This is a story about life on the farm...

Yesterday, I was too depressed to get out of bed. Being awake was horrible - I tried to doze for as long as I could. I was irrationally afraid of having to get up for some reason; on edge that there might come a knock at the door. My friends make me feel incredibly welcome, and I would always have somebody to talk to if I was feeling lonely and desperate, but I also feel like I should demonstrate my willingness to help wherever I can.

Today, it's been sunny and mild; very good weather for the time of year. Hiding under the duvet doesn't feel so bad when it's grey skies and raining, but I feel guilty about wasting the day when it's nice outside. Nice weather can paradoxically make me feel even more depressed.

I'm naturally a restless, anxious and fidgety person. "Where am I going? What am I achieving?" I continuously ask myself when I'm not consumed by a task; fixated on a mission.

At the beginning of the week, I dragged myself out of bed to go to the seaside. It was a drizzly foggy day, so the picturesque beach wasn't going to yield any nice views, but still, it was an outing. Rain-drenched families trudged through puddles. "Why are all these children not in school?" I asked. Apparently, it's half-term school holiday time in England - not so in Wales.

This jarring disparity; this acute difference between what consumes my thoughts, and what most other people are concerned with, is being well highlighted in my current environ. I was cut off from the world in my London apartment. It was wonderful to have the space & time to think & write, but I was very far removed from the day-to-day reality that most of humanity experiences. In the past few weeks, I've been reminded about school-runs, commuting to work and long days in the office, car maintenance, housing, pets, children, cooking and cleaning, although I can claim absolutely zero personal involvement in the running of these affairs - I'm an idle observer; a tourist.

Of course I worry that I'm lazy; worry that I'm mooching; worry that I'm a leech; a parasite.

"Yes, we'd all like to be a thinker; a writer; an artist; an intellectual; a professional layabout" I imagine people saying. "Your art is just a hobby... get a job" is what I imagine people are thinking. I feel guilty for not producing anything more tangible than the words on this page.

I started to get a little stressed about November, when I plan to write my second novel. "How am I going to find the time to write?" I wondered to myself, which must sound a little ridiculous to you. Why am I even writing anyway, when I'm not overtly commercialising my creative output?

There's something more socially acceptable about saying "I'm sorry, I need to write my book" as opposed to just "I'm sorry, I need to lie in bed feeling incredibly anxious and depressed". I wonder if more people would have breakdowns and refuse to go to their stressful and boring jobs, if it wasn't so stigmatised. Wouldn't we all love to just spend all day with our children, and not get out of our pyjamas? Why can't we skip breakfast and have cereal instead of a cooked meal, and completely reject the demands of society?

I feel immense guilt for not having a proper job, spending hours of my life stuck in traffic, being bored to tears by a bullshit job. What's my contribution to society? Why am I allowed to pontificate, when I haven't done my 9 to 5 grind?

I'm not so naïve as to think that the good life doesn't have to be bought and paid for with human misery. For every beautiful countryside cottage set in manicured gardens, nestled in lush green countryside, there is also an immense amount of suffering that's gone into delivering that dream. The children who wait 5 minutes, staring at a single marshmallow on the table in front of them, will receive two marshmallows as a reward for their patience. Those same patient children will shed tears when they are packed off to boarding school, but it'll all be for a good reason one day.

Are we even supposed to be so patient; so tolerant of intolerable cruelty? Are we any happier for all that homework? Are we any happier when we get "A" grades and go on to get a fancy job, miles and miles away from our home and our family? Are two marshmallows sweeter than one?

I feel like the cuckoo in the nest: I'm no genetic relation of the lovely family who I'm living with. Why do I get to enjoy the comfort of a farmhouse straight from the pages of Country Living magazine? What's my contribution to the household? What's my contribution to humanity?

Extrapolating, I can easily imagine that I will have produced my second novel in a little over a month from now, but I will have very little else to show for my time, not to mention the food and energy that I will have consumed. To say that I have been working on restabilising my mental health and attempting to rediscover my reason(s) for living, feels a little untrue given the trajectory of my mood. To turn a blind eye to my very real concerns about the difficulty of obtaining paid employment during the Christmas & New Year period, seems short-sighted - November will be over in the blink of an eye.

Throwing a ball for the dog in the garden, sucking in lungfuls of clean fresh air that's blown inland straight from the Atlantic Ocean, my physical health is undoubtedly improving. I'm seeing an aspect of existence that I'd long forgotten, trapped in a polluted concrete jungle, and surrounded by the seething masses in densely overpopulated cities. This life is so much healthier and happier than the rat race, but I can't afford it - it feels as if I'm enjoying a retirement I haven't paid for.

Perhaps you imagine that my time is free for the pursuit of leisure. Perhaps it is. If so, why am I so damn stressed?

Tags: #family #depression #writing

This is a story about storytelling...

I'm stood in a sunny garden, sheltered from the wind by mature shrubs. Beyond the confines of the walls and fences are lush green fields; rolling hills leading down to the sea. The air is fresh and clean, blowing in off the Atlantic. There's a smell of mown grass, which has been cut for the last time before winter - the trimmed blades clump on the lawn. Gravel crunches under my feet - I'm stood on the driveway where the cars are parked. There's a sound of a 2-stroke engine which powers a hedge trimmer, being used to tame the runaway growth in the hedgerows; the exhaust fumes blown away by the prevailing wind.

I'm throwing a ball for the white wolf. Eyes on the front of his head, not the side - that's how you know he's an apex predator; he's not worried about anybody creeping up behind him, although his ears are pricked up, listening intently. He's a smart wolf - anticipating me throwing the ball but not so eager to run and collect it that he would be fooled by a dummy. Besides, why would I want to trick a wolf? What satisfaction would I get by proving I'm smarter than an animal with a much smaller brain?

The wolf pants and drops his ball some distance away from me. The game is over. I fetch a water bowl for the wolf and he laps up the cool liquid with his long pink tongue. He brings his ball to me again, ready to play - the game starts over.

My throwing gets erratic and the ball lands on a rockery. I'm fearful that the wolf will injure himself. I stop throwing the ball.

A running sheep; a chasing wolf - he's found a new game.

Clambering over fences, the farmer holds the wolf while he strains to get at the flock which has retreated into a corner of the field, unable to flee further because the sheep are enclosed by a fence. The wolf has to learn that this is not a game.

I feel guilty. Did I get the wolf over-excited by throwing the ball for him? Was I the immature adult who gets the children over-excited before bedtime? Was I irresponsible; inconsiderate of the consequences?

I want to tell stories but not everybody wants to feature. I want to tell stories but invariably people will wonder if it's about them. I want to tell stories, but I have to be careful that I respect the need for peaceful private family life.

I'm lying on a bed with sunlight in my eyes, telling a story. It's warm and quiet and I'm very comfy and calm. My brain buzzes with thoughts; ideas - I've written a list of 49 stories that I want to tell, and I have another list with 70 more, some of which I've already told. There are more words than there are waking hours in the day to type them. Now that there is some calm around me, the dam has burst and I'm struggling to not be swamped by the deluge.

I think about tenses - why is this told in the present tense if it's a story?

So much has happened in the past and it's hard to not relive and refine the story. I do not embellish or exaggerate, but stories improve with retelling. With each iteration, a more accurate and engrossing account emerges. I have a mountain of material, and the temptation is to weave it all into a captivating patchwork quilt of tales; adventures.

Here in the present there's plenty going on but I'm a guest in somebody else's story, and it's not my place to tell it. It's strange for me to observe quietly and not pass comment. In all honesty, I swing between "where did it all go wrong [in my life]?" and gawping in awe at what's been built; forged - the achievements of the loving, kind, generous and humble family who've taken me in are breathtaking.

Outside, there's a well. It's blocked, but it's obvious what's down there - a dark cavern filled with cold water. To fall into the well would be deadly: you could never climb out. Why unblock it? Why go down there?

Obviously, the well is a metaphor for my past. I have an aquifer of hair-raising tales that I could never drain, even with a million buckets. I can draw upon my dark murky past, but perhaps I shouldn't - perhaps to plumb those depths will lead nowhere new. Haven't I written enough already, about the past?

I'm planning on writing another novel in November.

Tags: #writing #family

This is a story about being inspected...

Today the psych ward is being inspected by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) and the staff are so nervous that some of them feel physically sick. I try to reassure one nurse that they're doing their best, despite staff shortages and rampant drug use - the synthetic cannabinoid called Spice is ubiquitous throughout prisons and psych wards.

There's always somebody peering over your shoulder, sneeringly judging you. Is it any wonder that paranoia takes hold in a mind, destroying it? The United Kingdom has an exceptional ability to track the movement of its citizens, using simple conventional CCTV - no spy satellites even needed.

In the free West, we deride the Stasi and the KGB. We talk about China's vast number of people employed to snoop on their own citizens, but we don't acknowledge the work of GCHQ and the NSA. Have we forgotten Edward Snowden's revelations so quickly? The Government read your fucking emails and the police - the regular ordinary police - have a backdoor into Facebook to read all your private messages.

Nothing to hide, nothing to fear. If you believe that, why do you feel stressed if a police car is following you when you're driving, and a sense of relief when the police overtake you and disappear over the horizon? You have insurance; you've had your car's roadworthiness tested; you've paid your road tax... nothing to worry about, right?

It was only a short time ago that I was deeply indoctrinated by my schooling, that had shaped me into a meek conformist - I was fearful of defying any of society's rules and regulations. A family friend wanted to go fishing with me, and I said we needed to obtain a permit. "Our prisons are full of people who got caught fishing without a license" this friend laughed. "What are you in here for? Murder. What are you in here for? Fishing without a license" he continued jovially.

The city centre is crammed with 50,000 protestors preparing to march. I walk past a police cordon and I can hear a police officer yelling at me that I can't go the way I'm going, but I know that he'll be busy dealing with my obedient friend who will have stopped per the instructions. I keep walking, pretending to be unable to hear the entreaties to return. The policeman lets my friend go and we walk to the head of the march.

I'm sure that anarchy would be a disaster for sick and vulnerable people. I have no desire to see civilised society crumble. We can't all do whatever the fuck we want, whenever the fuck we want. Perhaps if everybody acted like I did, it would be the end of the world as we know it.

"Don't walk" says the sign in the United States. I jaywalk with gay abandon. Even in Manchester people look at me like I'm mad and suicidal, for the way I cross the road. However, it's done with such confident aplomb that nobody challenges me. I notice that people who are surrounded by plenty of steel and glass and plastic, such that they would suffer no injury at all if they killed me to death with their motor vehicle, do not give a single fuck about whether I live or die. In London, a motorist will slow down or even brake, to avoid killing a pedestrian, but these provincial plebs treat human lives with no such sanctity.

To live in a crowded city is to be humbled by humanity. To be detained against your will on an underfunded psych ward is to humbled, also. In the city, you are forced to confront your pathetic meaningless existence, as an ant crawling in its nest would be, if it had the faculties to perceive itself and its surroundings. But an ant's nest is akin to a row of gleaming skyscrapers, insofar as being a testament to what can be achieved by a society working together. On the psych ward, you are forced to confront your powerlessness over forces greater than yourself - society will exclude its troublemakers.

Perhaps you think I would endorse heroin being sold in supermarkets and that babies' pacifiers should be replaced with crack pipes?

As six police officers pinned me to the ground and my bum was injected with lorazepam, in the Accident & Emergency department of a hospital, I noticed a cleaner and a security guard nearby - some of the lowest paid people in society are often completely unacknowledged for the role they play in maintaining the division between the peasants and the aristocracy. My face was inches from the floor, but the policeman's trousered knee on my head was clean and so was the linoleum. Circles of red and green blinked at me - the police bodycams, videotaping the whole gruesome specatcle. I'd fallen from grace, but I hadn't slipped anywhere near the bottom - it's a long way down.

A friend whose judgement I trust and respect, tells me that I should drop the bad boy image of "the guy who got fucked up in Manchester". She knows that people are watching and I'm misrepresenting myself. She knows that people are lazy and won't look any deeper than the superficial image that I present.

Is my life - and the way I document it - by accident or by design? Do you imagine that when I'm writing, I don't think at all about how things are going to be perceived? The joke's on you if you don't read what I write with the prerequisite pinch of salt.

If you just dip in at random - like a care quality inspector - then you will get a random impression. On a good day you'll get a good impression. On a bad day you'll get a bad impression.

Do you think the graph above shows that things are improving? No. No it does not. Things are getting worse. Much, much worse. The data above shows conclusively that during the period under examination, there was a fourfold increase in the very metric that was supposed to be cut by 80%.

Do you remember blue tablet man? Well, anyway, he assaulted a nurse for giving him a yellow tablet (5mg of diazepam) instead of a blue tablet (10mg of diazepam).

A drugs dog sweeps the ward. The patients believe the dog can sniff out cigarette lighters. I ask the handler if the dog can sniff Spice and he confirms that it can. There's Spice everywhere on the ward, despite its deleterious effect on the mental health of susceptible individuals - prodromal schizophrenia can turn into fully-blown psychosis under the influence of the powerful synthetic cannabis, making it all the more concerning that it's so widespread on an acute psychiatric ward.

The patients here are the lucky ones and they know it. Everybody agrees it's better to be here with a warm dry bed and three hot meals a day. Everybody agrees it's better to be here, where the chances of being beaten up and/or robbed are minimal. With winter on its way, months of unimaginable suffering lie ahead of Manchester's homeless population, which has increased 1,100% in just 7 years - and a huge number of them smoke Spice.

Abandon hope all ye who entered the world from the mid-1990s onwards. What are the prospects for the youth of today, and the glut of graduates who were promised that indebting themselves and spending three or four years at university would be a good move?

Does it not seem like an obvious reaction to a decline in living standards, to retreat into drugged-up oblivion?

We're sifted and sorted and dissected by tests. We're examined, inspected and measured in every conceivable way. We never have any respite from the world's desire to label us, grade us and monitor us. The pressure to meet the expectations placed upon us is relentless. Some of us will crumble and have nervous breakdowns or be paralysed by anxiety disorders. Some of us will rebel and kick back at the suffocating environment that's desperate to eject and marginalise anybody who doesn't neatly fit in a box. Lots of subcultures have sprung into existence, with members exchanging knowing looks - these people are so much happier now that they have rejected the stereotype they were supposed to embody.

It saddens me that the hard-working staff on the ward are anxious and on best behaviour, when the other 364 days a year I know that they try their very hardest. This is just one of many psych wards, where the macro problems are greater than anything that can be influenced in the microcosms.

If you're going to randomly dip in, be careful to not make a lazy judgement based on a small sample size.

Tags: #nhs #hospital #mentalhealth #addiction #politics

This is a story about mismatches...

Writing is hard. More specifically, writing well is pretty damn hard. To write well every day; to finish a book; to have the discipline - that's the hardest. Lots of people write - it's our preferred method of communication these days, rather than the phone. My Facebook friends are mostly what you'd term "well educated professionals". Some of my Facebook friends are people who used to write every day on the same discussion forum as me. When I step out of that bubble, I'm reminded that it was the general populace who invented 'text speak' and still use it to this day, because writing is just a means to an end for them - to send short colloquial messages about their banal lives, where the style, grammar and intangible beauty of a well-constructed sentence has zero value to them.

When I started my blog, I didn't know where I was going with it. Then, I remembered that a friend who aspired to be an author, and has now published three books, said that he was going to blog for a year, to test his discipline and hone his art. I copied that idea.

When I started my debut novel, the idea was to write at least 1,667 words a day, so that after a month, I would have achieved a 50,000+ word count.

This year, things started going wrong almost from the very outset.

In the blink of an eye, I found myself in hospital on a high-dependency ward, with acute kidney failure. My weight had gone from 77kg to 95kg, because I had stopped urinating: my bladder was empty. I was on dialysis and generally being poked and prodded by some very worried looking doctors. I didn't have my laptop or a means to connect to the Internet - those aren't the kinds of things you take with you when you get a phonecall from the doctor you saw in Accident and Emergency saying "how soon can you get back here? Do you need us to send an ambulance?"

Like dominoes, the pillars of my life started to collapse. First, I lost my job - they couldn't wait for me to get better, even though I discharged myself from hospital after two weeks, against medical advice. Then, rent, taxes, bills, insurances and everything else started to become a matter of imminent financial implosion. Depression tore through my mind like an inferno through a building. The strong opiate painkillers, that I needed for the leg injury which caused my kidney failure, made doing anything at all quite challenging - it might not have been heroin, but I sure as hell got sick if I forgot to take my 4-hourly dose. Writing and work were replaced with lying on the sofa in a drugged-up haze, half-aware of whatever was on TV.

You'd think that after I got off the painkillers and I could walk distances again, without it causing me agony, I would be ready to find another job. Anybody who followed my story through December and January, will know that Christmas and New Year scuppered my job search. Effectively, I went through the stress twice, and then lost the job anyway through no fault of my own. I wrote about how psychologically damaging that was, having argued with the doctors so much, discharging myself and getting angry phonecalls from doctors and consultants saying I needed to go back to hospital; I was risking my life and I was still critically ill.

I didn't need concerned doctors to tell me I was still ill and in no position to work - my commute to work, with my heavy ankle brace, caused me untold pain. How was I supposed to travel every day on overcrowded public transport, and walk the final part of the journey, when it would leave me exhausted and crying in pain when I got home. I was relieved when my boss told me to take some more time off to get well; only it was him being cowardly - my contract was terminated soon after leaving the building.

Everything else from that point has been measured by that yardstick.

If it's hard and stressful to get a job - and to start that new job - under normal circumstances, can you imagine pulling out a 25cm dialysis tube from a massive blood vessel in your groin, with blood everywhere, and leaving hospital when all the doctors are begging you to stay? Can you imagine your first day in the office, except that less than 48 hours ago you were considered so sick that you might need a kidney transplant, or even die because the dialysis wasn't working effectively? Can you imagine working those first few days in your new job, getting phonecalls twice a day from different doctors saying that if I turned up at any A&E and had a blood test, they would admit me to hospital as a critical case, because of the dangerous toxins circulating in my bloodstream? Can you imagine dealing with almost unbearable pain as well as doing your job? And then what happened? I went to all that effort and I lost the job anyway.

I've been a full-time IT professional for 20 years, and to be honest I lost the love for it very quickly. I spent most of 1999 recovering from weekends of all-night raves. I spent most of 2001 to 2005 chatting with my friends on a discussion forum and organising kitesurfing holidays and weekend trips away. 2005 through 2008 I worked very hard, but I surrounded myself with alcoholics, who were some of the very best people I've ever had the privilege of working with. 2008 I thought I was pissed off with JPMorgan, but it turned out that I had simply reached the limit of what I could take with IT jobs for big companies. Ever since then, I've made my money as an entrepreneur, independent developer and IT consultant, as well as speculating in emerging technology (e.g. iPhone apps, Bitcoin mining). I work about 5 months a year, and I hate it, but it pays the bills. My last contract paid £660 a day, so you can see, I don't have to work for very long to earn what I need.

So, now I'm in the situation where I was tipped over the edge. It's not normally very hard for me to find a new contract, and I find the actual work very unchallenging; easy. To have worked so hard to get well, get out of hospital, get to that job, and then to lose it... when I fucking hate IT work anyway. It was the last straw. The company said they'd have me back as soon as I was fully recovered, but the spell was broken - I used to put up with the boredom and the bullshit, because I was earning the equivalent of well over a hundred grand a year... if I ever worked a year. I can't go back to it. You could offer me £1,500 a day, start tomorrow, free rein to work on whatever project I want, and I don't think I could do it. It's like all that hatred of the job and the politics and the bureaucracy and the insanity and incompetence of people in positions of authority, suddenly hit me all at once.

I stopped caring that I'm going to be nearly £6,000 short on my tax bill, in 27 days time. I stopped caring that I'm not going to be able to pay my rent next month. I stopped caring that if I go bankrupt I'll never be able to work in financial services again, be a director of a company, have anything except the most basic bank account, which means I wouldn't be able to - for example - rent a car. I stopped caring that I'll never be able to get another mortgage or rent my own place. I stopped caring that I would lose my excellent credit score - I have borrowing facilities of £30 grand and no debt that shows up on those credit checks. I stopped caring that many of my possessions would be sold by bailiffs for a fraction of what they're worth. I stopped caring that I would lose things that I spent years and years choosing and customising: a mountain bike I bought when I was 18, with the lightest frame money can buy, handmade and hand painted - including my name - which I have added the very best of everything to, bit by bit, until the total cost of the bike is as much as a decent car... but it's not about the cost; it's about the pride in doing that - the pride in customising something with painstaking effort over 19 years.

Now, I'm a minimalist. I'm a digital nomad. I've used all my experience as a mountaineer and Alpinist to travel light, with clothes that pack small, but they're super warm and everything either dries quick or stays dry. I have a grab bag that weighs perhaps no more than 15kg, but I could sleep quite comfortably in an extremely cold winter. I learned through bitter experience, the discomfort caused by cheap equipment: blisters, wet feet, damp clothing, sleeping mats that don't stop the cold penetrating from frozen ground, tents that get flattened by gales, synthetic sleeping bags that don't keep you warm. Everything that I carry meets the three criteria: light, strong and expensive. There's also a fourth criteria: how effective something is in terrible weather. It might be subtle, but there really is a big difference between a 'good' waterproof jacket, and one that costs well over £400; for example, are you able to use the hood but still move your head to look around? How many drawstrings are you able to operate without having to unzip anything?

There's so much crap that I just want to dump. I've ended up with paperwork that goes back to 1997. I only ever wear a few different outfits and I wear my clothes until they're threadbare. I could lose 95% of my clothes and not even miss them. I have boxes of stuff that I rescued from my house before it was sold, during my divorce. It was a smash & grab - I was paying for the man & van by the hour plus we had to get back to London before my self storage shut. I literally took no more than an hour to grab anything of real value, and a mug that my sister hand-painted for me. Can you imagine that? I dumped my books, a summerhouse that I designed and built myself, stuffed full of gardening equipment, garden furniture, tools, mountaineering equipment like ropes, ice axes, crampons, a pile of kites that probably cost me many thousands of pounds when they were new. I dumped my hot tub. I dumped games consoles, games, DVDs. I dumped kitchen knives, Le Creuset cast iron casserole dishes. I dumped my Weber barbecue, my fire pit and patio heaters. I dumped the bed I bought when I moved to West Hampstead in 2000. I dumped the oak dining table and chairs I bought when I bought the house. I dumped an antique sash window that had been turned into a mirror by my dad, as a Christmas gift. I dumped the huge wardrobe that I built to go right to the bedroom ceiling - one side customised just how my ex-wife wanted it, and another side customised just how I wanted it. I dumped a garden that I had lavished hundreds of hours on, making the grass lush and green, weeding the path, mulching the beds and tending the mature shrubs and palm trees. I dumped my electric guitar and electronic drum kit. In fact, I dumped a whole band's worth of instruments for playing Guitar Hero. Where was I going to keep all this stuff, living in my friend's spare bedroom? It was going to be ages before the house was sold and I got the money to get a place of my own again.

Now, I have a place of my own, by accident. One friend thought he was going to live with me rent free, but he hadn't done the maths - the rent was more than his salary, and he was fucking useless. The one bit of work that he was supposed to do that would have brought in some money for my company he fucked up. He hassled me for an interview at HSBC, which I wangled for him... and then I had to deny I knew him very well, as he was exposed as inept. My next flatmate didn't pay his rent for 3 or 4 months and never paid me any bills. He was surprised when I told him that he was going to find his stuff dumped on the street if he didn't get the fuck out.

If I was going to cut & run, I'd want my two MacBooks (Air & Pro) and I guess I'd take my iPad Pro too - call them tools of the trade - plus 3 pairs of high-end headphones, and my grab bag (tent, sleeping bag, sleeping mat) with my good waterproof jacket and my down jacket. I'd wear my waterproof trainers, water-resistant trousers and my fleece, with a merino wool base layer. I'd take my passport and €500 in cash that I have lying around. I'd take phone and a battery pack that can charge it 12 times. There's not a lot more that I tend to travel with, except copious quantities of benzodiazepines and Z-drugs. When you live in a hostel for a year, you learn what you need and what you don't. When you live under a bush in a park or on a heath, you learn what you're prepared to have stolen, potentially. It took my fellow homeless in Kensington Palace Gardens over a month to find my hiding place - people don't really venture into massive thorn bushes. If you're smart, you can disappear from the world, despite living in a densely populated city. People's dogs would smell my food, but their owners couldn't see me in the gloom. Hampstead Heath is somewhat more of a challenge, because people like to fornicate in the bushes, but the general rules apply: people are lazy and stick to the paths mostly, so by choosing the remotest part of the heath, you very rarely see anybody.

My life is in the process of breaking up again; disintegrating. I don't care. I am so depressed.

Let it all burn down, I say.

Tags: #depression

This is a story about infidelity...

Yo ho ho and a bottle of Xanax. We're off to take a sailing trip across the Atlantic to New York. I'm nervous, but she's with me - she's also an experienced sailor - so I'm excited and I'm sure that between us we can manage the voyage. At first we are heading towards Dover. Why are we travelling East when we need to be sailing West? Then, we are becalmed and a fog descends. The water is glassy and flat and the sails flap uselessly. A road sign appears and it becomes apparent that we are in London, on a road. We are towing the yacht on a trailer. I rack my brains, trying to think of the best marina with a hoist to lift our yacht into the sea. I can't think straight.

This is a dream, obviously.

Next, I'm approaching a nightclub, skipping the queue outside and heading straight for the entrance. I present my left hand to the bouncer, who shines a torch on it. I brush past him so confidently, and he's not really paying attention, so he doesn't notice that I don't have an ink stamp that says I'm allowed in. Nobody challenges me. I go past the dance-floor and into another room. I notice somebody sucking on a glass tube with what looks like shards of gold, or maybe honeycomb, being ignited with a lighter. Then, an old schoolfriend wants to show me something he's making. He's pouring chemicals into a large jam jar. He's making shake-and-bake methamphetamine. The crystals aren't perfect shards of ice, but instead they're a milky mess. I know the drug will be potent, but the solvents and other chemicals used are deadly. I'm afraid, but also drawn to it, like a moth to a flame. Somebody has prepared some lines of a white powder; it's being passed around. I wake up.

My doctor warned me that my new depression treatment - California rocket fuel - would lead to vivid dreams, but I've always had a lot of dreams.

In a way, my new dreams are better than the old ones. When I used to dream before, they were basically all the same: I have some supercrack and I'm trying to find a private place to take it, but every time I think I'm safe from intrusion, and I'm about to snort a line, somebody interrupts me. Then begins a stressful game of hide-and-seek where I'm trying to escape the voyeurs who wish to intrude on my private drug use. I never actually manage to get any drugs up my nose before I wake up.

Of course, drugs are still my mistress. I've got a virtually unlimited supply of opiates, in the form of tramadol and codeine. I've got stacks of benzodiazepines, in the form of diazepam and Xanax. I've got loads of Z-drugs in the form of zopiclone and zolpidem. I've got pregablin, venlafaxine and mirtazepine. I've got Viagra and Cialis. None of these chemicals seem to make the blindest bit of difference to my depression, and they're certainly not my drug of choice: supercrack.

I go to the chemist, and I have to give two signatures, because they're giving me medications that are controlled substances - they're illegal to possess without a prescription. I'm handed a carrier bag that's bulging with boxes packed full of blister strips containing capsules full of chemicals, or pills that have been pressed into certain shapes and sizes, with numbers and letters imprinted on them. Everything is so colourful. If I lose a pill on the floor by accident, I can identify exactly what it is.

I get confused at night, as I swallow 6 pregablin capsules (white with black lettering), 2 venlafaxine tablets (round and dark orange), 2 mirtazepine tablets (small lozenge shaped, light orange), 2 zolpidem tablets (tiny white lozenges) and a Xanax (an oblong with "XANAX" imprinted on one side). Sometimes I also take a zopiclone if I can't sleep (round white tablet). When my leg was in pain, I would also take 2 co-codamol with 30mg of codeine in each tablet (large white lozenges) and 2 tramadol capsules (green and yellow). Trying to remember if I took everything, and make sure I don't take anything twice, is quite difficult. I'm almost at the point where I should prepare all my tablets and check I've got everything before I greedily gulp them down. I can now swallow 6 tablets at once, easily.

My real mistress, and the beast that's out to kill me - supercrack - is tamed at the moment. I know that a lapse would be disastrous in my financially precarious situation, but I'm also so doped up that my libido and craving for supercrack is under control... for now. I'm not a superstitious person, but I feel like I'm tempting fate just writing these words.

I don't bother keeping a tally of how long I've been 'clean'. It's a ridiculous idea. If a person quits one thing, they start doing something else. A former gambling addict might become obsessed with fitness and go to the gym 7 days a week. A smoker who quits will probably start eating more, to compensate for the loss.

It might seem logical that the longer you're addicted to something, the harder it will be to quit and stay 'clean' but nobody seems to realise that the more times you quit and have periods of abstinence, the better you get at quitting and resisting temptation. Medically, the binge & quit cycle of drug taking is the most damaging, because the binges are so extreme: days and days without sleep or food, and huge doses of really harmful drugs, when your poor body has just about recovered and was starting to get back to normality.

Of course, the really harmful stuff is to relationships. She doesn't mention it very often, but she's worried about the next time I just disappear off the face of the Earth, and reappear skinny, sleep-deprived and suffering from all the nasty side effects of supercrack: paranoia, obsessive-compulsive behaviour and panic attacks; not to mention tachycardia, malignant hyperthermia and rhabdomyolysis. I'm no stranger to hospitals and psych wards.

If you meet me in person, I seem polite, well presented, somewhat smart and certainly confident and self-assured. I can make smalltalk and feign interest in other people's lives. I remember the tiny details that people tell me, which I can see are important to them, so that I can bring them up if ever there's a lull in conversation; an uncomfortable silence. There's no chance you'd peg me as a 'druggie' or a 'stoner' or a 'junkie'. I take perverse pleasure in contradicting and confounding the stereotypes.

Despite my ability to confidently bullshit my way through life, I do wonder if I'm as seriously sick as my doctors tell me I am. They can't make their mind up whether I have treatment-resistant major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder or some dual or triple diagnosis of all of them, plus the substance abuse, of course.

On top of the chemical cocktails, there's a bottle of wine every night, just like every other middle-class professional. Lots of people would say that alcohol is part of the problem, but the last time I quit I quickly went hypomanic and lost my contract. Seems to be the story of my life: losing my contracts through ill-health. All the evidence points to chronic illness that makes me unfit to work, but my confident and upbeat attitude - plus my employability - has got me stuck in a groundhog day loop, where I work enough to pay the bills for a year, but then implode spectacularly and find myself without gainful employment, yet again.

Undoubtedly, my affair with supercrack wreaks havoc across every area of my life, but what about the depression? What about the hypomania? What about the fact I see everything in black and white, and I either love you or hate you? Even when I'm 'well' and functioning, I've still gotta be right: intellectual pride and arrogance.

I've committed to a new regimen of antidepressants, for the first time in years, so maybe my mood will improve if I can keep taking the pills regularly for 4 to 6 weeks... then we'll see if these blunt instruments of brain manipulation actually fucking work for once.

Meanwhile, money pours out of my bank account and the end of the runway gets ever closer, but the wheels of the aeroplane are still on the tarmac. If I can't psych myself up to overcome the depression, stress and anxiety enough to hide my problems and tackle the arduous task of getting another contract, I'm fucked. The house of cards will collapse quicker than you can say "fuck my life".

It's remarkable how much time I spend thinking about setting my affairs in order: making sure my life insurance pays out to my sister, making sure I've left instructions so that friends who've helped me out get repaid, making sure I've thrown away everything that's of no value, making sure that I've listed the details of all my bank accounts and creditors, making sure I've left enough money in my company so that my accountant can wind up the business and he gets paid, and also making sure that at least a teeny bit of my legacy is preserved: I've written a novel and this blog has about 600,000 words, plus photos. I always said I wanted to leave a smoking gun, in case anybody wanted to investigate how stress - mainly financial worries - can destroy a person and drive them to suicide. My biggest fear is being written off with a simple throwaway label: "mentally ill" or "substance abuse" or whatever... things are never as simple as that.

While most people are planning summer holidays and extended weekend breaks over the bank holiday weekend, I'm paralysed by the ever-approaching end of the runway, combined with debilitating stress and depression. Things look straightforward, because I've made life look like a walk in the park so far, but in fact I'm just very good at hiding the deteriorating situation, when my back's against the wall. Just because I can rescue myself in the nick of time, doesn't mean I can always do it, forever. I feel physically sick at the thought of the effort involved in doing what I do, all over again, even though it's a well-practiced tried-and-trusted formula.

Time just gets frittered away, which is fine when you're getting your regular salary and you spend most of your time at your desk just counting down to the weekend or your next holiday, but when you're in my situation, in a way, I'm dying. How do you think you'd feel if you were left penniless, homeless and with a bunch of vultures trying to take the clothes off your back? How do you think you'd feel if you know you can make everything alright again, if only you were well enough to work, but you feel sick and the thought of going back to the office caused you severe stress, anxiety and paralysed you; unable to cope or deal with the situation?

Tick tock goes the clock, and it doesn't stop. You have to run just to stand still. This is why it's so attractive to run away with my mistress and pretend my problems don't exist: escapism.

I want to escape this invisible prison.

Tags: #drugs #depression #suicide #mentalhealth #career

This is a story about a disappearing act...

Jesus could turn water into wine. I can turn wine into water, urea and a small amount of faeces. I can do the same with gin. It's a miracle!

Miracles and acts of faith are supposed to cause the skeptical to be surprised. I myself, was very surprised to see that a couple of bottles of gin have disappeared without a trace. Where is it all going?

I've lost all portion control.

With beers, I can tell you how many cans or bottles I've had. I think to myself "if I have that 5th pint, I'm going to feel like shit tomorrow".

With wine, when you start measuring it in bottles - plural - then you're in trouble. Two bottles of wine is shitloads of alcohol. The problem is that three large glasses of wine finishes a bottle, so I think "I'll open another bottle and just have one glass and leave the rest" except that I don't ever leave wine undrunk.

With spirits, I have no means of accurate measurement. A 'finger' of gin in a glass is a substantially different volume, depending which finger I use and which glass I'm pouring into. I actually have no idea how much hard liquor I'm consuming, versus wine and beer. I totally lose all portion control.

When I'm sharing a bottle of wine, secretly I know that I'm drinking faster and filling my glass a little higher, but I still only count the number of bottles consumed. Two bottles between two means that I only drank one bottle of wine, therefore I can have that extra drink, for some perverse reason.

I don't get the shakes. I don't have to have an 'eye-opener' drink in the morning. I don't pour vodka on my cornflakes. However, I guess it's a fine line. I can't remember how many consecutive days I've drunk a substantial amount of alcohol. Who's counting?

The recycling is mostly empty green glass bottles, and I shamefully dump disproportionate loads, while my temperant neighbours have diligently washed out their kale smoothie bottles and neatly folded up the cardboard box that contained organic vegetables.

These warning signs don't escape my notice, but sobriety achieved nothing. What did I prove, being sober for over a hundred days, just for a challenge? I do need to get my drinking under control though.

In a way, walking up to the corner shop for a £1 can of lager kept me in check. There was a small amount of effort involved, and the social pressures of not being drunk and disorderly in the streets (or the shops). If I was too pissed to stagger to the off-licence and get another can, then I'd had my fill and it was time for bed. I would wager that I drank less when I was homeless. It's the middle-class respectability and covert nature of drinking at home in the company of other well-heeled individuals that makes it all OK, provided you don't go over the top.

We speak in hushed whispers about that one friend or relative who's slightly too eager to reach for the bottle and refill everyone's glasses, filling his or her own to the brim. "Are they OK?" we wonder, and then we reassure one another "I'm sure they've got it under control".

It's the drinking alone that'll get you. To be released on your own recognisance is a dangerous situation. One, two, skip a few, ninety-nine, one hundred. Who's counting anyway?

So, my 'special squash' and nightcaps will have to go, and then perhaps I'll have the demon drink under control a little bit. A bottle of wine a night seems to be about the middle-class average anyway. How the hell is a person supposed to cope with this stressful world without wine?

Goodbye gin, my only true friend.

Tags: #alcohol

This is a story about sick leave...

On my very first week at my very first full-time proper job after college - working for British Aerospace - my friends talked me into pulling a sickie so that we could go to Alton Towers for the day. This was 1997 and I didn't yet have a mobile phone. I had to call my boss from a payphone in the car park of Alton Towers. You could hear people screaming with terror, as a rollercoaster thundered by, not far away from where I was making this tense phonecall.

I didn't make a habit of throwing a sickie. I moved to the town where I worked, so I could wake up late and walk to work. My boss was quite relaxed about me turning up late, as long as the work was getting done.

No sooner had I moved to Dorchester, then BAe decided to send me off to the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA) on Portsdown Hill, near Portsmouth. A friend and colleague, who became my boss for this project, would come into my maisonette every morning and coax me out of bed. The early morning starts were agonising, especially if I had spent the weekend clubbing in London and was recovering from drug-fuelled all-night dancing. My body clock was sent haywire, but because I was only 18, I suppose I could just about cope.

I didn't have another sick day with BAe or DERA, or with the next company I moved to Winchester to work for. When I worked for Research Machines near Oxford, I even managed to get to work during the petrol crisis. I was allowed a day off when snow pretty much paralysed the country, and I went sledging in Haslemere, Surrey.

As an IT contractor by now, I realised I could use the time off between contracts to do cool stuff. I went on a week-long RYA Day Skipper course, to learn how to sail cruising yachts. I spent time with family in Devon, and did my interviews over the phone.

The dot com crash and 9/11 were rather unsettling events, so I decided to take a permanent job with HSBC, who are one of the more conservative banks. The interview process was exhaustive, testing my literacy, numeracy, reasoning and a bunch of other aptitude tests, and a grilling from various managers. "Why do you want a permanent job when you're earning good money contracting?" they asked. "Why do you want to work in banking, now that the bonuses aren't so good?" they puzzled.

HSBC Asset Management had a very familial feel to it. They had a policy of hiring a lot of former London Irish rugby players, and Surrey and Middlesex cricketers. If you were accepted, they would look after you. There was camaraderie. There was true team spirit. There was also copious amounts of drinking.

Somehow I got through some 4+ years at HSBC without pulling a fake sickie. One weekend, I ate far too many magic mushrooms, and then a team in Hong Kong phoned me up to ask why millions of pounds worth of equities settlement messages were stuck in a queue and were not being processed. The backs of my hands looked like playing cards, the walls were throbbing and swaying and everything was bathed in bright green light. I made my excuses and quickly phoned a trusted colleague, begging him to handle the support call for me, because I had accidentally gotten a bit too pissed. He laughed and I got away with it.

I had a persistent tickly cough that was annoying me. I had read somewhere that dextromethorphan - the cough suppressant - could make you have a psychedelic trip if you took enough, so I rang my boss, and said that my cough was so bad I couldn't come to work. I then downed 3 bottles of cough syrup, containing DXM. I got precisely zero thrills out of that particular mad caper.

Moving to JPMorgan, I had the perfect job. I used to work mornings and evenings, and go kitesurfing during the day. I say 'work' but what I really mean is that I used to turn the volume up really loud on my laptop, so if somebody sent me a message or an email, it would wake me up and I could see whether I needed to deal with it. JPMorgan were really cool with people working from home, especially if you were supporting their live systems, which was mainly my job at first.

I loved that job at JPMorgan, and never pulled any sickies. In fact, I would often work weekends and late nights. I was pissed a lot of the time, and there were plenty of Friday afternoons in the pub where we never went back to the office except to get our coats and laptops on our way home, but that was the culture. Work hard, play hard.

Switching to New Look - the high-street fast fashion clothing retailer - I had a long commute to Weymouth every day and they didn't really know what they wanted me to do. I spent a day working in a store, which was interesting. I spent a couple of days at their distribution centre, watching the boxes of clothes arrive from the sweatshops, and the stock being sent out to the stores. I spent some time trying to understand what the hell they wanted to do as a business, and what the hell I was supposed to do about enabling it. Eventually, I broke down and decided I couldn't face the commute. I couldn't face the job. I couldn't face anything.

Three days off... no problem... just fill in a self-certification of sickness absence form when you get back to the office.

Four or more days off... got to go to the doctor and get signed off: get a sick note.

It started with two weeks off. Then a couple more. Then I couldn't even face going to see the doctor any more.

I found out what happens if you just stop turning up for work, sending in your sick notes, answering your phone... anything. I just disappeared. The company gets scared that they're going to get taken to some tribunal and found guilty of making somebody so stressed and unwell that they can no longer work. The company is scared it's going to cost loads of money and be hard to get rid of you, so they offer you a cash payment to fuck off quietly, promising you a good reference if you just resign.

With my JPMorgan bonus, my payoff from New Look and my iPhone App income, I was having a pretty bloody good year financially, despite being laid low with depression for a couple of months. I would have continued to take time off, but my phone rang and it was an agent with a contract in Poole: about a 20 minute drive from my house. I interviewed and got the job. I was the highest paid contractor in the company, which was a joke because the company mainly did Microsoft work, and I'd specialised in completely different technology. I actually bumped into another contractor I knew - Bob - and I felt bad that I was earning more than he was, because he taught me so much and he was so much older and more experienced. Oh well, the arrogance of youth, eh?

Anyway, my boss was this cool French guy who liked the fact I could speak colloquial French quite well, so he used to send me over to their main office in Besançon very often. It was great in the winter, because I could go snowboarding in a little place just outside Geneva, before flying home. Me and a friend bought a boat and used to go wakeboarding during our lunch hour. I took my boss out on my boat. I took one of my colleagues out sea fishing. Life was pretty sweet. However, I got bored and started claiming I had illnesses like swine flu, so I could take some time off work. I took so much time off sick, that my boss asked if I really wanted the contract anymore. I admitted that I didn't, so we parted company amicably. I partly needed to get away from an annoying guy with a ginger beard who I had to work with, who irritated the shit out of me.

I then became a full-time electrician. At first, I let the customers choose when I would do the work, and filled my diary up with lots of random jobs. Then, I learned that I could block time out, to give myself a break whenever I wanted. I could tell customers that I was booked up in the mornings, so I didn't have to get up early. It should have been a dream job, which allowed me to go kitesurfing whenever I wanted, but by this stage my relationship was on the rocks and I was depressed and stressed as hell. I didn't do much of anything. I sold my share of the boat. I started to get out of my depth with the work that I was taking on.

After becoming too sick to work, I had a couple of months doing nothing, and then a tiny bit of holiday cover work for a friend turned into some iPhone development work, which then exploded into my idea for a startup: Roam Solutions. I decided to create a software house specialising in mobile apps for enterprise. I threw together a hunk of junk proof of concept and we exhibited at the Learning Technologies conference, at Olympia. Somehow, in the space of a couple of months, there was a working app on iPhone and Blackberry, a fancy website and some glossy brochures. A whole exhibition stand had to be designed and built, allowing people to play with the phones but not steal them. There was so much branding to do. So much design.

I wasn't actually that passionate about what Roam Solutions did, which turned out to be mostly digital agency work. Rebranding as mePublish, then Hubflow; rewriting all the software and creating an Android version - those were momentary distractions. Sales meetings were stressful. Supporting your software 24x7 with just you and a mate is stressful. Getting any money out of our customers was like getting blood out of a fucking stone.

We managed to get about £16k out of a couple of customers and raised another £10k by selling a few percent of the company's shares. In return, me and my mate got to go on a 13-week 'accelerator' program. The program was fantastic fun, but exhausting. By the end, I didn't turn up for a couple of days because I was 'sick'. The truth was, I was burnt out.

I should have swapped roles with my business partner. He made a great CEO in the end, when I stepped down. Anyway, I just disappeared for months, and my friend helped to tidy up the mess and calm the shareholders down. I was almost out of cash. I needed a job.

I went to work for a company that helped people who'd got into debt problems. Not one of those debt consolidation places - we actually wrote to the creditors and negotiated debt-write offs, freezing the interest and lower repayments. We helped people avoid bankruptcy or IVAs. It was a cool company, but they wanted me to be IT director without actually vesting me in or letting me sit on the board. I wrote them a brilliant IT roadmap. They ignored it. I had an argument with the CEO. I went off on a sickie. The private equity firm that owned the company liked me and sacked the CEO. But then I got paid off because I couldn't face going back. The following year, I was at a conference, and there was the bloody CEO of the parent company, who'd followed my fucking IT roadmap to the letter, telling the delegates how well it worked. I felt proud, vindicated, but also I know deep down that it would have taken a lot of hard work to implement, and I was no part of that, so I can't really claim credit.

After the London Olympics, I went back to JPMorgan. I was not a well man. I was limping along.

I managed to fix one of JPMorgan's major issues that was threatening to cause a major catastrophe - front page of the Financial Times stuff - and then I disappeared, never to be seen again. I got a phonecall from my boss, saying I'd received an extra bonus in recognition of the important work that I'd done. I felt like a fraud, thanking him for that, but knowing that I was so sick that I wouldn't be able to go back to work.

My GP signed me off for 5 weeks, and my first thought was literally this: "I can get fucked up on drugs for 4 weeks and have 1 week to recover enough to go back to work."

There was The Priory. There was the separation from my wife. There was the realisation that the rumours of my mental health and drug problems were well known to everybody I knew in Bournemouth and Poole. It's a small place. I used to ride a tiny folding bicycle invented by Sir Clive Sinclair, for the 10 minute trip to work, but yet this had not escaped the notice of all kinds of people whose path I crossed. I was becoming known as a rather odd and eccentric character - a nutty professor; a madman; a drunk; a junkie. It was time to go somewhere so big that those kind of labels couldn't follow me around: London.

I put my back out picking up my niece to put her on the swings at the playground, so I had a week working flat on my back at home, while I was working for Barclays. I started to slowly relapse into taking legal highs, and ended up taking another week off, where I rewrote the entire software system we were working on in a nonstop hackathon without sleep. It rather made a mockery of the whole project, as well as terrifying the hell out of the architects.

At HSBC, I had a full on meltdown after my first week, realising that it was impossible to work a demanding contract while living in a hostel. Somehow, I managed to get away with a week off work, thanks to my sister ringing my boss and making excuses for me. I did also have half a day off because I was so dreadfully hung over once. I wasn't going to bother at all, but my boss persistently phoned me. I reeked of booze, as I turned up at my desk at 2:30pm.

At a well-known leading consultancy, working for the world's biggest security firm, I didn't take any time off at all. I was a little late on a couple of occasions, and had to ask one of my team to run my morning meeting on my behalf, but I was mostly a reliable little worker bee. It helped that I had a whole week-long holiday: my first relaxing week-long break for over 3 years.

I was all set to start a new contract with a well known high-street bank, who I once worked for when I was 20 years old and Canary Wharf was mostly just a building site. However, I knackered my leg, which caused my foot to swell up and my kidneys to fail. I had to pull a sickie on the very first day. Thankfully, they've waited two weeks for me to get better; most of which I've spent on a high-dependency hospital ward, having dialysis. My leg is still fucked.

And so, I go back to work tomorrow, limping along with my robocop ankle brace and doped up on tramadol. I've got one reliable reference from the last couple of years. HSBC hate my guts. Most people at Barclays were shocked and appalled that my contract was terminated early, and my boss lost his job over his decision to fire me, but do you think I can get a good reference? Who knows.

I should have paid my rent 10 days ago. I just told the taxman that he's not getting any VAT off me for a whole quarter, and he fucking hates that. I have no idea what my bank balance is, but I'm sure that what little money I have is being frittered away at a frighteningly quick rate.

However.

I could possibly delay a few weeks and get another contract. I could have stayed in hospital, letting them do their blood tests and fretting over my kidneys - which have proven resilient so many times before - and waiting patiently for them to finally take a look at my original complaint: my fucked foot/ankle/leg. It feels like I've torn a bunch of ligaments and muscle. It feels like my old injury has suffered major complications.

But, two weeks work gives me the best part of 3 months rent. If I can limp through the contract, I go from zero to hero. I've been so depressed about having to watch the pennies and not being able to treat my girlfriend to romantic dinners and whisk us off to exotic locations, or at least make plans to have fun. My plans have all been focussed on stopping the ship from sinking.

You might think I'm mad to take such a risk with my health, but mental health is part of it. Stress is part of it. Money and the need to not run out of it, is something that has to be considered. I don't trust myself: that I'm able to knuckle down and get on with the job. I did a good job of keeping my mouth shut in my last contract and it sorted me out financially a bit. This is my chance to continue that streak of improvement, if I can hold my shit together despite my health being a bit iffy. This is my chance to get in front. This is my chance to reduce all that stress and those worries and that anxiety and that depression about having to be super careful with money.

Anyway, let's see what happens tomorrow, eh? Let's see how sympathetic people are, about the fact that I've just been discharged from a high-dependency hospital ward, where I narrowly avoided chronic kidney failure, which would have meant having to have a kidney transplant and all the rest of that kind of shit. My leg is fucked, but I've found some contraption that allows me to get around without crutches. Still though, it looks like I broke my ankle or something. Surely, I've got to get cut a bit of slack, given what I've been through.

But, it doesn't work like that with IT contracting. Nobody owes me anything. The contract is between my company and another company. It's not an employment contract. It's a contract that says my company will provide consultancy services to their company - I could send anybody I think is qualified. I could hire somebody on minimum wage, train them, and send them to go do the job in my place, and I'd earn just as much money. However, the client doesn't really want somebody like me. They want me and they want me tomorrow at the latest, otherwise they'll just find somebody else. London's not short of talent. It was an extremely kind personal favour, that they waited this long for me to get better.

It's going to be horrible, starting work in pain and so exhausted from the nights in hospital where you're repeatedly disturbed by patients yelling out in pain, nurses coming to measure your blood pressure and take your temperature, and phlebotomists coming to take blood samples. They wake you up at 7am for the crappy breakfast of dry bread and marmalade. It's going to be a struggle to stay awake at my desk, especially with all the pain medication I'm taking.

So, it might all go to shit anyway, but at least I tried. I could have taken my sweet time over everything, and let the hospital string me along, but eventually, I can't cope with the frustration anymore: the lack of control, when your destiny is in the hands of somebody who doesn't even know what they're looking at. Somebody who's hiring because there's a knowledge gap in their organisation: they're hiring somebody who knows what they don't know, so how can they know that the person they're hiring knows what they know? So many stupid interviews, where the interviewer just wants to talk about the lame crap that they have just about managed to memorise. So tedious. In the end, intolerable.

I'm falling asleep and it's 5 o'clock and I didn't wake up until after 10:30am. Tomorrow's going to be fucking awful. But, think of the money. Just think of the money.

Tags: #career

Contents

Chapter 1: The Caravan

Chapter 2: Invisible Illness

Chapter 3: The Forest

Chapter 4: Prosaic

Chapter 5: The Van

Chapter 6: Into the Unknown

Chapter 7: The Journey

Chapter 8: Infamy

Chapter 9: The Villages

Chapter 10: Waiting Room

Chapter 11: The Shadow People

Chapter 12: Enough Rope

Chapter 13: The Post Offices

Chapter 14: Unsuitable Friends

Chapter 15: The Chase

Chapter 16: Self Inflicted

Chapter 17: The Holiday

Chapter 18: Psychosis, Madness, Insanity and Lunacy

Chapter 19: The Hospitals

Chapter 20: Segmentation

Chapter 21: The Cell

Chapter 22: Wells of Silence

Chapter 23: The Box

Chapter 24: Jailbird

Chapter 25: The Scales

Chapter 26: Descent

Chapter 27: The Syringe

Chapter 28: Anonymity

Chapter 29: The Imposter

Chapter 30: Wish You Were Here

29. The Imposter

The doorbell rang and Neil went to greet some more guests. It was Russ and Katie.

"Hey guys. Come in, come in" Neil beckoned the couple inside. "We're all in the garden."

It was a beautifully warm Saturday in May: the first really good barbecue weather of the year. The garden was well maintained: bright pink and purple azalea, camelia and lilac flowers were in full bloom on mature shrubs that filled the borders. The freshly mown lawn smelt of grass cuttings. The extension at the back of the house didn't leave a lot of outside space, but it was still large enough for a social gathering. In one corner there was a patio which was filled with smoke as the charcoal had recently been lit and was getting up to temperature. The guests moved around trying to avoid the smoke as the wind changed direction.

"Red, white, beer, soft drink?" Neil asked.

"Can I have a white wine spritzer, please Neil?" asked Katie.

"Certainly. Anything for you my dear" Neil replied flirtily. "And for you, Russ?"

"I'll get a beer."

"Beers are in the bucket of ice right there. Opener's on the table. Katie, I'll be back with your drink in a minute" said Neil, disappearing into the kitchen.

There was a fine spread of food on a table set up in the garden. Potato salad had green flecks of chopped chives mixed through the buttery yellow new potatoes. Greek salad was full of bright white crumbled feta cheese, jet black olives and juicy red tomatoes. Mixed bean and pasta salad completed the vegetarian fare. There was enough salad to feed a small army and very little would actually get eaten. Everybody would take a few scoops of each dish to decorate their plate with, but copious amounts of bread and meat were about to be consumed.

"Here you go" said Neil, presenting Katie with her drink. "Barbecue's lit. I'll put the burgers on once the coals are hot" he said loudly to the group. A cheer went up from a couple of slightly tipsy men.

"What are you going to do about that shed, Neil? It's rickety as hell" asked Russ.

"I'm glad you asked that, thanks Russ" said Lara from the kitchen doorway with a smirk on her face.

"Oh you're back are you?" Neil said sarcastically.

From a plastic carrier bag, Lara deposited napkins, paper plates, paper cups and two bottles of Prosecco on the table.

"I've already had a go at trying to tackle that blasted shed. Problem is, a lot of those cheap sheds you get from garden centres come with big panels that we can't carry through the house easily" Neil explained to Russ.

"I heard you already knocked it down once."

"That's not exactly true. We just filled it up with a bit too much stuff" Neil replied, shooting a sideways glance at Lara. She was fiddling with a bottle cork. There was a pop and people cheered. Neil was grateful for the diversion as Lara filled paper cups with a thimbleful of fizzy wine.

"What's the occasion?" somebody asked.

"Oh, I don't know. First day of summer... almost" Lara replied, distributing the drinks.

Neil went to check on the barbecue. It was a shiny black enamelled one with a huge lid. The coals had stopped smoking and turned a little grey with ash. There was no flame but there was a lot of heat. He spread the coals out, put the grill over them and went into the kitchen. He returned with a large oval metal plate covered with plump home-made burger patties. The meat quickly started to drip juice and fat onto the coals, making them sizzle and delicious cooking smells filled the air.

Lara fetched out a serving dish piled high with burger buns and placed it next to a selection of assorted condiment bottles.

"Who wants cheese on their burger?" she asked.

Having tallied the numbers, Neil flipped the patties, which were now nicely char-grilled on one side. He placed sliced cheese on most of the burgers so that it would melt on the hot meat. Placing the lid back on the barbecue gave everything an authentic charcoal smoked taste.

Exchanging the subtlest of glances with Lara, Neil indicated that it was time to serve up the main event.

"Right, everybody grab a plate and a burger bun" Lara yelled.

The guests, who had enjoyed many such a gathering before, now swarmed around the table and passed ketchup, mayonnaise, salad leaves, relish and other things around amongst themselves, while some of the hungrier ones took their place eagerly at the barbecue. Neil deposited burgers into buns as people clustered around him and his giant stainless steel tongs.

With most people happily enjoying a burger, Neil now covered the grill with a variety of sausages. Pork and apple, leek, chilli and onion. Cumberland, Lincolnshire and chipolatas joined a smörgåsbord of traditional and flavoured sausages. Content that the best British barbecue sausages are burnt black on the outside, he could now relax and enjoy a bite to eat himself.

"You're still thin as a rake considering the way you eat, Neil" said his friend Adam.

"Mmmm" Neil responded with a mouthful of food, his hands dripping with burger juice.

"Still, you're looking a lot healthier than last time I saw you. You were wasting away."

"Mmmm mmmm" Neil nodded in agreement, chewing. He reached for a napkin. "How's work?" he asked, swallowing.

"Oh same as ever. Same shit, different day. You?"

"Pays the bills. Can't grumble" replied Neil.

"Last time we spoke you said you were thinking about trying something new. Retraining even. Changed your mind?" Adam asked.

"I was thinking about it. Been doing the same thing since I left college. I'm just grateful to have a job and be working at the moment. You read about a lot of layoffs, you know?"

"You can't worry about that too much though. Life's too short. The gaffer says you've been working every bit of overtime you can get. Make sure you look after yourself, right?"

"Right. It's hard though, isn't it? You get used to the extra money, then you don't want to give it up."

"Sure, but you've got a lovely house. Just don't over-stretch yourself. Don't wanna burn out." Adam cautioned light-heartedly.

"Yep. You're right. I've been feeling pretty down lately. Thought about going see the doctor for the first time in ages. So hard to get time off when your diary's full of client site visits."

The barbecue progressed from sausages to chicken and finally finished with bananas and chocolate wrapped in foil, baked in the hot ash of the coals. The nights were getting longer but it was still cold as soon as the sun was gone and some guests started to make their excuses and leave. A few of the men had moved to the lounge while the ladies were sipping wine in the dining room.

"I've completed this one" Neil was saying, flashing the box of a computer game.

"No way. That's supposed to be really hard."

"I know. I'm not really into computer games, but I really got into that one. Took me weeks."

"Weeks?"

"Well, I don't get to play that often."

"Nah, me either. Bit bored of computer games to be honest."

"I got this one. The sequel. It's impossible. Can't get into it at all" said Neil, showing round another box.

"I hate that whole Duty and Honour franchise" said Adam. "Stupid shoot-em-up. Let's play that go-karting game."

They set up a 4-player computer game while Neil fetched more beer from the kitchen.

"I don't know if it's going to happen again, but I just have to trust that it won't" Neil could hear Lara saying as he passed the dining room. The ladies cooed with sympathy. "Everybody has a blip at some stage in their life."

Back in the lounge, Adam was skinning up a joint. "Outside, yeah?" he asked.

"Yeah, please. No smoking inside the house" Neil replied.

"You coming?"

"Nah. You know I don't like weed."

"Just the white powder, eh?" Adam joked, poking his nose with a bent finger and sniffing.

"That was just that one time at Barry's and she doesn't know" replied Neil in a hushed tone, conspiratorially.

"Gave you the confidence to chat her up though, didn't it?" Adam winked.

"Enough said already. Fuck off and smoke your joint. And make sure the neighbours aren't in the garden before you spark up."

Some time after midnight the remaining house guests departed en masse. Lara and Neil spent a bit of time gathering glasses and bottles into the kitchen and putting the worst of the rubbish into big black plastic refuse sacks, before retiring to bed.

"Do you remember what we were like when we met?" Lara asked, lying next to him with the bedside light still on.

"Yeah. Why?"

"You were so... different."

"When? Then?"

"No, not really. Now. Things seem so different now."

"In a bad way?" Neil asked.

"No. I don't think so" Lara replied, turning off the light.

The room span slightly from the amount of alcohol he had consumed and he was tired. He fell asleep almost immediately. Lately, he'd been drinking more and more. Without going to bed drunk, he would lie awake feeling depressed. Suicidal thoughts were creeping in.

He really didn't want to trouble Lara with his worries. He was struggling to get up in the mornings, but he really needed his job to pay the mortgage and they thought highly of him at work. He'd barely taken a day off sick since he'd started and he knew his bosses were pleased with his performance.

Why was he so tired all the time? Sure, he enjoyed entertaining guests from time to time - especially when there was alcohol - but the rest of the time he struggled to find the motivation to do anything. It was so damn frustrating to not have his usual levels of energy and enthusiasm. He didn't seem to be enjoying life very much anymore.

Next chapter...

Contents

Chapter 1: The Caravan

Chapter 2: Invisible Illness

Chapter 3: The Forest

Chapter 4: Prosaic

Chapter 5: The Van

Chapter 6: Into the Unknown

Chapter 7: The Journey

Chapter 8: Infamy

Chapter 9: The Villages

Chapter 10: Waiting Room

Chapter 11: The Shadow People

Chapter 12: Enough Rope

Chapter 13: The Post Offices

Chapter 14: Unsuitable Friends

Chapter 15: The Chase

Chapter 16: Self Inflicted

Chapter 17: The Holiday

Chapter 18: Psychosis, Madness, Insanity and Lunacy

Chapter 19: The Hospitals

Chapter 20: Segmentation

Chapter 21: The Cell

Chapter 22: Wells of Silence

Chapter 23: The Box

Chapter 24: Jailbird

Chapter 25: The Scales

Chapter 26: Descent

Chapter 27: The Syringe

Chapter 28: Anonymity

Chapter 29: The Imposter

Chapter 30: Wish You Were Here

25. The Scales

The crisis team - part of the community mental health team - social services and the police had all been quite helpful when Neil had originally gone missing. The police had quickly discovered that Neil had left his phone, wallet and passport behind. All the services were very concerned about Neil's welfare and had attempted to establish his last known movements as well as searching for him. Because Neil was considered a vulnerable person at risk of suicide, there had been a lot of initial effort, focus and attention on helping Lara, Colin and the family to make sure he was found safe and well.

With all avenues exhausted, there was little more that any of the services could do unless new information emerged. Lara and Colin were main points of contact, liaising with a police detective who was in charge of the ongoing - but parked - investigation.

Frustrated with a lack of progress, two highly regarded private investigators were contacted by Colin. After initial discussions they decided that there was insufficient evidence for them to be able to pursue the case. The truth was that nobody really wanted to touch the case, because of the number of government bodies already involved: National Health Service, mental health services, the police and social services.

Colin had eventually taken matters in to his own hands and gone to the house to look for more clues, when he found the transactions that had led him to the ongoing prosecution of the businesswoman and her associates. Once he'd found the names of the defendants, it was a simple case of searching the register of directors and finding the trading address of their company in the public records.

Now, he was back at the house once again. He regretted involving Lara so closely, but she wanted to play an active role and had discovered vital information that he himself - a grey-haired man in his sixties - would have been unlikely to have been able to extract from anybody embroiled in the court case.

Colin had sounded out friends - retired police officers, solicitors and even a judge - about bringing their own case to court. "Not a hope in hell" were the exact words of one former Justice of the Peace. His sentiments were pretty much echoed by everybody else Colin consulted informally.

"Imagine if a person was selling rat poison as heroin" said Bill, the retired judge. "Now, if that person was to sell rat poison in place of sugar, they might be convicted of murder or manslaughter. But as soon as they sell it as heroin, they'll be convicted for supply of a controlled substance, even though rat poison is not illegal to sell per se."

"But that's insane! Surely the charge of murder should take precedence over the charge of supplying a controlled substance" protested Colin.

"Well, it's about the buyer. If the buyer thought they were buying heroin, then nobody really cares whether that junkie dies. The seller will be convicted as a drug dealer, not a murderer."

"So the law really doesn't care whether you sell a junkie sugar, caffeine, heroin or rat poison?" asked Colin.

"Yep."

"What if the buyer didn't know what they were getting?"

"What did they actually buy?" Bill asked.

"A controlled substance."

"What was it sold as?"

"A chemical for laboratory research."

"There's no chance it could have been confused for a foodstuff? Was it marked as hazardous? Unfit for human consumption?"

"Yeah. It's not like it was sold as sugar or anything" Colin replied.

"Well then, the only conviction you could possibly get would be for supply of a controlled substance."

To make matters worse, everybody advised Colin not to mention the drug use to the police. One whiff of drug abuse and the case would be filed in a dustbin marked 'lost cause junkie'.

Back at the house searching for more clues, he looked high and low before finally he decided to search the attic. Boxes of Christmas decorations and long-neglected exercise equipment, the attic contained very little else except for a disused hot water cylinder and a galvanised metal cold water tank. There was a chipboard lid on the tank and Colin noticed that it was an inch or so out of place, overhanging on one corner. Lifting the lid, there was a green plastic box floating inside with a black plastic handle.

In the kitchen, Colin towelled off the green box so it was clean and dry and took it through to the dining room. Unclasping the two black plastic latches, the lid was stuck tight until the airtight and dust proof seal released the pressure. Inside the box was grey foam to protect the delicate instrument contained within: a laboratory-grade weighing scale.

Normal kitchen scales might tell you the weight of something in grams, but not very accurately. If you needed to weigh 10 grams - approximately the same as a one pound coin - then your kitchen scales would be woefully inadequate. Even fine balance scales with small weights would struggle to weigh anything lighter than a gram. Some digital scales could weigh one tenth of a gram with reasonable accuracy: 0.1g. The scales that Colin had found could weigh at a sub-milligram accuracy. Less than 0.001 grams. Even breathing on the instrument or standing too near the table on a wooden floor would cause measurement fluctuations, so there was a special stand, cover and calibration weights to ensure the readings were accurate. The "quick reference" instruction manual inside the case was a hefty pamphlet.

There were some spatulas and a metal dish inside the green box. A tiny amount of light brownish powder residue was visible on the foam that held the dish and the spatulas. There was also a very small plastic resealable bag which was almost empty except for the tiniest residue of powder in the corners.

Colin spent the whole next day searching the Internet and phoning testing facilities, before he finally located a laboratory that would be able to swab and test the tiny traces of drugs that he had found. Using gas chromatography mass spectrometry, the lab was able to then search the 'signature' of the chemical compounds and to find a match in their database.

After sending the scales by courier to the lab in the Netherlands, it took 3 weeks before he got the results emailed to him. There was no conclusive match, but there were several compounds that were 97% similar to chemicals that were held in their database. He had been warned that a 99% match was the highest that he could expect anyway, so it was a good start.

Searching the Internet, he found detailed online encyclopedia entries for two chemicals, as well as a brief summary of a third. The compounds were stimulants from three different families of drugs. Two had been developed and patented in the 1950's and 1960's, but had never been marketed to the public because of serious side effects. Colin found a shorter acronym form of the full chemical name of each of the three compounds and started to search the Internet for more information.

Quickly, Colin was immersed in a world of online discussion forums. Thousands of Internet users from around the globe were talking about their experiences of self-experimentation with chemical compounds that had been abandoned by pharmaceutical companies or not even patented. Some of the chemicals had only been thought of as theoretically possible, but a laboratory somewhere in the world was cooking up these drugs for people to buy and try on themselves.

He couldn't read any more. What he saw was immediately horrifying. Hundreds of stories of addiction and horrible psychotic episodes, health damage and hospitalisations. Internet users were swapping stories about how awful these chemicals were and that they were the most addictive drugs they'd ever tried. Many lamented the day they ever first experimented. One message stood out as clearly as the obvious warning to never take these substances: accurate measurement was the difference between desired effects and overdose.

Perhaps Neil had two sets of scales, but one set alone was worth almost £1,000. If he had overdosed at home, surely he would have been found there along with his scales?

From what Colin had read, a powerful dose of those drugs was just 0.005 grams. If Neil had half a gram delivered from China, that would be 100 doses. The effects would last well over 12 hours. That meant Neil would have been on a nonstop drug binge for 50 days with just one free sample, assuming he was measuring accurately.

He felt sick. His son had got mixed up with something so dangerous that it had overwhelmed him and taken his life in the blink of an eye. There was no way to sugar coat this. Was there even any point in telling Lara and the family that Neil had been completely consumed by addiction and stimulant psychosis? In less than 6 weeks these powerful Chinese drugs caused him to flee his home to his final resting place.

Next chapter...

Contents

Chapter 1: The Caravan

Chapter 2: Invisible Illness

Chapter 3: The Forest

Chapter 4: Prosaic

Chapter 5: The Van

Chapter 6: Into the Unknown

Chapter 7: The Journey

Chapter 8: Infamy

Chapter 9: The Villages

Chapter 10: Waiting Room

Chapter 11: The Shadow People

Chapter 12: Enough Rope

Chapter 13: The Post Offices

Chapter 14: Unsuitable Friends

Chapter 15: The Chase

Chapter 16: Self Inflicted

Chapter 17: The Holiday

Chapter 18: Psychosis, Madness, Insanity and Lunacy

Chapter 19: The Hospitals

Chapter 20: Segmentation

Chapter 21: The Cell

Chapter 22: Wells of Silence

Chapter 23: The Box

Chapter 24: Jailbird

Chapter 25: The Scales

Chapter 26: Descent

Chapter 27: The Syringe

Chapter 28: Anonymity

Chapter 29: The Imposter

Chapter 30: Wish You Were Here

24. Jailbird

Her little car was buffeted by strong winds as she drove up the busy motorway towards Manchester. Steely grey skies drizzled just enough rain that her windscreen wipers juddered annoyingly as they swept the few droplets of water away. Huge lorries overtook each other, filling the inside two lanes. Lorries were speed limited to 60 miles per hour, but there would be 1 or 2% difference between the fastest and the slowest. Motorists sat in an endless miserable queue of traffic in the outside lane, travelling only marginally faster. The sheer number of vehicles meant it was bumper to bumper all the way from the Midlands to the North of England.

Night brought an orange glow: illumination from the lights above. Headlights reflected in the puddles and off every vehicle. Heavy goods vehicles threw up huge plumes of blinding spray, with the red lights of the driver in front as the only point of reference to keep on the road. Lara was in a trancelike state, just following in procession, watching out for brake lights as traffic ground to a halt.

Reaching the junction she needed, Lara pulled off the motorway and into the service area. A sign directed traffic to the right for fuel, straight on for refreshments and left for a hotel. She turned left. The car park was filled with shiny new fleet rental vehicles used by sales representatives and other businessmen and women who travelled all over the country, touting their wares. Row after row of medium-sized family cars from respected German manufacturers, in sensible colours: black, silver, grey and navy blue. Some had suit jackets hanging in the back, ready for business in the morning.

Parking her cheap French car that was nearly 10 years old, it looked worse than ever now that the spray from the long drive had given the white paint a thick coating of dirt up the sides. You could hardly read her back numberplate and her hands got covered with filth when she opened and closed the boot to get her overnight bag out.

After checking in to the hotel and finding her way to her room, she looked at herself in the mirror. She wouldn't need to do much to pretend to be exhausted and in a bit of a state tomorrow. Rounding off a long drive, the rooms had paper thin walls: a man snored loudly on one side while a woman made over-enthusiastic unconvincing sex noises on the other. She would have thought that it was somebody watching porn on TV except she could hear the bed thudding into the wall.

Dropping her key-card at the reception desk in the morning, there was no need for her to check out. The bland chain of traveller's hotels had no room service, minibar or other services for their guests. There was no bill to settle as she'd paid for her stay in advance.

Tired, hungry, stressed, without make-up: she was looking perfect for the day's goal.

Punching an address into her sat-nav, she was directed to an industrial estate on the outskirts of Greater Manchester, near a large satellite town. Many large corrugated metal sheds were spread over an area of several square miles, served by a warren of private roads. This was one of the largest warehousing and distribution hubs in the UK, handling stock for many national retailers as well as much smaller businesses too.

Lara knew precisely where she was going, having consulted a map of the estate at the entrance, but she left her car and continued on foot. She passed several bus stops and made a mental note of their route numbers and the bus company that provided the service. The large estate was divided into several different parts, with side roads allowing access to the units that subdivided the enormous sheds. Each unit had its own loading bay and a door into the reception and office areas.

Finding the unit she was looking for, the loading bay was deserted but there was a light on in reception. The red LED on a keypad showed the door was locked and there was an entryphone. A dog-eared piece of paper in the window of said: "Post/courier: *81#". Lara typed it into the keypad. The LED flashed green and the door lock buzzed. She stepped inside and there was a 'beep-bop' electronic noise.

She approached the unmanned reception desk. Part of the desk could be lifted up to get behind it and through to a short corridor with 3 doors. The door at the far end was open, but she couldn't see any further inside. One of the other doors opened and a man stepped out. He closed the door behind himself and walked up to the desk, looking quizzical.

"Can I help you? We weren't expecting anybody today." he said.

"Yes, I'm hoping you can help me. I've travelled a long way." Lara replied.

"Oh? Where have you come from?"

"London."

"You must have set off very early."

"I stayed in a hostel in Manchester last night and then got the first bus out to the estate this morning" she lied.

"You must be very keen to see us about something."

"Yeah, it's about an order."

"An order? We haven't sold anything for months."

"I know. That's why I'm here."

"Look. I'm very sorry but we've ceased trading. We haven't even got any stock any more. I'm just here doing some administrative work."

"My boyfriend and I are desperate. We've been going through hell since you shut down."

"You do know why we shut down, right?" the man asked.

"I heard something."

"What do you want?"

"I want to buy FRL." Lara replied

"That was a special order item." the man said, his eyes narrowing.

"Randy! I'll take it from here" said a female voice at the end of the corridor. A woman came from the left hand side of the open doorway, stirring a spoon in a mug. She walked down the corridor and set her drink down on the front desk, lifting up the part to allow access.

"Follow me, my love." the woman said, giving Randy a long look as she walked past him and down the corridor. She turned left into a kitchen with a metal sink, water-cooler and a round table with 3 chairs around it. "Take a seat" she said, gathering a few papers that were on the table and putting them upside down under a blue notebook. "I'm Pauline. Who are you?" the woman asked.

"My name's Lara."

"Lara what?"

"Lara Sutton."

"Do I know you?"

"You might know my boyfriend's name. He bought from you regularly."

"What do you want?" Pauline asked, firing off quick blunt questions with a blank impassive expression.

"FRL."

"You know all my stock has been seized. It's all been tested. My solicitor has got a copy of the results. You've got everything you need. What more do you want?"

"I don't know what you mean."

"Look. I need to speak to my solicitor. I've already been co-operative and everything is in my statements. I think it's time for you to leave."

"You think I'm a policewoman?" Lara asked, shocked.

"Or a journalist. I don't know. Either way, I'd like you to leave."

"Look you fucking bitch. My boyfriend's dead, OK. He's fucking dead. I want to know what the fuck FRL is and where you were getting it from." Lara yelled, anger suddenly surging up from deep inside. Her eyes blazed with rage and she stood up so fast that the chair she had been sitting on crashed over backwards. Randy leapt out of the office and stuck his head around the corner.

"It's OK, Randy" said Pauline. "Sit down and be quiet" she said with a smile curling up at the corners of her mouth. She looked like a predator toying with its prey.

Lara slowly pulled the other chair round the table without breaking eye contact, scraping the legs noisily across the concrete floor. She sat down and folded her arms, glaring ferociously back at Pauline.

"You're really clueless, aren't you?" Pauline asked rhetorically, chuckling to herself. "Is your boyfriend really dead?"

"You don't seem to care."

"That's not true. Everything we ever sold was marked 'not for human consumption' with a big skull and crossbones, but yet I'm probably going to end up in jail."

"Yes, but it will be for conspiracy to supply a controlled substance, not for manslaughter."

"Oh, so you do know something" Pauline feigned a shocked face.

"All I know are the charges brought against you. I don't know what FRL is or where you were getting it from."

"Ha!" Pauline suddenly laughed. "Nobody knows what FRL is. That's the fucking point. Do you want to know the little joke we had in the warehouse?"

"Tell me" Lara said, gritting her teeth. She desperately wanted to punch this woman in the face but she knew that she had to bottle her feelings or else she wouldn't get a single bit more information until the trial.

"Fuck Real Life. That's the joke. Do you know what the V part is?"

"No."

"Version. Whenever we used up a batch, we'd make up another lot using whatever we had in stock. A cocktail. We didn't know what we were selling any more than the junkies knew what they were buying."

"So you knew you were selling to addicts? You knew people were taking the drugs you were selling?"

"If an addict's not buying from us they're buying from a street corner or direct from China. I'm just a middleman. Supply and demand" said Pauline matter of factly.

"Your drugs killed my boyfriend."

"You don't know that though, do you? Be honest."

Lara's eyes betrayed her. She broke her stare for a fraction of a second and Pauline saw a flicker of doubt cross Lara's face.

"He stopped ordering from you 6 weeks before he disappeared."

"How much was he taking?" Pauline asked.

"I don't know. He was spending £25 each time."

"Different things cost different amounts. I don't remember all the prices of everything we sold."

"I've got an invoice here" said Lara, producing a photocopy with Neil's name and address redacted.

"Half a gram." Pauline said.

"Where does it say that?"

"Right there. 0.5g. That's 0.5 grams."

"Enough to kill him."

"I couldn't say. I'm not a doctor. But it's not enough to last a junkie for 6 weeks."

"He could have quit and relapsed."

"Well if he did, he didn't get his drugs from me. By your own admission he hadn't bought anything from us for 6 weeks when he disappeared. When did he die? What drugs did he have in his bloodstream when he died?"

"You'll find out when you're put on trial, murderer!" Lara spat. "I bet you've never had to look your victims in the eye, you heartless bitch."

Pauline sat calmly with icy coldness, looking at Lara, considering her.

"If your junkie boyfriend bought drugs directly from China, as I suspect he did, cutting out the middleman, then he would have been getting 99% purity."

"What do you mean?"

"We would add an excipient to the products we sold, to bulk it out. If your boyfriend was buying half a gram from us, that would be the same as buying 5 grams direct from China."

"So you're saying what you can get from China is 10 times stronger than what you sold?"

"At least. The Chinese chemists are always coming up with new stronger drugs too. He could have ended up with something a hundred times stronger than anything we were selling. A completely novel compound unknown to anybody here in the UK. He was a human guinea pig. If he only wanted half a gram, the Chinese labs would send him a free sample of their latest creation to get him hooked."

"You disgust me" Lara said, her eyes filling with tears. Her head swam with all this new information and she was overwhelmed. She didn't know who to be angry with, who to blame. It was all too much to process.

She'd had thoughts that she wanted to hurt Pauline, or at least scream abuse at her. She wanted her to know how much damage she'd done. She wanted justice. Lara couldn't think about that at that moment. She stumbled to her feet and out of the warehouse. Outside she sucked in gasps of cold air, hyperventilating.

The unit opposite was a garage and had its loading bay door open. Two cars were lifted up on inspection stands and were being worked on by mechanics. A man in dirty overalls came over.

"Are you OK?" he asked.

Lara looked at him but couldn't quite hold herself steady enough to speak.

"Do you need an ambulance?"

"No. I'll be OK. I just need to get away from here" she said, starting to walk off in the direction of where she parked.

The mechanic went back to the workshop, taking off his oil-stained gloves. A moment later, he emerged from the garage driving a car.

"Do you need a lift?" he called through the passenger window.

Lara stopped walking and thought about it for a moment.

"My car isn't far. Just by the entrance to the estate."

"Jump in anyway. It'll save you 5 minutes walk."

There was a moment of silence as they pulled away. The mechanic was sat on a clear plastic bag that protected the driver's seat. He kept his eyes on the road.

"What was that all about?" he asked as they pulled up behind Lara's car.

Lara looked at him, but she didn't reply.

"I work opposite. I've seen the police in there quite a few times, pulling out loads of stuff bagged and tagged as evidence. Everybody on the estate knows they're scumbag drug dealers. There are housing estates in Manchester where they beat the living shit out of any heroin dealers they catch. These 'legal high' places selling on the Internet seem to be getting away with murder."

"You're not wrong about that. Thanks for the lift." said Lara.

Next chapter...