Candy

by Luke Davies

  By the six o’clock news a bad electricity was coursing through my body. I was stretched tight on an invisible rack, a rack of ugly, distorting force fields. The stomach cramps continued, the headaches became more concrete, more defined, and the diarrhea began. Candy was going through a vomiting stage, over in the corner with a bucket.

  We didn’t sleep for a second that night, despite all the medication. Our eyes watered and our noses ran and we vomited bile and pissed a fruity piss and shitted something rancid. The only holes not bursting forth with poison and crap were our ears, though it felt to me my brain would explode any minute.

  We got through another flagon of the port, and a couple of packets of cookies. The drunkenness helped ease the electric torture a little, although it probably increased the vomiting. We were desperate to sleep, since that would pass the time more quickly than anything else.

  We had only four Rohypnols left and we’d wanted to save them for Saturday night or Sunday, as a kind of reentry reward, but we figured we needed them badly now. The heavy artillery of the small-stake pills. They fuzzed the edges some more but did absolutely nothing for the central issues of sleep and pain.

  By one or two A.M. even the good stuff on TV was unwatchable, but we left it on for the mild distraction it could offer. A kind of background radiation.

  It must have been around three A.M. that we began masturbating in the hope of bringing on relief from the tension. Living on heroin was like drifting through endless savannas of superspiritual comfort. Coming off it, your body became acutely physical. So it was easy to masturbate.

  There was nothing sensual about it, nor was it about sex. To touch each other in any way would have been merely to increase our physical discomfort and distress. It was about release and the desire for oblivion. Masturbation was a pathetic substitute for smack.

  But it was easy to come. We were like two chimpanzees on amphetamines.

  “I’m going to masturbate,” Candy said.

  “Sounds like a good idea,” I said.

  She wet the tips of her fingers and spread her legs beneath the sheets and put her hand down there. I started stroking my dick and it got hard in ten seconds. I rubbed my hand across my stomach to wet it with the slimy sweat and used that as lubrication. Candy’s legs shot out straight and she clenched her teeth and went “ffff, ffff” and was still for a second before her body relaxed.

  I only had to pull up and down about five times and my body began to tingle and I came. It was a little painful, like something that tickled too much, but I guess it was the nicest expulsion of fluid I’d experienced in a while. We came at the same time, almost. Tremendous fucking effort! I turned the sound down on the TV and we lay as still as possible and closed our eyes and waited for sleep to come on.

  We listened to each other’s breathing and it didn’t change.

  Fifteen minutes later Candy said, “You awake?”

  “Yep.”

  “Fuck it. I still can’t sleep.”

  “Me neither.”

  A sneezing fit came on, one of those fits unique to the heroin detox, seven in a row, painful and wet and disorienting. It rattled my head around and I was wide-awake again. I blew my nose and groaned. I touched my dick again. It felt possible. I was sure that somehow the microseconds of relief after masturbation would offer the body the chance to slip into sleep.

  I started masturbating again, and Candy said, “I think I’ll do the same.”

  We came almost immediately. It was functional and grim. Between three A.M. and dawn we masturbated six or seven times, and none of it got us any closer to sleep. In the end I was coming without even a full erection, and Candy said her cunt hurt because the muscles of her vagina were contracting without anything to contract onto. It was more than we’d come in a year or two. Dawn came like a defeat anyway.

  We were in the real horrors by nine A.M. Saturday. Not just the physical stuff, but the very concept of where we were. The night stretched behind us and leaked back into Friday: heroinless. Ahead of us a new stretch, infinite, even worse to contemplate. It wasn’t that the idea of a life without heroin was bad. It’s just that in the middle of pain it was bad. Because the pain seemed potentially endless. And the antidote to the pain was heroin.

  By now the street was filled with the usual Saturday morning buzz of activity. Families and shoppers and all that shit. I couldn’t bear to look out the window. The only positive thing was that after a day and a half we were getting marginally more used to the misery. Coping with it better. And we were a day and a half closer to it being over.

  On the downside, the hideous pain continued without abatement. If only it would just ease into boredom and a little discomfort. Not yet. We were dehydrated and hungry. We were chain smoking when we weren’t vomiting or shitting or sneezing. Everything tasted bad and smelled bad. Our sweat smelled like formaldehyde. Our senses were opening up to the world; the world was clearly an unbeautiful place.

  I stumbled downstairs to the kitchen and made up a jug of cordial. I found some Salada cookies and spread them with butter and jam. Willy was there hassling, and I realized she’d been inside for twenty-four hours. I emptied the rest of the tin of cat food into her bowl, this time without vomiting. As I bent to her bowl I noticed she’d laid a huge shit in the corner. I couldn’t even think of dealing with it. I’d let it harden for another day or two. I put her and her bowl outside and closed the back door.

  I took the food and drink upstairs to Candy, my good deed for the day. She asked me to wipe her down with the towel. The talcum powder and sweat stains formed a brown continent on the sheets. There was nothing but sports or children’s crap on the TV.

  We ate the cookies and drank the cordial and felt a tiny surge of well-being. This is why they invented public detox units. So you can eat properly and take a few vitamins while you’re going through this shit. And get your sheets changed.

  In the face of despair it was hard to be positive. I must have had a rush of blood to the head.

  “You know,” I said, “if we could make the effort to have a shower and change the sheets, we’d feel a lot better afterward.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Well then, you have a shower first, then run a bath for me, then we’ll change the sheets, then I’ll have a bath.”

  Under the shower I realized it was a bad idea. It was hard enough getting down to the bathroom and getting my clothes off in the frigid air. I hadn’t allowed for the fact that if everything else felt alien without heroin, so would a shower. The water attacked my hypersensitive skin, tiny malicious darts fucking up the already distorted electrical currents. It was too hot, then too cold.

  I tried to let it soothe me. I was sitting down because standing up would have meant fainting. I lay down and put the washcloth over my face. I could hear my labored breathing, and the drumming of the water on the enamel surface of the bath.

  Soon the shower had made a hot crop circle on my chest, but my feet were beginning to get cold. Temperature control was out of control. I sat up again and pulled myself tight into a ball, trying to get all of me under the jet of water. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine syringes with wings, floating toward me to lift me away on the feathery air. Then I thought I might start to cry and decided I’d better get out.

  I dried myself quickly and turned on the taps for Candy’s bath. I looked at myself in the mirror. I looked skinny and pale and distraught and it didn’t feel like me. I hated seeing my pupils that big.

  It was a cold day and I ran back inside and upstairs as quickly as was possible in such a weakened state. I rifled through the drawers and pulled out a completely new—that is, dirty but dry—set of sweatpants and T-shirt and sweater.

  “It’s worth it,” I said breathlessly. I was hot and weak. One more monumental task to go.

  We ripped the covers off the bed and changed the sheets, breathing hard and flopping everywhere. We turned the blankets and the quilt upside down, sweaty sides away from us. I fell into bed and Candy went down
stairs to have a bath.

  It gave us a good hour or so, not much more. By the time it started raining and the day turned dark at four in the afternoon, both of us were lying crumpled and panting in a pool of muddy sweat and talc.

  We’d taken far too many pills. Our second sleepless night was coming up and we had no Rohypnol, twelve Valium, six Serepax, six Lomotil, and a handful of seemingly useless Doloxene. Poor management skills and poor preplanning. We would have to be really careful.

  Candy had to run downstairs and shit, and on the way back she made four pieces of toast. That would do us for dinner. We watched the Saturday night news, which was mostly sports, and took two Valium each. We tried to ignore the TV and sleep. We were delirious. Short of heroin, either sleep or death would have been good. Of course it was a forlorn hope.

  We drifted through a half-arsed attempt at continuing the crossword. The Saturday night movie was Song of Bernadette, starring Jennifer Jones. It was another apt movie because it was all about Saint Bernadette having these visions of the Virgin Mary, and we were beginning to hallucinate too. The walls were wobbling and Bernadette was saying weird things and after a while I just lay back and stared at the patterns forming and shifting on the ceiling. It was not really pleasant to see the ceiling mutate like that but it was easier than concentrating on the movie.

  Saturday night was a repeat of Friday night. In no particular order, we masturbated, sneezed, blew our noses, sweated, shitted, pissed. And lay awake. There was a late movie, The Outlaw Josey Wales, with Clint Eastwood, and I couldn’t wrap my head around that one either. We watched it without interest. Every cell in my body was sending messages to my brain that something was lacking, big-time.

  After midnight it was all crap on all stations, The Six Million Dollar Man, soft cock rock on the music video show, stuff like that. Stuff that might have been bearable, even funny, in my normal life, my real life, back on heroin. Back on heroin. That sounded good.

  The least pathetic thing was tennis, live from somewhere around the fucked-up globe, and it would be running till five A.M. There was something comforting about its hypnotic blandness. I watched a couple of sets after each bout of frantic masturbation or diarrhea. It seemed to pass the time, though it’s not something I’d ever watch under any other circumstances.

  At some point toward dawn I must have fallen into a short, troubled sleep, because all of a sudden a noise jolted me upright and The Big Valley was on and Candy was hunched in the corner where she’d been vomiting into the bucket. She was rocking back and forth and bawling her eyes out.

  “What is it, baby?”

  Given our circumstances, it was a supremely stupid question.

  Candy continued to rock and cry. I thought she must have been freezing in the corner like that.

  I jumped out of bed and promptly fell over. I pulled myself over to Candy and cradled her in my arms. I stroked her hair.

  “What is it, baby, what’s the matter?” I had a real limited repertoire when it came to dealing with emotional situations.

  “I can’t do it, I can’t do it, I can’t do it …” She went on bawling this for a minute or two. I was thinking, I’m with you, baby, I’m with you all the way. I can’t do it either. How can we get some smack? I should have said, “We can do it, we can do it,” but instead I said, “It’s all right, it’s all right,” which is not the same thing.

  “Come back to bed. You’ll catch a cold.” Incredible the things we say. I put her back under the covers and lay wiping the tears away from her face. I hated seeing Candy crying. Was all this worth it, this detoxing bullshit? Maybe we could just not use so much hammer. That was it! Starting today, turn over a new leaf. Avoid this kind of pain, get it under control.

  It was Sunday morning, six A.M. We hadn’t had a shot for sixty-seven hours. I was angry about the bullshit on TV and angry about the fucked world and angry about why drugs were a problem. I was angry and upset that Candy was crying. It was totally fucking unnecessary. I had no idea what to do with my anger. All I knew was that I felt, or everything felt, fucked and hopeless. So I lay there stroking Candy and saying it’s okay it’s okay it’s okay.

  Then all that was on were the religious programs. Some pedophile Yank with a southern accent was saying, “If you will but surrender to Jaysus.” Fuck you, Jack. I slammed the off button on the TV and the room seemed to hum with a terrible starkness.

  It was probably at that moment that I decided I would use hammer that day, whatever it took. Candy too, I guess. She kept saying, “I can’t do this,” and after a while I had to believe her.

  We lay in misery until about nine and then turned the TV back on to watch some cartoons. The bullshit began, slowly at first, but soon enough fast enough. We started talking about how well we’d done and how using now after nearly getting over the hump wouldn’t really be failure, as such, and how nice a taste would be and how the hell could we get some?

  We had no money. That was a part of the plan. Now that the plan had changed, having no money was a bit of a problem. But it was something that had never gotten in our way before.

  Still, it was Sunday, a bad day under any circumstances. There wasn’t much book stealing and selling I could do. Candy couldn’t do a trick sick like this. I didn’t have any stolen credit cards. We’d told all our friends we were stopping, so they’d dropped us like hotcakes. We weren’t expecting any visitors, no smack Santa Claus.

  But now that we’d decided we wanted to use, all the despair left us and the day took on an edge of frantic desperation, even enthusiasm. What we did in the end was very simple. We started calling our dealers and telling them the truth. There were five to call and we were sure someone would have a heart.

  On the second call Lester said, “All right, I’ll give youse a hundred on tick.” Candy promised that by getting the dope she would get well enough to go do a shift at the Carolina Club and pay him back by Monday morning. Lester knew that no one fucked with him, so I guess it was easy for him to say yes.

  Suddenly we had energy. We jumped out of bed and dressed ourselves and I ran my fingers through my hair to make it neat and Candy brushed her hair and put some makeup on.

  We were so fucking excited. The world was okay after all.

  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 dr
ug, 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.