Matt Rowland Hill - Original Sins

A shattering portrait of addictiongenerously open, desperately honest and confronting.

Catherine Cho, author of Inferno: A Memoir of Motherhood and Madness

A scorching, relentless, absolutely essential read about the roots of addiction and what it takes to save yourself. Hill writes like he has nothing to lose, and like he was born to create this harrowing, utterly transfixing, beautifully wrought portrait of a young man tortured by the twin horrors of family and religion. I couldnt put it down.

Merritt Tierce, author of L ove Me Back

A stunningly well-written, funny, heartrending and utterly gripping memoir about learning how to live with who we are. Read it. Read it now.

Nathan Filer, author of The Shock of the Fall

Matt Rowland Hill guides us to the edge of devastation, and doesnt flinch from the ache of addiction, family anguish and inward despair. But this is a book thats optimistic to the core, as honest about grief as it is about joy. I wont forget it.

Jessica J. Lee, author of Two Trees Make a Forest and Turning

A wildly original and gripping debut, told with humor and compassion, about what it means to survive.

Christie Watson, author of The Language of Kindness

What most impressed me about this addiction memoir was its staunch refusal to become an addiction memoir. Instead, Hill allows his story to be precisely what all of our stories are: a series of days, and hours, and moments in which we are given, over and over, the profound responsibility to choose life over death.

Jamie Quatro, author of Fire Sermon

What a frightening and funny book, full of shocking, memorable scenes. Im glad Matt Rowland Hill lived to tell the tale.

Adam Foulds, author of The Quickening Maze

Matt Rowland Hill was born in 1984 in Pontypridd, south Wales, and grew up in Wales and England. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, the Independent, New Statesman, the Telegraph and other outlets. He now lives in London. Original Sins is his first book.

Original Sins

A Memoir

Matt Rowland Hill

For Jonathan Rhys Hill

For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory;

While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.

2 Corinthians 4:1718

The crisis in a young mans life comes when he half-realizes that he is hopelessly overcommitted to what he is not.

Erik H. Erikson, Young Man Luther

Contents

Is there anything more lovely than the sight of clean needles, fresh from the pharmacy in the morning?

Theres a knock at the door, but I dont answer. Staring back at me from the bathroom mirror is a thirty-year-old man wearing a charcoal-gray suit and a black tie clipped neatly into place. Laid out on the toilet lid are three aluminum spoons in blister packs, six yellow sachets of citric acid, four orange-capped 1ml syringes in sealed plastic wrappers, eight antiseptic swabs in miniature white envelopes, a tube of cigarette filters and three lighters. I know by the end of the day Ill be rifling through pockets of blood-soiled litter for a needle that isnt bent and clogged beyond use. But for now, looking at my tools in the rhomboid light cast by the window above the sink, I feel inspired, like a gifted painter standing before a blank canvas.

The knockings louder this time, and a Welsh-accented male voice calls through the door: What yew doing in there, mun?

Ill just be a minute! I shout. Theres no reply, and it occurs to me with satisfaction that my strangled tone might, under the circumstances, be mistaken for grief.

As far as bathrooms to shoot up in go, this oneclean, spacious, well litis close to the ideal. I once thought myself a connoisseur of bathrooms, these sanctuaries where I can leave the world unseen and be alone with my favorite hobby. I relished the nefarious glamour of injecting heroin in an upholstered lavatory with palm fronds and gleaming brass taps. I even had a perverts fondness for a reeking public toilet scrawled with felt-tip cartoon dicks. But as you grow older, you increasingly come to appreciate what really matters. And, as they say, its the little things that count: a decent light to help find a vein, a flat surface on which to carry out the sacrament of cooking up, a reassuringly heavy door. If I absolutely had to find fault with this bathroomif I could change one thingit would be the fact that its in a church filled with mourners at the funeral of a friend of mine who died last week from an overdose of the same drugs Im about to mainline into my bloodstream.

Oh well, I think, as the knocking starts again and I kneel over the toilet, slowly opening a pea-sized plastic wrap of chalky brown powder: you cant have everything.

When the call came ten days ago, I almost didnt pick up. I was waiting for Armani in a piss-scented stairwell in Hackneys Downs Park Estate, and the sight of Joanna Sidhus name on my phone made me feel embarrassed, caught out. The floor looked as though the detritus of a shipwrecked crew of junkies and crackheads had washed in with the tide: shattered glass, crushed beer cans, a single bloodied ballet pump, a headless plastic doll. It was hard to imagine a world where this scene and Joanna Sidhukind, benign Jo, with her emphatic North-American smilecould both exist.

Hey, stranger, said the voice on the line. Long time.

Normally, once Id known someone awhile, a wariness would hatch in my mind and begin to infect all our interactions, until I felt sure that somehow Id thoroughly disgraced myself and that my humiliation was an open secret, like a repulsive crime equally impossible to mention or forget. But Jo, though Id known her since university, had always been exempt from this rule. She never showed any sign she was aware of my real or imagined sins. Which is why I accepted her call, even though I usually never answered the phone while waiting to score. I lit a cigarette with my free hand.

Jo, I dont have long, I said. Works crazy right now.

Oh man, tell me about it. Works crazy here too. Actually Im about to go into an eleven oclock. But listen up a minute, OK?

From the stairwells screened window I could see Armani peddling laboriously up the main road on a kids BMX. It was summer, but the sky was overcast and his shoulders were hunched against the spitting rain. I watched him turn right into the estate and I knew that in three minutes hed have cycled through the car park, locked his bike, walked across the courtyard and climbed the four flights of stairs to where I was standing. Id waited here so many times that my brain had learned to count down those three minutes with remarkable precision. My guts loosened with anticipation, and I realized I hadnt heard a thing Jo had said.

Sorry, Jo, the lines terrible. What was that?

Two minutes and fifteen seconds.

Can you hear me now? I said I got a call this morning, about Gareth Lloyd. I know you guys used to be close, so I wanted to tell you. Im so sorry, Matt. He died yesterday.

Wait, what?

One minute and fifty seconds.

They wont know till after theyve run tests, but they think it had something to do with drugs.

A hundred seconds. Under a hundred seconds.

Jesus Christ, Jo. I dont know what to say.

I know. Its likeI dont think its sunk in for me yet either.