One of the nurses is a big kindly woman with drawn-on eyebrows, another is quite small and pretty with bleached blonde hair, and there are two orderlies or care workers, one a bearded man with a ponytail and the other a frail-looking but surprisingly strong lady who looks older than me. I suppose if one of them – well, just the pretty blonde, if I am being frank with myself – ever showed any sign of sexual interest in me I might reconsider my pre-emptive pre-bath self-pleasuring. So far this looks unlikely and I am bathed with a sort of professional detachment by all of them.

There is a day room at the end of the corridor where other patients gather and watch television. I go there rarely and affect not really to understand the programmes even when I do. Most of the other patients just sit there slack-jawed, and I emulate them. Now and again one of them will try to engage me in conversation, but I just stare at them and smile and mumble and they usually go away. One large fat bald chap with bad skin doesn’t go away, and regularly sits beside me, watching the television while talking to me in a low, hypnotic voice, probably telling me about his ungrateful and dismissive family and his sexual exploits as a younger and more attractive man, but for all I know regaling me with lurid local folk tales, or his detailed design for a perpetual-motion machine, or professing his undying love for me and setting out the various things he would like to do to me in private. Or perhaps his undying hatred for me and setting out the various things he would like to do to me in private – I don’t know. I can hardly understand a word he says; I think he talks in the same language as the doctors and nurses – most of whom I can understand well enough – but in a different dialect.

Anyway, I rarely bother with the television room or the other patients. I lie here or sit here and I think about all that I’ve done and all that I intend to do once the immediate danger has passed and it is safe for me to re-emerge. I smile and even chuckle to myself sometimes, thinking of these poor fools mouldering away until they die here while I’m back out in the many worlds, living and loving; an operator, getting up to whatever mischief takes my fancy. How shocked they would be, patients and staff both, if they only knew!

Funny thing is, I always loved cocaine. I mean, obviously I loved it in the sense that I loved how rich it made me, how it helped me to drag myself up from the pretty much nothing I started with, but what I mean is I loved it when I took it.

It’s a proper brilliant drug, coke. I loved everything about it, I loved the way it all seemed of a piece. The cleanness of it, for a start. I mean, look at it: this beautiful snow-white powder. Little yellow sometimes, but only the way really brightly lit clouds are yellow though they start out looking white, from the sun. Bit of a joke it looks like cleaning powder, but even that seems right somehow. It feels like it’s cleaning out your skull, know what I mean? Even how you take it goes along with all this, doesn’t it? Clean, sharp, definite things like razor blades and mirrors and tightly rolled banknotes, preferably new, as big denomination as you like. I love the smell of new notes, with or without powderage.

And it energises you, gives you what feels like ambition and ability in one easily snorted package. Suddenly nothing’s impossible. You can talk and think your way round any problem, batter down anybody’s resistance, see the clear, clever way to make any challenge work for you. It’s a doing drug, an enabling drug.

Back where I came from they were all into dope, or H, or speed, which is the poor man’s coke, and they were starting to get into E. Speed’s like laminate instead of real wood, or faux fur not pukka, or a hand job instead of proper sex. It’ll do if you can’t afford the real thing. Ecstasy’s pretty good, but it’s not immediate. You have to commit to it. Not as much as kosher old-fashioned acid, though, cos I’ve heard people old enough to be my dad talk of these trips that lasted eighteen hours or more and just turned your whole world inside out, not always in a good way, and you needed to organise everything, too, like where you were going to spend the time you were tripping, and even who with. Support staff, practically. Like, carers! How the fuck did hippies ever get that fucking organised, eh?

Anyway, compared to that time-consuming nonsense E isn’t that bad, like drinking spritzers instead of whisky sodas or something, but you still need to organise everything to come up at the right time and it really is mostly about dancing, being loved-up in amongst lots of fellow travellers and boppers. Fine for that long drawn-out moment of collective euphoria, but it’s more like part of a sort of rite, a ritual. What was that song that went, “This is my church”? Something like that. Like a service. Bit too collective, too chummy for my taste.

Cannabis was sort of similar in some ways in that it made you mellow, didn’t it? Though how that squares with the fucking Hashisheen I’ve never quite understood. But it’s all that lying around like old hippies, wreathed in smoke and talking bollocks, that I could never take. All that claggy brown tar gumming up the cigarette papers and your brains and making you choke and splutter and wrecking you to the point where it seemed like a great idea to drink the old bong water for the final hit that’ll really take you over the edge into some other realm of understanding. What a load of bollocks. I can see it was a great Sixties drug when everybody wanted to smash the system by having love-ins and painting flowers on their bum, but it’s all too hazy and vague and sort of aimless, know what I mean?

H is proper hard-core, got to respect that. It’s a serious lifestyle commitment for most people, and it’s like discovering the mother-lode of pure pleasure that all the other drugs including the legal ones like drink have all come from, like finding something utterly pure beyond which there can’t possibly be anything better, but it’s a selfish drug. It takes you over, it becomes the boss, everything else becomes about the next hit and it takes you away from the real world, seems to say that the one where the H is is the real world and the one you’ve lived in all this time and where everybody else still lives, the poor fools, and where the money is, sadly, annoyingly, is just a sort of game, a kind of grey, grainy shadow-place where you have to go back to far too often to make these sort of robotic responses that’ll let you get back to the tits-out Technicolor of the wonderful and enchanting world of the H. Proper commitment, H is, and the way it’s served up is potentially lethal too. Bit like joining the army or something.

Plus, all that melting the mucky-looking stuff in ancient-looking spoons and searching for a vein and pulling ligatures tight with your teeth and having to draw your own blood out to mix it up in the syringe. Messy. You don’t need that. Not clean like coke. Exact opposite. And you need a bucket by you cos the first thing that happens when it hits is you chuck your guts up! Call me old-fashioned but I thought drugs were supposed to be about fun! What sort of fucking fun is that?

Like I say, respect to people prepared to suffer that sort of degradation for the sake of the river of warm bliss you end up submerged in, but fuck me, it’s not a drug you take to make your life better, which is what I’m looking for, it’s a drug that empties you out of one life and pours you wholesale into another one completely where it’s all very fucking wonderful but the drug is the only way into it and the only way of staying there. It’s like becoming a deep-sea diver in one of those old brass-helmet jobs with the porthole grilles and the air hose leading back to the surface. The H is the air hose, the H is the air. Total dependency.