The Ice Age (46 page)

The most recent photo I've seen of Smithy was a picture of him with his new, young girlfriend who lay, smirking, sticking up her middle finger as Smithy slept like a dead man, with his sickly, grey skin and marks on his face. By some reports, he was now easing off the meth and taking GHB — a cheaper, less exhausting drug — regularly instead. He was moved on by the landlord from his place in Pakenham — that house in the Toomuc Valley — and eventually he lost contact with everybody who knew him. I don't know where he ended up or what became of him.

Twelve months after the order giving custody of the twins to Smithy's father and stepmother, the Children's Court would make an order for the boys to stay with them indefinitely. It was hard not to conclude, that all things considered, it was the best choice of several bad options.

Beck has given up crystal meth, though. She's worked in some odd jobs as a waitress and a food server. She has remained living with her parents, and settled into a long-term relationship with a mechanic who lived interstate — a man she met on a dating app.

Other than that, I didn't know the details of how she lives her life. By calling the Child Protection Unit, I knew that was the end of the friendship. Eighteen months after I left the house, Beck and I still haven't spoken. This, I have to admit, makes me feel incredibly relieved. I wonder how much I went back to Beck again and again out of habit, out of a drug habit, and also to make sure the kids were being looked after properly. I wonder if we actually had anything in common other than our drug use, born in that cold valley together in a state of teenage-angst isolation. I decided to cut contact with most of her family — all of them, except for Hayley.

Hayley finished Year 11; she had no specific plans about what to do. However, she told me she was determined to make something big of her life. She stayed living with a family in an area right near her high school. Two years had passed by this stage, and she still hadn't spoken a word to her mum. She still spoke with other members of the family — her aunties and Beck's parents — but she never saw them. She smoked cigarettes for a little while and then quit. She told me that she drinks only sometimes. She jogs most days, and eats a very salad-heavy diet. She takes vitamins every day. The last photo I saw of her, she was in her school uniform, flashing her teeth, holding up two fingers with a caption saying ‘I love education'.

I keep waiting for the cracks to appear, but they don't. Perhaps they already did, and, as they say, that's how the light got in.

Select bibliography

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Acknowledgements

It's difficult to know where to start, quite frankly. Thanks to Erik Jensen for taking a risk by publishing the article detailing my crystal-meth addiction in
The Saturday Paper
, and huge thanks to Scribe for taking an even bigger risk by agreeing to publish this book. The editors at Scribe have been patient, flexible, open-minded, and very kind from the very start. Thank you. And thanks to my agent, Shelia Drummond, for making this all happen for me.

There are some others I would like to single out who have been particularly helpful to my media career in a variety of ways: Steve Cannane, Rosie Beaton, Kyla Slaven, Ben Naparstek, Justine Kelly, Vicki Kerrigan, Serpil Senelmis, John Safran, Lauren Martin, Jo Curtin, and Jennifer Hopper.

Thanks to Mrs Haywood, my Year 11 literature teacher, who introduced me to T.S. Eliot, and to Philipa Rothfield at La Trobe University for introducing me to Georges Bataille and Julia Kristeva. Thanks to Vicky G. for introducing me to William Burroughs when I was a 19-year-old meth junkie and philosophy student.

Thanks to my parents, and my life-long friends Bree, Erika, and John. Thanks, in general, to everyone for putting up with me.