Candy

by Luke Davies

  Will I ever stop using?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Then Mum and Dad are packing up.

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

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

  “Did you have a good day?” Dad asks.

  “Yes, Dad,” I say.

  “We’ll do it again soon,” he says.

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

  And I fall into the welcoming night.

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

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

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

  I look at Candy and we smile for a moment.

  “Hey, baby, hug me,” I say.

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

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

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

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

  FREELANCING

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “How you doing?” I asked.

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

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

  “Are you looking for something?”

  “I … urn …”

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

  “Sex?” I offered.

  He seemed relieved. “How much?”

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

  “Fifty bucks, blow job,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said quickly.

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

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

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “David.”

  “David!” I laughed.

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

  “I’m David too!” I lied.

  I was developing a plan.

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

  “Eighty’s all I’ve got,” he said.

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

  We caught up with Candy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Um, I’m not sure,” she said.

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

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

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

  I walked around the front with David.

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

  “What?”

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

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