The meds were running low and my anxiety was building with every day that passed. Anybody who's had a serious mental health crisis — and I'd had more than one — will understand that particular panic, even when you're in an otherwise stable patch. But I couldn't tell Niels and Carey I was even on anything. Not a word. So I invented a vague illness and said I needed to see a doctor.
I turned up at the local GP and they didn't want to see me at first because I had no CPR number — the Danish health card. I offered to pay. They looked at me like I'd suggested something illegal. There's simply no facility for it — that's not how it works there. Eventually someone asked what passport I had, I said British, and that solved it — EU citizen, they'd see me, but I needed to get down to the local commune and register so I could get a CPR card of my own.
The GP was an older man, kind, patient, and he sat through my whole long, boring history without once looking at his watch. Mirtazapine for the depression, half a zopiclone at night for sleep. He told me, gently, that Denmark doesn't like prescribing sleeping tablets long-term — a philosophy my South African doctors had never troubled themselves with — but given how long I'd been on it, he wasn't going to cut me off cold. He just wanted me tapering down. The antidepressant he had no issue with at all; apparently it's practically the house brand over there.
It would be years before I found out neither of those tablets was doing much for me at all — that's a story for later. The doctor entered it straight into his computer, and just like that every pharmacy in Denmark had it on file — no paper prescription to clutch, no ceremony, just a system that quietly worked in a way I wasn't used to. I walked to the nearest pharmacy and picked up the meds, pathetically grateful the whole thing had worked out.
Meanwhile the visa was still crawling through whatever bureaucratic pipe visas crawl through, but Maurya rang to say Sciforma Days was coming up in Los Gatos and she wanted me there — not a sales event, more a company-wide get-together, everyone flown in for a bit of team building. I had almost no money and no way for her to send me any, so the only route that made financial sense was to fly back to South Africa on the open leg of my return ticket and book a fresh ticket from Johannesburg to San Francisco.
Late April, I flew back and landed on Dave and Kim's doorstep, who took me in exactly as hospitably as they always did. A couple of seriously boozy nights of backgammon later, I got on a plane to Los Gatos.
And that was where it all became real. While I was there my Australian visa came through, and just like that I was officially employed by Sciforma. They walked me into HR, handed me a contract and an email address — peter.rosenfeldt@sciforma.com — and I stood there in the Hugo Boss jacket I'd bought in Copenhagen feeling, for possibly the first time in years, like I'd actually arrived somewhere.
The year before, when we'd been at that same event, Maurya, Ian and I had all still been at MPS. Now Francois was there too, and all three of his top people had ended up at Sciforma — including Ian, who'd quietly watched everything unfold from a distance, said nothing to me at the time, and then resigned from MPS himself and was now packing up his wife and two kids to move to America. I'm not fool enough to take credit for another man's decisions, but it was hard not to feel something seeing him land on his feet too.
There was a night in the hotel bar, waiting for a taxi to the airport, when an American woman across the room caught my eye and asked if I had the time. I looked down at my phone to check — and only afterwards realised she had a phone sitting right in front of her. I'd been hit on, and it had gone straight past me. I'd never been any good at recognising that kind of attention. Self-esteem wasn't exactly my strong suit. We talked for a long while before my cab came. She said if I was ever back in San Jose I should look her up. Nothing happened. It was just nice.
From there it was back to South Africa, where Angie and Olie were out visiting from Nigeria. I put together a week at Hazyview, down in the Mpumalanga Lowveld — a golf estate, a round every day, elephant-back rides, ziplining through the canopy. It was one of those stretches of time that felt entirely uncomplicated.
While I was there Maurya called again. Sciforma had a major prospect in Kansas City — a big bank — and they wanted me out there running requirements gathering. I pointed out that I thought I was meant to be starting in the Sydney office. She said something to the effect of: until the visa's fully sorted, you're gainfully contributing wherever we need you. Fair enough. Terrifying, but fair enough.
So from Johannesburg to Kansas City, Missouri. They put me in a hotel and then in front of a room full of Americans, and I have never in my career been more out of my depth. I knew PSNext backwards, which was the only thing holding the whole performance together, but I had no real sense of how a corporation that size actually moved. One of the men there took me to dinner and spent the whole meal working through his grievances with his own team — my first real look at how much internal warfare goes on beneath the version of a company you see from outside. I got through it. I have the Danish sleeping pills to thank, if nothing else, for getting me through the jet lag in one piece.
From Kansas City back to South Africa, then Copenhagen, then a few days later Sydney. I'd arranged a place to stay through Gabby — a friend of my cousin Bill's, in real estate, who offered me a room in her apartment for $450. I thought that sounded very reasonable. What I hadn't realised, being new to the country, is that in Sydney rents are quoted weekly, not monthly — because if they quoted the real monthly figure, half the population would simply lie down on the pavement. $450 a week worked out to roughly $1,900 Australian a month, and in 2012 the Aussie dollar was stronger than the US dollar, so I'd just agreed to something faintly insane without realising it.
Gabby picked me up at the airport. I remembered her from a previous trip — a few years older than me, and, if I'm honest, rather striking. We drove off toward the apartment.
What happened next is its own chapter.