Junk - Melvin Burgess [61]
But we found it, so it isn’t wasted. And wrapped in the silk is the book. Lily calls it the Sky Bible because of that remark I made when I first saw it. Rob kept repeating it. ‘It must be like owning the sky.’
Lily lights incense sticks and candles, and fills the room with smoke and candlelight. Then she takes the book out very slowly, very carefully.
‘Sky Bible, what we gonna do today?’
And she lets the book fall open. Last time it was a piccy of a naked woman. Not young, quite old and baggy. She was sitting on an armchair smoking a cigarette and looking out of the window. All the smoke was coiling around the place. She wasn’t pretty or anything but the photograph was really beautiful. I thought so anyway.
‘What’s it mean, Lily?’ asked Gemma.
Rob said, ‘Have sex in an armchair?’ He’s a bit irreverent about it, it annoys Lily.
Lily screws up her eyes and thinks carefully. Then she says, ‘Nah. It says, we gotta do some heroin today…’
Everyone fell about laughing. But she really meant it, she got quite annoyed.
‘Strange, that’s what it said last time,’ I said.
Lily patted it. ‘The Sky Bible knows how to have a good time,’ she intoned.
I could never work out if it’s a game or not. But I think if anyone’s magic, Lily is. It’s funny – sometimes she’s dead against any sort of hocus pocus, other times she acts like she’s the Queen Witch. You never know what’s going on with Lily. She worries me sometimes. She thinks that whatever she happens to be thinking is fantastic. And the problem with Gemma is, she thinks whatever Lily is thinking is fantastic.
I tried to talk about it to Gemma the other day, but she just got annoyed. She thought I was getting scared, told me I ought to lay off the junk. I’m not worried about it for myself, I never take smack two days on the trot, just to show myself. But I do worry about Gemma. I can take it or leave it, but she never says no.
It’s one of the problems that we all do the same kind of thing. There’s always one of us wants a chase. Of course we never use needles, we’ve got more sense than that… but I might want to have a break but Gemma’ll feel like she wants some. Or if both me and her decide to have a break, Lily’ll turn up or Rob will or Sally…
You sort of infect one another like that.
It’ll be all right. I just have to remember I got away from my mum and dad. If I can escape from that, I can escape from anything.
Chapter Seventeen
Gemma
One day I’m going to have babies. One day I’m gonna move to the country and grow flowers and vegetables. Maybe I’ll have a little flowershop. Maybe I’ll sell the things I grow. And in the summer when I need to get off my head I’ll go round the festivals and meet all my friends.
One day. But right now, I’m a city girl. It’s all here, in this half a square mile. You can stuff your face on it. You can just bend down and pick it up, anything you like.
In the city, you gotta have money. For the first six months we lived off nothing but after that… well, you need money to do everything. You need money for the bus, to go to bops, to buy yourself things. The only thing is, you gotta find an easy way of making it. Work in the factory for forty hours a week? No thanks, I’d rather be skint at home.
Money’s easy, that’s another thing Lily taught me. It was – I dunno – last spring? We were all really skint. We’d been having a bit of a binge that week, too much really, but it’s nice to do too much once in a while.
We’d had a couple of grams at the beginning of the week. Then Sal came round. It was about the time she’d given Col the elbow and she was missing him but she didn’t want to take him back. She’d been away visiting her brother in Manchester so she’d been clean for a week and she was gasping. She bought a couple of