Dave Hutchinson - Sleeps With Angels

I dragged Marcin through the mass of heaving bodies towards the front door, which was not easy to do for two reasons: firstly, there were a lot of heaving bodies, and secondly, he was a big man. He wasn’t fat any more, but he was tall and bulky, like an amiable bear. He was wearing designer jeans and a white shirt and a jerkin of butter-soft leather. After university, he’d gone to work for a little biotechnology company in Belgium, and from his clothes it looked as if they were doing well.

Finally, we reached the door and stepped out onto the landing, where we could finally hear each other.

“Do you know whose party this is?” I asked.

He shrugged.

“It was your idea to come here,” I said.

“You know how these things work,” he said. “Anonymized emails, posts on bulletin boards. Nobody ever knows whose parties they are.”

There was shrieking behind us. We looked round and two topless girls were standing side by side in the doorway. “Hey, Marcin!” shouted one. “Great party!”

Marcin grinned and waved hello and the girls turned and plunged back into the flat.

“Okay,” he said. “It’s my party. But don’t tell anybody.”

I was staring at the naked backs of the two girls as they half-walked, half-swam through the press of bodies. I was fairly certain that I had last seen one of them in the newspapers, receiving an award as Young Polish Entrepreneur of the Year.

“I’ve got something for you,” Marcin said.

I smiled. Marcin’s company developed what used to be called ‘designer drugs,’ and down the years he had been a fairly reliable source of pre-release medications. Most of them had been of limited use to me, but he had been responsible for several evenings of chemically-induced enjoyment. He didn’t come home all that often these days, but when he did he usually had a present for me, a successor to those CDs and DVDs he’d given me when I left the hospital.

He reached into a pocket of his jerkin and took out a little plastic envelope and handed it to me. “There you go,” he said. “A taste of the future.”

“What does it do?” I asked, turning the little envelope over in my fingers.

The sound system emitted a single huge chord that reverberated through the building as he said, “It’s paint medication,” he said.

“I’m not in pain,” I told him.

“No,” he said a little louder. “Not pain, paint . Paint medication.”

“I beg your pardon?”

He sighed. “Do you want it or not?”

I thought about it. He had never brought me anything harmful. I tore the edge off the envelope and tipped its contents into my palm. It was an odd-looking tablet. Round and thin, a couple of centimetres across, and made of some gelatine substance. It was floppy , which in my experience was an unusual attribute for a medication.

I put the floppy tablet in my mouth and it melted on my tongue. It tasted very faintly of kiwi fruit. I looked at Marcin and raised my eyebrows.

He grinned. “There you go,” he said and he put his arm around my shoulders and started to steer me back into the party. “Now, let’s see if there’s anything left in the bath…”

I regained consciousness the next morning and my phone was ringing. I lay where I was, eyes closed, for quite a while waiting for the ringing to stop, but it didn’t. Finally, without opening my eyes, I reached out to the bedside table, picked up the phone, and after some fumbling located the little button that turned it off. Then I lost consciousness again.

Some time later I became aware that the entryphone by the front door was buzzing. I didn’t know how long I’d been awake; it seemed, at the moment, that I had been listening to that buzzing noise all my life.

I waited for the buzzing noise to stop. I waited a long time. It stopped. Some time passed. The buzzing started again. I opened my eyes as far as they would go, which wasn’t very far at all. Down in the harbour, a speedboat went by and it felt as if the noise was scalping me. I became aware that something awful had happened in my mouth over the past few hours, and now all my taste-buds were misfiring. Meanwhile, the buzzing went on and on and on.

I closed one eye again, which made things a little more bearable, although not by much, and rolled off the futon onto the floor, where I briefly fell asleep again until the buzzing brought me round.

Slowly, I rolled over onto my stomach, and from there managed to lever myself up onto my hands and knees, and in that position it was a crawl of only a couple of light-years to the front door, where I slapped at the button to open the downstairs door.

A minute or so later, there was a knock on my door. From where I was sitting, I pawed at the lock until it clicked. “Open,” I managed to say, and then I was sick in my lap.

The door opened and Marcin stepped into the hallway. He saw me sitting slumped against the wall and he shook his head. “And you call yourself a Pole,” he said. He looked almost painfully bright and clean. He knelt down beside me. “Here,” he said, holding something out between his thumb and forefinger and pressing it to my lips. “Take this.”

Whatever he was holding made it between my lips and I swallowed reflexively.

I’m not sure I can describe what happened next without it sounding like a hallucination, but a sensation began at the soles of my feet and travelled like a wavefront up my body. It was as if all the crap and pain and poison and illness and fatigue was carried ahead of the wave, and when it reached the crown of my head it fountained up into the air and I was crystal-clear sober again. As far as I could judge, the whole thing took less than five minutes.

“What the fuck was that?” I asked.

“Can’t say, I’m afraid,” Marcin said, reaching a hand down to me. “There are copyright issues. You need a shower.”

I looked down at my lap. “Hm,” I said.

It was, as it turned out, the most extraordinary shower I had ever taken. It was as if my skin was a drumhead; I felt every individual drop of water hitting my body. I could smell each ingredient of the shower gel I used. I became fascinated by the grout between the tiles of the shower because I could see the way its surface had crystallised as it set. Everything was pin-sharp, as if a gale had howled through my head and blown away a fog.

Stepping out of the shower, I smelled coffee. Marcin had obviously decided to make himself at home.

“Coffee,” I said, walking into the kitchen towelling my hair.

Marcin was sitting at the table, a steaming mug in front of him. “You don’t want to drink coffee after what I just gave you,” he said. “Your heart couldn’t take it.”

“I just want to taste it,” I said, and I picked up his mug and took a sip and it was the most extraordinary thing I had ever tasted. I didn’t have the language to describe the experience.

I put the mug down and sat across the table from him, draping the towel around my neck. “How long is this going to last?”

He shrugged. “Different subjects metabolise it differently. If you’re in the median, you’ve got another hour and a half or so, then you’ll be back to normal, but without the hangover. In about twelve hours you’ll crash and sleep like a baby.”

“Have you got any more?”

He looked levelly at me. “What I just gave you is at least five years away from human trials. I could go to prison for the rest of my life just for giving you that one tab. And you ask me if I’ve got any more.”

“Excuse me?” I said. “ Human trials ?”

“We’ve just started testing it on lab animals,” he said.

“You’re giving it to monkeys.”

“Primates next year. So far we’ve been giving it to rats.” He shook his head at the expression on my face. “Did it work?”