The Words of the Mouth

  ******

  Several weeks later, the police raided me.

  Next door to me lived a dealer named Jack, an upper-class twit who had no street sense and carelessly kept his stash in his flat. I would buy from him for some of my street-wise and villainous friends who wouldn't go near him. One evening I had a feeling he was going to be raided and had tried to persuade him to hide his stash, which was then about seven pounds of cannabis resin, somewhere outside. But he wouldn't listen.

  'Plum' had been visiting me, and on his way out he saw the police massing at the police box. He nipped into a nearby telephone kiosk and phoned Jack.

  "The police are on their way up. You'd better go out the window."

  Jack was half way out the window with his bag of dope when they burst through his front door. The bag split, some of it falling outside, the rest scattering on the sill. The police, however, rushed about the flat saying, "Where's Sangster?" They thought that I lived there, that I was the dealer they were after.

  "He lives in the next stair," Jack's wife told them.

  Meanwhile I had tidied up any incriminating evidence because of my premonition, and was on my way down the stairs, a large lump of dope in my pocket. I heard the stampede of policemen coming up the steps, and quickly swallowed the dope, but carried on downstairs nonchalantly.

  At the head of the group of police was Shag, a highlandman with whom I had had a run-in before. I pulled out the keys to the flat.

  "Here's the keys." I looked him straight in the eye. "You're ten minutes late; I thought you were never coming. The house is clean, so you're wasting your time."

  Shag looked at me malevolently. I had heard he believed in the evil eye.

  "I'm psychic," I continued with a knowing wink. "I can read your mind. And you'd better watch what you say to your colleagues. Little birdies talk," I added, just to sow suspicion in their ranks.

  I could feel the lump still going down my throat, as I followed them into my two-bedroomed flat. Anticipating a police raid, 1 had broken all the lights in it, to make searching difficult. There was only one bulb on a forty-foot flex. If I wanted to cook, or read, I would just trail the light after me.

  There were eight policemen crowded into the cramped, dark flat, completely at sixes and sevens, trying to search the place with several tiny torches. Two London policemen were amongst them; they spent their time looking at the books on my shelves, noting my interests.

  During the search, I recalled that in the past I had been very paranoid about the police and had thought, 'Who is the symbol of my paranoia? SHAG!' So I had made a little badge painting of him, with the body of the Incredible Hulk. I'd put it on the wall and drawn a circle round it, which I would punch in anger whenever I felt badly about the police.

  I turned to Shag. "I've got something to show you." He followed me to the kitchen, expecting me to reveal where I had hidden my dope. I showed him the badge; it was a brilliant likeness. His eyes widened in consternation.

  "If you like, I can stick a pin in it," 1 suggested, picking it up and reaching it out towards him. "I mean, so you can wear it as a badge, "I added, as he backed away, horrified. I couldn't resist following after him, holding the badge up in both my hands, like a priest exorcising the devil, until he shrank helplessly against the wall.

  On a table in the sitting room corner, was a small box containing a beautiful stone. "Don't touch that," I sternly commanded, as one constable reached forward to pick it up. He drew back in obedience.

  "Thank goodness you didn't open that," I spoke with relief.

  "Why?"

  "That's my Ju-ju," I explained mysteriously, adding another dimension to my improvised weirdo act.

  To my amazement they didn't open the box. Shortly after, they left, having found nothing.

  I recalled that I'd eaten a huge piece of hash, and I tried to make myself sick, in order to regurgitate it; but to no avail. Instead I made myself go to sleep to avoid the effects. This was the worst thing I could have done. I awoke hours later, drenched in sweat, to see a man run out of the ceiling and into the floor. Hours and hours of unstoppable hallucinations commenced now, which seemed to be projected from a beam centred in my forehead, to wherever I looked. I discovered that I could control these by simply desiring a picture, which then appeared. There was no rest, as waves of pictures swept over everything around me, I could see devils; the curtains swirled about the room; as I walked, my shadow changed into various people. It was as if Pandora's box had opened, I felt like King Midas when everything he touched turned inexorably to gold. These visions profoundly influenced my paintings for years thereafter.

  The next day I went out to a respectable bungalow in the quiet suburb of Corstorphine, where Plum and his friends lived. I had been given an SOS to come and find their dope stash, which they were too spaced out to locate. I'd done this on several occasions before, usually working out fairly quickly where it was, from their vague recollections; this time, however, I couldn't find it. But for some reason I persisted for a couple of hours and eventually came across it, in a plastic bag, buried in the garden.

  I had an impulse to fill the bag up with earth and rebury it in the same spot, after I had removed their dope.

  That night, a huge raid, led by Shag, and involving some twenty police cadets, along with a van carrying a generator and portable flood- lights, descended on Plum's home. The lights were set up, the cadets formed a line across the garden and began to dig it from one end to the other. If you are feeling lazy, then I suppose a good way to get your garden dug is to tell the police that drugs are buried in it.

  Plum and his friends were confidently relaxing in the sitting-room, thinking they were clean, when they heard a great hoot of triumph from the police outside. Their spirits abruptly sank.

  Among the policemen, an argument ensued.

  "It's soil'."

  "It can't be; who would bury a bag of soil in the garden - there MUST be dope in it."

  "Get a sheet and empty it out."

  On the sitting room floor they meticulously fingered through the earth, then took some of it away for analysis. Their raid was totally wrecked, and they knew it.

  As they were about to leave, Shag's eye fell on one of my gnomes; his face contorted with recognition.

  "Look!" he raged, "It's one of that fuckin' Sangster's gnomes! I hate him! I hate him!”