A memory, taken out of context.
Or maybe the needle slipping into her thigh was the context. Bringing back more consensual injections in what (in spite of everything) probably counted as happier times.
“I don’t know,” Jess said.
“What don’t you know?” John’s mouth was quirked up into a grin. As though he already had a good idea what she was going to say, and wanted her to say it because it was going to be hilarious.
“I’m clean,” Jess told him. As shorthand for a lot of other things.
They were sitting cross-legged on the floor, with the lights down, the TV playing without any sound and soft music on the iPod. The track was “The Trouble I’m In” by Gavin Rossdale, which didn’t feel like a good omen at all, but they’d shared a curry, two King Cobras and a tub of Cherry Garcia. Now John wanted to share something else, and he seemed to want it badly.
“If you’re clean now,” he pointed out, “that tells me there was a time when you were using. You’ve done it before.”
“Not this!” Jess protested. This was a little plastic baggy full of China White. This was Not Kansas, was way beyond anywhere she’d ever been. She tried to explain. “I was on oxy for a while. It took me a long time to get off it again. Heroin… Honest to God, John, that’s not my thing.”
He was still grinning. “You know what the active ingredient in oxycodone is, Jess?”
“No.”
“It’s diacetylmorphine. The exact same thing that’s in heroin. You were already on opiates. This isn’t any different. Except that the way I take it, you don’t get so much of the dangerous stuff. You just get a quick high. Look, I’ll show you.”
There was no ligature, no spoon, no syringe. “None of that shit. That’s mental!” John liked to hot-rail using the glass tubes that florists sell single roses in. He demonstrated, heating the white powder with a Bic lighter until the inside of the tube filled up with creamy white smoke that seemed almost as solid as mashed potato.
He took a hit himself, then held the billowing tube, the white kaleidoscope, out to her. “Come on, babe,” he murmured. “Don’t leave me here on my own.”
Memory and longing betrayed her. She let him put the tube up against her lips. She breathed in. A shallow breath at first. But the second one was deeper. And from there, by slow and inexorable degrees:
the needle
the first time he hit her and said he was sorry
the first time he hit her and explained why it was her fault
losing her friends
losing her job
burning the house down
murdering Alex Beech.
Jess was aware of the needle going in, but thought she’d dreamed it. The little prick of pain that promised pleasure, an artefact of a past that had to be gone for ever. She’d been floating in and out of consciousness for days now, and she couldn’t tell any more where her dreams ended and the real world began. It was all one long pilgrimage through a slough of synaesthetic porridge.
The one reliable thing in that bleary universe was the fall and rise that came with each dose of tramadol – the dip into profound darkness, where everything was sweet but barely there, and the gradual return to a more negotiated place of dull aches and neural static.
When this dose hit her system, it felt at first like the familiar welcoming descent, and Jess surrendered to it in much the same way she’d once surrendered to the saccharine sting of heroin. But this time was different. She sank down with jolts and jars, as though she were pushing her way through a crowd – and then, although she didn’t stop falling, something else was falling through her. Lots of somethings, red-hot and razor-tipped.
The pain swelled and swelled to a terrible, impossible pitch. She kept on tumbling, end over end. How could anything hurt this much?
She wanted to cry out but she couldn’t even do that. This was an interior place where things like sound didn’t really exist. There was only the one feeling, filling every corner of the world. She was a snowball in hell, rolling and rolling, cocooned in more and more thicknesses of whatever it was that was hurting her.
This place didn’t look like how she imagined hell, though. She fell through a roiling chaos of shapes and forms that exploded out of each other and then folded back in again in an endless cycle. There were faces in there, and hills, and meandering hallways. Shifting, hurtling mazes of something and nothing and then something again. Gravity and perspective lurched and plunged from moment to moment, filling her with a sort of bodiless nausea.
It was a place of infinite size. It had no edges or borders. But after a long, long time – hours or ages – something else loomed up ahead of her. Or perhaps below her. It was a dark and ragged circle, as perfectly black as the moon occluding the sun. She was going to fall into it, whatever it was. Even in a dream world, that yawning absence terrified her. It looked like death.
Jess tried to reach out an arm to grab something to slow or stop herself, but she had no arms. She had no body. She was only a point of view, flying like a comet through silent immensity.
But a point of view implied eyes, and if she could have eyes she could have hands. This was a dream, right? In a dream you could have anything, be anything. Give me hands! she thought desperately, and she felt an attenuated prickling where hands might be, or come to be.
It was too late to take that experiment any further. She’d drawn level with the black circle, which was both bigger and closer than it seemed, and shot right on into it, into a shaft of unrelieved dark. The ocean was gone. There was nothing around her now but emptiness. Emptiness and pain.
And acceleration. The pit had its own gravity. It laid claim to her. It was bringing her to its bosom with invisible hands and she couldn’t fight it.
I can, a voice said. Hold on.
Something laid hold of her, pulled at her from above. The touch was feather-light at first, and unavailing. The pit refused to let go.
But so did this newcomer. It turned and angled Jess. Twisted her. A little at a time, but persistently, repeating the movement again and again. She was being dragged sideways. Buffeted by contradictory forces. The terrible momentum she’d built up was burning away in shuddering waves that danced and drove through her.
For a moment it seemed that she came to a halt in mid-air as those forces found a balance. Then she was moving downwards again, or at least it felt like down.
And landed, with a surprising jolt of impact, on something solid that supported her.
Jess’s immediate instinct was to throw herself flat, but there was nothing for that instinct to act on so she just stayed where she was.
Which was where, exactly? There was no way of knowing. No way to tell if she’d just been rescued or taken as prey.
The one thing she was sure of was that she wasn’t alone. She felt the same sense of close and intense scrutiny that she’d felt on her first night in the Fellside infirmary, and many times since.
The thing that had taken her was watching her now and had been watching her for a long time. She was defenceless. Terror filled her like a cup and leaked away again just as quickly because she was nothing. She couldn’t hold anything, not even an emotion.
Jess had seen a movie once where the hero took his gun apart to clean it and then heard the footsteps of approaching assassins. Over a soundtrack of pounding drums he struggled to put the dismantled weapon back together in time to defend himself. There were no drums here, no sounds at all, but that was what she tried to do now.
What Jess was building for herself, though, was a body. She might be attacked at any moment, but she built outward from the core because that seemed the right way to do it. She made herself a heart – not a beating heart, because for all she knew she might be dead, but a heart that was her centre of gravity.