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I’d do anything for a hit. It’s a shameful fact that not many people would admit about themselves, but not me, I’m nothing if not honest, that’s why they call me Frank. I’d cut off an arm and slice my tongue in two for a little baggy of the good stuff. I have so many track marks up my arm that my poor little nephew once tried to use me as a dot-to-dot.

I wasn’t always like this. I feel that’s important to mention. I was a smart kid, a little morose and prone to melancholy, but smart. It only takes one little mistake, a friend you shouldn’t have made, a trauma you ought to have faced up to and I could be you. When I was younger I was good at writing and after school I managed to get a place at university to study English. I shouldn’t have gone. It was at university it all started going downhill.

One fateful evening at some shitty little fresher’s party above the student union I had my first experience with weed, which led to a loving dalliance with coke, or charlie as me and my friends would call it. We’d party all weekend, high off our tits, snorting powdered lines in our bedrooms and inhaling hippy crack out of latex balloons. It was fun. I wanted it to last forever. My friends didn’t. They all got jobs and families. How boring. I stopped being able to afford Charlie a while ago and opted for a cheaper bedmate; heroin. I took her as my wife during a sad little Christmas alone. She ain’t as pretty but she gets me there all the same.

Though cheaper heroin is still expensive and well, employment has always been a challenge for me. You try sticking to a job when you look like me, when you smell like me. My poor mother cried last time I saw her; my arms full with her jewellery. My brother who gave me a black eye as I tried to slip out the back door had to cover his mouth and nose with a rag to avoid the stench. Even my family can’t stand the sight of me. An employer wouldn’t look twice at me, and if he did, it would be to judge me or to make sure I didn't take the bonnet mascot off his jaguar after the interview.

So I did little jobs here and there and some shoplifting to fill in the gaps. My favourite thing to pinch is infant formula. There’s always demand for it and it goes for a pretty penny. Ten quid a tub in the shops and you can sell it to penny-stripped parents at half price and they’d grab it out your hands even if you smelt like Danny Devito’s armpit after a workout. I sell it on a facebook group. You know the ones. Free and For Sale in whatever dump you live in.

It was there I saw the job ad. It was posted by a woman named Beatrice - whose profile picture was a photo of a tulip. People don’t often post job adverts there, there’s a separate group for that, but sometimes they get confused. Old people and the internet mix as well as oil and water. It seemed benign enough:

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>Hi there lovelies,
>
>I hope I'm posting this properly! This new technology eh? I’ve got a little job that needs doing. My house has gotten a little bit of a mess lately. I’m a single mother and it’s hard to keep everything tidy and clean. I’m sure all you ladies will understand! We have a bit of a rat problem. Needs doing today. No timewasters please. Cash in hand. Cleaning supplies provided. £200. XX
>
>Edit: No negotiations my lovelies, that number is final. Also, how do I report users? A mean man called Robert *redacted* offered his pleasure sausage as payment? These youths. Xx

​

I chuckled to myself a little and stared at my empty wallet. Cleaning through a little rat droppings for two hundred smackers? Naive technophobe lady too - it was like Christmas - I bet I could pinch a family heirloom while I was there. I sent her a message.

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FRANK:

>Hey there, I’d be happy to do this for you. Just let me know you’re address, and I’ll be over as soon as possible.

BEATRICE:

>Hi my lovely! A young gentleman who can clean, my what a dream. I’ll pop you over my address just shortly. It is just me and my little darling who live here. My son will be in the living room, you don’t have to clean in there, but you mustn’t bother him, he loves his video games and hates to be distracted. Thank you. Xxxx

FRANK:

>Sure, fine. Be there sharpish.

​

The address wasn’t very far thankfully. My jaw was still trembling from a little bit of coke I’d manage to score last night off a deadbeat passed out in a nightclub and I still felt very fragile. The house was nice from the outside. It was an ex-council house, I could tell by the fresh paint job. It was at the end of a block and there was a mobility scooter parked by the front door. I thought she was a single mother - not a single grandmother? I rubbed my hands together and clambered through the gate and chapped on the door.

The door opened almost immediately.

It was as if she had been there already waiting to open it. Had she?

“Oh, hi there my lovely!” A shrill voice startled me. I was too rough to deal with this chipmunk-ass bitch. “It’s so good you came.”

She was a portly little thing who walked with a pronounced limp. Her fingers were like Richmond sausages and her wrinkled face had been emulsioned in a thick layer of orange foundation. She had an apron on, one of those gag ones that looked like a sexy woman in lingerie, and her lips were crusted over with cheap matte lipstick. Her efforts to disguise her age seemed to me to have done precisely the opposite. But who am I to judge, I’m just the neighbourhood junkie (Or dophead, methhead, druggie, whatever you call us wherever the fuck you are).

“Just inside here. Forgive the smell. It’s the rats, the exterminator said there’s probably a dead one somewhere!” She chirped.

I crossed the threshold into the house and immediately regretted every decision I had made that led me to this point. Anyone else would have turned around and left. Not me. I had my wife Helen to think about, and my mistress Charlie to save up for.

“It’s bad. Jesus fuck woman, that ain’t a dead rat, that’s a fucking family of dead rats.” I covered my nose with the sleeve of my jacket. Beatrice looked offended.

Ammonia hung in the air as an invisible haze, turning tears into acid and breath into hot fire. I’d smelt death only once before. It had been my neighbour and fellow druggy; Big Bobby. His so-called mates had been too busy getting high to call anyone. He was bloated and blue and dripping with maggots when the body-collectors came to drag his sorry-ass out the door. They had all gotten noseblind to him over the week and a half they had lived with his corpse, easy to do when you’re higher than the Burj Khalifa on stilts. Beatrice must have been noseblind too. Only way you could live here.

“Mind you’re tongue my lovely. Just like my son. I know it's bad - it’s just so hard being a single mother these days.” She shook her head dismissively.

“How old’s your kid?” I asked curiously, wiping at my wet eyes. I was expecting the house to be disgusting to match the stench, but the hallway was perfect. I’d seen messier showhouses.

“Thirty-four next week.” She squeaked.

“Uh-huh.” Jesus fuck me in the ass with a bottle of white lightning. Crazy ass-bitch

“Now if you would start in the bathroom and move on to the kitchen - please leave the living room to me, my sons in there, he hates to be bothered.” Beatrice said. “I’ve left all of the cleaning supplies in the cupboard by the stairs. Anything you need, I shall be out in the garden. My petunias aren’t doing too well and I must tend to them my lovely.”

I was expecting an absolute craphole. The bathroom was spotless like the hallway. There were some foundation smeared into the walls, but that was nothing a little degreaser couldn’t handle. The kitchen was fine too. I couldn’t work out where the smell was coming from and where the rats were. Usually rats congregated in the kitchen - at least that was my experience having had a good few infestations myself. The smell however lingered; no matter how much dettol I sprayed or zoflora I wiped under my nose. There was death in the air. But where the frick was it?

I finished up in the bathroom and the kitchen and spared a thought for the living room. She hadn’t wanted me to go in there. Maybe that’s where she was hiding the good stuff. These old codgers always have some money slipped away somewhere. Her son was in there, a little risky, but I could be subtle.

The layout of these council houses were strange. The living room was to the back of the property, not connected to the kitchen or even the bathroom. The door to it was shut and I could hear a very quiet buzz whirring across it’s threshold. Was this it? The smell was stronger here. But why wouldn’t she want me to clean the source of the stench, wasn’t that the whole point of my employment?

When I opened the door my eyes burned as if they had been met by hot smoke from an oven. I coughed and felt a sickly-sweetness cling to the back of my throat.

This was it. This is where death lived.

The TV was on. Call of Duty it looked like. I could hear the push of fingers on buttons. Her son was there. I could see a rush of his greasy brown hair sticking up from the back of the fabric patterned sofa that looked like something from the 90’s.

“Alright dude? Just cleaning up for your mum.” I said cautiously, struggling to get the words out as the ammonia overwhelmed me. There were flies buzzing around but they all seemed to be congregating around the couch. Around her son.

He didn’t reply.

I was scared. Scared of what I’d see sitting on that couch. Was he dead? Was her son the cause of that awful stench?

Then I saw it laying there on the couch like a washed up whale in summer; A rotund mass which used to be a man, swollen with rot and gas, enshrined in mustard-stained sheets and liquified fat. There were mountains of maggots basking in the chaos of seeping flesh and rotting bed sores. I could not see the legs, it seemed to me that they had fused together with the couch, the piles of excrement serving as a goopy glue to aid the cursed marriage of man and couch.

“Holy- holy fucking shit.” I stumbled backwards, knocking over my cleaning trolley. I wondered how long ago he’d died, to have rotted away like that. Too fucking long ago. No wonder there were rats. Beatrice was crackers. More fucking crackers than the druggies on South Street who had lived with Big Bobby’s corpse for a week.

Then I heard it again. The fingers on buttons, the mashing of the controller, the TV still on and a lone shooter sniping from some hill in pixelated Beirut.

Motherfucker was still alive.

Just as soon as I realised it, he let out a large groan and twisted his horrifying mass to look at me.

There were shackles where his ankles should have been; buried under blankets of pillowy soft flesh. If I touched his skin, I imagined it would have come sloughing off the bone like a well-cooked Christmas turkey.

“Get out.” He mouthed at me. It was all he could do, and it seemed to take him a lot to say. His jowls shook as he said it and his rotted teeth clattered. “Now.”

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But it was too late...

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I woke up a few hours later. Across from the rotted mass of her son there had been a small couch; a two-seater. It was in the same gaudy print as the other but looked new and was untarnished by rot. I woke up there, my bloodied head resting on the arm of the chair. Beatrice was beside me, with the frying pan she must have walloped me with. I tried to move, but my legs were shackled together.

“Don’t panic my lovely. Everything’s alright. I did tell you not to come in here. I don’t have many valuables, I’m sure that’s what you were looking for right? I don’t hire drug addicts to clean my house without hiding my precious things first. Now. Now. Don’t worry. I’m here to help.” She smiled. “We all have vices. Mine is tea, I could drink it all day! My Connor here loves his - Yell of duty - or whatever it’s called. I live to please. What is it you want?”

I thought about all the shit I’d just seen. A man fused into a couch, rotted to the point where he resembled nothing but a lump of flesh; things no one should ever have to see. Run. I wanted to leave. I wanted to not have eyes. I wanted to feel good again, unmarred by trauma. I wanted the smell of ammonia out my nose. I wanted…

I wanted…

“Charlie.” I spluttered, I realised Beatrice would not know what Charlie was. “I want cocaine. I want to get high.”

“Of course my lovely! Your mummy will get it for you.” She smiled. “All you have to do is stay right here and I will take care of you.”

It’s pretty funny when you think about it. It could be a lot worse, I mean there are children starving in Africa and junkies with no fix. Who am I to complain? I don’t have to do anything for a hit anymore.

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>Hi there my lovelies!
>
>This is Beatrice, my little darling loves writing stories so I gave him a notebook and pen to pass the time. I decided to post this here, he does love to exaggerate that little rascal! I'm not sure if this is the right place for it but I do love to please. I feel very strongly that everyone deserves to have their voice heard. With that being said, would any of you lovelies be interested in a cleaning job? £200 cash in hand. I'll supply the cleaning supplies. I can be very generous. There's some extra money in it for you if you're good at digging holes. My poor garden has gotten out of hand!
>
>See you soon, Beatrice.

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