In My Skin (25 page)

Robbie was my companion and a loyal one; he was thin and worn, going nowhere, but he was my friend and my loving boy. Sometimes we lay in the park across the road from the boarding house and I’d hold his hand and we’d smile at each other, startled to find ourselves still a couple after everything. It had been more than a year.

His face was drawn with boredom and depression, his notebooks full of plans and dreams I had no intention of financing, and no heart to criticise. But he could still make me laugh.

Now I took a night off every week, as the season changed and the weather improved again, we could go out. I still slept all day, of course; but in the evening we’d score, and walk into town. Sometimes we’d see a movie or have a cheap meal somewhere. Robbie already spent many of his nights alone wandering town, but for me it was wonderful to see the streets full of people, the world going on. I had the sense of being part of it briefly. The shops were shut, of course. For years now I had walked past shops closed for the night.

It was always too late; too late in the day to do anything but rise and go to work; too late at night for more than reading in bed and sleep. Too late to find my old friends; too late to catch the shops open. Too late to make love, too late to score and make it to work on time; too late for doing anything but drift forwards.

I didn’t always make enough money to score. If I had a bad night with few customers, it was a disaster. Waiting for Plum to arrive, wheedling and apologising and promising money tomorrow, when I hoped I’d have it but I wasn’t really sure. Sometimes Plum said yes. Sometimes no.

No drugs. Clammy with withdrawal after my fruitless night at the brothel, I would keep pulling the thin sheet of sleep back over me as the hours went past. Dim daylight scorched through my eyelids. Even opening them was more than I could bear. The weird chemicals of withdrawal made my head spin; I had synaesthetic reveries, so tactile I could taste them, smell them over the rankness of my own skin. I’d whimper in confused fright, and hear Robbie next to me, grunting back, or turning roughly to settle again.

Who was I, how had this happened, how could it ever be right, how could I ever open my eyes again? Terror a thin mucus at the back of my throat.

Finally, I’d feel Robbie clamber out of bed; he’d dress, and disappear while I dozed again in my muck. Then he’d be back, hours later, murmuring
Hold out your arm
, and he’d sink the needle into me while I still lay there, my face crumpling with relief. The drug would spangle into me, miraculous; we’d smile at each other. Sweet blood sticky and stoned, running down the white flesh of my arm. Robbie had gone to the dole office and begged money out of them. Or he’d borrowed it from a mean thug down the hall, pawned something for a few dollars, or got credit from the dealer. The catastrophe averted once more. I would have to make twice as much the next night, but at least I would be able to go to work.

We used twice a day at least—once before I went to work and once afterwards, before we slept. It seemed a waste to sleep through the easy first hours following a taste, but if we didn’t, we’d doze off in the engulfing drowsiness of withdrawal, and then wake weak and in need. We split ‘halves’, at over a hundred dollars each time. This was enough to keep us going. But it meant that, with cigarettes and food, I needed to make good money every night. Heroin always soaked up everything. If we had the cash, we could use five or six hundred dollars’ worth of drugs in a day. Every fortnight Robbie would get his dole payment, and that was one of my nights off. What was meant to last two weeks was gone in an hour. It was up to me to keep us going.

I thought from time to time that I should look after my own needs before I shared my meagre score with Robbie, but that seemed churlish. And I needed him. For companionship—he was the only person in the world who knew who I was now—for tenderness, and for an anchor. He could score, and that was important. But I resented the burden put on me to keep us going.

One night I came home, brittle and worn. He had made a mess in the room, dirty clothes everywhere; he’d smoked the last cigarette and there was ash all over the bedsheets.

‘How was your night with all your rich boyfriends?’ he asked, barely looking at me, staring at his book.

‘I got fucked up the arse tonight,’ I spat. ‘Three times. Three times, and each time I got paid less for it. I gave the last one for free, just to get the booking.’ I wanted him to hear. Tears were hot in my eyes. I looked at him in loathing.

‘What do you want me to say?’

‘Just—nothing. Just—’ Oh God, I was so tired.

He rubbed my back, and then went out to meet Plum. ‘I love you,’ he said quietly as he uncapped a syringe.

‘I just want this to stop.’ I climbed into bed and turned to the wall.

We didn’t have many belongings to pawn when we needed money. In my room at the boarding house there were only a few piles of clothes and assorted trinkets we’d collected. I toyed with the idea of selling the piano still at my parents’, and dreamed of the sum it might fetch. But I could never quite resign myself to giving up the promise of playing it again. I had some cds, however, and my old bass guitar and amp; these two went in and out of the pawnshop for a pittance. Every time my bass was hauled over that counter and put in a back room I gazed after it mournfully. And one day we didn’t have the money when it was due, and when we went back it was too late. I didn’t lose many possessions from my habit, but I lost that, and it was like a grief.

With time off I had the chance to see my family again. Every second week I’d leave Robbie to himself yet again and go across town for dinner. It was beyond strange to walk back into my parents’ house, the familiar smell and light and objects that now seemed so far away. And yet, for those hours, it all felt almost close. Now that I was working in a safe house, inside, stable, it was like a normal job; I had a place to live, with an address; I had a boyfriend, however unpopular, to keep an eye out for me. My parents were still going to their weekly support group for families of addicts and they looked at me with no less pain but more acceptance. They’d stopped wanting to interfere; they’d learned how dearly that cost. My sister, too, was quicker to hug me, less likely to hang back full of the mulish horror I’d seen in her before. We’d have dinner together and watch television, just as we always had. All around us the rooms full of books, the shelves of music. My room, stacked high with my belongings, at the end of the hall, the door closed. Sometimes I’d take a few things away with me: clothes, books, tapes. Mostly I just left it. The stale scent of that dusty room made me uneasy. It wasn’t a smell that belonged in this warm house, with these loving people.

My mother would drive me back to the boarding house. We’d talk.

‘Would you consider methadone?’ she asked, nearly every time.

I’d shrug. ‘It’s not that great, I’ve heard,’ I said. ‘And it ruins your teeth.’

‘Better bad teeth than dead,’ she said, and that had to be admitted. But I pushed the possibility of death out of the space between my mother and me. I didn’t want her to think of that.

It wasn’t the drug, it was managing a habit that was the hard work. If the dealers didn’t inflate the price with every step down the chain—if it didn’t cost so much—if I had enough money—if there were enough money left over for a life—if the gear weren’t cut with nasty powders that scraped my veins—if there were some way to make it
work
—

There were celebrities and professionals who had enormous habits and yet carried barely a crease on their skin to show it. They could afford their supply; they had good, clean stuff. That’s what I wanted, I thought—not to have to give up the drug, which was so much a part of me, but to have it without the grinding slavery and sacrifice.

The numbness of my soul I dismissed.

It was too late to think of a simple detox. By now a detox would involve puking and diarrhoea for days, would involve massive disorientation and pain, perhaps hospital. I couldn’t conceive of the torture my mind would go through. My parents had mooted the controversial Israeli program, in which an addict was sedated and pumped full of replacement sodium solutions, supposedly to awaken restored after a week in a Tel Aviv centre; but that seemed outlandish, not to mention expensive. I considered returning to rehab, but I simply couldn’t face the idea of the detox.

So just before Christmas I decided, after four years of using, to try a methadone program. Robbie had been on the ’done sometime before he’d met me, and grizzled about it still. You were tied to a chemist visit every day, they fucked you around, if you missed a dose there was trouble, it was hell to get off, it was invented by the Nazis to control their soldiers and what did you expect, it was a sadistic government plot to register addicts and keep them controlled and on lists. I thought this was all quite probably true, but it couldn’t be worse than having to score, and I was ready to muster some energy for helping myself. If it didn’t work, then at least I could tell my mother I’d tried.

Robbie had no choice. If I wasn’t going to buy his drugs, he had to follow me.

We registered at a clinic near St Kilda, in fact only a few doors down from my old dealer Jake’s flat. There was a lot of paperwork, and a long wait in a room full of whining junkies with smelly clothes. I looked at them in distaste.

The doctor was calm and jaded, with a tweed pocket full of pill bottles and a messy desk. ‘How long have you been using? How much? How often?’

I thought of doctors’ examinations in my student days.
Have you
ever had unprotected sex? Have you ever used intravenous drugs? Ever had anal
sex? Ever had an abortion? Ever been tested for HIV or hepatitis C?
I’d put a long line of ticks against the ‘No’ column. ‘I’m awfully boring,’ I’d said cheerfully.

Now it was
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
A different kind of smile.

Afterwards, we popped in to see Jake. But no one answered my knock, and I couldn’t see the GI Joe on the windowsill when I looked up from the street. For a moment I feared Jake or Vicki had died. Then I remembered someone had said they’d got clean, gone up north. It was a long time since I’d visited St Kilda. Across the road was the flat I’d had with James, its balcony still shaded by the big plane tree. I didn’t point it out to Robbie.

We found a chemist just around the corner from our boarding house. We had to be there every day before it closed at seven, to drink a small cup full of red cordial and bitter methadone solution. The dose was high to start with; over the following months it would be reduced steadily, by tinier and tinier amounts as the dosage got towards zero.

The methadone, a synthetic opiate, would hold us and alleviate the symptoms of withdrawal. The idea was that we wouldn’t need real smack anymore; but of course our greed was no less. Whether or not our bodies actually craved the drug was almost irrelevant, once we had the luxury of thinking that way. The idea of a day— even half a day—without the solace of a needle was inconceivable. And we were terrified of the methadone letting us down. It didn’t seem plausible that a couple of sips of sickly cordial could replace the chemical that crackled from a needle in a vein. So we started methadone, but kept using. Just a little less.

Now, with the promise of getting clean, or at least cleaner, I decided that I wanted a house again. I lay in my ash-stained bed in a waking afternoon daze and fantasised about a living room, about coming home from a shift and being able to make toast and watch television. My books close to me again: rows of books, on a real bookshelf, like a normal person. I wanted to ease a space away from Robbie too, and the money he was inexorably leaching from me. I wanted something of my own.

Now we were on methadone we didn’t spend quite so much on heroin, and the difference showed. A little cash, stashed away, hidden from Robbie and the dealers and the other girls, money from fantasies, money from extras; my own money, it felt like. I scraped it together until I had five hundred dollars. I figured that if I had a high rent to meet, I’d economise and use less heroin. And then I looked at the ads in the paper.

Several weeks in a row, after a big Friday night shift and before a busy Saturday night, I got out of bed after only two or three hours’ sleep and went to inspect houses to rent. It would have been hard enough, without a car, without a phone at home, dashing between houses that were each open only for twenty minutes. I was dazed with fatigue, my make-up still on, blinking in the light and trying to hide my pinned pupils from agents and owners. I trundled around to various dank cottages and luxurious apartments. I figured that I could share with someone. I warned Robbie that it wouldn’t be him.

‘It’s not that I want to split up with you, but I need someone who can share the rent,’ I said. ‘I mean it.’

I was resolved to be stern, to ignore his pleas, my guilt at leaving him to his own devices. I felt love for him, but many other things as well.

‘Sure,’ he said, and yet he did nothing about finding a place to go.

I found mine. It was a renovated Victorian terrace in the next suburb, with hardwood floors, french windows off the bedroom, a little garden, an ironwork verandah, a spa bath, two bedrooms and a new kitchen. And white roses in the front garden. It was perfect, the most beautiful house I’d ever lived in; full of light and peace and room for books and lovely things. I got a reference as an ‘entertainment co-ordinator’ from Bea, paid my bond in cash, and moved in.