NOTHING PERSONAL
©2007 Lorne Patterson

‘Will you? Please?’ She had never asked before. Since the attack though she had grown afraid. I didn’t feel comfortable with the request but she was my friend so I said yeah, sure, I’ll go with you.

When she went to the hotel she wore the stolen cashmere that she kept for such emergencies. The coat was her passport to guarded places. It distracted from her face where careful make-up tried to pass off gaunt as model-thin, pasty skin as chic pale. I watched while she strode past the doorman, then sat in a café across the way drinking over-priced coffee and waited.

Usually she left the building with the money after sending whoever approached her upstairs first. Sometimes she had no choice but to go with them. She had been attacked after one of her pick-ups insisted she accompany him to his room before he paid her. ‘Should have quit right then’, she told me later, ‘I could feel it going bad’. But she needed money, and quick, so she closed her mind to her fear and went with him.

She said it was the sight of her needle-sores that triggered the beating. ‘Thought I was about to introduce him to Mr. Slim’, sponging down the bruises and caked blood, voice evil but dark eyes tired. Between her abscesses and thinness it wasn’t too hard to see where the AIDS idea could come from. Or maybe he was just one of those men who got off on hurting a woman and would have battered her in any case. For a brief moment I guess we both wished she had been a carrier.

The question and anger were mine. She had no real interest in the reason, fists and foulness just one more hazard to be avoided if possible, endured if not.

I sat and waited until I saw her as she came out of the hotel’s nearest side exit, moving deceptively fast despite her casual manner. The cashmere was already over her arm, wig barely visible within its folds, and as I went to meet her I had the half-jacket ready. When she bumped into me both coat and jacket were dropped, exchanged. I apologised for my clumsiness, and with her accessories safely in my bag watched as she strode away, straw hair lifting in the breeze.

Later.

Hearing the tape-deck before I got there, the sound easily escaping the thin door of her basement flat. Otis, ‘I’ve been lovin’ youuuu, tooo long….’. She’d already copped, used. Our code, that if there was no music playing I’d go away, come back later. I’d started watching once as she hunted down a vein, fingers probing, testing, searching past the rigid ruin of old injection sites. But shooting up was an ugly intimacy, one that couldn’t be shared without participation so I left.

Plenty of noise now, so I used the key she had given me long ago and let myself in.

She was sprawled across the sofa, dog-eared copy of Bulgakov’s ‘The Master And Margarita’ in hand. Like Otis, something she had introduced me to. Good memories. Ones to balance the others. A smile lighting her face at the sight of the bags of take-away in my hand. Sniffing the spice aroma, book forgotten. As I got plates from the kitchenette I could see her kneeling at the low sitting-room table clearing away the paraphernallia she’d left there.

This time it was tourniquet, bottled water, and flame-blackened spoon, the works she’d used in hitting up. Sometimes, it would be kitchen scales and other equipment, making ready to sell on a little of whatever she’d managed to get. Bulking it out with talcum powder if it was for her tight little circle; brick dust or other dirt for the rest. If she didn’t know you at all, she wouldn’t sell. It was no guarantee of safety, but with user-dealers like her the bread and butter of police-sweeps and public hysteria it helped improve poor odds.

Remembering. Way back, when we were young enough to both be wearing our school uniform, how she would tell me there was any number of reasons to take something, try something. A toke of this, a taste of that, anything I would want courtesy of the tab or tribal smoke. ‘The magical mystery tour is waiting to take you away,’ dancing around me as she sang it. Beautiful and full of life and I loved her so.

Later, when school was a thing of the past, at least for her, the whole truth. Of what happened when the dose was wrong, or the stuff was bad or mixed and they slid you over the edge. If you took them stupid. Or took them smart even but so sorry, your karma was bad. ‘Listen’, on our second bottle of wine, the sheets tangled down around our legs and the sweat starting to cool, me light-headed, she not even buzzing as far as I could tell. ‘No free rides on the magic bus.’

Pushing the words into my heart with a heavy finger. ‘Doesn’t matter what it could be, what it was. It’s just junk now. You hear me?’

No ‘us’ for a long while. Diverging, moving on. Different lives. One for me; for her, time and opportunities discarded like copper change. But still friends. Always coming back into each other’s lives, accepting each other, honest with each other. Even when lies and deceit had become the currency of her life I don’t think she lied to me. Not consciously, not about anything important. Occasionally she spouted the Party-line - I’m in control, I’m only chipping, I can stop whenever I want. Neither of us believed it although I’m sure she would have liked to. Otherwise, she told me things openly, things she’d seen and done and had done to her, things I would never have told anyone about myself. Ever. The nakedness of her life a gift to me.

I brought the food and cutlery through while she tidied away her gear, the curry easily overwhelming the lingering chemical odours. By the time she returned from the bedroom I had the food dished out, the wine poured.

As we sat down the phone rang. She wouldn’t answer it, pushing the ring-volume down to silence instead. ‘Thank you’. Ducking her head in acknowledgement. Knowing what I meant. Not tonight, no business tonight, tonight at least was about us. We clinked glasses and she finished off half her drink with the first swallow. Reached over and topped herself up before starting on the curry.

I had heard her but she was still riding the bus. Still paying. The magic long gone.

I heard the sniffing as I came awake, a familiar sound that put a twist in my guts. The running nose a red flag signalling she was in trouble. It would be the eyes next, then the sweats. Asking me to rub her legs, her back. She must have been greedy yesterday, lost to the moment, and the morning scrapings hadn’t been enough for the wake-up to do its job. As I stood to pull on my jeans she brushed past me still only half dressed. I followed her with my eyes, watching as she stooped to pry an ornamental brick loose, reach beneath and scoop out a small bottle. Unable not to notice how little flesh was left on her bare thighs, how white and bloodless they looked.

My trepidation at the increasing isolation and desperation of her life. Watching as that glorious, animated face dwindled to blankness, to stillness, ready to be moulded into whatever mask the situation required. Looking on as the person I knew disappeared month by month, lie by lie. Not sure what to do except try and be there for what remained, keep looking for solutions that didn’t seem to exist.

She counted out the tablets in the palm of her hand before swallowing them dry. ‘Enough to calm baby’s jitters until it gets its proper medicine.’ A sickly grin for a joke that wasn’t funny.

I knew that was going to be the rest of her day, looking to stop the pain. It wouldn’t matter how, not anymore. So many promises broken, the ones to herself the ones that ate her up when she wasn’t floating. I smelt her too. A rancid seeping from her pores like a biological warning to stay clear. Or else you’ll get hurt. Nothing personal, just the way it is.

‘You have to do something’ I told her. Our old argument.

‘I will, my love, I will, but let me do this first’. A reflex response, not even hearing me enough to be irritated, wriggling the tights up over her hips before tugging down her dress.

Stepping forward, taking her by her arm above the elbow, away from her sores. Hating the thinness I felt before she pulled away. ‘There’s nothing out there to help me now.’ Her need and her fear riding her, spurring her. The anger at being obstructed, at my perseverance for a tired subject hot in her eyes. ‘I’ve got to see to myself first, you know that.’

I’d brought her to treatments. Collected her from them too. Watching her walk out as often as she was thrown despite her promises and good intentions. Her mother had long since passed from despair to anaesthetised indifference - her father hadn’t been part of her life since the pregnancy was discovered.

Arguments over medication, over rules or commitment, about being crow-barred into programmes that held no meaning for her, no relevance. It wasn’t a question of will, I knew all too well if she had to score, she’d score and that was that. It was… something more. Something fundamental that I could sense but not quite reach.

I don’t know what she saw in my face but she changed. A smile, sad, and her hand gentle on my cheek, fingers trailing as if tracing a stranger’s memory.

Sometimes, when she wanted to be held, we would still go to bed together. She would let me turn off the light and I would pull her close and stroke her hair until the pills took effect. Feel her bones against my body as she jerked and struggled against her dreams. Try not to recall how tranquil she lay upon me when we were young.

‘You don’t know, you can’t understand! Knowing it’s right there. Just waiting!’ Crying. Wanting me to accept.

‘You don’t know what it’s like to give in’. In the poor light from the street-lamp, her bed sheet had looked like a shroud against her pale skin. When I’d tucked it round her I’d felt like her undertaker.

I stood before her not knowing what to say. Feeling something should be said, hating myself for not having the words to make a difference. Terrified the odds would finally catch up with her. Maybe it would be a dirty needle, dirty dope, and she’d mainline rat poison or some quiet bacterium straight to her heart. Perhaps the stuff would be cut more than usual, cut less even and she would misjudge the dose. Take one pill too many beforehand. Maybe her body would grow too tired, too old.

Or maybe it would be the kamikaze couplings that did for her. AIDS something she didn’t like to think about much, voracious little genocide that wouldn’t kill her until it rotted her body alive first. Trying to shrug it off. She lay still as a corpse anyway she’d told me, the wine helping her talk, kept silent as the grave unless they wanted to hear her whimper and beg while they did their things and mouthed their hatred.

Trying not to count down to the inevitable bad-choice who’d be too heated or full of rage to stop. Too many men out there with a taste for blood and the sound of a woman’s pain.

So many terminal possibilities. The one thing I dreaded above all the one thing she wouldn’t talk about: that she would finally stop caring. My fears a weight on my chest that wouldn’t let me draw a full breath.

Making my decision. ‘I’m sorry,’ I told her, voice ragged, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’ But she was already lost to me, eyes flicking towards the phone, some plan forming behind her tears and pushing aside her sorrow. Needing me to be gone.

Nothing personal, just the way it was.