Slow Poison - Chapter Six

Chapter Six

Cheltenham December 8th

He let himself into the basement flat with difficulty. The padlock seemed to be out of alignment, as though recently forced. The unlit steps down to the entrance would not allow a clear view. Piles of damp newspapers littered the space around the door. A shirt lay crumpled along a sill, a makeshift draught excluder. A dirty towel was pinned over a broken window, keeping something out, or something in. None of the lights in the dingy apartment seemed to be working. The place was bitterly cold. The body sprawled across the filthy sheets in the curtain-less bedroom looked like a corpse, long dead from hypothermia, a Belsen wreck.

The light that found its way into the room through the narrow wall between the houses at the back, from the boarded up windows, from the passing cars and taxies, sent the up-ended cigarette butts into long moving shadows. The floor was covered with these tiny pillars. Some gold-ringed, some lipstick kissed, some tainted with blood. Some with funnels of ash that reached precariously up toward the low flaking ceiling. There were hundreds of them. His tread crushed a path to the body, jarring slops of ancient coffee into the dust around the bed. The body was naked. Blue, scarred and pocked. Trim knelt down beside the bed and pulled a thin grey sheet over the cold meat. The corpse reacted to the unaccustomed warmth. It shielded bloodshot eyes against the floodlights and arc lights of the gloom.

“Who’s there? It is you? Have you got the stuff?”

Trim nodded and hit the corpse across the mouth.

“Hello, Lenny.”

He doubled over, sobbing into the dingy sheets. Trim looked around the walls, at each surface stripped of its wall covering. Inch wide lengths of once beautiful wallpaper lay in damp curls around the rotten skirting boards.

“You’ll get your stuff. You know what to do. Be a good boy.”

Lenny reached across to where Trim was kneeling. He fumbled with his fly. Trim helped him. The Armani trousers slipped slowly around his thighs, exposing snow white underwear, exposing a long, thin, snaking scar stretching from groin to knee on his left leg. Lenny lunged forward and tugged at elastic with arthritic fingers seeking out the warmth. Trim grabbed Lenny’s ears and bucked and ground his face below him, no thought of anything but release. He cursed and pounded at the thin shoulders of the soul hunched before him like a novice at prayer. Lenny was almost senseless as Trim came, spraying his heat over the toothless face and the grimy sheet. Spent, he pushed him away like a doll. He zipped and belted the Armani. Car lights played over the moisture at the corner of his mouth.

“Have you got the stuff? For Crissakes, have you got the stuff?”

Without a word, Trim felt inside his camel coat. He pulled out a small wallet, a manicure set containing the sterilised needles he used, the only clean thing in that awful place. In the wallet, the white crystals, the Unicorn Dust.

Lenny sat in the dank gloom, shivering suddenly with the ever present need, the need that never went away. He looked over at Trim, standing with his back to the towel-covered window. He watched him prepare the crystals, the flame, the syringe, the transporter, the time machine. God he was - all-powerful, almighty, holding the germ of creation in his cool hands. And, in the beginning god created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form, and void: and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

“You verminous little shit. You fucking bastard.”

And god said, let there be light: and there was light, such bright light. Brighter than the winding sheet upon the bed, brighter than the eyes of Lucifer. The needle found the vein, the swollen vein that squeezed its gore around Lenny’s body and the needle pumped its light into the gore stream and it was good, oh, so good. And god called the light Day and the darkness he called Night and so it was and on oceans of cloud with golden arrows piercing through, bright staffs of gold. Here he stepped, here he walked in glory, transfigured, sainted, redeemed, immortal, at the right hand of god, the Golden Pen pushed deep into the life blood, speeding wing spores and angel cells deep into his radiant soul.

“You little turd. You disgusting fucking animal. Rot in hell, goddamn you!”

Trim snapped his hand across the dead mouth, sending spittle and blood and semen across the bed in a protein arc. The corpse gazed sightless at the filthy windows and saw eternity. Trim pulled a cigarette from a monogrammed case, a stranger’s initials engraved in the gold. He lit it and drew in the vapours, exhaling, sending haze into the darker corners of the room. He dropped to his knees on the bed and drew hard again on the cigarette. The glowing tip sent warmth and fireflies diffusing into the damp air. He ran the tip of the cigarette along the emaciated arm, singeing hair, scorching flesh. He drew again, then lightly dragged the glow along the length of the Lenny’s bloated penis, grinding the cigarette to death in the hollow underneath his scrotum leaving a small, but permanent scar. Lenny fell back somewhere at the edge of heaven, the light kiss of sulphur, the luke-warmth of hell breaking through, reminding him.  Moving lights filtered into the room, a Mercedes, Trim at street level, dismissing all further thought with Mozart.

The quiet mews cottage hung with the scent of Pledge and ripe bananas in the Spartan rooms, hung with slubbed silks that cast shadows over cerise and gunmetal blue surfaces. The prints were signed Mapplethorpes’. All was order. Precision.

Trim placed a small Faberge egg upon the low rectangular coffee table. It was most probably a rather good copy. The stones were almost certainly paste, but the work had been exquisitely executed. Others in the crowded antique shop on the Spiegelstraat had handled the piece. Indeed, it had been quite warm when he had slipped it into his pocket, having just purchased a quite ordinary little Meyrowitz enamel table watch, all sunrays and scarabs. He placed that too on the low coffee table, suddenly deciding that the Meyrowitz was far more pleasing. The egg seemed garish, showy, out of place among the clean lines of the room. The watch stayed; the egg was scooped up and placed in a drawer, nestling alongside all the other hoardings, pica pica prizes that sparkled dully as he closed the drawer.

His eyes were tired. He pinched the bridge of his nose and released a sigh. In the hall, his coat hung limply. He felt in the pocket for the diary, found too the diamond pendant. He tossed it in the drawer with the other trinkets. He sank down on to the settee and stretched himself. The diary brought another layer of fragrance into the room, a pot-pouri of leather and decay. He found one more familiar passage, summoning ghosts from someone else’s past.

August 17. 1939. Leeuwaarden. The Northern city loomed down on us like the threatenings of a summer squall. The first light drops of rain spitting dust like spilled mercury from a shattered thermometer; the small clusters of suburbs. The rush for cover when earth scents rise and excite. Here, the painted shop fronts, the decorator’s cart with its outsize artist’s palette and brushes, the baker’s doorway aromas. Then sheet upon sheet of solid out-pourings, high grey walls of anonymity. Similar lives, different lives, desperate, disparate, singular, insular lives, cascading in torrents of resistance, submission the only clear way through.

August 18. 1939. Cathedral silence far from here, each sound thrown high and bounced from blackened glass and girder, circling the grey ruffled pigeons, to skim serene each paint-fast bolt, to slide in agony, suicidal, toward the oily stones caught between the parallel steel. And always the pungent immediacy of coffee, punching low at the needful stomach, drawing hands toward coin, drawing on and in, in to the womb warmth of the third class restaurant. It is here the ghosts are summoned, here with simple séance that the shallow cups of hope, caffeine clutches, take the heart and lose it forever.

He scratched at a small stain at the foot of the page. After a moment of reading, he lay the diary down on the coffee table and picked up the Meyrowitz. The movement was still in good order, the dealer had assured him. He turned the small key in the back and felt the resistance of the steel spring as it tightened. Light ticks brought time into the room with a measured elegance. Time to kill. Almost. He kept his supply of cocaine in the base of a spelter and chrome Art Deco lamp. It stood, used nightly, in a corner niche. The base unscrewed to reveal a hollow cache. Inside were several clear plastic envelopes. Good medicine. The Best.

He arranged two parallel lines of the powder, three inches long, on a circular marble coaster. He added two more of equal length. He never shared. His pleasures were solitary, single minded, spiteful. He rolled the silver tube between his fingers with pleasure as the drug washed through him, cleansing, purifying from the mind outward, as though drenched in soothing balm, massaged with cool fingers. Blessed. No music played. The cottage was still. Peaceful and serene. Chaste.