I stood up again, leant against a wall, looked needily at passers-by and quailed as one by one they threw filthy expressions at me.

I don’t know how long I loitered for, cringing and desperate, when finally a boy came up to me. In a few short sentences, in language we both understood, I conveyed to him that I wanted an awful lot of cocaine, and he seemed to be in a position to help me.

‘And I need some downers,’ I added.

‘Temazepam?’

‘Fine.’

‘The coke’ll take a while.’

‘How long?’ I asked anxiously.

‘Maybe a couple of hours.’

‘OK,’ I said reluctantly.

‘And I get a hit of it,’ he added.

‘OK,’ I mumbled again.

‘Wait in the pub at the end of the road.’

He relieved me of eighty pounds, which was daylight extortion, but I was in no position to negotiate.

As he hared off I was gripped with the conviction that I’d never see him, the coke or the money again.

I fucking hate this.

I went to the pub. There was nothing I could do but wait.

There were a few people – all men – in the pub. The atmosphere was macho and hostile and I had a strong sense of how unwelcome I was. Conversation entirely ceased as I ordered a brandy. For a horrible moment I thought the barman was going to refuse to serve me.

Nervously, I sat in the furthest corner. I hoped the brandy would calm my frantic agitation. But when I finished it, I still felt terrible, so I had another. And another.

Avoiding eye-contact, willing time to pass, I sat, sick and edgy, drumming my fingers on the brown formica table. But every now and then, like the sun breaking through the clouds, I remembered I was only a short time away from being the proud owner of a lot of cocaine. Maybe. That warmed me, before I was pitched back into the hell of my racing head.

Whenever I remembered my awful night with Chris or what my mother had said, I took another swig of brandy and concentrated on what it would be like when I’d got my hands on the coke.

After I’d been there ages a man approached me, wondering if I’d like to buy some methadone. Keen and all as I was to achieve oblivion, I knew that methadone could be fatal to the uninitiated. I wasn’t that desperate. Yet.

‘Thanks, but someone is already getting me some stuff,’ I explained, terrified of offending.

‘Ah, that’d be Tiernan,’ the man said.

‘I don’t know his name,’ I said.

‘It’s Tiernan.’

Over the next hour, every person in the pub tried to interest me in buying methadone. Clearly they’d had a bumper harvest that year.

My eyes were constantly trained on the door, as I waited for Tiernan to reappear. But he didn’t.

Despite the brandy, my panic picked up again. What would I do? How would I get drugs now that I’d given away so much money?

Another possibility broke through into my consciousness. It suddenly seemed like a merciful rescue that Tiernan had done a bunk with the money. You could get up and go now, go home, sort things out with your mother. This isn’t irreversible.

But then my thoughts swung back again. I couldn’t imagine anything being all right, ever again. I was too far down the path I was on to be able to make my way back. I ordered yet another brandy.

So that I didn’t have to be alone with my own head, I eavesdropped on the conversations around me.

They were mostly extremely dull, all about machinery and involving the sentence ‘… So I took it up to the brother-in-law for him to have a look at it…’

Occasionally, though, they were interesting. There was a nice one about ecstasy.

‘I’ll swap you two Mad Bastards for one Holy Ghost,’ a tattooed man offered a raw youth.

‘No.’ The raw youth shook his head adamantly. ‘I’m happy with my Holy Ghost.’

‘So you won’t swap?’

‘I won’t swap.’

‘Not even for two Bastards?’

‘Not even for two Bastards.’

‘You see,’ the tattooed man turned to the other tattooed man beside him, ‘people everywhere are saying they’d rather have one Holy Ghost instead of two Mad Bastards. Holy Ghosts give a cleaner, whiter buzz.’

At least, I thought that’s what he’d said.

At about two o’clock – although time had ceased to have any meaning between the trauma and the brandy – Tiernan returned. I had almost entirely given up on him, so I thought I was hallucinating. I could have kissed him I was so ecstatic.

Quite drunk, also.

‘Did you get…?’ I asked anxiously. My breath shortened when he waved a small bag of whitish powder at me.

My heart gave a great hop and I itched to hold it in my own hands, like a mother wanting to hold her newborn baby. But Tiernan was very proprietorial.

‘I get a line,’ he reminded me, swinging the bag out of my grasp.

‘OK,’ I gasped, fizzing with rush-lust.

Hurry up.

In full view of everyone in the pub, he chopped two gorgeous, fat lines on the formica table.

Fearfully, I looked around to see if anyone minded, but they didn’t seem to.

He rolled up a tenner and neatly hoovered up one of the lines. The bigger, I noticed angrily.

And then it was my turn. My heart was already pounding and my head already lifting in joyous anticipation. I bent over the coke. It felt like a mystic moment.

But just as I was on the verge of sniffing, I suddenly heard Josephine’s voice. ‘You were killing yourself with drugs. The Cloisters has shown you another way of living. You can be happy without drugs.’

I wavered. Tiernan looked at me quizzically.

You don’t have to do this.

You can stop right now and no harm will have been done.

I hesitated. I’d learnt so much in the Cloisters, made such progress with myself, admitted I was an addict and looked forward to a better, brighter, healthier, happier future. Did I want to throw it all away? Well, did I?

Well, did I?

I stared at the innocent-looking white powder, arrayed in a wobbly little line on the table in front of me. I had nearly died because of it. Was it worth continuing?

Was it?

Yes!

I bent over my cocaine, my best friend, my saviour, my protector. And I inhaled deeply.

66

I woke up in hospital.

Except I didn’t know it was a hospital when I first came to. I struggled to swim out of sleep and up to the surface. I could have been anywhere. In any stranger’s bed. Until I opened my eyes I could have been in any of the millions of beds that exist all over the globe.