Diary of a Drug Fiend

186 The Diary of a Drug Fiend “Her snout for the quarry set Fleshy and heavy and gross, Bestial, broken across, And below it her mouth that drips Blood from the lips That hide the fangs of the snake, Drips on venomous: udders Mountainous flanks that fret, And the spirit sickens and shudders At the hint of a worse thing yet.” We had, on the other side, some spasms of weakness ; a ghastly sensation of the sinking of the spirit. It’s the same unescapable dread that seizes one when one is in a lift which starts down too quickly, or when one swoops too suddenly in a ’plane. Waves of weakness washed over us as if we were corpses cast up by the sea from a shipwreck. A shipwreck of our souls. And in these hideous hours of helplessness, we drifted down the dark and sluggish river of inertia towards the stagnant and stinking morass of insanity. We were obsessed by the certainty that we could never pull through. We said nothing at first. We were sunk in a solemn stupor. When it found voice at last, it was to whimper the surrender. The Unconditional Surrender of our integrity and our honour! We eked out our small allowance of H. with doses of strychnine to ward off the complete collapse of all our physical faculties, and we picked ourselves up a bit on the moral plane by means of champagne. In these moments of abdication we talked in fragile whispers, plans for getting supplies. We had both of of us a certain shame in admitting to each other that we were renegades. We felt that in future we should never be able to indulge frankly and joyously as we had hitherto done. We should become furtive and cunning ; we should conceal from each other what we were doing, although it was obvious to us both. I slipped out this afternoon on tiptoe, thinking