Candy

by Luke Davies

  The bank had given Candy and me Visa cards when the loan for the farm was approved. I hated the idea of using a card with my own name on it, not the least because I had no money to make repayments. It had sat in my wallet, unused, for months, like a terrible harbinger of yuppiedom.

  So I asked Kay if she’d buy my plane ticket to Sydney, and again, without missing a beat, she said sure. I asked her if she’d pick me up at the airport, and she said sure to that too. Maybe she was missing the old days a bit, all that drama and action.

  Whatever. I walked back to the farm and threw some clothes and a couple of books into a bag. Candy said, “Where are you going?”

  “It’s none of your business,” I said. Then I left the house and walked down the driveway and started hitchhiking to the train station. I wanted Candy to follow me. She didn’t. I wanted to cry but I clenched my jaw instead. I thought about picking up my methadone for one last time, but I was so angry and confused that it didn’t seem important anymore.

  Within an hour I was on a train, heading for Melbourne and the airport. When the train picked up speed I started reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a book of which absolutely everything now escapes me other than its pervasive odor of sadness. The carriage clanked and rattled. I glanced outside. It occurred to me that the landscape was moving away from Candy.

  As a drug addict, the days had always been fairly predictable: scam, get the dope, scam, get the dope. Now I felt I was balancing on the edge of a cliff in a thick fog. I had no clear notion of what lay in front; I was all spastic legs and flailing arms. I no longer knew what I thought about Candy and me. I tried to concentrate on reading the book. Our own life seemed even less concrete than the world that existed inside that ethereal fiction.

  BREAKAGES

  Memory is a fucker, the way it blurs things. The thing is, I can write about events. All that heroin, it was all events. When the events slowed down and emotional stuff began, well, I don’t know that I know how to write about that. Perhaps it’s enough to say: we fought for what seemed like a long time but wasn’t, and then one day I found myself catapulted north, to Sydney and the breaking of everything that was familiar.

  This was a time of life being out of whack.

  When I fled the farm, I felt on top of the world. I’ve heard since that this is called denial. It makes sense. The brain shuts down at times of true crisis, and nothing but the locus of hilarity (or is that hysteria?) is active. Nothing could stop me, not even the depression and confusion hovering off-screen, back in Gippsland where Candy was. I went to Sydney and then farther north, to the Sunshine Coast. I plunged into sex as if it offered absences greater than overdose. For fuck’s sake, I was trying to come off the drugs. There was nothing else but sex.

  The first night in Sydney, I slept with Kay. I have no idea why we fucked. The situation seemed set up. Some people are attracted to sickness, to the kind of madness where sparks fly off the head, to the incoherence of despair, masked by nervous energy, which winds up looking like bewildered joy.

  I think Kay was attracted to this in me.

  For myself, nothing at all seemed strange during this time. Since everything was new, everything seemed correct.

  Sally was Kay’s trainee editor and live-in housekeeper. She was eighteen and had come down from Queensland a year earlier. She’d left school and landed what she saw as an exciting job in the big smoke through friends of friends. She was tall and confident, a rangy country girl with long black hair and sweet green eyes. I thought she was beautiful.

  That first night, after Kay’s husband Aaron had reached his nightly blackout, sprawled and snoring on the spare couch in the baby’s room, Kay and Sally whispered conspiratorially in the kitchen.

  I sat in a rocking chair on the back veranda, overlooking the freight lines at Lilyfield. It was my first night back in Sydney in four years, and that trip had just been a quick two-day heroin run. I’d done a few trips like that, but it was seven years or more since Candy and I had moved to Melbourne to get away from drugs.

  And it was thirty-six hours now since I’d last had my methadone. I was beginning to feel a bit frayed around the edges. It was very uncomfortable, like I was shedding skin. I knew it would get worse before it got better.

  But the smell of jasmine, at midnight, reminded me of how much I loved Sydney. I was drunk, sad, and excited, though the excitement masked the edginess, the deep unease.

  Kay came out through the glass doors.

  “You’re going to sleep in Sally’s bed,” she announced.

  “Sure. Fine,” I said, thinking that somehow, miraculously, it had been arranged that I was to sleep with Sally. I’d been in Sydney for six hours. To sleep with Sally would have been my wish. I thought we must have all been remarkably in tune with each other’s thoughts. Like I said, nothing seemed strange. I suppose it was easy that night to believe that in Sydney, magic realism was real.

  I went to bed, expecting Sally to follow.

  Kay came instead. I didn’t really care.

  “What about your husband?”

  “He’s too drunk. He won’t wake up.”

  We fucked and then she went back to her room, to share the bed with Sally. Aaron remained sleeping all night on the couch.

  On the second night Kay and Sally dragged me along to a party. I figured the only way to ward off the methadone devils was to get really drunk. But of course, coming off methadone, you tend to skip the drunk part and go straight to unhinged.

  Everyone else was smashed so it didn’t matter. It was a loud, crowded party, Sydney in summer. Coming from the darkness of Melbourne, I thought I could feel the future exploding upon me. Nothing mattered. On the stairs I said to Sally, “I didn’t really want to sleep with Kay last night. I wish I’d slept with you. I’d rather sleep with you.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Then sleep with me tonight.”

  This was really not good in terms of the etiquette of houseguests.

  In the morning Kay’s three-year-old daughter wandered into the room and looked at Sally and me and wandered back out.

  “Mummy,” I heard her say, “what’s Sally doing in bed with that boy?”

  Sally looked at me and winced and then got up and pulled on a T-shirt. She composed her face into an expression of casual indifference, and walked out of the room. It was silent for a while and I drifted back into a restless sleep.

  After a few minutes I jolted awake. I could hear doors and cupboards slamming. I could hear Kay screaming at Sally. All about boundaries. “You’re fired, you bitch. And you’ve got half an hour to get out of my house. I don’t want to see your face again. This is my house. How dare you?”

  Sally came into the room. “Well,” she shrugged, “a turning point in my life.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “They’re lots of fun.”

  I was feeling pretty sick by this stage. Some heroin would have done the trick and made the world nice. But I was trying to stick to my task of not using.

  Sally was packing her stuff and muttering, “I can’t believe it.” I guess she was eighteen years old and her life had just turned upside down, but that’s not what I was thinking at the time. I was thinking how much I needed to smoke a joint, to ease the creaking of the bones and make that supreme effort to get out of bed. Then Kay burst into the room.

  “And as for you!” she shouted. She pointed a bony finger at me and held it there with an air of dramatic malevolence before storming out again.

  I packed my bag. This took me all of fifteen seconds. In the kitchen, Aaron, always pleasant whenever conscious, was curing his hangover with a glass of wine and a grapefruit.

  “Don’t worry, old son,” he said, tipping his glass to me. “Kay’s problem is, she hasn’t had a fuck in so long, she’s obviously jealous of you and Sally getting it together.”

  I felt a bit queasy right at that moment, but knew it was not the time to show guilt or awkwardness. Not the time for public confessions.

  “Have you
got any of those heads left, Aaron?” I asked. “Do you think I could roll a quick joint before I go?”

  In a perverse way the whole thing was a kind of bonding experience for Sally and me. We were thrown together. I was only the third guy she’d ever fucked.

  All the intense weirdness of coming off the methadone over the next couple of weeks was mixed in with the strangeness of viewing an old city through new eyes. The explosion and disintegration of my relationship with Candy were briefly tempered by the alien hypnosis of sex from the unknown.

  Sally didn’t care too much, not after the initial shock. Kay ran a tight ship emotionally, and when I arrived, like a small typhoon, I think Sally saw it as some kind of opportunity to jump ship, to learn to swim in a bigger ocean. I was older and fucked-up, with the diamond glint of absolute abandon in my yellow eyes: everything an eighteen-year-old could dream of.

  We flew north, obviously not courtesy of Kay’s credit card this time. It was time, at last, to start using mine. Sally took me to meet her parents, in a beautiful house in the rain forest. They were nice to me, for her sake, I suppose.

  I don’t know what they made of me, eating their mangos for breakfast and rabbiting on in my frantic enthusiasm for a life that had been new for all of about five minutes.

  I don’t know what they made of the tanless pallor of years in Melbourne, or my slicked-back hair and pointy boots. I don’t know what they made of the black tracks down my skinny arms, now so pathetically exposed in Sally’s dad’s T-shirts in the crushing Queensland heat.

  They bought me a pair of shorts, so I wouldn’t look so out of place on the beach. Sally gave me a Chanel T-shirt and a pair of sandals. I swear to God I looked like a fucking dipstick.

  They lived in an open-plan house, cool and cedared, beautifully designed some twenty years earlier during one glorious hippie summer. There were screens and partitions and levels everywhere. Sally and I had to fuck silently, but even the stress of that was fun. Late at night the endless croaking of the frogs soothed me through the methadone pangs and into brief snatches of sleep.

  Like I’ve said, I’d never driven much, never even had my license. In the early days, when I was a successful young drug dealer, I’d always gotten a lift to wherever I wanted to go. There was always someone willing to drive me. Later, when I was a successfully fucked-up junkie, we didn’t have cars too often. In any case, Candy had always driven, since we figured if you’re already breaking drug laws it’s best not to compound things by breaking traffic laws as well.

  Really, the sum total of my driving experience was minimal, bordering on nonexistent. Now Sally somehow convinced her trusting parents to give us—for a whole week—their brand-new four-wheel drive.

  It was a Holden Jackaroo. The cabin seemed to be at least fifteen feet off the ground. It had none of the idiosyncrasies of junkies’ cars in Melbourne. Nonetheless it frightened me. The concept of financial responsibility, coupled with my lack of driving experience, frightened me. Not having a license was icing on the cake.

  But without the car, we couldn’t get out of the rain forest, couldn’t go off exploring the coast.

  “Yeah, I’ve driven these before,” I said. “No problems.”

  They stood on the gravel driveway, waving us good-bye. Do not crunch the gears, I willed myself, stoned on their outrageous pot, smiling through clenched teeth and sweating profusely. Do not crunch the fucking gears.

  In all this madness, in all these mad few weeks, I tried to forget that back in my real life, where I’d left it in Gippsland, things were more than bad. I tried not to think about going home. I tried to maintain my anger, about Candy fucking Paul Hillman, about Candy’s weeks of vitriol in the lead-up to saying go. But I was haunted by the feeling that I deserved everything bad that was sure to come.

  After a week I called her from a phone booth in Noosa Beach, where we were staying with Sally’s sister. There were years of connection. It was hard to be in new lives, other people’s lives.

  Candy said, “Everything’s fine. Everything’s turning blue here.”

  “Blue?” I asked, a little alarmed. “Everything’s turning blue? What do you mean?”

  “Blue! Everything’s turning blue. Everything’s fine.”

  I stood sweating in the hot glass booth in the tropics, feeling acids eating at my stomach.

  “Listen, I’ll be back sometime soon, I guess. We’ve got a lot to sort out. I feel okay coming off the methadone. How do you feel?”

  She had stopped it too, the day I left. I don’t know why. I only dropped off the methadone because I was going to Sydney, a thousand kilometers from the Korrumburra pharmacy where we were registered to pick it up.

  “Fantastic,” she said. “I feel fantastic. Everything’s going blue.”

  “Candy, what do you mean? What do you mean, blue?” I gripped the phone and my knuckles were white. For the last faltering seconds I tried desperately to believe there was something here I was misunderstanding, that Candy was speaking of things that made sense, things that belonged to a world I was familiar with.

  “Blue! Blue! You don’t get it, do you? It’s simple! I’m speaking clearly. Everything’s turning blue. Everything’s going to be fine.”

  “Okay, Candy,” I sighed, overwhelmed, “I’ve got to go now. I’ll talk to you soon.”

  When I came back from the phone booth, Sally knew I was no longer there. I was delving into the darker unease of burnt-out loyalties and remembrances of things past. Of an imminent horizon of collapses and breakage. Of how a mind could overload and suddenly change into something unfamiliar and unknowable. Of how something felt deeply, however misguided, could disappear forever. This must be a kind of death.

  I couldn’t tell Sally how I thought that perhaps Candy was going crazy, and I didn’t even say it to myself.

  I was hoeing into the Visa card now. It was so fucking ironic to have my own credit card at last. But I’d developed bad habits from all those earlier years of fraud. The Visa card was magic money; I had no concept of the future. At this time of my life I lived truly in the moment, in the worst possible sense.

  We had dual cards on the same account. Candy was buying weird shit down in Victoria, Belgian crayons and mountain bikes and cookbooks and theatrical makeup. Up in Queensland, with not a cent to my name, the card was all I could use. In this three-week period, Candy and I took it seven thousand dollars over the two-thousand-dollar limit. Before the computers caught up with us.

  Sally and I were smoking lots of dope, and suddenly all over the coast, the heads dried up. Normally this news would have passed entirely unnoticed through a consciousness preoccupied with slightly stronger drugs. But by now I was ten days or more off the methadone, all wires and pangs, and if I had to be sleep deprived, I wanted to do it on Warp 5. Up there in the lush river flats, you were about as close to the source of the warp as you could get.

  Sally couldn’t get any dope. When we arrived back at the rain forest, we found that even her parents had run out. I was really keen for some fucking buds, believe me. Finally we got Sally’s mum revved up, appealed to her sense of the frontier spirit. I think we framed it like a challenge: if you were such a pioneer in the dope scene back then, why can’t you get some now?

  She rose to the occasion. She found an old hippie girlfriend still growing crops in the boondocks. As a rule this lady didn’t sell dope. She was simply wire-brushing the inside of her skull, slowly, over twenty years, to let the air in.

  For Sally’s mum, though, in a time of need, Wirebrush would make an exception and sell Sally a pound or so. Now all we needed was the cash.

  Sally sweet-talked Mac, a friend in Sydney, into supplying the dollars. He would take a cut of the dope and profits and leave me to do the business. Money had to be transferred from Sydney. We had to get out of the rain forest and straight into the nearest bank. And we had to get Sally’s mum to ensure that Wirebrush was punctual and businesslike. It’s funny, but it felt good to be doing that shit again.
What’s more, it gave me something to keep my mind away from things turning blue.

  All this would take two days. Maybe Wirebrush had to check the runes, work out the most opportune moment. On the first night of waiting, the call came, the call with the bad news.

  I was trying to be invisible. You drop off methadone as if off the face of a cliff. In the raw pain of being flayed and crazy, you want to disappear off the very surface of the earth. Through a convoluted route, Candy’s parents tracked me down. The call came at midnight. It was her dad, such a decent and bewildered man. He got straight to the point.

  “Candace is in the hospital.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “She’s had a bit of a nervous breakdown.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Royal Park. You’d better come down.”

  “All right. I’ll try to arrange for a bus or a plane. I’ll call you tomorrow and tell you what’s happening.”

  There was not much to say. I guess I had known this was coming, but now I could feel my heart going up into my throat. The holiday was over.

  I climbed back under the gauze mosquito net.

  “Are you okay?” Sally asked.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said, and already the cool tang of Melbourne was prickling up my arms.

  But we still had to organize the dope deal. Late morning and early afternoon we fucked around, panicking when the money hadn’t arrived, making urgent phone calls to Sydney. Finally we got the money five minutes before the bank closed.

  I called Candy’s parents, believing that the best defense for odd behavior was offense. I told them I was having trouble getting a lift to the bus depot from the rain forest. Her mum’s tone of voice was perplexed and dubious, but what could she do?