by Luke Davies
“We’ll be all right. Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll be all right.”
She was right. It was so sad. It was sad that feeling sad was so rare. It was sad too that feeling happy was frightening. It only meant wanting to feel even happier. The only way to do that seemed to be heroin, and that made us so unhappy in the end. It was better to be sad, I guess.
I couldn’t see a future but I wanted to. I couldn’t see a future after methadone, without heroin. I couldn’t see a future without guilt, for what I’d done to Candy.
Here we were. After drugs, I couldn’t imagine anything but sex. I couldn’t imagine growing old. But here we were. Sam slept and Candy drifted and the sunlight moved across the room.
The morning was well on its way to becoming afternoon. We hadn’t gotten our methadone yet. We had to get moving.
Candy smoked a cigarette and we pulled a few bongs and got dressed and went out into the day. It was nice in autumn in Albert Park, on a methadone program. Everything sedate and easy to handle.
We crossed the tram lines and rode our bicycles down toward the bay and Albert our pharmacist. Albert the dispenser, who looked like Woody Allen.
Albert saw us come in and nodded hello. He went out the back to his alchemist’s cubbyhole and reappeared a minute later with two plastic cups. We drank the syrup and threw the cups in the bin and Candy bought a packet of jelly beans and I bought a honey and nougat log.
“Thanks, Albert. See you tomorrow!”
We picked up our bikes from the footpath outside Albert’s and stood there working out our plan for the rest of the day. It was the first Friday of the month, so the first thing we had to do was give a supervised urine sample at the pathology lab. That was just a block away.
After that we could go around to Dee Dee’s café and have some coffee and watch the cars go by and fuck around doing the crossword for a while. Maybe think about some food. Then we could go home and pull a few more cones and watch the afternoon soaps on TV. Later, when the kids’ programs began, we could go for a long slow bike ride through the flat backstreets of Albert Park and Port Melbourne.
We didn’t know there was less than eighteen months to go. We had no idea we would move to the country, and come off methadone, and try not using heroin, and go crazy, and move back to Sydney, and dribble toward good-bye. I guess there are times, in retrospect, when you can see that ignorance is bliss.
“I wonder what the kittens are going to look like,” I said, gliding beside Candy with my hands off the handlebars.
“Pretty good, I reckon,” Candy said. “Pretty beautiful.”
PART THREE
The Momentum
of Change
“I did not want to live out my life in the strenuous effort to hold a ghost world together. It was plain as the stars that time herself moved in grand tidal sweeps rather than the tick-tocks we suffocate within, and that I must reshape myself to fully inhabit the earth rather than dawdle in the sump of my foibles …”
JIM HARRISON, Julip
TRUTH 5: POPLARS
I remember this, Candy. One weekend we tried to go away. This is way back. We drove three hours north, to the town with the hot springs we thought would help us detox. We picked up the old man hitchhiking. He had the sad, determined air of one who had been in the concentration camps. His wife had died and he continued to return to the holiday spot that reminded him of her, of their early years in Australia, maybe even of Europe, up there in the cold mountain air two hundred kilometers from Melbourne. When we dropped him off he said, “You are good people.”
I remember—this may be the saddest memory I own—that we sat in the tiny hotel room, shivering from lack of heroin, ready for the night that lay ahead. I remember your little pill box, and how you sat on the bed and doled out so carefully our meager rations of pills. Your beautiful delicate hands. There were not enough pills to make things all right. Two little piles on the faded quilt. We gulped them down and climbed into bed and clung to each other as if only the clinging could ward off the night. We were cold and unhappy in a bed not our own.
We didn’t last too many hours up there, got itchy feet, kept thinking of Melbourne and heroin, as if Melbourne was a giant finger and we were the yo-yo attached to it. It was all we could do to make it through one day. Mud baths and hot springs no longer interested us. We reached the furthest limit of the string and spun back to the city that now contained all we knew and desired.
Almost in a straight line. On the way home, in the dying glow of a cold late autumn day, you stopped the car. An avenue of poplars stretched away to the horizon. The weird ferocity of poplars. What can I say about that afternoon? The poplars, bent double, and the roaring of the wind. Such a rush of blood to my throbbing temples. Even then, such devastation already behind us, and so much still to come.
“Why are we stopping?” I asked, though the answer was already clear.
You were silent, transported, elsewhere, another. A slight grin, despite your jangled nerves, and the unswerving purpose of someone in a trance. You pushed me into the backseat, straddled me, pulled your underpants sideways, to let me in. I held my hands at the small of your back as if your hips were the fulcrum on which all pleasure turned. Everything you did was precise and to the point. At the end your eyes closed gently and you made one tiny noise. The last thing I remember is being aware of the poplars—I could see them bending and lashing beyond your right shoulder—as my fingernails made scratches in your flesh.
We didn’t say a word. We never really felt complete, as if some disease already ate away inside, as if some source or spirit was always eluding us. Somehow we drove home without crying. Concentrating on what awaited us. Too many barriers already. This was all so long ago.
There are times love would seem to be the only word capable of describing the frightening physics of this momentum. There is desolation and then there is each other.
COUNTRY LIVING
Love. And then in a way it ended.
Splitting up was more a process than an event. We moved to the country, tried to slow things down, maybe stay out of trouble for a while.
After a while, on methadone, we didn’t look so gaunt. Some stability must have leaked into our lives. We’d stopped hassling Candy’s parents for money, and maybe they were impressed. They were hoping that this time it might be for real. All those years of false starts.
One day, out of the blue, they told Candy some old investments had come off and they were going to give her ten thousand dollars. It might have been a tax break but we weren’t about to complain. It was a sign that they trusted that methadone was a step in the right direction. When we found a cheap old farmhouse on two acres in the country, a couple of hours out of Melbourne, near where Peter and Michael lived, they gave us the ten grand and grudgingly guaranteed the small bank loan. We found a country pharmacy open seven days a week and willing to take over the methadone dispensing. We planned to reduce to zero within six months.
I don’t know what we thought we were going to do down there. Maybe I would grow the world’s greatest dope crop, and Candy would restore furniture or something, and we’d live happily ever after. But the silence in the country, and the not knowing each other, and the coming down off drugs, was really a brilliant recipe for disaster.
I knew nothing about mental illness. I didn’t know what a nervous breakdown looked like. If any signs were obvious, I think I must have buried them. Because when you think you are in love, you don’t want to know about the things that could end it.
At any rate, when you’re pretty crazy yourself, you really don’t want to know it. You cannot afford to know it, and you don’t want to see it in anyone else. Least of all your wife. The whole thing was a lost cause. But it takes the slowing down to even see the madness in the first place. Moving to the country on low doses of methadone was a big slowing down.
I was no less crazy than her after all those years of pushing it. But I didn’t end up in Royal Park Asylum. It feels like good
luck, though that phrase suggests happiness. Weird luck and good luck are not the same thing. If it’s luck, it’s the luck of the draw.
The truth was, it was awful and frightening, having so few drugs in our systems after all those years. I could sense the methadone levels dropping lower and lower, like a pond drying up in a drought. I felt brittle and dusty, and often in the months leading up to the move to the farm, I found myself close to tears. But I couldn’t cry, and at such moments I felt alarm edged with despair, and occasionally despair edged with alarm. At night I would often drink too much. Once or twice I fell over, hard, in the hallway, like I’d done so long ago on Clonidine, when we’d first arrived in Melbourne and were trying to construct a new life.
Sometimes I’d be walking down the street and I’d be overcome with the dread that there wasn’t enough oxygen in the thin air to sustain my lungs. I’d stop where I was and lean against a bus shelter. I might stare for a minute at my hand clasping the wood or I might look up at the strange wisps of cloud high above the bay. I would try to take a deep breath, and with a sinking heart I would be struck by the notion that only heroin would oxygenate me. My soul was a tattered rag of a thing. Heroin would, and could, if sought, do everything. And I knew it was bullshit. But I knew nothing else.
I expressed none of my doubts, my panic, to Candy. We were trying to be nice to each other, but there was a lot of damage. I figured that actions spoke louder than words, and I’d just spent a decade saying one thing and doing another. I figured it was my duty to be positive about changing our lives. I felt that talking about how I felt would be unfair to Candy. A mean, hard world without heroin loomed like something out of a postapocalyptic comic book, but I didn’t see the point in getting wimpy about that. And as for guilt: fucking forget it. Bad times happen. That’s what I figured. You move on.
Yet alone, with my thoughts and my growing unease, I found myself adrift on a broiling sea of guilt in a gale-force wind.
As for the future, the real tentativeness was about love. What was going to be there now, in the gap where smack had been? A crater of uncertainty. A fucking bomb site.
But we never talked, or when we talked, we bullshitted. “Things are going to be great.” I tried to believe it, and I tried to not believe that there were vultures as big as pterodactyls circling overhead, waiting to descend on my soul as it expired its final weak breath. I could hear the leathery flap of their wings in the crackling air.
I’d never thought such things before and it was an effort to suppress them. I knew I was in trouble but I didn’t know what it was. I had a glimmer of awareness that the spirit had been squeezed out of me. I didn’t know if I could ever be inflated again, without drugs. It was a world of trepidation. Even the clanking of trams rounding bends made me jittery.
Maybe in the end we would have gotten around to taking stock of our lives. We never really got to find out. When we moved to the country, things fell apart fast. The whole thing, really, the big final thing, could in a way be measured in the gestation period of a cat. Nine weeks. It’s hard to believe that all the weirdness that was about to happen could happen in sixty-three days.
In the last weeks in Melbourne and the first weeks on the farm, Candy just got speedier and speedier as the methadone went down. But that’s what you’d expect, I thought. Candy was getting a little bit hyper, a little bit edgy. That’s all it was. That’s what I told myself. We would come off the methadone and get through the withdrawals and she’d be the queen of serene. In the meantime we started putting more and more effort into finding grass. I thought it was a slow drug. I thought it was our reward. I didn’t realize it doesn’t help in nervous breakdown situations. Well, I was none too slow myself. I could hear the clockwork whirring out of control, a massive background noise.
It’s funny how you could come off heroin and methadone and lose your bearings like that. The whole fucking world was a blur.
The old guy we bought the farm off had been there for forty-five years. He’d bought it when he was forty, after his wife had died and his son moved out of the home. Now it was time for the retirement village.
The farmhouse was covered on every surface and in every nook and crevice with at least forty-five years of grime that we should have dealt with. We started with good intentions but the job never got done. The kitchen was particularly dark and smoky. The stove was a big old wood combustion thing which was also the heater for the house’s hot water. You had to get it going at least four or five hours before having a bath or shower or cleaning the dishes. And then you had to keep feeding it and checking it. I was way out of my fucking depth, swinging that axe out at the woodpile, jarring my wrists and working on my blisters.
We never even cleaned the cupboards. We just moved everything in on top of the grime. We didn’t seem to have a great deal of energy, and the move itself had been exhausting. Very quickly we were overtaken by events, and the farmhouse remained a dirty farmhouse full of unpacked boxes. Dust and grit got into our bedsheets and never got out.
I kept forgetting to feed the chickens that the old guy had left us. I didn’t know if I was supposed to let them out of their little shack. I didn’t know if I was supposed to clean it out, or if all the soft stuff on the ground was part of the setup. Anyway, they scared the shit out of me. I remembered I once read how Werner Herzog had said if you want to know evil you must look into the eye of a chicken. Up on the farm it made perfect sense.
The cats came with us and they seemed reasonably happy, or at least curious about their new surroundings. I was jealous of the way animals led their lives and didn’t have drug problems.
I don’t know what we ate but I can’t remember ever cooking. There were no corner stores for miles around so it was not so simple to get a chocolate bar or a cream bun for dinner anymore. We lived on toast. But one day we tried to cook, and something happened that was one of those signs, getting harder to ignore, that things were wrong.
“We’ll have my parents to Sunday lunch,” Candy had said. Well, we were a proper family now, with cats and chickens and runner beans. We weren’t just drug addicts anymore. It made sense to invite the folks up. And everyone had told us how lucky we were, how the old-style combustion ovens were the greatest and food cooked in them tasted out of this world. I took it that this was information you picked up in Belle or Country Homes.
I’d met Candy all those years earlier; we’d fallen in love and our lives had begun. Everything else, other than me and Candy and drugs, was absolutely peripheral. This included parents.
I suppose her mother had tried to make an effort to like me. But you have to look at the facts. Candy’s mother’s grandfather was a turn-of-the-century Freemason industrialist. He hated the Irish so much that he refused to have the color green anywhere in his house. That kind of mistrust lived on in Candy’s mother. I was pure CIA: Catholic, Irish descent, Addict. I’d come to sweep her daughter away, and for the better part of a decade we’d confirmed all her worst nightmares. So I guess it was an effort for her to even give me the time of day.
The best word to describe her relationship with Candy would be “strained.” The best phrase: strained to breaking point. They used to just go at each other, like the meaning of life was to pull triggers and push buttons. Each thinking the other was in the wrong. I was always on Candy’s side, of course.
Candy’s father was pretty mellow. He’d been in Vietnam, Special Air Services or some elite shit like that, so I thought he was cool. And he was. I think he searched for the good in human nature, and I liked him because he always seemed to try and give me the benefit of the doubt: maybe next week I really would stop using heroin.
So they came to the farm for a Sunday roast with their Labradors, Sparky and Spanky. We were down to about 10 mils of methadone a day by now: more placebo than holding pattern, really. I suppose both our heads were coming off at the hinges, but since I couldn’t see myself, I noticed it most in Candy.
We were never organized, so the first fuckup of t
he day was the difficulty of buying vegetables in a small country town in Gippsland on a Sunday morning.
“I can’t believe you didn’t get them yesterday,” I said as we drove slowly along the quiet main street, having just drunk our methadone at the pharmacy.
“Fuck you!” Candy said. “Why should I be the one who has to think about things like vegetables?”
Sometimes I couldn’t help myself. “Well, they’re your parents. You invited them up here.”
“We were in here yesterday getting our methadone. I’m the one who’s going to cook the meal, so you should have worried about getting the vegetables.”
“Oh shit!” I exclaimed. “That reminds me—I haven’t got the stove going yet. I haven’t even chopped any wood!”
This set the tone for the day.
But we salvaged something. At the liquor store, while I was buying beer, I sweet-talked the girl at the counter into raiding the pub kitchen. She gave me some potatoes and onions. I offered her two dollars but she said not to worry about it. Then we drove half an hour to the next town and found a frozen chicken in the mixed-goods freezer of a gas station. On the way back through to the farm we dropped in on Peter and Michael, who gave us all the vegetables they had, which was half a pumpkin. Finally we picked a handful of runner beans from our own overrun garden, the old man’s dying garden. The produce of the land. Good honest toil. It was the first time we’d done it. It wasn’t the same as a supermarket, and all that dirt made me wary.
“They’re pretty tough. They’re not very green,” I said to Candy, holding out my hand while she sniffed them suspiciously. “Maybe it’s the wrong season. Maybe they’re not ready yet.”
“Don’t worry,” Candy said, “we’ll just steam them for ages and cover them in butter.”
Candy was making lots of Turkish coffee during this period of our lives, a thick muddy sludge that tasted good and really got the heart racing. So while I had a few beers to get mellow for the imminent arrival of the in-laws, Candy got snappy on the Istanbul express. We smoked a joint, thinking it would make our energy levels meet halfway, but it was strong dope and the end result was the compounding of our inability to get much of a move on.