Weirdest thing. Just coming out of the cubicle after a nice toot and there’s this big fat old guy combing his hair in the mirror.

– Got some more if you want it.

– More what? Unlikely he would be law, but better safe than sorry.

– If you’re not interested, no worries. Very pure, very cheap. Try a line.

The guy hands me a wrap, just like that. Incredible. And fuck me, was it ever wild gear. Whooh! Nearly blows my fucking head off.

– How much? I ask, coming back out of the crapper, eyes watering, heart pumping like a locomotive.

– Fifty a gram.

Fifty. I mean, what? It was sixty fifteen years ago. Fifty. There’s got to be a catch.

– Come on, man. What’s the catch?

– Need you to take an ounce at a time. Got to get it off my hands.

– Look, I don’t have much cash on me at the moment.

– Got a card?

– You’re kidding. Thought for a second he meant a credit card. Oh, right. I give him my business card.

– Faces? What’s that then?

– Model agency, the waiting staff out there. They’re mine.

– The look-alikes?

– We call them featured stand-ins in the business.

– Yeah, right. Look-alikes. And there’s me thinking that really was Prince Charles. The name’s John. Give us a call.

And off he goes, leaving me with over two grams in the wrap which he doesn’t even ask for back. Don’t remember much more of that day, I can tell you. And next day a whole ounce for only five hundred and fifty quid. That soon went, twenty-eight grams in five days. Thirty grams if you include the initial freebie. You’re burning the candle at both ends and the middle, Rufus.

The door-bell chimed and he got up from the sofa and went over to the entry-phone.

‘John.’

‘Oh hi. Come on up.

By the time John had got to the top of the stairs his face was streaked in sweat and he was wheezing like a perished accordion.

‘Christ,’ he gasped. ‘Haven’t you heard of lifts?’

‘Mm, sorry about that, mate.’

The flat was on the second floor but even Rufus, flabby, overweight and unfit as he was, could usually manage it without heaving and panting like a dying walrus.

‘Get you a voddie?’

‘Nah, I’m driving.’

Rufus poured one for himself and watched, out of the corner of his eye, as John took a baggie from his pocket and dropped it on the coffee table.

‘Chop one for yourself,’ said Rufus.

‘I’ll love you and leave you, mate.’

Oh, such bliss. So many dealers liked to hang around. Worse still, so many stayed at home and forced you to visit. It was the part of drug life that Rufus most hated. The enforced pretence of matiness. If you want a pork chop, all you have to do is go into a butcher’s shop, he reasoned. You order and walk out with the fucking thing in a bag. No chit-chat, no shit. No ‘cheers mate’. Visit a dealer for a supply of charlie on the other hand, and you’re in for an hour of droning views on music, sport, politics, genetically modified crops and the evils of the World Bank. A sensitive social dance had to be danced, to show that you didn’t think of the guy as a servant or social inferior. You had to pretend that the whole transaction had something to do with friendship and mutual studenty Bohemian cool. It was a relief that he got none of that bullshit from John.

Still, he thought, it would be nice to see him take a line just once. Just to show that he did. Dealers who didn’t use always made Rufus nervous and guilty.

‘Can I ask you something?’ John said as he stood in the doorway, ready to leave. He looked a little nervous.

‘Sure. Ask away.

‘You don’t fancy coming in with me on something bigger, do you?’

‘Bigger?’

‘It’s my brother, see. He keeled over with a heart attack a couple of weeks ago …

‘Oh, bummer,’ Rufus said. ‘I am sorry.’ And you’ll soon be following him, he added to himself. Not so much a gene pool, more a lard pool.

‘No, it’s not that. He was a streak of fucking piss as it goes. Couldn’t stand the sight of him. Only, fact is, he didn’t have no family besides me and I’ve inherited five kilos of his bleeding gear and I don’t know how to shift it. Found it in a cupboard when I was clearing his flat out.’

‘John, I’d love it. Believe me, I’d love it, it’s great gear but I don’t deal. I wouldn’t know where to begin.'

‘No, what I’m saying is that I heard tell of some guys up in Stoke Newington who might be in the market. Turkish boys. Thought you could come up with me and help push it through. I’d go sixty-forty with you.’

‘If you already know who these people are, why do you need me?’

‘Well, I don’t want to get ripped off. You, you’re a businessman, you’ve got the public school accent and all that, touch of class. They wouldn’t dare do the dirty on someone like you. Someone like me, they’d probably just take the stuff and dump me in an alley, you know what I mean?’

‘Sixty-forty?’

‘Yeah. Reckon that’s fair.’

Rufus did some reckoning of his own. A kilo is a thousand grams. Fifty thousand quid. Five fives are twenty-five, so that’s a quarter of a million. Forty percent of quarter a million is … one hundred thousand. A hundred grand. A hundred grand.

‘You’re on,’ he said. ‘What kind of people are they?’

‘Well, they’re not boy scouts. They’re drug dealers, aren’t they? But business is business, I reckon. How’s Thursday night for you? I’ll give ‘em a bell and set it up. I can come and pick you up and we’ll drive there together.’

They shook on the deal and, as John waddled slowly down the stairs, Rufus sat down on the sofa and breathed out long and slow. A hundred grand. A hundred fucking grand.

With a hundred grand he could set up an international agency on the web. Look-alikes, singing telegrams, party events. He could have girls and boys across the globe, hired electronically. They would pay a registration fee, he would get them work. With his hundred grand he could design a ritzy pitch, artwork, dummy website, financial projections – the works. He’d take it to CotterDotCom and blow their minds with it. Might even get to meet the great Messiah himself.

Rufus dipped the corner of a credit card into the bag and dug out the biggest bump he’d ever sniffed in his life.

Breakfast time at the Fendemans’ was a confused affair that transcended age and gender expectations. Gordon ate nothing, but tried a different coffee or tea every day, Portia tucked into bacon, sausages and eggs and Albert, on the rare occasions he breakfasted at all, would eat nothing more than a slice of toast.

There were reasons for this. Albert rarely had appetite in the mornings. Anything that took him from his room and his computers he considered a waste of time. He had once spilled a cup of coffee over a USB hub and on another occasion the entire contents of a glass of orange juice had destroyed a printer. Portia, on the other hand, had discovered a new high protein diet. It was a regime that involved such a low intake of carbohydrates that she would check her urine each day with diabetic testing sticks to see how many ketones her body was leaking, much to the affectionate derision of her family. Gordon sampled different teas and coffees every day because tea and coffee constituted his trade. He usually spat the coffee out because he had inherited his father’s weak heart and the specialist disapproved of him ingesting caffeine. Java the cat ate whatever was going, but preferred pilchards in tomato sauce because he was peculiar.

On this particular morning however, Gordon was making a terrific mess in the kitchen because he had decided to experiment with cocoa. The fine powder was being transferred from surface to surface and from fingertips to finger-tips, which was causing panic.

‘Where’s my carbohydrate counter?’ Portia wailed.

‘Dad this stuff is getting everywhere,’ complained Albert, coming into the kitchen and spreading his hands out in front of Gordon’s face. ‘Look at it. The more you try and dust it away, the more it gets ingrained into everything. I’ve got cocoa on my keyboard, cocoa on my screen and cocoa on my mouse.