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It had been like this for weeks now. Grey, gloomy and constantly cloudy, but no rain. It was horrible. Like being in prison, or trapped in a cave. Sally felt she'd go mad if the weather didn't change soon.
The minute she'd stepped off the plane, she knew they'd made a mistake. It had seemed like a good idea at the time - go back to London and visit their friends. Just a visit, of course. They wouldn't go.there without return tickets. They weren't quite that stupid. But they were stupid enough! Sally thought as she lay there feeling claustrophobic, trapped, pressurized by the heavy clouds that hung above the window.
At least now she knew why she'd felt so happy in australia. She'd forgotten britain was like this. Grey, dismal, oppressive. Even in the summer!
She turned her head and looked at Anton sleeping beside her - stoned, of course, the bastard! She felt trapped by him too in a way, although she wasn't sure why. He didn't want to go back to australia yet. He kept telling her they'd only been in London a few weeks and it was crazy to go so soon. But he was using again, so of course he didn't want to go - probably couldn't have even if he did want to. Anyway, smack was half the price here that it was in australia.
Of course, there was nothing to stop Sally going on her own, and she'd been seriously thinking about doing that in the last few days. But, for some reason, she really didn't want to leave him here - not like this. Not after the time he'd spent all those months in Sydney, and they hadn't seen each other for ages. Then, they'd only been a thousand kilometres apart. If she left him here, there would be the whole world between them - fourteen thousand miles by plane - and she was sure she'd never see him again. God! What a fucking nightmare!
*-*-*
Sally'd only been at Happy Christmas about a week when Anton had turned up.
"Fancy seeing you here!" she'd said casually, as they walked up to each other in the middle of the village where Sally was staying. They stopped a few paces apart and looked at each other. "You don't half look a mess." She laughed.
Anton smiled uncomfortably. "I don't look as bad as i feel." They'd kissed and put their arms around each other, holding one another tightly as they both relaxed slowly into the feel of a now barely familiar body.
"What a journey!" Anton groaned when they were seated on the sandy ground in the shade of a gnarled old gum tree outside Sally's humpy. "I'm absolutely fucked ..."
"Just the journey, is it?"
"Well, no ... I'm a bit sick as well." Anton answered warily.
"Been using a bit too much, have you?"
"Just a bit ... But i'm definitely knocking that on the head for a while."
"Only for a while?" Sally tried not to sound too concerned. She certainly wasn't anything like as bothered by it as she had been once, but she still worried about him sometimes. And seeing him like this didn't help.
"Yeah, well, i've learnt a thing or two in the last few months and i've realized that the more freaked out about using you are, the worse it affects you and the harder it is to keep off it. I might never use again, although i doubt that, but either way, i'll take it as it comes and not let the fact that i'm using the drug drive me further and further into using it. I've met quite a few people that can either take it or leave it ... I'd like to be like that."
"Yeah?" Sally shrugged. "Sounds alright. I'm sure you'll sort it out in the end. How long are you staying?"
"Dunno. That depends, i suppose."
"On what?"
"How you and me get on, really."
"Well, we've always got on alright up to now." Sally broke into a grin. "I don't see why it should be any different here!"
"Could be a long time then!"
*-*-*
It had been a long time since Sally and Anton had seen each other. They were both surprised when they worked out just how long it had been. And equally surprising was how little they both seemed to have done since they'd arrived in australia. It was so different to the visions they'd had of their new life before they came.
Sally had carried on living at Mainline, doing stuff for the pirate station on and off, as she felt like it. Her relationship with Phil had continued pretty much the same - casual but good. And she'd been learning more about her surroundings and coming to a better understanding of the australian bush. The wet season had eventually faded off, giving way to what could loosely be called "winter".It was nothing like any winter she'd ever experienced before but. It was only really at night time that you could even think of it as winter. The days were still warmer than most London summers.
As the short winter passed and spring took its place, Sally began to feel an urge to mave. She wanted to go back to Happy Christmas and this seemed like the right time to do it. Then one day, Phil announced (slightly pretentiously, Sally thought) that he was going "walkabout" and left on the train for Sydney that night. Well, maybe it IS time i went, thought Sally, and started making preparations to go to Happy Christmas.
Preparing for that trip took more doing than just buying a ticket and hopping on a train like Phil had done. At Happy Christmas, everyone lived basically independently, and although they all shared their things, it was necessary to arrive prepared for survival. This meant a couple of pots and pans and a plate, at bare minimum. Then there was bedding to carry. And it seemed like a good idea to take along the tarp she'd been sleeping under all this time. Sally had the feeling she was going to be staying at Happy Christmas for quite some time.
Not much had changed in Anton's life over those months since his failed attempt to catch up with Sally, either. He'd continued using most days and working with John a fair bit. Although eventually he'd decided that being too closely involved with John wasn't doing him much good. It was making him use sometimes on days when he'd rather not have done. And he found John's neurosis was beginning to rub off on him too. He knew he couldn't blame his using on John, but when there's easy money to be had and the encouragement of another junkie to stick it up your arm... well ... It didn't take much.
Anton had found himself a squat, with a couple of other people held got to know since held been in Sydney. It was a nice house, not too far from Morna's and Pilar's places, but it hadn't lasted long before they'd got unceremoniously booted out by the police. The next squat lasted a bit longer, but the owner came round one day to say there was a tenant moving in and could they please clear off! So that finihed that one. After that, they had a couple of one- or two-nighters before finding somewhere that lasted for a long time. The other two were still living there when Anton decided it was time to get out of Sydney.
The day he was leaving, Phil turned up on his doorstep. He'd come to spend a month or two getting a "city hit".
"Perfect timing," Anton said, "you can have my room!"
Then it was the long trek to Happy Christmas. Yet again, Anton arrived at Mainline to find Sally had recently left. He wasn't really surprised, he'd sort of known she wouldn't be there. So he stayed at the house for a few days, slowly finishing off the last of the smack he'd brought for the journey. But then, he knew he had to catch up with Sally and the tarp was gone, so he figured she wouldn't be coming back in a hurry. He set off after her, to hitch to Happy Christmas.
*-*-*
That was about nine months ago, and the lives of Sally and Anton had changed quite dramatically at that point. After he'd dried out and the sickness had passed, Anton had hardly thought about smack at all. They'd both become thoroughly immersed in the lifestyle at Happy Christmas and deeply involved in the running of their village and the development of the community as a whole.
Living there was very cheap and Anton had been able to save most of his dole money and eventually buy enough canvas to make a teepee. Sally didn't like teepees very much, although a lot of people at Happy Christmas lived in them. Somehow she felt they didn't really fit into the way they were living. They didn't really fit into the australian bush. To her they were just another example of what she saw around her everywhere else in australia - bits of imported culture that had little relevence to this country, swamping and pushing aside the native australian culture. She thought, jokingly, that teepees were a bit like Macdonalds, only for alternative people! But she didn't push the point about teepees too hard with Anton, and she spent a lot of time helping him make his one. They lived happily at Happy Christmas for about six months.
But then, somehow, inexplicably, something had drawn them both back to London. They both had the urge to go there at the same time. They wanted to see their old friends again, and visit their families. And, somehow, over the course of a few weeks, they'd worked each other up to a strange state of blind homesickness. In the back of their minds, they always knew the reality of why they'd left the place, but they somehow adjusted their view of it so as to leave out all the bad things and convert the good things into something wonderful. They both knew they were being silly, but that didn't seem to make any difference, they just had to go back and make sure.
The three months they spent in the. city, working and saving money, had been hard. Almost unbearable sometimes, after the freedom and happiness and the relaxed way of life in the bush. But they survived it - without Anton using heroin once - and eventually left for London.
As soon as Sally stepped off the plane at Heathrow, she'd been overwhelmed by a feeling almost of panic. She knew she'd done the wrong thing. She'd been happy where she was. Free for the first time in her life. But she'd let some crazy delusion grow into a monster inside her head and lead her into doing what seemed like the most-stupid thing she'd done in her life. But it didn't seem to affect Anton that way. He seemed genuinely pleased to be back, to be walking the old familiar dirty streets again and to see friends he hadn't seen for a year and a half.
But within two weeks he was back on the junk again.
*-*-*
Sally lay there in bed, on the top floor of a squatted house in Stoke Newington, and stared miserably at the motionless grey clouds. Why was it that just when she'd found what felt like real happiness for the first time in her life, she'd had to go and fuck it up like that? She felt like screaming. She didn't want to be here. She didn't even really know WHY she was here.
There were a few good things about being back in London again like seeing friends and family and walking through the familiar areas where she used to live. There was even something comforting about the poverty and the dirt, the litter lying everywhere and the disgustingly polluted air. She didn't really like it, it was more the familiarity of it. The feeling of coming back home. But she'd seen it now and she just wanted to go again.
She longed for the trees, the fresh air, the river, the animals. But it was more than that. She was slowly coming to realize that what she really missed, what she really got out of living in australia, was the freedom to be herself. To be what she wanted to be, not what her upbringing and all the cicumstances of her life up until she left britain had forced her to be. The claustrophobia she felt wasn't just from her physical environment - the concrete and tall buildings and the feeling of being shut in by the clouds. But, more importantly, it came from her cultural environment. The social pressure she felt that pushed her into conformity with a way of life she wasn't comfortable with.
She could barely understand it. At this stage it was little more than an intuitive feeling about why she wasn't happy here. But as the weeks had passed and she'd thought about it more and more, it began to make some kind of sense.
She loved her family and was really happy to see them again, but at the same time, she vaguely understood that part of her happiness in australia came from being a long way away from them. She had no obligation to them there. It was only a small thing, but it brought a degree of freedom with it. The same thing went for her friends. In some way, the friendships she'd developed in australia were freer and more open -,probably because she'd become more self-reliant and less dependent on the people around her. But there, no-one would get offended if she didn't go and visit them for months. And when she did see them, they were happy to see her and took her just as they found her. In a way, the same thing was true in britain, but it wasn't quite like that in her head. She felt responsibilities that didn't need to be there, she felt pressure from her friends to socialize with them even though she might not really feel like it.
But that wasn't the main thing, she thought. The biggest problem was that everyone she knew had a picture of her in their minds. And they imposed this on her without allowing for the fact that she could change. In a way, they forced her into being what they thought she was. (Funny, she thought, that's what they did to australia too!) And when she met new people, she met them in the context of her existing social relationships, so the whole thing went on forever. But when she'd left all that behind and gone to australia, where she knew no-one, she'd been able to form herself again. Free from the past. She could become what she really was - not what she might have been ten or fifteen years ago. And now she'd come back to London, even though her friends realized she'd changed, she felt herself being pushed slowly, but firmly, back into being her "old self". She bad to get out before the changes became permanent!
None of these things seemed to affect Anton. Or, if they did, he wasn't conscious of them. When he got back to London, he felt a distinct uneasiness and disorientation. It was so different to australia and the people were so different. He'd spent the last year and a half getting used to australians and learning how to communicate with them without having too many misunderstandings. And that hadn't been easy. He'd even picked up a bit of the accent - which Sally didn't seem to In ve done. But it didn't take long before he felt himself fitting back into London again. Getting used to the different pace and way of life.
He started seeing all his old friends again and going up the pub with them regularly. After a while, it seemed as if nothing had changed, as if he'd never been away. That did disturb him a bit, but he put it out of his mind and just carried on with life as it came.
He'd made a firm decision not to use drugs while they were in London, but that didn't last long. The first time he met someone he knew was into smack, he got stoned. It bothered him a bit, but he was so pleased to use some of the old familiar british type of the drug, that he soon forgot about it.
"Shit, it's been a long time since i've seen any of this gunjey old stuff!" he said, as he opened the little paper packet. The powder inside was a lightish brown colour, not like the white stuff you get in Sydney. "Brown sugar" it was known as, and you had to mix it with vitamin C or citric acid and heat it up before it dissolved. It left a familiar acidic sweet smell in the air and a sticky deposit on the spoon.
He soon got back into the London junkie slang too. The expressions he'd learnt in Sydney meant nothing when he got back here. In London, "dope" is "gear", a "taste" is a "hit", a "fit" is a "works", "getting on" is "scoring" and "nodding off" is "gouching out". In Sydney, a "weight" is a gram of smack, but in London it's a pound of hash or grass. It seemed funny at first and Anton kept getting puzzled looks when he talked about a "fit" or a "taste". But it didn't last long.
Anton knew Sally was unhappy about being back in London, but he thought it was just taking her longer to get used to it than it was him. They talked about it a bit, but he couldn't really understand what she was feeling. For the second time in less than two years, they began to drift apart again. And,again for the second time, Anton using smack had something to do with it.
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