The Ice Age (12 page)

The general's troops were in cars, strategically scattered around the house of Cassie, a 19-year-old philosophy student. She lived in a wooden Belgrave Heights shack, amid giant mountain gums, and cottages with wind chimes that were — on this grey July day in 1999 — deadly still.

If you flew a helicopter low over the area, you would see Cassie's tin roof, the general's station wagon parked out of the front, another car across the road, two at either end of the street, two behind the property adjoining, and half-a-dozen others in various strategic exit points in the neighbourhood. They were utes, mainly. All were linked up with a radio, and some were so eager for the attack on ‘The Subject' they were revving their cars in excitement. Some had guns for backup, though this would probably be unnecessary. These were big blokes who played football; a couple of them had military training.

‘I wanna get him now, boss,' one said, slapping his hand on the steering wheel. ‘Can't we just run on in there?'

‘Don't worry,' the general said. ‘His time will come; he will feel the pain. We just need to be patient, strategic — wait for him to fall into the trap.'

Cassie had been the one to call them in. The ‘Subject' was her guest. The ‘Subject' was, in fact, me. There was nothing I could do, sitting in Cassie's lounge room amid her art-history and feminism books, on a still, grim mountain day, waiting, just waiting — knowing all the cars were building up outside.

Cassie had misinterpreted a story I had told her the night before: although I was gay, when I was six I had experimented sexually with my 7-year-old female next-door neighbour. Cassie was incredulous, explaining to me — partly through her mad-cutlery eyes, pupils swimming like furious teacups on little spinning plates — the high number of girls who were sexually assaulted in their most vulnerable years, and that men like me were the ones responsible for it.

You should have seen her face that day: with its furious expression, and her long, messy pink hair, she looked like a homicidal troll doll. Although she was having doubts about whether to go ahead with the murder — she looked unsure and guilty — in the end she concluded: ‘You have to feel the pain.'

And again: ‘You have to feel the pain.'

My God, she must have said it a dozen times over.

And then, when I picked up the phone to call my parents, she took the receiver out of my hand and said, ‘That's not a good idea, Luke.'

I was just waiting and waiting for one of the men to burst through the door.

Kill yourself, Luke, do it. Kill yourself, it's the only way out
, I began to think.

At one stage, she disappeared into the bedroom. I was lying on a mattress in the lounge room, staring up at the layer upon layer of clouds through the windows. There was a strange haze floating in the winter afternoon as the mist set in, and I was struck with a sudden feeling of déjà vu. I felt as defenceless and uncertain as if I were in a dream, my darkest intuitions and fantasies about the world materialising.

I picked up the biggest knife from the kitchen I could find. I walked to the toilet, and locked the door. I pulled the knife across my wrist with full force. It burned, hurting more than I anticipated, like stabbing myself with twenty pins at once. I removed the knife — shit! It had left only the slightest graze. Cassie's big cooking knife was as blunt as a broom handle, and hadn't left a single drop of blood.

Seeing Cassie reappear, I dashed out the back door, slippery as a cat, ducking for cover between her and her housemate's cars as I moved down the driveway. I was heading for my parents' house, about a four-hour walk away.

I passed daffodils and oak trees, and made my way to the bottom of the driveway. The general was no longer there. WTF?
Run, run.

I snuck around Cassie's car and popped my head over the bonnet to catch a glimpse. Where were they?

I ran up a little-known mud footpath that went between two properties. But they must have somehow realised that I was leaving, because when I got around the corner, there were two utes parked on the street. I tried to make my way through the most deceiving, most rarely used, residential street. But somehow they knew I was going that way. I noticed a panel van parked outside a house. There were more of them. More parked down the next street, and then a few driving down an adjoining road.

My God
, I thought,
there must be dozens of them
.

It was their military training; they had every corner covered. They had brought together every person who hated me, and every person who
would
hate me if they knew me.

I decided to walk and stay in public until I reached my parents' house. I couldn't think of anybody to call except for the ladies in the local general store. They loved me; we would always have a chat. If I could get in there and ask them if I could hide in there, they could call the police.

The store was on a main road; it was something between a milk bar and a supermarket, dusky and poorly lit, with just three aisles. I went straight to the counter, but there was nobody there, so I hid behind the biscuit display at the end of aisle two.

I waited another five minutes. Where were they? I banged on the back door: ‘Please help me, please — they're trying to kill me.' There was no answer. Were these women dead? I had never known that shop to be unattended, let alone for this long. Perhaps they'd also turned on me. Then a panel van turned up out the front, and there was no place to hide. I ran for it.

I ran for five minutes until I reached a house, the last house before the highway, and still a good 15-kilometre walk to my parent's house. It was a highway full of mysterious rolling hills, rickety, dry, rough bushland, kangaroo road-kill, Victoria's second-biggest reservoir (which was fenced off by barbed wire and surrounded by pine trees), and empty farms. It was a highway that usually roared with yobbos and rednecks, and was, on that day, filled with hundreds of cars from the military-trained gang.

I banged on the door, screaming for them to help me, screaming that I needed to call the police. There was no answer, and this was, I concluded, because they were dead. By now, word had spread around the region, and thousands of men were excited by the prospect of my slow, violent, well-deserved death, and they all wanted to join in. Every car along the highway was part of the gang, and even though none had stopped, they were driving past because they were gathering around the next corner. One would eventually stop, I was sure, and drag me in.

At first the road was straight and narrow, and then I turned left onto a road that wound through desolate hills. I walked to the rhythm of stones crunching under my foot, waiting to meet the void and the masters of the void. One kilometre … two kilometres … three … I could feel the impervious rhythm of nature … four kilometres, and I was like the antelope chased by lions, or the witch burned at the stake. The mob continued to drive past, thundering past at 120 kilometres per hour with little restraint. They were driving straight from the heart; they were doing the right thing; I had to feel the pain. This was a finite road with a finite destination. I started wheezing. Five kilometres now, and what's three hours when soon there will be no time left at all?

By now it had become a dark winter's night. I was walking past the reservoir when a car pulled up behind me.

They have been tormenting me all this time
, I thought.

A girl's voice came from the car.

‘Hey Luke, wanna lift?'

It was a girl from high school.

I got in the car: ‘Jesus Christ, Claire, fucking help me. Thank God. Drive. Look out — bullets.'

‘Um, Luke, are you on drugs?'

‘Yes, I had some speed last night, but that's not important. Just drive, drive.'

She drove me to my parents' house. I was screaming at them that people were trying to kill me.

‘Cars!' I said. ‘All the cars down Wellington Road, they're all part of the gang.'

‘But how do you know they weren't just cars on the road?' Mum asked, leaning into me with a meaningful look

Oh.

Oh my.

Right.

I then went on to talk about the ‘speed' I had taken the night before.

Oh dear. Revelation — I shouldn't have done that either.

I'd had some kind of episode. And now my parents knew I took drugs, and that I had had a psychotic episode and, fuck, how embarrassing.

I rang Cassie, who was extremely upset. ‘How could you have just walked out on me like that, after everything we talked about—'

‘What did we talk about?' I asked.

‘I was telling you for hours about how sensitive I am to rejection,' she said. ‘You just sat there, and then repeated the same question over and over again.'

‘What question was that?'

‘Is the door green? You wouldn't stop asking me whether the door was green.'

I asked my mum to ring a doctor so I could take some Valium, but she said, ‘I think you've taken enough drugs for one night, don't you?'

The next day she took me to a drug counsellor, who said the experience was probably the result of smoking cannabis and using amphetamines. She called the psych ward, who told her they didn't need to come. I told her she was young, stupid, and unhelpful, and left after five minutes.

When I got home, I rang Beck, who immediately passed me to the perfect counsel — her new jailbird boyfriend, Nick, who had a minor history of drug-induced psychosis himself.

I told him the story.

‘Brother, there's one thing I've always noticed about you. You watch way too-fucking-many movies' he said, before ascending into a deep, wheezy laugh. ‘Even your nut-job fantasies are as unimaginative as some bad Hollywood thriller.'

Touché, Nicholas, touché.

There are two things I know now that nobody told me at the time. First, I had experienced a drug-induced psychosis. Second, I hadn't actually taken ‘speed' — I had been taking meth instead.

As we have seen in Chapter 3, from around 1996, drug cooks — and soon many others — discovered that they could make much stronger gear using pseudoephedrine from cold-and-flu tablets; they had runners working for them, who would go from chemist to chemist to buy multiple packets. By adding pseudoephedrine to the process, these cooks were making powdered methamphetamine, and not amphetamine sulphate. While there is no evidence that any crystal meth was being made here (unlike in the US) Rebecca McKetin from ANU has told me that, ‘By 1999, in most states, over 95 per cent of amphetamine powder seized when people were arrested for possession and trafficking was actually meth.'

Bit by bit, meth — coming in from China, Thailand, Myanmar, and the Philippines via the post, hidden in footbaths and kids toys — was superseding heroin. Bikies here were upping the ante, and making stronger formulas. This all means that when I first starting taking ‘speed' in 1998, it is highly likely that I was among the first few thousand people in Australia to take meth. This is probably because after high school I gravitated toward a group of intravenous drug users, who are usually the first in the chain to get the latest drugs.

So it's fair to say — for whatever reason — that my dream of becoming a reclusive, intellectual psychologist hadn't come to fruition by the time I was nineteen. In fact, perhaps it never was my destiny to be a therapist — I mean, I can't imagine too many people wanting to discuss their problems with somebody whose only advice is ‘Please tell the general to go easy on me'.

Dreams still fascinate me, however, and there are three that I have had over and over since I was a teenager.

The first is the feeling of first looking at something, then being curious about it, and then being stuck inside it (like, say, watching a television and then being trapped in it). I find I am in an extremely confined space, and I know that I am going to be stuck there — in terrifyingly cramped contortions — until I die. A psychiatrist told me this likely represented birth trauma; my mum
did
tell me that she had an extremely long, difficult birth, and that I wasn't too happy about having to face the world.

The second recurring dream is that I am on some kind of building structure that seems to move around and change. When I look around, I realise I am on the top of something and at risk of falling off. I try to hang on, but the structure keeps changing shape. I eventually get exhausted trying to hang on, and decide to let myself fall. I enjoy the exhilaration of falling, though I know I will die when I hit the ground, and I always wake up just before I do.

The third and most common recurring dream is one where I am back in the Emerald house I lived in as a teenager, and I am trying to work out what has happened to all the bush in our backyard, and trying to work out ways to replace it, or let it grow back.

Let me provide a bit of context here: while we were living in a small timber house in a neighbouring town, my dad took over managing the piggery he had worked in most of his adult life. The amount of money coming into our household grew exponentially, and so we moved to a big house, twice the size of the old one, on four acres. It was 30 square metres, and looked even bigger because it was thin and long. It had a white roof, colonial windows, three living areas, and four bedrooms. There were floral curtains in nearly every room. The place was heavily alarmed, and every room had movement sensors in it The house sat half-way up a big hill; for Dad, it was also an entire world away from his childhood of roasted rats, empty stomachs, beatings, grime, and the disempowering shame that went along with those things. Dad used to be so ashamed of his origins that, one day, when one of Mum's friends was coming over with her husband, who worked in a bank, Dad wanted to leave the house. He was worried the man would think he was stupid because he worked in an abattoir. He had eventually taught himself how to read, and Mum had taught him how to write. Now he was managing director of his own business — they'd turned the business around, and now made millions of dollars in revenue.