Candy

by Luke Davies

  I’d talked fast enough. Reluctantly, he pulled out his wallet and handed me the eighty bucks.

  “Back in a jiff.”

  I sprinted up the stairs and went in through the front entrance. Then I went straight out through the laundry exit and up the back stairs. Candy was waiting for me on the landing. We crept giggling into the flat, number thirty-six.

  “Better leave the lights off, I think,” Candy whispered.

  We stumbled around in the dark, keeping our heads low and away from the window. We mixed up Fat Nick’s hundred in a shaft of light from the streetlight, and banged up a nice blast. Candy crawled down the hallway to run a bath.

  I sidled along the wall toward the front window, making sure I stayed in shadow. When I finally leaned forward enough to take a peek down at the street, I was a little saddened by the sight. I may have even felt a twinge of guilt, I’m not sure.

  It was four in the morning and David was standing in the cone of light cast down by a streetlight. He was staring up at the block of flats. I could imagine how dark and imposing it must have looked. He’d spent ten minutes waiting for a light to come on. I guess now he was waiting with a rapidly decreasing sense of hope. Not a car slid by on Alexandra Avenue. Behind him the Yarra flowed silently by, hidden in a thick mist.

  I stood in the blackness, fascinated for a moment by his pain. Finally he clenched his fists and pounded the air twice, as a child might bang a knife and fork on the table. I saw his mouth say, “Shit!” and he stamped his right foot on the ground. He looked around him, and he looked up one more time. Then he walked away. The cone of light was empty.

  We didn’t turn the lights on, just in case. Our eyes adjusted. We had a bath together, and kept adding hot water until dawn. The thing I liked most in the vague suggestion of silver light was soaping Candy’s breasts, in slow trancelike circles.

  “That was cruel,” Candy said.

  “I know,” I said. “I shouldn’t have done it.”

  But what we really knew was that we’d both just warded off the demons, by another eighty bucks, and you had to do that if you could. We’d bought the hundred from Fat Nick, and then David came up, an opportunity. So really the hit we’d just had, Fat Nick’s hit, only cost us twenty bucks. In theory.

  It made it feel special. We would go to bed soon. When we woke up we’d be that much further in front. There was no point in getting lazy. Every dollar counted, always. And David would have gotten home all right, I’m sure, and been more careful, more suspicious, next time.

  Not all the nights on Grey Street were good.

  Soon after the David episode there was one of those nights when everything went wrong. Candy made some money early and we scored and the dope wasn’t great. That didn’t seem too dire, though. It was only midnight. Then the weather cut in, serious Melbourne midwinter rain, and in half an hour the cars cruising by had all but disappeared.

  I sat in the car—Jesse’s car again, borrowed for the thousandth time—and Candy did the forlorn walk up and down the street. Finally a BMW slowed and she got in for the discussion. Normally at this point they would take off, and I would expect to see her back in five minutes or half an hour. Great fucking security system.

  This time she climbed from the BMW and came over to me. She got inside the car.

  “This guy could be interesting. I’m not sure. He reckons he’s connected to the clubs. Says he can pay me in smack. Says it’s good gear too. Pink rocks. Lots of it. But he can’t pay me until after two. He’s got to get the dope from the Shangri La Club at two.”

  “What? And we go with him?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “What do you think? Is he straight up?” I was having visions of a new dealer, a step up, a BMW schmooze with the uncut rocks.

  “I don’t know. I think he’s okay.” It was funny how wishful thinking could turn into fact if you were desperate enough. I suppose that’s what had happened to David.

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “We’ll take him back to the flat,” Candy said. “I’ll drive this, you’ll have to go with him, show him the way. Fuck I wish you could drive. Then afterward we’ll go and get paid at the Shangri La.”

  Candy introduced us and I got into his car. I had no wish to make conversation. He seemed pretty quiet too. He was dark-haired, burly, clean-shaven, nondescript. There was something tense about him that I didn’t like. Maybe it was just the way he gripped the steering wheel. But I had to forget about that, since he was going to be giving us the gear.

  I waited in the lounge room, and turned the TV on, and Candy and Burly went to the bedroom. After a while they came out. It was past three.

  We drove back to St. Kilda the same way, me in the BMW like a standover weed. But this time he put his foot to the floor and we really took off. Candy couldn’t keep up in the old Holden. This guy was flying. I gripped my seat.

  “Ah … you better slow down for her,” I suggested, motioning toward the back window with my thumb.

  “She knows where we’re going.”

  I thought we’d roll, or crash. It was wet out there. My brain wasn’t going too fast. I couldn’t work out why he was doing this. I needed the money or the pink rocks but I wanted to get out of the car.

  I had a feeling that I hadn’t had in a long time. I was scared shitless, and it felt physical. He was getting up to 160 K’s in short suburban streets.

  “Could you slow down just a little, mate?” My voice sounded high-pitched and silly.

  He didn’t answer and he didn’t slow down. I looked across. All I could see was the clench of his jaws, and I knew then that he was crazy, one way or another. A different way from me and Candy. Speed psychosis? But he looked so straight. Steroid meltdown? Nonspecific fury? The streets flashed by. My whole life didn’t pass before me, but I got a kind of edited slide show. The car was taking sharp bends on two wheels only. At one point the back tires fishtailed. I thought, This is related to my heroin addiction. Definitely. I would not be in this car for any other reason.

  We came over a rise and left the ground for a second. Then, in a deft display of precision braking, he drew up sharp outside a police station. The engine was still running. He reached under the seat and pulled out a gun. It was silver. It looked heavy. My heart seemed to go quiet. He just flopped his hand toward me, so that the barrel of the gun gently prodded my thigh. Then he uttered the first direct words that he’d said to me. I remember they were slow, precise words.

  “Get the fuck out of my car. Before I take you in there and arrest you.”

  My mouth dropped open and I stared at him. His mouth was clenched and he stared back.

  I was about to say, “What about the fucking money? What about the dope?” when I realized that, cop or no cop, he was a little bit disturbed. It definitely looked like too much methamphetamine to me: tight jaws, paranoia. He was not in a good mood and he was pressing a gun into my thigh. Sometimes you have to readjust.

  So I said, “Right. Okay. Right.”

  I unclasped my seat belt and got out of the car, uncomfortable with adrenaline, almost in pain.

  He left at the same mad speed. I stood there bewildered. Was he still going to the Shangri La Club, to get the hammer or the cash? Maybe he just had something against me. But something wasn’t right. I thought about Candy. I had to stop her. I turned around just as she came hurtling along at the best speed the Holden could muster, following the route to the Shangri La.

  I lurched out onto the side of the road, waving to get her attention. It was too late. She was hunched forward and worried and didn’t notice me through the rain-drenched windshield.

  Now it struck me that he could kill her.

  I ran through the rain. The Shangri La was about a kilometer away, down along the Lower Esplanade. I had four dollars in my pocket. A cab came past and I hailed it. He dropped me off thirty seconds later at the Upper Esplanade, from where I could look down into the Shangri La parking lot.

  As I reached
the railing I saw Candy pull in and park. The place was full of cars.

  She got out, looking around her for the BMW, uncertain as to where I might be or what to do.

  I cupped my hands over my mouth. “Candy! Candy!”

  It must have reached her faintly through the rain. She turned and scanned the horizon. I waved my arms in the air.

  “Get the fuck out of there! He’s got a gun!”

  I don’t know exactly what words she heard. But she knew. She got out of there.

  Twenty minutes later we sat in the car in the parking lot of the Port Melbourne 7-Eleven. The rain had stopped. Now you couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead of you in the swirling mist that had replaced it. It was four A.M. There were no more jobs tonight. No more money. No more dope.

  We had enough money for cigarettes. We knew that if we even attempted to shoplift on a night like this, we would be caught. Sometimes you just had to accept the limitations of your bad luck runs.

  We were shaken up. Candy was crying and my eyes weren’t real dry either. I tell you what else, I hated that guy.

  “This is bullshit,” Candy sputtered between sobs. “Our lives are bullshit. Do you understand that? We have to stop. Do you see what’s happening to me?”

  She said a lot of stuff like this, and I said I know I know. We will we will.

  It was a highly charged scene, with dawn coming on and all those tears and mist and the cold car and no dope. It was never nice to have bad feelings leak. That’s why heroin had to be a full-time career. Anyway, we drove home and went to bed feeling fucked. We took some Rohypnol, but it was hard to sleep more than a restless hour or so.

  For a while afterward I found it satisfying to try and imagine what ended up happening to the guy in the BMW. I used to imagine he died in a high-speed crash, but that he didn’t die right away. It was a country road, maybe, in the middle of the night, and he was all mangled up around a tree. He was upside down and covered in blood and bent out of shape in all the twisted metal. He knew he was dying. It was getting harder to breathe. He screamed for a good long time.

  But no one was around, of course. And I wasn’t about to help him.

  Grey Street was when things were getting real fucking ugly. So it was like a blessing when Casper, an old friend of Candy’s, came back from the States. I saw a chance to redeem myself. To pull my weight and supply the dope for a change. If I could only make heroin—and Casper was the key to this—then Candy and I could live like landed gentry, and all the bullshit would disappear from our lives.

  COOKING

  When we finally convinced Casper to sell us the recipe, I figured we could begin to live in a kind of self-constructed heaven. A heaven on earth forever and ever, for as long as we both should live.

  It wasn’t easy to get Casper to yield his secrets. I hounded him relentlessly.

  “But, Casper, we don’t really know the same people. It’s not like I’m going to be taking any business away from you.”

  “You and Candy every day is not business?”

  “Come on, man, be a friend. There’s plenty more where we came from. Sell us the recipe. I want to be self-sufficient.”

  Finally he agreed. Casper was a brilliant chemist gone, you might say, slightly awry. He was tall and handsome, urbane, polite, considerate. He had a massive habit and he manufactured his own hammer, extracting the codeine from Panadeine capsules, converting it to morphine and then heroin. He’d just returned from a Fulbright scholarship in the United States, where he completed his doctorate on a new synthesis of tetracycline and related antibiotics. He was back in Melbourne doing some part-time lecturing and tutoring at Melbourne University.

  As an undergraduate, he’d fucked around a little making speed and ecstasy, and once he even cooked up synthetic mescaline for everyone. Now, with a more sophisticated problem that he’d fine-tuned in New York, he wasn’t about to mess around with kids’ stuff. He’d gone back through the journals and sourced some of the original papers on the synthesis of codeine and morphine, particularly Gates’s 1954 morphine paper.

  He was a bona fide fucking genius. Casper read this shit and he worked it out in his head in ten minutes. He was pretty private, of course, so it was lucky that Candy knew him from the old days. He wouldn’t see many people. Didn’t need to.

  Casper had the best smack in Melbourne, no doubt about that. This was not a backyard home bake with bad equipment and inadequate chemicals. Casper became number one on our list. But as a heroin dealer, he was awful, because he was so comfortable, and therefore unreliable.

  I knew the story, the terrible vicious circle. When you’ve got dope, why worry about someone else’s pain? But when you’re in pain, you wonder how a dealer could not understand. Of course, we got used to taking the shit with the sugar, but it was frustrating sometimes, knowing that Casper was probably on the nod at his place three suburbs away, with all that Yellow Jesus in a jar. The midday movie meandering through his brain and his mum cooking him lunch.

  After I’d begged and groveled every day for about three months, he relented and sold me the recipe. Five hundred bucks, which included three lessons and the contents of those three cooks. I had to get the lab equipment and the chemicals myself, from supply companies in the outer suburbs. I got a basic starter’s kit together for less than seven hundred bucks, money I begged and borrowed from friends keen to taste the fruits of my industry. I paid Casper the five hundred in installments, after I sold some of the batch from each lesson.

  At first it was shaky. I knew nothing about chemistry, and could only follow Casper’s written recipe to the letter. I didn’t know how to adapt to unusual situations, to changes in color that Casper hadn’t predicted. Gradually, though, through trial and error, I began to get a clearer idea of what I was doing. Within a few months I was doing all right. I was getting better all the time. I even began to enjoy the process.

  I thought of myself as the scientist in the cartoon Milton the Monster, which I’d watched as a kid. I still had the theme song in my head, and sometimes, laughing, I’d sing it to Candy as I cooked:

  “Six drops of Essence of Terror,

  Five drops of Sinister Sauce.”

  “When the stirring’s done

  May I lick the spoon?”

  “Of course! A-ha! Of course!”

  What was best about the whole situation was that finally, after all the trials and tribulations, I was supplying the dope, controlling the means of production, as I’d always hoped I one day would. Candy didn’t need to work anymore, except in emergencies. Things felt smooth, and why wouldn’t they when you always had dope? The occasional desperate need to try and dry out seemed to have faded into the distant but harrowing past. I felt we’d begun a new chapter in our lives.

  Suddenly everyone wanted to see us, but we didn’t need to see many people to keep the show running. Just enough cash to keep things turning over. It may not exactly have been a perpetual-motion machine, and we may well still have been mice running in a wheel, but suddenly, for a while, the wheel seemed a whole lot bigger. Breathing space—as well as pure heroin—was what it was about.

  It was nice to have a bit of cash. It was nice to have food in the fridge. It was really nice to go to bed and know that you had a blast to wake up to in the morning. It was good not to have to hustle so much every day, though buying such large quantities of Panadeine wasn’t easy and involved some real logistics; most pharmacies wouldn’t let you buy more than one or two packets, though of course we got to know, love, and frequent the ones whose concepts of professional ethics were conveniently loose. But everything was better than before. These were calmer routines than the routines of the street.

  There is certainly a kind of beauty to chemistry.

  On an average day, O’Brien might call and say, “What’s the story?” Candy would say, “We’ve already got five packets, you bring three.” The three grams of codeine in eight large packets of Panadeine would eventually become one gram of heroin. Down at the l
ower end of the junkie food chain, the place where we were used to doing business, a gram of pure heroin could be like four or five of street heroin. So we were doing all right. Every day now was like the old, rare, thousand-dollar day.

  The cooking became a meticulous routine: breaking open the capsules (“shelling the peas”), mixing the powder with water, extracting the codeine with a vacuum aspirator and throwing out the paracetamol, separating the codeine from the water with dichloromethane, then evaporating the dichloromethane and dissolving the pure codeine in a reagent, the heating of which resulted in a morphine freebase. From the shelling of the peas to morphine was a detailed and complicated process, which took the better part of two hours.

  At this stage I would have a thick liquid—“Tending toward a viscous state,” as Casper had described it, in his strangely formal junkie-scientist drawl—in the bottom of the flask. It was a deep orange-brown, and if it wasn’t, I was in deep shit. I had no contingency plans, like Casper did, with his vast brain full of the poetry of molecules.

  The feeling now was always that we were on our fucking way to glory. A couple more extractions in the separating funnel with dichloromethane, a little vacuum aspiration with the flask lowered into boiling water—dichloromethane evaporates at 40 degrees Celsius, a long time before morphine—and a light brown foam of pure morphine would begin to form inside the flask, as if from nowhere.

  In all those years at school, I’d never realized that chemistry could be so exciting.

  I added enough acetic anhydride to dissolve the morphine, then heated the solution over a naked flame until it began to boil. Right now a beautiful thing was happening. The morphine, bonding with the acetic anhydride, was becoming diacetylmorphine, commonly known as heroin. The by-products were being evaporated away by the action of the vacuum aspirator. I disconnected the aspirator, added a couple of pipettes of water, and swirled. Most of the oil dissolved. I could get the rest later with a quick reheat. Finally, since it was alkaline dope, I added a single drop of glacial acetic acid.