Free Bucket Nut by Liza Cody

suddenly felt very weird. I didn’t understand her at all. I’d moreor less told her she couldn’t trust me, but it hadn’t made a blind bit of difference.
    â€˜You know I was sick last night?’ she began.
    â€˜Yeah.’
    â€˜Well, I think I was suffering from narcotic poisoning.’ She paused to see how I would react.
    â€˜I thought you were rat-arsed,’ I said, frowning.
    â€˜I’d had a couple of drinks, but that wasn’t it.’
    â€˜I don’t like druggies,’ I said, feeling even more upset.
    â€˜I’m not a druggy. I’ve never taken heroin before in my life. I want you to believe that.’ She stopped and looked at me and I noticed that her eyes had black borders around the blue which made her look very deep and mysterious.
    â€˜Do you believe me?’
    â€˜All right,’ I said, because it seemed important.
    â€˜Calvin was Peter Pan,’ she said, ‘and I was Tinkerbell.’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜Peter Pan,’
she said. ‘You know. The book by J. M. Barrie.’
    â€˜I can read books,’ I said. I thought it was about time I checked on the dogs. It was awfully hot in the Static.
    â€˜Don’t be like that,’ she said.
    â€˜Like what?’
    â€˜Cross,’ she said. ‘I only meant that there’s a passage in
Peter Pan
where Captain Hook poisons Peter’s medicine. Wendy leaves medicine for Peter in a spoon. Captain Hook puts poison in it. And Tinkerbell can’t get Peter to believe it’s poison. So in order to show him she drinks the poison herself and nearly dies.’
    â€˜That’s stupid,’ I said.
    â€˜Yes? Then I was stupid too.’
    â€˜I don’t mean
you’re
stupid.’
    She sighed. ‘What happened was that I found out Calvin was taking drugs. I found out last night because he put them in my bag. I expect he thought it was safer that way. Black guys are stopped and searched for no reason whereas white girls never are.’
    I knew what she was talking about there and I felt better.
    â€˜We had an awful row about it. I said he was destroying himself.He said it was only fools who couldn’t control it. So I took some myself – just to show him. And also so that there would be less for him to take.’
    â€˜You must be barking mad,’ I told her.
    â€˜But think about it,’ she cried. ‘See it from my point of view. I was so upset that he took smack. I thought if I took some he’d be upset for me too – that he’d look at what he was doing with different eyes.’
    â€˜And did he?’
    â€˜He couldn’t have cared less. And when I started to get ill on stage he came over and fired me.’
    It was beginning to make sense to me now – what I’d seen last night, and the way she’d said he broke her heart. She had sacrificed herself for him and he had kicked her in the teeth. I felt quite sorry for her, but all the same she was an awful fool.
    â€˜You’ve got to promise me something,’ I said.
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜That you’ll never do any of that shit again. It’s a fuck-up. It’s the stupidest fuck-up I know.’
    â€˜Yes,’ she said. ‘But you see what’s happened, don’t you? Calvin’s drugs and Calvin’s syringe are in my handbag. And I can’t get it back, and I can’t go home.’
    â€˜You don’t have to draw me pictures,’ I said. ‘I won’t kick you out, and I won’t dob on you. But you have to swear you won’t do that stuff again.’
    â€˜You don’t have to worry about that. It was revolting. It wasn’t nice at all. It made me really sick and now it’s twenty-four hours later and I still don’t feel right.’
    â€˜You were lucky,’ I told her. ‘You might have liked it.’ And that was that.

Chapter 11
    The next day I took Goldie to Sam’s Gym. After what she