Junk - Melvin Burgess [58]
No thanks.
Yeah, I like to smoke a little hash. I like to breathe in a little smack. It makes me feel good.
I got to admit, heroin’s the best. I mean, THE BEST. The others, well… Acid, your thoughts come alive and they start to live a life of their own. Hash, your senses sort of wake up. But with heroin, ahhh. You can just sit in a sewer all day and be soooo happy and feel soooo good.
Chasing the dragon… yeah. It’s like Chinese magic. That smoke, that’s your Chinese dragon, and when you breathe that dragon in and he coils about in your veins, like Lily said, you feel better than anyone else ever did. You feel better than Churchill after he won the war, you feel better than the caveman when he discovered fire, you feel like Romeo did when he finally got to bed with Juliet.
That’s why it’s dangerous. You have to be strong to feel that good, because after a while you have to open the door again and step out and… go to work or ring up your mum or whatever. You almost don’t dare to do it because it’s one hundred million dollars of feeling good. You don’t dare take it just to escape because when you get back, you might not like it much. Yeah… to do heroin, you’ve got to have a life.
No, really, it is dangerous. Even I know that. Rob and Lily used to have a thing. That was before they came to Bristol, when they were still living in Manchester. They got into a bit of a mess up there, especially Rob. He had a hard time for a bit but he managed to kick it on the head. He’d been clean for a month when we moved in.
Lily – well, she’s something else. Rob says she used to take loads and loads in Manchester. Then when she saw how he was in a mess, they both packed up and went to Bristol and she went right off it, no problem at all. Then once he was clean again, she started up just like that. Now she takes loads and loads again. She frightens me, she takes so much. She says that’s because she’s stronger than anyone else. Well, she is.
Actually, Rob was never addicted to the heroin. It was the needles – jacking up. He had a thing about sticking the needle into his arm and pushing down the plunger. He used to do it with gin and vodka; he even used to do it with water when he hadn’t got anything else. But that was before we all got together. Things are different now. Sure, heroin’s strong. But we’re stronger. You have to be able to stop and start when you want to. Like, we do a bit, or we have a little binge and then we lay off for a few days, or a week. We all gave up for a week once, me and Lily and Tar and Rob. We just said right, that’s it, no more for a few weeks. And we did it. I could do it again tomorrow.
We dug the garden, Tar got on with his dandelion. He’s doing a really huge one on the wall of our bedroom. When we first moved in he started on it straight away. When it’s finished it’s going to take up a whole wall. You should see it – dense black in the back and these amazing arrows of yellow and orange.
‘That’s you,’ he says, colouring in a petal. He still says that to me sometimes – you know, dandelion. He whispers it to me at night when we’re cuddled up. Only I don’t say ladybird back any more. I say, dandelion. Dandelion, dandelion. I love you.
He’d stopped doing it for a while, but when we gave up junk for that week he almost finished it. And Rob got on with his motorbike. It had been lying in bits on the floor ever since we moved in; he hadn’t touched it. Then he got stuck in and he got the wheels on and the engine in place. Pretty soon, we’ll pack it in again and then he’ll finish it, I expect.
It wasn’t difficult, coming off. I could do it again any time. So long as I feel like that I know it’s all right.
Chapter Sixteen
Tar
It’s a beautiful winter’s day.
Here in Bristol you don’t get much frost. The sea gets channelled up the Bristol Channel and keeps us all moist and cool. But these past couple of days it’s been really cold. Yesterday there were tiny little frost crystals on all the walls and the twigs and branches. There’s a lot