I met Sebastian* and Helen* in the waiting room of a doctor’s clinic in Drouin, outside Melbourne. The place was alive with the twitching coprolalia of ice, bodies spitting and stammering in imprecise detox.
Every ten days, they take their son Peter* there on a six-hour round trip from Melton, hoping the doctor might fix him.
“We didn’t ever think it would come to this,” Sebastian says to me. “This makes Breaking Bad look like a cake walk. This makes The Killing look soft. They got nothing on the kinds of lives we have. That’s just piss TV.”
Sebastian is a big man, hewn from rock. There’s nothing poetic about his form.
When I meet him again, it is in Melton where he and his wife work. They sit together, but strangely apart. A gap forced by they hell in which they find themselves. Talking about the drug that is ruining their son, it is as if they are describing a civil war – whole communities stripped of hope or consequence. As they talk, they seem frequently astonished by their own stories. Like until now they hadn’t the time to realise how terrible things had become.
“Some nights when my heart’s beating like there’s bombs going off,” Sebastian says. “I look up at the ceiling. The room shakes with each explosion inside my eyes. I just wonder `What the fuck did we do to deserve this?’ I stopped promising answers. I stopped saying `This is what we are going to do to get out of this’, because that all dried up a few years ago.”
Nearly gone is the rage of his twenties when, as the son of Polish and Croatian Catholics he set the world on fire. He had fear and respect for the elder men that from time to time belted it into him. “We used to make our living from stealing cars…and we were in gangs and would fight near to death…but we loved our mother and we went to church, and we looked up to our father. It was different. If my dad said “Jump’ I would and I’d shit myself that I wasn’t going to jump high enough.”
Sebastian’s giant hands clench together. His giant shoulders hunch, suffering under their own weight. “Sometimes I can’t go on…” He drew his lips thin and his eyes squinted with such intensity I have to look away. “The man…” he insists, as if saying a repetitive prayer. “The Man. The man is the rock. The husband and the father. The rock .He holds up the world. He doesn’t flinch. He is the guard. He gives life. He builds men. Takes them shooting. Takes them fishing. Takes them to the football and shows them how to become men. He builds them and tells them they’re gonna be all right.”
He pauses. “What does it say about me when I got nothing to give, and I don’t know I can keep going? I look at myself and see. I’m no longer that rock.” He looks across at his wife, sitting opposite on a small stool that squeaks every time she moves. “I cant tell her that some days I don’t even care any more. About anything. It’s like I’ve been gut shot and cut, and I just bled out.”
Helen has translucent skin. The deepest black rings circumnavigate the sockets of her eyes. The eyes themselves are impossibly dark. Looking into them, it is like looking into a night without dawn. She has a few ear piercings and raven blueblack hair and some large tattoos that appeared and disappeared from under a black tee shirt with every breath. It reminds me of seaweed swaying with each long breath of the ocean. “It’s different for me,” she tells me. “I grew up in a house with mental illnesses. I understand this. My mother was addicted to many things. Schizophrenic. My brother died. Ten years of ice. My sister’s addicted, too, and has overdosed a few times. She’s not here for long. I know this world. Yeah… but my brother died…”
There is silence …
There is silence, and then Sebastian talks. “We paid his house off. We are a family… we look out for each other. We knew it was a gamble – but he lost his job, lost his wife, lost his children and we feared if he lost his house it would kill him. So we paid his drug debts and paid out his house. Cost us 50. Our son looked up to him – loved him. Adored the ground he walked on. They helped each other in a way.
Then he died. That gutted us all. My son – he didn’t speak for weeks. And then one of his best mates hung himself and that was like a piece of the world just blew away…”
Helen’s bottom lip trembles and it takes her a moment to take back the muscles and hide the feeling away. “We’re in a perfect storm of the dead and the dying,” Sebastian says. “Shortly after her brother died our son’s best mate hung himself in his bedroom – and his sister found him. She was 14 and she rang her own mother at work and told her she better come home really fast and the mother panicked and a few minutes later ran her car off the road near Ardeer and slammed into a tree. She died, too. Two of them, same family – two of them dead in less than three hours. And then my son’s best mate. Coming down the street to see us, popped a mono on his Yamaha and went under a truck. He’d smoked crystal before he left and was full of it. He wouldn’t have felt a thing.”
Between them is an understanding of parents who have given everything to their child. “We don’t sleep together,” Sebastian says. “We don’t make love any more. We’re not together. We’re both standing back to back fighting to stay alive and keep our family alive.” He looks at his wife, his ally. “Sometimes I don’t know where she is, even when she’s right in front of me.” She answers his stare with a painful truth: “I don’t tell you everything because you can get so mad.”
I ask what led to this, although I already know. It is why they were in the doctor’s waiting room. It is the scourge that is tearing through these small communities.
“My son changed,” Helen says. “He was a quiet boy at school and somewhere around year 10 he got into a group – that changed everything. And he got in with a young girl – well, she got pregnant and we put them up in a flat – we paid for everything, but her Mum deals in shit, and so whenever they went over to her place, she’d give them a smoke. Getting off on the gear isn’t the dangerous part – it’s the cravings and the psychosis that follows. He can take ice on Sunday, and we just know that by Wednesday or Thursday it will be hell on earth. They go for days without sleep. He gets violent and a couple of times I have moved her and the baby out and taken her to the police to get an AVO out on him.” Your own son? I ask. “Yes. That baby. That girl, his wife. We thought the baby would be good … but he isn’t connected, he makes promises about being a good parent – but it’s what he thinks we want to hear.”
Sebastian interjects, imitating his son. “‘Mum and Dad. I’m going be a really good father to my baby.’ And I ask him, ‘Where is your daughter now, son?’ And he doesn’t even know.”
Helen and Sebastian sit looking at each other. Three metres and a universe seem to separate them. Welded together, but both numb and trapped in this horrific dream. Sebastian shifts. Clears his throat. He remembers taking his son hunting when he was young, fishing. They were happy. “Sit in the sun all day, catching fish and laughing,” he says. “Now that seems like life on a different planet. Sometimes I go out into the bush and sit. And I sit, and sit and I sit. And one day I just shot all of my bullets into the ground.”
Sebastian looks into his wife’s eyes, those black pools across the room. For a moment, he ignores me entirely. “If I hadn’t – I don’t know what I would have done. Maybe shot someone. Maybe shot a lot.
Maybe shot myself.” He turns to me. “I just loaded up all my clips and emptied them. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Into the ground. Then I sat down and cried like I was full of water. I only saw my father cry when he was 87, and that was when my mother died. They were in a German camp. There wasn’t a time when they had been apart. That was the first time I saw him cry. I never saw him cry after that … even when he was dying …”
Sebastian puts his head in his hands …
Sebastian puts his head in his hands and stares at the floor. A plastic wall clock with bent arms tocks away, punctuating the silence. I looked around the room. The walls are grey-pink. The colour of an old man’s gums. The pink turned to blue the nearer it got to the single old fluorescent tube that occasionally flickered on the ceiling.
“It’s cost us thousands,” Helen says of her son’s addiction. “But what can you do?”
She looks at Sebastian. “There’s a lot I haven’t told you. A lot of money I paid out … Now I say to Peter, ‘I’m going to tell your dad.’ He doesn’t like that.”
Sebastian does not move. There is no response. He had been broken by this years ago, by the chaos and the fear, the anticipation of something more horrible and inevitable yet to come. Helen continues. A confession. And it occurred to me in this little room with its pink grey walls that this interview was their confession.
That there was no more time for doctors or priests, just desperation and the truth. “Peter was high. Running around like he was God. Talking gibberish,” she says. “And a Commodore pulled up outside. I always know when it’s serious because no matter how high Peter is – it’s the only thing that stops him dead. Like he’s been shot and hasn’t fallen over. The blood just drains from his face. So you got this car with four or five blokes in it. Then you got another one pulls up with the same. And they all got rifles and sawn-offs and Peter starts screaming and I go out and they don’t move. I’m terrified, shaking like a tree. But I’m not going to have anyone of mine killed in my house or on my front lawn. They’re gonna have to shoot me first.”
Helen looks at her husband again. He takes this in, the news of his wife and the danger his son put her in, the secrets she has kept of this addiction. “I’ve done this many times. Just have to suck up my guts and walk out like I’m going to get a baby off the driveway. So I go right over. Some of them are watching me. Some of them look straight ahead. Most of them are on the gear. Last time I counted nine guns.
And I go straight to the car and say, ‘What are you doing here?’ ‘We’ve come to get Peter.’ ‘Well you can’t have him. What does he owe you this time?’ ‘Two thousand. If we don’t get it – someone will get us, and that isn’t gonna happen. So bitch you better get out of the way because if we don’t take him back … we’re gone.’”
I ask what would have happened if she had not had the money. “Oh – they’d have shot him. If I didn’t pay they’d hurt him really bad. Shoot out his knee or his hand, or if he owed them a lot he would just disappear. Last week… Last week there was a boy killed and left in the street just up the road. They beat him and ran over him a few times. We couldn’t get to work because the roads were all blocked off.”
Sebastian looked up. He looked at her, and cleared his throat. “This is where I start to wonder. Why a group of us don’t go and get some semi-automatics and shoot out the lot. But the cops tell us there’s too many. So we’d have to get thousands of rounds and go to them. We might die – but we’d hurt some people really bad. And then I wonder, what have I become? Everyone knows – including the government – that we should be hitting the source. But no one wants a civil war.”
I ask about police. It’s a reasonable question, and yet in the face of their trauma it feels almost naïve. “It’s just a job. They don’t want to engage,” Sebastian says. “It’s too hard. They got families, too. Too dangerous. We get warned – they come here and say, ‘There is nothing we can do, and nothing you can do.’” When I speak to police about ice in Melton, the response is resolute: “I’d say we are at absolute best treading water.”
Sebastian starts to tell me about the hunting rifles he planned to give Peter, how he wanted to pass them to his son. He tells me how Peter’s addicted friends cut into his gun safe with an oxy welder and stole them. Soon after, Peter moved out.
“A mate of mine is a plumber,” Sebastian says. “Got his own problems and can be a bit weird – but he’s older than Peter and these other punks. And he got a place. So I asked if Peter could go and live with him. We needed a rest. We wereexhausted. And we thought it might do Peter good – start following someone else. So he started living there. Now my mate, he put web cameras on the walls. Because he told the boys staying there – if he recorded them with any gear he’d throw them out. Anyway. Second night in – the cameras filmed Peter stealing money from the other boys’ clothes. My mate come to me and he said – what do you want me to do. I told him he better do whatever he thought best. So he told me he was gonna hurt Peter real bad. Make an example of him. Teach him a lesson. Peter came home and started hiding in a cupboard. Like he was running from hell. My mate and some of his mates came to get Peter. Now, they are tough as a brick wall these guys. They came into the house, found Peter and dragged him out. He was kicking and screaming and asking for me to help. Clawed the carpet like he was being dragged over a cliff. I went to my mate and told him, ‘You rough him up and scare him bad. Don’t break anything, don’t cut him – but you hurt him and frighten him as much as you like. I even paid him some money.’”
Sebastian is crying as he tells me this …
Sebastian is crying as he tells me this, a man ruined by desperation, amazed by what ice had done to his son and what his son’s addiction had done to him. “I ran out of … of gas … Nothing else had worked.”
He holds his head forward. A giant tear collects at the end of his nose, reflecting light and swaying before it falls with all the others Sebastian has cried for his son.
“So they took him back,” he struggled, “tied him to a chair and any time my mate or one of his mates went past that chair they’d belt him, telling him they might take a trip and waste him in a gravel pit. He was terrified. A few days later they dropped him home. He was settled. He was really good. And so I asked a mate to find me an outboard motor that needed some work. I wanted to work on it with Peter. Settle him. Do something together. Next day my mate turns up with the motor and we spent all day on it. Peter mostly standing around texting his mates.
At the end of the day he looked at us and said, ‘I could sell the motor and buy some smack.’”
Sebastian mentioned another friend, another person who offered to help. “He tell me, ‘If I find out who’s selling ice to your boy I’ll belt them within an inch of their lives.’” Sebastian’s voice goes grey and dark.
“Turned out my mate was selling it to Peter,” Sebastian finally said. “So I did to him what he promised he would do.”
I ask them what might change. They talk about accountability, about how whenever there was a crisis they were there to help, to buffer and to take on the load. “If we stepped back and let him deal with the consequences – he’d be in the ground already,” Sebastian says quietly. “We know that. If we step away now, we sign his death warrant … and it will all be over in a few days.”
Helen swallows, looking at her husband. “This is where we are different. He wants to go to war, a bloody battle over in a week. I think this has got 10 years or more yet to come. And our son used to be real gone on us every day. Then it was every second day. Then it was every third and then perhaps once a week. Then we relapse. If we can just keep it going this way, the weeks might become fortnights and then months. The trouble is, as he has told us many time: ‘Mum, the ice – I just love it.”
Helen and Sebastian look at each other. They have not looked at each other for a while, but now they stare in silence. I don’t know what they see.
*Names have been changed.
Parents of Ice addicted children. ©Richard Butler.
First published in The Saturday Paper
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