The double-slit experiment

Tara always used to take the piss out of me for being “posh”. All because I stayed on to do my A Levels at sixth form college, and because I was brought up in one of the “nicer” welfare houses on the opposite estate. I insisted I wasn’t, and anyway, unless I was at school, I was with her and everyone else on The Crescent. Treading the same tracks from the mucky grey pavement up to Billy’s flat, looping up and down the high-rise in the piss-stinking lift. If not at Billy’s, then roaming bored shitless round the estate, kicking at the same corrugated iron fronts of shut down discount stores, our defunct library and community centre. We called it The Crescent because we knew – instinctively, I think – that a name like Jardine sounded a little too floral, a little too dignified. I once told Tara it meant garden or orchard in French. She just laughed and called me posh again. 

High-rise and low-rise blocks of flats lined the half-moon of our green. They stood in concave formation, backs to the world, cringing self-consciously as though well aware they were a sight for sore eyes. A checkerboard of picture windows ran around their exteriors, each a vista on to a different kind of deprivation, lack or smallness of life. Columns of shallow balconies – for the luckier ones – cast a trippy interference pattern across their facades. Each iron grille thrust itself forward, gesturing towards something a little more like freedom. 

Entering Billy’s block felt like ripping reality a new one. A tear announced by the jarring grate of the buzzer and confirmed by the decisive slam of the self-closing door behind us. The sound would seem as infinite as it seemed final, resounding through the cold cavity of the lobby’s interior. With its ominously unmanned welcome desk, the lobby was a shady no-man’s land that was not what it was: a supposed intermediary between the disorderliness of the public and the sanctity of home. We’d head straight for the lift, its inners soaked with piss and anonymous spittle, then with a press of the magic button be heaved fourteen floors up to Billy’s flat. All along the way, the hoisting cable would creak, churn and tease us with the idea of an impending death plummet.

We spent most of our time at Billy’s, because Billy’s was where we felt most free. His grandma had raised him there before being struck down by a heart attack when Billy was sixteen. By way of succession, the state handed Billy full rights to the tenancy. Tara and me, amongst other transient residents present and past, were truly grateful of the favour. Grandma would have turned in her grave knowing what had become of that flat. How careless strangers had sullied her doilies, seared cigarette holes into her polyester-satin, re-carpeted the place in a thick layer of takeaway cartons, cans, ash and empty baccy pouches. In any case, the place suited us just nicely: its floral, bric-a-brac stylings, for instance, made for surprisingly good visual stimuli when tripping balls. The illicitness of racking up lines on one of Grandma’s “just for show” china plates was also never likely to lose its novelty. 

Tara and me would spend most afternoons slumped side by side on Billy’s sofa, chatting shit and dozy on hash. Together, we looked like two different editions of the same line of product. Matching Adidas trackies, silver-nickel nose hoops, clip-in extensions and nuclear orange tans. Distinguished the one from the other only by our choices in hair dye; mine, brittle peroxide blonde – muddy brown roots – hers, a bottle blue-black that left her looking permanently washed out. Tara was a white blonde naturally, and so the rare occasion her brows weren’t pencilled in might have been mistaken for something from another galaxy. 

I watched her marker pen brows furrow, this one day, as I was showing her a video on Schrödinger’s Cat.

“Right. So. You’re trying to tell me the cat’s alive and dead at the same time?” She smirked at me, eyes narrowed, stifling the release of the toke she’d just taken.

“Exactly.” I said. “Until someone decides to look through the flap in the box – it’s alive and dead at the same time.” 

In all honesty, I didn’t really get it either. Not that this prevented the idea from making absolute, total sense when I was high. There was something in the nature of hash that seemed to bolster my capacity for mental acrobatics. 

“Fuck off, man!” She laughed in a sputtering exhale, shaking her head and passing the spliff back to me. She sat up.

“Hey, hey – it’s Magical Craig!”

Tara dug me in the ribs as a shifty slip of a man slinked round the doorway, cautiously manoeuvring his way through the junk. Magical Craig reminded me a lot of a creepy-crawly in the way that he seemed to shimmy out of some dark crook or cranny in the architecture and then silently return there afterwards. He’d started reappearing round Billy’s about a couple months prior. Before we knew Billy, Magical Craig had stopped there for a month, not long after the death of Billy’s grandma. An unlikely pairing, but at the time Billy was just glad of the company. Magical Craig took up residence in the dining room, holed up in there by a singular determination to kick his heroin habit once and for all. Billy told us how Magical Craig spent all day everyday painting portraits of the same red, screaming lady – over and over – until at last his demons were exorcised and he was finally purged of the drug.

Other than the aforementioned, it was hard to get at any kind of origin story with Magical Craig. Hence, I supposed, his “Magical” charm. The task was made no easier by his selective mutism and general evasiveness of character. Even in his presence, it was the done thing to refer to him indirectly, in third-person, and he seemed very happy with it that way. We knew this, owed to his preferred modes of communication: winks, smirks and eyebrow waggles. I was scared of him at first with his gaunt cheeks, bald head and sinister look, but Tara reassured me he was just a kitty cat, and truly he was. He sat lodged between us on the sofa, hunched over, dutifully knocking up our next spliff. I paid careful attention to the back of his head; the dents in the surface of his skull, the meaty pork rind of his earlobes, the crinkles behind his ears and in the back of his neck where his ageing skin lacked the same elasticity as ours. Many a time, with a fitting magician’s flourish, he’d unfurl each hand to procure us both with a mystery pill. More than once we’d stayed up all night, barely speaking, him parked between us, taking it in turns to play music videos on Youtube. Wordlessly he’d supplement our highs with intermittent lines of speed, dematerialising by the morning as miraculously as he had first surfaced.

Tara and me were less fond of uppers, but we took our highs where we could get them. We were at our best on ketamine. This was where our money went. Every week, we pooled my grant money from the sixth form and the little wage Tara got, working the care home where her mum was manager. All together, we’d have just enough for three grams. We’d jump the bus with others’ discarded old tickets to pick up from the Chinese restaurant in town. We did our first lines – real slugs, always – in the disabled loos. I’d try my best to hold it together as we made our way back out through the restaurant. Liquid salt trickled down the back of our throats as our bodies bent gradually to gravity’s pull. Hand in hand, we slid down the path of least resistance, watching as reality’s vertices flexed and flattened all around us.

It was especially fun to be fucked off our faces in broad daylight. On my favourite day, after picking up, we ran by morning delivery cages, looting fine pastries and two bouquets of flowers. The universe’s gift to us. We bagged makeup bits and demonstration bottles of perfume from Boots. The alarms blared and we ran on. A bank was celebrating the opening of its new branch, so we stole big bunches of red balloons and tied them to our wrists. They seemed far more fitting to our own celebration. Having claimed the backseat of the bus, we set to racking up more lines on the back of our iPhones, brazen as anything in front of backward-facing passengers who eyed us with fright. We freshened up our makeup, adding a dash of bronze from our newly stolen compacts. Not that we were ever going anywhere special – always just back to Billy’s.   

No one was home this particular day when we got back. We went into our bedroom, or grandma’s bedroom as it was formerly known. The walls were danger-orange and black in the lowlight. We settled on her floral chenille bedspread and sniffed up the rest of our supply. I listened as Tara’s voice gradually morphed and warped to nothing but static. I watched as the walls began to reverberate like the skin of a drum, to fold down and disassemble themselves like flat-pack furniture. I saw the two of us, cast adrift in space, spotlighted on the stage of our single bed. In the next moment, we had fallen through a split in the universe, had abandoned our human forms entirely. We seemed to forget who each other was because we started to kiss. We kissed a lot. We were subatomic particles, behaving strangely and unexpectedly. We were all states at once. I felt by the end that I was fucking a black hole itself – that I had entered a space from which I would never return.

As it went, following on from that afternoon, Tara and me fell into fucking very naturally. Almost as if we had never actually not been. Billy moaned about how insular we’d become. I suppose it wasn’t part of the deal, that some day, by way of our newly found symbiosis, we’d have nothing new to bring to the party.

There was a very specific genre of party that Billy liked to hold, and he held them most weekends. These revolved largely around the fact that Billy liked boys. Straight boys, in particular. Hence where me and Tara came into the equation. Billy was a shrewd one – he knew that we owed him; we basically lived there rent-free, after all. The first time, there were five of us in total. Four litres of vodka and eight bags of ketamine. Mathematically, it all seemed to make sense. Billy’s bedroom was nothing if not fit for purpose: two old double mattresses wedged side by side. There was quite literally no way that you could enter Billy’s bedroom, and not then end up in his bed.

The whole thing started off in a juvenile enough way – spin the bottle, strip poker, or something to that effect. It started with me and Tara kissing, then feeling each other up a bit. The ketamine and vodka helped make everything flow. Me then going down on Tara, Billy sucking off Peter. Then Peter’s fucking me, and Ryan’s fucking Tara. I had never felt so close to her as I did then. I felt like we had no secrets from each other, or at least none of the physical kind. Billy had his way with boy number three. I remember, in the corner of my eye, down the hallway and through doorframe of the lounge, as if at the end of a long, lonely tunnel, the silhouette of Magical Craig, sat there puffing smoke rings into empty air. Time was so dilated, it’s hard to gauge how long we carried on for. There was still a rhythmic shifting in the bed when I passed out, the ketamine finally coaxing me into a milky black slumber.

To this end, Billy would do anything to deter us from going out of a weekend. Like the Friday, for instance, we told him we were off to the karaoke at The Raby.

“The fucking Raby?!” He yelled in outrage. “Sketchy as fuck there. I’m telling you, the other day I saw a bloke sprinting out of there with a bloody meat cleaver in his hand. It was ten in the fucking morning, man”. Tara and me just laughed.

“Don’t be daft Billy, probably just a butcher having his liquid breakfast. Nowt wrong with that,” we giggled.

Off we then went, arm in arm careening through the night, much to Billy’s disdain. Yes, the place was rough as tits, and you wouldn’t want to be seen looking at anyone the wrong way, but what a good fucking night there was to be had there. The oldies by the bar found us irresistibly sweet, as we scored ourselves at least a dozen free pints before the night’s end. Wrapped around each other, we swayed by the mic, belting out our passionate rendition of “Black Velvet” before skipping off back home like a pair of naughty twin nymphs. 

We buzzed and buzzed at Billy’s flats but to no avail – intentionally or otherwise we had been locked out. The odd light still burned in the high-rise, but Billy’s wasn’t one of them. It was cold, wet and dark, the air was effervescent with rain and the pavements were pooling with black tar. Making the best of a bad situation, we cashed in our last pennies for a three litre bottle of Frosty Jack’s. Tightening our hoods around our faces, we took refuge in a remnant of forest tucked away behind The Crescent. As we built our nest amongst the bushes, I remember thinking how I would have happily settled for a life, right there, in the primitive wild. Living as animals for as long as Tara wanted the same.

We cuddled there, sharing the cider and listening to all our favourite songs on my tinny phone speaker. I stared at her moony-eyed as she brought my fingertips to her mouth and blew and kissed the cold away. Had we have died there, in that moment, I don’t believe I would have minded. By morning, they’d find us; two little birds, curled up together, fragile, cold and blue like the last pair of an endangered species. Biologists might have been keen to preserve us, to make a museum exhibit of our morbid love. I imagined us behind the vitrine; two sleeping beauties, tucked together in foetal position, never to grow past our reckless teen years.

Tara’s mum threw a barbecue in the late summer of that year. I was heading into my second year of sixth form and life seemed to have gained a velocity I wasn’t entirely comfortable with. It was a time when I was supposed to be thinking about my choices, my future plans and all the rest of it. As we entered Tara’s mam’s house, already half-cut on a couple cans of K cider, we caught sight of Magical Craig, hovering silently on the upstairs landing. He mimed sniffing and ushered us upstairs with a subtle upward nod. We shuffled into the kiddies’ playroom, of all places, as Magical Craig offered us complimentary bumps of coke from the dip in his hand between his forefinger and thumb.

“Can’t beat Magical Craig!” We shouted, bouncing back downstairs to the party. 

We settled ourselves down on our own personal plane, on the swing chair, out the way, at the back of the garden. Smiling stupidly at one another, buzzing off the fact of our own existence. Tara looked me dead in the eye.

“I proper love you, you know” she said, lips pursed, jaw tight and eyeballs wide.

“I love you as well” I replied, my tongue flickering and toes tapping ten to the dozen. 

I was struck, in that moment, with a sudden terror that this might not last forever, that we might be separated, that I’d cede to the expectation of moving on to “bigger and better things” – whatever the fuck that might have meant. My thoughts began to overleap themselves.

“I’m not going to go to uni, you know.” I told Tara. “I’m gonna take a gap year instead. Maybe a few. We could get a place together. I could work at your mum’s. We could get a little flat by the coast. Would be fucking lush, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it?” I was gushing, breathless, and Tara was laughing her head off. 

“You’d wipe shit off oldies’ arses, would you now? Rather than go off to some posh uni?”

“Yeah, I fucking would,” I insisted, and truly I meant it. “Listen, Tara. My mam and dad are away next weekend, the house will be empty. Let’s not bother going round Billy’s. Come to mine. I’ll cook for you.”

“Yeah, alright then” she answered. She was still laughing.

*

It got to 7pm on Friday. I had laid the table and cooked a meal for the first time in my life. I even bought all of the food as opposed to robbing it. I wanted everything about the evening to be ours and ours alone. I wanted us to coincide in a way that was more than just incidental or convenient. I wanted to know that she chose me; that if I plotted a point in space and time that was just for the two of us, she would come willingly and meet with me there.

I kept checking my phone, checking the time. An hour passed, I texted her. Nothing. Imposing those limits had been my gravest mistake. I left the food to simmer and ran round to Billy’s.

“Have you seen her?” I enquired urgently as I burst into Billy’s room. “She’s meant to be coming round mine.”

He barely lifted his head from his laptop, sucking hands-free on his cigarette. A boy I didn’t recognise was curled up, sleeping, beside him.

“I haven’t seen her all week, babe,” he responded, as clueless as I had been.

*

I found out she was pregnant through Facebook. We didn’t speak after that night she was supposed to come round mine – not then, or since. She looked to be a good mam to her little girl, or so it seemed to me from the pictures. Just the job, because Magical Craig never seemed much like the fatherly type. In another of his great disappearing acts, he was off the scene, gone from The Crescent entirely before their baby’s first birthday.

*

I had had every opportunity to spy through the flap, the night of Billy’s first orgy. As I was dipping in and out of my k-hole, I might have chosen to investigate the shifting mass on the periphery of my vision. I might have peered down the periscope of the hallway to see that which I didn’t want to see – Tara and Craig, locked together in violent communion. Horizontal and conjoined as one massive, thrusting, mechanical beast. As it happened, I had chosen not to observe. I preferred not to quantify, not to measure our situation. Not to see how the two realities superposed one another, not to let them collapse into one that was less favourable. I chose not to acknowledge the hidden variables; Tara working more and more lates at the care home, she and Craig’s increasing familiarity on the sofa. I turned away, instead, to snort the leftover snowy peaks on the bedside table. I waited for the drip, then sank back into the latticework of spent, sleeping boys. I dreamt of mechanical bulls, the colour red, bullseyes and candied swirls. Of me and Tara, of cats and orchards and a lift to a high-rise that went higher and higher, without end.