Nobody tells you that the thing you'll miss most about a job is the simple obligation of it — somewhere to be, a reason to put on a shirt. The day I stopped having that, something came loose in me. I was working for myself now, out of a basement flat in Northcliff, and I'll say this for the place: the location was lovely. It sat beneath a big house with a big swimming pool and plenty of room for the dogs — Annabelle, Lady and Rosie had the run of it. On paper it was idyllic. In practice I was more alone than I'd been in years.
The family had scattered to the four winds. Mikey was in Copenhagen, Angie and Olie were in Nigeria, Niels and his lot were long gone. I was the last of us left in South Africa, rattling around a basement at the bottom of someone else's garden, having walked out of a secure job at the bottom of a global recession on a hunch. The future, which a few months earlier had felt full of doors, now felt like a long corridor with all of them shut.
I did the one thing I'd resigned in order to be able to do: I contacted Sciforma directly. I told them I'd left MPS, that I was available, that there wasn't much about PSNext I didn't know, and that I'd very much like to come and work for them. They were warm about it. They were genuinely interested. They also didn't have anything for me right then. And here is where I have to be honest about my own naivety, because the truth is I'd half expected an offer to materialise more or less on the strength of those conversations at Sciforma Days — all that warmth, all that mutual admiration in the room. I'd let it convince me. It hadn't occurred to me that warmth and a job are two entirely different things, and that the second one runs on its own slow clock. The trouble with being a free agent is that the word "free" does a great deal of quiet work. Free of a salary, mostly.
That Christmas — the end of 2011 — I went to Denmark, to stay with Niels and Carey and the boys and to see Mikey. And it was there, in the cold, that I lost the Rolex.
It had been my twenty-first present from Briony, and I'd worn it for the best part of three decades. New Year's Eve, I was standing in the enormous crowd outside Tivoli, filming the fireworks, when two women — Eastern European, I guessed — appeared at my shoulder and asked me for a light. I told them I didn't have one. This did not deter them in the slightest. I was to come to their party, they informed me; I was coming with them, no argument. One took me firmly by the arm. And the other reached down and took hold of me, with great confidence, somewhere a good deal more private than the arm. So there I stood, a grown man in a Danish crowd, a camera held aloft in one hand, one stranger gripping my elbow and another gripping my testicles, explaining with as much dignity as the situation allowed that I was here with my family, who were, ah, just over there. They lost interest as suddenly as they'd found it, and melted back into the crowd. It was only ten minutes later, when I stepped away for a leak, that I realised the watch was gone. I had to admire the choreography, even as it sank in that I'd never see it again.
I came home to a Johannesburg summer and the slow, undignified business of running out of money. The windfall that had bought me a little courage was thinning out, Sciforma still had nothing, and web design — for all that I was reasonably good at it — was not making anyone rich. I wasn't sleeping. The anxiety I've written about elsewhere was back and louder than ever, and I was doing the worst possible thing about it, which was drinking to quieten it. The dangerous part isn't the drinking. The dangerous part is that I knew precisely what I was doing — knew that using alcohol to medicate anxiety is a door that only opens one way — and did it anyway, while at the same time fussing over a juicer and a cupboard full of supplements, eating cleanly, trying to undo with one hand what I was busy doing with the other.
Which is roughly the state I was in, around my birthday in March 2012, when I started spending my mornings at Dave and Kim's dining-room table in Blairgowrie. They very kindly let me work there, and the truth was I needed the company. It was Kim who had the idea. "You remember Belinda?" she said one morning. I did — Belinda, from the Dullstroom days. She'd been around our age back then, in her twenties, and she'd once confided to Kim, who was her best friend, that she thought I was rather the ideal sort of man.
I should explain why that lodged. I'd grown up convinced I was the runt of the litter. Niels and Briony were the good-looking ones; I was the skinny one, the afterthought, and I carried no great opinion of my ability to turn a head. It was only in the Dullstroom years — married to Terry, and quietly astonished to find myself getting hit on with some regularity — that it dawned on me I might have an appeal of my own. So Belinda's old verdict still flattered the boy in me, all these years later.
She was living in Mauritius now, Kim said, with some high-powered job, and she'd love to have me out for a couple of weeks. Why not ask her, I said. Kim, it turned out, already had. And so I booked my tickets.
In hindsight the packing tells you everything. I took the juicing machine. The whole machine. Along with a small pharmacy of vitamins and supplements — and, in my jacket pocket, a stash of prescription sleeping pills and antidepressants. The saving hand and the sinking hand, zipped into the same suitcase, off to Mauritius.
It nearly ended at the airport. Going through customs I noticed a man in a dark suit pacing slowly behind the row of officials, glancing at me, then glancing again. As I went through I was pulled aside and held for the better part of two hours while they went through my luggage with a fine-tooth comb, plus a myriad of questions. They were convinced I was bringing drugs onto the island — a place where, if I'm not mistaken, that carries the death penalty. The exquisite joke, of course, was that the only actual drugs I had were the prescription ones sitting in the jacket pocket they never once thought to search.
Belinda's driver was waiting on the other side, unbothered, and we drove north to a complex of townhouses where she had a lovely double-storey, three bedrooms, the works. Six units, as I recall, every one of them occupied by South African expats, and among them some of the dodgiest characters I've ever shared a postcode with. That first night Belinda made her move, and we ended up in bed, and it was an unmitigated disaster — the kind where some clear, sober part of you sits up and says, very plainly, I cannot do this. It turned out that whatever my own problem with drink was, Belinda was in another league entirely. Vodka first thing in the morning. Drinking, steadily, all day long. I'd come all this way and found my own worst habit waiting for me, magnified, wearing someone else's face.
I knew I'd never sleep with her again. I also knew that the couple of strikingly attractive expat women who made their intentions fairly plain over the following days were not an option — you do not, whatever else you do, repay a woman's hospitality by working your way through the friends she's introduced you to in her own backyard. So I just drank instead. The remaining ten days dissolved into a fog of it. At one point a man I barely knew gave me a ride on the back of a superbike, and I watched the speedometer climb past 180, 190 kilometres an hour as we tore down through the sugar plantations all the way to the south of the island and back. How I am alive to write this I genuinely do not know. And then, as if to underline the whole sorry business, a cyclone came through and shut the island down, and we sat locked indoors for a couple of days with nothing to do but drink some more.
I flew home from Mauritius frightened, and with one thought arranged very clearly in my mind: something had to change, drastically, or this was not going to end well.
The first thing waiting for me was Annabelle, who was not doing well.
One of Mikey's friends had house-sat while I was away. She'd been struggling for a long time by then — hip dysplasia, getting worse by the month — and I'd taken her to the vet more than once before I left, hoping for something, anything. There was nothing to be done; the vet had been gentle but clear about that. By the time I got back she was in too much pain to go on, and there was only one decision left to make. I took her in and I held her while they put her to sleep. She went very quietly, the way they do, and I stood there holding a dog I'd loved for years, in the middle of the worst stretch of my adult life, and felt something in me give way completely.
It wasn't that I was doing nothing to save myself. That whole stretch, I was trying — clumsily, and against the current I was creating myself, but trying. I was reading, properly reading: Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now, which genuinely helped, and Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, which was simply brilliant and which I think I needed more than I understood at the time. I ran, again and again, up to the top of Northcliff koppie, as though I could outpace the thing if I just got high enough above the city. There was a lovely man named John Mayer — about fifteen years older than me, who'd been mine and Terry's personal trainer back in the Fishy Pete's heyday. He owned a small gym, and the thing about John was that he'd lost everything, at roughly the age I was then, and built it all back again. He knew exactly what the bottom looked like. He let me train for nothing, and on Sunday mornings we'd play squash. The plain discipline of making an appointment and keeping it turned out to matter more than I'd have guessed. My emotions were all over the place — at Pete Becker's forty-fifth I gave him my entire collection of handmade knives, the whole lot, just handed them over.
And still I drank. Still I didn't sleep. For all the reading and the running and the squash, I knew, with the particular clarity that comes after you've frightened yourself badly enough, that I was in a very bad way indeed.
My GP recommended a psychologist, and I started seeing her. Her name was Frankie, and she really helped. I was entirely open about the drinking and how much it was worrying me. She assured me that although it was clearly too much, I wasn't exhibiting alcoholic behaviour — no blackouts, no binges, no risky behaviour. I drank at night, when I wanted to sleep and couldn't. It was still too much.
Things were about to change for the better, with one unexpected phone call.