heroin 2

Everyone on their year abroad was supposed to receive a visit from a tutor, who was meant to check what progress you’d made in the research for your dauntingly long final year project. I had been dreading it but when my turn came, I was relieved to find out my visitor would be a lovely French professor who was very laid-back, and luckily the subject only cropped up once during her short time in Nice.

She took me, and another student out to a bar and after a few drinks she said; “so – got a topic for your dissertation then?” “Oh yes” I replied, “I just need to go to the loo, back in a minute”. It worked perfectly. By the time I returned, she’d forgotten all about it. She was a brilliant lecturer – she taught me to love French cinema – Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol - but she wasn’t very good at making people do things, and I think she was also a little drunk that night.

It wasn’t until late summer that I finally decided I wanted to write about May 1968 and so I had a lot of work to do when I went back to college. I can’t remember how many thousands of words it had to be, but there were an awful lot of them, and I had spent almost the whole of the previous year on the beach.

My time in Nice wasn’t entirely wasted though – I had met a few other students there from my college who were doing European Studies. Most of them were members of the Militant Tendency and they were really helpful when I got home – talking me through Trotsky and Mao, the different kinds of anarchists, Grosvenor Square, and the other student protests in the States, for the background.

So after my wonderful birthday, it was pretty useful to discover that Zachy had been spot on when he’d talked about how good heroin was when you wanted to get through stuff. He was endlessly helpful with all the artwork I wanted to put in – there was so much. We used to photocopy all sorts of things I was given or had found in the newspaper library, layering them one on top of the other, adding colour, then recopying the final results.

I would sometimes trail along with Zach to his dealers. There were two of them – one was a really strange man who lived alone in a council flat just off the Portobello Road. He was the same age as us and he was only small-time. I think he did it mainly to meet people because he seemed quite lonely.

After a while he started coming over to my halls – “just passing by”, but he was very boring, and impossible to get rid of once he was through the door. I can’t remember the number of excuses I used to have to invent to get him out again.

Finally he got the message and stopped coming. His parting shot, the last time I saw him, was; “Your voice is quite deep – are you a lesbian?” It seemed such an odd thing to say – my voice wasn’t at all deep, and I was quite obviously not a lesbian either. Maybe he thought it was an insult or something. He was a total puzzle to me. Zachy didn’t help – he just laughed when I told him.

The other dealer was a crooked barrister who was doing up a lovely Regency type house behind Kings Cross. You would never have believed what he did as a sideline if you had seen him in his smart city suit. I remember going into a large formal drawing room, beautifully restored, with the original fireplace. It was empty except for a long, low, button-back sofa on which we all sat together while Zach and the man exchanged money and foil. I don’t think he was actually living there yet, but it was where he did his dealing. I suppose it was handy for all the addicts who lived in the squats around that area.

Smack was also just lovely for relaxing – it could enhance even the most perfect afternoon. One of the few times I remember going out with Zach and Hetty together was when we spent the day at Highgate Cemetery. It is one of the most beautiful places in the world. I hope they haven’t cleaned it up too much. You used to be able to wander around all day, gazing at the stunningly over the top gothic monuments people had built to their loved ones in the nineteenth century.

Nothing was in very good condition – the angels were all crumbling away and had bits missing, there was moss and lichen spreading over the stonework, and the planting was completely out of hand, but to us that made it better. It was private enough, what with all the brambles and tall weeds, so that you could sit quietly, hidden away, and smoke heroin in peace, listening to the stillness away from the busy road and gazing at the beauty of it all.

In the Autumn too, there were few tourists, which was a shame for them, because it meant they mostly missed out on one of the best things about that place – and the whole of Highgate village; the sudden mist – a real, ghost story type sinister mist, that would suddenly appear as the afternoon drew on.

We stayed, smoking, watching the magic of it, and completely lost track of time. Eventually, it became really quite dark, so we wandered over to the gates, but we’d found such a private little place to sit, we hadn’t been noticed, and we found were locked in for the night.

It was 1983 and it must have been Hetty’s day off because we were all in black – that’s what most people wore then. It was hard to climb over the railings – they were high and had sharp spikes on the ends, and also, we weren’t exactly in the right condition for that kind of thing, but we managed in the end, and emerged, white-faced, out of the mist and into the rush-hour traffic, trying to look as normal as we could.

It wasn’t difficult to find smack, and it wasn’t very expensive unless you had a bad habit. It was never more than a fairly regular diversion for me. Nothing in the world would have tempted me to inject anything into my veins – I’d seen the damage that could do from a very early age. I don’t think Zach did either, or Hetty at that time.

Later, it was different for her. When I met up with Zach a month or so ago. he told me she’d run off with a dealer called Smiler the following year, and had descended quite quickly into a habit so expensive she’d had to give up St. Martins so she could devote her whole life to its maintenance, selling herself to anyone who would pay enough to get her through the day.

Poor Hetty, whenever I think of her I remember her wide smile, and her pink tutu and her generous nature. Zachy had no mercy for her however, when she came up in our conversation. She had crossed his very rigid black and white line when she left him and that was it as far as he was concerned – even twenty-four years on. He neither knew, nor cared what had happened to her in the end.

Smiler is still alive though. He’s a crack addict now, and homeless. Zachy told me he often sees him wandering around the streets in Camden.