Dedicated to my husband and the love of my life Nephalim, as well as my very good friends Heroinegirl and bi11i, as well as all the other junkylifers and others who’ve been into the belly of the beast and been shat out the other side, some of us innumerable times. May we one day find the strength to slay that monkey on our backs once and for all.)

I’ve been using heroin for nine years, on and off. I had a full-blown, serious, lifestyle-consuming, money-burning habit in the late 1990’s, but I have been walking the tightrope known as “chipping” for several years now. I used smack as others might use pot, or alcohol - for a buzz, an occasional escape from daily life.
All in all, I should have known better than this.
I should have known when to give using heroin a good old miss for a while … for instance, when I was running out of veins, when my easily-injectable “sweet spots” just didn’t work for me anymore. When my inner arms start to resemble part pincushion, part domestic violence scene, surely I should have known it was time to STOP.

Part of me, of course, did know. That little voice of caution, of course, hardly ever leaves me (although sometimes it grows fainter)…

You’re using too much, too often, and have been doing so for too long without a rest, that inner voice said. Three days using and then three days without (to avoid a habit) may have been someone else’s rule, sure. But going at it this hard for almost a week, after… HOW many weeks’ worth of pushing your luck? Come on, Peri. Something’s gotta give…

And so it was. I took my last hit, a small one, at about 9.30am on the sixth morning. I didn’t even feel it, but those few drops of heroin kept me healthy for a few hours. By late that afternoon, though, there was no denying it any longer. The impending nightfall felt unusually cold, I had the sniffles, and it felt like someone was rearranging all the bones in my legs… slowly… and painfully. The words of Mark Renton, character in Irvine Welsh’s novel (and the film) Trainspotting - “I’m no’ sick yet, but it’s in the post, that’s fir sure. The junky limbo.” Ladies and gentlemen, fasten your seatbelts as we begin a slow descent into hell. We may experience some turbulence, and you would do well to expect a bumpy landing…

7.30am, seventh day.
Awake. No slow, gentle slide into consciousness this morning. Instead, I thud into consciousness with a bone-crunching snap…
Oh, FUCK. Someone get me OUT of this BODY! is my first thought, as the pain coursing through what feels like every single part of me. My mind instantly registers how sheerly and utterly awful I feel - my bones ache, my head is pounding, my skin is drenched with foul-smelling sweat, and my stomach is ready to leap straight out of my parched mouth.

There is no heroin in the house, and I have been through this whole loathsome cycle enough times to despise myself for even needing it. “Need” being the word here - simply requiring the drug, on this base level, to feel normal.

I don’t want to move, yet I am irrevocably awake now. No more sleep for me, despite the fact that I feel tired beyond endurance. I hurt too much for further sleep to be even a remote possibility.

My bones scrape against together in an unbearable cacophony of tremendous misery. The pain in my legs astounds me - for, no matter how many times you’ve gone through it before, every heroin withdrawal is different. Sometimes it’s the headaches and watery eyes, sometimes the nausea. One time, my blood pressure dropped to the point where I could barely stand up for days.
The author Leo Tolstoy wrote, “Every happy family is alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I believe the man had a point, and not just about families. Every withdrawal is a unique study in misery, and in my experience, they differ not only in duration, intensity, but in their special combination of symptoms.
The notable symptom in my case this time, it seems, is going to be bone-crunching agony. In no time at all, I feel as though I’ve aged eighty years and have an agonising case of osteoarthritis.

The fact that this is all self-inflicted, of course, makes the misery all the more singular. My nagging voice within is determined to make me suffer still further. You had to push things too far, didn’t you? It taunts. You stupid, stupid girl. Honestly, aren’t you old enough to know better?
You’re damn right I’m old enough. Right now, physically, I feel about one hundred and ten years old.

It could be worse. It could be a lot worse. I hate myself for letting it get this bad, however. I vowed never to be physically dependent on the drug ever again. So now, it’s time to ride this horse as hard as it’s ridden me, sweat through the withdrawals, and set my mind on the future… some point in the future… when I can wake up and not feel every fibre of my being screaming out to get on again…

Until then, what?

Music… television… and the internet. They will not soothe my ravaged body, but they can help my spirit. The spirit has to revive before true healing begins.

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?