LIFE STORY OF TERRY DONALDSON CHAPTER 5

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Chapter 6: BARBADOS
It was one of our local dealers who suggested I do a run to the West Indies.
‘A sweet little run, Tel,’ he said, ‘Just got back from the West Indies myself. A doddle.’
I was offered five grand for the trip, plus spending money. As things stood at that point, there was no other way I was going to make it. I really think this was the lowest point I reached in my entire life.
I agreed to do the trip, and the dealer, Dean, gave me a hundred quid’s worth of gear on tick. I didn’t want to do this; I had to. My drug addled reasoning was that if everything worked out and I got through, I would be five grand better off. If it didn’t, and I got busted, then at least I’d have a chance to get off the gear and maybe start afresh. Things could not go on as they had been. Something had to change, or one day I’d be found dead in a shop doorway
Next thing I know, Dean wants my passport
‘Just so we can get you a ticket for the trip, Tel. You know, if you had a girl you could bring with ya it would be great. Know anyone?’
I tell him I don’t.
So, the dealer makes off with my passport, and for the next day I hear nothing. Just when I start to think it’s all a wind-up, a scam to get my passport so someone can open up a bank account in my name for some fraudulent purpose, he is back. There is a young woman called Mons with him. She is short, attractive, and takes me by the hand as she comes in through the door. She is very flirtatious, with a bandana in her beautiful black hair and a sweet woman’s body underneath her skirt and blouse. She moves with all the agility of a black female panther.
‘We’ll be here Monday at six a.m. to pick you up.’ she says, ‘Dean’s going to take you out to get some new clothes and stuff first.’ Dean sorts me out with gear on tick too.
In addition, all my expenses will be paid for, and I will get five hundred pounds spending money to last me for my stay. I will be going for a week. The first thing to cross my mind is that I’m going to lose the methadone script. That script was hard to get. It wasn’t much but it was all I had.
‘Bollox!’ says another part of my mind, ‘IF you get back you can buy what you want. And if you don’t, then you won’t be needing it anyway.’
On the Monday morning, at six a.m. they were knocking at my door. Not gentle knocking, but hard. A ‘come on you old bastard, let’s be having you’ kind of knock. Claire and I were lying together on a single mattress, like two creatures of the forest huddling together for safety from the storm.
I jumped up and opened the front door. Mons was there with a suitcase in one hand. She walked straight into the back room where Claire and I were staying. Mons opened the suitcase, and inside were piles of underwear, vests, shirts, trousers, and shoes.
‘Some of these things are for you, the rest is for you to hand over to the man that will come and see you. You are to stay at the Hotel Ocean Spray when you get there. Get a cab from the airport straight there, and pay for the whole week in advance, OK?’
It seemed fair enough to me, although I noted that the detail about all my expenses being paid had already been changed.
I slipped out of my old clothes and into the touristy ones she showed me. The trainers were a size or two too big. But it didn’t matter. They were to last for as long as the trip took. After that I’d be able to get my own clothes, wouldn’t I? I looked down at the cheap trainers they had bought me. They looked ridiculous, like Charlie Chaplin shoes.
Claire gave me a cuddle, throwing her arms around me. Just then I regretted being such a drug addict, and not being able to shag this mad bird senseless when I’d had the chance. Now, it felt like it was all over. Game over. Try again.
Like a lamb to the slaughter, I went outside, dragging the suitcase with me. The shoes felt like two boats on the end of my legs. I put the case in the back of a very smart BMW. Inside was an elderly, distinguished-looking man. I had to do a double-take. Fuck me it was Trevor MacDonald! No it wasn’t, but it was a good likeness. Mons got in, and handed my passport back, along with a travel agents’ envelope with a pair of tickets inside. The accompanying letter made reference to two tickets that had been purchased.
‘Oh, so I am going with someone, after all?’ I asked. At that she got nervous.
‘Er, no. That’s a mistake. No, you’re going alone.’ she said, taking the letter back briefly to check it. Then she gave it back to me, looking sideways to the Trevor MacDonald.
I looked at the destination: BARBADOS. That song from the seventies came ringing back into my mind, ‘Hey, we’re going to Barbados, flying with Coconut Airways.’ Just then we pulled out of my street, and I swear I could see Claire and my dad upstairs in his bedroom window looking down, like an old Derby and Joan. My old man had been raring to hang the flags out, I know that. At last he’d got rid of me.
The distance flew by, and we drew up to the entrance to Gatwick Airport. Mons told me to go inside and get a photo of myself from one of the machines, and then to come back. She handed me the suitcase, and told me to check it in. Then she would let me have the spending money. I got the photo done. This was so her man at the other end would know my face. Mons said she was going to fax it through to him.
Going into the hubbub of Gatwick terminal was a nightmare. I was still coming down off the stuff Claire and I had smoked up the night before. But there was no going back now. I checked the suitcase in, and then tried to find the car. I couldn’t. Where had she gone? I started to panic. I went back into the building to see if I could find her. Just as panic threatened to overwhelm me, I saw her cheeky little face come waltzing along, that sexy sweet lil’ ass of hers swinging as she walked.
She indicated that I was to follow her at a discreet distance. Alright, now we were getting places! This was exciting, like we were kids at school playing secret agents. We seemed to walk a loop around the airport, up the stairs and down again. Then out the door to the car, which was exactly where it had been when I left it earlier. When you have been smoking crack, it can make you very disorientated. I felt relieved to be back in the back of the car. She handed me an envelope. Inside was five hundred pounds.
‘Your best bet is to change it into dollars,’ she said. ‘Out there people will accept Sterling, but dollars are easier to change. It’s two local dollars to one US.’
I took the envelope and nodded dumbly.
‘And be careful who you talk to. The locals out there are very nosey, and if you talk too much they might suss on. Don’t tell them anything about bringing anything back.’
With that, I got out of the car and, with the money in my pocket, walked to the bureau de change to change the money into US, as she had suggested.
Going through onto the plane was the worst bit. Standing there, in his ultra-clean and smart uniform, was some customs robot. He gave each person who passed by to get onto the plane a sticker on the cover of their passport. You either got a red one or a green one.
‘How long are you going for?’ he asked me.
‘A week.’ I said, and at that he stuck a green one on the front of mine.
‘Jesus,’ I thought, ‘what does that mean?’ Maybe green meant that I was ‘alright’, and could be allowed to go through. After all, green was for ‘go’, wasn’t it? A red one would have been a lot worse, because that meant ‘stop’ didn’t it?
On the plane I asked for a drink, indicating that I had money to pay for it. But no-one ever brought me a drink. After a while I began to feel the cramps of heroin withdrawal creeping in, and felt the overwhelming need to stretch out on the floor. One of the hostesses came up to me and asked me what was wrong. I said that I was alright, that I just wanted to stretch out my back as I found the long flight taxing. The hostess didn’t look too convinced at that, but eventually she went away.
The flight was long and boring. I tried to interest myself in the free flight magazines and look at the films that were on. Eventually, the huge blue sheet of water underneath the plane turned into land, and outside through the window I could see palm trees rushing up to greet us, as we came into land. Then the palm trees were whizzing past at a terrific speed, and we were taxiing to a stop. Before we all got off the plane, two hostesses waltzed along the aisles spraying us with some kind of bug spray. I didn’t like the look of it. It was like something from a futuristic film where they do an experiment on people. I wondered if I was going to start having breathing problems. Isn’t it amazing how a crack smoker can smoke a hundred grand’s worth of Charlie and heroin, and not worry about how it might affect him, but the thought of inhaling some insecticide scares the crap out of him?
I got off the plane, and immediately the warmth of the day hit me. On the tarmac were rolling jeeps containing big burly members of the Royal Barbadian Police Force. Were they looking at me? Had they been warned I was coming? I was grateful for the shade when I got to the terminal building, more of a warehouse than a terminal really. My legs were beginning to pack up underneath me. They were always the first thing to go wrong when I start to Cluck. They just seem to shrink, and become ultra-stiff. Then, bit by bit, the rest of my body tightens. In the meantime, my bowels open up, and I become incontinent and that begins to get smelly and nasty. It is a very anti-social thing to withdraw from heroin.
The official at passport control asked where I would be staying.
‘The Ocean Spray,’ I told her. Was it my imagination or did she grimace when I said that? But she just stamped my passport, and I was through. Coming out of the terminal building was like walking from an air-conditioned refrigerator back into an oven. Outside there were people waiting for family or friends, and I made my way over to the taxi rank
‘Taxi?’ I asked the first driver I came to.
He nodded, and asked me where I wanted to go.
‘How much to the Ocean Spray Hotel?’ I asked,
‘Twenty dollars.’ he answered, adding ‘US’ after a moment.
Although not a flea pit, the Ocean Spray hotel was quite far out from anything going on in the more built-up areas of Barbados. This is probably why the smugglers liked to use it. It was a good walk to the nearest rum shop and the small supermarket that stood next to it outside Oistins, a small fishing town in the southern part of the island.
The taxi pulled up, and deposited me outside the reception area. I booked into my room for a week. I was shown to a ground level room accessible from the gardens in the front with a great view of the sea. I could plainly hear the sound of the surf washing over the beach outside. At first it was very relaxing, but as the days wore on it began to get frustrating. The more my cold turkey kicked in, the more annoying the bloody sound of the surf became; wish, wash, whoosh. A couple of times I found myself at the window ready to shout at it to fucking well shut up, before it dawned on me that I was going off my nut.
I bunged the suitcase to the side of the table. I didn’t even bother unpacking. I went out and made my way up what seemed like the Mother of All Hills to the rum shop I had spotted on the taxi ride in. I spotted a couple of likely-looking lads sitting outside, cheekily grinning as I came along, showing the perfection of their pearly white teeth. One of them had a red bandana on. I asked him if he wanted a beer, and we both had a Banks. Behind the counter was a barman the size of an average bell tent. His name was Paris, and his brother was even bigger. The bar was a really simple affair, with an electric refrigerator right under the counter where the beer was kept, only one brand, the local brand, Banks.
At an adjacent table a local lady was playing an involved game of cards with a couple of elderly gentlemen, and clearly beating the fuck out of them. The money they put on the table seemed to flow in one direction, and that was towards her. She was a cool, efficient killing machine. She gave me a brief glance, and could immediately tell all kinds of things about me that told her I would be a waste of time. I thanked God she wasn’t going around selling life insurance.
The young lad I had sequestered introduced himself as Kehn Daniels. We knocked back the beers and I asked him if there was anything to smoke.
‘Only the green stuff man.’
‘Balls to that,’ I said ‘where’s the white stuff? I want the real thing!’
At first he was reluctant to get me linked with any of the local crack, but after a few seconds pressurizing he relented, and took me along several long, quiet side streets, lined with quaint bungalows. Each looked as though it had been individually built, and to no one specific plan; almost as if each house had just simply grown there, on its own patch.
He took me to a small house. We entered a room he called the galley. There was a table with what looked like voodoo markings on it; a stencilled pattern of curves and spirals. There were a few seats dotted around, and rough planks formed the floor. His cousin produced, from inside a white handkerchief, a set of pearly-white stones. They were pure white, unlike the yellowish ones we used to get back in London. There was always a great debate within the crack-smoking fraternity over the relative quality of the white or the yellow. As for myself, I don’t know. I just used to blast away.
On the way back to my room, Kehn and I stopped to pick up a small brandy bottle, which we knocked back, and began to prepare for smoking. There is a particular brand of brandy that crack smokers prefer, because the bottom of the bottle can easily be knocked out with a nail, to turn it into a crack pipe. A metal wire is then pressed together to act as the filter, and this is pushed tightly into the stem. The piece of crack is put upright on the very tip, and melted with a flame, preferably from a bic lighter. The crack melts straight onto the wire. At this point, the smoker inhales from the bottom of the pipe. The smoke is thick and black as it moves through the chamber, and enters the lungs. It goes from there to the heart, and from there to the head, and creates the most powerful rush of pleasure man has ever been known to experience. They say that the first rush of coke is your best. For me, it was almost religious, with a massive kick of sexuality and the feeling of having just won the lottery at the same time.
Unfortunately, those little few stones ran out, just as the party got started. Kehn had a good blast, too, licking his lips in preparation for his next, but unfortunately the larder was now dry. Only it wasn’t. I still had a fucking great pile of money on me, didn’t I? I peeled off another twenty.
‘What could we get for that, Kehn?’ I asked, holding it out under his face. Automatically his had reached out and took it back. Moments later he was off out the door, on his way to ‘Silver Sands’ where the dealer was, and we could get a better deal.
He wasn’t gone long. The withdrawal symptoms had receded, but I was Clucking, and I knew there wasn’t any H to be had for love or money. The only thing I could do was hit the crack, and hope that I would get through the worst of the Cluck before the money ran out. I nearly did it too.
For the first two or three days, Kehn ran almost non-stop between my room and whoever was supplying us in the mystical kingdom of Silver Sands. Every ten or twenty hours he grabbed a short sleep, or I might, but effectively he was on call.
The feeling of it each time was sweet beyond belief. It wasn’t just that the stuff seemed to be stronger than it was in England, it was also that the misery of my withdrawal seemed to highlight the beauty of the high. That lovely crackle of the white marble pieces as the flame hit and melted them into a wax-like substance, running like cream into the wire mesh, and mystically transforming into thick black smoke. The kick of that high was unbelievable. With that singing in my veins every tiny shred of pain and setback in my life was instantly wiped out and was replaced with a religious awareness of God and my destiny in His great plan. It all seemed so clear at the time.
Soon all of that great wisdom and supreme ecstasy would fade within minutes, to be replaced with the mockery of me crawling on the floor, searching for any crumb of crack I might have missed, desperate to hold onto that high, but increasingly unable to. With trembling hands, I would scrape out the insides of my crack pipe. An hour’s delicate work would yield enough black stuff on the wire mesh to chance another hit. It worked! For another ten minutes I was spun back into the beautiful Garden of Eden I had been in before. The gods have rewarded me! And then it would wear off again, to let me down even harder.
I went to sleep. There comes a time when, no matter how much gear you do, your brain cells are unable to process any more. It normally takes about two or three days of non-stop use to arrive at that point. I went out and got a bottle of local rum, knocked it back and fell into a troubled sleep. I woke some time during the night with the deep need to vomit. I just about had time to make it to the waste paper bin before emptying my guts. The stink was unbelievable. I couldn’t handle any cleaning up though. All I could do was try to get back to sleep on the hard bed. I turned over, trying to get some respite, but unable to find any. The sweat was rolling off me. I recognized the stink from my last turkey. It was the smell of ammonia, which builds up inside the tissues of the heroin addict while they are on the drug. It starts to breaks down leaking out as soon as they start to come off. It is a nasty smell. Real chemical-like. Having a shower is one of the best things you can do when you are Clucking, but the thought of dragging myself to the bathroom was too much. All I wanted to do was curl up into a little ball and hope and pray that the dawn would come soon.
I don’t know how long I lay there, but I gradually became aware of knocking on the wooden slats of my window. I hauled myself off the bed, and I looked into the face of a black version of Charles Atlas. This guy had what was probably the most perfect physique west of the Greenwich meridian. He hardly had any neck at all, but his shape was an almost perfect V from the top of his shoulders down to the pencil-slim circumference of his waist. He was dressed in a deep red T-shirt that looked as though it had been sprayed on. He wore a pair of dark glasses. Around his non-neck hung a stylized golden and ancient-looking crucifix.
‘My name is Mike’ he said, looking through the slats at me. Was that supposed to mean something to me? Who was this fucker? I opened the door for him and he just walked in, as though I was supposed to know him. Then it dawned on me that he might well be the person I was supposed to link up with.
‘I’m from Corinne,’ he said. Or Mons as I knew her.
He sat down on the bed, and gave me a straight look. The kind that said many things, but here and now meant ‘you’d better not be fucking with me, kid.’
He then moved over to the suitcase and opened it. He started pulling out all the pairs of white underwear and vests. Inside was a birthday card. There was a handwritten declaration of love or admiration on it. I spotted the words ‘To a very special person’ before he saw that I was peeping and took it away. Then he started in on the pairs of socks. I hadn’t bothered sorting through all that stuff after arriving at the hotel. I had gone straight out on the razzle. Imagine my astonishment when he pulled a thick bundle of notes out of one of the pairs of socks! They were all 100 dollar bills, and it was about two inches thick. Counting it slowly, with the occasional glance in my direction, Mike was making his way, inexorably, up to five grand US. There, it was all there. I hadn’t realized that I’d be ferrying cash over to this place. Five grand. I began to wish that I had searched the case before this guy had arrived. The notes were all fresh as a daisy, too. Crisp and absolutely tidy, like a middle class family on their way to mass. If I had found that money, I would just have got up, walked out of there, and made my way to the airport. From there, the nearest flight to Pakistan, just to get my hands on a big bag of heroin. It would have been a dream come true. But it was not to be.
Satisfying himself that everything was in order, he made to get up. I wasn’t going to let him go without getting some gear. He’d just picked up five grand on the basis of my work, so I felt that I had earned it.
‘Could you bring me some white?’ I asked, ‘if you don’t mind of course.’
I cringed at the whining note in my voice but he nodded, and went out the door without saying a thing. He did return a bit later, with a small wrap of both white and some green. They were wrapped in a page torn from the Bible: the page at the end of Revelations where it talks about the divine punishment on the head of anyone who takes any pages out of this prophecy. It was like an evil omen.
The next day, another Englishman moved into the hotel. He was sitting on the upstairs balcony getting some sun as I came out and walked up the path. He had a tattoo of great big tiger leaping up along his leg, its head and shoulders disappeared up into the inner regions of the trouser leg of his shorts.
‘I like your tattoos!’ I called out, elated to see a fellow holidaymaker around, someone I could have a brief chat with now and again.
‘Come up and have a beer!’ he called back. I needed no further invitation. I was straight up there, and once I was inside his room, I could see that he had it a lot better off than I did. His room had a much nicer bed, for one thing. At first I thought he was Australian. But as I got closer his speech descended back into a more northern England accent. Inside his fridge was a complete arsenal of beer bottles, all lined up. About a dozen cans of corned beef sat there with them as well.
We downed a few beers, and he told me about himself. He was on fifty grand a year, apparently, as an electronics expert, and had recently moved from one part of Britain to somewhere else in the north with his wife. I kept an eye out from the vantage point of his balcony, knocking back the beer at his expense. I suppose he was glad for the company. Apparently he was awaiting some sort of reunion with old friends who were due to meet him on the island.
Every now and again Kehn would turn up with some more gear. Later that evening, after I had left the Englishman, I was back smoking up my stuff in my room. There was a slight tapping sound at my window. Looking through the blinds, I could see a woman’s outline, silhouetted against the moonlight. I unlocked the door and she introduced herself.
‘Hello,’ she said in that very distinctive Caribbean accent, ‘My name is Catherine. My nephew Kehn told me you were here, and might want some female company.’
It hadn’t occurred to me. Perhaps it was considered bad manners not to. I let her come in. She wheeled a bicycle in with her and placed it on one side against the wall. The smell of the vomit from the waste paper bin was still there, I realized. I picked it up, and moved it out into the bathroom, careful not to spill any.
She was wearing a hat, which covered the top part of her face. When she removed it, I could see that, although not unattractive, she was certainly no spring chicken. It turned out that she was my age and also an Aries.
In her hand she held a small white paper serviette containing a little set of crack stones. She offered me the lot for thirty dollars, and I gave her twenty. She tut-tutted at first, but then accepted.
‘Do you want a piece of cunt as well, mister?’ she asked me.
She was at least direct, I thought. Before I could answer, she had pulled up the hem of her dress and showed me her pussy. Perhaps thirty years ago it had been the turn-on of the village.
‘I’ve had three children, would you believe?’ she asked me.
The pussy that looked sullenly back at me resembled the face of an animal with a bad case of toothache.
‘Er, yes, I would, actually,’ was all I could say in response, as I successfully declined her generous offer. I took the stones and showed her the door.
All I wanted to do was get out of my face, but the money was beginning to run low and the stuff was neither getting me quite so high nor for anywhere near as long.
The next day, Englishman called by and suggested we go for a walk along the beach. I hadn’t brought any suntan lotion, and wasn’t interested in getting a tan. I only ever go a bright lobster pink in the sun. Kehn bobbed along with us, as we made our way along the sandy stretch until we found a little spot where we could go for a dip. The water was shallow but beautifully warm. It made all my stiff muscles and joints relax, at least for a bit, and I made a prayer to Poseidon, thanking him for taking me back into the sea.
We made our way back to the hotel, and went up to the Englishman’s room, where we had some more beers. My back was sunburned from the brief time we had spent in the sea.
‘I know the cure for that, mister’ said Kehn, as he went out and down the steps. Coming back a few minutes later he had some leaves in his hand.
‘Dis is aloe vera’ he said.
I recognized the leaves of the plants that were dotted all round the perimeter of the hotel. These leaves were long, very hard, and tailed off into a thin but deadly spike at the end. Nasty. Kehn cut the leaves up and extracted a white, sperm-like juice from them. The two lads now proceeded to rub this stuff all over my back. It soothed the burn. Kehn then gave me some aloe juice to drink, to clear out my system. I swallowed back a big mouthful, but it didn’t seem to do anything to me. Maybe I needed a stronger dose.
The next day I was due to be getting on the plane to come back home. I was still waiting for the drugs to turn up. I decided to give Mons a ring. It seemed to take forever to get through to her. Apparently there had been a mix-up, but it was sorted now, and the guy would be over to deliver in the next day or so. There would be no problem changing my flight. I could just hang out on the island for a few more days.
The next morning, I left my room early to look around for Kehn. First, I checked his place. Looking through the window to his bedroom I could see that he wasn’t there. The morning before I had turned up at six in the morning and awoken him, nigh on forcing him out of bed to go score for me. Then, I made my way along the deserted road. Here and there, a dog chained up in front of a house would growl at me, warning me to keep my distance.
By the time I got back up to the rum shop, the Cluck was starting to hit. I had to sit down, it was so painful standing up. I had just parked my bum by the side of a bus stand when Kehn came along on his bicycle. I gave him one of my few remaining ten dollars, and he sailed away, off to Silver Sands. I scuttled back to the hotel room, to wait for him there.
Later that evening, I was able to drag myself up to the rum shop between pipes. There was quite a crowd there, so I sat outside on the steps and looked up into the warm Caribbean night. I could almost touch the stars. The crowd inside were from a neighbourhood close to my own, in Tottenham, north London. We got chatting and they invited me up to their room. When I got there, I noticed a suitcase standing in the middle of the room. If I had leaned closer I would have been able to read the name and address on the label that hung from the handle.
Just then, one of the fellas asked if he could come and see my room. I could tell he wanted me out of there for some reason, and took him next door into mine. He looked around for a moment, said goodnight and left. I was still standing looking at the door, slightly bemused, when there was a loud knock. I opened the door to find two guys who wouldn’t have looked out of place as Tonton Macoutes in Haiti. One held the suitcase I had seen standing in the other room. He saw me looking and moved the case behind him. Both he and his friend wore dark glasses, even though it was night time, and walked straight into my room.
The suitcase they brought in was soft-backed with a reinforced backbone.
‘What do you want to do with the other one?’ the first Tonton asked.
‘Probably best for you to take it away.’ I said, ‘I’ve got no use for it.’
So the elder of the two picked it up.
Just then I heard Kehn appear from nowhere and call out, ‘Terry!’
‘Not now, Kehn,’ I replied.
He might have stayed outside, peeping in. That seems most likely. All he would have seen was that I had a couple of visitors. Even so, as a local man, he would have sussed what was going on. This didn’t particularly bother me at the time, even though I had a kind of ‘fated’ feeling about all of this. Almost as if I was an actor going through his script.
I hit the elder Tonton for an extra hundred dollars.
‘I have got debts to pay, before I can check out of here,’ I complained.
He moaned a bit, but in the end I got a few more bob for a drink that night and relatively decent smoke.
The next morning I was up and ready to roll. The Englishman from upstairs had himself a chat or two with Mons when she had mistakenly come through on his phone line while trying to find me. I found out quite by chance, when I picked up his phone once when it rang. It was Mons, asking for my whereabouts. Well, well, well. It was all turning into one big happy family.
I was a bit tired, physically and mentally, and needed the Englishman’s help in getting the big suitcase wheeled up the long slope to the rum shop. There, the friendly rum shop owner offered to give me free lift to the airport. After a beer, we were off, the Range Rover we were in doing over a hundred miles an hour as we careered past dozens of other vehicles travelling in the same direction.
When we got to the airport, I pulled the suitcase out of the back, waved good bye to the Englishman and the rum shop owner, and walked into the terminal building. It was cool here, and also much darker. I looked around at all the other holiday makers and realized that I was still wearing the same clothes I had arrived in. I hadn’t even had a wash or a shower in all that time, either.
When I went to check in, the fat white girl behind the screen looked at my name, and then suddenly jumped back. Keeping a sharp eye on me, she went to a little room at the back marked ‘Security’. As she returned, I saw a very worried-looking black guy come out, take a sideways glance at me and then scuttle off. The white girl continued to check me in. My suitcase went over into the luggage area, where it was immediately put to one side, away from all of the rest of the suitcases. The girl returned my passport to me. Just then, it became difficult for me to stand up. I needed a cigarette. I crumpled to the floor with my back against a pillar, lit up the fag, and took a deep breath. I closed my eyes and rested my head against the pillar behind me. When I opened them again, I saw two black men approaching me. They showed me their police badges. A sudden heavy sinking feeling hit me right in the guts. I knew they had me. They knew it as well. My body felt as if it weighed about three tons, and I was now moving in slow motion. Each step seemed to take about ten minutes. We stopped and they recovered the suitcase. Now I had to wheel this thing along, as we made our way to the customs inspection area.
There, they told me to put the suitcase on a giant X- ray scanner. The operator ran the case through, but was unable to find anything wrong with it. He must have seen something the second time he tried. He shrugged to one of the cops, who then pulled a knife from his inside jacket pocket, and started tearing out the inside lining. Yards of black cloth peeled out of the innards of the case, and underneath it all was a large piece of sheet metal, tailored to run around the inside rim of the case.
‘The work that must have gone into that!’ the first policeman marvelled, struck by the artist’s determination and craftsmanship. By now several more large, burly men, clearly security, police and customs types had congregated.
They all lined up to take a photograph, with the broken-open case in the foreground. Unsure of what to do, I entered the picture, but one of them waved me away to the sidelines. They all puffed out their chests for the picture that would be coming out in the newspaper the next day.
‘We can get you twenty-five years for this, sonny,’ one of them said.
I felt weak, totally gutted. What the fuck had I done with my life? It looked as if it were all over bar the shouting, now. I had to lie down. Twenty five years or no, I was going to lie down. I wondered if I wasn’t close to fainting. Maybe I was. I wanted to smoke a cigarette, and tried lighting one up, but it was snatched from my mouth just as I took the first drag on it and inhaled. Then I was hauled to my feet. With one guard on either side of me, we marched out the door into the main concourse. There were dozens of tourists all lined up, ready to go, looking at me as I was marched past them. It was obvious that I had been busted for drug smuggling. They put me in the back of a police car. A young black man sat in beside me. A ring glinted on the third finger of his right hand. I squinted to get a better look; it was engraved with the Masonic square and compass.
I leaned a little closer to him and extended my right hand. Unsure of what to do, he took it in his, and I gave him the Masonic handshake. He gave me back the right handshake. When I thought back to my days as a Freemason, it all seemed a million miles away. What a different kind of life! How had I managed to go from being a respected member of the order, to getting busted for drug-smuggling in this god-forsaken place? It was beginning to dawn on me how far down the ladder I had fallen.
My young companion and I worked our way through the traditional greeting and then sat next to each other, laughing about what could potentially have been a very miserable experience. He turned to me. There was such an expression of sadness on his face.
‘So, how did you fall from the light?’ he asked me.
I wished I knew. I had no answer to give him. I had no answer even inside my own head.
Two more policemen got into the car. A barrier was raised for us to pass through, and then we were out on the open road, with a police jeep behind us, its light flashing. I could feel the heat from the Barbados summer day hitting me through the windscreen, and took a deep breath as I wondered what I was in for. Probably a good kicking, I thought despondently, as I considered just how massive these cops were. I wouldn’t survive a kicking from this lot. And as for Freemasonry, you can’t use that as a shield for carrying out illegal or unethical activities, or as a licence to evade any negative come-back from the repercussions of your actions in life.
We drove to back Oistins, to the police station there. We all got out, and they took me into the entrance hall. As I looked around, I had the strangest feeling that I actually recognized some of these people. I was sure that I saw big Mike of the red T-shirt and the two Tontons, who had delivered the suitcase of coke to the hotel. They were still wearing their sunglasses. Maybe I was tripping from all the coke I’d been blasting away on.
I was bunged into a cell right at the back. It was tiny, like something from the Crimean War. There were only two or three cells in the entire police station anyway. At first I thought it was already occupied. But what I took to be a body curled up on the floor, turned out to be a pile of food bags containing slowly mouldering items.
There were two thin strips of foam, both soaked in the sweat of innumerable other men and initially cold to the touch as I laid down on one of them. Not to worry, I thought to myself. I knew my body heat would soon bring out the smell of all those other peoples’ sweat. Hopefully, I wasn’t going to be here for too long. The best thing to do, I reasoned, would probably be for me to make a full confession, and plead guilty to whatever they wanted to charge me with. They had me bang to rights, so I might as well minimize the agony and get it over with. You hear tales of people trying to get out of it, by pretending ‘they didn’t know.’ They end up waiting for one hell of a long time before they even get to trial, sometimes years, and then they get an even bigger sentence when they do get found guilty.
As I was lying on this foam mattress in the cell another fella was brought in, a tall Rasta man, his long dreadlocks reaching down to his waist like thickly-coiled ropes.
He just lay down and went to sleep. That seemed the best thing to do. So I followed his example.