Candy Read online

  A Ballantine Book

  Published by The Random House Publishing Group

  Copyright © 1977, 1998 by Luke Davies

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in slightly different form in Australia in 1997 by Allen & Unwin, Australia, and in Great Britain by Vintage UK.

  Lyrics from “Milton the Monster” theme song (this page) are reproduced with permission of Seeger & Seeger. Lyrics by Hal Seeger, music by Win Sharples, copyright Hal Seeger Studios, Inc.

  A version of “Crabs” appeared in Blur, Random House, Sydney, 1996.

  Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Davies, Luke, 1962

  Candy / Luke Davies. — 1st American ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-77537-5

  I. Title.

  PR9619.3.D29C36 1998

  823—dc21 97-48390

  v3.1

  Have the gates of death been opened unto thee? or hast thou seen the doors of the shadow of death?

  Hast thou perceived the breadth of the earth? declare if thou knowest it all.

  Where is the way where light dwelleth? and as for darkness, where is the place thereof?

  JOB 38:17–19

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Example of Good Times: Summer and Love

  Example of Bad Times: Sugar and Blood

  Part One: Invincibility

  Crop Failure

  Problems with Detachable Heads: 1

  A Change Is as Good as a Holiday

  Foursome

  Colin Gets Lucky

  Freebasing

  I Do

  Wallet

  Crabs

  Books

  Life and Death

  Part Two: The Kindgom of Momentum

  Truth 1: Dreams

  Ashtray

  Truth 2: How It Is

  GPO

  Drying Out

  Truth 3: Kisses

  Freelancing

  Cooking

  Problems with Detachable Heads: 2

  Truth 4: Where Is the Earth?

  Cats

  Part Three: The Momentum of Change

  Truth 5: Poplars

  Country Living

  Breakages

  Hospitals

  Blinding Truth: Frisbees

  Epilogue

  Candy

  About the Author

  Prologue

  EXAMPLE OF GOOD TIMES:

  SUMMER AND LOVE

  In the beginning: Sydney, summer

  Everything’s fucking beautiful! I’m so in love. I’ve just met Candy, it’s been a month or two. We’re discovering each other’s bodies. Candy’s just discovered smack and I’ve just discovered she’s got a bit of money. Keen as all fuck to get dirty.

  Candy’s got the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen, a kind of mist you fall into. It’s weird how you can be going along, and all you’re thinking about is heroin, and then you meet someone, and other thoughts get in there. It makes it like meeting Candy was meant to happen. Things were getting hairy, as they tend to when you’re using. As always, I was enjoying the dope. It can be all right being alone. But partnership is a good thing and helps focus your energies.

  We did a credit card scam together, and Candy’s still reeling from the adrenaline rush. She thinks we can be like Bonnie and Clyde, me handsome, her beautiful, both of us glamorous and full of sex and ready to take on the world. I suppose I mean Dunaway and Beatty. Anyway, falling in love is kind of exciting.…

  EXAMPLE OF BAD TIMES:

  SUGAR AND BLOOD

  Much later: Melbourne, winter

  My day in the light, the day is darkening. I’m hurling all the little joys against the greater sadness. The sadness is a giant weight. It presses down. Its meaning: “What’s the point?” The little joys are pebbles. The pebbles are getting smaller and smaller and the weight of the sadness is growing, the sadness is gaining density and mass, until in the end I’m throwing handfuls of dust at matter so thick there’s no space between the molecules. Nowhere anywhere for anything to move. The years roll on.

  I can’t stop. I just can’t stop. I can’t stop anymore.

  I’m sure it is possible, but no leap of the imagination can make it seem like it’s possible.

  There’s a drought. Or you could say a flash flood. A flash flood of no heroin. Once every year or two, these things seem to happen. It’s probably just a coming together of circumstances, like the way an eclipse occurs and it seems to be a message, that slide into darkness.

  For two or three days, all the panicked phone calls, everyone ringing everyone else. Just enough dope to scrape by, deals from a friend of a friend of a friend, crap cut with so much sugar you barely feel it. Everyone saying, “I hear there’s some pink rocks coming tomorrow.”

  Some phone calls come our way. “If you get on to anything, we’re waiting here with money.” I go right through my phone book. I call Dirty Julie, so treacherous and unreliable she’d never get a call under any other circumstances. Hangs out with some fucked-up guys, the rumor is they do home invasions and kidnappings. Very violent types.

  But Dirty Julie says she has dope. “What do you want?” she asks. I tell her I’ll call her straight back. I make a few calls. Everyone gets revved up. Secretly, I make up a packet of powdered sugar. Survival of the fittest in times of drought.

  O’Brien and Victor and Maria and Schumann and Martin come around. Everyone piles into Victor’s car, nobody wants to leave their money for too long. Candy waits at home. I’m the connection. Everyone is nervous, nobody is stoned. Drought brings out the worst in us and it’s easy to hate your fellow human beings. We drive silently to Dirty Julie’s, suspended inside the terrible tension in the car like pieces of fruit in gelatin. I direct them to park around the corner. “Wait here,” I say. Five of them crammed into the car in the dark street, and the space where I had been. Everyone smoking cigarettes, the inside of the car like a dark mist in which hover fireflies.

  Dirty Julie and some of the boys are waiting in the lounge room. “Hurry up, let’s get this done, we have to go too.”

  I should listen to my instincts. I know I’m getting ripped off, that they’re hanging out too, that they’re waiting for my money so that they, in turn, can go get on. But there’s no turning back now. It’s more than eighteen hours since I’ve had any smack. I just hope there’s a little bit in the deal, enough to hold me until things get better. I’m buying dope for seven people, including Candy and me. Surely half of seven people’s dope, even if it’s a rip-off, should be enough to hold me. And then tomorrow, maybe, good times will come back.

  I go through the motions. I taste the dope. It’s got that doughy taste of a big cut. But I’m trapped in the momentum of ignorance now. “I’m just going to take a little for myself,” I say. They’re all watching me, edgy. They’re standing. I’m the only one sitting.

  I take out half the dope, put it in a separate package, slip it down my socks. I add the same amount of my powdered sugar, give it a quick stir. This is what will happen. We will get back to the warehouse and try the dope—I will have to go through the pretense and hit up what I know to be mostly sugar—and everyone will realize they’ve been ripped off. They will all complain and grumble and I will apologize and say, how was I to know, what could I do? Finally they will disperse. And then I will have my private hit, and be okay. Even Candy can’t know abo
ut this one. Times are tough.

  But I get back to the car and they check the dope and freak. “Take it back. We don’t want it.” It’s the official word. Everyone dipping their little finger and tasting it on their tongue. “Take it back. This is shit.”

  I’ve done a dumb thing. I am caught between a rock and a very hard place. But I have to pretend. The situation is fraught with peril. I will take the dope back, knowing that Dirty Julie and the boys will refuse, knowing that they saw me cut it.

  Martin and Victor are angry. “We’re coming with you,” they say, following me around the corner. “No,” I say, “you’d better not come. They’re heavy people.” It’s the truth. “You’re not supposed to know where they live.” But I can see they don’t trust me, and they keep following.

  I don’t have time to think. I don’t know what to do. We arrive just as Dirty Julie and the boys are pulling the front door shut. “Who the fuck are these guys?” the boys ask, gesturing angrily toward my friends.

  “We want our money back,” Martin says behind me. “This dope’s shit.”

  Everyone starts shouting at once then, and I’m in the middle trying to calm them all down. If the rumors are true, I know one of these guys has killed. We mean nothing, my skinny St. Kilda friends and I.

  The boys are puffing their chests and leaning into our faces and shouting and it’s getting menacing and ugly under the streetlight. Martin and Victor sense the violence and back off, hands in the air, saying, “Okay, okay, forget it.” Everyone moves away, grumbling, but heading in opposite directions.

  My heart is beating. I’m thinking, Phew. Still got the dope down my sock. We get to the car, but Dirty Julie and the boys have changed their mind. They screech around the corner in their own car, pull up to a halt outside ours. We know this is heavy now.

  One of them jumps out, pointing at me. “He cut the fucking dope anyway, he cut the fucking dope!” I’m almost in the door, last one in, but I step back out.

  Arms in the air again, trying to calm him down. “Okay, okay, it’s over, forget it.”

  He’s like a locomotive coming at me. He swings so hard and fast I don’t even blink. His fist is a hammer cracking all over my face. I feel my nose break and I’m in the air and as the back of my head hits the gutter, hard, I become unconscious.

  Then there’s a gap in what I remember.

  Because it’s like coming out of a deep sleep. I’m groggy, and arms are pulling me into the back of the car. I must have been out for five or ten seconds. I can hear the squeal of tires as Dirty Julie and the boys pull away, I can hear them screaming, “You fucking arseholes! You fucking arseholes! Don’t youse ever come back here again, you motherfuckers!”

  And I’m thinking how there’s not much likelihood of that.

  My nose is broken and both eyes are closed up and I’m crying because it hurts so much. The blood keeps pouring out. It’s all over me, but someone’s trying to hold an old rag to my face.

  I’m sobbing, “I didn’t cut the dope, I didn’t cut the dope,” because I have to make them believe me. I don’t know if they do. They may well be torn between sympathy and anger.

  And we get back to the warehouse and everyone has a hit and no one feels a thing. It’s a ruined night.

  Finally they all go, everyone resigned to their personal despair. Candy’s bathing my face with warm water and a washcloth. Even though she is sick, she is loving and gentle, and I love her. She says things like, my poor baby my poor baby it’ll be all right. I keep wincing. Even the warm water hurts. After a while I can’t wait any longer and I tell Candy I have to go to the toilet. The toilet is outside the warehouse, on the roof courtyard. I get some water in the syringe and lock myself in the cubicle and mix up. I say, “Please, God, if it’s not dope, please make it dope.”

  I inject it and nothing happens.

  There is no warmth in my body. I drop the syringe and untie the tourniquet, usually an act that occurs in the onrush of bliss. Ten seconds, thirty seconds, a minute. I feel absolutely nothing. I drop my head in my hands, my fingers still sticky with blood.

  I can no longer cry. I groan a few times. Through the slits that are my eyes, I stare at my shoes, at the gray swirls of the concrete floor, at the bright orange lid of my syringe. And I realize—it’s a kind of horror—that this is my life.

  And I can’t stop. I just can’t stop. I can’t stop anymore.

  PART ONE

  Invincibility

  “Now as soon as they had tasted the honey-sweet fruit of the lotus, they wished for nothing better than to stay where they were, living with the folk of that country and feeding on the lotus. They remembered their own homes no longer, nor did they yearn any more to return to their own land …”

  HOMER, The Odyssey

  CROP FAILURE

  There were good times and bad times, but in the beginning there were more good times. When I first met Candy: those were like the days of juice, when everything was bountiful Only much later did it all start to seem like sugar and blood, blood and sugar, the endless dark heat.

  But I guess the truth is, it didn’t really take all that long for things to settle into a downward direction. It’s like there’s a mystical connection between heroin and bad luck, with some kind of built-in momentum factor. It’s like you’re cruising along in a beautiful car on a pleasant country road with the breeze in your hair and the smell of eucalyptus all around you. The horizon is always up there ahead, unfolding toward you, and at first you don’t notice the gradual descent, or the way the atmosphere thickens. Bit by bit the gradient gets steeper, and before you realize you have no brakes, you’re going pretty fucking fast.

  So what did we do, once the descent began? We learned how to drive well, under hazardous conditions. We had each other to egg each other on. There was neither room nor need for passengers. Maybe also we were thinking that one day our car would sprout wings and fly. I saw that happen in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. It’s good to live in hope.

  There was a time, after that Indian summer of our falling in love—after we’d gone through the money Candy’s grandmother had left her, after we’d done a few scams and had a pretty good run for six months or a year—when we knew it would be good to slow down or stop and see where we were. It’s funny how difficult that would turn out to be. It would be almost a decade before the car finally came to a silent stop on an empty stretch of road a long way down from where we’d started. Almost a decade before we’d hear the clicking of metal under the hood and the buzzing of cicadas in the trees all around us.

  In that first year, Candy developed her first heroin habit. Like all the rest of us, no amount of words and warnings could prepare her for the horrors of drying out. So when we were forced to give it a go, she was a little shaken by the power of the thing.

  This was in Melbourne for her. Candy grew up in Mekbourne, and she went back there to dry out because we figured it would be too tempting to fuck up if we tried to do it together. It was her first habit, so she probably just needed a week at a friend’s place with some good food and a trunk or two of pills.

  I’d been gunning it now for a few years, so the plan for me was to go to detox for a while. I’d been getting this good brown Sri Lankan gear from my dealer T-Bar. There was lots of it, and everyone wanted it from me. It wasn’t all that heavily refined—it wasn’t the Thai white or even pink rocks. It was alkaline, and you could say rough as guts. But it was pretty pure, because three or four times a year it came into the country in condoms up T-Bar’s arse. I stepped on it one-to-one with chocolate Quik, and still everybody was more than happy.

  But Murphy’s Law in the world of heroin said that if things could get out of control, then of course they would. T-Bar’s brown was still in abundant supply, but I was starting to owe him more and more money, and he was getting pissed off with me. So I had some motivation to get things together in that department. I wasn’t the world’s greatest dealer. The simple equation was that the more dope I had, the more I used. I
noticed that some of the people I sold to regularly were calling me less often; maybe I wasn’t so reliable anymore. Detox seemed like the ideal opportunity for a breather.

  The signs to stop were there. The plan was that Candy and I would link up in a week or two and be happy and healthy and maybe Candy would get pregnant. Then maybe we’d move to Melbourne, just to be on the safe side. Start a new life down there, away from the gear and all my Sydney connections.

  Or maybe we could stay in Sydney and go back to hanging around with my old friends, my pot-smoking friends who held down jobs and went out on the weekends and seemed to enjoy their lives.

  Mason Brown was one of these friends. Mason was six-foot-three, with a craggy face and sandy hair and a permanent grin. He loved his life like nobody I’d met before. He loved smoking buds and he only ever had the best, the lie-back-and-laugh stuff. He loved live music. He even loved—loved with a passion—his job as a field officer with the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.

  We’d grown to like each other a couple of years earlier, when we’d done a lot of business and smoked a lot of bongs. Mason had stood by me as others started to avoid me. He was never one for getting moral. He got a little sad when he saw me fucking up. He never said anything stronger than, “You really ought to stop this shit.” He bailed me out of little financial holes on several occasions, and never asked for the money back.

  A few days before Candy left for Melbourne, we went out to see a band. Be social, be normal, have a bit of a preview of our life to come. There were lots of people I knew there, and a few of them gave me the dirty eyeball, and some of them spent a fair amount of time staring at Candy, who always stood out like a beacon of beauty.

  Mason Brown was there. I hadn’t seen him in a few months and we caught up on the news. After a while he gave me one of those searching looks and said, “So—you okay?”