The Ice Age (30 page)

Because I found it so incredibly clichéd and poorly expressed, I decided that it must be a parody. A parody of me! And, for some reason, I linked this back to my failed attempt at doing a show at triple j — that somehow the people behind this were people who I used to work with at the station, who were making fun of me. And when I went back to my Facebook feed, it looked like all my triple j ex-colleagues were making coded allusions to me, and how lame I was, in their status updates. I contacted a trusted friend, who was able to talk me down from my delusion, and soothe me, at least momentarily.

Dr Michael Eigen, in his book
The Psychotic Core
, describes the experience of the psychotic individual as one of opposing extremes: ‘At times, it seems that the psychotic person dissolves their mind in order to rebuild themselves. Or he may seem to search grimly through its debris, leaving nothing out, as if he were looking for something essential, but still unknown … The flux itself becomes fixed and imprisons him.'

And yet, for me, the psychosis would often just fall apart very quickly, and I would feel clearer and more enlightened than usual. The paranoid delusion would just become too big to sustain itself, there would be too many people involved in it, and I would realise how wrong I had been.

One night, when Smithy kept going on about Beck and New Year's Eve, I asked him why he was so worried about it — given that
if
it had happened, it had happened when they weren't even together.

‘Concentrate on yourself,' I said, and he looked at me with a glimmer of surprise. ‘What would you like to be doing with your time? I mean, I know you're a full-time dad, but what else would you like to do?'

‘Play cricket,' Smithy whispered like a little kid.

‘So why don't you start playing again?'

He didn't respond.

‘I reckon you don't want to play because you like to be good at everything, and you're scared that if you start playing again at your age, you won't be any good at it. I understand that, Smithy. I reckon we're actually quite similar.'

And upon hearing that, he nodded, staring into the distance, and said ‘I love cricket, I miss it, I miss it,' and started to cry. I got him some tissues, waited for him to stop — which took no more than a few minutes — and then I said ‘Let's talk about something else.' It was like a neurosis was smashed open, shattered, and then evaporated that night; Smithy never talked about New Year's Eve to me again.

Chapter Eleven

Parents and thieves

I WAS STANDING
inside an indoor shopping centre in a middle-ring suburb, with the smell of potato cakes, and kebabs, and Kentucky Fried Chicken not so much lingering but dominating the air amid the cheap clothing stores, the buzz of a hundred voices murmuring at once.

I was with two young crystal-meth users, Samuel and Jodie. Both were in their early twenties: Samuel was bone-thin with blue eyes and very white skin, and his wife was a heavyset Italian. They were not every-day-of-the-week, skin-falling-off-their-face addicts, but they
did
pay for their habit with crime. And, just to clarify, they didn't start committing crimes when they started doing meth. Samuel, then twenty-two, had been doing so-called petty crimes for almost a decade.

I had come along to see how they generated cash through crime. For a few weeks prior, I had seen them coming back to Smithy's from their crime sprees with hundreds of dollars — all obtained by stealing from department stores, and not by visiting pawn stores, which are a sure way for the amateur criminal to get caught.

Samuel had a slouch when he walked; he wore a cap and fluorescent worker's clothes to make it look as if he'd just come from work when he walked into a store. Much of his behaviour was subterfuge, designed to detract from the fact that he had sticky fingers and a smooth, deceptive tongue. He was disarmingly slight, and one could easily interpret his accent as that of a good, hard-working man: a furniture removalist, a labourer, or a factory worker.

Samuel had been in jail, and he knew the kind of crime he was carrying out is considered petty and not worth the risk — more manipulative than masculine. It didn't involve violence or weapons or gangs, and yet he still took pride in telling me that his trick would earn ‘six hundred bucks in less than hour … it might be petty, but it brings in the cash and I have never been caught'.

And on that note, he asked, ‘Are you ready?'

‘Yep,' I said, wanting to play it cool, and not show how excited and nervous I was. We walked through the entrance of a low-end department store; Jodie came in behind us with their 18-month-old son Greg in a stroller. Both said hello to the female bag-checker, who smiled approvingly at them and their baby.

‘Come with me,' Samuel said, and he took me down the aisle. ‘Now find the smallest, most expensive thing you can, and put it in your pocket.'

‘What about security bleepers?' I said, too loudly.

‘Keep your fucking voice down. Those bleepers are an illusion; there's nothing on most of this stuff that actually causes them to go off. And nobody is watching those cameras. It's all a fucking illusion, nobody is watching, I've been doing this for years.'

On one level, perhaps, Samuel was worth listening to. Or, at least, he was an authority on this particular subject. He hadn't worked for a long time. He didn't care what other people thought. He had developed an apparently ingenious technique for avoiding all the responsibilities that plague so many of us. He had cheated the system, beating alarm clocks and irate bosses — and meth was part of his ‘perfected' lifestyle. In a world where choice is apparently so prevalent, but finding a genuine counter-culture is rare, Samuel used meth and crime to live a lifestyle that he considered superior to everyday human experience.

Indeed, there is a definitive link between meth and crime. People who already commit crime often take meth because it fits with their lifestyle. This may skew the statistics: this cohort would probably commit crime whether they were taking meth or not. Other people use meth to give them the Dutch courage to commit crime. And as for manufacturers of meth, it is not uncommon for them to coordinate sophisticated robberies of amphetamines and amphetamine precursors from pharmacies, chemists, and pharmaceutical warehouses.

A two-month research project into police detainees in key areas around the nation conducted in 2015 by the Australian Institute of Criminology found that 61 per cent of those held at Kings Cross police station in Sydney tested positive for amphetamine, as did 40 per cent of those who ended up in the Brisbane City watch house, and 43 per cent of those in East Perth.

Results from a New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics research study revealed that heavy users of amphetamine — those who reported at least sixteen days of use in the month prior to arrest — had 53 per cent more property offence charges (like stealing or trespass) recorded at arrest compared to detainees who were less frequent users and non-users. Higher rates of property offences among methamphetamine users were also associated with younger individuals, being unemployed, and having reported illicit use of benzodiazepines in the thirty days prior to arrest. According to the Australian Institute of Criminology, between 1999 and 2012, 20,402 police detainees tested positive for methamphetamine. The highest proportion of charges recorded against these detainees were property offences (26 per cent), followed by violence offences (24 per cent).

Detective Leading Senior Constable Jason Bray told the Victorian parliamentary committee that one of the biggest problems police face with meth-related crimes is that career criminals who use it are able to be much more active:

When people are taking this drug, they are able to stay awake for three, four days on end … In the last year, for instance, we had a career criminal that I have known for probably ten years. In the past he may go out and do a burglary or a break-in of some sort, once every week or two weeks, depending on what his circumstances are at the time. On this particular night he did upwards of 20 crimes.

The inquiry also heard from the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service, who reported that, based on reports from their solicitors and client service officers, ice was making their clients more likely to offend, either to ‘fund their habit' or ‘because ice makes them more likely to take risks'. In 2013, South Australian District Court Chief Judge Geoffrey Muecke told the
Adelaide Advertiser
that methamphetamine-related cases were ‘clogging up' the court system. ‘In a normal arraignment list of say 30 cases, there will be I think at least half ... either trafficking meth or supplying or manufacturing, or there are assaults and/or robberies to feed an addiction,' he said. ‘It's probably the most highly addictive drug that we've ever had.'

It must have been halfway through my time in the house when I met another, um, ‘interesting' character at Smithy's house. His name was Jake; he was twenty-seven, and had grown up in southern New South Wales. He took me outside to smoke cigarettes with him while he ranted about how Australia was no longer Australia, about how there were no longer enough houses or jobs for Australians because there were too many immigrants coming in, and about how said immigrants were taking over, and fuck the kind of society we were living in, and so on. I never even pretended to agree with him, telling him instead that it sounded rather like 1990s Hanson-ism to me, as well as slightly fascist. It wasn't until the next time I was at the library using a computer that I realised how entrenched his ideas were. I had a Facebook friend request from him, and his profile pic was of an eagle with a swastika. A few weeks later, Jake came over with his girlfriend, who I noticed was looking teary as she stared at the television. I asked what was wrong, and she didn't hesitate to tell me that they were living at her sister's house in Cranbourne because they couldn't get a rental house, Jake couldn't find a job, and she was too scared to apply for a housing-commission house because she was worried that Human Services would be notified, and they would take away her kids because of their crowded living conditions.

‘Everybody thinks I am a bad mother,' she told me. ‘But I'm trying my best … every rental I apply for has over a dozen applicants and we don't even get a look in, and I think it's because Jake has a criminal record.' I offered to help in any way I could, including writing letters and organising for her to see a social worker, while quietly thinking to myself how appalling it was that there would no available housing in a low-budget suburb surrounded by hundreds of kilometres of cleared, sparsely populated farmland that, for reasons I could not understand, was
not
being used to build low-cost housing.

His girlfriend never came back, but Jake would come over and smoke crystal meth now and then. To his credit, and for all his anger and problems, he never got hooked. Every time he came over, he thanked me for hearing out his girlfriend, and would always offer me cigarettes, or some of his meth. Politics was not discussed, but one day, when I had my back to him as I was watching television, he was talking about how great he was in bed and I replied, ‘I find that very hard to believe; if you had confidence in your own ability to fuck, perhaps you'd stop feeling the need to be such a fascist fuck.' He cracked up laughing and proceeded to tell me, in great detail, how he could make a girl orgasm.

As I turned around to look at him, I saw that, unbeknown to me, the daughter of one of Smithy's clients had been standing at the door listening. I don't know how old she was, but she was standing there in a school dress; once Jake finished his lengthy description, he turned and stared at her.

About a month later, on a Saturday night (or perhaps I should say Sunday morning — it must have been at least 1.00am) I had given Smithy some cash, which I knew he had spent on drugs with Jake. But on this night, he hadn't given me the dose, and I was very much in the mood for it. Instead of my drugs, I saw Jake standing in the front doorway dressed in a navy-blue hoodie, and black tracksuit pants covered in dried plaster.

‘Where are you going?' I asked, which was really code for ‘where is my meth?'

‘Just off to work, honey,' Jake replied.

‘Work? What do you mean work? You told me you haven't had a job in years.'

‘Work — I'm going to work,' he said again.

‘What are you talking about, work — I don't understand.'

‘Now Luke, let me get this straight,' Jake said. ‘You've studied law, you used to work as a journalist at the ABC, you have two degrees …'

‘Yes,' I said.

‘And you can't work out what I'm doing?'

‘Um, no,' I replied. ‘That's why I'm asking.'

‘Has anyone ever told you that you're a dumb fucker with a good CV?'

‘Just tell me where you're going.'

‘To find you some common sense,' he said.

And he left, and soon thereafter I sunk down a couple of bongs, struggled to get a word of sense out of Smithy — who was, as he was so often, preoccupied with his face in the mirror — and promptly went to sleep.

When I got up the next morning, there were three brand-new fridges and a new washing machine in the kitchen and dining area.

‘Jesus, what's with all this new stuff?' I asked.