Dartford Pastoral

Speed = Distance ÷ Time

“I’ve tried Brendan, he’s not answering.”, “You tried Persian Tel?”, “I don’t know him.”, “Yes you do, Terry the Greek.”, “What? Wait. Which one?”, “They’re the same bloke, he lives in the toilet in The Sally.”, “You got a number?”, “He lives in the toilet, you think he’d have a phone?”, “You think he’ll be there now?”, “Yeah, he doesn’t get out much.”. Persian Tel, Terry the Greek, lives in a toilet. I can already smell amphetamine and the curious, ludicrous logic that scars everything it touches.

I’ve spent the week juggling various welfare blags and ripping bong-loads for breakfast. Now it’s the weekend it’s time to get some Sulphate. The girlfriend’s coming over and if we’re going to fuck and watch porn all weekend, I need some Sulphate. Love, eh?

I promised Tony and Jenny some too. They don’t have sex, but they will tidy the entire house times thrice, and there’s a chance he’ll get the bathroom floor tiled. They’re the only two people in the whole town who don’t understand why Sulphate is also known as Pervert Powder, but they nod their heads and Tony does the filthy grin he remembers from his uncle, who, when Tony was twelve, would show him what the boys in the army do if they have to share a bed. Handy reference. When Jenny sees this, she tells herself she doesn’t understand men, but in truth she doesn’t understand – worse – even know, Tony.

Jeremy, who you can only call ‘Jel’ because he thinks the name ‘Jeremy’ is gay (everyone thinks ‘Jel’ the person is gay) wants a bit too. He’ll probably go fishing, or wherever he goes when he leaves his young family every Friday evening, his rods, tent, and umbrella hitched to his back.

Absolutely smoking hot Lucy and her dull boyfriend Nick want some. Lucy resents sex with Nick and has adored me since we met when both teenagers. She still is, but hey. Lucy and my girlfriend flirt with each other in the boozer, they go up to the toilets to have a dirty fiddle, then come back down and tell me all about it. We talk filth all evening in the bar whilst Nick walks around trying to be liked by his friends who can’t understand why he hands his girlfriend over to the greedy, snatching and delirious clutches of me and my girl. They don’t mention it though, life’s already bent Nick out of shape, having had one of ‘those childhoods’, poor cunt; and his smoking hot girlfriend, all of eighteen now, is all he has left, and he hasn’t really got her, she’s just waiting for a better option to come along, so he’ll put up with anything just to maintain the illusion, which he considers better than nothing. Perhaps for people like Nick, it is.

And Robert. Robert wants some. He’ll sit there playing board-games with his children and wife, Racheal, him sipping on a couple of beers as she has just a wonderful time now it’s the weekend and he’s not going out of his mind as a delivery driver for a bakery chain. In truth, he drives hashish and ecstasy around the country for his cousin, Del, who makes a fortune. Racheal dreams that Robert might get a promotion in ‘the business’ – being family and all – and they’ll also make such money and get off the estate and into a house with spare rooms, a utility room, and other things she considers if not luxuries, then at least some kind of success. Robert knows there’s more chance of a six stretch at her majesty’s pleasure, but plays the family guy well, charging on speed, passing go and collecting two-hundred quid as his daughter rolls the dice for her turn.

So, with a lot of people’s weekends and giddy traumas relying on me, I stomp across town to ‘The Sally’, The Salutation pub. A stinky, half empty - symbol of an England that’s disappearing - boozer. The regulars like it just like that as there’s enough chemicals running through their veins to send a small country psychotic, and it’s theirs in a world where they haven’t much else. Not a lot is quite a bit compared to nothing.

I approach a ginger lad I vaguely know who sits alone at the bar. “Hello mate, I’m looking for Persian Tel”, “Terry the Greek? Yeah, he’s home, just through there”, and he points to a set of double doors with a damp, coconut husk type matt on the floor before them that squelches under foot as I push the door open, with my shoulder, something telling me not to put the bare flesh of my hand on the handle. Stupidly, I then open the door marked ‘Gents’, but it’s just a toilet. Fancy that. But with the two or three women that actually venture into this place once a year being the type who would have pissing competitions in the men’s urinals, barely able to stand up, dangerously and impressively pivoting on their heels and helping each other remain upright as their piss sprays all over the wall, the floor, pretty much everywhere but the urinal, their cackling wenchness echoing around the walls like a perverted sound experiment were such a thing to exist, which of course it certainly does, in so many places, and at so many times, you can no longer really hear it.

A sixty-year-old man whacks off in the sit-down toilet as the puddle of warm, steaming, piss makes its way to the tips of his shoes as he inhales the remains of their sluttish echo. It’s hardened him more than he’s known in thirty years. But after he’s gone at it with a commitment and gusto he never knew he still had, he feels disgusting, and as he flicks the lumpen semen from his fingers into the puddle of piss he now despises, he sneers, knowing he can’t leave until the ‘filthy fucking harlots’ (as he now calls them under his breath) have left the toilet.

I enter the ladies and there he is. Persian Tel, Terry the Greek. A skeleton of a man reclined on a white sunbed that belongs around a pool somewhere in Thailand, complete with sleeping bag and pillow. There’s various shelves fixed to the walls, littered with the likes of razors, a comb, some Old Spice, a toothbrush. There’s even what looks like old family photos before Persian Ernie or whatever, jacked it all in for the good life.

There’s a stack of books under the sink, a kettle, and some half-eaten cereals in a couple of bowls (he’s had guests over for breakfast!), yep, it’s your typical sort of home in a toilet, with a free, uncluttered access to the sit-down, just in case a woman does need to have a shit. For a second, I imagine that’s the whole set up, and Persian Tel stroke Terry the Greek is just waiting for the day he can lay on his bed while a female stranger has a shit just two feet away, so close he can hear the steamy waste crackle and click as it curves its way out. Pervert Powder, and all.

“Hello mate!” He says, with a big toothless grin, yet in a very honest way that for a second convinces me we’ve met before. But we haven’t. I have never heard his name(s) before, and I have never been a guest in his toilet. He’s a stranger in a strange lavatory. “First things first, who sent you? We have to be careful with these things.” We don’t. The police don’t care about Sulphate. A drug so cheap to produce and barely a penny to be made off it (The dealer lives in a toilet) it’s hardly a priority. On the off chance the media reports a speed bust it’s always by weight. With Cocaine it’s like “Two million pounds of Cocaine were seized in a house” etc. But with Amphetamine Sulphate, Speed, cooked up in bathtubs using legal precursors, it really is a piece of piss to make, and smells like it too. A speed bust is always reported in weight. “Police say 10 kilos of Amphetamine Sulphate were seized” about two grands worth, wow, stay down, Pablo.

Not knowing the ginger lad’s name, or the name of the man I phoned whose number I only had because Brendan used my phone once and I was wise enough to store it for such occasions, I took a risk with Brendan. “No worries, any friend of Brendan’s is a friend of mine. Take a seat son, I’ll be with you in a moment.” I look around, there’s the sit-down toilet, which feels weird, like sitting in the lounge while he’s in the dining room. There’s the floor, which is rank. Or there’s the tiny bit of the end of the sun lounger that appears as Iranian Peter shuffles his feet out of the way for me. “How much you looking for, son?”, “Two ounces”, “No problem” and he shoves his hand down his pants and pulls out Thermos flask. A bollock-warm, huge, Thermos flask. It serves no purpose being down there. I’m sure were the police ever to bust him, when he stood up, they’d be like “What’s that massive container in your pants?” I guess it’s a comfort thing, since his empire depends on it.

I immediately smell ammonia, the pissy stench of Sulphate, but since it’s fresh from his sweaty sleeping bag underwear, this is not necessarily a sign of potency. Well, it is a sign of potency, but of what, there’s unpleasant options.

I’ve been here too long. I can feel the skanky environment making its way into my pores and it’s getting too much. He pulls out a bag that looks like about an ounce. “I’ll be with you in a minute, son, I’ll just have a little tickle myself, since I’ve got it out and all that.” Sulphate is disgusting. Even the smell can throw some people into a dry-heave. If you make the mistake of tasting it as it goes down, you’re likely to puke it all back up again. And yet French Georgie tore the bag open with his teeth, the off-white, yellowish and slightly damp powder spilling all over his lips, then picked up a tablespoon, dug it into the bag and spooned out what must have been about ten grams. I could feel my mouth watering, and my throat constrict. I didn’t want to see what I was going to see, but couldn’t not watch as he just put the lot in his mouth, crunching on it like sherbet, and licking the spoon clean, both sides. “Do you want me to get you some water?” I asked. “No, I don’t touch the stuff, it’s bad for you. Full of all sorts of shit.” And he swallowed the lot. “I take it you’re planning a bit of a party tonight?” I said, marveling at the pasty speed still stuck all around his mouth and gums, living in a toilet, spooning the stuff into his trap, the pure dedication. “No, I’m just going to stay in and watch a movie” he said, tapping a tiny little black and white television to his left with a screen about 5 inches wide on the diagonal, and wired to a car-battery.

He tossed two, one-ounce bags at me and asked for a hundred pound. A bit pricey to be fair, but I’d make on it anyway, once chopped up and distributed. And it was hardly my living, the welfare blags were my wholesome vocation, I was just happy to get people speed as I’d relied on them at times and I know when you want some, you want some, and with the fear of the police being nil, it’s much like sorting a few friends some croissants.

I remember I got arrested in Sainsbury’s once, apparently my appearance matched that of a man who’d been stealing from handbags left on shopping trolleys while the owner fished around in the frozen meat section. They arrested me, and searched my flat. They’d got the wrong bloke and there was no evidence of any such crimes in my flat. No pile of purses or handbags, nothing. There was a couple of ounces of speed, some scales and a bag of little bags on the sideboard they completely ignored, though.

I finally managed to get out of Italian Pedro’s toilet, The Sally, the stench and the failure, and stomped my way back to my flat. With about an hour until my girlfriend arrived, I needed to chop up the speed into three-gram wraps, have a shower, and make sure I had some fresh porn from the Indian newsagents across the road, which was always an awkward purchase, the wrinkled sixty-something woman in her saree, having to finger and survey the covers of each to check the price of all four magazines with names like ‘Voluptuous Slags’, ‘Huge Tit Lesbians’, you know the coup. It’s like some weird confessional. “Oh, and some king-size Rizla, three packs.”

Hang on a minute. Do I really need to tell you about dishing this shit out to Robert, Tony, Jenny and Jeremy? I think I wanted to write a longer piece with all the character’s different nights on speed entangled and making connections to fascinate, engage and amuse. But to be honest I can’t be bothered. This is the story of the best threesome I ever had, one of the best nights of my life, and I can’t really be arsed with some middle of the road speed freaks lingering around and slowing it down. When I think about them too much, they tend to reveal something about me in the blatant emptiness at the heart of their desire, a kind of loneliness and failure at the core of their life – the little worlds they’d created which I’m guessing weren’t what they’d hoped they’d be. Through speed, they managed at once to avoid the chasm of meaning that existed at the heart of their basic need for pleasure, whilst also magnifying it, and in that detail get lost again, only this time deeper, lonelier, and with ultimately less pleasure. Like all drugs, speed marks the absence of pleasure and gives you back that missing and profound absence in the form of intensity – which in such a context marks another absence, intimacy.

You can see why I don’t want all that understanding and brutal insight to get in the way of one of the best nights of my life, because now it feels like one of the worst nights of my life. I hate writing.

So, my girl arrives at my house. A princess, twenty-one years old and my first love. I know I will be with her forever. I do not know that I will lose my mind and leave her for a maniac, a psychotic, bulimic stripper in Leeds some two-years later, and never quite get over it. Anyway. Yeah.

We wrap up a couple of grams of speed each in Rizla cigarette papers and wash them down with a shared pint-glass of water, her gesturing wildly to pass the glass as her hastily made wrap is dissolving in her mouth, and no one wants that. Within about ten minutes she’s sucking me off while I flick through my favourite edition of Club International, specifically Danielle and Charlotte in matching sequin miniskirts, each sequin like a kaleidoscope of sex piercing my pumping heart, that feeds blood to a body good for nothing but sexual indulgence, nailed to the cross of filth, whatever that means.

“Can you do your make-up like her?” I say, pointing to the Club International cover girl, Carla. There’s nothing particular about Carla’s make-up that I like, there’s just loads of it, that I like. “Sure” she says, and set about painting a whores face on hers. Lamb dressed as mutton, that was my thing.

We walk the warm summer evening down to the boozer, her wearing six-inch ankle breakers and understandably struggling to keep up with me, pretty much gliding along. We get there. It’s a chain pub; no worries, I’m only there for Lucy, and in mere minutes she’s sitting with me and my girl, and under the cover of the table I’m rubbing my hand up the thigh high slit in her white satin dress, as the conversation immediately turns to sex. Lucy is also overdressed for the environment, but not for the situation, which is all she cared about when getting ready at home. This ritual had been going on for months, us three flirting, hands and feet rubbing, stroking, talks of setting up sex-cults and naughty giggles. And with speed giving your feelings the emotional equivalent of neon, it’s absolutely wonderful; hyper-real, hyper-active, hyper-hyper – hooray!

Lucy and Nick had also had speed and Nick is clearly struggling, as yet again on yet another Friday night he knows exactly what’s going on but can’t bare to accept it. He walks over to the three of us occasionally, his presence so clearly unwanted he looks starved of love and freakishly familiar with that feeling. There’s a sad poverty about his awkward lingering, and after his ham-fisted attempts to pretend it’s all just fine, (which does nothing but etch the clearly not all just fineness of it into the bloated air that’s expanding between us, threatening to burst it and cover him in a big splat of truth) he waddles off back to his friends, the speed both protecting him from and reminding him he’s being duped only by himself. Lucy doesn’t need anything from him. Not now, anyway.

And as if by magic, his voice appears some two minutes later “Lucy, we’re all going to The Cellar in Gravesend, do you want to come or shall I meet you later?” This question is really asking “Are you going to have sex with these two or is there a chance in Hell that you want to come with me and my band of dull, guitar-playing failures to a grimy nightclub in grimy Gravesend. Gravesend. Indeed. “I’ll stay here” says Lucy, as I slip my hand through my girlfriend’s stocking strap and push my fingers into her underwear.

It’s called speed for a reason, and it felt like seconds before I’m walking the short walk back home with my girl and Lucy, the two of them arm in arm and me walking behind them as they swing their arses side to side, the cheeks of which are pushed up in the air by their heels, presented to me. And this bit is key – I knew this was too good – I knew few men will ever get the pleasure of two of the hottest girls ever, at his sexual whim, their brains pickled in pervert powder to boot. I knew this was going to be a night less to remember, more to never be able to forget. An experience I would have chosen, if given a wish, and yet it had chosen me. Everything that had come before it felt like it had been leading up to it, and everything that would come after it would not matter, since anything would be worth it

The Speed is hitting hard now and it’s like there’s lightning in the periphery of my vision. It hasn’t even got dark, so short was our time in the boozer, and combined with the delirious potential of the next few hours the next thing I know I’m preparing three more wraps of speed while Lucy and my girl touch-up each other’s make-up, more of it. More and more. They even change outfits a few times, Lucy making different selections from my girl’s collection of slutty crop tops, mini-dresses and PVC items; my eyes on stalks and my stalk in hand.

I’ll spare you the details of the next six hours of riding the double-bubble amphetamine fueled, sexual dream machine as I’m sure you can guess. At just twenty-three years of age, I was drowning in an ocean of delight with two of the hottest girls I’d ever seen, on my bed, in my head, slipping and slithering around in a festival of flesh. And then some. More. Too.

But all good things come to an end, and really good things come to a really real end. By which I mean the sound of Nick – Lucy’s ‘boyfriend’ (lolz) knocking on the window saying ‘Lucy? Lucy?’ are you in there?” as the three of us rapidly pulled tongues and genitalia apart, unwound and separated into individuals again for the first time all evening and slowly ducked down under the window. Each of us a mess of sweat, make-up, and the sudden jolt of unwanted and inescapable change. It was quite the fall.

So, Lucy had the key. Their key. The key to their flat that Nick expected to get back to the boozer and collect with his ‘girlfriend’, and go back home with. Shit. We all looked at each other. Not true, they both looked at me. I put my finger to my lips and shook my head. There were more voices, conversations were occurring. There was no fear of any engagement. Much like Nick, his friends were not the type to actually fight for anything they believed in, wish to defend, or simply deserved a slap. I actually just felt for Lucy and the wrecking ball of reality that just came out of the blue and hit her straight in the PVC minidress, knocking her blonde bob wig to the side.

It felt like an eternity, but when they finally left – and I can only guess it was a minute or so – although for sure they knew we were in there – we had a quick ten minute more indulgence to take our minds of the shit and the fan, etc., then set about getting cleaned up to face the music.

It was a terrible job, the clean-up. The three of us walked to Nick and Lucy’s house, just two roads away and as we approached, they all just watched us, Nick and his friends, us barely able to walk as we tried to negotiate the truth of the situation combined with an arrogance of knowing how it would turn out, the glaring truth we would deny because we could, knowing no one would dare call us out. They just weren’t strong enough.

It was only when we all walked into the glaring fluorescent light of Nick and Lucy’s flat the extent of the failed clean-up became apparent. The girls had lipstick smeared all up their faces, on their necks and pretty much on any flesh that was on show – which was quite a lot. I too had a fair amount of foundation, purple blusher, and other garish colours clinging to my beard, my neck, my dirty, wonderfully filthy fingers. We must have stunk too, we’d been at it for hours, and any adult will register that smell on a deep psychological level, especially, unsurprisingly, the boyfriend. But – as predicted - no one said a thing about it. Nick would save that for when he was alone with Lucy, probably slap her a few times while she pretended to give a shit while she thought about the incredible evening she’d had.

We just all sat around while they talked about guitars and anything else that – in the current situation could only have the soft impact of the mundane. I was ready to leave but I didn’t want to give them that luxury, and sat there as if all was well for an uncomfortably – for them - long time. All conversation in that room was simply any vaguely connected words that would spare them the silence- that on the few times it did poke its absent head above the phonic parapet - immediately filled the room with the truth that everyone was doing their best not to think about while it took front and center stage in their consciousness, combined with an unhealthy, and understandable amount of jealousy, hatred, and immature, idle thoughts of revenge.

Years later, Lucy told me that when me and my girlfriend left, they spent all night slagging me off, which was just many different ways of saying we’d spent the evening fucking. My girlfriend holding Lucy’s legs apart for me while Lucy ate her pussy. That sort of thing.

The End

Chris Dangerfield

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