So I guess it went like this: the amphetamines gave me confidence and, even more than that, a window into an idealised, transcendental reality — which, for all I thought at the time, was actually a mystical parallel reality. At the start of 1999, just before my nineteenth birthday, I popped the ecstasy pill to end all ecstasy pills at an outdoor bush doof at a place inappropriately named Mount Disappointment. The world took on a wonderfully cartoonish flavour as I thought, This is how I always wanted life to be. This led me on a voyage to rediscover that high, and when other ecstasy pills didn’t do the trick, I turned again to needles. I claimed study allowance from Centrelink — even though I never went to uni — and with the proceeds I pumped my veins full of ‘speed’: monthly, then weekly, then during the week. I eventually stopped going out to raves and dance parties, and just stayed home and took drugs instead. This went on for a good twelve months; I was a ‘pleasure glutton’, besotted by the broom that swept all the dread away. It was like alchemy, like magic — who wouldn’t want that?
According to Jung, one of the most universal and universally misunderstood archetypes is Mercurius — aka the Roman god, Mercury — known for his speed and mobility. In the ancient art of alchemy, the Earth’s three principle substances were mercury, sulphur, and salt — in fact, the Sanskrit word for alchemy is Rasavātam, which means ‘the way of mercury’. Jung saw Mercurius as the essence of the unconscious. He also believed that Mercurius was the ‘trickster’ archetype — a shape-shifter who could change gender and meanings, who was ambiguous, paradoxical, and duplicitous. A destroyer, Mercurius is also volatile, meaningful, and difficult to contain. According to Jung, it is only through Mercurius that we can see the fullness of our psyche, including evil.
The more I injected ‘speed’, the more the meanings of things started to change and to take on a sinister turn. I would be having a rapid-fire conversation with someone, and everything they said would sound as if it had a deliberate, sly, tricky, persecutory double meaning. Language, at times, totally disintegrated. I would take odd words out of somebody’s sentences when they were talking, and I would think they were directed at me. Somebody might mention ‘underwear’, and I would think they had caught me masturbating. Or somebody would be talking about a guy they hated called ‘Pete’, and I would think they were passive-aggressively telling me in code what they hated about me. Most of the time I would be able to find my way in the conversation and realise I was being paranoid. But then came a day, after a year or more of building up, when I couldn’t snap out of it at Cassie’s — where it felt as if the apocalypse had come. Mercurius was, perhaps, riding around with me that day. In doing so, it revealed a painful, dark shadow.
After my psychotic breakdown, the clouds seemed to clear — it was as if a cyst had been burst open, and I could start to live again. The anxiety eased. I went back to uni. The shadow had come into light. The psychosis had proved a creative starting point. Things were starting to change — both for me, and in another part of the world ...
In the rugged, remote, wildlife-rich mountains covering a corner of Burma (now Myanmar), Laos, and Thailand, the monsoon rains hadn’t come for three years. Amid the hills was an area that was more or less controlled by a renegade ethnic gathering called the United Wa State Army. The military wing of a fringe Burmese political group formed after the collapse of the Burmese Communist Party in 1989, the army took control of the land bordering Thailand, as well as the region’s opium poppy fields. In 1997, South-East Asia still accounted for well over half of the world’s opium production. As the new millennium came, the drought was broken, and was followed by abnormal flooding and frost in Burma.
It would prove to be the drought before the storm in more ways that one. Drugs were the main source of the army’s income, and they began searching for alternatives.
Chapter Five
Rise and fall
BECK, AGE NINETEEN, gave birth during Melbourne’s spectacularly hot, fire-ridden summer of 1998. A beautiful rosy-cheeked, hot-tempered child, Hayley was born at the Ferntree Gully Hospital on 11 February, and returned with her mother about a week later to a rented, non-air-conditioned share house in Rowville in Melbourne’s flat, sprawling south-east suburbs.
Many of Beck’s adolescent tendencies had continued into adulthood. If somebody in town believed in ghosts, or had a bad deformity, or had spent most of their life in jail, you could rest assured that Beck would track them down and be knocking on their door with a bottle of goon, ready to entertain.
Along her travels, she got to know one man named Barry, a former television-station electrician who’d hurt himself at work and then became lost in his own mind and its many theories — including one that Easter eggs were actually grenades wrapped in foil. Barry, in turn, introduced Beck to Nick while she was pregnant. He was a tall, muscular, kind-of-French-looking, handsome lad. Aged twenty-seven when they met, Nick hadn’t spent a single birthday out of prison in his entire adult life. He was a big fellow, but not usually a violent one. In fact, Nick was a bit of an intellectual; he read Dostoevsky and maths textbooks when he was in prison, and took classes in physics. When he was out of prison, he stole at every opportunity. His main trade was robbing houses, but he also robbed service stations — sometimes with a weapon (although his physical presence was often enough to get the attendant to cooperate) — when he got desperate.
Nick and Beck got together, and he moved into the Rowville house when Beck was six months pregnant. When she entered the late stages of her pregnancy, he would come home after a busy day with new toys, prams, and electronic goods. Beck was always uncomfortable with stealing, though no man had ever lavished her with such gifts. She told me she often felt terribly guilty knowing that somebody came home to find their baby’s goods missing.
Home robberies became at least a weekly event for Nick and some of his friends — ‘rorts’, they called them. They often sold the goods at second-hand stores, or traded them for pot, acid, and ecstasy.
On one occasion, when Nick and his friend Jason had cased at least a dozen homes in one particular area of Rowville and had made their way out the side window of a house with a few watches, phones, and entertainment consoles, they noticed a police car gliding toward them as they made their escape in their car. The police sirens screeched and their lights flashed, and Jason hit the accelerator. A chase ensued through the labyrinth of Rowville’s monotonous terrace-roofed suburbia, and when they got to the first traffic lights, the police instructed them through a loudspeaker to pull over and surrender; instead, Jason revved the car, and reversed into the front of the police car, over and over, in an attempt to blow up its engine.
Police cars are built to withstand such force, however, and the chase continued into neighbouring Lysterfield. At the next traffic lights, a panicked Jason — young and thus far without a criminal record — gave himself up. Nick made a run for it, until the police found him about to get on a bus a kilometre away.
Nick was charged and sentenced to around ten months in jail, which he didn’t mind; he always said he preferred life on the inside.
Beck’s other housemates had also moved out, and so at this stage, when Hayley was about ten months old, she asked me to move in to help out. So I did.
I had been scared of Hayley until she was seven months old. I was scared of breaking her. I didn’t know how to act around a creature who I thought I was supposed to bond with, and for the first part of her life, my presence was neither here nor there. Then one day, when Hayley was a rosy-cheeked, sweet-smelling 8-month-old sitting on the lounge room of Beck’s parent’s lounge room — not long before Beck moved to Queensland — I picked her up. She looked at me with confusion, and then she smiled. The next day I picked her up again and she giggled. Soon thereafter, nearly every time I saw her she held out her arms to me. Before Hayley was born, I had no idea how much we humans need each other, how much we need love and attention.
A few days after
I moved in, I noticed Beck was no longer as sulky or needy. She had managed to find rhythm in this new life, had become, in fact, one fearsome bitch.
Beck’s mum had been a bank teller and an aged-care worker; her dad was a senior nurse at a big public hospital. While she enjoyed being a budget ‘gangstar’s moll’, it went deeper than that; she also enjoyed the thrill of the fall away from her hardworking family. She found her life relaxing and liberating, even funny. She seemed to almost thrive in it.
A few weeks into this new house set-up, we had a guy named Andrew move in. Andrew was a heroin addict who had tuberculosis and constantly threw up in the kitchen sink. He had also, much to his pride, been to jail and learnt the art of rape threats. One day he threatened the elderly man next door: ‘I’ll tie up your wife and put a knife to her throat,’ he said. Within a week, the house was for sale.
Another day I was sitting in my room, stoned and daydreaming, when Andrew and Beck started arguing. It didn’t take long before he started throwing around couches, and, as I sat petrified in my room, I heard him say he was going to rape her ‘in your toerag arse’ and then screamed that he would track down her younger sisters.
He then said — and I quote — ‘you toeragin me dowwwll’, before threatening her mum, her nanna, and her dad. To this day, we don’t know what he meant.
After about a minute’s silence, I heard Beck start laughing — at first sincerely, and then deliberately and provocatively loudly — and say, ‘First of all, Andrew, I am not a fucking toerag, and second of all you are going to rape my dad.’
And that was the end of that: a new era of Beck had begun.
We must have quoted that day a thousand times since, at random times and with the best comic timing we could muster: for example, while waiting in a doctor’s surgery she would say, ‘Oh shit, I forgot to ask my dad if Andrew has raped him yet’. That and ‘dowwwll’ would thereafter become permanent parts of our secret lexicon.
Despite the fun we had, I too moved out not long after this incident; this new Beck was constantly screaming and yelling abuse. She herself only stayed in that house for a little while longer before moving to Queensland. Then Nick got out of jail, and moved in with her into a tiny two-bedroom house in a southern suburb of Brisbane.
As for me? Well, after surviving the violent homicidal urges of hordes of angry large men — both real and imaginary — I settled back into uni, post-psychosis, with newfound confidence and a newfound addiction to reading. I took classes such as Classic Literature, Existentialism, Reason and Logic, and Post-modernism. I read obsessively. I avoided drugs, and sought to find the answers to what had happened to me in the materials I was reading. I began living with some of the hippies from Cockatoo in a large Northcote warehouse with a bunch of musicians, painters, and circus performers. We had no bathroom, and there were so many people coming and going all the time that at some stage I learnt how to look people in the eye again. After a semester, I was still at a loss to understand my ‘great decline’, but I became so involved in the texts it didn’t seem to matter. My friends from Cockatoo seemed to get over using drugs as well, and became involved in theatre, painting, and circus.
After a few months, it occurred to me that the house wasn’t quite my fit: I had yet to have any experience with gay guys or the gay world. I found a gay housemate online, and moved into a place in Collingwood. He turned out to be a 45-year-old Telstra exec who moped constantly about the loss of his younger ex-boyfriend (and his ‘elongated cock’) and who also injected ‘speed’ (powdered meth) on the weekends. I injected with him, and still didn’t have the confidence to walk into a gay club. I must have walked up to the door of The Peel a dozen times before walking away again, petrified. I was, quite simply, worried that I wouldn’t be attractive enough in a world where looks and sex mean everything.
Other than that, I found the house too clean and too neat. I don’t remember much about it except for my housemate’s loud middle-aged queeny queens coming over, and don’t remember much of that except for the pungent smell of their cologne. I had started to feel lonely by this time — I’d failed to make my way into gay culture, and I was missing Beck and her cavalcade of addicts, gypsies, tramps, and thieves.
One day, on one of our many phone chats — we had stayed in touch — she invited me to go and live with her again, and I took her up on her offer.
I spent a week in King’s Cross before going up to Brisbane, where I took a train south to a small town 20 kilometres from Brisbane, in the heart of Logan City. I arrived to find a cute, basic, warm, sunny town with palm trees, plate-sized cane toads, and a large Islander population.
‘So I’m in a relationship with a criminal, I’m on the dole, I live in the welfare and crime capital of Queensland on dole street. I’m on the dowwwwll, man. The dowwwwwll,’ Beck said as she met me at the train station.
‘You make me sick,’ I replied.
And so it began.
Beck lived in a tiny house on sand like soil, with a gigantic eucalypt in the backyard. She woke me up every morning at 8.50, tapping on a bong with the lighter and saying in a faux-posh voice:
‘Luuuuuuke, Denise is on.’
And so every morning, when Hayley (then two) was in day-care, we would sit in front of the television, ripping down bongs and watching the Denise Drysdale show for two hours, normally so stoned we couldn’t follow what was going on. Then the Olympics started, and we took turns making angry, stoned phone calls to Channel 7 about how disrespectful it was to Denise that the program would be off-air for three weeks.
By the time I arrived in that winter of 2000, Beck and Nick were using intravenous ‘speed’ as well, though not every day (mainly because they couldn’t afford to). Beck wasn’t showing too many signs of going nutty, and while I did use, the big psychotic episode I had in 1999 — and the break from drugs I had taken after it — had seemed to clean out some of my demons. I decided not to inject it, but to snort it instead.
Fortuitously for me, Beck and Nick had made friends with a few gay guys from Brisbane. Brisbane back then was slow and friendly, more like a country town than a city; the high-risess in the CBD felt very artificial because it really could have been a country town in Gippsland or Central Victoria. The gay guys were less intimidating: less concerned with the way they dressed, friendlier, and more down-to-earth. The gay clubs felt like country pubs, and for the first time, I found myself going out all the time without feeling much in the way of anxiety.
I began to feel comfortable in my own skin, although life in Woodridge could be a little rough at times. One of our most frequent visitors was a guy named ‘Filthy’ who was in his mid-sixties and had tattoos all over his face and body. He used to rob houses, and pawn what he’d stolen in second-hand shops. He would come to our house, sit there in the kitchen — bone-thin — with a syringe, and inject himself with powdered meth through a huge track-mark. He would stare into space with his chin moving up and down, just like an old woman’s might do involuntarily while she knitted or did the crossword.
We also had regular visits from a woman who lived across the road. She had three young children and a shaved head. One night, she came over asking if she could take some of our blankets or mattresses.
‘Ours are all being used, sorry,’ I said.
‘Well, we have people staying over.’
‘Sorry, we need them,’ I replied.
‘Well, so do we,’ she said, staring at me like a serial killer.
Beck then screamed abuse from the bedroom, ‘Fuck off, Simone, you stupid bitch, or else I’ll come over there and beat the fuck out of you and your skinny runt excuse for a fucking boyfriend.’
Simone remained expressionless, staring at me, while I smiled awkwardly and slowly closed the door in her face.
Another day, I was lying in bed, half-stoned, in the middle of the afternoon, listening to Beck and Nick argue in their bedroom. We’d all had
‘speed’ — which, of course, was powdered meth — the night before. I could only half make out what they arguing about. Then, in an instant, it all boiled over. I heard the bedroom door fling open.
‘Well fucking go then, go, get out!’ Beck yelled, her anger tinged with anguish and fatigue.
I heard him mumble something back, to which she let out a cross between a scream and a gasp. ‘You fucking arsehole! How could you be so cruel?’ This was followed by a loud, hollow ‘pop’ — like a bottle being shot with a gun — that jolted me right out of bed. I opened the door to see Beck picking up whatever she could reach in the kitchen, as Nick rather sheepishly tried to defend himself from the attack. She was a flurry of wild brown hair and garbled swear words as she first smashed two coffee cups over his head, then picked up a large frying-pan.
‘Stop it, stop it, please, please,’ I said. ‘What the fuck is going on?’
Beck stopped and Nick stepped out on the balcony.
‘He’s going to slit Thor’s throat,’ she said.
‘Why?’
‘He said he wanted to leave, he said he doesn’t love me anymore, so I asked him what he was going to do with Thor and he said he was going to slit his throat.’
With that, she started howling and ran into the bedroom; Hayley was thankfully in day-care. I went outside to the balcony. Nick had his back to me, and was smoking a rollie. ‘Nick,’ I said.
The Ice Age Page 11
