The nail in the coffin that secures the end of my time in Dubai comes just two days earlier. What I have done, in fear of losing my mind, is abandon my fragile but terrifying Mother and obedient, terrified boyfriend and bolted, without warning or consultation, from the shopping mall where we have been attempting a pleasant afternoon. Running from the lure (or threat) of the mall and its excesses and pretence (‘more’, ‘bigger’, ‘better’) and into a prickly, stifling late Middle Eastern afternoon. Full of mezze and ice-cream coffee, I have stumbled to my car and escaped. An automaton in the driving seat. In my panic to get away, I have mistakenly clicked the wipers rather than the indicator so the rubber arms are manically squeaking across the windscreen in fifty-degree heat.
I am in the car driving down the busiest road in the city, a city I’ve called home for just short of a year, my foot daringly flat on the accelerator, deaf to the relentless ding-ding-ding of the car’s speed warning. Someone is screaming and crying, breaths coming in great deep gulps and gasps. It is me. I am scared of myself and when I look down at the steering wheel, the hands that should be curled tightly around it are idly resting, flat on its curves. I am not in control. Every so often, I allow my head to loll right back onto the headrest and I stare straight up and through the sunroof at the aircraft warning lights poised on the tops of the five-star hotels, the trade centres and apartment blocks whizzing past my crazy. I am prepared, in this moment, to close my eyes and ears, press the accelerator down hard and drive straight into the back of the car in front, putting an end to everything.
Five minutes later I am sitting in my living room fingering the Toyota emblem on my car key, watching through the window the cars travelling up and down the very same road on which I have just been driving and contemplating suicide. The screaming has been replaced by humming and groaning. I am a parody of one who is losing their mind. Soon I will be rocking. If I’m lucky, I’ll cultivate some drool and it will fall from my impotent lip, down my chin and into my lap. I have left my front door wide open and the car parked at an angle in front of my building rather than in the underground car park where it belongs. It is possible I have left the driver’s-side door open and the lights on, meaning it is now protesting and beeping in alarm.
Seventy-two minutes pass and I am still clutching the keys, staring out at the highway. I will continue to do this for another three hours. I am furious with myself that I am still alive and that now there will be consequences for what I’ve done. I know already that death is a great excuse for bad behaviour and that I have missed any chance of taking opportunity of it.
When Mum and Computer Guy return flustered (but fed), there are whispered conversations. Sensible, saintly, tolerant Computer Guy has explained to hand-wringing, exasperated Mum that I am not a bad person, but rather one who needs the help of professionals. Mum agrees in part, at least to the funding of a venture designed to fashion her a more agreeable daughter, and a decision is made and a countdown begins. I have forty-eight hours. There are to be no half-measures. Everything I wish to take with me into my future must fit into two suitcases; the rest will be sold on or be left behind. I feel as if someone has put a sign above my life, ‘EVERYTHING MUST GO!’ Most significantly, I am to go. Away. It is unlikely I will ever come back. I am to leave Dubai for Johannesburg, South Africa, where I will stay for four weeks and be made better by people who know what to do with people like me. My immediate feeling is one of relief. No more having to play grown-up, for now at least. It was fun for a while, but fuck this for the long haul. There is the promise of a clean slate.
First off, the apartment must be handed back. I am grateful to see the back of the place that has never felt like home. I’ve never bonded with it. I’ve always felt like I was trespassing, as though the apartment itself knew I didn’t belong. An imposter. ‘When is the real tenant getting here?’ it seemed to whisper to me whenever I stepped inside. The building itself is brand new, and we are the first tenants. It is a grand property in a not-so-grand neighbourhood. It’s also fallen victim to the curse of Dubai’s development boom. A rush to wrap up the building project means some of the last-minute touches have been shoddily completed, some simply unfinished, which irk me. Like the misaligned light sockets and the bumpy grouting still visible between the bathroom tiles. It often feels like we’re upmarket squatters. I am constantly irritated by the dust, the smell of sewage in the guest toilet that I simply cannot get rid of, despite the incessant burning of incense day and night. I long for thick bespoke curtains that reach down to the tiles, not flimsy, opaque two-pairs-in-a-pack numbers that hover three inches above the floor and allow the wretched sunlight an all-access pass.
The apartment is vast. Far too big for two people, too bloody big for a family of five, but this is Dubai. Everything is bigger. It also seems bigger because of how sparsely furnished it is. We’ve done our best, Computer Guy and me, but after securing our initial bargains of a second-hand sofa and a half-price flat screen, our enthusiasm for becoming home-makers dwindles significantly because, (a) we both secretly and silently know we won’t be here long, and (b) we are, of course, broke – which is my fault, because I’m the one who’s dragged us to this godforsaken hole on an impulse and thanks to me we’re now paying a mortgage in the UK and sky-high rent on a two-bedroom, four-fucking bathroom uber condo in the desert.
I tell the woman at the real-estate agency that they’ve found a ‘lump’. I don’t go into details. Don’t need to. ‘Lump’ says it all. The unspeakable. ‘Lump’ carries with it the suggestion of something terrible. Terminal? Perhaps. Serious? Definitely. A possible end to the existence of now. She tilts her head and comforts the left side of her face with her palm. ‘You are ill,’ she says. It is a both question and a statement. I stare at her in silence. She looks as if she will cry; I do too.
Forty-eight hours later I’m at the airport with one of the two suitcases containing what I consider to be the contents of my life. The other case is being sent on to London where it will become a burden on my mum despite being housed, out of sight, in her loft. Computer Guy has accompanied me to the airport to say goodbye but also to drive the car back to the rental company and sign the relevant paperwork. We hug and smile resignedly at one another at the Departures drop-off point and me and my suitcase turn and walk, without looking back, toward the check-in desk.
As the plane is about to depart for Johannesburg, I realise that I am more like her than I have previously cared to admit. At the time of my adoption, Kris had been asked, by the social worker handling my case, to describe herself. Presumably so that I would one day know more about the woman to whom I had once belonged. She had said that she was very affectionate and sentimental, but had a tendency to lose her temper and be domineering, and on reading it, it appeared that the bad apple had not fallen far from the tree. But as I settle into my seat, pull down the window blind to shut out the world, I realise there is more. I realise I have inherited the worst parts of her. I disappear when things get tough. I am a pretender, a fraud, a keeper of secrets, a liar. Like her, I do not want to take responsibility and I will do anything, it seems, to avoid the consequences of my own decisions. I have tried to run from something that will always follow me.
The plane begins its frantic, powerful charge along the runway and metal meets metal as I buckle in. I pull the strap tight, for a moment believing it will save me if the worst should happen. I look out onto the tarmac and burst into tears. I cry until we take off and then I am grounded, up in the air again. There is now yet another failure to chalk-up, ‘my spectacular fall from grace in the desert’. I add it to the growing list of fuck-ups.
At 34,000 feet, somewhere over the Persian Gulf, in the sky between Dubai and Doha, I take – although I do not know it at the time – what will be my last alcoholic drink. It has the required, desired, soporific effect and I sleep for the next eight hours knowing that when I touch down it will be time to unpack and begin again.
CHAPTER 17
Homecoming<
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* * *
‘You need a return ticket, ma’am.’ The immigration officer is becoming annoyed.
I want to show her my passport again. ‘There!’ I want to scream. ‘Right there! It says so, it says I belong here!’ And in a way it does. Under the section that reads ‘Place of birth’ is written ‘Johannesburg’. But the woman at the counter knows I’m not from here and I’m escorted to an airline ticket desk, where I’m forced to purchase a return ticket before they will let me enter my country.
When I am finally allowed through to baggage claim it is late. I am late. I should have been here ages ago. Not just because the plane has been delayed by several hours or because of the return ticket debacle. I should have been here years before, tears and tears ago. Somewhere in my mind is the belief I should never have left.
I notice that I am one of only a handful of stragglers at baggage claim. When my suitcase eventually emerges onto the conveyor belt I watch it for a while. Only when it is right in front of me and I’m sure it is mine, do I take it – the last thing I need is to be carrying someone else’s baggage. My case seems heavier than it did when I left Dubai, or maybe I’m just weaker. I make my way through into Arrivals, where South African Airways is blowing its own trumpet on massive illuminated signs that hurt my eyes. I squint and rub my sockets. As they adjust I notice that behind the metal railings is a piece of paper with my name on it, but the person holding it is not looking for me. He is looking for his own imagined idea of me. Taller? Possibly. Thinner? For sure. White? Definitely. I keep walking towards him until we are practically rubbing noses and still he does not see me. ‘That’s me,’ I say, and point to the name, my name, he is holding. He blinks and takes charge. ‘I’m Warren from the treatment centre,’ he says and starts to walk off, a couple of paces ahead of me, towards a battered yellow parking payment machine. For some reason I feel I should offer to pay, and immediately feel guilty and awkward, but I don’t have any change. Not in the right currency anyway. We climb into the car in silence and drive in darkness. I am entirely lost. I tell myself that four weeks is no time, no time at all.
Four weeks is the time I’ve given myself to get my shit together. In four weeks, I tell myself, I will have learned how to eat what I want without getting fat. I will have discovered how to stop my feelings getting the better of me. I will have been taught how to stop hurting the people who say they love me. In four weeks I will have pulled myself up by the boot straps and will be ready to start life again. Not in the desert, but somewhere. Somewhere where nobody knows me. In just four weeks. I pretend I’m on a kind of extended vacation rather than rehab. Then when I get a little more real; I say ‘rehab’ rather than ‘treatment facility’ because its sounds better. Rehab is where celebrities go to rehabilitate, treatment is where serial killers go for electric shock therapy.
After what seems like an hour, we arrive outside a mustard-coloured house with an enormous brown electric gate and security fencing running right the way around the top of the perimeter wall. A black man sits in the driveway watching noise on a small television. When we park, he stays seated but stops watching. He is the security guard. His shirt tells me that. He is also poor; his shirt tells me that too. He stares at me.
I follow the man who is the sign-holder, and who’s also clearly the owner of the security guard. We have to go through three doors to get inside the house, then head straight up a narrow staircase into a room where a black woman sits dressed as a nurse. In the same way that it seems the man from downstairs has been handed a shirt and told that today he is a security guard, she is wearing a white nurse’s tabard so that I know – and she knows – that tonight she is ‘nurse’. She is fat and smiling and her braids are fuzzy. She is intrigued by me, which makes me embarrassed.
Before I am allowed to sleep, there are forms that must be completed. Absolution of responsibility, a caveat of no blame. It’s the oldest trick in the book of ‘cover your ass’. After a mere five minutes since walking through the door, I am certainly not ready to give myself over to this place. That I am being told to sign here and here and here after so long up in the air seems barbaric, suspect and sly. Mentally I add jet lag to the list of reasons why the filling in of forms at this hour is unscrupulous, but the reality is that the time difference between Joburg and the desert is negligible. I am soon to discover I am always full of excuses.
I am asked by the nurse how I am feeling. I say, ‘Fine,’ because I think it is true. ‘Are you feeling anxious?’ I’m not and I say so. Nonetheless I am given a small white oval pill. Much later I will learn it is a benzodiazepine and can be highly addictive. But for now it will apparently relieve the anxiety I’ve just said I don’t feel.
I am told I will be allowed to call home whenever I like. I feel no sense of relief or gratitude at what is clearly a privilege. Maybe if I knew where ‘home’ was I would be more enthusiastic. In the dark, I am shown to a room. Enough light trespasses through the curtains so that I can make out four enormous slug-like shapes on four single beds. The room smells of setting lotion, mothballs and shampoo. There is another smell I can’t quite identify. Still in my clothes, I climb into one of the empty beds and morph into another slug.
In the morning, I wake up shivering. My body is not used to the cold. For close to a year I’ve known only punishing heat or automatic cool. I’ve forgotten what it feels like to be genuinely cold. I’ve forgotten what it feels like to feel most things. The contrast hits me like a freight train. Because it’s the end of August, it’s still technically winter in South Africa. Johannesburg winters are something of a contradiction in themselves, particularly if you grew up in a place where winter traditionally means bitterly cold days and nights. Winters in Joburg are marked by toe-numbingly cold, crisp mornings, then, as the city wakes up, so the mercury begins to rise, leading to smiling sunshine days and clear, lucent, blue skies, lulling one into inappropriate T-shirts and open shoes. But, as dusk approaches, the temperature plummets and the nights demand wool and blankets and, even better, the whirr of a fan heater in order to sleep soundly under the covers.
In the morning, I am aware of several other people drifting around, but try to make them as invisible as I want to be. I have spent the last forty-four minutes sitting on the toilet seat in the bathroom, obsessively counting the toothpaste spatters on the mirror above the basin and wondering how long I can hide. Every so often I spin the toilet-paper roll, run the tap for a few seconds or perform a concerto of loud coughs to make sure nobody walks in on me. There are no locks on the doors here.
When, wrapped in a blanket, I finally make it downstairs there is a cowboy in the kitchen. He’s about six foot three and neither stocky nor slim. His hair is longer than it should be for a man of his age, which I guess to be about forty-three. It has been streaked by the sun and every so often he scrapes it back into a prospective ponytail and then lets it fall loose again. His legs, clad in faded jeans, seem to start just below his breastbone and when he walks he bounces as though there are springs not only in his heels but in his toes too. Later, when we take our daily constitutional, I will have to skip to keep in time with the bouncing. It takes me four days to realise he’s not a member of staff. He’s just one of us. Another fuck-up on a journey to make himself less raw.
Standing in the kitchen, in the light of the morning, I imagine this is how kidnap victims feel. Snatched from a place of safety and taken, in the dark, to a place unknown. When the blindfold is removed, there must surely be this same sense of bewilderment and displacement? I try to square last night’s shadowy journey through the house with what I can now see in the daylight and draw a blank. Nothing is recognisable or familiar, not a smell nor the sound of the linoleum under my feet triggers any sense that I have ever been here before. It is disconcerting. As though I have entered one house and woken up in another one altogether. I think about the white pill I was given by the nurse last night.
I am forced out of my paranoia with a jolt … The Cowboy is talking to
me. He directs me to the kettle and tells me his name, which I instantly forget. I make myself a drink. Coffee. I’d rather have tea – and there is tea – but make coffee nonetheless. Looking around, the others seem to be drinking coffee, so I will drink coffee too. I make it far too strong and without sugar. The very opposite of how I like it. These are the kinds of things I do when I’m insecure.
Finally, desperate for a cigarette, I head from the kitchen, through the dining room, and onto a large patio where a small group is already sitting. Although the sun is out, it’s cold. It’s been a while since I’ve been this cold, and now I remember that I don’t like it. I sit and shiver in a chair I’m praying hasn’t already been bagsied and attempt to give off a vibe of indifference, or failing that, at least one of being wasted or jet-lagged. It’s a remarkably difficult vibe to pull off. It would be far easier to just be myself, but I haven’t been taught that yet.
Killing Karoline Page 15