Others by James Herbert Page A

In fact, Acid, Charlie and Amphets had been easy to dump, and I’d never used H anyway - heroin was too addictive for someone like me who constantly sought escape. My main gig nowadays was Skunk and booze. Hell, I’d spit in your eye if you even offered me E. Sure, I knew it was considered smart to be part of that scene, but I also knew that those poor suckers were the losers in the long run (and that was their problem - it took time to find out). No diatribe here, no preaching; just the hard facts.
    Naturally, more than one psychologist - not psychiatrist; nobody’s ever thought me crazy - had tried to get me on their metaphorical couch, assuming I had to have some kind - any kind - of inner turmoil because of my ‘impaired’ physique; and maybe I had - of course I bloody had - but I’d never felt the need, or even the urge, to discuss it with the medical profession - or anyone else, for that matter. My mind was my own territory. Let doctors prescribe medicines and pain-killers for the afflictions my physique brought me, but my thoughts were private, they belonged to me alone. Tormented I might be, but it was my own personal torment, invisible to outsiders, unlike my deformities, which were on show for all the world to see. Besides, I had the constant and irrevocable feeling that no shrink would ever understand, let alone resolve, the reason for my lifelong disquiet, this unease that was always with me and which grew more ponderous as the years went by. They’d assumed my troubled mind was due to my dysfunctional form, and I knew - don’t ask me how I knew, I just did - the issue was far more complex than that.
    Self-discovery had never been an indulgence of mine. That earlier time of fierce drug-taking had always had two clear purposes: pleasure and escape. With both there came a ‘lifting’, a supposed ascent on to a higher plane where creative thought is enhanced and where you feel at one with all around you, at one with the essence of life itself. Huh! Try it enough and you’ll discover it’s a false concept; that, rather than being a great mind-expanding experience, it’s ultimately a closing down of avenues of reason, an occlusion of actuality, and so a limiting of the thought process. At the time you may think you’re on the road to perception, to Nirvana even, but in truth you’re travelling blind alleys (although instead of heading towards a dead end, you’re on the way to cerebral dissipation). Am I sure? Sure I’m sure. Just look around at all the deadheads left over from the sixties, the mental cadavers of the drugs revolution, those once creative musicians and artists and writers, and even businessmen and financiers, their powers of creativity long since withered, their drive stultified, not through passing years but through damaged brain cells and enfeebled resolve. You know who I mean, those dried-up facsimiles of their former selves, their talent mere echoes. Many - of those who survived, that is -are rarely heard from, they seem to exist in some intellective timewarp, while the bleatings from those still in the public eye tend to be an embarrassment.
    Anyway, for me the comedowns that followed the highs were too disenchanting to bear and the pursuit itself too ineffectual, meaningless and self-deceiving, to desire. Besides all this, the cost was too great, both to pocket and body (let alone the mind).
    These days, I stuck mainly to cannabis and booze for no other reason than to dull my own wretchedness.
    I retraced last night’s route to the office, on the way passing by the bar I’d swilled in last night, not even giving its locked door a second glance, and stopping to breakfast at one of those archway cafe’s along the boulevard. The sun was already working up to a steady blast, the slight sea breeze cooling the few holiday-makers who were about so early. The sea itself was a fresh blue, dark on the horizon, white caps breaking easily along the shoreline; one or two sunbathers were