Just Say No

In what I hope is a kindly indication that I might be rehabilitated once my compulsory re-education is finished -- it's a course without a specific graduation date -- Cath offered to run some of my stuff over to Hayley's. Thus I was able to attend the last couple of days at work in my own trousers, rather than Hayley's, which exhibited the gnarled spindles that are my Max Wall-ish legs rather too explicitly.

The author yesterday

I say "last days at work" pointedly. On Friday, as I was sliding into my own more concealing trousers, I received a call from the agency, informing me that that day was to be my last at the hospital. A couple of people who have been self-isolating, but finding no trace of plague in their breasts, have come back to work, ousting me.

I got in to read an email from the HR Manager, saying that he is going to have a look round to see if he can place me anywhere else. I've applied to be an ambulance call handler. They're paid £9.40 an hour, a poor wage for that job, but I need something.

Crack, of which I have had more since moving here on Tuesday than in my entire life, is a fucking waste of money. Like art, it's put into the market to absorb any amount of spare income. Me, Hayley and Harry stood around in her / our living room-cum-kitchen with a proper pipe this time. Harry moaned in a way suggestive of an orgasm aftermath, ran his hands through his hair, and said he had to sit down. I analysed my pleasure, wondering why it wasn't matching the others'.

It's pleasant, but lesser in physical and social warmth than that produced by the second bottle of red in familiar company; and the worst value drug of anything I've tried. I've done well the past year, living relatively frugally, working long hours in jobs where you get fed, so all I've had to find is rent, bus fare and alcohol. I've given Kirsty four hundred pounds towards our Brittany holiday, and have more to give her. I don't want to see my advantages go down a crack pipe.

I went out this morning and met a rather aggressive ex-paratrooper. He was sitting topless with a rucksack, its strewn innards of clothing, and a bottle of vodka nearing exhaustion. He gave me a can of Stella and invited me to sit down. His mother was a twat, apparently. A degree short of a cunt then?, I didn't say.

Asking after my background, he silenced me whenever I went to speak, apologised for doing so, then silenced me again after I'd resumed my story. His eyes brightened in brotherhood when I said I'd recently lived in Kazakhstan. "Yeah...I know Afghanistan too."

I gave him five pounds towards a bottle of vodka. He went swerving across the street, yelling about St George's Day in front of a bus, and came back with a carton of orange juice. "No, he won't sell me alcohol. I'm banned from there." I said I had to get a bus to go and meet my daughter. Most of them are more interesting than that.

I sat in the park. Middle class dyads and offspring, expensive bikes, the men in tubular shorts. Hayley rang and I said I was writing. I told her there was a salad in the fridge. "Thank you so, so much!" she said, the retarded hunger kicking in. When I got in I was pleased to see her and Harry there, and two empty plates, only a small portion out of a saucepan-full left for me.

"Oop!" she said, and got up to get a detergent spray gun to use on the spots of blood she'd leaked onto the settee. I felt like a good mother. They are like my children. I mop and clean and cook -- in as far as one can cook in a house with neither knives nor a cooker -- and every hour, give my silent thanks to her. Sexy, mini-skirted, and kind.