Cocaine (7 page)

The first term at Cambridge had been a whirlwind of new societies and parties and ex-convent girls eager to experiment with their bodies and mine. The second term had been spent trying to get rid of my new acquaintances and the ex-convent girls. The third term was spent cramming for part 1A of the Natural Sciences Tripos examination and listening to Duran Duran – the ‘
Rio’
album – at sufficient volume to attract a visit from the Senior Tutor. He popped his head through the wide-open window to my ground-floor room and reminded me cheerily that youthful exuberance was best exercised on the sports field and preferably in silence. He remarked on the inappositeness of the Simon Le Bon lyric - ‘
Don’t say a prayer for me now, save it til the morning after
’ – adding that unless I buried my head in materials science and Darwinian theories of Natural Selection, he would feel compelled to pray for me both now
and
the morning after the Tripos results were displayed on the wooden boards outside Senate House. I turned the music off and apologized.

I opened my eyes to see Kieran holding up a little bag of white powder.

‘Canadian coke’, said Kieran. ‘Thought we’d do a little test.’

‘You heard of the expression ‘
bringing coals to Newcastle
’?’

‘Nope.’

He opened the bag onto the top of the copy of the Spanish bible that came free with every room. He took out a credit card from his wallet and used it to chop up the coke and separate it into six lines, thin ones.

‘Two each’, he said. ‘I’ll go first.’

Kieran rolled up a fifty peso note, leaned over, placed the end of the little paper cylinder against the book and snorted up one line into his left nostril, then another into his right. He sniffed and his eyes watered.

‘Not bad’, he said. ‘Not too shady. English?’

I felt a little woozy from the hash. I also felt a little hungry suddenly.

‘
C’mere.’

I stood up with difficulty, my head heavy, like I’d had too many pints of Guinness, and I took the rolled up note from him.

‘First time, huh?’ he asked

‘Listen…Kieran…’

‘Go on.’

I did what he was urging me to do and suddenly I could taste a sickly-sweet taste in the back of my mouth. My nostrils felt numb. Kieran slapped me playfully on the back.

‘You’re a man now, Ryan Jacobs. Your mother would be proud.’

I suddenly felt wide-awake. My eyes stung a little, but the effects of the hash had vanished. Juan Andres dabbed a finger into one of the remaining two lines and licked it. He used his tongue to smooth the crystals over his teeth.

‘Thirty percent, maybe not even this much’, he said.

‘So what’s the other seventy?’

‘
Who the fuck cares, English, huh?’

Kieran’s grin was infectious and we high-fived each other. Kieran went into a strange Red Indian-style jig and Juan Andres leaned on the sideboard in amusement.

‘
He is crazy, your Canadian friend.’

I noted that Juan Andres called him
my
friend, not
our
friend.

‘
Sure am, keemosabee’, hooted Kieran. ‘Now who’s for some food and salsa?’

‘
I stay here’, said Juan Andres. ‘You go.’

I suddenly didn’t feel very hungry anymore. All I wanted was some more coke.

‘
I’ll stay too’, I said.

‘
Listen – I need to get out or I’ll just bounce off the walls, my friends.’

‘
Bring us back some empanadas, Kieran?’

‘
Sure, English. Catch you later, amigo.’

‘
Si, claro.
’

When Kieran left we both seemed to relax. Juan Andres took off his boots and lay back on his bed, humming a song in Spanish.

‘
What’s that?’ I asked him.

‘
Is about a beautiful black girl who send you crazy.’

‘
Do you have her number?’

‘
I wish, Ryyy-an.'

‘
Tell me about Tropinone.'

8

March 2007 – Cannes, South of France

‘You English?’, she asked me.

‘Yes,’ I replied.

‘London?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh I love London. Whereabouts exactly?’

‘All over really. Mainly Kensington and Chelsea.’

‘How funny. Me too. Roderick always used to say Kensington and Chelsea was the only part of London worth living in. The permit, you see. Rod's the ex, George, no need to look worried.’

Arabella raised her glass. She was about forty, medium height, dyed blonde hair and lots of heavy jewellery. She was quite attractive and definitely, as Jack Wiseman had put it, ‘up for it.’ She crossed her legs, leaning on the side of the sofa, her skirt splitting open to reveal a large expanse of sun-tanned thigh.

‘Are you married, George?’

‘No.’

‘Divorced?’

‘No.’

‘Girlfriend?’

‘No.’

‘Excuse me grilling you like this, George, but it is so rare these days that one meets a soul-mate, someone to really talk to, a good listener, you know.’

‘I couldn’t agree more.’

‘
You’re
a good listener, George.’

‘Thank you.’

‘If it’s not a personal question, what do you do for a living? I mean, do you work?’

‘I don’t work anymore.’

Arabella’s eyes twinkled like diamonds.

‘What did you use to do?’

‘A bit of this and that really. Technology, mainly. Boring really.’

‘My husband’, she said, edging closer along the top of the sofa, ‘was a banker. He left me a very rich woman, you know.’

‘Where do you keep her?’

‘Ha ha! You’re quite funny, George, in a lovely way. I hope you take that as a compliment?’

‘Of course.’

‘Where do you live?’

‘Just opposite.’

‘I’m miles away. Was planning on getting a little tipsy tonight, you know, have a ball…’

‘Sounds like a good idea.’

‘Yes, it does, doesn’t it? You know, Jack wants me to invest some of the divorce monies. Roderick’s given me nearly seven million. What do you think?’

‘Pounds, euros or dollars?’

‘Pounds.’

‘That is an awful lot of money, Arabella.’

‘Is it?’

‘You know it is. Don’t play games, now.’

‘Should I give Jack half a million? He says his scheme is brilliant.’

‘Has he explained it to you?’

‘Not yet. First he wants me to take a course, to educate me. It’s ten hours, two hundred and fifty an hour.’

‘Who gives the course?’

‘Why Jack of course. Here, in the flat.’

‘Ten hours and then what?’

‘Then, if I like what I hear, I can get him to invest my money.’

‘Excuse me just one moment, Arabella, I must use the bathroom.’

‘Of course.’

I emptied the contents of my signet ring onto the loo seat. Those fuckers outside had no fucking idea. No fucking idea. But Jack Wiseman now, Jack had gone up considerably in my estimation. He was verging towards the very, very clever if tonight’s guests were anything to go by. Everyone wanted to give him money, everyone seemed charmed by a man who had, in his own words, not a clue. The little scalpel crunched the white powder into even finer granules, and I removed a five hundred euro bill from my wallet.

Jan Wiseman had no idea what her husband was up to. How long, I wondered, had they managed to keep doing it in Marbella? It only worked when one of the team was an innocent, the other knee-deep in shit. I pitied Jan, and suddenly found myself despising Jack. An idea for an excellent test, more of an experiment, was beginning to form in my mind. I rolled the note up and knelt down on the miniature Persian rug in front of the cistern.

Time to clean out the pipes.

***

October 1990

At nine-thirty we were inside the laboratory wing of the science faculty of the
Universidad del Cauca
. There had been no guards, there were students milling about, working in the libraries, smoking and chattering about Jon Bon Jovi, Sylvester Stallone and Michael Jackson, or at least that was what we could hear through the open window.

‘Leave it’, Juan Andres had said. ‘Maybe they always leave it open.’

‘Maybe it’s the fumes.’

I pointed to a complex set of phials and connecting plastic tubes. The liquid inside was grey and smoked a little.

‘
Si, claro.
’

‘
Claro que si.
’

We looked around at the metal racks that lined the walls. Large tubs of standard laboratory filler, the uninteresting part of my course, I remembered, were not much use.

‘Do they have medical students here?’ I asked.

‘
Tal vez
.’ Maybe.

‘Opthamology? Anaesthesia?’

Juan Andres started walking carefully to the end of the large room, towards the double doors we’d entered by.

‘If they stop us’, I said, ‘we just say we’re lost.’

‘
Claro
.’

We walked down a long corridor which smelt of disinfectant. It smelt like my school, like those first experiments with carbon and potassium and hydrochloric acid. The bumbling teacher, a former rugby prop-forward, getting the mix wrong and blowing little shards of glass into his stomach, the red spreading across his white coat, the fumbling for the door, the meandering down the corridor, the collapse and then, minutes later, the replacement teacher, a robotic man whose name I’d forgotten. We stopped under the tiny brass plate that we’d missed on our way in.
Departmento opthamologico.

‘Is it open?’

‘
Si si.
Is good.’

The ‘department’ consisted of one small room with four desks, two on each side, and bundles of papers piled untidily on a metal rack. The cupboard containing the materials we needed was locked, but Juan Andres opened it carefully with a strange implement that he called
un chiave universal
- a universal key – and he did it without scratching the lock.

‘
Don’t touch anything you don’t need to touch’, he said.

‘
Prints?’

‘
Si.
’

The cupboard was large enough for both of us, but I left it to Juan Andres to go inside and have a look on the basis that not everything would be labeled in the generic mix of English and Latin, and there would be brand names that he would recognize and that I would not.

Viennese ophthalmologist Karl Koller introduced local anaesthesia for eye-surgery in 1884. Solutions of chloral hydrate, bromide and morphine were unworkable, but after his colleague Freud remarked upon the numbing properties of cocaine, especially when spread across sensitive areas of skin or the gums, Koller realized that these were not unwanted side-effects. In fact, they could become its
raison d’etre
, a powerful local anaesthetic.

It was perfect for eye surgery, which, prior to the late nineteenth century had been almost impossible. Involuntary spasms, the reflex movements of a patient's eye, made any form of contact extremely difficult. Koller discovered that a few drops of a solution of cocaine would overcome the problem, as well as causing the pupils to dilate, known as mydriasis.