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They'd made her watch a video at the australian embassy in London when she'd applied for migration. And Goonabah and its residents didn't look anything like the image it presented. It had made australia out to be a land of happy people, where life was easy and material comfort was combined with spiritual fulfilment. In short, it was the nearest place to paradise on earth. She hadn't seen anything that even came close to this image since she'd arrived. In fact, so far, hell on earth would seem to have been a closer approcimation to where she was.
Obviously she'd taken the claims and implications made by the video with a pinch of salt, but somehow the spirit of it had penetrated her unconscious mind. It had skilfully glossed over the problems which inevitably faced all migrants when they arrived and somehow left her less prepared to cope with the reality than she would have been if she hadn't seen it.
And of course there had been no black faces in it. Not one. If she'd have thought about it she would have realized what the set up here was. But she hadn't thought about it at all. Not until she'd met Jimmy in the Starlight the previous morning. For the first time, she'd begun to understand what the reality was. What Jimmy had told her had combined with some kind of intuitive revelation to make her realize that australia was an apartheid country. Just like south africa. The only difference was that here the whites were in the majority and didn't feel so threatened.
The effect of this sudden disillusionment with the country she'd come to live in combined with her worries about Anton using heroin and the insecurity of being so far away from everything she knew to make her feel completely deranged at times. Her fight with Anton that morning had come at the height of one of those deranged moments, probably amplified by a bad hangover, and it really hadn't made her feel any better. In fact all it had achieved was to make her feel more miserable and make it harder to communicate with the only person she really knew on this side of the planet.
There was Max, of course, somewhere. But she'd only known him for a short while - and he wasn't anywhere to be found anyway. Apart from that, her nearest friends were fourteen thousand miles away, which wasn't a very comforting thought.
But even if Anton hadn't been the only person she knew, she didn't want to fight with him. They didn't normally fight - that's not what their realationship was all about. They were usually both quite happy to let each other go their own way and do what they felt happiest doing. They'd both had traumatic relationships in the past and neither of them had wanted anything like that again. That was one of the main things that attracted them to each other. And one of the strongest bonds between them since.
But she couldn't help being incredibly freaked out by Anton using smack. It wasn't that she had any strong objections to it on moral grounds. What Julie had said about heroin use was quite reasonable and she couldn't really disagree with most of it. But she still had a very deep aversion to getting close to heroin users.
It wasn't that she didn't understand them or their desires. She did. Too well probably. Or that she had never reaally known any junkies. She had. That was the heart of the problem. In fact if she hadn't ever known junkies she probably wouldn't have reacted so strongly to Anton using. But she'd been too close to heroin users - one heroin user in particular - and the memory was still very painful. It had been her that found him dead.
She'd never spoken about it to Anton, it had been too close and too painful a memory when she'd first met him. And later on it wasn't something she ever felt comfortable enough to bring up. She found it awkward talking about past lovers at the best of times. And one that had died only a year before her and Anton had met had just proved impossible. She wished now that she hadn't been so silly. If she'd told him about it they probably wouldn't have had that last fight.
She made up her mind to talk to him about it as soon as she could. It ha been long enough now, and she'd known Anton for long enough too, to be able to bring the subject up without much discomfort. She just hoped he wouldn't withdraw too much, with the smack and the arguments, and make it difficult.
Feeling a bit better, now she'd sorted out in her head what the problem was all about, she got up and walked out of the kitchen where she'd been sitting since the others went. A cup of coffee in the Starlight seemed like the only option and she headed that way.
*-*-*
"Hey, guess what." Julie said, as she walked up the stairs at Phil's house. Anton, Phil, Yota and Rafa were all lying around in the big bedroom that everyone living in the house shared. They slowly emerged from their stoned stupors at the sound of her voice.
"Hello Julie." Anton smiled vacantly.
"What." Yota asked, sitting up on the battered old mattress she was lying on.
"Harry Kerr is dead!" Julie announced cheerfully and enthusiastically.
"That's good." mumbled Phil, still half absorbed in one of the spike dreams that had been acting themselves out in his head since he'd been lying there.
"How come?" Yota asked as Julie sat down on the mattress next to her. Julie was pinned and obviously stoned too. She laughed. "The horse he was fucking accidentally bit through a power cable in his bedroom and they were both electrocuted! Shame about the horse, but at least it's got rid of 'dirty' Harry."
"Get fucked..." Phil said disbelievingly, in a low voice. He stayed lying down, but he was fully back on the planet now. He stared at the corrugated tin roof above him and smiled.
"True!" Julie replied. "Good eh?" She lay down herself now, on the double mattress next to Yota who moved over a bit to make some space. "Some of the mob from town are going to Ningwana Bay tomorrow to have a memorial hit in the toilets across from the police station."
"Eh?" Anton asked, puzzled by the relevance of this. Everyone else laughed.
"Kerr hated the thought of anyone hitting up in 'his' toilets, as he called them. But everyone did it anyway." Yota explained. "And he never managed to catch anyone at it. He's been known to hide in the bushes near the toilets for days with his gun in his hand, trying to catch someone in the act! But of course everyone knew he was there and they just waited till his attention was taken up by one of the other cops running out of the station to give him a message or ask him something, then they'd slip in unnoticed. They'd always write on the wall 'had a hit here...' and the date and time, just to wind him up." Everyone in the room smiled at this vision of one of australia's sickest cops crouching in the bushes. Then they all drifted off, back into their own individual spike dreams.
"Things are getting a bit dodgy between me and Sally." Anton nervously told Julie a little bit later. "She's really got it in for me taking smack."
"Yeah, i know." Julie answered thoughtfully. "I was talking to her yesterday.
"Does she know you use?" Anton asked, feeling happier already for just talking about it.
"Umm... i don't think so." Julie frowned. She hadn't even thought about that. As far as she could remember, she hadn't told Sally she was a junkie too. But then she hadn't told her she wasn't either. The subject hadn't really come up, except for that time in the dole office, when it had seemed irrelevant.
"It's a bit of a worry really." Anton continued. "We've never really been like this before. Arguing isn't something either of us like doing much, so we don't"
"I think she's feeling pretty spun out by being so far from home." Julie said, "And this is just another worry that she doesn't need right now."
"Yeah, i suppose i feel the same really. About being here and things, you know. But i just try to ignore it, so it doesn't bother me too much. And the smack helps that too." He paused. "Maybe she should try it!?"
Julie shrugged. "I don't think she'd be too into that idea!"
"No, i was only joking. She hates it. But i don't know what to do. I'm actually fairly happy to be using right at the moment. For the first time in my life!" Anton grimaced.
It was true. For the first time ever, he'd found himself in the company of a group of junkies who didn't give themselves a hard time about the drug they chose to use. And suddenly he was getting a glimpse of a new way of looking at smack. It wasn't much like the way he'd looked at it when he'd been using before. And he wasn't looking at himself the same way either.
He'd used to think there was something wrong with him for wanting to take heroin. That he was sick, or abnormal, or just a deviant. That, he was now beginning to realise, was what other people wanted you to think. Dirty junkie! That was how he was supposed to feel. And that was how most of the people around him had felt at heart. But now he'd found a group of people who didn't believe that shit. They weren't prepared to allow it to fuck up their lives. They knew they were OK. They knew that at worst they were no less worthwhile as human beings than the people who liked to sink a few beers at the end of the day to help them relax and cope with their drab existence.
He hadn't quite worked it all out in his head yet. But there was the glimmer of a new reality, or a new view of reality, coming into his life. It seemed more important than all the other things that were happening to him at that time - his view of himself as a junkie, or an ex-junkie had had a strong effect on the way he felt about himself at times. Somehow, he felt that he would always be a stranger in this country, and that its people would always be at least slightly incomprehensible to him. So he really had the rest of his life to come to terms with being a migrant. But the opportunity to come to terms with using the drug of his choice seemed like something that could easily escape him before he'd really done it.
But there was still Sally. He couldn't just forget her. He didn't want to just forget her. But, somehow, their paths seemed to have diverged a bit since they'd arrived in Goonabah. As he thought about this he realised he didn't really want it to happen. He hadn't thought about it before, but him and Sally going separate ways wasn't something he was prepared for. He didn't want it to happen. He could see that, somehow, it had already started, but maybe it wasn't too late to do something about it.
"So what can i do about it?" Anton asked Julie after a pause. "Any ideas?"
"I'm fucked if i know mate!" she replied. "It's a tricky situation eh? Maybe you should try to get out of town. Find somewhere to live out this way or something. You'd probably be happier living in the bush. After all, you could have lived in a town like Goonabah in england, eh?"
"Not like Goonabah!" Anton laughed. "Not in england!"
"You can come and live here if you like." Phil joined in. He'd been sitting back with his eyes closed, listening to the conversation and remembering what it had been like for him when he'd first come to Goonabah. He'd still been an illegal immigrant then, of course, so it was a bit different. That was before he'd married Julie.
He went back in his head to before that, before he'd become illegal, to when he'd first got to australia, with a six months visitor's visa still fresh in his passport. It was a weird place then, before he'd had time to learn to understand his surroundings. When he'd thought australia was all surf, sand and sun - and sydney. In some ways, it had been quite a shock after the cold winter he'd just left. Not the weather, so much, but everything really. Looking back on it now, it seemed like he'd completely misinterpreted what he'd seen.
Sydney had been so incomprehensibly different that he couldn't do anything but interpret it as if it was another european city. Then it made some sense. His strongest impressions of the city itself in those first few weeks was of an underlying craziness. A dangerously high level of collective neurosis bubbling away below the surface. That impression had faded now and he could only remember it as he'd felt it then. He didn't actually feel it anymore. He reckoned he must have just got used to it - become part of it most likely - as it had been to strong to have gone away.
But his main preoccupation in those days had been getting a good dose of the sun to make up for all those grey northern european summers he'd had to endure - not to mention the never-ending, cold and deranged winters. Twenty five of them, to be exact. And that was at least twenty four too many! So it wasn't until sydney ceased to be just a holiday spot for him that it had really been neccessary to look at it in any real depth. And as soon as he did that, he got out.
An illegal immigrant, running from the paranoia of a heavily policed (or so it seemed) city. Not wanting to get deported now, because her realized he could never survive living in britain again. Not after this. The taste of freedom that he'd really only glimpsed in Sydney so far had been enough, he knew, to haunt him forever if he left then. The weather alone would do it - another british winter would probably kill him!
So he'd eventually ended up in Goonabah, after passing through a few places on the way. Places that had stunned him. Beaches, mountains and forests that had made Sydney look like the arse end of a municipal rubbish tip. Places that'd had the same effect on him then as Sydney had when he'd arrived fresh from the cold, grey, yuppified and nearly defeated London docklands. So by the time he arrived, he knew he had to stay. And suddenly Goonabah had given him the opportunity - the chance of marriage.
He was still married - to a woman he'd never lived with. Never even had sex with. And now he was legal. It had taken a long time, and both of them had gone through a lot of bureaucratic shit. But in the end they let him stay. Strangely enough, he'd grown to love Julie through it all - in a way he probably never would have if they'd been lovers. That love was permanent too, not like the passing infatuation of a real married couple. There'd been no insecurity, no fights - only friendship and support. Things that, when it really came down to it, were probably more common in marriages of convenience than in the other sort!
"Live here?" Anton replied, surprised. That was a possibility that would never have passed through his mind.
"Yeah, it's not quite as bad as it looks!" Phil grinned, as Anton looked around at the house they were sitting in.
"No. I didn't mean that." Anton replied quickly. "I was just wondering how we'd fit in the place."
"Oh, we've had a lot more than this living here in the past." Phil said. "I'd have to ask the others, of course, but i know they won't care." He paused. "If you want a bit more space, you could always string up a tarp on the hill behind the house, back there. We had this geezer living there a little while ago and he built a platform there you could put a tarp on."
"Hmmm..." Anton frowned. It seemed like a good idea. Living in the bus was OK he thought, but it would be good to get out of town. It was a bit boring there.
"I wonder what Sally'll think." he said. "We're not on good terms at the moment!"
*-*-*
"It sounds like a great idea!" Sally said, when Anton suggested it to her that evening. "But i'd like to go and check it out before i decide for sure."
There'd been a few awkward moments when Anton and the others had got back from Mainline, but it had passed quite quickly and they'd cuddled and made up. Sally still hadn't been able to bring herself to tell him why she was freaked out about him using smack, but she made up her mind to explain it to him really soon.
She'd had the whole day to think about it all, but that was too long really, and she'd been right into it and out the other side. It was still occupying too big a portion of her mind to be able to talk about it sensibly and calmly and she felt it was better to wait until it got a bit more in perspective.
She did tell him, though, that it worried her and she thought he ought to at least be aware of that, althoughshe didn't want to try and push him into not doing it or anything. He replied that, yeah, he knew and he was glad she cared, but he knew what he was doing and he wasn't going to have any more for a while anyway.
For his part, he couldn't bring himself to tell Sally about his previous experiences with the drug. He meant to, but somehow it wouldn't come out. He was a bit worried that she'd be pissed off he hadn't told her before and it would spoil this period of peace. He knew he should tell her, and he meant to, when the time was right. But right now he just couldn't do it.
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