Adieu (Cold Turkey.........)

Adieu – to God

The days went on monotonously – each peppered only with its ecstatic moments of scoring. The cycle comprised two or three days without rest, then a heavy crash – a dark, languid sleep, sometimes thirty hours of it, Ben waiting for the buzzer to spring into life, and then the dash down the Chase. On a few occasions he sensed watching eyes as he returned from closing a deal. He’d change his route, his clothes and hairstyle (as best he could), afraid he’d be seen as what he was - a lowdown dirty user, a junky, a fiend. Someone with no place, no rights in society – someone easy to rob, to beat up, to terrorize - and someone who was holding the white milky rocks. He was ripe for pruning; if he’d failed to score he’d still have Chrissie’s dirty wedge of money on him. Ben was no fighter, he was just over nine stone and reeked of weakness, of crack-rottenness. Reeked of smack.

Towards the end of the third week of Chrissy staying with him, his share of the spoils was going down and down. He felt guilty and self-disgusted taking drugs off Chrissy, but with his habit almost totally financed by her she’d encouraged this dependency to her growing advantage. Chrissy increasingly adulterated his gear, until after injecting himself, and tasting the tang of citric in the back of his throat, he was almost sure that the hit hadn’t had a speck of heroin in it. But he wasn’t of the calibre of the Foggos of Phase Ten; he wasn’t about to smash her head onto the rings of the gas cooker.
“This gear’s getting really weak you know Ben,” Chrissy said as she drooled over the kitchen table.
“I know,” he conceded – pupils still dilated, stomach in knots. “It’s getting – well, like I feel like I’m almost clean you know. The dose your giving me seems homeopathic! Maybe I’ve just become addicted to lemons instead – it’s like 0% Heroin and 100% Jif………I’m become a lemonhead – addicted to ‘dat citric rush, babe!”

She scowled back, “What the fuck are you implying. I need more than you and besides; I do disgusting things for my money. You’re becoming a greedy lil’ fiend. I come down and just hand you the cash...........you have it so easy Ben.”

The next few times they after they scored and cooked up, he noticed that the liquid in the pin was almost back to the reddish brown colour you’d expect. But the rocks were still measly – this was getting to be a bind. Maybe he’d elope to the West Midlands, get some Zopiclone and some good Roche Valium and do his cluck. Chrissie was constantly dissing him, speaking to him like he was her gopher – the expeditor of misery-wraps, bowing to her increasing needs.
He had never welocmed her being around, never planned that it would be for so long. It was greed that was the enabling factor of this insalubrious situation.

Chrissie’s stories sickened him. One day she’d moan about the punter that by her reckoning had a dick approaching a foot long. Then there was this other guy who asked her to piss on him before sex, and stories of coprophilia were not unheard of. The tastiest tale she told was of some Chinese guy who’d drive up in his Merc and mesmerise her with cash. He could barely speak anything beyond pidgin English. Paid well, but his kick was to get her to save used condoms from her earlier tricks – for what purpose no one knew. He’d often arrive a live goldfish in a bag of water, ask her to do things with it. Ben didn’t believe a word of this at first, but later, returning from a score, he bumped into one of the other girls. She broke away from him excitedly when she saw the expensive-looking car – “Ooh, Ben it’s me Goldfish man, - He pay werr,” she announced, with a mock oriental twang, before running over to the vehicle. It was a crazy depraved world and the vice squad rather than do anything about it seemed to play their own grim part.

Sometimes after turning tricks on the beat, Chrissie would come back with the remnant of a McDonalds – saving Ben a half-eaten Cheeseburger or some cold greasy fries. On each occasion she came back with the drugs herself and other unusual gits like antibiotics or painkillers. .
“This time – he took me for a meal and then to score down Meadows. Didn’t even have to do anything dirty, either” she told him after one such jaunt. Later while she gouched out, a card fell out of her coat pocket: “Peter Sherman – NOTTS C.I.D.” She’d beencarousing with the old bill – or getting a blue giro, as the street slang had it. The girls saw a lot of what went on – beatings and muggings, and were often in the company of some of the male users who earned their dosh through armed blags, burglary and other nefarious activity. Whether Chrissie ever gave the police any real information, or just told them what they wanted to hear – Ben could only guess. He had no problems with this anyway, but some of the others those more ‘street’ and antisociety – they would find this inexcusable.

People did go missing sometimes and these were often people who had become indentified as grasses – the dealers would enquire about their valued customers, missing the huge amounts of heartbreak cash they’d have spent. St Anns from the Woodborough pub to the Wells Road, it was a epicentre of low-level crime and violence, and that was becoming more and more visible to Ben, as his former sense of identity, it seemed, began melting into nothingness.
After scoring one day and then getting another fix of watery gear, he decided that this deal with Chrissie must end. He was sick – sick with withdrawal, sick of the verbal abuse, sick of the fucking yardies and wanted his flat to himself, his privacy. He made a plan to go to the John Storer Clinic – see Gordon, a drugs specialist and social worker who would arrange a meagre supply of sleepers and tranquillisers. He’d barricade the front door and turn off the buzzer – then just sit it out.

Chrissie had one of her assignations on a Tuesday at 2.30pm, with some rich dude who’d take her out to lunch before getting down to things. She’d be gone for hours. When she went out he switched off the buzzer and double locked the door – putting a note outside, saying he’d been taken in for questioning by the police – they’d seen him shoplifting on Jessop’s CCTV. Bang to rights.
But 5pm came and he relented, switching the buzzer back on – desperate for smack and crack. She wasn’t back till well after 7pm and he was never so pleased to see her – especially with the £200 quid she’d raised. The plan was off again – ‘till tomorrow”. It another week before he had the guts to go through with it. He’d procured the Valium, and taken half the bottle on his way home from the clinic. This was so he’d be knocked out or at least be in drugged indifference when the inevitable screams came as she realised she was no longer welcome. If he wasn’t near-comatose, he’d probably cave in to her pleadings – how much money she’d earned, how she’d treat him right this time………The Valuim did their trick……when he awoke it was 4am.

He slipped out onto the balcony; the din of the police chopper was just about audible audible as it circled a far-away estate. The cool night air stilled him. He felt lonely and sad and missed Chrissie. He didn’t know if this was just the prospect of no drugs for now, but his real emotions were beginning to well inside him. He found himself crying, sobbing gently. These tears were real enough – he’d never ever imagined that he’d get in so deep with the drugs, the girls and the dealers. The last few weeks had been crazy, he kinda missed the company of Caddy and Kevin the Gerbil. Chrissie’s arrival and subsequent control of the money, the drugs and affairs of his flat had distinctly marked a new, egregious era of addiction. The amounts he’d used had trebled, maybe quadrupled – despite her recent meanness with the wraps. Over Cheverton Court the new moon seemed to beckon a freedom – he felt elated, though he knew only too well that was mostly Valium. By dawn he’d be in acute cold turkey – the sweats, the waking nightmares – the pain. He only had twelve blues left – not enough to get him through tomorrow. Giro day was not for six days – no money, no drugs – and the clinic had only given him three sleeping pills. Maybe Caddy would sub him – he’d smoke the gear on foil from now on, and frugally at that (if such a state could be attempted). He made a plan, before crashing on the balcony.

When he awoke it was early morning. The bird song seemed intense. His vision flickered. He went to the kitchen to make a cup of tea, but remembered that the Diplomacy Teabags had been soaked when Chrissie dropped the box in the sink days ago. He boiled the kettle anyway and made a cup, knocking the sugar bowl over in the process. Four sugars, went into the scoured mug, scraped up from the floor with a blackened spoon – the brown liquid still tasted foul when he tasted it. He washed down three blues, hoping the warm wet brew would kick them in faster – but minutes later he spewed over the kitchen floor, not making it to the toilet. In the mess he saw the semi-dissolved tablets, no good now. Shit – only a few left………..Fuck – now he knew he was in for a ride.

By noon, the heat in the flat was unbearable yet again. Ben’s head was pounding, the noise of the traffic seeming to pulse through his cortex. He turned on his B-and-W TV – then turned it off. Radio Four had been a good friend to him in the past, but this time the middle class tones of the presenters only jarred him – he had to stop himself launching the transistor from the balcony. It disturbed him that for weeks he had not done anything, not so much as read a newspaper, other than use drugs and sleep. He had been living on some other null world.

This was sheer panic fear. Adrenaline was being fired around his body as the opiate receptors starved –his heart felt like it was going to implode. Now, he wanted Chrissie so bad – she seemed the best friend he’d never had. He thought of unlocking the mortice and taking a walk onto Cranmer Street- tell her that after the episode described in his note he been held but then released without charge - he was sorry he hadn’t been there to let her in. But this time, from somewhere within, he knew he’d made his decision. He took the rest of the pills and ran a hot bath. He was going to get clean -–or at least get his habit down to half a bag a day. Maybe alcohol would help – get pissed with Caddy – get blackout drunk through the worst. But then it came back to him, from some 60s Beat novel he’d read, that alcohol was strictly contraindicted.

Nothing except crack could intensify a cluck worse – and booze seemed to prolong the effects of withdrawal. He lay in the bath for over an hour, visions of hell flickering through his mind. People torturing animals. Car accidents and other horrors were common themes.
When he got out he decided to take the sleepers, all of them - now. He swallowed the pills under a makeshift sunshade on the balcony and switched on a desk fan. Then he crawled under a thin blanket and waited for the meds to do their trick.
It no time he’d slipped into sleep. When he awoke everything seemed - the same. He checked his watch – he’d slept for less than ten minutes. He glanced at the makeshift bed; a patch of drool had appeared, making the dirty sheet look even worse. In that brief slumber he’d had a dream-cum-nightmare. In his near-delirium reality and subconscious blurred into one. He’d seen beautiful dry hills and a sublime sun setting over a valley. The country he was in had no name, but now awake he imagined it could have been somewhere in Afghanistan. Taking him on this tour was a dark skinned moustachioed man. Suddenly the vision became one of endless opium fields. His guide offered him some kind of pipe, filled with the sticky sweet produce of his lands – Ben smoked the pipe watching the brown tar melt and then the fumes overcome his senses. Something terrible happened next – the smoke disappeared and he was alone on the Chase, looking over to Deano and Pablo. They smiled at first but then drew long knives from the comedy bum bags they were wearing – then he realised he was on his balcony and again in the nightmare of the now – cold turkey.

The days and nights strobed by – interspersed first with vomiting, then diarrhoea, stomach cramps and muscle ache, but always worst was the insomnia – Ben would almost enter the world of sleep, but would then find himself trapped in a hellish world just short of sleeping. Occasionally experiences similar to the one on the balcony would repeat. Ben nodded off for what he thought was half an hour – but his watch would tell him barely a minute had passed.

By the third day – he was pleading, spitting prayers that Chrissie would return. But the buzzer remained silent . Sometimes he felt pleased that he had made the right decision, at other times he almost welcomed his illness as a penance for his sins – but most of the time he just wanted heroin. In the past he would have gone out and borrowed, stolen or even earned money to score. Now he was too ill. Lying on a pile of filthy sheets in the middle of his flat, freezing cold with chills down his spine at times, roasting hot at others, he could never get comfortable. The best thing to do was listen to music on the radio, as he didn’t have the concentration to read, watch TV, let alone do anything constructive. For the first four days Ben didn’t eat a thing, only reused the same stale teabags over and over again. On the fifth day, he was ravenous but when he went to the cupboards there was nothing there. All the time Chrissie had been at his flat, he hadn't bothered to go shopping, to go into Nottingham or take care of any of the basics of living. At the back of the freezer he found an ice encased sausage – it was better than nothing and so he cooked it. Later he found a large bag of mouldering dried chick peas – but he was glad. They would keep him for the next few days at least

A week later, Ben managed to get an hour’s sleep for the first time since his cluck began. He’d found some of the Librium tablets Caddy had given him weeks ago – he had six left, but they were 25mg (strong ones). He was becoming more and more sane each day and this time he’d use the medication wisely.
Librium was the weaker father drug of Valium – but they were of a similar mechanism and although normally prescribed for alcoholics, they eased the anxiety symptoms of Heroin withdrawal.

Finding the Librium was a literal answer to his prayers. He had been praying for some divine assistance since day one and it seemed to be working first the sausage, then the chick peas – one of the interesting things about withdrawal is the magical significance you attach to things in this state. Without Chrissie and now dependant of just his giro, he’d run out of tobacco by day three. However, when he went out and up and down the stairwell (this was a far as he could walk) he was delighted to find plenty of juicy cigarette butts. (these could be broken down and then rolled up later). As he filled his back pocket with the sticking butts he began to sing “Pennies from His Heaven” with “Dogends” substituted in the title phrase. If he had any neighbours listening to his shouts of ‘Hallelujah’ and ‘Praise the Lord’ when he found the stashed pills they would have been forgiven for thinking something really good had happened to him.

Friday afternoon and he found the strength somehow to venture onto the balcony and stare the day in the face, for the first time in ages in seemed. Sitting on the deckchair, he gazed over Nottingham’s skyline, the Victoria Centre flats in the distance, Marple Square and the Phase Ten estate (this was all soon to be demolished , or so they said). It was a pity, he thought - in another world these buildings could have had a useful purpose. Flats for professionals, students or trainee nurses close to a thriving city. Maybe if they cleared out the flats and refurbished them, he thought…perhaps he could suggest that down at the Resource Centre. It did seem a shame to demolish them.

The 1970s architecture was in decay already and been left alone for years now, it was a relic to the short term thinking and failures of the preceding deacdes. . A semi-jungle of weeds and vine type plants had taken over parts of the South face of Cheverton, springing from the cracked concrete, giving the place an oriental look. Next year was the Queen’s Golden Jubilee, and an engraving up in the communal gardens put the completion date of Cheverton as 1977, the year of her first jubilee. In less than twenty-five years these flats had become unfit for habitation.

He then remembered a story Kevin the Gerbil had told him, during a crack-fuelled monologue, that anything built by the council from 1975-1985 was only meant to have had utility for twenty years. This was due to the oil crisis and lack of funds, but, more importantly, the Cold War. It was assumed twenty years, but no more was the most humanity could expect before a nuclear annihilation wiped things like cities from the map. In which case Cheverton Court was well past its inception date. Ben thought that this was a tall tale as Kev was a master of bullshit., it was the drink and drugs talking again. On reflection though, most of the things Kev said did contain elements of truth, no matter how small. As he recollected the story sat in the midday heat and looking over the estate he felt there was poignancy to the tale too. He felt sad.

Emotions are heightened in heroin withdrawal and the mind plays tricks. Important things could seem trivial and trivial things acute. Ben was at the stage when the mind and body are totally clear of opiates and normal mental functioning begins again. When this happens your perceptions seem to be overclocking, burning out. A joke could have you rolling around, spitting laughter but sad thoughts could make you jump off a cliff. But Ben was also feeling waves of elation occasionally now: he had come this far and was going to make it.

Now a week after he’d bid Chrissie and her drugs goodbye, by late afternoon over distant hills, he could make out the first concussions of a thunderstorm. Ten minutes later the first huge drops spat down. It had been dry and unbearably hot for what seemed like months. This was happy relief. Instead of going inside when the deluge finally broke he stayed on the balcony. It was washing him clean, clean for the first time in ages……………….and it felt good………………….