In My Skin (6 page)

‘What you want?’ the others demanded. ‘What you talking about mate?’ I suddenly wondered if they had knives.

‘All right, but you owe me,’ I said with futile bravado, and walked away to try someone else. I too began to carry a small knife. Not that I would have known how to use it.

It was a surreal existence for months. During the day I was a mild, neat bookstore assistant, chatting with the local matrons and book groups, exchanging gossip with my colleagues, handling money, making phone calls, straightening my skirt. At home I was a nice, polite, middle-class girl living with her parents in an old haven of innocence. At James’s, I was the awkward girlfriend, not quite cool enough for his housemates. And in the city, I was a swaggering junkie in dark streets.

Standing behind the counter at the bookshop I began to read Holocaust memoirs. Something in me was almost consoled by comparison with the horror of the camps, by the radiant silence of tragedy. I read one after the other, turning my mind for a moment away from the trepidation in my own heart.

The money I’d piled so carelessly on my mantelpiece went quickly now, even with the cheaper gear. James was still on the dole. The idea of not getting on was enough to make us anxious and uneasy. I sold some cds and old books; I worked overtime if I could get it.

One last taste to say goodbye; one last taste to help out Jake when he rang needing money; one taste to get me through a difficult day; one taste to share with James. A taste to make me feel better; a taste to stop me feeling bad. If it was a grey day, heroin would brighten it; a sunny day was made perfect with a fix.

But it was no longer as simple as wanting heroin, liking it. Often now as winter came down I resented it. My body was tired; it was raining outside; the hour was late. Time for bed. And yet I had no choice. The drug took me out of the house, on cold bleak nights, on aching feet; it drove me to places I didn’t want to be. There was a steely compulsion in me. I often wrote in my journal of how good it would be to be clean, how I was going to get clean, how fresh my life would be next week, next month, how resolved I was—but when it got dark, the thought of the drug muffled all else. I wrote of heroin as a scaly green lizard wrapped tight around my mind, blinking its cold eyes at me, blinding me.

In the meantime I was down to my last few dollars.

My parents didn’t know I had resumed using, I thought. I was careful to hide my pinned pupils if I was home, or I would spend the night at James’s. But there was hostility brimming in the house. Things went unsaid. As the first shock had sunk into my parents’ minds, their fright curdled to something else. I had broken the innocence of our family and my cheer, forced, only made the atmosphere brittle.

And I could see that things were getting worse. I was more and more fixated on money, and on the single diversion of drugs. My old friends were out there, but already they seemed to belong to another time. A sense of humiliation scorched me; everyone had expected so much from me, and this was so little.

Another Christmas came and went. I worked hard, kept quiet.

There was a bowl of loose change in the house. Shiny gold two-dollar coins in among the dull silver. Late at night I scooped them out and put them, heavy, in a little bag; there were enough to score with. I thought,
no one will miss them
. Not yet.

Then my parents said they knew I was using again. I could only tell them that it was under control, that I was going to stop soon. They looked at me and didn’t know what to say. Neither did I.

I was away from St Kilda, in the suburbs, in my routine of work and home and ‘getting on’: scoring. James and I were bound by the drugs, and love too. But we made love now less often. Heroin first blesses its users with enchantment and then parches them of sensation. The pulse between us was weaker. It was hard to come, hard to find the momentum towards crisis. But we embraced, still enraptured by each other’s fragility, the poignancy of this grace amid the grime. We held each other close.

It was already a year since we’d left our little flat. Things were changing under the mist of drugs and at times I felt James grow cautious with me, drawn to his new friends and their common interests. I knew I was losing him.

We sat on the edge of his bed in the thin light of a grey afternoon and had nothing to say. I wanted to suggest we score; but we’d scored. I wanted to touch him; but I’d touched him enough. He was sitting apart, staring at his shoes. My beautiful boy, frail-thin and old-souled, full of thoughts he couldn’t tell me, of a self-protective instinct I didn’t possess.

He said, ‘I think I can’t do this anymore, Kate. I think I have to stop. I have to be on my own. You know I still love you…I still do. But this is killing me.’

And I sobbed and sobbed, because I knew he was right, and I wanted him well, and not shadowed by this dreariness, but I was so frightened to be alone, and I knew I wasn’t ready for anything.

After we broke up I was numb. It was one thing to lose a lover from a fault in the relationship, or from having made a mistake, or even from loving too much. James and I loved each other, but this was emptying everything we had. It seemed a long time since the sarsaparilla on his porch back in St Kilda, and him running after my tram waving goodbye with his skinny arms.

He was stronger than I was. He went to his parents’ place up in the hills and, without medication, without them knowing, without succumbing to the pain in his limbs and the torture of temptation in his head, he went through withdrawal and came back to his house and didn’t use again. We talked sometimes on the phone, and when I cried he soothed me. But I was nostalgic for the early days, and he said, ‘I don’t want to think about any of that anymore.’

In bed at night I touched myself, clenching at the memory of James making love to me; the sweetness that we had forfeited. My face made the crumpled shape of pleasure, or tears. A huge grief yawned open in me, and then left me vacant.

SO I WENT ON. AT HOME there were eyes on me all the time. There was little chance to do anything but go to work and return to the house. Now I had to find a way to score without the alibi of visiting James. I was feeling the effects if I didn’t fix up regularly enough; I’d spend the morning in the store, dragging myself up and down the shop floor, limbs like sacks of mud, back aching, sweat acrid under my arms. It was hard to smile at the customers, to pretend I was fine, to run up the stairs to fetch books. Towards lunch I’d obsessively check the time. And then I’d dash out the door and hail a taxi. A mad drive to St Kilda, glaring at my watch; I had only three-quarters of an hour, and the drive took twenty minutes each way. A sprint up the stairs to Jake’s door, a hasty chat, a quick fix in his living room, the bliss of relief and a few puffs of the post-fix cigarette; then back to the waiting taxi and the panting arrival back in the shop, ten minutes late. I did this every day.

My excuses about shopping and forgetting the time rapidly grew absurd; my nervousness was conspicuous. After a while I didn’t even bother insulting my employers with these feeble lies, but just skulked back to the shop counter and knew that my deception was undoing years of friendship. But by that time I’d be cruising on the relief of drugs in my system, and it was possible not to care.

It wasn’t as if I got a big rush from the smack by now, after a year and a half of using. There would be a heady sense of glow for the first five or ten minutes; my heart, racing with anticipation before the fix, would steady and I’d breathe cool and delicious air. I was aware that my physical pains had magically eased. Then I had the relief of having scored, of having achieved what I wanted above all else, of having managed it yet again.

Heroin is compelling, in the end, because it is satisfaction you can hold in your hand. Fulfilment, contentment, pride—these are feelings that a person can derive from being a good person, an able parent, a successful worker, an inspired artist. They are inchoate, invisible, ineffable feelings, for all their wonder. They are abstract. Heroin is a satisfaction you can pursue, it’s concrete; you must get the money, find the dealer, arrange the equipment. Then you take the little grain of promise, and you dissolve it, and you draw it up into a needle; you hold it in your hand, and you push it into your flesh.

The further you get into heroin, the more it is the only kind of satisfaction you can imagine.

And heroin gives you permission to do terrible things. For the first time, I found myself behaving with all the ruthless selfishness and disdain of a real junkie. I told myself it didn’t matter.

I was clear in my mind: I was a heroin user. Perhaps an addict, if I admitted it, though the word was frightening. A junkie was one of the hollow creatures I saw in the city or stumbling onto the tram, talking too loudly. Junkies had given up all their dignity. They had no respect for themselves, or other people. They did what they did without reflection, without a thought to consequences. They nodded off on the train; their faces were grey and blind-eyed. I was never, ever like that; I never gave up my composure. But inside I was skidding towards the single-minded obsession of need.

I stole money from work. It was so easy, with all the notes nestled there in the drawer. Even through the first year of using, when James and I were so poor in St Kilda, it had never occurred to me that every day hundreds of dollars passed through my hands. But now it did, and once I had the idea I couldn’t let it go.

I didn’t mean to steal. I would take the cash—a hundred dollars—and replace it later that day once I’d been to the bank with my pay cheque. Just a little loan. But the shop was busy; my afternoon break came too late to get to the bank; the money was spent and the drugs already simmering in my veins.

Standing behind the counter, counting the minutes before the till was reckoned at the end of the day, I became very cold and deliberate. It was a chilly April afternoon and the shop was quiet. The floor manager was down the other end of the shop. I could cover my tracks; no one need know that this had happened, that I’d slipped so far. I forged vouchers and adjusted receipts to hide the loss. My coolness horrified me and saved me.

My two bosses trusted me, they’d known me for years. I was like a niece to them. They were lovely. But they weren’t stupid; they knew I was strange now, and a week later they told me to come into the office and they asked me to leave.

They were kind. They said they knew. They didn’t want to punish me, but I couldn’t stay. Their faces were tight with misery and hurt, and I looked back at them, buckling inside with disbelief that something so awful was happening, that I’d done something so horrendous and now they knew it. I started to cry. Messily I said that I was sorry.

‘You know—you know I use heroin, don’t you.’

One of them said, ‘Yes. Yes.’ His face was full of sorrow.

They sat there as I cried, and silently gave me an envelope containing a cheque for dismissal payments and sick leave. I knew I didn’t deserve it, but I took the money, and got up, still crying, and left the shop where I’d worked since I was a schoolgirl.

It was the middle of the day. I didn’t say goodbye to my colleagues, or the customer whom I’d been helping. I just left. Outside the sky was smooth and white with clouds. I went to the sea at St Kilda, and sat there, looking at the pale dirty sand.

I scored, of course; I bought several caps. I went home, and told my parents. They knew—that I’d been using, that I was desperate for money, that it was likely I’d steal eventually. The atmosphere was almost relieved, now that everything was open. My sister gave me a hug. We joked about what a lazy girl I would become without a job. I was still stiff with horror and remorse at what I’d done. But I didn’t have to pretend anymore. I was out; I was turning into a junkie. Something was changed. And something had to change.

My sister got me alone and said, ‘You don’t know what happens when you’re not around. It’s so easy for you. Mum and Dad
cry
. We sit around talking about you, and we’re all crying. You have no fucking idea how that feels.’

‘I can’t,’ was all I could say.

The money my bosses had given me would last a while. It was a 44 lot of money. My mother took charge, and suggested I leave it in her keeping, to dole out to me. We talked. It was agreed that I was allowed to go on living with them, even though I was using; there was no point in trying to fix things abruptly. My mother gave me enough money every day to score, and I stayed at home, trying to use less, trying to make sense of what I’d done, trying to envisage anything but this existence, and finding it almost impossible.

All the time people were telling me I
had to stop
. It seemed so simple to them.
You just have to stop
. Yes, I’d say. I know. But I couldn’t, I couldn’t. I could only try, and hope, but I felt that no one could understand the power of what was occurring inside me.

My sister, mother, father and I sat in the living room and they tried to talk to me. ‘Do you see what’s happening? Can you see where this is going? What you’re doing to yourself ?’ They all looked at me, perplexed and injured. The more I tried to explain, the more insane I sounded; there were no words for what I felt. I sobbed in humiliation. There had never been sounds like that in this house before.

There were days of using, and days of struggling against it. I would slump around the house, ill and disconsolate, pursued by tempting thoughts. Walls curved in and over me. There was a whine of pure terror inside my mind. Reality hurt me like a sandblaster.