When I got back from Switzerland, I was still living out in Lanseria, renting the old main bedroom of a property that had been chopped up into small sub-apartments. It had seemed like a clever move at the time — the rent was low — but in reality it was a terrible decision. I was spending a fortune on petrol commuting to CH Chemicals in Edenvale every day, and whatever money I thought I was saving was disappearing straight into the fuel tank.
So I started looking for something closer in. Eventually, through a friend of Briony’s, Pat Corbin, I found a small apartment in Auckland Park. It was central, cheap, and available.
At work, I was still battling away with Neil Hellman’s patents, trying to justify my salary and make myself useful. This was the first time in my life I’d ever been employed on a fixed monthly income, and I felt a strange mixture of relief and quiet panic. Relief that money was coming in. Panic that I wasn’t entirely sure what I was doing.
Around this time, something happened that still stands out as one of the strangest emotional moments of that period.
I was dropping the kids off one weekend. By then Terry was living in a beautiful four-bedroom townhouse in Linden— bought largely with the proceeds from the sale of the Parkview house. I’d given her everything I could. She’d essentially paid cash for it. The place was lovely: two storeys, a garden, each child with their own bedroom.
To my surprise, she asked if I’d like to stay for a braai.
I said yes.
It was deeply strange — being back inside a version of the family I adored, with the woman I had loved so completely, pretending for an evening that nothing irreversible had happened. We drank too much. At some point it came out that she and Doug were fighting, and that he’d gone away for the weekend.
That night, we ended up in bed.
I’m not proud of it — particularly given how confusing it must have been for Mikey — but it was the most emotionally intense sex I’ve ever experienced. For a brief moment, it felt as though something fundamental had been repaired.
It hadn’t.
To be clear about the timeline: we didn’t get back together. She went back to Doug and told him what had happened. I remember phoning him and asking if he liked how it felt. It was petty, and I’m not proud of that either. I wasn’t in a state to be noble.
Not long after that, Sam drifted back into the picture.
Friday afternoons at CH Chemicals involved drinks at three o’clock. One of those Fridays, we both drank too much. That weekend I was due to move into the Auckland Park flat, and Sam suggested she come home with me so she could help me move the next morning.
I saw it for exactly what it was. And I took it.
The next day, with the help of John Cartwright and Sam, I moved into the Auckland Park flat — a dark, depressing place in an old complex, brown tiles in the bathroom, no light, no warmth. Standing there among the boxes, I remember thinking: I cannot live here.
Looking back now, at the time I thought it the lowest emotional point of my life, unware that there was worse to come. I was still clinging to the idea of family. I’d slept with Terry, then with Sam, moved again, and nothing had anchored. Everything felt provisional, unstable, temporary.
I went away over Christmas — Plettenberg Bay, with Briony and her friends — but it all blurred together. When I got back, Terry picked me up at the airport, we had had a number of emotional phone conversations whilst I had been away.
On the drive home, she said she wanted to try again. To be a family.
I was ecstatic as you can imagine.
I moved back into her townhouse in Victory Park.
It lasted three days.
I felt like a ghost in my own life. I didn’t feel wanted. I didn’t feel safe. I didn’t feel loved. I was riddled with anxiety, drinking too much, barely functioning. Terry saw the state I was in and pulled the plug.
I moved back into Auckland Park.
At CH Chemicals, my role was still to try to make Neil Hellman’s patent ideas real. Some of them were genuinely interesting; most were completely mad. I’ll write about the full circus later. For now, I was focused on a solar panel concept involving black fluid circulating inside a clear polycarbonate tube.
Neil insisted the prototypes be installed on the roof of his mansion in Sandhurst.
I was building them in a makeshift lab at CH Chemicals. Whatever engineering theory I still remembered mattered less than practical skills I had from my time at R.J. Spargo Ltd — cutting, fitting, improvising, making things work with what I had.
The roof at Neil’s house was flat, three storeys up with a waist high parapet. I accessed it via a long aluminium ladder, which I normally secured at the top by tying it to a 44-gallon drum filled with water.
Neil was away in Europe, and I was under pressure. I hadn’t made enough progress and was desperate to have something in place for him to see when he got back. Neil was an extremely difficult person to work for, everyone at CH Chemicals feared him including me.
The 1st of May 2003 was a public holiday and a Thursday. Neil was due back that weekend.
So on the Friday, I strapped the latest version of the panel to the roof of my VW Jetta and drove it over.
What I didn’t know was that a DSTV crew had been there earlier to move a satellite dish. They’d untethered the ladder from the drum — but left it standing exactly where it always had.
I was stressed, distracted, and in a hurry.
I strapped the panel to my back and started climbing.
Near the top, the ladder began to fall backwards.
Three storeys up, I lunged forward and managed to hook my fingertips over the parapet wall. The ladder and the panel smashed to the ground below.
I was hanging by my fingertips.
I screamed for help. The maid ran out and called the gardener. They tried to reposition the ladder, but couldn’t get it right. I could feel my grip weakening. I knew I wouldn’t hold on much longer.
To the left was a small courtyard with a vicious rotary clothes line. To the right, the tennis court and a low wall.
When my grip finally gave out, I swung to the right and let go.
I landed hard.
The main impact was on my right leg on the wall. I remember lying on my back, bleeding from cuts on my hands, with excruciating pain in my leg and a familiar, sickening pain in my back — where I’d injured myself years earlier in the helicopter crash.
An ambulance took me to St Vincent’s Clinic. Surgery followed the next morning.
When I woke up, my leg was held together by a frankly medieval looking external fixator — bolts drilled into bone, rods holding everything in place. The surgeon cheerfully told me I’d be “as good as new” in six weeks.
Then he said I could go home.
Panic because the problem was I lived on the second floor in Auckland Park and there was no elevator.
Briony came and picked me up, she was using my car and I tried to drive. I made it about half a kilometre.
By the time I reached the flat, I could barely get up the stairs. Briony, who’d delayed her flight to London because of the accident, told me she had to leave that night.
I stood there on crutches, completely fucked.
I couldn’t reach the pin sites properly. I couldn’t cook. I couldn’t cope.
So I phoned Terry and told her I had no choice — I was going to have to come and stay with her.
She wasn’t happy. But I was paying alimony, and perhaps out of obligation, perhaps out of residual humanity, she agreed.
I moved back into her townhouse — this time as a cripple.
It was miserable. She went away again with Doug, leaving me with the kids. The pin sites got infected. I wasn’t sleeping. The anxiety was relentless. I self-medicated with alcohol. I was a wreck.
To Terry’s credit, she took me to another doctor, who admitted me to hospital for a couple of nights to control the infection and stop the spiral.
When I came out — sober and infection-free — things improved slightly.
Every morning, the CH Chemicals driver picked me up and drove me to work through parts of Johannesburg I’d never seen before. One day I noticed some small townhouses for sale.
I saw an estate agent. A tiny three-bedroom unit in a 1960s complex was for sale. Cheap. The bank approved a bond. I bought it.
I arranged for my belongings from Auckland to be moved into storage.
One Friday night, Terry came home, she had been out with Doug and was clearly drunk. When I mentioned storage, she exploded. She thought I was planning to stay indefinitely.
She hit me. Started pummelling me, screaming.
Despite being on crutches, I managed to get to a bedroom and brace the door closed to stop her onslaught. The kids were screaming. Mikey was shouting at her. I begged her to call the police.
Things went quite and I phoned Guy Johnson and asked him to come and get me.
Bernie and John arrived. John took the kids. I broke down completely, telling Bernie how desperately I’d tried to keep everything from falling apart.
When I finished, I opened the bathroom door downstairs. Terry had been inside. She’d heard it all.
Guy arrived and took me to his home in Bryanston.
I don't know how he heard of the incident but the next day, Neil Hellman phoned and said I could stay at his place. His girlfriend Sue — a genuinely kind woman — had apparently said, We need to look after this guy.
And so, improbably, I moved into my boss’s mansion in Sandhurst.
I don’t think I was at Terry’s for more than a month, but it was one of the most desperate periods of my life. It can’t have been easy on her either.