The Ice Age (2 page)

The other frequent delusion I had was that there was a paedophile ring operating in my suburb, that my roommates were in on it, that the headquarters were located at the local Coffee Club, and that it was my purpose in life to expose it. Then, at other times, I had positive delusions — such as the belief that something mystical was happening in my life, and that my crystal-meth use played no role in these feelings.

Correspondence with a guy I'd met in a nightclub three weeks earlier

02/05/2014

From: Luke Williams

Hi Matt, it was great meeting you in Sydney last month — you and your friends were all very welcoming. I just wanted to tell you — and please don't freak out about this — I have been using crystal meth.

It's actually part of a thing called The Journey. I suspect you might have something to do with this, given your interest in mysticism.

I am onto something good, I know it. I have had a couple of ‘episodes' and some horrible memories came out and now I feel so confident and free. I really feel like I am becoming a better, kinder, more open person through The Journey.

02/05/2014 12:05

From: Matt F

Hey Luke, Thanks for the message, Is everything okay? Do you want to talk on the phone later this arvo?

02/05/2014 12:06

From: Luke Williams

Yes please, thanks, because I wanted to ask you something. I have growing extra-sensory powers since I have started The Journey and have been practising telepathy, I just wanted to see if you or anybody you know have been sending me messages.

02/05/2014 12:08

From: Matt F

Not that I know of.

02/05/2014 12:06

From: Luke Williams

Okay. Do you know anybody who practises witchcraft, because I think one of your friends has cast a spell on me. I feel like I am under some sort of spell, and it is making me change in some way.

Correspondence with my mum

More than 500,000 Australians take powdered and crystallised meth each year, and between 10 per cent and 20 per cent of those are considered to be either abusers of the drug or addicted to it.

The Victorian and Northern Territory parliaments have both held official inquiries into the crystal-meth problem in their communities. The New South Wales Police Commissioner, Andrew Scipione, has said that if we don't adequately address this problem, it's not an overstatement to say that ‘[crystal meth] could bring us to our knees as a nation'. Gordian Fulde, the head of emergency at Sydney's St Vincent Hospital, says he finds ice users to be the ‘most violent human beings I have seen'. In New South Wales, Australia's most populated state, places such as western New South Wales, Nowra, and Mt Druitt are showing signs of having the highest rates of harm caused by meth. While Western Australia has the highest per-capita meth use, Queensland remains Australia's meth-production capital, and crystal-meth use is increasing across all of South Australia and Tasmania.

There have been extraordinarily long waiting lists to get into rehabs and even to see a drug counsellor in many parts of the country — particularly in regional Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory. This often leaves users in the hands of family members, who are in turn at a loss as to what to do.

Date: 02/06/14

Subject: Please Help

To: [email protected]

From: Luke Williams

Mum,

I am sorry about everything. Please help me, please I am scared.

Please help me.

Chapter One

Ice monsters

I SMELT LIKE
a dead pig. My hair looked awful. There were dark rings around my eyes, and dog-shit on my teeth. Smithy wouldn't stop masturbating. Daytime television was blaring all over the house —
NYPD Blue
,
Hawaii-50
,
JAG
. There were never-ending television programs running in our heads, too. Smithy's sexual fantasies were particularly vivid and enduring, full of highly skilled method actors who knew his tastes perfectly well — right down to the costumes, and the lack of dialogue and backstory. There were all kinds of different people in guest-star roles, in long-running plots, doing whatever Smithy wanted and liking whatever he liked: saucy librarians, the people next-door, a horny, rough-necked bisexual couple, and so on.

Smithy was in a sexual-fantasy world that released him from his most pressing, most unpleasant, and most urgent real-life problems as the father of three kids. But on this day, these fantasies were being used for another, more deliberate purpose — distraction and metaphor. Things seemed normal — dare I say,
suspiciously
normal. I'd just worked out that Smithy had been conspiring to kill me for months, and that my parents were paying him to do it.

Here's how it panned out: it was a bright Tuesday autumn afternoon, and we were in the middle of a meth binge. Just another day in Pakenham, really. Smithy was wearing a red T-shirt and white tracksuit pants; I was in my tartan ‘daytime' pyjamas. We were sitting in the lounge room of Smithy's neat, new, spotlessly clean home. Three bedrooms, two living areas, furniture assembled around televisions, a 1997 computer with no internet, and smooth white walls, one with a framed picture of the 1991 Collingwood football team posing and smiling as if they were in a school photo.

As usual, the curtains were closed, and the scent of bleach (and bong smoke) was in the air. Clean carpets, filthy minds: when Smithy wasn't cleaning, he was usually masturbating, for six to eight hours at a time, stopping only to pull a bong. Having visitors rarely stopped him.

Smithy masturbated so much because he shot up meth. I suppose you could call him a junkie. He was also an occasional drug-dealer, a long-time friend, and a full-time house cleaner — a cricket-loving, needle-using, dole-bludging Collingwood fan. He'd adapted poorly to new technology, feminism, and the demand for high-skilled workers — in fact, I could probably save some time by just referring to him as ‘Smithy from the 80s', because in many ways it's as if he never left them. A graduate of rehab and the army, he had also, about three years earlier, graduated from ‘truckie speed' to using meth full-time. He had a track mark that looked like a chunky, purple birthmark.

He was constantly pulling shady little scams to get by, and he must have sensed the opportunity for another one a few weeks earlier when I'd pissed my parents off. He and my dad must have discussed the plot at length over the phone at night, while I was in bed. My dad would hand over $5,000 now, and then another $5,000 when the deed was done.

Smithy had been dropping hints all day that there was a plot to kill me. He'd been yelling at me about the state of my skin, my odour, the fact I hadn't shaved in over a month, and my tendency to put my plates away in the bookshelf instead of in the sink. What this
meant
, though, was that Mum and Dad were paying him to slip me small, untraceable bits of arsenic mixed with doses of crystal meth. They knew full well that I had a history of drug addiction, loved living in a fantasy world, and that I couldn't say no to the world's most powerful stimulant — the perfect potion to hide your poison in. Smithy had been giving my dad regular updates on my ‘progress' for weeks, and every time I left the room, my roommates would snicker. The plan was all falling into place — I had been so off-my-face for the past month, I hadn't even noticed what was going on.

I knew that arsenic works by blocking the molecules your body's cells need to perform their tasks. Eventually, arsenic kills by causing haemorrhaging, destroying enough cells to cause multi-system organ failure. So the arsenic poison had been building up in my liver and intoxicating my bloodstream, leaving boils on my skin, dark rings around my eyes, and strange dark matter around my teeth.

It would have killed me, of course, and the police would have thought it was a drug overdose, or a mysterious stroke — provided, of course, that they weren't in on it, too. I realised what was happening when Smithy began telling me how awful I looked that day. By ‘telling me', I mean he followed me around the house yelling it at me. We were in Smithy's meth house: a bright, brand new, three-bedroom house — rented by Smithy from a large corporation that owned every second house in the neighbourhood — in Pakenham, 61 kilometres south-east of Melbourne, in a little pocket of new housing in a little valley surrounded by bushland and farms. Pakenham is right on the tip of the Gippsland/Latrobe Valley region, and is considered to be one of the most badly affected meth areas in Australia.

It began when I rejected Smithy's sexual advances. He went on the offensive: ‘What do you think
you
look like from the outside?'

Oh dear
, I thought.

‘You look revolting,' he said, a packed bong in his hand, lighter flicking on and off. ‘And the way you smell, Jesus — people have been commenting, it's rank — the whole end of the house stinks because of your bedroom.'

Oh dear
.

I took a sniff of myself and, yes, it would seem I smelt a bit off — something had been seeping out of my veins in an unseemly, abject manner. Never one to be distracted from the task, I asked, ‘Can I have that bong if you're not going to smoke it?'

‘No!' he growled, the refusal seeming to shoot out of his nose.

Each room of the house provoked a new criticism: the unused vegetables in the fridge revealed I wasn't eating properly; the dry, unclean bathroom revealed I wasn't showering, while the bathroom cabinet revealed I wasn't using deodorant; the bong bowl in the bedroom was a clear indicator I had been smoking too many of his cones.

‘Go on, go and look at ya self in the bloody mirror.'

I walked to the mirror in his bedroom — the light was switched off, and only a little bit of light crept in through the bottom of the closed curtains.

I looked at my reflection, and saw a very attractive person with glowing skin, so I walked back out of the room and told Smithy, ‘I look hot, as always.'

‘I think you should have a closer look,' he mumbled. ‘Why don't you go and have a look at your teeth if you think you look so good, you fucking pea-brain.'

This time, as I stared in the mirror, I saw poison oozing out of my skin, pus-y pimples, dark rings around my eyes, strange blisters on my neck, and blackened teeth. What
was
going on? I mean, really — there was something
really
messed-up going on. I started to think that perhaps Smithy wasn't being nasty with his attack — perhaps he was trying to tell me something. My previous understanding of reality as more or less safe, fairly predictable — though at times somewhat mysterious and ambiguous — began to rupture from beneath those bathroom tiles. It might have been some kind of ontological earthquake right there in Pakenham, only the break wasn't so much a big crack as an all-encompassing clear line of revelation: Smithy's outburst, the dark rings around my eyes, why my ex had left me years ago and why he now looked so feminine, why our other roommate sometimes looked at me strangely, why my friend Beck had stopped talking to me a few weeks ago, why Smithy kept telling me to look in the mirror, my sunken cheeks, why my parents hadn't called me for the past few weeks, and why I had those strange blisters. Finally a light of revelation had begun to flash:
everyone is trying to kill me
. My parents had organised it, my friends were carrying it out, and I was dying — slowly, silently — without a single ally, and with poison seeping out of every pore.

So now to the point at which I rang my dad — my gentle, generous, non-offensive dad — to reveal what I had finally figured out. Dad answered the phone half-asleep.

‘G'day, mate.'

‘Don't try to pretend everything is normal, Dad! I've worked out what's going on — please don't do this to me. You have to understand, Dad, I was only joking in that story about killing you and Mum, it was only a story, and it wasn't even about you, and now I know what is going on—', and on I went, talking a mile a minute. I told him about the crystal meth, the arsenic, the secret sex-change, the animal-liberationist plot, the money exchanged with Smithy's seedy drug-dealer friends, until finally Dad said the inevitable, ‘Um, mate, I think I might put you on to your mum.'

But I hung up the phone and walked into the lounge room — where Smithy was now entertaining a couple of seedy-looking guests — saying, ‘I know what's going on, you rats …'

They started laughing. ‘Oh fuck, you're a tripper, Luke,' one said. ‘Never a dull moment when you're around.'

‘You writing one of your stories again, Luke?' Smithy asked, smiling.

I had been telling tall tales back then. Some of them took on a life of their own; in some I killed everybody I knew in graphic detail, often in the most unlikely ways, and with the most unlikely accomplices. These fantasies often took place in a post-apocalyptic world with no police, and where the council served only to take the bodies away.

Confused, I rang my parents back. My mum answered, and when she asked why I thought that they were trying to kill me, I realised there were a few gaps in my logic; that, in fact, I had been deeply mistaken. Beyond my imagination, there were memories which revisited me like movies: I started sweating as teenagers dressed in bright-red uniforms called me a faggot; then I was in Year 9 and my best friend was throwing my pencil case on the ground and telling me to sit somewhere else; then
I was homeless and stealing food.
Soon I was in tears, talking about the bullying I'd gone through in high school, and what had happened since, in a conversation that lasted nearly six hours.