The Quarry (23 page)

‘His heart really did react badly the time we tried it – I tried it, we did it – for my birthday,’ I tell them.

‘Guess it’s how he’d like to go, though,’ Rob says, staring at the small remaining pile of white powder. There’s probably enough left for one last blast each. I wonder if that’s it, or if Paul’s got some more stashed away somewhere else he’s not telling us about.

‘Oh, that would look great,’ Paul is saying to Rob. ‘We turn up, get him ripped, his heart gives out and the cops show up.’

‘We should turn the music down,’ Ali says, looking at the dock where Haze’s iPod is playing stuff like Happy Mondays and No Doubt and Oasis and Madonna and the Stone Roses.

‘Why should the cops show up?’ Rob asks.

‘The cops?’ Haze yelps, head jerking as he looks from the door to the window and back.

‘Because we’d have a fucking dead guy on our hands?’ Paul says to Rob, then turns to Haze. ‘No cops, Haze,’ he says calmly, ‘no cops; just talking about if Guy pegged out on us while we’re here. Purely hypothetical.’

‘Yeah, but we wouldn’t call the cops, we’d call an ambulance,’ Rob says.

‘I’ll turn it down.’ Ali gets up and turns the music down.

‘When you have a corpse under retirement age involving sudden death, the medics will tend to want to call out the cops,’ Paul says (Pris is nodding). ‘Which might prove awkward for us if we’re all pinging hysterically about A&E, babbling, with white powder lining our nostrils, and pupils like tunnels.’

‘Aww,’ Haze says. ‘Ali!’

‘Sh!’ Pris tells him.

‘So, no?’ Rob says. ‘We’re not getting Guy up?’

‘Very bad idea,’ Paul tells him.

Rob sighs and runs a hand over his smooth scalp.

I shake my head emphatically to Rob’s question, then nod equally vigorously to Paul’s statement.

Rob looks over at the iPod, frowning. ‘Music’s gone quiet …’

‘Kit! We need some thread!’ Rob says.

‘I’ll get some!’ I tell him.

Pris has been telling me about something totally fascinating called a Tea Tool so I’ve missed the context of the thread being required but it seems to involve Haze, and Ali covering her mouth with her hand and making an odd squealing noise.

‘And olive oil,’ Haze tells me.

‘I’ll get that too,’ I tell him. ‘Wait a minute; we only have groundnut oil or rapeseed oil or—’

‘That’ll do.’

I fetch these, then I have to go and wash my face so I go and wash my face in the sink in the downstairs loo and then I think I ought to go and have a quick look outside for some reason so I go and do that – everything’s fine; hint of rain but some stars too, temperature still mild, though according to the forecast this is all just a respite and there’s more heavy rain coming later in the night/early next morning – and when I come back Haze is sitting with a party popper in his hand and his tongue out the side of his mouth as he carefully pulls the little string away from the end of the popper – too gently to set off the party popper – and then starts tying a length of thread onto the string.

‘I didn’t know we had party poppers,’ I say.

‘Haze brought them,’ Hol tells me.

‘You really going to do this?’ Ali says.

‘Why not?’ Haze is saying, tying off the extension to the party popper cord. He inspects his handiwork. ‘Hmm,’ he says. ‘My loose ends are a bit long. Anybody got a pair of scissors?’

They all look at me, but Ali is reaching into her bag and bringing out a dinky little pair of scissors. Haze uses them to cut the ends off the knot; he does this again on another party popper he’s already prepared that I hadn’t spotted until now, then lines up the two pieces of thread and cuts them both to the same length. Then he gets some oil from the groundnut oil bottle I brought through and smooths it over both stretches of thread.

‘The oil’s an innovation,’ Rob says. ‘This your concession to Health and Safety, Haze?’

‘Yeah. Thought I ought to do my bit.’

‘Oh, Haze,’ Pris says, shaking her head. ‘This still your party piece?’

‘Don’t pretend you’re not impressed,’ Haze tells her, coating the threads with more oil.

‘Definitely not pretending,’ Hol says. Pris snorts.

Then Haze is snorting. Not more cocaine; the thread. He lies back on the couch with his head over one end and his nostrils pointing almost up at the ceiling, and he’s feeding the lengths of thread into his nose; one up each nostril, then, once they’ve disappeared for about half their length, with much huffing and snorting—

‘I can’t watch this,’ Ali says, looking away. ‘This is so gross.’

‘Nah,’ Rob says, sitting forward to see better, drinking some more wine. ‘A chap should have a hobby.’

—Haze leans forward and, holding the two party poppers near his chin, both in one hand, sort of coughs and makes throat-clearing noises until both lengths of black thread appear out of his mouth.

‘Oh, yuk,’ says Ali, who’s glanced. She looks away again.

‘You absolutely sure these are the same bits of thread you just snorted up?’ Hol says. ‘There could be a lot of shit up there.’

‘Watch and be amazed,’ Haze says. He lies back the way he was before, with his neck in a convex curve and the bottom of his nose pointing at the ceiling; he pulls the threads slowly out of his mouth until the bottleneck ends of the two party poppers disappear into his nostrils, then winds the ends of the threads round his index fingers. The threads seem to be slipping easily through the gaps between his molars, lubricated by the oil.

‘Nutter,’ Paul is saying, though I think he sounds affectionate.

‘I can’t believe you’re still doing this,’ Ali says.

‘Fire in the hole,’ Haze says. His voice sounds like he has a cold. He pulls sharply on the two threads.

Both party poppers explode, releasing little ribbons of coloured paper almost straight up into the air. The bangs are only slightly muffled.

‘Yay!’ yells Ali, clapping.

‘Woo-hoo!’ says Paul.

I look back at the door to the hall, worried about all this noise waking Guy up, but it’s okay; I remembered to close it and he sleeps really soundly with all his medication.

Haze levers himself upright through the thin cloud of smoke and falling streams of multicoloured paper – it’s like the spaghetti of confetti, I realise suddenly – and slowly pulls both party poppers out of and away from his nose, string and thread trailing damply after the spent bodies of the poppers. He’s coughing and his face has gone very red. ‘Ta-
dah
!’ he says, then coughs some more.

‘Doesn’t that
hurt
?’ Hol asks him.

‘A bit,’ Haze confirms, nodding, voice hoarse.

‘Probably not advised if you’re a wine taster,’ says Paul.

Hol is shaking her head slowly as she contemplates Haze. ‘Or, just … rational.’

‘Best to do it after some coke,’ Haze tells us, then coughs again. He points at his nose, which has started leaking clear snot like thick tears. ‘Anaesthetises.’

‘On which note,’ Paul says, sitting forward and taking up his credit card. ‘Thinking you should go first here, Haze.’

‘Cheers.’ More coughing and spluttering. ‘Anybody got a hanky?’ The smoke smells acrid.

Hol frowns, nods. ‘Snot’s turning red, dude.’

‘Nah. ’T’s okay. Meant to do that.’

Rob is looking intently at Hol, some time after we’ve all stopped sniffing. Mostly. The coke is all gone.

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ he tells her.

‘Try listening, harder.’

‘Oooh …’ says Haze.

‘Try explaining, better,’ Ali says. She has been listening to Hol and Rob, leaning closer, looking like she wants to say something, for a while.

‘Hey,’ Rob says to her.

‘Well,’ she says.

‘I’m calling it miraculist thinking,’ Hol says. ‘This is sort of my own term but if you can think of a better one, feel free.’

‘Miraculist thinking,’ Rob repeats.

‘It’s partly linked to millenarianism, but only partly,’ Hol says.

‘That’s to do with hats, isn’t it?’ Haze suggests.

‘Miraculist thinking,’ Hol says, ‘is that which assumes that only one of our ideas or behaviours – society’s ideas or behaviours, humanity’s ideas or behaviours – really needs to change, or be changed, to somehow suddenly – miraculously – make everything okay.’

‘Such as?’ Rob asks.

Hol shrugs. ‘At its crudest it’s the
Why can’t we all just pull together?
argument.’

‘That’s hardly an argument,’ Ali says.

‘That’s more of a plea,’ Rob agrees.

‘Why
can’t
we all start being nice to each other?’ Pris suggests.

‘So, we all start following the same religion or something?’ Paul suggests.

Hol nods. ‘All religions are essentially miraculist, though they postpone until after death the instigation of the eventually-okay state that they promise, neatly skipping the requirement to back up such extraordinary claims with even ordinary proof. Marxism—’

‘Oh, shit,’ Ali says, sitting back, ‘here we go.’

‘Marxism,’ Hol continues, looking at Ali, ‘for all its clear-headedness and determination to be scientific, has been used as a miraculist crutch, and libertarianism is the new Marxism. To the extent they’re miraculist, or are used in a miraculist manner, they’re wrong.’

‘Yeah, but what the hell has this got to do with romantic love?’ Rob asks.

‘Yeah,’ Ali says.

‘All I’m saying,’ Hol says, ‘is that the same belief – that if only everybody would believe in this or behave like that, everything would somehow come right: that there’d be no more of all the bad stuff, or at least an absolute minimum of it – is closely related to the idea of romantic love and that … that conviction that if only this person will love me, will agree to us being together – for ever – then my life will be perfect, and all will be well. You know; happy till the end of time, till the mountains crumble into the sea, till the rivers turn to dust, etcetera, blah.’

‘So now you’re shitting on love?’ Ali says, folding her arms.

‘Well,’ Hol says, ‘how often does that actually happen?’

‘Well, hey,’ Ali says, suddenly taking Rob’s hand, ‘I guess some of us are just lucky.’

Rob lets his hand be held, but is still looking at Hol.

Hol sighs. ‘Yeah, but even after you’re together with your perfect person – and I’m very happy for the two of you, obviously,’ she says, with a smile directed at both of them, ‘you still have to accept you continue to live in the real world, and there will always be problems in it, and even perfect couples – who, obviously, do completely exist – have arguments and disagreements and, at the very least,
risk
growing apart over time.’

Ali narrows her eyes but doesn’t say anything.

‘And this relates to
Independence Day
how?’ Rob asks.

Hol rolls her eyes. ‘Via Jeff Goldblum defeating the entire invasion of Earth with a bit of viral code on his clunky old laptop, delivered by a purloined, bad-guy space-fighter and the piloting skills of Will Smith.
Star Wars
and
The Lord of the Rings
indulge the same fantasy, only a little less outrageously. We all know it’s total hokum, but deep down it’s how we’d really love all our wars ended and our problems solved, with something as trivial but as crucial and absolute as a few lines of code or a shot down an exhaust port or the dissolving of a ring in magma, and I’m saying that it’s very similar to this belief that if we can only find the right person, our mythical other half, all our personal issues will be sorted. They’re both examples of miraculist thinking and they’re both bollocks. As is the belief that some new piece of kit is going to change everything, suddenly and for the better. As is the belief that some new political theory will magically transform us into nicer or just more productive people.’

‘You sound very disillusioned,’ Ali says, nodding.

‘So? Who would choose to be illusioned?’ Hol asks.

‘Well …’ Pris says.

‘Okay,’ Ali says. ‘I meant bitter.’

‘What I’m saying,’ Hol says again, just starting to sound tired, or at least as though she’s struggling to be patient, ‘is that there’s never the equivalent of one little switch in the shared human psyche that can be thrown; there is no single line of code that – if only it were rewritten or corrected – would make everything okay for us. Instead there’s just the usual slow but eventually steady progress of human morality and behaviour, built up over millennia; instead there’s just the spreading of literacy, education and an understanding of how things really work, through research and the dissemination of the results of that research through honest media.’

Haze makes a noise like, ‘Phht!’

‘Everything,’ Hol says, ‘– print, radio, television, computers, digitalisation, the internet – makes a difference, but nothing makes
all
the difference. We build better lives and a better world slowly, painstakingly, and there are no short cuts, just lots of improvements: most small, a few greater, none … decisive.’

‘Remember when we spent three days running round half of London trying to find a Wii?’ Rob says to Ali. She frowns at him. ‘Before Christmas, whenever it was,’ Rob says.

‘I remember we
got
one,’ Ali tells him.

‘Yeah, but in
Croydon
,’ Rob says.

‘Croydon,’ Ali agrees, and shivers.

‘Well,’ Rob says, ‘that was a bit like that, remember?’

‘No,’ Ali says instantly. ‘I don’t think it was like that at all, actually.’

‘No? That feeling of needing that Wii,’ Rob says. ‘
So
badly. And I’ve felt the same thing with the iPad and the Kinect when we couldn’t get hold of them immediately either. Whatever the latest shiny new toy is. That feeling like an ache, like love, like an addiction.’

‘Whoa,’ Haze says, shaking his head. ‘Back to drugs again. Tsk tsk tsk.’ He’s building a large joint on the mirror. He still has a twist of paper hanky stuffed up each nostril, though he’s stopped coughing.

‘It feels,’ Rob is saying, ‘like there’s something wrong with the universe, or at least our lives, if we don’t get it, soon, now. This thing, whatever it is.’ He nods at Hol, looks at Ali, who is glaring back. ‘And you get it and it’s brilliant – it’s so
new
– but then comes the comedown, sooner or later; the realisation that everything hasn’t changed and you stop using it so much, and you realise it wasn’t that great a gadget after all, or at least there’s another, better one coming along soon, if you can only get your hands on one.’