In My Skin (8 page)

I stayed the month in rehab. I grew clear and vibrant. I was a veteran to the new arrivals every day. The staff winked at me as I bounced past, as I ran around the yard playing ball, as I tried out the boxing bag up the back. I spent time alone, thinking, trying to work through what I’d learned in therapy about myself and my self-esteem and my family and the perverse behaviours I’d identified. Clarifying things. I felt better than I ever had in my life. This was like a home. On my last night I made a speech at dinner, about the wonder of surprising yourself. My room-mate came and gave me her silver chiming bell. ‘To remind you,’ she said.

But my time was up. ‘You’ve done really well,’ Cassie said. ‘Don’t be too confident, though. I mean, there are a lot of pitfalls out there. It’s a long road.’

‘I think I’ll be fine,’ I said, and there was a huge smile of hope on my face, and in my deceitful heart a little sneaky wriggle. Because the afternoon I walked out, instead of going home to where my parents and sister were awaiting me, waiting to see their healthy, happy daughter, I turned left at the gate rather than right, and went to Jake’s.

Just one. Just to say goodbye to it. Just as a reward. Just because I’d waited, and I was confident I was changed. Because it was there.

I rang home, on the way to Jake’s. I told my parents I wanted a night of transition before I came back. They were bewildered when I said I’d stay with an old housemate in St Kilda, and see them tomorrow. I knew they were expecting me, with a special dinner and proud faces. It was too late for me to think of that, to allow even one flicker of their hope to enter my heart. I found my coldness all over again. I thought that meant I was strong.

The taste was too potent for me. I’d been a month without heroin, and my tolerance had fallen. This was the kind of situation where people ‘dropped’. I didn’t overdose, but I was sleepy and dazed when I arrived at my friend Matilda’s to beg a bed. She was surprised to see me, but let me in. My dazed eyes must have told her all she needed to know. I sat up to keep watch over myself late into the night, and through the thick haze of the drug and the numbness I wept a little because I knew I’d already failed. The humiliation was raw to touch. I flinched. Like a cord the addiction had pulled me, against all the tethering of my reason and support, pulled me right back, and I’d followed. My fear of losing control made my heart race like a drug did; only the drug could calm it.

I went home the next day, still pinned, still stoned. My parents’ smiles wavered when they saw me, when I wasn’t the cheery, hopeful girl they’d talked to on the phone at rehab, their daughter restored, the nightmare over; when I averted my face and said I was tired and couldn’t face their company. They didn’t say I was stoned. I didn’t say, I’ve blown it. I just crept into my room and told myself it didn’t matter. Of course it did.

I TRIED. I TRIED SWIMMING at the local pool, to keep up the fitness I’d gained, but the school children there crowded me. I tried drinking herbal tea; coffee was tastier. I did improvised yoga in my room, but there wasn’t space. I tried to keep busy, but I didn’t know what to do. And I tried not to use again, but I did.

My tolerance shot up again. When you stop, you dip your resistance to the drug. But a few tastes and you return to exactly where you were. The drug is a constant lover.

It was as if rehab had changed me, but it hadn’t stuck. Out of the safe environment, away from the talk of psychological patterns and the company of those who knew what drugs were like, I felt like I’d walked out of a dream. That silver chiming bell hung around my neck but it didn’t help. Now it was just me, the house in the suburbs and my disappointed parents.

I was alone with my terror. And I clung to the cord of heroin, because at least it tied me down.

The days at home strung out. One shallow breath after another.

There was a silence griming the spaces between our words to each other, the falsely normal interactions of daily life. Since I had lost my job, I was home almost all the time, walking carefully, sitting in my room, avoiding my parents. I didn’t like them to see my pinned pupils, the harsh signs of my helplessness.

I marvelled at the unmarked skin in the inner arms of everyone I saw. Not a nick, not a bruise or scab. Those people turned their palms upwards, reached across a table without a thought.

I needed another job. I had no references, no particular skills beyond bookselling. My classics degree was useless. I was exhausted. And the drugs seemed like enough work.

It was still bizarre, using drugs in the same house as my parents lived, where I had once been innocent. My room was much as it had always been, with the pale green paint I’d chosen when I was fifteen; with my own name scrawled on the chest of drawers in my childish hand. It had the dustiness and quiet of a museum. My piano remained mostly closed; to play Beethoven’s grandeur now, when I felt so humbled, seemed ridiculous. I skulked through the familiar spaces of our house.

When I walked up the hall to my room, what did my parents think? I would fix up, furtively crouched behind my bed. The laws of bad luck would inevitably have my father knock and enter at the moment when I had the needle poised against my skin. Shoving my tied arm out of sight, shaking with the reflexes of shock, I’d mumble replies to his conversation, humiliated and impatient. I had no idea what he knew, or guessed. My lies were always less successful than I thought.

Obviously, they knew I was using. When I went out, it was to score. I was trying to stop, and they knew that too, and upon that they fixed; this time, with encouragement, with attention, I might break through the crucial five or six days of major detoxing and out to the stage where I could think lucidly, where I would see the disaster of my life.

A few days on the gear, a few days off. I was either ill or stoned. My diary entries were fastidious, loquacious, repetitive. It was a stumble from one jerk of fright to the next, eased with drugs in between. I was never so certain of getting clean as when I was dirty.

My parents had to believe what I said, though they knew I was a liar. They loved me so much, and their love sustained me and enraged me and broke my heart.

We experimented with systems. We tried pretending nothing was going on. We tried being jovially honest about it. We tried giving the money that I still had left from the book shop to my mother and having her drive me every two days to my dealer to score, hiding my little packets in her wardrobe to dole out to me three times a day. I crept in, found the stash with the unerring instincts of the needful, had my fix before I was meant to, and pretended I was going along with the program. That system didn’t last long.

My father made paternal chat, as if nothing were wrong, with a disquieting, tremulous hope in his eyes. My sister had moved out. When she came to visit us she was taciturn with me. Her smiles were emptied by the apprehension in her eyes.

We tried locking me in the house. I found new ways to sneak out late at night and score. Edgy with nerves as bedtime approached, measuring my mother’s dallying in front of the television against the time of the last tram to St Kilda, fingering my bank card from its safekeeping in her wallet and replacing it later in the dark. The next morning my parents hugged me and said, ‘You’re doing so well, we’re so proud of you.’

I turned my not-quite-pinned eyes away and said, ‘Yeah, thanks. Thanks.’

A week later and I swore I was going to get clean, but I had to pay Jake back some money first. It had been three torturous days of detoxing and I said he would come looking for me if I never went back to pay him off. All my funds were gone now. ‘You won’t buy another one?’ my father asked.

He fetched a fifty dollar note. I took it smiling. ‘I won’t.’

I did. The repayment was a lie. The deal was hidden deep in a corner of a pocket. ‘Gotta go,’ I grinned at Jake in his living room. Outside my mother waited in the car. She’d warned me, driving there, that she’d search me. It was for my own good. I thought she was joking. I sweated with the anticipation of a fix. Only half an hour more, and I’d have it, I’d have it.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said once we were home, as she told me to raise my arms. She rummaged in my pockets, paused. She was out the door of my bedroom and stalking down towards the toilet before I could stop her.

Too late; she’d thrown the packet down the flushing drain. It was gone. The water roared. I couldn’t believe it. Something animal and raging came up in me; I slapped at her arm, as hard as I could. I smacked it again, in spite. She was too close to me. ‘
You fucking
bitch,
’ I heard myself shriek.

‘I don’t believe anything you say,’ she shouted, appalled; there was horror in her face. ‘If you say the sky is blue I think you’re lying.’

‘I’m not always lying,’ I protested, wounded. ‘Sometimes, sometimes—’ I was crying. ‘I’m still me. Please believe me. I’m still me.’

The mortification was complete. I couldn’t do the right thing; I couldn’t admit what I was doing; I could only lie, and have my lies recognised, and keep on lying because there was no other way of getting what I needed. Or protecting the ones I loved.

‘I don’t ask you to care about me,’ I said. Their care was the rope around my neck and the thin thread to which I clung. Without my family I would have nothing except myself, and the drug.

And yet I simply could not stop. There was something in me, even beyond the torture of detoxing, beyond the shame of using, the anguish of causing my family hurt, that insisted that if there was an opportunity, I should take it. As if I were still making up for my tentative adolescence, leaping into adventure. An adventure of dreary predictability, but edged with the glamour of a sharp silhouette moving through a ragged world.

The scar on my arm was clotted with tissue now, and sometimes it was butchery as I tried to find the vein beneath, digging into flesh, racing to beat the blood thickening in the syringe. But at night, sick and sweating, or even when I was coasting easy and already stoned, the drug nagged at me.
More.

We all watched television together at night. We ate dinner. I rambled around the house, reading, keeping to myself. But I noticed that when I tried simply to make conversation, it was met with a kind of perplexity. It was hard to know what I should say instead.

A week later and we had fallen back, in exhaustion, to letting me out of the house unaccompanied. There were errands to run, friends to catch up with. I came home in the afternoon, weary with the effort to resist St Kilda. I’d been holding back all day. At the end of the street my house was in sight, only a few metres away. I paused and thought,
I could go back out for one
. I could get some smack, and I could have it. Surely it was only a matter of time until I used again. Entering the house meant giving up my chance. I stood, wavering, tormented, for ten minutes. I knew what it meant if I went back; it meant I was turning away from this safe house, from the ones waiting in there for me, from their concern and their love. If I went to Jake’s, I would have to wait till night to return, when they were all in bed, to hide my give-away eyes. Me in the cold night, waiting for shelter. I stood there, with my head resting against a tree in the bleak grey light of the afternoon, gulping down pain. Until I walked back to the tram stop with my emptied heart.

I made a ‘will’, a letter to my family, just in case I overdosed.
Don’t be sad. Don’t be angry. Thank you for everything. This wasn’t your fault.
I had a good life. I’m so sorry.
I scrawled it in my diary, where no one would have found it anyway.

As I grew more and more frightened of myself it seemed a good idea to see a counsellor again. I was escorted to see a woman with a snug office in a day rehab centre. She had a short haircut, a realistic smile. Juliette was good for me. I could tell her what was going on; we talked about practicalities. She didn’t let me bullshit too much. I couldn’t talk about everything, of course; I was ashamed. Even to this sanguine woman I couldn’t admit the whole reality of my deviousness. The absolute cold will to destruction and the disregard for others. I chatted, and ruefully admitted to many faults, and charmed her with my jokes and cleverness. And I knew I was forfeiting a chance to have been honest, if only I’d known where I could find honesty in myself. My soul seemed glassed with ice.

Juliette, however, was good company. She knew the scene but was not of it; she had seen girls like me before. I wasn’t the worst case she’d met. I don’t think she knew what to make of my prospects; I had all the factors for a good possibility of recovery, but equally I had the intellectual shrewdness to obfuscate. I had the single-minded, absorbed self-destruction of the privileged child.

We began to meet for each session in a café, drinking iced coffees. Around us couples smoked cigarettes in the sunshine. The stereo played Cuban jazz. Juliette said, ‘If you don’t stop, I reckon you’ll be dead within a year.’

That made me pause. ‘I don’t think so,’ I said, and snickered at my own arrogance. Charming, disarming. ‘I’m too clever for that.’ I didn’t think she believed what she’d said.

‘Clever,’ she said, challenging me with raised eyebrows. ‘That won’t save you.’

Sometimes I pretended to go to see Juliette and instead took her fifty dollar fee and skipped off to St Kilda. At Jake’s I sat on the floor, being witty. Vicki was slumped on the couch, dozing; Jake made coffee. It was a nice afternoon but the curtains were drawn.

‘Vicki’s having a busy time on the streets,’ Jake remarked. ‘There’s some festival in town, lots of tourists. It’s mad.’