Jon McGregor - Even the Dogs

The poppy heads swaying suddenly in a strong breeze, pressing themselves flat to the ground as if ducking for cover, and the helicopter suddenly dropping out of the sky. Like a what like a fucking like a black mother goose but. What were they even doing in bloody Helmand. And all the warm hands lifting him through the air, over the field, into the belly of the mother, and the mother lifting high over the landscape, over the fields and the mountains and the roads and trails which wind almost invisibly through the valleys and passes, over the rock-sheltered pair of shacks where the bare-chested boys are bundling up dozens of paper-bound powder bricks and loading them on to dust-coloured mules who wait patiently in the midday heat before setting off in long ambling trains through the hills. And the mules keep walking steadily for days, guided by young boys who run and scramble alongside, waving sticks and shouting high-pitched commands which vanish into specks of sound no bigger than the distant birds of prey which spiral high above them, following the shape of sunlight and shadow across the valley each morning until a small group of canvas-draped shacks comes into sight around the last corner and a man ducks out through a low doorway, pulling a scarf down from his mouth and welcoming the boys, offering them tea, shaking their hands like men and already moving towards the mules to untether their loads. Behind him, inside the shacks, other men are crouched over pots and pestles and fires, pounding the pressed bricks back into dust and mixing the dust with vinegar, heating it over low fires before adding water and charcoal and washing soda, cooling and reheating and steaming the solution, passing it through filters and steambaths and pipes until finally a bright white powder begins to form in the bottom of a broad flat pan, and is carefully warmed and scraped and lifted out on to sheets of paper to dry. And by the time the powder is poured into clear plastic bags and weighed and sealed, the boys and their light-footed mules are halfway home, their pockets fat with money and their talk full of what they will do with it, the things they will buy their families and the savings they will put towards a scrap of land on which to grow poppies of their own, while somewhere overhead Ant still lies in the belly of the helicopter as it clatters over the landscape, angry and low, its shadow rising and falling as he looks up at the faces around him and feels the warm embrace of the morphine flooding through his broken body while men with headscarves and rifles and rucksacks full of heroin scramble over the hidden mountain passes which cross the border into Iran, making their way down to the roads where convoys of Toyota pickups are waiting to race across the plains towards the city, tensed for battle against the government soldiers who are waiting for them, soldiers who are now checking their weapons and sipping mint tea, listening to the evening’s briefing, watching the sun dip behind the mountains and wondering again why they would sacrifice their lives to interrupt this unstoppable flow of wealth passing through their land on its way to the marketplaces and backrooms of the city, to be packed and weighed and repacked and sold on to other traders, other smugglers, other men with weapons and suitcases and armoured cars who will take the cargo on through the fields and deserts towards the west, to the Turkish border and far beyond, while they stay here and watch the sun dip behind the mountains, and listen to the evening’s briefing, and watch through night-vision binoculars as shimmering Toyota pickups come racing towards them from out of the moss-green fearful dark.

The same darkness from which the helicopter drops down into Camp Bastion, resting lightly on the ground for a moment while the many hands carry Ant out into the warm dusty air and across the concrete, the helicopter already falling away into the sky overhead as he’s taken through to a spotless operating theatre where the scrubbed-up surgeons are waiting with forceps and scissors and an electrical saw. And as they pour more drugs in through the hole in his arm, pushing him over the edge into a deep dark painless sleep, he sees, in a single whirling moment, what we all can see: this strange journey the seeping poppy gum takes across continents, from an Afghan field to an English city street, carried by mules and men and pickup trucks, through shacks and labs and mountain passes, across borders, through hotel rooms and teashops and dark-windowed cars, stuffed into bags and suitcases and petrol tanks, coffee jars, coal sacks, butcher’s vans, freight containers, arseholes and vaginas and crudely stitched wounds, forced in and out of desperate bodies, glued in under wigs and false beards and fake-pregnant bellies, squeezing into Europe through the narrow gateway of Istanbul and on through the transit routes of Kosovo and Macedonia and Bosnia, bloody Bosnia, shipments bought and sold by men with dark glasses at café tables looking over the sea, suitcases of money changing hands in backrooms and bathrooms, arguments settled by fists and knives and boys with borrowed pistols buzzing past on scooters, the cargo gathering weight and value and bloody narrative as it hurtles on through Italy and Germany and Holland and Belgium and France. And as Ant rumbles his way home in the hold of a Hercules, his leg cut down to a bandaged stump, he flies over an English Channel across which the heroin shipments are pouring, in fishing boats and yachts and speeding cruisers, in light aircraft, in the distended stomachs of human mules pacing uncomfortably up and down the decks of passenger ferries, in the backs of container lorries bringing the stuff in by the tonne to be driven on to warehouses and safehouses across the country, weighed and cut and bagged again on kitchen tables and workshop benches, sold on and split and sold on again, broken down into smaller and smaller batches until a bald-headed man in a baggy tracksuit gets out of a BMW on the Milton Estate, jogs up the concrete stairs of a towerblock to the ninth floor, knocks twice on the steel door, and walks in past a young man in a baseball cap who nods and closes the door behind him. And a few minutes later a boy in a grey hooded top comes out of the same stairwell carrying a bike, and rides off down the hill towards the railway sidings, down past the police station and the hospital, over the canal and under the motorway and around the roundabout to the Miller’s Arms and the phoneboxes where Danny still waits, tutting at the damp ragged note Danny hands him and circling around on his bike before flicking a bag into the long grass and pedalling away up the hill, looking once over his shoulder to see Danny scrabbling across the ground for the gear and shutting himself in the phonebox with Einstein still jumping around outside, laying out his works on the crooked metal shelf and trying to keep his sweating shaking hands even a little bit still while he cooks up a fix in a blackened spoon, too much, holding his breath as he jabs the needle into the filter and draws up the coffee-coloured juice, too much, he knows it’s too much or he thinks it might be but so what he wants to make sure, so what he doesn’t care, pulling down his soiled trousers without waiting for it to cool and poking a new hole through the scabbing wound over his fem pushing in deeper in and feeling for the vein feeling for the blood feeling the pain the good pain that means he’ll be well soon that all shall be well and he draws back the syringe a little to see the blood from the vein to be sure he’s got the right place but there’s nothing there there’s nothing there he moves the needle he takes it out and puts it in and takes it out and puts it in and there’s nothing there so he pulls it right out and wipes it clean on his sleeve and turns to the window and uses the dark night as a mirror to focus in on his neck he clenches his jaw to make the veins stand out he chooses a vein and watches closely in the darkly lit glass and pushes the needle in to a good new vein a clean vein the blood billowing back into the syringe and he eases the plunger down down down and feels the gear charging through his body’s borders around his bloodstream through his heart and his lungs and his brain and it feels good good good he feels well again he feels whole again he feels sorted at last he feels what he feels warm and clean and wrapped up in silk and tissue and cotton wool he feels the way he felt when he first began he leans his face against the cold dark glass and looks out at the city at the lights at the passing cars the passing trains the orange-bellied clouds and the black star-pierced sky a flock of pigeons silhouetted against the neon walls of the shopping centre in the valley and he drops the needle to the floor and presses his hands to the cold glass and slides to the floor and curls up on the floor all this shall pass and he waits for all this to pass.