Will The Smiles of Women Make Good My Sins?

It's easy when you don't know why

So, there it was, writhing around underneath me like I was killing her, my best friend’s ex-girlfriend. They split up that morning and just four hours later here we are, fucking, going through the motions. All I could think while she gasped and groaned, was how much I’d rather be shooting cocaine. She knew I was a junkie, but there’s knowing and there’s knowing, so I didn’t just want to pull it out and say, ‘Wait a minute, I’ve got something better to do.’ So, I styled it, well I didn’t, I just pretended to – more for my benefit. ‘You like that?’ I said, as I stopped fucking her. Like what? It was weird, she didn’t know what to say, because I gave her no options. Looking at her there, confused, silenced, I felt a bit (a bit) bad, I just wanted the cocaine more. But in two years’ time, she’d be dating a bloke twice her age who was in wheelchair and always would be, so, you know.

As I stood up, for the first time I saw the beauty of her pale, tiny, body. It lay there like the ghost of my sex-life. I could tell I should be enjoying having sex with her, but heroin kind of drains your libido, and pretty much everything else. But it made me sad to know - for that split second - I should be enjoying it, if only I could actually get anywhere near her.

I went into the kitchen, grabbed a spoon from the sink, a spike from the draw, and bag of coke from somewhere else. I made up the hit, my back to the doorway so she couldn’t see, not that she’d even moved, laying there with her legs open and looking at the ceiling. Poor creature; she didn’t deserve to have ended up here. I didn’t either, but she had just kind of drifted into this mess, almost invisible, consumed in my pissy duvet on the bed that folded out of the wardrobe. She was the fifth ex-girlfriend of a friend I’d indulged in, three of which within two days of them breaking up. It’s not something I’m proud of. Yes, it is. Because at twenty-three years old I’d pretty much lost faith in anything but taking the piss. And most of the girls who ended up on the slippery end of such petty nihilism, well, they seemed to be losing faith in everything too, they just didn’t know it yet.

I pushed the spike into the scar above my femoral vein, pulled blood into the syringe and pushed it all back. My teeth were chattering before the plunger had even finished its one-inch plunge. I spazzed and twitched my way back to the poor little flower and got back inside, her face screwing up on entry like she’d just slammed a Tequila. I noticed a pair of boots by the door and realised I had no idea where they came from. I looked down at her cunt to maybe remember why I was exerting all this energy, but instead I saw nothing but blood. Lots of blood. Blood everywhere. Blood that had pumped out of the hole in my femoral vein and covered us both. This happened sometimes, maybe once a year, and not only when fucking. ‘You’re bleeding!’ I said, the look of horror on my face totally authentic, because it’s not that nice telling a young girl that the half litre of blood spread around your combined genitalia is hers for no other reason than to not admit it’s yours.

She quickly covered her body with the duvet like she just realised she was naked and that a man she couldn’t trust was looking at her. She was holding back tears as she scampered off into the bathroom. She’d enjoy that. There were no cleaning products, utensils, soaps, flannels, towels, nothing but a toilet, a sink, and a motorcycle crash-helmet to stop me hitting my head on the floor every time I fell off the toilet.

I ran into the kitchen and quickly put another hit together, this time heroin. The cocaine had done its job and always left me feeling like I was turned inside out, existentially. There are only two things you can do to remedy that feeling, take more, or take heroin. Heroin won. It always does.

I wanted her to walk back into the room wearing the crash-helmet and those boots, I wanted her to do something interesting; It’s not good for someone so beautiful to be trapped in their own banality, it will cost them dearly. But no, ‘Sorry about that’ she said, ‘I don’t know what happened.’ I didn’t bother cleaning any of the blood off my body, I wasn’t going to carry on having sex with her, I don’t even know why I started.

I sat on the edge of the bed and lit a cigarette. She sat next to me. ‘Do you ever wonder why people like you. Or not like you. You know, do you ever wonder what people think about you?’, ‘I try not to, but I guess I do a bit’, ‘Everyone likes you though. You don’t need to think about it’, ‘No, everyone fantasizes about liking me, because they don’t know me, and they know - because of heroin – they can’t know me. So, they invent a version of me that suits them. The selfish bastards.’

‘You’re a very beautiful woman.’ She lit a cigarette and wiped tears from her cheeks as she smoked it. ‘No one’s ever called me a woman before’, ‘Me neither’ I said, and she smiled for the first time since arriving, resting her head on my shoulder, her chemically damaged hair sticking to the sweat on my chest.

The End

Chris Dangerfield

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