Read Online Scattered by Malcolm Knox - Free Book Online Page B

fourteen or fifteen, Gagalowicz was locked into the habitual drug user’s spin cycle.
    Anyone who uses a number of drugs will develop a preference. Among keen recreational users, desert island drugs are a favourite subject of conversation: If you could choose just one drug, which would it be? Matthew Gagalowicz found his desert island drug in 2000, at the age of sixteen, when one of his school friends gave him his first try of amphetamines.
    This was a ‘clean’ amphetamine—some dexamphetamine the friend had been prescribed to cope with his attention deficit disorder. Unlike street amphetamines, dexamphetamine is not cut with who-knows-what impurities. When Gagalowicz took dexies, for the first time in memory he felt comfortable, light on his feet, confident and energetic. Smoking so much dope had begun to make him lethargic and paranoid, introverted and mostly miserable. Now he wasn’t feeling anxious about a thing. He felt supremely ‘normal’.
    In year eleven he changed high schools. He only stayed at the new school for a short time, but it was long enough to make some new friends who introduced him to ecstasy and cocaine. Though he enjoyed these, dexamphetamine, or the more commonly available methamphetamine, remained his drug of first resort.
    By 2001, Vicki Wolf and Mark Thomas would tell friends that they were emerging from a long, dark tunnel. Having two babies so close together was a challenge to their fitness and sanity, but the moments of joy outweighed the fatigue and sense of being a little old before their time. The friends they had made at their respective law firms since moving to Sydney tended not to have children, and Vicki and Mark spent most of 1998–2001 quietly envying their colleagues’ Friday-to-Sunday merry-go-round. Observing their friends’ party lifestyle was a form of nostalgia; Vicki and Mark mocked the shallowness, but also acknowledged that they missed it. A little shallowness once in a while might make a refreshing change.
    In 2001, they took their first holiday away together without their daughters, whom they left in Melbourne with Mark’s parents. The girls were sleeping to a sound routine, waking up at a luxurious six-thirty in the mornings, and were generally a great deal easier; they were no longer toddlers.
    So Mark and Vicki went back to Thailand, their old happy hunting ground, and lay on beaches for a week. They avoided situations where they might be tempted to take any drugs, let alone shabu, but they did find themselves talking about their past trips to Thailand, romanticising their golden days, almost daring each other to plunge back into a past that they weren’t absolutely sure they wanted to remain, simply, the past.
    When they returned to Sydney they went to a party in Coogee. They were feeling rested and tanned, healthier than they’d been at any point since 1998. Everyone at the party told them how good they were looking.
    Mark was quite drunk by about 10 pm, when he went to the toilet. It was occupied, so he waited outside the door. After a few minutes the door opened and a male face peeped out. It was Peter, a workmate of Vicki’s. He bobbled his eyebrows at Mark. Mark went in.
    Peter and two other lawyers, one a barrister and the other from Vicki’s firm, made space for Mark. One of the guys was bent at the vanity tipping some crystals from a plastic bag into the ball-shaped end of what Mark recognised, like an old friend, as a pipe for smoking drugs. Without a word, the guy passed Mark the pipe and a metal lighter in the shape of a revolver.
    â€˜Pow-pow!’ the guy said.
    Mark declined—could they give him a minute?
    He left the bathroom and found Vicki talking to someone in the kitchen. Like a caveman, Mark dragged his woman off by the wrist. Laughing, she went along.
    It was the old mad rush they remembered, only more so. They only had two or three puffs each, then suddenly wanted to be out of the