TRUTH 4: WHERE IS THE EARTH? 3 page

The bank had given Candy and me Visa cards when the loan for the farm was approved. I hated the idea of using a card with my own name on it, not the least because I had no money to make repayments. It had sat in my wallet, unused, for months, like a terrible harbinger of yuppiedom.

So I asked Kay if she’d buy my plane ticket to Sydney, and again, without missing a beat, she said sure. I asked her if she’d pick me up at the airport, and she said sure to that too. Maybe she was missing the old days a bit, all that drama and action.

Whatever. I walked back to the farm and threw some clothes and a couple of books into a bag. Candy said, “Where are you going?”

“It’s none of your business,” I said. Then I left the house and walked down the driveway and started hitchhiking to the train station. I wanted Candy to follow me. She didn’t. I wanted to cry but I clenched my jaw instead. I thought about picking up my methadone for one last time, but I was so angry and confused that it didn’t seem important anymore.

Within an hour I was on a train, heading for Melbourne and the airport. When the train picked up speed I started reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a book of which absolutely everything now escapes me other than its pervasive odor of sadness. The carriage clanked and rattled. I glanced outside. It occurred to me that the landscape was moving away from Candy.

As a drug addict, the days had always been fairly predictable: scam, get the dope, scam, get the dope. Now I felt I was balancing on the edge of a cliff in a thick fog. I had no clear notion of what lay in front; I was all spastic legs and flailing arms. I no longer knew what I thought about Candy and me. I tried to concentrate on reading the book. Our own life seemed even less concrete than the world that existed inside that ethereal fiction.

BREAKAGES

Memory is a fucker, the way it blurs things. The thing is, I can write about events. All that heroin, it was all events. When the events slowed down and emotional stuff began, well, I don’t know that I know how to write about that. Perhaps it’s enough to say: we fought for what seemed like a long time but wasn’t, and then one day I found myself catapulted north, to Sydney and the breaking of everything that was familiar.

This was a time of life being out of whack.

When I fled the farm, I felt on top of the world. I’ve heard since that this is called denial. It makes sense. The brain shuts down at times of true crisis, and nothing but the locus of hilarity (or is that hysteria?) is active. Nothing could stop me, not even the depression and confusion hovering off-screen, back in Gippsland where Candy was. I went to Sydney and then farther north, to the Sunshine Coast. I plunged into sex as if it offered absences greater than overdose. For fuck’s sake, I was trying to come off the drugs. There was nothing else but sex.

The first night in Sydney, I slept with Kay. I have no idea why we fucked. The situation seemed set up. Some people are attracted to sickness, to the kind of madness where sparks fly off the head, to the incoherence of despair, masked by nervous energy, which winds up looking like bewildered joy.

I think Kay was attracted to this in me.

For myself, nothing at all seemed strange during this time. Since everything was new, everything seemed correct.

Sally was Kay’s trainee editor and live-in housekeeper. She was eighteen and had come down from Queensland a year earlier. She’d left school and landed what she saw as an exciting job in the big smoke through friends of friends. She was tall and confident, a rangy country girl with long black hair and sweet green eyes. I thought she was beautiful.

That first night, after Kay’s husband Aaron had reached his nightly blackout, sprawled and snoring on the spare couch in the baby’s room, Kay and Sally whispered conspiratorially in the kitchen.

I sat in a rocking chair on the back veranda, overlooking the freight lines at Lilyfield. It was my first night back in Sydney in four years, and that trip had just been a quick two-day heroin run. I’d done a few trips like that, but it was seven years or more since Candy and I had moved to Melbourne to get away from drugs.

And it was thirty-six hours now since I’d last had my methadone. I was beginning to feel a bit frayed around the edges. It was very uncomfortable, like I was shedding skin. I knew it would get worse before it got better.

But the smell of jasmine, at midnight, reminded me of how much I loved Sydney. I was drunk, sad, and excited, though the excitement masked the edginess, the deep unease.

Kay came out through the glass doors.

“You’re going to sleep in Sally’s bed,” she announced.

“Sure. Fine,” I said, thinking that somehow, miraculously, it had been arranged that I was to sleep with Sally. I’d been in Sydney for six hours. To sleep with Sally would have been my wish. I thought we must have all been remarkably in tune with each other’s thoughts. Like I said, nothing seemed strange. I suppose it was easy that night to believe that in Sydney, magic realism was real.

I went to bed, expecting Sally to follow.

Kay came instead. I didn’t really care.

“What about your husband?”

“He’s too drunk. He won’t wake up.”

We fucked and then she went back to her room, to share the bed with Sally. Aaron remained sleeping all night on the couch.

On the second night Kay and Sally dragged me along to a party. I figured the only way to ward off the methadone devils was to get really drunk. But of course, coming off methadone, you tend to skip the drunk part and go straight to unhinged.

Everyone else was smashed so it didn’t matter. It was a loud, crowded party, Sydney in summer. Coming from the darkness of Melbourne, I thought I could feel the future exploding upon me. Nothing mattered. On the stairs I said to Sally, “I didn’t really want to sleep with Kay last night. I wish I’d slept with you. I’d rather sleep with you.”

“Okay,” she said. “Then sleep with me tonight.”

This was really not good in terms of the etiquette of houseguests.

In the morning Kay’s three-year-old daughter wandered into the room and looked at Sally and me and wandered back out.

“Mummy,” I heard her say, “what’s Sally doing in bed with that boy?”

Sally looked at me and winced and then got up and pulled on a T-shirt. She composed her face into an expression of casual indifference, and walked out of the room. It was silent for a while and I drifted back into a restless sleep.

After a few minutes I jolted awake. I could hear doors and cupboards slamming. I could hear Kay screaming at Sally. All about boundaries. “You’re fired, you bitch. And you’ve got half an hour to get out of my house. I don’t want to see your face again. This is my house. How dare you?”

Sally came into the room. “Well,” she shrugged, “a turning point in my life.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “They’re lots of fun.”

I was feeling pretty sick by this stage. Some heroin would have done the trick and made the world nice. But I was trying to stick to my task of not using.

Sally was packing her stuff and muttering, “I can’t believe it.” I guess she was eighteen years old and her life had just turned upside down, but that’s not what I was thinking at the time. I was thinking how much I needed to smoke a joint, to ease the creaking of the bones and make that supreme effort to get out of bed. Then Kay burst into the room.

“And as for you!” she shouted. She pointed a bony finger at me and held it there with an air of dramatic malevolence before storming out again.

I packed my bag. This took me all of fifteen seconds. In the kitchen, Aaron, always pleasant whenever conscious, was curing his hangover with a glass of wine and a grapefruit.

“Don’t worry, old son,” he said, tipping his glass to me. “Kay’s problem is, she hasn’t had a fuck in so long, she’s obviously jealous of you and Sally getting it together.”

I felt a bit queasy right at that moment, but knew it was not the time to show guilt or awkwardness. Not the time for public confessions.

“Have you got any of those heads left, Aaron?” I asked. “Do you think I could roll a quick joint before I go?”

In a perverse way the whole thing was a kind of bonding experience for Sally and me. We were thrown together. I was only the third guy she’d ever fucked.

All the intense weirdness of coming off the methadone over the next couple of weeks was mixed in with the strangeness of viewing an old city through new eyes. The explosion and disintegration of my relationship with Candy were briefly tempered by the alien hypnosis of sex from the unknown.

Sally didn’t care too much, not after the initial shock. Kay ran a tight ship emotionally, and when I arrived, like a small typhoon, I think Sally saw it as some kind of opportunity to jump ship, to learn to swim in a bigger ocean. I was older and fucked-up, with the diamond glint of absolute abandon in my yellow eyes: everything an eighteen-year-old could dream of.

We flew north, obviously not courtesy of Kay’s credit card this time. It was time, at last, to start using mine. Sally took me to meet her parents, in a beautiful house in the rain forest. They were nice to me, for her sake, I suppose.

I don’t know what they made of me, eating their mangos for breakfast and rabbiting on in my frantic enthusiasm for a life that had been new for all of about five minutes.

I don’t know what they made of the tanless pallor of years in Melbourne, or my slicked-back hair and pointy boots. I don’t know what they made of the black tracks down my skinny arms, now so pathetically exposed in Sally’s dad’s T-shirts in the crushing Queensland heat.

They bought me a pair of shorts, so I wouldn’t look so out of place on the beach. Sally gave me a Chanel T-shirt and a pair of sandals. I swear to God I looked like a fucking dipstick.

They lived in an open-plan house, cool and cedared, beautifully designed some twenty years earlier during one glorious hippie summer. There were screens and partitions and levels everywhere. Sally and I had to fuck silently, but even the stress of that was fun. Late at night the endless croaking of the frogs soothed me through the methadone pangs and into brief snatches of sleep.

Like I’ve said, I’d never driven much, never even had my license. In the early days, when I was a successful young drug dealer, I’d always gotten a lift to wherever I wanted to go. There was always someone willing to drive me. Later, when I was a successfully fucked-up junkie, we didn’t have cars too often. In any case, Candy had always driven, since we figured if you’re already breaking drug laws it’s best not to compound things by breaking traffic laws as well.

Really, the sum total of my driving experience was minimal, bordering on nonexistent. Now Sally somehow convinced her trusting parents to give us—for a whole week—their brand-new four-wheel drive.

It was a Holden Jackaroo. The cabin seemed to be at least fifteen feet off the ground. It had none of the idiosyncrasies of junkies’ cars in Melbourne. Nonetheless it frightened me. The concept of financial responsibility, coupled with my lack of driving experience, frightened me. Not having a license was icing on the cake.

But without the car, we couldn’t get out of the rain forest, couldn’t go off exploring the coast.

“Yeah, I’ve driven these before,” I said. “No problems.”

They stood on the gravel driveway, waving us good-bye. Do not crunch the gears, I willed myself, stoned on their outrageous pot, smiling through clenched teeth and sweating profusely. Do not crunch the fucking gears.

In all this madness, in all these mad few weeks, I tried to forget that back in my real life, where I’d left it in Gippsland, things were more than bad. I tried not to think about going home. I tried to maintain my anger, about Candy fucking Paul Hillman, about Candy’s weeks of vitriol in the lead-up to saying go. But I was haunted by the feeling that I deserved everything bad that was sure to come.

After a week I called her from a phone booth in Noosa Beach, where we were staying with Sally’s sister. There were years of connection. It was hard to be in new lives, other people’s lives.

Candy said, “Everything’s fine. Everything’s turning blue here.”

“Blue?” I asked, a little alarmed. “Everything’s turning blue? What do you mean?”

“Blue! Everything’s turning blue. Everything’s fine.”

I stood sweating in the hot glass booth in the tropics, feeling acids eating at my stomach.

“Listen, I’ll be back sometime soon, I guess. We’ve got a lot to sort out. I feel okay coming off the methadone. How do you feel?”

She had stopped it too, the day I left. I don’t know why. I only dropped off the methadone because I was going to Sydney, a thousand kilometers from the Korrumburra pharmacy where we were registered to pick it up.

“Fantastic,” she said. “I feel fantastic. Everything’s going blue.”

“Candy, what do you mean? What do you mean, blue?” I gripped the phone and my knuckles were white. For the last faltering seconds I tried desperately to believe there was something here I was misunderstanding, that Candy was speaking of things that made sense, things that belonged to a world I was familiar with.

“Blue! Blue! You don’t get it, do you? It’s simple! I’m speaking clearly. Everything’s turning blue. Everything’s going to be fine.”

“Okay, Candy,” I sighed, overwhelmed, “I’ve got to go now. I’ll talk to you soon.”

When I came back from the phone booth, Sally knew I was no longer there. I was delving into the darker unease of burnt-out loyalties and remembrances of things past. Of an imminent horizon of collapses and breakage. Of how a mind could overload and suddenly change into something unfamiliar and unknowable. Of how something felt deeply, however misguided, could disappear forever. This must be a kind of death.

I couldn’t tell Sally how I thought that perhaps Candy was going crazy, and I didn’t even say it to myself.

I was hoeing into the Visa card now. It was so fucking ironic to have my own credit card at last. But I’d developed bad habits from all those earlier years of fraud. The Visa card was magic money; I had no concept of the future. At this time of my life I lived truly in the moment, in the worst possible sense.

We had dual cards on the same account. Candy was buying weird shit down in Victoria, Belgian crayons and mountain bikes and cookbooks and theatrical makeup. Up in Queensland, with not a cent to my name, the card was all I could use. In this three-week period, Candy and I took it seven thousand dollars over the two-thousand-dollar limit. Before the computers caught up with us.

Sally and I were smoking lots of dope, and suddenly all over the coast, the heads dried up. Normally this news would have passed entirely unnoticed through a consciousness preoccupied with slightly stronger drugs. But by now I was ten days or more off the methadone, all wires and pangs, and if I had to be sleep deprived, I wanted to do it on Warp 5. Up there in the lush river flats, you were about as close to the source of the warp as you could get.

Sally couldn’t get any dope. When we arrived back at the rain forest, we found that even her parents had run out. I was really keen for some fucking buds, believe me. Finally we got Sally’s mum revved up, appealed to her sense of the frontier spirit. I think we framed it like a challenge: if you were such a pioneer in the dope scene back then, why can’t you get some now?

She rose to the occasion. She found an old hippie girlfriend still growing crops in the boondocks. As a rule this lady didn’t sell dope. She was simply wire-brushing the inside of her skull, slowly, over twenty years, to let the air in.

For Sally’s mum, though, in a time of need, Wirebrush would make an exception and sell Sally a pound or so. Now all we needed was the cash.

Sally sweet-talked Mac, a friend in Sydney, into supplying the dollars. He would take a cut of the dope and profits and leave me to do the business. Money had to be transferred from Sydney. We had to get out of the rain forest and straight into the nearest bank. And we had to get Sally’s mum to ensure that Wirebrush was punctual and businesslike. It’s funny, but it felt good to be doing that shit again. What’s more, it gave me something to keep my mind away from things turning blue.

All this would take two days. Maybe Wirebrush had to check the runes, work out the most opportune moment. On the first night of waiting, the call came, the call with the bad news.

I was trying to be invisible. You drop off methadone as if off the face of a cliff. In the raw pain of being flayed and crazy, you want to disappear off the very surface of the earth. Through a convoluted route, Candy’s parents tracked me down. The call came at midnight. It was her dad, such a decent and bewildered man. He got straight to the point.

“Candace is in the hospital.”

“What’s happened?”

“She’s had a bit of a nervous breakdown.”

“Where is she?”

“Royal Park. You’d better come down.”

“All right. I’ll try to arrange for a bus or a plane. I’ll call you tomorrow and tell you what’s happening.”

There was not much to say. I guess I had known this was coming, but now I could feel my heart going up into my throat. The holiday was over.

I climbed back under the gauze mosquito net.

“Are you okay?” Sally asked.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said, and already the cool tang of Melbourne was prickling up my arms.

But we still had to organize the dope deal. Late morning and early afternoon we fucked around, panicking when the money hadn’t arrived, making urgent phone calls to Sydney. Finally we got the money five minutes before the bank closed.

I called Candy’s parents, believing that the best defense for odd behavior was offense. I told them I was having trouble getting a lift to the bus depot from the rain forest. Her mum’s tone of voice was perplexed and dubious, but what could she do?

“Is Candy okay?” I asked.

“It’s not good,” she said. “Just get down here.”

All through the next day, the time for the deal kept getting shuffled. Old Wirebrush was nervous about the “karma” involved with capitalist transactions. Kind of interesting for someone who certainly had their finger on the pulse of current market prices. Sally’s mum decided to come with us, to help with the distasteful business of handing over and counting money.

We met in a picnic area beside a six-lane highway. Wire-brush’s weird choice. Her hippie kids played on the swing. Sally’s mum sat with Wirebrush in her car, counting the money.

Sally and I sat in the four-wheel drive and checked the dope. When I opened the shopping bag, I knew it was a winner. The pungent smell, the globules of resin on the hairy gold heads. I broke off a branch, nothing but head. Sally rolled a huge ragged joint.

The dope hurt the throat. We gave the thumbs-up to Wirebrush, or Farmer Shiva the Destroyer, as she was rapidly becoming. I began to clench my teeth. Within two minutes I was wired beyond what was pleasant, and paranoid about having so much dope in a public place. We waved our good-byes—I never actually met her directly—and pulled back out onto the highway.

Sally and I were giggling, already wasted. Her mum was driving and serenely finishing the joint.

“I’m ripped. I am fucking ripped. This is good dope,” I said.

“Mmm,” Sally’s mum said, like a wine taster who’s been there, done it all. “I suppose it’s not bad. It’s got a nice soft edge to it. Kind of mellow and golden.”

A soft edge? Mellow and golden? Yelping noises were coming from deep inside my brain, and behind that the clang-clang-clang of giant machinery. I imagined the police were behind us. Sally’s mum continued speaking.

“Let’s go up and look at the view from Arundel Rock.”

“Yeah!” Sally said. “You’ve got to see this place. It’s really special.”

I realized they were talking to me.

“It’s an Aboriginal sacred site. A very magical place.”

Oh Lord untie the stomach knots! I was not well. My wife had been committed to a mental hospital. I wanted to do a business deal and turn a profit. I wanted to curl up in a ball and I wanted the world to quiet down. I did not want to see an Aboriginal sacred site.

But I was just too stoned to try and talk them out of it. The real world, away from heroin—I was not handling it.

Sally’s mum had the goods on me. I think she could see very clearly that the state I was in was one of such distorted ugliness that even high-quality marijuana could do nothing more than intensify the distortions. I think also she wanted to calm me down, put me on a plane, and get me the fuck out of her daughter’s life.

And Arundel Rock did calm me down. The huge granite dome rose abruptly out of a luscious green floodplain. We drove until the driving trail stopped and then walked to the top. Directly below us, a thousand feet down, was the darker green of the rain forest canopy, skirting the river that snaked around the rock.

We stood awestruck in the sunlight on the flat bald summit of the granite giant. All around us were rock pools and carvings. I felt like an intruder, and rightly so. I had no connection with anything, least of all the earth. Only the cushioning effect of these monstrously potent heads prevented me from falling to the ground and weeping—for everything that flooded out of me as the methadone faded; for my absence from myself for so many years; for Candy, whose fragility was now exposed by the absence of drugs; for the terrible tragedy I sensed I was about to enter.

“Look at the way the light falls everywhere in gold particles,” Sally’s mum said.

She was holding her arms above her head and wriggling her fingers like the storyteller on Playschool imitating rain. If anyone else had been there I would have cringed. But I was so stoned I saw the gold particles too.

That night we triple-wrapped the pound of heads into separate, smaller packages, placed the packages in front of the Jackaroo’s tires and gently rolled the four-wheel drive over them to compress them for my flight home. Even though customs wasn’t involved, I was nervous about my first plane flight with drugs. Especially such smelly drugs.

In the morning I learned too late that even the tiniest amount of this stuff was enough to make you comfortably stoned. All I had wanted was to be laid back going through the airport shit. I must have been overzealous in the amount I rolled.

I could feel that I’d become nothing but a huge stretched smile. It was a smile that didn’t belong to me, yet I couldn’t get rid of it. The hilarity of the dope was effectively nullified by a hole in my gut as big as a harbor. This had been there, slowly expanding, since the “everything’s turning blue” phone call. But the corners of my mouth were being pulled in opposite directions by invisible wires.

My eyes were half closed. I needed dark sunglasses. I felt a little ridiculous, trying to keep my balance at the ticket counter as the airline clerk told me my Visa card had been canceled.

I had dope in my shoes, up my legs, in my underpants, around my stomach. I was expecting a pack of snarling police dogs to come bounding around the corner at any moment, sliding toward me on the polished departure lounge floor.

Sally, for whom nothing other than the cancellation of a Visa card could have been an appropriate ending to a whirlwind fling with someone so consummately fucked-up, went and had a word with her mum, who’d driven us to the airport.

They bought me the ticket.

We said our awkward good-byes. On the plane I drank a lot of orange juice, and it leveled me out a bit. Two awful airline coffees made me feel I had a second chance at the day.

Somehow I got through the teeth-gritting paranoia of imaginary drug squad cops waiting for me at Sydney. Sally’s friend Mac, the money supplier, was there to pick me up, and I went back to his place to use the phone and get business rolling. It was ten o’clock in the morning. I booked a seat on a Melbourne bus for eight that night. I had ten hours in which to off-load the gear, give the money to Mac, make a profit (or at least pay for my bus fare), keep some dope—hopefully lots—for myself, get the hell out of there and get back to my life in Melbourne and Candy in the nuthouse. Which was the reason I wanted lots of dope.

I could have gone for the bigger cash profit but I knew I would only expend my energy running around trying to exchange it for drugs. Probably the wrong kind of drugs. It seemed simpler to just take the grass.

I called Candy’s parents to tell them I was now halfway home. Could they pick me up from the bus depot at eight in the morning? By now Candy’s mother was openly expressing her dismay and fury—it was a full two days since I’d been informed of the hospitalization. What in God’s name was going on?

Knowing it was a flimsy excuse, I told her again that I’d had trouble getting a lift out of the rain forest. I was trying to create the impression that I’d been staying in some place accessible only by helicopter.

At any rate, they said they would be there to pick me up.

Making lightning deals in Sydney all day was a good way to temporarily distract myself from myself, or rather, from the concept of my life. I wrapped up business quickly and efficiently, getting in touch with old, old friends who had never been burnt by me, who were happy enough to gather the cash for a bargain deal on an ounce or two of major mindfuck.

Night came quickly. I boarded the bus to begin the horror trip I’d done several times—which is several times too many—over the years. The Sydney-to-Melbourne route. Memories of Rohypnol and Serepax, of the Big Merino towering beside the highway, of the all-night restaurants in Goulburn or Albury. The luxurious privacy of hitting up in the disabled’s toilet, where you had your own basin and the door reached fully to the ground.

All memory now, I hoped. I rolled a joint strong enough to disable an ox, and smoked it quickly and furtively in the truck-stop parking lot at Albury at four in the morning. Another mistake in an avalanche of panicked mistakes.

I think the thing that disturbed Candy’s parents the most about my appearance, when they met me at the bus depot, was not so much my disheveled state or deranged, clenched smile, as the size of my pupils, expanded by the methadone withdrawal. In the years they’d known me they had rarely seen me with pupils much bigger than a match head.

Now here I was, my relationship with them altered forever by a calamity that was forcing us together when we didn’t want to be forced together. They stared intently at the vast pools of blackness that were my pupils.

I think they found it disturbing, as if they were looking at a different me. Of course, they were in many ways. But they didn’t know what it meant: not just the methadone comedown, which lasts a month or two or three, but the well of fear that can stretch your pupils as wide as the sky at night. I was reentering the world of the woman I thought I loved, and yet the woman I thought I loved might never really be there again.

And I didn’t know anything except the world of her and me.

I figured I just had to grit my teeth, get her out of the place she was in, help her pull her socks up, and we could get our lives back together. Candy and me.

Trying to do this while trying to stop using drugs was probably overly ambitious.

Candy’s parents drove me back to their house. They fed me breakfast, which straightened me out a bit. At nine-thirty we drove to Royal Park. The long driveway meandered through a mixture of Victorian and modern buildings. It was very similar to a detox I’d been at once in Sydney, before I’d met Candy, before this story began. The modern buildings had the unoffensive and unassuming appearance of a Christian holiday camp.

We drove through the curving avenues of shrubs and pulled up in the parking lot. All morning her parents had been curiously elusive when I’d asked for specific details about Candy’s breakdown. Now they told me they thought it would be better if they waited outside while I went in by myself.

A nurse took me through various locked Plexiglas doors. Everywhere were the stereotype nutcases, leering at me as I passed them, or twitching compulsively, or staring intently into space. This was the movie nuthouse. These were the One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest crew. And suddenly, there was Candy.

I saw her from behind, shuffling uncertainly in the middle of the huge recreation room. I had imagined her to be frail and vulnerable, suffering this temporary and appalling injustice like a stoic and tragic heroine. A mistake: of course, a mistake had been made. I was here to sort it out. My head was full of conflicting emotions, mostly anger and fear, but for a moment my heart went out to her.

As I came closer she turned around. The ground seemed to tilt. My heart stopped in my throat. The world I had known disappeared. For a long time I’d lived with momentum. Now it flipped over into hyperdrive. And then all that could be felt was loss, and the profound bewilderment of vertigo.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 517