Bee got beat up by a client the other day, some guy who didn’t like her words or her prices. I photographed her fading injuries for our records, standing outside in the sunshine, wrapped in a towel, her legs bared. She would have happily gone sans towel but, as she told me with a wink, ‘cool chicks don’t wear undies.’ Then she pulled up her pants and went back to work, sans undies. Why is she going straight back to work? Because she has a heroin habit. A massive one.

It’s four am and I’m writing this because I can’t sleep. I’m trying to measure my words, pace myself through an outline of why I hate heroin. But whether it’s the early hour, or the bubble of rage that seethes in my chest when I think on it, all I want to do is launch a scathing, vitriolic attack on this dreary, awful drug that I’ve come to see as the bad friend.
I’ve never used it and even if I wanted to narrate you a first person account of its loathsomeness, I couldn’t. I’m allergic to morphine, the medically sanctioned cousin.

The first and only time I saw someone shoot up heroin I looked away. I was sixteen and it was too scary. I’m not squeamish or afraid of needles, but heavy drugs were such an alien concept to this small town girl that my body flooded with a psychedelic swirl of emotion, heavily salted with fear. Drugs are scary. They remove you from real life, transplanting a shadowy doppelganger in your place. And the urban myth of the casual user, a functional person who uses on occasion? I’m disinclined to believe it, because drugs eat you alive. Literally eat you from the inside out. They eat you until your face is hollow and your bones jut; until you’ve given up your home, and your husband, and your children; until you’re selling your sex on the street because there is no other way to earn enough, quick enough to get your fix. Sex 4 Drugs. Like Me 4 You 4 Eva but infinitely worse.

M. comes in to Gatehouse a lot. She’s tall, beautiful and disarmingly open, almost childlike. She’s also a pretty cool character. She has an elaborate tattoo covering her back, wears some neat threads and drives one of those cool old cars your parents might’ve owned. At another time I would probably envy her effortless style, but right now she is in the midst of descent into a very uncool situation. Her long legs are becoming skeletal and her face, which I imagine was once strikingly pretty, has faded away to a pair of oversized brown eyes.

M. is staring down the barrel of jail time for unpaid fines because her habit eats up all her cash. She’s on a payment plan which, in light of her circumstances, a judge set at forty five dollars a fortnight but she still can’t do it. She must earn a significant amount of money from sex work. She is still beautiful enough that I imagine men must screech their cars to a halt, choosing her first from the corner selection. Only it all goes into her veins.

Dan is one of those girls who looks vaguely familiar. Someone you have a strange recollection of playing netball against in high school or that nice girl who might have lived on your street. Dan is amazing. Or rather, she was doing amazingly well until she slid backwards. It remains to be seen whether she can put her habit down and take her life back up.

When I first arrived, that sort-of-familiar-looking nice girl was asleep on the couch. At the time, lots of the women looked so foreign to me, with missing teeth, and the ubiquitous hooker outfits, but Dan was one of the most shocking to my newly arrived senses. She wore no makeup and her ash blonde hair was always scraped back into a ponytail. Her uniform of trackies, a hoodie and runners was so incongruent with her work.

Dan had been gradually getting straight. She quietly stopped using and stopped working. She started helping cook Tuesday lunch and eventually booted Louisa and I out of the kitchen with muttered curses against our in-the-wayness and took over cooking completely. On one of those Tuesdays, I just leant against the bench and started up a conversation. She had been pretty aggressive with me initially, testing my commitment to being there I suppose, but for whatever reason she had softened. I asked her about giving up. How and why?

‘I don’t want to work anymore,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to use drugs anymore. It’s not easy but I’m doing really good.’ I told her she was awesome. Literally inspiring awe. I watched her over the next couple of months. She finally picked up a camera and became totally engaged with the photographic process. She asked me for two sorts of cameras to see how differently they worked. She liked me more and more, throwing me the odd compliment and hug. She cooked, and took photos. She even wrote a letter to Kmart asking them to donate better kitchen equipment to Gatehouse.

Then Bee and her habit became homeless and kind, soft-hearted Dan took her in. It started again. When you are a recovering junkie, having another user move in to your home and supply you with drugs in kind, you go right on ahead and have a taste. Then a taste becomes a daily fixture and then you’re working again and coming in stoned, under some bleak haze of drugs. I watch her now through a mist of regret. Dan had become someone I like very, very much, someone of whom I am greatly proud. Someone genuinely awesome.

I hope with all my heart that this is a blip in her self-propelled road to a habit-free life. But regardless, her story fuels my hate. Heroin is a curling, spitting, hissing, vile thing that turns the corners of my mouth down even just writing about it. I loathe it; loathe everything about its measly, pitiful existence. It is the bad friend that is always waiting for an opening to strike up a chat, moving on to a cuppa, before sliding into your life and taking over completely.