The Ice Age

by Luke Williams

  So a few nights later, I still believed this, though I’d also had periods where I believed it to be a delusion, and longer periods where I completely forgot about it. But on this night, as soon as Kristie walked in the door, I looked her up and down, thinking that Nathaniel had done a pretty good job at becoming a woman, except for his shoes, and so I walked up to her and said, ‘Everything looks okay, but I don’t like your shoes.’

  Then I called my Mum again, who once again talked me down, and then sent me a stack of emails telling me that I needed to get off ice and that it was destroying my brain. In return, I told her that she needed to apologise for kicking me out of home, as well as for ignoring the bullying I was going through in high school When she refused, I refused to stop taking the drug. And on it went.

  One thing that didn’t really change, though, was my belief that I was on The Journey — that some kind of creative discovery was in store for me, and that I was getting closer to realising it.

  Smithy would usually ask me if I wanted meth when he was going to score. When I was trying to keep down my doses, and sometimes even succeeding, I would say ‘no, thank you’, but would often, much to his annoyance and long after the meth had arrived, change my mind, and ask if I could have some. The following happened on one of those nights.

  ‘You bloody always do this, Luke,’ Smithy said. ‘If you want some, you need to ask me in advance.’

  I apologised, saying I would pay him back, and he agreed to give it to me.

  ‘There’s only one issue,’ he said. ‘There are no fresh needles; you’re going to have to get a used one out of The Bag.’

  ‘The Bag’ was a large, sturdy bag that sat at the top of Smithy’s wardrobe. It was a suitably dreadful jumble of freshly used, hepatitis-inducing needles, bloodied swabs, and bent spoons. For future reference, if you ever see a bent spoon with white stains on it, stay away; it is not something you should be using for your Petit Miam.

  I kept reaching my hand in and then pulling it out again, as if I had dropped my wedding ring in a bag full of mousetraps. I finally took the plunge, and laid my hand on one of the 50 or so needles in the bag. It had a red cover on it, just like every single other one, and was surrounded by bloodied cotton swabs, and, for some reason, it seemed like the one to choose — who knows, it might have even been mine.

  So I carefully picked it out and unscrewed the lid; when I looked down the shaft, I could see a glob of dried blood in the end — it looked like something not even a mosquito would eat, and I almost vomited. Nevertheless, I went in the kitchen and started washing out the needle. No matter how hard I squeezed, and how much bleach I put in the bottom of the syringe, I could not get that last remaining bit of dried blood out of it — it was as if it had been painted on. Then there was a knock at the door.

  You can’t see directly into the kitchen from the front door, so I wasn’t worried until I heard Smithy’s mother’s voice.

  Oh no, I can’t let her see me like this; she thinks I am one of the few decent people hanging around with her son, I thought.

  Panicked, I ran into the garage with the syringe and rushed to put the lid on; at that moment, my fingers slipped and the tip of the needle went straight into the top of my index finger. A surprising amount of blood flowed for a good ten minutes while I hid in the main bathroom until she left.

  A few nights after the dirty-syringe episode, Smithy was listening to triple j loudly in the lounge room. For the most part, the biggest threat as perceived in my psychosis was the radio — particularly triple j. I would think that Smithy was texting them and telling them what I was doing, that the songs were about me, and that the presenters on the radio were doing impersonations of me.

  On the Friday night at the end of the same week, Smithy had two female visitors to the house, who had visited before. After they left, I started to wonder if they were who they said they were. Why were they so worried? Were they actually relatives of mine who had been sent in to see if I was okay?

  While I was sitting there thinking about this, Smithy walked in, his Popeye-zombie eye flaring again, and said he had given them the last of his meth for free. He did this, apparently, because one of the women had sent him a sext telling him that she and her sister were about to take a bath together.

  This text message struck me as being part of their subterfuge, and added to my desire to work out whom they really were. I asked him first if I could text them, and he said no, very angrily, and then I asked if they were prostitutes. The answer was, again, no. Not having my usual capacities to just let things lie, I then asked him — relatively innocently and probably naively — whether he thought that maybe they were winding him up in order to get free crystal meth.

  ‘Are you sure they’re not just manipulating you, Smithy? I mean, do these girls ever pay for the drugs you give them?’

  ‘That’s none of your fucking business.’

  ‘Well, I just find it highly unlikely that two sisters would get in a bath together, and that the only time they talk sexy to you is when they’re half an hour away.’

  ‘Well, nobody wants to fuck you, Luke. You smell like shit, and why don’t you go and have a look at yourself in the mirror?’

  Which, I think, is probably a good opportunity, for the sake of clarity, to explain that I was experiencing a mix of psychotic ideas, clear ideas that were based on fact, and things I was not, and am still not, completely sure about.

  My psychotic ideas

  •There was a paedophile ring in town being run out of the Coffee Club.

  • My ex Nathaniel had been turned into a woman who now visited the house.

  • I had been chosen to become a famous music performer.

  • Smithy and my parents had been trying to kill me.

  • Everything I had been seeing on Facebook was about me in secret codes.

  • People from other countries were communicating with me via telepathy.

  • People were talking about me on the radio and television in a nasty way.

  Things I wasn’t sure about

  • Was Smithy trying to get me to do things sexually while I was off my face, even though I told him no?

  • How upset was Beck about this sexual attention? Did she feel she’d become a third wheel in the friendship?

  • How many times did Nathaniel cheat on me that I did not know about, and did Smithy ever come on to him?

  • How damaged were the kids by all of this, and how much did they understand about what was going on?

  • Were these women manipulating Smithy to get drugs off him?

  • Was using crystal meth making me more creative? Or was I destroying my brain? Or both?

  • Had I been the victim of a lot of bad things in my life, or did I have a persecution complex?

  • Was I actually on some kind of Journey, or was this all due to psychosis?

  All of this was floating around my head on this night, and I guess — as psychotics do — I had a need to weave it all together so that it made some kind of sense. As I was doing that, a guy named Jake — who was a frequent visitor to the house — knocked on the door, came right in, and sat on the bed next to Smithy. His talk eventually moved to a pretty blonde 16-year-old girl he’d seen in the house, and he complained about how unfair he thought it was that sex with younger teenagers was unlawful, before launching into a story about his own sexual experiences, at the age of twelve, with his neighbours, in their thirties at the time.

  I wasn’t sure whether he was joking or making it up or what, but I left the room. In the garage, trying to put it out of my mind, I started writing poems. I couldn’t stop thinking that there something going on, though, and this led to me thinking about the Coffee Club paedophile ring, and Nathaniel, and I had this urgent feeling that there was a secret for me to uncover.

  Why was Smithy constantly talking about sex? Why was he constantly ma
sturbating in front of me, even though I didn’t want him to? There seemed to be a kind of conspiracy, and then it hit me: one night, years and years ago, my ex John was visiting on the same night as Nathaniel. We were lying in Beck’s bed watching a horror movie, when Nathaniel left the room because he was scared. When I got up the next day, there was a strange vibe around the house: looking back on it now, I was convinced that all four of them had slept in the lounge room, and that John and Nathaniel had taken turns having sex with Smithy. I even believed they have given me a sleeping tablet to make it happen. Then when Nathaniel dumped me, Smithy kicked me out of Beck’s house, and all this so he could turn Nathaniel into a transsexual and keep sleeping with him. It all made a terrible kind of sense, and so I said to Smithy, straight out, ‘Why did you sleep with Nathaniel?’

  He looked at me, and I looked at him. He seemed puzzled, and I stood over him as he sat on his bed; I looked at his soft, supple neck and his eye sockets, and I felt my elbows and my fingers and my fists, and I wondered: How could he have done this to me? How could he have told Nathaniel to break up with me just so he could turn him into a transsexual to satisfy his weird sexual appetites? I could imagine Smithy whispering about it to Nathaniel when I went to sleep.

  ‘I finally worked out what you’ve been up to,’ I said. ‘Nathaniel dumped me at the same time you guys stopped talking to me — this all seems a bit convenient to me.’

  He was looking at me curiously, guiltily; he had even stopped masturbating.

  ‘How could you do this to me?’ I asked.

  ‘Do what?’ he replied. And the more I asked, and the more I stood over him, and the closer I got, the more he looked scared and ashamed, and started checking out the window as if he thought I might have a gang waiting for him outside.

  And so I moved closer, ready to attack, and I said: ‘For the last time, why did you fuck Nathaniel?’

  On that he stood up, raced towards me unexpectedly, and said, ‘Don’t you fucking threaten me, you piece of shit. I could beat the living fuck out of you without even trying.’ I went from homicidal to terrified of being killed in instant, and in that same instant, I realised I was being paranoid and that I had upset him.

  By then he’d kicked me out of his room, but I became confused. I couldn’t remember what had just happened or why he had closed the door or why he was angry. I felt terribly lonely standing there outside his door; I wondered if he had tried to kill me, and I really, really felt like a bong. I called through the closed door, ‘Please, Smithy, you are the only person I have left in my life, please let me in.’

  ‘Fuck off,’ he said, and upon hearing this I felt deeply wounded, and scared. He could easily crush my face in if he wanted to.

  ‘Please, Smithy I’m sorry, I feel suicidal because of what happened.’

  ‘I don’t have to put up with this fucking shit from you, Luke.’

  ‘What shit?’

  He opened the door slightly so I could just see his face and said, ‘Stop stealing my fucking pot. I know you’ve been stealing it for months on end.’

  I walked outside to an unremarkable grey day, the cold wind tingling my skin, and started thinking again that maybe it was possible that Smithy had slept with Nathaniel, that maybe he shut the door because he was guilty.

  After wandering in circles for hours, I got on the train and headed for the local hospital; I didn’t have a Myki card, but when the woman at the gate saw the expression on my face, she opened the gate and said, ‘I hope you’re okay’. Otherwise I don’t remember the train trip, and I don’t remember walking to the hospital.

  But I do remember walking into the hospital, into an empty emergency waiting room with hard white floors. I remember telling the woman at reception that I needed help. The woman was meek and mild, and told me to take a seat. Not long after, I was taken into a small windowless room with a man who appeared to be a typical nerd, apart from the full-sleeve tattoos on both arms. He asked me a range of questions, looking at me with dark eyes and through dark glasses, about what I had been doing, what I had been thinking about, why I was doing what I was doing. For the first time in a very long time I remembered what I really was doing: ‘I moved into the house to research a story. I’m a journalist; I just got a bit too caught up in it.’ He told me he also used to be a journalist, for a small regional newspaper in England, and he asked me what I have been doing for money. I explained that I had still been working, and he asked me who for, how much they paid me, and how often I wrote for them. The answer seemed to annoy him in some way, and he told me that I didn’t need to see a doctor because I was still functional, and if I didn’t suffer from psychosis outside of meth use, I needed to see a drug counsellor not a doctor.

  ‘I’ve been here before,’ I told him. ‘A few years ago, I came when I was clean and feeling suicidal and you let me stay—’

  He cut in and said ‘Yes, I know, I have the notes here.’

  He asked what the hospital could do for me, and I said I didn’t know. He gave me a card and told me to go to a drug counselling drop-in service, which wouldn’t be open for another two days. When I asked for a Valium, his response was ‘We’re not giving you any more drugs’. He told me there was nothing they could do for me, and left the room. I returned to the admissions desk and told them that I felt suicidal. I was finally admitted, but then doctor after doctor came up to tell me there was nothing they could do for me and that I had to leave. I believe I was obviously in need of help — I was talking to myself and experiencing some mildly psychotic delusions (such as telling staff that my mum had dementia and telling triage I had been communicating with people via telepathy) mixed with moments of genuine clarity. I had been feeling suicidal all morning, and the hospital was the only place for me. The doctors I saw told me that being in the hospital was making my condition worse, and that there was nothing they could do. I know this might seem a bit unbelievable — that I could be begging for help in that state and the medical staff refused to help — but turning away suicidal and psychotic patients, especially drug-affected ones, is a surprisingly common problem in Australian hospitals.

  In retrospect, it’s not clear why the hospital didn’t simply provide me with a low dose of anti-psychotics and keep me for observation (as the relevant methamphetamine treatment guidelines suggest a health-care worker should do). It is tempting to conclude that the staff lacked experience and expertise in dealing with those experiencing crystal-meth-induced agitation (and weren’t trained on the relevant guidelines); however, there have been a number of cases reported by the Victorian coroners court and by plaintiff law firms that show that several people have committed suicide or assaulted somebody after being released from the hospital I visted, in some cases while still showing signs of psychosis.

  There are a number of ways of looking at this issue. First and foremost is the lack of access to mental-health services within the community, which means people suffering acute psychological distress often end up in under-resourced emergency rooms full of medical staff with no formal training in mental-health care. The local drug-counselling centre that the staff referred me to wasn’t open until Monday (I was at the hospital on a Saturday).

  Second, many people who come to a hospital emergency room feeling suicidal have reported that they don’t feel they are treated adequately, and sometimes not even treated respectfully. In December 2014, the mental-health advocacy group Sane Australia released a report they conducted with the University of New South Wales. The report was based on interviews with 31 Australians who had made attempts on their own life. Eighty per cent of those interviewed reported that their hospital experience was ‘negative’, and a third of the study sample felt their concerns were not taken seriously. The Guardian Australia covered the release of the report, and quoted Patrick McGorry: ‘[I]t is all too common that the patient who made an attempt on their life, who is desperate and in emotional pain, turns up and is seen by emergency-d
epartment staff as a nuisance rather than as someone with a life-threatening emergency.’

  Third, people who experience both mental illness and drug addiction frequently fall through service gaps because they don’t quite fit either category. Surveys from the Australian Injecting and Illicit Drug Users League in 2011 found that of a 300-person sample of illicit-drug users, 60 per cent of them said they had experienced discrimination at a hospital, making it the second most likely site of discrimination after police stations. I had attended this hospital previously, in 2009, when I was feeling suicidal, and I was given an anti-psychotic and allowed to stay the night. I was also given counselling. When I arrived on drugs, I was — and I hate to say this — more or less told to fuck off.

  Fourth, medical and hospital staff can tend towards ‘black-and-white’ thinking and be incredibly defensive about the quality of their care. Several mental-health rights groups have told me it is common that after a complaint is made by a mental-health patient, the hospital will buckle down and go into legal adversarial mode: denying that anything is wrong with the system, or that they made any sort of mistake, be it individual or systemic. And why is this? It’s possible that it happens because a mentally unwell complainant is unlikely to be believed no matter how legitimate their complaints. On the release of the Sane Australia report, Sally McCarthy, an associate professor and the immediate past president of the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine, said that complaints about the standard of psychiatric care in emergency departments were ‘ignorant’.