Scorched and Burned.
I guess, in writing my story, I had used similar tactics to that adopted by Stalin against the Nazis in World War II. My own Scorched Earth policy – a military strategy that involves destroying, often burning, anything that might be useful to the enemy while advancing through or withdrawing from an area. Somehow, owning your own truth, your own disaster, gives you a little more power than if others own your truth. My book was pretty hardcore stuff, not easily forgotten or forgiven. But somehow of great benefit – and despite the path of destruction it may have left in its wake – to the perpetrator; in my case, to me, the writer. In the case of my family, for many years, it created instant and long-term alienation.
In fact, despite a number of attempts at apology, it took a long time before any real reconciliation with my sister ever took place. These days we were forced to keep a geographical distance. She lived in the north. In Sweden, to be precise. In the ice. I preferred the south. It was warmer.
It takes a lot to say sorry, but perhaps it takes even more to forgive.
She had sounded sweet on the phone, this Hotel Hospital Genie woman. Motherly, even. Not like my stern Germanic mother. Fuck. Suddenly I missed her. It happened sometimes, leaping out of nowhere; a longing for my mom would sweep in, at a traffic light, in a queue. Quite uninvited, it would arrive like a black crow and nestle in my neck and drag out my tears.
She’d been buried almost a decade. Cremated, actually. Even though our mother was never one who would go along with any of those Eastern beliefs, my sister had insisted that she be burned. With death, our mom had lost her right to argue.
At the end all we had was a little box of ashes. I don’t think my mother would have approved.
Truth be told, I hadn’t really liked her. Loved her – sure, she was my only parent – but liked? No, not very much at all when she’d been alive.
But here, about to check into this strange clinic that looked like a hotel, I felt my aloneness, my umbilical cordless-ness so acutely that the ache all but ripped right into the place where they had once cut and tied the feeding line at birth. I had never felt further away from a place called home, even when I had been homeless. A little speck spinning in some faraway black hole. Lost out there in the horizonless Star Trek of a place they call space.
The feeling of free falling might have had something to do with the fact that I had hardly told a soul I was heading here. Not even my brother. The one person I did tell, however, was my publisher at The Magazine. Concerned by my recent downward spiral, I think she was relieved to see me go off to get help.
It must have been hard not to notice that I had been growing progressively more fucked up at work since The Crash. Drowning daily in a symphony of wayward sobs. Sometimes hourly. Over the past six months, tears had spread like the slime of nuclear waste; I had shed so many that they had all but eaten through the thread-bare office carpet that coated the floor beneath my swivel chair.
But yesterday was by far the worst. Even before I got in to work, the tears had already taken me hostage. Although who could blame me really? After what happened on The Weekend.
By the time the two young journos I managed got to the office, I was crouched on the floor. Half kneeling, and rocking like a crazy daisy. Awkwardly, they tried to comfort me, but as I looked up helplessly at them, I noticed the “What the fuck are we to do with the boss?” fear in their eyes. That really made me howl. I didn’t care that by this stage 30-or-so people, including the entire Sales and Marketing team and writers from two other magazines, were peering over from their desks. I felt no shame. The ability to control myself had long since left as I leopard crawled back to my station.
It was at that point that I Googled the clinic. A white mansion-like building filled the screen. It looked like airbrushed heaven, or at the very least, like a five-star hotel. Sounds of tranquillity accompanied the visuals. They may have mixed in a few early-morning bird calls, which faded into a stream bubbling over smooth pebbles … Contact numbers appeared on the top left of the screen. The toll free 086 number was discreet.
So I had made the call.
Now, perched on the edge of the leather couch in reception, I prayed no one I knew would see me. What if someone from Narcotics Anonymous had booked in? Or perhaps someone I knew was working as a counsellor here? I knew a few addicts who had done that. Become counsellors when they got clean. They had usually fucked up their lives so badly – lying, stealing, running from the cops and SARS – that they were mostly unemployable, so had little choice but to open rehabs. Establish secondary care, halfway establishments. Sober houses.
To give nobility to the cause, someone would inevitably quote Step 12 of the programme: “Help the addict who still suffers.” But in some instances it looked, to me, a lot like the blind leading the blind, and over time I had grown increasingly suspicious that many of those who established these “recovery” facilities had ulterior motives: ego and money. The two were intertwined. In fact, some of them were actually more wasted in the head than the addicts they were taking large amounts of money from to “help”. And then of course there were the Svengalis who used their sexual magnetism to prey on newly clean addicts, who invariably fell to pieces after they’d been fucked with and often went back “out there” to use again. A lot came close to dying, some even did.
Sitting in reception, I suddenly saw the insanity of my train of thought. Here I was, at this pathetically low juncture in my life, and I was taking the world’s inventory. That’s what we addicts often do; the more fucked up we feel inside, the easier it is to glare at the world and shoot scud missiles at anything that moves.
At this inglorious point of my existence I’d slid right down to Step 1, blubbering my way back to “I came to believe that my life was unmanageable”. Lately I had really been struggling to admit that there was a power greater than me that could restore my sanity.
I hadn’t been to a meeting in months. It felt like the more fucked up I was getting, the more I was struggling to get into the circle of NA again. I knew this was a bad place for me to be. In fact, the last time I had actually really shared at a meeting was on 1 September 2013. My 14-year clean birthday. The Crash had happened on 2 September.
Right now, as I peeped from behind my blinkers and confronted the state of my being, I was terrified. How could it all have gone so horribly wrong?
“Hey, Mel! What are you doing here. Have you come to share?”
Fuckfuckityfuck. Just what I’d dreaded. I recognised the voice immediately. “My name is Jax – I’m an addict” – an older guy I’d met in Yeoville back in the nineties. Before I’d started smoking heroin and crack. Jax, who had once walked up and down Rocky Street, bare-footed and unkempt, selling wind chimes to feed his intravenous smack habit. Although I had noticed back then how swollen and purple his sandalled feet always looked, I had been innocent enough to be entirely unaware of the ravages that heroin leaves behind.
Today expensive trainers covered those toes.
He had always been cool to me, especially in those early days when I stumbled into the rooms of recovery, fresh off the streets of Hillbrow, crack-skittish, skinny and coughing like a hag. He’d welcomed me.
He had been almost two years clean by the time we had reconnected at one of my first NA meetings back in 1999. Two whole fucking years. That had seemed like an impossibility for me back then. Stringing 24 hours together felt like Everest. Never mind a full 365 days x 2 = 730 fucking days. No fucking way could I even begin to grasp that.
Clean-shaven, smiling and employed, I’d barely recognised him. Later I would become tremendously inspired by the transformation I saw in him.
At six