Cancelled

This project has now been cancelled due to lack of public interest. 
I am still working on writing the book but it will no longer appear here chapter by chapter. 

My novella A Cigarette Burn in the Sun is out on Yellow King Press and available on Amazon UK and Amazon (dot) Com.

Chapter 1

13 Grams of Amphetamines - Chapter 1

Tee Tee DeVille fires up a blunt and gets behind the wheel of her old ‘69 Ford Cortina, looking fantastic in a pink tutu and black leather biker jacket, fishnets and high heels, electric blue streaks in her wild blonde hair. No doubt about it, she’s easy on my eyes at least.

 

Whole a the city is aglow, lit up in neon. I’m in the passenger seat. Both of us skinnied to fuck from months of taking shit loads a the old white lightning. Couple a grams already pumping through my veins tonight, I’m broken all up in pieces, I got too many bruises on  my body and soul, I’m black and fucking blue, chewing gum to the soundtrack a the Cramps Human Fly cranked up on the car stereo. Screaming static feedback in my head, all my nerve endings detonating like nuclear fission. This is the only kind a euphoria I’ve ever known. And I don’t know if it’s sum kind a trip I’m on but I feel like my synapses bin hotwired and everything is spinning around me like it’s just unreal, like I’m watching my life unfold on a cinema screen. Tee Tee passes me the rocket-red lipstick stained blunt and says all she wants to do is get amped up and drunk and fuck shit up. 

I roll down the winnder and put my arm out:

Well, that’s what we’re gonna do then. We’re gonna get amped up and drunk and fuck

  shit up. 

We pass the blunt back and forth, Tee Tee’s sucking on it and not maneuvering the car too good as we pull up to the pumps on the monochrome lit ESSO petrol station forecourt along the Wolverhampton Road. We got three bottles a vodka on the back seat, a shit load a little envelopes of speed in the glovebox and we’re gonna drive up to Edgbaston Reservoir, park the car overlooking the water and kill the rest a the night there until the sun comes up.

Tee Tee fills up with petrol and I fetch the derringer out my jacket pocket and wait until the place is deserted before I conceal the little .22 in my palm and walk into the kiosk. 

I point the gun at the redhead girl behind the counter:

Easy, Doll. Listen to me, you ain’t gonna get hurt if you don’t do nothing to piss me

  off. Just open the till and step back from the counter and keep your hands by your

  side, there’s a good kid.

The girl don’t even panic none. A bona fide Birmingham city girl, she might only look about seventeen but she’s sin all this kind a shit before with her own eyes. I mean this girl don’t even fucking blink:

You gotta be joking?

No, I ain’t joking, Doll. But I am Joe King. Just don’t act funny and you’ll do alright.

She’s a good kid, she don’t give me no gyp, she just does as she’s told and stands there looking cute in her gingham blouse and short denim skirt, chewing gum and staring at me with insolence in her eyes, sum kind a stupid smile wiped across her face that makes me think she’s mocking me and when she talks she talks all slow and drowsy voiced:

Save your breath and just take what you like, you think I even give a shit?

I reach over and rip the notes out the till, stuff them in my pockets and walk out the joint. 

Tee Tee had edged the Ford round to right outside the door and I jump straight back in the passenger seat:

Whoo whee, she was a cool cat. I like it when they’re cool. But let’s get going, she’s

  gonna have hit the button now. 

With nothing obstructing our way Tee Tee dons her Wayfarers and swings the car back out the garage onto the road and then I yell watch out! as we nearly hit this woman on the pavement. She’s a middle-aged woman with a speckled complexion like sum sort a pizza that you wouldn’t want to eat. She leaps out the way and waves her arms about, spitting obscenities at us that I can’t even hear becuz a the ringing in my brain. My head spins round hundred and eighty degrees like an owl. I turn the stereo down:

 

Fucksake! You nearly killed that woman.

Tee Tee’s being wilfully obtuse as usual, laughing and touching up her red lipstick again in the rear view mirror. She bangs the volume on the stereo back up:

Who’s driving this car? Don’t come at me telling me what’s what. I can do whatever I

  like, you schmuck.

Jesus Chirst!

I’m on a rollercoaster ride. Tee Tee still pretends not to even notice the pizzaface woman fading into the distance behind us or maybe it’s becuz she really just don’t give a fuck, acting all cool as a cucumber as she floors the accelerator and shoots us into the flow a traffic. She’s doing her dramatic act, like one of those old time Hollywood actresses:

Hold on , daahh-ling. Just hold on.

Oncoming cars flash their high beams at us as we slingshot over onto Broadway and then cut a swerve onto Norman Road. Reflections of the orange streetlights shift across the black lenses of Tee Tee’s Ray Bans. It seems like we’re away now down the backroads but she don’t ease off the gas at all. I’m holding onto the sides a my seat:

Slow down. . . Slow down.

Her laugh is like wet gravel:

Don’t worry, I know exactly which way to go. 

We pinball through a maze of streets, Tee Tee threading the car narrowly between parked cars and oncoming traffic, until we reach Rotton Park Road where she eventually slows down and we pull over at a convenience store run by sum effusively polite little Chinaman and we stroll in there just about as chill as you like and buy ourselves sum cigarettes, bottles a Coca-Cola and plastic party cups. We get back in the car and I chuck all the stuff on the back seat. Tee Tee twists the key in the ignition:

I like it that you said the garage attendant girl didn’t give a shit. People who love their

  piss-poor jobs are just about enough to mek me sick.

***

Roads rescind to dirt tracks. The clamour of the urban jungle recedes. We park up overlooking the reservoir and Tee Tee kills the lights. She laughs and strokes my hair back off my forehead:

You sure you’re alright, daahh-ling? You look pale.

While she rolls up another blunt on her thigh I get out the car and peel off the black tape we used to obfuscate the registration plates. The moon and the stars shimmer silver on the gentle rippled surface of the black water. It’s all so beautiful and serene, I catch a few breaths of cool night air but I still can’t slow my heart rate down. In the car I count out the dough:

Three hundred and fifty quid, man. Three hundred and fifty-three, to be exact. And

  that’s after I paid little Ching Chong back there for the stuff.

Tee Tee’s shoots me an icy grin and reaches in the back, grabbing one a the bottles a vodka and twisting off the cap:

I love you, Joe King.

 

I waft the notes in her face:

First you get the money, then you get to make the rules. That’s how it works.

No fucking shit?

No fucking shit. 

You’re never gonna get your hands on the real money working a shithouse job. I’ve sin men in jobs that nobody should have to do. Dirty, stinking, back-breaking work - grime and chemicals so indelibly ingrained into their skins they can never even wash it off. Aged beyond their years and rendered sick in body and mind becuz a what they have to do day in, day out for years, left devoid of all dreams and nothing left of their bodies, worn down to little nubs of men. They got no sensations left to feel and the thoughts in their heads just lie there blotted out and dusty like a dead letter office. I knew one kid, worked in an industrial glue factory, place drove him fucking mad. He called the suicide line for help, but get this - nobody picked up, so he went ahead and killed hisself anyway. 

I got no intention of hitting baseline just yet and I root around in the glovebox and fetch out a couple more wraps a the speed:

I’m just glad we didn’t have to break nobody’s face in the process. I hate it when we

  have to break somebody’s face.

That’s the only bad thing about speed is the comedowns. It detonates inside you and you never felt as good as that before and you don’t never want to come out of it. Your senses strung out across the sky, you’re walking through the city like a god in the machine with all your fuses blown and then you come crashing right down and hit baseline and nothing is the same anymore. Everything is flat and normal again. Everything is shit and unless you’ve done speed you got no idea just how shit normality is. For me, I’m seeing a kaleidoscope of images in a grainy black and white and everything is jump-cutting around me on a roll a fast moving film, I’m watching everything shift in cinemascope video clips but then you come down and the sensations are gone and everything is back to just shades a grey and everything is slow and monotonous and you just about know, you know nothing can ever feel that fucking good again and until your next hit you’re just thinking about shit, slitting your wrists in the back of your mind.

Tee Tee draws on the blunt and passes it to me:

You know, most a them people, their lives ain’t worth a damn anyway. They can’t

  even think for themselves. Most a the fuckers only get their thoughts from what they

  see graffitied on the backs a toilet stall doors.

I just don’t enjoy it as much when you get sum fucking hero in the mix and you end

  up having to break his face, that’s all. Look, I don’t hate people and I don’t havta see

  the colour a sumbody’s blud to know these people are just stuck going through life

  and they bleed real blud from their veins just the same as I do.

I chop out two lines a white lightning on the dashboard with my pocketknife and we both beak one each with a rolled up fiver. It hits me and I feel another explosion. Everthing in the cosmos is all moving away from each other, the particle horizon is getting bigger as the universe continues to dilate. There’s white noise in my head like I’m picking up a cannonade of signals on frequencies I cannot decipher. Without question, discovering speed was the best thing that ever happened to me.

Tee Tee puts her seat back, slots a Beach Boys cassette in the player and pours us vodka and cokes in the plastic cups:

All I ever wanted to do was fuck myself up and I want to do it so badly it makes me

  want to scream.

Yeah? Well for Christ sake don’t be another one a my friends to go down in a ball a

  flames. I couldn’t stand it if you of all people were the next one to fall. 

I stare at the stars that glow with a glacial light and wonder what lies beyond our own tiny quadrant a the sky and what will the very end of all time be like when our sun finally dies. I gather up the notes, roll them up like a donut and tie them together with a rubber band dug out a my jacket pocket. I take a few more tokes and hand the blunt back to Tee Tee again and she puts her head back and smokes it right down to the roach, then she rolls down her winnder and throws it out, the burning orange embers cast a sparkling trail in the air like a comet and we watch the water douse it.

The night air has gotten colder.

Peeling the cellophane off a pack a Marlboro, Tee Tee shakes her head:

Nah… It only feels that way, daahh-ling. It only feels that way.

 

Thank you for reading. This is an experiment. If you liked this and would like to read Chapter 2, please let me know.

If the interest is there, as we go on, I might have the whole novel up chapter by chapter.

And if you do like this, you'll love my current novella, A Cigarette Burn in the Sun, out now on Yellow King Press and available on Amazon.