Her Majesty

I’ve gone round to see a friend, who isn't in a good way. Poverty and drug addiction will do that to you. She doesn't look great when I turn up, and asks immediately if I'd go to the nearby pharmacy for her. This is a familiar request: ‘going to the chemist’, means picking up a pack of sterile syringes, for injecting methamphetamine. Three bucks gets you five sterile, medicalised, ‘skin-pop’ syringes of the type used by diabetics. They’re not suitable for intravenous injection, but that’s what you're given and they’re clean and sharp at least. The packs, she says, used to come with a little squeeze of sterile water and a spoon for mixing up, but they’ve stopped that now. The price didn’t go down. ‘They’re free in Britain’, I say with a shrug.

At the pharmacist my request for a ‘pack of 1 ml sharps’, gets me a dirty look from the stern and ugly woman behind the counter. She bustles around noisily, making a show of it. ‘Enjoy your day’, she says pointedly, handing me the pack. There’s no point telling her they’re not for me, or of the misery and half-life of addiction. I couldn't care less what she thinks anyway. There has never been an argument in my mind about the worth of providing sterile injection packs for intravenous drug users; it should be mandatory and free of charge in fact, because I’ll tell you this for nothing: they’re going to do it anyway. These people - junkies, users, druggos, addicts, whatever awful label you want to pin on them - have children, hopes, dreams and fears just like everybody else. They don't deserve to die of AIDS, Hepatitis B, Septicemia, or whatever else it is lurks in the glistening drop of liquid that waits at the sharp end of the needle, drawn from a dirty spoon. I don’t have even a moment in my life for the people who don’t understand this. And if you think it’s just a matter of saving users from recycling old needles, then you should see how they do it in prison. I won’t describe it here.

I’m back in the flat, and the various deeds are done, quietly and with no fuss in another room, away from the children, with all the dignity that can mustered in such a situation. She emerges looking relieved. ‘Thanks’, she says, and goes off for a long shower. I look for some music to put on for the kids. Abbey Road by The Beatles is the first thing on the playlist, and then, Maxwell’s Silver Hammer; a children’s song about a serial killer. The kids dance around the room.

‘Bang, bang, Maxwell’s Silver Hammer came down upon her head.’

The shower has finished, I've done some half-hearted washing up but it’s time for me to go. ‘Are you gonna be alright?’, I say. She nods a little sadly, ‘I guess.’ The place is a mess, but the kids are clean and seem happy enough. There’s food in the freezer, and fresh fruit in the bowl.

The blinds are drawn in the flat, and on the telly silent images of Queen Elizabeth's death roll on, the death march to end all death marches. The next track on the playlist arrives like an in-joke and I have to smile at the lyrics, an irresistible collision of coincidence, that captures all the moments at hand.

Nick Jordan

Her Majesty, by John Lennon & Paul McCartney, courtesy Universal Music Group.

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.