In My Skin (14 page)

I ended up convincing him to let me score at intervals. Once every two days, then every three, then every four and so on. Every time I used again, I had to start withdrawal again, but it seemed worth it, and slowly the severity of detoxing began to lessen each time. When it was the day to score I’d be relieved, energetic, housecleaning and going out with Boris for dinner and walks in the soft summer twilight. We’d run across the road from his building and into the sea. Swimming; I hadn’t swum in the sea for years.

Mostly, however, I was listless. Boris would try to interest me in a stroll, and I’d creak down the beach path and back again. I was sullen; tempers got short. He was kind, but he was quick to anger and baffled by my behaviour. The nymph he’d invited to live with him had turned into an intractable child. And I started refusing to have sex.

It wasn’t only that my body ached. I could feel myself drawing in. The integrity of my body’s bounds grew more important. I couldn’t convince Boris that having sex with him reminded me of the life I was trying to escape now, that it made my sensitised skin crawl, that I needed to seal something around myself, my apertures, in order to nurture the strength to believe in myself. He would tug at me at night, and when I locked arms and legs and clenched my body tight, he would lie there in a simmering fog of resentment. I couldn’t let him fuck me, but I knew that, if I didn’t, I would lose my haven. It was a terrible tension.

‘
Get out
,’ he said one dawn when he finally got up to go to work. ‘You can just get out of here.’

‘Fine. But I can’t believe you’re kicking me out for this. You fucking bastard,’ I said, shoving my clothes together into a bag. He said nothing as I slammed the door.

I went back to David’s. I still had a key to his front door. But that night, when I was out on the streets again and stoned, I saw Boris’s dark car pull up and his sad face look out. I ran over and got in.

It was Christmas. I arrived to spend the night with my family, and my mother said, ‘I’ve got a message for you, and we’ll take care of it, and then we don’t have to talk about it anymore.’ She was very tense. ‘The St Kilda police rang. They said you weren’t at the hotel where you said you were, and if you don’t go in tonight there’ll be a warrant for you. They said you’d been charged with working on the street. Are you?’ She stood there, shorter than me, looking up, trying to keep it together.

I just stared at her. ‘That was fucking
months
ago! Of course I’m not at the hotel! They rang you to tell you there’s a
warrant
?’ I wasn’t a frail girl anymore. Now I was a woman on the streets of St Kilda. Now I knew what was what. ‘And they rang you
tonight
?’

My mother said, ‘I’ll drive you down there.’

The pink sheet I was given at the police station said I was charged with soliciting. I was taken into a room and asked to make a statement of what had happened. After all these months on the street my conceit made me almost chummy with the officer who took my statement. There was a date for a hearing at the Magistrates’ Court in six weeks. I stared at the flimsy paper, and put it in my pocket, and walked out.

‘So you are working,’ said my mother who had waited in the car. ‘Daisy rang us and hinted. Just to let us know you were all right. Once, when you hadn’t rung for a while. Are you safe?’

‘It’s not like you think it is,’ was all I could say. ‘I can look after myself. It’s fine,’ I said, because I had to. ‘I’m not in any danger.’

She looked at her hands loose on the steering wheel.

‘It’s fine.’ I had to hug her. ‘Don’t worry, Mama. Don’t worry. One day this will all be over. I promise.’

‘Do me a favour?’ said my mother. ‘Keep your ID on you all the time. Just—in case.’

The next day as usual we had a Christmas lunch with the extended family of cousins and their children. Most of them knew what had happened to my life; some didn’t. I sat there, aware that my pale skin, the shadows under my eyes, were being assessed. An outcast, a prodigal daughter, returning for one, fake day of normalcy. I kept smiling. And when everyone left I went straight to my stash, to fix up. My parents pretended not to notice. Later that night Boris picked me up.

He stood outside the front door to meet my father. I was so fond of him, and grateful, that I didn’t see how awkward it was for both of them. I assumed my parents were grateful that someone was looking after me. Boris and I rode off on his motorbike and my dad stood on the verandah, waving us off.

January was spent detoxing and ill, chemicals seeping from my pores, peering through Boris’s high window at the healthy, happy, beautiful people of St Kilda as they ran alongside the beach, roller-bladed, chucked frisbees, had picnics, swam, enjoyed life in the sun. I envied them so much. It seemed impossible that I would ever be able to run again. Or gather with friends. I sat there mucky with rancid sweat. My bones were pumice; my veins were lead. It was an effort just to breathe. Time was very slow.

Again, I dreamed of my house in the country. Surely this time it would work. Boris said he’d drive me up there in a fortnight, when he could give me some money. He might even stay with me for a few days. I knew he would be forlorn without me.

I was still going to counselling with Daisy. One day as I left I bumped into a young man I’d met on my last stay inside and a couple of times out in St Kilda. We’d shared cigarettes and laughs and he’d read me some of his poems. He was a slim guy with an impish face, long curls and a country boy’s long lope. Now a few of us lay on the sunny lawn outside the centre and Robbie joked with me, complimented me, delighted me.

‘I’ll steal your heart one day,’ he said, smiling at me from his freckled face and broken teeth.

‘We’ll see,’ I said.

THE NEXT TIME I WENT TO see Daisy, a week later, Robbie was there again, and we walked down the street for coffee with another guy, Charlie. I was feeling the restlessness of my temporary release from Boris’s apartment. Halfway through the drinks Charlie said, ‘It’s my dole day,’ and there was that distinctive ripple in the air around us.

‘I’ve got a number,’ said Robbie.

His smile was gorgeous. And so we called the number, and we scored, and I swaggered off with the two of them to fix up in a park, feeling the old life, the comradely nonchalance of the user in company.

It was a nice afternoon; we lay around dreamy. I mentioned that I was going to the country and Robbie said, ‘Can I come?’ Benevolent with chemicals, I nodded. I wandered back to Boris’s, expecting to beat him home before his return from work, and somehow hide my pinned pupils by staying in bright lights. But he was already home; he looked at his watch, and my skittish gaze; he knew.

‘This time you can stay out,’ he said. And because I was stoned, and I had somewhere else to go now, and I was sick of him and his reproachful looks and his middle-aged complacence and the claustrophobia of his apartment, I didn’t apologise, or protest, or tell him calmly that I appreciated all his kindness but it was time for me to leave. I just took my stuff and left with a cold heart. I left him to his anger and his empty place and the silence when he came home from work every night. And I didn’t ever see him again.

I worked on the street for a couple of hours, then went that night to my family, who took me in. I stayed over, camping as I’d done occasionally on the lounge room floor and mixing up furtively in the bathroom. It was home, but it wasn’t a place I could stay. Already I was looking forward to making a new start—again—in the country.

I arrived off the country bus the next day to surprise my house-mate Jason. He was a cheerful person, and didn’t seem put out by me suddenly appearing. He was used to my haphazard plans by then. I stocked up at the supermarket; not having scored before I came, I had some cash. The weather was warm, I was feeling good.

My attempts to get clean at Boris’s hadn’t worked, but nevertheless I’d reduced my usage dramatically. Even the taste the day before, while it had jerked me back to the early stages of detoxing, had left me only with a mild version of the aches and sweats. Gradually, I’d diminished the effects of withdrawal, and I had some medication left, and I thought that this time I could make a go of it.

I had no place at Boris’s to go back to. My pride prevented me from begging forgiveness. And David was moving out of his house. There was nowhere for me to run back to in Melbourne. I was here to stay.

I was sitting in the garden three days later, nursing my tired bones and reading a book, when the phone rang. It was Robbie, saying he was at the bus stop in town and asking directions to my house.

He’d said he would come, but I hadn’t expected him to. I barely knew him. He had a dirty sports bag with him, and a sneaky, pleased smile. Part of me wasn’t horrified when he pulled a tiny foil packet from his pocket.

‘I know you’re getting clean,’ he said. ‘But I thought you might appreciate this.’

I took it from his palm. It was a sunny day, and I felt cheerful; some smack would make everything sparkle just that little more. I had no clean needles, but there was a hard yellow plastic jar in my bag, designed to store dirty fits and still containing a few. I smashed it open on the kitchen floor with a rock. Washing out an old fit—the darkened blood rinsing out gradually, the delicate weight of the thin plastic cylinder in my fingers—mixing up in my room with Robbie crouching nearby, the wicked glances between us; it was all easy. My heart was beating fast. And then, sitting outside in the buttery sun, with the trees all around and the long sweet grass and a charming boy next to me, it beat more slowly with the ease of contentment.

Robbie stayed in my bed that night. We didn’t have sex, but we kissed. I said, ‘I don’t want to fuck you because I can, I want to mean it.’ And he said he knew that, and kissed me again with his cool freckled lips.

The next day we went for a coffee in town, talked and looked in bookshops and felt our bones creak but not too badly. I liked Robbie, with his cheeky sense of humour and iconoclastic take on the world; he could discuss politics and UFOs and antique furniture and street life, a loose arm slung around my shoulders. He was pale and soft-skinned, with a bewitching laugh, and for the first time since James I felt like I cared to kiss someone, sleep next to them, and feel safe.

We could get clean, we thought. This was the life. Up here, in the country, with my books and Robbie’s plans for furniture restoration and making crafts and gardening. He was full of grand designs and it sounded so easy. I was simply delighted. Everything seemed possible suddenly.

Robbie had to go back to Melbourne, though. Did I want to come with him? He had a room in the Gatwick on Fitzroy Street, an old boarding house full of crazy characters. He said, ‘I get the dole tomorrow, we’ll be right. Come back with me while I get my stuff.’

St Kilda was still cruising in summer. On Fitzroy Street people were sitting beneath the plane trees, drinking beer in the late afternoon sunshine. I’d sat on the bus from the country watching the side of Robbie’s face and falling in love with his clear skin, his sunburnt neck, the firm line of his jaw. People greeted him as we trod up the stairs: old alcoholics with bilious faces settled in armchairs on the landing, a tiny, scrawny woman with bleached hair and black gothic clothes who whined out his name with affection. His room was panelled with wood, dark and old-fashioned, and the floor creaked with every footstep. I was enchanted with all the seedy cinema of it.

We were going to get clean, but first things first. We were back in town, and we had money. I rang Jake. He greeted me with his usual knowing smile. ‘Who’s that?’ he asked me as Robbie waited outside.

‘That’s my man,’ I heard myself say.

In our creaking old bed Robbie and I ate cream cakes for breakfast and read
Alice in Wonderland
to each other. I couldn’t believe I was lucky enough to find such a beautiful man. ‘Be mine,’ he said. ‘Be mine forever.’

It took two days before the money ran out. Then, of course, we didn’t have the cash to get back to the country. ‘I can work,’ I offered, and Robbie didn’t like the idea, but it was all we had. His previous girlfriend had worked in a parlour. ‘I’ll spot for you,’ he said, and so as I strolled around my block he followed a little behind, to take down licence-plate numbers and wait until I returned safe from each job. Once, I looked around and he was veering as he peered at the pages of a book of Baudelaire’s poetry I’d given him, reading by the orange streetlights he passed. I loved him for that, and I was proud to be able to make the money, to match him in street-smarts. We were a tough team, for all the tenderness between us.

So there was a new routine. Of course, there wasn’t as much money now I had to split my earnings to support two of us. We bought from Jake, but there began to be times when I needed to get it on tick, and couldn’t pay him back when I’d said I would. I lied, and said I’d thought Robbie had done it already. ‘He’s going to be trouble for you,’ Jake said. ‘You’re already different.’

When I came home at four o’clock now it was to the always-busy Fitzroy Street, with its ragged characters, its screaming in the street and all-night takeaway joints and sleek bars. I loped up the stairs of the Gatwick greeting the regulars still ensconced on the landing. Robbie and I made friends with two gay boys upstairs, pretty young men who welcomed us in to share joints and giggle and try on clothes. One was a transvestite, even more exquisite in his stockings and heels, and he worked down at the park near the beach, where the boys loitered.