High Season by Jim Hearn

Author:Jim Hearn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO000000, book
ISBN: 9781742695068
Publisher: Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd
Published: 2012-06-29T16:00:00+00:00

19

Leaving the Barracks and Brisbane wasn’t a difficult choice in the end. There was a night there, right at the end of things, when after hanging around the hotel and getting completely smashed, I projectile vomited into a group of friends without bothering to get out of my chair. Which is difficult PR for anyone to spin. It was a vomit that took me, as well as my friends, by surprise. Smack makes everyone vomit, it’s just par for the course, but lately I’d been getting very tired of having to run off to the toilets and dry-retch so I had fallen into the habit of simply bending down or turning away from people and sort of heaving into my sleeve before turning back to the table of friends or pretty girls with what the fuck are you looking at? eyes. How bad could it be? If I hadn’t eaten for a while or had been dry-retching for a few hours prior, I figured it was a pretty safe bet that nothing was going to come up this time and I could save myself the inconvenience of having to walk to the bathrooms. How I got it so very wrong on that particular night is still a mystery to me. Even more unfortunate was that, in my attempts to try out new things, I figured that if I didn’t actually turn away from people any more, the heaving action would be less noticeable. As a technique, I still don’t write it off completely, but I can also categorically state that there is no sure way of knowing whether you’re going to have a dry run or actually spew up about four litres of Italian mise en place.

People were growing tired of me in Brisbane and that was something I was both embarrassed about and unfamiliar with. I was used to being quite popular and, generally speaking, close to the centre of things. During the last few months, though, people had started to treat me with disdain. I was in my mid-twenties and that fact alone seemed to forgive a lot of illicit behaviour, but there was also little doubt that my drug intake was being perceived by others as something that was running the show rather being on the periphery of things, like it was for them. And, sadly, all the time I had spent out west on the block of land getting straight, getting to know myself and get the fuck over Newtown had disappeared from my short-term memory. It was like it had never happened and my heroin habit had picked up from where I’d left it in Sydney. And it was pissed off with me for leaving it behind. It had grown lonely and weird during my absence and now it was demanding an ever-larger speaking part. Such demands were expensive and difficult to please given the quality of the local dope.

I found myself up to old tricks with the cash register and late with the rent.

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