Candy

by Luke Davies

  It occurred to me that I owed it to Candy to stick by her, no matter what happened. But then it occurred to me more strongly that Candy, should she ever get through this, would no doubt have the sense and strength to see that she was better off without me. I knew that even if I could change, as in really stop using dope once and for all, there was still a past that was fucked-up and wrong. It had never really occurred to me that for a long time love may have only been loyalty, and that work, Candy’s work, was degradation, pure and simple. How effectively I’d blocked it out became apparent as the methadone withdrawals began to taper away. Maybe the only way to make an amend for all that was to let her walk off to her future, should she choose.

  In the early afternoon I would visit her at the hospital. She was moved out of the locked ward after a week. After a while she was less crazy, but so heavily sedated that she was just not there. We talked about taking it easy when we got back to the farm. I saw all the antidepressants and antipsychotics as the new problem, but the doctors took me aside and assured me that these things would be necessary for a period of time. It was Candy with no spark. They were telling me I had to accept that. That the alternative was Mel Gibson’s sister, messages from the CIA, and a gradual buildup of the anger and anguish I’d seen in the months before I left. They told me we’d done a big thing, coming off heroin and then methadone after all those years. Don’t give yourselves a hard time, they said.

  Later each afternoon I would feed the ducks again and smoke another joint. Then I’d come home, have dinner and a glass of wine with Candy’s parents, make small talk, watch a bit of TV, and go to bed, hoping I would sleep, though I didn’t much.

  The first time I went back to the farm, it was like the cats had all gone wild. I don’t know what they’d been eating. They were almost hysterical, clustering around me frantically as I fed them. The whole house was overrun with fleas.

  Coco was skinny now, and when she finished eating I followed her into the spare room. She nosed her way into a pile of old clothes and I could hear the tiny squeaking of kittens only a few days old. It was a magic moment, a patch of softness in my brittle life. I reached my hand in to stroke them as they flailed toward their mother’s breasts. But one seemed to be asleep. I rubbed its head with my finger, then recoiled as I realized that the head was all there was. The body was gone. The kitten’s head rolled out and landed on the floor.

  I stared in horror at the raw pink patch that was its neck, where the head had been bitten off at the shoulder. I didn’t know then that when a cat is malnourished it will sacrifice one kitten in order to let the others live. Candy’s mother explained that later. All I knew was that this was awful, and I didn’t know how many more awful things I could take.

  I picked up the head and carried it outside, balancing it gingerly in the palm of my hand, careful not to make contact with the wet pink insides of its neck. I took a good windup and launched it like a catapult over the windbreak and well out into the field. The wind seemed to help it along. The tiny head landed and bounced several times and disappeared behind a tuft of grass. I screamed at the top of my lungs, “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!” though I don’t know who it was directed at. And then I stood there for a long while and didn’t move or make a sound, other than the occasional dry sob.

  Candy came out at last, fragile and scared of the world, and I picked her up and brought her back to the farm. In the final week, before Peter and Michael had called her parents, she’d written strange poems, meticulously lettered with nail polish, all over the walls and doors. They said things like, “Mother of the blueness. Angel of the storm. Remember me in my opaqueness. Of the flooding. Hit me up. Dear Mother says you were born in Vietnam. Whistle down the wind (Alan Bates). You said you would look after me. Fly away sun.”

  I found some old cans of paint in the shed, all different colors, and tried to paint over the poems. I didn’t prepare the surfaces or use an undercoat. My heart wasn’t in it. The inside of the house looked like a strange patchwork, and as the paint began to dry, the faint outlines of the poems reappeared, like the return of ghosts.

  In the first months, Candy slept up to sixteen hours a day. The doctors said it was okay, a natural side effect of the drugs. When she was awake, she shuffled slowly through the house. Our lives didn’t seem exciting. We had nothing to talk about. We were utterly trapped by the heavy weight of lethargy.

  No matter how hard she tried, Candy just couldn’t stay awake past eight o’clock each night. I thought if we could just stay up together, sharing the experience of watching TV, it would mean something.

  “Please stay, Candy, the fire’s going, we’ll watch this show.”

  “I’m sorry,” she’d say, “I can’t hold my eyes open anymore.”

  I’d kiss her good night. Often she’d cry and say, “This is so awful.” I’d sit on the couch and smoke cigarettes—the buds were long since gone—and watch bad television long into the night.

  One night I stood up and walked outside, past the windbreak of pine trees and into the paddock beyond, where I’d thrown the kitten’s head. The countryside was all around, utterly dark and silent. I lay down in the wet long grass and looked up at the night sky strewn with stars. I thought, If the universe is infinite, if there are stars in all directions, then why isn’t the night sky entirely white? The answer, I knew, was that this is the local galaxy, in the local cluster. Everything was local. Everything else: too far away. The light would never reach us. Local pain was all we’d ever know. My entire life seemed weightless, and yet I felt pinned down, as if the night were a weight of pain pressing on my chest. At least with heroin we’d had a purpose. Yet I sensed, at last, clearly, the worthlessness of the world I had constructed.

  The farm was too fucking depressing. Even Candy, on the psych drugs, thought so. Almost as quickly as we’d got it, we sold it, and hightailed it out of the battlefield. We gathered our straggly lives and moved back to Sydney, to start afresh. We only had one agreement: no smack.

  Within six months Candy came off the psych drugs completely. It was as if the very color that came back into her cheeks was flooding into her soul as well. For the first time in all those years, she started going back to acting classes. She began to laugh a lot, like she had when I first met her. We were in Sydney, where we’d started so long before. It seemed we might have a second chance, might be able to make up for lost time, to turn bad fortune into good. I got my first real job in many years, as a kitchen hand in a busy pub restaurant.

  It was good, in a way. It should have been good. But I felt I was sitting in a little wooden boat that had been cut adrift from a big ship. The boat was leaking and I had no oars. I felt a big hole in my gut, the one that heroin had always filled, and I didn’t know how to live. What could I do in that boat? Dip my hand in the ocean, drink salt water? I knew it would make me sick.

  And then I bumped into Casper again.

  Casper was in Sydney now, working on enzyme inhibitors in the research division of a big inner-city hospital, staying late each night and brewing up the Jesus-in-a-jar. I’d lost touch with him entirely and our meeting was accidental. It was his lunch break and he was striding along a busy street in a white lab coat.

  I saw him from a distance and stopped still. Chemistry tingled up my spine, and even in the mere anticipation I felt I’d been descended upon by the doves of absolute peace. He was lonely in the new city and happy to meet an old friend.

  I thought to myself, Just this once. It’s been so long now. Almost six months. “Hey, Casper! How’s it going?” Ten minutes later I was struck by the thunderous heat once more. Dumbstruck. But just this once.

  That was a Monday. By the Friday I was edgy, so I called him again. On Sunday I woke up and his phone number was in my head and my hands were lifting the telephone. You know the story. Candy said I broke the rules. She said she was going back to Melbourne if it kept happening. After two weeks I couldn’t stop. Once the wiring’s there, I guess it’s like a switch. Bang, you f
lick it on.

  Candy gave me a couple more warnings. Then she said, “This is a definite decision. You’re using. I’m going back to Melbourne.”

  It was almost sad, the lack of animosity. There was not even much to divide. One day she kissed me good-bye and climbed into a rented car laden with her possessions and said, “I hope it’s only temporary. I have to go.” Her eyes glanced back at me in the rearview mirror as she pulled away, but I couldn’t read them anymore.

  So then I was left alone, in a flat where I stopped paying rent, and Casper—can you believe this?—got sloppy, and got caught. He was a good research scientist, and hospitals hate scandals, so they gave him one chance and sent him to detox and threatened him with police action if it happened again.

  But Casper lasted three days in detox. He must have been thinking, How can I possibly stay here, in all this pain, when I still have the key to my lab? He must have also known that leaving detox was the end of his career.

  He left anyway. He went to a doctor, and then a pharmacy, and then a liquor store. It was a Saturday; there was no one in the research division. He cooked one final batch. He downed a packet of Serepax and drank a bottle of scotch and had a big shot of Jesus and out he went.

  Leaving me, as I saw it, in the absolute fucking cold.

  I really didn’t have much energy left. I just couldn’t contemplate returning to crime, to being a petty criminal with a petty habit. I couldn’t even contemplate trying to get a lab together again: it was all I could do to gather each day’s scoring money. Even working as a kitchen hand had made me think there might be a better life.

  Casper was gone and I was reduced to scoring shitty deals off shitty dealers. Candy was gone too, maybe forever. It was clear to me that there was no pleasure anywhere in my life. Even when I used, even if the dope was good, I didn’t seem to get relief anymore. I’d have the shot, and feel the little rush, then straightaway find myself in the middle of a fidgety low-key fear, about how I was going to obtain my next one. The high point of my day, the apex of anticipation, was when I got the dope in my hand. After that I knew it was all downhill.

  I trudged the streets unhappily. I avoided going home to my empty flat, where the only knock on the door was likely to be the landlord’s.

  This was the time of the world being gray. Even Lex wouldn’t lend me money anymore. One day I got home to my flat and the locks were changed. I broke a window and climbed inside but all my stuff was gone.

  I took to sleeping in doorways. For days I lived on chocolate bars: Fry’s Five Fruits, Rocky Roads, Cherry Ripes. Good stuff for energy, easy to steal. I needed all my money, which wasn’t much, for heroin. Then some ancient Social Security fraud I’d forgotten about caught up with me. My check wasn’t in the bank when it should have been, and I learned I’d been cut off welfare.

  And so at last it was my turn for the hospital, the thing I’d been putting off for so long. One day I just walked to a detox, somewhere along Moore Park Road, and pressed the buzzer.

  Detox. I’d never even liked the sound of the word. I’d only ever preferred tox and more tox. And now here I was.

  They told me the first step toward change was not to use any drugs at all. It was so simple that I’d never thought of it. Swapping one drug for another, that was as far as I’d ever gone. What I liked about their advice was that not using anything seemed just as extreme as using the amounts I’d been using. An extreme solution for an extreme situation. It was okay by me. And when I stopped using, they said, then the changes could begin to occur. Look at your life, they said. Try not to kid yourself anymore. If you stop using and stay stopped, you have a chance to open out your future in ways you can’t imagine. You even have a chance to clear some of the wreckage of your past. One day you might try to contact your father, for instance. “I suppose that’s possible,” I said. “I suppose I could think about that.”

  I gave myself over to all these extraordinary new concepts. The swirling in my head was almost unbearable as it gathered force each evening and built into a cyclone by dawn. For nine long nights I didn’t sleep a minute, racked by spasms and nervous electricity in a sweat-soaked bed in the men’s ward of the detox. I stayed for three weeks, moving like a sleepwalker each day through dream states of delirium beyond pleasant and unpleasant. The pain, at last, was beautiful.

  I thought I’d been running, and that exhaustion had pursued me relentlessly across the years. Instead I arrived at exhaustion. “I’ve never moved a muscle,” it said. “All I ever did was wait here for you to come.”

  I surrendered to my tiredness. On the eleventh day of my delirium, alone in the hospital courtyard, I found myself smiling, so astonished had I suddenly become by the mere fact of eleven days. Could I turn eleven into twelve? A counselor passed by. “So why are you smiling?” she asked.

  And all I could say, with a heart full of hope, was, “I have no idea in the wide world.” It was a good enough starting point.

  BLINDING TRUTH: FRISBEES

  Everything changes so rapidly it’s hard to believe. There’s no Candy and there are no drugs. They tell me in the detox that I’m a bit like a “clean slate.” It seems to be true. At any given moment I have no idea what’s going to happen. This should mean that nothing comes as a surprise. And yet everything that happens is unexpected.

  The planet spinning round and round, for instance. Suddenly, in the middle of your life, or late in your youth—it doesn’t matter which, because after a decade or more of arrested development, it might as well be one and the same thing—you get a vivid physical sense of what this actually means.

  I come around the curve, the ground drops away. Space surges toward me and I’m frightened, for a moment seeing blueprints behind the sky. The indelible traceries of physics. That moment of adjustment when the cortex dissolves and the stomach locks tight and you resist the urge to vomit.

  In that rush of atoms I feel lightness and hysteria, a giddiness that seems boundless. My pupils are huge yet they flood with light, as all the static lines of the physical world before me surge into movement.

  I begin to see objects—actually see them. Around their well-defined edges I see their colors. The colors that they are; the things themselves. Such surgical, such molecular, clarity.

  For months the world appears to me this way. After the drugs begin to leave my system, after I get out of detox, the world explodes upon me with an intensity that’s almost too much to bear.

  At night I lie awake trembling in bed, in a shared room in a halfway house, my eyes full of tears, unable to cry. I feel exhilarated and raw, full of fear, full of hope. Astounded by consciousness.

  Somehow I make it through the bright strange winter days. Inside me, fragility and enthusiasm seem to reach a compromise that ensures my survival. As the days become longer, Ken and I play Frisbee in the glare of the setting sun and into the purple dusk.

  I met him in detox. It seems to me now that friends will be important. He has the top bunk in our room. I won the coin toss, got the bottom bunk. We’re thirty years old. It’s not embarrassing. It’s where we’ve arrived. How old we are means nothing after living half of a lifetime that ends in a detox.

  We take turns playing into the sun. I see Ken’s silhouette as he steps forward into the air and flicks his wrist to release the Frisbee. The glow of his dirty gold hair, his grace and finesse. The things you never notice, all those years. The jolt of being alive, right now, without a meter running on the smack in your blood.

  The Frisbee spins toward me and disappears, directly in the path of the sun. As I look into the sun, searching, the world glows white, all outlines disappear; blinded, I can see the red of the blood vessels in my own eyes.

  Suddenly, above my head, the Frisbee bursts into my vision, a hard black circle moving through the sky. I spin around and begin to run. The Frisbee hovers over my shoulder and descends.

  I follow long, luxurious arcs through the cool of the evening and Ken does the same and we pass our time this way
, experiencing moments of convergence. I reach up and pull the Frisbee down from the sky. My spine tingles, I gasp with joy. The emotion of awakening—is there a name for it?—floods my body.

  We’re like some elastic machine, running all over the park, tuned, tight, uniquely monocellular, locked into trajectories, aware of every angle. It becomes apparent that throwing a Frisbee is the most spiritual, the most poetic, of all sports.

  We walk together and talk together—long rambles through Redfern and Surry Hills and Darlinghurst—made partners by the common bond of having recently emerged from a weird situation of fear and trauma, from the psychic shredding machine of detox. We catch the bus to Bondi Beach. It’s as if we’re going to another country. What a frightening thing, the ocean. The sheer physicality of swimming.

  They’ve got strange rules in detox and halfway. They say no contact with Candy for ninety days. Except for the phone call to tell her no contact. Who am I to argue? And what do I know, what’s good for me or not? I have no strength other than the strength to survive.

  I make the call. Twelve hundred kilometers of cable and wire and yet her voice is right there, in my ear, as if I could merely close my eyes and she would lean toward me and kiss me. Since all we know is the past, we don’t yet know that the future between us is doomed. We know but we don’t know. We’re operating on habit. “Please come to Sydney,” I say. We arrange it for the ninetieth day.

  At the end of the three months she arrives in Sydney. There’s not much privacy in a halfway house. We go to a Lebanese restaurant on Cleveland Street.

  “Things are possible without drugs,” I tell her.

  “I guess so,” she says.

  “What’s going to happen with us?” I ask.

  “Who the fuck knows?” she says. Her eyes are sad, the way they look away. She tells me she’s seen another guy a few times, and maybe she’ll keep seeing him, and maybe we should just give it a break, let it ride, see what happens. After all, she has no intention of being in Sydney and I have none of being in Melbourne. It’s a very sad truth. I say a prayer, not out loud: God, make it okay for Candy.