	Peace Returns
        =============

The feeling of being all right, of being at peace, of not being 
fucked-up, that had grown steadily from when Trinnie had 
woken up shivering and sweating only a few hours before, 
was coming to its peak, the peak she knew so well and 
which was all that made her life worth living. 

And then, so suddenly, it was over. An abrupt collapse into 
a state of sickness and disgust. At which point she sucked 
out the fluid from her veins back into the syringe. 

Soon, and really very soon, she would push open the door 
of her shitty little room in the huge condemned apartment 
block, where she lived with only a mattress and a few, too 
few, possessions. She would padlock the door behind her, 
not wishing to lose what few things she had to the junkie 
with the haunted black eyes whose room was next door. 
She would then run a half mile or so of twisted roads 
clutching in a plastic sachet the mass of powder she'd 
reconstituted from the contents of the syringe. And when 
she got to that padlocked and claustrophobic apartment in 
the council estate, she would give the sachet to Ken, a 
thickset guy with a ring through his eyebrow and needle-
thin pupils. For this she would be paid twenty, thirty or fifty 
pounds, depending on how much she'd extracted from her 
veins since she'd last seen him. A necessary transaction for 
both life and living.

And then with the money paid to her by Ken, dodging past 
his savage bull terrier as she squeezed out of his apartment, 
and with the money she also collected from the shops 
where she'd returned the food she'd regurgitated in neat 
parcels and wrapped up neatly, the alcohol she spat back 
into the bottles or cans before sealing them tightly and the 
cigarettes she artfully regenerated from the ashes left in her 
ashtray, she would take all this money, sometimes a great 
deal of money, and go on to the streets where she would 
squander it on the entirely unsatisfactory sex to which she 
was somehow addicted and for which she would sometimes 
pay six, seven or eight men, in just an hour or so, for the 
privilege of fucking her.

Trinnie wasn't sure why she insisted on paying for sex. It 
was, if anything, the least pleasant part of her life; the most 
meaningful and satisfactory being those moments just 
before she extracted the fluid from her vein and then, with 
so much ceremony, undid the poultice around her ankle or 
arm, or released the pressure on the vein on her neck or 
crotch, and then by the miracle of the creative energy of her 
cigarette lighter and that old flame-enamelled spoon, 
manufacture the powder for which she was paid so well.

However, times were getting better. Things were steadily 
improving. Now she shared a squalid squat with Juanita, 
the small girl whose tits always dropped out of her shirt, and 
Phil, whose front teeth were missing, Although Trinnie's 
memory was at best hazy, she could still occasionally recall 
those times, long before she settled in the squat, when she 
mostly slept in shop doorways and underneath railway 
bridges. And somewhere in that time she remembered 
waking up after the most blissful high she could ever 
remember and soon became aware that everything in life 
was just shit. Shit, crap and just fucking awful!

Why did she spend so much money paying men to fuck her? 
Except for the odd few kind words they said when they left, 
and sometimes, but not always, when they met, it was just 
fucking. Fuck. Fuck. Fucking. They would push their tiny 
shrivelled penises into her vagina, cunt, twat, (whatever it 
was called, it was just a hole between her legs, with no 
feeling and no sensation), sometimes sheathed in a condom 
and sometimes, but less frequently, not. Then it would 
almost suddenly suck up all the fluid that had previously 
swollen the nipple of the condom or trickled down her inner 
thighs, and, like a rubber syringe, become stiff and hard. 
And the pleasure of the fucking would be up against a wall 
in a dark alley, on the back seat of a car, on the mattress in 
her squalid room or behind a bush in the park. 

For this dubious pleasure, she paid the men sometimes up 
to fifty pounds a time for the privilege of fucking her. 
Sometimes she would pay more, perhaps a whole ton, but 
for this she was paid at least twenty quid for a small room 
in a seedy hotel, that, despite the many semen stains on the 
linen, was the nearest to comfort Trinnie ever got to know. 
And usually before she splashed out on such an expensive 
fuck, sometimes where her arse was also violated, and on 
one occasion where she spat out urine from her mouth 
straight into the penis in front of her, she would stay in that 
room all night, usually totally smashed, before extracting 
the fluid from her veins for which Ken so handsomely 
rewarded her.

But her life was definitely getting better. 

Trinnie regarded the skin on her calf muscle through bleary 
eyes. She remembered she once sported a horrible septic 
scar there, which got gradually worse and worse until that 
vicious bull terrier of Ken's pressed his teeth into her and in 
a few moments effected a miracle surgery that returned her 
calf to its current state, where only needle scars marred the 
skin. And there weren't as many parts of her body covered 
with scars like that as there used to be. In fact, they were 
gradually healing up, one by one. 

She didn't feel as ill as she used to, either. Okay, she still 
felt pretty much like shit most of the time, but just straight 
nauseous, not like really, really influenza- or pneumonia-
type ill. The horrible spots that had ruined her complexion 
were getting slightly less swollen. There wasn't nearly as 
much pus coming out of them nowadays.

But Trinnie had only recently started caring at all about 
anything much, and her memories of really not that long 
ago seemed to be increasingly repulsive, whereas at the 
time she didn't care very much at all. Her life was one 
round of pulling fluid out of her veins, selling it to Ken and 
his vicious bull terrier, which Trinnie was much more 
careful about treading on, and buying men's services. 

Of course, Trinnie didn't just pay men to fuck her. 
Sometimes she paid for a blow job, where she fed the 
semen from her throat back into the penis's tiny little hole. 
Sometimes all she did, and this hardly cost her anything, 
hardly the price of even one fix for which she was paid by 
Ken, was to take the penis in the palm of her hand, coated 
with semen that she'd rubbed onto it from a tissue in her 
pocket, feed it back into the vent, and then pump the shaft 
until it lost the stiffness it so abruptly began with and fell 
soft and limp between the man's knees. However, she 
noticed that as time went by, she was paying more and 
more for sex, but finding less need for it, while at the same 
time her business of extracting powder from her veins to 
sell to Ken was becoming less profitable. 

Trinnie wasn't at all sure when it was she somehow gained 
a kind of lucidity and clarity of thought that had simply not 
been there until that time. At first, it appeared as a little 
chink between her passion for sex and her declining, but 
still lucrative, business in powder extraction. It was 
probably about the time that she moved out of the squat, 
leaving behind her companions, some she observed to be in 
a totally unhealthy condition, and moved into a relatively 
luxurious, but actually squalid, bedsit, where at least she 
had a proper bed and a kitchen. She was also surrounded 
by spoons, razor blades, mirrors, empty bottles of wine and 
whiskey, crumpled-up newspapers and the remains of take-
away food she might later return neatly wrapped and 
miraculously reconstituted.

She still had plenty of sex, although quite often the men 
who provided her with it would arrive at her apartment 
unannounced. Then Trinnie would pay them for the sex 
they would enjoy for the next five to ten minutes and then 
escort them back to the street corner where for a short 
while she would linger smoking cigarettes before returning 
to her bedsit. Then, after another while, and perhaps a 
spliff, another unannounced visitor would come to her 
apartment only for her to have to pay him for sex. 

She wasn't so much beginning to enjoy sex as becoming 
more aware of it actually happening. Her cunt was 
becoming more sensitive, and yes! now and then, she got a 
sensation from the penis thrusting into her, usually not long 
after it was put in place and sucked in its semen, that was 
very nearly pleasurable. But nothing as much as pleasurable 
as that sensation she got just before she extracted fluid 
from her veins and reconstituted it into powder ready to sell 
to Ken.

After a while, it wasn't Ken at all to whom she was selling 
powder, although Trinnie knew of his whereabouts. He was 
now a much less frequent buyer, and one she found rather 
less appealing as her sensitivity towards her environment 
grew more acute. In fact, she now only sold powder to Ken 
once or twice a week. More often, she sold powder to a 
much nicer couple who were both fairly blitzed out of it all 
the time, but a lot less prone to irrational acts of violence 
and didn't keep horrible dogs around their apartment. But 
as her friendship warmed towards Ally and Pete, as they 
were called, and she had fewer arguments with them about 
how they weren't able to afford to buy the powder from her 
that she'd extracted from her veins, she saw less and less of 
Ken, and became correspondingly less keen on having sex 
with strange men. 

Just as Trinnie's consciousness and awareness became more 
coherent, she also became more untidy. For some reason, 
she stopped steadily removing rubbish from her floor and 
returning it to the shops where she bought it, and began to 
deliberately add to it. Maybe, she wasn't that bad to start 
off with, maybe only once a month or whatever, but just 
after she'd returned every last bit of rubbish to the shops, 
and a huge exercise that had been, perhaps taking six 
months or more to do, she deliberately emptied a whole 
load of rubbish all over the place. She blew out dust onto 
the carpet, scattered newspapers about, spilt ashtrays onto 
the floor and carefully replaced stains and marks to the 
kitchen and bathroom furniture.

Still, despite this sluttish behaviour, she was actually paying 
for sex rather less often, though she paid more for it, and, 
strangely enough, got rather less sex for her money. She 
was also treated with more kindness by her clients, some of 
whom she paid to see more than once a week. Perhaps she 
paid more for sex because she was better looking. Many of 
the spots on her face had cleared up, some of her needle 
scars had vanished, and she started applying make-up 
around her lips and eyes. At first she was rather inexpert, 
always being in a hurry and not really bothered by the 
results, but after a while, just after waking up each evening, 
she washed out of the sink a more attractive face that she 
so laboriously removed later in the day. 

And she was still extracting a lot of fluid from her veins, 
but now mostly from those in her arm and legs. And she 
was being paid less, sometimes a lot less, for the paltry 
amounts she sold to Ally and Pete, who would take the 
reconstituted powder, carefully weigh it, and replace it into 
plastic sachets.

It was difficult to tell when Trinnie lost her appetite for sex 
with strange men. Bit by bit, it became less frequent. 
Perhaps only one or two a night, usually just before taking 
them to a hotel where she might buy them a drink or two as 
a reward. 

And then one morning, just before going to bed, she had a 
blazing row with a tall fair-haired man who stormed angrily 
into her room. This was Paul, who after this acrimonious 
and tearful encounter became her most frequent lover. In 
fact, there were sometimes days on end when the only 
person Trinnie would fuck was Paul. And she didn't even 
have to pay him anything to persuade him to do so!

Life was now much better, although Paul was often quite 
tearful, sometimes angry, sometimes melancholy, and he 
lived in a flat elsewhere in the city where he increasingly 
asked Trinnie to live with him. In fact, this seemed to be the 
general direction of Trinnie's relationship with him. She 
often wondered whether she would ever live with Paul 
permanently rather than stay in the bedsit, which 
incidentally was gradually becoming tidier. She would now 
empty rubbish onto the floor two, even three times a week, 
but not nearly in such great quantity. She was drinking less, 
smoking less, but strangely, although she was extracting 
fluid from her veins once, sometimes twice, a day she was 
also now smoking dope, snorting out neat lines of cocaine 
into neat rows and spitting out neat little pills. As she 
became more lucid, she also appreciated quite varied new 
feelings and sensations, some of which intimately related to 
whatever substance she regurgitated and for which she was 
paid by Ally and Paul, and also by some other friends of 
hers. 

She wasn't sure when she stopped paying for sex. Not long 
before she took up this job in an office. Not that she was 
very good at her job. In fact, she was absolutely useless. 
From the day she was escorted to her desk by the security 
guard, she wasn't sure why anyone would tolerate her being 
there. She'd sit in the toilet, extracting fluid from her veins, 
and, rather more often, snort powder down her nose 
through a twenty pound note and onto a glass mirror she 
carried for the purposes of catching the powder before 
gathering it into a plastic sachet to sell to Ally and Pete.

Paul was strange. He was always agitated, always tearful, 
telling her how much he loved her. And he was especially 
agitated just before any incident took place. He was 
especially agitated the day before she started working for 
the law firm, asking her again and again where she would 
find the money to afford her habits. Of course, she had 
almost totally given up paying for sex with men, though 
there were the odd occasions she went out for that purpose, 
usually followed a few days later by a phone call from a 
very posh sounding woman, Camilla, who at first 
complained about the quality of the sexual services she 
received from clients, but came increasingly to congratulate 
her and encourage her to spend more and more on this 
relatively infrequent habit.

However, Trinnie was pleased that her appearance was 
gradually improving. One morning, she looked in 
satisfaction at her reflection in the mirror, which also 
reflected Clem, a guy from Conveyancing, slumped naked 
on her bed, and saw that she had only one little spot left on 
her face: hardly anything to worry about. Her face looked 
quite good really. Her eyes had colour, although her pupils 
were slightly small, always a sign that she was due to 
extract fluid from her veins fairly soon, and she was being 
paid more and more to regurgitate healthier and heartier 
meals. 

Trinnie had a series of lovers from work and elsewhere, 
intermixed with the occasional, but less frequent, lover for 
whom she paid money. At first, she didn't care what Paul 
thought about them, although he was the most frequent, 
and to be honest, the most loving, of her lovers. She had 
gained a genuine kind of feeling in her vagina, and she 
found herself drenched with sweat and passion just before 
she had sex with anyone, but the more urgently and most 
vocally with Paul.

And things were improving at work too. She even got a 
phone call from some old people whom she discovered 
were her parents, although they were a bit tearful and kept 
on asking Trinnie why she was living in a seedy little bedsit 
when she could be living in a much more comfortable 
mortgaged property with Paul.

And then, one day, there was no Paul. Trinnie was living 
alone in the flat, but she now had more frequent lovers and 
she met for the last time the woman from the escort agency 
who arranged her meetings with strange men. She was 
extracting fluid from her veins less regularly now. She 
sometimes didn't bother reconstituting it into a powder 
from her veins, but simply blew it out of her nose in its 
original powder form. She also went out much more 
frequently. Just after waking up with a lover, quite often a 
different one each evening, she would head to a nightclub 
where she would dance and fuck in the toilet cubicles, and 
after a while she would spit out alcohol into glasses and 
tablets into her hands for which she was always later paid. 
She was having a great time, though she missed Paul, who 
might not always be the best fuck in her life, but was the 
most considerate and thoughtful.

And then, one day, Paul reappeared. After a long day, 
which started with Trinnie leaving the small hotel room 
she'd been living in, with all her possessions, for the last 
week or so after having previously left the bedsit she'd lived 
in for the last few years, she found herself shouting and 
yelling at Paul as she entered his well-appointed apartment 
in the town centre. It had been six months or more since 
she'd last seen him, when he left her meekly and 
apologetically at the ground floor door of the apartment 
block that housed her bedsit. 

But living with Paul was pretty dreadful to start off with. 
They were always having arguments, even though these 
often started with the two of them making passionate love 
in the huge bed they shared. 

He didn't like the heroin she was gradually extracting rather 
less often from her veins. He didn't like the cocaine she was 
snorting out of her nostrils. He didn't like that she smoked 
so much. Most of all, he didn't like the fact that she'd 
started having sex with someone called Tony, whom she'd 
met at a party once. Of course, there was nothing wrong 
with Tony, although Trinnie didn't pay him a penny for his 
services. There wasn't just Tony, although Paul didn't seem 
to know this, but other lovers, if many fewer than she'd had 
in the past. There was Vikram the computer magazine 
journalist, Roddy the Irish barman, Ally and Paul 
themselves who liked a little threesome, Paolo the Italian 
waiter, and what would Paul make of Jayne, the girl she'd 
got to know just before she went on that all-girls night out? 
Trinnie was fairly dismissive at first of Paul's accusations, 
but as time went on, she began to care more and more. 
Gone were the times when she'd say "So fucking what if I'm 
fucking Tony!" or "If I want to get high, I'll get fucking 
high!" and more often she would try and persuade Paul he 
was really the only one who mattered.

But life was undeniably getting better all the time. A kind of 
peace was beginning to form in Trinnie's life. Her work 
improved dramatically. In fact, she now only snorted out 
one line of coke from her nostrils each day, usually around 
eleven o'clock. She still smoked a fair bit, and she still had a 
few other lovers besides Paul, whom, she became aware, 
was actually her husband. 

Indeed, she was much more discreet about the men she 
made love with, deliberately making sure that Paul wouldn't 
find out about them. Tony was only one of them to be sure, 
but lately her liaisons tended to be fewer and fewer 
between. And although Paul and she would often spend 
hours at a time, fucking away, sweat and fluids intermingled 
in slippery, orgasmic coition, her other sessions were at 
least as passionate. There was none of the abruptness she 
had once associated with sex. The build-up towards 
lovemaking was slow and tender, the male partner 
gradually awakening from his pre-coital slumber toward a 
long discussion about life and its meaning, and then after 
hours of sexual coupling that was tiring and energetic, there 
would be a period of enrobing followed by the regurgitation 
of cannabis and cocaine.

It was about this time that Trinnie stopped selling heroin to 
Ally and Pete. In fact, after she last saw them, sitting in 
their apartment, surrounded by huge cushions and the 
sound of some pretty funky Arabic and Asian world music, 
she didn't have any to blow down a rolled-up five pound 
note to sell to anyone. Indeed, when she gave Paul and Ally 
the pitifully small amount they were so incredibly mean 
about reimbursing, she never had any more at all. However, 
she felt better for it. Perhaps, all that stuff she'd squeezed 
out of her was better for having been removed, although it 
had once been such a lucrative source of income. How else 
would she have been able to afford to have sex with so 
many men?

However, that was one addiction she also saw less and less 
need for. Somehow, Paul became all that Trinnie needed in 
the form of a lover. Trinnie said goodbye (or, in truth, 
"hello") to Gavin, Paul's best friend from college, who she 
had been making love with on an occasional basis for so 
long, well ever since that acrimonious argument between 
Paul and him, which was when she first met Gavin. And all 
that was left to satisfy her lust for pleasure was Paul. Okay, 
she also had the occasional snort of coke, but most of the 
fun that Trinnie had was with Paul and no one else. 

As she settled down naked in Paul's arms, the sounds of the 
Dave Holland Quintet emerging from the Bang & Olufssen 
speakers, passing a cigarette from lip to lip, Trinnie felt at 
last the peace that had evaded her for so long. Somehow, 
as far back as she could remember, everything had been a 
progression leading step by step from her ragged disease-
ridden beginnings where she had been placed so carefully 
by the policeman who had dragged her corpse there from 
the ambulance, to this moment now, where the peace she 
had once only attained fitfully before extracting heroin from 
her veins was now solid and real. And as she regarded Paul, 
who smiled back at her, a hand cupped around a nipple, 
while she stroked his tumescent penis, she compared their 
love with that which she'd had with so many others. It was 
true that, by being circumscribed by Paul's rather 
unadventurous sexual preferences, their love had less of the 
sense of danger or passion she'd experienced with other 
men. But whereas in the past, she had found his reluctance 
to even engage in such relatively innocent variants as anal 
intercourse a sufficient cause for contempt, now she saw it 
as just a part of his character. After all, no other lover, 
including Jayne, had expressed as much love with his 
tongue nor could anyone else succeed in bringing her to 
such spasms of ecstasy without the assistance of drugs, just 
with his teeth, tongue and lips around her vagina.

Trinnie hugged Paul close to her. She knew now she was 
truly in love. Her drugs, her casual lovers, her degeneracy 
behind her. From now on, all she could see was a future of 
love and passion. 

This was her moment of peace. This was the zenith of her 
life. She just wished there was some sense, in the vagaries 
of time and space, that this moment could last forever. 


