Jeremy Clarke
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In this pub’s beer garden I’d encountered Tom by chance. It must have been around midnight during what was starting to feel like a New Year’s Eve riot. Tom was on coke, which had had a noticeably sedative effect on him. People were dancing frenetically all around us to music coming from the outdoor speakers. Tom then introduced me to his partner’s brother, who now also materialised in the midst of the bouncing crowd.
This guy, a Scot, was calmness itself. It struck you. It was in the eyes that you saw it first. They weren’t darting about like a fool’s. They were wonderfully unperturbed. Next you clocked the unafraid body language. Impressed, I asked him what drugs he was on. None, he said. He had once been hopelessly addicted to heroin, he said, but had managed to wean himself off, and he’d given drugs a miss ever since.
I heartily congratulated him. How did he manage it, I said, to get off and stay off? The eyes weighed me calmly then smiled. We were on to one of his favourite subjects already, apparently, and this was the self-deprecating smile of someone who well knows how boring or incomprehensible his hobby-horse is to the vast majority. He decided to take a risk, however, and run it by me. ‘Eckhart Tolle,’ he said. ‘He wrote a book called The Power of Now. Have you heard of it?’ I shook my head disappointedly and dismissively. Reading The Power of Now changed the way he thought about himself, he said, undeterred. Changing that changed his behaviour and consequently his life. Before he’d read Tolle, he said, he’d paid too much attention to the negative narrative going on in his mind. Now he was entirely freed from it, transformed, and fully alive for the first time. He offered a quote. ‘In the eye of the ego,’ he said, ‘self-esteem and humility are contradictory. In truth, they are one and the same. T-O-L-L-E,’ he said. ‘Read it.’
The barmaid led me and our carry-out to a house at the bottom of the hill. The door was wide open and people were coming and going. Someone wearing sunglasses was face down in the garden. I recognised him as a coke dealer. Promising.
We went upstairs to the party and here was that druggy Unitarian atmosphere again, though some of the guests were staring in disbelief at this seriously old git who’s just arrived carrying a soggy cardboard box containing pint bottles of Czech lager. Then they saw I’d come with the barmaid. This constituted in their minds a laissez-passer. A friendly hand passed me a joint of skunk which already had the guts sucked out of it.
Normally, I wouldn’t touch skunk with a barge pole, but it was after midnight and a different year, and the friendly hand belonged to this gorgeous beast, about 19, so I suavely took the joint between forefinger and thumb, stuck it in my gob, and sucked hard, like Reg Varney having a crafty one. And then I saw, across on the other side of the room, Tom’s partner’s brother, the Scot’s guy. So I bowled across to wish him and his sister a happy new year. But in the time it took me to get there, my head caved in. I was in such disarray when I got there, I couldn’t speak.
The Scots guy’s eyes calmly took me in. He was standing there with a glass of what looked like lemonade. He was exactly the same clear-thinking guy I’d spoken to in the beer garden earlier. He smiled. And like a schoolmaster humorously hectoring an incorrigible miscreant, he said, ‘T-O-L-L-E. Have you got that now?’
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