Chapter 1

A 9ml short intro [the detail comes latter]

I must have been around thirteen, I think, things are kind of blured from that part of my life. I do remember the waiting room however, the rickety wooden chairs that where different sizes and shapes, and the way it all felt all cheap and over used, unsafe and old in that crappy beat up sort of way you only get in government buildings from that era. I'd just been expelled from yet another school, and my mother had done her usual thing, complaining to the relevant authorities, writing letters to anyone who had influence in that area, and more importantly, whoever was actually prepared to listen. In those days she looked after us, this was the life before we fell into shit, she actually fought for us, [though we'd already given up, but more of that latter] and in the end she got an appointment with a child psychologist to determine what it was that was wrong with me. What was wrong with me, just the thought of it was alien and fucked up, but I couldn't stop myself from thinking about it as my eyes glanced across the barely cared for and dull surroundings. It was the fact that I couldn't concentrate on anything, and got bad grades despite having tested with a high IQ. That was the gist of what was wrong with me, oh and the violent, aggressive behaviour [me stopping people kicking my skull in].

I can't remember his name, but I do remember the musty smell, and the miss matched furniture. That part I couldn't forget if tried to drag it out with a claw. The old magazines on the low wooden oval scratched veneer table. Cheap and once probably quite nice, maybe even loved or cared for, but now reduced to simply being old, second hand or donated by some government department that didn't need it, or just plain didn't want it. Maybe even a department that plain just didn't exist. That was pretty much the way my mind worked back then, probably still does.

Years before I spent a few of them entombed in my mind. A lot, lot younger, in the firmly held belief that I was in fact the only genuinely living creature in whatever this place was. I didn't call it home or earth, Belgium, or England; In essence it was everything else that was no me. They were a simulacrum of living things, and growing organisms, trees, people, animals, frogs, mice, anything, and indeed everything, everything that is except for me. I was real, why I didn't know, and I was frankly too afraid to ask about [and didn't know who to ask], but there was a purpose, that much I was sure of. Back then I didn't sleep much. That began at the age of five when I had discovered during a religious lesson at school that people died. They when to heaven, but my mind being questioning, and having trained to be so by my eclectically strange farther, refused to trust that new piece of information. My first thought was that this new information meant that my mother would one day die. I was sent home in floods of tears, where I was duly comforted by her. She however, it being a male dominated household, was not the repository of wisdom, and for a definite answer I would need to ask my him. A man who I later learned had been brought up in a claustrophobic military family crammed with archaic contradictions and tradition that he had attempted in his own way to rebel against. My question to him when he returned from work was simple.

"What happens to us when we die".

His answer was equally simple, yet had possibly the most profound effect upon my life of any imparted piece of knowledge before or since.

"Nothing happens, you simply stop existing."

A five year old mind has problems grasping such a concept, and at first that deceptively simple idea spewed forth a plethora of new questions.

"What does it feel like?",

"Where do you go?",

"Will I still be me?"

Nothing, from that point nothing was never the same for me mentally, or perceptually. The idea crawled into my embryonic consciousness where it spawned into every though that had a genesis in that period, in other words the formation of my personality.

The waiting room was a cramped little space where everything had been squeezed in with barely enough room for the essentials, let alone any luxuries, or comfort. Most of the light was provided by over head strip lighting that flickered, despite the presence of two small windows with dirty glass. Outside three pigeons could be seen on the ledge, moving side by side in a futile mating dance as the smaller female flew away. Nothing you'd find in a dentist's office, even an NHS one, nothing but typical government buildings of the time, shabby and underfunded. Not the bright antiseptic red cotton and metal seating fixed to a durable floor you'd find today, the appearance of order and efficiency in the face of real and palpable chaos. Everything gets shabby the longer you leave it in the hands of those who do not care to be placated, or trivialised, it's a law of the universe, entropy.

I sat there waiting, fidgeting, and unable to sit still. I remember it wasn't long after my father had died in a road accident, mini VS Ford Cortina, the Cortina won, obviously, particularly given that dear old dad was driving a foreign car so that the driver's driver side was reversed. He spent three weeks in intensive care dying while no one would let me see him. All I wanted was just to see him one last time, just to say goodbye. Everyone kept pretending that he might be alright, but I knew he was dying, just like everyone else who wouldn't speak of it in front of us, like it was poison or something. The thing is I didn't really cry when I heard the news, I just went back inside and carried on some inane conversation I was having, some stupid game that I can't even remember now, but at that actual moment it all seemed so much more important. That's burned into my consciousness as though by physical heat from a metal stamp had been used, drilled into my brain as it were.
At last the psychologist deemed to see me, does loads of test and, talks at me like I'm a retard. I resent him immediately in his crumpled grey-ish-brown suit. Then there's his sweaty overweight smell that hangs in the air around him like flies. He looks too big to fit in his overly emphatic chair, towering old leather behind the big oak desk once loved, now uncared for, probably much like the job and the man, but somehow he manages it. After all those tests where over the good doctor tells my mother that I'm in fact dyslexic, and possibly have hyper attention deficit disorder, and then promptly shipped me off to a special school for disturbed children. They had their diagnosis tool, and their diagnosis, but they didn't know what to do with it when they found it.
Killray, can you imagine a more unsuitable name, I mean 'Kill Ray', how fucked up is that. The whole place was full of nutters, and I mean real nutters, the kind who carried around knives, and broke into cars for a laugh so they could get chased by the police for the thrill. You see when you farther beats you on a constant basis, and fighting don'r do it any more, you need to find something new that pumps you up and makes you fell alive again.

The whole reason I was chucked out of my last school was that I was being bullied, and no one would believe me, so I through a chair at a teacher when he was reprimanding me for fighting [or was it a desk, I can't actually remember, you'd be amazed how light a desk can be when you're mad]. Fighting, that fight was basically me being grievously assaulted for daring to stand up for myself, something my father would have been proud of, if he'd been alive. In reality it was just stupid. My dad always thought I was too much of a sissy, but by that time all his dreams had been shattered, and he was drinking every day, and spending money we didn't have on crap we didn't need.

So they put me in an institution full of psychos, and my life was supposed to get better, undeniably it just got worse from that moment on. The whole place was more like a reform school, actually I think it was a reform school, but they had people who supposedly knew how to deal with dyslexic kids, hyper active children, children no one else could control. The only good thing about the place was that they didn't use corporal punishment, just a good measure of God. This turned out to be more about letting me read comics, rather than teaching me anything useful. I suppose one good thing did come out of it, a love of comics, they opened up whole new world for me, and it did help me to read. Pictures you see, far less demanding that pages full or words in neat lines and regimented columns. When you can't read well a big fat book full of words is a little off putting, but a comic, with pictures that illustrate the story, that doesn't seem all that insurmountable. Perhaps they had a point after all...

No one was aloud outside the school grounds during break times. You got brought to the place on a bus in the morning, they locked the gates, and you got dumped back in town late afternoon. At least at my old school I could escape during lunch, here I was trapped with the worst people I could imagine all day long. One big fucked up black guy who'd probably taken one too many insults during his life took an instant disliking to me, and decided that I was in some way a threat to his reputation as the nastiest, hardest bastard in the place. God alone knows why, I spoke like a fucking Victorian prince for God's sake. He however drove the point home in an underpass in the city centre one Saturday afternoon. Christ that bastard could run fast, and punch just as fucking hard.

Nobody at the school asked about the massive bruises on my face, not one teacher, or one single pupil. Cuts and bruises where taken for granted, kids turned up every day with black eyes, marks on their body, it was fucked up, a few years ago it would have been me, but right then my mum was still single. That was when I learned that life can throw you a real curved ball. All my life I'd been the fucked up weird kid at every school I'd ever been to. When we were really young and traveling around all the time it didn't really matter that much, by the time things started getting out of hand we'd be gone. But now that my dad had gone broke, and was no longer alive, and we lived in crappy flat things were different, there was no escape to a new town or country the next summer. This was a cruel twist, but a new somewhat more fucked up twist was about to happen. Suddenly I was no longer the most fucked up kid in school. Life's is truly cruel, but it saved my arse when an extremely an extremely gay, short kid turned up at school wearing make-up. Needless to say it didn't go down too well with the other kids, so for a while at least most of the negative attention was focused on him instead of me.

Then some other kid decided to fuck me up, and something in me just snapped, and for the first time in my life I found myself fighting back, and actually making a difference. It felt massive, adrenalin surging with every punch, blood, the taste of it, the smell of it, the sight of it, for a moment I was no longer there, I was somewhere else entirely. It was like all the anger and frustration that I'd been suppressing for all those years just blew out into one explosive moment, with a strange sense of calm at the centre of that raging tornado.
Then the world came back into focus as we were dragged off each other by a small gang of teachers and school prefects. His face was a mess, but for some fucked up reason he was smiling at me through broken teeth. We both got detention, and my status in the school went up a notch or two, but not so much that I even approached being cool. Fucking someone up didn't earn real respect, but once people realised that you could turn into a psycho if they pushed hard enough, they stopped pushing so often. The mad thing was that kid became one of my only, and best friends at that fucked up place.

His hobby was basically robbing other people's cars, and driving them to destruction, then setting them alight in a field somewhere outside the estate where he lived. He knew everything about how to disable an alarm, open locked doors, starting them without a key, and he was only my age. His older brother had just gone down for a five year stretch for stealing a police car, and crashing it into someone else's house, which is most likely where he acquired his skills. It was basically only a matter of time before he joined him, but I wasn't about to point that out because he pretty much knew it anyway. That was the saddest part of it all, but you could never speak it aloud, that was the deal with emotions. It was like he knew his life was crap, and just wanted to burn out in a blaze of messed up glory.

His second eldest brother had robbed a parking meter attendant and stolen the key that opened all the meters for that aria, so he had access to ready cash. Every now and then he'd give me twenty quid or so, and we'd go to town and buy football cards. I hated football, but it was his money so I figured what the fuck, it's better than going home. I ended up with an album full of soccer stars that I didn't really want, couldn't be bothered to remember in any great detail, and never looked at unless I was putting in a new batch of stickers. It did give us something to talk about though, and that somehow made me more friends. One of them was even more psychotic than he was. Paul was his name, and he was a tall, wiry kid, with blond hair.
One day he was on a bus and beet up some other kid because he had a blue Peter badge. He wore that badge every day after that as though it had been given to him for some act of benevolent charity, or bravery. Then just as I found myself settled in the nut school, they transferred me to a comprehensive, Saint John Almonds. The place was run by psychotic nuns who used the cane like it was a way of moulding young minds into sensitive caring individuals, a channel though which Christ could reach us via his pain. The head teacher was so fat she had to walk down stairs sideways, and she was the bitterest person I'd ever encountered, even to this day. The only thing they ever taught me was that Catholics where largely filled with repressed hatred and self-loathing, and where usually hypocrites.

The absolute worst part was that the fat bitch announced at my first assembly that I was being transferred from a special school for disturbed and violent children, so naturally every cunt in the place wanted to fight me. They figured figuring if I'd been in a reform school then I had to be a psycho, a real challenge. Most days I'd dodge the crap, sell my free meal ticket to some first year, which I got because my family was on the dole, and piss off out of the place to buy chips and a couple of ‘loosies’ [single loose cigarettes to the uninitiated]. That didn't stop them from finding me, and fucking with me on a daily basis. There really is very little you can do against four people who just want to kick your head in for the fun of it, and when they think that they are gaining some sort of provincial status from the act, then that just makes them all the more determined. Stupidity runs while in groups, that one I learned really early in life.

This went on pretty much every day until one again I lost it. This time things this had changed. My mum was living with a fucked up, mid failing solicitor with a propensity for mental cruelty. By then she'd stopped caring, the loneliness, fighting and caring for four children, all of whom where screwed up in one way or another had finally got to her. She reached out to the first willing hand and allowed it to pull her into his world. Not really a very nice world either. One the first day I met him and his "investigator", the moment she'd left the room he demonstrated how strangulation could render a human being unconscious. When I started smoking, largely because he he did, and it was a link to my past, and my farther, he made me smoke a whole pack of twenty. I smoked every one of them just to piss him off, even though it made me sick, even though I never wanted to see another cigarette again in my life, I carried on smoking simply so he wouldn't win.
He fancied himself a bit of a karate expert, actually he was a brown belt, so I went to the Y, and started taking an informal course given by a frankly dodgy, but good hearted man who had little respect for belts, and a lot for talent. I advanced quickly, it was a pretty serious thing for me at the time, and I'd practice with the first years who loved running at me and trying to kick or punch me. There really is nothing like a bunch of psychopathic, hyperactive kids to hone your reflexes.

The kid in school had been picking on me for weeks because of the way I talked. My dad was kind of well brought up, and spoke with a very English, English accent. We grew up in Belgium, and for most of our lives, where the only English accents we ever heard where either American [from US forces network radio], or our very overly upper middle class, ex air force, with snooty overtones, father and his wife. That was my dad, a drunk, sometimes brilliant, mixed up freak that believed in corporal punishment, yet aspired to be a hippy and join the movement of his times. He ended up in an advertising career that kept us from settling down in one place for more than a year or two at any one time. So I grew up believing that nothing I did ever mattered because by the end of the year I'd be gone anyway, except that this time we weren't moving, this time all the repercussions from my actions came back to slap me in the face. That's the curs of the nomad forced to settle down. Needless to say that things did not go well and once again I found myself staring down at the bloodied face of another human being, who smiled back up at me in that fucked up, beaten down way that said 'Your OK really, aren't you'....

The way we ended up back in Liverpool, the place where I was born at home into a draw, was actually simple and quite brutal. One night my mother woke us all up and told us to take ten things we really wanted to keep, and get dressed. She'd laid out clothes, and gave us each a cardboard box. It was about two thirty something in the morning. I packed, and got into the back of a rented van, clutching my cardboard box with the memory of having to release my dormouse into a bush fresh in my mind, knowing that he would not survive the night. The pour little thing was so old that he was going bald, I cried all the way to the ferry, wide awake, unable to shake out the strands of my life into some sort of sense. I'd just started to settle down into my life, my school, my friends, and all of this was being taken away from me, yet again. Only this time without any warning at all, this time it had turned all turned to shit without warning. The long and the short of it, I found out when I was old enough to understand, was that my father hadn't paid any taxes on his new business venture for over a year. So we scrambled back to England, back to Liverpool where I'd been born because my mother figured that it would be better to be poor in a place that they knew. We didn't know shit about the place even anymore; the world had changed in the six years we'd been away. England was now in the depth of a recession, and we were homeless and jobless, and my farther refused to give up his God given lifestyle. We slept in the back of that van for over a month before the council found us a flat. It was a two bedroom flat in the middle of Princes Park, so all three of us boys had to sleep in the one room, while my sister slept in her own room. That's was the law, and it really pissed me off, having to go back to sharing a room with my brothers. I'd got used to having my own room, even if it was for just a year or so, and now we were poor again. I'd been poor most of my early life, and it sucked, it really, really, really sucked.

So the first day at school was really shit, I can't even remember what it was called, but it was some primary school that I had to get a bus to each day. That's where I learned that in English schools bullying didn't just consist of name calling, and petty mockery. It contained a large portion of violence, and physical and mental abuse. I'd always hated school, even in Belgium, but Liverpool was in a different league. I took to finding places that I could hide out at break times, and generally just went into a world of my own. By the time I went to secondary school, a profoundly catholic institution by the name of Saint Nick’s, I despised the whole concept of organised education. Liverpool county council might just as well have thrown kids into an ultimate fighting championship for all the good or education that was imparted to them. On my first day a first year was dangled by his ankles from the third floor landing at the top of the stairs. It was a cold modern building, concrete and glass, bad architecture, and worse planning. They might have well-built it with ambush points in mind. The very worst part was that it stood in the shadow of the catholic cathedral at the other end of Hope Street. The most ironically named street in the city, and only named because of the two churches at either end. One catholic, the other protestant in a largely Irish emigrant community, a false symbol of hope, a building despite that built out of light, with incredible and opposed to every other structure around it. On days of real futility I'd go to that place, stand in the pool of directed light, and wonder if there was indeed a God, or if I was actually alone. That was my first lesson in social engineering, but not my last.

By now I'd well and truly learned that British schools where nasty. British teachers didn't give a rats fuck about you if it meant they had to do any extra work of any kind, and that the only person you could turn to was you. That much I learned in the first five minutes of being there when a kid threatened me in assembly for no apparent reason other than that I was new.

I could speak English, do maths and science, but I'd been learning from a totally different curriculum, which meant I knew fuck all at this school, or any other school of actual value and had been playing catch up for the past year, which in the eyes of my peers made me a moron, and a source of amusement, and more importantly a target of ridicule. Within the first year I'd thrown a chair at a teacher, and my father had got himself killed, and I was still only thirteen. They sent me to a psychologist, put me on Ativan for depression, anxiety, and rage, and sent me to a special school. That's how the medical mind works. Give the boy a prescription and he can keep himself medicated, but give him a diagnosis and he can be put down for good.
There in lay the real root of the problem, at the age of nine I'd had two major operations, both of which had included a very prolonged exposure to morphine. The first one of which came out of a long and complex disorder that I was persuaded by a cabala of Doctors and psychologists was in my mind. Given that I'd already persuaded myself that I was the only living thing in existence, was unsettling to say the least. On top of that my older brother had developed behavioural problems that rivalled anything anyone of us could muster. On the one hand it was comforting knowing that there was someone more fucked up than you. On the other, knowing that you may well be on the same path, but two years behind was unsettling to say the least.
It all came to a head, after months [maybe years] of headaches, I started to piss blood. I was rushed to the local doctor, who immediately called scheduled a series of tests at a massive hospital in the capital of Belgium, Brussels. A massive and very modern building, striking and imposing in a way that immediately made you feel safer, like these people had to know what they were doing for sure. I attended the most intrusive and determined series of physical investigations I’ve ever undertaken. I was probed, had blood taken, was tested for allergies, and x-rayed more times that I can remember. So much so in fact that I actually started to wonder if it was indeed psychosomatic.

Then the worst possible set of circumstances collided, my brother broke his arm [a spiral fracture], and developed a hernia, right at the point that the Doctors found out what was causing the potentially imagined maladies [pissing blood once apparently could be chalked up as a fluke]. The problem, it turned out was that my kidneys where shutting down. A birth defect with the valves between my bladder and my kidneys had slowly been getting worse to the point where urine was washing back into my system. I could wait, but it would probably mean dialysis. Rick, my older, mental brother was in agony, and this was a country where you had to pay for health care. We were sat down by my farther. Two children of nine, and eleven, and told to come to a decision. Rick didn’t even hesitate; I knew then that I could never repay that debt, no matter what I did in the future, no matter what happened I would always owe him my life.

“He needs it”

He said, trying to sound unrest and elderly, and coming off like the frightened child that he really was. The frightened children we both where, forced to make a decision an adult with years of life experience would shy away form. Things from that point moved at a speed that I can barely recall. Calls were made, and within I was being driven through a sheet of rain into that same hospital. This time the edifice didn’t seem so reassuring, only the sheer height of the building gave me pause for perspective as I looked down on the tiny people below wondering if this was how Gods saw us, if we were just there to amuse them while my farther held unrest and silenced conversations in a corner of a crowded white room with a man in a white coat. White, which was the major impression I’d built-up about the inside of that place, white, and with the smell of forced sterility. It was nothing like out family doctor, yet another family doctor. When you move around it becomes like a routine, you check into all the places you need to, school, doctor, dentist, post office to forward your mail. I’d seen my parents do it for as long as I had mature memories. I had dim and distant memories of a different time when we were a lot more pour, but they were faint, and scattered.
That place, I think that's where it all started. I mean what beats being pumped full of morphine by caring nurses when your home life constantly sucks. All I really remember from that part of my life is being semi-conscious, and also being in so much pain that I could hardly speak, or even in a whisper. It took three months to get over it. First I could talk, then I could sit up, and the world came back into focus with all its disappointments. I’d spent the better part of a month in a dream world being cared for by angels, being fed and dressed, and being given injections into a permanently fixed cannula. I was so out of it that I’d persuaded myself that one of the doctors had actually given me a used one to play with. Back then I didn’t really understand why, but I understood that more than one kind of pain had been removed. When I could finally walk again, they told me that I had to do all that shit over because my other kidney was also damaged. That one really fucked with my head.

Years later when I when I was at school I discovered that you could open up sleeping pills, and snort the powder inside and it got you numbed you out, you didn’t exactly sleep, you just weren’t really awake, something I’d come to understand all too well because of sleep deprivation. This was different though, this wasn't like the weird fucked up feeling you ended up with after not sleeping properly for weeks in end. Getting high meant leaving behind all the bullies and shit heads and the puissant teachers that didn't give a shit.
The truth however, looking back, was that I'd been getting stoned long before anyone gave me chemicals. Soon after I came out of hospital I developed a fondness for chewing rolled up balls of solvent based glue. Then I just started chewing yoo-hoo straight out of the tube. I'd sit in class and squirt it into my mouth, then chew it until it became a soft rubbery ball like chewing gum. I did it right up until I found out about pharmaceuticals, and I didn't even realise it was getting me fucked up.

I supposed the best school I ever went to was the school John Lennon attended, Quarry Bank. I don't really remember much about that place, mainly because I was pretty much always off my face in one way or another, or just not there, but I do remember the girl. Beautiful permed brown hair, slim, delicate features, and a perfect body. To say that she was sublime would be like breaking a nut with a pile driver, but she hung out with bunch of other girl. The leader of their little gang was a want to be street wise bottle blond, pretty enough, who was doing the bad girl routine. The first time I saw her I went up to her in the hallway on my first day, in front of everyone in the class, all her friends, and told her she was the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen in my life. She never went out with me, but I always wondered if I'd been cooler, less of a looser, not so poor. From the moment she turned me down I sabotaged any real chance that I might have had. I knew that she liked me. I could feel it in the way she looked glanced on those rare occasions where no one was there to judge her. I did all the usual stuff, lent her rare records, bought her stupid stuff and pretended to be her friend, but I never asked her out again, I never asked anyone for anything again, except for drugs, and booze.
Quarry Bank was a very big institution in the wealthier part of Liverpool, and I only had two real friends there, Tim, who had a second name I could never remember, and James. Tim was the one who introduced me to weed, but it was James who perpetuated the situation. I never really stayed in touch with Tim, but James lived fairly close to the poky little flat we all lived in. His parent's house by comparison was a mansion. A four storey building just off Lark Lane, and I spent most of much time there. He was into comics, which was a thing we both shared.

At the end of my fifth year we both decided that school was basically pointless, and promptly told our respective parents that we would not be returning in the new term. It seemed so adult at the time, like finally taking charge of my life and. The truth was however that the school was glad to get rid of me that they didn’t even bother to notify the education board that I wasn’t attending anymore. I can’t really blame them, during my time at Quarry Bank I’d managed to get into just about every kind of trouble they had a punishment, and some they didn’t. I started a riot in my forth year by simply climbing out of a window when the geography teacher was late one day. In retrospect it was a misjudged action, given that he was actually one of the few teachers that actually inspired me. History, the moment it the causes of the first World War I was hooked. I’d been watching connections on BBC2, and took my lead from there. I wrote an essay that got the highest mark in the class, actually one of the highest marks ever awarded for a history essay, 98%. Something about the relevance to our situation in society, the strikes, the recession, I could see all the links to the present day, all the events and the situation we found ourselves in. It was the birth of Anarchy, and the sex pistols, Ted Heath, the coming of Margret Thatcher…

The plan was to become a pair of creative geniuses, but somehow it never worked out that way, nothing ever does when you plan it without any real detail, but that is the exuberance of youth. Well I don't really know, maybe for Tim it did, but for me all we seemed to do was sit around smoking dope and coming up with great, but impossible stories that never got written down. We took mushrooms, acid, and speed by the boat load, all in search of a better existence, as though this one was somehow a staging area for our real lives which would come out of these experiences, but only when we pieced together the puzzle, and pierced the boundaries of reality. Of course we never did, because there wasn't a puzzle, just endless conspiracy theories to twist and unravel, and waist time over when we should have been working.

Tim’s mother was a full blown hippy who believed in everything from lay lines to crystals. She ran a small book shop on Lark Lane, the name of which I can't recall; only that she didn't run it very well because it went out of business. It sold all the alternative propaganda, the paranoid far left view of the world filed with UFO's and hidden secrets about cloning programs, and secret NSA plots to destabilise the far east, though that last one doesn't seem so paranoid anymore. That's the problem with paranoia, the truth gets sucked up into all the bullshit so when someone makes a valid point it gets ignored or dismissed as the voice of yet another whack job. It's taken over two hundred years for people to stop believing everything that gets printed in a newspaper. Now they believe what the read on the internet, though sifting through the paranoia to get to the facts remains a chore, but one worth seeking out.

Anyway, we were going to change the world, somehow. No one ever had a real plan as to how this was going to be accomplished, just vague notions planted in our heads from too much dope and Philip K Dick. We'd stay up all night, sometimes two nights in a row, and just talk about how we were all oppressed, and the general crap of the late seventies when punk was considered proper music, and the anarchists had a party. Naturally we were members, completely ignorant of the irony.

Personally I always preferred what came after it socially, the correct use of soap, now that was a real album. The ruts were pretty good too, a real shame their lead singer died of a smack overdose, but that was the style of the times. Self-destruction, impending doom, rioting on the streets, it felt like the world was coming to an end, or at least society was crumbling under the weight of its own inertia.
It was about that time I moved out of my pseudo parents flat and into a bed sit, or should I say more accurately I was kicked out into the world. Not a very nice world either. By this time I'd started developing genuine paranoia verging on schizophrenia, which isn't pleasant when your older brother was in a mental institution for that very same thing.

The place I was living in was a real crap hole with a TV you had to put money in to watch it, everything was slot coin metered, and nothing worked. In winter there would be ice on the inside of the windows, once the dish water was actually frozen, like a skating pond in miniature with dishes sticking out of it.
It was around that time I discovered heroin, though I'd taken it before, I'd never known where to get it, but Liverpool being Liverpool I hooked up with a guy named Tom. Tom was very much like me, scared of the world and wanted no place in it. We deliberately set out to become junkies having read the naked lunch. That's how stupid we were, and it didn't take long. Before I knew it I was robbing giros, and hitting up with dirty needles. Not like today where you can get a bag of pins from almost any chemist, back then you had to be inventive.

The usual story was that you needed them to clean a camera, but luckily we knew a guy who worked as a hospital porter who shared our interest in pharmaceuticals, but that was a rarity. Fuck, we actually made money selling syringes to junkies they were that difficult to get back then.

Tom was a man of very few words, and remarkably little else in his life except drugs. Like me he'd done way too much dope, and acid, and suffered psychosis from the experience. Smack was the ultimate antidote for all of that. The truth is that the ads are all bullshit; heroin makes you feel great, at first. The problem is that it eats up whatever money you have, no matter how hard you try to control it. The real solution would be to just let GP's prescribe the stuff to people who need it. It is after all possibly the best anti-depressant ever discovered, and imagine a world in which all the dossers never robbed or scammed anyone, and sat at home watching TV and paying their bills. It would probably save the country billions. The problem is that the idea is massively unpopular because giving junkies what they want is bad because normal people don't like the concept of people not having to work and being rewarded for it, particularly with drugs. They should all be punished because we all know drugs are bad, the papers tell us that, and there never wrong. They'd rather have a bunch of thieving, con artists roaming the streets doing crime, getting nicked, and causing trouble that costs the tax payer billions of pounds a year than a placated bunch of misfits causing no real harm.

After my first bedsit, from which I stole the last rent cheque, Tom and I found a flat that nobody was using. The back window was open and it really wasn't a difficult task to get in and change the locks. I wouldn't exactly call it a home, but for some reason the electricity and gas where still plugged in and there was a couch and a mattress. Malcolm, a guy I'd met through James lived just down the road. He'd been in and out of mental institutions since God alone knew when. He was a nice guy, but really unpredictable, and spooky with it. There was this one time when he'd just broken out of a mental ward where he was under a section, and I was putting him up in my freezing bedsit. He insisted on sleeping in the wardrobe laid out on its side. Anyway, we were having a conversation about some shit I can't even remember, when he basically told me what I was about to say, right down to the last syllable. Then he lay down in the wardrobe and closed the door without another word.

He would come round to our squat with drugs, some of which he'd been prescribed, so we started hanging out with him. He was a short odd looking man with an awkward stance, and always neatly dressed. He had a habit of rambling about nonsensical subjects like how he was a reincarnation of Ian Curtis, or how Curtis was in fact the Egyptian God Horus, king of the underworld.
He also used to get twitchy from the medication he was on, which he didn't always take, claiming that it sucked the essence from his soul. I felt sorry for him, the drugs he was on weren't very nice, but for some reason I couldn't fathom how he'd got himself a sane, and unusually beautiful girlfriend, along with a skinny, disturbing lodger who had a penchant for overtly homosexual comics. He himself maintained that he was straight, but something didn't fit, not that I cared one way or the other. Actually no one cared except him.
At that point we weren't really what you'd call junkies, we did gear but neither one of us had the cold heartedness to perpetrate the kind of crime spree it would take to keep us in drugs on a daily basis. So we spent most of our giros on the stuff, and then other peoples as well, without their knowledge of course. It's nothing that I'm proud of, it's just something that I did and can't undo, but it was where it really started.
The two things I despise myself for the most are snatching the bags of two students, and robbing an old lady. That one haunts me to this day, but by that time I really was addicted to the stuff, and I was suffering. I hated myself, and still do. After that I started begging, which carried with it a much higher chance of getting caught, but didn't actually hurt anyone, but that one's in the future. At the time we were happy to hit up Tunol [a barbiturate] and speed, and do gear two three times a week.

It was around this time that I met Cathy. She was from New Zeeland, the child of a single parent hooker who'd followed in her mother's footsteps. She was really beautiful, and the first time I saw her she was wearing a bed sheet that she'd made into a dress using nothing but safety pins. She looked like a goddess in leather sandals laced up to her ankles, and ray band wayfarers she'd nicked from a guy at the same party.
The next day she was round at James's smoking a joint, and she walked up to me with a match and struck it on the zipper of my jeans, all the while pinning me with her gaze. She lit the joint and asked me my name...

"Zack" I replied bluntly, but somewhat self-consciously, I wanted to say something else, anything that would keep her talking to me, but It wasn't in me, and I didn't run into her again until I went to that party.
It was one of those bashes that echo and the bunny men held in the flat they kept for rehearsals, it was a cheap night out, cheap beer, and good drugs. She was standing in the middle of the crowd looking dazed, smoking a cigarette, wearing a red summer dress, with a paten of small flowers on it, and boots, big black dock martins. I walked over and started talking to her, which was a lot easier with beer and valium in me. It turned out she had no place to live due to the guy she was hanging out with now being in jail for possession.
The next day we woke up together with a really bad hangover, and some surprise. All I remembered from the night before was a garbled conversation about quantum physics, and definite miscomprehension of mathematics, and then she was there, naked and asleep. There was no way we could have had sex, I was far too wasted for any of the mechanics of that to work properly. She opened her eyes, smudged makeup and all, and smiled, more of a goddess than ever.

"Morning Zack..."

I couldn't quite believe it, but there it was, my mouth was dry, my head hurt, and I generally felt like crap, but I had a beautiful naked girl next to me, a prostitute, but still beautiful, and still naked. Why the fuck had I told her my name was Zack, because it sounded cool and wining perhaps.
She reached into her handbag which was lying on the floor next to the mattress, and pulled out what looked like a nail care kit, and unzipped it. The thing was full of works, and a ching bags.

"D'you wana a hit?"

She said it calmly, brushing the bleached blond hair from her eyes as though everyone in the world would understand this behaviour, and see her unfettered beauty.
"Cos if you do you need to get me some water and a spoon." Her tone was lucid and business like.
She looked at me blackly, as though this was something we'd pre-arranged, maybe we had, I couldn't remember, but I got out from under the blanket and fetched a clean spoon, and a glass of water. I noticed I was still wearing my jeans, the rest of my cloths scattered on the carpet less floor.
Just a side note here, [and it might not be so important to most people] but fruit other than apples doesn’t belong in cider. Pear cider, I mean what the fuck is that about, that's not fucking cider, it’s fermented pear juice.

I put down the glass and the spoon, and she cooks up, and back fills a pin for me. I did it without saying a word, not quite believing my luck, and then I lay back down. She's done hers but remains seated, wearing a clean white bra.

"Thank you." I say to her, my eyes closed, a wave of relief and euphoria rushing through me.

"Think of it as rent."

She replies coldly, the concept of this being where I live popped momentarily into my head, until the truth of the situation drains into my pail skin. I open my eyes, she was smiling. She did that a lot, despite what she did to make money. Christ she's was beautiful, she could get anyone she wanted I thought to myself watching her cleaning up the pins, and gear, and putting things back into her handbag.
It's was a black leather bag, expensive, and new. What was she doing with me for God's sake?
"Have you got some cloths I could steal, I'm sick of this sheet."
She says it in a detached tone of voice. I thought about it, but most of what I owned was dirty, never having any money to clean things made that a certainty. Most of the time I didn’t have the inclination to do anything about it when it's possible anyway.

"Nothing that's clean" I say hopefully.

"That doesn't matter, what you got?"

She got up and walks around the bare room, looking for somewhere cloths might be. She soon found my bag of cloths, and started rummaging through it. Pulling out a pair of ripped genes, and a striped shirt she held them up and smiled. I nod in approval, and she slipped into them like they had been made to fit her body perfectly. They were too big, and too baggy, yet so perfect with that belt and roles up sleeves. I just wanted to tell her how fucking sexy she looked, but even with the smacked I couldn’t bring myself to say it. How the fuck she ended up in bed with me remains a mystery to this day.

"It's good, isn't it" She says, obviously referring to the gear.

"Yeah, it is."

I was surprised at my own sincerity, my tone of voice, maybe it was her influence or something. She puts on her boots, and laces them up, and then warped the laces round the top, twice, before tying them in a neat bow. Then sat up and looked at me with that angelic face, and deviant smile.

"I need you and you friend to do me a favour." She said enquiringly

Her manner was relaxed, and totally not intense.

"Like what kind of favour?" I responded, a little suspicious.

"All you have to do is stand with me, and take down the licence plates of the cars I get into. If I'm gone for
more than an hour, then call the pigs."

I got the picture immediately. She needed us to look like nasty people who might do bad things to her clients if they try anything. Tom still looked like a bit of a bad ass, big, and still chunky enough to pull off a mean stare without needing to resort to actual violence, and I was tall. I suddenly understood why she'd picked me, us, I just didn't get why she woke up next to me, and not Tom. She reached down and put her hand on my cheek, it was soft and warm and she looked at me in a way that was almost tender, it stirred something in me. Some long deep forgotten longing.

"You look like an angel." She said softly

There was a note of inflexibility in her voice, some lack of real conviction which I chose to ignore. Why shouldn't I, I hadn't even given her my real name.

That night we went out with her as she did her business, it was like watching some kind of genetically evolved creature, like she was born to it. We stood close enough to her for the people to realise that we were her backup, but not so close that we looked like a group. She only ever picked pathetic looking men, men she somehow knew, or thought wouldn't harm her, men she could mould and dominate. It seemed to work, by the end of the night she had three hundred pounds, two hundred of which she spent on gear. She made us wait round a corner while she phoned and met her dealer, then we walked back down Princess avenue chatting as though we'd just been on a night out.

Half way down we ran into a bunch of old bill wrestling a local loony to the ground. He was clearly drunk and making a lot of noise. Without a second thought she started in on the cops, asking them what they were doing. I was shit scared, I mean she's carrying two hundred pounds worth of heroin, and she was bitching at the cops, questioning three angry policemen about their actions in one of the worst parts of town.
In the end they cuffed the guy and got him into the back of a car, and she walked away, telling them she was going to write to her MP. Obviously given the way she was dressed they didn't have much to worry about. I can't work out whether she was incredibly brave, or just stupid, but she was free in a way I’d never seen before, dangerous, but completely free of all that restrained most people.

We went back to the squat and had a hit. It was our share for doing our job for the night, that and a tenner each. She seams totally unfazed by the events of the night, everything, but she went and took a bath, and asked me to come into with here. I do it feeling slightly out of place for some reason, and not quite right.
"So how come you're living here." She said to me casually, as was soaping herself.
"I don't know, the back window was open, so we changed the locks." I said with a wet sponge in my hand.

"That's not what I meant."

"I mean why aren't you living with your parents, you look to innocent to be living like this."

"Innocent!" I repeated, uncertain of what to make of her remark.

"Yeah, it's not an insult or anything; you just don't look like someone who can’t look after himself."

A sudden shock of impudent childish anger flooded through my brain as I realised how right she was. I should be living at home with caring parents. But I wasn’t, I didn’t have those; I had a step dad who pushed me out as soon as I was old enough to get dole, and a mother who went along with him. It dawned on me that it was Tom, who did everything, who got all the money, and found the drug dealers. I didn’t do anything other than live off him. I suddenly felt ashamed of who and what I was, and hurt, but I didn’t show it, that was one thing I was good at, but not good enough for her not to notice.

"I'm not innocent." I said to her unconvincingly.

I sounded like a child clinging to his last shred of dignity in front of a classroom full of bullies with his trousers round his ankles. She looked at me, suddenly tender, more like a mother than a lover, and it made me feel odd, naked, and completely vulnerable in a way I’d never experienced before.

"You don't need to prove anything to me." She says gently.

"I like who you are, and by the way, I know you're not called Zack."

She ducked under the water, and popped up reaching for a towel which I handed her. She stepped out and puts on the shirt and gens I’d given her that morning, or rather that she’d chosen.

"Why don't we go to London?" She said casually wrapping the towel round her long bleached blond hair. I'm still taking it all in, how she could deal with all the bullshit and still like me.

"And I want to get my hair cut." She added, like we've known each other for a lifetime.

I took it all for granted, but then I think of the squat, I mean leaving this place behind, it seemed stupid to me. As though she'd anticipating my reaction she turned round and said.

"We can make mad money in London, I know people there as well where we can stay." It's not a discussion; she expected me and Tom to go with her.

It turns out she had a friend who lived half way down Princess Avenue in a small flat on the top floor of a dilapidated building. It was a nice place full of plants and books and cushions. Her friend turned out to be a young girl, plainer but pretty, and immaculately dressed in gens and a tee shirt with really clean trainers. She lets us in and we sat down, and I realised that I hadn't asked her name. We've slept in the same bed, but I didn't know what she was called.

"This is Janice." She said introducing use to her friend, we all said hi and introduced ourselves awkwardly. I gave her my real name somewhat awkwardly, and then find somewhere to sit. Janice seemed clean; she didn’t have that hollow look about her, and her apartment was well cared for and tidy.

Tom fell for her right away. I could see it in the way he looked at her. I'd never seen him look at a girl like that before. Usually he was shy around women, didn't actually interact in any significant way, but with her he seemed different, more confident, and they launched into a full blown conversation from the off. From that point on they were inseparable, but really only as friends, nothing actually happened until Janice kissed me.
That was the bomb that went off in our little group. Her name turned out to be Kiki, and when she found out about the frankly meaningless kiss, they had a major argument over it. I was in the other room, but I could hear most of what was being said.

"He was mine, you knew that." She said bitterly.

"It's not like you even like him Kiki, it's not like you've made a move, Tom told me, you sleep with him every night, but you don't do anything."

This last remark seamed to cut her silent for a moment. I knew that she'd be taking it out on me next, but it was true, she'd never made a move on me, and I'd just assumed she wanted the company, and didn't really care about having anything else, given what she did for a living.

"It's not the point." She said eventually, "you knew I liked him."

‘You know I Liked him’, those words cut through me as I realised that something possibly special had just vanished in front of my very eyes.

"How, Kiki, how did I know, I'm not fucking psychic, and anyway it was just a kiss, one fucking kiss, that's all, I mean he's a good looking guy, but fuck...."

I felt a sudden waive of ego enhancement, which jarred with the rest of the turmoil bubbling inside me. Up until now I'd steered clear of this sort of thing, but I opened the door and walked into the room. Kiki was wearing a clean pair of jeans and a fresh tee shirt, obviously plundered from Janice's wardrobe. They both looked at me at the same time, and I looked from one to the other searching for a hint or clue as to what I might say.

"I here'd you arguing." Was all I finally came up with, and closed the door.

After that evening , days later Tom and Janice hooked up, and I had a faint inkling that it might be responsible for her outpouring of emotions?

"We weren't arguing." Kiki said coldly lighting a cigarette and taking a long pull off the thing.
I had none, and the feeling that neither women were about to give me one if I asked, so I didn't.

"Look," I said staring at Kiki, "it really didn't mean anything, I was just curious, and it's not as if you've ever really given me any indications that you had any feelings about me."

She looked back at me, smoking her cigarette and viewing me through accusatory eyes, she looked suddenly like a child trying not to show how she felt to a cruel parent, even fragile, and I'd broken something special to her.

"What do you want from me?" I said to her as bluntly as I could. She turned away and looked out of the dirty window at the world below.

"I'm serious Kiki, what exactly do you want from me, you sleep with me, and never want me to touch you other than to hug you, what am I supposed to think?"

"You're supposed to think that I like you, and that I need some time. I have sex with men for money, what did you think I was going to be like for fucks sake."

I felt like the biggest cunt in the world. I didn't know what to say, she had a point, not one that I could grasp onto and hold in my head, but she had a point. Maybe I was an impatient cunt, maybe I was being insensitive, I couldn't tell anymore.

"Look, do you still want me to sleep with you or not?" I said tentatively, which wasn't very forceful at all, and quite pathetic.

"Do I want you to sleep with me?." She looked suddenly betrayed, and small, and it was never the same after that evening.

We slept together, we even had sex for the first time, but it felt more like a negative thing than anything given freely and without bonds, like she was trying to reignite a spark that had now ling since died. It was payment, because she was lonely and because despite her feelings she didn't want me to leave, at least not on my terms. That's the way I saw it at any rate.

A few days from then we went to London. We stayed with two of her friends who lived off the embankment in a really classy flat with marble statues in alcoves in the hallways. We slept on the floor under a blanket in our cloths. We stayed there for a week, until they finally kicked us out, after which we stayed with a single mum she knew in Brixton.

It was a small flat and it was the last time I saw her, but for one. She left one morning to go to the shops and never came back. Me and Tom managed to beg enough money to support our selves, and we even robed an ambulance, but all we got where syringes and bandages. The thrill of doing it however guilty it made me feel, also made me feel alive. We told ourselves that this hurt no one, that it would all be replaced by the NHS.
We got through another four weeks, and then Tom went back to Liverpool with Janice to get married. I drifted around London for a while, and then went back to Liverpool, back to nothing from nothing. I stayed with my mum for a while then went to a rehab. One of the nastiest place in Essex I’ve ever been too, ran by two fundamentalist Christians who'd previously ran a half-way house for young offenders.

It very soon became clear that their mission was not one of mercy, but one of financial gain, the vast majority of people in there where there by court order, I was one of the only self-referred patients. This place was supposed to be one of the better places according to my doctor, who referred me there. The only problem was that there was no heating and we were basically a work crew helping to renovate a very large building, while they were being paid by the government. Most of the windows were either broken or toilets, or didn't close or open properly, and you were allowed one shower a week.

After three months, when I'd come off the methadone I left them to their pitiful scam and came back to Liverpool, and yet another crappy flat that my mum's boyfriend arranged.

Within a month I'd spent the rent cheque and was homeless. That was the first time, but certainly not the last...