Candy

by Luke Davies

  “Is Candy okay?” I asked.

  “It’s not good,” she said. “Just get down here.”

  All through the next day, the time for the deal kept getting shuffled. Old Wirebrush was nervous about the “karma” involved with capitalist transactions. Kind of interesting for someone who certainly had their finger on the pulse of current market prices. Sally’s mum decided to come with us, to help with the distasteful business of handing over and counting money.

  We met in a picnic area beside a six-lane highway. Wire-brush’s weird choice. Her hippie kids played on the swing. Sally’s mum sat with Wirebrush in her car, counting the money.

  Sally and I sat in the four-wheel drive and checked the dope. When I opened the shopping bag, I knew it was a winner. The pungent smell, the globules of resin on the hairy gold heads. I broke off a branch, nothing but head. Sally rolled a huge ragged joint.

  The dope hurt the throat. We gave the thumbs-up to Wirebrush, or Farmer Shiva the Destroyer, as she was rapidly becoming. I began to clench my teeth. Within two minutes I was wired beyond what was pleasant, and paranoid about having so much dope in a public place. We waved our good-byes—I never actually met her directly—and pulled back out onto the highway.

  Sally and I were giggling, already wasted. Her mum was driving and serenely finishing the joint.

  “I’m ripped. I am fucking ripped. This is good dope,” I said.

  “Mmm,” Sally’s mum said, like a wine taster who’s been there, done it all. “I suppose it’s not bad. It’s got a nice soft edge to it. Kind of mellow and golden.”

  A soft edge? Mellow and golden? Yelping noises were coming from deep inside my brain, and behind that the clang-clang-clang of giant machinery. I imagined the police were behind us. Sally’s mum continued speaking.

  “Let’s go up and look at the view from Arundel Rock.”

  “Yeah!” Sally said. “You’ve got to see this place. It’s really special.”

  I realized they were talking to me.

  “It’s an Aboriginal sacred site. A very magical place.”

  Oh Lord untie the stomach knots! I was not well. My wife had been committed to a mental hospital. I wanted to do a business deal and turn a profit. I wanted to curl up in a ball and I wanted the world to quiet down. I did not want to see an Aboriginal sacred site.

  But I was just too stoned to try and talk them out of it. The real world, away from heroin—I was not handling it.

  Sally’s mum had the goods on me. I think she could see very clearly that the state I was in was one of such distorted ugliness that even high-quality marijuana could do nothing more than intensify the distortions. I think also she wanted to calm me down, put me on a plane, and get me the fuck out of her daughter’s life.

  And Arundel Rock did calm me down. The huge granite dome rose abruptly out of a luscious green floodplain. We drove until the driving trail stopped and then walked to the top. Directly below us, a thousand feet down, was the darker green of the rain forest canopy, skirting the river that snaked around the rock.

  We stood awestruck in the sunlight on the flat bald summit of the granite giant. All around us were rock pools and carvings. I felt like an intruder, and rightly so. I had no connection with anything, least of all the earth. Only the cushioning effect of these monstrously potent heads prevented me from falling to the ground and weeping—for everything that flooded out of me as the methadone faded; for my absence from myself for so many years; for Candy, whose fragility was now exposed by the absence of drugs; for the terrible tragedy I sensed I was about to enter.

  “Look at the way the light falls everywhere in gold particles,” Sally’s mum said.

  She was holding her arms above her head and wriggling her fingers like the storyteller on Playschool imitating rain. If anyone else had been there I would have cringed. But I was so stoned I saw the gold particles too.

  That night we triple-wrapped the pound of heads into separate, smaller packages, placed the packages in front of the Jackaroo’s tires and gently rolled the four-wheel drive over them to compress them for my flight home. Even though customs wasn’t involved, I was nervous about my first plane flight with drugs. Especially such smelly drugs.

  In the morning I learned too late that even the tiniest amount of this stuff was enough to make you comfortably stoned. All I had wanted was to be laid back going through the airport shit. I must have been overzealous in the amount I rolled.

  I could feel that I’d become nothing but a huge stretched smile. It was a smile that didn’t belong to me, yet I couldn’t get rid of it. The hilarity of the dope was effectively nullified by a hole in my gut as big as a harbor. This had been there, slowly expanding, since the “everything’s turning blue” phone call. But the corners of my mouth were being pulled in opposite directions by invisible wires.

  My eyes were half closed. I needed dark sunglasses. I felt a little ridiculous, trying to keep my balance at the ticket counter as the airline clerk told me my Visa card had been canceled.

  I had dope in my shoes, up my legs, in my underpants, around my stomach. I was expecting a pack of snarling police dogs to come bounding around the corner at any moment, sliding toward me on the polished departure lounge floor.

  Sally, for whom nothing other than the cancellation of a Visa card could have been an appropriate ending to a whirlwind fling with someone so consummately fucked-up, went and had a word with her mum, who’d driven us to the airport.

  They bought me the ticket.

  We said our awkward good-byes. On the plane I drank a lot of orange juice, and it leveled me out a bit. Two awful airline coffees made me feel I had a second chance at the day.

  Somehow I got through the teeth-gritting paranoia of imaginary drug squad cops waiting for me at Sydney. Sally’s friend Mac, the money supplier, was there to pick me up, and I went back to his place to use the phone and get business rolling. It was ten o’clock in the morning. I booked a seat on a Melbourne bus for eight that night. I had ten hours in which to off-load the gear, give the money to Mac, make a profit (or at least pay for my bus fare), keep some dope—hopefully lots—for myself, get the hell out of there and get back to my life in Melbourne and Candy in the nuthouse. Which was the reason I wanted lots of dope.

  I could have gone for the bigger cash profit but I knew I would only expend my energy running around trying to exchange it for drugs. Probably the wrong kind of drugs. It seemed simpler to just take the grass.

  I called Candy’s parents to tell them I was now halfway home. Could they pick me up from the bus depot at eight in the morning? By now Candy’s mother was openly expressing her dismay and fury—it was a full two days since I’d been informed of the hospitalization. What in God’s name was going on?

  Knowing it was a flimsy excuse, I told her again that I’d had trouble getting a lift out of the rain forest. I was trying to create the impression that I’d been staying in some place accessible only by helicopter.

  At any rate, they said they would be there to pick me up.

  Making lightning deals in Sydney all day was a good way to temporarily distract myself from myself, or rather, from the concept of my life. I wrapped up business quickly and efficiently, getting in touch with old, old friends who had never been burnt by me, who were happy enough to gather the cash for a bargain deal on an ounce or two of major mindfuck.

  Night came quickly. I boarded the bus to begin the horror trip I’d done several times—which is several times too many—over the years. The Sydney-to-Melbourne route. Memories of Rohypnol and Serepax, of the Big Merino towering beside the highway, of the all-night restaurants in Goulburn or Albury. The luxurious privacy of hitting up in the disabled’s toilet, where you had your own basin and the door reached fully to the ground.

  All memory now, I hoped. I rolled a joint strong enough to disable an ox, and smoked it quickly and furtively in the truck-stop parking lot at Albury at four in the morning. Another mistake in an avalanche of panicked mistakes.

 
I think the thing that disturbed Candy’s parents the most about my appearance, when they met me at the bus depot, was not so much my disheveled state or deranged, clenched smile, as the size of my pupils, expanded by the methadone withdrawal. In the years they’d known me they had rarely seen me with pupils much bigger than a match head.

  Now here I was, my relationship with them altered forever by a calamity that was forcing us together when we didn’t want to be forced together. They stared intently at the vast pools of blackness that were my pupils.

  I think they found it disturbing, as if they were looking at a different me. Of course, they were in many ways. But they didn’t know what it meant: not just the methadone comedown, which lasts a month or two or three, but the well of fear that can stretch your pupils as wide as the sky at night. I was reentering the world of the woman I thought I loved, and yet the woman I thought I loved might never really be there again.

  And I didn’t know anything except the world of her and me.

  I figured I just had to grit my teeth, get her out of the place she was in, help her pull her socks up, and we could get our lives back together. Candy and me.

  Trying to do this while trying to stop using drugs was probably overly ambitious.

  Candy’s parents drove me back to their house. They fed me breakfast, which straightened me out a bit. At nine-thirty we drove to Royal Park. The long driveway meandered through a mixture of Victorian and modern buildings. It was very similar to a detox I’d been at once in Sydney, before I’d met Candy, before this story began. The modern buildings had the unoffensive and unassuming appearance of a Christian holiday camp.

  We drove through the curving avenues of shrubs and pulled up in the parking lot. All morning her parents had been curiously elusive when I’d asked for specific details about Candy’s breakdown. Now they told me they thought it would be better if they waited outside while I went in by myself.

  A nurse took me through various locked Plexiglas doors. Everywhere were the stereotype nutcases, leering at me as I passed them, or twitching compulsively, or staring intently into space. This was the movie nuthouse. These were the One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest crew. And suddenly, there was Candy.

  I saw her from behind, shuffling uncertainly in the middle of the huge recreation room. I had imagined her to be frail and vulnerable, suffering this temporary and appalling injustice like a stoic and tragic heroine. A mistake: of course, a mistake had been made. I was here to sort it out. My head was full of conflicting emotions, mostly anger and fear, but for a moment my heart went out to her.

  As I came closer she turned around. The ground seemed to tilt. My heart stopped in my throat. The world I had known disappeared. For a long time I’d lived with momentum. Now it flipped over into hyperdrive. And then all that could be felt was loss, and the profound bewilderment of vertigo.

  HOSPITALS

  I’d seen her with hep, I’d seen her stoned, I’d seen her happy, angry, beautiful, really sick. But not this, whatever it was. Candy stood leering at me. She seemed no different from anyone else in there. At first I couldn’t even tell if she recognized me. I suppose it was a grin but it looked like a leer.

  “Hi, Candy,” I said. I felt the hesitancy in my voice.

  She’d lost twenty or thirty pounds. It was worse than the time she’d had hep. She looked like a bag lady, the way her clothes hung off her. A purple dress, a cardigan. Her collarbone jutted out. She stood suspended, as if about to begin a step. Trembling, swaying. Her own pupils were so big that I could barely see the blue I’d always loved. And the smell. Candy had always been the bath queen. Now there was the faint stench of something putrid. Not only the odor of stale sweat, but something I couldn’t clearly identify.

  Everything was wrong.

  “Hi!” she whispered conspiratorially, holding my gaze and smiling.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Phew,” she exhaled, shrugging her shoulders, her head bobbing, her fingers fidgeting. “I am not okay.”

  I took one hand in my hands, squeezed it tight. A thick film of sweat covered her skin.

  “Shit, Candy. I don’t know what to say. What happened?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know,” she whispered. “What’s going on? Why am I here?”

  She was pretty zonked on psych drugs, trying to smile but distressed, her lips quivering.

  “I’ll get you out of here in no time. Things’ll be okay.”

  “Can I come now? Can I come with you?”

  “I don’t know what the fuck’s going on. I don’t think you can, baby. I don’t know what the story is. Can I smoke here?”

  “Out here,” she said, and led me to a crowded TV room, the air blue with smoke. She started introducing me to everyone. I couldn’t see the point. A couple of the men shook hands, wouldn’t let go, stared into my eyes with the earnestness of the vacant. An enormous woman lifted her head from her chest. Her head wobbled as she looked at me and spittle drooled from her mouth. She spoke in a sedated drawl, as if the air could barely make it from her lungs into the room.

  “Is—this—ya—boy—friend?”

  We squeezed onto a vinyl couch. Everybody turned their heads to listen. I tried to whisper.

  “Baby, what happened?”

  “I don’t know. But guess what I found out in here?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t tell anyone. You can’t tell anyone, okay?”

  “Okay. What?” She was deadly serious, so I leaned forward.

  “My father is not my father.”

  I put my face in my hands and I furrowed my brow. Then I looked up. “I’m sorry?” I said.

  “Mel Gibson’s father is my father. I’m Mel Gibson’s sister. I’m really Hayley Mills.”

  I paused. My mind was racing. I was about to say, “Candy, you’re talking shit,” but too many things were happening at once.

  Instead I said, “How do you know this?”

  “Someone in here told me. It makes sense now.”

  “Candy,” I said.

  She grabbed my hand and pulled me up. “Here, I’ll introduce you to the girl who told me.”

  We went back out into the rec room. A pale-skinned, dark-haired girl sat curled in a tight ball on a couch in the corner.

  “Helen, this is my husband.”

  The girl gave no glimmer of recognition. She seemed catatonic, shaking her head and repeating over and over, “Nnnnn. Nnnnn. Nnnnn,” rocking backward and forward and staring at the floor.

  “She only speaks to me,” Candy said. “Don’t you see? She would know.”

  I sighed and held her hand. My whole chest felt constricted. In all the rush of thoughts, the one that stood out was that it was my fault. I should never have gone away.

  “Candy, things are fucked-up. I’m sorry, baby. We’re going to fix this up. You’ll get better, we’ll get better, everything’ll get better. I’ll get you out of here soon. We’ll go back to the farm. We’ll just calm down.”

  She started crying then. I hugged her tight and understood the real meaning of the phrase “bag of bones.” I concentrated all the pain into my head—that way I didn’t cry. I didn’t want Candy to think that things were worse than they were.

  “It’s all right, it’s all right,” I said. There they were again, those words.

  Candy was the coolest junkie I’d ever known and the person I’d loved most in my life. I wasn’t prepared for what was happening. It seemed a quantum leap from everything’s turning blue to this. And yet everything around me, in this mental hospital, was undeniably real.

  They let me out of the locked section. I located the admitting psychiatrist and sat in his office for five minutes. He used a lot of technical terms, like “psychotic episode” and “manic-depressive.” He told me she’d been sectioned for her own safety. None of it meant much, not compared to what Peter and Michael would later tell me, about what actually happened down there on the farm in the last couple of weeks. Candy demanding they close all thei
r blinds, to keep the sun out, to keep things blue. Candy explaining that the sun was a god that was trying to kill her. Candy pleading with them to take their money out of their banks, as the world was about to collapse and electronic systems would no longer work. Candy sleeping in the shed because the cats had told her to get out. Candy running naked through the back paddock, telling Peter and Michael, when they finally coaxed her down from a tree, that clothes hurt her skin. At which point Peter, unable to find me, had called Candy’s parents.

  I walked out into the sunlight. Candy’s parents were sitting in the car. They got out when they saw me coming. I sucked in my breath as I approached, felt it whistle between my teeth. I’d gone inside thinking, We’ll fix this, and they probably knew that I’d be coming out a little different.

  I heard my shoes crunch on the gravel. I couldn’t feel my body. I wanted to melt into liquid, flow down the path and into the gutter, disappear into the earth. But I wanted to hold myself together too. I figured that when you gave up smack, the penance must begin. Obviously this was the first task. It was the Catholic coming out in me. I didn’t know that things can get better too.

  We didn’t say anything. Candy’s parents looked at me expectantly.

  “Well …” I shrugged, and then two strangled sobs emerged, unexpectedly, from deep in my throat. I lowered my head and splayed my hand over my eyes.

  Candy’s dad put his hand on my shoulder and half hugged me, the way men do, with absolute awkwardness. Then I cried a little more, for maybe thirty seconds. He patted me on the back and said, “There, there.” He was a nice guy, and the thought that he might be in my life in the future, if it ever worked out with Candy and me, was like an oasis in this desert of dread.

  The rest was a long haul, but not such a long story. I stayed on the fold-out sofa bed at Candy’s parents for a couple of weeks. In the morning I’d wander over to feed the ducks on the lake in the park across the road. I’d smoke a big joint and wonder where my life was going to go and what would happen to Candy.