The next morning I received a package from who I guessed was someone high up in the program. It was the size of a small coffin, all stamped cardboard done up with masking tape. I suspected nothing except a joke, like a legless and armless blow-up doll. They existed. You could buy them in online boutique shops. They even arrived in fashionable bodices. My mate Simon had bought one once, in a drunken shopping spree. It had turned up at his parent’s house. He hadn’t known where to put his face.
I ferried the package down into the basement, where I kept my weights bench, and started peeling off stickers about Amazon’s warehouse. Armed with a pair of scissors, I cut the tape and ripped the card with my fingers. Its innards were confusing to behold at first, when I opened the front flaps; it all felt strange and unfamiliar, as if I were staring at an unusual array of objects I had never seen before. But slowly as my eyes adjusted I began to recognise what was poking me in the nose.
Contraband.
It was the only word to explain it.
There were
several large bags of white powder. A fat even larger packet of brown. See-through
bags of different coloured tablets. Strips and strips of prescription pills. What
looked like transparent pencil cases of sludgy paste. An open bag for life full
of hashish. Bars of solid resin. Wow. My fun was cut out here. Bottles of
spirits. Cartons of cigarettes. A gun. Rounds of ammunition. Stacks of cash,
cold hard tender. Even a few bankers bags of £2 coins, as if whoever had put
together this worthy bundle had won at the arcade machines on his way over
here.
But me,
far from feeling like I had dropped the jackpot, reached over to draw the
curtains. Then I realized I was in the basement, under a bare bulb, hunched
over my newly acquired batch like a vulture over a carcass. My expression must
have been hard to read. I was sickened and inspired in equal measure. Mostly I was
starting to panic. Already I was hearing knocks at the front door in my mind. Hello,
police…
I mean
what was I looking at in terms of possession with intent here, ten or so years
in prison? Don’t worry judge, I’m a super soldier for Ultra. Or at least I thought
I was gunn be, until I got set up. I didn’t understand. Was this a DIY suicide outfit?
I suffered from an addictive personality, you can take the kid out of the block
but you can’t take the block out of the kid, I’d overdosed on prescript tabs as
a teenager, bought off the black market and slushed down with vodka. That wasn’t
the only good piece of narcotic survival testimony I had in my story backpack. As
it was, I hadn’t drank for about a year. Looking at these bottles of spirits,
gleaming with their syrupy contents, I considered having a good glug in a glass
and smoking two or three cigs just while I considered the best course of action
to take. Surely I would be protected by police if this was part of my
programming detail? I doubted it. Sometimes the program wanted you detained,
and it there was nothing to stop it from detaining you.
I sat back in my rickety chair and
exhaled. Back in the day, this was the life I had very keenly coveted. To be a
master criminal, a trendy gangster, with enough dope to sell and make a living
and also plus get high with on. I must tell you how helpless an addict I used
to be! I was truly one of the most hopeless variety. And the battle had never
really left me. There were tiny little pipes in my property which poisoned me
with chemicals all the time, but willful intoxication for a leisurely purpose
was completely different. I had beaten the hedonistic half of me into
submission, with pure drive to exist through this torture deathcamp scheme. Now
here facing me were all my demons in the nice secluded solitary space of my own
private basement, where nothing could go wrong or get me.
Scenes of desperation and ruin crossed my
mind. I saw myself vomiting and coughing up blood. Is this how my uncouth handlers
planned to do away with me? Screw them, I wouldn’t touch a morsel! More soon…
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