Читать книгу Crashed - Melinda Ferguson - Страница 13

I said it all started with The Crash. But sometimes, when you look back at a powerful life-changing event that implodes, there are a whole bunch of mitigating factors that contribute to the actual explosion, the gunshot thwack, where the head cracks open like a big, pippy pomegranate.

So the actual trigger to me driving myself to the Hotel Hospital (in the Audi or the Alfa) was The Weekend. But the actual push-me-over-the-edge-of-the-cliff event had started six days earlier, before I checked in on Boyfriend on his birthday, April Fools’ Day.

But for all of these events to have taken place, The Weekend of the Break-Up has to be considered a leading cause. This had happened six weeks earlier. At a seven-star luxury hotel.

It had come as a total shock. Cold and icy even though the night was sweltering.

You know those times when you don’t see something until it hits you? Like a car accident, when you’re left-sided by a truck or when you aquaplane across a wet road. When you swallow a bee from a can of fizzy drink at an airport, cut yourself on the jagged edge of a tin while you’re feeding a homeless stray? That feeling when you get axed in the head from behind. Blood and guts of the heart stuff.

Just after Valentine’s Day (not that we celebrated that commercial cheese – we were both too cool for that), I had taken Boyfriend to a seven-star mountain getaway an hour and half out of town. A PR team representing the marketing of the hotel had been on my case for ages, relentlessly pursuing me (plus partner) to stay for two nights. The trip offered all expenses paid, including full access to the mini bar, and couple’s spa treatments. These were the obvious perks of working on a magazine. You get invited to things you could never normally afford, and get given gifts as veiled bribes in exchange for gushy editorial.

Of course, as “gratitude” for all the treats laid on, you’re expected to review it. Favourably, of course. Travel and motoring journos are unarguably the biggest hos for freebies in the media industry. We might not earn huge amounts, but what we are rich in is experience.

Wealth used to be judged by the amount of money you managed to accumulate. But things have been changing ever since the world economic meltdown that kicked off with the collapse of the global bank Lehman Brothers in September 2008, an event that exposed the fragility of the world’s economy and almost brought down the financial system of the entire planet.

As a result, today the world is regarded as a much less stable or predictable place. According to a recent life survey conducted by American Express, known as The Life Twist survey (due to the respondents’ overwhelmingly similar attitudes towards the twists and turns they had come to expect in life), being regarded as successful no longer entails having money. In fact material wealth was right down at number 22 of 24 priorities in the survey. Having experiences such as happy relationships and adventures were regarded as by far the most important in order to have a fulfilled and successful life.

By all accounts, being afforded plenty of opportunity to travel and savour sponsored adventures and experiences, I appeared to be living la vida loca, the envy of my friends and acquaintances. But, in reality, the majority of the time saw me playing in the playground of plastic.

Of course, most people would have immediately leapt at the opportunity to stay in a seven-star joint, but after almost a decade with The Magazine I had grown a strange aversion to the relentless hunters who called themselves PRs. I got a certain kick out of playing slippery cat-and-mouse games with them until they were salivating at the bit to have me agree to attend their launch or trip. Weird that I would get off on such pathetic power games but, shamefully, at that time I did. Looking back, I have come to believe the crappier you feel inside, the more you objectify and treat others badly.

Behind the scenes, me playing hard to get with the seven-star joint was utter bullshit on my part. I actually really didn’t need that much convincing. I was close to finishing my fourth book on the stump-legged athlete and I was exhausted. So the intention behind the getaway was twofold: to share some much-needed romantic time (read: sex) with Boyfriend, and to get some quiet space to at least make some headway into writing the introduction and author’s note for the book.

With matching his-and-hers Samsonite luggage packed, we were ready to leave by late Friday afternoon. We looked the perfect upwardly mobile seven-star couple as we drove into end-of-week get-out-of-town rush-hour traffic in the gorgeous new Jaguar XFR-S 5-litre, V8, 460kW, R1.4-million super sedan. With its 20-inch Varuna alloy wheels and Meridian sound system banging out the beats, my life felt pretty much complete. It’s amazing how material objects can be such a seductive drug of denial and amnesia and how a Jag can make you forget a Ferrari, even if it’s just for a few hours.

After checking in, we were taken in a golf cart to our VIP R7 000-a-night villa, perched on the edge of a never-ending smoky purple vista of mountains and valleys. The sweaty stiff-upper-lipped manager pointed out various high points: “The Jacuzzi is here, the mini bar here … This is the WiFi code … Breakfast is served from 7 am.”

I wished he’d leave. I’d visited enough upscale joints to know where everything was. How hard was it going to be to find the kettle, for fuck’s sake? In the end, besides minor décor details, all these swanky places looked pretty much the same. All I was really interested in was the damn WiFi code.

Fuck, I felt jaded. With the hotel man gone, surrounded by silence except for the whispering grass, and some faraway bird call, I found myself tumbling onto the triple king-size bed with 400-thread-count Egyptian linen.

Fuck, I was tired. I hadn’t realised just how exhausted I really was. I half-heartedly shouted for Boyfriend, who was texting from a recliner on the deck of the plunge pool, to join me in the bedroom. He probably couldn’t hear me. I didn’t even have the energy to wonder who was taking up so much of his energy. Too tired to be curious, I made a mental note of it. It was a good line. “Too tired to be curious to care.”

I closed my eyes and almost immediately drifted off into a deep slumber.

Boyfriend had been calling me narcoleptic for the past year. Maybe he was right, but I was usually asleep before he even got to -leptic. Truth be told, though, I was actually quite affronted by the label. There was nothing attractive about falling asleep all over the place – unless you were hot, like River Phoenix, of course. The only time I had ever come across an actual narco was River as Mickey, the half-asleep gay homeless hustler in My Own Private Idaho.

I loved that movie, especially River’s character, who called himself a “connoisseur of roads” because he had been “tasting roads all [his] life”. I guess he appealed to my sense of homelessness, never staying long enough in one place to allow grass to grow beneath my feet.

I remember when River died. It was September 1993. Just 23 years old, he had died of a speedball – a deadly cocktail of heroin and cocaine. Around that time I had just started playing around with smack – chasing the dragon. Melting sticky lines of brown heroin on silver tinfoil and inhaling the clouds of heady smoke through a foil tube. Despite being high as a kite, touching the clouds, I felt sad inside the day that River died. To help me forget, I lit another hit.

It was dark when I woke up in that king-size bed in the seven-star luxury hotel. I hated the grogginess you feel when you fall asleep at the wrong time, between that crack before day becomes night, and wake up feeling all wrong, like a chloroform cloud has invaded your brain.

The acrid smell of cigarette smoke that drifted in from the lounge area didn’t help.

Fuck. The one thing management had requested was no smoking in the villa. I had stopped eight years ago and I wasn’t one of those irritating non-smokers who held my nose and asked everyone else to abstain. Besides, I knew better than to ever say a word to Boyfriend when it came to his smoking. But still, right now I was the one responsible for the joint.

The blare of a Man United football match sliced through the silence.

I walked into the darkened lounge. He’d raided the mini bar, beer cans strewn all over the place. A bottle of red vintage wine stood open. R400 a pop. Merlot or Shiraz. It was too dark to tell.

“Darling? Uhmmm … Could you maybe smoke outside? You know, they asked me—”

“Fuck it!” he muttered, and hauled himself back onto the deck.

I hated that passive-aggressive thing he did.

“Okay, okay. Just not fight about it … Just calm down,” my inner voice placated me. I would later christen her Echo. “You’re here to rekindle the flames. Be nice to him. Put on that sexy little dress he gets hard for you in … and stop being so selfish. It’s not all about you.”

With Boyfriend, when all else failed, sex prevailed. We’d been together for almost nine years and the sex had never waned. Not one single bit. There was none of that usual bedroom boredom and tedium, that sense of being castrated by mundanity that often sets in between couples when you get to know each other inside and out. It was probably the most significant, and possibly even the only reason, why we were still together. I had never experienced anything quite like that in any of my previous relationships. Wasn’t it supposed to be “familiarity breeds contempt”?

The great sex might have had something to do with the fact that we’d never moved in together, had never shared a common space. He stayed in his house and I stayed in mine. That’s just the way he was. He had always been like that with girlfriends. Boundaries. Control. He was a “Treat them mean – keep them keen” kind of guy. After nine years of being together, I’d stopped thinking of it as weird. After nine years together, perhaps, I had lost the gift of discernment. Time can make a mockery of reason.

Although some of my friends in long-term relationships were envious of my verdant sex life, they definitely thought our living arrangement was strange. “When are you two going to move in together?” had become something of a mantra. I’d even stopped seeing most of them simply to avoid the questions.

But this was a first for me. This not-living-together thing.

I had always moved in with a dude, played housey-housey almost immediately with the man I “dated” and shagged. Looking back, some men who should have been one-night stands turned into four-year relationships because of immediate cohabitation. I had even married one. Boy 2 – the other one, the one who had been my husband.

But, unlike with Boyfriend, with all my live-ins, soon after the rose-tinted phase waned, we would slip into the creases in the couch. Watch television, slowly growing numb as the screen sucked all the passion and paused all the problems.

Then, finally, when a break-up was absolutely unavoidable – which was invariably long overdue – there’d be a screeching fight over fridges and coffee cups and knives and forks … Dogs were especially hard when it came to the division of spoils. Never share an animal, I learned.

So maybe Boyfriend was right about keeping eroticism alive by not sharing common space. But if I were really honest, as the years passed, in the Quest for Flesh, the emotional intimacy between us floundered below zero. It was all about priorities, he’d tell me. Keeping the erotic going required tactics of destabilisation.

A while back he had suggested that I read Mating in Captivity, a book by Esther Perel. Perel wrote that the reason why couples stop shagging is because, in modern-day relationships, we are expected to be both best friend and erotic partner. According to Perel, the two simply don’t mix. Once couples move in together, get to know each other, become “best friends” and lose the edge, desirability and sexual sparks go south. Living together, she says, kills desire, the whole “familiarity breeds contempt” philosophy. Couples get hooked on security, knowing each other totally, expecting their partners to know them completely. They look to each other and expect that each one will make the other feel whole, that they own and belong to each other. There is no gap for discovery, no surprise and, as a result, all desire is lost.

Perel goes on to question the real connection between love and desire. How do they conflict and not mix with each other? She comes up with an interesting conclusion. The verb that comes with love is to have and the verb that comes with desire it is to want. In other words, love is all about being close, knowing everything about the beloved, narrowing the stranger gap, obliterating the tension. Whereas when we are in a state of desire, we don’t want to know the end. We don’t have a sense of comfort or conclusion. With desire, we sense the adventure, the unknown; there’s an edge, a modicum of insecurity …

So it was that, in a weird just-woken-up haze of automation, I made my way back to the bedroom and took out my black sexy stockings and fuck-me heels. In the bathroom, I slipped on my little black dress, looked at myself in the mirror. I think I liked what I saw, but I wasn’t even sure of that. I looked tired. My reflection blurred before my eyes. My body morphed in and out of shape. At the time, I was a size 8. But, with my Body Dysmorphic glasses on, that could easily balloon into a size 12. I had to work fucking hard to keep it that way. Thin. Not too long ago, I had actually been a size 12 and I had even been a size 14 at one point.

“Sizeist,” the voice snarled.

It was true. I was obsessed by size. My own body shape had been tormenting me since I was a child. Growing up with an overweight older sister had elicited dread and terror in me. Additionally, a hugely critical mother always kept an eye on our weight and watched the contents of the fridge like a beady-eyed Nazi mouse. I have never forgotten the year her idea of a birthday present to my sister came in the form of a Weight Watchers diet plan, wrapped up in an envelope and tied with a bow.

By the age of 14 I was dieting insanely, shedding kilos like a moulting cat. Thin meant I was good, fat meant I was a failure. Dieting and deprivation became part of my everyday life, after waking up and before going to sleep, assessing whether I had been a “good” or a “bad” girl. But with serial dieting came starvation and a crazy desire to stuff my face. At least that’s how it was for me. Then, in order to stave off the inevitable weight gain and the insane sugar craving that comes from crash dieting, I began my long journey with Mistress Binge-and-Purge, otherwise known as Bulimia.

Of all the substances to which I have been addicted – and there have been many: heroin, crack, alcohol, dagga, ecstasy and nicotine – food has probably been the most deviant and the hardest to handle; sugar specifically, but actually food in all shapes, textures and flavours.

And if I was sizeist, Boyfriend was too – brutally so. It was thus quite logical that it would be on his watch that I’d lose the 15 kilos I’d accumulated over a period of about two years.

The weight gain had started surreptitiously after I’d stopped smoking – just when I had met him. That was during a crazy, dark time in my life when, within three days of kicking the nicotine, I’d learned that my mother was dying of pancreatic cancer. At the time I most needed the crutch of a Camel, I tossed it aside. But in ditching the cigarettes, I reached for food and the kilos began to pile on.

At first I hadn’t even noticed really, but slowly, like a devious fog creeping in, the jeans I’d previously slipped effortlessly into no longer fit that easily around the hips, struggling to close at the waist.

So I began to avoid certain outfits. I told myself that a too-hot wash was the reason the skirt was now too tight. When I tried on clothes in a store and realised I needed a bigger size, I blamed the new sizing systems. I stopped looking in the mirror, afraid of what I’d see, which was hard for me, because from the time I was little I had been kind of obsessed with my reflection.

When I asked Boyfriend whether I looked fat in an outfit, he would half grin and say: “What d’you think, Tubby?” Tubby! What kind of a fucking name was that? I kept my anger inside, of course – and reached for an extra helping of dessert instead.

Then one day I went to a doctor for something quite arbitrary. As part of the routine check-up, I was told to get on the scale and I weighed a whopping 75 kilos. Since giving up the cigarettes, I had put on 17 kilogrammes of flab. For someone my height, that was insane. How had that happened without me even noticing? I wept all the way home. Now each time I looked in the mirror a pale, puffy Bridget Jones stood before me, all plump and distended around my hips, ass and boobs. I hated what I saw. My outsides told me what an abject failure I was.

I now attacked my body mercilessly, willing and beating it into submission according to my grand plan. My gym membership, which had been on the verge of expiry, was suddenly reactivated. Cardio, in the form of spinning, became my daily ritual. I tried to cut out sugar and began to eat almost entirely vegetarian, which was easy because Boyfriend was a great veggie cook.

The scale became my daily companion. Every morning my worth greeted me by way of my weight in numbers. And slowly, over the next few months, the kilos melted away and by the end of that year I was back to a svelte me. I made a pact never to let my eye off the ball again.

And then one day, about a year before I admitted myself to Hotel Hospital, driving home from a particularly stressful day at The Magazine, I had a deep and inexplicable craving for something sweet. It was such an utterly overwhelming longing that it forced me to pull over at the service station around the corner from my home. Like a drugged-up zombie, I walked up and down the sweet aisles, surveying the display rows of Kit Kats, Tempos and Bar Ones. And then I reached the ice-cream fridge. Shiny ice-cream wrappers glinted back at me. Armed with my Almond Magnum, it felt like I had scored a gram of the best crack in town. By the time I got home it was finished.

The next day it happened again. And the next and the next and the next. By the end of the week, one ice cream had become two, adding the Classic to my Almond stash. I think one day I ate five. Sickly sweet icky sugar filling that hole in my soul that was suddenly getting a whole lot bigger.

Sugar had become my new addiction, my stress reliever, my surrogate mommy. It felt comforting knowing that I had something to rely on on dark and lonely days.

But on the flip side, the fear of ballooning, putting all that weight back on, screeched at me. I had already seen the scale’s needle move up two notches since my foray into ice cream. There was only one thing to do: get rid of it. And so, just as a fraudster deletes all evidence of the crime, I needed to remove all trace of my failing as soon as possible.

And so I found myself back with my head down the toilet bowl. The quick-and-easy “you can have your cake and eat it” solution. When things got really stressful – like after The Crash, or after The Weekend – I found my sugar craving to be as strong as my darkest days on heroin and crack.

By the time I booked into Hotel Hospital, in the week leading up to my self-admission, I had been fixing on sugar day and night.

At the seven-star luxury getaway, I avoided the sweets in the mini bar fridge. Instead I stared back at my reflection in the mirror in the bathroom while Boyfriend puffed away on the deck. It had become a habit of mine. Looking at myself. It reminded me that I was alive. On the outside I liked what I saw. On the inside I’d never been so lonely in my life.

I felt a bit like a Glock without a round – a bit like that Kid Cudi song that bounced around in my brain.

I checked my hip bones one more time and added a slick of matte red lipstick. Danger Red. Mac.

I went out to where he sat under the stars. He didn’t look up. He was still texting. In retrospect, I should have grabbed his phone there and then to find out who was keeping him so distracted. Instead I sidled closer.

Hardly noticing me at all, wine glass in hand, he moved straight past me and back inside. Man U had resumed their game after halftime. I had learned never to seek attention during a football match, so I sat on the couch opposite, waiting on the sidelines practising my best Stepford Wife glare.

When the final whistle blew I dug the heel of my fuck-me shoe into his crotch. He usually loved it when I did that. But this time he barely noticed. He got up abruptly, and moved outside again for another smoke. I hated it when he did that. Chose cigarettes, little nicotine sticks, over me.

“Play with yourself,” he commanded from the deck, muttered like a crumpled-up afterthought. I wasn’t really in the mood for masturbation. I had come all this way, made all this effort, to feel some skin. Suck his cock. Cum. Fuck.

I suddenly felt a wave of sleepiness wash over me. Jeez. Maybe I was a River Phoenix narco. Stay the fuck awake! I pinched myself. I forced myself up, moved to the deck. I sat on his lap, rubbing myself on his hardening crotch. He touched my breasts. He never could resist my tits. I leaned in closer. He pulled the straps down, his mouth finding my hardening nipples. I felt him get harder. God, I loved his cock. Then I was in the place he liked most. On my knees I unzipped him and went down on him, looking up. The way he loved it. Slowly. Gently, then all the way Down. It left me breathless. I felt him relax, close his eyes. I felt my worth rise as my mouth sucked and stroked his rock-hard cock. And all the erotic tension grew in the ink-black star-speckled night. And in all that alienated separation, desire returned.

He didn’t cum and neither did I that night.

A little later I went to the bedroom to fetch a jersey, found myself on the Egyptian cotton duvet, lay down for what I told myself would be five minutes and woke up three hours later as he bumped into the side table on his way inside. I could hear by the way he moved that he had made further inroads into the mini bar.

He smelt of whiskey and smoke.

He stumbled slightly and switched on the aircon. Like open-plan offices, the other thing I hate is fucking aircon.

“Please turn it off,” I groaned. He snarled under his breath. Through sleep-foggy eyes I watched him pull the heavy double-layer floor-length curtains open.

“Noooooooooo! Please keep them closed,” I whinged. “I need to sleep late. The light will wake us too early.”

That was it. Out of the room he stormed, and back to the deck.

Sleep-bleary, I followed him.

“Darling, please don’t be cross … Please come to bed. I didn’t mean that. I miss you – I want you. I’m sorry. You can put the aircon on – please come back.”

He stayed silent. I could feel his fuming. He poured another glass. Lit a cigarette. Fuck.

“Why don’t you come in? Please. Don’t you think you’ve had too much to drink?” As soon as the words left my mouth I wished I could retract them, unpull the trigger. The unleashing, the rushing avalanche. It was as if what would follow had been bubbling under for a thousand years, waiting, longing to explode.

“Okay, that’s it! That is fucking it. It’s over, it’s over! Do you fucking hear me? It’s over.” His voice burst thunder into the ink-black sky.

Over? Over-over? WTF? Over aircon …? Curtains?

“Darling, please …” I could feel a panic attack begin to rise within me.

“No, no, no! I mean it. This is it – it’s over. You and I are done! We’re totally incompatible … You like all this crap – this five-star-hotel bullshit. I hate all of this. I like camping … The outdoors. I want to be out there” – he pointed at the faraway shapes of dark mountains. “I don’t wanna be here. It’s over. We’ve had a good run … Nine years – that’s more than I have ever spent with anyone, but now we’re done.”

And all I could say was: “But why didn’t you say something before? After nine years, you’ve only noticed now?”

Then I began to weep.

That was end-February. By the first week of April my tears had become the Red Sea.

And, as with everything in this world – cliché as it is – there’s always a price to pay. Desire gone wrong often results in chaos and madness.