“Are
you not going to do up all of it?” demanded Beni narkily.
“I was going to save some for later
– for both of us, I mean.” Not for the first time, Craig was a little taken
aback that someone wasn’t in tune with his thoughts without his having to
explain them. “And I thought you could do without your neighbours seeing the
paramedics arrive.”
“If you’re worried about dropping, take
less yourself and give the rest to me – or don’t give me any at all. I’m an old
man with old veins. I’m not pricking my skin for half a twenty.”
Craig sighed, shrugged, and emptied the rest
of the deal into the spoon.
“And by the way,” added Beni. “If I drop, don’t call the ambulance. Just
wash your hands, wipe off your fingerprints, and lock the door behind you.”
This old trip. “Not
a chance,” Craig shot back, smiling an impatient grimace. “You have my
permission to kill yourself, but not while I’m watching.”
The expression of his readiness to die was
nothing unusual for Beni. Neither was the petulant assertion of rights over someone’s
generosity. First, there was that manic euphoria most junkies default to having
decided, despite themselves, to score. And then, he’d lived his entire life in
a world of influence and favours. Put simply, he saw it as his just recompense
for a phone-call and a safe place to shoot.
Like most old gangsters and stand-over men he
was on the bones of his arse, although a small trust account allowed him to
live decently – if frugally. And old habits are hard to break.
Some people wondered why Craig liked Beni,
but he did. Then again, Craig had never had Beni put a gun to his head. Neither
did Craig own a small business where Beni could walk in and threaten to go
berserk if he wasn’t given coffee or a meal.
He hadn’t always been a gangster – or a
depressive – the war did that. He had seen his country occupied and torn apart.
He had seen his brother ambushed and killed. And, along with the bullet wound
and the mortar shrapnel lodged in his legs and chest, he’d carried away a new streak
of cynical ruthlessness – a brooding sense that life eviscerates everyone; that
all you can do is take whatever you need, by force if necessary. Suddenly, vice
seemed more natural to him. The war rumbled over his ideals. It scorched and
blighted the future, imprisoning him in eternal present scourged by incessant memory.
The tragedy was that Beni hadn’t needed to
fight. He’d gotten out. But his family were active in government and defence,
and his travels had made him a believer in causes. He was hardly a Kennedy but,
in a small post-colonial state where land ownership and military service still
counted, he was close enough. He was, he knew, a prince; a son of the families; born not to rule, but to govern. Tradition,
duty and conviction brought him back. His older brother received him with
surprise – and pride – and Beni went to work alongside him in the secret
service.
Until then he’d been seeing the world. A
stint in the mines of Western Australia had led to a position in the union, and
then membership of the Communist Party. On learning he was fluent in several
languages, and could make himself understood in several more, the Party gave
him a press-pass and sent him abroad. Most of Beni’s thirties were spent in
passionate, purposeful travel. Working as a journalist, translator and
part-time intelligence gatherer, he’d seen Paris and London, Moscow and Vienna.
He had reported from Latin America and South-East Asia. He’d played baccarat in
Monaco, and fallen in love at least once on every continent. Before the war
Beni was both a joyful liver and that rare thing, a practical revolutionary.
Before the war, Beni wasn’t a junkie.
Not everyone knew these things about him. Not
everyone knew that his flinty rapacity existed side by side with a
fundamentally over-generous nature. People who rolled their eyes when they saw
Craig paying for Beni’s coffee didn’t know that, sometimes, Beni fed Craig for
days at a time. Nor did they know how he worried whenever the younger man was
ill. And they certainly wouldn’t have recognised the figure Craig had found one
night, upon returning to Beni’s flat, after going out without his phone.
It was his turn at having some cash, so Craig
had gone to buy them a meal. Finding nothing open close-by, he’d walked some
distance to a pizzeria he knew. All up he was gone about an hour, maybe a
little more. Now, while it wasn’t unheard-of for Craig to become preoccupied
and lose tranches of time, on this occasion he happened to know just how long
he’d been away – he’d checked the TV guide before going out. When he opened the
door, the pizza box still warm against his forearm, he saw on television the
start of the movie for which he’d hoped to be back in time. He also saw his
friend pacing, panicked and teary, up and down the living room. Beni had nodded
off over a book and, waking, had misjudged the time by an hour. The sound of
Craig’s ringtone from the kitchen counter when he’d tried to call and check on
him turned foreboding to the certainty of disaster. Obviously, he’d been mugged
or had overdosed somewhere.
Yes, that would definitely surprise some
people.
It didn’t surprise Craig. Theirs was an odd
friendship, but a friendship it was; the kind formed between types who know and
like a lot of people, but have few real friends; who form few attachments but,
when they do, form them strong and deep. They had helped one another through
bouts of depression, each knowing when to prod his friend into the world and
sunlight and when to leave him the hell alone. They talked about politics and history,
books and music, science and religion, women and misfits they knew. They drank
a lot of coffee and spoke in French; Beni, fluent if a little rusty; Craig,
much the same way he spoke English – in a monotone, either too fast or too
slow, too soft or too loud, and nowhere near as well as he read it or wrote it.
Despite a vast difference in age and class,
culture and experience they were, in many ways, remarkably alike. Both were
attractive to women, though with little idea why or what to do about it. Both
could be considered either brooding or hilarious, depending on the day or the hour
in which you caught them. And they shared a basic existentialist philosophy –
which though never quite breaking free of a Catholic education rendered it, at
least, a kind of poetry. Neither believed in heaven or hell; neither was
morbidly suicidal. They both simply accepted the Algerian’s take on Sisyphus: that
every day you decided anew whether to keep pushing the boulder up the hill or
let it roll back over you; all other considerations flowed authentically from
that. You made the best decisions you could, and accepted the consequences.
Beni kept a chosen death as his last reserve,
to be employed when all else was exhausted. His father, the Commandant, had
done the same thing. Widowed and sick but still strong enough to exert his will,
he had, Beni said, “planned it like a military operation”. Finalising his
affairs and waiting till his youngest son had left the country, he’d just stopped
taking his medication. Within a month he was found, upright in his favourite
chair, dead.
Alongside the grief and resentment, Beni admired
that. He planned, one day, to go with the same kind of dignity – though
possibly with a little more drama. He liked the idea of smuggling a syringe,
loaded with a gram of coke and a gram of heroin, on to a sky-diving plane. One
last monumental rush before his heart exploded in terminal free-fall had a nice
ring. It seemed like poetry. It was also why he wanted to preserve his last
workable vein.
So, no, you didn’t have to worry about what
he might do if you left him alone at the wrong moment. He talked in terms of a
few years. “Who wants to live much past seventy?” he’d say. Craig could respect
that; even offered to help, if the need arose. The trouble was that Beni
mistrusted his kismet. For all his military planning talk, he was certain he’d
be taken in some absurd accident – he’d get his toothbrush stuck in his throat
and choke to death, or fall under a bus after tripping over a Chihuahua.
“Here,” Craig tendered. Beni snatched the
syringe and, clenching his fist, jammed it straight into the vein that bulged
on his knuckle. He always did it that way. Craig liked to be a little more meditative.
He liked the ritual; tying-off his arm, swabbing the injection site and
flicking the bubbles from the fit while the alcohol evaporated from his skin;
the careful, clean insertion and the bloom of dark blood like an undersea plant
in the liquid. Scoring was usually impulsive, so he liked the using to be
deliberate. Beni would soon start talking again. Craig adjourned to the
bathroom and closed the door.
Sitting legs crossed on the edge of the
toilet, he withdrew the spike, tongued the blood in his elbow-crook, applied a
cotton ball and waited. His eyes fell on the electrical cord, plugged in and
switched on, snaking down to the part-open vanity drawer.
Every morning Beni would wash his face and
shave, then wet his hair and reach from his puddle for the blow-dryer. As he
closed his eyes and felt the heroin burst warm then cool in his brain, Craig
decided that this time he wouldn’t unplug it.
