A CHANGE IS AS GOOD AS A HOLIDAY 5 page

Down to business. With a pair of very sharp nail scissors we took turns extracting the individual monsters from our skin.

Crab lice have eight legs. Each leg has a sharp prong or barb, as on a surveyor’s tripod or a whaler’s harpoon, for gaining a firmer hold.

Of course they must also have some kind of puncturing and sucking device for getting the blood, but I couldn’t actually see this. I just saw the huge rust-colored bulge of their bodies and the dainty flailing of their transparent legs when we pulled them from our skin.

It was a long night because we inspected each specimen one at a time. I sifted Candy’s spiky pubes under my thumb or index finger. I would see something that looked like a tiny freckle or a faint blemish, gently prod its edge with the point of the scissors, and begin to lift. If you listened really carefully you could hear a faint ripping sound as the legs began to tear loose from the skin.

I’d slide the scissors in between the legs and under the body. Then lift straight upward, with a finger hovering to trap the creature gently on the flat blade.

As the crab came loose from the skin, we would inspect it. There weren’t really any criteria of excellence other than size.

“Look at that, that’s fuckin’ huge!”

We worked a wide area around each other’s groins, shining the lamp in close. They were everywhere. I worked downward from the top of Candy’s pubic hair and along the lips of her cunt, outward to her upper legs and around to her arse. There were crabs on the rim of her sphincter. I’d never seen a sphincter at such close range, under a hundred-watt bulb. I was surprised at the reflex action it made—a kind of puckering—when I touched its edge carefully with the point of the scissors.

We killed them between two thumbnails, watching the body distort. Then a clear cracking sound, and the body was flat, surrounded by a small field of red.

In a way it was sad to be so thorough, to know that before the night was over we would have them all. So we left the eggs alone. These were tiny white dots laid on the base of a pubic hair. To get rid of them you had to clamp them tightly between two fingernails and pull upward along the hair. But this was nowhere near as exciting as the crab-lifting.

At any rate, our theory regarding the eggs was like good fisheries management: you don’t kill the young, so you’ve got plenty of adults later on. We imagined we might still be interested in doing this the next day, maybe even the day after.

But after a few hours we got bored of the killing. We began to collect them. This was more fun. Soon we had a herd of them, all fighting over each other on the arid glass stretch that was the inside curve of one of the lenses of my sunglasses.

From the crabs’ point of view this must have been a bloodless wasteland, a place of utter desolation. What did the crabs need to live? Blood. What did we have regular access to? Our blood. It was three A.M., time for a little nightcap before bed; time also to feed the crabs, to succor them in their last hours.

We mixed up again and shot up. Normally I liked a 1 mil Terumo syringe (nondetachable head, of course) to be filled to about 70, and after I’d plunged the shot right in I would jack back once or twice to 20 or 30. The idea was, you get all that blood back in there, rinse out the barrel, don’t miss the skerrick of heroin that might be left in the tiny steel cylinder of the needle itself.

This time, after I’d injected the heroin, I jacked all the way but didn’t push back in, so I pulled from my arm a syringe of thick crimson.

“Hey, Candy, check this out.”

I was worried about those crabs. Maybe they’d become addicted to the heroin in our blood, and the blind tumbling and clawing and frenzy that could be witnessed in my sunglasses was actually the insane and absurd pain of withdrawal.

I isolated a crab from the main pack. I started with just a drop of blood, protruding from the needle of my syringe. It hovered like a holy balloon, the single drop bigger than the crab’s entire body. It touched the broad back of the crab but maintained its globular shape. Then it burst.

The crab was instantly saturated. You could see its legs buckle beneath it and imagine it was experiencing something similar to the bliss of overdose.

With the scissors I pushed the other crabs around the outer rim of the lens. I squirted some more blood, and a small lake formed in the middle, where the lens reached its lowest point. Candy watched all this intently and gave suggestions and strategies.

Within twenty minutes we had created a scene of bucolic bliss. All around the edges of the lake of blood were gathered like cows a hundred docile and happy crabs. Traumatized by the ordeal of the scissors, they drank in bliss from the healing depths.

As I said, things were fucked up, but not too bad. There were moments soon after a shot when the whole world seemed at peace.

We joked about breeding a race of monster crab lice, about joining the circuit and entering them in all the shows. But in reality I didn’t want to go to bed with the thought of those things climbing over the edge of my sunglasses and going off to explore other parts of the warehouse.

The game was over and the time for death had arrived. We killed them quickly, crack crack crack for half an hour, and went to bed.

In the morning we got up and had a hit and Candy went off to work. I started reading Our Man in Havana, which was a pretty interesting book.

BOOKS

Here’s the kind of trouble I could get myself into by myself. This is just a three-week period. Something like that. Maybe only two.

Candy hadn’t been feeling too good in the stomach. She’d had diarrhea for about a week, which didn’t make sense, given the amount of heroin we were using.

One night she came home at five A.M. from a Sultan’s Harem shift. I woke briefly and we organized the morning activities. Candy counted out two hundred fifty dollars from her earnings and I set the alarm.

I woke when it went off at nine. I paged Kojak and he called me right back. I caught a cab out to meet him on Dandenong Road, at Caulfield. As usual I sat in a tram shelter and waited for fifteen minutes. At least once you got onto him and made arrangements, Kojak was reliable. He was never more than half an hour late. I got a two hundred off him and caught a cab home. At the café beneath the warehouse I bought two ham and cheese croissants and two take-out coffees.

It was the way Candy liked it, and fair enough too. It was the least I could do, considering I did fuck all. I came in the door at about ten-thirty.

“Coffee’s up!”

I was in a good mood. The dope in your pocket, how could you not be?

Candy stirred. She sat up and stretched her arms and climbed down from the bed alcove. A new bright day beginning. I was mixing up already.

“How are you, baby?”

I leaned across to kiss her as she sat down. Suddenly I gasped.

“Shit, Candy!”

Candy was bright yellow. I mean, electric yellow, fluorescent yellow. Her whole face. Her eyes, where they should have been white, were neon yellow. I’d seen the jaundiced tinge of hepatitis on many people, but I’d never seen anything like this before.

“What is it?” she asked. She saw the alarm in my face.

“Oh fuck. You should see yourself. Bright yellow. You’ve got hepatitis.”

She ran to the mirror, inspected herself. “Shit.”

It happened just like that. It came on that fast. One day she was marble white, the next, canary yellow. There was no way she could work. After we had a hit we went to the Fairfield Infectious Diseases Hospital. We figured we’d find out what to do to knock the hep on the head as quickly as possible, to get back to our normal lives.

But they took one look at her and put her into a sealed room. Candy was under quarantine. It might as well have been house arrest.

Two weeks at least, they said. She’s not going anywhere.

They grabbed me too, took blood, asked if we’d been sharing needles, told me I’d be lucky if I didn’t have it myself. When they’d finished, I asked if I could go say goodbye to Candy. They said, “Just don’t be long. She needs to start resting.” Candy looked gaunt and emaciated in the dimly lit quarantine room.

“This is a nightmare,” she said. “How am I going to get dope?”

“I don’t know, Candy, I don’t know. I’ll try and bring you some.”

“Please try, baby. Please help me.” Her eyes were wide with fear.

“I’ll see what I can do,” I said. “But make sure you stress that you’re a heroin addict. They’re a public hospital. I think they’re obliged to give you methadone. I’m not sure, but I think so.”

“Yeah, I’ll do that. But still, try and bring me a taste.”

I stroked her yellow hands. By the time I left the hospital in the afternoon, she’d entered a kind of delirium. She would stay that way for two weeks. Luckily, they did give her methadone, which was a blessing, since I was hardly the man on the spot to be bringing in the grams of pure. It seemed to be all I could do to look after myself, and that very badly.

It was such a hostile universe: I got arrested twice in the next few weeks. They were both dumb events, but the first one was particularly dumb. It was just a pair of ten-dollar earrings from Sportsgirl, something to make Candy feel better. But I walked outside the shop and felt the shop detective’s hand on my arm. “Can you come with me?” All that crap. I couldn’t believe they even bothered with the police. The cops were bored, took me back to the station, did the paperwork, let me go with a date to appear.

Most days I stole books. This was a labor-intensive form of crime, long hours for low rewards. I was always tired and never stoned enough. But in the second week I got hold of a credit card from O’Brien—plastic wasn’t his thing—and it’s how I got arrested the second time.

I acted quickly when I got the card. I had a good Saturday buying books from various places and selling them to a secondhand dealer in Carlton. Recent-release hardbacks, biographies, “serious” novels—stuff like that was always the best for resale, and that’s what I concentrated on.

I lulled myself into a false sense of security, telling myself that card cancellations don’t get run through the computer on the weekends. I used all my dope on the Saturday night, thinking Sunday would take care of itself. It did, but not how I expected.

I was in a discount bookstore in the middle of the city, one of those places that seemed to be full of remaindered art books. The cashier ran the card through the machine and something must have come up on the screen. But she was good and didn’t even bat an eyelid.

“It’s a more than hundred-dollar purchase,” she said. “I’ll just run out the back and get the manager to approve it.”

Where the fuck was my radar? I was only faintly suspicious, but I figured I’d give it three minutes, then bolt. The cops were there in less than two. This is better-than-average response time.

I was leafing through a magazine, trying to look casual. They were two uniforms who must have been near the shop by sheer coincidence. A beefy man, the usual mean-lipped woman. She blocked the door while he sauntered to the cashier, who was just returning from the back room.

She pointed at me. “That’s him.”

The male jack was overweight and I was thin. The female was in a dress, and I couldn’t picture her running fast. I was sure I could get away from these two clowns, up some alleys I knew, the back way to the warehouse. If I couldn’t, then my afternoon would collapse around me.

I didn’t have much choice. There was no time to stand there and regret my stupidity about waiting too long in the shop. It was time for action. I jumped a John Grisham display bin and landed, accidentally, in a somersault tumble that took me out through the door and past the grasping arms of the policewoman.

I was on my feet and flying. I couldn’t believe I’d done it. I ran into the street and into the path of a car. It screeched to a halt and I rolled across the hood and kept running.

I was aware that the city was pretty deserted, I was aware that the weather was cold. I could hear Beefboy’s footsteps close behind me and I could hear Meanlips huffing into her walkie-talkie about male suspect in pursuit and shit like that. Everything else went by in a blur. There was nothing but my feet slamming on the footpath.

Then I became aware of how tired I was becoming, of how hard it was to run fast. It was like the oxygen had been sucked out of the air by a nuclear blast. I was gasping, heaving; I felt I was being strangled. My adrenaline stocks had been depleted in about thirty seconds, and now my legs were about to collapse.

And the motherfucker wasn’t losing ground. Let me rephrase that. The motherfucker was gaining ground. I knew this because his puffing was becoming louder, as were his footsteps. I could hear a siren in the distance, then another, and at one point I thought I could feel his breath on my neck.

We’d come about a kilometer. I was braying like a sick donkey now—whee-haw, whee-haw—but the warehouse was close. I needed to beat him around the corner. There was a fire escape I knew. I could disappear up that, leap across a small gap between buildings, and pull myself onto the little rooftop courtyard that adjoined the warehouse. From there I could slip into the warehouse the side way, unseen.

But it all depended on my beating Beefboy around the corner by at least five or six seconds, so he wouldn’t see where I went.

It wasn’t going to happen. We rounded the corner stride for stride. I ran straight past the fire escape. My last hope was that I could work up a second wind. But I was slowing down, and the next thing I knew, he’d dive-tackled me. It was a high-speed, full-body embrace. His power seemed enormous. We hit the ground hard in a heap. I felt the skin of my knuckles graze off. Only the padding of my overcoat prevented me from serious injury.

It was delicious, in a sad way, to stop running. He pulled himself up. He was breathing so hard he couldn’t speak. I was breathing so hard I couldn’t hear anything. He pushed me onto my stomach and pinned me down with his knee in my shoulders. He twisted my arms behind my back and handcuffed me tight. I lay there thinking my lungs were about to explode. Within a minute there were sirens and police cars and lots of other coppers. It was like a little street party. They threw me in the wagon and drove me to the lockup. Same old shit.

Eight hours later. Released from custody with a date to appear and sick as a dog. I didn’t even have the tram fare to get home. I was supposed to visit Candy earlier but that was out of the question now.

I walked through the cold. Sunday night, midnight, midwinter. The city was deserted. Stomach cramps were beginning to cut in, and I held my stomach tightly through my overcoat pockets.

A vacant taxi passed, slowed, the driver peering at me. I waved it away. But it stopped. The driver leaned across and wound down the passenger window. Sweet Jesus, it was Schumann! The nicest junkie in the world. The sweetest fucked-up person of all the fucked-up people I knew.

“Schumann! Am I glad to see you!” I climbed into the taxi. “Man, you wouldn’t believe what happened to me.”

And I told him the story.

Schumann was tall and gaunt, with a fine aquiline nose and lank brown hair swept back over his ears. He’d seemed to attach himself to Candy and me, and the three of us often scored together. Everyone chipping in. Schumann always the gentleman, always waiting to use the spoon last, or the tourniquet, or whatever. In any situation of dual purchase, the story was usually that one person divided the dope while the other chose. It kept the divider honest. But Schumann would always shrug and say, “Just give me what you think. Whatever’s fair.”

I would have trusted Schumann with my life. Well, almost, you know the way it is. He carried with him an air of great nobility. Schumann had been riding high on the crest of a beautiful scam for a year or two. It had all come undone, through no real fault of Schumann’s, and now he was reduced to driving the taxi, grinding the slow wheels of his habit seven long nights a week.

The scam had been simple but effective. Schumann had a trusted friend, Pok, in Bangkok. Every time Schumann wired thirty U.S. dollars to Pok’s bank account, Pok would send Schumann two weighed grams of very pure Lion Brand No. 4 Thai white powder—the best that money could buy. The two grams were spread out evenly under a mildly adhesive tape, inserted between a folded letter, and sent in a normal airmail envelope. So there was no discernible bulge. It was just a standard airmail letter, delivered to your mailbox, not a “Please pick up from Post Office” slip.

The dope was so pure that when you squirted the water into the spoon, the powder dissolved and there was no need to stir, let alone heat. Clear liquid. It was awesome gear. It made you realize how heavily cut most street dope was.

Schumann didn’t sell much, just enough to keep the Pok bank deposits going. Over a period of a few months he found that he was actually stockpiling, and at any given time he had ten or fifteen grams put away for a rainy day.

Candy and I had met him at the tail end of the scam. He let us into his life because he liked us. We had the pleasure of doing business for a couple of months only. It was the funniest thing, Schumann so gentle and so wasted, always talking about how he had to stop, how he couldn’t do anything on this stuff.

That was an understatement. It was a local joke, Schumann and the radio. Schumann had such an abundance of heroin that there were absolutely no ups and downs in his life. He was meandering through his days at the level of terminal and unwavering saturation.

What had happened was this. The heroin had slowed down his metabolism so much that almost everything in the world was too fast. The smallest act represented a kind of sensory overload.

He couldn’t read. He couldn’t muster up the effort to focus on the page, and besides, at any given point in his reading he couldn’t remember the preceding sentence. He didn’t feel like walking. He found it hard to talk; when he went to the corner shop for his daily supplies of cigarettes and cookies and orange juice, he merely grunted and pointed at the desired items.

When visitors came, such as Candy and I, he was forced to engage in conversation for a few minutes, as he made up the deal of dope. This speech act probably represented the high point of his day.

Even television was too fast for him. He’d tried to lie all day and watch whatever was on. It spun his brain too much, he said, and he’d wound up feeling tense, which kind of defeated the purpose of the heroin. But he felt he needed to do something. He found it impossible to just lie there and drift.

And then he’d discovered the perfect thing. Schumann lay on his bed, day in, day out, face toward the ceiling, and listened to a community radio station called 3RPH. The RPH stood for “Radio for the Print Handicapped.” It was for blind people. What 3RPH did was read the newspapers—all day long, very clearly and very slowly. Schumann was deeply satisfied. He told us he felt like a part of the world, like he knew what was going on. He said it was really the perfect radio station for heroin: stimulating, but not too fast.

We’d turn up to buy some smack and we’d hear the clear, precise tones of the announcer, moving along at a snail’s pace. “The—Local—Government—Remuneration—Tribunal—has rejected—requests—by—local—councils—for—pay increases—of—up—to—one hundred—percent—despite claims—that—some—mayors—are—working—up—to—seventy-eight—hours—a week—on—council—business.”

We’d tap on the window and look in. There would be Schumann, spread out on his bed, a glass of water beside him, the radio in the corner, the fan gently whirring.

Unfortunately for everyone, Schumann gave the Pok system to one other friend, who was a touch more greedy than Schumann had bargained for. Pok opened a second bank account so he could differentiate between who was wiring him money. Schumann’s friend Tony had visions of an empire, which is hard to build on two grams at a time. He did have a glorious ascendancy, but it all fucked up within two months. Tony finally got arrested after seventeen airmail letters from Bangkok, all addressed in Pok’s spidery handwriting to Tony’s place, arrived at the mail exchange on the same day. Pok had integrity as a businessman but not necessarily any common sense; he merely sent the corresponding number of letters to the amount of money that showed up in his bank accounts.

Evidently the only really smart thing that Tony did was keep his mouth shut about Schumann. But some Australian Federal police visited Pok in Bangkok, hassling him for names, and later Pok phoned Schumann, semihysterical: “I’m fleep out, man, I’m fucking fleep out!” Schumann decided enough was enough for that scam. It was a bummer when it all ended.

Nowadays he didn’t want to risk things anymore. He’d had quite a tough time trying to reduce his habit from such good dope, but he’d gone back to the hard slog, driving taxis all night and using only as much smack as the money he earned would buy.

When I’d finished telling him what had happened with the credit card and the chase, I leaned my head back and sighed.

“Mate, I need a hundred bucks. Can you help me? I need a little for tonight and a little for the morning. I’ll do a day of stealing tomorrow, I’ll pay you back at the start of your shift.”

“I can’t do it,” he said. “I’m really sorry, a hundred’s all I’ve got right now. But I’ll shout you a taste.”

I felt a surge of warmth in my chest. “Schumann, you’re a living wonder. You’re saving my fucking life, man.”

“It’s all right. I know how bad you must feel. I’ll buy us a hundred and we’ll go halves. I was just about to score anyway.”

That was just like Schumann, to give away dope even though it meant he might not be sure how much he’d have in the morning. I could never have done that myself. We went to St. Kilda and scored. We had a hit in the cab and Schumann even drove me home.

“Look after me if I ever need it, okay?”

He was a gentleman to the core. He tooted the horn and drove away.

I walked up the stairs to the warehouse, feeling better about my change of fortune. Of course, I still had the problem of no dope in the morning, but that was tomorrow, and right now I could zone out on TV and try and enjoy the stone.

Life struggled on. I tried to make ends meet. I visited Candy in the hospital, still delirious in a darkened room. I held her hand weakly and said, “You’ll be better soon. Cheer up.”

She said, “Please bring me some dope. This methadone’s not enough.”

I said, “I’ll see what I can do,” and near the end I actually got it together one visit to bring her a loaded syringe.

When I picked her up to go home, they said to us, “Your lifestyle has to change, you realize?”

I thought, What the fuck would they know? How could they understand anything?

We got back to our normal lives for another while longer. It wasn’t really pleasant but it wasn’t a nightmare either. The yellow didn’t fade from Candy immediately, but after a couple of weeks you could barely notice it, and a month later you couldn’t even tell she’d been sick.

The test came back from the hospital, and for some weird reason I didn’t have hep. It was a world that made very little sense.

I went to court twice. The first time, I got the Legal Aid solicitor to defer both my cases and get them heard together. The solicitor seemed like a nice guy. He must have been fairly green, though, because he left his bag in the briefing room when he went outside for a moment. I had a quick look through and pinched the biography of Jack Kerouac he was reading. It would fetch me about six bucks. Every little bit counted.

The second and final appearance, I was well wasted. But I wore a suit and thought I looked like the ant’s pants. Candy was with me, looking like a blond vampire, and all the detectives in their beige sport coats were checking her out. The judge said you are a fool, words to that effect, and fined me four hundred dollars. I went straight to the county, clerk’s office and applied to pay it off in installments. Twenty bucks every two weeks. I made a commitment to myself to try to keep out of trouble. I sincerely believed that this terrible momentum was a thing I could impose my will on, something that could be slowed down.

In Schumann’s case, it slowed down a little too fast. At four A.M. one freezing night, police were called to a taxi parked in a dark street in Richmond. The engine was idling and the driver was slumped over the wheel. Schumann had been dead for more than two hours already. He hadn’t even managed to untie the tourniquet. I imagine this means that the dope was excellent, so I imagine, and good luck to him too, that Schumann died happy.

LIFE AND DEATH

Somehow at some point we thought that a baby would change things. It gave us something to aim for. It was easy to focus on an outside solution. The theory went like this: we would stop using, and then Candy would get pregnant.

But we got caught a little unawares. Candy discovered she was pregnant and we both had big habits. We had to readjust our way of viewing things. This is the baby we wanted, we said. This is the baby that will change our lives. So now we have a reason to stop using.

Of course, I didn’t really have to stop. The baby wasn’t in my body. But it was the ideal opportunity for both of us to grab hold of the change of direction that we figured would set us on the course of our future. Schumann’s dying had shaken us a bit; it seemed that even the generous weren’t exempt from the bad flow of events.

In the early weeks after Candy found out, we realized we were going nowhere in the stopping department. We tried and tried, and kept saying tomorrow, tomorrow. Or we talked about a quick methadone reduction program: start on just 40 mils, go to zero in two months, something like that.

Time flies. We managed to miss the ultrasound, the birthing classes, the prenatal appointments. Suddenly Candy was twenty-two weeks pregnant, and one night there was blood in the bath.

“Oh shit! I think this is bad,” she said.

“It’ll be all right,” I said.

We got a taxi to the hospital.

They took her into the room to check her out. I waited where the other men were, in a waiting room with blue plastic chairs and a TV chained to the wall. The men were excited and talkative.

After a while, maybe an hour, a nurse came and called me in. Candy was crying.

The doctor looked at me and I could tell she didn’t really like me.

“The waters have broken. The cervix is dilated. There’s no going back now. This is what we didn’t want to happen. This is a premature birth. As I’ve just explained to Candy, she’s going to have to go through labor. Whatever that takes, however long. But you need to know, at twenty-two weeks, the baby’s not going to survive.”

The words were clear, but nonetheless I stared at her for a while. Tasting the sour meaning on the back of my throat.

“Ahh,” I groaned. “Ahh, shit.”

I felt the future drain away from me, like a rush of blood to the toes. It was physically painful.

Candy sobbed more and I moved across and held her hot hand. She squeezed my hand tight. For a moment it felt like we weren’t really junkies, but two people who loved each other, in the middle of pain and loss, in the real world.

A nurse took us to the room where it would happen. It was a delivery room, just like the ones where the live births arrived. The nurse made Candy comfortable.

“I’ll be in and out,” she said. “You should be okay at the moment.” Then she left.

There was not much for us to do or say. Every so often Candy groaned. Sometimes I held her hand. She wasn’t sobbing, not in a rhythm. But the tears kept streaming down her face for more than an hour, until the pain began to heat up.

When she looked at me, there was not the toughness there that I knew so well. Her forehead creased and her soft lips quivered and her eyes were saying, “Help me, help me.”

And I was helpless, or unable to help. What the fuck could I do for her?

“It’s all right, baby, it’s all right.” I stroked her forehead. “We’re just going to have to get through it. I wish it could be me instead of you.”

Words were really ridiculous.

For a long time Candy stared at the ceiling, crying, and I sat on a chair beside the bed, hunched over with my head in my hands. I heard the plastic doors swing open and closed. I heard the shuffle of feet on linoleum, people probing Candy and asking questions.

They must have thought we looked pretty bad. At one point a counselor came and talked to us for a while. It was good to talk to anyone. She told us how it wasn’t the end of the world and how surely we’d be able to have a baby sometime in the future. She told us that even though it was going to die, it was our baby, and when it was born we should hold it, look at it, touch it, say good-bye to it. She said that when it happened they would leave us alone for a while with our baby.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 577