In My Skin (4 page)

Heroin was a lure, a security, a delight. It calmed me, glossed me; the infusion of heat, the tickle of satisfaction. With junk in our veins, we were the most beautiful people in the world.

I liked how our eyes would all glitter as we waited for the dealer to arrive; how they’d soften after the fix. The sex was fantastic.

James and I always had lovely sex; but there’d been moments when we sat in pubs, in my room, just gazing at each other with nothing to say. Now, with the glee and balm of the drug in our systems, we couldn’t stop talking, touching. When we made love it was for hours, in a cocoon of warmth, in drowsy low lamplight, his skin a miracle under my hands, his mouth rapturous on mine.

Max said, ‘I don’t like it. You don’t know what you’re doing with those kids. I’ve seen people who use smack, you’re not like that. Do you even know what the fuck you’re doing?’

‘It’s fine,’ I said, my smile reaching him, my eyes already drifting away.

He didn’t know how it was. There was something full of awe surrounding that drug, in our respect for it, the way our excited giggles would flatten into seriousness for the administration, and then rise again in the happiness afterwards.

My housemates, Cathy and Dan, knew something was up. We were watching a program about the heroin trade in Afghanistan. ‘I’ve been doing some of that,’ I said finally, off-hand. ‘Heroin. It’s kind of interesting.’

The television blared on; they stared at me. The room stiffened. It wasn’t the reaction I was hoping for.

They stopped talking to me; when I walked into the lounge room Cathy would leave, looking upset. They put a second television in their bedroom and I rarely saw them. Petulant and baffled, I decided to move out. My life could be so much better, fresher; something new was what I wanted. Now I was finished with university it was time to re-set. I would be clean and healthy, I would take myself in hand, firm myself up. I had a beautiful boy, wonderful friends. James and I decided to move in together.

We could find a deco flat, in the suburb of Elwood just nearby. I pictured myself reading in the afternoons, perhaps studying a little ancient Greek, and writing with a thick-nibbed pen. My hair smooth, my mind clear as water. There would be plane trees shading my window and pools of sunshine on the floor.

There were plenty of beautiful apartments, but all too expensive for a bookshop girl and a student. We ended up with a flat in a seventies building. Its exterior was the drab brown of a Communist foyer and inside were small, box-like rooms without decoration. The ceiling was like regurgitated porridge. ‘We’ll decorate,’ we said. But my black-and-white nudes, my gauzy wall-hangings and my candlesticks looked a little odd against the bleak beige walls.

At our housewarming party there was no food or drink, since we had no money to buy any, and old friends mixed awkwardly with new. At the end of the evening, the non-drug users departed, leaving the rest of us to borrow money to score from the last to leave. I’d sworn to myself I’d never use if I didn’t have the cash on me; but it was only twenty-five bucks. We liked two tastes each by now. James, Jodie, Sam, Abbey and I sat on the floor in a haze of contentment, and didn’t care that the others had gone.

My parents came to see the new place. They’d visited me from time to time in St Kilda, though it was easier for me to go home to see them. In the past I’d usually stayed the night, but I hadn’t done that for a while. Every now and then I’d catch up with them to see a film or have a meal. Now my parents looked around the new place.

‘The ceiling’s pretty low,’ said my mother. ‘It’s a good thing you haven’t much furniture, in this little room.’

‘But look at the big plane tree outside the window!’ I said, and directed her attention outside. Out of the corner of my eye I’d seen a forgotten swab wrapper lying on the carpet under the couch. I kicked it out of sight.

‘It’s nice, darling,’ said my mother as we walked down the concrete stairwell and into the concrete carpark. ‘I just hope you can afford it, you two.’

I started a new journal. On the front cover I stuck a picture of Anaïs, elegant and composed, at the brink of her career, and framed it with black velvet. In the back, I kept a list of the dates we used heroin, until there was no point because it was every day. I filled the pages with looping letters, chronicling a life that seemed to be moving beyond what I had ever expected.

It had been a couple of months since we started using. Already when we didn’t score we felt the difference. A slight flush of sweat, loose bowels, thin fatigue. My skin dried out from the chemical. But the compensations seemed enough. The prickling excitement of fixing up, the gluttony; how sleek and luminous we were when the drug was inside us.

It was a good life for a while. I worked several days at the bookstore; I’d come home, up the leafy street still sunny with the last of autumn’s warmth, with icy-poles for us to eat on the balcony. Jake lived in a flat across the road from us, so most nights one of us would go and visit him and come back to find the other waiting with teaspoons, syringes and a cup of water ready. We’d fix up, smoke a few cigarettes, talk, cook, watch television. It was a calm routine.

Jake was an exotic character who exactly fitted my expectations of a smack dealer. He wore black with rockster swagger and told outlandish stories from his life—his champion athlete days, kangaroo-shooting with his brothers, perilous car accidents he’d miraculously escaped. He was about the same age as me. His girlfriend Vicki was a morose blonde who said little and slumped on the couch. She was a street prostitute; Jake said she was tired from all the energy she used up working at night. They worked and dealt to cover their habit; they weren’t flush with cash. There was a kind of cinema glamour to them, in their flat full of kitsch and cigarette smoke and discarded thigh-high stiletto boots. Vicki’s eyes were smudged with make-up; they had a GI Joe doll on the mantelpiece, armed with an uncapped syringe. At first we begged needles off them, from a full box in a drawer; then they told us where to get clean fits from the needle exchange. Their apartment always smelled of the harsh alcohol scent of swabs. It felt good to sit in there, talking; when other customers arrived, we said hello, smiling. It was the bonhomie of complicity.

When I met Jake on my own, to score, he sat close, and talked low. I liked making him smile, caught by the implausible glamour of the man. Blushing when he complimented me, allowing myself to be flattered. His manner was a cross between lounge-lizard and big brother. With Jake I felt as if I were in a new world, but he made me feel safe too. Under the braggadocio, he was just a young man with a habit getting by on small-time dealing. Making the best of it. He tried to warn us what heroin would bring; but of course he had to sell his gear too. I never held that against him. I just liked his attention.

We saw less and less of Jodie and Sam; they’d moved in together, with Jodie’s sister Abbey and her boyfriend, who was also using now and, though we were all bound by friendship and the drugs, I found myself infuriated by their blitheness and self-absorption, because they mirrored my own. James and I drew more and more together as the winter came down. I was busy cruising, not doing any art, not reading enough, idling and telling myself it was okay, this was my year off after uni.

‘I love you,’ we said to each other every time we slid the needle into the other’s arm.

The drug fuelled us into one cigarette after another. After a taste we would be jittery with excitement and a feeling of power, talking rapidly, fluently. I hadn’t expected it to be a stimulant. But most of the time it held us steady, serene. There was little physical thrill except for the first minutes, when I’d feel a glow that was as much psychosomatic as chemical. It wasn’t quite the ecstatic swoon of the movies. We liked to lie back with a cigarette after the fix, but after a minute we’d sit up again. It was the doing of it, the equipment, the ceremony, the promise, that made my mouth water with excitement.

We still smoked pot from time to time but I liked it less now, on top of the smack; the two sedatives made me listless, and occasionally I would realise, dazedly, that I had breathed out but not in.

Again and again my journal described our resolutions, bright as epiphanies, that the drugs were no good, that we should quit; the raggedness of my nerves; the resolve to fix everything; and our failure. I wrote compulsively of being in love, and briefly of the drugs.

The light in the kitchen was high and fluorescent; one night I wandered in to get some water and, caught by my reflection in the window, I stopped and could not stop looking at my pale, lost face.

The band I played bass guitar in, a hard-edged indie trio, was staggering by now. The friendship continued, but we all had problems which seemed very rock and roll; Mike suffered a panic disorder, Cass was driven and quick to tears; and here I was, in a black leather jacket, doing heroin in the toilets. Our music got darker, heavier, and the arguments more hysterical. In between we played the occasional gig and I still had the electric thrill of satisfaction—me, the shy girl, up there in the red lights, bashing out the sonorous chords of angst. But everything was unwieldy, and I knew that my band-mates were impatient with my tiredness, my crappy equipment I couldn’t afford to replace and the way I turned up to every practice session late. I found it hard to come up with melodies now.

It wasn’t long before we decided to take a break, and then the break turned into the end. ‘Too hard,’ said Cass. ‘I’m sorry.’ Later, I saw in the paper that the two of them were still performing occasionally. I said it was probably for the best. Sometimes James took my bass out of its case and played sad, jaunty songs on it. I just watched.

James was out seeing his parents, and I was alone in the flat. We’d scored; had some, and left the rest until later, for a bed-time treat. There was nothing to watch on television; I had no concentration to write or read. I fingered open the little origami packet of powder.

The packet, cut out of a magazine, revealed a shard of lipsticked mouth on glossy paper and a crease full of white powder. I held the little fold of paper carefully in my hands and tipped it into a spoon. I’d cleaned the spoon with alcohol first, with a swab from a small square packet with red lettering. The syringe punctured a plastic ampoule of distilled water; I drew up a centimetre or two of water, and then eased it onto the powder. With a pop the inner tube of the syringe came out of its casing and with the blunt end of it I stirred the powder until it dissolved.

In Australia heroin is not like in American or British movies, where a yellowish solution must be heated or mixed with lemon juice to break open the chemicals; our heroin comes from Afghanistan and Asia, and is pure white. What lay in the cradle of the spoon after a minute looked just like water.

I slotted the fit back together, dropped a tiny corner of the swab into the fluid, and used it as a filter as I eased every tiny drop of liquid into the barrel of the syringe. I peered at the fit to make sure there was no air. It didn’t really matter—it was made with a lock to block any air bubbles entering the blood. But this was a fastidious matter. One took care with this drug.

Fixing up was one thing; I’d never injected myself. James’s light fingers had always slipped the needle in for me. I set about learning how to do it.

In the back of a drawer I found an old tie. Tethering it tightly enough around my upper arm, one-handed, was difficult. It kept slipping loose. I gripped one end between my teeth and pulled it tight. I pumped my fist until I felt the veins swell; with my free hand I swabbed my skin. The needle-point closed in on me; inconceivably, it kept coming. Only a fraction of space between it being outside me, and inside. It didn’t hurt much at all. At first I couldn’t be sure I had the vein, then the needle popped into one with silent satisfaction. A tiny flush of crimson swirled into the barrel of the fit. And then I pulled my blood out of me, so fresh and bright in the chamber, until I had a proper conduit, the needle steady inside me, and I pushed the plunger in. My heart hammering.

Then I had to ease the metal out of me, carefully. I forgot to untie my arm first; blood spilled out of me under the pressure, down towards my wrist. I unwrapped my arm and stared at the wetness, the brilliant colour. I licked the blood off, captivated by what I’d just done. The proof of it, my blood, which I saw so often now, was almost glorious.

My other friends were busy with jobs. The house where Max lived had disbanded; that centre of my life was gone too. Never good at picking up the phone, I hadn’t given my new number to other people and these days St Kilda wasn’t as full of chance meetings and idle coffees. When I bumped into people something was awkward, and we’d wave goodbye on the footpath. No offers to duck into a café for a chat.
See you. Yeah, see you soon.

In fact there weren’t many coffees anymore. Money was difficult; even with minimal using, just enough to soothe the itch of want (and there was something about night time that confounded our resolutions to take a break), I didn’t earn enough to support two people’s habits, and pay my share of rent, and buy food, and go out. I worked four days a week in the bookshop and my wage didn’t quite cover one taste each per day. On payday we’d have a drink at the pub, but most days we had to share a latte at City Books Café. I found an old credit card my parents had set up for me when I’d gone overseas a few years before. Every few days I’d withdraw fifty dollars, hoping I’d somehow pay it back before the account was sent to my mother. It was a nice clean number, fifty: discrete, dedicated to one deal from Jake. In a mad way it seemed irresponsible to take this money for food or bills; so we used, as conscientiously as possible, and one by one things dropped away.