Sherlock

I suppose there are probably a great many people in the world who are worse off than me right now. There must be refugees starving somewhere. Children living on rubbish tips. Miners with lungs full of coal dust, former asbestos handlers, cancer patients, assault victims, trafficked prostitutes, any living being whose business brings it into contact with my brother, the list goes on. Undoubtedly there are a great many people in the world who are in far, far worse positions than me, suffering depths of shame and abject misery that have yet to even suggest themselves to me. Undoubtedly.

And I honestly could not care one atom less about them.

It hurts, do you understand? Not like any former withdrawal either, because those were temporary. Whether caused by lack of funds or laziness, it was only ever a matter of time before I could score again and it would be over. But now it just hurts. It hurts all the time. Even more sickening than the sickness itself is the fact that it's supposed to hurt. I'm supposed to be grateful that it hurts. Gets worse before it gets better, isn't that what they say? They talk bollocks when they say that kind of thing. It's not getting any better. They talk absolute bollocks.

Oh, and that's the worst of it; it's robbed me of all eloquence. It took me most of last Thursday just to reconstruct the phrase 'robbed of all eloquence'. Still, it passed the time. Last Thursday was bad. Last Thursday I was dressed and ready, had the money in my hand and got as far as they end of the street before I made myself turn around again. Then I sat in and tried to put all the separate, shattered words back into some semblance of order again. They don't want to form up anymore. I have to prepare myself if I want to speak with any coherence.

It's not my fault. My brain still works. As well as it always did. Better, in fact, without that old haze, without constantly having to think about how long since the last hit and where I can go for the next one. I'm on fine bloody form I just can't do anything about it. Not that I ever could. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if that's why I went on the junk in the first place, but I don't remember, exactly.

For instance, I can't watch the news. Can't walk into a shop that sells newspapers. Granted, yes, most of the headlines are scandal or politics or disaster and there's nothing to really guess at.

But sometimes the stories are mysteries. Well, mysteries to those telling the stories. Like the one last week, maybe you heard about it, about the missing cash at a bank that had no indication of having been robbed? God, it was awful... Not the money, I don't mean that was awful; banks really ought to expect it, they make such targets of themselves. No, what was awful was watching the news, sitting listening to that bimbo anchorwoman spew copy from the autocue, completely unaware she was telling the whole world everything they needed to know.

It was the cleaning lady, by the way. If you can still find it anywhere, watch the CCTV footage they showed on Five News; she's not doing it in that particular stretch of film, but those are the precise circumstances during which she can grab two thin handfuls from the counter and use them to pad her bra. No more than half a cup-size, for safety, but it all adds up. But what could I do? A call to the police. To, as the really very friendly lady on the phone told me, register my concern. Anything stronger than that and I would have ended up in an interview room myself.

I can't afford that at the moment. Mycroft would find me and I'm avoiding him.

Oh, and don't judge me for resorting to Five News either; I had only hoped it might be vacuous enough not to torture me. I end up throwing things at BBC... But that's exactly my point; what use is knowing and understanding and being able to put it all together if you can't make that knowledge useful?

All my life, growing up, I was referred to at home as a 'font of useless information'. And I took great exception to that because when I was young and relatively stupid, I believed that all information was useful, in its context. And the only way to make sure you were prepared when the context came around was to know everything you possibly could. I was good at it too, I was a bloody excellent student of how to know everything.

Look where it's gotten me.

Do you know what I'm doing today? To make the time go in and to try and find a place where there is nothing to think about? I'm cleaning between the bathroom tiles, one scrupulous inch at a time. Look where knowing everything has gotten me.

It hurts. More than the muscle cramps and the shaking and the gastric disturbance and the brutal, degrading resurgence of a crushed libido and all the other hideous side-effects of making the shift from junkie to 'real person', it hurts. Do you understand? To be in this world and see it all with absolute clarity, and be able to do nothing about it? It's like having all the books in the world and nothing to read.

Do you...? No. No, you don't. How could you?

Jim

I need to find a new dry-cleaners. Again. There's only so many times you can bear up under the same narrow, suspicious eyes before the thought creeps into your head, He thinks I'm a serial killer. I'm looking at Mr Po now and thinking it's a shame to move on. He's very good at his job. And he's terrible at speaking English, so he hasn't been able to accuse me out loud yet, like the last one did.

The last one told me, in public, on a Saturday afternoon, how I seemed to spill an awful lot of cranberry juice. But until today, Mr Po has been able to keep his theories strictly private.

Why today? What's pushed him over the edge this time? Well, it could be the particular depth of the dried brown splatter on the cuffs of the shirt I'm dropping off. It could be, but he's seen that before. It could be the fact that this time I'm dropping off a woman's dress to, and this one with a large, sharp-edged tear in the body, another slash across the waist, as well as duplicates of the aforementioned splodges.

"My sister," I explain, clearly as I can. "Got mugged."

Well, it's half-true, really... The woman isn't my sister, but she was mugged. Well, she was attacked for an item of value she was carrying on her at the time. If that's your definition of mugged, she was mugged. Whether or not the muggers worked for Her Majesty or not really doesn't come into it. And if the item happened to be some high-level industrial espionage material of a military technology bent, that shouldn't matter either. We're talking about two men mugging a woman here. The world we live in, eh?

Anyway, Mr Po seems to accept my excuse... Sorry, explanation, he accepts my explanation. I move on to trying to make him understand I want separate tickets for the two items, but the same bill. He's not getting it. I lean in, and try not to do that thing where you just say the same thing only louder, but it's hard to resist.

"My- sister-," I try, and Christ, I'm slowing down too... We're two sentences away from the fat tourist in his Man United shirt, burned all over and bawling, 'Uno Pint-oh-, por favor' over a Benidorm hotel bar...

Let's start over. "My sister will pick up her dress. But I'm paying for it, okay?"

Why? If you're smart and you know me you're asking yourself why the hell I'm getting the tab.

"Okay," says Mr Po, complete with the little thumb-and-forefinger sign that means the same thing. But until I've got two of his little green raffle tickets in my hand I'm holding my breath. "Your sister," he goes on, as he goes about writing up the details, "She is okay too?"

... What's your definition of okay? Because she's been all stitched up, she's conscious, she's on enough painkillers to leave the average Freesian happily humming 'Boogie Nights' to itself in the corner of the field. But she's not suffered any amnesia about the incident. She still remembers who it was that said to her she'd be alright, that there'd be nobody on her tail, that she definitely shouldn't carry her gun with her, not even in that distasteful inside thigh way, because it would ruin the line of her dress.

I was getting blood on my cuffs and what was she doing? Not crying and writhing in pain, not cursing her attackers or the loss of what she'd stolen, not asking whether or not she'd live, oh no... No, she was glaring up at me and saying, "Dress is ruined now, though, isn't it?"

"She's... a bit shaken," is how I put this to Mr Po. By some miracle he actually does put two tickets in my hand, though without explaining which is which. It's up to me to look over the counter and see which number matches my shirt. I put that one safely in my wallet and the other in my pocket and am about to leave when he puts his hand on my sleeve.

"One moment please."

Oh, for God's sake... I knew it was too good to be true, that I'd managed to communicate those simple instructions almost first time. Christ knows what he's got coming for me. There's only so many ways I can think of interpreting Two-Tickets-One-Bill, but this is bound to be fecking interesting. And I'm not wrong, either; when he comes back I can already see something in his hand. It is, as far as I can tell, completely unrelated to anything we've been discussing. All I can see is a braided red string. The rest is in his palm and I'm sure this'll be fun...

But again, he surprises me. He's not even thinking about tickets and bills. He just holds this out to me, by the string, so I can see what looks like a small, lumpy white bead on the end of it. On closer inspection it's jade, and not lumpy, but carved. "What's this?"

He calls it something that sounds uncomfortable like 'killing'. Then adds, "For your sister. Will protect her."

He's still holding it out, and smiling all over his face like he really believes this. Would it be callous to point out that the time for 'protection' has come and gone? That would be callous, I probably shouldn't do that... Anyway, the frigging thing's just going to hang there until I take it, so I have to. Mr Po is practically glowing, like he really has done his bit for human existence with this little gesture. Well, fair play to him. Me and mine, life we lead? We can always use a fresh good luck charm.