by Luke Davies
In between these two extremes were the medium times, which was most of the time, the day-to-day stuff, neither sickness nor bliss. Heroin was the oxygen that fueled our bodies through the days. Sometimes the idea of marriage carried over, like a kind of leakage, from the bliss times to the medium times.
We were at Candy’s parents for dinner. It’s fair to assume we were putting on the bullshit fronts about how good our lives were; it’s what we did in such situations. I was always working on some big plan or project. It was pleasant, like a dream, going to Candy’s parents’ place and eating nice food and drinking real wine, expensive wine.
Candy’s father, a gentle man in favor of a quiet life, would often bring the conversation around to the grandchildren he was so looking forward to.
“When’s that half forward coming?” he said. “We’ll have him playing for the Saints.”
Candy and I would look at each other, and what with the red wine and the meal and a little bit of heroin and the real love between us, it was easy to smile and feel real emotions.
“I think soon would be good,” Candy said.
“Me too,” I said. “I really want a baby.”
The four of us seated around the table were engulfed in a mixture of hope and belief—that the arrival of a baby would, must, clean up the mess we were in. The mess was generally unacknowledged and unspoken at gatherings like this, but if you concentrated, you could sense it in the air, like a faint smell.
“I must say one thing, though,” Candy’s father said. “I know it must seem old-fashioned for you younger generation, but I’d like to think that no grandson of mine will be born a bastard.”
I had no intention of ever not being with Candy. Deep in my heart it was inconceivable that we would ever separate. The mess our lives were in: that was the thing that would end.
“We’ve talked about getting married,” I said. “We think it’s a great idea. It’s just a matter of when, really.” It was rare to be able to speak from the heart with Candy’s parents.
“Exactly. It’s just a matter of when,” Candy’s mother said.
“Well, we’ll start planning it,” Candy said, and later in the week we really did begin the process of filling out the necessary forms and applications.
It wasn’t hard to plan. In the end we opted for low-key simplicity: a registry office wedding, a couple of witnesses, a couple of relatives. Anything larger seemed too daunting, and besides, we knew that money spent on any kind of lavish displays would be money not available to us in times of desperation.
“What about inviting your father?” Candy asked. “It might be a good chance to try to get in touch with him.”
“Candy, you know the story: any event in my life is a negative event in my father’s eyes. I don’t think he’d see a wedding as being any different.”
“Things change, you know.”
“I don’t think so. But maybe you’re right. Maybe Lex has got a number where I can reach him.”
“And what about Lex? Let’s invite him. It’d be great to see him again.”
“Yeah, well, I’ll definitely do that. That’s a good idea,” I said.
I did invite Lex, who couldn’t make it, and he did have a number where I could find my father, but in the rush of things, I never got around to making the call. It had been so long. It was too hard.
Candy’s father had a younger sister, Catherine, who lived in Sydney with her eleven-year-old daughter, Candy’s cousin Sarah. I’d met them once or twice back when things were beginning with Candy and me. We’d had leisurely dinners in the late summer dusk in Aunt Catherine’s leafy Stanmore backyard. Sarah idolized Candy, and possibly me too. Candy and I might have been, to Sarah, visitors from another world, where style and grace and freedom were the norm, where every drag of a cigarette glowed with a renegade beauty. We invited Catherine and Sarah and they were thrilled to accept.
We were married one winter Saturday. Obviously it was a big dope weekend. You want to be relaxed at your own wedding. But we were caught short of money, so Candy arranged a brothel shift for Friday night. Aunt Catherine and Sarah arrived at six that evening. They met us outside the warehouse and took us to dinner.
“Are you excited?” Sarah asked.
“Of course!” Candy said. “It’s my big day.”
“Our big day,” I corrected, and everyone laughed.
It was awkward making excuses—“I still have to go to my cleaning job, worse luck,” Candy said—and cutting the dinner a little short. I liked Catherine and Sarah a lot. Catherine probably knew what was going on but chose to operate with a discreet and nonjudgmental compassion. Sarah’s innocence and enthusiasm were charming, and under the circumstances, painful to watch. We walked them to their hotel and told them we’d pick them up in a taxi in the morning. Then Candy caught a cab to work and I wandered home and watched the Friday night movie, Alien.
Candy came home in the early hours with enough dope for a big morning hit and plenty of money for later. We set the alarm and grabbed a few hours’ sleep, allowing ourselves an hour to get ready. I felt a bit fuzzy but it wasn’t too hard to get out of bed on such a momentous day. I sat in my underpants, hunched over the coffee table as I squirted the water into the spoon. Some kind of speech welled up in me, a rare event but a sincere one.
“I don’t know about you, Candy,” I said, “but I’m doing this today, above all else, because I love you. Today really is special.” I pulled out the plunger from the barrel—it made a tiny, lovely pop—and languidly stirred the water to dissolve the heroin. “Today we’re making it formal. I want to be with you forever. I don’t want to use dope forever.”
Candy was naked, exquisitely beautiful. She walked across the room and straddled my lap, facing me. She stroked my temples and cheeks and kissed me once, a dry sweet kiss, on the forehead. “Forever and ever,” she said. “We’ll be together forever.”
She wrapped her arms around my neck and squeezed me to her chest. I sat there with my ear pressed against her skin, at the boundary between the world outside and the inside world of Candy. After a moment I pulled back. I grazed my fingers back and forth across her left breast, until her perfect pink nipple began to rise. My hand was swaying like seaweed in a rock pool washed by a gentle change of tide. Then I leaned forward and cupped her breast in my hand and wet the nipple with my lips. It was a fairy-tale kiss.
“Come on,” I said, “let’s have this dope. We don’t want to be late.”
We whacked up and then made some coffee and Candy had a shower while I lathered and shaved. I was well stoned, so the long slow rasp of the blade on my skin was at that moment the noise of all pleasure condensed.
I showered and dried and gelled my hair back and dressed in the tuxedo I’d rented. I felt wonderful.
“The ring,” Candy said, “have you got the ring?”
I felt for it in my pocket. “No worries,” I said, “the ring is safe.”
It was a plain rose gold band we’d bought for eighty dollars in a hockshop during the week and which, a few days after the wedding, regretfully, we would end up hocking for twenty dollars.
Candy had found a magnificent Spanish lace dress in a secondhand clothes shop. It was old and some of the white had yellowed, so she’d dyed it black. By chance, in another shop, she’d found a pair of elbow-length black lace gloves. Her long blond hair hung wildly, and bright red lipstick defined her pale face. She stood in the middle of the room and twirled around.
“How do I look?”
She took my breath away, a kind of Gothic flamenco baby doll.
“Amazingly beautiful,” I marveled. “I wish we owned a camera.”
She smiled. “Tonight, you will be my husband.”
I nodded my head a few times, savoring the wonderful thought. “And I guess that means you’ll be my wife.”
When we pulled up in the taxi to collect Aunt Catherine and Sarah from their hotel, Sarah’s eyes nearly popped out of her head.
“Your dress is
black!” she said, climbing into the back seat beside Candy, and Candy smiled and said, “I know.” Sarah grinned in astonished delight.
“It’s different,” Aunt Catherine said, deadpan. “But you do look beautiful.”
The registry office was in the Old Mint building, a musty colonial relic with an air of decaying grandeur, incongruously nestled amid the skyscrapers of the business district. Anne and Len were our witnesses, or bridesmaid and best man, if you could call them that in such a reduced ceremony. They were waiting out front with Candy’s parents when our taxi pulled up.
I saw Candy’s mother’s jaw drop as her daughter emerged from the taxi in her black Spanish dress. Her face seemed to ripple for an instant as the battle between the need to be angry and the need for composure took place.
“It had to be something, didn’t it?” she muttered to Candy as we all gathered around and made pleasantries.
Candy’s father kissed her and said, “You look like a princess, darling.”
“The wicked princess, yes,” Candy’s mother said, but she smiled and shook her head, as if accepting defeat, and we all went inside in a fairly good mood.
It was all very nonbaroque, the civil ceremony. There was a little spiel from the celebrant guy, the “in sickness and in health” stuff, and then the “Do you take this woman, do you take this man?”
“I do,” I said.
“I do,” Candy said.
I slipped the ring on her finger. I made a little prayer to the powers that be: Make this real. Make it a moment of change. Then we kissed and there were flashbulbs flashing. We signed our names a couple of times and Anne and Len did some signing too. We went outside into the overcast day and everyone took a few more photos and we smiled lamely and Candy’s mother said, “Well, back to our place for some drinks and a bite to eat.” It all seemed a strange letdown. I really just wanted to be alone with Candy.
But we went back for the tiny gathering. It was a little stifling, with classical music turned way down low in the background and the eight of us milling around sipping champagne or lemonade and nibbling at cheese on crackers. After a while I found that trying to make small talk was becoming difficult. I was the safekeeper of the dope and I had our syringes and a spoon down my socks. I figured it was time for a visit to the toilet.
I was trying to find a vein and had been in there for a few minutes when Candy came to the door.
“What are you doing in there?”
It wasn’t that I was trying to hide it, it’s just that I wanted to be alone for a minute. It wasn’t as if we both could have disappeared into the bathroom. But I could hear from her tone of voice that she didn’t like the idea of me being in there alone, making biased decisions about how to divide up the dope.
“I’m doing a shit.”
“You fucking liar,” she hissed, trying to keep her voice down. “Open the door!”
“Candy, go away.” It was hard trying to talk with my belt looped around my arm and held between my teeth.
“Open the fucking door!”
I could see the handle jiggling, the strain she was putting on the lock.
“I’ll be out in a minute,” I said, trying to sound pleasant.
Bingo! I got the spurt of blood into the syringe and pushed the plunger in. Candy was whispering, “If you don’t get out right now,” but it really didn’t matter. I cleaned the syringe and flushed the toilet for effect, out of habit.
“There you go,” I said, opening the door and smiling widely. I handed her the packet of dope and the spoon and a syringe. “There you go, wife. Have a nice blast.”
“You prick, husband.” She laughed and took the stuff off me and went into the bathroom and closed the door.
I went back out to the lounge room to be social. The next thing I knew, I was sitting on the couch, hopefully only a couple of minutes later, and Candy was shaking me awake.
“You must have fallen asleep,” she was saying, trying to gloss it over. “A little too much champagne, I think.”
“I’m so sorry,” I exclaimed, jumping up, straightening my suit. “It’s all the lead-up to the wedding. I haven’t had much sleep.”
The others halfheartedly entered the convenient fiction, mumbling, “Of course,” and, “Yes, I’m sure it must be nerve-racking,” but it was really time for us to make our excuses and good-byes before things got any worse.
“Thank you for everything,” we said to everyone.
We weren’t going on a honeymoon, and a wedding is a seminal event, so we figured we’d go get lots more dope, lash out more than usual. We’d talked Candy’s parents into giving us cash for a present—“We’re right for everything else,” we’d said—and Aunt Catherine had slipped us an envelope at the last minute too. There was also Candy’s money from the night before. We made the taxi driver stop while I got out and phoned Lester from a booth. Lester said come over, and we directed the taxi across the Westgate Bridge.
“You were fully nodded off back there, you idiot,” Candy said.
I cringed at the thought of it. “Shit. That’s a bad look. I remember sitting down and talking to Aunt Catherine. I must have just closed my eyes for a moment. Do you think they would have noticed?”
“Oh, of course not. They were only all standing there gawking at you like they’d just seen a snow leopard. Of course they didn’t notice, darling.”
I bit my bottom lip and shook my head slowly and looked out the window, almost groaning in embarrassment. Then I caught Candy’s eye and we both burst out laughing.
We made the taxi wait across the street from Lester’s place. Lester thought it was hilarious, us turning up in our wedding gear like that, and he gave us an extra hundred on top of what we bought.
“I like to see old-fashioned commitment,” he said. “Good on you both.”
We were hungry now. The taxi took us back across the bridge and we got off at a McDonald’s in the center of town, not too far from the warehouse. We attracted a few curious stares, and I guess maybe it was a bit strange being dressed like that at McDonald’s. We didn’t give a fuck.
I had a Quarter Pounder with cheese, a chocolate shake, medium fries, and an apple pie. I liked taking the lid off the shake and dipping the fries in. You got the salt and sugar tastes at the same time. Candy had a cheeseburger, a strawberry shake, and a large fries.
We sat in the smoking section. Normally we bought Horizons since they were the cheapest, but today was our wedding and we’d splurged on Stuyvesants, the international passport.
We were the coolest people in McDonald’s.
We had a lot going for us. We’d found the secret glue that held all things together. We were young and beautiful. We were married now. We were about to go home, get out of our monkey suits, get naked, and get wasted.
WALLET
“Eh, Nick, how you going?”
“Hello, my son,” Fat Nick replied from behind the counter. “What you like today?”
“Chocolate milk shake, thanks, Nick. Extra chocolate.” This was not a code. I had a sweet tooth, and for a long time sugar was the mainstay of my diet. Just being in the café was the code.
Nick busied himself making the milk shake. Candy waited in the car outside. I sat on the stool in front of the cash register, tapping my fingers on the Formica. Nick’s short-order cook, Little Nick, threw hamburger patties onto the grill. It was a beautiful Melbourne Sunday, and I almost felt that I didn’t really hate all the straight families who’d come down to St. Kilda for a gelato and a stroll.
Nick took the ice cream scoop from its milky rinse water and lowered his arm into the freezer. He looked at me and raised his eyebrows in a question.
“A one-spot,” I murmured.
He nodded, no worries, and the day became even more beautiful than a moment before. There were other people, of course, better people, really, but this was quick, convenient, and reliable. Candy had gotten home from a night shift at about four A.M. and we’d shared the last of the dope and gone to sleep.
Now it was midday. We had oodles of money, so we could ring Kojak on the pager later. We weren’t really sick, but it was always nice to get the day started as soon as possible after waking up. So Nick’s café was it.
Fat Nick hitched the milk shake onto the stainless steel blender and left it frothing as he leaned down to the fridge door. He rummaged around and popped back up, pulling the milk shake off and placing it on the counter. He took a straw and speared it into the shake.
“Anything else?” he asked, ever the normal milk bar proprietor.
“That’s it, thanks.”
“Two dollars twenty,” he said.
I opened my palm to show him a folded hundred-dollar note. As he took it he dropped the small packet into my hand. It was wrapped in foil first, then tightly bound in Glad wrap. I put it in my mouth, lodging it up the back between my cheek and my lower teeth.
The hundred went into his pocket. He pressed some buttons on the register and pulled out a random selection of small coins and gave them to me. He always liked to make a show of giving you your change. I liked the way I never actually paid for the milk shake.
Among those of us lucky enough to be okayed by Fat Nick for heroin purchasing, the urban myth went around about how the dope was actually kept in the hamburger meat, and how once an unsuspecting (real) customer had bitten into a nest of foilies in the middle of his cheeseburger.
“What’s this?” he’d exploded, spitting a mouthful of meat and bun onto his plate and holding the burger open for Fat Nick to inspect.
Fat Nick hadn’t missed a beat, merely stepped around the counter, swooped up the plate, and ordered Little Nick to make another burger. “With the works, hurry up!” Pulling fifty dollars from his pocket, he’d thrust it upon the hapless customer.
“For the inconvenience,” he said, as if it were a hair or a fly and not seven hundred dollars worth of heroin.
Personally, though, I thought the story was merely the product of the wishful thinking of our small but motley circle of privileged buyers. It was certainly a hamburger I’d like to buy.
