Wasps and White
by Lee Carrick
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: None.
Description: Near-death on the streets of Edinburgh. It's Trainspotting all over again!
_____________________________________________________________________
One wasp appeared; then two and then three. At first I thought I was imagining it, I turned to Stevey, he was bent over the table with a ten pound note up his right nostril. “Look, can you see that. Stevey, are they real?” He threw his head back and snorted hard. “Aye, mate, they are.”
Ian Banks said that Edinburgh was a city the size of a town that looked like a village, and I must presume that he was standing at the Water of Leith in Stockbridge when this astute observation came to him. Stockbridge is a village only a ten minute walk up Fredrick Street to Princes Street and Edinburgh’s city centre.
It’s a place where one can hide from the congested roads of Oriental tourists in raincoats taking endless photographs of the Scott Monument and the Balmoral Hotel. It’s a quiet haven where ducks swim in the cold water and strangers greet each other as they pass. It’s a cosmopolitan soup of middle-class English students, Pakistani greengrocers, Polish café owners and Scottish pub landlords. It’s a microcosm for my adopted city. It is Stockbridge.
Royal Circus is split into two crescent shaped streets by a cobbled road and a private garden for paying residents only. The huge town houses that were once owned by the high society of Edinburgh have been developed into much smaller individual flats that are better suited to the needs and financial constraints of the 21st century tenant. I lived at 18/5 on the second floor.
The flat had two small bedrooms and one tiny bathroom but this mattered little once one stepped into the living room; it was on three different levels and stunning. On the ground level was a kitchen and dining room. Above, up three stairs on the second floor, was the sitting area with two white couches on either side of the room. A large oak table in the middle sat on an antique rug and Frank the Plant. Frank was a house plant that had grown so huge that its roots were more than ten feet long and spread all over the room. Its leaves were the size of dinner plates and its stem was taller than a man. He was a beautiful olive green and demanded the attention of all who saw him.
Above the seating area was the mezzanine which was used as a study and occasional spare bedroom. The entire room was lit like a football stadium by four wall to wall, floor to ceiling windows that were twelve feet high and looked over the old Edinburgh skyline. It was a magical place to live, especially for someone as young as I.
I had lived in Edinburgh for three months and in Stockbridge for two, I was working on Princes Street, earning more money than I knew what to do with and living in one of the greatest cities in the world and I had a met an excellent cocaine dealer named Stevey.
Stevey was the perfect dealer, he never cut his product, he never turned his phone off and he never expected to be paid on time. He would drop off anywhere within the city and surrounding areas and was never late. He was my favourite person in Edinburgh and we became overnight friends.
Stevey and I had been ‘out’ for two days. Being ‘out’ didn’t mean leaving the house; it meant staying in and perpetually filling the nostril with white powder. We had been at it for thirty-six hours when the wasps appeared.
“They’re coming from behind the lamp on the window ledge. Is the window open?” Stevey asked me. “Nah, mate, the windows on that side are never open,” I replied. More and more wasps appeared until there was a mini swarm and I convinced myself that I was having a mental breakdown. They flew around the room landing on cups, beer bottles and settling on empty plates. They buzzed calmly past my ear and in front of my face and I began to panic.
My heart was already racing, fuelled by the copious amount cocaine I had ingested, but now it felt like my heart had picked up a hammer and was forcing its self through my rib cage and out of my chest. “I’m going to bed, mate, I can’t handle this,” I told Stevey. I needed to get away from the wasps, I felt like I was losing my mind. In my intoxicated state I couldn’t comprehend their existence in my house. I snorted one more large line and headed for my bedroom. As I began to walk down the three stairs to the kitchen, I felt a sharp shooting pain in my chest which caused my knees to buckle and my teeth to clench tightly together.
I fell backwards on to the wooden floor and lay in agony in the foetal position; an angry fist closed its muscular fingers around my chest and squeezed the blood out of my arteries. Stevey rushed over and with a frenzied mind tried to lift me from the floor, but I was rigid with fright. “Phone an ambulance,” I demanded. “No way, mate, too much coke in the house,” he said. I began to froth at the mouth and my muscles were vibrating violently around my bones. “I’ll phone you a taxi but you’ll have to get down to the front door and across the road, I’m not giving the firm this address, too much gear here, mate, we’ll both do time.”
I could hear Stevey talking but I couldn’t understand what he was saying; I was lapsing in and out of consciousness. I lay on the cold wood floor shaking uncontrollably and expecting to die. A few minutes later I was dragged to my feet and marched down the stairs to the front door. Stevey threw me out into the street and told me to go to number 15 where a taxi would pick me up.
I sat outside the navy blue door of number 15 Royal Circus overdosing on cocaine. The taxi arrived and I crawled into the back seat. ”Edinburgh Royal?” the taxi driver said. I nodded in reply and he sped away. His radio was playing the Verve song Lucky Man, and for five minutes I felt calm; the song had soothed the white devil trying to explode my heart.
I walked into A and E and collapsed at the front desk. My head crashed against the floor and I looked up at the clean white ceiling above me and closed my eyes. When I awoke I was in a hospital bed with a heart monitor beeping continuously beside me. A nurse opened my mouth and sprayed an anticoagulant into my throat while another nurse wheeled in the defibrillators and placed them beside the bed in anticipation of imminent death. “Try and relax, there’s nothing we can do until your heart rate decreases,” the nurse advised.
As I lay there I thought of my life, my mistakes, my family and my stupidity. I was twenty-one and going to die from an overdose. I was living in a Trainspotting nightmare that I had secretly coveted since moving to Edinburgh. I wanted to be Renton and now I was and that idiocy was about to end my life.
I awoke two days later on a hospital ward with tubes coming from my wrist and nose and patches on my chest. Stevey was sitting next to my bed reading the Scottish Sun. “Alright shun?” he said. I looked around the room. I was on the addict’s ward, tramps and junkies everywhere I looked. Stevey left an hour later. A doctor took my blood and explained that he would need to test for an enzyme that is only released when one has a heart attack. The test results were negative; no heart attack. The next day I was released from the hospital, broken and scarred and now needing to take Beta-blockers for the rest of my life.
Stevey picked me up from Edinburgh Royal Infirmary and dropped me off at Waverley Station. I wanted to go home to the North East to recover. Four hours later I was in Central Station in Newcastle and thirty minutes after that I was in South Shields. I took my phone out and called a friend. “Alreet, Dean, how’s tricks? Can you drop me off four grams of sniff, please, mate?”
Swearwords: None.
Description: Near-death on the streets of Edinburgh. It's Trainspotting all over again!
_____________________________________________________________________
One wasp appeared; then two and then three. At first I thought I was imagining it, I turned to Stevey, he was bent over the table with a ten pound note up his right nostril. “Look, can you see that. Stevey, are they real?” He threw his head back and snorted hard. “Aye, mate, they are.”
Ian Banks said that Edinburgh was a city the size of a town that looked like a village, and I must presume that he was standing at the Water of Leith in Stockbridge when this astute observation came to him. Stockbridge is a village only a ten minute walk up Fredrick Street to Princes Street and Edinburgh’s city centre.
It’s a place where one can hide from the congested roads of Oriental tourists in raincoats taking endless photographs of the Scott Monument and the Balmoral Hotel. It’s a quiet haven where ducks swim in the cold water and strangers greet each other as they pass. It’s a cosmopolitan soup of middle-class English students, Pakistani greengrocers, Polish café owners and Scottish pub landlords. It’s a microcosm for my adopted city. It is Stockbridge.
Royal Circus is split into two crescent shaped streets by a cobbled road and a private garden for paying residents only. The huge town houses that were once owned by the high society of Edinburgh have been developed into much smaller individual flats that are better suited to the needs and financial constraints of the 21st century tenant. I lived at 18/5 on the second floor.
The flat had two small bedrooms and one tiny bathroom but this mattered little once one stepped into the living room; it was on three different levels and stunning. On the ground level was a kitchen and dining room. Above, up three stairs on the second floor, was the sitting area with two white couches on either side of the room. A large oak table in the middle sat on an antique rug and Frank the Plant. Frank was a house plant that had grown so huge that its roots were more than ten feet long and spread all over the room. Its leaves were the size of dinner plates and its stem was taller than a man. He was a beautiful olive green and demanded the attention of all who saw him.
Above the seating area was the mezzanine which was used as a study and occasional spare bedroom. The entire room was lit like a football stadium by four wall to wall, floor to ceiling windows that were twelve feet high and looked over the old Edinburgh skyline. It was a magical place to live, especially for someone as young as I.
I had lived in Edinburgh for three months and in Stockbridge for two, I was working on Princes Street, earning more money than I knew what to do with and living in one of the greatest cities in the world and I had a met an excellent cocaine dealer named Stevey.
Stevey was the perfect dealer, he never cut his product, he never turned his phone off and he never expected to be paid on time. He would drop off anywhere within the city and surrounding areas and was never late. He was my favourite person in Edinburgh and we became overnight friends.
Stevey and I had been ‘out’ for two days. Being ‘out’ didn’t mean leaving the house; it meant staying in and perpetually filling the nostril with white powder. We had been at it for thirty-six hours when the wasps appeared.
“They’re coming from behind the lamp on the window ledge. Is the window open?” Stevey asked me. “Nah, mate, the windows on that side are never open,” I replied. More and more wasps appeared until there was a mini swarm and I convinced myself that I was having a mental breakdown. They flew around the room landing on cups, beer bottles and settling on empty plates. They buzzed calmly past my ear and in front of my face and I began to panic.
My heart was already racing, fuelled by the copious amount cocaine I had ingested, but now it felt like my heart had picked up a hammer and was forcing its self through my rib cage and out of my chest. “I’m going to bed, mate, I can’t handle this,” I told Stevey. I needed to get away from the wasps, I felt like I was losing my mind. In my intoxicated state I couldn’t comprehend their existence in my house. I snorted one more large line and headed for my bedroom. As I began to walk down the three stairs to the kitchen, I felt a sharp shooting pain in my chest which caused my knees to buckle and my teeth to clench tightly together.
I fell backwards on to the wooden floor and lay in agony in the foetal position; an angry fist closed its muscular fingers around my chest and squeezed the blood out of my arteries. Stevey rushed over and with a frenzied mind tried to lift me from the floor, but I was rigid with fright. “Phone an ambulance,” I demanded. “No way, mate, too much coke in the house,” he said. I began to froth at the mouth and my muscles were vibrating violently around my bones. “I’ll phone you a taxi but you’ll have to get down to the front door and across the road, I’m not giving the firm this address, too much gear here, mate, we’ll both do time.”
I could hear Stevey talking but I couldn’t understand what he was saying; I was lapsing in and out of consciousness. I lay on the cold wood floor shaking uncontrollably and expecting to die. A few minutes later I was dragged to my feet and marched down the stairs to the front door. Stevey threw me out into the street and told me to go to number 15 where a taxi would pick me up.
I sat outside the navy blue door of number 15 Royal Circus overdosing on cocaine. The taxi arrived and I crawled into the back seat. ”Edinburgh Royal?” the taxi driver said. I nodded in reply and he sped away. His radio was playing the Verve song Lucky Man, and for five minutes I felt calm; the song had soothed the white devil trying to explode my heart.
I walked into A and E and collapsed at the front desk. My head crashed against the floor and I looked up at the clean white ceiling above me and closed my eyes. When I awoke I was in a hospital bed with a heart monitor beeping continuously beside me. A nurse opened my mouth and sprayed an anticoagulant into my throat while another nurse wheeled in the defibrillators and placed them beside the bed in anticipation of imminent death. “Try and relax, there’s nothing we can do until your heart rate decreases,” the nurse advised.
As I lay there I thought of my life, my mistakes, my family and my stupidity. I was twenty-one and going to die from an overdose. I was living in a Trainspotting nightmare that I had secretly coveted since moving to Edinburgh. I wanted to be Renton and now I was and that idiocy was about to end my life.
I awoke two days later on a hospital ward with tubes coming from my wrist and nose and patches on my chest. Stevey was sitting next to my bed reading the Scottish Sun. “Alright shun?” he said. I looked around the room. I was on the addict’s ward, tramps and junkies everywhere I looked. Stevey left an hour later. A doctor took my blood and explained that he would need to test for an enzyme that is only released when one has a heart attack. The test results were negative; no heart attack. The next day I was released from the hospital, broken and scarred and now needing to take Beta-blockers for the rest of my life.
Stevey picked me up from Edinburgh Royal Infirmary and dropped me off at Waverley Station. I wanted to go home to the North East to recover. Four hours later I was in Central Station in Newcastle and thirty minutes after that I was in South Shields. I took my phone out and called a friend. “Alreet, Dean, how’s tricks? Can you drop me off four grams of sniff, please, mate?”
About the Author
Lee Carrick is in his twenties. Originally from Newcastle, he now lives in Edinburgh. His biggest passions in life are writing and travelling, and he likes to combine the two. He has been writing poetry since he was 15, but only recently began to write short stories and his first novel. He was inspired to write by Ian Banks' The Wasp Factory and Neil Gaiman's Smoke and Mirrors.
Lee’s website can be found at http://leecarrick.weebly.com. His poetry can also be read at http://writers-network.com/members/carrick. And his blog is at http://scheemieintheroom.tumblr.com.
Lee’s website can be found at http://leecarrick.weebly.com. His poetry can also be read at http://writers-network.com/members/carrick. And his blog is at http://scheemieintheroom.tumblr.com.