Candy

by Luke Davies

  Candy was there, really worried, and O’Brien was over too. She’d called him in a panic when I hadn’t shown after a couple of hours.

  “You fucking idiot,” she said, and hugged me.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said.

  I collapsed onto the couch.

  “O’Brien is going to lend us a couple of hundred. He had a good win at the races.”

  Getting arrested was a hassle, of course, but at that moment I felt the purest thrill go through my shoulder blades. I sighed and smiled.

  “You’re a good friend, O’Brien,” I said. “This is really good of you.”

  “It’s nothing,” he said.

  “I’m serious. I’ve had a fucker of an afternoon. This is good. If you were a girl I’d say I love you.”

  O’Brien laughed.

  I knew the dope was coming now, to wash away the GPO, so you really could say that love, just then, was the closest thing to what I felt for O’Brien.

  But even O’Brien was concerned about us.

  “You guys should give up,” he suggested.

  “We’re going to, soon,” I said. Or maybe Candy said it. “We’re going overseas, you know?”

  DRYING OUT

  It took me a long time to realize that home detox, like home-delivered food, is not the best way to do things. But of course, mostly you just learn things the hard way. There was an awful long time when I was naive. Candy too, I guess, and everyone else using in our frantic little world, which we thought was the only world there was. A black naiveté.

  The problem with home detox was that it felt a little informal. This made the rules loose. You could break loose rules. What would start with the best intentions would drift into that gray area where sickness overrides everything. And there we’d go again, off and running and trying to ignore the hard fact of another failed attempt at coming down.

  A few months down the track, we’d do it all again, try and stop. And each time, the using in between became more fierce, more intense. Each time, our dedication grew: use well. Avoid detoxing. Detoxing is bad. Detoxing is more unpleasant than almost anything, and anyway, detoxing doesn’t work. You always use in the end.

  But then there’d be a bust or a drought or a rip-off or some evil event that would interfere with the flow of things. We’d go through the horror and panic of not having dope for twelve or twenty-four hours, and this would give us some kind of startling glimpse into the precarious nature of our dependence.

  After such times, after we finally got some dope and could relax and act like—feel like—we loved each other, the bravado would course through our veins and we’d make our heroic plans to stop.

  The real horror was that sometimes we’d actually commence these plans.

  We were living in Port Melbourne now. Long since evicted from the warehouse. After one miserable midwinter stretch, we decided to aim for a Thursday afternoon start to a new home detox program. We stocked up on pills, a little something for every occasion—I’m talking sedation here—and the cheapest palatable alcohol short of metho that we could find, which was a few flagons of four-dollar port.

  Not for the first time, Candy said, “This one’s gotta be it.”

  We knew it would be a bad, hard stretch of a week.

  On Thursday morning we had the last of our dope. We bundled up and went for a slow ramble down around the bay, where the empty factories gave way to windswept vacant fields, and the rusty cargo ships left on their long haul across the water to Tasmania.

  Even though we were stoned, our guts were churning with sadness and fear. Mostly fear, which lots of heroin will turn into sadness, which feels like a vague nausea. It’s like how purple and green will make brown. We were scared; the thought of not having dope would make anyone scared.

  We walked along past the old seamen’s mission, a derelict building we’d once broken into in search of furniture. The dirty beach began to peter out and we walked around the point through a field of industrial rubble. We sat on a rock with our backs to the city and looked across the oily water to the distant power plants at Altona.

  We were tired as well as sad and scared. I guess we were able to feel our tiredness because, having planned to detox, we didn’t have to run around and do the things we usually had to do, all the hard work that goes into maintaining supply. All that was going to stop this afternoon.

  We sat on the rock and we were silent for a long while. I was remembering another time, a better time, on a day like this. It seemed like a lifetime ago, when we’d first moved to Melbourne. We were really in love and had oodles of hope. The future was a thing that gleamed.

  That day we’d walked out along to the end of the rocks past St. Kilda Pier. They were huge black basalt rocks like the one we were sitting on now. It was a winter’s day like this one, sunny and windy and weird. We’d sat on a big rock well away from the view of the crowds on the pier and Candy had buried her head in my woolen overcoat and sucked my cock, gently and slowly. A police helicopter flew overhead and tilted to check us out and hovered there for a while. I didn’t give a fuck. I felt secure and warm, and as I came I reached my arm high in the air and gave them the finger.

  That was all those years ago. Now here we were without radiance. The air seemed brittle and empty, like it was hard to breathe.

  “I really think we can do this, Candy,” I said.

  She reached over and squeezed my hand. She had her knees drawn up and her head buried in them and I knew she was crying. It made me feel awkward and stupid. The only solution I knew to tears and awkwardness was heroin, more of it, lots of it. Without any gaps that would let things in. Maybe this is why it was so hard to stop.

  I rubbed my hand along her neck and tried to massage her shoulder blades through her pullover.

  “I know it’ll be hard,” I said. “But I’m sure it’s like a bridge, and once we cross it, it’ll be okay.”

  Candy sniffled and looked up and smiled at me, and the hard sun made her pinned pupils all but disappear. It was like looking into a pale blue mist. I felt so unhappy trying to smile back at her. Even heroin couldn’t quell the despondence, the foreboding.

  I pulled her toward me and she slumped into my arm. Her head lay on my chest and she continued to cry softly.

  “Can you describe what’s over the other side of the bridge?” she asked.

  I stared at a container ship coming around the west side of the bay from the city docks. The ship was connected to a world that could answer the question, How do men build ships? How the fuck do they bother?

  “I don’t think I can exactly describe it,” I said. “But whatever it is, it’s a place where things aren’t so fucked up all the time. Bad things don’t happen so much. And we’ll have money. And we’ll own lots of nice stuff. And we can have a baby and this time he’ll live. And we can get back to loving each other properly, without all this bullshit in between.”

  My mind was drifting into the unfamiliar territory of hope.

  “Across the bridge I guess it’s greener, and more peaceful. And we’ll have good friends and we’ll know who they are.”

  “No cops,” Candy mumbled through her tears.

  “No cops. If the cops come to the door, I’ll say, ‘What do you want? What the fuck is your problem?’ Cops can’t push us around across that bridge. Cops can’t come into our house and treat us like shit. Maybe you could do some drawing, painting, paint nice things. Maybe we’ll live in the country, grow vegetables, feed the chickens.

  “Or maybe we’ll go live in Thailand—and not use. Live in an Asian country, nice and cheap, eat great food and chill out for a year or two. Thailand would be great if we didn’t use. Or the Kashmir, or the Ivory Coast, or Paris. Or all of them.

  “What else? I think we could go canoeing, you know, whitewater rafting, stuff like that, mountain climbing, hang gliding, whatever. It’ll be nice to get healthy, sleep well, not have drugs in our system. I’m sure it must feel good.”

  I felt fucking
dreadful, in that everything I felt was dread. A bundle of nerves and need. I stroked her hair in silence for a while. “I love you, Candy.”

  She was really bawling now. She lifted her head from my chest and her makeup was streaked and her nose was blocked and her lips were quivering. Her shoulders heaved with her sobs, and the words came out in short bursts.

  “We really have to do this. We have to do it this time.”

  “We will, baby, we will. We’ll really fuckin’ do it this time.”

  The container ship was now passing where we sat. It was only about a hundred yards away and it seemed huge and silent and empty. A lone seaman waved lazily to us from the foredeck. He probably thought we were happy. It was ridiculous but I waved back. He came from the real world, which we were about to try to enter. I felt obliged to return the gesture.

  We sat there for about an hour, which is always long enough to feel the heroin begin to fade. The downhill slide, when it starts to creep away from you, and you wind up tight like a coil as the need for action and money grows. Not today. But I was winding up tight with a different kind of nervousness and anticipation. Detox. Dry out. Motherfucker. Motherfucker. Bonebreaker.

  “I suppose we should start getting back,” I said. I wanted to get home and get comfortable a few hours before the early stages of the misery began.

  We trudged through Port Melbourne and spent most of the last of our money on a carton of cigarettes and some chocolate bars and cookies. We knew we wouldn’t be able to eat much more than sugar over the next few days.

  By three o’clock a bitter wind was howling down Heath Street, and it was pretty much time for another shot and we weren’t about to have one. The pits of our stomachs were laden with gloom, and underneath the gloom was a ferocious panic wanting to burst out.

  It was time for secondary medication.

  We lugged the TV upstairs and set it up on a table at the end of the bed. We had ashtrays and water and cookies, and talcum powder for when we began to sweat. We poured some port, and downed three Valium each.

  The children’s programs had started on TV. I couldn’t stomach that so I propped myself up on some pillows and tried to read a book while I could still concentrate. I drank a few glasses of the port, and after twenty minutes or half an hour the Valium were beginning to come on and I was feeling wobbly and even a little comfortable. The heroin hadn’t completely gone away yet.

  The first hours drifted on. The day turned dark and we watched the news and occasionally Candy read me a clue from the crossword. We watched a couple of lame American sitcoms. We were a little drunk, but it was not so much the surplus of alcohol as the absence of narcotics that was beginning to invade our minds.

  At eight-thirty Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds came on. The cars were cool and it was kind of creepy. Apt too. I began to think it was hysterical rats rather than seagulls that were starting to screech and peck at me and Candy.

  Dealing with the commercial breaks was hard without heroin, but all in all I liked the way a half-decent movie could make a couple of hours go by a touch faster. Or more to the point, a fraction less slowly.

  We had to be careful with our pills, save them for when we would really need them, in a day or two. But at the same time we liked to set up that psychological buffer zone where you overload in case there’s a bad patch ahead. Anyway, the port was blurring our judgment a bit. We took two more Valium each at about eleven.

  The midnight movie was A Hill in Korea, starring Stanley Baker. I was really drunk and pilled by now and I was drifting into restless five-minute fragments of sleep. I wanted to continue this trend and get some sleep the first night, and I figured a blackout would be the best way to go. We skolled two more glasses of port each and turned off the TV just as the Koreans were shelling the shit out of the temple where the Brits were holed up.

  It worked. I slept for five hours. The first night was over. I woke at six to a hideous Friday. The room was cold and my bones ached. My bladder was full and my mouth was dry. My head was thick and fuzzy. The first thing I thought about when I opened my eyes was heroin. That was normal, but usually I had some, or some coming, one way or another.

  I knew that only heroin would bring me to a bearable state of consciousness. I thought if I didn’t move I would hurt less. I lay there for an hour, willing myself to go back to sleep. But all I got were bad waking dreams flitting behind my eyes.

  Candy was starting to breathe shallowly beside me and I knew that soon she’d wake and join me in the day’s misery. She rolled over toward me and her face looked unattractive and swollen.

  I went downstairs and out the back to piss. We got the house for cheap rent because it only had an outside toilet. My breath made steam in the air. Willy, the alley cat who’d recently adopted us, followed me out, and as I stood pissing she arched her back and rubbed her flanks in and out against my shins in a figure eight. My feet were like ice and it was nice to have the warmth of her fur down there.

  In the kitchen I opened a tin and dished out some cat food in Willy’s bowl. The smell of it caught me as I leaned down. Cat food. What is that stuff? I retched once, stumbled over to the sink and vomited over the dirty dishes. I leaned with my head on the metal edge of the sink and panted, watching my saliva fall to the floor.

  I ran the tap and tried to shuffle the dishes around and get my spew down the sink hole. It wasn’t working so I had to take them all out and rinse them one at a time, stacking them on the counter. When I finished, the sink was clear and I vomited again, and this time it was easy to run it down the drain.

  Candy was awake, lying in bed smoking a cigarette. Big black saucer pupils, like I hadn’t seen in a while.

  “How are you?” she asked. It was clearly a rhetorical question. I answered it anyway.

  “Fucked. I just vomited.”

  “This is bad,” she said, overstating the obvious. “This is gonna be fucking awful.”

  “We’ll be all right, Candy,” I said. “Let’s have some Doloxene and Serepax.”

  We wolfed down a mouthful of pills. Our skin was starting to crawl so we tried to arrange the sheets and blankets in such a way that we didn’t touch each other. It was a bad time for TV, of course. No one should ever have to be awake between six and nine in the morning, unless Ren and Stimpy is on. We lay there as the day picked up and the wind began to rattle the windows.

  I couldn’t get back to sleep. The pills made me groggy but there was a gnawing hole in my stomach. I tried to read but my eyes were beginning to sting and water. I drank a couple of mouthfuls of water and ate a Chocolate Weston cookie. It tasted like cardboard. Mostly I stared at the ceiling, willing the day to speed up and go away.

  All this happened in a state of personal pain. I guess it was a similar morning for Candy too.

  We tossed and turned in bed as our body temperatures fluctuated wildly. One moment Candy would be buried beneath the blankets shivering uncontrollably, and I’d fling the sheets away and lie there sweating and panting. Five minutes later our roles would be reversed. Every minute seemed like an hour.

  At ten-thirty A.M. the American soaps began and we tried to allow them to distract us. It was hard going. Everything was becoming so extremely uncomfortable that it was hard to stare at any one thing for very long, even a TV. Most of all my hands were uncomfortable. My fingertips felt like they were going to burst. I tried to shake them, to get the demons out, but everything was uncoordinated and my arms and hands just went limp.

  By midday we were starting to sweat pretty much all of the time. This is when the real tricky stuff began, because we knew we still had a few bad days to go and it was important to keep the sheets as dry as possible. The sweat would come quickly, with a hot flush down the body. It was like wearing a thin layer of slime. A while later your temperature would change and the sweat would turn cold and really fuck you about. It smelled strange too.

  Every now and again we’d have to get out of bed, slowly and painfully, and wipe each other down with a to
wel. We’d wipe off the slime and shower ourselves with talcum powder and sprinkle a little on the mattress where we lay and jump back under the sheets before we froze. Then we’d feel a little warmth and comfort for four or five minutes.

  Once or twice during the long delirium of the afternoon I raised myself up from the bed and stared out the window. The street seemed quiet. A workman parked his van. A mother walked by pushing a baby carriage. I found this world perplexing. I sank back down beneath the sheets and tried not to think about anything. But it was now more than twenty-four hours since our last shot. It was hard to focus on anything other than the terrible fact that sat like a stone in our stomachs.

  We kept downing pills. They dulled the edges a bit, but by midafternoon the stomach cramps were cutting in. I took a few Brufen to counteract this but I knew from past experience that there was nothing for it but to weather the cramps for a couple more days at least.

  The nicest thing in the world would have been a back massage, but we both knew that neither of us could possibly have done that for the other. My joints ached, my bones ached, my muscles ached. There was nowhere that did not ache. My muscles throbbed too, like my head, which was finally following the rest of my body into the pain zone. My skin itched and I was never comfortable, not for a minute.

  We tried not to talk about heroin. Lack of. Like water circling toward a drain, this was the natural place the conversation would go. We had to battle against that flow. Say positive things instead.

  “Ohh Jesus,” I moaned. “This is fucked. This is major league fucked.” I rolled over and lifted myself up on an elbow. “Listen, Candy. You know, if we do this properly, we only have to do it once.”

  “What time is it?” she asked feebly.

  “A quarter past three.”

  “Friday?”

  “Friday.”

  “How much longer? I can’t stand it.”

  “The worst’ll be over soon,” I soothed. “Maybe if we can get through tonight, it’ll start getting better tomorrow.”

  Of course it was bullshit. But you had to cling to something on that first full day. The second and the third days, the fourth at a pinch, would be the worst.