Phantom(46)

The man passed me the bag, turned and limped down the street.

Normally I would have chucked the bag in the nearest bin. I couldn’t even sell the shit to make money for me; I had a reputation to tend to. But there was something about the gleam in the madman’s eye. As though he knew something. So, when the working day was over and we had settled up with Andrey, I went with Oleg and Irene to Heroin Park. There, we asked if anyone felt like being a test pilot. I had done this before with Tutu. If there were new goods in town you went to where the most desperate junkies hung out, the ones willing to test anything so long as it’s free, who don’t care if it kills them because death is round the corner anyway.

Four volunteered, but said they wanted an eighth of real heroin on top. I said that was not on offer and was left with three. I doled out the goods.

‘Not enough!’ shouted one of the junkies with the diction of a stroke patient. I told him to shut up if he wanted dessert.

Irene, Oleg and I sat watching as they searched for veins between encrusted blood and injected themselves with surprisingly effective movements.

‘Oh Jesus,’ one of them groaned.

‘Fffff …’ another howled.

Then it went still. Total silence. It was like sending a rocket into space and losing all contact. But I already knew, I could see the ecstasy in their eyes before they disappeared: Houston, we have no problem. When they landed back on earth it was dark. The trip had lasted for more than five hours, double the length of a normal heroin trip. The test panel were unanimous. They had never experienced anything with such a kick. They wanted more, the rest of the bag, now, please, and staggered towards us like the zombies in Thriller. We burst out laughing and ran away.

When we sat on my mattress in the rehearsal room half an hour later, I had a bit of thinking to do. A seasoned junkie typically uses a quarter of a gram of street heroin per shot while Oslo’s most hardened junkies had got as high as fricking virgins on a quarter of that! The guy had given me pure junk. But what was it? It looked and smelt like heroin, had the consistency of heroin, but to trip out for five hours on such a small dose? Whatever, I knew I was sitting on a gold mine. Eight hundred kroner per gram, which could be diluted three times and sold for fourteen hundred. Fifty grams a day. Thirty thousand straight in your pocket. In mine. In Oleg’s and Irene’s.

I raised the business proposition to them. Explained the figures.

They looked at each other. They didn’t seem to be as enthusiastic as I had expected.

‘But Dubai …’ Oleg said.

I lied and told them there was no danger so long as we didn’t trick the old boy. First, we would go and say we were stopping, that we had met Jesus or some such bollocks. Then wait a bit before starting up on our own in a small way.

They looked at each other again. And I suddenly realised there was something to it, something which I had not picked up on before.

‘It’s just that …’ Oleg said, his eyes struggling to find a focus on the wall. ‘Irene and I, we …’

‘You what?’

He squirmed like an impaled worm and in the end glanced at Irene for help.

‘Oleg and I have decided to live together,’ Irene said. ‘We’re saving up to put a deposit on a flat in Bøler. We’d thought of working through till the summer and then …’

‘And then?’

‘Then we were going to finish school,’ Oleg said. ‘And then start studying.’

‘Law,’ Irene said. ‘Oleg’s got such good grades.’ She smiled the way she used to do when she thought she had said something stupid, but her usually pale cheeks were hot and red with pleasure.

They had been sneaking round and palling up behind my fricking back! How had I managed to miss that?

‘Law,’ I said, opening the bag which still contained more than a gram. ‘Isn’t that for people who want to make it to the top in the gendarmes?’

Neither of them answered.

I found the spoon I ate cornflakes with and wiped it on my thigh.

‘What are you doing?’ Oleg asked.

‘This has to be celebrated,’ I said, pouring the powder onto the spoon. ‘Besides, we have to test the product ourselves before we recommend it to the old boy.’

‘So it’s fine then?’ Irene exclaimed with relief in her voice. ‘We carry on as before?’

‘Of course, my dear.’ I put the lighter under the bowl of the spoon. ‘This is for you, Irene.’

‘Me? But I don’t think—’

‘For my sake, sis.’ I looked up at her and smiled. Smiled the smile she knew I knew she had no antidote for. ‘Boring getting high on your own, you know. Sort of lonely.’