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lurking in a sharkskin suit. I stood in the bathroom staring in the mirror trying to perfect looking normal, nonchalant. “Hey, how’s it going?” I practiced saying.
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    At the party, the usual round of So-what-have-you-been-up-to?’s. Everybody looked pretty much the same, apart from me. Intensely aware of the lines under my eyes, the puffiness of my face, the track marks still healing on the backs of my hands. I drank too much, said too much. Got into an argument over politics with an earnest young NME journalist in the kitchen, secretly pissed that he was hogging the whiskey, and hating the fact he was wearing an ‘ironic’ Kylie Minogue T-shirt. I told him he was a know-nothing college-boy asshole. He was talking aboutTony Blair, picking sides, the same old arguments I always heard at home.
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    â€œIt doesn’t matter,” I told him, drunkenly leaning in too close. “We’re all dying…. Why do you care what variety of shit you have to eat in the meantime?”
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    I drunkenly showed my track marks to Dante Thomas, an old friend from the music days. His band had been the most successful unsuccessful band in history. He looked identical to the last time I had seen him, staring at my plate with a head full of Ecstasy in the Stock Pot, Soho, 1998.
    â€œMy, my” he said. “Aren’t you the reckless one….”
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    All that Emma and Marie wanted to talk about was the old days, the carefree days of my drinking and fooling around as if the crash wouldn’t happen. Too much “remember when…?” for my stomach. I could sense I was disappointing them. I felt old and tired and sad that I hadn’t stayed here instead of leaving. Maybe then I wouldn’t have been so worn out, so beat down by circumstance.
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    Eventually, I drank all of the red wine and whiskey in the place and left to try and score with a sallow-looking guy who said he used smack once in a while and knew where to get it, even at one in the morning.
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    â€œYou just got to look for prostitutes,” he told me. “Wherever the prostitutes are there will be dealers….”
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    Tried to get money but I was so drunk I forgot my PIN number. The guy got nervous that I was trying to hustle him out of money and split, leaving me stranded in north London. I tried to kick the screen on the ATM in, and fell over on the pavement with the piss and the rain and the mud.
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    After two unsuccessful weeks in the hostel we found a flat share advertised in a free paper. It was a two-bedroom council flat in a high-rise in Hammersmith. The place had the improbable address of 109 Batman Close, and cost one hundred pounds per week. It was close enough to the BBC’s White City studios that when the Real IRA exploded a car bomb outside of there the day after we moved in, the windows of our room shook, and I thought that the walls were caving in around us literally as well as figuratively. Our flat mates were a couple, he a monstrous English beer belly constantly sucking on a joint, drinking lager, glued to The Weakest Link or Bargain Hunt . She was South African, tall with a butch buzz cut, piercings dangling from her face. We heard them fuck noisily and constantly through the walls of our bedroom, and I listened to the creaking and his grunting and her oh-oh-there-yeah-there-don’t-stop’s and watched the wet patch on the ceiling, with Susan sleeping beside me or threatening suicide and chain-smoking again. I listened to the Queens Park Rangers crowd roaring from the stadium across the road, daytime television dancing across my face. I knew that soon I would be insane or a suicide myself.
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    I really needed to score.
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    Then I came across RJ. I met him outside of the needle exchange on Fortress Road, Shepherds Bush. I had stumbled across the store-front needle exchange a week after arriving in Hammersmith, while wandering the area’s backstreets. I