EXAMPLE OF BAD TIMES: SUGAR AND BLOOD

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Prologue

Example of Good Times: Summer and LoveExample of Bad Times: Sugar and Blood Part One: Invincibility

Crop FailureProblems with Detachable Heads: 1A Change Is as Good as a HolidayFoursomeColin Gets LuckyFreebasingI DoWalletCrabsBooksLife and Death Part Two: The Kindgom of Momentum

Truth 1: DreamsAshtrayTruth 2: How It IsGPODrying OutTruth 3: KissesFreelancingCookingProblems with Detachable Heads: 2Truth 4: Where Is the Earth?Cats Part Three: The Momentum of Change

Truth 5: PoplarsCountry LivingBreakagesHospitalsBlinding Truth: Frisbees

Epilogue

Candy

About the Author

Prologue EXAMPLE OF GOOD TIMES: SUMMER AND LOVE

In the beginning: Sydney, summer

Everything’s fucking beautiful! I’m so in love. I’ve just met Candy, it’s been a month or two. We’re discovering each other’s bodies. Candy’s just discovered smack and I’ve just discovered she’s got a bit of money. Keen as all fuck to get dirty.

Candy’s got the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen, a kind of mist you fall into. It’s weird how you can be going along, and all you’re thinking about is heroin, and then you meet someone, and other thoughts get in there. It makes it like meeting Candy was meant to happen. Things were getting hairy, as they tend to when you’re using. As always, I was enjoying the dope. It can be all right being alone. But partnership is a good thing and helps focus your energies.

We did a credit card scam together, and Candy’s still reeling from the adrenaline rush. She thinks we can be like Bonnie and Clyde, me handsome, her beautiful, both of us glamorous and full of sex and ready to take on the world. I suppose I mean Dunaway and Beatty. Anyway, falling in love is kind of exciting.…

EXAMPLE OF BAD TIMES: SUGAR AND BLOOD

Much later: Melbourne, winter

My day in the light, the day is darkening. I’m hurling all the little joys against the greater sadness. The sadness is a giant weight. It presses down. Its meaning: “What’s the point?” The little joys are pebbles. The pebbles are getting smaller and smaller and the weight of the sadness is growing, the sadness is gaining density and mass, until in the end I’m throwing handfuls of dust at matter so thick there’s no space between the molecules. Nowhere anywhere for anything to move. The years roll on.

I can’t stop. I just can’t stop. I can’t stop anymore.

I’m sure it is possible, but no leap of the imagination can make it seem like it’s possible.

There’s a drought. Or you could say a flash flood. A flash flood of no heroin. Once every year or two, these things seem to happen. It’s probably just a coming together of circumstances, like the way an eclipse occurs and it seems to be a message, that slide into darkness.

For two or three days, all the panicked phone calls, everyone ringing everyone else. Just enough dope to scrape by, deals from a friend of a friend of a friend, crap cut with so much sugar you barely feel it. Everyone saying, “I hear there’s some pink rocks coming tomorrow.”

Some phone calls come our way. “If you get on to anything, we’re waiting here with money.” I go right through my phone book. I call Dirty Julie, so treacherous and unreliable she’d never get a call under any other circumstances. Hangs out with some fucked-up guys, the rumor is they do home invasions and kidnappings. Very violent types.

But Dirty Julie says she has dope. “What do you want?” she asks. I tell her I’ll call her straight back. I make a few calls. Everyone gets revved up. Secretly, I make up a packet of powdered sugar. Survival of the fittest in times of drought.

O’Brien and Victor and Maria and Schumann and Martin come around. Everyone piles into Victor’s car, nobody wants to leave their money for too long. Candy waits at home. I’m the connection. Everyone is nervous, nobody is stoned. Drought brings out the worst in us and it’s easy to hate your fellow human beings. We drive silently to Dirty Julie’s, suspended inside the terrible tension in the car like pieces of fruit in gelatin. I direct them to park around the corner. “Wait here,” I say. Five of them crammed into the car in the dark street, and the space where I had been. Everyone smoking cigarettes, the inside of the car like a dark mist in which hover fireflies.

Dirty Julie and some of the boys are waiting in the lounge room. “Hurry up, let’s get this done, we have to go too.”

I should listen to my instincts. I know I’m getting ripped off, that they’re hanging out too, that they’re waiting for my money so that they, in turn, can go get on. But there’s no turning back now. It’s more than eighteen hours since I’ve had any smack. I just hope there’s a little bit in the deal, enough to hold me until things get better. I’m buying dope for seven people, including Candy and me. Surely half of seven people’s dope, even if it’s a rip-off, should be enough to hold me. And then tomorrow, maybe, good times will come back.

I go through the motions. I taste the dope. It’s got that doughy taste of a big cut. But I’m trapped in the momentum of ignorance now. “I’m just going to take a little for myself,” I say. They’re all watching me, edgy. They’re standing. I’m the only one sitting.

I take out half the dope, put it in a separate package, slip it down my socks. I add the same amount of my powdered sugar, give it a quick stir. This is what will happen. We will get back to the warehouse and try the dope—I will have to go through the pretense and hit up what I know to be mostly sugar—and everyone will realize they’ve been ripped off. They will all complain and grumble and I will apologize and say, how was I to know, what could I do? Finally they will disperse. And then I will have my private hit, and be okay. Even Candy can’t know about this one. Times are tough.

But I get back to the car and they check the dope and freak. “Take it back. We don’t want it.” It’s the official word. Everyone dipping their little finger and tasting it on their tongue. “Take it back. This is shit.”

I’ve done a dumb thing. I am caught between a rock and a very hard place. But I have to pretend. The situation is fraught with peril. I will take the dope back, knowing that Dirty Julie and the boys will refuse, knowing that they saw me cut it.

Martin and Victor are angry. “We’re coming with you,” they say, following me around the corner. “No,” I say, “you’d better not come. They’re heavy people.” It’s the truth. “You’re not supposed to know where they live.” But I can see they don’t trust me, and they keep following.

I don’t have time to think. I don’t know what to do. We arrive just as Dirty Julie and the boys are pulling the front door shut. “Who the fuck are these guys?” the boys ask, gesturing angrily toward my friends.

“We want our money back,” Martin says behind me. “This dope’s shit.”

Everyone starts shouting at once then, and I’m in the middle trying to calm them all down. If the rumors are true, I know one of these guys has killed. We mean nothing, my skinny St. Kilda friends and I.

The boys are puffing their chests and leaning into our faces and shouting and it’s getting menacing and ugly under the streetlight. Martin and Victor sense the violence and back off, hands in the air, saying, “Okay, okay, forget it.” Everyone moves away, grumbling, but heading in opposite directions.

My heart is beating. I’m thinking, Phew. Still got the dope down my sock. We get to the car, but Dirty Julie and the boys have changed their mind. They screech around the corner in their own car, pull up to a halt outside ours. We know this is heavy now.

One of them jumps out, pointing at me. “He cut the fucking dope anyway, he cut the fucking dope!” I’m almost in the door, last one in, but I step back out.

Arms in the air again, trying to calm him down. “Okay, okay, it’s over, forget it.”

He’s like a locomotive coming at me. He swings so hard and fast I don’t even blink. His fist is a hammer cracking all over my face. I feel my nose break and I’m in the air and as the back of my head hits the gutter, hard, I become unconscious.

Then there’s a gap in what I remember.

Because it’s like coming out of a deep sleep. I’m groggy, and arms are pulling me into the back of the car. I must have been out for five or ten seconds. I can hear the squeal of tires as Dirty Julie and the boys pull away, I can hear them screaming, “You fucking arseholes! You fucking arseholes! Don’t youse ever come back here again, you motherfuckers!”

And I’m thinking how there’s not much likelihood of that.

My nose is broken and both eyes are closed up and I’m crying because it hurts so much. The blood keeps pouring out. It’s all over me, but someone’s trying to hold an old rag to my face.

I’m sobbing, “I didn’t cut the dope, I didn’t cut the dope,” because I have to make them believe me. I don’t know if they do. They may well be torn between sympathy and anger.

And we get back to the warehouse and everyone has a hit and no one feels a thing. It’s a ruined night.

Finally they all go, everyone resigned to their personal despair. Candy’s bathing my face with warm water and a washcloth. Even though she is sick, she is loving and gentle, and I love her. She says things like, my poor baby my poor baby it’ll be all right. I keep wincing. Even the warm water hurts. After a while I can’t wait any longer and I tell Candy I have to go to the toilet. The toilet is outside the warehouse, on the roof courtyard. I get some water in the syringe and lock myself in the cubicle and mix up. I say, “Please, God, if it’s not dope, please make it dope.”

I inject it and nothing happens.

There is no warmth in my body. I drop the syringe and untie the tourniquet, usually an act that occurs in the onrush of bliss. Ten seconds, thirty seconds, a minute. I feel absolutely nothing. I drop my head in my hands, my fingers still sticky with blood.

I can no longer cry. I groan a few times. Through the slits that are my eyes, I stare at my shoes, at the gray swirls of the concrete floor, at the bright orange lid of my syringe. And I realize—it’s a kind of horror—that this is my life.

And I can’t stop. I just can’t stop. I can’t stop anymore.

PART ONE Invincibility“Now as soon as they had tasted the honey-sweet fruit of the lotus, they wished for nothing better than to stay where they were, living with the folk of that country and feeding on the lotus. They remembered their own homes no longer, nor did they yearn any more to return to their own land …”HOMER, The Odyssey CROP FAILURE

There were good times and bad times, but in the beginning there were more good times. When I first met Candy: those were like the days of juice, when everything was bountiful Only much later did it all start to seem like sugar and blood, blood and sugar, the endless dark heat.

But I guess the truth is, it didn’t really take all that long for things to settle into a downward direction. It’s like there’s a mystical connection between heroin and bad luck, with some kind of built-in momentum factor. It’s like you’re cruising along in a beautiful car on a pleasant country road with the breeze in your hair and the smell of eucalyptus all around you. The horizon is always up there ahead, unfolding toward you, and at first you don’t notice the gradual descent, or the way the atmosphere thickens. Bit by bit the gradient gets steeper, and before you realize you have no brakes, you’re going pretty fucking fast.

So what did we do, once the descent began? We learned how to drive well, under hazardous conditions. We had each other to egg each other on. There was neither room nor need for passengers. Maybe also we were thinking that one day our car would sprout wings and fly. I saw that happen in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. It’s good to live in hope.

There was a time, after that Indian summer of our falling in love—after we’d gone through the money Candy’s grandmother had left her, after we’d done a few scams and had a pretty good run for six months or a year—when we knew it would be good to slow down or stop and see where we were. It’s funny how difficult that would turn out to be. It would be almost a decade before the car finally came to a silent stop on an empty stretch of road a long way down from where we’d started. Almost a decade before we’d hear the clicking of metal under the hood and the buzzing of cicadas in the trees all around us.

In that first year, Candy developed her first heroin habit. Like all the rest of us, no amount of words and warnings could prepare her for the horrors of drying out. So when we were forced to give it a go, she was a little shaken by the power of the thing.

This was in Melbourne for her. Candy grew up in Mekbourne, and she went back there to dry out because we figured it would be too tempting to fuck up if we tried to do it together. It was her first habit, so she probably just needed a week at a friend’s place with some good food and a trunk or two of pills.

I’d been gunning it now for a few years, so the plan for me was to go to detox for a while. I’d been getting this good brown Sri Lankan gear from my dealer T-Bar. There was lots of it, and everyone wanted it from me. It wasn’t all that heavily refined—it wasn’t the Thai white or even pink rocks. It was alkaline, and you could say rough as guts. But it was pretty pure, because three or four times a year it came into the country in condoms up T-Bar’s arse. I stepped on it one-to-one with chocolate Quik, and still everybody was more than happy.

But Murphy’s Law in the world of heroin said that if things could get out of control, then of course they would. T-Bar’s brown was still in abundant supply, but I was starting to owe him more and more money, and he was getting pissed off with me. So I had some motivation to get things together in that department. I wasn’t the world’s greatest dealer. The simple equation was that the more dope I had, the more I used. I noticed that some of the people I sold to regularly were calling me less often; maybe I wasn’t so reliable anymore. Detox seemed like the ideal opportunity for a breather.

The signs to stop were there. The plan was that Candy and I would link up in a week or two and be happy and healthy and maybe Candy would get pregnant. Then maybe we’d move to Melbourne, just to be on the safe side. Start a new life down there, away from the gear and all my Sydney connections.

Or maybe we could stay in Sydney and go back to hanging around with my old friends, my pot-smoking friends who held down jobs and went out on the weekends and seemed to enjoy their lives.

Mason Brown was one of these friends. Mason was six-foot-three, with a craggy face and sandy hair and a permanent grin. He loved his life like nobody I’d met before. He loved smoking buds and he only ever had the best, the lie-back-and-laugh stuff. He loved live music. He even loved—loved with a passion—his job as a field officer with the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.

We’d grown to like each other a couple of years earlier, when we’d done a lot of business and smoked a lot of bongs. Mason had stood by me as others started to avoid me. He was never one for getting moral. He got a little sad when he saw me fucking up. He never said anything stronger than, “You really ought to stop this shit.” He bailed me out of little financial holes on several occasions, and never asked for the money back.

A few days before Candy left for Melbourne, we went out to see a band. Be social, be normal, have a bit of a preview of our life to come. There were lots of people I knew there, and a few of them gave me the dirty eyeball, and some of them spent a fair amount of time staring at Candy, who always stood out like a beacon of beauty.

Mason Brown was there. I hadn’t seen him in a few months and we caught up on the news. After a while he gave me one of those searching looks and said, “So—you okay?”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“Things aren’t too good, Mason,” I said. “I’ve got to stop. I really like Candy too. But she won’t put up with it. It’s not going to last if I keep this up. I want to travel. I want to go overseas. I want to do things. I’m going nowhere. I just need to knock it on the head. Go back to smoking. I wish I could do it like you.”

“You can, mate, you can.”

Mason seemed to have a blind faith in me that even I found embarrassing.

“I’ll tell you what,” he added. “I’ll do you a deal. Grow a crop with me. We plant it, we look after it, we sell it, we go halves. We’ll sell in bulk, don’t fuck around with small things. You’d know a buyer. We’ll make some good bucks. You and Candy can travel for a year, see a bit of the world, have some experiences. Get that monkey off your back.”

It was endearing and charming, the way Mason used the corniest old expressions. He even said “junk” sometimes, as in, “Keep off that junk and you’ll be right, matey.” But he got me going with dreams of solid cash and a bright future. And he was the bud man, the gardener. I couldn’t go wrong doing a crop with Mason. I knew also that he could grow a good crop quite successfully without me. That he was trying to be a friend.

“It’s September,” he said. “It’s time to plant. It’s already a couple of weeks late. But let’s do it. I’m willing to bring you in on the plan. But here’s the catch.” He looked at me sternly. “Tonight’s Friday. Next Friday night, or Saturday dawn, we leave. I know the spot, I’ve been checking some maps. So you’ve got seven days to dry out. If you’re fucked up, we don’t go ahead with it.”

I was stoned to the gills on the good Sri Lankan brown, so of course I could promise him the world. I was an endless reservoir of enthusiasm. We shook hands on it and I hugged him. “Good on ya, mate,” we said to each other.

I found Candy in a crowd near the bar. I pulled her aside, bursting with the news.

“Guess what, sugarplum? We’re going overseas, in a few months.”

I quickly filled her in. She seemed pleased enough. She knew that Mason represented a healthier life, so something involving Mason and me was better than something involving me and my own brain.

Seven days to get off smack. A new life. No problem, with this in front of me. I could do it on my head. The very thought of a successful detox made me feel warm and relaxed. I went to the toilet and found a cubicle with a lock that worked and had a nice blast to celebrate. Then I went outside to enjoy the band.

The next day I still had a gram of T-Bar’s dope and some money to give him, and it’s not like I was about to flush the gear down the toilet or anything. I’ll make Saturday a good one to go out on, I thought. Things drifted into Sunday, and Candy and I were getting sad about leaving each other for a week, so I gave T-Bar his money and got two more grams on credit. We sold a bit and used a bit.

On Monday we had our last blasts, several times, and we caught a cab to the bus depot for one of those sad and tawdry Greyhound good-byes.

“Hang in there, Candy,” I murmured as we hugged. “When we see each other next week we’ll both be feeling fine. Just get through this week, that’s all.”

“You too,” she said. “Don’t fuck up.”

“Don’t worry,” I said, “I’ve had my last shot too.”

“I love you.”

“I love you.”

But the bus pulled out and we waved good-bye and suddenly I could feel the magnetic force of T-Bar’s house dragging at the iron filings in my stomach.

As long as I stop by Tuesday night, then I should be half okay by Friday night, I reasoned to myself.

By Tuesday I decided I might as well just keep using, get the crop planted, then go to a proper detox (which was the original plan) next week (which wasn’t). I decided I would have a big hit just before we left early Saturday morning, and leave my dope at Mason’s house, and white-knuckle it for twenty-four hours as a test of strength. I’d grit my teeth and be helpful and agile for Mason, and I wouldn’t have small pupils, or nod off and have him cancel the whole deal.

So it was business as usual Wednesday and Thursday and Friday. At some point I called Candy, who was sick, and told her I wouldn’t be far behind. She was a little pissed off at my lack of stamina, but I assured her that I really just wanted to concentrate on the crop business for the time being, and that things would be fine, whatever the timetable.

Friday came and I organized to meet Mason at the pub where one of his favorite bands was playing. I hit up some coke before I met him so my pupils weren’t too small. I told him I was feeling okay and that I’d gotten through the week. I smoked joints with him on the fire stairs and drank lots of beers as if to back up my story.

We got home to his place about one A.M. I was pretty drunk and we pulled some cones and I really could have done with a big sleep. Mason set the alarm for a quarter to five and said, “We’re out the door by five-fifteen, okay?”

I figured the beginning of a business venture must be the hardest part.

Mason shook me awake when he got out of the shower at five to five.

“Coffee’s on. Jump in the shower.”

I took all my stuff into the bathroom and locked the door. The Sri Lankan gear was alkaline, so I’d gotten a slice of lemon at the bar in the pub, wrapped it in a tissue, and stuffed it into my shirt pocket. It was a bit dry and stiff now but it would have to do. I put the water and the heroin and a drop of lemon in the spoon and heated the mix and whacked it up.

I could have stayed in that fucking shower for hours. I’d had a real lot of heroin, thinking of the twenty-four hours ahead. It was a massively peak experience, drifting under that jet of water. Mason banged on the door and shook me out of the silver heat and dream-steam.

“It’s ten past five. What are you doing in there?”

I dried myself, dressed, and walked out into the kitchen.

“Sorry, Mason,” I groaned, “I’m a bit hungover.”

The kitchen’s fluorescent was very bright. I shielded my eyes.

I took my coffee upstairs to the spare room and hid my syringe and spoon and dope under the bed. I felt a twinge of nervousness leaving it there, but I knew it would be good to have it to come back to. I felt certain I could make it through a day or a day and a half.

We were away at twenty-five past. It was dark and the streets were empty, so we had a good run northwest through Sydney. Mason was thoroughly prepared. His sawed-off animal of a pickup truck was loaded down with hoes and shovels and star posts and chicken wire, brown and green spray paint, fertilizers, cooking gear, and sleeping bags and a tent. His professional attitude was reassuring to one in such a dissolute state. I felt I was in the hands of a winner. I, told him I needed to sleep and I closed my eyes and enjoyed the stone.

A couple of hours out of Sydney there was a bright clear morning sky. The roads were getting narrow and we moved into some pretty isolated stretches of bushland. Mason eased the pickup off the road and into a fire trail.

He pulled out one of those maps that serious bush walkers use, a government-printed topographic thing with the squiggly contour lines and the heights in meters. It didn’t mean much to me. Creeks, roads, fire trails, contour lines: they all looked the fucking same.

Mason was in his element. He directed me with his finger. I tried to focus my eyes and look interested, nodding my head here and there at concepts I couldn’t grasp.

“This is where we are now. We’re going to drive the pickup as far as we can down this fire trail. Then we unload the gear. Then we drive the pickup back to here, and put it over behind those trees. We want as much distance between us and it as possible.

“So then we walk back along the trail to the gear. If we muscle it, we can carry all the gear between the two of us, so we don’t have to do any backtracking.

“We’ll follow this track along the creek for, let me see, it’s about fourteen K’s. That’ll be quite a slog. It should be nice to camp here, on this sandy bit. In the morning we have to get into some pretty rough scrub. We have to get away from any walking trails, that’s the only way for this to be a success.

“We’ll head off through this bush here and come up on that ridge. That’ll be a couple of hours. After that it’s downhill for an hour or so. Now, see this spot here? See how these contour lines spread out near where these two creeks meet? That means there’ll be good dirt there. Good alluvial soil. This is our spot. It’s the middle of nowhere. We’re looking at about ten hours heavy walking, the rest of today and a little in the morning.

“We’ll hoe out a patch and clear the vegetation. Fertilize, plant, put up the fencing, camouflage, get the hell out of there. The trip out will be quicker and easier, we won’t have so much weight from the star posts and seedlings. Maybe only five hours, maybe a little less. If all goes well and the rainfall’s good this summer, we won’t need to visit more than once or twice to check on it.”

It began to seem daunting. I hadn’t been expecting so much bush bashing, but I guessed it made sense to do it that way. Anyway, I felt committed and strong.

It was a big day. It was hard on the shoulders. We were fully laden, with a backpack each and several star posts on our shoulders and picks and shovels and mallets and rolls of chicken wire. We were like some tiny strange circus struggling through the heat. I could barely see for the sweat in my eyes. I could feel my face getting badly burnt. Every so often I’d have to stop for a cigarette and collapse in a heap for a while.

Until about midday I felt fine with the dope in my system, and even at five in the evening I still felt neutral and all right. I thought maybe the descent into sickness wouldn’t happen, maybe there wasn’t enough time, maybe I’d make it without a hitch. It had been so long since the last time I was sick, I think I’d forgotten how bad it could be.

Near dusk we set up camp and Mason lit a fire and we drank billy tea and ate a stew that tasted good. We had swigs of whiskey and a couple of joints. I felt kind of eucalyptic and all-Australian and a little euphoric in my exhaustion. I was shocked by the number of stars in the sky. I was bone-numbingly fucked and I knew I’d sleep well.

We crawled into the tent. I lay in my sleeping bag thinking, It’ll be okay. Only half a day or so to get through. Just think of the dope back there under Mason’s spare bed. We talked for a while about our hopes for the future and how, things would be all right. Then I fell asleep hard and deep.

I woke at dawn, bolt upright in the clear consciousness of the idiocy of my predicament. Mason was shuffling about outside the tent, getting the fire going, whistling, pissing.

“Come on, mate,” he chirped. “It’s going to be a beautiful day.”

I opened the tent flap. The ground was covered in a late frost. My bones ached. What had I done? I hadn’t brought the heroin with me! Here I was in—I don’t know, a place with no name, Government Map No. 9030, 1-N, grid reference 130873—and my dope was at Mason’s house in Ultimo. Ultimo. Near the center of Sydney, the Heavenly City of Heroin.

Ultimo! It was all I could think of. It was a long way away. I just had to go through with this. I wanted to die. I really needed some smack in a hurry. I could hardly share these sentiments with Mason. I wanted to close my eyes and ignore the pain.

I groaned and tried to go back to sleep. But all I could think was: What the fuck were you doing, thinking it would be okay to leave the dope back there?

I had to make a show. I couldn’t stay in the sleeping bag all day, though that misery would have been preferable to movement. I dragged myself out into the cold morning and rubbed my wired eyes. Mason handed me a coffee.

“I’m heating the last of that stew. You want some?”

He was disgustingly healthy, and I stood there trying to muster up some hatred for him.

“No, mate. I feel sick.”

“Well, you’ve got to have something. We’ve got a big day on. Here, have an apple and a banana.”

I sat on a log chewing miserably. Neither apples nor bananas were mood-altering substances. Coffee hardly counted.

“Can we have a joint before we go?”

I was thinking, Anything. Any fucking thing.

It was already rolled, of course. He flipped it out of his pocket and gave it to me with a grin.

Let me tell you, pot’s a nice drug, but it’s not so pleasant when it’s not what you want or need. The morning remained sour and the awful feeling that I was in a nightmare trailed me like a shadow.

We packed up our gear and got going. Or really, Mason packed our gear. I helped straighten the tent before he folded and rolled it. I asked if I could have some of his whiskey, even though it was an embarrassing question at seven in the morning. It was acrid and hot down my throat, and for a moment I felt I was going to vomit.

I staggered my way, literally, through the day. The weight of the posts and shovels on my shoulders was two- or threefold from Saturday. I kept telling Mason how sick I felt.

“Maybe I’ve come down with something.”

“Maybe,” he said.

He was always ten giant strides up ahead of me, pounding through the dense bush like David Attenborough pumped up on cocaine.

It was an ugly, ugly day.

At ten-thirty we stopped on the high ridge he’d spoken about. Mason breathed in the air like it was a form of happiness.

“Down there,” he pointed, “not far now.”

But it was all too apparent that Mason’s concept of “not far” was very far removed from mine. I squinted my eyes into the distance, but the valley seemed to quiver in a ghostly heat haze.

An hour later we reached the approximate spot. I dropped everything off my shoulders and fell into a heap. The last time I’d felt this bad was never. Mason scouted around for five minutes, running soil through his fingers or consulting the oracles or whatever the fuck he did. I lay in the soil sniveling and sneezing, and the sun drilled through me.

“Over here, this is it,” Mason shouted. “Between these two trees.”

I willed myself to stand. I dragged the gear through the undergrowth.

“Mason,” I puffed. “I need a fucking rest, man. I need to lie down. I’m really sick.”

He looked at me and shook his head. “You do what you have to,” he said. “But the quicker we do this, the quicker we’re out of here. Just help me clear this patch.”

He moved around and dug a line in the brush and soil with the toe of his walking boots. He formed a rough square about five meters by five meters.

“You take the hoe, get rid of all vegetation. I’ll take the pick and churn the soil.”

I did the best I could, under the circumstances. It was not a real lot. I couldn’t stop sneezing. I was covered in a film of sweat, I was gasping for air. I thought I was going to vomit or shit. Finally Mason got pissed off, or as pissed off as he ever got.

“You’ve got to use a bit of muscle there, mate.”

I stopped. “I can’t do it, Mason. I think I’m going to collapse. I have to lie down. I’m really sorry. Just for ten minutes. Then I’ll be okay.”

He didn’t lose his temper, but I think around this time would be the moment when I’d definitely stopped being his business partner. I curled up beside a tree, trying to wedge myself into soil and shade. I could hear Mason working furiously in the background. He cleared the plot in half an hour, did stuff with fertilizer, planted forty seedlings. Then he needed my help with the fencing.

I held the posts in place while he whacked them with a mallet. I’d come on the expedition in a long-sleeve shirt, and now I’d rolled the sleeves up in the heat of the day.

“Missed a vein, did we?” Mason asked out of the blue, between swings of the mallet.

I was taken aback. He nodded to my right arm. There was some bruising halfway along the inside of my forearm, a blue and yellow blush where I’d been searching for new vein territory.

“No, no,” I stammered. “That’s just … I mean, er, it’s …” My voice trailed off. “I don’t know what it is.”

It was a poignant or pathetic moment, depending on which way you looked at it. I knew there was no crop future between me and Mason. I’d never find this place alone, and even if I could, I’d never rip Mason off. It was not my crop and I knew it. I was not a partner. I’d failed the test. Fucked up.

I was all at sea, here in the bush. Okay, then. I’d make my money the way I knew how, with my dealing, or something like that, and then I’d stop using and Candy and I would still go overseas. Fuck the crop. Besides, my dope was still back at Mason’s. Things were looking up. We’d be back there before long.

Mason sprayed the chicken wire in random patterns of brown and green, explaining to me that it wouldn’t pay to have a helicopter see any metallic glints in the bush. He secured a rich assortment of foliage to the enclosure, using baling wire and pliers.

Even in my sickness I could recognize that it was a work of art. It disappeared from view no matter which direction you looked at it from. You couldn’t even see it from ten feet away. It was wallaby-, wombat-, and helicopter-proof. Insects and frost were the only real problems. But somehow I knew that they wouldn’t be my problems. I only had one problem at that moment, as we packed up our gear and departed.

I was like a horse returning to the home paddock, going faster. I bashed through the bush with abandon. It was a long afternoon, but the pain had moved into a kind of delirium, and with the help of a special Mason after-work joint, I somehow made it alive back to the pickup.

It was five in the afternoon. I figured that, barring weekend traffic snarls, I ought to be in heaven by seven or seven-thirty. At any rate, even though it was bad to be alive and breathing and thirty-six hours without hammer, it was good to be sitting in the cabin of the pickup compared to hauling through that evil bush.

As we moved off the freeways and into the suburban streets of Sydney, the only thing I could really concentrate on was traffic lights. Orange is not a good color, and red is even worse.

I felt like I’d failed, but we didn’t talk about the crop at all. Finally we pulled up outside Mason’s house. It’s a peak thing, a gorgeous feeling to know the dope is there. Just as amputees are said to experience a “false limb” syndrome, so the knowledge of that tiny package under Mason’s spare bed imbued me with a strange happiness that I could have sworn was real.

But there was one more obstacle to conquer. Mason’s flatmates were home, relaxing in front of the TV in a Sunday night bong fog. On Monday morning they would all get up and go to work as solicitors and graphic artists, whatever it was they did. My slice of lemon was gone, so I had to somehow get some vinegar from their cupboard. But the kitchen opened onto the lounge room and I was in full view of everyone.

I had to pretend to be hungry, fuck around with biscuits and cheese and shit. It was awkward sliding the vinegar along the counter an inch at a time, toward the bathroom door.

Finally I did it. Got in there and locked the door and had the big reward. My veins were like rivers bringing warm bliss on the king tide through the glacial landscapes of my taut muscles. The melting. It was good again, everything.

Not that Mason and his flatmates didn’t know, I’m sure, seeing the way I drooled and scratched and nodded off when I went back into the lounge room and tried to be social.

A month later, anyway, I was talking to Mason and he said, “By the way, mate. You know the night we came back from planting the crop? You left your spoon on the bathroom shelf.”

I looked him in the eye to see if he was joking. He wasn’t. I could feel my ears burn red.

“It’s the little details that count, you know,” he went on. He had a strange way of being kind even at his most sarcastic.

Mason also told me how he’d been out to check on the seedlings, and guess what, the unthinkable had happened: attack by insects. The little crop had never stood a chance. It was ruined, gobbled up before it had time to grow even six inches. I guess it was just Mason’s polite way of saying no thanks. I don’t know, maybe there really was a plague of fucking locusts. I wasn’t interested by then. Candy and I were talking more seriously about moving to Melbourne.

God, it was good to get back to Candy. I knew that with her I could overcome anything. She’d come back from her drying out, a newly clean Candy, keen for a one-off reward blast, and then things kind of just kept going, the way they do. Pretty soon she was back into the swing of it. It’s hard, I suppose, to stop at a year or less, when you still look good, when it still feels good. We decided to put off drying out until some other time. We had each other to get into first.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 746