Everything in the smoking room was brown. Everything from the walls, to the sticky floor,  to the public health information poster on the wall (which was pretty much illegible from all the brown), to the glass of the barred window which never opened.

We shared that room in various stages of our alcohol withdrawal, some of us grounded and locked down for the first week of our incarceration in case we take notions to wander out in the grounds and have ourselves a seizure, or make a run for it and aim for the nearest pub.

There was one week however, when everybody was locked down. It was during the autumn season of ’17 and a massive and violent storm had erupted with power-cuts threatened so they wouldn’t let us outside to smoke or wander in fresh air to break the monotony of sobriety. We were all stuck inside together, jonesing and shaking, probably smoking a lot more than we normally would do.

I’d rolled up a few cigarettes and was perched on the bench in that smoking room, not wanting to spark up yet another one, but not wanting to leave the company of my ragged friends. We took bets as to what the colour of the walls behind the public health poster would be, played word games, made up dirty limericks… then I spotted the air vent.

The screws were loose on the vent when I poked at them, so I pulled them out and lifted the sticky brown grille off. Behind it, inside the vent tunnel, was years and years worth of sticky brown fluff and gunge. I felt around in there gingerly, and… YES!!

There was a baggie.

Inside the little brown baggie were little brown pills.

Everybody in the room grew quite excited, and I’m sure were all thinking the same thing.

The most hardened alcoholic among us took the baggie out of my hand, opened it and pulled out the pills to see if he could identify them.

“Do you dare me?!” he asked, with a big grin on his face.

“Um, NO!” we all replied in unison, but secretly all probably hoped he wouldn’t listen.

He did not listen. He left three pills in the baggie which he stashed in his pocket, and swallowed the remaining two. ‘They taste like a hobo’s arse’ he told us, before wandering off back to his room to enjoy the buzz, or whatever there was to come for the mad bastard.

He didn’t die. He went very quiet for a while, then followed this up with a brief phase of intense paranoia, then about a week later he disappeared never to be seen again. Nobody knew if he checked himself out, or finished his rehab term, or wandered off into a forest to have himself a seizure.

This was a pity, if he’d stuck around longer, he’d have found the little bag of cocaine hidden inside the guitar in the entertainment room.