In My Skin (31 page)

I told my mother some of my concerns about Robbie, and she said, ‘Why don’t you come and spend a week with us? Just for a break?’

It was a week later, the beginning of January, and things at work were slow after the Christmas rush. Going home, where I’d visited for Christmas Day and revelled in the familiar summery atmosphere and full fridge, was exactly what I needed. I would keep working, but the change would be a kind of holiday.

To be asked meant a lot.

I worried about Robbie, exiled from his family by his history of drug abuse. Christmas had been a bad time for him, and he was miserable and malign. ‘I’m just going for a week,’ I reassured him. ‘You can have some time to think.’ I didn’t offer to supply him with money for drugs; he could try fending for himself. It would be a good lesson to him: a taste of what would happen if I actually left him for good. I rang the dealer myself and bought enough drugs to last me several days. Usually I didn’t dare buy in bulk like this, because in our greed we would simply go straight through it, but I hoped I could monitor myself without Robbie.

‘You’re so lucky, with your family,’ he said forlornly. I squeezed his hand and left.

‘Don’t go,’ I heard him murmur after me.

My mother had made up the spare room for me, and I went to bed the first night ready to sleep late, lie around the garden and appreciate the kindness of my family. I woke up the next morning to see Robbie clambering through the open window from the front verandah.

‘
What the fuck are you doing?
’ I hissed. ‘Get out! My parents will call the cops. What are you doing here?’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and dropped into a crouch on the floor next to my bed. ‘I’m going crazy, I haven’t had a taste since yesterday—’ He kept his eyes on the ground, abashed. I squinted at him furiously; I didn’t have my contact lenses in and he was a murky shape on the floor.

‘I just want some fucking time on my own,’ I said. ‘Is that too much to ask? I
warned
you I was going away. It’s not my responsibility, Robbie.’ I was shaking with the sense of trespass. He was still on the floor, crouched like a creature.

‘I’m sorry, Kate, I’m so sorry,’ he murmured, and climbed back out the window. I watched him stumble down the path and away.

Not once had he looked at me. I just sat there for a moment, full of grief for his helplessness, and shock that he had violated my parents’ home. Then I remembered my bag, on the floor where he’d been crouching. I checked it, already knowing.

He’d taken all the money and all the drugs. A wad of cash and enough heroin to kill him. All the heroin I needed for the next week. He’d taken it all.

By the time I threw on my clothes and ran down the street after him, he’d vanished. I stomped back up to the house and into the room. Shock collapsed into fury.

My mother came running in when I shrieked my rage. ‘That
fucking bastard, that fucking little shit!
’

She sat down on the bed, ready for a catastrophe. ‘He was just here, he took—’ I gestured to the bag. There was no pretending with my mother, she knew what I was talking about. My parents were aware, of course, that I’d be using in the house, and it was understood that, as long as they didn’t have to see, they would accept it. They could hardly expect me not to do it. Those days were long past.

‘I don’t have any more money to score, and the dealer’s on the other side of town, I don’t know how I’m going to—’ I was nearly in tears.

‘Okay, well,’ she said. ‘Maybe this is a sign, a sign that you and he just can’t go on anymore. And it’s okay, you’re here. We’ll look after you. You’re still on the methadone, right?’ I nodded miserably. Every day I went to get my dose—and it was still as high as it had been a year ago when I’d started the program. While I was using there didn’t seem any point in dropping it.

‘How about—’ She looked at me carefully, lovingly, encouragingly. My wonderful, staunch mother. ‘How about if I take you to get your dose later, and you just try getting through the day without the drugs?’

I gazed at the blanket beside my knee. The anger was sluicing out of me, replaced by weariness. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’ve never—’

‘Just one day,’ my mother said, and put her hand over mine.

And so I didn’t score that day. By mid-afternoon my skin was fever-hot and my bones ached, but it wasn’t unbearable; I still had enough residual heroin in my system from the taste the night before to bolster me. I sat around in the garden, and drank tea, and flicked through a book on Paris. Then before dinner my mother drove me across town to the chemist, and half an hour later I felt better.

It was the thirteenth of January. I had been using heroin for almost five years.

THE NEXT DAY I SLEPT LATE; again, I was a little feverish, but I went to the chemist and then to my shift, and although I was uncomfortable, I managed. I didn’t think past,
I’m coping
. When I left work I got a taxi back to my parents’ place; more than ever, I didn’t want to see Robbie in my living room. If he’d overdosed, I thought, I didn’t care.

The week at my parents’ place ended, and they suggested I stay on. It had been seven days without a fix, only methadone. Each day I’d woken, automatically reaching for the thought of heroin as I had for five years, and then, astonished, recalled that there was none, and I’d lasted another day without it, and I was okay, I was actually okay.

Already the pride at
one more day
bolstered me. I was so full of my achievement that now I dreaded the defeat of that list of days ending with a taste. A moment of satisfaction followed by the banality of failure. Then I’d have to start again, or worse, just go on as before, and these days of success would count for nothing. I knew too well from my old attempts to get clean how bitter that felt; all the anguish swallowed up in the fact that once more I was using. I didn’t want that again; I was too far past that; I was somewhere else now, and going ahead.

Eight days without. Then ten. Then fourteen.

Two weeks clean.

It was strange to be back at home with my family. Strange because it had been such a long time, but it was so familiar in its atmosphere and its security, the friendly chat of my father and the scent of his cooking, and my mother bent over her desk working. My father hugged me. ‘Love my daughter,’ he said.

Something had changed since those old days of fraught struggle and pain. My parents were more at ease; they’d ceased trying to protect me. Now they just loved me. And I was no longer the sullen rebel I’d been when I left.

And yet it was as if, in a way, I never had left. Away from the claustrophobia of my little house and the daily plod down to work, I felt removed from my recent history, and embedded once more in an older life. The grimness of housing commission flats and dull drugs seemed so very far away. It was like a miracle of waking to find myself back in a happier dream.

Going to work didn’t seem very different. I’d sometimes wondered if the drugs were what made the work bearable, according to the accepted wisdoms about prostitution and junkies. I’d looked at the other girls and asked myself if their experiences were really so different from mine; clearly, they could work without drugs to blunt them. I’d tried to gauge how much buffering the opiate gave me against the abrasion of constant penetration. My only experience of working ‘straight’ was when I was detoxing, and that was difficult; but in that state I had been over-sensitised.

Now I found that working without heroin made little difference. Of course, I was still on methadone, a high dose, even if I didn’t feel stoned. I went on smiling, caressing, getting fucked, talking with the girls, eating my takeaway, working—perhaps gingerly, as my metabolism adjusted and I walked with a sheen of sweat on my skin. My body responded more strongly to the sex. But, apart from the sudden, periodic recollection that there was no beautiful syringe waiting for me as my reward at the end of the night, heroin left a smaller space inside me than I’d expected.

All those years drowning, and now the addiction was slipping off me as lightly as water.

Three weeks in, and it had been a difficult, tiring, crazy shift. Jewel and I were in the powder room getting undressed, giggling a little with fatigue. ‘I need a
drink
,’ I said. It seemed like the night to just blow something, to bite in deep. We were ragged with the aftermath of all the night’s dramas—floods of clients, crazed receptionist, hectic sex.

‘I need a bloody taste,’ she said, and I looked at her.

One more time, I thought; just once more, to show myself I don’t want it anymore.

‘You want to come home to my place?’ she asked.

It was full daylight by the time we got a taxi to her dealer’s and then to her house. All the way I’d been realising what I was doing, and how it would feel to have broken my record of days clean. I knew I didn’t really want it—not the way I’d wanted it other times, coming off a period of abstinence. I wasn’t hungry for it; I just felt dull and tired. But I thought I should go through with it. For the last time.

I told Jewel I was getting clean. ‘It’s so
easy
,’ I said, in wonder. She looked at me with the usual scepticism of the long-term user who’s heard it all before—the same look I’d have given her. Full of encouragement and not much confidence. Especially as I was watching her mix up.

‘Do you still want it?’ She held out the syringe. I looked at it.

‘Fuck yeah,’ I said, and plugged it in.

But it only made me sleepy, blurred and weary. There was no joy in it at all.

And I knew I didn’t need this thing anymore. What I needed was myself back. Already I was impatient for the drug to clear out of me and the new life to begin.

Robbie was living alone at my house. I had almost cut communication with him there; I rang a couple of times from my parents’ house, and he spat reproaches at me until I hung up. ‘I want you out of my house,’ I’d said. ‘It’s time for you to leave. You have a week. I’m sorry.’

‘Just because you’re so happy—what about me? I’ve got nowhere to go, Kate!’ he said. Whenever he used my name I knew his outrage was half performance.

‘Just find somewhere,’ I said. ‘Things are different now.’

Then he stopped answering the phone. I worried about what he was living on—he had only his welfare payment, and he’d have spent that on drugs. I knew he wasn’t ready to get clean; it wasn’t his time yet. It was my time, though, and I was full of a steely certainty about what I had to do.

I went over to my house to pick up some stuff about a week later. It was a blazing hot day. When I opened the front door, the house smelt fuggy and dry. Robbie’s things were scattered around; the place was a mess. A dried-out alcohol swab and a dirty spoon lay on the kitchen bench; I passed them with a long glance and looked away. On the table was a note.

I’m sorry, I can’t take it anymore. This life wasn’t meant for me. I love you
.

‘Fuck,’ I said, and started to cry.

He was nowhere in the house. I had no idea what to do; the note wasn’t dated. I thought it might be for real; or was it just one of his tricks? I rang Serena, his ex.

‘Oh shit,’ she said. ‘He was around here the other day. He was really weird, all strung-out, and talking about how he’d held up a service station with a syringe. I think—’

‘What the fuck do we do?’

She rang the police and then called me back. There was no record of service stations being held up recently. They’d told her to file a missing person’s report. I was cold with horror, and anger too. I called work to let them know I’d be late; I rang the rehab centre, to see if he was there. They couldn’t tell me; it was policy. ‘Could you tell me if there’s any point in leaving him a message?’ I asked. ‘No,’ they said. I rang hospitals. No trace. Was he lying under a bridge, in the bushes of a park, a needle sticking out of his arm, where was he?

There was no sign of him when I came back to the house the next afternoon; nor the next time. I left notes on the bench:
Please
call me. I love you. Don’t be a fucking idiot.

I grew used to the idea Robbie was dead. Serena and I met and talked about when to ring his mother, when to go through his belongings, how to arrange a funeral when his body turned up. It seemed like this was something we’d been expecting. I wept for my beautiful boy, vanished and alone, all his dreams and the waste, the thought of his pale skin being rained on at night, his grief, the pity of it. There was nothing I could do.

I went every afternoon to the chemist for my methadone, and as I walked out one afternoon two weeks after the note, I saw Robbie. He stood in the doorway, waiting for me.

‘Hello,’ he said, and smiled.

I just looked at him. He was thin and unwashed but okay, standing there as if nothing had happened.

‘You fucking—
you
—I don’t—’ I said. He held out a hand as if to embrace me. I slapped it. ‘You just keep the fuck away from me.’

I left a note for him at the house.
Leave the key on the bench and stay
out.
I put his belongings in a box and dragged them out to the front verandah.
I still love you. But I can’t see you anymore. You break my heart, you
just crush it.

That was February. Occasionally I visited my house to find cds missing, or fresh remains of food on the bench. Then I saw Robbie again; he was sleeping on the front verandah, in a bundle of blankets he’d taken from the house. He’d left the key for me as asked, but I assumed he’d made a copy. Once, the bedroom window was smashed in. When I accused him of entering, he denied it; or sullenly refused to say anything. It was strange, being exiled from my own house. I missed it there; I missed the days we’d spent together there; I even missed Robbie, but it felt perilous to be too close to that house. I was comfortable at my parents’. I’d brought over some of my stuff now, and had a proper room set up in my old bedroom; there was a pantry full of food and a computer and the tranquility of suburbia. My own little cottage was swollen with stale heat and the smell of an old life.