These users are alive to the travails of farmers in Peru, but care nothing for deprivation in their own borough. Whenever a stern new measure is tabled, they invoke the north London hypocrite, who worries more about the provenance of her coffee beans than she does the origin of her drugs. Politicians’ ideas about the drug seem to reside in the 1990s, when cocaine was the preserve of city workers, PRs and journalists.
It was where I watched my recreational habit of two decades tip into something more needful and compulsive. During the 18 months I was there, I took more cocaine than in all my years in London combined. The chicken shop represented a low point in my working life, but a high point in my drug-taking career.
I always think of this job when I hear politicians railing against cocaine use by middle-class professionals. What have the authorities ever done for them? They are opposed to authority on principle. As time goes on, I start to think that maybe they just hate me. At first, I put this down to my being a woman. I don’t earn any more than the kitchen staff. I am the manager, though this is an entirely theoretical distinction. I don’t take the call, so am deprived of the only part of my job I truly enjoy: saying “I am the manager” when customers demand to speak to the manager. I’m not sure what the basis of her complaint is whether it’s about the book’s title, or the fact I’m reading at all. One night, a customer calls to complain after she sees me sitting at the counter reading I Love Dick. It’s like saying I’m working towards being a footballer, or a film star. In truth, my old life is receding so fast, the idea of writing a book has come to seem fanciful. I tell myself this job is a stopgap, while I finish my book. Taken to anaesthetise yourself against the realities of your life, not so much Cocaine taken for fun is easy to give up. Once the bag is open, it is the only subject on the table. There is no need to specify what you’re talking about. Or just: “Have you got that?” There are a lot of slang terms for cocaine, but frequent users rarely call it anything at all. “Have you got that thing?” we’ll murmur to each other. As closing time approaches, we start talking to each other in cokehead’s code, a register so vague it barely qualifies as language. There’s no time to sit around waiting for ibuprofen to kick in.Ĭocaine is for the end of the shift, to propel us through the final hours and ease those psychic knots, the side-effect of working in a dirty, tedious, unrewarding job. We all suffer with sore backs, sore knees, sore calves the muscular burn that comes from spending eight hours on your feet without a break. Everyone smokes weed, for its painkilling effects. As minimum-wage gigs go, it isn’t bad – it closes before 11pm, so we miss the post-pub trade, and get home at a reasonable hour – but weekend shifts are still gruelling. My parents pressed me to go to university, precisely so I could avoid a lifetime of this sort of work. I haven’t had a job like this since I was a student. The town is so deprived it hurts, but people find the money for cocaine. Others shed white flakes as I unfurl them. I lose count of the number of curly notes I’ve been handed at the till. At weekends, dealers send marketing texts, boasting about the purity of their packages, or offering cut-price deals. On certain estates, there are whole streets that stink of weed not a faint whiff, but a pungent fug that sticks to clothes and hair. He has racked up a line for me, on the shelf behind the cistern. It is a tiny movement, imperceptible to anyone else, but I know what it means.
“He seems pretty happy.” My colleague meets my eye, and tilts his head towards the bathroom. “There’s a man out there, showing off his stab wound,” I say. I print the order out, and take it to the kitchen. But here, you have to act as if it’s normal, to walk around bearing the bruises of a recent fight. In my home town, people would pass comment. One of the first things I learned when I took this job was that it was considered very gauche to remark on a person’s black eyes and split knuckles. If words fail you, you call on other means of communication. Violence is part of the local vernacular. He’s just telling his friend about his week. “Got stabbed the other day, didn’t I?” He doesn’t sound upset. “Now then ,” he says to his friend, whom he has spotted in the queue.
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