There was my sly man on the corner of Old Compton and Berwick Street, just as I’d walked around the block with difficulty as if that was some kind of risky balancing act, wrapped tightly in a long black coat, a scarf over my mouth, hoping to catch the underhand eye of a dealer. I knew it would happen, and, as predicted, it happened.
A middle-aged guy in hoodie emerged from the shade of an alleyway, cleared his throat ominously and asked for a cigarette. I took my time getting it out, smiled and asked casually: ‘So, what are you doing out here, this time of night?’
‘Helping the needy’, he said.
Bingo.
I mentioned oxys, and we soon got chatting, about New York, about hip hop, about life in London, comparisons between the two cities. He had two chubby pitbulls on a leash, and a walking cane in the other hand. We walked around arm in arm for a little while. He was enjoying himself having a random stroll, nodding at various people passing by, and introduced me to a small, older man in a blue cashmere coat and hat.
‘This lady wants two balls’, he said.
‘Two balls?’ the old man frowned at me, avuncular, Caribbean, whistling his astonishment. He turned around and pulled two cellophane wrapped balls out of his mouth, removed the outer wrapper and gave me the celluloid treasures.
‘Two brown for the lady’, he said. I slid two notes in his hand.
‘If you want my opinion, try snorting them like cocaine’, he said.
I went upstairs the O-bar, locked myself in the bathroom, then I sat down on the sofa with a vodka and red bull.
Memories shone like headlights, memories of times spent just above these floors, like a fish in a bowl, years ago in Soho when I could still see all the colours. Soho then was so beautiful to see, then, it was so colourful. I remembered a winter morning the snow had formed iridescent rainbows over these few, magical streets as they lay motionless in the silence of Sunday morning.
That shabby, heart-warming grocer’s market on Berwick Street, and the Italian fruit monger, who had reminded me of my Italian roots one day when he said to me in Italian: ‘Do you want a half apple? Will you eat it with me?’, and I said, in Italian, ‘sure, how much do you want for half an apple?’, and he said ‘don’t you worry, it's on me’.
It had taken me back all the way to my four year old self hearing church bells in my grandma’s home village, with its cypress trees, its dry river in the summer, children playing with horses and riding bareback, and familial cemeteries in fields of brown grass, there, far away underneath the Alps, in the Italian North.
"I went upstairs TO the O-bar, locked myself in the bathroom, then I sat down on the sofa with a vodka and red bull."
By chance, amongst the crowd of rush-hour shoppers on Oxford Street, I ran past Jonathan just outside Topshop – and I think he saw me as well. In the split second when he walked right through me, far too late to jump out of his way, I recognized his face. He was wearing an old leather jacket and looking very out of it. I thought about turning around or calling his name. I did not. Nor did he, either. I considered it. Everything was still red hot and just a few weeks old. If I had turned around that day, all this perhaps would have been just an eight week long lasting fight, in our long relationship, and we would have gone back to our usual tempestuous menagerie, in London, both of us, again. I thought about it, and kept walking straight ahead, into the nearest shop and up the stairs, where I stayed in hiding for a few minutes, my heart pounding.
An Excerpt from Polly Trope's book
Cured Meat
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