Others by James Herbert

bathroom cabinet and scrabbled with the lid of the Elastoplast tin. Somehow I managed not to spill the contents as the lid came off.
    Inside, instead of plasters, were my ready-mades (Sunday afternoons was generally reserved for rolling enough joints to get me through the week), comprising of two varieties, some rolled in brown cigarette skins (papers), the others in white. The Skunk - in this case Kali Mist, named after the Hindu goddess of destruction - was for when I was really strung out, and the other, white-skinned, was more gentle, a good Jamaican sinsemilla. Tonight I chose the brown.
    Lighting up, I went through to the small furniture-crowded sitting-room and poured myself another Highland Malt, this one a Dalmore, before drawing the curtains of the barred windows a little and flopping on to a cushion-strewn sofa. Anticipation as the smoke burned its way down my throat was almost as pleasant as the mellowness that I knew would quickly follow. No rush involved, just an easy sinking into a better place, and while waiting for the mood change the drug and alcohol hopefully would bring about, I surveyed my surrounds, something I often did when my emotions were low, my perspective hopeless. Two small versions of magnificent sculptures stood at each end of the sideboard, Rodin’s Eternal Spring, a dark bronze whose male and female figures were wonderfully natural on one side, and Epstein’s Genesis, an anti-naturalistic carving of a pregnant woman, an elongated hand stretched across her swollen belly, a piece that was the very antithesis of its opposite neighbour but no less beautiful. Adorning the wall over the room’s mean little fireplace was a wood-framed print of Agnolo Bronzino’s Eleonora da Toledo and Her Son, the mother serene in her beauty, the young boy placid in his innocence, and on the mantelshelf below was a miniature copy of Hepworth’s Mother and Child, an abstract carving in marble, all fluid lines and pierced stone (make what you will of my choice, its romanticism, the obvious underlying yearning - I only knew that they took my mind on journeys). I sipped whisky between the drags.
    Sleep, helped along by a couple of Motivals before I turned in, was uneventful that night. Rather than fall into another dimension where everything was troubled and plausible only in the dream state (which was my usual sleep pattern), I drifted off into oblivion instead, cares and worries excluded, fantasies barred. Even my hangover next day was tolerable, and although I suffered a few hurts and bruises from the tumble I’d taken, there seemed to be no real harm done (thank you squidgy stair-carpet).
    I wet-shaved in front of the bathroom mirror, used to the ugliness that stared back at me; used to it, yes, but never willingly accepting that countenance, still disturbed and saddened by it, even after all these years. An everyday ritual like shaving was still a routine torture. Once, when I was on heavy stuff like Ice - crystal meth - another face would sometimes regard me from beyond the glass, one that watched me with two good eyes and whose features were regular, though too blurred for recognition. That ill-defined but handsome countenance had hinted at something too evasive to remember properly, too vague to focus upon, yet still filled me with a strange, elusive regret. Regret and guilt. At one time those emotions had become so overwhelming I’d turned away from hallucinatory substances completely -what good was a high whose sidekick was profound but unaccountable remorse? Maybe a shrink would have some answers, albeit predictable ones: cut out the bad stuff, think positive, drugs altered and eventually deteriorated your mind state. You take the drugs to escape your own reality, but in the comedowns the reality only becomes more depressing, and the stronger the substance, the harsher the aftermath. Well, I’d already cut out the heavy stuff, because it scared me too much, and I didn’t need a shrink to tell me so.