The Byron Journals (9 page)

She sighed and sat on the bed. ‘Tim and I were… having a cuddle. That was it.'

‘A cuddle?'

Andrew was set to launch into the meaning of the word ‘cuddle', but she cut him short. ‘I was talking to him about Mum's accident. It was two years ago today…' ‘Oh, shit Heidi…Today?' He sat beside her and drew her to him. ‘I'm sorry.'

She whimpered and then began to sob. ‘Tim's the only one who knows the full story. And he understands what it's like because of what happened to his mum. That's why I went to him. I was crying and Tim put his arms around me and that's when Jade walked in.'

‘Why didn't you come to me? You could have talked to me.'

She sniffled and pulled away. ‘I'm going to tell you about my mum, Andy—eventually. But right now, it's too raw. I just want to go to sleep.'

He searched her eyes. It was so unlike her to open up like this that he couldn't help but believe she was telling the truth. ‘So you were just talking?'

She nodded and wiped her nose with the back of her wrist. ‘I promise.'

Her phone rang and she flinched when she saw the caller ID. ‘I have to take this.'

‘Who is it?'

She covered her face with both hands, then looked up and sighed. ‘Do you mind leaving me alone for a few minutes?'

Andrew closed the door and waited outside, but he could only hear part of her conversation.

‘I'm sorry, Dad…soon…I promise… Of course I was going to call…How is she…?

I know, I'm sorry…I'm really tired… I've got to go, Dad…I'll call you soon…I will…I promise…' The following morning, Heidi acted as if nothing had happened. They had a lazy breakfast of mangoes and coffee and walked to Belongil beach. After a swim, they spread their towels to lie in the sun.

She unclipped her bikini top and lay belly-down on her towel. ‘I've got good news.'

‘What?'

‘We're going to Sydney.'

‘Huh?'

She laughed. ‘Sam's agreed to record us. We're taking the show down the coast!'

He lay beside her, trying to let what she'd said sink in. He wasn't sure he wanted to leave Byron; he wasn't sure he wanted to go anywhere.

‘When?'

‘I don't know—as soon as we've harvested the pot. Tim's dad spoke to his brother down in Melbourne, and he can hook us up to sell it down there for much more money than we'd get for it here.'

‘So we're going to Melbourne?'

She smiled. ‘Your home town, right? You'll have to show me around.'

He'd forgotten about that. ‘Shut up.'

‘Tim's going to start looking for a tour bus today.'

Heidi left to work the lunch shift at the café and Andrew moved into the kitchen to make himself a sandwich. Still half-asleep, Jade emerged from Tim's bedroom and yawned melodramatically. She stumbled past him in a loose singlet and white knickers and switched on the kettle.

He turned and looked her up and down, then cursed himself. ‘Heidi told me the good news,' he said, focusing on his sandwich. ‘About going on tour.'

She shrugged, then took a slice of tomato from the chopping board, sprinkled it with salt and ate it. She sucked the juice off her thumb and index finger. ‘Did she also tell you what she was talking to Tim about?'

He hesitated. ‘Yeah, her mum's accident.'

Her mouth fell open. ‘She didn't tell you about the drugs?'

‘Yeah, about taking the pot to Melbourne?'

‘No. She's asked Tim to get other drugs for her…to sell in Melbourne.'

‘What kind of drugs?'

She moved her tongue around the inside of her bottom lip. ‘Swear you won't say anything?'

‘Just tell me.'

She pressed her thumb onto some salt on the chopping board. ‘LSD…Liquid acid.'

‘Liquid acid?'

‘Yeah.'

She sucked the salt off her thumb. ‘Tim's dad can get it through his hippy connections.'

‘But why wouldn't she want us to know about it?'

‘You know what she's like.' Jade smiled. ‘Always a few secrets…But it's a silly idea, anyway.'

‘Why?'

The kettle boiled and clicked off, steam running up the cupboard doors to the ceiling. Jade began making herself tea. ‘If it was coke or whatever, I could understand. At least she'd be making a decent profit off it. But LSD? Who buys and sells LSD? There's no money in it. She must be crazy.'

ten

Tim locked the front door and drew the curtains while Andrew helped Heidi and Jade tape old bed sheets over the uncovered windows and clear the furniture to one side of the living room. Next, they covered the living room floor with newspapers. A week earlier, Tim and Andrew had chopped the plants into sections and hung them from the ceiling, and planted the new crop. Now that the buds had cured, it was time for the harvest. It took them a full twenty minutes to bring it up from the cellar. They passed the dried branches along a production line. Tim was in the cellar, Heidi and Jade on the stairs and Andrew in the living room, piling the branches into rows on the newspaper. The piles widened and thickened—almost filling the entire floor—and the sweet, humid stench of ripe marijuana filled the air. Once all the weed was upstairs, Tim closed the cellar and moved around the house, double-checking the doors and windows were secure.

The toilet flushed and Tim's dad, Ananda, emerged; he'd come down from Nimbin to help out. He was a lean, weathered man with dark, curly hair, an unkept beard and tobacco-stained fingers. He put on Led Zeppelin's second album and sat down to roll the first joint.

‘No one expecting any guests, I hope?' He sparked the joint, took a big draw and exhaled as though deep in thought. He drew again, exhaled and grinned at Tim. ‘Well done, Kashala! You've made me proud.'

‘Huh?' Andrew glanced between the two of them. ‘Who or what is Kashala?'

‘That's Tim's other name,' Ananda replied. ‘Kashala Premala Sudha but he—' ‘My real name,' Tim interrupted. ‘On my birth certificate is Tim—' ‘I changed his name to Kashala when he was ten but he reverted to Tim when he started at Byron High. I think his spirit yearns for a more conservative path than the one I've taken. He'll probably end up a banker.'

‘Just because I don't want to end up broke and living in a caravan park, doesn't mean I want to be a banker.'

‘He's ashamed of his hippy roots,' Ananda explained.

‘Bullshit,' Tim said. ‘I got sick of people thinking they knew something about me 'cause I had a hippy name.'

Ananda laughed. ‘Ah! The terrors of what people think.'

Andrew grinned at Tim. ‘Can I call you Kashala?'

‘Fuck off.'

Ananda and Tim delivered a quick tutorial on picking the buds: what was worth keeping and what wasn't; what to trim with scissors and what to leave. They set to work cutting and breaking buds from their stems and piling them into clear plastic salad bowls in the middle of the table. Some of the buds were clustered into heads as thick as cucumbers and others were spread out along spindly branches. When the bowls filled with buds, they emptied them into sixty-litre bins at either end of the table and continued picking.

Less than an hour later, Ananda stood up, swapped the Led Zeppelin album for Hendrix's
Axis: Bold as
Love
, and looked around at everyone, his cheeks red beneath his beard.

‘You know Hendrix used to sometimes put a tiny cut in his forehead, stick a tab of acid to it and cover it with his headband before going on stage. Some people used to say he'd dropper it into his eyes too—one of the fastest ways of absorbing it.'

‘No one believes that, Dad,' Tim said. ‘He wouldn't have been able to play.'

‘But he did. And he played like no one has played before or since…Who wants to drop acid now? Maybe we'll discover a conversational Jimi Hendrix in our midst.'

‘No, Dad.' Tim said. ‘We'll never get any work done.'

‘But it will make the passage of time far more interesting.' ‘Have you got some here?' Andrew asked.

He nodded, grinned and narrowed his eyes. ‘Ever tried it?'

Andrew shook his head and glanced at Heidi. Ananda must have supplied her order.

‘Oh, man!' Ananda chuckled. ‘You'd love it!'

‘I don't know.'

‘It's like dreaming with your eyes open,' he said. ‘I've seen stuff on acid you wouldn't believe! Trees giving birth, cats conversing in Mandarin, clouds forming intricate palaces in the sky. I've gone spinning through deep outer-space and distant galaxies. I've even had the spirits descend from the heavens and explain the meaning of life to me.'

‘And what was it?' Andrew asked.

Ananda laughed. ‘God, I can't remember now! But for a few brief moments—I understood everything. The universe stripped naked before my very eyes!'

Andrew turned to Heidi. ‘Have you tried it?'

She focused on the branch she was harvesting. ‘Yeah, once…but I didn't get the palaces in the sky, understand the universe version. I got a tour through hell. It was one of the worst experiences of my life.'

‘What happened?'

She sighed and sat back in her seat. ‘I had spiders crawling over me, blood seeping beneath doorways, about forty voices in my head, umm…portals to different dimensions opening and closing on the wall in front of me. Ghosts of murdered children whispering to me.' ‘Couldn't you make it stop?'

‘You've obviously never had acid, Andy. You can't just switch it off. Everything that happens is as real as you and me sitting in this room, and Ananda scratching his nose, and the smoke coming off that joint. I was trying to tell myself that what was happening wasn't real, but I had dozens of identical voices arguing in my head—and I had no way of knowing which one was the real me. Acid gives you a taste of what it must be like to go completely mad. Schizophrenic, psychotic or whatever.'

‘And some people never come back from it,' Ananda laughed. ‘I think I'm permanently stuck about halfway back—in limbo—but it's a pleasant place to be.'

‘How long did it last?' Andrew said to Heidi. ‘Your nightmare trip?'

She drew a breath and sighed. ‘Two days.'

Jade slapped the table and shrieked. ‘Are you serious, Heidi?'

She nodded without smiling. ‘By the end of the second day, I was willing to do anything to make it stop.

I ended up taking sleeping tablets to knock myself out. After that, everything's a blur. I woke up in someone's back garden a few blocks from home in the middle of the night. And I had no idea what had happened, or how I'd got there.' She leaned forward and continued picking buds. ‘I swore I'd never touch it again.'

Jade glared at Andrew as she passed the joint.

‘That's heavy,' Ananda said. ‘You must have had some evil energy running through your spirit to see all that.'

‘Why? It could have happened to anyone.'

Ananda shook his head. ‘Acid just amplifies whatever's inside you at the time. If you've got goodness, love and happiness inside you—then the world over-flows with those things. But if you've got hell and evil stuff repressed inside you, then that's what you're gonna see. You've got to know what's inside you and make a decision based on that.'

‘Yeah, well—I wasn't really thinking properly when I took it.'

‘I think it's a horrible drug,' Jade said. ‘I'd never touch it.' She glanced at Heidi, waiting to measure her reaction, but Heidi remained impassive.

Tim looked around at them and snickered. ‘Yeah, well that's why I don't do any drugs.'

Ananda laughed. ‘I can't believe I spawned a child who doesn't take drugs.'

‘You've taken enough for both of us, Dad.'

‘No doubt about that,' Ananda said, still laughing as he sparked the next joint. ‘So, I guess acid is out of the question then.'

Hours later, they'd barely made a dent in the stockpile of branches. Andrew smoked more joints in a row than he thought was possible and, little by little, lost track of what was going on. He tuned out for a while and focused on picking the buds or following the guitar riffs of whichever record Ananda put on—Bowie or Iggy Pop or Dylan. Then he looked up and everyone was laughing, but he wasn't sure why. He started laughing too, but everyone else stopped.

He caught bits and pieces of a neverending story Ananda was telling about Byron Bay when he first arrived with Tim. Drugs, free love, dance parties, the beginnings of Ecstasy, people returning from spiritual awakenings in India, uncrowded waves at the Pass and Lennox. Then he talked about Byron today—property developers, sea-change baby boomers, the endless stampede of backpackers and locals getting forced out.

‘Enough, Dad! Please!' Tim said eventually.

Ananda laughed. ‘I'm just talking, Timmy. Telling—' Three sharp knocks on the front door silenced them. They sat there stunned, staring at each other. Ananda extinguished the joint and turned down the stereo.

‘Anyone expecting—' Another triple knock stopped him short. Andrew felt Tim looking at him expectantly and realised with dread that he was being called upon to earn his cut, not just as the legal protection, but also as the smiling face of the operation. Everyone seemed to be looking at him to sort it out, and he was too stoned to say no.

He walked up the hallway to Heidi's room and peeked through the curtains. Cops. There were two of them waiting by the front door. Heart pounding, he walked back to the living room. There was marijuana everywhere—all over the floor, the kitchen table and in the bins at either end. They couldn't have hidden it if they tried. He mouthed
cops
and everyone looked at each other with the same bewildered expressions.

‘We're gonna get busted,' Jade whispered.

‘What are they doing here?' Heidi whispered back.