A CHANGE IS AS GOOD AS A HOLIDAY 6 page

The counselor left and Candy held out her arms and we hugged. I could feel her hot tears on my shoulder, soaking into my shirt.

The doctor came back. I asked if there was any chance the baby could live.

She shook her head. “I’m sorry. It’s just too young. Another few weeks, you never know. I’m very sorry.”

“Well, will it be dead when it’s born?”

“It might be alive for a minute or two. But unassisted, it can’t live for long. And we won’t do anything to keep it alive.”

Candy’s contractions were becoming more frequent. It seemed like she screamed for hours. Time went by in an antiseptic blur. The smell of the place was bugging me, something I couldn’t put my finger on. Then I remembered that hospital smell, the smell of the corridors, after the car accident.

I am sixteen years old, rushing to see my mother in the emergency ward. The nurse says go in. I walk into the room full of machinery but I can’t find my mother. There’s an ugly lady with a huge purple head but I can’t see my mother anywhere. For a moment I think this must be the wrong room. The lady with the swollen head—it’s big as a watermelon—is hooked up to all sorts of tubes and screens. Then she smiles weakly and raises her hand. I move toward her and say, “Mum,” but my legs buckle under me. I know I am fainting and can’t stop it. I taste vomit and hospital disinfectant at the back of my nose, and then I black out. When I wake up the nurses are fanning me and they have wheeled my mother away somewhere else. “Where’s Mum?” I say. “They’re just working on a little problem, love. There’s been a bit of a blood clot. They’ve taken her down to surgery.” The next time I see her, two hours later, she is already dead.

I shook myself out of the memory and went back to mopping Candy’s brow with a wet towel. For the next nine hours I felt I was an inconsequential sidetrack, branching off the freeway of Candy’s ordeal.

I hated the world so much when the world went wrong. A whole long night of blood and screaming, and I hadn’t had smack since early afternoon. I remember feeling guilty—an unusual emotion—because I wanted so badly for Candy’s pain to end, not just because of the pain itself, but more because of the way the clock ticked on the wall, tick tick tick, the hands moving away from my last blast, or toward my next. That’s an essential truth of the night. Even then I knew the guilt would be the kind of guilt that would bury itself for years. Still, when you need a hit you need a hit.

A lot of the time I couldn’t watch. I stood at the window and looked down nine floors. The park was down there, a dark rectangle around which the traffic edged. At one point Candy’s screaming shook me out of my trance.

“What the fuck is that! Nurse! What the fuck is that!”

She was sitting up, her legs spread, lifting her butt off the bed, covering her bloodied cunt with her hand.

The nurse on this shift had been a bitch.

“That’s its foot. Take your hand away! Leave it alone!”

I did not want to see the baby’s foot.

It seemed like hours later that the baby was born, but it probably wasn’t long after the foot appeared. It was nearly dawn.

The smack thoughts and the guilt kept growing. I was in the middle of a tragedy, Candy’s and mine, and the longer the night stretched toward dawn, the less I could think about the thing at hand, the more I became obsessed with the thought of my next shot. The need for smack. All I could picture was the syringe, the pulling back, the spurt of blood. An image of myself in great relief, slumping back on the couch.

But Candy was going through labor and, pethidine and epidural aside, there were no shortcuts.

The baby came feetfirst. The doctor and the nurses tugged at it. Candy was screaming and I held her hand. Now I had to look down. For a moment only the head was still inside Candy. Then they pulled it free.

Candy was delirious and I stroked her face. They gave the baby to me for a moment. It was just like a real baby. Its arm moved up and down.

“It’s alive!” I shouted.

The doctor had a look. “It’s probably just a spasm,” she said.

But I knew I had held it when it was alive. Sometime in the next minute it died. They cut the cord and cleaned it, wrapped it in a soft white blanket. They cleaned Candy and changed the sheets and propped her up in bed.

Candy stroking her dead baby. Everything white and clean.

Candy wasn’t screaming anymore. But she was crying again. The endless tears of Candy. She was moaning softly and I tried to kiss her tears. My eyes welled wet and red. I looked down at the baby boy and rubbed his soft warm head.

Finally I began to cry. Then I realized, It doesn’t matter if I don’t rush out of here. The heroin can wait. We lay there crying together, touching the baby and crying. I hadn’t cried in so long, my chest was tight with the very fear of it. A foreign experience invading my body. A kind of surrender for a terrible moment or two.

The nurses left us alone.

We said things like:

“Look at his little hands, his fingernails.”

“Look at his lips, his beautiful lips.”

“Look how perfect he is.”

After a long while the nurse came back, not the foot bitch, a different one, a soft one.

“You two should sleep for a while,” she said.

It meant she wanted to take the baby away now.

“There’s a chapel here,” she said. “We’d recommend you have a funeral service in the morning. It’s a ritual. It’s the way to say good-bye.”

She took the baby. Candy and I fell into each other’s arms. Five hours later, at eleven A.M., they woke us.

I felt so empty by now, I hardly even thought about heroin, even though I was sicker than I’d been in a few months. Under normal circumstances it would have been my focus. I was wired as if I was speeding—definitely not my favorite state. But my welfare check was due in my bank account today, so there was something to look forward to in the gloom.

I felt that something dark and important had happened, but I knew I couldn’t really pause to think about it. I was trying to get through things, a minute at a time.

The nurses helped Candy from bed into a wheelchair. I wheeled her though the corridors to the hospital chapel.

The counselor from the night before stood with a generic-brand hospital chaplain at the door to the chapel. They welcomed everyone who arrived. I guess it was their job to be sincere, so it’s no use being sarcastic about it.

The chapel was pretty sterile. The same hospital smell, the same linoleum tiles, a few rows of seats, a big cross on the wall, a vase of abundantly colored flowers on a table. I tell you, the flowers made me feel sad but good. They were beautiful things to look at. Staring at the flowers seemed to help me not cry.

Candy’s parents were there; I had called them during the night to give them the bad news. Candy was always at them for money, so things were not good when it came to the subject of their daughter and drugs. But here they were, downcast, upset, everybody comforting everybody else.

There were a couple of nurses and cleaners. White uniforms and green uniforms. I don’t know if they were just Christian types who loved to pray for the passage of the souls of the dead, or if the hospital had a policy of forcing staff along, to beef up the numbers. Some kind of funeral roster.

Candy was paler than I’d ever seen her. She had been drained of the boy who now lay dead, wrapped in a white shawl, in a tiny open casket not much bigger than a shoe box, on a stainless-steel meal trolley at the front of the seats.

“Wheel me up there,” Candy said.

She had to stand up to look into the casket. I held her under the arm. She looked up at me and her eyes were erased of everything but tears. No color there, just liquid. She reached her arms around my neck and hugged me and cried. I looked down at the baby. The sleep of the dead, as they say.

The chaplain came over. “He’s gone to a better place, you know,” he said.

I suppose that had to be true, wherever he’d gone, us being junkies and all.

Candy slipped her finger into the baby’s hand. “It’s so beautiful,” she said. “Why can’t he be alive? Why?”

“We just can’t know the whys and wherefores of God’s will,” the chaplain said.

I touched the baby’s face. I rubbed its cheek with the back of my index finger. It was stone cold now. It had been in a fridge since dawn.

We all sat down, except the chaplain. He stood at the front and said a lot of stuff. I’m sure his words were good.

They wheeled the trolley away. We all stood outside the chapel, where a trestle table had been set up with sandwiches and cordial. A nurse drew me aside. She carried a clipboard and had papers for me to sign.

“Burial or cremation?” she asked.

“Does it matter?” I said.

“I’m sorry, it’s a legal requirement if death occurs any time after twenty weeks of pregnancy.” She was awkward.

“Can’t you just … throw it out?”

“It’s a registered death. I’m sorry. You have to choose.”

“Cremation,” I said, and signed the paper, knowing I would never pay the bill, or collect the ashes.

Candy was staying in the hospital for a couple more days. She asked could she have some more pethidine, and the nurses said they would find out if it would be all right. I knew she would work the system. I knew she would do fine in there, hopefully not feel anything.

“I want to sleep for a week,” she said.

I kissed her and hugged her good-bye and said good-bye to everyone else. Then I went out into the day, my shirt still stained with blood and placenta, to look for a bank and withdraw my welfare check and find someone to score off.

PART TWO The Kingdom of Momentum“Some of the evil of my tale may have been inherent in our circumstances. For years we lived anyhow with one another in the naked desert, under the indifferent heaven. By day the hot sun fermented us; and we were dizzied by the beating wind. At night we were stained by dew, and shamed into pettiness by the innumerable silences of stars. We were a self-centered army without parade or gesture, devoted to … a purpose so ravenous that it devoured all our strength, a hope so transcendent that our earlier ambitions faded in its glare …”T. E. LAWRENCE, Seven Pillars of Wisdom TRUTH 1: DREAMS

Sleep. The place where a deeper unease can penetrate through sick bone and aching muscle, an unease so fine and lightweight it can settle even on the atoms of oxygen in your lungs, coat them with a dread silt, weigh them down, so you puff restlessly all night and whimper into the dawn.

When I’m drifting into sleep, sometimes I jolt half awake for a moment, and I realize I feel scared. Then I think about the sickness enveloping our lives. What’s outside the mist? Surely goodness and mercy shall follow us, I dunno, it seems such a tall order. So then I think—and I’m stoned, mind you—I will stop this. I can stop this. I will stop using drugs. I will reenter the world: free at last to choose from all its parts. Not just forced to choose only one of them.

Forced to choose. Hmmm. Near sleep the mind throws words around. Compulsion. Independence. All that shit.

On any given night I dream of horses, car accidents, mental asylums, endless train journeys, storms. One night in a dream Candy points to an island in the middle of the harbor. She is luminous, otherworldly, transparent as a ghost.

“Come with me, in a boat,” she says, “across to that island, and we’ll fuck over there.” As if a dream could prophesy surrender and relief.

Then in the morning, I wake up, there is nothing but fear, oceans of it, no boat to be seen, and how long can I dog-paddle? The water is everywhere, every direction I look. A mean day, the gray water. Nothing is not fear. The day takes place.

In or near overdose you drift in a profound stasis broken up only by the endless falling of snowflakes. But dreams are different from that. In dreams, things happen. This is so unsettling. Things. Events. They just happen, you don’t control them.

It’s away from the madness of daylight, in my dreams, I find the sadness that my days just can’t connect with. Out in the day we can only survive. For every hundred-dollar cock in Candy’s cunt, Candy needs a two-hundred-dollar jab in the arm. And I’m Prince Pimp, welcome to the show. I would vomit up my life if I could.

ASHTRAY

Now and then I pulled a scam, but opportunistic and fruitful crimes were really just occasional blips on the gray monitoring screen that recorded the faint pulse of our ephemeral lives. The real money came from Candy. Over the years, as our habits got worse, I guess she began to think about imbalance. That she earned all the money and I used half the dope.

This was some time down the track from the glory days. We were now in the middle years of solid habit. There was a grim determination to our using. The miscarriage seemed to have faded from our minds. At any rate, we never talked about it.

Well, this was what love was, for better or for worse. But when times were tough then the whole world disappeared and nothing existed but bad blood. At such times I discovered a venom in Candy that sat measure for measure with the abundant juice of what she had been before heroin got bad.

It had been a long, uneventful winter. The warehouse was twelve hundred square feet of wooden floors and drafty open spaces, a cold place at the best of times. There were only two ways of keeping warm. One was heroin, the supreme crucible in which all sensation melted to a base level of comfort. This was generally how we did it. The second way, when there was no heroin, or not enough, was a two-bar heater that we huddled around.

There was our bed too, on a raised wooden platform in an alcove near the door. Our clothes hung beneath the platform. We reached the bed, a thin, sweat-stained futon, by climbing a ladder. But invariably we’d end up crashing out on one of the couches, in a jumble of blankets and pillows, in front of the old black-and-white TV, night after night after night.

The couches were in front of the bed alcove. Over the other side, next to the window, was the makeshift kitchen area. In the far corner was the bathtub, which had to be filled and emptied with buckets. This whole section was divided off by a thin partition made of sheets of latticework and Chinese paper. The rest of the warehouse was empty space. The toilet was outside the door, off a small courtyard, across the landing.

I spent my days reading or wandering around the city. Candy was still earning bucketloads, but it no longer felt like enough.

We would always talk of stopping and always find a reason not to. Memory blurs these things, but maybe it was me who found those reasons more often. I’m really not sure. I wanted to stop, but the thought of stopping was an impossible thought to hold down.

Fights could begin for no big reason and stay peaked at a high-tension level for days. One day Candy was pretty pissed off with me because I’d gone to score, the dope and I hadn’t come straight home in a cab. I mean, we’re talking five minutes. The point for Candy was, I came home stoned. Meaning I was caring more about myself than her.

I’d met Little Angelo in a park in Prahran. I know I could have come straight home, it’s just that I was hanging out a little more than usual, and I didn’t see how a quick visit to the public toilet could hurt. I was edgy. The powder was beckoning. There had been delays with both Lester and Kojak, so we were down to Little Angelo, a long-shot, number three choice.

I went into the toilet. It was a scungy fucked-up place, smelling of stale piss and bad plumbing. However. You adjust. I went to the basin but there was no handle on the tap. Normally I would pour some water into the cupped palm of my hand and suck it up with the syringe.

I swore I’d never get water from a toilet bowl. There was only one alternative. A pipe came down from the cistern into the stainless-steel piss trough. At the top of the trough the pipe ended in a half circle from which the water sprayed out intermittently. I balanced myself and placed the syringe under the fine spray of water.

It sucked in mostly air, and a trickle of water each time. I had to keep tapping the air bubbles to the top and starting again. I was careful not to allow the needle to scrape on the steel of the trough, for fear of barbing the point. Finally I got enough water and hit up in the cubicle as quickly as I could.

But when I walked in the door of the warehouse with a big grin and my soul full of warmth, Candy took one look in my eyes and said, “You’re a slimy cunt.”

She said the word cunt very hard. I was taken aback.

“Hey, baby, I just had a quick little hit. It was nothing.”

“While I was waiting here biting my fucking nails!”

“I got back as fast as I could! It didn’t make any difference.”

“No difference? Did you have your hit in a time warp?”

“You know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t know what you mean. Where did you hit up?”

“In the park. Where I met Ange.”

“Did Angelo do it with you?”

“No, he left as soon as we did the deal.”

“Yeah, because he’s decent enough to go home to his girlfriend.”

“Candy, he sold me the dope. Why would he want to have a hit in a public toilet?”

“Well, why the fuck would you?”

“Look, I admit it was dumb. I don’t usually do it. I’m sorry. Okay? I’m sorry.”

I went to the dresser and pulled out the bathroom bag that contained our fits and spoons. I just wanted to ease the situation into a lower gear.

“Here,” I offered, “I’ll make you a nice taste.”

“I’ll make it myself, thanks, dickhead.” She snatched the packet of dope away from me.

I was offended now. “What’s your fucking problem?” I snapped.

“You’re my fucking problem. You’re a waste of space.”

“I’m a waste of space?” Repetition. It was the last refuge of the brain dead. “Jesus, Candy.” I was searching for a comeback. “I’d think you had your period but I know you never get them these days.”

It was a low dig.

“Yeah, I never get my period because my body’s all fucked up and out of whack because of this fucking drug that you’ve led me into.”

“Oh, right. Like I held a gun to your head, is it?”

She was concentrating on mixing up the dope in the spoon.

“Eh? Held you down and hit you up, did I?”

“Fuck you,” she said.

“Fuck you too, Candy.”

I didn’t want to fight but it was hard to back down. Heroin was not designed to go hand in hand with stress. I slammed the door and walked outside, into the city crowds. I walked for an hour or more. I found myself in the State Library and wandered around for a while. I leafed through a book of photos from Life magazine, and another book of photos of houses designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Picture books were easier. Then I came home. Of course I wanted to sulk. But I couldn’t stand the thought of being away from the dope for too long.

But Candy had it in for me that day, and the bickering continued into the night. She wanted a reaction. As usual, I felt nothing but the desire not to have a confrontation.

Something was beginning to give for Candy. A seismograph in Sydney feels the distant rumbling of a profound rupture in the earth’s crust a thousand kilometers away, beneath the ocean floor. In the same way, through all the distance laid down by heroin, I was registering a flutter of discontent. God only knows what that flutter was like inside Candy. A deafening upheaval, I suppose. I was sure I loved her, but it seemed that no matter how hard I tried, smack came first.

I was trying to ignore her. I was not a sophisticated unit. “Shhh! I’m watching TV.”

“I said, when are we going to stop using?”

“Whenever you like, Candy. Whenever you like.”

“What, tomorrow, then?”

“Okay, fuck, tomorrow. I don’t care. Tomorrow we stop using.”

“Listen to me!”

She stamped her foot. I looked away from the TV and our eyes met. She was crying.

“Don’t you see what this is doing to me?”

“Candy,” I said, “I don’t want to fight. Look, I just don’t see what your problem is tonight. We have a life. It’s neither good nor bad, okay?”

She laughed an unpleasant snigger and looked around the room as if there was an audience.

“You’re kidding, aren’t you?” she asked. “Our life is more than bad. It’s utterly fucked. And you are evil.”

They seemed such heavy words in the cold stark warehouse.

“Oh yeah, right, I’m evil. Now I think you’ve gone too far, Candy. Goebbels was evil. Adolf fucking Hitler was evil. Put things in perspective, eh?”

“Do you know what I do all day and night to earn the money that we put up our arms?”

I closed my eyes. It was like the question that dare not speak its name.

“Candy … I know. You know … you know I’m not happy … about that.”

“About what? Say it.”

“Candy, I know what you do all day. Okay?”

“What do I do all day? Listen to this, dickfuck.” She stood in front of the TV, blocked my line of sight. She pointed at me and I had to look at her. “What do I do all day? I fuck men. Lots of men. I humiliate myself. I hate my life. What are you going to do about it?”

“Listen, that’s it.” My arms went up in the surrender sign. “I don’t want you to work anymore. That’s it. No more brothels, no more escort. We’re gonna detox, start a new life. That’s really it this time.”

The conversation was getting too emotional for me.

“You don’t understand, do you?” she continued. “I want to keep using. I’m sick of working, yes. But what if I want to keep using? What are you going to do about it?”

It was like I’d been cornered by a series of trick questions.

“Candy …”

I gulped. For the first time in a while I felt the fear that was rooted in my stomach, that was always there but rarely noticed, that was beginning to rise into my throat. You sensed it first as edginess, then the vague onset of a panic not yet concrete.

“Why don’t you ring Gay Blades?” she said. “You start working for once. You hock your arse.”

“Candy, you know I can’t do that. I’ll … you know, I’ll get AIDS.” It was a pathetic stab in the dark.

“No, you won’t,” she said. “You’ll use a condom, like I have to.”

“Baby, I wouldn’t know what to do. You’re heterosexual, right? So you’re just doing what you were good at anyway. Let me fuck women, no problems. If I could do it with women, I’d make us all the money, you’d never have to work, I swear.

“But look at me, Candy. Nobody would fuck me for money, I don’t think. Or not very often. Those women, they want muscle chuds, don’t they? Vogue magazine—type guys. If there was a market out there, I’d do it. But I don’t think there is. And I’d be hopeless with the gay stuff. You know that.”

“You’d learn,” she sneered. “You may not like it but you’d learn how to do it. You’d even get good at it. Then you could find out what it’s like, day in, day out. I’d love to see how you’d handle that. And how you’d feel about giving me half your money.”

I shrugged. I was trying to look impassive. I was trying to signal it was all too much.

“I’d give you half my money,” I said. “You know that. We share everything. That’s what we do. You get half of what I do in scams. It’s just that you earn more, that’s all.”

She still stood there in front of the TV with her hands on her hips. I looked at her stomach as if I could see straight through it to the screen.

“On average,” I added, shrugging.

“You’re pathetic,” she said.

It was hideous. Even through the heroin I was squirming.

“Listen, Candy, I go get the dope every day. I organize the deals. I organize the scams. Sometimes I steal books. Who got all the money from that guy’s cards? Who took all the risk in the banks? Who does most of the check stuff and card stuff? At least you can’t go to jail for working in a brothel.”

“Let’s get this straight,” she said. “If the credit card’s a woman’s name, I do it. If it’s a man’s name, you do it. It’s that simple.”

“Yeah,” I retorted, “but when you do it, it seems I help you. I come into the bank or the shop so that we look like a couple. When I do it, I do it by myself.”

We were really down to quibbling here. It was time to change tack. I sighed.

“Candy, let’s not argue. Listen, I tell you what. Okay, try this. You need to work sometimes, just sometimes, I’m saying. We need the backup money. But I’ll start putting more effort into dealing. I’ll try and push it a little so it becomes sort of full-time.”

“You can’t deal,” she said, “you always use too much. You’re hopeless.”

“Well, no I’m not,” I said. “That’s not exactly true. You wait and see. Kojak said he’d offer me a system. For every five halves I move, I get one free. So I don’t really have to cut the deals, and maybe I can get things rolling along.”

“Yeah right, we’ll see. And in the meantime?”

There was a long pause.

“You don’t have to work if you don’t want to, Candy.”

Another pause. She couldn’t believe what she heard.

“You are a cocksucking cunt, you know that?”

I was getting pissed off with the personal abuse.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Candy, get away from the TV. I’m trying to watch a show. I’m not going to talk to you if you go on like that.”

It went on and it got more vicious. There were lulls and then the thing would charge up again. There were times when I could settle into the TV for half an hour or so, but there was a bad edge to the night. In the end we reached an agreement of sorts. We couldn’t just give up tomorrow. We both knew that. I’d give more serious dealing a shot for a few weeks. Try and get established, try and get a healthy business going. Use Kojak’s freebie system and put out the word that I would be available from nine A.M. till midnight (these were Kojak’s regular hours) each day. In the meantime Candy would keep working, so we would have lots of cash.

But if the dealing wasn’t all that successful, then in a month—we gave ourselves a time limit—we would go down to Gippsland to dry out. We had a couple of friends who lived there, a couple of hours out of Melbourne, in rich green dairy country. Peter and Michael had been on again and off again for a few years. They’d settled into a pretty stable relationship now, and a nice life down there, smoking buds and gardening and painting. Their offer had always been there—if our intentions were good, we were welcome to come down and make use of their spare room and good food and quiet lifestyle.

If that didn’t work, if we came back to Melbourne and started using, then a methadone program, we agreed, was finally around the corner. We would get on methadone for six months or twelve months, give ourselves some breathing space, some time to get our lives in order.

It was a kind of relief that there was really nowhere else for the argument to go. Nonetheless a stony silence ensued. Candy sat at the dresser fiddling with makeup and I watched TV, willing myself to be absorbed into the screen.

It was after midnight now, more than six or seven hours since I’d gotten home from meeting Little Angelo. I suggested we have a blast.

“Yeah, okay,” Candy said, “but we have to go to bed soon. I’ve got to get up for work in the morning.”

“Don’t worry, I don’t want to stay up too long.”

But of course I loved staying up on a fresh whack of heroin, even if staying up just meant sitting on the couch and nodding off. Maybe Candy just wanted the big hit and the release, the collapse into dreamless sleep. A few times a year I wanted that too. Mostly, though, I liked to fiddle, do crosswords, read, watch TV, squeeze pimples, smoke cigarettes.

I should have gone with the flow that night, but the flow through my veins was always stronger. Such divided loyalties.

We had a nice taste. Candy climbed up to the bed and tried to read for five minutes, then turned off the lamp.

“Come to bed now,” she said.

“Yeah, soon.”

I was engrossed in the late movie, The Servant, with Dirk Bogarde and James Fox. It was a very cool film, with all the British pacing and subtle rhythms that made for good smack viewing.

After fifteen minutes Candy sat up.

“I can’t get to sleep with that on. Turn it off!”

“Candy, it’s a really good movie. I’ll turn it right down, okay?”

I turned it down so that even I could barely hear it. I checked the TV guide.

“Anyway, there’s only half an hour to go.”

But she wouldn’t accept that. I watched the last half hour with a blanket draped over the TV and my head, my face six inches from the screen, the pixels of the tube making everything look abstract, the tiny hum louder than the faint dialogue. I assumed that Candy fell asleep during this time.

The movie finished. I switched the TV off and turned on the lamp beside the couch. I was still shaken by the fight, by its intensity, by the evening’s events. I had the strange but strong urge to write something just for myself, something private, to dispel the awful emotions and work out how I felt.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 562