Down and Out on Murder Mile by Tony O'Neill

her unwilling confidant. She continually found excuses to come into the garage and bore me stupid with the minutiae of her life. After a week of this I started giving serious consideration to leaving the job.
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    I lasted another month. The job was easy, and the money was useful. But the main reason I had for liking the job—not having to deal with other people—was now irreconcilably ruined. One day after drinking my methadone in the chemist’s I walked out onto the street and turned right instead of left. I went to McDonald’s instead of Stoker’s house and bought breakfast. Once I was half an hour late for work I left the restaurant and called RJ and set up a meet to buy some coke and heroin.
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    My time of being an employed citizen was, for now at least, over.
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    The kicker was that a month or so later I was watching the local news. The police raided the video shop right across from where Amy lived with her idiot boyfriend and her little shit children, after a tip off that people were selling crack cocaine out of there. What they found was a sophisticated operation where crack was on sale for bulk purchases. The bundles where stashed away in VHS copies of the latest movies. In the back room they were producing the rocks from powder cocaine in a mini production line. I laughed to myself, wondering if Amy had seen this yet.
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    Poor, dumb Amy.

14
NA
    Jack was an eighteen-year-old kid with a shaved head that I thought at first was because of an affiliation to skinhead culture, but which I later discovered was because he was deeply ashamed of his natural, bright ginger locks. The first time I heard him speak was quite typical: it was during the Tuesday-night Narcotics Anonymous meeting in Camden. It took place in a filthy, cold room above a community center that everybody referred to as “the crack house.” He shared a long, meandering story in which he came across as a rather buffoonish, comical character. In this story, some friends set him up on a blind date. As he was “sober” he had assumed his friends would be decent enough to set him up with a similarly sober girl. I remember at this point wondering if there was such a thing as a sober eighteen-year-old in London. It seemed entirely possible thatJack was the only one—a kind of twelve-step Omega Man.
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    Anyway, the story continued. Of course the girl, Louise, was not sober. In fact, she showed up piss drunk to meet Jack. When he told her that he didn’t drink or do drugs, she just smiled and said, “That’s okay mate—all the more for me!”
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    I smiled. Nobody else did. What was it with fucking NA meetings? Nobody had a sense of humor.
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    The story continued and at one point featured a stone-cold sober Jack holding the girl’s hair as she vomited twelve Bacardi Breezers and a döner kebab into the piss-stinking toilets of the Intrepid Fox on Wardour Street. The tale culminated on a night bus at two in the morning, with the obliterated Louise throwing strawberries (I can’t remember where the strawberries came from) at the assorted drunks, psychos, hard men, and yardies riding the N87 to Wandsworth that night.
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    â€œWhat the fuck are you doing?” Jack whined, trying to grab her wrists before somebody beat the living shit out of him.
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    â€œI’m sharing the strawberries, dickhead!” came the reply.
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    I laughed. Everybody looked at me, Jack included. I held up my hands in a kind of I’m sorry but it was funny! way. He seemed genuinely aggrieved. I talked to him afterward, and that was when Irealized that Jack wasn’t even an addict. He was attending NA meetings because he thought he smoked too much weed. I shook my head sadly at him.
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    â€œYou’re eighteen,” I said as gently as possible. “You’re meant to smoke too much weed!”
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    I had offended Jack for the second time that night. He frowned and shot me an