Contact High
CONTENT WARNING: Suicide, drug use/abuse, coarse language. 18+
Tim’s parents died in a hit-and-run when he was 19 and the family lawyers took almost a year to track him down to tell him that he’d never have had to worry about money again. Apparently he grew up rich, could’ve fooled me.
They’d left him their four bedroom family home in Randwick and had life insurance to the tune of two million dollars per dead parent. There was a younger sister who had died when Tim was five, he’d only mentioned her to me once: said she was funny but that he couldn’t remember anything else about her except that his parents had never been the same.
Tim couldn’t remember the last time he’d spoken to his mum and dad and he didn’t seem to care enough to try all too hard. He said he never missed them.
We got the keys to the house from the lawyers’ office in the city and got the 396 bus from Bridge Street toward Randwick. It was raining and there was a family running across Anzac Parade that nearly got hit by a taxi. This whole city stops when it rains and the bus took ages.
When we were almost at our stop near the racecourse the weather had cleared and Tim said ‘Let’s just stay on and go to the beach’ so we went all the way to Maroubra and sat on the concrete wall with our feet hanging over the edge not saying a word before getting on the next bus back to Randwick.
Stepping into his silent childhood home—him for the first time since he was 15 and me for the first time—felt like we’d broken into a display home except that everything was covered in a fine layer of dust.
We stood for a minute or two in silence, I guessed he was thinking about his dead parents or his dead sister or whatever so I just stood as still as I could next to him. Those couple of minutes felt like an hour to me and I spent the whole time trying to come up with an excuse to leave.
Pointing at a coffee table Tim said ‘help me lift this’ and we lifted one end each and I walked backwards and we put it just out the front door then we started clearing out wardrobes of shirts and jackets and dresses and shoes, and then wardrobes, and furniture and tables and chairs and shitty art prints and vases with plastic flowers and potpourri in crystal bowls and candles from Byron Bay that smelled like bergamot and body odour and sandalwood that had a sticker on them that said ‘BYRON BAY™,’ and bowls of shells also from Byron Bay but taken from the beach by tiny hands when Tim was a little kid—he told me this matter-of-factly and with absolutely zero trace of sentiment—and bowls of plastic fruit and bowls of keys and coins and empty bowls, and bowls and bowls and bowls.
We put it all out on Wansey Road, on the overgrown nature strip. No one had thought to mow it since his parents died and we weren’t about to do it. The long grass was itchy on our legs but soon it was completely covered with the remnants of someone else’s life.
We took what was left of his upstairs childhood bedroom and chucked it out the window to make a pile then added what his parents had kept in his dead sister’s room, throwing it on top.
We sat on the front porch watching scavengers that probably have three cars in their garage and stocks and holiday houses pull over and take it piece by piece back to their own loungerooms and bedrooms, kid’s rooms, spare rooms. Or, more likely, having changed their minds, abandoning it half way home, dumping it in front of a neighbour’s house to rot in the rain we could see building in clouds like bushfire smoke on the horizon: it was coming in over the ocean like the waves we’d been watching swallow sand at Maroubra only a few hours before.
Tim’s parents’ house smelled like new leather and vanilla-scented hand soap and now all of these vultures’ houses will smell just a bit of his parent’s scent and their excess and their deaths and the flakes of skin and strands of hair turned to dust that had settled on their stuff and this is their family’s only legacy and in a way it’s how their memory will live on but no one really remembers or wants to remember, especially not Tim, so really they’re just gone.
Tim had spent a large amount of his insurance payout on crystal meth. He wouldn’t tell me how much but whatever it cost was enough to make him smirk when I asked as he was pulling a giant bag of the stuff out of his backpack.
That was the first smile he let betray his mood, which had been all-business up until the city started settling into evening and took us with it.
We spent the rest of that first night portioning the powder out of a large Ziploc™ bag into 100 small clear Ziploc™ bags—which themselves had come in an even larger Ziploc™ bag—and snorting it and piling the bags on the kitchen bench.
Fewer than 100 in the end, due to how much we had to take to get the job done and the fact that I’d slipped a couple of bags in my pocket. I didn’t ask why he wanted to parcel it out like this when it was just for him to take, I thought maybe he had planned to sell it. I think he at least planned to tell himself he would.
Once we were done I was going to steal some more and go home but that rain was still around and even though spring had started winter hadn’t quite finished. Tim had started a fire and my house was always freezing so I decided to stay and help him get through it.
Now that the house was empty—apart from a few small appliances, a fridge, one three seater leather couch, two stools and a rug which was too heavy for us to lift—all there was to see was exposed timber beams and dust and timber rafters and thick timber benches and timber everywhere and dust everywhere (except where we’d moved stuff from which was surprisingly clean).
But there was also stainless steel and glass and sharp corners contrasting with the rough surface of the wood and it felt like we were living in a magazine article about piece of shit families that could afford to own a four-bedroom house in Randwick.
The second-story loungeroom had a big double window overlooking the street and beyond the street was a view of the racecourse so that weekend we sat on the only couch and through Tim’s dad’s old binoculars we watched all of the rich pricks and their fascinators and their royal blue suits and their sparkling South Australian wines and their greed, slobbering and tripping over each other to impress themselves, tearing tickets and burning through futures.
While these disgusting beasts bet on horses which are also disgusting beasts we sat and rubbed powdered crystals into our gums and talked about why The Future Sound of London was more punk than the Sex Pistols ever were and we’d try to outdo each other naming PJ Harvey b-sides and sharing quotes from Bill Hicks skits we had listened to over and over in our early teens, the cheap lasers wearing out the plastic coating of the CDs until we couldn’t play them anymore but it didn’t matter because we knew them all by heart.
Talk would sometimes turn to politics and war and we’d solve all the problems of the world and we’d argue and later we wouldn’t remember our grand solutions just the arguments then we’d forget we were arguing and just continue on with the absolute nothing that defined us.
Days and nights would blur into one and I didn’t sleep or eat for four or five days at a time and then we would fall asleep and it was fitful and long and we would wake in each other’s arms on the rug sweaty and sore with the sun in our eyes and we would rub more sharp powder into our gums which were raw and red and our fingers came away with smudges of blood on them but we were so high or exhausted or both that we didn’t stop to wonder where the blood was coming from.
I would get up and butter us pieces of bread to make sandwiches but thick layers of butter was as far as I’d get and they’d sit and rot on kitchen benches covered in poppy seeds and ants and cockroaches.
Weeks or months or days later when the drugs ran out we filled the last few baggies scattered around on the floor with water and shared little sips between us to make sure we got every last crumb.
It was almost dusk when we stepped outside for the first time in forever and it felt like a montage in a movie but it always feels like that when there’s more than one of you and you start coming down, like its post-apocalypse, like time has changed or shifted and it becomes impossible to count seconds or minutes or hours or to notice or to care and it feels significant like it should be being filmed like you’re the most important people on earth but at the same time you think that everyone hates you and you think that everyone that you walk past somehow knows you’re coming down and even though they can’t really know why did they cross the street when they saw you coming? so maybe they do know and while all of this makes you self-conscious it doesn’t embarrass you it’s just part of the journey, part of the mission, and there’s always a mission.
You’re always heading somewhere and there’s always a reason, even if you don’t really know where you’re going or why.
The only time we stopped was to get a Red Bull™ each from the servo to try and extend the small and final buzz we had going. I saw a newspaper headline that read “Pacific Solution” and I thought ‘what the fuck does that mean?’ and the servo had WSFM on and they were playing ‘Small Town Boy’ by Bronski Beat and we spent longer than we needed to in the aisles so we could hear the song to the end and I bought some chewing gum but spat it out because it burned the inside of my mouth.
The song’s synth line reinvigorated some fragment of unmetabolised drugs and our pace quickened and our pulse quickened and the Red Bull™ tasted like baking soda at the back of our throats and the lights burned the back of our eyes and as Jimmy Somerville sang ‘the love that you need will never be found at home’ I closed my eyes and saw bright orange with black stars and almost knocked over a display stand stacked high with bags of Twisties™.
When we left the servo I was feeling good thanks to the music and I said ‘Let’s go out’ and Tim said ‘Nah, let’s go home’ but we didn’t, we walked in silence until it was completely dark then Tim said he was turning around and heading back to the house and I said I was going to walk to my house and we went our separate ways. It took me all night to get home and I only got lost twice. I didn’t want to see the morning light but I wanted the night to end and I never know what I want and I’m just talking to myself anyway.
I shut the front door behind me and the last thing I saw before the welcome darkness of my house took hold was the sun starting to peek over the high rises in the city and I lay on my bed stinking like salt and stress and the Red Bull™ I’d spilt down the front on my shirt when I ran into the Twisties™.
I put on a mixtape that Tim had made me years earlier and wondered if he made it home OK and also wondered if he had hidden some of the drugs from me and was taking them now and decided to walk back to his house to find out and then I fell asleep.
I realised that I hadn’t seen or heard from Tim for almost three months so I got a cab to his house and found his body hanging from the rafters in the loungeroom. No shoes or shirt, just wearing army-green cargo pants that hung low around the bottom of his hips.
Slumped in on himself, he seemed longer than usual and his shape only had rounded edges and his head was bowed so that from the door you couldn’t see his face just the top of his head showing where he’d started to go bald.
I didn’t know what you were supposed to do when you find your dead friend and I guess I still don’t know. I called an ambulance which took three hours to arrive even though the hospital was a 10 minute walk away, and I didn’t know it would take three hours but I also didn’t know how long he’d been hanging there for so I thought he probably didn’t mind the wait and I didn’t mind.
I killed time by taking photos of Tim’s body on this cheap Minolta point and shoot which had a broken flash, in between poking around looking for drugs or anything else of value but I didn’t find anything except the binoculars which I left untouched.
I finished off the roll of 36 that I remember him loading on New Year’s Eve that we’d quickly forgotten about once our Es had kicked in, when we’d run out into the night not returning to rest until most of January 1st had come and gone.
I never got the film developed. I put the roll in with Tim’s body before they cremated it, in the breast pocket of the last suit he’d ever wear.
Listen to Tim’s mixtape and the Running Writing living soundtrack here