The Ice Age

by Luke Williams

  She was like a mysterious otherworldly plant who sucked up the shit around her and turned it into beautiful flowers that attracted anyone and everyone. She was independent, and preferred her peer group to home life, although that was hardly surprising.

  About three months before I moved into Smithy’s, I was staying at Beck’s on a visit from Sydney. On the walk back from the doctor’s one morning, Beck happened to drive past me (she had spent the night at Smithy’s). She stopped the car on the side of the street, crying hysterically. When I asked what was wrong, she said she had a cold, and when I rolled my eyes, having heard it so many times before, she told me Smithy had done something to her. I was in no mood for her drama, and just kept walking. I ended up at Smithy’s for the afternoon, and when I didn’t return at night, Beck called, still crying, demanding to know why I was spending my time with him and not her. So I went back to her house, where she told me again she had sinus pain, and ran to her room to cry for an hour.

  That night, Hayley came back and asked to talk to me in her room.

  ‘Mum is a bully … she screams at me all the time, over nothing, she calls me names — I just can’t live here anymore.’

  (By this stage, Beck and Smithy had split up. He had a restraining order against her, and Beck — despite her best efforts to contain it — was starting to crumble.)

  When I left that time around to go back to Sydney, I sent Beck a long and thoughtful Facebook message telling her that I was worried about her behaviour and that I thought the way she was behaving around her kids may have been damaging. She never replied, and later admitted to me that she’d never read the message.

  A few days after Christmas in 2014, Hayley — still fifteen — contacted me to say Beck had kicked her out of the house on Christmas Eve. Apparently, the camera I’d bought for Hayley a few years earlier was missing as well, along with several other things from the house, and Hayley told me that — along with some of her niece’s things — Beck had sold them in a pawn shop.

  ‘I know I’m not sixteen yet, but I really want to move out,’ Hayley said.

  She explained that there was a family who were happy to have her move in. She gave me the mum’s number and I rang and had a chat with her — the family were church going, liberal-minded, and reasonably well off. The mum told me that the kids had set dinner and homework times, and that they loved Hayley to bits. They were happy to have Hayley stay as long as she wanted, and would look after her like she was one of their own.

  I agreed to support Hayley in moving out and to help organise her Centrelink, and told her not to tell her Mum that I had helped her. Beck was deeply hurt when her oldest left the nest at such a young age, and I think she would have wiped me from her life if she had known that I’d helped her move out.

  So while I’m really not sure what sort of parent Beck would have been if she had not been a drug user, I do know that crystal meth’s ability to dull everything else so you keep feeding on it undoubtedly made her less of a parent that she might have been. The way meth works on the brain probably explains the relatively high number of women who continue taking meth while pregnant. In 2013, at the Royal Women’s Hospital alone, 15 babies were born to mums who had used ice during their pregnancy.

  Their paediatrician, Dr Ellen Bowman, told me that some of these babies are born showing withdrawal symptoms, meaning they could be floppy and refuse to eat, and be undersized or irritable. She said the long-term risk with these babies could be that they grow to be adults with undersized heads. Research by journalist Kate Legge, in an article published in The Weekend Australian magazine, also found that pregnant mothers using ice was a growing problem, with numbers increasing at those hospitals that screen mothers for substance abuse (which many do not).

  There are also many examples of minors getting involved in meth irrespective of their parents’ actions. In their submission to the Victorian parliamentary inquiry, Melbourne City Mission report that workers in their early intervention programs have identified meth use in ‘clients as young as 12 years of age’ and that ‘70 per cent of [their clients] between the ages of 14 and 15 years of age have had some experience or use of ice’. The Victorian component of the 2011 Australian School Students Alcohol and Drugs (ASSAD) survey found that approximately five per cent of 17-year-old male and female secondary school students had previously used amphetamine for non-medical purposes at least once in their lifetime. The same survey showed 1 per cent of high school students aged between twelve and fifteen have used amphetamine or methamphetamine in the last month.

  Suzi Morris, community services manager for Lives Lived Well, the super-clinic formed after the merger of the Alcohol and Drug Foundation Queensland, the Gold Coast Drug Council, and the Queensland Drug and Alcohol Council, told The Courier Mail that young adults and teenagers using drugs was becoming more common.

  ‘I would say 15 to 24 is a common age group. There are a lot of street kids and a lot of kids who have been traumatised. They don’t have loving and caring homes, they are couch surfing and they are vulnerable.’

  More generally, if there are lot of teenagers using crystal meth, there’s a lot of very worried parents. Or, at least, I hope they are worried — and worried in a reasonable, proportionate, rather than hysterical way.

  I know, for instance, that I gave my parents more than a few headaches when I was staying in Smithy’s house. During our conversation on the night my mum talked me out of the idea that she and everyone else were poisoning me, I made the link between my psychosis and what I had been through in high school. A painful exchange between Mum and me followed:

  ‘I know what this is all about,’ I said. ‘Do you remember why I had to leave high school?’

  She hesitated as if she were struggling to remember.

  ‘C’mon, Mum.’

  ‘Because you were gay?’

  ‘Yes. Did you know there were people at my school who believed gay people should be killed?’

  Silence.

  ‘Well, Mum, there were, and that’s why you shouldn’t be surprised that I have delusions of people wanting to kill me.’

  And on and on I went.

  ‘And how come none of you noticed what was going on? It felt like you were in on it at times.’

  She stayed silent, and I guess — in retrospect — listened attentively as I detailed the awful things that went on in that high school, things that I have outlined in this book but am usually reluctant to talk about. She remarked on how horrible this must have been for me, but the more I talked the more I wanted to talk, and the angrier I became. Mum kept on bringing the issue back to drug use, a move I regarded as superficial, and which made me even angrier again.

  The conversation spanned many hours and I shed many tears; at times, I regressed to adolescence, and said many of the things I wished I’d been able to say when I was that age.

  A few days after that conversation, my mother rang me and said ‘You have to come home, Luke, you have to get away from the drugs, you have to come home right now!’ with many tears and much drama. It was beginning to remind me of high school, when she’d kicked me out of home. No doubt she was bitterly disappointed by my choice to start using crystal meth. My parents had paid $8,000 for my graduate certificate in law, and had then given me more money to go and live in Sydney.

  Although we still fought fiercely, as my drug use increased, I was ringing her at least once a week during a psychotic episode — she was actually very good at bringing me back to earth — and eventually she stopped pushing me into coming back home.

  One of the reasons she probably got off my case was that she could tell that in between meth doses — I was usually close to being back to normal then — that I was trying to fill a gap in the twins’, now aged five, lives. The boys lived at Smithy’s, at Smithy’s insistence. He wanted to have full custody of the boys as he claimed that he didn’t trust Beck with them because of her
‘foul temper’. After Beck’s crack-up at Smithy a few years earlier, their break-up, and the subsequent restraining order, his mum had helped pay for a solicitor to ensure he got custody of the boys.

  Beck was largely absent from the house, and although Smithy was a decent dad, the drugs meant the twins were often placed in front of the television for hours at a time. I had noticed that they weren’t getting much individual attention, or any of the extras that went with that. I bought them reading books, and textas, and blank paper. One twin liked to sit with me at my computer, pretending we were doing work for our ‘boss’. The other liked colouring in and creative games. That same twin was well behind his brother in his reading and writing, and, no matter how much time I spent with him, he was unable to pick it up. The thing that I found most troubling about both boys was their speech, which was particularly poorly developed: a combination, probably, of twin-talk, being raised on cartoons, and not having been enrolled in kindergarten, though they were well overdue.

  At her worst, when I tried to talk to Beck about the twins, she’d sit there with a sour expression on her face, barely looking away from the TV screen, occasionally rolling her eyes as if I were simply showing off. When I told her about the learning difficulties of one of the twins, she commented only that he must have ‘Smithy’s slowness’, because the other twin didn’t have the same difficulties.

  As I was not using very much for the first six weeks, I was also getting the twins’ breakfast for them — after a few days on the gear, Smithy would go into these micro-sleeps from which nobody could wake him. So the twins would come into my room at about 10 o’clock in the morning:

  ‘Weet-Bix, Uncle Luke,’ one would say. ‘Get out of bed nooowww,’ the other would yell before they ran off laughing. After I poured them bowls of cereal, one would usually say, ‘Thanks, Uncle Luke, you are the bestest uncle in the whole world’. Not quite — there were times when I saw them, played with them, and looked after them when I was on meth, and while I don’t think they were directly harmed by this, I can now see that the risk to them was high, and I believe it affected the sanctity of our relationship.

  I had fallen in love with the boys long ago, but now I felt a sense of responsibility for them; I was genuinely worried about their fate if I left the house.

  The department store was still buzzing along with the smell of potato cakes and the nonsensical chatter. I was waiting in line with Samuel, who had managed to stuff no less than six printer cartridges in his pants and under his top. These printer cartridges were worth $53 each. Samuel was making a purchase — a packet of Smith’s salt and vinegar chips — both to make him look less suspicious, and to get him a branded plastic bag, which was crucial for the next stage of his operation.

  After charming the cashier, Samuel paid for his chips and — just as he had predicted — walked through the security gates with over $300 worth of stolen goods.

  He texted Jodie, who followed him through the same checkout a few minutes later. Her purchase was chocolate; when we got back to the car a few minutes later, she revealed more secret compartments in the baby’s pram than you’d find in a military bunker. These compartments were filled with DVDs and CDs — perhaps about $400 worth.

  ‘Now we go to the next store,’ Samuel said.

  He drove us twenty minutes down the road to the next suburban shopping mall, which had the same department store. He walked up to the customer-service counter with the six printer cartridges in the bag with the department store logo, where he was greeted by a young and rather flirtatious clerk, who listened attentively as Samuel told her he’d just realised he’d bought the wrong thing.

  ‘As it turns out, you don’t sell the cartridges I need,’ he said. ‘My ex-wife is really angry with me — we need the printer for a big school assignment, and I’ve spent all my cash. Can I get a refund?’

  The clerk scanned them and said, ‘Well, I can see they’re from here. I can give you a refund, but I will need to record your ID.’

  Samuel handed over his fake ID, and the clerk entered some data, and then handed over $318 cash.

  ‘Oh, thanks so much,’ he said. ‘You’re a life-saver,’ and the girl glowed with satisfaction.

  Samuel didn’t celebrate until we were a hundred metres or so away from the store.

  ‘Now what?’ I asked.

  ‘Time to get some meth,’ he said. ‘Want to join?’

  ‘Why not?’ I replied. ‘Why not.’

  Chapter Twelve

  The devil

  WHEN FORENSIC PATHOLOGIST Dr Isabella Brouwer examined the corpse of 18-year-old Ultimo woman Jazmin-Jean Ajbschitz for the coroner, she noted that the injuries were consistent with and typical of the kind of blunt-force trauma injuries she saw in catastrophic car accidents.

  Specifically, she noted that the force of the impact that killed the teenager had crushed the right side of her ribs so badly that her heart had almost been torn in half. Dr Brouwer’s examination also revealed bruising on Jazmin-Jean’s left shoulder, her left leg, right arm, lower back, upper back, her scalp and the left side of her neck, multiple rib fractures, and haemorrhaging to her tongue.

  All fairly standard car accident injuries, right?

  As we learned in Chapter 1, though, the hard-partying 18-year-old with olive skin and a kindly manner was brutally killed by Sean Lee King, her long-term boyfriend, in her own apartment.

  The pair had originally met at a music festival, and things were good between them for the first three months. But over time, Jazmin-Jean found him jealous and controlling. He would read her text messages to and from other people, and demanded to know where she was at all times. Drugs became part of the mix, and in the few months before the murder they had been arguing about meth — Jazmin-Jean was worried they were both using too much of it.

  On the day he killed her, Sean Lee had been smoking crystal meth, and had drunk an entire bottle of bourbon. The pair argued throughout the afternoon, mostly via text message, before she seemed to dump him in a text in which she also called him a ‘cheating, girl-bashing dog’. He called her back, and Jazmin-Jean and a female friend who was with her put him on loudspeaker where they heard him say, ‘I’m going to fucking kill you. Wait until I see you. You don’t know what I can do.’

  Sean Lee made his way to his now ex-girlfriend’s unit block on Harris Street, Ultimo, on the city fringe. He began yelling at her from outside, in the black of night, amid the high-rises, the terrace houses, and the semi-new public-housing blocks. Jazmin-Jean eventually came outside, hugged him, and invited him inside.

  Twenty minutes later, she was dead.

  When police arrived at the scene, they found bloodstains on various parts of the hallway that led to the bathroom, as well as on Jazmin-Jean’s scarf and one of her shoes. They saw blood smeared on an adjoining wall, and more blood staining the floor of the bathroom. Faecal material had been deposited in the shower recess — it is thought that Jazmin-Jean was so terrified in the last moments of her life that she lost bowel function.

  Sean Lee was arrested and faced trial. The 27-year-old told the court that he’d only killed her because he was high on crystal meth; he said that he didn’t intend to do it, and didn’t remember doing so. And it is true both that Sean had never killed before, and that meth has a reputation for being a deadly drug, an evil drug — a drug that is known to have been involved in many homicides and violent crimes. Indeed, few dispute that there is at least some link between methamphetamine use and violent behaviour.

  McKetin’s 2014 research, as quoted earlier, found that people become more violent when they use more ice, and this propensity increased if the person experienced psychotic symptoms. The researchers found a six-fold increase in violent behaviour when chronic users take the drug: while only 10 per cent of users were violent when they were not taking the drug, this increased to 60 per cent when they were taking crystal meth in heavy doses. In t
he United States, a 2006 study from Ira Sommers and Arielle Baskin-Sommers from the School of Criminal Justice and Criminalistics at California State University interviewed 205 meth users in Los Angeles, and found that 26 per cent of them committed violence while under the influence. Further to this, although a slim majority of those had committed violent acts when they were not on meth, 46 per cent of the study participants who committed violence reported that they had never committed a violent crime prior to the methamphetamine-based events. The researchers concluded that for those individuals ‘chronic methamphetamine intoxication produced a paranoid state, including frightening delusions that often resulted in aggressive acts. The nature of these acts overwhelmingly took the form of intimate partner violence.’

  Based on experience, I have to agree that if you take enough meth over a long enough period of time, it can open one’s own heart of darkness, until one’s system is flushed with the darkest bloodlust one may ever know. What is bloodlust? In this context, it is a feeling of excitement about committing a violent act — as if all your life had led up to this moment, and your cruellest, most playfully sadistic behaviour will be your legacy, your act of revenge: a most dramatic and symbolic way to be remembered.

  You may remember Rebecca McKetin’s explanation that meth users are effectively ‘paranoid from too much dopamine, irritable from low serotonin, and overhyped — all at once’. And for some users, this biochemical reaction plays out in shatteringly real ways.

  Nicole Millar — an attractive mother of three with dark-brown hair and bright-blue eyes — had fought off her own share of drug and alcohol issues over the years. But in June 2010, at age forty-two, her life was relatively stable; after spending half a decade working as a cleaner, she now worked as a driver for an automotive spare parts retailer. She drove the youngest of her children — Kane — to school every morning, kept herself busy at her job, where she was well liked, and spent most of her nights relaxing with her kids at her public-housing house in Bayswater — a fairly rough but reasonably pretty town shadowed by the hills of the Dandenong Ranges in outer south-east Melbourne. Nicole was known as a quietly spoken woman, and a naturally gifted caregiver, but there was one problem she hadn’t yet been unable to free herself from — attracting highly abusive men. Nicole had already fled a violent relationship in 2005, an event that led into her public housing. In 2008, she began seeing 37-year-old David Hopkins, a nightshift tunnel-worker/foreman at the local Eastlink freeway, which was then still under construction. The pair felt immediate chemistry, and it wasn’t long before David moved in. Nicole would soon find out that David — a tall willowy man with olive skin and light-brown hair — had a foul temper and propensity for drug use.