JAMES SAID A FRIEND OF his had found a rehab for him to go to. I didn’t quite understand. The idea that he might want to change things disturbed me, despite the hardship we had; as if I’d be left behind again, as if we weren’t happy together. He said he’d be in there for a week. I couldn’t visit. I couldn’t ring him. He would send messages through the friend, a ‘safe’ person—someone who didn’t use. An ex-girlfriend. I was simply numb with shock when he went off with his little backpack. That afternoon at work I got a call from her.

‘He’s fine, he said to say he loves you,’ an unfamiliar female voice told me.

I was bloodless with rage. How dare she tell me he loved me? How dare she stand between us? I went home from work that evening to the empty flat, scored, fixed up and smoked a joint. I lay in bed crying.

The week was terrible. I was angry with James for leaving me, for being so selfish, for letting this other woman back into his life, for going somewhere I couldn’t follow; I was bleak with loneliness. I rang the rehab centre to leave a message for him and the voice at the other end knew that I was the no-good girlfriend, that I was a user. It was the first time I felt that abashment. When the week was over I went to pick him up; a woman came to the front room where I was waiting.

‘James has decided to stay a little longer,’ she said. ‘But he’s worried about you, so we’re going to let you come in and see him for a minute. We don’t usually do this.’

The woman led me out through the building, to a yard with another building on the other side. She put a hand on my shoulder; I flinched it away, rigid with distress. A few people were hanging around, smoking and talking. I glared at them all. And then there was James, coming towards me with a shy smile.

‘Hello,’ he said, and wrapped his arms around me. He’d never said Hello before. A wrack of grief went through me; I started crying. His body felt thinner than ever, he smelled different.

‘It’s great here,’ he said. ‘I feel so good. New. I’ve been having massages and acupuncture and vitamins, they do Chinese medicine here and I had reiki, had this crazy vision and I saw Jupiter and the moon and—oh, hi Shane!’ I couldn’t bear it. It was as if they’d taken my James away and replaced him with a stranger. I hated his happiness. I wept and wept. He said he was sorry, but he was getting better, and he knew I was left alone, but he’d come home in another week and help me too, and he kissed me.

I dried my tears and went home blank, and the only thing I could think of to do with the empty afternoon was score.

He did come out a week later as he’d promised, and he sent ahead a message to pack a bag and go to a doctor and request Doloxene, a medication to ease heroin withdrawal. The doctor studied me carefully as I made my request, impassive behind his glasses, and wrote out a script. Then I went to work and asked them to give me a week off. It was the fortnight before Christmas, the busiest time of the year, and they needed me but I said, awkward and humiliated and apologetic, that I was having some problems with a drug, and they looked at me with pity and care and said, ‘Of course. Take as long as you need.’ I could barely smile straight with the embarrassment.

The next thing was to tell my mother. My dad was away, and it didn’t seem fair to leave my mother upset on her own, but there was no delaying it. This time I stayed the night; in the morning, I squatted next to my mother in the sunny garden and said, ‘There’s something I have to tell you. Please don’t freak. I’ve been doing… something. Heroin. But it’s going to be all right,’ I said quickly. ‘I’m going away and I’m going to fix it all up. Don’t worry.’

My mother just sat there, and held my hand, and said, ‘I knew there was something wrong. I knew it. Oh, darling.’

So when James came home to our flat we paused long enough for him to repack his bag and then my mother drove us to get a train to the country home of one of my old friends. On the way James said, ‘Just tell me, you didn’t bring any, did you? Because I know you might have wanted to. And you have to be honest with me if I’m going to help you get out of this too.’

‘No,’ I said, and I hadn’t stashed anything in my bag, because I had my James again, and when he said he knew what to do I trusted him.

It wasn’t so strange, after all, to have him back, and not to use. Jason’s house in the forest was comfortable, and the summer was hot; we walked up and down the dappled rough road to town, sat around talking and scratching the ground with sticks. The tiny pink capsules from the doctor removed the physical suffering I might have had, but I didn’t think there’d have been much anyway. I’d been using such small amounts. One pill fewer every day; we sat in quiet sunshine and made plans for a new future. I felt calm and blank. James’s skin was hot under the arm I wrapped around him; he was as tender and loving as ever, we couldn’t stop smiling quietly at each other.

Back in Melbourne after a week, we went straight to stay with my parents. The flat was too full of memories, and Jake was just across the road. James rang his own folks and after a couple of fraught discussions arranged for his brother to take over the lease. Christmas with my family was a mix of unstated strangeness and comfortable familiarity. My parents were happy to have me move home. Their static smiles told me they were still stunned by the idea that their precious daughter, the academic, the innocent, was a heroin user. But, as I said to them again on my return, everything was going to be okay now.

It was a muted summer. James went to stay with his parents for a while; then he got a room in a sharehouse not far from where I was. I went back to work at the bookshop, and that kept me busy; with no drugs to buy, slowly I paid off the credit card debt, and then the cash piled up. I missed St Kilda, but it was like a return to one’s own country to be at my parents’, where the fridge was full and the rooms lined with books. My bedroom was awkwardly stacked with all my belongings. I settled in, because this was really my home; I was twenty-four, but after my adventures, it felt right to be there again. We seemed to have agreed that I would stay until I’d recovered my nerve. The days were full of dusty yellow light and quiet.

Then James and I started going back to Acland Street, for a coffee, for a wander. St Kilda was also a realm to yearn for, it was the place we knew together. We were always aware that just up the road, just a short stroll, was Jake’s. And one day in February we took the walk. Back in his musty living room, back with the tough chat about the scene. The sweet sting of the needle in my skin. James and I looking at each other, mischievous with guilt. Afterwards we went to the park; we lay under dry trees, we felt great. It wasn’t hard to tell ourselves it had been a nice thing to do. The other words, the words about the folly of it, were too hard to say.

The string of habit, slack, pulled tight. Days reeled together, the days when we’d decide, so casually, almost with speaking, that it was a using day. Once, then once a week; then the idea of waiting another week seemed unreasonable, and it was every few days. We’d go after I finished work: a tram ride, a stroll, a coffee after the fix. Like an outing. We were meticulous in our manoeuvrings towards suggesting it. The trick was not to be the one to say it. Heavy sighs, quick glances. It was crucial not to be the one seen weakening; through all the matrices of our shared knowledge of each other, we knew, each, exactly how to edge the other.

When we scored, we were full of love. Hours of talk, of voluptuous delight in each other’s company. When we didn’t, there was silence. And still we thought we would be together forever.

Some time towards the end of that summer we started trying the dealers in the city. Jake’s supply was unreliable and it was getting more expensive. Everyone knew where to go in the city. There was a particular stretch, lined with amusement parlours and idle Asian youths. It was a different scene. Bruised-looking, rugged white guys loped up and down, buying, scoping, yelling. At the backs of the parlours, or walking slowly up the footpath, were young men with bad teeth and alert eyes. The first times James and I went down there we hardly knew what to do, but it was easy.

A voice said, ‘You chasin’?’ in our ear, and we nodded, and followed a tracksuited back down a nearby alleyway. The guy pulled a tiny coloured balloon from his mouth. It was deflated, knotted; when I took it, there was a small hard bump inside. ‘Forty,’ he said. I dug into my pocket and dragged out two twenties. He nodded, and left. James and I walked away quickly; there were always a lot of police around that area. We headed to a café we knew in the next street; I took my bag with me to the toilet. I’d brought my portable drugs kit: a rigid sunglasses case containing a metal spoon and swabs and a couple of fits. There was a bottle of water in my bag. I had to rip the balloon with my teeth. Inside was a minute white rock, wrapped in foil. It wasn’t powdered, like Jake’s gear; I mushed at it in the spoon, and it dissolved into cloudy liquid. I remembered what junkies did in films; I took out my lighter and held it underneath, and the liquid cleared. When I withdrew the needle from my skin, my palms and soles prickled hotly.

The stuff wasn’t clean, but it was cheap. I’d go around to James’s late at night, after a day on my feet in the store; we’d scrounge our money together; and we, or increasingly just I alone, would walk to the station. I got to know the time of the last train home, the bustle of that street just before midnight, the way to nod at a pair of intent dark eyes, and duck into the back of an amusement parlour, among the clashing lights and bells and yelling boys; to pocket the deal, or hide it in the fingertip of my glove, and stroll off. I’d usually go straight to a busy bar, where an interloper skulking in and out of the toilet wouldn’t be noticed. Sometimes the toilets were fitted with blue lights, supposedly to make it difficult for junkies to find their blue veins. I had only to locate the little hard bump of scar tissue in the crook of my arm, the small dark shiny circle where I’d punctured the skin again and again before it ever had a chance to heal.

A couple of times I was cheated. The rock was tiny, or the solution, when I heated it, remained cloudy with whatever it had been cut with. Once, amid the clanging arcade games, the boy I was buying from scooted off as soon as I handed over the money, and when I opened the balloon and the foil in a loud club toilet, there was only a flint of gravel inside. My sense of street cred was affronted. I wandered the street until I found him.

‘You ripped me off,’ I insisted, while his friends gathered around, threatening. The boy was showing me his wallet for some reason, perhaps to demonstrate that he’d never met me, that my money was not in there.

‘What you want?’ the others demanded. ‘What you talking about mate?’ I suddenly wondered if they had knives.

‘All right, but you owe me,’ I said with futile bravado, and walked away to try someone else. I too began to carry a small knife. Not that I would have known how to use it.

It was a surreal existence for months. During the day I was a mild, neat bookstore assistant, chatting with the local matrons and book groups, exchanging gossip with my colleagues, handling money, making phone calls, straightening my skirt. At home I was a nice, polite, middle-class girl living with her parents in an old haven of innocence. At James’s, I was the awkward girlfriend, not quite cool enough for his housemates. And in the city, I was a swaggering junkie in dark streets.

Standing behind the counter at the bookshop I began to read Holocaust memoirs. Something in me was almost consoled by comparison with the horror of the camps, by the radiant silence of tragedy. I read one after the other, turning my mind for a moment away from the trepidation in my own heart.

The money I’d piled so carelessly on my mantelpiece went quickly now, even with the cheaper gear. James was still on the dole. The idea of not getting on was enough to make us anxious and uneasy. I sold some cds and old books; I worked overtime if I could get it.

One last taste to say goodbye; one last taste to help out Jake when he rang needing money; one taste to get me through a difficult day; one taste to share with James. A taste to make me feel better; a taste to stop me feeling bad. If it was a grey day, heroin would brighten it; a sunny day was made perfect with a fix.

But it was no longer as simple as wanting heroin, liking it. Often now as winter came down I resented it. My body was tired; it was raining outside; the hour was late. Time for bed. And yet I had no choice. The drug took me out of the house, on cold bleak nights, on aching feet; it drove me to places I didn’t want to be. There was a steely compulsion in me. I often wrote in my journal of how good it would be to be clean, how I was going to get clean, how fresh my life would be next week, next month, how resolved I was—but when it got dark, the thought of the drug muffled all else. I wrote of heroin as a scaly green lizard wrapped tight around my mind, blinking its cold eyes at me, blinding me.

In the meantime I was down to my last few dollars.

My parents didn’t know I had resumed using, I thought. I was careful to hide my pinned pupils if I was home, or I would spend the night at James’s. But there was hostility brimming in the house. Things went unsaid. As the first shock had sunk into my parents’ minds, their fright curdled to something else. I had broken the innocence of our family and my cheer, forced, only made the atmosphere brittle.

And I could see that things were getting worse. I was more and more fixated on money, and on the single diversion of drugs. My old friends were out there, but already they seemed to belong to another time. A sense of humiliation scorched me; everyone had expected so much from me, and this was so little.

Another Christmas came and went. I worked hard, kept quiet.

There was a bowl of loose change in the house. Shiny gold two-dollar coins in among the dull silver. Late at night I scooped them out and put them, heavy, in a little bag; there were enough to score with. I thought, no one will miss them. Not yet.

Then my parents said they knew I was using again. I could only tell them that it was under control, that I was going to stop soon. They looked at me and didn’t know what to say. Neither did I.

I was away from St Kilda, in the suburbs, in my routine of work and home and ‘getting on’: scoring. James and I were bound by the drugs, and love too. But we made love now less often. Heroin first blesses its users with enchantment and then parches them of sensation. The pulse between us was weaker. It was hard to come, hard to find the momentum towards crisis. But we embraced, still enraptured by each other’s fragility, the poignancy of this grace amid the grime. We held each other close.

It was already a year since we’d left our little flat. Things were changing under the mist of drugs and at times I felt James grow cautious with me, drawn to his new friends and their common interests. I knew I was losing him.

We sat on the edge of his bed in the thin light of a grey afternoon and had nothing to say. I wanted to suggest we score; but we’d scored. I wanted to touch him; but I’d touched him enough. He was sitting apart, staring at his shoes. My beautiful boy, frail-thin and old-souled, full of thoughts he couldn’t tell me, of a self-protective instinct I didn’t possess.

He said, ‘I think I can’t do this anymore, Kate. I think I have to stop. I have to be on my own. You know I still love you…I still do. But this is killing me.’

And I sobbed and sobbed, because I knew he was right, and I wanted him well, and not shadowed by this dreariness, but I was so frightened to be alone, and I knew I wasn’t ready for anything.

After we broke up I was numb. It was one thing to lose a lover from a fault in the relationship, or from having made a mistake, or even from loving too much. James and I loved each other, but this was emptying everything we had. It seemed a long time since the sarsaparilla on his porch back in St Kilda, and him running after my tram waving goodbye with his skinny arms.

He was stronger than I was. He went to his parents’ place up in the hills and, without medication, without them knowing, without succumbing to the pain in his limbs and the torture of temptation in his head, he went through withdrawal and came back to his house and didn’t use again. We talked sometimes on the phone, and when I cried he soothed me. But I was nostalgic for the early days, and he said, ‘I don’t want to think about any of that anymore.’

In bed at night I touched myself, clenching at the memory of James making love to me; the sweetness that we had forfeited. My face made the crumpled shape of pleasure, or tears. A huge grief yawned open in me, and then left me vacant.