Cost of Business

The first time I cooked crack I was doing somebody a favour.

Well, no, that’s not strictly true.

The first time I watched crack being cooked, I was helping somebody out.

When you work in a shop, people come and go.

You get high schoolers who work weekends only to make some extra cash. You get those who jump from job to job, never finding a place to settle down. And you get people who come one day, work a week, then vanish as though they’d never existed to begin with.

In shops though, there’s a select few people who make it beyond a year. If you’ve been employed at a shop for any longer than that, you’re considered an old-timer, a senior in the world of retail. Work five years? Damn, you’re practically in the grave already.

I was one of those people who’d been there beyond a year. Three, to be exact.

In that time, I’d seen all manner of people come and go, all of those we just covered. And over the three years of my life I’d spent in the shop, there were only two people I considered friends: Ben and Rahul.

By the end of this story, Ben will be dead.

The retail sector of Britain is teeming with drugs.

As is the restaurant industry.

Go into the bathroom of any shop or restaurant – the bathrooms accessible only to staff – swab the place, and you’ll no doubt find the residue of any number of substances the staff have used to get them through the day. I’d put my life on it.

The long hours of retail, and the often-soul-destroying nature of having to bend over backwards to facilitate entitled customers leaves a void that caffeine just doesn’t touch. Waking up in the morning, preparing yourself to face eight more hours of this joy vacuum, you’ll need more than a coffee or a can of Red-Bull.

For our shop, cocaine was the tool of choice.

Ben had been working in the shop for years; he was there before me.

Yet, it didn’t take long before I understood how he operated.

It wouldn’t be uncommon to see him leaving the shop floor at a variety of times throughout the day – 10am, 12pm, 3pm, and 5pm were his favourites. The reason for these quick breaks to the bathroom were simple: to replenish his system with the vital stimulants needed to power through his shift.

When I first started working at the shop, the reliance on prohibited substances to keep your mind and body active came as a shock to me. Three years in, though, seeing him slouch off to the back of the store, and come back full of beans, was normal. Expected. Often, if it was a particularly busy day, welcomed even.

You could be sure that with the powder dancing in his system, Ben would be the most productive of us all.

Rahul joined the team on a Wednesday.

The manager brought him to the front shop – the customer service area – before the doors opened and the day began.

“This is Rahul!” the manager said to us, his voice the usual height of joy and chirpiness. Even now, I don’t know if the manager was also using coke to get through the day. Nobody could be that happy all the time without something to keep them going.

We were told that Rahul would be joining the team, and him and I would be working the same shift pattern.

I had a lot of time to get to know Rahul.

He was one of those keep-your-head-down types of guys, those who get a job at a shop not because they have a deep passion for selling customers overpriced garbage, but because they need the cash. Understandable. I think we were all in that position.

Naturally, then, Rahul wasn’t quick to offer information about himself. Also understandable.

Still, we were working the same shifts, so soon I wore him down and he started revealing little bits and pieces about himself.

Rahul was an older guy, around forty years old. He had broad shoulders, a shaved head, and a look in his eye that told you he’d seen more than he was letting on.

Rahul was married, and he had a daughter. He lived in the poorer area of town, a long way from the shop. To get to work he travelled in by bus each morning, and went home the same way.

Rahul had perpetually red knuckles.

Ben and Rahul rarely worked the same shift.

In retail, there are people who are lucky, finding themselves on normal, predicable shift patterns – myself and Rahul were in this group. And there are other people whose shifts are irregular, starting and ending at different times each day – this was Ben’s group.

I think Rahul was working at the shop for something like three months before him and Ben crossed paths. But cross paths they did.

It wasn’t chance that brought them together, but a sickness. One of the regular shifters called out, so Ben was brought in to cover. Ben did his thing, going in and out to hoover up his lines, which caught the eye of Rahul.

“You need more?” I heard Rahul tentatively asking Ben in the breakroom around lunchtime one day.

Everyone has a different name for coke – blow, charlie, ching, wash – with it seeming that nobody was ever comfortable using the real name.

“Need more of what?” Ben replied, wiping his nose.

“Charlie.”

That’s how Rahul became Ben’s supplier.

Rahul was often at work before me.

His bus had a weird timetable, with him either getting to work half an hour early, or twenty minutes late. The result is that he’d be sitting in the breakroom when I walked in to put my stuff in my locker.

One morning, his eyes were bloodshot, and he had deep, dark circles underlining them.

“You okay?” I asked, closing the red door of my locker with a squeak.

“Yeah man,” he replied.

Rahul was one of those guys that would only engage in a conversation if there was some other thing he could focus on. You know how deep chats are much easier during long car rides, because both driver and passenger are focusing on what’s happening outside the window? The same could be said about Rahul.

As we were stacking the shelves, both of us focusing on clearing the red boxes that the delivery came in, he told me about his situation.

“She’s kicked me out, man.” He told me.

A bit more shelf-stacking-induced sharing revealed that his wife had left their flat the night before, taking their daughter with her. Then this morning, after she’d known he’d have left for work, he got a text telling him to not come back.

“I’m fucked, man. What do I do?”

I took pity on him.

The first week or so of Rahul living with me were fine. He was quiet, generally detached, and largely kept to himself.

Week two was when he asked if he could do it.

Week two was when I said he could, because I’m too much of a people pleaser.

Week two was when I first saw crack being cooked in my kitchen.

I watched him mix the cocaine with water and baking soda in the same pot I’d used to make my entry for the shop’s annual Bake Off competition. I watched the mixture become a grey paste, and I watched him pour it out onto tin foil that I’d fetched from the drawer.

We sat in the living room and watched The Office on TV whilst the mixture was setting, and when it was done, I watched him break up the now hardened, concrete-like substance into small, white rocks.

Then, finally, I watched him package up those rocks, wrapping them tightly with clingfilm and greaseproof paper.

The strange thing was how normal it all felt. Once you got over the idea that a Class A was being cooked in a kitchen that had only been used for dinners and desserts, it felt like any other night.

Layout the ingredients, follow a recipe, and get cooking.

Since he moved into my flat, Rahul and I had been going into work together.

I had a car, so despite all that was going on with him, he was pretty happy to not be taking the bus. More so, he was happy to be getting into work at a normal time. Several times he told me how pissed off he was being there early.

“It’s like I’m just giving them half an hour,” he said, “that’s why I camp out in the breakroom.”

You couldn’t blame him. I think I’d do the same.

We get into work and head into the back, dropping off our stuff, putting our lunch in the fridge, and things like that. Ben is already there.

As I’m putting my backpack in my locker, I see Rahul take a wrap out of his pocket and hand it to Ben. They used that handshake that’s only used, presumably, in cheesy street movies and apparently the real world. You know the one, where it’s painfully obvious one person is passing something to the other person.

“Use that at home,” Rahul said to Ben.

Crack is different to powdered cocaine. The effects are about the same, but you have to smoke crack. You drop it in a pipe and light a flame below it, then inhale the fumes. The nature of the burn means it’s much more conspicuous than its powdered cousin. Rahul’s advice to enjoy the drug at home would save them both a world of trouble.

The sweet, acidic smell of crack burning would be much harder to explain away than a non-descript dusting of white powder on the breakroom table.

“Cheers pal,” Ben said to Rahul, sliding over some cash, “I’ll need this to get through the next week.”

The person he’d been brought into cover had been signed off work a while. I forget what was wrong with her.

Ben didn’t show up to work the next day.

Ben didn’t show up to work the day after, either.

A week passed, and Ben still hadn’t shown up.

A week and one day after Rahul had passed Ben the crack, an advert went up online.

The shop was hiring.

The manager had told us, at the start of a shift exactly one week and one day after Ben had taken the crack from Rahul that, because Ben had refused to turn up to work, he had been terminated.

“I’ve tried to contact him,” the manager said, his balding head shining in the harsh fluorescent lights above us, “but he’s not answering.”

As we stood in the huddle, positioned in a semi-circle around the manager, I caught the eye of Rahul. Neither of us needed to say anything.

Those of us living normal lives, without the benefit of a celebrity status, rarely make headlines when we die. Most people, if it’s not connected to them, care only about the deaths of singers and film stars, not a man who was just doing what he needed to do to get by.

Ben’s death didn’t make the news. It wasn’t even in those free newspapers that people hand you on the street.

The shop’s computer system was painfully outdated; I found Ben’s address in just a few minutes. On the day he told us that Ben was fired, I drove out to his house at the end of my shift. I think I knew what had happened, but I didn’t want to believe it.

He lived in a bungalow on a quiet road.

He had no family, and by that, I mean no partner or no kids. No pets, either.

I pulled up. A man held his phone up to take a photo of what used to be Ben’s home. He saw me looking at the bungalow. “Interested in looking inside?” He said to me, the practiced smile painted across his face.

“It’s a steal,” he said, “the renter di-… vacated in a rush.”

We both saw the single piece of police tape on the fence post as it flapped in the wind, evidence of something neither of us would acknowledge.

I drove away.

“You’ve got to go, man.”

I said this to Rahul as we got to my flat after work a couple days later.

“Huh?”

“You’ve got to go.”

I’d been rehearsing this all day in my head. I’d be stacking the shelves going over the conversation. I’d changed that opening a million times. I experimented with giving the news gently, I practised being stern, I tried pleading.

In the end, it was best to just say it. No sugar coating.

“Why?” he asked.

“You know why. You can’t stay here anymore.”

He looked at me with anger. I could see the veins on his neck sticking out, his eyes clouding over, his hands flexing in and out of a fist, red knuckles shining.

“Tell me why.”

“Ben.”

“What about him?”

“He’s gone.”

“What’s that got to do with me?”

“The crack, I said, “the shit we cooked in here, in that pot – killed him.”

“So, you’re kicking me out?” Rahul didn’t deny it.

“I can’t have you here, man.”

“Ben was a cost of business, it happens.”

I didn’t reply. Rahul left the flat that night.

A part of me didn’t want to see him go.

Despite it all, I liked him. But things happen where you can’t see people the same way anymore.

I drove into work the next day by myself.

I put my backpack in the locker and started stacking shelves.

Rahul wasn’t there.

I drove into work the day after.

Rahul wasn’t there again.

A week later, the manager gathered us at the front of the store.

“We’re hiring again,” he said, “Rahul hasn’t shown up for a week, we need to fill the role.”

Becky, one of the high schoolers I told you about at the start, said it was a real shame that people kept leaving.

“It’s a cost of business,” the manager said, “it happens.”

Someone else was hired, things went on as they always had done.

Ben and Rahul were never mentioned again.