Junkie Love by Phil Shoenfelt Page B

so you would sit there, sweating and twitching, pretending you really weren’t too concerned whether you scored or not — when in truth, every nerve and fibre of your body was screaming out for the precious elixir that was now being flaunted right before your eyes.
    On several occasions I went with him to his house, and once he showed me his set of antique glass syringes, the type Sherlock Holmes would have used to inject himself with cocaine (“Purely for medicinal purposes, Watson”), and of which he was inordinately proud. He had a whole ritual for shooting up, andnothing could be allowed to interfere with this. In a room crowded with nappies, toys and drying laundry, and with the baby crying loudly for attention, he would carefully lay out the tools of his trade and prepare himself like a priest awaiting the presence of the Holy Spirit. Only afterwards, when he was satisfied that every last particle of the drug had been thoroughly absorbed into his bloodstream, could you talk to him again. The baby would be pacified, the room tidied, the dishes cleaned and life allowed to resume its normal flow — after which, finally, you would be allowed to score.
    Eventually, of course, the Regent’s Park shooting gallery was rumbled. A posse of police surrounded the lavatory building, just after Bela had bought half an ounce of new heroin and was busy in his office dividing it into smaller deals. Luckily, he had plenty of toilets to flush the stuff down, and with only a small amount of personal on him he got off with a six months suspended sentence. However, all his capital had gone, and the last time I saw him he was looking dirty and dishevelled, his clothes stank and he had been forced to sell his treasured set of glass syringes. He didn’t seem too bothered, though, accepting this set-back philosophically as part of the price to be exacted in the service of his master, Lord Heroin. As he shuffled off to search for the next half or quarter-gramme, with the same toothless and insane grin, I noticed he had a big, spreading stain in the seat of his grimy, fawn-coloured trousers.
    My main dealer, though, the person I bought quantity from, was Joe the Geordie. An archetypal Northern hard man, his place was like a fortress: he’d had a steel-reinforced double door fitted to his flat, and there were enough locks, keys and bolts to satisfy the warden of a maximum-security prison. Joe had been busted on several occasions in the past, and having done time inside was determined to avoid repeating the experience. Before he would allow me to buy from him, I had to meet him several times in various different pubs, so that he couldcheck me out and satisfy himself that I wasn’t part of some setup, and on the first occasion he even shook me down to make sure that I wasn’t carrying a wire for the police. After these pleasant and diverting formalities, I was finally accepted as being on the level and told the address to come to when I wanted to score. A telephone call had to be made first, though, and an elaborate but simplistic code followed, that would have fooled no-one listening in who was in possession of a more or less functioning brain — something along the lines of: “Hello, is Mr. Brown in please? Oh, he’s not — could you tell me what time he’ll be back, then?”; or, “Yes, I’d like to meet Mr. White, but I’d prefer it if Mr. Brown came along too”; or again, “A quarter past three would be okay, but half-past would suit me much better.”
    Joe had also had a video security camera installed above his front door, with a monitor in the bedroom, that gave him a perfect view of the hallway and whoever might be approaching, or lurking there. But even with all these precautions, the doorbell still had to be rung a certain number of times, and in a certain way, according to a code given over the phone before a visit (“two short, two long”), and which was changed each day. Without the correct code the door would not