Ed. Note - Both are a drug. They will hook you with sudden rushes of euphoria. You will nod off in ecstasy. You will see your friends less and feel the world in such sudden urgency that any previous rendering of the world seems incomplete. It will become your joy and curse until nothing else exists but this single thing alone. And, then, it gets truly interesting. We are talking about love and heroin. When you combine the two you get the excellent VICE documentary Swansea Love Story.



   It is, like most VICE documentaries, compelling stuff focused on compelling characters. Not only are there Amy, Cornelius and Clint, but there is the city of Swansea itself. Petra Antevasin has gathered these elements to form his own documentary of sorts.



   We don't do fiction in The TPR Stream (that's meant for TPR Is Lit), but thought that this particular piece blurred the lines enough between fiction and reality to merit a place here. Like they say, any good rule deserves to be broken...



An Homage to Amy Protheroe



   It was too many dreams. It was having too many dreams that crushed the lot. They all went down at the same time, one by one, with every trickle of alcohol Mum poured on the burns from Jonesy’s cigarettes, with every beating in the night-time, where nobody could hear. A new location, so far away from Swansea. Nobody’s place at all. So many dreams.



   So many dreams put to sleep like a dog – like that dog Amy had watched Jonesy tackle and then kill, when she was six years old. Then came the fights between him and Mum. She didn’t know where he came from, and she imagined him to be a witch doctor come to torment her for a wrong she did not know. But the wrong was there – she had learned that pretty early. Something inside her was unlovable, and needed tending to quickly with a stick against her bottom, her back. Inside. The pain was inside, whenever she felt. That didn’t happen for long, the moment in which she could feel. He tore it away again.



   “You shiftless bitch,” he said in his voice hardened by alcohol. “I’m sick of havin’ ye around. If it warn’t for me mortal fear of the Lord, and yer cunt mum kickin’ me out, I would force you out to git, like a dog.”



   She had listened in a silence of stone.



   “Why don’t ye make yerself useful, you come-swallowing whore? Aye, ye even look like one. You look like a fat pig cunt – not fit to lick me arse. It’s off to the parlor with ye.”



   Jonesy was a hard-mouthed Englishman who meant what he said. He was Mum’s dealer, and gave her heroin. He held together the family with booze and drugs, eggs, speed, liquor all day long. Fights, wrestles. Sleepless nights. The mother who didn’t love her, and watched as her daughter was sold to the whorehouse.



   Mum couldn’t kick him out. She needed the hit. She was in love with the high. The high was the closest she would be to okay. The woman felt this in her heart, but the daughter never knew. Amy would come to know the starvation, the bitterness, the emptiness for men that the mother knew – that all addicts who are girls know. Amy only saw a life she couldn’t believe in, but would not get out of. It was bound to happen.



   Lots of sex in the “parlor”, all of it meaning nothing. Men inside her, men out of her, going around the room, coming on her face, in her mouth, in every possible hole of her body. She learned pretty fast not to say anything as they bullied her, like the older boys made fun of her on the streets as she got home for the afternoon. The older whores, who knew the ropes and the words, taught them to her. She grew up.



   Then she smoked weed. She got on heroin and met Cornelius.



   “A right tidy girl,” he said she was. “I’ve always had a soft spot for you.”



   Dead. They were both dead to the world, dead to death. How could she die when she’d never lived?



   There was Swansea, and Cornelius’s eyes. Lost, friendly. Unable to get her out of it. Only when he smiled at her, she wasn’t so sure that “out” was where she was supposed to be. His kiss was as much of an injection as the heroin. Fifteen, sixteen – she got thrown out on the street. Seventeen. Pregnant. Stillborn, at eighteen. Cornelius’s dad hated her guts.



   “She’s a bitch,” he said through a toothy grin, only his teeth were half gone. “No, sorry. I wouldn’t wanna insult dogs.”



   Days of apple cider and summertime during which it rained. More of Cornelius, except when he went to jail, leaving her alone to die. Suicide watch. His sweater on her neck would set her free.



   Leaps into the ocean. No teeth, and only ratty blue clothes.

​

   “I loves me baby, an’ he loves me.”



    And so they go into the tunnel. Unknown.



    “Twat. You silly twat.”



    “Baby.”



    Heroin over the decade. Gone, gone. Who knows where she’ll be in a lifetime? Only the echoes of the waves in response. The ocean is so steely and wooden. Dirty needles everywhere, and Clint sees her smiling her way into the grave.



   It’s the best. This rush is the best.



Curtain Call.