Junk - Melvin Burgess [72]
That’d be nice. It’s started to get me down doing that job. I keep telling myself that it’s just a job, it’s easy money. It’s no worse than any other job. People have a prejudice about sex, but it’s just something you do with your body. I jolly myself into it. Sometimes I think, I’m here to make these people happy, and I do. On a good day I see these guys walk into the parlour looking like dogs and they walk out like princes. Let’s face it, they’d never get a girl like me if they couldn’t pay for it. But… well, it’s still a job, you know? I can think of better ways to be spending my time. It’s easy money, that’s all.
I’m thinking I’ll stop doing tricks at work – I mean, full sex. It’d be up to me, you don’t earn as much but you can still do all right. Maybe when we’re all clean I’ll pack up altogether and have a baby, too.
Did I tell you, Lily turned blue the other day?
It was really frightening. We were all out in the back bedroom with the works. We were taking turns. There were some friends of ours in the front room, so after we’d done we went through to see them. Lily was last so she was on her own. I thought it was funny at the time because Lily is never last usually, when it comes to getting her smack.
I only went back because I’d left my fags in there. She was lying on the bed and I thought she was asleep but she was this strange colour. Blue. I just stared; I didn’t realise what I was looking at until I saw the needle in her arm. Then I thought about what Tar said about Alan and Helen. The needle was still in, you see. There was a little blood had found its way into the works and…
‘Tar, Rob, Tar, Rob!’ I screamed. I thought she was already dead. I jumped over and I hauled her upright on the bed. Then I remembered the blood in the works and that’s supposed to be really dangerous, you can get air in your bloodstream and if that little bubble gets round to your brain… So I tore the needle out quick and I ripped her arm doing it and this black blood oozed out of the hole. Black blood. I was thinking about Alan and Helen, I never thought it could happen to any of us. Rob came in, then Tar. She was getting bluer and bluer. Tar pushed her back on the bed because he wanted to press her heart, but Rob was pulling her upright; he had this feeling she ought to be upright. I started slapping her face, whack, whack, whack. Then she twitched.
In the silence that followed she took two little sips of air. I could hear them. It was so shallow, her breath.
We all stopped breathing then, I think. And so did she. I slapped her again and again and again and she took another breath, a deep shuddering one this time, and a little pink came into her face.
Then we got her on her feet and started marching her round and round the room. She started to come round and she was muttering something. I was really terrified because – it was really strange this – I thought she had some message, you know, from the other side. Because she’d died, she’d stopped breathing, her heart had stopped. I had this awful feeling that she was coming back from the dead with some terrible message for us, like in a horror story. I really wanted them to put her down and just let her die…
Then the words started getting clearer, and all it was was ‘Leave me alone, leave me alone…’
She was all right after that. She began to come round. It was so weird because she was just normal. I mean, if I hadn’t gone back for another few minutes she’d have been dead. And here she was, just like Lily, normal.
Later, when she came out of the smack a bit, she tried to make a joke out of it. ‘Live fast, die young,’ Lily kept saying. But it just wasn’t funny. But what was weird, she was laughing. She found it funny. I honestly think she wouldn’t have minded dying. Like it was just another adventure.
It turned out she’d stayed behind and had another little one. But the stuff was stronger than usual. We’d all been remarking on that