Snow

The snow was so deep that it covered all the dirt this city sporadically threw up, like a giant spewing, black-bile gushing oversized child. I felt bad because of the cravings, especially faced with this backdrop of purity. In all essence I didn’t expect the heavens to open up and simply pour down this cold, solid white torrent on top of me and it felt numbly suffocating. I was reluctant to leave my warm bed, stuffed as I was in a catacomb of embroidered quilts, expensive to buy new, but worth nothing on resale, and dragged the phone cable over to me. Snuggled deep in my four blankets and duvet today didn’t seem too bad until I realised it had become an impossibility to score. As I resigned that I would have to get up and go out at some point today I shuffled the layers off me, a snake shedding skins, and ventured to the bathroom to throw up. I now regretted that I never bothered to buy carpets with my carpeting grant. The unadorned wooden floor chilled my feet and made the cold feel slightly damp. I returned to my bed shivering from the lack of central heating and perhaps from the first bits of withdrawal, complete with some dry crackers and a mouldy piece of stilton. Chomping on my choice of breakfast, which was simply born from lack of any other edibles in the flat I continued my futile search via telephone.
If I was to work in research for some big media corporation I would be the excellent man for the job, but as it was all I wanted to score was drugs. Two years back I had majored in media studies and passed successfully. I got a job, got a house, got a car, got a girlfriend. Only a year out of graduation I was all I should have been, but some nauseous feeling in the pit of my stinking, rotting stomach made me throw it all away. I was bored and dull and beginning to see the life drain out of me bit by bit in such a vampiric way by the things I had thought I desired. Everyone says that’s what I had to do, that’s what I had to feel, but they didn’t bother telling me that life still needed work. I expected the feeling of dissatisfaction and dissipation that I had with my self to easily disappear as I reached my goal. But it just made me miserable that I had accomplished everything I was supposed to want. Delilah, blonde, beautiful, going places Delilah, the woman who had such a flashy name she was embarrassed about, soon got bored of my apathy and disappointment and promptly had an affair with her boss because that was just what she had to do in that situation. Truthfully, I was glad that it happened; it freed me off the hook because I was just ready for commitment. I drank whisky the week she left and called into work sick. I knew I wasn’t going to get a doctor’s note so I didn’t bother going in on Monday.
The next step was to call all my old university friends. I ran up a huge phone bill trying to find the least successful ones. Lots of them had done a conversion course and all lived in London being lawyers. They were supposed to be my type of people. Eventually I called Rez. Rez was an English major who had moved into halls, smoked a lot of dope and dropped out within the first year. We never particularly got on back then, but something attracted me to him. I invited myself over to his dilapidated house that he shared with a few other stoned tramps with amazing facial hair. I packed only the minuteness of personal things and left the apartment with everything of value, my laptop, Delilah’s gold jewellery and even our prized CD and DVD collections. Cash converter shelled me out nearly a thousand pounds that day and if I had the coherent thought to contemplate how much this stuff had cost me to buy brand new I might have paused.
I settled into Rez’s house quite successfully. It was the first time I sofa surfed and for a moment I felt that I was far too old, but after a while one of the tramps moved out of his room and I inherited his grey mattress. The room was wonderful. Apart from the strange urine patch, it had fantastic arched bay windows and a chimney. It let all the heat out of the house and the glass was broken and patched up with cardboard, but I was happier than I had been in years. Rez and I soon used up my thousand quid and what was left of my savings on cider and cheap heroin. Soon we had developed bad habits, but I was beyond caring.
This morning my bones began to ache. I had called over a dozen dealers but they were all dry. The nearest I got to a lead was one dealer saying that the only smack in the city was probably located over at the university, almost a mile and a half from my house and I really didn’t want to trek out in this weather. I called the number of my contact, so lovingly supplied by an old dealer, and arranged to meet the girl near her halls. She was someone I had bumped into around, met on several occasions and not really thought much about. As a matter of fact, as I pulled on my army boots and dressed in jumpers and scarves, I could barely remember what she looked like. I strained my memory to recall her features, but all that surfaced in my mind was a long black ponytail, I hoped she wasn’t muffled in scarves and woolly hats, although it seemed likely on a day like today, or else I hadn’t a chance in hell of recognising her.
The walk over to the halls was fairly painless when I got into my stride and formed some kind of negotiation with the ice ridden pavement. It did take me twice as long as I had anticipated to reach my rendezvous point and I only saw one hardcore dog lover (or sadist) walking along my path. He didn’t even look up as he grunted a welcome at me which I ignored. I reached the halls and looked from left to right in despair. Perhaps she had been waiting for me and given up, thinking I had changed my mind and not shown up? This was bad, I couldn’t let the chance of a viable future dealer think I was unreliable due to snow. I wondered to a payphone and called her number; fortunately she answered and agreed to come out in ten minutes. In the mean time I sat and waited against a wall which was damp from snow and juggled my hands in my pockets in a vague attempt to keep warm and not look like a potential crazy flasher.
The campus was covered in undisturbed white. I found it quite beautiful and for once in the past few months regained a formed mental picture of Delilah. We had holidayed in Switzerland, decided to go skiing, but all this meant to me was watching Delilah dress in expensive designer ski suits and zip along the hills with her bronzed, Italian instructor. I stumbled and frightened myself on the beginner’s slope wondering why I had agreed to such a humiliating experience that set my bank balance back to the minus. I hardly saw Delilah’s long blonde head over the holiday and I probably should have known then that the relationship was over.
A black spot moved over to my left and I swung my head surround to see it. She appeared out of the snow driven landscape and marked it with the footprints of her boots. As she advanced towards me I took in her clothes. Black boots similar to my own for coping with the dead weather, purple and black striped tights which reminded me of cartoon witches and anaemic Goths. A black duffle coat with mittens hanging abortively off the cuffs with an invisible string. Mr Tumness coming to get Lucy with the express purpose of exposing her to evil queen Jadis and I felt momentarily scarred, but ultimately relieved. She didn’t smile as she approached me, rather deepened her scowl. And I felt guilty at getting her out of her flat on such a cold day. She came up to me and I noticed she had let her hair down out of the black ponytail, its length acted rather like a scarf
“Come on” she said with a flick of her head “I don’t do deals outside. Too many eyes”
I went to her flat. It was a large halls of residence house with Masonic windows and converted drawing rooms. Her room was right by the front door and blessed with a heater that made me envious. The room mimicked my own in its large dimensions and proportions and she sat on the heavily quilted bed. I felt a little uneasy and sat down on the seat to her desk. The room was covered in books, underwear and discarded bottles and cans. She had many strange ornaments dotted about the place which I couldn’t tell were expensive or cheap knock offs from the seventies. She threw her coat on the floor in an almost tantrumetic gesture and motioned me to do the same. She clicked the kettle on to the side of her bed and it began to make a noisy slur as it gathered heat and steam. I noticed her black dress, long sleeved with black lace panelling along the body and I wondered what Delilah would have made of its lack of sophistication. Blonde Delilah lying naked and cosy in the arms of her new lover on a day so close to Christmas. But I didn’t want to think about that now, I didn’t want to be reminded of the life I so readily turned my back on.
“Your Rez’s mate, aren’t you?” she began as she rolled a cigarette. I didn’t want her to be holding out on me, didn’t want her to try and make small talk to pass the time as amusement. I just wanted my drugs and to be back home in bed taking them. “You’re the straight who left a good job and became a junkie”, she smiled as she lit the cigarette
“yeah.” I gasped; I could feel the sweat and spots boil up on my face. I looked really bad “I suppose so”,
“What’s it like to be straight? To be one of those people who commute to work every day in the mornings? Five days on, two days off?”
“Its crap”, I said looking straight at her “that’s why I became a junkie”,
“Oh, you’re not a junkie”, she laughed “no more of a junkie than I am or Rez is. I was just joking.” She softened and made me a cup of tea not asking how I liked it. I sipped my unsweetened tea just letting the cup thaw my frozen hands out and I lit a cigarette.
“So what made you do it? You must have had everything you wanted. What made you quit it all and drop so low? Were you just bored or was it a girl?” I just stared. I wondered if she and Rez had spoken about me, I wondered if everyone I knew was speaking about me.
“Don’t worry. She said instinctively reading my mind “it’s just a lucky guess and I am psychic”; she laughed and blew on her tea. She then tossed a baggie full of weed to me and motioned for me to skin up “you look dreadful. Have some of this before you do any heroin”, she smiled and I began to warm to her. She seemed to know things about me that I hadn’t told anyone simply by looking at me and it felt like I had pealed away another layer, one gone from my corporate life, now one gone from my anitsociety life. We smoked the joint and chatted like I had never done before and it felt slightly unnerving. The weed began to make me paranoid and I really wondered how she knew all this stuff about me. She repositioned herself on the bed with her legs outstretched and propped her back up with a pillow. She complained of back cramps from doing too many drugs and eased off her boots. Sitting there like that she reminded me of a raggedy Anne doll I had seen in Delilah’s parent’s house. It belonged to her as a child. She closed her heavy lidded eyes for a moment and I thought she may drift off to sleep. I felt a little out of sorts, a voyeur watching her snooze, but her eyes snapped back open again and rolled out from the back of her head like a doll.
“Let’s do some heroin”, she announced and I protested to doing a chase with her. I was still sticking to my original plan of scoring and getting back home, but by now you would have thought I’d realised that plans were to be broken. Ignoring me she rummaged around in her bag and bought some out. She set it all up, the equipment was scattered around the room, and gestured to me first “don’t worry, its mine, its free, I'm sharing because I think you need some TLC”, she said and I came over to her bedside. I knelt on the floor using the bed to prop my elbows on and did a little chase as she bounced off the bed and wondered over to the stereo. She placed on some music that was soft and tranquil and again stretched out on the bed. She did a bit and motioned me to sit down next to her. I though this might have been some elaborate come on, but it seemed unlikely as my skin was clouded with pock marks and I had lost over two stone since I began using. Being cold and hungry these days were just another state of affairs which I had got used to. Meeting strange people was something more. I watched her as I sat on the bed and the heroin began to take effect. I love the way it thawed me out, reset me back to zero and made any little speck of self doubt or paranoia disappear. It just felt so good. I felt hazy and cosy, like my veins had been filled with nectar. We sat and chatted to her for a bit, for the first time in ages I felt like talking and unloading some of the heavy baggage I had been carrying around in my head for so long. She placed a hand on my arm, but it was totally unsexual, it was more of a warming gesture, like the heroin.