Junk - Melvin Burgess [90]
I was living with Sandra at the time. I’d had a great time in Australia and South-East Asia. Bicycling is the only way to travel. I used to go down regularly to the New Forest when mountain bikes first came on the market and I knew at once I’d seen the future of cycling. South-East Asia was only the first step. I’m going to do India next.
I’d often thought of Tar when I was over there. He’d have loved every second of it. I used to think of the last time I’d seen him and what he’d said to me, ‘I don’t have to run away to Asia to have a good time, Richard.’
I was sitting on this fallen statue in Thailand at the edge of a ruined temple in the jungle. I’d slept on the beach, had a swim and cycled through the jungle for fifteen miles. There were huge butterflies everywhere, big as birds. I thought, I know where I’d rather be…
Then when I got back I went to live in Birmingham for a bit. I had friends in Birmingham, but it’s a city I’d never lived in before. That’s where I met Sandra. She was living in the same house as my friends and we started to have an affaire du coeur. Unfortunately I’m not very good at that sort of thing. Then she got a place in college at Reading. Reading! I must have been mad! I went and interviewed at a bike shop there and they offered me the job.
That’s life. I came back thinking I’d earn enough money to get off to India fairly quickly. Instead I ended up with Sandra in a flat in Woodley. The worst of it was, Sandra liked it.
I keep falling in love but it always makes me unhappy, I’ve no idea why. When I told Sandra about Tar she was very disapproving. I tried to tell her what a lovely person he was, what a hard time he’d had as a child, all that. It wasn’t as though she’s unsympathetic, actually, but only professionally. Her course was for working with handicapped kids. She was doing work experience with some very badly handicapped kids and it had a very high burn-out rate. By the weekend the last thing she wanted was work at home.
‘Junkies are bad news,’ she announced. I suppose after dealing with people with those sorts of problems, addiction looked a bit self-induced.
I told her what he’d said.
‘What’s “sort of” supposed to mean?’ she wanted to know.
I had a good idea.
Tar was his usual shifty self. I mean, that’s usual for him since he got on to smack. He’d lost that open look he used to have about him quite early on, after about six months of leaving the squat, I’d say. It was funny. I hadn’t actually liked him for years. I loved him when he first turned up. He had this way of trying to hide everything but it all came shining through anyway.
The heroin covered that up soon enough but I kept getting little glimpses. He’d look shyly at me out of the corner of his eye, or a slow smile would spread over his face and I’d think the old Tar was still in there somewhere.
The evening started off not too bad. He told me about the bust. I thought it was very noble of him to go in when the place was crawling with pigs and take the rap. And he talked about the detox centre. I think he got a lot from it but Sandra wasn’t impressed.
‘Obviously you didn’t get enough from it,’ she said. It wasn’t very comfortable. She went up to bed early on but I stayed up with Tar rapping. He had a lot to say about junk and getting off it. It all sounded very sensible to me. I thought he was okay.
I went up to bed about an hour later and Sandra was furious.
‘I want him out of the house first thing in the morning,’ she said. I couldn’t believe it.
‘Why?’
‘He’s just bombed out of his head, that’s all.’
‘No, he told me he’s been clean for a month…’
‘He says! Didn’t you see his eyes?’
‘He wasn’t… was he?’ And even as I said that I knew it was true. He’d been getting more and more dopey and his pupils had been getting smaller and smaller. I’d been smoking so I hadn’t really noticed, but looking back he was bombed out of sight. If it wasn’t heroin it was