By the end of March 2012 I was in about as crappy a place as I'd been in my adult life. MPS was behind me, Mauritius had been a disaster, I was unemployed, running out of money and my kids were all overseas. I had no idea where my future was, or if I had one. I had never felt so alone.
What I didn't know was that behind the scenes, quite a lot had been going on.
Sciforma, based in Los Gatos, California, had been bought out by its own French franchisee — Yann Le Bihan's Agencies, the crowd we had visited a couple of years earlier — and the newly enlarged company was on an expansion drive. Part of that drive was buying MPS Australia back from Francois outright and renaming it Sciforma Australia. Just like that, the Sydney office stopped being Francois's satellite and became the official Sciforma Sydney office. Maurya, who was running it for him, went across as part of the deal.
I'd always had a good relationship with Maurya. She'd been impressed with my knack for landing big tenders when Francois had flown me out to Sydney a couple of times, and with my presentation skills once they had bought PSNext. What I hadn't known was that she'd agreed to head up Sciforma Australia only on the condition that she could bring me with her — she knew I was on the market, and she wanted me in Sydney as her senior consultant.
So the phone call, when it came, came out of nowhere. Did I want a job. Senior consultant. Sydney. Working with her.
Yes. Yes. Fucking triple yes.
The next thing to arrive was a contract, 66K USD per year, not too shabby, and then an email from an immigration lawyer, engaged by Maurya to get me a working visa. That turned into its own small ordeal — tuberculosis tests, medicals, a stack of paperwork — and then, having done everything asked of me, there was nothing left to do but wait.
It was Niels and Carey who solved the waiting for me. Why sit on your own in South Africa, they said, when you could come and wait it out with us in Denmark.
So I set about dismantling a life. I sold what furniture I could and gave away the rest — a lot of it went to Dave and Kim. The hardest thing to let go of, oddly, wasn't anything of value. It was a box of university notes I'd carried with me for years, moved from house to house, because I'd been so proud of the marks they'd got me. In the end I gave them to a young black fellow at Cash Converters who'd shown an interest in them. I hope they did him some good.
Then I got on a plane. I was nervous as hell. One of the things worrying me was that I had been on prescribed antidepressants for years, as well as sleeping pills — specifically Mirtazapine and Zopiclone. How was I going to access these in Denmark?
Niels picked me up at Copenhagen airport and drove me south, about thirty kilometres out of the city, to a village called Jersie. He and Carey were renting an old farmhouse there — 1678 on the door, if I remember right — a long, low building that had been converted for living in, with a big attic on one side and more rooms built into the attic on the other, and a big enclosed garden behind it.
Niels and Carey had sold up in White River and come out of it with a decent amount of money, but no clear idea yet of what to do with themselves. I could see Niels doing what Niels always did, which was circling for the next opportunity. And one day, not long after I arrived, they came to me with one.
They wanted to start a business looking after people's dogs.
There was a small tragedy sitting underneath the idea. A couple of years earlier Niels had accidentally run over and killed their own Maltese poodle, and they hadn't had a dog of their own since. But they'd been minding dogs for friends as a favour, and they were good at it, and they'd started to wonder if there was a living in it.
So sure, I said. What do you need from me?
A website, they said. And some way of getting people to find it.
I built them one on Joomla and set up a Google Ads campaign, skills I had learnt by being a jack-of-all-trades at MPS. We called it Lille Hunde Ferie — "little dog holiday" in Danish. The budget Google suggested was something modest, fifty kroner a day or thereabouts. We went live and sat back to wait.
Not twenty minutes later, Niels's phone rang, and we had our first customer.
I heard a stream of frantic Danish on the other end. Niels cut him short. "Sorry — do you speak English?" Most Danes did. Niels, fifteen years in the country by then, still couldn't manage a word of it. That's another story.
The caller had flown to Bornholm for the weekend with his kids and left his young husky puppy with friends. The friends had just called to say that if he didn't come and get the dog, it was going out on the street — it was jumping on the kids, biting, general chaos. Niels didn't hesitate. Sure, no problem, we're on it. He and Carey tore off in the car and came back an hour later with the dog. His name was Aslan.
We were in business.
The next customer was a Doberman-Great Dane cross the size of a small horse, belonging to a young, sophisticated gay couple from Copenhagen. His name was iDog. The whole premise of Lille Hunde Ferie was small dogs looked after in the house, no kennels, nothing industrial about it — and iDog was, without exaggeration, one of the biggest dogs I have ever seen in my life. Carey was horrified. Niels was not about to turn down a second customer in his first week of trading, and iDog moved in and set about redecorating the farmhouse from one end to the other.
Then came customer number three, whose parents wanted to inspect the property before committing. I was lying in bed the night before the visit, listening to Niels and Carey arguing through the wall about the plain fact that nobody who saw iDog in full flight was ever going to leave a dog with them. The business would be over before it started.
So I offered the only contribution I could think of. Let me take iDog for a long walk while you show the new people around, I said. Ring me when the coast is clear and I'll bring him back. They were pathetically grateful.
Taking iDog for a walk turned out to be the wrong way to describe it. iDog took me for a walk. I was dragged across the hills and fields of southern Jersie by a dog with more raw horsepower than I had known a dog could possess, hanging on with both hands, waiting for my phone to ring. Eventually it did. The coast was clear. I brought iDog home, and Niels and Carey had their third customer.
That business, it turned out, was built to succeed. But I was still waiting on my own papers and running out of meds. There was no way in hell I was going to admit to Niels and Carey that I was taking meds for a mental issue. In their world of "harden the fuck up," that would simply be unimaginable to me. I lived with the shame of my condition, the way many people unfortunately do.
This had been a pattern my whole life. I could never discuss my mental health issues with them. If you couldn't cope, or you were struggling, it was simply put down to weakness of character in their eyes, so my whole life I had done my best to hide it from them. I don't even believe I ever told them about my ECT treatment back in 2002, which I outlined in an earlier chapter.