CANDICE

by
Joseph Ridgwell

My one and only encounter with the beautiful and damned Candice was in Australia. At the time I was working on a tourist visa in Kings Cross, the red-light district of Sydney Australia, after arriving from South East Asia without any plans other than basic survival. Due to my status I was flitting from one crap job to the next. When I say, �flitting from one crap job to the next,� I mean jobs like peanut seller, sandwich board man, and doughnut maker, until I landed a half-decent job as a porter in a small private hospital.

This job went okay until I took a couple of sickies. I took the sickies when I couldn�t get out of bed, I couldn�t get out of bed after drinking too much. After the second sickie the supervisor pulled me aside and said sharply,

�One more day off mate, and I�ll have to let you go?�

A few mornings later, after another drinking session, I awoke on the settee of my cheap rented apartment with a feeling that everything was dead. A couple of light beams filtering through two holes in the curtains told me it was morning and the cheap watch on my wrist told me it was a quarter to seven. My shift at the hospital commenced at six and I couldn�t help remembering the words of warning from the supervisor, �One more day off mate and I have to let you go!� I stared vacantly at the blank TV screen with a disconnected feeling.

After five minutes of screen gazing, with a head that felt like it was filled with cotton wool, I suddenly got energised and started an argument with myself. One half reasoned I could go in to work late, but the other half, the only half I was prepared to listen when hung over, said it was out of the question because I looked like shit and smelled like a brewery. That settled my own argument.

I opened my wallet and took a look inside. Inside was a lonely looking twenty-dollar note, all that was left until Friday�s payday. As it was only Monday it would have to be conserved with the utmost care. With this in mind I went into the bedroom, lay down on the bed, and stared at the many cracks in the ceiling like I was an investigator of such phenomena. Then an idea came to me. The idea was to feed the birds in the Botanical Gardens.

I grabbed a stale loaf of bread, left the flat, and stepped out into the shocking daylight. At the Kings Cross Hotel I forgot about feeding the birds and wandered into the 24hr gaming room. There was nobody inside the hotel apart from a barman with a face like a hamster. I ordered a schooner from the hamster, took a couple of quick toots, and then got mesmerised by all the bright lights flashing on the poker machines. Those flashing lights were insidious and tempted me to stick a ten in one of the machines and try my luck, but it was my last ten.

The machines were linked to other machines around the state of New South Wales and a jackpot of 15,000 dollars was flashing red on a long black board. As the number flashed I wondered about that jackpot and knew it was a fake jackpot, just like the flashing poker machines, all a big con. I�d never seen anyone win it, but had often heard stories from other pokie players of the time when the jackpot paid out, but all pokie players have a story like that; it�s what keeps them playing, keeps them chasing the dream.

I looked at the machines and then at my last ten bucks. I did this several times. You can never tell, maybe I�d luck out with a big win and a big win would mean not having to go back to work, not for a few weeks anyway. I could even take a trip up the coast, learn how to surf, work on a tan, but I needed those ten dollars. Then, like a zombie, I stuck my last ten in a poker machine and lost it in about three seconds. �What the fuck did I do that for?� I said disgusted with my actions. I stared blankly at the machine, finished the rest of the schooner, and left the hotel.

Outside the hotel I sat down on a nearby bench, decided pokie machines were evil, and vowed never to play them again. At the end of the road a big friendly sun was rising and slashes of pink and orange filled the city sky. Many cars whizzed by, the noise of the engines attacking my ears, and lined each side of the road were palm trees, the trunks of which were entirely blackened by the constant traffic. If you ignored the traffic and concentrated on the green fronds, you could almost imagine yourself at the beach. Quite a few determined looking people walked past me on their way to work. The people all walked with great purpose, and they made me feel like a bum, a guilty bum.

As I sat there feeling sorry for myself an aboriginal girl appeared and sat next to me. Although slightly surprised by her sudden appearance I gave her the once over. She had wild hair, chocolate coloured skin and dressed in ragged purple trousers, a thin yellow cotton blouse and barefooted, she looked like a character out of a lost Dickens novel. The girl wasn�t wearing a bra and two thick nipples poked through the thin material of her yellow blouse.

The sight of the barely concealed nipples was just beginning to turn me on when the girl faced me with a pair of sad magical eyes, eyes that were surrounded by incredibly long eyelashes. Looking for business? She asked, but I couldn�t take my gaze away from those eyes, they were mesmerising, the nipples forgotten. How much I mumbled? Fifty dollars, I could do whatever I wanted for fifty dollars! The girl had those long skinny legs, which most aboriginal women have, legs with hardly any shape to them at all, and she kept closing her fantastic eyes, nodding her head, and swaying slightly.

I asked the girl her name. Candice she said. Immediately I liked the name and decided it was a beautiful name. I rolled the word around my tongue, Candice, Candice, Candice of the long legs, mad hair, and magic eyes dark as night. Could I give her fifty dollars? She pleaded, but I wanted to give her a thousand just because of the eyes, but I didn�t have twenty dollars, let alone fifty.

Then I thought about taking her back to the flat and doing what ever I wanted with her. It would be easy to do once the decision was made, but somehow I didn�t have it in me, no guts. This girl was very young, really just a kid, but she was also beautiful. Okay it was a flawed, damned beauty, but it was all there.

When I told her I was broke Candice yawned, sighed, leant her head on my shoulder, and folded her skinny legs on the bench. Her feet were scabby and cut up and looking at them made me slightly nauseous. Candice appeared to be extremely young and I had to ask the question, how old was she? Fourteen, she mumbled sleepily. Fourteen! Fourteen, I said to myself shocked, as Candice closed her crazy eyes and drifted off to someplace else, somewhere kind and forgiving.

As Candice slept I leant over and felt her warm sour breath on my cheek, a strong impulse to kiss her nearly overwhelming me. Then I pulled away, saw needle marks on both arms, and recoiled. So Candice was fourteen and a junkie. Why was she a junkie? Why wasn�t she walking to school and dreaming about movie stars and her first kiss? Why was she wandering the streets looking for business to fund a heroin habit, in broad daylight, on a weekday? But then why was I sitting on a bench, half-drunk, and over ten thousand miles from home, with a stale loaf of bread under my arm. Fuck Knows!

I sat there about ten minutes without moving because I didn�t want to wake Candice. None of the people walking past took any notice of us and I began to feel drowsy, tired by life, and drink, and a perilous future. Somehow on that bench it was like we were in a bubble invisible to the outside world and my eyes closed, and mad visions filtered through my alcoholic brain.

I was half-asleep when, with a violent jerk of her body, Candice awoke. She looked at me in an alarmed way, stood up stiffly, and rubbed her eyes. Looking for business? She sounded like a robot and I told to her go home. She didn�t have a home, but surely this was her home, this country, this city, these streets and buildings belonged to her.

Could I give her fifty dollars? I didn�t have fifty dollars. Candice stood up, her knees clicking like two small gunshots, and then she spun around and nearly fell over. As she stumbled along the high road I hoped she wouldn�t cut her feet on any broken glass, but kept watching as she walked away in her yellow cotton blouse and silly pathetic purple trousers, items so sad and pitiful I could have cried just looking at them. Still she possessed those wonderful eyes and with those eyes surely she could do anything. But what chance did she have? Born into a defeated race, in a country stolen and taken away from her people for good.

I stood up and made my way to a flight of steps that led down to the botanical gardens. At the top of the staircase hundreds of City skyscrapers and mirrored office blocks dominated the view. I gazed out over Sydney feeling like an urban explorer. There were names on some of the buildings and I read the names, all those big corporations and multi-nationals, what did all that shit mean? Money and power, power and money, I shrugged my shoulders and thought about Candice.

It was now very hot and the sun no longer looked friendly and shone down with a fierce contempt. By the time I walked into the botanical gardens the short-lived beer buzz had worn off and I was sweating profusely, but there were no birds anywhere. I began breaking pieces from the stale loaf of bread, scattering them on the ground in front of me. Why I had come to feed the birds? It had seemed like a good idea back in my flat, but now I felt stupid and weird.

As if to answer my question, a couple of cockatoo�s appeared and began inspecting the bread pieces by picking them up with their feet and placing them in their beaks. More and more cockatoo�s arrived until there were about thirty in front of me, but they were indifferent to the bread, casting the pieces aside and advancing towards me. All their feathers were missing and Cockatoo�s without feathers are scary looking birds, an unnerving sight.

I started walking backwards, but the birds continued their advance, screeching loudly, flapping their wings, and with their scrawny exposed necks and big baldheads they looked grotesque. I thought they might pluck out my eyes or take chunks out of me with their beaks and panicking I turned around, lobbed the remainder of the loaf over my shoulder, and ran away from the horror of it all.

I didn�t stop running until I reached a bronze statue, which stood atop a little hill. The whole episode had shaken me up and sweat poured off me in torrents, the sweat trickling into my mouth, dripping off my chin and tasting salty. The bronze statue was of the great Australian writer Henry Lawson. He was dressed like a tramp and had a dog at his feet. It was weird; in life the Australia establishment had refused to pay his alimony bills and keep him in drink, but in death they had given him a state funereal, commissioned a statue in bronze, and finally put his name on the back of their twenty dollar note.

Henry Lawson gazed impassively into the distance, unperturbed by the irony of it all. What would he have done in my situation? Being a drinker he would have gone to the pub, and that�s what I needed, a cold beer to calm the nerves and get me thinking straight. I headed back to Kings Cross.

Back in the Cross everything seemed exaggerated. The cars seemed to be going too fast and people appeared different. Then I had a startling vision, no it was more than a vision, it was an epiphany right there on Darlinghurst Street, in broad daylight. White Australians were developing Aboriginal characteristics and racial features. I studied the white people walking past and my observations confirmed my thoughts. The white Australians looked different to Europeans. Their faces were wider, their lips and brows thicker, their noses broader. The differences were almost imperceptible, but they were there.

Yes there was no doubt about it, White Australians were turning Aboriginal, and by my reckoning in a few hundreds years, or maybe a couple of thousand, there would be no white Australians left. They would all have evolved into Aborigines. I shook my head and rubbed my eyes. Was I going crazy? What was going on? It felt like some unseen force was informing me of this freaky notion, but why me? I tried to get the weird thought out of my mind and ran inside a bottle shop and paid for a six-pack with my last six dollars.

I only felt safe with the door of my apartment shut firmly behind me. Then I flipped open a beer, took a long, long swig, and walked over to a window. Outside it was hotter than ever, the intense heat melting the tarmac of the road, which popped and hissed as if in protest at the rising temperature. Four lorikeets flew past the window like bullets threw the air, brilliant flashes of red and green. I watched impressed as they disappeared over the top of a tall brown-bricked building, and then I saw her again. It was Candice and my heart melted.

A tingling sensation rippled down my back, like an electric eel, as I watched her through the open window. She was with a young anaemic looking white man. The man had long blonde hair and didn�t look aboriginal at all, more like a fucked up surfer boy. Candice was still wearing the purple trousers and yellow cotton blouse, and she was still barefoot.

The two of them sat down in a recess opposite my apartment and began kissing. I wondered if the defunct surfer was a client of her�s or even her boyfriend, and instantly I disliked that long-haired smack-head. Why, because I fancied Candice, that�s why, but how could I fancy a teenage, aboriginal, junkie, prostitute? That was easy; because of the eyes, eyes that were magic and enough to drive a man insane.

I walked back into the kitchen and grabbed another beer. When I retuned to the window, Candice and the surfer boy were still there, but they were no longer kissing. No, now they were preparing a fix, and the needle reflected in the sunlight. Simultaneous waves of excitement and fear washed over me and there was a strange tension in the air. The blonde boy rolled up a sleeve of Candice�s yellow blouse, tied a strip of wire around her childlike bicep, and injected her. Candice closed her eyes and lay back in the recess, then the boy injected himself and lay back, and both their legs protruded from the recess.

For a few minutes nothing happened, but I watched the recess like a hawk, and supped my beer. Then Candice�s head suddenly re-appeared like a jack-in-the-box and she vomited violently onto the pavement. Her body began shaking and she rolled into the gutter. For a few moments she flapped around in the gutter like a fish out of water, before lying still. Then the ex-surfer appeared, scratched his head, looked around nervously, and ran off.

For a few moments I was frozen to the spot. What should I do? What could I do? Call the police? Call an ambulance? I grabbed the phone and was about to dial. Then there was the sound of a siren and I dropped the phone. An ambulance appeared just as I reached Candice. Her eyes were closed and lines of spittle, flecked with red, run from both corners of her mouth. I fell to my knees and leant over her, but couldn�t feel her warm sour breath and I wanted to feel her warm sour breath. Then I was roughly barged aside.

When I picked myself up from the gutter two paramedics were kneeling around Candice. In uniform the paramedics looked very dynamic. They had some type of equipment, two round pads attached to the chest of Candice, and they were counting. Candice�s body made several violent jerking actions and then it was still. Her eyes were closed, but she looked beautiful, like a sleeping angel. One of the paramedics addressed the other,

�It�s too late mate, she already gone!�

The paramedics placed a blanket over Candice�s head and nobody would ever see those magic eyes again because Candice was dead.

I opened the door to my apartment just as the telephone began ringing. Before I could reach the phone the answer machine switched itself on. The muffled voice of my supervisor informed me that I�d lost my job due to unreliability. I grabbed a beer from the fridge and walked over to the window. I was two weeks behind on the rent and there was no food in the house.

Outside the sun was shining and the recess was still there, but Candice was gone and once more everything seemed dead. Sometimes in life you meet people who leave a lasting impression, no matter how brief that meeting is, and I knew I�d remember Candice forever. I don�t think anybody could have helped her, but maybe she didn�t need help, and maybe, just maybe, she was an angel, an angel of the streets, streets that now looked a lot emptier than ever before.

� Joseph Ridgwell
Reproduced with permission