Free Down and Out on Murder Mile by Tony O'Neill Page B

get any more perfect, unless perhaps I was to wake up tomorrow and all that was left would be the night stretching from one end of the land till the other, and the neon would be on 24/7, and the city noise would be nothing but yells and raucous laughter and music blasting from bars and clubs.
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    After two weeks or so of being late to work because of picking up my methadone in Hackney I switched my methadone pickup to the Boots chemist in Tufnell Park, around the corner from Stoker’s house. I did not like the new spot, despite its convenience for work. The old bitch that ran the joint would make me drink the methadone on-site. This was the rule for all new attendees. Despite the time I had under my belt at my old pharmacy, I was treated like I had wandered in off the street for the first time. There is no reasoning with pharmacists when the issue at hand is narcotics. In their eyes they are talking to you from a morally superior standpoint, so no words can be persuasive enough to make them relent.
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    At work one day, while I was doodling idly in my notebook, the new employee knocked and came in.
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    â€œHi,” she said.
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    â€œHello.”
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    â€œYou busy?”
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    I shrugged and put the notebook down.
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    â€œBrian is out for a bit. I was bored.” She smiled, perching on the desk.
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    â€œOh yeah? There’s nothing much happening in here.”
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    â€œYou’re on stuff too, right?”
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    I eyed her suspiciously. “Stuff?”
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    â€œIt’s cool,” she insisted. “I saw you at the chemist taking your dose. You didn’t see me. I was buying tampons.”
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    â€œWell,” I said, at a loss for the right words. “That’s nice.”
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    â€œMy boyfriend uses too. I mean, he’s on a script too. He don’t do the gear anymore. I made him stop. It was killing him.”
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    Her name was Amy, it turned out. She seemed okay, a little slow, but okay. Two kids, a boyfriend out of work and on a script, and both of them hitting the crack pipe. She was working illegally—cash in hand—for Stoker to supplement their benefits. I didn’t ask if the blow jobs were a part of the deal. I figured it would be best to keep my mouth shut.
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    Once she started talking it was hard to get her to stop. She had a crackhead’s machine-gun mouthall right. She talked to me about anything, everything. That first day I stared off into space as she riffed on her kids, on her boyfriend, on reality television, on how bad Stoker smelled. I tried to listen to the World Service over her monologue, but found it was impossible to focus on anything else—her voice had a nightmarish quality about it, whiny and grating, and it seemed to reverberate from within your own head. Maybe that’s why Stoker insisted that she put his penis in her mouth once a day.
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    I garnered all kinds of useless information about this woman. Where she lived (around the corner, across the road from the video store), what medication she and her boyfriend took regularly (Lustral—an antidepressant—and a blood-thinning medication for the boyfriend’s deep vein thrombosis in his leg), her kids behavior (“Steve…come to think of it Steve and Jackie…They’re both little shits”), and, her favorite topic, the fact that she had to drive to Kings Cross every night after work to score rocks.
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    â€œWhy aren’t there any decent crack dealers around here?” she would moan, repeatedly. “I hate having to drive all the way to the Cross to buy. I’ve never found a source for decent stuff around here. Why is that?”
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    â€œIt’s a mystery, I suppose,” I would tell her.
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    The visits became more and more regular. I’m sure Stoker had the good sense to ignore her, but ever since Amy had discovered my “secret” Isuppose she now thought of us as friends, and I became