In My Skin (3 page)

Afterwards I would read, relishing words, their magic transport to luminous worlds. I smoked a bong and flicked page after page, still dreaming.

For my honours year I wrote a thesis on Anaïs Nin, who recorded wild sprees of sex and love in her writings. The pathology of her behaviour excited me. Besotted by the similarities I saw in our natures—yearning, passionate, repressed, fragile—I dressed like her, in heavy thirties dresses and heeled shoes, red lipstick and a glossy bun. For a year I read Anaïs and wished for her elegance, her daring, her sexual fulfilment. I was in love with a charismatic young man called Max who admired Nin’s lover Henry Miller. In his dim, sun-dappled room down the road from mine we talked and talked. Philosophy, art, writing. Occasionally he would take me to bed. And when a year later I wept inconsolably on his bedroom floor for our failure to be happy together, I told myself that Anaïs, too, had felt this pain and made of it something beautiful.

My life was surging and bright, like a wave in the sun. I stayed close to my family, whose house full of books and happy chaos and good humour had buoyed me all my life. I had an arts degree with honours—the final grade wasn’t what I’d hoped, but what could I expect when I’d spent most of my last year playing pool with Max and indulging in romantic melodramas? Now my bookshop employers offered me more part-time work. I wasn’t going to get any further with my studies, but I was sure I would find a place in the world of literature somehow, and so selling novels was as good a way to start as any. The idea of a dour office job and professional career repelled me. I was twenty-three years of age, and my life was just beginning.

I moved out of Matilda’s and into a large Victorian house closer to Acland Street. It had tall, pale ceilings, unused iron fireplaces and a rich garden full of flowers and marijuana plants. I lived there with Cathy and Dan, a slightly older couple who both played in rock bands and decorated the kitchen with bright painted ceramics. My room was dim and cool, its ceiling rose chipped. There was a kindly lemon tree outside my sashed window. I made the room as thirties as I could, with drapes and lamps; I hung my Anaïs dresses along one wall. The house always smelled of incense and pot.

I was still close to Max and his friends, though he and I were no longer lovers. In his house around the corner I said hello to a thin, intense young man with pensive eyes and a nervous habit of drawing in a sketchbook. We had met before, at parties and exhibition openings. I peered at what he was working on: a self-portrait, exaggerating his slouch, his skinniness, his glare of apprehension. And a picture of me, cute and thin also. Underneath, as I watched, James wrote, not looking at me,
I like you.

Taking the pen from his hand, I angled the page towards me.
I
think I like you too
.

Max passed behind James, and winked.

Love, love ran through me like sunshine.

In the summer evenings of St Kilda with James, down there by the sea, with our clever clothes and happy heads, holding hands, everything felt so young and fresh and possible.

Life was all lightness the summer I was twenty-three. The lightness of James’s fingers across my breast in sleep, the lightness of my spirits as we roamed Acland Street in search of midnight chocolate and vodka. We sat on his front verandah in the twilight, dressed alike in short-sleeved gingham shirts, drinking sarsaparilla. James played on an old acoustic guitar. We lit each other’s cigarettes.

James was my bliss. Though he was four years younger than I was he had the deep, thoughtful gaze of an old soul. He lived just around the corner with Jodie, the sister of one of Max’s housemates; Jodie had a boyfriend, Sam; there were other hangers-on. And so I had found myself in a new circle of younger people.

There was underground art I’d never seen, and different music; something joyous and satisfying about their world, new things to talk about. They were so bright and cool, these people, with their wicked humour. I felt older and wiser, but not too much.

I stood on a stage under red lights, playing with my band, striking a pose for the benefit of James kneeling on the floor below, and laughed at him through the hot smoky air. On sunny days in parks I read him my favourite poetry by Yeats and Judith Wright and Stevie Smith, and he wrote me funny, melancholy ditties in return. We made love every day and beneath his hands and his slender body I found pleasure at last, was flushed through with it. I was late to work as James would sleepily reach out from the covers when I bent to kiss him goodbye and he’d pull me in; helplessly I’d sink back into his embrace. It didn’t seem to matter. Love was the most important thing in the world.

And when, two months into our relationship, I found I was pregnant, even that seemed like some kind of adventure.

‘I don’t think we can—should—’ I said.

‘No. But—oh, Kate.’

It made me ill; that was the burden. We tried to imagine that there was a living thing inside me, but it was impossible. All I knew was that I felt dreadfully sick, and wanted it to stop. We didn’t want a child: we each lived in a shared house with only a bedroom to ourself; James was twenty years old. It was all too early and rushed and accidental. When I went to the clinic for the termination, it was with relief. I refused the general anaesthetic, because I wanted to witness the moment, feel the pain. It hurt, but I felt maybe I deserved that.

Afterwards, things continued as they were. If James felt grief, he kept it from me. If I felt grief, I didn’t know.

IT WAS THE NIGHT OF OUR three-month anniversary: a cool evening in April. All day James and I had been teasing each other, promising erotic delights, expensive liquor and luxurious pleasure to celebrate. I was brimming with anticipation, I clutched his hand tightly. And so it was a shock when, walking away from the pub after a drink with Sam and Jodie, James said he couldn’t come back to my room after all.

‘The others and me, we’re doing something at my place.’

I stopped in the footpath. ‘What? What are you doing?’

I was rotten with disappointment but I kept smiling. To show I understood.

‘You don’t want to do it. We’re—’ his face took on a kind of pride ‘—we’re doing heroin.’

Heroin was all around us in St Kilda. We’d been to see a movie about junkies, there were fashion shoots of sullen anorexics in smeared make-up, and the suburb we lived in had a high population of tottering, lean-thighed people with harsh mouths and dirty jeans. But it was a scene I’d never known; it was something I passed in the street. I’d never seen the drug itself, except in films.

The idea of heroin, its swooning rush, strapped arms in hotel rooms, and the romantic tradition of laudanum, had always appealed to my adolescent dreams of exquisite oblivion but to me it was as foreign as motherhood, or speaking Chinese. A black hole, edged with a halo of glamour, radiating transgression. One of my school friends had dabbled in it a few years earlier; when I’d asked him about it, he’d said he didn’t want ever to talk about it. I hadn’t dreamed it would come any closer to me than that.

Now here it was, ruining the evening ahead, entering the house I spent time in, taking my boyfriend to a strange place I didn’t know. I turned, left him, ran to Max’s house numb with fright for tea and consolation. Then I spent the night alone.

The next day James came around, and hugged me. He looked at my face, and hugged me again. ‘It was just something I wanted to try,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’

When we made love, I saw the tiny red mark on the inside of his arm. A little puncture, where something brutal and metal had pierced my beloved boy. I said nothing, but in the dim green light of the afternoon I surreptitiously kissed the tender flesh there.

The next time I went to his place there was a new shiver in the air. James, Sam, Jodie and another friend had the gleeful air of children with a secret. I sat there, all too aware of being the one not invited to share.

I looked at them as people who had crossed a river, who were going somewhere joyously while I stood alone on the other bank. They’d done something I couldn’t conceive of: they’d put a needle in their arms. They’d taken a hard drug. Marijuana and trips, they were one thing; this was like entering a world full of legends and awe. Sid Vicious, Billie Holiday, Kurt Cobain. Of course I felt the pull of that glamour, but I also remembered how all those people had died. What kind of courage was getting my friends past their fear?

That night, and again a week later, there came a point in the evening when looks were exchanged, and someone said, ‘You might like to go home now, Kate.’ As if I were a child to be protected. I could only set my face in a smile, and go away.

I knew this sensation: being judged too innocent, too immature, to remain part of the group, just when I’d found one. Playing horses by myself as a child. Being left behind when my high school friends went out. I was so appalled to find this feeling yet again. And I felt contempt too; I had dallied in the ragged life of the pot-smoking student, but I was still at heart a sensible prude, and I thought they were completely out of their minds to be doing heroin. They didn’t seem to be taking it seriously. I looked at Jodie’s beautiful young face, and I thought of James, sinking backwards on a bed in the ecstasy of a smack rush, with an almost erotic charge of horror.

I didn’t know whether I despised or envied my friends. Fear, temptation, and panic all wrenched at me. All I wanted was to be happy again.

There was no single moment when someone looked at me and said, ‘Just have one go.’ No one made me try heroin. My friends told me to keep away. There was no enticement; just an inductive pressure, a sense that if I didn’t, I would lose.

And so I thought perhaps I should try it. Just once, to know. To join them behind the closed door of someone’s bedroom, to be able to say,
You really are insane, now I know what you’re doing.
To leap over that river. To test myself.

James said no. ‘I don’t want you doing it,’ he said. But then, later, making love to me, he had a little smile on his face and when I kissed him and asked what he was smiling at he said, into the side of my throat, ‘I’m thinking bad things. Bad things about heroin,’ and I, with the same smile, wanting to stay close to him, knowing what it meant, said, ‘Me too.’

And the next night, after James had been done, and then Sam, and Jodie’s sister Abbey, while the rest of us waited edgy and incandescent in the lounge, Jodie took me into her bedroom. James held my arm under the hard light of a lamp and Jodie kneeled in front of me, saying, ‘I’ll try not to hurt you too much, baby.’ I smiled to hide my nervousness. Jodie’s beautiful face was like a Flemish Madonna’s in the blank light; I just stared at the immaculate skin in the crook of my arm, and thought,
In a minute I’ll have taken heroin
. It was inconceivable, but here I was, and it seemed like what I wanted.

The metal approached my flesh; there was a sharp sting, the ridge of the needle under the skin, the sucking pressure of blood drawn out, and fluid pressed steadily in. James released my arm and I licked the tiny spot of blood. It tasted metallic with chemicals. He kissed me, in consolation or congratulation. My head felt dazzled, from my racing heart. But I didn’t think I could feel much else. Sleepy, perhaps. A little spangled with sensation. Proud.

Then I decided that I needed another try before I could say I’d done heroin; I hadn’t had the legendary rush of chemical bliss. It had taken a couple of tries with pot, too, before I’d really felt the effects. There seemed a varnish in me that had to be scratched before a chemical could enter. I didn’t work up the nerve straight away. James and I went on with our kisses, drawing, smoking joints, hanging out. The next attempt was a week later; and this time I was aware of a happy thrill in my veins: a dizzy feeling; then dreaminess as I lay back on Jodie’s bed. I was aware of a contented glow, warm in my marrow. I couldn’t judge how much of that was the drug, and how much was the satisfaction at my own courage.

Heroin is like wading into the sea. The first fizz of water at your ankles is delicious, shocking. You’re aware of every cold pulse of water against your skin. You wade further; your temperature accommodates; you walk more slowly. The water is still shallow, though the bottom slopes. You’re delighted as you relax into the sway, the buckle of the waves. You grin with pleasure, and you think, Why didn’t I come in sooner? How gorgeous, how thrilling! Then abruptly the sand drops beneath your next step, and you plunge into deeper water, and you can’t feel the bottom anymore.

It took about two weeks before I began to realise we were in thrall. That every time the group of us got together the question was,
Shall
we?
That we waited with shivering nerves and giddy smiles for Jake the dealer to arrive, in his shiny boots, with his well-tended hair and enigmatic drawl, with his little origami packets of treasure. That we were having a better time now than ever before; that if we didn’t ring Jake for his wares we sat around listlessly drinking beer, the conversation more laden with effort.

Giggling at each other’s pinned pupils. ‘Butterflied,’ we called it. ‘You’re so butterflied.’

We gloried in the secrecy, the ritual and the closed bedroom door. A deal was fifty dollars, split between four of us; the money wasn’t an issue. The next day we didn’t feel bad, but perhaps dozed a little longer in bed; it didn’t matter since none of us had more than a part-time job, a few uni classes, the washing-up to do. The little red points on our skin healed within a day.