‘Yeah! Sal?’

‘Better,’ sighed Sally. She took the needle out of her arm. She wiped it carefully on the tissue and put it down. Sally is always so neat and delicate.

We always use separate needles ever since we started work. You’ve got to be sensible. We used to share because it was only with each other. These days I only ever share with Tar. If I got something like Aids, he’d get it anyway.

Then Lily said this thing right out of the blue. She said, ‘I’m going to have a baby.’

Christ!

‘Oh, my God! What are you going to do, what are you going to do?’

‘Oh, Lils,’ said Sally sadly.

It was so awful. Sally was pregnant a while ago and she had an abortion and she felt dreadful for ages after.

I said, ‘Have you told the doctor yet? Has he given you a date?’

Lily glared at me. I could feel myself shuffle back on the bed a bit, because she really has a temper and she doesn’t often glare at me because we’re soul sisters.

She leaned across to me. ‘Listen, Mrs Sister. You know what dead babies do. They come back and haunt you. They’re all over the place, I see ‘em. Yeah – dead babies floating on the ceiling looking for their mums ‘cause their mums had ‘em scraped out and they never had a life…’ She kept glancing across at Sal as she said all that stuff. I started remembering how when Sal had her abortion Lils was all quiet about it, just smiled and never said a thing. Now Sal was looking upset, and I thought, O-oh…

‘I’m not gonna kill my baby. That’s my baby. No one’s gonna kill my baby.’

‘I didn’t say kill it.’

‘I said, I’m going to have a baby. I’m going to have it. There’s gonna be a baby. A baby, Gems…’

I glanced at Sally. Even though she looks so prim Sally’s got a terrible temper. She said, ‘You’re on the game and you’re a junkie, Lily. You ought to have an abortion.’

‘Are you telling me to kill my baby? Are you telling me…?’

‘You ought to have an abortion for the sake of your baby.’

‘You want to kill my baby? You wanna? You wanna kill it? Come on, come on, you kill it then, you do it now.’

‘Your baby is a junkie. Your baby is inside you and it’s full of junk, same as you. You want to give birth to a junkie? Is that what you want? Is that how much you love your bloody baby?’

Lily’s eyes were absolutely bulging out of her head. ‘I’m a fucking junkie, are you telling me I’d be better off dead because I’m a junkie? Are you telling me that?’

‘I’m telling you it’s not fair to your baby to be pregnant with it while you’re full of junk. What sort of a mother…?’

She didn’t need to say any more. Lils was up off the bed walking up and down the room, poking herself on the chest and trying to find the words. I just held my breath. When those two start, you take cover. I was getting ready to disappear under the table.

Finally Lily got it out. ‘I can give it up any time I want…’

Sally just laughed. I mean, it wasn’t funny but under other circumstances it would’ve been. The number of times we’d tried to give up – I’d lost count. I dunno why. It used to be easy. Maybe the comedown’s worse when you’ve been using for a while. First you get the shivers. Then you get the aches, then the cramps start in your guts, then it’s the squits and you’re diving into the bog every five minutes. Then your teeth start aching, and your bones begin to hurt, and then you feel sick in the pit of your stomach and then you’re throwing up.

And all it takes is one little needle and Lady Heroin makes you feel… mmmmm. The days when you could say what Lily said – they were long gone.

I was gobsmacked. It never occurred to me she might want a baby. I mean, apart from the junk, well, it could be anyone’s.

Lily gave Sal this look. She looked… And Sal was sitting on the bed still and she started to get up because it looked as though Lils was going to land one on her…

Then Lily just turned round and walked out of the room.

It was awful.

Sal sat back down and lit up a fag. I just stood there. I said, ‘Let’s have one.’ She gave me a fag and I paced up and down the room smoking, trying to get calm. Sal took a few more drags then she said, ‘I think I better go.’

I said, ‘Don’t go, don’t go, it’ll be all right, it’ll be all right.’ She’d gone white; she had a temper almost as bad as Lil’s. She didn’t run around screaming but she was just as bad. Next door, Lils put some music on – ‘Lurkying About’ – feel-good music, our theme tune. The music was filling up the house; the feel-good wasn’t coming in through the bedroom door yet, but I could just imagine Lily jiving around the front room, getting herself back.

I said, ‘See? She’ll be okay.’

The track was about halfway through when the door opens and Lily comes back in. She was jiving about, glancing up at me and Sal, but jiving about like she was in her own space. She was singing along. ‘Lurkying, lurkying, lurkying about…’

She fiddled with some stuff on her dressing table. She started to smile her big Lily smile… then she came over and sat on the bed and put her arms around Sal.

‘Okay, Sal? Okay?’

‘Yeah, I’m okay.’

‘All right, Sal, mates again. Soul sisters…’

‘Yeah, soul sisters, eh?’ Although Sal didn’t exactly sound convinced.

Lily got up and started walking up and down in the space between the bed and the wall. ‘There’s gonna be a baby, right? It’s a fact. That’s just all there is to it. Right… a baby. Right? Think about it. I’m gonna be a mother. Everything’s gotta change. Right? Like Sal says, I can’t do junk if I’m a mother. See? I can’t. You can’t come round here smacked up when I’m gonna be a mother. See…?’

I said, ‘Yeah, yeah,’ just to keep things cool, really, at that point.

‘There’s gonna be a baby, Sal, I’m gonna have a baby. I’m gonna be a mother and you’re gonna be its mother and so’s Gemma and we’re all gonna get clean and live the real life…’

She looked at us, just willing us to think like her. She said, ‘You’re not gonna come round here junked up, you’re not gonna give me smack when I’m pregnant…’

‘No, right, no,’ I said. Even Sally was nodding now.

‘See?’ Lils was grinning from ear to ear. And I began to feel it.

‘Everything’s gotta change. You don’t do smack when there’s babies. It was good but now it’s on to something else…’

I began to see what she was on about. We started talking. It turned out she’s over a month gone already. We’ll have a baby in the house for Christmas.

A baby.

It means you have to live another life…

You can see it, can’t you? Lily can’t be on smack while she’s got a little baby growing inside her. That wouldn’t be fair. And it’s not fair on her to do it all on her own. So, we’re all going to pack it in together, just like we’ve done everything together ever since we met. Out of solidarity to Lily. Out of solidarity to the baby.

That’s how it happened. The change. Because it all started making sense. After about a couple of days no one could talk about anything else.

Lily and Rob had already started making plans. He was gonna get a job and we were all going to move off the City Road, where, let’s face it, it’s pretty squalid. And Lil was coming off the game and she was gonna grow veg in the garden and keep chickens and everything.

Lily’ll be its mother, of course, no one can be its mother and father except her and Rob, but the baby will belong to all of us. Rob and Tar are going to build a swing in the garden, a little one just for the baby. All right, it’ll be a while before it’s big enough, but still. And they’ve been out round the skips looking for a cot and all that sort of baby stuff. And Sally and me are going to knit – imagine! Me knitting!

And the first thing – the big thing – we’re all going to give up smack. That’s it. It was good for a while. No, I don’t regret it, why should I? Okay, there’s been casualties, there always are. You walk across the road, there’s casualties. But now it’s gone on for too long. It’s time… we’ve all known that for a long time, it was just a question of the right thing, the right time. And now it’s come, courtesy of Lils, as usual.

The way I look at it, I had a love affair – but now it’s over. Me and Junk, we’ve fallen out. It’s just so right that we all get led out of it by a little baby. You know? Like baby Jesus.

A baby is different, isn’t it?

So what you do then is take more and more and more, chasing that dragon, chasing that hit, chasing that feel-good feeling. You take more and more and more, and more often. Then you get sick of it and give up for a few days. And that’s the really nasty thing because then, when you’re clean, that’s when it works so well. That’s when you can take a hit and mmmmmmmmmmmm!

We’ve all been talking about it and we’ve realised –we all feel the same way. I was getting scared. Rob and Lily do so much. Every day. Tar and me have days off, at least.

Actually, though, Tar scares me, too. He’s got so cynical. You know Tar, he was always so delighted by things. He used to get so emotional about, I dunno – me, a flower, the stars out at night, it was all wonderful for him. These days he doesn’t care any more. I don’t understand him these days.

I don’t feel that I’ve changed, except I feel so rotten a lot of the time. But he has.

Sometimes I think I preferred him the way he used to be, almost. Not really, he used to get so upset, but…

And the other thing is, he lies. About smack. You know? Like, we’ve run out, it happens from time to time. He tells me he has none left, and I think, Shit, that means coming down. But then he sneaks off and when he comes back he’s got eyes like glass, and I say, ‘You’ve just had some.’

And he admits it. That actually happened the other day. He just sat there smiling and nodding, ‘Yeah, yeah, I had a bit…’ And he starts explaining to me that he didn’t have enough for two and how if we’d shared it we’d both feel awful so he thought it would save a lot of trouble for both of us if he took it on his own. And he’s serious. He’s actually convinced himself that this is sensible behaviour and he gets really put out when I don’t agree.

‘You could have given it to me,’ I said.

And he said, ‘I could have done. But I didn’t.’ And he smiles like a snake at me. Then he’s going on about how he’s got to go out and score some so he needs it more than me. I have to go and rub up old men at the parlour. Does he think that’s fun? Does he think I like that? Doesn’t he know I’d rather be out of it when I do that?

But it doesn’t make any difference. He believes anything he tells himself. ‘I need it, Gems,’ he says. Yeah.

Imagine! A baby… Actually it’s made me go all broody. What if I got pregnant? We could bring them up together and they’d be really good friends just like me and Lily. I know you can’t tell how your kids are going to turn out but I really think we all live so close together they’d be bound to be friends. I’m sixteen now. I could go on the dole. I could pack my job in…

That’d be nice. It’s started to get me down doing that job. I keep telling myself that it’s just a job, it’s easy money. It’s no worse than any other job. People have a prejudice about sex, but it’s just something you do with your body. I jolly myself into it. Sometimes I think, I’m here to make these people happy, and I do. On a good day I see these guys walk into the parlour looking like dogs and they walk out like princes. Let’s face it, they’d never get a girl like me if they couldn’t pay for it. But… well, it’s still a job, you know? I can think of better ways to be spending my time. It’s easy money, that’s all.

I’m thinking I’ll stop doing tricks at work – I mean, full sex. It’d be up to me, you don’t earn as much but you can still do all right. Maybe when we’re all clean I’ll pack up altogether and have a baby, too.

Did I tell you, Lily turned blue the other day?

It was really frightening. We were all out in the back bedroom with the works. We were taking turns. There were some friends of ours in the front room, so after we’d done we went through to see them. Lily was last so she was on her own. I thought it was funny at the time because Lily is never last usually, when it comes to getting her smack.

I only went back because I’d left my fags in there. She was lying on the bed and I thought she was asleep but she was this strange colour. Blue. I just stared; I didn’t realise what I was looking at until I saw the needle in her arm. Then I thought about what Tar said about Alan and Helen. The needle was still in, you see. There was a little blood had found its way into the works and…

‘Tar, Rob, Tar, Rob!’ I screamed. I thought she was already dead. I jumped over and I hauled her upright on the bed. Then I remembered the blood in the works and that’s supposed to be really dangerous, you can get air in your bloodstream and if that little bubble gets round to your brain… So I tore the needle out quick and I ripped her arm doing it and this black blood oozed out of the hole. Black blood. I was thinking about Alan and Helen, I never thought it could happen to any of us. Rob came in, then Tar. She was getting bluer and bluer. Tar pushed her back on the bed because he wanted to press her heart, but Rob was pulling her upright; he had this feeling she ought to be upright. I started slapping her face, whack, whack, whack. Then she twitched.

In the silence that followed she took two little sips of air. I could hear them. It was so shallow, her breath.

We all stopped breathing then, I think. And so did she. I slapped her again and again and again and she took another breath, a deep shuddering one this time, and a little pink came into her face.

Then we got her on her feet and started marching her round and round the room. She started to come round and she was muttering something. I was really terrified because – it was really strange this – I thought she had some message, you know, from the other side. Because she’d died, she’d stopped breathing, her heart had stopped. I had this awful feeling that she was coming back from the dead with some terrible message for us, like in a horror story. I really wanted them to put her down and just let her die…

Then the words started getting clearer, and all it was was ‘Leave me alone, leave me alone…’

She was all right after that. She began to come round. It was so weird because she was just normal. I mean, if I hadn’t gone back for another few minutes she’d have been dead. And here she was, just like Lily, normal.

Later, when she came out of the smack a bit, she tried to make a joke out of it. ‘Live fast, die young,’ Lily kept saying. But it just wasn’t funny. But what was weird, she was laughing. She found it funny. I honestly think she wouldn’t have minded dying. Like it was just another adventure.

It turned out she’d stayed behind and had another little one. But the stuff was stronger than usual. We’d all been remarking on that in the front room while she was dying in the back room.

The really awful thing was… I mean, the other awful thing was… You see, it was nearly two weeks ago, that. No one has said anything. I know, I know, it’s just a blob of jelly at this point, it isn’t a person or anything. But I still keep thinking of how whatever it is went blue inside her as well. It’d be dreadful if the baby wasn’t all right.

I know I’m being stupid. She wasn’t out for long. It’s very early days. If anything is wrong she’ll probably miscarry or something. But it would be so dreadful. If she has a miscarriage I’ll think about that all the time.

A baby! Imagine…