The Quarry (22 page)

‘I’m guessing you and this ex didn’t last very long if this was your attitude to giving him support,’ Ali says.

‘You guess correctly,’ Hol informs her. ‘He swapped one crutch for another: half-hearted alcoholism for half-witted, happy-clappy Christianity. Took up strumming his way to salvation in one of those big old north London churches where they think replacing the pews with beanbags is doing the work of the Lord.’

‘So it did
work
,’ Ali says.

Hol shakes her head. ‘Nah, not for long. Last I heard from him was when he rang me up to tell me he’d decided he actually was a sex addict and did I want to hook up later in a vodka bar?’

‘Tell you what; I’ll have yours,’ Haze is saying, nodding at Rob as he sidles into position alongside Paul.

‘Will you, fuck,’ Rob says, grinning. He accepts the rolled fifty from Paul and bends over the mirror.

Ali looks at Hol and says, ‘Thanks,’ with a sneer as Rob snorts first one line, then another.

Rob sits back, offers the little paper tube to Ali. ‘Sorry; should have been ladies first, I guess. You partaking?’

She snatches the note from him. ‘Suppose I’d better stay in touch,’ she says, pivoting towards the mirror. ‘Hold my hair back.’

‘
No?
’ Paul says to Hol. ‘Seriously? After all that?’

‘Just making my point about disease and addiction,’ Hol says. ‘Wasn’t committing to hoovering the marching powder.’

‘I’ll have yours, if you like,’ Haze says.

‘What?’ Ali says, sniffing hard. ‘You decided you might have a problem, Hol?’

‘No,’ Hol says. ‘I just don’t want to give money to the sort of people who produce – well, distribute – this stuff. I wouldn’t wear fucking blood diamonds either.’

‘It’s a fucking
moral
thing?’ Rob says, laughing loudly.

‘Yeah,’ Hol says, ‘it’s a fucking moral thing.’ She sighs. ‘I
like
cocaine. I’m good on cocaine. We get along very well, me and cocaine, and, one day, maybe, I hope, I’ll get to start doing it again; if they legalise it and tax it and it’s not distributed by murderous scumbags with dollar signs in their eyes. They make the fucking vulture fund operators look like hospice nurses.’

‘I wasn’t going to ask for a contribution, Hol,’ Paul says, tapping the note on the mirror, dislodging a little coke. He nods. ‘This is just fun amongst friends. With my compliments.’

‘You know what I meant,’ Hol says.

‘Also,’ Paul says, handing the note to the waiting Haze, who swoops in immediately, ‘I think you’re doing a disservice to my dealer. Anybody less like a coked-up, ultra-capitalist, murdering nut-job is hard to imagine. If he was any more laid back he’d fall over. Backwards, obviously.’

‘What?’ Hol says. ‘Does he travel out there himself and source it direct from a fair-trade cooperative of artisan bio-certified coca-leaf farmers?’

Paul frowns. ‘Actually I think this stuff comes via FARC or somebody like that. They’re the anti-government side, anyway, whatever their name. The guerrillas. This stuff funds the comrades.’ He’s looking up at Hol, who is gazing back down at him. ‘Seriously,’ he says.

‘Uh-huh,’ Hol says.

‘That’s good stuff,’ Rob says, sitting far back in the couch and breathing in deeply. He looks at Ali. ‘That is good stuff, isn’t it?’

Ali nods, sniffing hard. ‘Yes. Yes it is. It’s good stuff. Very good stuff.’

Pris, who snorted after Ali in a very delicate, tidy, ladylike manner, is sitting with her head on the back of her couch, looking almost straight up at the ceiling. ‘Mm-hmm,’ she says. ‘Missed this, have to say.’

‘Fell for that line, did you?’ Hol asks Paul, grinning.

Paul shrugs, offers the note to me, eyebrows raised. ‘Just telling you what I was told, Hol. Didn’t even ask for it. My man volunteered the information, unprompted. Didn’t seem at all sure I’d approve, seemed to think I might refuse the deal, demand charlie produced by the right-wing cartels in league with the cops, army and torture cells or something.’

I take the cocaine, a line up each nostril. It tastes of almost nothing. I think the stuff Guy and I had was cut with crushed-up painkillers or something. This is much better.

I manage to snort without coughing or sneezing or banging my knees off the table and upsetting the mirror or anything. I nod to Paul, return the note, put my head back and sniff hard to keep the drug in there, then return to my pouffe.

‘Sure I can’t tempt you?’ Paul says, offering the note to Hol. There are four lines left. ‘All bought and paid for,’ he tells her. He smiles round at the others. ‘Suspect it’ll all be going this evening, no matter what.’

‘Yeah,’ Rob says. ‘Not releasing any unused stuff back into the wild.’

Haze giggles at this. He’s rolling a joint.

‘Also, I just wouldn’t lie to you, Hol,’ Paul says quietly.

Hol takes in a deep breath and then sighs heavily. ‘Ah, what the fuck,’ she says, and quickly unfolds her legs and sits forward, accepting the note.

‘That’s our girl,’ Ali says. Hol ignores her, though I gain, anyway, the impression that what was meant to sound sarcastic ended up coming out almost affectionate. Or maybe the other way round.

Paul takes the last two lines and mops up the last little remnants, some with the note and some with a moistened finger, applying it to his gums again. Haze joins in from his side of the mirror.

Paul sits back. ‘Hoo-
wee
!’ he says, to the background of a lot of sniffing.

‘The trick is to contra-rotate,’ I tell Pris.

‘What,’ she says, ‘you have to pirouette while you’re stirring?’

‘No! Not you; the teaspoon, and so the tea! I usually count eight rotations clockwise, then a brief pause, then seven the other way—’

‘Not eight?’

‘No, cos you’re counting down, see? There’s less undissolved sugar to stir into the tea by now. Then, after the seven anticlockwise …’

‘I
took
the train! Twice. I got the same racist fucking taxi driver both times,’ Hol is telling Rob.

‘You sure it was the same guy?’

‘Positive! Asked where I’d come from and when I said London he fucking went on about how London had no real Londoners left in it any more, just people from “all over”, and there were schools where the main language wasn’t even English any more, it was Bengali or Pakistani, and how he blamed everything on the Somalis; there were streets in Newcastle where there was nothing but all these Somalis who couldn’t speak a word of English but they were living the life of bleedin Riley on all these benefits and we should send them back where they came from and all our problems would be solved.’

‘That is a bit old school.’

‘I thought he was trying to have a really bad-taste laugh, I thought he was trying to be a local Borat or something. I was looking for the concealed cameras. I asked him, seriously: the country’s bumping along the bottom after we baled out the fucking greedy, corrupt, incompetent bankers, while the poor are hammered and the rich have their taxes cut and he blames the people who can’t even vote, who have the
least
power of anybody?’

‘And?’

‘Yeah, he said that was about right. Get rid of the lot of them.’

‘Good God.’

‘I told him I felt exactly the same way as he did.’

‘That’ll have confused him,’ Paul says. ‘Just confused me.’

‘About people like him; I’d kick out all the racists and the EDL shitheads. Ha!’

‘What’s EDL?’

‘Jesus, Rob …’

‘Then you can do surface stirring,’ I tell Pris.

‘What?’

‘That’s when you’ve put too much milk in your tea and there’s hardly room even to put the teaspoon in, let alone stir the tea with it once it is in there.’

‘Oh.’

‘You’ve put the milk in but you’ve put in too much so the tea looks wrong.’

‘Looks wrong?’

‘Yeah, it looks like a brain or something.’

‘A brain?’

‘Or any folded organ compressed within an outer membrane, I suppose, but you know when you see a brain – a human brain, because they’re the most folded, I think; not a mouse brain or something because they’re almost smooth, but a human brain, with all those foldings on the surface?’

‘Oh, right. Yeah.’

‘Well, the tea looks like that, with these sort of pale areas – really volumes, but you know what I mean—’

‘Uh-huh, uh-huh.’

‘These sort of pale folds of milk slowly turning over under the surface tension of the tea within these borders of darker tea, and it just looks wrong, it looks evil!’

‘Evil?’

‘Yeah! Just evil! Disturbing!’

‘I’ve not paid enough attention to my cuppa, clearly,’ Pris says, looking concerned.

‘This has to be after you’ve stirred the sugar in, obviously.’

‘Obviously. Though I don’t take sugar.’

‘Never mind. But the thing is this technique won’t have any significant effect on the main body of the tea, or the tea/sugar layered mixture if you haven’t done the main stirring.’

‘Contra-rotating, naturally.’

‘Of course.’

‘So what is surface stirring?’

‘You just blow gently across the surface of the tea; it’s that simple.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. Though you need to blow across to one side, if you know what I mean, not across the middle, to get a bit of circulation going. That’s important.’

‘Important?’

‘Yes. It stirs the tea and milk together so it looks normal and you can drink a little of it, and then once you’ve done that of course there’s room to get a spoon in now because of the reduced volume in the cup, if you need to, though you shouldn’t need to, and that’s surface stirring.’

‘Wow.’

‘No, but I just feel we didn’t really give ourselves a proper chance. We bailed on each other too soon.’

‘Haze, you were together for eleven years. How much longer did you need?’ Ali says. Haze is talking to her and Paul. I’m listening in while Pris nips to the loo.

‘Yeah, but it was a short eleven years.’

‘What does that mean? How can you have a short eleven years?’

‘I just mean it felt shorter—’

‘You can have a short lunch-break, or a short weekend—’

‘Instead of a long weekend, like this,’ Paul says.

‘That’s just a weekend, isn’t—’

‘You can have a short
life
,’ Paul says. ‘Like some kid with leukaemia or something, but—’

‘I’m just saying—’

‘You can have a short holiday or a short summer, I guess,’ Ali says. ‘With any one of those you can find yourself looking back after they’re over and thinking,
That went quickly, that went like it was really short, I really feel like I almost missed that entirely it went so fast
. But a short decade; in fact, a short decade-and-a-bit—’

‘One point one decades,’ Paul says.

‘Yeah.’

‘All I was trying to say—’

‘I don’t see how you can have a short one of those. That’s just too long. That’s not feasible. Won’t fly. You’re not even the same person after eleven years; you’ll have changed, as a person.’

‘Yup.’

‘Well, it felt short to me.’

‘Maybe so, but, like, really?’

‘
This
is feeling long.’

‘What is?’

‘This. Me trying to tell you how I feel Pris and I never gave it enough time to make it work. I feel like we were just on the cusp, you know? But she just … bolted. First with this Statoil guy—’

‘Statoil? I thought he was called Bergquist—’

‘Hernquist—’

‘He
works
for Statoil—’

‘Oh.’

‘Then with this Rick guy.’

‘Yeah, well …’

‘Another thing I like to do is to do different things with my left hand and my right hand at the same time, while I’m making the tea,’ I tell Pris when she returns.

‘Really?’

‘Like, I’ll be stirring the tea—’

‘Contra-rotating.’

‘Naturally. And at the same time I’ll use my left hand to open the fridge – because you can reach the fridge from the bit by the draining board where I do the tea – and take the milk out and close the fridge door with my foot and there’s a way you can hold the milk carton so that you can grip it in one hand and unscrew the top at the same time, though obviously it can’t be brand new because taking off the foil seal under the twist-off cap on a brand-new carton can’t be done one-handed, so it has to be already started. But, see, the point is—’

‘Kit?’

‘What?’

‘I’m getting bored with all this stuff about making tea.’

‘Yeah, I know! It is a bit boring, isn’t it? I think I’m boring myself. Thanks.’ I take a big slurp of tea. I made tea for everybody; a great big pot.

‘You’re like Rick and his fishing.’

‘I’ve never fished. Is it fun?’

‘Not for the fish, I’m guessing.’

This makes me laugh.

‘Also,’ Pris says, ‘not for the person having to listen to interminable tales of working out which fly is best in light rain under bright overcast as opposed to intermittent soft showers with a darker overcast and a changeable breeze, in autumn.’

‘Should we get Guy up?’ Rob says. ‘Let him have a choice, have a chance to join in?’

‘Why?’ Haze says. ‘Do you think we’re making too much noise?’

‘Are you crazy?’ Paul says. ‘The poor fucker’s had an exciting day by his standards. Right, Kit?’

‘Are we being noisy?’ Pris asks.

‘It has been strenuous,’ I tell Paul and Rob. ‘Just being up and awake through most of the day, and having so many people to talk to, I mean, you guys in particular, with so much to catch up on, and he has been looking forward for months to you being here, well, weeks at least, and then meeting new people, well, a new person – Rick – and then the whole thing with the tower; that’ll have exhausted him, even though he was the one in the chair, for sure.’

I think I’ve just startled myself. Right there, I said ‘for sure’, and I never say ‘for sure’; it’s just not in my vocabulary, or at least not in my normal phrase-choice drop-down/pop-up menu or however you want to express it. Bizarre.

‘We’re not being that noisy,’ Haze is saying. ‘We’re not, are we? Are we? We might be. But are we?’

‘I don’t know,’ Pris says.

‘Let the poor bastard sleep. Besides,’ Paul says, gesturing to the mirror on the table, ‘this stuff might be too much for him. Could kill him.’