Acid Casuals Read online

  ‘No problems?’

  ‘Fine, Héctor. Tell me, what does our associate do?’

  ‘Fuck, Estela. This is no secret code line, we speaking in the open-fucking-air. You heard of spy satellites. He’s a money man, is all.’

  ‘He has some financial tools? He’s prepared to offer his services to a higher bidder?

  ‘Tha’ kind of shit, yeah. He wants to break an exclusive care contract previously negotiated with us. He go to auction, he give our competitors the same advantage in the European market we got. We wanna keep it proprietal. Okay?’

  ‘Okay, Héctor. I’ll see you soon. One, two days.’

  ‘Okay, baby. You know I wan’ you back by the pool. Until then, all the saints preserve you.’

  She switched off the phone line and stared back into the case. All that was left inside was a plastic container with the raised logo Fempax, a tampon manufacturer. Her bullets were inside. As long as no stray bullet had been racked into the chamber, the Beretta was harmless. Estela did not know why Yen had avoided the tampon box. Maybe he was squeamish. If he was too stupid to check it out, that was in his favour.

  Estela hoped that Yen was stupid. Really, really stupid. She would have to hunt him down, of course. The second she had put on her face, perhaps straightened the flat. It looked as though she might be in Manchester for a little longer than she had anticipated. She might as well make herself comfortable.

  *

  Yen sat on the office desk, swinging his legs and looking at the bottle of pills he had taken from his pocket. Theresa could clearly see the whitish capsules crowded on the inside of the brown glass, but it was obvious Yen did not know what they were. He was staring at the labelless bottle, his face blanker than usual.

  The offices lay beneath the club in the old cellars with their curved bricked ceilings, a reminder that the Gravity had been a warehouse, before it was renovated and remodelled. Theresa and Yen sat on one side of the office, opposite the bank of TVs ranked along the facing wall, waiting for the show to start. It was Junk who invited them downstairs. He had asked if they wanted to view his latest video. Now he was crouched on the floor, stabbing at the VCR machine, his one good eye and his one glass eye fixed to the flashing green arrow. Junk had worked at the club since it opened and had access to the offices. It made Theresa nervous, trespassing downstairs. It didn’t bother Yen, he was only worried about his pills. Yen held the bottle up. ‘What do you think they are?’

  Junk turned away from the machine, he had no idea. ‘What do I know? Why don’t you ask the woman who gave them you?’

  Yen said, ‘Maybe. I don’t know if I’m seeing her again.’

  ‘Who was she?’

  ‘I don’t remember. She wasn’t from round here.’ Yen mimed a flamenco, clicking castanets. ‘Hispaniola or something. You know. Riva, Riva, El Mariachi.’

  Yen emptied a clutch of the pills on to his hand and sniffed at them. Talking aloud, he said the woman wasn’t freaked by drugs. If she was Latino, maybe the pills were cocaine: straight outta Colombia and only moulded to look like standard pharmaceuticals. Although there could only be twenty-five grammes in total: the bottle held fifty pills.

  ‘Or they could be barbiturates. Valium or, you know, some equivalent.’

  Theresa let him talk, watching him gape at the pills through his floppy fringe. She could guess what had happened. Once he was inside the woman’s flat, he would wait until she was asleep and run through her medicine cabinet. Theresa was the same age as Yen but it was only after meeting him that she began to feel especially mature. He was dreaming if he thought they were cocaine. If he honestly thought they were Valium, let him experiment.

  ‘Well, what are they?’

  Theresa shrugged. She knew Yen would try a couple. Even a handful, just as he had with those anti-psychotic pills last year. He pronounced them Halaperadol and had snapped back more than a dozen. An hour and a half later, Yen’s jaw had gone into a spasm, his teeth virtually welded together. His mouth took on a horrendous Jack Nicholson grin that had grown more and more painful through the night. The doctor described the side-effect as sardonicus rictus, although it was another forty-eight hours before Yen admitted himself to hospital. Until then, he had rolled a comic book into a tube and forced it between his teeth. It did nothing to stop the upper teeth from grinding against the lower ones. The comic ended up with a mouth-size chunk bitten out of its centre.

  Theresa would have reminded Yen of that time but even he could not have forgotten. The whole medical staff at the hospital, doctors and nurses, came out to look at the idiot who had swallowed a case-load of Halaperadol. Theresa kept Yen company but made him tell the doctors himself what was wrong. It wasn’t that she minded too much being associated with a moron. She had thought it would be funny, watching him trying to talk like a mad ventriloquist, pronouncing the name of the drug through clenched teeth. It was funny. Especially when the first injection of antidote only partially worked and his tongue began to loll uncontrollably out from his painful smile. But she wasn’t in a hurry to go through it again. Yen put the bottle away and started work on a joint. It was neatly rolled and trimmed inside a few seconds but it was Theresa who had to find an ashtray.

  Junk’s tape had spooled to its beginning. He pressed Play and a selection of cartoons flashed on screen. They seemed to be elongated, as though they had been stretched for cinescope. Bugs Bunny was short and fat and moved with a pensive waddle. Theresa didn’t know how Junk had made him do that.

  Junk stood up and stretched, looking over at Yen. ‘Careful where you leave the roach. I don’t want Burgess to know I’m using his office during the day.’

  *

  Back in her bathroom, Estela found her supply of Chicadol was missing. She could weep. They were the best hormone pills she’d ever found. They gave her the best shape she’d ever seen.

  Chapter Three

  Down to the Mancunian Way, through the underpass with its strange cobbled hillocks – some kind of urban design feature – and up into Hulme. Junk walked everywhere. He kept his head down as he took his long stepping strides, his hands in the pockets of his snorkel jacket and his waterproof satchel dangling at his back. To the right, just out of sight, was his own flat. Beyond were the remains of the Crescents, the huge blocks that, uninhabitable or squatted, had lately been demolished. On the left, slung over Princess Park Way, was the narrow footbridge where gangs would wait at night to tax crossing pedestrians. On the far side was Junk’s lock-up, a garage he had rented from a small ad in a free paper. He only visited his lock-up once a week and only ever in the early morning when no one was around to see him. He found that most people liked to get to bed by five or six a.m.

  Junk reached shelter at Moss Side Shopping Centre. Across Hulme and Moss Side, the rain was coming down in heavy sheets like the lead lining around a casket. He put his hand to the base of his pony tail and squeezed down until the water ran off the end. He would have put his hood up, but he knew he looked like a fool when he did that. He checked the fastener on his satchel. The ounce of amphetamine sulphate, twenty-five grammes, was safe and dry; snapped shut, as an extra precaution, inside a video case labelled Straw Dogs. That was why Junk had visited his lock-up that morning: to fetch the speed and measure it out with his plastic jug. There had looked to be a couple of kilos left in the fridge, hidden at the back of the garage under a tarpaulin. It was almost all gone. Was that good or bad? Fuck knows.

  He had always thought that he might be tempted, but had never once touched as much as a speck of his secret speed stash. It would be twelve years now, about that, since he had last taken amphetamines. Although he still hadn’t put the weight back on again.

  Junk trotted past the few working shops and the empty stores between them. He re-entered the rain on Moss Lane East. The gym where he was meeting his gangsta connection was directly to his right. He always felt stupid as he walked inside. It wasn’t just that he was white, or even that he was so thin, but somehow he felt he was
an insult to the boys who trained there. They worked at their repetitions, counting under their breath as they lifted, jerked, pulled or punched. Junk grew self-conscious of his own irregular rhythms, his skittery habits that grew out of an excessively nervous system.

  Junk tried to make himself inconspicuous as he sat down on a bench, watching a sparring session and waiting for the Taz-Man and his posse to show.

  The two boys in the ring were really slamming into each other. An old man with a strong Jamaican accent, pork-pie hat and a Fila sweatsuit was jumping around in excitement, shouting instructions through the ropes. Neither of the two boys could be listening. How could they? They were hammering away, they didn’t have time to listen. Junk stared ahead until he went blank.

  It was strange, last night in the WARP, believing that he recognised Yen’s woman. A thing like that could come out of nowhere, a retinal snapshot that you’d see once and be incapable of erasing; extra proof that your mind was never quite your own. She had not seen him, even when she brushed past him on her way to the cab. Another snapshot, the tiger skin seatcovers at the back of the old Nissan. Junk had watched through the open door, as Yen and the Hispanic woman got inside. And then another flash as the driver turned his head to check the passing traffic and Junk caught sight of the tiger skin headrest above the driver’s seat. Vibrant orange, over-printed black; like the robe draped over the blue corner post ahead of him. No, not quite like that. The boxer’s robe was silk, napless and smooth. The taxi seats were acrylic fur.

  The Taz-Man’s voice came from somewhere off to Junk’s blind side, ‘The Junkmeister. How’re you doing, you all right or what?’

  Junk jerked round. ‘Yeah, I’m all right, Taz.’

  The Taz-Man stood at the entrance to the changing room. He filled the bottom half of the doorway; other members of the ConCho Heavy were visible above his head. Junk stood and walked over when he was beckoned.

  The Taz-Man had taken a seat on the double bench at the centre of the changing rooms. Three members of his posse gathered around him. Towards the far wall, there was a boy wrapped in a towel, steam coming off his wet shoulders as he looked through his locker. The Taz-Man looked over to his lieutenant. ‘Tell him to do one.’ He nodded at the boy. A moment later, the boy was shivering in the main room of the gym, skipping up and down in just a towel. Trying not to catch a chill.

  The Taz-Man said, ‘Look at him. Fucking Batty Boy, couldn’t fight Chewie’s sister.’

  The Taz-Man’s lieutenant was saying, ‘No, couldn’t fight my baby sister.’

  ‘I don’t know why he shows round here.’

  ‘Fucking Batty Boy.’

  A locker to the Taz-Man’s left had the ‘C’ sign of the ConCho Heavy sprayed on the door. The Taz-Man rapped it. ‘Subtle eh? Open it up, Chewie.’

  Chewie took a key to the heavy duty padlock. The guns inside hung from hooks by their shoulder straps. There were loose magazines and assorted handguns piled at the bottom of the locker.

  ‘Sweet, eh? Fucking bootcamp, this. Chewie’s the quartermaster. You’ve come in the middle of us planning a mission.’

  Junk said, ‘I’ve come at the time I always come.’

  ‘It’s sweet. Just letting you know what kind of motherfuckers we turning into. Every month, you come down and we’re a little more fucked up than the last time. Soon we going to be as crazy as you.’

  Junk looked back in the locker. The Taz-Man was right about one thing: every month they were more fucked up.

  ‘Now you seen it, we’ll go and do the dirty deal. What you got for me this month?’

  Chapter Four

  A conversation in the WARP.

  ‘I don’t understand these video games. My little brother, right, he’s hooked up to his Megadrive twelve hours a day. I’ve got to drag him off by his fucking ears otherwise I can’t watch the telly. And the thing is, right, television is something you watch but a video game is something that watches you. You know what I mean?’

  ‘No.’

  The redhead was a conspiracy theorist. He worked away at his theme while he sucked at the quarter of lemon sticking out of the top of his beer bottle. The other one, the dark haired boy, had a less manic style. He leant well back in his chair, keeping the redhead in perspective through lazy blue eyes. The redhead began to elaborate, picking lemon pips out of his teeth as he talked.

  ‘Like video games are a trip, right. So they’re addictive. And they’re also a machine. So my brother’s having his reality reconfigured according to machine code, right.‘

  ‘You sound like the kind of freak who goes on Donahoe. Now you’re saying video games are addictive. Last week you were telling me you didn’t even believe drugs are addictive.’

  ‘They’re not. It’s just the power of suggestion, right, if you believe they’re addictive, then you’ll get addicted.’ The redhead paused. ‘Anyway, all I know, since my brother got into video games, my mum’s stopped worrying about where I am, the state I’m in or the time I get back – she’s more scared he’ll catch epilepsy from playing Sonic the Hedgehog.’

  The dark boy seemed to wake up, shaking his beer bottle like a maraca as he recalled the program: ‘Sonic, he’s the blue hedgehog, yeah? … I’ve seen that. I can’t believe it’s so fast. I tell you, those video games only appeal to kids because they’re too young to drive down motorways on acid.’

  The redhead was nodding vigorously. The dark boy had a smile around his eyes, leaning back again, watching how his friend reacted. Estela noticed how slender his fingers looked, holding the neck of a beer bottle.

  The WARP was a converted furniture shop, around three times as deep as it was broad. The granite bartop to her left ran along the whole length of the whole building. The style of the bar was what they termed post-industrial, meaning that it had yards of bare masonite and the tabletops were panes of reinforced wire glass. The lighting was great. When Estela cruised through the previous night, she had seen Yen directly. She’d thought mm-mmmm, that would smooth the kinks out of twenty hours of airflight. That’s why she had headed back to the WARP this evening. As soon as she found him, he had better hope there was a place among the angels for light-fingered space cadets.

  Tonight, at a little after five o’clock, the bar had not begun to fill. Estela saw the redhead conspiracist and recognised him as a friend of Yen’s. The darker boy was speaking as she strolled up.

  ‘You’ve got hair round your lips, and now you’re talking like a cunt.’

  Estela looked over at the redhead as she sat down. He had a goatie beard, too pale to see unless you were close. The dark one blushed as Estela sat, a boy who preferred not to say ‘cunt’ in front of a woman. Estela smiled and said hello.

  ‘I believe I remember you both from las’ night. I was with a frien’ of yours called Yen. Today …’ Estela leant closer, the two boys did the same. ‘… I found he left a little bag in my apartment and it was full of marijuana. Now, I don’ know what to do. I was thinking, shall I smoke it, shall I return it? Or shall I share it out?’

  Estela dropped her packet on to the table top. A small block of resin wrapped inside the kind of plastic envelope banks use to separate and weigh five pounds’ worth of silver. It had taken her all of five minutes to buy the dope, from leaving her apartment to closing the deal. The cab driver had been absurdly helpful – taking her to the door of a Moss Side pub and even offering to score for her while she waited in the cab. She had laughed, really he didn’t have to be so protective. She was a modern woman.

  ‘Share, I reckon.’ The dark boy smiled, and put his hand over the envelope. Estela smiled back.

  ‘But not here,’ he said. ‘The management’s beginning to get edgy about smoking.’

  ‘Then we share it some other time. It’s only fair. It’s not as though Yen was so wonderful last night I feel eternally grateful to him.’ She stretched out her hand. ‘My name is Estela.’

  The redhead was Tom, the one with the beautiful hands was called Cozy. Of the two
, it was Cozy who remembered her, not Tom. He had seen her last night, as she talked to Yen in the window alcove. Estela told him he should have come over, there was no reason to be shy.

  *

  She sat with them for the few hours it took the WARP to fill. Different kids, aged from seventeen to around twenty-two, drifted by. Some would join them, some would just touch hands, laughing over something and ending by saying, ‘Safe, see you later.’ Yen never arrived but when she mentioned him again, Tom said he would be along. Either that or he’d be at the Gravity. It was a while before Estela understood that the Gravity was a nightclub at the far end of town. Cozy and Tom’s friends had started to talk about a girl named Theresa.

  ‘She’s sound.’

  ‘She’s a bit mad.’

  She’s got a mad touch, but she’s sound.

  Estela heard that Theresa helped put on video shows at the Gravity. There was an argument about whether Yen was seeing her, or whether he just hung out with her so he could meet the DJs. Cozy said, ‘Yeah, that was it, Yen’s just a total DJ-groupie’. He would offer to roll their spliffs or carry their record cases, ‘then rip them off’. Estela agreed it sounded like Yen, from the little she knew of him.

  Cozy told Estela they’d be moving along to the Gravity after, she should come along. Estela was happy to stick around their crowd. She recognised a few of Tom and Cozy’s friends from the previous night. She found them likeable, friendly. The ones who were stupid made her laugh, the ones who were not stupid made her laugh as well.

  Everyone took an interest in her. She blushed, but could easily stand the glare. They asked where she was from, what she did. When she told them she was a cleaner, looking after a couple of old businessmen out in Florida, they laughed. She didn’t look like a cleaner, wearing a Betty Jackson suit, its straightness relieved by chunky touches of gold. Estela had learnt not to feel out of place. Tonight she felt relaxed. Her various problems, the disarray that jet-lag, alcohol and unhinged libido had injected into her first night in England, all that could be tidied up.