I had spent the night on a bus, heading south through the darkness. The sun dawned bright on the northern suburbs of Sydney, and I watched them slow to a crawl through the window as the streets filled with peak-hour traffic.

It had been three years since I was last in Australia’s biggest city. I had only been coaxed southward now by an old friend from my Melbourne days, who had moved there with her boyfriend some months before. “Come down and stay with us for a few days,” she’d urged me on the phone the previous week. “We’ll have fun.” I suspected she was bored, with the long hours her husband-to-be was putting in at Ericsson, combined with her own jobless status. But, lacking anything better to do, I’d booked my ticket on Greyhound.

I’d called her from Brisbane the previous night. “Um, I can come and meet you off the bus… but I got a job in a deli near the Town Hall, and they want me to start tomorrow,” she sounded worried. “It’s only part-time, so I’ll be finished by about three…” She made it sound almost like a question, and I reassured her I’d be fine, I’d meet her at the deli after work.

It was the mid nineteen-nineties, and heroin had taken hold of the collective Australian consciousness, through the mass media. Heroin had also taken hold of me, just the year before, in a more direct way.

My first taste of the drug had been in Melbourne, even further south, but that is another tale for another day. On returning to Brisbane, I became a semi-regular user, and had even developed, and kicked, a couple of “baby habits” in which the withdrawals were no worse than a weekend in bed with the flu.

Now, I found myself in Sydney. I’d used the night before, mainly to quell the claustrophobia which overcame me on long bus trips (Brisbane to Sydney is 12 or 13 hours). The bright morning found me alone amidst the seething masses at Central Station, cashed up and curious about a place called Cabramatta…

Cabramatta, on Sydney’s south-eastern outskirts, was a suburb known to the wider Australian public for two things – its Vietnamese immigrants, and its heroin trade. The two were inextricably linked. Apparently it was an easy place for a white girl to score, if you believed the hysterical media reports. In the name of “research”, I decided to find out for myself.

I stood staring at a map of Sydney’s rail system until I found it. Cabramatta, the station before Warwick Farm, almost at the end of the Liverpool line. I looked up at the departures board. No shortage of trains out that way. Come on, whispered a little voice in my mind. You know you want to. What are you waiting for? Sure, it’s a bit of a train ride, but it’s got to be better than shuffling around the inner-city for hours, looking at overpriced consumer crap you don’t want.

The inner voice won. I felt for my wallet in my purse, as I walked towards the sign that said TICKETS.

The ticket window was standard-issue government drab. “Yeah,” said the guy behind the Perspex window. “Return to Cabramatta, thanks,” I said, pushing a five-dollar note through the slot. How many times a day does he hear that, I wondered, and suppressed the urge to smirk. But the ticket seller didn’t even smile or look at me as he pushed my ticket and change back through the slot. I moved away, through anonymous commuters, and strode toward the platform concourse.

Ten minutes later, an almost-indecipherable platform announcement signalled the departure of the limited express train to Liverpool, which lurched away from the platform. I stared out the window, trying to quell the growing restlessness and anxiety which stemmed not from withdrawals (I didn’t have a habit), but rather from a voice in my mind which was hissing, What in HELL do you think you’re doing? Scoring in a place you know almost nothing about… this is insane!

The better part of an hour later, I swallowed my anxiety and stepped off the train at Cabramatta. Immediately, there on the platform, I saw to my surprise, relief and frank amazement that I needn’t have worried – I wouldn’t have to go far to score, as the dealers were competing with each other right there on the platform. “You, lady, you want gear?” I nodded. “You come this way.” I followed two teenage boys up onto the overpass between the platforms at this outer-suburban station, and conducted my transaction swiftly. At the last moment, one of the boys wasn’t sure about me. “How I know you’re not a cop?” he demurred, holding off before heroin and cash were exchanged. I nodded, thinking I probably was dressed pretty well for a user, and hitched up my sleeve, showing him my trackmarks. “Okay, you fine.” Money and dope changed hands. “See ya, thanks, gotta go,” I murmured to the boys, as a city-bound train rumbled beneath us, and pulled into the station. I slipped inside just before the doors slid shut behind me, and the train rattled off.

I’d been in Cabramatta all of about three minutes, tops, and for my time – and sixty bucks – I had two good-sized balloons of heroin. The train carriage was almost deserted, and I found a seat. But the anxiety of the score hadn’t gone away – now, I wanted to know what this stuff I’d bought was like!

Hold off, said the voice of caution in my head. Wait for a larger station, somewhere where you can change platforms, change train lines… somewhere where shooting up in the toilets is going to be a little less obvious…

I listened to my voice of reason, waited. Eleven stations later, I stood up and got off the train at Strathfield. Took a lift to the concourse below the platforms. Walked up a few platforms, chose one, took the lift up. Found the Ladies’ Room. Walked inside. Found a cubicle, locked the door.

Only then did I inspect my prize. Two balloons of heroin. I broke one, found a small plastic bag inside. I untwisted the top of the plastic as with the other hand, I reached into my handbag for the glasses case which held fresh syringe, spoon, alcohol swabs, sterile water, and cotton. Retrieving the spoon, I shook some of the heroin out onto it. Creamy white rocks met my eager gaze.

Careful now, murmured the voice of reason. You don’t know how strong this stuff is. Better safe than sorry… I put most of the gear back in the bag, leaving myself with a small amount of powder and a tiny white rock or two on my spoon. I moved through the process of mixing up deftly and swiftly, drew the mixture into my freshly-opened syringe, and tapped the barrel to rid it of bubbles. Tying off with a scarf (also from my trusty handbag), I lined up a vein and slid the needle in, pulling back until blood filled the barrel, then pressing the mixture home…

The rush sped through me. I felt gloriously weak, and my vision went black around the edges. Nice. Almost TOO nice. I sighed blissfully and remembered where I was. Just as well you were cautious, the voice of reason said faintly. OD’ing alone in a public toilet is really not a good look. As quickly as I could, I packed away my works, straightened my clothes out, and left the Ladies’ Room. I felt as though I was floating.

I floated through the next few hours, back into town, and through Sydney’s streets which normally so stressed me. At 3pm I was sitting in the nearly empty food court where my friend was finishing up for the day at her new workplace.

“So, how was your day? You found plenty to keep you interested in Sydney?” she asked me innocently, as we walked away from the food court and through the shopping mall.

I gave her a slow, pinned smile. “Oh, yeah,” I drawled. “Nice town you got here.”

Trackmarks are hard to hide in the Brisbane climate, I reflected ruefully, staring at the arms which showed my sins so starkly. Wearing long sleeves was, for nine or ten months of the year, close to unthinkable due to the heat, and so the habitual user learnt to brazen it out (or shoot elsewhere). For some of us, shooting elsewhere wasn’t really an option. Shooting in the hands and feet was risky at the best of times, although I’d resorted to it, on occasion, when my arms simply would not give up a shootable vein…

My veins were never close to the skin, and I studied my arms now with the cool eye of someone assessing a building. If I were a building, I thought, I’d be a run-down tenement flat. Pale inner arms showed the dots that signified missed veins, the bruises which came as part of that package, and the trackmarks – some so deep that they looked like collapsed veins – where I usually shot up, despite knowing it was better to rotate injection sites. Sometimes it was just easier to go where you knew there would be a vein, because waiting for that taste for one more second seemed unbearable…

And here I was, waiting again, waiting… waiting, for a visit from the dealer. “I’ll be there in ten minutes”, he’d promised on the phone, half an hour ago. ‘Ten minutes’, for this guy, could be anything between that and ten hours. He and his girlfriend were two of the most disorganised people I knew, even for smack dealers. But they hardly ever switched their phone off, so they were usually around, and their deals were usually okay… even if sometimes, the wait could be hours.

Still, I was a junky. I was good at waiting. I’d had plenty of practice. And waiting at home was far better than the alternative – waiting on the streets. I’d done plenty of that in my time, nursing cups of coffee for longer than would seem feasible, except that it wasn’t the coffee I wanted, it was the heroin…

I looked in the mirror. A pale, wan face with messy hair stared back. Had I showered yesterday? I thought back… yes, probably. I’d gone out, shopped, done a five hour shift at the bakery last night. I hardly ever worked - hardly ever left the house, come to that - without washing. I looked a mess, but most of the time I could hold it together in the glare of the outside world…

The telephone sat before me, a mute question mark. Should I call him again? No. Five more minutes… then I’d call, ask where he’d gotten to, inquire if he remembered that I needed to see him…

I heard the familiar rattle of the front steps, someone knocking at the door. I dashed to answer it. The smile as I opened the door went as far as my eyes, no further.

“Come in.”

Three minutes later, the deal done and the dealer gone, I was mixing up my precious white powdery rocks on the desk next to my bed with a hand held still by force of will… sucking the energy-giving and ultimately life-taking elixir into a fresh syringe, and aiming the needle at a vein I knew wasn’t too damaged…

The heroin hit my bloodstream, and I moaned softly and lay back on the bed.
I have to stop doing this, I thought. But I don’t know how to stop. I just don’t know how. I sighed, as the heroin took away my anxiety, my runny nose, my aching legs.
I’ve tried to quit before, and yet here I am, at it again. Is there really anything better out there, anyway?