Killing Karoline

by Sara-Jayne King

  For a while I do my best not to feel. But gradually I creep deeper and deeper into self-loathing. I sink into bouts of inexorable depression. I lose more weight, then gain it all back; I swear off drink and then crawl into work hungover as hell and slur my way through news bulletins. I fuck Computer Guy with the perfunctory sense of obligation I feel is expected of me, but the faux intimacy of these unsatisfactory rutting sessions eventually becomes too much and I tighten up like a clam and hang a ‘Do Not Enter’ sign on my cunt.

  So it is that I am beyond grateful when a job opportunity comes up in Dubai in 2006. This is my chance to run, to disappear, and I take it. I think about just packing a bag and making a run for it in the dead of night, leaving a snoring, sexually frustrated Computer Guy dreaming of hard drives, coding and accessible vaginas, but my codependancy won’t allow it. I’m still terrified of failure and I need to take Computer Guy along with me as a hostage. If it all goes to shit, I’ll need someone to blame. I manage to convince him that we need a new start, a new life thousands of miles away. A persuasive fuck seals the deal and we start making plans to head to the desert. The move will give us the perfect opportunity to start again, and me the chance to bury my head in the sand.

  CHAPTER 16

  Escape

  * * *

  It is the smell, rather than the heat, that strikes you first. Of course, there’s the fucking heat – it is mid-October and although it is not yet 6am, the temperature is already creeping into the forties – but the smell, the immediate, musky, spicy, overripe scent overpowers me and forces itself into my throat and chest. It chokes me. I feel like I’m being assaulted. At first I think it is incense, but it’s not. It’s oud. It dives into my nostrils the minute I step off the plane and into the terminal at Dubai International Airport. Foreign, different, unfamiliar, oppressive. It will become a tangible memory of my life in the desert. The smell of my success, the stench of my failure, the fragrance of my surrender. Ironically, when I am back at the same airport in less than a year, once again leaving a life behind, my existence shrunk to the size of a suitcase, I will inhale it deeply and feel a profound sense of sadness, a sting of shame and again a feeling of having left something unfinished. To this day I hate it when the smell of oud catches me unawares. It’s like running into an ex-lover without warning. Sometimes it will surprise me by hitching a ride on a handsome stranger or hiding in the pages of an expensive magazine.

  As I retrieve the sum of my life from the revolving belt at baggage claim at Dubai airport I realise that I spend my life loading and unloading. Packing and unpacking. Baggage and boxes. There is constant movement and moving, when all I want is to stay still. I am expert at folding, at stacking, at wrapping precious things in bubble wrap lest they be damaged in transit. In transition. I am transient because I cannot settle. I cannot settle because I know I do not belong. When I try to plant roots, the soil is either too hard to crack or crawling with parasites that drain all of the good from my foundations. All I want is to make peace with a place and build my spirit’s house there, a haven for my weary soul, but every time I announce ‘I am home!’ and release my shoulders and kick off my vagabond shoes, the ground begins to shift underfoot, the zephyr of life becomes a hurricane and I find myself folding and packing and loading again.

  Dragging my bags, I make my way to the arrivals hall and wait to be collected. My eyes scan a mass of hijabs and holidaymakers for a sign – literal and figurative – that I am meant to be here, to remind myself why I have come. I have come to start over, to begin again, to be reborn. Here, I think, I can be anyone I want to be. I can shed the skin that does not fit and expel the waste of my fractured life simply by touching down on new ground. Everything that has come before can be forgotten. I will be a new person, a better person. I will be good enough. My square peg will find a square hole and I will be a perfect fit. My eye catches a clipboard with my name spelt incorrectly on it and I follow it to a waiting car.

  My first two weeks in Dubai coincide with the last two weeks of Ramadan. I have arrived right in the middle of the holy month observed by Muslims worldwide as a month of fasting. According to Islam, it commemorates the first revelation of the Quran to Muhammad, but to me it feels like a time when the whole city is covering up some sworn secret. The restaurant at the hotel where I am staying until I have my own apartment, puts up enormous blinds with which to shield the restaurant areas every day and when I return from work in the evening, starving, I feel a sense of shame when I sneak behind these blinds and order myself a plate of hummus and some chips. Like I am breaking a secret I never agreed to keep. I feel an enormous sense of relief when Eid comes around and the covers are pulled off everything and there is no more hiding.

  I have been in Dubai a little over month when I get a phone call from Wendy at the agency. She has received a call from my brother Alex! He wants to meet me in London that coming weekend. Fuck! I curse Sod’s law and wonder if the universe is conspiring to keep us apart. I tell Wendy about my recent geographical shift to the desert and she tells me Alex has left an email address for me to contact him. The second I hang up the phone, I begin typing.

  Dear Alex,

  I recently had a call from IAS saying that you may want to meet with me. Let me first say that I am delighted that you felt able to make contact and I appreciate that this whole situation must have been incredibly difficult for you. I am not sure what you do or do not know about me – however, I am more than happy to answer any questions you may have as honestly as I can.

  Unfortunately I have recently moved to Dubai and therefore won’t be in London this weekend. I would love to arrange a meeting in the future – however, until then perhaps we could email or speak on the phone? Again, thanks so much for getting in contact – it means a great deal.

  SJ

  I hit Send.

  The next day when I am at work, a job for which I have moved across the world and have come to despise in just a few short, unforgivingly hot days, I meet Jacques, a white South African who, like every other expat in the desert, has fucked out and come to Dubai to be someone else. We are sitting in the smoking area in the punishing heat; I am in between reading news and weather bulletins: ‘Nothing bad happened in Dubai today, the forecast is sun, sun and more fucking sun and your high is 55 degrees.’ Jacques is one of the few South Africans I have ever met – except for the friends of a friend’s parents who tell me once that they have been forced to leave South Africa because of the ‘kaffirs’ – and I feel a kind of compatriotism that isn’t reciprocated. Because I am not yet familiar with the accent, I ask him where he is from. He grins and tells me South Africa, then grins even harder when I excitedly tell him I am too. He doesn’t believe me. ‘Where?’ we ask each other simultaneously. I say Randburg, he says Cape Town. ‘Amazing,’ I say. He asks me questions about Randburg. How often do I go home? Which school did I go to? I am caught out and forced to admit that I have never been back to South Africa since leaving as a baby. ‘Oh, so you’re not really South African!’ he laughs. I feel like I’ve been stabbed. Not really African, not really British, not really black, not really white, not really their daughter, not really, not really anything.

  I briefly tell him how it comes to be that I am a ‘kind of’ South African and when I see him lighting up another cigarette I feel compelled to get his opinion on something that’s been bothering me ever since Wendy made contact with Alex. I want to find out if it matters. That I am not white. If it matters to Alex. If it matters to Alex that he has this sister, this blood connection, whose colour was deemed so abhorrent, so disgraceful, so unacceptable that she had to be buried alive and secreted away. I find myself candidly blurting out the story of the dead baby and the discovery of the ‘real’ brother and asking this stranger for permission to be me. My greatest fear is that I will be rejected again. There has already been so much rejection that I sometimes question whether I even exist any more. It is not enough to see my reflection in a mirror, to open my skin with a blade
and lick the rusty blood, to starve or fill or purge my body. None of these things allows me to see myself or believe that I am real. I need someone, someone to see me.

  When I am done with my story, inhaling anxiously on yet another Marlboro, Jacques laughs. ‘Jesus! I can’t imagine what I’d do if I found out I had a little mixed-breed sister! A little Thandiwe running around! That would be fucked up!’

  Three days after my conversation with Jacques, I get the email.

  24.11.2006

  Hi Sara-Jayne

  Sorry for the delay in getting back to you earlier in the year. Finding out about you was a complete shock to me and I knew nothing about you until the adoption agency contacted me.

  My dad told me what had happened back in Joburg at the time you were born and is being supportive, but for some reason can’t seem to be able to explain why everything was kept a secret all these years. I guess once you have kept a secret for so long you become confident the truth will never come out and so the secret continues.

  My mother is reacting to the fact that a certain guilty error in her life has been unearthed, which was the cause of my parents getting divorced, among other things. I don’t want to give the impression she is a bad person, but I still find it difficult to understand and forgive her and haven’t spoken to her since I found out about the whole situation. Because of this, I don’t know much about you, but I would like to change that! I want to thank you for finding me and getting in touch. It has helped me understand a lot more about my parents’ past and the reasons for their divorce. It is great to be in contact and I’m sure we both have lots of questions. I’ll try to answer any you may have as honestly as I can.

  Alex

  I read the email over and over and over. I baulk at ‘guilty error’, but overlook the inelegant description of myself because I have learned by now how to avoid seeing or feeling or even acknowledging pain.

  Over the following few months, my brother Alex and I continue to send emails. In one, he attaches a picture of himself. I print it out and carry it with me in my handbag, often pulling it out to check again the angle of his jaw, the hue of his eyes, the order of his teeth against my own.

  In one of his emails early in 2007 he tells me he is flying to the States to visit his mother to whom he has now not spoken for a year. I am once again plagued with questions and hungry for answers. Desperate to forge some kind of relationship with him, I reply with what I want to be the truth:

  I don’t judge anything that happened in SA – how could I? – however, in recent years it’s been difficult for me to get my head around some of the things that have happened since. Still, over time I’ve learnt to forgive her and I think I feel sorry for her more than anything now – does that sound harsh? I don’t mean it to be. Anyway, as I said before, the last thing I wanted to do was cause any kind of rift between you guys and I thought for years about whether it would be the right thing to do – in my heart of hearts, I still think it was. So I really, really hope you’re able to make peace … I’ll be thinking of you.

  It takes a few weeks for him to reply, but when he does he tells me the reunion went well. I pretend I am not envious at her apparent willingness to want to make amends with her son, but cannot deny completely the pain of not being deemed worthy enough or important enough to deserve a similar consideration. He is her ‘real’ son, I must remind myself over and over.

  Their meeting also signals the end of his willingness to talk about the past. Although he, like me, speaks of having so many questions, he ultimately decides that he must focus on mending his relationship with his mother and the future. ‘There’s nothing you can do about it now, “history!”’ For his healing, he needs the past to be forgotten, for mine I need it to be acknowledged.

  And so the nature of our email communications changes. Mine are lengthy, filled with details of my ‘wonderful’ life, information about myself and amusing witticisms. I want him to know me. Or, at least to know the version of me I think he will find acceptable. In contrast, his are brief and contain little, if any details about who he is. I am still desperate for answers, while he, it seems, is desperate to forget. Any hope that we may share a need for the truth has evaporated. In that first year of email contact, I learn little more about him than I do about Mohammed, the superintendent of my building who I greet on my way out to work every morning. But I overlook all of that. I have a brother, and I cannot and will not jeopardise that for something as luxurious as the truth.

  My time in the desert is short-lived. Dubai is not an easy place to live or work for the uninitiated and I vacillate between throwing in the towel every day and declaring it the second best place on earth after Disneyland. At times, it serves every purpose I need it for: the illusion of glamour, the escape from something, the unashamed indulgence; but at other times I hate its cliquishness, its constant excess, its façade, its cleanliness. It’s godawful.

  In addition, my eating disorder, which my mother has labelled a ‘food problem’, takes me from fat to thin to fat and back to thin. My weight yo-yos continuously and none of my clothes fit. They are either too small or too big. When I am not starving myself and purging myself to exhaustion with a punishing exercise regime, I am binging uncontrollably. I eat in secret, mainly in my car, which becomes littered with fast-food containers and empty chip packets that I am forced to stash in the boot. The periods between restricting and eating compulsively grow closer and closer together until the obsession has total control.

  My drinking is also becoming a problem. It is not so much how much I am drinking, although that too has escalated considerably, it’s how and why I’ve started to drink. The less I eat the more I drink. But soon the booze I am able to get my hands on at local hotels is not enough. I haven’t managed to arrange the alcohol licence I am required to have in order to buy alcohol from the handful of stores allowed to sell it, so if I want to drink at home, which I do, I have two options: to rely on friends who are brave enough to do a booze run to neighbouring Ras al Khaimah, or persuade people who regularly fly into the city to stock me up at Duty Free. Luckily for me, Computer Guy spends weekdays, Sunday to Thursday, in neighbouring Kuwait, which means on Thursdays I am always excited – not to see him, but for the alcohol he will be bringing with him from Duty Free. Every Thursday evening I drive the now familiar route to the airport to collect him (but really to collect my contraband), itching with anticipation. I stand, twitching, at Arrivals, my eyes scouring pale holidaymakers, suited executives and local Emiratis, waiting to see my supplier lumbering through the gate. When he appears, I can exhale, give him a perfunctory kiss and then start to check his bags for my medication. The same prescription every time: two bottles of red wine, a litre of gin and one of peach schnapps. The wine is my treat for the airport shuttle run, and is polished off within a few hours of returning home; the stronger stuff is kept in the cupboard under the sink. There I can sip it at my leisure. A tot or two in the morning before work, several tumblers for sundowners on the balcony in the evenings and, more and more frequently, a glug or five to put me back to sleep if I wake in the night. These covert midnight sips are harder to conceal and require stealth-like guile to execute. I have two choices. The first is to run the kitchen tap, so as to drown out my illicit under-the-sink scavenges, although this carries with it the risk of alerting Computer Guy to my being in the kitchen. The second, my preferred option, is to flush the toilet in the half bathroom, then make a tip-toed dash to the kitchen, open the cupboard with lightning speed and slowly, carefully and most importantly silently, twist the cap off the gin, hoping the cacophony from the toilet goes on long enough to conceal my frantic slurps. On the occasions when Computer Guy arrives back in Dubai empty-handed, he is either punished with a weekend of silence or furious rages. If we had a normal relationship I’d probably punish him by withholding sex too, but we are by now long past the stage of physical intimacy, and where I am finding comfort in food and booze, he is (he thinks secretly) escaping the banality of our relati
onship in the digital darkness of online pornography. We exist together in a vacuum of addiction and co-dependence.

  Eventually I am sacked from work for insubordination. It has been only a matter of time really, and while I am indignant, I am not surprised. Losing my job signals the end of my time in the desert and although on face value I seem to have acquired all the trappings of success, once again, I know I have failed. But with the feeling of failure also comes the most enormous sense of relief. I have had it with the desert and it’s illusion of perfection. I know there is no such thing.

  Coming up for a year to the day that I brought myself to Dubai, I realise that I have run out of options. I am utterly miserable. I have no job, a boyfriend who tolerates my moods by jerking off to porn and, despite my best efforts, I am unable to shift those stubborn ten pounds that are preventing me from hitting my university weight.

  There is only one thing left for me to do and that is to go. But this time I want out for good. I decide life is not all it’s cracked up to be. Life and I both have the same idea: we’re leaving each other. I’m at a disadvantage, because life has secretly been gaining a head start. Regardless, I’m determined to go first and so I do. I leave. I leave the apartment, the car, the fill-in boyfriend, the overdrawn bank account, the cell phone and its number that after a year I still can’t remember. I leave the handful of other alcoholics I’d migrated to over the past few months. I leave the ironing board, the guest towels, the mismatched lounge suite and a full roll of bin liners under the sink. I leave the precious books I’ve never read but that make me feel safe, tucked into the nook at the foot of the bedroom window I’ll never look out of again. I leave the mahogany dining set that arrived with one chair broken and that I never bothered to return. I leave the ants that march across my kitchen counter when I spill peach schnapps, but that are too busy when I only spill tea. I leave the thirteen take-away menus that inexplicably live in a plastic bag hooked to the back of the toilet door. I leave the phone company and the cable firm who will now never know if I want to upgrade my package to include the Discovery Channel and Cartoon Network. I leave the people I’ve come to love and the people I think I hate. I leave behind both the perceived idyll and the actual horror. I don’t leave my job because, of course, it has already left me. But despite all of the leaving, of all the left-behinds, when I check in at the airport I am still too heavy.