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By Root 324 0

and I’d come down a few mil a week, but of course I was using all the time as well. Well, not all the time. A lot of the time I was selling the methadone to buy smack; you get plenty of methadone users, too. Then I’d have a binge and tell the doc to put me back up to twenty-five or thirty. But in the last weeks before my case came up I was doing quite well. It was something to focus on, I suppose. I was thinking: don’t use needles, stick to chases if you have to, do your best not to take any at all. And I did all right considering I’d been in such a huge mess in the months leading up to it. I managed to get by without any junk at all in the last week, and that’s not bad because you can imagine how tempting it was – the last fling, make myself feel better, you know…

So coming down was the first thing and it was awful. Coming off methadone is worse than coming off junk. It really makes you feel bad. They’re crazy, because that’s what they give you to come off heroin – something that’s even more addictive and worse to come off. The only reason they give it to you is because you don’t get the same hit. It’s not fun. It’s medicine so it can’t be nice. It’s bonkers, really.

I spent a few hours rolling around groaning in my cell and they let me go to the pharmacy. I was in a horrendous mess – sweating this horrid yellow juice that stung and aching, and my teeth with this toothache that kept jumping from tooth to tooth.

I explained to the nurse what I needed and she just laughed at me.

‘We don’t have methadone in here, David.’ Stupid git that I am, my heart actually leapt. I thought, Yeah, they’re going to give me a diamorphine script – that’s the real stuff. You don’t get it any purer than the hospital gets it.

‘But I need something…’

‘You’ll live,’ she said.

I waited a few seconds as it began to dawn on me that the heartless bitch was going to give me nothing. My teeth started screaming in horror.

‘You don’t understand –’

‘I don’t suppose I do. But I do know we don’t give methadone to heroin users in a young offender institution.’

I said, ‘Some Valium.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Something,’ I croaked. She pulled a face and went to the medical cabinet and broke off a couple of tabs which she handed to me.

‘Two Paracetamol?’ I said. I couldn’t believe it. I thought, Doesn’t she know anything?

I tried to be patient and explain to her. ‘Two Paracetamol won’t do anything to me. I’m a big user, I need something a little bit stronger…’ I smiled encouragingly at her, which wasn’t easy when your bones are trying to break themselves up in your body. She’d just about had enough.

‘I’ve got a lot of people to see…’

I stood there staring at my miserable two tabs of headache pills until the screw pushed me back outside.

I was horrified. Two Paracetamol! It was monstrous. It had to be against the Geneva Convention or something. I mean, locking you up, I could understand that, maybe even electrodes up the bum. But giving me just two Paracetamol in the middle of methadone comedown was inhuman.

‘You don’t understand,’ I said to the screw as he slammed the door in my face. The thud of it went right through my spine; I thought it was going to snap in twenty different places.

‘Have a nice time,’ he told me. And they just left me there.

I’d have escaped. I’d have committed murder. I broke the Paracetamol into four halves and took a half then and saved the rest for later. When that’s all you have to get you through, you might as well go for the placebo effect. I even ground one of them up and snorted it, but that wasn’t much good either.

That’s the way it works. You’ll eat shit or go in the ring for ten rounds with Mike Tyson – slave, hero, rent boy, pimp, master of the universe – you’ll do whatever you have to do to get your next hit.

Looking back – some of the things we were doing. Rob was cottaging – you know? Selling sex to homos in the public toilets. Lily went mad when she found out, it totally did her head in. It was all right her doing it at home, but him doing it with men – she just went ape, running around screaming and crying. Me, I