A Journey 2

I paid one of my son’s friends to house and cat sit for me. He’s doing retakes so he’s still at school.

“Fifty quid for emergencies and essentials” I said. “Just write down what you spend it on – loo roll, taxi to the vet, whatever.”

When I got home there were a few pounds missing – not many, and a very short list. It went: “ Milk. The Times,” and I thought it was quite heart-warming – even though I don’t approve of giving Rupert Murdoch money, that an eighteen year old should count a newspaper as an essential on the same scale as loo roll and milk, so I didn’t say anything.

Anyway, that’s how come the magazine happened to be on my kitchen table, and I picked it up this morning and read it as I drank my coffee, because my resolution to leap into sorting my house out hasn’t exactly got off the ground yet – I haven’t been feeling very well since I got home. Huge picture of Keith Richard on the cover and I think it’s quite nice that he’s still wearing eyeliner at his age, and that he’s revelling in his wrinkles - he has so many he looks a little bit like a crocodile now. Also his old fashioned language – he calls people “cats” – amused me. Then I got to the part where he describes how he got addicted to heroin and I stopped laughing because that’s exactly what he said when I was in Tucson – it creeps up on you.

When you start, you do a bit, then you do a bit more, and then you go somewhere there isn’t any and it’s not a big deal. That was us in July; when we ran out it wasn’t the end of the world. Perhaps you don’t really need drugs in Las Vegas.

We’d talked about it before. I’d said how come you don’t get a habit? And he’d said all you have to do is stop every few weeks – have a break. No problem. Makes sense.

The thing is, he forgot. He was so busy trying to get rid of his meth habit that he forgot the part about stopping every now and again, and then one day he woke up, and thought he’d got flu, did some black, and felt totally well again. That was when he realised. So now he has a smack habit. He’s completely confident he can get over it though. He did it once before, - a long time ago.

In the meantime he’s started skin popping. Sounds better than shooting up doesn’t it. More like some kind of street dance craze involving a woolly hat or graffiti in an odd place or something. It’s not. It’s shooting up but not mainlining – not into a vein. You just find a fleshy part – upper arm, thigh, somewhere like that, and you stick the needle in .You don’t get the rush like in the song - well, maybe just a little bit. Mainly you need much less to get by, to avoid the flu feeling. Economising is the point.

“You see that bit you’re smoking?” he pointed to the dot on the foil I was holding. I nodded.

“That could keep me going eight hours – no problem. You’re going to need more in half an hour”

He was right. I did. I did so much there almost wasn’t really time to do anything else. We’d planned to spend time by the pool, walk up a small mountain, all sorts of things, but we just never seemed to get around to any of it.

I wrote, and he finished some stunning paintings, and we talked a lot, and I’m pretty sure we left the apartment at least once a day, though quite often not until fairly late in the evening. Once we spent almost a whole day sitting in bed talking about the ins and outs of living together – how to arrange it all. It was a bit like a long lovely dream.

And . the thing is – the thing is…I don’t really know what the thing is. I need to get over the jetlag flu feeling first - I can’t really think straight right now. Nothing was quite as I imagined it would be. I suppose you could say I heard what I wanted to hear – but not quite in the way I imagined I would. And I need to think about that.