A CHANGE IS AS GOOD AS A HOLIDAY 1 page

But when tomorrow came, it was always so hard. We decided that moving to Melbourne would make the process easier, that if you couldn’t change in small increments then you could maybe do it with a big bang.

It seemed like a good enough adventure to me. Anyway, I was sick of Sydney’s summers. All that sweat when you’re so sick.

Like all junkies, I guess I’d thought for a long time that my environment was the problem. My situation. The people I knew. I must have figured that somehow in Melbourne the desire to use heroin would miraculously go away. We started with high hopes, and for a while we almost got to find out what it might have been like, being in love, being in a relationship, without drugs. I wanted so much to treat Candy with respect, because she was beautiful and incredible and deserved it. I always thought that heroin was a temporary thing, an obstacle on the other side of which lay the real future. I continued to believe this long after it was obvious that heroin had settled in for the long haul.

Candy hadn’t used smack in Melbourne, and of all her friends, O’Brien was the only one who was really into it. So I suppose it’s not really strange that O’Brien would soon become our main Melbourne friend. He was thin and hyperactive, pale-skinned, with dark circles under his eyes and a shock of black hair that he was endlessly flicking out of his face. I liked his nervous intensity from the moment we met.

For a while, for a few weeks, I was on my best behavior. I was in a new town. I was Candy’s boyfriend. I was under the spotlight. Certain rumors had preceded me, and it was known that Candy had started using while in Sydney. Such a promising young actress: there were people who cared and worried about her. I wasn’t exactly seen in a favorable light. I was the guy who introduced her to heroin. When you’re typecast, when you’re pigeonholed, it’s an uphill fucking battle.

So our PR campaign involved getting clean. When we moved to Melbourne we hadn’t had a hit in at least four days. We intended to keep it that way. It seemed most of Candy’s friends just drank a lot. I was doing a Visa card at the time, a Mr. Irving J. Gibbon, that I’d stolen from a bedroom at a party in Sydney. I tried to ingratiate myself by showering everyone with cases of Heineken and bottles of Stoli. Maybe it was appreciated. I was generally too drunk to notice.

We were taking these heart-condition tablets called Clonidine. The word was they made it easier to come down off the hammer. They lowered your blood pressure, so they reduced the sweating and palpitations and a few other things. I don’t know about that. They made me faint a few times. Which was not a great introduction to Candy’s circle of friends.

You hit the ground hard on a Clonidine faint. After a bit of bruising, we decided it was better to be drunk and take lots of Valium. Then we wouldn’t stand out so much in Melbourne.

We stayed with Candy’s friends Anne and Len in the beginning, across the bridge at Yarraville. Len was a wild drinker, so our foibles were insignificant. He made it comfortable to lie around and be self-indulgent. We really tried hard to stay away from the smack those first few weeks.

We got over the hump and were beginning to feel all right. I stopped using the Visa card because I figured I’d been pushing my luck after six solid weeks of trivial shopping under the limit. We started to settle down into a more low-key life: pulling bongs, drinking beer, watching videos, and thinking about our future. Melbourne was okay. The nervous edge was a result not so much of the city itself as the unfamiliarity of a heroin-free life.

We tried. One day we even woke up and decided to have a picnic, just the two of us, in the Botanical Gardens. We started the day with a cup of coffee. No Clonidine, no Valium, no beer. We sat in the morning sun in Anne and Len’s backyard and planned our picnic. We were light-headed with possibility. The day seemed to invite. It was exciting, getting prepared, buying food, catching the train to the gardens. By one o’clock we were spread out on our blanket, throwing morsels of food to the small birds who twittered around us on the grass. I lay with my head in Candy’s lap and she stroked my arm. A soft breeze blew through the park and the light came dappled and swaying through the trees that arched above us. We talked about everything. I said, “You’re more important to me than anything in the world.” We decided it was time for Candy to try and get pregnant soon. I’d always liked books, so I was going to start looking for a job in a bookstore. We drank some cheap champagne and didn’t even finish the bottle, and I thought, How debonair, how civilized. This is what people do. We packed up and walked arm in arm to the train station. It seemed that it wasn’t just love, but romance too. Later, at home, we kissed ourselves into a white heat.

It was good, too, getting into some nonfutile sex. Candy was the juice, I tell you. I took a leap forward in the kind of stuff I knew.

But then that night came when I met O’Brien and, you know how it is, that fucking hammer thing dominates like a thick presence in the air. Like a smell. Like a viscous fog. Just the vibe of heroin is all I’m talking about. Its unspoken absence.

We were trying to be social. “How have you been, Candy?” and “What do you do, O’Brien?” All that kind of stuff. Five minutes later O’Brien grins and says to Candy, “So, I hear you’ve been a bit naughty in Sydney.” I know where this will head. My heart starts going. I swear to God I can’t recall the next three minutes of conversation. Then O’Brien is saying, “Do you want to?” Candy looks at me and grins and says, “What do you think?” We’ve all got the wicked eyes and suddenly we are the thumbs-up buddies. Let’s go!

We got revved up and then we scored. O’Brien took our money and went into a block of flats in St. Kilda and came out with a small tinfoil packet of pink rocks. Jesus, what a pleasant surprise. We all got stoned and relaxed and then O’Brien started explaining to me about the dope situation in Melbourne, how to score, who was good, what kind of prices, how it worked. So I learned a bit. It was damn good gear that first night. We were pigs in shit, the three of us.

Why does it seem so absurd to explain all this now? From there it was just a hop, skip, and a jump. Some weeks later our dope-buying forays had increased. The St. Kilda scene was all right and we soon had a couple of phone numbers too. We were sniffing our way up the ladder. As you do. It didn’t seem dangerous at first. Once or twice a week, how could you go wrong?

Suddenly it was two months later.

One day we woke up and realized we’d just been using for nine days straight. It was one of those mini periods of beautiful smack. We were pinned from dawn till dusk. On the tenth morning we had no money. The churning was back in our lives, in our stomachs.

There was a pawnbroker on Acland Street. It didn’t matter who we went to, they were all just as fucked as each other. Candy had some jewelry, not much. There were a few nice things. Some silver and gold. The wedding ring her grandmother left her. Some knickknacks we’d bought on credit cards. Antique lacquered Chinese goblets. Odd stuff. We got a little money. Enough to use for a few more days.

Then we decided to stop.

“We’re just going to have to put up with it,” we said.

“It hasn’t gone too far this time,” we said. “A few days sick, and then we’ll be all right.”

“Tomorrow,” we said, “we wake up and act as if the last two months haven’t happened.”

Tomorrow was a Saturday. We woke up at nine. By eleven we were feeling the cold front of anxiety moving in.

“There must be something we can do,” I said.

Candy was wearing a silver necklace, something she said she’d never sell. It was important to her, fuck knows why. Time has a habit of making things special.

She fingered it. “I suppose we could try this,” she said.

“Sure,” I said.

She bit her lip and frowned. Her eyes were sad.

“Look, Candy, you’re only hocking it, you’re not selling it. We’ll get it back. We’ve got three months. Or more if we keep paying the interest.”

It was half past eleven. The hockshop shut at midday. We jumped in the car, an old bomb Len had given us, and sped across the Westgate Bridge. I knew to expect disappointment from pawnbrokers. We were hoping the necklace would bring maybe seventy bucks. Surely it was worth a couple of hundred.

Acland Street was crowded. Saturday morning madness. Bad traffic. We pulled up outside the pawnshop at five to twelve. Candy double-parked and went in. Cars backed up and honked but I ignored them.

She came out at one minute to twelve. She got in the car.

“Twenty-five bucks,” she said.

My heart sank. It was not enough. She started the engine.

“I have to move the car,” she said. “Just wait a minute. Maybe he can work something out.”

It didn’t make sense, or I didn’t want it to. I looked at her to make eye contact. She didn’t let her eyes meet mine.

She made a U-turn across the tram tracks and parked the car.

“I’ll be back soon.” She got out quickly. I sat in the car. A cog turned a notch in my stomach. The future was beginning.

It was bright and sunny. There were people everywhere. I hated them all, since it was so hard to hate myself or my own life. I wished I could stop time and take the money from their wallets.

I sat in the passenger seat staring at a ladybug crawling across the windshield. It was hard to avoid thinking about what Candy was doing across the road. But somehow I managed to avoid it for a little while.

After about five minutes I craned my neck around and looked across the road. The pawnshop door was locked. The Open sign had been turned around to read Closed. The security grille was pulled across the window, protecting the jewelry and cameras.

I told myself that Candy was not fucking the guy in there. The inside of the shop was an unreachable space. My mind went pretty blank. I watched the ladybug. Then it flew away. The sun beat hard on the car hood. Everything was glare. We needed the money, I told myself. It was a sensible world of supply and demand.

After about fifteen minutes she came back. She opened the door and climbed into the car. I was watching her for every small signal. Maybe I never knew a lot about Candy in all those years. But I knew at that moment that her heart was beating fast, that she’d just been through a new kind of fear, through a dark tunnel into new territory.

With her right hand she turned the keys in the ignition. With her left hand she threw a pair of scrunched-up panties on the floor.

We pulled out into the traffic and I looked at the panties among the crumpled cigarette packets and chocolate wrappers.

“What happened?”

“I fucked him.”

“Shit.”

My body released something into itself. I was flooded with a substance that might have been adrenaline. It was deeply unpleasant. For an instant I had the sensation of falling. This cannot happen again, I thought. This is not a good thing.

I looked across to see what she was thinking or feeling. Her face dealt with the traffic and nothing more.

“Are you okay?”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Don’t be,” she said.

There was a pause. An old lady struggled through a zebra crossing.

“Well, what happened?”

“I told you, I fucked him.”

“How much?”

“Forty bucks.”

I sat in silence. It seemed a pathetic amount, not that I really knew the going rate for a pawnshop owner’s Saturday morning poke. We had sixty-five bucks. It was more than a fifty, but way too little for a hundred, which was what we really needed. Forty bucks for a fuck. It didn’t seem right.

“Are you okay?”

“You asked that already.”

I could read the subtext. I was not a stupid guy.

For a moment I wanted to stroke her, to comfort her, to turn the clock back fifteen minutes. Fifteen measly minutes. To say, “Not that. We will never go there.” But heroin was its own special hunger, and clocks ran in one direction only.

“That’s it. We’re going to stop using, Candy, once and for all. Fuck it. Fuck it all.”

“Yeah right,” she said.

What we did with the sixty-five was, Candy sweet-talked Fat Nick in the café into giving us a hundred. Nick said, “With beautiful lips like that asking me, how could I refuse, darling? You owe me thirty-five. I trust you.”

That was the hop and the skip. Somehow after that the jump into prostitution didn’t seem so big. We’d been around at Victor and Maria’s, friends of O’Brien’s, a few days after the hockshop business. Victor was all right, a little pretentious in his “I am a vampire” sort of way. He was a junkie and a musician, one of the cotton-fields-and-chain-gang-boys from Melbourne Grammar School. He was okay. He was pretty honest in the dope-dealing sense.

Maria was always a glowing angel, the softest junkie I ever knew. She was pure Italian art gallery stuff—the translucent skin, the dark curls. Victor and I chatted while he divided up the dope, and Maria took Candy into her room to show her some clothes or something.

Later Candy told me that Maria told her about working at the Carolina Club, about money and conditions and what went on. So we knew someone from our world, the normal world, who worked, and suddenly it didn’t seem so foreign or so wrong.

“Would you ever do it?” I asked, a little hesitantly, not quite sure of the danger inherent in the question.

“I don’t know,” Candy said. “She earns a lot sometimes.”

The thing, the concept, seemed to hang in the air, in the gray cloud that had formed between need and unease.

A few days after this we were driving near the Carolina Club and Candy stopped the car.

“I just want to talk to them for a second,” she said.

She went inside. I didn’t feel as bad as the Saturday morning at the hockshop. Just a couple of flutters in the stomach.

She came out in five minutes. “Well, I’ve got a shift if I want it. Thursday night. Start at seven. Finish at three or four. What do you think?”

I didn’t answer.

What I thought was, Do it, we need the fucking money. How I felt was, nauseous, just a little, as I stared at the gear stick and shrugged my shoulders.

“Look, if it’s horrible, I won’t do it again,” she said.

“I suppose so,” I said. “I suppose it’s just money.”

And it was, and would be. For all the years to come, in the quest for hammer, it paid for Candy to fuck other men, but it didn’t pay to think about it.

Candy told Anne and Len she had a job doing phone sex. It seemed an acceptable alternative explanation for her dusk-to-dawn absences. I doubt they believed it for a minute. But it was convenient for all of us to pretend.

On the first night, Candy was nervous. She got dressed and put makeup on and picked a fight.

“I don’t want to do this,” she said. “What the fuck am I doing? Why don’t you earn some money?”

For fuck’s sake. I was hanging out for some dope. This was not what I needed at six-thirty P.M.

“Baby, it’s temporary. I’m going to earn heaps one day.”

“You’re fucking pathetic,” she said.

“Listen,” I lied, “don’t go, then. It’s not important.”

“Okay, good, then I’m not going.”

“Okay, fine.”

“Fine.”

“Good.”

She sat down and lit a cigarette. I was lying on the bed.

“It’s probably better this way,” I said. “We’ll be sick for a little while, then we’ll be okay.” I was panicked by the prospect but I tried to sound calm.

She smoked the cigarette in silence. She stubbed it out in the ashtray. She stood and picked up her coat.

“You’re a fucking arsehole,” she hissed.

She slammed the door as she went out. The car started and she drove away.

I went out to the main part of the house and pretended nothing was happening. I drank some beer with Anne and Len. We watched a video. It was The Man with the Golden Arm. Maybe they were having a dig at me.

Anyway, it was not the best movie to watch when you were hanging out for heroin. I went to bed and took some pills and fell into a restless sleep at about one.

At four-thirty in the morning Candy shook me awake.

“Hi,” I said with a croaky voice.

“Can I turn on the light?”

“Yeah, sure.”

I was blinded for a second.

“How was it, Candy?”

“Good.” She smiled. “Guess how much I earned?”

“How much?”

“Five hundred and sixty dollars!”

“Shit!”

“And I’ve found a new dealer. He’s good.”

She fanned a wad of hundreds and fifties and twenties across the bed. She held up a small foil package.

“I’ve had a bit already. It’s super-strong dope.” I could see that both statements were true.

She leaned over and kissed me on the lips.

“I’m sorry about shouting at you earlier,” she said. “Anyway, it wasn’t too bad after all.”

“That’s all right. I’m sorry too.”

It was a good generic statement. It covered a lot of ground.

“Well, can I?” I asked, pointing at the dope.

“Sure,” she said. “I’ll get you some water. I’ll have some more too.”

That’s how it started. We had a hit and went back to bed and Candy described her night to me. How the men came in and had a drink and selected the girl they wanted. How they paid the house portion at reception, and the rest to her in the room. How extra money seemed so easily negotiable on top of that: twenty dollars to touch her breasts, thirty dollars for any serious change in position, like, say, doggy-style. How surprised she was at the way the money poured in all night. How clinical and unsexual it all seemed. I listened in rapt attention. With every word it seemed that Candy was describing either a world we could live with or one that was unacceptable. But the men sounded sad, and it all sounded like the joke was on them. As dawn came I thought, Maybe it’s not so bad.

We went to sleep and got up about eleven or midday and had another hit. The new dealer’s name was Lester, and he would figure in our lives, on and off, for a while.

Two Saturdays earlier, Candy didn’t know about her market value. The hockshop owner had taken her for a ride. He would get his later, when an overwrought methamphetamine addict in the throes of speed psychosis shot and crippled him in an argument about the value of a lawn mower. But Candy learned pretty quickly about market value. For a while, for a few years, she was the hotshot money tree and we lived, like royalty, in the kingdom of invincibility.

FOURSOME

The hotshot money tree. At the peak of good things financially, we actually rented a nice flat, out along Queens Road. The building was designed by some Swedish architect back in the thirties. It was a deco number, full of curves and whiteness and railings and round windows, designed to give the impression of being on a ship. It was full of yuppies too, nine-to-fivers in suits, with nice cars; and then there was us.

It made us feel so full of hope, to move into such a swish place. We felt a kind of duty to keep the place clean, to empty ashtrays, stuff like that. Perhaps we felt that our lives would change just by being there.

But not necessarily change as in making the decision to stop using dope. It was that time when things subtly shifted, when we began to accept that we were devoted to the cause, when the point became not how to stop, but how to use well. Candy was beginning to get good at working, at the way to do it without feeling, at how to get the most money for the least effort, to be in charge of johns so danger never happened. It hadn’t been long, but we’d done that mental somersault where we reasoned that it was all for money and therefore it didn’t affect our love.

We were on a roll. The money came thick and fast and it seemed the wonder of a comfortable life would be endless. We weren’t sick for months at a time. We felt instinctively we were in the middle of vast good fortune.

Candy was doing escort. It was less restrictive and less boring than brothels. We got to drive around together all night. There was some comfort in that, some comradeship.

Mostly things went smoothly. Occasionally Candy could earn a thousand dollars between six in the evening and six in the morning. We were stoned and happy all the time. Even when the money was bad it was good.

I didn’t have a license, of course, couldn’t really drive, having never done it much, but at least here I was able to give a kind of moral support. We had a deal with Jesse, a cousin of O’Brien’s who worked a day job in computers. We’d take his car every night on the condition we always filled it with gas when we returned it, and once in a while we’d give him a free taste. He was that rare breed, a casual user. They belong in nature documentaries.

We’d drive all night from job to job. Probably my greatest contribution to the whole deal was doing the street directory. I’d always liked maps. We’d park, Candy would get out. Sometimes I’d go to the door with her, to check that the place seemed all right. Then I’d sit in the car with the seat reclined back and the radio turned low, and wait for her to finish. There were times I felt a sadness, bored and restless in a quiet street in Doncaster or Heidelberg or Brighton. A kind of dull sadness about being tied by flimsy strings to this life, in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night. About my part—there must have been one—in accepting that a relationship could be like this. An ache of guilt, occasionally, that I could have the gall to call it love. But mostly I thought I wouldn’t swap my life for anything, that Candy was in it and heroin was in it and what more could you possibly want?

It was hard to score good dope at six in the morning. Generally we’d try and have that kind of shit wrapped up by midnight or one. Sometimes we’d still have a small whack left at dawn, and then sleep for a while. Other times we’d go to bed a little ragged. Then we’d wake up wired at midday, but with lots of money, so we could score straightaway.

The afternoon was the time of love, when things were bright and busy, when it didn’t feel like it sometimes felt when I sat alone in the car at night. We would wander and eat, or smoke a little grass and watch TV, or look for clothes in Salvation Army shops. We would often hold hands as we walked, and even in winter we’d feel warm in the sun. The supreme body furnace was in us, spreading its warmth through our veins.

We spent a lot of time scoring and organizing deals, doing all the drug stuff. Then in the evening the calls would begin to come from the agency.

One night at about eleven, Candy went to a job at some tacky motor inn in St. Kilda, and the bitch at reception had the nerve to say, “No. Not here you don’t. This is a clean hotel.” Candy ranted and raved, but she didn’t want to lose the guy. He’d booked for an hour, but once he saw her, he went a bit gaga.

Candy sensed this, which was what she did well. She told him that for eight hundred bucks he could spend the whole night with her, back in the apartment on Queens Road. He loved the idea. But he said he only had two hundred on him, he could get the other six hundred in the morning. Candy looked at me and said, “What do you think?” I shrugged my shoulders. I sized the guy up and thought it was worth the punt. He was as straight as they come. He was drunk and sincere. A Western District farmer down in the big smoke for a couple of days.

I was the minder, obviously. It couldn’t have been my physical size, but often in these circumstances people treated me with some deference. Or more likely, some wariness. It must have been the mere fact of being a pimp. As if we weren’t just a fucked-up boyfriend and girlfriend putting on a big front. As if Candy, being so beautiful, would have selected me as the toughest and the meanest from some pimp employment bureau.

His name was Keith. I shook my head and looked to the ground, trying to show a form of sympathy tempered by doubt.

“I dunno, Keith. Six hundred is a lot of money in a situation of trust. You sure you’ve got this money?”

“There’s no problem with the money. I swear, first thing in the morning. As soon as the banks open. No problem at all.”

“Because you cannot fuck around in a situation like this. You understand that, don’t you?”

“Of course I understand.”

I could hear the dryness in his throat, his nervousness at dealing with me when Candy was the object of desire.

“What have you got to give me for the night, Keith? I’ll be in the same flat, don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere. Driver’s license?”

“No problem.”

He pulled it from his wallet. I looked at it. He was thirty-six, a ruddy-faced farmer acting completely out of character for a night.

“It’s not much security though, is it?” I added. I looked at his wedding ring. “Tell you what. Give me the ring and I’ll feel good about this.”

“Oh come on,” he pleaded.

“Keith.” I cut him short. “Two-way trust. The ring’s not going anywhere.”

He slipped it off his finger and I put it in my pocket.

“And the two hundred,” I said. “You give me that now, as a deposit. Because I have to pay the agency at the beginning of an all-night job.”

It was bullshit, but only Candy and I knew that. We had several dealers to choose from, but we could hardly make Keith wait while we paged someone or drove all over town. The closest dealer, a door knock away, was Ellie May the transvestite. Her dope had been all right lately and I could just turn up without ringing; she was always there.

We drove the short distance to Ellie May’s flat and parked.

“What are we doing?” Keith asked as I got out.

“This is the office,” Candy said. “He’s dropping in your deposit.”

I got a two-spot off Ellie May and we went back to our Queens Road digs. Keith looked impressed and seemed to relax. We’d cleaned the flat immaculately in an afternoon smack-fiddling binge.

Keith went to the bathroom. Candy went to the lounge room and made a call to the agency. She told them the job had fucked up, that there was a big scene at the motor inn, that the guy had gotten freaked and canceled. She told them also she’d come down with some kind of thing and was vomiting a lot and wouldn’t be able to work anymore that night. It was only midnight by now so they weren’t pleased. Still, they had no real choice but to buy it.

Keith came out of the bathroom and Candy told him to go into the bedroom and make himself comfortable. I was in the kitchen mixing up on the counter. Candy came in, looked over my shoulder, and checked out the amount of dope we’d gotten.

“Hurry up,” she said. “I’ve got to get in there.”

I was almost ready with her syringe when Keith appeared at the door and gave us a fright. Our backs were hunched away from him.

“What are you doing?” he asked, a genuine curiosity in his voice. Candy swung around and guided him back to the bedroom.

“He’s just fixing a tap,” I heard her say. Sometimes the most absurd things make the greatest sense.

She rushed back into the kitchen and had her shot. I had mine and settled down to watch TV for the night. From time to time my conscience would wander into my body, and I’d think about what they were doing behind that wall at just that moment. I was never usually this close to it. But there’s a paradox about taking heroin and feeling anything, and it was easier to be blank and watch the screen.

After about half an hour Candy came out of the bedroom. When the door opened I could hear Keith’s loud snoring. Candy looked at me and grinned.

“He’s out for the night, I think,” she said.

We watched TV together and occasionally Candy went in to check on him. At about four A.M. we had another blast. Candy went back to the room then and everyone slept for a few hours. Jesse wasn’t working in the morning, and he had said we could keep the car until later in the night, as long as we gave him a nice taste.

I woke when Keith, hungover and pale, staggered to the bathroom at about nine. Since I was still dressed I was ready to go.

“Let’s hit that bank, then,” I said.

The three of us drove to the National Bank on St. Kilda Road. Candy waited outside in the car and I went in with Keith. There was a fuckup. As in, they wouldn’t give him his money. He didn’t have the funds. His credit card was over the limit too.

We stood in conference away from the counter. I tried to look angry but restrained.

“Keith, this is a serious problem. I’m sure you know that. It’s not that I’m heavy or anything. It’s just that the people I work for, the people above me, well—they are. And they won’t stand for this. It’s six hundred dollars. I have to have the money.”

“Listen, I can send it to you,” he pleaded. “I really didn’t expect this to happen. You can hold on to my driver’s license.”

“Keith, that’s not the way it works. I have to have the money before we part company, and I want to part company soon. I’m busy. I’ve got things to do.”

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 648