I have always been a headstrong woman (or a bloody-minded bitch, depending on who you listen to!) I’m also a study in contrasts - my personality by turns quiet and accepting, then loud and questioning. I am cautious in some ways, a flagrant tester of the boundaries in others…

Sometimes, in moments of introspection, I wonder where these seemingly contradictory traits come from.

Watching the Pope’s funeral with my dad a month or so back was an eye-opener in a number of ways. It taught me (or perhaps just reminded me?) a lot about my dad, and a lot about myself.

I had known since childhood that my dad (an engineer, and the son of an engineer himself) had gone to a Catholic school. Somehow, though, even though we were never religious in the least, I’d never thought to ask why he had gone to that school until I grew up. The answer surprised me.
“Because it was a good school, and because my father, your grandfather, went there,” my father told me.
“But why did he go there? We aren’t Catholic.”
“Well, actually, your grandfather was Catholic. But he asked so many questions, that the Church threatened him with excommunication.” I looked at my father in surprise. “Eventually, your grandfather saved them the trouble and left the church of his own accord.”
I smiled, recognising a lot of myself in this headstrong behaviour.

So, I come from a long line of people who take things apart and put them back together again. I also come from a long line of people who stand to one side, study things intently, and then yell out, “Yeah, but WHY?” The first idea explains (at least partially) my drug abuse. I suppose I’ve been taking myself apart (some would say, quite literally) for a long time now. The second idea – the “yeah, but why?” - explains many of my traits, and indeed, I suppose it explains this blog.

…And don’t I sound so magnificently self-aware. The myth of Peripat. The perpetual seeker, the wanderer, the storyteller, the junky. I am all of these things at once. And sometimes I feel like none of them at all.

Her legs shake slightly as she steps off the bus, four or five people ahead of me, at the transit centre. Out of boredom, perhaps, or an inherent sociability, I’d struck up a conversation with her – something about her shoes, perhaps, or her hat. People had told me that I had a gift for making people feel special… when I wanted to.

I look around for my girlfriend, who I’m meant to be meeting here, but instead, it is the old lady I had befriended on the bus who catches my eye. “Would you know where I go to catch a train?” she asked, and despite my distraction, I smile. “Why yes… which train? Ah, well, it’s easier to show you, anyway” I tell her. “It’s just through here, follow me.”

“You’re too kind,” the lady tells me, and as I reassure her that it’s fine, I was going this way anyway, I see the face of my girlfriend appear from behind an escalator. “My friend, here, and I were meeting up to go to the Roma Street parklands,” I told the old lady truthfully, “and so we have to go through the platform concourse. What station do you need to go to?”

“Auchenflower,” she says. “I usually travel with my husband, but he’s in the hospital there at the moment…”

Despite having other things on my mind, (for example, having just scored heroin for my friend and I, and being eager to disappear somewhere to mix it and shoot up), I smile at the old lady and tell her that we’ll walk her to her platform. “You’re very kind”, the old lady repeats. My friend catches my eye and mutters acerbically, “I don’t know why you don’t work for Queensland Rail.” She, like I, is eager to dash away somewhere and do our drugs… now, if not sooner.

But it doesn’t take long to get Mrs Wooldridge (as she told us her name was) to the platform from which she was to catch her train, and as we smile and take our leave, I murmur to my friend, “Just down here and into the ladies’ loos – there aren’t many people here at this time of day.” She follows me eagerly, and we preen at the mirrors until the few women leave. Then we disappear into a cubicle and lock the door.

I open up my needle pack, dig out my spoon from the bottom of my handbag, and proceed to mix up the small envelope of powdered heroin with lightning speed. “Can you do me up first?” asks my friend, with an edge to her voice which I know is eagerness and anticipation. I nod assent, and hold up her syringe, flicking it with my finger to make sure the air bubbles disappear. “Okay, get your arm ready,” I say quietly but firmly.

My hands shake slightly as I line up the needle with a vein. “Yeah, go in there,” directs my friend, eagerly, and I nod. “Hold the tourniquet firm,” I tell her, as I prod at her vein and it threatens to roll. “C’mon”, I mutter more to myself than anything, “You should know how this works by now… hold it firm and take it home…”

I slide the needle beneath the skin. First time’s a miss. Damn. I hardly ever do that. I slide the needle out again, feel further up the arm, and try again. This time I go straight into the vein – the bloom of dark red blood that floods up through the heroin mixture in the barrel, tells me that. I push the plunger home, and remove the needle on the count of “three”, as my friend covers the injection point with a thumb, leans back, and sighs deeply as the heroin bursts through her bloodstream like sunshine into a dark room.

I smile at her, as I push the used syringe into a disposal bin in my handbag. “It’s not bad gear, is it? These people, they always come through for me. In fact, their stuff has been better than good lately.”

My friend nods, unable yet to say a word. She wears the blank countenance, with the hint of a smile, that is the hallmark of someone who’s just been shot up with enough good smack to knock them on their backside. It was as well, I thought, that she was sitting down – and that my own tolerance was a little higher. I picked up my own loaded syringe, rolled up my sleeve, balled my fist and steadied my arm against my upraised leg, the foot of which was resting on the edge of the toilet seat. “Catch me if I fall,” I joked to my friend, still seated on the toilet lid. “You’d better not,” she drawled.

As I slid the needle into my usual vein and sank the magical poison home, I smiled to myself, bliss mingling with something less tangible – irony, perhaps? Five minutes earlier, my friend and I had been the picture of Good Samaritan youth, helping an old woman to find which train she needed to catch, in order to see her sick husband in the hospital.

Now, here we were, hitting up under a seedy fluorescent light behind a chipboard door, as trains rumbled on the tracks overhead.