And I thought I was doing well by making little rules, like never holding too much of anything and staying away from the jealous drugs, crack, tik, I talked myself into smoking some heroin once but never into putting it in my blood—
But slowly, slowly
Recognising less and less when I’d catch sight of myself in a mirror or a shop window—and I guess I can see it now
I wasn’t falling, I was throwing myself
Further and further into what, I suppose, was a state of being I thought befitted some guy whose fucking dad had died around a trashfire in some field ten blocks away.
One night I remember feeling like I wanted to spread my pain around town, and I grabbed the last couple of these pills I’d snuck from some dude who’d been shot but got over it really quickly—these pills that made you feel like a shark swimming in a sea of ether—and I went down the corridor and I found Heksie, who was famous even around The Rainbow Lodge for the variety of stuff he was into and his willingness to mix.
He happened to be at the tail end of a spree and he was desperate for something to help him pass out, so I traded him the pills for a bit of yellow-looking coke and I went back to my room and rolled myself a zingarette.
I smoked it in the shower at the YMCA and at the time I didn’t know if it was because I’d been off it for a few days, or if I just had the water too hot or something, but that bright little headrush you normally get turned into something much bigger—this blinding, swoony heartflowering—and this hardly ever happens to me but I burned to go somewhere and be around people, to talk to them, to have them bump into me
And in the mirror the face I scraped my razor across was smiling, and I went back to my room and changed into nicer clothes, and just so it was ready to put straight up my nose later on, I found two painkillers and I emptied the powder out the capsules and packed the coke inside. I walked into town. It was warm and there wasn’t any wind.
I ended up going to the Kimberley Hotel because I knew even if nothing was going on I wouldn’t be the only guy drinking alone at the downstairs bar—and those old guys, the full-time drinkers, always like to talk. But it turned out there was some music happening upstairs that night and the place was packed; even the upstairs balcony was crowded. I wasn’t out there long before I heard some drums and some fuzzy electric guitars start up inside, then people started heading into the band room. I was going to use that as my cue to go bump one of those capsules in the toilet. I got up and as I went round to the door
I saw Phil sitting at a table in the other corner of the balcony.
It was him and two other guys, same kind of hair as him, similar clothes, and then about six or seven girls—no one I recognised from the house in Rondebosch—and their table was full of empty glasses and bottles and they were laughing and you could tell, you could tell from a mile away, they were banged up on something that had a real beat to it.
I really wanted to go over there and sit down at the table with them—maybe talk to the one girl about the tattoos on her long, thin arms—but I was only a bit drunk and probably the cleanest I’d been at 10 p.m. in months and months, and I felt too shy to do anything except lurk at the door and hope Phil’d look over and see me and be friendly.
He did look over, and he did see me.
And the look that spread over his face, I swear, it’ll be with me forever—
Guilty and scornful, ashamed and angry all at the same time—
I looked away but it felt like I was still seeing it, even after I’d ducked inside and after I’d gone into the bathroom and locked the door, there it was still, this indelible watermark on all the stuff I saw around me.
Fuck him, right?
What a prick.
But that’s not all I was feeling.
Clouding the anger, there was a duller, softer sensation—defeat, hopelessness fulfilled, that sweet sense of giving over—
And I got one of the capsules out my pocket and unscrewed the top and I held it under my nostril
And I blew the whole thing in one go.
And everything that happened after that—and I mean for days after, maybe weeks—in my mind at least, it’s all bonded to that little plastic pill.
There was definitely something extra in that yellow stuff I guessed was coke in Heksie’s room. I felt it as soon as I sniffed, this sizzling between my eyes and a firetrail through my blood, then these swinging bouts of strength and queasiness. I knew right away that’s why the zingarette had hit me so hard earlier—
And I just had to sit there on the toilet with my face in my hands and try coach myself into being alright. Someone came and banged on the door. I kept quiet and they kept banging, it seemed like it went on for ages. I waited them out, but then it happened again and then again, and I knew I had to get out of there before someone called a bouncer or something—
And I unlocked the door and I spilled out into a world that streamed past me like headlights, onrushing blurs of heat and colour and I had no bearings and I badly needed air
And I forced myself through the noise and the UV wash in the upstairs bar and back out onto the balcony. The cool air blew away some of the fever and things started swimming back into focus. I was covered in a greasy kind of sweat and I really, really just wanted to go home—
And I suppose I might’ve been staring, or maybe just hanging too close to their table, I’m not sure, I wasn’t really noticing anything—
But next thing I knew, Phil’d come over and he was leaning close to me and talking right down into my ear. He wasn’t shouting—I think he was trying to be as cool as possible—but he rasped his words and I could tell he was trying to make me scared.
He asked me what the fuck my problem was. I was ner- vous and I told him everything. About how I’d just bunged a pepperball by mistake and how I was just trying to get some air before I went home—I promised him I just wanted some air and then I was going home
But it didn’t slow him down, he pressed in closer and then I remember he pulled my hair so my eyes and my ears were both close to his mouth, so I had to watch him say things at me—stuff like how we weren’t the same, him and I, how he wasn’t like me and he never was, and how his life was even better now and I just needed to fuck off, this was his bar tonight.
I had enough money for a taxi but the thought of catching one didn’t even cross my mind.
I started walking home—hating myself, nearly boiling over with it—and then when I got to the Adult World on Victoria Road, standing there under the throbbing neon and feeling it put a kind of sheen on me, feeling like it was very close, the world outside, and if I could just pass over I’d be okay, I got the other capsule out and opened it and stuck it up the other side of my nose.
It was all blurred swathes of orange light and shadows
Ghouls on the pavement
Cars passing soundlessly
A world of patterns I sped through like wind. It was mind free and it was wonderful, all the way down Lower Main and I did two loops of the last block home and even for a while after I’d gone into my room and stretched out on the bed, I remember there was a time there where I wasn’t thinking—I was just seeing, breathing, feeling …
Before the claws sunk in
And then I could hear them, and then I couldn’t stop hearing them—
Berating voices—a whole coven of them chanting in the dark.
All the classic ones. I hated myself for the drugs I was on, and I hated myself for every drug I’d ever taken and for the fact that deep down I knew I was always going to want to take more. I hated that I was lying in a bed in a warehouse in Salt River, and that if I showered the next day, I’d do it in a YMCA down the road where people bet things like drugs and women on games of pool. Most of all, I thought about my dad and I hated myself for everything there but especially for not stopping that day, when that might’ve been him, fucking begging on the side of the road—
And it shocked me, the coldest thing I’d ever felt—
&n
bsp; You hit twenty-seven three months ago, Ed.
How much smart money’s down on you turning things around from here?
On really bad comedowns like that—it started after I’d skipped town but then it was like a recurring thing for me—I’d worry about dying with my life in that kind of state. And I used to get this picture come to me, this vision, of my soul skulking around in the afterlife all haggard and drawn, nursing an eternal grudge against me for the things I did to it down here on earth. It used to make me sad, that image of my soul up there like an old guy in a gown smoking outside a hospital, sometimes sad enough to keep me sober for a decent spell.
But that night after the Kimberley Hotel, I wasn’t feeling sad and I wasn’t worrying about dying—I was worrying about not dying. I was scared about what was going to happen to me if I wasn’t stopped.
Finally it started to get light outside and I got out of bed and found my backpack and packed in the few loose clothes I had lying around. I found my box of keepsakes and I put that in as well. I counted the money I had left and I winced
But I went to Heksie’s room anyway to see if he had anything to sell me for the road.
His door was open, as usual, and his lights were on. What I expected to see was him sitting in his chair, this rotting velvet wingback thing he’d picked up off the street, with his big pair of headphones plugged into his phone, eyes closed, arms pumping, sweat dripping off his face
But, instead, he was passed out, he was completely gone. Lying on his mattress in such an unnatural position you might’ve thought he was dead.
I was going to back out of his room, turn off the lights, close his door
But then I saw his envelope lying on the chair—a green one, which meant it was Thursday—stuffed full of cash on its way to Ken.
And then I heard—not for the first time in my life—this voice shot with all the excitement of a Promethean gambit, urging me to Take it! Take it!
I grabbed it and put it in my backpack, but then—just so Ken didn’t think it was Heksie who’d fucked him over—I took out a shirt people would recognise was mine and left it on the chair, just where I found the envelope. For a second I baulked, knowing I was in the process of condemning myself to The Noticeboard—
But then I thought, Fuck it, you’ll never be back.
The way ahead’s got nothing to do this with place.
Go, Ed.
Just go.
I got my backpack on and I turned off Heksie’s light and closed his door. I walked down the dark corridor and stopped just before the entrance, right in front of one of the cameras.
I looked up at it and waved. Then I put my hands together, like I was praying—
And then I threw them up in the air, as if to say
Please, Ken, have mercy.
I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing either.
Outside the morning was bright and misty, the pale sun showing in the sky like a cheap pearl, and I could hear foghorns out in the harbour—this low, resonant dirge for a life I hoped was coming to an end.
I could feel it—it was time to take a run at living sober again.
Maybe you’ll finally start growing up.
At Salt River Station, I stared at all the names of the places on the map until finally one started speaking to me. Muizenberg. There was a guy at The Rainbow Lodge who always got so nostalgic about Muizenberg when he got high.
Two nights at a church haven battling with chills and muscle spasms and nightmares about Ken sending people to come and find me
Then forcing myself out to find a newspaper and—unbelievably easily, actually, considering I needed to find a place that didn’t need a deposit—
Finding my cottage, and moving in. Quite a cool, run-down, mostly furnished little place near the train tracks, next to some open land with a stagnant marsh and some reeds and ducks. Then just hiding out and sleeping a lot, and taking little walks into the village at sunset to get food and to remind myself that there were so many people out there and they didn’t need to get high to make it between sleeps—
And bit by bit, the fear of Ken bled out of me completely—
And all I had in front of me was that same blank dawn I’d shied away from so many times before.
When I couldn’t sleep because of the trains but I was too depressed to get out of bed, or when I was craving too badly to let myself out the house, I wrote lists, in the same book I used for my dreams, of things I should start doing with myself if I was really serious about changing. The lists started short but then they got longer and longer—and then they started to get short again. The last one I made:
Eat better.
Find a job you’re not going to hate.
Read more.
You can have a cigarette sometimes if you really need it but DON’T START smoking again. NO weed.
Get some fucking exercise.
Fall in love.
Go to meetings.
All of that—or kill yourself.
Either way.
I’D ONLY BEEN ON THE WAGON FOR A FEW MONTHS—
Even if it felt way longer—
And not once, not for a whole hour of one fucking day, did I really feel calm about it, or serene, or like I had it properly under control. I’d catch myself doing sad, ridiculous things—one day I walked about twenty kays, round trip, to feed a dog in a garden in Fish Hoek that had looked miserable when I went past it the day before.
Really, just trying to kill off hours
Wanting all the time—and that gentle wrack of not having most days stoked a feeling of injustice in me strong enough to close out my interest in the daylight, and force me back to bed, again and again, to cry or berate myself till I just let go and fell asleep.
And the worst of all: when I’d dream about drugs, and feel so happy, and I’d stay happy for ten, twenty seconds after I woke up—before I’d remember the way things actually were, what my life really was now, and then that curtain would come falling down again and I’d try anything to get back to sleep and into the dream but it was always too late.
Ja, some days I could feel a bit noble about my efforts, and very rarely I’d get these rills of stoicism running through me
But it was somewhere in this hazy stretch that I met Charlotte—and honestly, it was only then that the idea I could actually change my life got any kind of breath or colour in it.
Without her … who knows?
Very quickly, she became a kind of solution to me. This new thing in the world. This shadow-fox that all my hounding thoughts could chase and chase—
While I lay there in bed, feeling desperate and tragic—determined to stay alive at least until I was sure I couldn’t have her.
And then one morning hauling myself off to the bathroom.
Finding my jeans, finding the pillbox in the change pocket.
Flushing everything in there down the toilet
And smiling, telling myself, Give it one more chance, Ed.
One more chance to let you down.
And here’s proof.
Here’s proof you really tried.
THE REST OF APRIL
THINKING ABOUT HER ALL THE TIME made me see her everywhere.
On the street, on the beach, in cars going by, sitting in restaurants, even on TV once or twice—mostly they were young girls who just looked like her till I looked closer, though sometimes my heart went a bit crazy and leapt at anything that was even roughly her size or shape.
One afternoon I followed a boy for four blocks, getting closer and closer, surer and surer
Before he pulled down his hoodie and turned round and told me to los hom uit.
One morning I did the same thing to a woman who must’ve been sixty.
THE BEST DAY
THERE WERE THREE DAYS TILL THE NEXT MEETING—
I’d missed one because of bad nerves—
And I figured it’d probably help my confidence if I could tell her I’d found some kind of job since the last time she saw me. Tha
t’s normally the first thing people do. Well, normally they get religious first, but then they get jobs
And I knew what I needed—
Never mind how I was actually feeling—
What I needed was for her to believe I was strong.
I was doing it.
I was getting there.
So one morning, I was awake and thinking long before I heard the trains, and I got myself out of bed and spent a while in the bathroom and I made an effort to look alright, and then I made sure I ate some breakfast and then for about half an hour I sat with my dream book and I only wrote positive things in it. Then I went out in the weak sun and bought a Voice of the Village and a Tattler and some coffee, and I sat on a bench on Atlantic Road and started looking through all the classifieds.
If you count selling drugs and if you count working for my dad when I was sixteen, I’ve had eleven different jobs in my life. Finding them’s never really been the hard part. I’ve bartended, I’ve waited, I’ve signed people up outside a gym, I helped out an old lady in a library who cried when I left, for about two months all I did was wipe dew off second-hand cars in a lot in Kenilworth. I’ve worked at a crystal shop, I’ve worked at a kennel, I’ve taken tickets at a movie house, I’ve raked leaves out the driveway and into piles on the lawn outside a spa, and still, nothing’s ever been worse than selling Golden Products door to door with my dad. That was the first and I had to do it in the school holidays and—with the way stuff turned out for him and me—sometimes I worry that experience might’ve killed off my work ethic forever.
I tried three places that day.
A cool-looking bar right in the village, right in the heart there with the cobblestones and the gaslights, but they’d already found somebody. The library, but it turned out they were looking for someone who’d actually studied librarianship—apparently that’s a thing, it takes a couple of years and you have to do it at a university. A beauty place that was looking for someone to answer the phone and make bookings, but they told me they wanted a woman. They actually thought I was joking when I went in and asked.
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