hocus pocus

“There are rules here, man.”

There’s blood on her shitty rug and morphine in her shitty veins and for god’s sake does he have to point that gun at her at three in the morning? She isn’t scared, not fully, at least. He’s got a couple stone on her, sure. And despite the fact that he’s leaking bodily fluid all over her floor, the hand that holds his gun is as steady as hers used to be. So she’s only a little bit scared. Because more than likely he’ll hit her square on the first shot but the second will probably hit the shitty living room wallpaper and that was already more scratches and smudges than it was Dulux Moonshimmer. 

There’s a strange haze around him, his form fuzzy from lack of sleep and all the pills she had popped just before bed. Delphia can barely see him. But she can see his gun. And the way his mouth is set, grim against pain and her less than promising general disposition.

“Rule number one, no guns.” 

He doesn’t even seem to acknowledge the fact that she’s spoken. His eyes are trained on her and his hand is still steady but he shows no indication that he’s heard her voice. 

She tries again, hovering in the doorway like the scared mollusk she was born to be. “Rule number two, don’t point things at me.” 

Here he manages a snort. An actual derisive snort. As if he isn’t bleeding out all over her rubbish-dump rug. Bloody cheek. 

She sighs, long and hard and labored. 

“Rule number three, payment first.”

He reacts this time, face scrunching in disgust. He doesn’t seem to like that at all. He snaps the safety loose and the distinct sound of a gun being cocked echoes throughout the dimly furnished living room. She tries not to swallow. 

“Payment after.” 

Die then, bitch.

Is what she meant to say, of course.

But- well, he’s pointing a fucking gun at her and she’s almost certain (96.439%) that she doesn’t want to die today so she grimaces.

“Payment after. That’s fine. Good, even.” She sounds strange, agreeable and slightly airy in the way someone might talk after they’d run a mile. Or how they might sound after they’d been threatened with a deadly weapon. 

“Can I take a look?” 

He watches her, disgust wiped from his face only to replaced by mild disinterest. It’s oddly annoying. He grunts, eventually, clicking the safety back on and waving the thing about like it was a rich tea biscuit. 

She takes that as a yes and shuffles forward in her elephant slippers and itchy green cardigan. Her nails are jagged and he winces (and hisses and she’s pretty sure she heard the word bitch in there somewhere) as they scratch his skin. 

She’s not gentle as she lifts his shirt, tutting like an old mother at the (probably) two and a half inch laceration to his lower abdomen. The shoddy bandages are stained in sticky blood and half hanging off his (admittedly toned) also bloodied chest. He looks (and smells) like shit and he’s still bleeding on her shitty rug. 

She steps away and his eyes, weirdly bright in the dim room, follow her every movement. His gun hasn’t left his hand. In fact, it hasn’t really moved from being pointed at her chest. Without a word she turns and walks away, only to return moments later with a medical bag. She holds it up by way of explanation and he nods, closing his eyes for the briefest of moments while she gets set up. 

“You’re going to have to lie down or I’ll stitch you up wrong and your nipple will be by your belly button.” 

He does as she asks, admittedly with a little more attitude than she asked for but disgraced doctors who operate without a license out of the back of their flats can’t really be choosers. 

You didn’t hear it from her but he was a bitch the entire time. 

Moaning and hissing and cocking and un-cocking his big boy toy and threatening to burn her cardigan and really, the whole thing was way more dramatic than it needed to be and there was something a little bit...manufactured about the wound. Lower abdomen stabs wounds rarely missed anything. His wound was neither deep nor was it particularly dangerous. If she was a little less high and cared a little bit more, she may have wondered whether the wound was... self inflicted.

Instead, she attempted small talk as she dressed his wound. “So, you’re Irish?”

He replied instantly and made no attempt to hide his obvious laughter at her expense. “Why do you dress like a homeless woman?”

Her fingers, bony and long, stilled and she gave him a wide-eyed look. There was no more attempts at talking until she was done and he was halfway to the door. 

“Standard price for a stitch up is three hundred.” 

He grunted, again, shrugging on his jacket that she hadn’t noticed he’d taken off. “Tomorrow.”

“No. Now. I don’t do shit for free, Irish dude with an attitu-”

Silencers are brilliant little things. Great for listening ears outside, not so great if you’re on the receiving end of a bullet. The muted pop gave her such a start that for a moment, she thought she had been startled into being sober. When she looked around there was a small, smoking hole right in the middle of her Dulux Moonshimmer wall. 

At least it added t the drug-den aesthetic.

“Tomorrow.” he said again, voice low and dangerous and every bit of trouble he’d stank of since the moment he’d waltzed into her shitty flat. 

*

In the morning there was an envelope on her kitchen table. Five hundred cash and a blank business card with a sentence written on the back that left her with the taste of battery acid at the back of her throat. 

It’s late and she’s cold (when is she ever not cold?) and the sky is dark and the air smells like sewage and there’s no place like London.

Soho is a shitty place in the daytime and night isn’t any better. There’s always a rat in the corner of your vision, always a prick in a suit offering to buy you a drink if you’ll only answer his ‘friends’ question.

Tuesday, mercifully, isn’t too busy. Too many wanker bankers holed up in their offices and the students were indoors fucking and doing anything that wasn’t their reading to make it busy out. If it wasn’t for the piss and the shit and the general feeling of disease that seemed to hang around the so-called bohemian centre it might have been a pretty sight. All low hues and deep reds and inky blacks and cobbled alleyways.

Delphia wouldn’t even have bothered coming this way if she hadn’t misplaced her oyster card and her bankcard and any spare cash she had while she got high in the back of Frank’s club. The tosspot had fucked off before she realised and rather than grovel to one of his shitty bouncers, she strode (hobbled, swayed, stumbled) her way through the streets of London with only a vague idea of how to get back home.

There’s an alleyway up ahead, she knows. One that’ll lead out onto the main road and then it’s only a fifty minute walk. Only. With a sigh she continues, side-stepping the globs of sick coated to the sorry excuse of a pavement when a shout captured her attention.

Usually she wouldn’t care. Not in her state of in-tox-i-ca-tion but she knows that voice. Knows that timbre of self-hate and self-consciousness and self-loathing all rolled into a perfect smile and a dumb Mancunian accent. She turns, half-hoping she’s wrong because fuck, how is she supposed to get home if he’s with her asking questions and prodding and flicking her nose and being joyful even though she knows he’s sad?

No dice. It’s him alright.

Plaid shirt over a plain t-shirt and black jeans and black docs and even from across the street she can see that there’s grease on his neck where he’s given into an itch and oil on his sleeves where he’s been careless. She has half a mind to leave him here. Even as she watches (grim and inexplicably angry at him for some reason) him get tossed out of a crappy looking pub by an even crappier looking person. Seriously. This guy was fifteen stone of sharp edges and glares.

Shinwell was shouting, even as he landed on his side with a thud and rolled into a semi-sitting position. Indignation helped to soften the slur of his words but he was clearly piss-drunk.

Fu c K.

By the time she’s decided to help him she’s, curiously, already half way across the street, waving and shouting and swaying.

“He’s mine. I’ll take him. Don’t call the police.” The words are rushed, monotonous as she looks at Shinwell and the sorry state he’s in. She can’t judge too much though, the creases of her elbows are starting to itch.

The pub guy (owner, landlord, general sheep-fucker?) grunts at her, crosses his arms and mumbles something in a thick Irish accent that she doesn’t bother to ask him to repeat. Shinwell quiets as she stands above him. Delphia is all long limbs and brittle bones and eyes that are swimming on a high that is definitely about to take a nose-dive into comedownville.

“Get up.”

He’s smiling at her. All goofy teeth and full lips and puppy eyes and he makes her sick because that fifty minute walk is gonna take a minimum of two hours and she’ll definitely not be high by the time she gets back. She offers him a hand, jerking her head in the direction of home.

“Come on you fucking twat. Get up.”

*

In the end it only takes twenty minutes. She picks his pockets the moment he’s upright and finds thirty quid that she’ll replace with a fifty in the morning. They hail a cab and he sticks his head out of the window like the dog he was born to be the entire ride home. He talks too. Too-long sentences and slurred words and he’s not really making any sense but she doesn’t tell him to shut-up. His voice and the noise of Central London at night all blend into one low buzz until she’s back in her happy place. That is until she driver disturbs her peace and demands a tenner more than what she knows it should cost. She pays anyway. Why bother arguing?

Shinwell has cuts on his knuckles and he winces and hisses like a baby when she wipes at them with antiseptic and pushes her hard when she tries to bandage them. It isn’t long, though, before he’s quiet (finally, finally) and tucked into her bed on her side without a care in the fucking world. He mutters occasionally, lifts his feet at the appropriate times as she peels his trousers and socks off and chucks them to one corner of the room.

He’s soon asleep and Delphia lets out the breath she had been holding since Soho. He’s so strange when he sleeps, all the stress and the sadness is tucked away in his dreams and he looks so goddamn young. Smooth skin and light stubble and thick eyebrows. She sits down next to him, watches him the way she imagines her parents used to watch her when she slept.

“You can’t do this again.”

Her voice sounds strange, strangled with emotion the way a normal person’s voice might waver when they were sad.

Is she sad?

“You can’t do this again. Not ever. I’m not good, Shin,” she sounds like she’s pleading, though for what she does not know. “I’m not good at all. I’m actually very bad but when you’re here, well- I’m not completely terrible so you can’t leave.”

There’s a ‘me’ on the end of that sentence somewhere. Maybe twenty years back or so but it’s there. Suspended in time and space forever as she selfishly begs a good kid to stay with her because she’s too high to do anything but get more high and take money off bad men to pay her rent.

She’s so tired and upset that she rolls forward after her little begging session, sweaty forehead coming to rest on Shinwell’s broad chest. His breaths are so slow that she panics for a moment and thinks he’s dead but his hand untangles itself from the blankets and comes to rest on her head and wasn’t he supposed to be asleep?

He pets her hair for so long she thinks he’s fallen back asleep and continued the repetitive motion into REM but he surprises her again. Sits up and leans down and kisses the top of her head with such sweetness that her mouth fills with saliva in retaliation.

“Steak’ tom’row, yeah?”

She knows what he means. He means he wants steak tomorrow, of course (when does he never not want steak?) and it also means he’ll be on her side of the bed till then but above all that shit it most definitively means that he’ll stay.

we were almost blown up by two different governments on a nice beach off cuba.

( he licks his thumb and tries to rub a  lingering scratch of biro off his wrist. )

after that friendship felt like the natural next step.

[ she blinks, three times, lids forcing themselves over dry eyes. ]

Naturally. 

[ she twitches, trying and -probably- failing to look like she’s completely comfortable with him near her breathing space.]

[ she thinks of him, spread out like a particularly stubborn starfish on his bed, skin red and peeling, the pain numbed the reflection of the sun still in his eyes, and smiles. ]

    If I knew, I would’ve asked     for a refund, I promise.

[ she laughs,

the sound is dry and mimicks the grating of two sheets of sandpaper against one another. but it is a laugh, at  least.

she’s curious, of course. the notion of burning means ‘somewhere’ was right. and delphia wants details.

apathetically, of course. ]

where did you go? 

[ her tone is less than enthusiastic but she  leans forward on her chair,  dark, unkempt eyebrows raising. she notes the blush to the golden cheeks. notes the smile and lack of eye contact - ew ]

Bone tired and world weary. 

Her feet curl in her shoes and her hands rub at her eyes as she yawns, bones in her jaw popping against the motion. She drops her jacket on the floor next to her rucksack and winces as she hears the hypodermic needles rattle against one another. The apartment is dark and cold and the air smells of disinfectant and bleach and underneath that- deep beneath the clean- is the stench of blood. Coppery and iron-like it coats itself onto her tongue and worms its way into her lungs. 

Familiarity warms her veins, it’s occurrence is welcome.

She doesn’t bother to wander into the kitchen - can already guess that the shelves are bare and the fridge empty. Instead she heads straight to her bedroom, knowing that there is a roll of cash in her drawer and the number for various take-away’s scrawled on an old envelope thrown somewhere on her bedroom floor.

She doesn’t know if it’s the drugs that delay and calm her reaction or if, deep down, she had just known. There’s an arm, pale and peppered with dark hair, thrown out from beneath her thick blankets. She supposes it could be anyone but then again - she knows it can only be one person. Just as she knows the sound of his laugh, the feel of his fingers snatching a flask out of her hand in the morning. 

She knows. 

So, instead of screaming, or god forbid, waking him, she merely moves his arm. Picks it up with the utmost care and then drops it without a thought. She won’t tell him to leave. In fact, she’s almost certain that the brunette won’t be there in the morning, so she lets him rest because Delphia’s hasn’t ever been good at doing anything so she does nothing. 

And that thing - that wailing scratching thing burrowed deep within her - is momentarily soothed. 

Shinwell rolls towards her when she sits down on the edge of her bed, large, warm arms winding around her small frame. She allows the contact, if only because telling him to fuck off would mean waking him up and actually talking to him. 

She doesn’t want that. 

She wants silence and companionship and silent companionship so she keeps quiet. She even lowers her voice when she orders too much food and despairs at the thought of eating any of it. 

Shinwell yawns in his sleep and she pats his forearm comfortingly. This is ok.