PREGABALIN 75
Headed to my hometown for the day. Meeting a mate. He’s started a business and he needs some help with promo stuff. I’d help him with anything. Co-d.
I drive straight to the Albanian car wash. Cash only money laundering operation. They do the best inside-and-out you can ask for. I don’t recognise any of the lads here like I used to though. They were cool. These lot don’t even say hi. Old crowd moved on to better things, I guess. Or deported.
I leave my car at the car wash and walk down the high street through the gauntlet of the bus stops. Two headbangers are arguing loudly back and forth from about 20 feet apart as they wander around angry. One guy is nodding in the doorway of the amusements. A half torn-off poster for a Northern Soul night is taped to a pillar. Someone’s scrawled SARAH IS A SKET under it in marker pen. Everywhere smells of sick and everyone is vaping. This is the sort of poverty you can’t pose a JD model in front of. Ken Loach couldn’t make this sexy.
On this road, the main road, the Wilkinsons is closed down and boarded up. So is the Argos, so is the Colemans. Vietnam Nail Salon is thriving though. Fair play to them. They’re like the last little house between two skyscrapers, only the skyscrapers are the Twin Towers.
I arrive at the café where I’m due to meet my mate and sit down on the chairs outside. Text him: here. Wait for a minute and look around. Nothing’s really changed drastically, it’s just all a bit worse. Sun’s out though so it’s busy. Everyone’s hopped up on vitamin d. It’s nice. There’s nowhere like England in the summer.
One crackhead with a face like pebbledash stomps down the road in a pair of sliders with soles that resemble flat tyres. He shouts across the road to a young lad outside the other café across from me. It’s a bit more upmarket that one, they’ve got a Mr Whippy machine.
“Tenner, that’s my last offer!” shouts the crackhead.
The lad laughs and gestures upward with a box he’s holding like he’s bidding at an auction. The box looks like it’s for a new burner phone. Crackhead jogs over and the two negotiate. I’m earwigging. They decide on £13. The crackhead nips off to the corner shop, presumably for change, and catches my eye. He laughs and mouths “sucker”. Thinks he’s on Dragon’s Den.
Across the road some dealer is arguing with a homeless woman sat on the floor outside the chicken shop. She has a box of chicken and he grabs it off her and kind of barges her over. Three brickies on lunch break stop and look on as if they’re about to do something. The dealer immediately pipes up.
“What!?” he shouts. “Mind your own fucking business!”
Here we go. Some theatre. Bit of action.
The three brickies give it back and insults are thrown across the road until the dealer realises he’s outnumbered and will probably get banged out, so he tells the brickies to come down the alleyway nearby. He probably plans to stab one of them. Fucking coward. The brickies tell him fuck off and start walking. One turns round and shouts: “Eat your fucking chicken you twat!” Pretty good.
It seems like it’s about to go off but then my mate pops his head out from the café door and laughs at me. He was inside and I didn’t check. Fuck this fight. I get up and go inside. It’s busy. We sit in the back.
It’s cooler here and the dull buzz of overlapping conversations fades everything you say into the background. We like this café. It’s a bit of a tradition for us, each taking it in turn to pay for the food per visit.
It’s kind of the centre of what’s left of the community here up town. The owner is a Greek alcoholic. He’s pretty cool and he keeps things turning over nice. The food’s good and it’s cheap. This café isn’t the sort of Mike Skinner greasy spoon you’ll see Instagram artists putting ironic St. George flags in though. It’s less exciting than that. The style is knackered out Live, Laugh, Love mixed with a strange décor of faux-Mediterranean. None of it makes sense. No one cares. It’s perfect.
I notice at least three familiar people. Regulars. We don’t know each other, but we know each other’s faces. There’s something comforting seeing the same regulars in here today, even though I haven’t been back in ages. I used to live in the flats behind this café, up on the top floor. No lifts. It was a nightmare getting shopping in. That’s where I started Popular Front actually. A one room flat with rent arrears and mounting anxiety. Six years back now. Feels like forever.
Back then I’d get lunch at this café maybe three times a week. There was always this really thin old lady in there who smelt like an ashtray. She’d only ever order a tea and spend about an hour drinking it, nipping out front for a fag break every 10 minutes. She had this exhaust pipe voice that can only be acquired through a lifetime of chain smoking and hard living. I never really spoke to her properly, but I liked her a lot. She was one of those old people who has little time for other old people. You could tell she’d never consider the OAP bingo evenings or charity shop coffee mornings. She was her own and that was fine.
I look around the café. She’s not here. That’s sad. I doubt she’s anywhere anymore, in the mortal sense at least.
I chat with my mate about what he needs for his business promo and he offers to pay me for it and I’m like give over and he says thanks. I give him a decent camera I brought from home and show him how to use it. We eat, chat, and leave. He’s got to go pay rent and I’ve got to get my car, so we head for the free cash point across the road.
The cashpoint here, outside one of the Eastern European supermarkets, has become a de facto loiter spot for young drug dealers. Most of them are probably Joeys. You can tell who’s-who based on the clothing. The lads nipping back and forth on pushbikes are thrown together from the JD reduced rail. The bigger fish is wearing a checked Gucci belt and a Moncler body warmer in 27 degree heat.
As I withdraw £20 a ginger kid about 15-years-old rides past on his bike and asks me if I wanna buy weed.
“No,” I say. “I don’t smoke weed.”
The kid laughs and rides on. Me and my mate look at each other and laugh as we shake our heads. They get younger and younger.
I part ways with my mate and walk back up through the bus stops. Here comes the ginger kid again. He brakes his bike in front of me and asks me where I’m from. He’s not trying to start shit, he’s just strangely curious for some reason. I tell him I’m from here. Here is where I’m from.
“What, Kett’rin?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I say.
“Born and bred?”
“Born and bred you little cunt, yeah.”
The kid laughs. He’s alright.
“I’ve never seen you round here.”
“Why would you? You’re about 12.”
The penny drops. I think the kid is trying to work out if I’m a drug dealer or not. I think that’s what he’s getting at. I’m wearing a Stone Island t-shirt like the flash prick I am, so he’s probably thinking I’m maybe like the div in the Moncler. Perhaps he’s after a new employer.
But no. I don’t sell drugs, I’m a journalist. I don’t say that to him though, I don’t want him to lose respect for me do I.
“I’m from Kett’rin too,” he says.
I shrug.
Things have really changed. By the time I was his age I’d been punched in my face by grown men for being a gobshite at least a few times. That’s how it was. God knows I needed it. Couple smacks in the head from an adult stranger for trying to get lippy for no reason. You need a bit of that if you grow up around here. You need to be reminded you’re just a little idiot from a little idiot place.
One time me and my mate tried to steal this Page Three calendar through the window of the mechanics near his house when we were about 13. The mechanic caught us doing it, slammed the window shut on my mate’s arm, and then came running round the corner at us like a bull. He was about 40-years-old. He punched me and my mate in the face then kept shouting at us until we walked off. Obviously that bloke, protector of the tits calendar, is a top weirdo, but we needed those slaps either way.
Maybe I should punch this ginger kid in his face, for his own sake like…
Nah. I’m not that guy. He’s trying to sell weed off his pushbike to strangers when he should be in school. He’s probably got enough problems as it is. I kind of feel bad for him. Also, he’ll probably just stab me to death anyway. Imagine that, death by school kid. Embarrassing.
He shuffles around kinda nervous and then leans in closer. He asks me if I take “pregabs”. Clearly, he’s clocked I’m not a dealer and just some local who likes Stone Island. I don’t do drugs and am not often around people who do these days, so I’m clueless as to what that even is.
“What the fuck is that?” I ask him.
A pause. He shrugs.
“I don’t actually know. But I’ve got some.”
Bless him. Some older boy has got him selling mystery pills. Either that or he’s raided his parents pill drawer. I tell him to fuck off, in a friendly way, and he laughs and puts his thumb up. I put my thumb up. We part ways. Nice kid.
Later on, I ask a friend of mine what “pregabs” are. Turns out it’s pregabalin. I knew of that as “preg”, but I guess now it’s “pregabs”. Pregablin is an “anticonvulsant, analgesic, and anxiolytic amino acid medication used to treat epilepsy, neuropathic pain, fibromyalgia, restless leg syndrome, opioid withdrawal, and generalised anxiety disorder”.
Basically, if you take it recreationally it’ll get you off your head. That’s what the young lads are peddling now. That’s what people are after.