Howard Marks' Book of Dope Stories (30 page)

The kerb was rushing towards me at a terrible rate; I kicked up the tail, and hurtled over the kerb. I remember thinking ‘No way, you did it,’ but as that thought left my mind I landed, instantly realising I had left my board back at the kerb. I landed and fell into a twenty-mile-an-hour run, my legs were trying to fold under me, I could see the broken collarbone hurtling towards me like a freight train. I kept up and even managed to slow down a bit before collapsing in a heap at the other end of the alleyway. Varnish stood under a street light, in his usual subtle manner, lighting a massive cone that could have been spotted at two hundred metres.

‘Come on, let’s get out of here before those geezers come after us. Where’s your board?’

‘I think it left me at the kerb.’

‘Well, go and get it, before they come and get us.’

‘Relax,’ I stood up and brushed the grit and gravel off my hands. ‘They’re not after us, they’re probably pissing up a tree somewhere by now.’

I went and got my skateboard, it was still intact. This skateboard was indestructible, one of the old wide boards. We walked awhile smoking the cone, then continued on our boards through quiet council estates and subways, ending up down on the embankment by the River Derwent. The embankment was made of concrete and stepped down to the river. Not a bad place to skate, but we were in no fit state by then to even stand on a board. The methadone hung thick in our veins. Movement seemed almost impossible. We sat by the river and smoked a couple of pipes, then I lit a joint, this time a non-conspicuous size. Water rushed over a weir nearby, creating a hypnotic sound. I don’t know how long we sat there just staring off across the water watching what looked like random images and short clips of eight-millimetre film being projected on to the darkness on the other side of the river.

Something shocked me from the first peace I had felt in a long time. I looked around; everything seemed really dark and blurred. I couldn’t see Varnish. My eyes began to readjust. Then there came a voice.

‘Can you help me?’ I looked around; it seemed to be coming from everywhere. My head started spinning. I stood up, Get a grip, goddammit, I thought, where’s Varnish?

‘Varnish?’

There was silence. Then: ‘Yeah.’

‘Where are you?’ My vision was filling with black spots that seemed to have solidity and depth.

‘I’m here having a piss. Shut up, will you, there’s someone up there.’ My vision began to clear; I could see a bright orange glowing stone bridge in front of me. The voice came again.

‘Excuse me, please could you help me?’

I spotted a figure standing on the bridge to the left of us. He was looking straight at us. Varnish stepped out of the darkness by the river edge, zipping up his fly.

‘What’s up, Doc?’ he said. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Up there,’ I said. ‘We’ve been made.’

‘Excuse me, can you please help me?’

‘What’s the matter, man?’ shouted Varnish. I instantly knew this was the wrong thing for us to do, my instincts were saying cut and run, just get the hell out of there. This was going to be bad and we were in no state to deal with it at all.

The figure walked across the bridge and down the steps towards us. ‘Are you good people? Can you help me?’

Varnish said again: ‘What’s the matter, man?’

‘It’s my head, look. Look what he did to it.’ By this time he was stood in front of us, he tipped his head forward, he’d been holding his head since we first saw him, but only now did it register it why. His head was split open on the top, at least ten centimetres long. It was a gaping soggy wound and he was losing quite a lot of blood from it.

‘Holy shit, what the fuck happened to you?’ I asked.

‘This man, he hit me in the head with a tyre thing, you know a thing for the wheel.’ The man looked up; he was only a boy, sixteen maybe seventeen. His face was covered in glistening thick black blood. Some had dried, he’d had this wound a while, I remember thinking.

There was something about this boy I instantly felt uneasy about. He didn’t seem right, I mean in the way he seemed to be. His general calmness after being smashed in the head with a tyre wrench. Something had put me on edge and I didn’t know what.

‘Holy Jesus!’ I exclaimed, ‘you need to go to a hospital, man.’

‘Or the police,’ said Varnish. ‘Hell, we’ll take you up there, they gotta catch this guy. You can’t just go around hitting people in the head when you feel like it, there’d be anarchy. Where would we be then, eh?’

‘Maybe the police wouldn’t be such a good idea, Varnish,’ I said.

He looked at me puzzled. I gave a you-know-why nod. He seemed to realise.

‘No, I can’t go to the cops,’ said the boy.

‘Why not?’ we both asked simultaneously.

‘Because I’m on a curfew. I’m supposed to be in by ten every night. If they catch me out here now they’ll put me away.’

‘Why are you on a curfew?’ asked Varnish. ‘What you done?’

‘I, err . . . burgled a few houses a few years ago, when I was younger, but I’ve done my time, I just want the chance to get on with my own life, but they keep harassing me. They won’t leave me alone and now they’ve put me on this curfew.’

‘That’s some hard shit, man,’ I said.

‘Don’t worry, kid,’ said Varnish. Oh no, please don’t, but before I could finish that thought he already said it. ‘We’ll help you. We won’t leave you out here on your own. We’re good people. Honest citizens.’

Varnish put his arm around the boy and was already walking up the street.

‘Varnish,’ I called after him. He carried on walking, talking to the boy.

‘Well, err . . . what about the skateboarding? Are we just gonna forget that then?’

There was no talking to him; he was on a mission. His mind locked on to a certain point in time where he now knew he had to be. In my experiences of the drug culture this was common practice.

‘We’ll take him back to the flat with us,’ Varnish said as I caught up to him. We turned left and walked up St Peter’s Street, past shops and travel agencies, the orange light illuminating the red brick street. The clock on the weird concrete erection in front of us said 4.47. Great, I thought, it’ll be daylight soon and we can get rid of this freak. I lit a cigarette.

‘So, tell us again, what happened to you?’ asked Varnish.

The boy told us he had asked this man for the time and the guy smashed him in the head with the tyre wrench.

‘So this guy was in the street when he hit you?’

‘No.’ The boy looked at Varnish like he was an idiot. ‘He was in his house.’

Varnish looked at me full of confusion. I shrugged and dragged on the cigarette.

‘What do you mean he was in his house? Were you in his house?’

‘No, I just knocked on his door to ask him the time, then he hit me in the head with the wheel . . .’

I cut in. ‘Tyre wrench.’ This character was starting to annoy me.

‘Yes, the tyre wrench. He hit me in the head here.’ He pointed to his head again. Then it hit me: this boy was simple, backward.

‘You knocked on someone’s door to ask them the time?’ asked Varnish.

‘Yes.’

‘Did he tell you?’ I asked.

‘No, he hit me in the head with a tyre wrench.’ The boy scowled at me, I hopped on my board and skated off up ahead.

‘Might as well get some in, seeing as we’re going home,’ I called back. I headed up the hill towards the concrete structure then turned it and flew back down the hill towards Varnish and the boy, lurching all over the road. As we headed home the only thing open was a massage parlour, a gigantic red-and-blue neon sign flashing on and off outside. This area of the street was constantly filled with parked Mercedes, BMWs and Jaguars.

The sky was starting to lighten by the time we got back to the flat. You could see distant clouds rolling across purple skies over the flats facing us across the square.

We went up to the top-floor flat and I made tea. Varnish and the boy went to his bedroom. I remember Varnish saying he was going to clean the boy’s head. I went into the bedroom and entered a conversation I wasn’t sure I was hearing. The vibrations in this room were very unusual and definitely not friendly.

‘. . . Okay, I’ll go and run you a bath and I’ll call you when it’s ready,’ Varnish said. He turned to leave the room.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked.

‘His head’s a right old mess. I’m gonna run him a bath so he can clean it properly.’ Varnish smiled, but there was something unnerving in it. Was he keeping something from me? He turned and headed to the bathroom.

I handed the boy his tea, he said thank you. He was grinning insanely at me, I felt like I was in the ‘We’re gonna get ya!’ scene in
The Evil Dead
, a possessed character sat cross-legged on the bed in front of me, but when would he start singing those terrible rhymes at me? I had to keep my cool; this guy was starting to get to me. Remain calm, if this kid thinks he’s getting to you there is a distinct possibility he’ll take advantage of the situation. It seemed like he had the mind of a ten-year-old but the deviance of a habitual criminal. He wasn’t to be trusted.

I went and sat on the sofa in the left-hand corner of the room and put some music on. I heard the taps start running in the bathroom. I lay back on the sofa and drifted off into an uneasy silence. Everything I looked at looked black, even the lights. I felt like I was being swallowed into the sofa, slowly being sucked in. I could still hear the music but it seemed really far away. This sensation was familiar to me; I’d felt this type of drug many times before, sucking me in.

Varnish walked back in the room.

‘Okay, the bath’s ready. Come with me and I’ll show you what towel to use.’

The boy got up and followed Varnish out of the room. He still had the same stupid grin on his face as he left.

I sat up and started to paste a joint together. Varnish came back into the room a few minutes later and sat down on the bed. He started to load one of the many home-made bongs that were laid around the room.

‘He says he can’t wash himself,’ Varnish said after a minute or so.

‘You what?’ I couldn’t believe I was hearing this.

‘He says he can’t wash himself. He can’t even get himself undressed, I had to do it for him.’ My eyes darted to Varnish in shock; he looked straight at the blank television screen not two feet in front of him, no expression in his eyes.

‘Well, count me out,’ I said finally. Varnish snapped out of whatever world he was in. ‘No way, I’m not doing it. There’s something about this character, I don’t know what it is, but I don’t like it. Do you really believe that story he told us about the curfew?’

‘I don’t know,’ replied Varnish in a bilge of hash smoke. ‘He’s just not all there, you know, he’s a bit simple. Don’t worry, I wasn’t asking you when I said that. I’ll do it. I don’t mind.’

‘I don’t know, that’s kinda weird, you’re going to give a young boy a bath you’ve only just met tonight, doesn’t something strike you as odd here?’

‘Oh God, what are you saying man?’ Varnish got up and left the room, then came back in again a moment later. ‘I hope you’re not saying what I think you’re saying, because if you are saying what I think you’re saying then you’re sicker than I ever thought you could be.’ He stormed out making ‘uck!’ noises and shouting, ‘That’s disgusting.’

I lay on the bed smoking the joint and listened to the music, turning the volume up with my foot. What the hell was going on in there? Had I spent all this time sharing a flat with a man whose sexual orientations I had no idea of? What evil thing was manifesting itself in front of that poor unsuspecting boy, in the bathroom as we speak? That vile drug beast in the bathroom with the boy was not a man to be trusted, he enjoyed nothing more than freaking unsuspecting members of society while under the security of hard drugs. Perhaps the boy wanted it to happen, maybe he’d planned this all along, well, all except the bash in the head, but how would I know?

But good tunes at five thirty in the morning; suddenly everything is forgotten in a haze of thick grey-blue smoke and Tom Waits wailing over a king hell honky-tonky band.

I came around as the boy walked back into the room; I could feel him watching me, even without looking at him. I asked if he was okay. He said his head still hurt.

‘Well, you took a pretty heavy bang in the head, I’m surprised you haven’t got concussion.’

The boy returned to the exact position on the bed as he was before. Varnish came in and sat down.

We sat listening to calm sounds, smoking and drinking Ribena, thinking the vitamin C would do us some good. The sun shone into the room casting streams of yellow through the smoke-filled room. The boy asked what we were doing. I looked up from the smoking bong.

‘We’re smoking hash, what does it look like?’

‘Can I have some?’ he asked. ‘It looks good.’

We pondered this for a while, maybe it would help the pain in his head, maybe it would calm him down. Maybe it would knock him out completely and we’d end up with a young boy in a coma and a big crack in his skull to explain to the police. Then when he woke he would tell the police how these two degenerate-looking men took him to their flat, bathed him and then made him smoke some drug that rendered him helpless. No, this was a bad idea, I thought. He may even just go completely uncontrollable, we’d end up with a near-fit situation, I’ve seen it happen before and it wasn’t nice.

So we decided the hash painkiller was not a good idea. The boy began complaining that his head really hurt. Then he started to moan and rock backwards and forwards. Varnish and I decided to get him to the hospital quick, our time as Samaritans was over, we’d had enough of this creep. It was around six thirty as we stumbled to the car, my body rebounded from every step I took. I felt rubbery and I had little strength in any of my limbs. I had the boy in front of me, occasionally grabbing his jacket collar and helpfully thrusting him in the direction of the car. Varnish was in front us; he staggered around the car, pulling his keys from his jeans.