm, on acid, to celebrate their brother’s birthday.
“I’m thinking get the fuck out of here, we’ll just leave the tent where it is and go home. So I get up to go outside and I swear to you now, on my life, this fucking tree at the end of the woods got hit mate. It exploded like a firework. That was it then, I lost the fucking plot. You couldn’t see anything else in the dark except for what was left of the tree, glowing red and yellow, it was as if it had been a warning for us not to leave the tent.”
My heart started to beat faster as I imagined being in that situation, seeing something get hit by lightning in front of you. “How close was the tree that got hit?”
“How close? It was from where you are now to the houses on the opposite side of the street.”
I turned in my chair and looked behind me through the net curtains; the houses where pretty fucking close. Not close for a house but close for a bolt of lightning.
“Then?”
“Then the wind starts blowing the branches of the trees so they scrape on the side of the tent.
The twigs looked like fingers, like someone was trying to get in. I’d had enough by then. Fuck the storm, I was going home.” Rick started to use his hands to show me how the wind had blown the trees against the sides of the canvas tent. His long fingers almost looked to me like the twigs on a branch, swaying back and forth in front of me. I had to check my own hands to make sure they didn’t look the same.
“Then what?”
“Apart from the glow of the tree on fire, all we had to see was a torch that was at the back of the tent. So I reach over and turn it on and my brother, being off his nut, grabs it off me and throws it into the woods, shouting something about fucking conductivity. He thought if we turned the torch on the lightning would hit us. You’ve got to laugh really.”
I pictured my brother Dean and I in the same situation and what he would do. Even though he was only fourteen he was far more sensible than I was, he’d probably end up looking after me. Either way I definitely wouldn’t be laughing.
“So what did you do without a torch?”
“Then Dale starts crying, well not crying, he’s not fucking soft, just like mumbling about the lightning and getting all stressed out. It’s all coming down everywhere still mate; you can feel it, every time it hits the ground you can feel it. So I get him to lay down flat on the floor, as low as he can get and I zip up the front of the tent and get down next to him and we just lay there in the dark, waiting for the next time the walls of the tent light up and we know somewhere’s been hit. All that and everything I look at looks like it’s melting. Fucked up mate, I mean properly fucked up.”
The thought of being stuck there in the storm, not knowing if they were going to be hit next made the hairs on my neck stand on end. “What happened after that?” I asked, worried about the pair of them cowering there, hiding from the sky.
“Oh it stopped mate, it wasn’t all night. The rain didn’t stop though. It just kept banging against the roof of the tent, sounding like someone was playing the drums. By about four in the morning I thought I was going to crack, it was like we were being punished for something. Dale had passed out by then the lucky bastard, I think it was all too much for him.”
It dawned on me that I’d been sat on the edge of my seat waiting for some massive finale to the story, wanting to know more than anything if they’d been alright. Of course they had, Rick was sitting right in front of me.
I tried to calm myself down a bit. “Er....how did you get back?”
“I woke him when the sun came up and made him walk back, he looked like he was dying. I got him back here and put him to bed. Then I came down and laid on the sofa all day smoking weed to try and straighten myself up. I left the tent and that there. Yeah not something I’d recommend mate.”
“No stranger than jumping out of an aeroplane though,” I said.
Rick laughed, “No, probably not.”
I suddenly remembered I’d left my mates in the car outside, thanked him for the beers and left.
When I got back to the car they were livid. They’d spent the last twenty minutes walking the streets trying to find the house I was in, worried that I’d been murdered for a hundred and sixty quid. Fortunately I got back to the car before they’d started knocking on random people’s doors. Perish the thought I’d have to go back to paying the old prices again.
I handed the pills out and all was forgiven, and I told Kyle about the spotlessly tidy flat and the alphabetised DVD collection. The sign of a habitual amphetamine user apparently.
Then as we travelled the many winding roads that led the way back from Carlton, my eye was drawn to the distant yellow glow of massive greenhouses on the horizon. I’d seen them before on the second bus to and from work, but they never looked so inviting as they did tonight.
If Kyle Were a Ghost Then Al Probably Would Be Too
December 2000.
Christmas Eve of 2000 came around and we had planned to just have a quiet drink at the White Hart; none of us wanting to risk waking up feeling terrible Christmas day. Or worse than that not waking up at all, meaning we’d done too many drugs to feel the need to sleep in the first place. Last orders were called and I downed as many double Jack and Cokes as I could, before bidding everyone in the pub a final slurred “Merry Christmas” and jumping in Kyle’s Maestro for the journey back to James’s; accompanied by a deafening soundtrack of drum and bass, so Kyle didn’t have to listen to the bullshit conversation James and Al were having in the back.
Back at James’s flat was a bottle of Southern Comfort that his dad had bought him for Christmas; with it not quite being midnight we’d have to wait ten minutes before we could technically open it but we knew what it was because James got a bottle every year. Kyle disappeared out onto the fire escape stairs at the rear of the flat to get signal on his phone, before strutting back into the room and telling us he’d found someone nearby with weed but wasn’t going to go on his own. I made myself look busy by rifling through James’s cassette tapes.
Al looked at me as I tried to avoid his eyes. One of us was going to have to go with Kyle, we couldn’t expect James to go, it was his flat at the end of the day; plus it was cold enough to snow and he still had a pair of poxy shorts on.
“Fuck it,” Al reluctantly volunteered.
Then they left, Kyle slamming the door so hard behind him it made the windows in the flat rattle.
“Cold in here don’t you think?” James said, turning up the thermostat in the hallway and throwing me a smile that said you were lucky not to have to go outside again. “It’s gone twelve look, Merry Christmas dude. Let’s get that whisky open.”
“Yeah Merry Christmas,” I replied. “I just thought, it doesn’t look very Christmassy in here. Have you not got a tree?”
“Yeah I’ve got a Christmas tree. I just forgot to put it up.”
“Bit late,” I said, “I think you’re meant to put them up before Christmas day.”
“It’s not too late, we could put it up now. It will only take ten minutes; we could put it up before they get back to freak them out.”
“Yeah go on then mate.”
James went up to the loft while I poured our drinks- treble measures of whisky topped up with water as there was nothing else.
“There you go,” he said, handing me a long rectangular tattered box and a black bin bag full of red and gold tinsel.
“I’m not doing it all myself mate, it’s not my fucking Christmas tree.”
“You go on the decks then you schlemiel, while I put the tree up.”
“Fair enough,” I said, “I’ll pick a tape out then we can put the tree up together.”
James walked over to the stereo. “I’ll put a mix on I did the other night if you want? It’s all old skool.”
I nodded and made a start by laying all the branches out in groups of the same size, easy as they were labelled up with coloured rings.
“Mixing’s getting better then,” I said. I could remember when he’d first been given the decks and the pile of vinyl by his older brother; they weren’t great and neither was he. But he seemed to have come on a long way. Mixing was probably all he did when he wasn’t at work and we weren’t round. In fact it was pretty much all he did when we were round. “How long are you spending on there now?”
“Longest was eight hours,” James said.
“Eight hours in a week? That’s like a whole extra day at work.”
“No dude, eight hours in a night.”
“What?!”
“I’m on the decks at least two hours a day.”
“Two hours is long enough,” I said surprised. “What had you been taking when you did it for eight?”
“I normally put them on as soon as I get home, well after I’ve put dinner in the oven; then I stop while I eat dinner then have another mix after,” he said. “But last week, I think it was Tuesday, I was in the zone, every mix I did was bang on. I couldn’t just stop playing and do something else, I didn’t even stop to have my dinner. I put the plate on top of that speak
er and ate it while I mixed.”
I didn’t look up to see which speaker he was pointing to; I’d just put the last branch in what was now a complete, if somewhat bare tree.
“Mental. Is that the mix we’re listening to now?” I asked. James shook his head, his pony tail flailing behind him. “It’s a shame you didn’t record it, I would’ve liked to have listened to that.”
I started fanning out the branches while James unboxed all the decorations.
“Tell me about it, I thought of that when I was halfway through,” he laughed, “so the following night I ran the decks through the line-in on the stereo and filled this tape up.”
“What the one playing now?”
“Yeah.”
“Sweet.”
Between the pair of us we’d soon finished the tree.
“So how are we gonna do this mate?” I asked.
“How do you mean?”
“When they get back should we wait for them to notice or do you think we should subtly drop hints?”
“I’m sure they’ll notice won’t they?”
“I don’t know mate,” I said. “They weren’t here for long before they went out.”
“If they don’t then we’ll have to try and point it out to them.”
“How are we gonna point it out without making it obvious?”
“I don’t know,” James said. “We can’t really, unless we put something of theirs by the tree.”
I laughed, “There isn’t anything of theirs here mate.”
“Hold on, did you hear that mix?”
“Nah sorry mate.”
“That’s a good thing!” James exclaimed. “If you didn’t notice it then it’s a good mix, that’s the whole point. Hang on I’ll rewind it.”
He rewound the tape a couple of minutes.
“I’ve got it!” he said. “Put the tree in the middle of that wall and move the chair Al always sits on into the corner, that way he’ll have to go around the tree to get to his chair. He won’t remember doing it the first time he came in but he definitely won’t not realise he’s had to do it when he gets back.”
I heard the mix this time in the background, it was as seamless as he’d built it up to be. If only James’s last sentence had made as much sense.
“Er- that’s really good mate.”
“What the plan? Yeah I know,” he smirked.
“Nah the mix mate, well the plan’s alright as well.”
We moved the chair and Christmas tree like he suggested, James was obviously well excited about the whole thing. He put the bin bag in the old rectangular box and put them both back in the loft, while I gave the tree a final once over to make sure it wasn’t too obvious it had only just been put up. “The Power” by Snap came on in the background. I thought I’d already heard it once that night and got déjà vu.
“I thought you had more than three records mate,” I ribbed him.
“This is the one, listen to it. I’d already played this tune but the mix went so well I had to play it again just so I could try and repeat it.”
I listened and it was pretty bloody good, some nice chopping with the cross fader between that and “Baby Let Me Love You For Tonight” by Kariya on the other deck.
I wasn’t sure if it was fill half a tape up with the same two records good though.
“Do you know what? I’m gonna put these two tunes on now. I’ll see if I can do that mix again in front of you.” He skipped round to the other side of the speakers and started digging through his vinyl. As he did the door to the front room flew open.
“Alright Al,” I said as he walked in through the doorway.
“Not really mate, I’ll tell you all about it after I’ve got a drink.” With a disgruntled face he walked over to his chair and threw his coat down, passing straight by the Christmas tree on the way.
“Why what happened?” James asked, poking his head up from behind the record box he was sifting through.
Kyle followed through the door with a devilish look on his face. “Geezer! You two should have seen that, was funny as fuck.”
“Not sure if I’d class it as funny,” Al said.
“We’re not dead are we?” Kyle laughed, shoving Al in the side to prove he still had corporeal form; though I don’t know what that proved seeing as if Kyle were a ghost then Al probably would be too.
“Only just.”
“Well then, it was funny.”
“What’s happened?” I asked Al as he knocked back a whisky and the colour began to drain back into his face.
“You tell him.”
“Alright. Everyone sit down and I’ll tell you,” Kyle said.
James rewound the tape back to the start and we got ready to hear the world’s most over-hyped story.
“We got the weed from my mate,” Kyle began, “so I skinned one up cos I couldn’t wait until we got back here.”
“Wow, that’s exciting,” James said sarcastically.
“Fucking wait, that’s not the funny bit,” Kyle said. Al filled his glass back up. “So as we’re coming back through Frampton I’m toking on the spliff listening to that drum and bass CD on the stereo, when I drop the fucking spliff!”
“Right,” James said.
“These jeans are brand new and they cost me sixty fucking quid. There’s no way I was getting a burn hole in them already so I start looking around to see where the spliff is.”
It was my turn this time. “Right.”
“Then suddenly there’s this massive bang and Al makes this funny kind of squeaking noise.”
“I shouted! Kyle.”
Kyle laughed, “You didn’t shout mate. You squeaked.”
“So what was the bang?” James asked impatiently.
“I’d smashed into a row of parked cars and all their mirrors had exploded. Probably three of them in a row,” Kyle said.
“You schmuck,” James said. “Was that it though? You clipped some mirrors?”
“Only because I shouted at Kyle and he pulled on the steering wheel. Otherwise we’d have smashed into the whole row of cars and both died.”
“We wouldn’t definitely have died mate. Well you probably would have done cos it was on your side but I’d have been OK.”
“I hadn’t thought of it like that,” Al said. “I suppose if it was only me who would have died then that would have been alright.”
“I did apologise, I don’t know what else you want me to say.”
“I don’t think it counts if you’re laughing when you say it,” Al retorted.
“Look mate if it will make you feel better, then I’ll get back in the car and purposely drive it into a row of parked cars on my side, so that I die. If that will make us even.”
“Don’t be fucking silly,” Al said.
I tried to lighten the mood a little with a joke, “Sounds fair enough to me. I’m sure if the police had turned up they would have tried to arrest you. Until you explained they were sixty quid jeans. Then they would have been like ‘Why didn’t you say? We couldn’t have you burning your sixty quid jeans.’”
“Exactly,” Kyle laughed. “Anyway it’s all sorted now, let’s move on. By the way whose tape is this? It’s phat.”
James’s eyes lit up. “It’s me mate, from the other night. Like the mixing do you?”
“Yeah it’s really good,” Kyle said, “for a fucking thalidomide. And what’s with the Christmas tree? We all thought you were a Jew.”
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