The Ice Age Read online

  I knew that arsenic works by blocking the molecules your body’s cells need to perform their tasks. Eventually, arsenic kills by causing haemorrhaging, destroying enough cells to cause multi-system organ failure. So the arsenic poison had been building up in my liver and intoxicating my bloodstream, leaving boils on my skin, dark rings around my eyes, and strange dark matter around my teeth.

  It would have killed me, of course, and the police would have thought it was a drug overdose, or a mysterious stroke — provided, of course, that they weren’t in on it, too. I realised what was happening when Smithy began telling me how awful I looked that day. By ‘telling me’, I mean he followed me around the house yelling it at me. We were in Smithy’s meth house: a bright, brand new, three-bedroom house — rented by Smithy from a large corporation that owned every second house in the neighbourhood — in Pakenham, 61 kilometres south-east of Melbourne, in a little pocket of new housing in a little valley surrounded by bushland and farms. Pakenham is right on the tip of the Gippsland/Latrobe Valley region, and is considered to be one of the most badly affected meth areas in Australia.

  It began when I rejected Smithy’s sexual advances. He went on the offensive: ‘What do you think you look like from the outside?’

  Oh dear, I thought.

  ‘You look revolting,’ he said, a packed bong in his hand, lighter flicking on and off. ‘And the way you smell, Jesus — people have been commenting, it’s rank — the whole end of the house stinks because of your bedroom.’

  Oh dear.

  I took a sniff of myself and, yes, it would seem I smelt a bit off — something had been seeping out of my veins in an unseemly, abject manner. Never one to be distracted from the task, I asked, ‘Can I have that bong if you’re not going to smoke it?’

  ‘No!’ he growled, the refusal seeming to shoot out of his nose.

  Each room of the house provoked a new criticism: the unused vegetables in the fridge revealed I wasn’t eating properly; the dry, unclean bathroom revealed I wasn’t showering, while the bathroom cabinet revealed I wasn’t using deodorant; the bong bowl in the bedroom was a clear indicator I had been smoking too many of his cones.

  ‘Go on, go and look at ya self in the bloody mirror.’

  I walked to the mirror in his bedroom — the light was switched off, and only a little bit of light crept in through the bottom of the closed curtains.

  I looked at my reflection, and saw a very attractive person with glowing skin, so I walked back out of the room and told Smithy, ‘I look hot, as always.’

  ‘I think you should have a closer look,’ he mumbled. ‘Why don’t you go and have a look at your teeth if you think you look so good, you fucking pea-brain.’

  This time, as I stared in the mirror, I saw poison oozing out of my skin, pus-y pimples, dark rings around my eyes, strange blisters on my neck, and blackened teeth. What was going on? I mean, really — there was something really messed-up going on. I started to think that perhaps Smithy wasn’t being nasty with his attack — perhaps he was trying to tell me something. My previous understanding of reality as more or less safe, fairly predictable — though at times somewhat mysterious and ambiguous — began to rupture from beneath those bathroom tiles. It might have been some kind of ontological earthquake right there in Pakenham, only the break wasn’t so much a big crack as an all-encompassing clear line of revelation: Smithy’s outburst, the dark rings around my eyes, why my ex had left me years ago and why he now looked so feminine, why our other roommate sometimes looked at me strangely, why my friend Beck had stopped talking to me a few weeks ago, why Smithy kept telling me to look in the mirror, my sunken cheeks, why my parents hadn’t called me for the past few weeks, and why I had those strange blisters. Finally a light of revelation had begun to flash: everyone is trying to kill me. My parents had organised it, my friends were carrying it out, and I was dying — slowly, silently — without a single ally, and with poison seeping out of every pore.

  So now to the point at which I rang my dad — my gentle, generous, non-offensive dad — to reveal what I had finally figured out. Dad answered the phone half-asleep.

  ‘G’day, mate.’

  ‘Don’t try to pretend everything is normal, Dad! I’ve worked out what’s going on — please don’t do this to me. You have to understand, Dad, I was only joking in that story about killing you and Mum, it was only a story, and it wasn’t even about you, and now I know what is going on—’, and on I went, talking a mile a minute. I told him about the crystal meth, the arsenic, the secret sex-change, the animal-liberationist plot, the money exchanged with Smithy’s seedy drug-dealer friends, until finally Dad said the inevitable, ‘Um, mate, I think I might put you on to your mum.’

  But I hung up the phone and walked into the lounge room — where Smithy was now entertaining a couple of seedy-looking guests — saying, ‘I know what’s going on, you rats …’

  They started laughing. ‘Oh fuck, you’re a tripper, Luke,’ one said. ‘Never a dull moment when you’re around.’

  ‘You writing one of your stories again, Luke?’ Smithy asked, smiling.

  I had been telling tall tales back then. Some of them took on a life of their own; in some I killed everybody I knew in graphic detail, often in the most unlikely ways, and with the most unlikely accomplices. These fantasies often took place in a post-apocalyptic world with no police, and where the council served only to take the bodies away.

  Confused, I rang my parents back. My mum answered, and when she asked why I thought that they were trying to kill me, I realised there were a few gaps in my logic; that, in fact, I had been deeply mistaken. Beyond my imagination, there were memories which revisited me like movies: I started sweating as teenagers dressed in bright-red uniforms called me a faggot; then I was in Year 9 and my best friend was throwing my pencil case on the ground and telling me to sit somewhere else; then I was homeless and stealing food. Soon I was in tears, talking about the bullying I’d gone through in high school, and what had happened since, in a conversation that lasted nearly six hours.

  For many chronic users, self-deception can become extreme paranoia, and sometimes full-blown psychosis. And at some stage in the preceding weeks, I had slipped into meth addiction. Why did I look like that? Because I’d been on a meth bender for a couple of weeks, and had completely forgotten to brush my teeth. What had actually happened? I had been using the drug for nearly two months, and I’d become an addict. I’d used it bit by bit, here and there. I’d feel so tired I’d take a bit more, until my mind got so twisted I lost track of how much I was actually using, and how much my behaviour had changed. I had become what I later realised was one of the estimated 100,000 Australians addicted to crystal meth.

  On this particular afternoon, Smithy — the junkie and jailbird — had started that conversation because he was either worried about me, or he was experiencing some kind of psychosis himself. And yes, it took this person to tell me that what I needed to do was settle down and go to bed — but, before that, I really, really needed to use some Listerine.

  I knew long before I moved in that Smithy dealt drugs from his house, and that meth use and meth users were near-constant companions. There were always people coming and going, with plenty of ‘drug dramas’ — fights, conspiracies, drug dealers arguing — that generally arose during the comedown of the meth cycle, and then vanished once the drug wore off. People from the local boarding house often used Smithy’s place to shoot-up in. Many of Smithy’s friends were also thieves, who robbed display homes to help support themselves and their habits. They would sneak out in the early hours of the morning, coming back with fridges, washing machines, or microwaves that they would then trade for drugs.

  In short, Smithy seemed like the right subject for a story. So I came up with the idea of moving in with him to tell the ultimate story of meth addiction. Fresh out of a mind-numbing business-law job (I had retired from journalism to become a la
wyer, but that didn’t quite work out, and I never finished the qualification), I told Smithy about my idea, and he agreed to participate. (‘As long as you pay your bloody rent, I don’t care what you bloody do.’) So I rented a room for $130 a week. What could possibly go wrong?

  As it turned out, I got addicted to meth while living in a house to write a story about a meth dealer and his drug-addict mates. I cooked my brain so badly on meth that, after a few months, I genuinely lost track of the fact I was writing a story; I stopped taking notes, and became fixated on a series of non-existent events, with myself at the centre. So, yes — as you may have gathered — I got a story, a very good story. Only it wasn’t the one I was expecting: I didn’t bank on becoming a psychotic meth addict myself. I spent virtually the entirety of Melbourne’s beautiful autumn inside that house, gradually losing my mind. Slowly and unwittingly, over three months, I became an addict — replete with meth sores, violent outbursts, an obscenely bloody needle-stick injury, and shamefully long, disgustingly sweaty masturbation marathons. I met and had to make a few mad escapes from some very shady characters. I became embroiled in small-time crime, pointless, never-ending loopy conversations, and never-ending, taboo-busting sexual fantasies (Smithy’s and my own).

  I became violent and threatening, particularly toward my parents; in one particularly memorable phone message I left for my tattooed, retired slaughterman father, I put on my best ABC-news voice to explain that I would come up to Queensland and ‘kill you with my bare fucking hands’. Grandiosity, bloodlust, bad memories and paranoia can be a rather unsavoury combination. In short, I went from being nice, respectable Luke to being ‘an ugly, sweaty, desperate animal’ in scenes vaguely reminiscent of the promo for the 1971 classic Australian film Wake in Fright.

  June 2015: It was a winter’s night in Nowra, a stunning farm-and-bush town surrounded by mountains 160 kilometres south of Sydney. Inside the Bomaderry RSL club’s conference room, 100-odd people watched on as Tracey Reece told her story through a microphone.

  ‘He told us that there were people (probably adults) coming to the back gate of the school, and when we approached the school they said that it wasn’t possible, that they had teachers on duty down there,’ she said. Reece, a woman in her early forties with short, bleached hair, began to quiver.

  ‘Later on, a year down the track, we got told by our son that was where he was originally given it and asked to sell it,’ she explained to the police-sponsored Shoalhaven community forum on ice. Reece was talking about her son, now seventeen, who had been fifteen when he encountered meth, reportedly buying it from a dealer at the gates of his high school.

  ‘He went from being this beautiful little innocent boy who couldn’t lie to his mum, to [being] very angry. He turned into a monster,’ Reece said, tears streaming down her cheeks, as a slight murmur of agreement started to buzz around the room.

  When a person becomes a meth addict, they change. ‘Monster’ is a common and often appropriate noun used to describe what they have become. The word derives from the Latin monstrum, which means an aberrant occurrence, usually a sign that there is something wrong with the natural order. Over time, monsters appeared in mythology as sub-human beasts, as nasty, bloodthirsty, amoral, and ugly as they were large.

  Our long-running fear of monsters shows how the terror and sadness often experienced by those close to a meth addict, particularly as they begin to fall, is of a profound, archetypal, and very understandable variety; yet it is also one that is open to interpretation. We know the story of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 classic, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Dr Henry Jekyll takes an experimental new potion with the hope it will help his ill father — only to be transformed into the smaller, uglier Edward Hyde, who then kills two innocent people. Dr Jekyll vows never to turn into Mr Hyde again, but the transformations increase in frequency and do not, eventually, even require the potion to take effect. Dr Jekyll’s ability to turn back into himself diminishes, and ultimately Mr Hyde takes over; Dr Jekyll never returns. We never really know to what extent Mr Hyde was simply Dr Jekyll’s socially repressed dark side.

  People do strange and often terrible things when they meet the beast within. We never hear the story from Mr Hyde’s point of view, though in the beginning, at least, Dr Jekyll has a full memory of what Mr Hyde did. We are left with the question of how much agency Dr Jekyll really had, and this in turn makes me ask myself some uncomfortable questions about what I got out of living on meth.

  Leading up to my own addiction, I had observed this strange transformative process in many of the people closest to me, and I was often as upset as I was confused and alienated by the changes they went through on the way to becoming meth-heads. Before crystal meth started making it big in the news in late 2013, I had seen a key collection of my friends sliding into addiction, from 2011 onward. This included my cousin, my ex-boyfriend, my old friend Beck, and her ex-partner, Smithy, who — despite two restraining orders that forbade them from seeing each other — lived just around the corner from her, and visited regularly.

  Most had lost his or her job, as well as any sense of ordinary meaning and direction in life. They had become loose with the truth, although at times it wasn’t clear if they were being manipulative, or they believed their own lies, or, indeed, if it was a combination of the two. Their lives seemed to revolve around the drug, but they had either limited insight into this fact, or a kind of ‘fuck you, sheep’ response to the conventional idea that life was better when you were not using drugs. A few had lost teeth. A few had turned to crime; for instance, when my cousin discovered meth at the age of thirty-seven, he went from being a sulky, reclusive pot-smoker with a job and a mortgage to being an unemployed burglar who’d stolen from his mum, and was living in a car in a public park. Dinner — on the rare occasions he felt like eating — was sausages cooked on the park BBQ. Perhaps this doesn’t seem all that bad when you’re high on meth. Perhaps he found that lifestyle more exciting, more dramatic, more relaxing even, than having a mortgage and an alarm clock to worry about. In any event, it was a phenomenon that begged serious questions, and I wanted to find out what the allure of this drug was — what it was providing that users’ everyday lives weren’t.

  I had taken meth before, and enjoyed it, but I didn’t think it warranted throwing your life away. What’s more, the meth addicts I knew had taken just about every other kind of drug, and still managed to be semi-functional, crime-free, and predominantly sane — so why couldn’t these users manage their meth in the way they had managed their use of other drugs? And hadn’t the issue already been and gone? We had already heard about meth in the mid-2000s. What had changed by the time meth began to attract more and more of the public’s attention in 2013? Was this just an old issue being re-hashed?

  Actually, no — I would learn that this increased attention coincided with a purer version of the drug flooding Australia’s drug markets. The first real indication that this purer form of methamphetamine — crystallised meth or ‘ice’ (as opposed to the powdered variety that we had heard so much about in the 2000s) — had made its way to our shores came in around 2011, when drug experts around the country started getting phone calls from health workers on the ground in Nowra, south of Sydney, saying that crystallised meth was being widely abused, and wreaking havoc, in its Aboriginal communities.

  For reasons that are still not completely clear, however, it would be Victoria, and particularly regional Victoria, that would be saturated by ice. And it began to be felt in extraordinarily horrific ways.

  In the early hours of Friday 15 June 2012, 19-year-old Harley Hicks, a troubled young man who been separated from his parents at an early age and had a significant criminal record, was prowling around the dark, empty, eucalypt-lined streets of Long Gully, a suburb of Bendigo in central Victoria. On this cold winter morning, he had already robbed several houses, and wanted to find just one more before the sun broke. He was energised from
smoking crystal meth when he entered the old Victorian-style house in Eaglehawk Road. He was carrying a shoulder bag, and a makeshift baton crafted from copper wire and electrical tape. He first found a wallet on the kitchen bench that contained thousands of dollars set aside by the tenants, Matthew Tisell and Casey Veal — people Hicks vaguely knew — for a bond to move into a new house the next night.

  He grabbed whatever he could find — a set of scales, and a pair of sunglasses. Then he made his way to the front of the house, where he searched two rooms before entering the bedroom of 10-month-old Zayden Veal, who was sleeping with a baby monitor next to him. With neither a motive nor a feeling of any particular ill will towards Zeal’s parents, Hicks unplugged the baby monitor, and then hit Zayden repeatedly with his homemade baton in the face and torso. After several blows, the baby slipped into permanent darkness; the subsequent post-mortem revealed that Zayden had sustained horrific injuries to his face and scalp, the pathologist noting that Zayden had been hit not only with the length of the baton, but also with the end of it, from which copper wire protruded.

  In total, Zayden was found to have received at least 25 injuries to the face, and a minimum of eight injuries to the scalp. Hicks pleaded not guilty. The jury disagreed, and Justice Stephen Kaye sentenced the teenaged baby-killer to thirty-two years in prison before he would have the prospect of parole, telling Hicks before sentencing him that there was not ‘even the slightest indication by you of any pity or sympathy for the baby, whose life you had taken, or for his family, whose lives you have shattered. Rather, you seemed totally oblivious and impervious to such human feelings’.