The Ice Age (15 page)

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.

‘Yep,' he replied, turning around to reveal a spatter of blood on his forehead that had somehow already dried.

‘You are not really going to slash Thor's throat, are you?'

‘Well, what else am I supposed to do, she wants me gone.'

‘Listen, Nick, I'll look after Thor, Beck will look after Thor, and if we can't, then someone else will.'

He turned around again, looking across the palm trees and the dishevelled little houses.

‘Nick, Thor is a very nice dog. He is his own being. He deserves to have a full, lovely life and we can all make sure that happens.' At that, Nick put on his backpack and stomped down the steps. ‘It's a shame nobody ever gave a living fuck about me,' he said, his anger escalating. He was breathing faster and faster, his body heaving like the Incredible Hulk, until finally he began to scream. He left the house, and walked (and screamed) all the way down the street. He never came back.

By the end of the year, Beck and I had both returned to Melbourne. For a long time after this, we again went our separate ways. But in her world, I had started to grow into myself. I had survived and even thrived around her criminal friends. It gave me confidence, and, no longer crippled with anxiety, I felt it was time to get more involved in life. In Melbourne, however, I found people a little more intimidating, and I had next to no friends by the time I got back. Also, I was nearly twenty-one and had neither been in a relationship nor really even had sex. But the biggest problem, the one that had stayed with me since my drug binges of the late 1990s, was that strange thing I had been unable to articulate — my confusion about what was real, and, in particular, the fact that I kept hearing hidden meaning in people's words. I would be talking to someone, and I would hear a word and believe it was referring to me, or that the other person knew something secret about me, or that they were doing an impersonation of me. I couldn't even explain at the time, but I was — to put it mildly — one drug-fucked fucker.

I picked out a psychologist at random from the Yellow Pages. A week later, I had an appointment at his Clifton Hill terrace house. He was a small man in his seventies, crippled in some way — he had both a limp and shoulders that sat crookedly enough to suggest he may have had a slight hunchback. When I told him about my lack of friends, he went quickly to work through the categories and criteria he had learnt over his many decades of work as a therapist, and suggested that Schizoid Personality Disorder (SPD) possibly summed me up best — but that ultimately I didn't fit the criteria.

(SPD
is a personality disorder characterised by a lack of interest in social relationships, and a tendency towards a solitary lifestyle — which could also describe somebody who is introverted or whose confidence has been destroyed by being alienated from society because of the moral taboos of the time.)