The following is a true story from a few months ago. I haven’t written about it here until now, as the sense of violation and betrayal was like a fresh wound for some time, and it’s only with more time and indeed, physical distance from the event (I have since moved) that I felt ready to share. 

It was a sunny, early afternoon in late April. Nephalim and I were just about to head out to the doctor’s, having started the buprenorphine maintenance programme just a day or two before.

The quiet was shattered by the jangling of the front doorbell. ”I’ll get it,” I called, but my mother beat me to it. I walked into the living room, and all of a sudden, the entryway was awash in pale blue.

The cops had come for a visit.

“My name is Sargeant Josephine Mackenzie of the Karana Downs Police Station,” began the harsh-eyed, yet youngish, female policewoman, before introducing us to the men who were rapidly making our largish living-room feel rather small. “Are you the only two people in the house?”

No, my mother said, “My daughter’s husband is… Peri, where is he?”

“Ermmm… around the back, having a cigarette,” I replied.

“Could we have everyone in the house in here,” asked the policewoman, in a voice which meant this is a command, not a request.

I called him in, all the while thinking, cops in the house? Not good, not good. Not good at all…

“We have evidence from a source that cannot be named,” announced the policewoman, “That this house has been used for the purposes of dealing in illicit substances.” My eyes widened. Oh, for fuck’s sake, I thought, I do NOT need this. We’re going to be late for a doctor’s appointment, and for what? Because someone, somewhere, has decided to tell outright lies.

Inwardly, I was a mess. A seething, confused, but mainly just plain scared mess. I did a quick mental inventory of my room. No illicit substances, thank God, I thought. Please let there be no loose syringes I’ve forgotten about…  

“What’s this about?” my mother asked the assembled police, confusion and fear plainly evident on her face. “Drug dealing?”

“Mum, I would never…” I started to say, but she waved me quiet.

“I know, Peri. What… who made these allegations?” she turned and addressed the hard-eyed young policewoman again.

“We can’t tell you that,” she said, and the subtext was clear: I wouldn’t tell you anyway. I am the law, and you are scum.  I sighed inwardly.

Great. Some unnamed scumbag had reported us to the cops on suspicion of drug dealing, and we weren’t even allowed to know who it had been.

Drug dealing… from my parents’ house! As if!

Inwardly, I was seething with anger, and hardly even heard the policemen ask to search my room.

“Huh? Yeah, sure. It’s through here…” As I led three policemen to the room Peter and I shared, I heard my mother and Peter being interrogated by the cops.

“We run a family business from the house,” my mother was saying. “Oh yes… what sort?” ”Computers,” my mother told them, and went on to explain what, exactly, she and my father did.

“And where is Mr. ****” (my father)… “right now?”

“He’s out, seeing customers in the eastern suburbs,” I heard my mother respond, before the policemen who had followed me and I reached my room. I opened the door.

“We’ll try not to make a mess of the place,” a heavyset cop, the tallest of the three who’d followed me, said. I smiled, looking over the clutter that was the single room that Peter and I shared, clothes and papers and random lipgloss and other makeup strewn all over.

“Heh. Guys, I dare you to try,” I giggled, sounding far more lighthearted than I felt. I’m being raided, for Chrissake. RAIDED. This has never happened to me, not once in ten years of using…

I watched as they opened drawers, cupboard doors, looked under the mattress, peeked into corners. Even as I courteously answered their polite questions, I wanted to scream. I’m being raided. Fuck. The irony! I’ve just gone on bupe, the first time I’ve been on a maintenance programme in the ten years I’ve been using on and off, and this happens NOW.

After they seached not just the room Nephalim and I shared, but even my handbag as well (”What are these pills, ma’am?” “Well, there’s Xanax, and Valium, and amitryptiline, oh and those ones there are Polaramine…”), we were free to go.

Their unscheduled visit made us late for our appointment, though - which, ironically, was with the doctor who is supervising our buprenorphine program.

A few weeks later, I was walking by the front door when I saw something blue and shiny on the hallway table. “What the…?” I murmured, picking it up. It was a tape recorder.

“Oh yeah,” my mother said, passing by me that moment with a load of washing. “The police left their tape recorder here. They still haven’t been by to pick it up.”

It’s the year 2000 or thereabouts, I think…
South Brisbane, 3am. My eyes flicker open even before the alarm commands me to rise; it is payday, and the cash will have just hit my account. To be certain, I check my phone bank. “Your balance is…” YES! It’s there! I think to myself, smile, and hang up. I punch in the numbers of my next call from memory; long-practised habit means my fingers know the number better than my mind does. This is a good thing, as my mind is not at its sharpest first thing in the morning.

“Steve? Yeah, it’s me. Can I come see you?”
He answers in the affirmative, I thank him briefly and hang up. I throw some clothes on in the dark; S. is still asleep, catching a last forty-five minutes or so of shuteye before he must rise and start showering and getting ready for his five-thirty a.m. start at the meat packing plant.

This hour between three and four a.m. is a strangely silent time, even in the semi-industrial inner suburb we live in. The door of our run-down flat makes a loud screech, then a thud, in the dark, as I open it, slip through, and close it behind me. The wintry air hits my skin like a grandmother’s kiss, and I shudder, but the briskness stirs me awake. I tiptoe down the stairs, across the tiny front yard, and silently slip across the road to the ATM. The yellow-and-black sign is literally a beacon in the darkness.

The only sounds are the distant whooshing of cars and the digital sounds of the ATM as I punch in my keycode. Another number my fingers know better than I do… and then the whirring sound as the machine gives me my cash. “Sweet,” I whisper to no-one but myself, and slide the yellow, black and red polymer notes into my wallet.

Steve is the only dealer I know who keeps weirder hours than myself. This can be an advantage, given that I work swing shifts in factories across Brisbane, and I never have any set routine. Neither does he. Sometimes this makes for frustrating waits of hours, but more often, our schedules somehow mesh and…
(This serendipity is helped by the fact that I’ve managed to keep my car on the road. Ancient, decrepit, my 1972 Toyota Corona has more miles on her than I myself do - which is saying something - but somehow, year after year, I keep her going. Not many twenty-eight-year-0lds are still driving their first car, I reflect with equal parts satisfaction and shame - satisfaction because, well, so many drivers I knew were careless and couldn’t hope to keep hold of one car for five years, let alone ten; shame because… Well, I knew I’d have been able to buy a new car several times over with what I’d put up my arm - and S’s - in the past five years alone. Oh well.)

I slip my car keys out of my pocket and open the Toyota’s door. Condensation dripped down the inside of the passenger side window - I grimaced - (people who wouldn’t wind up the window properly! Eeesh!) but thankfully, I managed to start her first time. Steve moved around, and today he was across town, in New Farm.

The drive was a quiet one. Hardly anyone was out this early, and I blew across the Story Bridge in no time. Ten minutes later, I was cruising up the Brunswick Street hill past the sign that read: NEW FARM. My eyes scanned the cross streets for a phonebox (this wasn’t my part of town, and besides, I was now in that anticipatory state of nerves that one often got, just before a score…) There’s one, my mind registered. Please, let it not be broken…

It wasn’t broken. I slipped my forty cents into the slot and dialled Steve’s mobile. He answered in three rings, surprisingly awake for this time of the morning. He gave me a cross street and told me to meet him there in two minutes. I spoke my assent, silently hoping he’d be on time. When we both hung up, I hopped back into the car, and drove the short distance.

Two minutes later… three… There! my stomach leapt at the sight of him, and I smiled. He jumped into the passenger side of the Toyota.

“Just drive up the street a little,” he instructed me. “Have you got a cigarette?”
I pushed the pack toward him. It was empty, save for my cash - and one cigarette. He lit the cigarette, while exchanging the cash for a small packet of dope. “Not bad stuff, this.”

“Uh-huh,” I nodded, thinking That means it’s not cut until you can’t feel the dope for whatever other shit’s in there, anyway. Yeah, yeah. Steve rambled on some more, until he pointed out where to drop him. I was happy enough to comply - after all, I’d just scored, and I had a ten-minute drive back to my house. (Back in those days, shooting up in my car would never have occurred to me. Damned if I know why.)

The trip home is all the more sweeter, with the gear stashed and the anticipation of the morning’s shot to come… I smile as I pull up outside our flats, and notice a light on inside. S. would have the spoon ready, the syringes loaded, for sure. Pausing to lock the Toyota, I spring up the stairs. Before I can even turn the key in the lock, S. has the door open. I grin at his sleepy face.

“Hi honey, I’m home.” He opens the door and I slip past him, through our tiny living-room, into the bedroom. Sure enough, the table is set with a spoon, syringe full of water, and all the other paraphernalia we need, leaving me with only the mixing up itself to do. I immediately set to it, opening our precious parcel and tipping it into the spoon.

Two minutes later, I have two syringes ready to go. I hand one to S., who nods, then turns away to his task. I do the same.

Luckily, my veins are co-operating this week. Bang, there we are. Done. The glow spreads through me, and I slump across the bed. Damn, I love this moment.

“Good morning, sunshine,” I whisper.

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.”

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.