THE STREET, JAKE’S FLAT, the toilets in cafés and pubs where I fixed up, the bare room I had at David’s, my books, the needle next to my pillow. These things were my life now. The sky always darkening when I woke; the pewter glitter and hazed streetlight of the night.

Each night’s earnings were only just enough to get me through. There was never anything left to use for levering myself ahead. I honed myself down to the essentials to find out how strong I could be, how brave.

I was brave. I turned the fist of my heart until the knuckles showed.

If I dared think of what had happened to my life, how all the promise people had seen in me had been abandoned, I found myself curling into a ball, swallowing down the panic greasy in my throat.

Seeing people I knew was unbearable, full of awkward silences, nervous glances. I felt they could hardly bear to look at me, from their own embarrassment and my own. Occasionally I did bump into old friends; they asked after my health with either a careful intonation or a happy obliviousness of what had happened to me. When the front door of my parents’ house closed behind me after a visit I’d relinquish the strained cheerfulness of the past hours. Back out into the streets where at least I was not out of place.

There I knew people, a few familiar faces amongst the constantly changing rota of women in shadows. A girl in a red scrap of silk on the corner, a blonde matron by the milkbar. As I passed on my rounds of the block we’d say, Hello, how’s it going? Watch out for the blue stationwagon, he’s a fuckwit. It’s cold tonight. Where are all the mugs? The cheese are down at the corner, don’t go there.

And I knew other users, from rehab or from Jake’s. I walked out of Jake’s with a boy one afternoon, and fixed up in the park with him. He took me home to his bedsit and he was sweet and he kissed me. It felt almost like the beginning of something, but when he was going down on me I asked if I could have a cigarette while he was busy, because I was bored, and I knew I couldn’t find pleasure like that now.

He was leaving town to get clean, anyway. He gave me two tiny paintings he’d done of the sea, one bright, the other dark. I kept them, and stuck them on the bare wall behind my makeshift bed at David’s, but I never saw him again. I just went on, forgetting.

‘Have you heard about—’ someone would say when we bumped into each other in the middle of the night. Those words were never good. I heard that Tim had died, the handsome boy from rehab. He’d overdosed in front of his friends and they didn’t call an ambulance until it was too late and he was dead now. I sat down on the dirty footpath. I thought of sexy Tim’s beautiful tattoos and how they were rotting in the ground. Something that felt like tears came up in me; but I never cried anymore now.

Faces in the street, a ragged community passing through. You never knew who’d vanish next; left town, cleaned up, busy, dead. I drifted along like a dry leaf in a tired breeze.

But I wasn’t completely unmoored. I struggled every week or so to counselling appointments with Daisy, a woman who worked out of the rehab centre. Tiny, unkempt, witchy-wise, with tufts of white hair sticking up from her pink scalp, she was old and tough and droll and when we sat together she’d get down to brass tacks. ‘I don’t care if you’re stoned off your head, as long as you can think,’ she’d say. ‘I’m more interested in why you use, and how you’re living.’

I felt that I’d identified some of the reasons why I used—lack of self-esteem, a wish to obliterate myself—and yet had no idea how to approach fixing them. You couldn’t just buy a kit of self-esteem at the supermarket. It was hard to come by, when you were considered society’s lowest. Confronting my own pathetic perversity distressed me.

‘Come on,’ said Daisy. ‘That’s bullshit. Don’t get yourself down.’

‘It’s—I don’t know, something in me doesn’t want the responsibility of living. I wish you could fix me, Daisy.’

‘Fix yourself,’ she said. ‘Slow and steady, chickie. Every user’s story has a beginning, a middle and an end. You’ll get there. Whether you end alive or dead is up to you.’

And so we talked about how to get by, how to stay healthy and the problem of where I was living. ‘You’ve got a good friend in David,’ she said, ‘but you can’t stay there forever. The poor boy probably needs a break. You too.’

It was good advice. I could feel the edges of my survival fraying. I was wearing out from this relentless life, working every night. No movies, no outings with friends, no music or joy or ease. It had been months since I’d done something just for fun. My skin was pale from never seeing daylight. Men observed that I was yellow around the eyes.

I wanted to go back into rehab but the waiting list was months long. And so I came up with the dramatic idea of moving to the country. Somewhere simple, far from St Kilda, where I could unpack my books and find myself again. Using—well, there were no dealers there, were there?

Daisy stared shrewdly, but didn’t discourage me. ‘What will you do with yourself?’ she asked.

I said, ‘I’ll do stuff.’ As if determination were all that was needed.

Somehow, miraculously, I made it happen. I thought of a town where I had a couple of friends already living, a nice town, full of young people and artists and cafés. My old school mate Jason said he’d live with me; he found a house, and I went up for the day to inspect it and sign the lease. It was a huge effort—travelling four hours each way without sleep after a night’s work, looking the estate agent in the eye and handing over the bond money I’d borrowed from the government housing agency. I walked into the creaking, lopsided old weatherboard place, imagining a new life here for myself, a life full of afternoon sunlight and books and serenity.

‘Okay?’ said Jason, smiling from a doorway.

‘Beautiful,’ I said.

I moved in, with my parents’ help. My mother took a photograph of me and my dad that day: he’s hugging me tightly in my new back garden, a thin, pale me in my furry hooker’s coat, my eyes looking at the ground, a childish, abashed smile on my face.

I had that house for six months. And in that time, I spent probably three weeks there altogether. I had my books and my desk and my bed waiting for me, all laid out, all ready. It was terrifying.

Every time I arrived at the house I felt tired, already coming down after the journey from Melbourne, already wondering what I was going to do there. I had no television; the shops were a hilly walk away and in my state of weakness there was nothing I wanted to do but lie down. My friends there seemed embarrassed by me, and I couldn’t blame them; the last time they’d seen me I’d been ostentatiously shooting up with James. I hated our encounters.

I just lay around the house, baffled by the complexity of normal life. Even cooking was too much hard work. I had little money to buy groceries, having spent it all on as many tastes as possible before I left Melbourne. There was no fridge, and we had to buy drinking water. I was too sick to eat. All I could manage was to lie on the couch, making frail conversation with Jason. I reeked my way through the house, poisoning it with the stinking smell of my skin. And in my head, every second, the thought that I couldn’t bear this, that the night would come and there was nothing to do, another whole night of wakefulness in a chasm of time, my body screaming, intolerable, and the last bus back to town was leaving in an hour.

That house wasn’t my home. My home was a dirty bed on a bare floor. My home was my parents’, from where I was exiled. My home was Jake’s living room, where I could sit and chat with people who knew my world. My home was somewhere cold and comfortless.

I’d gaze at my books, with my burning dry eyes, and I couldn’t imagine opening them. The desk where I hoped to write stayed half-unpacked. The place was horrific in its reproach.

So I’d dither, and believe I was determined to get clean, and promise myself that I’d be back in my retreat in a couple of days. I’d dump clothes in a bag and run off, suddenly invigorated, to the bus.

Back to St Kilda and Jake and the gear. To another night on the street.

There was a regular I called Boris. He wasn’t Russian, but with his thick black moustache and strong accent and dark eyes, he had an affability that let me nickname him. He picked me up in his gleaming new car, waving out the window at me and I ran over and we drove to his apartment down by the water. He was witty and warm, thickset and easy to cuddle, and he said, ‘You can stay here to sleep if you want.’ I trusted him and stayed. He was gone to work when I woke up, so it seemed he trusted me too. After that it became a routine, that I would stay, and he’d give me ice-cream or a cup of coffee, and I’d let myself out in the morning. I found that I made myself at home when I was there, and he didn’t seem to mind. I liked him, his company and his kindness; his eyes were sad. He always paid me the full rate and gave me a chocolate bar.

One night I confessed that I used. It couldn’t have been much of a surprise to him. He looked at me with his sad eyes. ‘If I can help you with anything, Lucy, you tell me.’ I felt secure enough, after that, to fix up in his bathroom. He didn’t mind.

It had been six months of life on the street. The country house wasn’t working, but I thought perhaps it would, if I did a supervised detox at rehab first. Miraculously, when I called there was a bed going; I could get in straight away.

I lasted all of the first day and a half, and then in the middle of the night, the drug fretting at my mind, I left. Walking out into the cold night, already horrified that I’d been so weak, I rang Boris. ‘I’m out on the street. I’m frightened.’ I was crying a little. The world, in its blackness and emptiness, the silent street, the phonebooth glare, all appeared so forlorn. All I seemed to do these days was make mistakes. There was no right move.

‘I’m coming to get you,’ he said.

And so I went to stay with him.

It was a strange time. We were like lovers; but the sex was my payment for his hospitality. He was divorced, estranged from his family and angry about it. When we had sex, it was always the same. Hard. We were like friends: he and I talked all the time, shared confidences, jokes, pet names. We were like an old married couple: he went to work every day, long hours, while I slept and waited for him to come home, and cooked dinner for us. We were like a man and his kept woman, but at the start I still went out to work, and it was strange how uncomfortable I felt leaving him to go fuck other men.

I lived there for almost two months. He was very kind to me; he bought me expensive ice-cream every day, because I liked it. He had a motorbike, and we drove—me exhilarated, fearful, proud on the back—around St Kilda in the summer nights, and down the coast. He gave me driving lessons and took me out to dinner, and we went to see movies. He let a woman thirty years younger than himself come into his life and live with him, and he gave me money to score and paid all the bills until he was running out of cash. He joked me out of bad moods and kept me entertained. Sometimes I was in love with him.

I felt my life was stabilising; by now I was rarely going out to work. I was remembering the comforts of a proper home, a kitchen, a television, a partner of sorts. It was summer now, and all around me was the clamorous joy of St Kilda: people sitting late at outdoor cafés, going to see bands, walking dogs, wearing new clothes. Boris was my ticket to a better life. I knew, of course, that I was exploiting him; but he needed me too—for sex, for companionship, for affirmation. Sex was a currency: even a wife might have opened her legs in return for a nice home, a steady man, the solace of security. Perhaps that’s how everything worked. One needed; the other needed; you exchanged.

I lay in his bath one night. The candlelit room was dark and quiet in the steamy fog, and I watched my body slip in and out of the shining water. I looked at my body: its imperfections, its tenderness, its specialness. It was mine, this body. I imagined it dead.

A scalpel slicing a Y-cut up my torso, parting the flesh. My scalp slit above my blue overdose face, and my skull opened for a pathologist’s cupped hands to receive my brain. I imagined what a mortuary attendant would make of my tattoo, of the length of my fingernails, of the stubble under my arms. All the little details that would remain for another to see. Would they feel pity for me? Would they notice the fragility of my skin? I remembered James stroking my breasts, noticing a mole on my back. This strange body that I disdained so much. In the bath I wept for how I might die.

I decided, yet again, to try getting clean. This was the best chance I’d had in months. Daisy the counsellor said, ‘Try.’ So I planned it with Boris, who said he’d support me. I’d get medication from the doctor, and we’d sit it out. Boris took me to the video library and I rented all twelve episodes of ‘I, Claudius’, a historical melodrama I’d loved as a child. Itching, sweating, squirming, I sat there with him and we watched those tales of deceit and family betrayal. As long as I was absorbed in the drama, I could ignore the discomfort; when an episode ended, I’d blink back to the reality of my aching bones, my hot eyes. Twice I was fighting my way out the door when Boris picked me up and held me down in a chair. He withstood my complaints, my feeble rationalisations that one taste, just one, would allow me to go on detoxing more easily. He knew nothing about drugs or addiction; it was like the early days with my parents, but I was hoping that this time the ‘tough love’ would work.

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, house-cleaning 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.