The Ice Age

by Luke Williams

  Chapter Eleven

  Parents and thieves

  I WAS STANDING inside an indoor shopping centre in a middle-ring suburb, with the smell of potato cakes, and kebabs, and Kentucky Fried Chicken not so much lingering but dominating the air amid the cheap clothing stores, the buzz of a hundred voices murmuring at once.

  I was with two young crystal-meth users, Samuel and Jodie. Both were in their early twenties: Samuel was bone-thin with blue eyes and very white skin, and his wife was a heavyset Italian. They were not every-day-of-the-week, skin-falling-off-their-face addicts, but they did pay for their habit with crime. And, just to clarify, they didn’t start committing crimes when they started doing meth. Samuel, then twenty-two, had been doing so-called petty crimes for almost a decade.

  I had come along to see how they generated cash through crime. For a few weeks prior, I had seen them coming back to Smithy’s from their crime sprees with hundreds of dollars — all obtained by stealing from department stores, and not by visiting pawn stores, which are a sure way for the amateur criminal to get caught.

  Samuel had a slouch when he walked; he wore a cap and fluorescent worker’s clothes to make it look as if he’d just come from work when he walked into a store. Much of his behaviour was subterfuge, designed to detract from the fact that he had sticky fingers and a smooth, deceptive tongue. He was disarmingly slight, and one could easily interpret his accent as that of a good, hard-working man: a furniture removalist, a labourer, or a factory worker.

  Samuel had been in jail, and he knew the kind of crime he was carrying out is considered petty and not worth the risk — more manipulative than masculine. It didn’t involve violence or weapons or gangs, and yet he still took pride in telling me that his trick would earn ‘six hundred bucks in less than hour … it might be petty, but it brings in the cash and I have never been caught’.

  And on that note, he asked, ‘Are you ready?’

  ‘Yep,’ I said, wanting to play it cool, and not show how excited and nervous I was. We walked through the entrance of a low-end department store; Jodie came in behind us with their 18-month-old son Greg in a stroller. Both said hello to the female bag-checker, who smiled approvingly at them and their baby.

  ‘Come with me,’ Samuel said, and he took me down the aisle. ‘Now find the smallest, most expensive thing you can, and put it in your pocket.’

  ‘What about security bleepers?’ I said, too loudly.

  ‘Keep your fucking voice down. Those bleepers are an illusion; there’s nothing on most of this stuff that actually causes them to go off. And nobody is watching those cameras. It’s all a fucking illusion, nobody is watching, I’ve been doing this for years.’

  On one level, perhaps, Samuel was worth listening to. Or, at least, he was an authority on this particular subject. He hadn’t worked for a long time. He didn’t care what other people thought. He had developed an apparently ingenious technique for avoiding all the responsibilities that plague so many of us. He had cheated the system, beating alarm clocks and irate bosses — and meth was part of his ‘perfected’ lifestyle. In a world where choice is apparently so prevalent, but finding a genuine counter-culture is rare, Samuel used meth and crime to live a lifestyle that he considered superior to everyday human experience.

  Indeed, there is a definitive link between meth and crime. People who already commit crime often take meth because it fits with their lifestyle. This may skew the statistics: this cohort would probably commit crime whether they were taking meth or not. Other people use meth to give them the Dutch courage to commit crime. And as for manufacturers of meth, it is not uncommon for them to coordinate sophisticated robberies of amphetamines and amphetamine precursors from pharmacies, chemists, and pharmaceutical warehouses.

  A two-month research project into police detainees in key areas around the nation conducted in 2015 by the Australian Institute of Criminology found that 61 per cent of those held at Kings Cross police station in Sydney tested positive for amphetamine, as did 40 per cent of those who ended up in the Brisbane City watch house, and 43 per cent of those in East Perth.

  Results from a New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics research study revealed that heavy users of amphetamine — those who reported at least sixteen days of use in the month prior to arrest — had 53 per cent more property offence charges (like stealing or trespass) recorded at arrest compared to detainees who were less frequent users and non-users. Higher rates of property offences among methamphetamine users were also associated with younger individuals, being unemployed, and having reported illicit use of benzodiazepines in the thirty days prior to arrest. According to the Australian Institute of Criminology, between 1999 and 2012, 20,402 police detainees tested positive for methamphetamine. The highest proportion of charges recorded against these detainees were property offences (26 per cent), followed by violence offences (24 per cent).

  Detective Leading Senior Constable Jason Bray told the Victorian parliamentary committee that one of the biggest problems police face with meth-related crimes is that career criminals who use it are able to be much more active:

  When people are taking this drug, they are able to stay awake for three, four days on end … In the last year, for instance, we had a career criminal that I have known for probably ten years. In the past he may go out and do a burglary or a break-in of some sort, once every week or two weeks, depending on what his circumstances are at the time. On this particular night he did upwards of 20 crimes.

  The inquiry also heard from the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service, who reported that, based on reports from their solicitors and client service officers, ice was making their clients more likely to offend, either to ‘fund their habit’ or ‘because ice makes them more likely to take risks’. In 2013, South Australian District Court Chief Judge Geoffrey Muecke told the Adelaide Advertiser that methamphetamine-related cases were ‘clogging up’ the court system. ‘In a normal arraignment list of say 30 cases, there will be I think at least half ... either trafficking meth or supplying or manufacturing, or there are assaults and/or robberies to feed an addiction,’ he said. ‘It’s probably the most highly addictive drug that we’ve ever had.’

  It must have been halfway through my time in the house when I met another, um, ‘interesting’ character at Smithy’s house. His name was Jake; he was twenty-seven, and had grown up in southern New South Wales. He took me outside to smoke cigarettes with him while he ranted about how Australia was no longer Australia, about how there were no longer enough houses or jobs for Australians because there were too many immigrants coming in, and about how said immigrants were taking over, and fuck the kind of society we were living in, and so on. I never even pretended to agree with him, telling him instead that it sounded rather like 1990s Hanson-ism to me, as well as slightly fascist. It wasn’t until the next time I was at the library using a computer that I realised how entrenched his ideas were. I had a Facebook friend request from him, and his profile pic was of an eagle with a swastika. A few weeks later, Jake came over with his girlfriend, who I noticed was looking teary as she stared at the television. I asked what was wrong, and she didn’t hesitate to tell me that they were living at her sister’s house in Cranbourne because they couldn’t get a rental house, Jake couldn’t find a job, and she was too scared to apply for a housing-commission house because she was worried that Human Services would be notified, and they would take away her kids because of their crowded living conditions.

  ‘Everybody thinks I am a bad mother,’ she told me. ‘But I’m trying my best … every rental I apply for has over a dozen applicants and we don’t even get a look in, and I think it’s because Jake has a criminal record.’ I offered to help in any way I could, including writing letters and organising for her to see a social worker, while quietly thinking to myself how appalling it was that there would no available housing in a low-budget suburb surrounded by hundreds of kilometres of cleared, sparsely populated farmland th
at, for reasons I could not understand, was not being used to build low-cost housing.

  His girlfriend never came back, but Jake would come over and smoke crystal meth now and then. To his credit, and for all his anger and problems, he never got hooked. Every time he came over, he thanked me for hearing out his girlfriend, and would always offer me cigarettes, or some of his meth. Politics was not discussed, but one day, when I had my back to him as I was watching television, he was talking about how great he was in bed and I replied, ‘I find that very hard to believe; if you had confidence in your own ability to fuck, perhaps you’d stop feeling the need to be such a fascist fuck.’ He cracked up laughing and proceeded to tell me, in great detail, how he could make a girl orgasm.

  As I turned around to look at him, I saw that, unbeknown to me, the daughter of one of Smithy’s clients had been standing at the door listening. I don’t know how old she was, but she was standing there in a school dress; once Jake finished his lengthy description, he turned and stared at her.

  About a month later, on a Saturday night (or perhaps I should say Sunday morning — it must have been at least 1.00am) I had given Smithy some cash, which I knew he had spent on drugs with Jake. But on this night, he hadn’t given me the dose, and I was very much in the mood for it. Instead of my drugs, I saw Jake standing in the front doorway dressed in a navy-blue hoodie, and black tracksuit pants covered in dried plaster.

  ‘Where are you going?’ I asked, which was really code for ‘where is my meth?’

  ‘Just off to work, honey,’ Jake replied.

  ‘Work? What do you mean work? You told me you haven’t had a job in years.’

  ‘Work — I’m going to work,’ he said again.

  ‘What are you talking about, work — I don’t understand.’

  ‘Now Luke, let me get this straight,’ Jake said. ‘You’ve studied law, you used to work as a journalist at the ABC, you have two degrees …’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘And you can’t work out what I’m doing?’

  ‘Um, no,’ I replied. ‘That’s why I’m asking.’

  ‘Has anyone ever told you that you’re a dumb fucker with a good CV?’

  ‘Just tell me where you’re going.’

  ‘To find you some common sense,’ he said.

  And he left, and soon thereafter I sunk down a couple of bongs, struggled to get a word of sense out of Smithy — who was, as he was so often, preoccupied with his face in the mirror — and promptly went to sleep.

  When I got up the next morning, there were three brand-new fridges and a new washing machine in the kitchen and dining area.

  ‘Jesus, what’s with all this new stuff?’ I asked.

  ‘You really are a dumb fuck,’ Jake replied.

  There is among all this a far more difficult reality to digest — the presence of kids.

  When Cassy McDonald was in her early twenties and dealing drugs — all day, every day — she had one trio of regular customers who would offer to clean her house in exchange for drugs.

  ‘A grandmother, a mother, and a daughter,’ she told me. ‘Gran was about sixty, the mum was thirty-nine, and the daughter was eighteen. I would give them a point of meth between them, and they’d clean my house from top to bottom, cut my lawn, and then go over it with nail clippers to ensure the blades were even, wash and iron all my clothes, even stuff that was brand new.’

  Cassy’s mother also used meth — as Cassy found out when she started using herself at the age of seventeen. ‘It all added up,’ she told me. ‘My mum has always had big mood swings — she always had people over, and she never slept.’

  Intergenerational meth use is more common that you might think. Geoff Munro from the Australian Drug Foundation told me that it’s relatively widespread, often involves grandparents, and is ‘deeply problematic’. Dianne Barker from St Luke’s Anglicare in Bendigo told the Victorian parliamentary inquiry that she had been involved in a case where a mother was facilitating the delivery of ice to her children while they were in residential care in St Luke’s.

  In other cases, the children of meth users don’t live long enough to share in the lifestyle. There are stories from all around the world of people and parents who slip over the edge and fall so deep into the pit they can no longer see the cliff from where they fell. These stories never cease to horrify. There is the 25-year-old Californian woman Jessica Adams, who after a 4-day meth bender returned home from a party ready to crash. And crash she did, with her 2-month-old son asleep next to her. At some stage during the night, she rolled over in her sleep, suffocating the baby to death. Across the border in Nevada, meth addict Bransen Locks was charged with shaking his girlfriend’s 1-year-old to death while on a bender. An autopsy would reveal the baby had ‘midline shift’ of the brain after the incident. In Wales, former Lostprophets frontman Ian Watkins said he was on crystal meth when he engaged in an online sex session via Skype in which he instructed a woman as she sexually abused her infant for his entertainment. He later sent another woman a message saying he wanted a ‘summer of filthy child porn’ and spoke of a desire to ‘cross the line’. In the Slovak Republic, a 4-month-old baby was left brain-dead after his parents gave him crystal meth to stop him crying. In Phoenix, Arizona, the 5-year-old daughter of a meth user tested HIV-positive, after the girl complained about her mother sticking her with needles in late 2014.

  Research published in the Child Abuse & Neglect journal reported that kids said their parents would become ‘aggravated’, ‘angry’, and fight a lot, and one third of children who had parents who used meth reported that their parents became violent. Other children complained about not getting meals or not being taken to school. Throw in paranoia, depression, and the three-day-long sleep marathons after a binge and things are bound to go wrong. While I certainly saw evidence of this in the way Beck treated her daughters, what I found more difficult to discern was the kind of parent Beck might have been if she didn’t take meth — it seems possible, given her self-centred reasons for having children, that she would have pretty much behaved that way anyway.

  Dr Keith Humphreys, professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at Stanford University, describes crystal meth as a ‘seductive’ and ‘powerful’ drug that affects the part of the brain that signals our most essential functions including safety, eating, sleeping, and taking care of children. It is his view that the drug ‘takes over’ and leads users to believe that meth can replace these essential functions — hence why, in many cases, kids are neglected by their meth-using parents: the drug is competing for ‘resources, attention, and love’ that would otherwise be given to them. Dr Humphreys claims he has made contact with child-protective services over the issue, and says that some children are being sexually abused by their meth-using parents — a consequence, he says, of meth destroying both empathy and sexual inhibitions.

  Academic Susan McFarlaine, who has researched families living with amphetamine problems, writes that amphetamine-using parents may become ‘withdrawn, self-focused, paranoid delusional’ and are likely to be preoccupied with ‘planning, obtaining, and using drugs as well as emotionally and physically affected by ATS use and the subsequent withdrawal and craving’.

  From my own experience, the effect of meth use on parenting is far more subtle and far harder to detect than outright abuse. I saw parents slowly lose interest in their children, their instincts apparently lost in the fantastical fog of regular use. One user I interviewed, Mark McNeil, told me he used to live for his daughter, and for his family, but they soon became not so much second-rate as utterly irrelevant in the face of his addiction. In typical meth-addict style though, even after his wife divorced him, and there was a court order preventing him from seeing his children, he didn’t believe that he had a problem.

  And how were Beck and Smithy’s children faring in this culture? Beck’s oldest daughter Hayley, who was now fifteen, seemed to bear the
brunt of Beck’s bad temper. If Beck wasn’t screaming and yelling or threatening violence, she was crying. Hayley spent more than half of her week staying at a friend’s house. Whenever I came over to stay, Beck and Hayley would have a terrible fight, and I would spend an hour talking it over with Hayley in her room, where she would sob and tell me how much she disliked her mother.

  ‘She’s worse when nobody is home, and it’s just us kids,’ Hayley said.

  I am not sure why I never said anything to Beck — I guess I wanted to be the peacemaker and I was usually glad it wasn’t directed at me. I wish now that I had said something: it was Hayley who gave me my first taste of unconditional love as an adult. When Hayley was a toddler, she cried when I left the house. I spent hours with her, talking to my feet after I drew faces on the soles of them, turning them into a cheery old-fashioned married couple called ‘Sally’ and ‘Bob’. Sometimes I wondered if the only reason I stayed with Beck was because of Hayley; I always felt that the more people she had involved in her upbringing, the better. Beck’s yelling and screaming was always worse on Christmas day — as if to pre-empt and quash any suggestion that she should have gone without pot that week, and spent a bit more on gifts. I always tried to supplement Alice and Hayley's Christmas with gifts; one year, when I bought Hayley an expensive camera for Christmas, Beck asked me why I nor anybody else bought her presents.

  Hayley was highly intelligent; she won awards at school, won premierships at sport, she was attractive and well-dressed, and was always in the popular gang at school — all of which was quite inexplicable for those who knew the circumstances in which she was raised.

  Many of those who played a part in Hayley’s upbringing — and there were quite a few of us who did — want to take credit for Hayley. The truth is, though, that she was just born with something special about her.