It began innocently enough at King's Cross station, just hours after my release from prison earlier this year. It was midday. Having travelled down to London by train from Lindholme prison near Doncaster, circumstances decreed that I visit the bank to withdraw some cash for my immediate needs. There was a branch of Barclays directly opposite the station concourse. That would do nicely, I thought, at least until I had the chance to visit my own branch (in more fashionable Regent Street) to sort out cash cards, cheque books, overdraft facilities-all the necessary accoutrements of modern living.
Gingerly, I crossed the busy arterial. Given the decade of imprisonment I had only that morning completed, the experience proved unnerving. The fumes from bumper-to-bumper traffic were nauseating after the pollution-free atmosphere of my years in a car-less penal estate. The colours about me seemed brighter and the buildings (especially the revamped St Pancras) seemed grander. But I could see few differences between the tawdry King's Cross I had left behind at the end of the 1980s and the seething dystopic ram-jam which welcomed me back into the world today. The crowds still milled. The homeless still begged. Along the wide cracked pavements the hustlers still hustled. What was it about this scene that disturbed my newly released sensibilities? It took me a while to realise-everybody looked so young.
The dealer caught me as I came out of the bank. "You wan' some powder?" he asked, his face lamp-black, his head a bouquet of ill-kempt dreadlocks, Tommy Hilfigered, yellow-eyed, anxious to make a quick sale. "Heroin?" I asked, rather nonplussed by this bold approach. "Best gear on the Cross," he assured me, his eyes darting swiftly around in their sockets, making sure all was still safe and dandy. I hesitated. How had this complete stranger identified me as a potential customer? Maybe my gaol pallor had given the game away. Maybe the prison-issue jeans. At any rate, he had me sussed for what I was. It felt like Christ's temptation in the wilderness.
Before a borrowed van bore me and my bags of books and brown envelopes away from King's Cross, I was approached no fewer than a further three times by vendors of, in order of appearance, heroin, marijuana and crack cocaine. And for once in my life (I had a Channel Four camera crew following my every move) I managed to say no to them all. As we trundled along to Bedford Square for an appointment with the editor of Prospect, I wondered how long it would be before I did give in, and succumbed to the inevitable. Hard drugs, it seemed, were as common a part of Cool Britannia as spin doctors.
That evening, in an attempt to escape (if only for a few days) the Sturm und Drang of metropolitan life, I travelled out of London to stay in an isolated place close to the orchards in the Vale of Evesham. An old friend from prison (Peck's Bad Boy) met me on the platform. "It's good to see you back in the real world, Pete." He greeted me affectionately, as always. As we walked towards his car he put his arm on my shoulder. "By the way," he mentioned, casually but pointedly. "There's some blinding gear in town if you fancy a boot before going home to meet me Mam." I didn't.
a week later I was back in London, still drug-free (medicinal daily joint notwithstanding). Then, late one February afternoon I was sitting, between meetings, on a bench in Soho Square, munching on a prawn-and-salad baguette, and contemplating the eclectic mixture of architectural styles which lined the square's four sides. Monmouth had once owned a house here, designed by that undersung hero of the English Baroque, Thomas Archer. Recalling the long demolished mansion, I ambled off down Greek Street.
My thoughts were interrupted by a cry I remembered from the 1980s. "Spare a bit of change, guv?" a voice at my feet implored. I decided to learn more about this unfortunate young man's circumstances. I sat down by his side, offered him a Marlboro cigarette and engaged him in conversation.
The boy looked respectable enough. He sat cross-legged, shaven head erect, against some glossy black wrought-iron railings. He wore a pair of arctic combat trousers, a black vest, a quilted bomber jacket and a pair of spit-and-polished, high-laced drill boots. His high cheekbones protruded like those of El Greco's saints. His skin had a pale yellow tinge.
Suspicious, at first, of my motives, Steve relaxed when I showed him my discharge papers, which confirmed that I had just come out of prison after serving a 10-year sentence for armed robbery. "I've bin 'ere nearly 12 monf," he announced proudly. "'Ere. On this doorstep. This is my patch. All the other beggars know they can't sit 'ere between ten in the morning and four in the afternoon. I 'ave regulars who wouldn't give to anyone else. See there across the road?" He pointed to a pitiful-looking teenager with straw-coloured matted hair, huddled under a bright orange blanket right next to the cash machine outside another branch of Barclays. "That's Billy. 'E's me mate from Sarf Africa. That's 'is patch. We work togevver in tandem." I said I thought it odd that the bank tolerated beggars right outside its front door, but Steve reckoned they caused it no trouble at all. Indeed, members of staff brought the boys hot drinks during their own coffee breaks when it was especially cold on the streets. It was almost enough to redeem my faith in human nature. I was glad I banked with Barclays.
During the hour I chatted with Steve, he collected just over ?15 and several cigarettes. He said this was about average (when it wasn't raining) for an hour's "work." I did a quick mental calculation. If he sat here for six hours a day, five days a week, he would be "earning" something like ?450 per week completely tax-free. How could he be homeless and destitute on such a handsome income?
"I've got a ragin' crack 'abit" he told me without embarrassment. "So's Billy. That's why I'm 'omeless in the first place. Used to live in a semi in Chigwell. Me old man frew me out when I was 18. Spent some time in the Paras before vat, dishonourably discharged for assaultin' an officer. Was out me skull at the time. Can't remember nuffink about it. Listen," he asked, with an enthusiasm hard to resist, "do you wanna come for a walk with me an' Billy? We're knockin' off in a minute to do the change up. Share a rock with yer if yer want."
So here I was, back in Soho, a land of earthly vice and nocturnal shenanigans. During my decade of incarceration it had risen like a second Lazarus. What had once been a shabby labyrinth of quaintly named lanes, backstreets and alleyways (filled with tumbledown 18th-century townhouses given over to brothels, sex shops and drinking dens) had become in my absence a pulsating, almost Parisian quartier of the 1990s. The pink pound had come to town in style along Old Compton Street, Dean Street, Wardour Street and Brewer Street. Soho was awash with outrageous bohemian peacockery.
We weren't interested (for the time being, at least) in the gay flummery of London caf? society. My two beggar friends were on a mission of their own-first to "change up" their silver and coppers in a greasy Italian caf? in Romilly Street, then to seek out their "mainmen" in the lengthening shadows of Rupert Street. The short winter afternoon turned to a brittle, frozen night as we walked. I gave Steve a little more money so they could "do the business" without the impediment of an unknown face beside them. I waited, watching, from the stage door of the Apollo Theatre.
In doorways and telephone boxes, in stationary cars, astride mountain bikes, perched on walls and kerbstones, small groups of men and women huddled together, as if about to lay on hands at a charismatic prayer meeting. But their business here tonight was far from spiritual. It was more like the money changers' in the holy temple. Out of mouths spilled pellets of clingfilmed crack cocaine. Notes of all denominations changed hands. I felt a death-rattle buzz of urgency as the precious stones spewed forth for eager customers. There was a glint. Some fast leger-demain. The rocks were concealed and the notes passed on. In a trice the deals were done and the crackheads bolted for their secret holes in the ground.
I went with Billy and Steve up Wardour Street, then along Oxford Street, expertly dodging the crowds, as far as Rathbone Place. Through a back maze of fennels and ginnels we hurried on towards a bland featureless block of 1930s council flats. "We're better off the street," Steve said as he pressed the intercom. We waited a moment before a harsh Belfast voice crackled through the speaker. "Who is it?" "Us" said Steve. "Me an' Billy an' we've got a mate wiv us. Can we come up for a few minutes?" There was a muffled oath. "Whaderf I toild yer about bringin' strangers up heire?" A pregnant silence. "'E's sweet, Joe. Jus' finished a ten for armed blags." Mention of the bank jobs seemed to do the trick. The buzzer sounded and in we went.
On the second floor, the small, square, urine- stinking lift came to a halt opposite an already open sludge-green reinforced door. The Irishman, standing by the entrance, sized me up with heavy Bill Sykes eyes. Seemingly satisfied, he beckoned us in without a smile. The door slammed shut behind us. We followed our host down an unlit hallway. Flickering light from a black-and-white television set drew us to a room at the end of the corridor.
Nervous eyes looked up as we entered. On a bed in one corner lay a beanstalk of a man with long lank hair. Next to him, seated on a brocade-upholstered Regency chair, was a heavily made-up girl of about... well... I don't suppose she was any older than 15. She wore a Chinese silk sheath dress and totteringly high patent heels. Her dyed blonde hair had been arranged like Jodie Foster's in the child gangster movie Bugsy Malone. On the threadbare carpet, directly under the television, sat an earnest quartet of teenagers-all male, all bare-chested, wild-eyed William Burroughs boys, sparrowheads of intensity caught picking at the entrails of some long-dead prey. Grouped in a circle, they looked up when we came in, then stared back down at their collection of broken ampoules, overflowing ashtrays, spent needles, syringes, spoons, Benson and Hedges "Gratis" cards, Coke can pipes, gauzes, tapers, strips of foil and screwed up clingfilm wrappers. Grudgingly they made room for us in their circle-professional beggars, just like Billy and Steve whom they appeared to know well. Steve introduced me as his mate from inside. They asked no questions.
Billy began to unwrap our rocks. The Irishman stood brooding by the blacked-out window. "It's toime you were back oit there, isn't it" he barked at the young girl prostitute. She sighed, passed a syringe of dio-morphine which she had just prepared to the man on the bed, picked up a fake fur mini coat and walked out of the room without a word.
I sat between Billy and Steve as they prepared our feast. I, the crack virgin, eager to watch and learn, nervous, but certain by now that I would partake. The rocks were pithy styrofoam-textured nuggets the size of small dashed pebbles. Carefully, Billy placed the first one on a bed of ash laid over a dozen pin pricks in the flattened side of a Coca-Cola tin. Painstakingly, Steve gathered up the tiny fragments of "substance" (he called it "picking") which had fallen from the wrapper on to the floor. Slowly, under the close scrutiny of others in the circle, Billy put the "pipe" to his lips, lit the rock and inhaled. After a few seconds the rock melted on to the ash and Billy's eyes glazed over into half focus. He placed the pipe delicately back on the carpet, exhaled a sweet-smelling smoke, cocked back his head and smiled. "Yes!" he intoned heavenwards. "Yesyesyesyesyes!" His back teeth ground together and his nostrils flared as he passed me the re-loaded Coke tin.
"Let Steve go first," I objected. "He's worked hard for his money." "Steve jacks it up," Billy told me. And indeed, my original friend had already dispensed with his jacket and was pumping up Michelangelesque veins in his left arm ready to receive the needle and syringe which another boy had filled with crack cocaine solution. Steve wrapped a rubber tourniquet between his biceps and shoulder, pulling it tight and anchoring the end firmly with his teeth leaving his right arm to do the digging.
He slapped his left forearm sharply. I watched in the black-and-white half light, spellbound, as the tip of the needle pierced the skin and burrowed its unsteady way into the vein. He drew back on it. A cloud of black-red blood curled its way into the opaque white liquid in the barrel. Steve pushed back down. As the solution entered the bloodstream it seemed to clog slightly. The chosen vein inflated, expanding for a moment before subsiding again as the poison passed along, to let the rest of the fix flow in. "Isn't it dangerous?" I asked him in a whisper. "The needle wasn't even clean." "It's the only way I can get a proper buzz these days." He lay back on the carpet, bared his teeth like a rabid dog, spread his legs and raised his groin in a pseudo-sexual circular motion. "Yeh. He likes that one," another of the boys said approvingly. Steve leant forward again, let out a loud, rasping fart and uttered breathlessly, "Another! Get me another!"
Billy passed me the re-filled pipe. The Irishman nodded. I think if I'd refused at that point he would have murdered me. But the danger spurred me on. Now was the time to put all other thoughts out of my head and concentrate on the task in hand. I put the can to my mouth, held the clipper lighter just above the white mound, lit it and breathed in deeply. "Slowly does it," prompted the South African, sounding like an orthopaedic nurse. And slowly I did it. Slowly I began to feel it.
A stomach buzz at first, which rose like mercury up through my body, across my chest, down my arms as far as the end of my fingers. Then my head exploded in a euphoric afterwave. I felt I could have done anything. The world was at my feet; there for the taking.
So this was what it meant to be a master of the universe. Now I understood what all the fuss was about. Now I knew why people robbed, raped and pillaged for this cocaine supernova. The only trouble was that, just as they warn you in school, the "buzz" gave way in a matter of minutes to a kind of numbed dissatisfaction which had me craving for another rock barely before I put the can back down. Billy was "picking" the carpet now. Steve was babbling to the Irishman about a triad stabbing he had witnessed two nights previously. Anxious to be rid of us ("because there's a warrant oit for me arrest an' I'm expecting the Ol' Bill to burst doin the door anytaime") Joe hurried us out of his flat as hastily as he had "welcomed" us in. "Give 'im a tenner for 'is trouble," Steve advised out of his hearing. "Then you can come back again-if you want to," he added with a grin. We were out in the street in no time at all. Steve and Billy waved me good-bye. They had to return to their patch in Greek Street, I to my dingy flat in Peckham.
terry was a good-looking East London rent boy whom I met several days later, just five minutes after emerging, stylishly coiffed, from Trumper's, the Jermyn Street hairdresser. He had been released from Feltham Young Offenders Institute that very morning and was out "on the razzle" without, so he told me, the wherewithal for his first celebratory pint. Ever the mug for a plausible hard luck story and in need of some temporary companionship, I invited Terry-with-the-winning-smile to lunch with me at the Gay Hussar. After venison, a bottle of Ducru Beaucaillou and double helpings of profiteroles with fresh thick cream, I allowed myself to be talked into buying Terry a new outfit to replace the ragged garments he was wearing (to some consternation in the restaurant-Old Labour or not); the only thing he owned in the world, he said, which smelt unmistakably of that sweetish mixture of cabbage and white Windsor soup so evocative of Her Majesty's Prisons.
Fortunately, I had my cheque book and Connect card by this time, so I was able to tour the boutiques of the West End spend-spend-spending. Come four o'clock, we were laden with so many bags and parcels that a halt to the proceedings had to be called. Terry changed into his new clothes in the gentlemen's toilets at Green Park tube station. We took refuge from the hustle and bustle of Piccadilly and retired to the Dorchester Hotel for afternoon tea.
During our peregrinations we had spoken frankly about drugs-in particular, crack cocaine. We both agreed how "more-ish" a substance it was. Terry told me how easily available it had been in the houseblocks of Feltham ("if yer could afford it"). He was intending to meet some of his mates in Soho later in the evening to "'ave a right good session, 'ssuming, vat is, the punters come across like vey usually do." We must have looked like father and son in the sumptuous lobby court of the Dorchester, reclining like pashas on overstuffed sofas the colour of turquoise marzipan. Terry said suddenly: "Ask the waiter for a Coke can. Yer've looked after me good vis afternoon. I've got a little rock what I bought before I met yer. There's bound to be a bog in 'ere. Let's go an' do it in there."
The swallow-tailed waiter brought a bottle of Pepsi in response to my request for a can of Coke. So I had to leave Terry with his pot of Earl Grey, chatting amicably to a trio of Levantine businessmen seated at the next table, while I went in search of the necessary to the newspaper desk in the hotel foyer. I had no luck with drug-smoking paraphernalia there. But eventually, I managed to acquire a chilled can of Coca-Cola at a newsagents in Shepherd Market.
Back in the palm court Terry was sitting patiently where I had left him, a waiter hovering by his side, refilling his china teacup. I patted my jacket pocket. The boy's impish face lit up. After paying the extortionate bill, we retreated to the washroom where, luckily for us, the usually ubiquitous lavatory attendant was nowhere to be seen. We slipped into one of the veined marble cubicles. This was a far cry from the Irishman's flophouse north of Oxford Street.
Without a word, Terry prepared our "pipe" for the ceremony. The rock appeared on cue, stuck lightly to the tip of his glistening purple tongue. There was something almost sacramental about this silent ritual sharing. Forbidden fruit. The frisson of anticipation. A host. A chalice. We the devout communicants. I watched Terry' eyes as he took the first toke-a look of curious longing in them, lids so wide apart. Cloud of white ether on its fragile bed of ash. Ignited. Imbibed. A fire burning somewhere deep inside him. He exhaled into my face. I took the can. As I placed my half rock in position, Terry grabbed my left bicep and squeezed insistently.
Sweeping out of the Dorchester, filled once more with that all-consuming confidence which crack induces, I tipped the top-hatted door man a tenner I could ill afford before taking a taxi back to Soho. Terry had something he wanted to show me, he said, if I wanted to see it. But first I'd have to excuse him for an hour because he had some business with one of his regular punters who'd missed him during the short stay on remand in Feltham. I sat in the Coach and Horses wondering why the landlord Norman Balon employed such off-hand-if not downright impolite-bar staff. Terry returned some time later with a new stock of "dynamite rocks." "We're fat," he exclaimed. "The geezer couldn't get enough of me. Two 'undred notes ain't bad for a blow job, eh, Pete?" I nodded my approval. We dumped the shopping bags at a "drop" he knew by the French Protestant church in Soho Square. "An' now I'm gonna take you on a trip that'll blow yer 'ead off. Come on, mate. It's time to party."
There are maybe a dozen multi-storey and underground carparks scattered throughout the Soho and Bloomsbury areas. During the day they provide the most expensive parking in Britain. At night they are home to an army of disillusioned, disturbed, dispossessed youngsters, hooked on every hard drug known to man. When Terry led me into the first one over a high locked gate and through a damaged fire exit, I had every reason to believe I was being set up for a mugging. In the grey sharp-angled stairwell we passed ghoulish creatures who might have been guarding the gates of hell. Sitting alone, in pairs, laid out in stupors, indistinguishable from the heaps of rotting blankets around them, immersed in silent meditation, mumbled reveries and gibberish, they muttered and groaned in confused complaint as we pushed past them on our way down into the deeper and even darker levels of this secret place.
I needn't have worried. "This is the safest place in town-when yer wiv me," Terry told me, playing Virgil to my increasingly angst-ridden Dante. In the darkest corner of the deepest level we joined about a dozen others under the glow of reddish-orange pilot lights-beggars, thieves, rent boys, pimps, prostitutes, hustlers, homeless-junkies to a man (and woman), many of whose faces I recognised vaguely from my travels around the West End and the prison system. There was a Scot I remembered from Blundeston Prison (he didn't recognise me), dilapidated now, with only one lens in his spectacles, trying to coax a chip of rock from a wan little devil-eyed girl loading a pipe.
"That's Emma," Terry told me reverentially. "Don't be fooled by the school uniform. Part of the tricks of 'er trade-she's the best clipper in Soho. I know. I've worked wiv 'er." We settled down on the warm polished concrete floor. Terry produced one rock after another, sharing them with me and Emma, fighting off the unwanted advances of less affluent fellow crackheads, becoming more distant and distracted, yet hypersensitive to every noise around him. A crack-laden ballet unfolded before my eyes. There was little small-talk, only the hum of a generator and the crack ritual followed by all comers with concentrated religiosity. Lighters flashed intermittently, casting grotesque shadows across the floor and up the walls. The ragazzi of Soho, gathered like early Christian martyrs, lost in delusionary communal vagabondage-a soffit-side to life.
We kept on the move. Each carpark was the same. By the time we reached a private concern in Panton Street (our fifth or sixth stop) I was beginning to get the hang of things, and to understand more clearly why Steve and Billy couldn't ever have hoped to get by on their ?450 a week. This was just one night out of seven. "Rock licking" was a never-ending circle of irredeemable consumption. Terry had got through his ?200 in less than three hours. Emma was dispatched (with two minders) to "clip" another punter. She returned with four more rocks. I was persuaded to contribute another ?100 to the kitty. I had to change a cheque for foreign currency at one of the all-night bureaux de change in Coventry Street. Luckily the equally entrepreneurial dealers round the corner were happy to accept my French francs and Deutschmarks. Yet we still wanted more. Even I, temporarily carried away with the mad rush of the moment, craved with the rest of them.
"Give 'im any more an' 'e'll die of a frozen lung," I heard Emma warn Terry, as he kept refilling my pipe through to the early hours. In the basement of a carpark not a hundred yards from the Prospect offices in sedate Bedford Square, my mood darkened as dawn crept into our lair. Waves of paranoia crashed through my head. A spectral individual floated across the bunker, dancing a frenzied tarantella with a glittering switch blade in his hand, dashing from post to post, hiding coyly in the shadow before springing out again, astonished and astonishing. I was reminded of the Bedlam scene from Hogarth's A Rake's Progress. Here was I, the living embodiment of Tom Rakewell, voluntarily imprisoned among the doomed; desperate now to leave, to find my way out of this crepuscular underworld with my soul and body intact.
It wasn't difficult. By now Terry was entwined with Emma, blind to everything but his own insistent erection. I said I had a telephone call to make. I would rejoin them in a few minutes and buy them breakfast. I think we all knew I wouldn't be coming back. Wearily, I climbed a spiral staircase, trying to clear my head.
oxford street at dawn was a ghostly relic of a bygone age. A sudden intake of chill fresh air jerked my body into motor action. Lost in fractured, troubled thought, wandering aimlessly like a bemused extra-terrestrial, I was accosted in a spartan Lincolns Inn Fields by an old bag lady wrapped up against the cold in woollen fabric rags. The toothless hag screamed at me like a gin-laden harlot from the 18th century. "Who are you?" she raged repeatedly, "What do you want?" Taken aback by her rodomontade, I still had just about the presence of mind to try to calm her. "I'm a lawyer," I lied. "I want to help you." "Aaarghh" she shrieked. "You're a liar! You're the devil's advocate!" She scuttled away from me like a land-crab, whispering and screaming incomprehensible incantations to God knew who. I sat down on the steps of Sir John Soane's museum and smoked a calming cigarette.
By the time I arrived at a wet, unusually quiet but still litter-strewn King's Cross, I was sure of only one thing. I needed a bag of heroin and I needed it without any further delay. Oh dear. I had said at the start it was only going to be a matter of time. Now here I was, teetering again on the edge of oblivion, approaching a dealer out early with his wares, on the corner of York Way. "Twenty pound bag, please." I was in no mood for caution or any innocuous preamble. A quick exchange was made. Making sure nobody was following me, I sprinted up the steps of cathedral-like St Pancras, bought a KitKat from the newsagents and found an empty cubicle in the station lavatories. One quick bag, then home to bed in Peckham, I decided, as I pulled at the white plastic wrapping fastened tight at the top with strong green cotton. Heroin. The great equaliser. This would help me come down from the crack cocaine. I was beginning to get the nauseous twitchings in my stomach. Fucking hell. This cotton was taking forever to unravel. Aah. At last. I untwisted the plastic to ensure that not a grain of powder fell. Yep. Here we go.
And then it registered. No, it wasn't possible. I was on a bad trip. I picked up the morsel between my thumb and forefinger. I put it back down. My early morning friend had sold me a tiny ball of crumpled tissue.
