So here’s how it went down:

Elliot, he had a syringe, and Diane, his girlfriend, she had one too. He had smack in it, she had smack in it, he shot up and she shot up. Thing was, she died, and Elliot, he didn’t.

This guy Elliot, he’s a little troubled by this, because laying next to his cold, blue girlfriend with cold, blue eyes staring so very wide at him wasn’t so much how he expected to wake up as how he never thought he’d wake up in a million years.

Elliot looks at his cold, blue girlfriend and wonders perhaps if she wasn’t just tired last night when his hands went a few places and just how illegal necrophilia actually is. And then he thinks about drugs, because really, ten minutes is sort of a long time to go without thinking about drugs.

And Elliot, he goes into the pockets of his cold, blue girlfriend’s jeans and he takes out a crumpled packet of Silk Cut and he smokes. Elliot smokes until the smoke alarm starts bashing his head with a rusty spade and oh, sweet Jesus, it hurts, and so he hauls his tired arse up and whacks it with his cold, blue girlfriend’s stiletto. That smoke alarm, it kept it’s lousy trap shut that one time he didn’t stub a cigarette out properly, and nearly got him killed, the piece of shit. So Elliot whacks it one more time, for good measure, and it’s satisfying until the thing starts up again and the fat bloke next door yells something about shutting the fuck up, and Elliot wonders if he should just have smoked outside.

His mouth tastes like a mixture of cheap beer and mouldy oranges, and if he weren’t so busy being a little troubled by his cold, blue girlfriend, Elliot might find this a little unpleasant. But as it is, he is busy, and he’s trying to put his jeans on, and it’s bastard o’clock in the morning or afternoon or what the fuck ever, his girlfriend is fucking cold and blue, cut him some slack.

Dressed, or sort of because his clothes smell like the inside of his fridge, which is a bad thing, Elliot looks up and over everywhere for his shoes, or sort of because really he just sort of glances until he spots a knot of rancid, grey shoelace over on the other side of his cold, blue girlfriend. So he’s thinking about shoes, and also a bit about drugs because just then he nearly stabbed himself with the syringe his cold, blue girlfriend used to get that way, when he gets round the other side of her and wonders if maybe the bloody, gaping hole in the side of her head helped a bit too.

Elliot, he thinks maybe he should have noticed that one window has a bullet in it and the other one, it’s smashed to bits, and that he’s shoving his feet in shoes full of broken glass. But that’s not really the point, is it, not when there’s also a rock with a bit of paper and man, this is so Godfather. He’s weighing up which is better, huge, bloody horse or cold, blue girlfriend, and at the same time he’s poking at the string holding the bit of paper to the rock, because his coordination isn’t what it used to be.

So this note, it says you better pay up next time, huh and Elliot worries a bit that he actually has more than one debt that might have come to this, and also that next time he might not have a girlfriend to get in the way of his becoming cold and blue. He thinks, too, that maybe he should be doing somethingthat isn'tstanding at a window in plain sight of pretty much everything, going to find that gun he has, for example. That gun he has, it’s buried under his clothes and some girls’ clothes and some guys’ clothes, and a lot of other shit that keeps him from having to own furniture or, Jesus Christ, look at the floor in this place, and Elliot sort of pokes it and checks the magazine before shoving it in the pocket of the jacket he always wears.

Outside it’s cold and grey, a nice change from how cold and blue everything inside seems to be, and Elliot walks like he’s got a purpose, which he always does when he’s going fuck knows where. The people here, they walk with their collars up and their heads down, because otherwise nine times out of ten, you’re gonna piss someone off, and then, nine times out of ten, someone’s getting shot. Elliot, he doesn’t love those odds, so he puts his collar up and his head down and walks like he’s got a purpose until he realises that actually, he does have one, when he starts trundling in an aimless sort of way.

The purpose hehadn't realisedhe has, it’s to go and find Oliver, his brother, and say how he’s really trying to get clean this time, and if he could just have a couple of thousand to start him off, maybe he could get his life back on track, and then say how on the streets now, a couple means ‘nine’. Oliver works in this building that’s huge as fuck, and all the people there wear ties and their shoes aren’t full of broken glass, and Elliot, he’s about as inconspicuous as a broken nose.

Oliver’s gonna pretend like he doesn’t want to lend the money, but he will, eventually, because when it comes down to it, brothers come through for each other, and Elliot likes to think that he’d do the same for Oliver, even though in his heart of hearts he knows he’s too much of a tight bastard to do much more than sit in a shiny, shit-eating car with a shiny, shit-eating grin on his face.

Elliot’s right, his brother’s not pleased, but long-story-short sort of thing, he gets the money, and then he’s off, a little bit of a spring in his step because today, fucking hell, he’s got something to do that isn’t illegal, or underage, and that doesn’t happen a whole lot of often any more. The place where he’s going isn’t quite Kensington, or Chelsea, or any of those places he’s never been to but are always used in examples like this, but it’s further up the market than Elliot could ever afford in a whole month of Sundays, so he stands up straighter and runs his fingers through his hair, like it’ll make it look a little less greasy.

He’s on his way to see this guy, okay, this guy he wouldn’t normally go near with a ten foot piece of shit, let alone those barges everyone’s always banging on about. But this guy, he’s gonna let Elliot know who he’s gotta screw to get his cold, blue girlfriend out of his flat, and who he’s gotta shoot to stay warm and a sort of pinkish whitish yellow. This guy knows fuck-me-everything, and for a couple pink notes he’ll sing like a wind-up toy, and Elliot knocks on the door like he knows it’s gonna get him somewhere.

Ten minutes later, and Elliot’s tripping out the door because that step is a bastard sometimes, but he doesn’t give a flying one, he’s got a name and that, right now, it’s all he needs. This name, he knows it well, and where it lives, and what it likes for breakfast in the morning, but that’s not a whole lot of important right now because what he knows more than any of that, is that he’s going to kill it.

Elliot, he’s going to kill it, because it was the catalyst to a series of events which led to his waking up next to his cold, blue girlfriend, and he didn’t like Diane all that much even when she wasn’t cold and blue, but it’s the principle of the thing, and Elliot is hacked off.

The name, or maybe he should start thinking about the guy who owns it, lives not a mile away from Elliot himself, and he strides up to the door and hits on it like a hacked off guy, twice, before he starts feeling nervous. The name or the guy, he’s got a hell of a lot of little bitches with guns running around, to stop other little bitches with guns from getting within a hundred yards of him and Elliot, he’s never felt more like a little bitch with a gun.

And this guy who owns the name, which is Tony, opens the door and Elliot throws his fucking caution to the wind, shoves the gun nice and fast up under his jawbone, and they dance their little don’t-shoot-me-don’t-take-my-gun tango. What it comes down to is, Elliot’s got Tony sitting in a chair, with his fat arse wobbling with fear and promising all sorts of crap in exchange for his pathetic life.

So Elliot, he laughs a little, and then, because he’s not one to dick around when he’s got people to see and a cold, blue girlfriend to get out of his flat, he stares Tony in the eyes, because Tony’s a powerful guy but not a whole bunch of intimidation when it gets down to it, and he says you arsehole, you killed my girlfriend.

And Elliot, he shoots the guy.