My mother would have called it "navy." But it was an altogether more unusual shade of deep Prussian blue-sleekly tailored, double-breasted, three-quarter length, velvet collared-a cashmere overcoat which overwhelmed me with the desire to own it. That I hadn't the money to buy it never entered the equation. On the afterwave of the crack cocaine I had ingested minutes earlier, the coat already belonged to me. As I stared at it in the window of Crombie's exclusive emporium in Jermyn Street, I knew what I must do.
It was four days before Christmas, and the interior was decked out accordingly. Two immaculately dressed assistants were attending to a haughty-looking matron, deliberating over a selection of poplin cotton shirts piled high on the counter. The trio looked preoccupied enough as I swept past them with a nod of the head and a convivial "Good afternoon."
Heart beating preternaturally, I snatched the prize from its hanger and stuffed it into my capacious bag. I was just about to help myself to a grey number further down the rack, when I noticed the lens of a CCTV camera recording for posterity my impulsive hoist. As the drug furies raged inside me, chiding me for my idiocy, four burly security guards materialised out of nowhere, surrounding me before I had a chance to bolt for the door.
Like a pack of rugby forwards, the overweight swatsquad dived and felled me. The realisation of sure arrest and imprisonment sent my spirits plummeting into utter desolation. Christmas was the Holy Grail from which I was never destined to sup. And all because I had thought myself a Master of the Universe-cracked up, scagged up, totally fucked up-who really had to have that magnificent new overcoat to wear among the revellers on millennium eve.
Aeons ago. Or was it only late last summer? I was still a relatively fresh-faced, semi-addicted ex-con taking in the many wonders of the fin de millennium. Under tall irregular beeches and horse-chestnuts, on a quadrangle of grass in genteel Bloomsbury, I sat cross-legged trying to catch a glimpse of the much hyped solar eclipse. My companion that day was Rabbie, a misanthropic Dundonian ravaged by viral anti-bodies. Unlike me and the scores of office workers who had thronged the square at the appointed hour, Rabbie sat with his head bent in feverish concentration. He had no shoes and socks, and his faded blue jeans were rolled up to just beneath his knees. While the moon-blackened sun peeped shyly out at us, Rabbie battled with shaking hands to steady a well-used, bluntish hypodermic syringe, desperately seeking a vein in his foot rigid enough to take and hold the point of his heroin-charged needle.
It was a surreal tableau. The awestruck crowd beneath the darkening sky somehow reminded me of the Passion on Calvary. There was something of the Unrepentant Thief about Rabbie: stigmata from the rusting nails, the yellow skin and matted hair, the hollowed cheeks and wasted muscle. I had met him earlier that morning. We had both been scoring our gear from the same Yardie dealer down at King's Cross -the one with three gold teeth and a diamond stud in one nostril, who always stood by the newspaper vendor outside Thameslink, as blatant as a pizza-splash tie. One thing led to another, which was how we found ourselves, later the same afternoon, on the towpath of the Regent's Canal, where the trees form tunnels as they hang weeping into the still brown water.
As we sat by the side of the canal, passing the crack pipe back and forth, listening to the horseflies, keeping a careful watch for interlopers, I was wondering where I was going to sleep that night.
"Ye can stay in mah flat in Turnpike Lane," Rabbie suddenly suggested.
"I didn't know you had one," I said.
"Ah've had wen fi three moon now. Social worker sorted it for me wil me bein' HIV positive."
"So how come you aren't living there?"
"Prefer laife on the street. Only spent a naight there since ah got it." Rab grinned, showing awful teeth.
"What's it like?" I asked.
"Empty," he replied flatly. "Ye can ha'e it fae seventy poond a week, a month up front. Ah've got the keys in mah pocket. Ye can move in straight away."
Turnpike Lane tube was pure art deco, brick and dulled bronze lanterns, a monumental concourse and due rami staircase leading to the street. Around the entrance, the usual assortment of beggars and junkies hung about, selling half-price travelcards.
"Nearest frontlaine's Finsbury Park," Rab told me as we crossed the scrub, "but ah've a list o' local dealer's numbers. They serve up 24/7 roond here."
We took the West Green Road as far as Black Boy Lane, through a mile or more of "Little Turkey," as Rabbie called the area. In the coffee shops and backgammon parlours which lined the pavement, scores of dusky-skinned moustachioed men passed the time of day while sipping sweet tea from stemless sherry schooners, selling duty-free cigarettes from canvas hold-alls under the tables.
The ground floor flat was, as Rabbie had said-empty-apart from some basic furniture and a collection of spent hypos and carbonated silver spoons scattered about-the only evidence of his one night's occupancy. But the place was certainly habitable. It had a bedroom, sitting room and kitchen. There was a fridge and a cooker and even a little garden tucked away at the back in between two bedraggled laburnum trees. I paid Rabbie his month's rent up front, shook his hand, and took the keys. For the time being, the flat in Black Boy Lane would suit my purposes admirably. All I craved now was a bit of human company.
A week later I drew out my last ?200 from the Abbey National. Returning through Turnpike Lane tube at the rush hour, I found myself having to step over a young man. He had flame-red hair-so far as I could see, for he was partially hidden, hunched protectively under his windcheater; only a lock hung down over a pair of intense green-brown eyes. He didn't notice me at first, so preoccupied was he with a Martell bottle pipe loaded at the neck with crack cocaine. He was piping here. Openly. In front of so many unseeing commuters. I saw him, though. Eventually he saw me hanging around the entrance, and when he had finished his business, he approached me.
"You ain't got a spare smoke 'ave yer, mate?" he began, predictably enough. And of course, already entranced by a boy who could throw caution to the winds-"licking" rocks in the open and at this time of day-I had my packet of Marlboro reds out of my pocket before he had even finished his sentence.
"My favourite brand," he grinned, taking the proferred cigarette.
So I threw caution to the winds as well, and said, "All the better for booting with."
The flame-haired boy took in my appearance. Grey suit. Oxford brogues. Briefcase. Collar and tie.
"You use gear?" he asked with a raised eyebrow, a note of disbelief in his tenor voice. "I fought you was one o'vem boffin solicitors."
"Don't be fooled by appearances," I replied, to reassure him. "I've done 19 years inside." We looked each other straight in the eyes. He seemed to sense I was telling the truth.
"My name's Jay," he said brightly. "You fancy goin' somewhere a bit more private? Do some gear togevver? Away from all vis lot?"
As we walked, assuming that immediate intimacy which only comes with the shared knowledge of years of imprisonment, Jay told me his story. Abandoned as a baby, he'd been brought up in care, a "looked after" child who had suffered abuse in a number of homes before progressing on towards petty crime and the inevitable detention centres and young offenders' institutions. Jay was 22, had an intravenous addiction to both heroin and crack, and (he confided this after we'd broken the ice sufficiently, back at Black Boy Lane) was wanted on warrants from just about every police station north of Finsbury Park. He was a burglar. Homeless, penniless, friendless, but none of his ill fortune seemed to affect his natural optimism, which I found agreeably contagious. Such was the immediate empathy which sprang up between us, that Jay had only been at the flat an hour before I had made a decision and invited him to move in with me.
For the next four weeks, Jay and I lived exclusively for each other. From the very start he proved to be a conscientious flatmate. He was always keen to pull his weight-even if this meant going out thieving every night. There were times when I felt like the "kept" boy. I'd never lived with such a prolific criminal before. Jay would disappear the minute the clock struck two in the morning, and reappear, exhausted but ebullient, just before dawn. More often than not he would return laden with all manner of swag-designer clothes, wristwatches, radios, televisions, videos, telephones, answering machines, computers, printers, faxes, photocopiers. Jay didn't mind what he took from the scores of factories, offices and warehouses that he broke into. One morning he arrived home with half a dozen boxes of fancy buttons. Even these he managed to sell, with the same efficiency as everything else, through a network of bent Turkish mini-cab drivers along the West Green Road.
Our lifestyle was bizarre. Most of Jay's earnings were converted into crack and heroin behind the football pavilion in a local park. As long as we had a bag and a rock to wake up to, we were as happy as dot.com millionaires. I soon slipped back into my old criminal ways. I suppose you might have called us shift workers. The bedclothes never went cold as we went about our business. I'd do my thing in central London during the day; Jay would tour the suburbs by night. In between times were the drug binges, the exchange of confidences, and after a while the caresses-our mutual need and delight in each other's company gradually overcoming inhibition.
It used to scare me when Jay went to work on his own, so reliant had I become on his cheering company. I began to take him out with me to tap the much richer pickings available in Mayfair, St James's and the West End. We visited the National Gallery, the Royal Academy, the British Museum, the jewellers in Bond Street and the Burlington Arcade, the bookshops along the Charing Cross Road, the art dealers in Duke Street and Cork Street, Sotheby's and Christie's, the grand hotels and designer boutiques. We became familiar faces to the doormen of every smart watering-hole in town. None of them knew our darker purpose as we ducked and dived like Raffles and Bunny, two high-rolling aesthetes, keeping our eyes out for the main chance, helping ourselves to anything that wasn't stuck down.
The quest for drugs sometimes took us to Brixton. Strangers to the area, at first we had to seek out the mainmen, hidden between the trellis-stalls of the crescent market, lurking under the railway arches, loping in doorways along Coldharbour Lane. But the regulars soon got to know us as we turned up at the same time, day after day, to purchase their wares.
"Man with briefcase!" the lookout would shout as we turned the corner into the main drag of Brixton's frontline. And then we'd be inundated with competing dealers crying: "Buy mine! Buy mine!"
Between us, Jay and I were earning between ?400-500 a day. At the height of our enterprises, we had accounts with the biggest dealers in Brixton, Soho, King's Cross and Tottenham Court Road. They knew good customers when they saw them. Our tabs grew as long as our criminal records.
the leaves turned brown and fell on Turnpike Lane. Each evening we waded through higher piles of them on our way home. One night, Jay picked up from our letterbox a plain brown envelope. Alarm bells started ringing in my head straight away. Nobody sent me letters any more. Nobody knew where I was. This particular communication was addressed to "The Occupier" and marked URGENT in the top left corner. It came from the flat agency just 200 yards down the road. Because no rent had been paid for the last three months, it informed us, the agency had no alternative but to serve notice to quit the property. As all previous warnings had been ignored, no further correspondence would be entered into. We had seven days, the letter concluded, before the locks were changed and the bailiffs sent in.
Bastard! My buoyant mood sank without trace as the truth of what had happened became obvious. Rabbie, the benevolent White Knight of the Regent's Canal, must have taken the rent money and "done a runner." No wonder there had been neither sight nor sound of him since the day he'd handed over the keys. I'd been duped. What to do now? As the day of ejection drew closer there seemed only one option.
"Gorgeous" George, my erstwhile best pal and co-defendant, had broken my heart several weeks after my release from prison, when he brought back to the room we were sharing in Shepherd's Bush a "reformed" prostitute he'd picked up on the streets of Soho. After spending the night screwing her on a mattress not three feet away from where I lay alone in bed, he declared that he had "fallen 'ead over 'eels in love whif 'er" and that he'd asked her to move in with us. In a jealous rage I'd issued George an ultimatum. He could either stay with me or stay with Nicola, but never could he stay with both of us at the same time-at least not in the room in Shepherd's Bush, which was almost as cramped as the cell I had only lately vacated. It had taken George only seconds to choose. I was kicked into touch while he and Nicola waltzed off up the Yellow Brick Road. They were now living together in wedded bliss, two stops further north on the Piccadilly Line.
Jay was against it from the start. He listened, and then suggested that we buy a camper van and head for the open road. Yet despite my misgivings about engineering an expedient rapprochement, I persuaded him that calling on George wasn't such a bad idea. Although we hadn't spoken for two months, I felt sure that George would never see me on the streets after everything we'd been through together. We packed our cases and bade quite a sad farewell to Black Boy Lane. Jay took me to the crack house behind Wood Green shopping centre. There we stocked up with rocks to bribe our way into George's.
Bounds Green is a suburban middle class enclave of Victorian and Edwardian villas bordering on the North Circular Road. George and Nicola had moved into a house his father owned. We noticed straight away that there were tiles missing from the roof. Its walls were splattered with pigeon droppings; the windows were so dirty that you couldn't see through them. In the nine foot square front garden, someone had dumped a skipful of builder's rubbish into which the property seemed to be irretrievably sinking. This extraordinarily crooked house was set halfway along an otherwise nondescript red brick terrace.
"Don't look like there's no one in," Jay said, once more resigned to the fate of the homeless. We were just about to trudge off again when the heavy front door creaked open. There stood an emaciated Nicola, wearing one of George's T-shirts. Her face looked hard and unforgiving. All made up with nowhere to go.
"E's norrin," she said in her flat Yorkshire accent, looking me up and down with 'some distaste. It had started to rain. We were wet and beginning to shiver.
"Will he be long? Can we come in and wait?"
"I don't fuckin' know. What you want, any road?"
"To speak to George. It's business, Nicola."
Nicola cast her critical eye over Jay, then reluctantly beckoned us inside.
We waited for a full two hours, during which time the awkward silences were punctuated only by Nicola's insistent whinings for heroin. George finally turned up, drunk as a lord, after an evening spent downing pints at The Faltering Full-Back theme pub in nearby Palmers Green. To my surprise (and Jay's and Nicola's obvious disapproval) he kissed me full on the lips when he stumbled in, before launching a vitriolic attack on my failure to stay in touch.
"Wassamatterwhifyer?" he complained, maudlin and lachrymose. "Can't yers pickupaphone and call us?"
Eating considerable humble pie while sharing our crack with the inseparable couple, I explained that Jay and I were now an item, presently homeless. If it wasn't too much trouble, we wondered whether we might doss down with George and Nicola until we could find somewhere more suitable? The crooked house was Tardis-like in its interior proportions. Willing to take us in, despite "vee airtanairt liberties yer took," George led us upstairs to a spacious room with a kingsize double bed.
Quel m?nage! Four such disparate and at times desperate characters living under the same partial roof. Notwithstanding his avowed heterosexuality, George was immediately jealous of Jay. Jay was jealous of George. Nicola was jealous of me and I was quite frantically jealous of Nicola. There were, not surprisingly, constant squabbles and arguments. George was arrested one night when a slanging match with Nicola turned nasty. Nicola was collared by the vice squad a couple of nights later, trying to clip a punter in a West End hotel. I was picked up one day with a briefcase full of law books I was attempting to hoist from Her Majesty's Stationery Office in Holborn. Barely a week went by when one or another of us wasn't under lock and key. Amazingly, the courts kept granting bail. Jay was the first to be temporarily remanded in custody. He spent two weeks away, after a store detective in Lillywhite's clocked him filling a bag full of Nike tracksuits. When he returned to me after his "lie down," Jay confessed that he loved me.
a few days later I awoke to find his side of our bed empty. At first I thought he might have sneaked out on one of his nocturnal expeditions. I was about to turn over and go back to sleep when I heard whimpering from outside the door. On investigation I discovered Jay, naked, slumped in a corner against the puke-striated toilet bowl, tears streaming down his unshaven cheeks. By his side the drug "machines" lay scattered like toys of which a child had tired. There was his blackened spoon and filter, the bag of citric acid he used to break down his heroin, his needles without their orange caps, the last crack pipe scraped as clean as a work house dinner bowl. He looked up at me like a boy recently beaten. There was absolute terror in his eyes.
"What's wrong?" I asked quietly, trying to coax him out of his corner. "What's the matter, Jay? It's the middle of the night."
"I can't stop 'em comin' airt. They're everywhere. Crawlin' all over me."
He was picking at the ends of his fingers. He kept screwing up his fists, wiping them down the wall in desperation.
"You can't stop what coming out?"
"They're like black worms. Dairn me finger nails. They're slitherin' all over. Can't you see 'em?"
He held out both his hands. I could see nothing. I took hold of them. Examined each finger separately. "There's nothing there, Jay. It's just a bad dream. You're having a nightmare." I tried to console him.
He burst into tears again, becoming hysterical.
"I'm not! I'm not! They're fuckin' there, Pete! 'Elp me get rid of 'em, mate. They're gonna poison me." I took hold of his trembling body.
"Nothing's going to poison you. I won't let any harm come to you. You trust me, don't you?" I asked, carrying him back into the bedroom, talking all the time, trying to calm him, reassure him.
After a mollifying fix of heroin we went back to bed. He had come down sufficiently from the crack high to analyse the now receding hallucinations.
"Crack psychosis," Jay said, clinging to me for dear life. "I really fought it was 'appenin', you know. It ain't the first time. I've 'ad it before. Last time I fought it was spiders tryin' to get in through 'oles in the walls. Doin' too much of this shit. Let's try an' get off it. I'm tellin' yer, Pete. It'll drive us mad in the end."
Or kill us, I thought, but kept my opinion to myself.
Crack psychosis: Jay had said it. But his wasn't the only manifestation. Both George and Nicola used crack as often as Jay and I did, and despite our differences we would gather at the end of the day and sit in a circle around stolen scented candles, passing the pipe round, talking drug-induced gibberish. As each week passed, the line between fact and fantasy grew blurred. Waves of paranoia swept through the crooked house, as the wind rattled the rafters and banged the doors and windows against their frames. Suspicious of the slightest noise, one of us would have to get up every few minutes to go and search every room in the house for intruders, imaginary enemies, or the police, who seemed in our delusions to lurk in the shadows at the bottom of the garden, ready to break down our barricades and arrest us. As time went on and winter set in, our rocks appeared to diminish in size and quality. We never seemed to get as high as the time before on the same amount. We always had to smoke just that little bit more.
The division of each stone into four equal piles brought out the worst in all of us. "I'll 'ave vat one," George would say, grabbing what he saw as the largest quarter.
"No. That's mine," Nicola would object, fighting for possession.
"Ang abairt. 'Ang abairt," Jay would butt in. "You cut it up. We should get the first choice." And what none of them knew, if I'd brought the stones back from the West End, was that on the way home I would have already shaved a couple of pipes off for myself and smoked them in the toilets at Finsbury Park.
The crooked house turned into a warren of intrigue. Every time my back was turned, Nicola would try to poison Jay's mind against me. She told him I was only using him for sex. Said I'd never love anyone but George. Then George would come to me and say that Jay was going behind my back, hiding drugs away from me, had another boyfriend, had stolen money from Nicola's purse, had only come to stay with me in the first place because he thought I was an easy touch. So confused and paranoid had we become that we actually began to believe what they were saying. Jay and I stopped making love. Grew cold to each other's touch. Each day I began to stay out on my own for longer and longer, spending the money I earned on rocks for rent boys instead of bringing it back to share with Jay.
it was only later that I discovered that the burglary had been set up by George and Nicola to cause more mischief between Jay and me. But at the time I genuinely believed that a third party had broken into our house, stealing choice items from our room, while leaving the rest of the place untouched. My television was gone, and the computer and printer that Jay had stolen especially for me so that I could continue to meet my deadlines. Also missing were a pair of heavy duty Caterpillar boots, six brand new Thomas Pink shirts, some expensive aftershave lotion, a couple of slub silk ties and a fur-lined leather flying jacket.
"It's gotta be Jay, ain't it?" George suggested as we went through a list of possible suspects. " 'E was vee only one who knew vair was anything worf nickin'. Where is 'e anyway? Usually back by vis time, 'specially if 'e knows yer on yer way back whif gear."
Having sown his poisonous seeds, he took out several rocks "what Nicola clipped dairn ver Cross vis afternoon."
They say that a conman is easily conned. Come three in the morning, with no sign of Jay's return, I had become firmly convinced by their circumstantial "evidence" that my missing lover was the culprit.
Jay did not appear that night, nor did he show his face the whole of the following day. It became painfully obvious (even more so, after Nicola "discovered" more money missing from her purse) that he had helped himself to my things and made good his escape.
"Don't let 'im in if 'e does come back," George warned me as I shared out that day's spoils. "Never did like 'im right from ver minute I set eyes on 'im. Better off on yer own. One less mairf to feed, innit."
It was awful having to sleep on my own again. When I got into bed I cried myself to sleep, listening to the groans of sexual ecstasy coming through the wall from George and Nicola's room. Sometime in the early hours, two full days after his disappearance, Jay poked his head sheepishly around the door. In a fug of semi-consciousness I watched him prowl about the room, rummaging about in the darkness, as if he was looking for something he'd left behind.
"Where the fuck have you been?" I demanded, springing to life now I had him in my sights. "Come back for a second helping, have you? Spent the money you got for my stuff already?"
When I turned on the light I could see that he looked ill and withdrawn-white-faced, wide-eyed, a suppurating sore on the corner of his mouth.
"What you talkin' abairt?"
"The fucking break-in, Jay, as if you didn't know. Yesterday, while I was in town and George and Nicola were at his mother's. You cleaned me out. Just couldn't wait till I got home with the gear."
"I ain't taken none of yer stuff," he protested. "I've just bin released from Tottenham copshop. They picked me up yesterday for goin' equipped. Pete, mate, I'm in trouble. I need some gear."
"I haven't got any," I lied. "And I don't believe you. Why don't you fuck off back to Turnpike Lane? Get one of your mates to bail you a bag."
Jay looked wild. His hair was all over the place.
"Your fuckin' 'ead's goin'," he shouted. "Why would I break into me own airse? I've got money anyway. Just can't find a dealer that's on duty."
"I've got exactly what I need for the morning. You're not getting any of it."
"Am I not? Listen, Peter." There was a threatening edge to his voice now. "Don't talk to me like I'm some sort of mug cunt. You can see I'm cluckin'."
The more I looked at him, the more I wanted to give in. But I stuck to my guns.
"I've told you, Jay. You're getting fuck-all else out of me. Now fuck off and let me get some sleep."
I turned over and pulled the quilt over my head. A moment later Jay ripped it right off. He stood by the bedside, teeth bared, glowering.
"You'll either give me that gear or I'll..."
"Or you'll what? You trying to threaten me?"
"Yes," he snarled. "I fuckin' am. I mean it, Peter. Don't fuckin' test me."
"Don't make me laugh," I sneered. "Who do you think you're talking to? I'm a..."
But before I had a time to tell him what I was, he grabbed one of my legs and pulled me off the bed. Before I had a chance even to put up my arms, he had landed half a dozen solid punches to either side of my face. I cried out for him to stop.
"The fuckin' gear!" he was yelling now, tearing at my throat. "Where's the fuckin' gear? You want me to stop?" Bang. Bang. Another two blows crashed into my temple.
"All right! All right! I'll give you the gear. It's under the mattress."
As abruptly as he had laid into me, Jay released his grip, threw the mattress on its end and grabbed the small package of heroin. Cowering in the corner, fighting to regain my breath, I watched as he quickly gathered together the implements he needed to put his fix together.
Every time I tried to say anything he cut in viciously.
"I fuckin' loved you!" he yelled. "Look what you've made me do."
I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. My face was bloody and my heart pounding. I had to go feasting with panthers, didn't I? Now look what had happened. I was a snivelling nervous wreck.
"I want you out of the house by eight in the morning. And so does George," I added for good measure. "Don't let me see you about when I get up. We're finished. Got it?"
I grabbed the quilt and a pillow and stormed out of the room. A semi-tumescent George, and Nicola, stood at their bedroom door looking vaguely amused as I stomped past. The rest of the night I spent locked in the bathroom with its overflowing chemical toilet.
Expecting Jay to have gone by the time I surfaced, stiff and aching, sometime in the midmorning, it came as a surprise to find him playing Happy Families, cosily drinking coffee with a convivial George and Nicola. They all looked up when I walked in.
"You've got a right couple o' shiners there," George said. "Listen, mate. We made a mistake abairt Nicola's money. She fairnd it later on last night behind the wardrobe."
"An' Jay couldn'ta done the burglary," Nicola told me. "'E's gorris bail sheet from t'police station. 'E were in custody all t'time."
I was gobsmacked. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I looked at Nicola. Jay was loading a pipe.
"But you told me... you said..."
"Well we all make mistakes, don't we, mate. It was probably vat little firm dairn ver road what did ver drum. Certainly weren't Jay, anyway."
I felt Lilliputian.
"Jay. I'm sorry," I began.
"Fuck off," he said bluntly, without looking at me.
Loading his pipe, then passing it to George, he said again: "Fuck off. It's all over whif us. You ain't nuffink to me. Lovers trust each other."
I wasn't in the mood for remonstration. Returning to the bathroom I stuffed what was left of my belongings into my suitcase, feeling sick at the thought of betrayal. Quite what they were trying to achieve, or why they were doing it, confused and bewildered me. The sound of laughter from the other room drifted in. I felt isolated. Abandoned. I'd lost George to Nicola. Now I'd lost Jay as well. I didn't know where I was going to go-only knew I had to go. Without a word of farewell I picked up my bag and left the crooked house.
In a daze I boarded the train at Bound's Green, slumped down in my seat and stared at a point in the middle distance. A host of memories came back to me. Jay and George, my two lost boys. Nicola, the scheming femme fatale. There she was, seductively flashing her tattooed left buttock at me. There was George, the day I got out of prison, seated next to me on the steps by Cleopatra's Needle, full of crack, leaning over to kiss me as the black Thames water lapped at our feet. There was Jay. His smile. He and I returning to Black Boy Lane with a bag full of washing we'd stolen from the launderette. There was his frustration: tramping up and down Bond Street, seeking a shop that stocked hypodermics. There was his delight, when he gave me the fine leather briefcase he'd stolen from Fortnum's; there was his vigour, his determination, his sexual prowess, his flaws...
I disembarked at King's Cross, slamdanced my way through the milling crowds, dropped the big case off at left luggage, then made for the welcoming anonymity of the West End. I found a dealer in Leicester Square who supplied me with three bags of heroin and three large rocks of crack. The whole world seemed to be in state of celebration as I wandered towards Piccadilly Circus. Christmas shoppers with gaudy bags and packages hurried past me. I needed sanctuary-a bolthole to smoke the crack cocaine. In my trance-like state I walked west, stopping when I arrived at the church of St James on Piccadilly.
Inside it was dark and cool. I sat at the back of the empty church, staring at the Grinling Gibbons altarpiece, listening to the organist in his loft, practising what sounded like a Bach fugue. Carefully, I loaded a rock on to a Coke can. Holding the lighter up to the crack I inhaled slowly. Very slowly. Yes. That was better. As the music crescendoed, the pith melted into the ash. My whole body trembled as the fumes filled me and held me in their adrenalising grip.
Outside, on Jermyn Street, the cold air bit into my face. The last time I had walked this way, Jay had been by my side. We'd finally found him a hypodermic syringe and had sneaked into the toilets of the Cavendish Hotel to prepare his fix. Thinking about this, savouring the high of crack cocaine, I found myself standing still, staring in at the window of Crombie's. The rest, as they say, is history. n
l Peter Wayne is currently in a drug rehabilitation unit in Plymouth. Jay received three years imprisonment and is awaiting sentence for five more burglaries. George and Nicol
