By Peter Carty.
The following is an extract from chapter 23 (‘Negative Degradation’) of Peter Carty’s debut novel, Art (Pegasus, 2024).
Negative Degradation
He had five wraps left. A short time before there had been ten. If the wraps were fingers, he had lost a hand. He was in 333 and everyone was smoking heavily. Normally Billy liked smoke, the mysterious wraiths and tendrils, the life cycle of the cigarette. Cradle to grave in five minutes and then the butt, the dead end. Each cylinder an elegant metaphor for mortality, yet subservient to the smoker’s whim.
Tonight his appreciation for cigarettes had reached its limit. The fumes in here were so thick the air-conditioning couldn’t cope and his eyes stung. Mother, upstairs, would be better but he was with a large group of people and stuck fast amid their inertia. A skinny woman in a black tracksuit was talking to him. He’d seen her before, hanging round the Lux. She seemed to know him, but he wasn’t sure who she was.
‘Whose party is this?’ she asked, nodding her bony head towards the rest of the group.
‘It’s not a party, just a few people who’ve come on from a private view round the corner.’
‘Do you want an E?’
He considered briefly. Why not? She asked for, and was given, ten pounds. He necked the tablet straight away, crunching it up and washing away the bitterness with lager, trying to forget the touch of her fleshless fingers. The booze might swamp a lot of the MDMA, but what was left should cut down his craving for charlie. He thought about offering her a line, decided that there was no point. She was a collection of lines already, a stick woman, and anyway she was gone, lost to the murk.
A conversation was taking place around him. Words and phrases were buffeted about by gusts of music, intermittently spattering into him. There was no point cupping hands round ears and shouting requests for repetitions, because he wasn’t that interested. Every so often he yelled something non-committal in a likely direction. The others were probably doing the same. It was peculiar, he knew that the music was KLF’s Chill Out, but it had never sounded this way to him before, like a gale in full spate.
He finished his drink and looked into the glass in surprise, as surprised as he had been on looking into all of the other empty glasses he had seen in his life. A pint seemed such a lot to start with, but never lasted long. It was time for another line; the E wasn’t having much effect.
The toilets were at the rear, round a corner. Long and low, dank and ill-lit, they were reminiscent of a pantry in an old country house. He stepped into a cubicle and, impatient, rammed the bolt across. It wouldn’t go home, and the cubicle’s walls and door juddered at the impact. Taking more care over alignment and docking, he managed it at the second attempt and started to dig out the plastic bag containing the wraps. It was oversized and its compression in his pocket meant that when he tugged, one fold emerged at a time. The process was like pulling out a parachute, but he stopped because he had become distracted.
The cubicle’s walls were white plastic laminate, covered with a myriad of blue lines so fine as to be almost invisible. He wondered how many there were altogether: more than the grains of sand on a beach or less? Probably less, but still an incalculable number. They formed a measureless labyrinth: a tiny man or insect could start from one side and spend a lifetime navigating between them to reach the other. He stared at the lines and they hung in the air before him, diaphanous and shimmering. The E had kicked in, and it was far stronger than he had anticipated. He was tripping heavily.
Wall, floor, ceiling — which was which? His spatial coordinates had gone and the ability to discriminate at all within his visual field was receding. He couldn’t feel his hands and feet. They were becoming numb, solid, white. Hard and shiny. His torso, his torso was rapidly calcifying. He was turning into porcelain, part of the lavatory. Soon people would come in, and piss and shit all over him.
An uncertain amount of time later the rush wore off. He needed to get home at once, immediately. Everything would be more manageable in a place of safety. What a joke that was. His flat was the least safe place in all London for him, but there wasn’t anywhere else to go in this state. How the fuck would he make it back there from here? He needed a sedative to bring himself down. Easy to say, to think. It would be very difficult to get hold of a Valium. Maybe one or two of the clubbers somewhere in here had some, but he would never be able to identify them.
The important thing, the most important thing of all, was not to panic. If he panicked he would make everything worse, much worse than it was. There would be sedatives in the nearest A&E department if he could get himself to it. Where was it? Guy’s? No, it had to be the London Hospital down in Whitechapel. One of the bar staff could drive him down there, surely? But they’d refuse, laugh at him, even if he could get as far as the bar. That would be almost impossible, like trying to fly abroad after arriving at the airport naked and without a passport, all the while steadily turning into a lavatory pan.
A minicab, that was the answer. Somehow or other, he would have to get himself into a minicab and persuade the driver to take him to hospital. How? It couldn’t be done; he knew that he would never make it to the club’s entrance. He’d get lost and go round and round, trying to retrace his steps until he collapsed. They’d move him back to the toilet, plumb him in. If he told a stranger or one of the group he was with — though they were strangers as well, he did not know them at all — about his plight, begged them for assistance, would they help him? No, they’d be like the staff; they’d think he was mad, they’d disengage, mock him and walk away.
This wasn’t E. It was acid, very strong acid. He should never, ever have taken that pill and he was never, ever going to take drugs again. Why hadn’t he been alive to such obvious portents? The music was the tempest before the tragedy. The skeletal woman in the black tracksuit was death and she had scythed him down with her dodgy tab. He was dying, his life force slowly dwindling under a ferocious chemical assault.
The cubicle walls were pulsing in and out, giant bellows. Voices, he could hear voices. Some clubbers had entered and were going about their business. Thank God. The voices resolved themselves into two people immediately outside the cubicle, next to the washbasins. One of them sounded American, the other Scottish.
‘…sure fancies himself, goddam it—’
‘Ah ken, he’s thinks he’s the big banana… ’
It was some of the group from the private view and they were talking about him. Should he draw attention to himself to stop them? No, he was too far off his head to be able to do that with any effectiveness. They wouldn’t be around long, anyway; in a minute or two they’d be gone.
He waited and waited, but they didn’t go and their jibes became more and more poisonous. They knew he was in here and they were taunting him, sensing that he was powerless to fight back.
‘…always kinda thought—’
‘Tae flash—’
‘Awesome amounts of money—’
‘Yir jokin, that fuckin waster.’
If he was in his right mind he’d go straight out there and confront them, tell them exactly what was what. For a start, it wasn’t true that he had too much wedge. True, sometimes he might give the impression he had plenty to throw around, but he was just shuffling plastic to preserve an illusion of solvency. Why couldn’t they lay off? One of them banged on the cubicle door, they were getting more aggressive.
‘…dae ye ken whit’s up wi’ him—’
‘So gross, thinks he’s such a big noise—’
‘Naewan wants to know any more—’
‘Like a total embarrassment… ’
He couldn’t catch everything because they started the hand dryer in a mocking pretence that they didn’t want him to hear what they were saying. The rushing air from the dryer was never-ending if it was the hand dryer and not an airliner passing overhead. How long had he been in here? It must have been more than an hour. He looked at his wristwatch. Two minutes had passed. Impossible, the watch must be broken. Unless his sense of time had gone completely. What if he was stuck here forever, living through an hour for every minute that went by in the real world? He would go mad, have to be locked up. Maybe he should start screaming at the top of his voice, get it all over with quickly.
Another rush slowed. His surroundings were at the same time so vivid and so dreamlike. When he turned his head everything left long, colourful contrails. He tried to stare at one thing alone, the top of the cistern, but it flexed and flowed and swam about like an enormous amoeba.
All this time the slagging outside the cubicle continued, venomous, unrelenting. They didn’t know that he was in serious trouble in here. Or maybe they did and didn’t care because they had him where they wanted him.
‘…someone should dae something… ’
‘Time to kick ass—’
‘It’s oot ay order—’
‘Sure sucks… ’
If only he could get out of here, get himself somewhere he could be alone and drug free. He remembered the charlie. If he tried to go to A&E he’d be arrested, they’d find it on him, if he managed to get that far with it. Maybe those bastards by the hand dryer would take it off him, ignoring his ineffectual protests, before throwing him out of the toilets back into the bar area, to be pitched out into the street by the bouncers and complete his mental disintegration in public. Hell. He was in hell. The voices reached him again.
‘…all that blow—’
‘…polis—’
‘Turn him in—’
‘Barry solution… ’
They were going to keep him in here, trapped, while they called the police and had him arrested. With all those wraps they’d charge him with dealing, search his flat. Get rid of the drugs. Get rid of them straight away.
He fumbled in his pockets for the plastic bag containing the wraps, it could have been in any one of them and they had all become vast, confusing caverns. The only feasible way to get hold of the bag was to disinter the entire contents of each pocket and to arrange all of it on top of the cistern, which continued to swim around. It took a long time, and painstakingly identifying and re-identifying everything took longer. It was impossible to work out what most of the items were without intense concentration, and once he’d settled one object to his satisfaction he’d forgotten the identity of the others and had to start again.
Eventually he found the plastic bag. It had been hanging half out of his pocket where he had left it, but he hadn’t been able to differentiate it from the fabric of his trousers. He threw it into the toilet and tried to recall how to flush it away. After lengthy trial and error he wrenched the handle in the correct direction, and water rose up in a maelstrom which made him shrink back. When the force of the torrent was spent he was convinced he could see a solitary wrap left floating on the surface so he flushed a second time and the dam burst once more. They were all gone, he was sure of it.
They had nothing on him now, those evil fuckers outside. Let them malign him as much as they wanted with their slimy serpent tongues, he was out of here, hallucinating or not. He put everything else back in his pockets; that took a while but it was quicker than taking it all out — it reminded him of re-packing his bags at the end of a holiday and how much easier that was than the packing before setting off. Then he unlocked the door and walked out, striding boldly towards the wash basins.
The lavatory was empty except for a fair-haired youth in a striped T-shirt of blue and white hoops. He turned from washing his hands to stare at Billy, and then into the cubicle he had left.
‘I thought there were a few of you in there, mate.’
Billy said nothing as he turned abruptly and made for the exit into the club. A terrifying realisation slammed into him. There had been no one slagging him off. He had been talking to himself inside the cubicle in different voices, thinking that they belonged to other people. He had gone completely crazy, but there was no time to think about that now. Home. He must get home.
An indeterminate period of time later — it could have been an hour, or a couple of weeks — he slammed his front door behind him. Identifying and inserting the key had been another agonisingly protracted process, and that had come after it had taken all of the personal resources he possessed to get himself the short distance back. Crossing the roads had been torture; he couldn’t judge the speed of the vehicles. Thank god none of the block’s other residents had been in the lift. Rick. Loopy lips Rick, looney tunes Rick. He couldn’t have coped with Rick, couldn’t have coped with anyone. Never again, he would never, ever take another pill. After fetching himself a glass of water he lay on the settee. He knew that anyone out there who wanted could smash through the door and come get him whenever they felt like it, and there was nothing at all he could do about it. He would have liked to have shut his eyes and slept, left it all behind regardless, but there was a white light burning inside his head and it was inextinguishable.
An hour or two later he crawled into the bedroom on his hands and knees, occasionally stopping to clutch his chest and moan. Dimly, a horrifying item of information brought itself to his attention. He’d thrown all that coke away for nothing. There was a package full of it a few metres away, but he couldn’t touch it for fear of his life and now his own supply was completely gone. His answerphone was at his eyeline, and he noticed its light flashing. Perhaps, he thought, if he played back the message it would take his mind off his terminal stupidity. He reached over gingerly, hoping the motion would not induce a fresh bout of hallucinations, or a heart attack.
‘Ah Billy, a quick ring about that article…’
He didn’t recognise the confident voice booming out.
‘…if you could phone me when you get this message… ’
No hang on, it was that suit he’d interviewed, Lanchester, the one who’d paid fifty thousand for Becky’s installation.
‘…we must talk, I’m on… ’
What was up with the bastard? How had he got his home phone number? He hadn’t sounded amicable, he had sounded as if he was about to do something terrible to him. Billy knew that he must have libelled him inadvertently. He was going to be sued, ruined, broken. He lay there whimpering as the light inside his head blazed out into the night.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Peter Carty is an award-winning writer and journalist. After growing up on Merseyside he moved to London, where he was a close witness to the artistic explosion in Hoxton and Shoreditch during the early 1990s. He writes about arts and culture for publications including the Guardian, Financial Times and Independent. Peter also lectures on contemporary art and literature for leading art schools and universities. His short fiction is on English literature syllabuses. Art is his first novel
