Christmas at the Sharp End
We started
at about three in the afternoon. We
wanted to get the obligatory long-distance phone call to the folks out of the
way early enough. Well, I say phone call,
Baz’s brother was technologically savvy enough to have Skype so he was able to
make a free call over the internet. Mine
cost me a fortune, but it was good talking to my Ma.
Me and
Barry got up before noon because if we’d got up any earlier on Christmas day it
would have been a bit too depressing. Our
flatmate was away with his girlfriend and we were happy enough to be rid of
him. If he had somebody to be with then
good luck to him. Like us, he was a
stranger in a strange land, though he was born in this country he was from the
other side of it and as much a blow in as myself, from a shitty wee estate in a
shitty wee town at the edge of Belfast
and Baz, a dirty Dub but a good lad all the same.
We pottered
about the flat with some kid’s Christmas film blaring in the background and
generally gave the place a bit of a square round before the other two
came. We knew it was going to get
extremely messy later but it didn’t seem cool to just leave it as it was. We’d no tree but we had a few lights up
around the walls. They were actually
there from Halloween and were shaped like pumpkins and Witches Hats but somehow
they looked the part.
I still had
half a take-away box of Chicken Noodles from the Christmas-Eve carry out so I
nuked them in the microwave and ate them in front of the big widescreen TV we
had in the flat. Not exactly the best
Christmas breakfast I’ve ever had but it tasted good and was a bit better than
the “meat” pie Barry had in the oven. We
ate our stuff and watched the Bill Murray classic Scrooged. Great movie, must
have seen it dozens of times but it was only that time when I was watching it
that I realised that the title of the film was a sort of play on the word
“Screwed”.
About
halfway through the film, in the middle of the scene where the guy with the big
ugly face that used to be in that American punk band, you know the one Malcom
McLaren managed before the ‘Pistols, anyway your man that was doing the
cabbie-Ghost-of-Christmas-Past takes Bill Murray back to his childhood, and the
door goes. It’s Aleks, the guy that
lives in the bedsitter upstairs. He’s
from some place in one of the nastier countries at the fringes of Europe , bit like ourselves, just the other end of the
continent. We don’t know him too well
but we knew he’d be kicking around that flat on his own upstairs being all miserable
and killing our buzz if we didn’t have him down here with us. Besides at least he seems to have got the
message about what we were at, he’d brought his own drink for it and his face
lit up when he saw we were watching Scrooged.
“Yes, this
is good one, with the Ghost-buster. You
put on Sub-titles? I read in English
better.”
Normally I
can’t stand subtitles they distract me from what’s on screen and every little
difference between what comes up and what’s said grates at me, but you know ‘Christmas’
and all that, so I was like; “Aye, why not?”.
Around the
end of the film where Bobcat Goldthwait was chasing Bill Murray around with a
shotgun we had another knock at the door.
This time it was Adé. Adé is one
of the Nigerians from work. He wouldn’t
be one of our partyin’ crowd, but he would knock about with me and Barry and our
mates in the warehouse, eat his lunch with us.
For some reason he doesn’t get on with the other Nigerians, different
tribe or religion or something, same-shit-as-we-get-at-home sort-of-thing, but
he’s a good lad and when I explained what we’d be doing he was well up for it.
As the film
died to the strains of that “Put a Little Love in Your Heart” song, I nodded at
Barry to get his attention.
“Anything
else on?” I said. He surfed a bit
through the channels. We didn’t have the
best package for ourselves but we had a couple of hundred channels easy.
“Nuthin’. Just a laod a Christmas family shoite”.
“Well” says
I, this time to the room in general, “are we havin’ a party here or what?”.
This
pronouncement was met with general applause.
The TV went off and I put on the CD of cheesy electronic covers of
Christmas classics I had randomly bought for a laugh a couple of years
ago. To be fair to it, for an impulse
buy it had worked out sweet, we played the absolute fuck out of it that first
year and it was always on at our Christmas parties now. Luckily for me the first track, a Euro-Trance
version of Silent Night, had a nice slow build-up, which gave me just enough time
to do the wee speech I had prepared for the occasion.
“Well, you
boys all know the score. Wee Christmas
party, we all bring our own drink but we all bring a little something we can
share with the rest of the group, and since this is my party I’m hoping you
boys don’t mind if I go first”.
Not waiting
for a reply, I took the small mirror we had on the fire place off the stand and
put it on the table. I took the bags of
white powder out of my pocket and dropped them on the table.
“That there
is three grams of Mephadrome, the very last of the good stuff.” I opened one of the bags and poured the
substance onto the mirror. “Now you see
the way it’s not exactly powder, kind of like big crystals? That, if you care to remember before last
summer, was ‘the good shit’.” I took out
an old store card from a chain of music retailers back home which had long
since bit the dust in the credit crunch, the card I kept for these occasions,
and began to grind the crystal shards into a fine dust. “I got a good ounce of this in off the
internet before it was banned over here, twenty eight grams, sold a load of it
and took a serious load of it myself.”
The powder was now fine enough so I started to chop it up in preparation
for doing lines. “Never made that much
off it but hey whatever, kept me partying for a wee while, and now that’s all
that’s left.” I chopped the entire gram
into four long thin lines, which I adjusted, then re-cut, then moved a small
quantity from one line to the other, then realised I’d overcompensated and
mixed them all in together to start over again and repeated the process. “Could have sold these a long time ago, or
cut them and made a wee packet, but I wanted to save them for a special
occasion”.
When I was satisfied I stood up
and took a step back from the table.
“Anybody got a note on them?”
Aleks nodded in assent.
“You’re up first then, big-boy.”
Aleks took a nice crisp fresh one
from his wallet that he must have just got from a bank-machine and rolled it
into a perfect tube. With a goofy smile
on his face he addressed himself to the table, breathed in, let a long slow
breath out then went down and hoofed a whole line in one go.
He whinced a little and his eyes
watered but his smile burst into a full-on beamer. “Reminds me of the old country on a fresh day
in spring.”
Impressed at his fortitude, I
went next. I somehow came at the line at
a weird angle and left a bit, but I got the rest on the next pass. It stung like a high-dive bellyflop into the
most chlorinated pool in the world. Hits
you right between the eyes. It hurt damn
good but I liked it because that’s how you know it’s pure. I got that heady Meph-rush for the first time
in a long time and the ache in my knee died.
Ah its dirty stuff, but I love it and now it’s gone.
Adé went next. I can only think he didn’t know what we were
doing or saw the way we took to it and didn’t know what to expect or
something. He drew in about a third of
the line and stood with a look of shock and surprise on his face. He rubbed the nostril he’d been using in
obvious pain and his eyes were bloodshot.
“Woah, easy there big lad” I
said, “if you’re not use to it you just take your time with it sure.”
“In old country we say ‘The pain
make you strong, is the pain that make it good!’”. That Aleks, he can be a funny bastard some
times. I don’t believe for a minute that
anyone ever actually says stuff like that where he’s from but every time he’s
out with us he always finds some way to come out with some crack like that
about “Old Country”, usually something completely ridiculous, and it gets me
every time.
I took the bottle of clove oil I
kept in the place out of the drawer and passed it to Adé. “Sniff that, it’ll take the edge off”, I
says, and it did.
Suitably chastened, Adé picked up
the note and went back in for round two with the line. Took him a few goes but he got there. Unlike Baz who went straight for it, no note
no nothing, just smacked his nose to the glass and snootered the whole thing.
We were all feeling pretty good
about ourselves after those lines so we all grabbed another drink and shot the
shit for a wee bit. I did us all some
shots out of my bottle of absinthe and Aleks told us all the story of losing
his virginity to some wee snow-maiden in his home town back in ‘Old Country’,
and near dying of exposure because the only place they could find to do it was
outdoors, then nearly dying again when her Da found out and went after him.
I knew what Barry had for the party, he had
managed to get a gram of Ket and some really good green. All good stuff, especially since Ketamine has
been like gold-dust this weather, but more for the inevitable wind down and we
had many hours of Christmas to get through before that would be happening. I asked Adé, “so big lad, what all did you
bring for the us?”.
“It is on its way, it will be
here around ten tonight. I’ll get a text
message then I’ll go get”.
I didn’t like hearing that
because there was always the half chance he was pure going to get in on
whatever we’d all brought then be all like “sorry guys, it didn’t come”, but he
had a look on him like he knew something we didn’t and he was lovin’ it. I reckoned there probably was something on
its way right enough. He was blatantly bustin’ to tell us but he didn’t want to
ruin the surprise. Anyway, at worst he’d
have to buy us all a drink to make it up to us somewhere down the line. Whatever it was it would have to wait so I
asked Aleks for his contribution to the festivities.
This turned out to be a bag of
really good ecstasy tablets. These
weren’t the usual crap pills that were going round either. They were white with blue flecks through
them, were slightly bigger than the one’s I’d been seeing recently and had an
exclamation mark stamped into them. God
bless him, he didn’t know how many of us there were going to be so he bought
ten of them. We split two into half,
then banged one and a half each so we would all have one left for later. They were tremendous, they hit me like a
freight train and had me tripping, which I haven’t done on pills since I was a
teenager.
By this time the TV had picked
up, Die Hard was on one of the
foreign language channels but it was subtitled over English (thank god). Not that that would have mattered, I must
have seen that film about a hundred times or more. It was one of my favourites when I was a kid,
and I could probably act in it by now.
Actually, a badly dubbed Die Hard
with us filling in the dialogue might have been good fun but alas it was not to
be.
We watched away at Die Hard drank our drinks, polished off
another gram of ‘drome in little coke-lines and smoked cigarette after
cigarette, enjoying every minute of it.
At about quarter past ten Adés phone went. By now I was quite curious to see what he had
coming fir him. So he makes his
apologies and nips off, then comes back in about 5 minutes. Instead of bringing a wee bag or a wrap of
something, or I dunno like, a bunch of big dudes with sawn-offs to stroke all
our stuff and merk the whole lot of us, he brings this girl in. Pretty wee thing, big heart face and a button
nose. When she took her rain-drenched
faux-fur coat off she was wearing black fish nets, black denim hot-pants and a
tight sleeveless blouse over a petite but smoking-hot figure. She also had a shit load of make-up on her
face doing a not-very-good job of hiding how young she actually was. It shows you how naïve I am that I initially
assumed she was a stripper but I have to say, I laughed at myself a bit when I
realised what was really going on.
“Jesus-hell Adé, you brought a
hooker!”
“Yes my friend,” he replied
absolutely shameless, “I have her booked for whole evening, we all get to
share!”
Now to be fair, I was a wee bit
dubious about all this, particularly since I know Adé has a Mrs and a few
we-ones at home in Africa, but I thought, well fuck it, if you can’t give your
mates a bit of lee-way at Christmas when can you?
I smiled at the girl and chopped
her out a line of Meph from the pile and offered it to her. “Here, love you have a hit of that.”
She gave a shy wee smile back as
she went to it, but when she got the line she opened up a bit.
“Oh, that is very nice, thank
you!”, she said leaning over to stroke my knee, “you’re gorgeous, I can’t wait
for later when we….”
At that point I took her hand and
held it. “Nah, you’re alright kid, I
don’t do girl on girl, tried it once and it didn’t agree with me. You’re lovely though if I was going to go lez
it would definitely be with you.”
“It’s a shame, you’re so sweet
and you have such lovely big boobs!”
I took a complete reddener at the
compliment. I supposed I do like, but
you don’t notice these things so much, your boobs are pretty much your own
boobs and if they’re bigger than the average you don’t see it. Well not me anyway, I’m more worried that the
one on the left is fractionally smaller than the other one, not that I’ve had
any complaints mind.
Adé started getting stuck into
the girl, Aleks and Baz were having some inane conversation about the European
champions league and I was getting pretty lit up by this stage so I sat back on
the chair feeling a bit smacked out and watched the window where the rain had
turned to snow which was softly falling in light drifts, the flakes picked out
in the amber glow of the street lights.
Then, I don’t know if it was all the drugs I had taken up to that point
or what but I started feeling a bit, ‘Emotional’. We were all strangers really and could have
all been stuck with only ourselves for company today. My work visa was coming to an end and I could
feel the city lights of Belfast
calling me home already. Maybe I’ll know
these guys the rest of my life but there’s a good chance that I’ll never see
any of them again after I go, just a random person on Facebook, a tiny face in
the corner of the computer screen until such a time as I’m having a red out of
old contacts and people I don’t talk to anymore, and then not even that. But here we all are, together and having a
good time. It might just have been me
coming up on the pills but it felt like something more than that, like being
happy just to be where I was with these people and full of ‘Christmas Cheer’
for the first time since I was a kid.
I wiped the little tears out of
the corners of my eyes, raised my glass, said quietly but audibly to the room
in general, to myself, to no-one in particular, “Merry fuckin’ Christmas
everybody”.
