A CHANGE IS AS GOOD AS A HOLIDAY 9 page

We jumped in the car and flew across the Westgate Bridge and got the dope off Lester and kissed his arse, his fat ugly wife’s arse, and the very ground he walked on. Lester was a cunt, one of the greatest cunts in the Melbourne heroin scene. Today Lester was Jesus and Buddha rolled into one.

But you couldn’t hit up at the Buddha’s house.

My stomach was rumbling in anticipation. My saliva kept rising and I tried to swallow it and then I dry-retched once or twice. I needed to fart but I knew I would probably shit my pants. Eleven A.M., Sunday morning. It was exactly three days now. Seventy-two hours, an inconceivably long time.

I held the fart in and we drove a suburb away from Lester’s place. The suburbs out here were neat and ugly and I knew that any minute now they’d turn beautiful, or invisible, which is the same thing. The way hammer makes things stop intruding.

Candy stopped the car in a quiet street and I found an old Coke bottle on the floor of the car and went into someone’s front yard and filled it with water from their hose. We mixed up on the armrest between us and God was good and I found a vein quickly, trembling hands and all, and Candy did too.

I know how the farmers must feel when the rain finally comes.

Big hammer, God hammer, sky hammer, sledgehammer. I was knocked flying back into the seat, it seemed. I loosened the tourniquet, my head went wham into the headrest. The molecules of the vinyl welcomed, I mean profoundly welcomed, the molecules of my body.

“Oh fuck. Oh fuck.” Just like coming.

Candy groaned. It was joy from our toes to our wonderful heads. I was surrounded by light. My eyes flickered. Everything in the interior of the car was as it should have been. This was not transport. This was transportation. State-of-the-art fucking humdinger drug, none before and none since. I would murder for this bliss.

I licked my lips and tried to express my delight. It came out croaky, “Hnnnnn,” long and slow and easy. All the pills we’d been taking would have heightened the impact of the hammer. We were probably teetering close to overdose. That was the loveliest high wire there was.

A persistent noise was bugging me a bit. I opened my eyes. Candy had slumped forward onto the steering wheel and her forehead was pressing the horn. It jolted me back into the world. This was not the place to nod off.

“Candy!” I pulled her off the wheel.

“Huh? What? What?” The usual shit. “I’m okay.”

“Let’s go. Let’s drive,” I said.

A big Greek family, maybe Italian, had gathered in the driveway beside us. They were getting into their car but they were looking at us with consternation. They were all in their Sunday best and the daughter was wearing a frilly white First Communion dress.

“I don’t think they liked the look of us,” I said as we drove away. They stood there watching us go.

“They love us.” Candy laughed. “They fucking love us.”

We drove through Footscray and back toward the bridge and talked about how good we felt.

“I’m going to earn heaps tonight,” Candy said. “I’ve got a real strong feeling about it. It’s in my bones.”

“It’s in the cards!”

I laughed, glad that she seemed so keen about the matter and knowing that money meant dope.

“It’s in the stars!”

Candy was laughing too.

“It’s carved in stone!” I said. “Big money for Candy!”

“And we’ll never run out again!” she said. “Fuck, it’s good to be stoned. Now, let’s get some food. I’m absolutely starving. We’ll steal something from the 7-Eleven.”

TRUTH 3: KISSES

Late at night I think that if I could write a list of the things I like, I could somehow write my way out of the mess I’m in. I don’t know how this works or even how it occurs to me that it might work. How the fuck could it work? Write a list. It’s a bizarre thought. But what would I write? I like reading. I like movies, especially in the early hours, when the rest of the city is sleeping. I like the American football on TV, strange and beautiful sport from another planet. I like Candy, Candy’s warmth, Candy’s pussy, Candy’s eyes, breasts, sense of humor, attitude, legs, voice, laugh … I like a lot of things about Candy. I like sex. The list I’m trying to write should not include the statement I like heroin, because that won’t help. I sit for a while in silence but the list sort of peters out at this point and my mind begins to wander. I try to concentrate and bring it back to the list but it’s hard to think of things. Travel books. I like travel books. Then I give up. I think, Maybe there’s a lot of things waiting to be liked, and right now I don’t know what they are, but surely they’ll be good. Surely, in fact, goodness and mercy will follow us all the days of our lives.

Will I ever stop using?

The list-writing thing never really gets off the ground. Other times I try to tell myself I must accept certain private inevitabilities. I will live a life of continual deep fatigue, for example. I will carry in me, like a poison, like a virus, rancor for most things, and while this condition will not improve, nonetheless I will learn to live with my rancor as if it were a minor irritation. There will be many achievable things that I will not do and then there will come a time when I realize they are no longer even achievable.

Other things seem to be awkward truths rather than inevitabilities. It occurs to me that what I lack in balance I make up for in my familiarity with fear and unease and occasionally despair; and that this itself is a kind of balance. One truth comes to me strangely, out of the blue. It’s around two A.M. one night and Kubrick’s The Killing ends and The Wicker Man, with Edward Woodward, is about to come on, but first there are a couple of cheap ads. For no reason I can think of, the thought comes to me that the outlook of my life is narrowing, that things are closing off. I don’t think this truth but I feel it, sourly, in my stomach, and it’s as if my breath has been taken away from me, as when a roller coaster begins its plummet. Whoosh. The outlook is undeniably narrowing. The horizon is shrinking. It’s hard to swallow, and my heart starts to pound.

Then again, though I can hardly speak for others, maybe it’s also true to say that everybody’s lives are narrowing, one way or another. If that’s the case, why even bother to try stopping? Certain flashes of clarity come when it seems better instead to stop trying.

But it’s best not to trust clarity. Better to welcome and accept the mist that seeps into our life, that clings to our clothes, that soaks us to the bone in this scrapyard we are lost in. The mist.

And where does the idea of suicide come from? If the options are using or stopping using, and you know you can’t stop, that’s where suicide comes from.

Of course there’s despair, when things fuck up and you want to be dead, but that’s just circumstantial. That’s just bad feeling brought on by the adrenaline of events, by violence or rip-off or arrest. Bad feeling of the imminent absence of heroin. Absence looms like a mountain, I tell you.

But it’s entirely different, what’s been happening sometimes lately. There I am on the couch, in the serene embrace of heroin, the warm breast of the dove of peace, the feathered graze of mindlessness. The TV is on—it’s something beautiful and interesting, a documentary, say, maybe David Attenborough and the great sperm whales. Maybe cheetahs chasing down a zebra. Candy is watching too. I light a cigarette. There is nothing wrong with the world and nothing could ever be wrong. And then I feel—bang! just like that—that it would be better to be dead. What the fuck is going on here? Life is a circle and death will make it a line, snap it suddenly away from repetitiveness, fling it out into the void, beyond geometry, where at least there’s relief from the friction of things? What the fuck is going on?

I’m staring at the TV and the images blur to abstract pattern, leaving room for memory to enter, entirely uninvited. I’m seven years old and Lex is five. Why is this coming to me? The past is not a foreign country but a book long since returned to the library. Yet the scene comes to me and I am in the middle of it. We are at the river park. Mum sets up the picnic blanket and Lex and I run down to the water. Dad goes off to see the man about renting a canoe.

It’s exciting. We are used to the beach, where everything is aerated by salt and southerlies. But the Lane Cove River is dark and silty and smells different from the ocean. We tumble into the shallow edges of the river. We practice tackling underwater, pretending we are Stuntmen in slow-motion replays.

Dad calls us out of the water. “Okay, boys, canoe time!”

We sprint to be with him and he holds our hands and the three of us walk around the bend to the boat shed. The attendant lifts me and places me in my own canoe. I sit wobbling on the water as I wait. Then Dad is in his own canoe and the attendant passes Lex on board. Lex sits between Dad’s legs. The attendant gives our canoes a small push, and we drift toward the whorls that ripple and elongate in the hard midday sun.

I try to turn to come back around to Dad and Lex but my canoe moves in the wrong direction. Dad demonstrates with his paddle and I quickly learn how to steer and countersteer. Lex is grinning like the cat that licked the cream. His tiny hands clasp the paddle as Dad slices it through the water. It looks comical, as if maybe it’s Lex who’s pulling the strokes and Dad who’s allowing his arms to be moved. We meander on the river for half an hour.

Later on we stuff ourselves silly on all the food Mum’s unpacked. Lex and I wander off to explore the bush over behind the barbecue pits. Mum and Dad spread out on the blanket to chat or doze. The air is wet with the droning of bees and the piping of birds. The light swings in on the breeze and the breeze rustles the willows. It’s a dappled picnic afternoon.

Then Mum and Dad are packing up.

“What do you say we end the day with an ice cream?” Dad asks.

I’ve had a little too much sun. My body is hot. At the kiosk the ice cream spreads down through my chest like a cool balm. On the drive home Lex is curled up sleeping with his head on Mum’s lap. I spread out on the backseat. I tilt my head and let the trees and telegraph poles speed past upside down. The radio plays low. Hits ’n’ Memories. I hear “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” for the first time and am entranced by its dreamy sadness. It’s a joy to arrive home. Dad carries Lex inside and tucks him into bed. I get into my bed, on the other side of the room. The light enters from the hallway.

“Did you have a good day?” Dad asks.

“Yes, Dad,” I say.

“We’ll do it again soon,” he says.

He strokes my hair and then kisses me on the forehead. “Sleep tight, sunshine,” he says.

And I fall into the welcoming night.

The memory ends there. It seems painful to think of something so pleasant and so far away. The documentary ends too. I change the channel on the TV and get into some telemarketing. For $89.95 (introductory offer) I can improve my memory one hundredfold.

Somewhere the past changed. I don’t want it. I don’t want the present. There is no conceivable future. There is only the relentlessness of coping, punctuated by naked singularities of bliss. In the middle of such moments contentment is absolute: there is only heroin, there is only Candy, the three of us adrift on the endless sea of love. We carry the ocean within us and with us wherever we go. Suicide is therefore not so much ridiculous as impractical, since Candy and I are immortal.

The next day, a case in point, we’re standing on Swanston Street, in the middle of the city, waiting for the St. Kilda tram to arrive. We are stoned, as in very stoned. We are going to St. Kilda to meet Kojak to get more dope for later because we have a couple hundred bucks and why not? The cars glide by in a harmony of pistons, the peak-hour crowd flows around us with the buoyancy of astronauts on the moon.

I look at Candy and we smile for a moment.

“Hey, baby, hug me,” I say.

She reaches her arms up around my neck. She nuzzles her face into my ear and nape, all the while kissing me lightly. My left hand holds the small of her back, my right hand caresses her arse. I squeeze it slowly, backward and forward, the way a cat massages a pillow. Candy continues to kiss me all over the neck. With every splay of my palm I try to allow my little finger to wander closer up into her crotch. She arches her feet a little in response. She shifts her body imperceptibly, spreads her legs a fraction, pushes against my finger each time it completes its squeeze cycle. Then I sweep my hand up her back and slide it into the curve where her neck meets her skull. We tilt our heads from side to side and move in and out and kiss each other; contentment is in our very pulse. The kissing is languid and fluid. I close my eyes and sometimes I open them slightly. Candy does the same. Sometimes our eyes open at the same moment. Her long lashes seem to be reaching toward me. Her eyes have moved into a blueness beyond desire since all desire is satisfied.

This is the business. This is what we’re after.

A car horn toots and a young guy in the passenger seat leans out and yells, “Go for it!”

We look up and shrug. When the car has passed by, he no longer exists. We go back to kissing for a minute or so. Then the tram arrives and we climb on board and it moves off toward St. Kilda. We sit in the back holding hands and watching the street go by.

FREELANCING

What we had, continually, in the kingdom of momentum, was each other. We had each other, but there was never time to think. Time always hardened into basic units: what we needed to do to get by.

I guess it would be fair to say that Candy was fiery. Fairer still to say she was beautiful and fiery. And when she wanted to make money for heroin—which was basically all the time—she was good at it.

Sometimes she made so much money in brothels that the other girls didn’t like her. This is capitalism, you see: product and jealousy. But the fiery side meant that she didn’t take shit from the johns. Nor from the brothel bosses. And even the most tolerant boss had to weigh up a girl’s beauty with the more unpredictable aspects of her drug addiction.

Candy, who was always thinking of the future, as in later today and tomorrow, had a bad habit of taking the clients’ money and then trying to take some more. Sometimes it worked. More and more often she got the sack. The customer is always right.

She was getting tired. I had no experience of what went on in the brothels, so what the fuck would I know? Maybe after a while she just found it harder to play the pretty porn bimbo thing. Easier to nod off, to say, “Give me the money. What do you expect? Special treatment? This is a fucking brothel.” But it meant a kind of downward thing, like my petty crime, like our health, and like the drug itself—the way the more you took over the years, the more it seemed to lose its strength.

A downward thing, as in Candy went inexorably from good escort to bad escort, from the ritzy brothels to the cheesy. Always getting the sack for not toeing the line and for being too stoned.

And ended up freelancing it, on Grey Street in St. Kilda. After which there was really no place to go.

If we’d come down to Grey Street by cab, I would loiter in a shadow or sit on a bench and be useless. On the other hand, if we’d managed to borrow a car, off Jesse, say, or if we owned one, which happened once or twice, I would sit in the passenger seat and be useless, while Candy walked the street and got into other cars. Not having a license, I was there, I suppose, for moral support. Some would find my use of the word moral a little quaint.

Sometimes odd or funny things happened on Grey Street. Sometimes it was scary, and for a moment you would question what you were doing. More often than not it was boring. Occasionally we made big money hits, but it was not like the glamour days of escort jobs at the Regent. On Grey Street you made good bucks by turnover only: forty-dollar head jobs or sixty-dollar backseat fucks, negotiable. But they could be over in four minutes, and now and then on busy summer nights it almost seemed like the old days again.

I was never really into the idea of sucking dicks myself, so I wouldn’t have been much help on the gay beat down around Shakespeare Avenue. But one night we were going home about three in the morning with a pocketful of cash. We stopped off at Fat Nick’s café and scored a hundred, just to go to bed with. We were already comfortably stoned, but whenever we had the money we could never really see the need for thrift.

It was a fucking cold night. There weren’t many bodies around by now: even the living dead of St. Kilda had called it quits for the night. We were walking back to our car. I crossed the road and a young bloke glanced at me and I knew he was nervous. It was not the heroin contact glance I knew so well, so I guessed it had to be some other sub-cultural thing. The gay beat. He didn’t want drugs. He was a pretty boy. I figured that made me the rough trade.

He was maybe eighteen. All I knew was, it was dumb to ever miss an opportunity. You had to try your luck at least. I swung my head back as we passed.

“How you doing?” I asked.

Candy took the cue, like I had done so often, and kept on walking. Don’t ever interfere when the other is operating.

“I’m okay.” It was more of a question than a statement.

“Are you looking for something?”

“I … urn …”

He was obviously new to this game. As was I.

“Sex?” I offered.

He seemed relieved. “How much?”

We were standing in the middle of the empty street during this conversation.

“Fifty bucks, blow job,” I said.

“Okay,” he said quickly.

What had I gotten myself into? I had no intention of giving him a blow job. Though God knows Candy had told me often enough, in moments of anger, that it was what I should be doing, if I was a real man, a breadwinner.

I was pretty sure I wouldn’t even know how to suck a dick very well. So I was going to have to rip him off. I knew it was a paltry sum, but I just couldn’t help myself, and if I could get money in any way, then I saw it as my duty to get it.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“David.”

“David!” I laughed.

“What’s so funny?” he asked nervously.

“I’m David too!” I lied.

I was developing a plan.

“Listen,” I said, “if you want to be comfortable, we can go back to my friend’s flat, spend a bit more time.” I pointed to Candy down the road. “She’s got the car. She’s got a spare room. She won’t mind. But it’ll cost more. A hundred bucks.”

“Eighty’s all I’ve got,” he said.

“Okay. Eighty bucks. It’ll have to do.”

We caught up with Candy.

“Maryanne, this is David,” I said. “He’s coming back for a while, if that’s okay.”

She smiled broadly. “Hi. How are you?”

We walked to the car. Candy turned to me so David couldn’t see and gave me the what-are-you-doing flicker of the eye. I gave her the nearly imperceptible don’t-worry-it’s-a-good-plan shake of the head in response.

It was all about talking fast. Throw in some ambiguity about the entrance to the block of flats, and we were in with a chance. All I had to do was split me and him from Candy, so he wouldn’t know where the car was parked. Then somehow split him from his money. Then split myself from him. And make it all seem smooth.

As we climbed into the car I whispered to Candy, “I told him my name’s David.”

Candy drove. David One, that’s me, was in the front, and David Two sat in the back. I couldn’t understand how a smooth-skinned boy like him would need to pay for sex. But that wasn’t my mystery to solve. I spoke to him over my shoulder.

“This’ll be nice,” I said. “We can have a bit of an extended cuddle.”

I heard Candy stifle a giggle, turn it into a cough.

I was trying to make him not so nervous. I was in unfamiliar territory. I didn’t really know the lingo for gay prostitutes. Maybe I should have said, “I’m going to lick your little jackrabbit till it’s hard, I’m going to belt through your ring with my big fuckstick.”

We’d moved again—the usual problems with unpaid rent—and were living along the river in a flat on Alexandra Avenue.

“Maryanne, you should turn here and find a parking spot. We’ll go around the front and come in that way.”

If David thought this was strange, he didn’t protest.

“Oh,” I added, “is your flatmate home?”

Candy had no idea what I was talking about, and no idea how to answer.

“Um, I’m not sure,” she said.

“Hmmm. I hope she’s okay about it. Don’t worry, David, if there’s a problem we’ll think of something. The laundry room, maybe. I’ll reduce the price. We’ll get out here, Maryanne. You park and come around.”

I left my cigarettes on the dashboard. David and I got out of the car. We walked a few steps. Then I slapped my forehead and said, “Cigarettes.” I opened the door and leaned in and got them. I whispered to Candy, “Back path.” Then I knew she knew the plan.

There was another street nearby, a dead end. Halfway along the dead end was a rock path that led between two blocks of flats to the back of our block. Candy would park and go that way.

I walked around the front with David.

“Right, it’s up there.” I pointed. “I’ll just go in and check this flatmate situation. When you see the light go on in that window, come up. It’s number nineteen. First give us your money. I don’t want to get ripped off.”

“What?”

He stiffened with caution. He seemed a little surprised by this.

“Listen, David,” I said, trying to sound reasonable, trying to create a character who was basically nice, with just a hint of threat thrown in. “Listen. You have to show some good faith. You could just run away, change your mind. That would really fuck my night around. This is business. This is give-and-take. I’m trusting you in my friend’s flat. You have to trust me with your money for thirty seconds. I can’t go anywhere. There’s only one entrance. You’ll see the light come on.”

I’d talked fast enough. Reluctantly, he pulled out his wallet and handed me the eighty bucks.

“Back in a jiff.”

I sprinted up the stairs and went in through the front entrance. Then I went straight out through the laundry exit and up the back stairs. Candy was waiting for me on the landing. We crept giggling into the flat, number thirty-six.

“Better leave the lights off, I think,” Candy whispered.

We stumbled around in the dark, keeping our heads low and away from the window. We mixed up Fat Nick’s hundred in a shaft of light from the streetlight, and banged up a nice blast. Candy crawled down the hallway to run a bath.

I sidled along the wall toward the front window, making sure I stayed in shadow. When I finally leaned forward enough to take a peek down at the street, I was a little saddened by the sight. I may have even felt a twinge of guilt, I’m not sure.

It was four in the morning and David was standing in the cone of light cast down by a streetlight. He was staring up at the block of flats. I could imagine how dark and imposing it must have looked. He’d spent ten minutes waiting for a light to come on. I guess now he was waiting with a rapidly decreasing sense of hope. Not a car slid by on Alexandra Avenue. Behind him the Yarra flowed silently by, hidden in a thick mist.

I stood in the blackness, fascinated for a moment by his pain. Finally he clenched his fists and pounded the air twice, as a child might bang a knife and fork on the table. I saw his mouth say, “Shit!” and he stamped his right foot on the ground. He looked around him, and he looked up one more time. Then he walked away. The cone of light was empty.

We didn’t turn the lights on, just in case. Our eyes adjusted. We had a bath together, and kept adding hot water until dawn. The thing I liked most in the vague suggestion of silver light was soaping Candy’s breasts, in slow trancelike circles.

“That was cruel,” Candy said.

“I know,” I said. “I shouldn’t have done it.”

But what we really knew was that we’d both just warded off the demons, by another eighty bucks, and you had to do that if you could. We’d bought the hundred from Fat Nick, and then David came up, an opportunity. So really the hit we’d just had, Fat Nick’s hit, only cost us twenty bucks. In theory.

It made it feel special. We would go to bed soon. When we woke up we’d be that much further in front. There was no point in getting lazy. Every dollar counted, always. And David would have gotten home all right, I’m sure, and been more careful, more suspicious, next time.

Not all the nights on Grey Street were good.

Soon after the David episode there was one of those nights when everything went wrong. Candy made some money early and we scored and the dope wasn’t great. That didn’t seem too dire, though. It was only midnight. Then the weather cut in, serious Melbourne midwinter rain, and in half an hour the cars cruising by had all but disappeared.

I sat in the car—Jesse’s car again, borrowed for the thousandth time—and Candy did the forlorn walk up and down the street. Finally a BMW slowed and she got in for the discussion. Normally at this point they would take off, and I would expect to see her back in five minutes or half an hour. Great fucking security system.

This time she climbed from the BMW and came over to me. She got inside the car.

“This guy could be interesting. I’m not sure. He reckons he’s connected to the clubs. Says he can pay me in smack. Says it’s good gear too. Pink rocks. Lots of it. But he can’t pay me until after two. He’s got to get the dope from the Shangri La Club at two.”

“What? And we go with him?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“What do you think? Is he straight up?” I was having visions of a new dealer, a step up, a BMW schmooze with the uncut rocks.

“I don’t know. I think he’s okay.” It was funny how wishful thinking could turn into fact if you were desperate enough. I suppose that’s what had happened to David.

“So what are you going to do?”

“We’ll take him back to the flat,” Candy said. “I’ll drive this, you’ll have to go with him, show him the way. Fuck I wish you could drive. Then afterward we’ll go and get paid at the Shangri La.”

Candy introduced us and I got into his car. I had no wish to make conversation. He seemed pretty quiet too. He was dark-haired, burly, clean-shaven, nondescript. There was something tense about him that I didn’t like. Maybe it was just the way he gripped the steering wheel. But I had to forget about that, since he was going to be giving us the gear.

I waited in the lounge room, and turned the TV on, and Candy and Burly went to the bedroom. After a while they came out. It was past three.

We drove back to St. Kilda the same way, me in the BMW like a standover weed. But this time he put his foot to the floor and we really took off. Candy couldn’t keep up in the old Holden. This guy was flying. I gripped my seat.

“Ah … you better slow down for her,” I suggested, motioning toward the back window with my thumb.

“She knows where we’re going.”

I thought we’d roll, or crash. It was wet out there. My brain wasn’t going too fast. I couldn’t work out why he was doing this. I needed the money or the pink rocks but I wanted to get out of the car.

I had a feeling that I hadn’t had in a long time. I was scared shitless, and it felt physical. He was getting up to 160 K’s in short suburban streets.

“Could you slow down just a little, mate?” My voice sounded high-pitched and silly.

He didn’t answer and he didn’t slow down. I looked across. All I could see was the clench of his jaws, and I knew then that he was crazy, one way or another. A different way from me and Candy. Speed psychosis? But he looked so straight. Steroid meltdown? Nonspecific fury? The streets flashed by. My whole life didn’t pass before me, but I got a kind of edited slide show. The car was taking sharp bends on two wheels only. At one point the back tires fishtailed. I thought, This is related to my heroin addiction. Definitely. I would not be in this car for any other reason.

We came over a rise and left the ground for a second. Then, in a deft display of precision braking, he drew up sharp outside a police station. The engine was still running. He reached under the seat and pulled out a gun. It was silver. It looked heavy. My heart seemed to go quiet. He just flopped his hand toward me, so that the barrel of the gun gently prodded my thigh. Then he uttered the first direct words that he’d said to me. I remember they were slow, precise words.

“Get the fuck out of my car. Before I take you in there and arrest you.”

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 463