AKA everything goes to shit

It was a normal Saturday night, just me, Queenie and meth-head Mike, and everything was going to plan. We were, turd-like, passing through the arsehole of Brighton, AKA the Victoria Gardens vicinity, where the Brighton Sauna allows you to catch gonorrhoea in the hot-tub blowing some bear whose chest hair blooms like the flowers of Victoria Gardens are supposed to and then shuffle your way up to Morley Street to get your ceftriaxone injection to treat said gonorrhoea, AKA we were round at meth-head Mike’s.

Meth-head Mike is one of those hippie types – think baggy trousers, tie-dye headband and faint smell of incense and body odour. True to form, he had the incense burning when we arrived.

‘Frankincense and myrrh, this one,’ he says, ‘like the baby Jesus got for his birthday present. Now all we need’s the gold.’

‘Yes, let’s talk gold,’ Queenie chips in, ‘How much we getting?’

‘The big K – one kilogram. One thousand of your nicest grams. One thousand opportunities, one thousand regrets. But to us it means: one thousand deal bags at fifty per gram. That adds up right? Yes I tell you it adds up – up your Mum! – because that’s fifty thousand of your golden pounds. So now do you see?’

Queenie pouts in a way that would have looked sexy if her lipstick hadn’t been smeared like bird shit on the sparkly glass of your newly-cleaned windows (these lazy transsexuals, hey?) and pretends to do sums in her head.

‘So how much is my cut?’ she finally boils it down to.

‘Sixteen and half big ones. 16.666 recurring if you want to be precise – the Devil’s number.’

Queenie’s eyes light up like Christmas. She pretends to inspect meth-head Mike’s Moroccan lamp, which is casting a souk vibe across the room, all dimness and cultural appropriation.

‘Speaking of the Devil,’ she ventures, ‘what’s the detail? By which I mean, where’s the catch?’

‘The catch?’ Mike says, catching my eye, ‘Well yes there’s a catch. By which I mean, simply, we mustn’t fucking cane it all!’

‘Ah.’

‘Yes because every one of those puffs on the pipe is one of those shiny golden pounds wasted. Well, likely a few more than one.’

‘Got it.’

Meth-head Mike looks me dead in the eye and draws forth, turd-like, my first words of the evening.

‘Got it,’ I say.

*

But did we get it? I guess you’ll have to wait and see how the tale unfolds… But before I go all storybook on you, let me tell you about the Level.

The Level is a dirty little patch of grass of a park in Brighton and the scene for no once-upon-a-times. Daytimes the skatepark is haunted by dribbly-nosed baggy-arsed skate kids who blast their no-good musics out to drown out the birdsong. Nighttimes, well, that’s when the big boys come out to play. And by the big boys, I mean yours truly, Queenie and meth-head Mike.

So there we were on the Level at stupid o’clock under the arse-beams of the big ol’ moon, Queenie in heels sticking to the pavement and Mike and I gallivanting on the grass like God’s creatures on pastures new.

‘Got it?’ Queenie asks – again – in a stage-whisper loud enough to summon every piggy from here to the Marina.

‘Got it,’ Mike says, patting the black duffel bag of cash under his arm.

Click-clack-click-clack go Queenie’s heels and then suddenly silence as she stops.

‘I think that’s him!’

I look around from the dog waste bins to the benches with their flock of yesterday’s Stella tins forming an unheavenly congregation. I see no one.

But then suddenly from the ghost-glow of the street-lamped skatepark – a figure. Black-hooded and impertinent against the pale moon.

‘That’s him,’ Queenie offers, as if our all-seeing narrator, God-like, hadn’t already clocked him.

We click-clack over to the skatepark and come to rest behind the biggest of the skate-ramps where our anonymous black-hood joins us. We stand there the four of us, silhouetted against the moonrise of the streetlamp like four pillars of apocalypse.

‘Yo.’

‘Yo.’

A brief pause, and then, because we’ve all had enough of this fucking yo-yoing, we crack on to business. Bags are exchanged and just like that the deal of a lifetime is done and we’re hot-footing it back to meth-head Mike’s with one kilogram of your purest crystal.

*

‘Mummy,’ says the kid in the park, pointing to the carbuncle of rhinestones and pink glitter that is Queenie’s shoe, ‘What’s that?’

‘It’s a shoe, darling,’ says Mummy, ‘a pretty shoe for a pretty lady. She must have lost it, like Cinderella on her way home from the ball.’

‘Did Cinderella have a ball here last night?’

‘Yes, darling! Right here on the Level!’

‘Did she get a kiss from Prince Charming?’

‘Yes, darling. And she was whisked away in a golden carriage.’

‘Will they get married?’

‘Yes, darling, and that’s the end of the story.’

*

Meanwhile our story’s just heating up.

We made it back to meth-head Mike’s and Queenie, who in the course of hot-footing it home with a kilo of meth had managed to lose a shoe, was rubbing her sore and mud-encrusted toes and laughing.

‘I never thought I’d see the day when I’d lose a Pleasers and not care! I stripped my way into owning these stripper-heels and I’m damned if I’d let the black mud of the Level claim one of them!’

‘But this isn’t any ordinary day, is it?’ says meth-head Mike. ‘This is the day we make it big. The day we stop snivelling around for the last crumbs of Tina and arguing over whose turn it is to pick up. The day we dream big. The day we make something of ourselves. Here, ladies and gentlemen, is our ticket to freedom – a free pass at life in crystalline form. Would you just take a gander at that?’

Here he gestures to the giant mountain of white crystals on the coffee table in front of us. It rises, Everest-like, above the skies of our highest ambitions.

‘That,’ he continues, ‘is what I’m fucking talking about. Diamonds in the rough. But remember the golden rule of Aladin’s cave – look but don’t touch.’

We nod enthusiastically. All agreed. Rule number one in the dealers’ handbook: never try thine own supply.

‘Because what’s once done cannot be undone. Entropy, innit?’

Queenie pulls a face like a puckered arsehole, ‘You what?’

‘Entropy,’ Mike says. ‘The tendency of a system towards chaos. The second law of thermodynamics states that within an isolated system, such as the universe, entropy will increase over time.’

‘Alright, Albert Einstein.’

‘You can put milk in the coffee and stir it in, but you can’t unstir it. You can put one of your finest Tina crystals in the pipe and smoke it, but you can’t unsmoke it. Right now, us being such meth-heads as we are, there are millions and millions of Tina molecules just swimming away in the air of this very room, but they won’t spontaneously come together to form a nice juicy smokeable crystal because of entropy. Diffusion, innit? Molecules move apart from each other over time, the universe cools like a freshly laid turd, entropy increases. AKA everything goes to shit.’

‘The moral of the story?’

‘The moral of the story being that everything goes to shit if we so much as whet our whistles with this here Tina.’

We all nod gravely, even meth-head Mike whose great speech it was, the fucking pretentious cunt.

So who was it then that suggested we nibble a little, just so as to know our wares, as ’twere? I’ve forgotten (your narrator, you see, is fallible). But I’ll let Queenie, Eve-like, take the blame for that. Because we were about to take a generous bite of a mother-fucking-delicious apple.

*

Fast-forwards (because that’s what drugs of the speed class do to time and anyway who likes a fucking drone-on narrator?) and of course we’ve blown through it. Every last delectable crystalline inch of it. Gone in a rush of fast nights and fast regrets and exiting stage-left in a cloud of white smoke.

Gone are all hopes of making it big, gone are all of our chances – every last gram deal-bag of them – gone are all of our lovely golden pounds. Misery sits, turd-like and unflushable, on the shoulders of our three sorry characters.

Entropy, innit? The tendency of a system towards chaos. The second law of thermodynamics states that within an isolated system, such as the universe, entropy will increase over time. You can put milk in the coffee and stir it in, but you can’t unstir it. You can put one of your finest Tina crystals in the pipe and smoke it, but you can’t unsmoke it. Right now, us being such meth-heads as we are, there are millions and millions of Tina molecules just swimming away in the air of this very room, but they won’t spontaneously come together to form the Everest of meth we once had because of entropy. Diffusion, innit? Molecules move apart from each other over time, the universe cools like a freshly laid turd, entropy increases. AKA everything goes to shit.

So I guess it’s a tragedy I’m telling. All weepy-waily and shit.

Or it would be if it weren’t for – and here let us have a drum-roll, please, for the incoming deus ex machina – fabulism.

Fabulism, AKA magical realism, is the inclusion of magical elements in an otherwise realistic story. Or somesuch bollocks. And the magic in our story is happening right now.

For look, as a million million Tina molecules, all diffused so entropically throughout the room and the universe, begin to turn tail and hot-foot it back towards each other again as if the very laws of space and time and physics and all that jazz were breaking down. Look, as they dance their way to meth-head Mike’s coffee table and come together – a very holy congregation – lining up in shining phalanxes, an army of crystalline perfection, a whole meth mountain once more.

And will it all be alright in the end?

So I say to you in answer, dear reader: yes, darling, and that’s the end of the story.