I drop pills, you drop pills we’re all dropping pills and it’s just f*****g fantastic isn’t it. White ones mostly but you need Valium after, I once trekked to a flat somewhere near the Ferrier estate maybe, maybe Downham I can’t recall exactly where now. Could’ve been someone’s mum's house, colonized by bands of wastrel teenage boys whilst they take their extended holidays in the south of France your children are killing themselves. The lights dimmed, weed on the table. Some guy with an awful woolen jacket, patterned, hippy style is the best way I can describe it. The lights are dimmed and when I see it initially I think maybe he has a birthmark on his face, he’s hunched down at the table, not looking in any particular direction, maybe he’s skinning up. As his head rises I realize that a gigantic scab that runs partially down onto the bridge of his nose dominates his forehead but nobody alludes to it initially.
“So you got Valium’s?” Says Patrick, or maybe Bennet.
“Yeah man, just got back from Egypt and s**t.” This guy slurs in reply, especially the ‘yeah’ of the sentence, which is exaggeratedly elongated. “Went around all Cairo and s**t, can just walk into a f****n’…a f****n’…a f****n’…a f****n’…” The guy pauses to compose himself “…chemist.” Then he stops staring at a fixed point somewhere behind us.
“And what?” Says Patrick, forever the pragmatist; the seemingly unhinged state of this guy isn’t going to stop him from having a conversation with the guy. Scab man’s vision comes telescoping back into focus on the crowd before him.
“Just buy that s**t over the counter man, as much as you want.” Is the pretty uninspiring finish to his sentence.
It’s late at night and it’s dark outside. It might be a Wednesday, we are not at a party, there is no explanation of who all the other people in the room are. Patrick and Bennet wanted to come here and buy Valium because that’s what we do now, everybody’s popping pills, doing pills. Pill’s innit. So we’ve come here, wherever here is and now we’re talking to this guy who none of us have met before. I want to be at home with my parents, I don’t even have any money to spend on Valium and I’m pretty sure Patrick or Bennet aren’t going to give me any of theirs. I want to ask this guy where his parents are, why he’s got all these people in his house? Is he ok? Does he want them here? Is he fully in control of his life? These are the things that I want to ask him but instead I say:
“What happened to your face man?”
His myopic gaze saunters onto me. He seems to regard me with a measure of suspicion, perhaps there’s anger buried deep beneath his tranquilized state. As if his emotions are battering at the back of his hypothalamus trying to break through but he simply won’t allow it. The whole reason he got into this state was to do away with the tedious matter of emotions. He grins broadly and starts to speak again.
“F****n’ noshed two bluies then topped it off with a yellow the other night, was just standing in the kitchen and then, and then just f****n’ lights out. Smashed my face on the kitchen counter woke up blood everywhere man.”
“Rar” says Patrick. This utterance is delivered with such a lack of enthusiasm or engagement with the causality that could’ve led to such a chain of events. To Patrick this is simply a tedious aside in his ongoing mission to buy prescription drugs cheaply. I stare at the guy who is still smiling.
“Are you ok?” I say.
I notice a couple of people in the room glance over when I say this, and Bennet’s back stiffens up. I have crossed a codified line and I know it but something compels me to ask the guy. To engage with the status of someone’s emotions is a no go area in whatever this is. The unspoken agreement is that we are here to blot out pain, no matter if it is valid or not. You can be getting beaten by your dad or just simply not love your daddy and want to detach, the key is to never ever discuss it. This brings a democracy to the proceedings of taking drugs, any kind of drug. No one wants to hear about your pain, they want to communally bask in the absence of it.
His grin doesn’t falter for a moment.
“Yeah. It’s two pounds for the blues and five for the yellows. Seven blues for a tenner, four for fifteen on the yellows.”
“What’s the milligram-age?” Says Bennet.
“Yellow’s are five, no idea about the blues but they’re definitely weaker.” He says suddenly startlingly elegant in his delivery.
Despite all my compassion I want the Diazepam in me. All posturing and theorizing, my resentment of Bennet and Patrick to allow me a membrane to separate myself from them but why am I here wherever here is at 9pm on a rainy Wednesday or Thursday night in November? In Downham or Brockley or Eden Park? Why have I ventured beyond the confines of my safe existence, the pork with the three mustard’s, the patio door locked tightly at night, the tiles on the floor where the guinea pigs used to s**t and piss when they were let out of the cage? What am I doing here?
I want the Diazepam and I don’t have the money to pay for it.
