Junk - Melvin Burgess [71]
Lily’ll be its mother, of course, no one can be its mother and father except her and Rob, but the baby will belong to all of us. Rob and Tar are going to build a swing in the garden, a little one just for the baby. All right, it’ll be a while before it’s big enough, but still. And they’ve been out round the skips looking for a cot and all that sort of baby stuff. And Sally and me are going to knit – imagine! Me knitting!
And the first thing – the big thing – we’re all going to give up smack. That’s it. It was good for a while. No, I don’t regret it, why should I? Okay, there’s been casualties, there always are. You walk across the road, there’s casualties. But now it’s gone on for too long. It’s time… we’ve all known that for a long time, it was just a question of the right thing, the right time. And now it’s come, courtesy of Lils, as usual.
The way I look at it, I had a love affair – but now it’s over. Me and Junk, we’ve fallen out. It’s just so right that we all get led out of it by a little baby. You know? Like baby Jesus.
A baby is different, isn’t it?
I’m really looking forward to being clean again. It’s this weird thing with smack. First off it makes you feel so good. But after a bit, after your body gets used to it, it stops working like that. You start needing it just to stay normal. You know? So you wake up feeling disgusting because you’re coming down. So you do some and you feel okay, but that’s all you feel. It’s like medicine. You get like some old woman who has to take her pills in the morning in order to get through the day.
So what you do then is take more and more and more, chasing that dragon, chasing that hit, chasing that feel-good feeling. You take more and more and more, and more often. Then you get sick of it and give up for a few days. And that’s the really nasty thing because then, when you’re clean, that’s when it works so well. That’s when you can take a hit and mmmmmmmmmmmm!
We’ve all been talking about it and we’ve realised –we all feel the same way. I was getting scared. Rob and Lily do so much. Every day. Tar and me have days off, at least.
Actually, though, Tar scares me, too. He’s got so cynical. You know Tar, he was always so delighted by things. He used to get so emotional about, I dunno – me, a flower, the stars out at night, it was all wonderful for him. These days he doesn’t care any more. I don’t understand him these days.
I don’t feel that I’ve changed, except I feel so rotten a lot of the time. But he has.
Sometimes I think I preferred him the way he used to be, almost. Not really, he used to get so upset, but…
And the other thing is, he lies. About smack. You know? Like, we’ve run out, it happens from time to time. He tells me he has none left, and I think, Shit, that means coming down. But then he sneaks off and when he comes back he’s got eyes like glass, and I say, ‘You’ve just had some.’
And he admits it. That actually happened the other day. He just sat there smiling and nodding, ‘Yeah, yeah, I had a bit…’ And he starts explaining to me that he didn’t have enough for two and how if we’d shared it we’d both feel awful so he thought it would save a lot of trouble for both of us if he took it on his own. And he’s serious. He’s actually convinced himself that this is sensible behaviour and he gets really put out when I don’t agree.
‘You could have given it to me,’ I said.
And he said, ‘I could have done. But I didn’t.’ And he smiles like a snake at me. Then he’s going on about how he’s got to go out and score some so he needs it more than me. I have to go and rub up old men at the parlour. Does he think that’s fun? Does he think I like that? Doesn’t he know I’d rather be out of it when I do that?
But it doesn’t make any difference. He believes anything he tells himself. ‘I need it, Gems,’ he says. Yeah.
Imagine! A baby… Actually it’s made me go all broody. What if I got pregnant? We could bring them up together and they’d be really good friends just like me and Lily. I know you can’t tell how your kids are going to turn