SO I WENT ON. AT HOME there were eyes on me all the time. There was little chance to do anything but go to work and return to the house. Now I had to find a way to score without the alibi of visiting James. I was feeling the effects if I didn’t fix up regularly enough; I’d spend the morning in the store, dragging myself up and down the shop floor, limbs like sacks of mud, back aching, sweat acrid under my arms. It was hard to smile at the customers, to pretend I was fine, to run up the stairs to fetch books. Towards lunch I’d obsessively check the time. And then I’d dash out the door and hail a taxi. A mad drive to St Kilda, glaring at my watch; I had only three-quarters of an hour, and the drive took twenty minutes each way. A sprint up the stairs to Jake’s door, a hasty chat, a quick fix in his living room, the bliss of relief and a few puffs of the post-fix cigarette; then back to the waiting taxi and the panting arrival back in the shop, ten minutes late. I did this every day.

My excuses about shopping and forgetting the time rapidly grew absurd; my nervousness was conspicuous. After a while I didn’t even bother insulting my employers with these feeble lies, but just skulked back to the shop counter and knew that my deception was undoing years of friendship. But by that time I’d be cruising on the relief of drugs in my system, and it was possible not to care.

It wasn’t as if I got a big rush from the smack by now, after a year and a half of using. There would be a heady sense of glow for the first five or ten minutes; my heart, racing with anticipation before the fix, would steady and I’d breathe cool and delicious air. I was aware that my physical pains had magically eased. Then I had the relief of having scored, of having achieved what I wanted above all else, of having managed it yet again.

Heroin is compelling, in the end, because it is satisfaction you can hold in your hand. Fulfilment, contentment, pride—these are feelings that a person can derive from being a good person, an able parent, a successful worker, an inspired artist. They are inchoate, invisible, ineffable feelings, for all their wonder. They are abstract. Heroin is a satisfaction you can pursue, it’s concrete; you must get the money, find the dealer, arrange the equipment. Then you take the little grain of promise, and you dissolve it, and you draw it up into a needle; you hold it in your hand, and you push it into your flesh.

The further you get into heroin, the more it is the only kind of satisfaction you can imagine.

And heroin gives you permission to do terrible things. For the first time, I found myself behaving with all the ruthless selfishness and disdain of a real junkie. I told myself it didn’t matter.

I was clear in my mind: I was a heroin user. Perhaps an addict, if I admitted it, though the word was frightening. A junkie was one of the hollow creatures I saw in the city or stumbling onto the tram, talking too loudly. Junkies had given up all their dignity. They had no respect for themselves, or other people. They did what they did without reflection, without a thought to consequences. They nodded off on the train; their faces were grey and blind-eyed. I was never, ever like that; I never gave up my composure. But inside I was skidding towards the single-minded obsession of need.

I stole money from work. It was so easy, with all the notes nestled there in the drawer. Even through the first year of using, when James and I were so poor in St Kilda, it had never occurred to me that every day hundreds of dollars passed through my hands. But now it did, and once I had the idea I couldn’t let it go.

I didn’t mean to steal. I would take the cash—a hundred dollars—and replace it later that day once I’d been to the bank with my pay cheque. Just a little loan. But the shop was busy; my afternoon break came too late to get to the bank; the money was spent and the drugs already simmering in my veins.

Standing behind the counter, counting the minutes before the till was reckoned at the end of the day, I became very cold and deliberate. It was a chilly April afternoon and the shop was quiet. The floor manager was down the other end of the shop. I could cover my tracks; no one need know that this had happened, that I’d slipped so far. I forged vouchers and adjusted receipts to hide the loss. My coolness horrified me and saved me.

My two bosses trusted me, they’d known me for years. I was like a niece to them. They were lovely. But they weren’t stupid; they knew I was strange now, and a week later they told me to come into the office and they asked me to leave.

They were kind. They said they knew. They didn’t want to punish me, but I couldn’t stay. Their faces were tight with misery and hurt, and I looked back at them, buckling inside with disbelief that something so awful was happening, that I’d done something so horrendous and now they knew it. I started to cry. Messily I said that I was sorry.

‘You know—you know I use heroin, don’t you.’

One of them said, ‘Yes. Yes.’ His face was full of sorrow.

They sat there as I cried, and silently gave me an envelope containing a cheque for dismissal payments and sick leave. I knew I didn’t deserve it, but I took the money, and got up, still crying, and left the shop where I’d worked since I was a schoolgirl.

It was the middle of the day. I didn’t say goodbye to my colleagues, or the customer whom I’d been helping. I just left. Outside the sky was smooth and white with clouds. I went to the sea at St Kilda, and sat there, looking at the pale dirty sand.

I scored, of course; I bought several caps. I went home, and told my parents. They knew—that I’d been using, that I was desperate for money, that it was likely I’d steal eventually. The atmosphere was almost relieved, now that everything was open. My sister gave me a hug. We joked about what a lazy girl I would become without a job. I was still stiff with horror and remorse at what I’d done. But I didn’t have to pretend anymore. I was out; I was turning into a junkie. Something was changed. And something had to change.

My sister got me alone and said, ‘You don’t know what happens when you’re not around. It’s so easy for you. Mum and Dad cry. We sit around talking about you, and we’re all crying. You have no fucking idea how that feels.’

‘I can’t,’ was all I could say.

The money my bosses had given me would last a while. It was a lot of money. My mother took charge, and suggested I leave it in her keeping, to dole out to me. We talked. It was agreed that I was allowed to go on living with them, even though I was using; there was no point in trying to fix things abruptly. My mother gave me enough money every day to score, and I stayed at home, trying to use less, trying to make sense of what I’d done, trying to envisage anything but this existence, and finding it almost impossible.

All the time people were telling me I had to stop. It seemed so simple to them. You just have to stop. Yes, I’d say. I know. But I couldn’t, I couldn’t. I could only try, and hope, but I felt that no one could understand the power of what was occurring inside me.

My sister, mother, father and I sat in the living room and they tried to talk to me. ‘Do you see what’s happening? Can you see where this is going? What you’re doing to yourself?’ They all looked at me, perplexed and injured. The more I tried to explain, the more insane I sounded; there were no words for what I felt. I sobbed in humiliation. There had never been sounds like that in this house before.

There were days of using, and days of struggling against it. I would slump around the house, ill and disconsolate, pursued by tempting thoughts. Walls curved in and over me. There was a whine of pure terror inside my mind. Reality hurt me like a sandblaster.

Heroin interferes with the chemical transmitters of the brain; it substitutes its own balms for all of these. And when there’s no more heroin in a body, it goes into crisis, bereft. There are no endorphins to kill pain; they’ve all been disabled by the drug. The body feels flayed and raw. Mineral levels of all kinds are unbalanced; the brain works strangely. Deranged thoughts and crazed plans seem reasonable. And, through all this, there’s the icy quiet knowledge that even if your chemistry readjusts, and the body battles through the discomfort, and you give up the one thing that makes life bearable, then there are days and weeks and months and years of resisting ahead of you. As you lie there, hardly able to think or breathe for the fatigue, engulfed in the moment, this idea is impossible.

I couldn’t keep it up for longer than a few days, and then I’d seek the solace of the needle. It was more terrifying than anything to actually be trying, with all my will, and not be strong enough.

My parents pressed me to see a psychiatrist. He was a dour man with a waiting room full of lace doilies and modern paintings. We’d sit in his darkened office, which was a little cold, and he’d set his thick face towards me and wait. There wasn’t much I could say. I wanted to find out the mechanisms of my behaviour, and adjust the apparatus. But I had no idea how to go about that. I wanted someone to stop me dead, stop my agile mental justifications; someone to shove me against the wall with a hand to my throat and not let me go until I’d dug out some truth. But this man just kept saying he couldn’t help me until I stopped using. And I couldn’t.

‘I get so depressed and frightened,’ I said. ‘Whenever I try to stop. The detox—trying to kick, sitting around at home all sick—it fucks with my head. Everything seems too big. I think I’ll never ever make it past the fear.’

I left with a prescription for anti-depressants. It was true that they stabilised my mood; but, already numb with the sedative of heroin, I had little mood left.

All the pills did was damp down any feelings I still had. Swaddled, my little heart throbbed more quietly. The legal drugs weren’t strong enough, though, to muffle the terror when it came to spike me.

I had no job now; no references, no confidence. I’d lost my boyfriend, my home in St Kilda. The respect of my family. My friends were busy. It was as if I’d walked into that pale sky—an empty, quiet place.

The love that my family still proffered embarrassed me. I could not tell them how little I felt I deserved it.

I sneaked out of the house and got caught coming back. I filched money. There were days when no one could bear to speak to me.

Night after night I plugged the needle into me. Its cool kiss.

Then my parents said that if I didn’t get clean I couldn’t stay with them. I had to sort myself out; what was wrong with me?

‘I can’t stand to see you killing yourself,’ my dad cried, with a desperation I’d never seen in him. ‘Please, please do something.’

So I rang the rehab James had gone to. It didn’t seem like such a stupid idea now; they might know how to fix me. They said it was a six-day program, but if I wanted, I could apply to stay longer.

‘Stay for the month,’ urged my parents. I was to go in the next week.

‘I’ll just see how I feel.’

One last taste; I mixed it up in my room the morning I was to go in. Liquid ready in the spoon, the needle poised to suck it up; my mother knocked. I jammed my crossed arms over the tray on my lap, to hide the gear. My parents had never actually seen me shoot up. ‘I just want you to know we love you,’ she said.

‘Uh-huh?’ I was trying to smile. I was impatient for the fix.

‘We’ll take you down there when you’re ready,’ my mother said, and left the room.

I pulled my arms away from the spoon. It was empty. I stared. The edge of my borrowed dressing-gown had dipped into the spoon and soaked up all the liquid. I couldn’t stop staring. Sucking at the fabric desperately. Nothing. The shock I felt—my last taste, gone—was beyond words.

I told my mother. She started to giggle. ‘It just got sucked up!’ I said, and the stupidity of it hit me. ‘Your bloody terry-towelling!’ I was laughing too. ‘I have to score,’ I told her. ‘Before I go in.’

‘But you’ll be late!’

I looked at her, reason ready and sly on my tongue. ‘I have to. One last taste. To say goodbye. Otherwise I won’t have finished.’

So my mother drove me to Jake’s, and waited outside while I had my taste in the living room there. I got back in the car.

‘Ready?’

I was full of heroin and relief. ‘Ready.’

It was an old church building, with the day-treatment out the front, a yard behind, and at the back the residential building, sealed from the outside world. The centre was a holistic healing centre: they offered massages, acupuncture, reiki. The front rooms smelt of perfumed oils. The back building smelt of household cleaner and detox sweat.

In the lounge of the residence there were a dozen people making sandwiches at a large table and sitting around on old couches. The person admitting me, a brisk middle-aged man, took me up to my room. Three beds.

There was no chocolate, sugar or coffee allowed. The diet was a healthy, detoxifying one. We would be in bed every night at ten.

He was kind, evidently accustomed to the blank look I had on my face. He put a hand on my shoulder. ‘You’ll be fine here, Katie.’

I went downstairs and outside to have a cigarette under the green plastic portico. There were mud-splashed plastic chairs in a circle around an old fruit-juice can used for an ashtray. Some people came out and sat with me and lit up smokes.

‘I’m Danny,’ said a round-faced, dazed-looking young man. He spoke slowly, and tugged at his long jumper. ‘Everyone knows me here. I’m always here, aren’t I?’ he asked another man.

‘You’re like the house mascot,’ the man said. He had a rough, lined face and a beanie on his head. ‘You’re our fucking totem.’

I sat and smoked. People smiled at me, and asked my name. ‘You been using long?’ one asked.

‘Nearly two years,’ I said, and found myself almost proud. ‘About a hundred bucks a day.’

‘Right,’ he said. The feeling was almost of school camp, except that here faces were pale with sweat, or rugged with life’s experience. Jeans were ripped, jumpers were saggy. There were some young women, timid or loud; a couple of clean-cut young guys, a couple of Asian faces, a lot of men. I gathered almost everyone was here because of heroin.

The afternoon went on, and already I felt comfortable. I knew enough of the scene, and Jake’s assorted associates, to know how to mix with this company. Jail terms, comparing of scars; a blokey humour. ‘You’re a bit nice for this kind of thing, aren’t you?’ someone said.

‘Not too nice.’

‘Hah!’ He grinned and offered me a cigarette. ‘Me neither.’

I heard that people would arrange drops of chocolate bars over the fence. Forget drugs; heroin users are addicted to chocolate. We dreamed aloud of ice-cream and cake.

There was a good feeling there. The staff had shifts, but after only a few days there were familiar faces. Three times a day we were called, one at a time, for our meds, and some traditional Chinese medicine as well if we wanted; black and bitter mouthfuls of liquid, to soothe the nerves or help the detoxification process. I took everything they offered. The little pink Doloxene pills familiar from the country detox with James helped too; I managed to sleep every night. Others didn’t; there was one young man, Andy, who said he hadn’t slept for fourteen nights. He was pale and aggrieved. ‘Every time I do manage to nod off during the day they fucking wake me up!’

‘It’s all about getting a routine,’ the staff said. ‘Regular meals, regular sleep times. You’ve all been all over the place, you have to get some order back.’ Andy scowled.

The days were tightly scheduled. Breakfast, then a swim at the public baths down the road. At first I just paddled around one end of the pool, shy in my bathers and weak in the muscles. Then I tried some laps. It was humiliating. In the next lane the local patrons ploughed up and down—young women and Russian grandmothers slogged, never pausing in their slow heaves towards each end. Our gaggle of young people flopped arms towards the rim of the pool, out of breath. It was so obvious what we were.

‘It’s a terrible thing, that heroin,’ said an old man to me. He was white-haired and one-legged. ‘Lost it in the war,’ he said. ‘You young folks. You’re all getting better now, aren’t you?’ He smiled at me.

‘We are,’ I said. ‘We are.’

There were tensions, but mostly the atmosphere was cheery. People seemed to like me. I was happy to talk to everyone. I made jokes with the men and chatted with the girls. I made friends with my room-mate, a sallow, gentle girl who wore a silver bell around her neck. My old friends wrote me encouraging letters which I received with surprise and gratitude. Cheered once I got over the first week of withdrawal, I was jaunty in the mornings, surprised at my energy, and starting to discover a zeal for improving myself. The group therapy classes were almost like university tutorials; it seemed that there was a science to the understanding of addiction. And each acupuncture session, each massage, seemed like a limbering of something I’d allowed to stiffen in myself.

Being treated embarrassed me. A guided meditation class had me in tears, trying to visualise the correct shade of magenta spiralling through my body. Reiki made me giggle in the awed hush of the room. But I persisted, and I found that just taking it, taking the kindness, wasn’t as dangerous as I’d thought. I let my limbs loosen and my body be gentled. I felt better every day.

Still the thought of heroin hummed in the background. I was in a strange mood; removed from the life I’d known, safe in this small, enclosed world; but surrounded by the issues of drugs, by those who understood what it was like. We’d wake some days to find one of our number missing. ‘Jumped the fence,’ we’d say, although whoever it was had simply asked to leave, and gone. It was as easy as that. I could feel the pull of healthiness, of hope, but also the tug of heroin and its promise. Recovery, as we were told every day, was hard work. Long work. It took years. The prospect of such struggle was so exhausting that it sometimes seemed as if it would be simpler just to use.

One night this all got too much. Dazed in bed, desperate to sleep in a prickle of thoughts and dread, I got up and went to Becky, a plump, motherly staff member on night duty. She was watching television in the lounge. The room was cast in blue and black.

‘I’m afraid,’ I said tiredly. ‘I’m so afraid I can’t do this.’

She smiled at me. ‘But the thing is, just because you’re afraid doesn’t actually mean there’s anything to be afraid of. Perhaps you can do it, even if you’re afraid. Have you thought of that?’

I hadn’t. Maybe I could puncture the bubble of panic, maybe I could just try it anyway. What was the worst that could happen? I thought, I can always use when I get out, if I still want to. And so I stayed.

Tim, a handsome, lithe boy with dreadlocks and tattoos, didn’t. He walked right past a staff member with a bar of chocolate in his hand. He had to leave. ‘He’ll go out and use,’ we protested.

‘But he’s broken the rules that keep you safe,’ the worker said. ‘It was his decision.’

A few days later there was a whistle from behind the tall wooden fence that separated us from the outside world. Tim’s head appeared. A few of us stood and chatted to him. But his face was pale, and his speech and eyes slow with drugs. It was horrifying, and we understood how different we felt inside here.

In my diary I wrote, I can do without heroin for now. I feel good like this. But I shan’t say ‘never again’. Not just yet. It’s out there. I can wait. But when I leave… It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in recovery, or see the need for it. But there was a hushed voice in me that said what I wanted, I would get. And while I was happy now, I couldn’t shut that voice up. The drug had its own psyche, embedded in mine.

We all had private counselling sessions. Mine was with Cassie. It seemed hard to believe she had ever been a user; she was so groomed, so calm. She sat there, facing me, and said, ‘You’re always smiling, Kate. Are you happy all the time?’

‘I guess not,’ I said. ‘I can’t be that happy if I’m using, can I?’

‘No, I don’t think you can be happy all the time. What do you feel when you’re not happy? When you’re sad, or angry? Where do you feel it?’

I touched my belly, my throat.

‘And what do you do with that?’ She was looking at me serenely.

‘I just try to deal with it. I try to keep going. You know?’

‘You’re smiling. Can you stop smiling a moment? Just—stop smiling.’

There was silence. She watched me. I blinked at the ground.

I thought of how much pain I’d been through, and how stupid it was always to be smiling when my throat was aching with misery, and I sat there, and I couldn’t get the absurd little curve off my lips. This woman could see right through my bravado; she knew I was a faker. She knew I wasn’t all right, and I knew that, but I’d done so many stupid things, and I was trying to be brave, and all I could do was hold on. She was beautiful and composed. I was sitting there, having fucked it all up.

‘You’re still smiling,’ she said. I couldn’t stop. I had a stupid grin on my face and my eyes were full of tears.

I stayed the month in rehab. I grew clear and vibrant. I was a veteran to the new arrivals every day. The staff winked at me as I bounced past, as I ran around the yard playing ball, as I tried out the boxing bag up the back. I spent time alone, thinking, trying to work through what I’d learned in therapy about myself and my self-esteem and my family and the perverse behaviours I’d identified. Clarifying things. I felt better than I ever had in my life. This was like a home. On my last night I made a speech at dinner, about the wonder of surprising yourself. My room-mate came and gave me her silver chiming bell. ‘To remind you,’ she said.

But my time was up. ‘You’ve done really well,’ Cassie said. ‘Don’t be too confident, though. I mean, there are a lot of pitfalls out there. It’s a long road.’

‘I think I’ll be fine,’ I said, and there was a huge smile of hope on my face, and in my deceitful heart a little sneaky wriggle. Because the afternoon I walked out, instead of going home to where my parents and sister were awaiting me, waiting to see their healthy, happy daughter, I turned left at the gate rather than right, and went to Jake’s.

Just one. Just to say goodbye to it. Just as a reward. Just because I’d waited, and I was confident I was changed. Because it was there.

I rang home, on the way to Jake’s. I told my parents I wanted a night of transition before I came back. They were bewildered when I said I’d stay with an old housemate in St Kilda, and see them tomorrow. I knew they were expecting me, with a special dinner and proud faces. It was too late for me to think of that, to allow even one flicker of their hope to enter my heart. I found my coldness all over again. I thought that meant I was strong.

The taste was too potent for me. I’d been a month without heroin, and my tolerance had fallen. This was the kind of situation where people ‘dropped’. I didn’t overdose, but I was sleepy and dazed when I arrived at my friend Matilda’s to beg a bed. She was surprised to see me, but let me in. My dazed eyes must have told her all she needed to know. I sat up to keep watch over myself late into the night, and through the thick haze of the drug and the numbness I wept a little because I knew I’d already failed. The humiliation was raw to touch. I flinched. Like a cord the addiction had pulled me, against all the tethering of my reason and support, pulled me right back, and I’d followed. My fear of losing control made my heart race like a drug did; only the drug could calm it.

I went home the next day, still pinned, still stoned. My parents’ smiles wavered when they saw me, when I wasn’t the cheery, hopeful girl they’d talked to on the phone at rehab, their daughter restored, the nightmare over; when I averted my face and said I was tired and couldn’t face their company. They didn’t say I was stoned. I didn’t say, I’ve blown it. I just crept into my room and told myself it didn’t matter. Of course it did.