Although I have managed to slip almost inconspicuously into the empty chair, my foreign cigarettes alert everyone to the fact that there is a new inmate. Their appearance on the ash-covered table soon becomes quite the talking point. There are discussions about the ‘funny writing’ on the side of the packet and I am brought into the conversation by way of my exotic Marlboro Lights with the Arabic script.
Thank god for smoking. Such a great leveller. I’ve always found cigarettes to be a fail-safe way to ingratiate myself into what I believe is the ‘in’ crowd. It’s sure as shit why I coughed and choked my way through my first, second, third, fourth and probably fifth cigarette at the age of fourteen. The way I saw it, I had the rest of my life to die from lung cancer but I needed to be accepted now.
During the early to mid-nineties the National Health Service in England embarked on a no-smoking campaign targeting teenagers and young people. ‘Kissing someone who smokes is like kissing an ashtray’ taunted the posters in school halls and bus shelters. I would roll my eyes. Is it? I would think to myself. How likely is it that my nonexistent kissing opportunities will be put in jeopardy by smokers’ breath? If anything, I thought it might better my chances. My cool points as a known smoker would skyrocket.
Then there was the promise of £200 from my mother if I managed to steer clear of the filthy habit by the time I was twenty-one. It was a promise her parents had made to her and which, of course, she had managed to cash in on her twenty-first. But not me. I’d done the mathematics and, taking inflation into account. I’d come to the conclusion that £200 would buy me very little worth having in 2001. I wasn’t prepared to sacrifice several crucial years of social approval for pocket change. Besides, I rationalised, by then I’d be a famous singer and money wouldn’t be an issue. So fuck it. Light me up.
Back around the table, someone asks me where I’m from. I tell them I live in Dubai, which isn’t true. At this stage it is out of the question to admit to anyone, including myself, that I am homeless and that the sum of my life is upstairs in a fluorescent pink suitcase, in a strange room, in a strange house, full of strangers. I volunteer the information that I’m a journalist. Which is true. I leave out the bit that I’ve just been fired from my job. I tell them I’m often on television, which isn’t true. I tell them I was born here in Johannesburg, which is true and which I mistakenly think will make them see me as ‘one of them’. I tell them I was raised in London. Not strictly true, but having gauged my audience I decide approximation is as good as pinpoint accuracy in this instance. I sip on my rancid coffee, and drip feed truths and mistruths to my audience, grateful that my cigarettes are giving me something to do with my hands.
Before too long someone, a man – tall, handsome and Lebanese-looking – turns to me: ‘What’s your drug of choice?’
Oh God.
‘Umm, food,’ I mumble into my empty mug. Blank faces stare back at me.
‘He means what do you use?’ says an angry-looking spikey-haired girl with a nose ring.
‘Food.’ I say again. ‘I’m an eating disorder, I … I mean I have an eating disorder … I’m an anorexic.’ My size-fourteen jogging pants are straining at my gut and my thighs are unforgiving on the plastic garden chair. ‘And bulimic,’ I add by way of explanation. I can’t bear to give the full story, although it’s patently obvious that I’m also an overeater. A glutton. Full disclosure is not an option, certainly not to this lot who are cocking their heads at me the way dogs do when you growl at them. I start chewing imaginary gum, another thing I do when I am too aware of myself.
‘You mean you’ve never done drugs?’ frowns a young, blond kid who looks like the ‘bad boy’ in a barely pubescent pop group.
‘No,’ I say. I almost add, ‘Sorry.’
I am mortified and I am a liar – because I have done drugs. I smoked pot regularly for a couple of years in my late teens and sporadically through university. I also have a serious over-the-counter medicine habit but I don’t know that yet so it doesn’t count, but these guys don’t mean cannabis – they mean drugs. Real drugs. Crack, smack, needles, pipes, dirty floors and piss-stained mattresses, quick deals done down dark alleys, a blowjob for a wrap, heroin malnourishment and the occasional accidental overdose. I don’t think I’ve ever even had the munchies, although if they ask me I’ll tell them I have.
I want the ground to swallow me up. I’ve made a mistake; I shouldn’t be here. Even though the woman on the phone assured me they deal with ‘all types of addictive behaviours’, I can tell that this place is really just for people who need help kicking the ‘habit’. The proper addicts. I’m not one of them. I’m just a fat, selfish, weak pig who has fucked up again.
The Cowboy appears in the doorway through the cloud of smoke we have created with our non-stop puffing. ‘Sara, we need to check your bags, and you lot need to clean up – it’s kak dirty out here.’ Without complaint, people begin picking up coffee cups and empty cigarette packets while blowing errant tobacco off the tablecloth. A white cat ambles out from under the table and stretches in the sunshine. The Cowboy picks it up and whispers something in its ear.
On my way back upstairs to Nurse I check my hair in the mirror. I had it cut short before leaving the desert. It suits me but also unnerves me. I keep combing it and pulling it down as if to remind it, and me, of how it used to be.
The bag check is entirely wasted on me at this early stage in my rehab career. Sometime later, when I am hellbent on destroying myself, such things – along with room checks, mouth inspections and more intimate searches – will become the routine de jour. For now, though, the only contraband I have is the extra carton of cigarettes I bought at Duty Free and smuggled in my hand luggage. Nurse, who is still on shift from the night before, is baffled. She clearly suspects there’s nothing wrong with me.
Throughout the day I meet the rest of the ‘treatment community’. Since it is a Saturday and there is no programme on weekends, many of them are taking the opportunity to sleep in. But as they emerge, the introductions begin again. Sara-Jayne. Dubai. Journalist. Television. Johannesburg. London. Food. Food. Eating disorder. Anorexia. And bulimia. No. Well, not really. No. Not cocaine, no. Yes, food. Yup, I guess so. Sure.
I inspect my fingernails for nonexistent grime and suck in my stomach. More of my automatic responses to situations I find uncomfortable. I have always hated introducing myself. Something about saying my own name out loud makes me extremely uncomfortable. It’s not that I’m shy – I’m not. Reserved at times, downright stand-offish, some have said, but it’s more that I feel like a fraud. Like I’m not who I say I am. My name sounds strange coming out of my mouth. Sara. Sara. Sara-Jayne. SJ. I prefer to be introduced. ‘This is Sara-Jayne.’ Then I’m okay. Someone else has affirmed me. I’m acceptable. Perhaps it has something to do with being adopted, this idiosyncrasy of being a living, breathing identity crisis.
Late in the afternoon, a pretty girl with long dark hair, thick eyelashes, a killer body and a distinctive Joburg drawl arrives at the house. She makes a beeline for me and whisks me off down into a quiet corner of the garden so we can talk prah-vut-lee. Her name is Audrey, she used to be a patient here, is bipolar, also has an eating disorder, is a recovering cocaine addict and has fake tits. I learn all of this within two minutes. Out of everything, I am most interested in the tits, but I smile and nod as she stands in front of me, not an ounce of spare flesh on her, and tells me how she ‘relates’ to my food issues. I soon learn that ‘relating’ means sounding like you are interested in someone else’s problem, then turning the conversation around to talk about yourself. Audrey ‘relates’ for about forty-five minutes. She relates about her father who is a top lawyer in Jaahburg, she relates about the BMW Z3 he bought her for her birthday and the Lambo she’s hoping to trade it in for. She relates about the new pair of Armani jeans she wants and her frustration at the store not stocking them in a six. She relates about her Jewish heritage, her time at boarding school and finally her hellish years in ‘
active’ addiction, a slave to cocaine. ‘So we’re, laaaik, soooo similar,’ she says finally, smiling an unnervingly wide smile and linking her sparrow arm through mine. We walk back up to the house with me feeling like the fat friend at a party. I’m relieved when I see her pick up her car keys from the smoking table.
‘Be nice to her,’ Audrey calls to nobody in particular as she scoops up an impossibly small handbag and wiggles to the front door. ‘See you,’ she says, without turning around. I hear her fire up the engine of the Z3 and drive away.
For the rest of the day I drink revolting coffee and chainsmoke. I spend fleeting moments contemplating how I think I should be feeling about ‘stuff’. Like having returned to the country where I was born for the first time. I note that I feel ‘fine’. I allow myself a brief thought of Computer Guy and again conclude that I am fine. I project a couple of months into the future and ponder on where I might be. Wherever it is, I tell myself, I’ll be ‘fine’.
Before bed I am fed another white pill and told that, if I like, I can call home. I tell them no one will be there. I go to sleep and dream of fake tits and talking cats.
CHAPTER 18
Cuckoo’s nest
* * *
For the first couple of days, I read. Compulsively. Another one of my favourite techniques to cope with life outside the comfort zone. An escape mechanism learned in childhood but which on Planet Recovery is considered a form of ‘using’.
There are about fifteen books on a dusty shelf in what, if this was an ordinary, residential home, would be the TV room, and I read them all. Some are trite, others more complex than I care to admit, but I read them nonetheless, anything to zone out. In one, inanimate objects talk to each other while making a pilgrimage to the Holy Land – they frustrate me. In another, a woman spends years getting jacked up on heroin before finally ‘getting clean’ – I am jealous. She’s a published author and I am not. Another tells the story of sins, sinners, burning bushes and a guy who convinces a load of people he’s the son of an omnipotent miracle-maker. It’s a pretty good read for a work of fiction.
I not only read, I write too. I have to. I’ve been given a blue spiral-bound notebook in which I must write every night and hand in each morning. So that ‘they’ know what is going on in my head. Good luck, I think, and diligently begin putting pen to paper every evening before bed.
I treat the journal-writing exercise as I do most things in life, as a test, which I can either pass or fail. My diary is full of hyperbole, witty musings and other devices aimed at demonstrating my intelligence but not revealing anything of myself that can be used against me. I feel like I am winning.
I have been moved to a room downstairs with two girls, because we are closer in age than the other three women here who are in their forties, fifties and sixties. The idea is that we will have more in common. So now I am sharing with Tamsin, the spikey-haired punk with the nose ring and twenty-six-year-old Alice. Tamsin is from Pretoria and is a heroin addict. A bad one. She’s back here at New Life Treatment Centre after having run away. Twice. That’s what Tamsin does. She runs. Like me. Before she came here she’d already been to three other treatment centres and run away from all of them. Every time she speaks I have to say, ‘Sorry?’ because she mumbles, and also because I’m never quite sure whether she’s talking to me, even when we’re the only two people in the room. Often I’ll just end up nodding or saying, ‘Mmm,’ because I can’t face having to ask her to repeat herself yet again. I don’t think she’s bothered either way. She reeks of sadness and I’m scared of getting too close to her in case some of it clings to me. I soon realise I am in no danger of that.
While I am largely indifferent to Tamsin, Alice I hate from the off. Tall, slim, with a mop of curly, jaw-length dirty-blond hair and a large nose, she is strangely attractive. Sexy, in a grubby way. She’s a crack addict and has the pipe burn on her lip to prove it. She’s been in the house a little over a week after being kicked out of a neighbouring rehab for fraternising – in other words, fucking – one of the other patients. In the short time between being chucked out of the other place and coming here, she ‘bumped into’ her dealer, which ultimately resulted in the pipe-burnt lip, a black eye and a night in a jail cell. Alice also has an eating disorder, but hers has not betrayed her like mine has and I constantly find myself staring covetously at her thigh-gap, elegant collarbone and concave stomach which, every so often, I catch glimpses of when her T-shirt rides up over the top of her scruffy designer jeans. This, of course, further fuels my hatred for her. I yearn for the days when my anorexia had me like a cat on a hot tin roof, determined, heart racing and in control. Like several of the other inmates, Alice is no stranger to treatment centres. This is her fourth or fifth go on the merry-go-round. She’s certainly not shy and already, I note cattily, seems to be making firm friends with the penis-owning members of the house. I find her loud, brash, disingenuous and rude.
It is immediately clear that my dislike of Alice is reciprocated. She employs all the obvious tricks to try to make me feel as uncomfortable and unwelcome as possible. From the minute I arrive she refers to me as ‘the new girl’ and continues to do so for the first three weeks of my stay. Rather unsuccessfully, she tries to coax our mutual room-mate into being ‘besties’, suggesting the pair do each other’s hair and make-up, sit next to one another at meal times and team up for chores. Tamsin – who is not a hair and make-up kind of girl, barely eats and prefers to be on her own team – manages, for the most part, to fend her off, but Alice is unrelenting. When I walk into the bedroom she stops talking, or stares directly at me and says to Tamsin, ‘I’ll finish telling you later.’ One her favourite things is to make sure she has a sizeable audience and then make a point of purposefully excluding me from the conversation. More often than not, the rest of the inmates pick up the bait and she succeeds in elbowing me out of group. Classic exclusion technique. Stupid bitch.
When someone helpfully suggests a few days later that it is the characteristics we hate in other people that we least like in ourselves I respond by being characteristically loud, angry and defensive.
Our room is one of two downstairs bedrooms and leads off a narrow corridor from the entrance hall. It has French doors leading to the patio, but we’re not supposed to use them. There are three single beds and, as the newcomer, I have last pick and end up with the one facing the double doors. I’d have preferred to have had one of the other beds – either Alice’s, which is against the farthest wall, or Tamsin’s, which is nestled cosily in a nook by the window, looking out onto the top of the garden and the swimming pool. In my middle bed, with no wall to lean into, I feel exposed and vulnerable.
With the exception of weekends, we are not allowed in the bedrooms during the day. Only after our daily programme is finished can we return to our assigned sleeping areas. There is to be no hanging out in rooms other than your own and, the most important rule of all: no boys in the girls’ rooms and vice versa. That’s a punishable offence.
My relief at having an en-suite bathroom is short-lived when I discover just how urgently ours is in need of a revamp. Apart from its inexcusably chintzy décor, one of the opaque windowpanes is completely broken and the glass has been removed. So not only does it allow the unkindest of the Joburg winter to whistle through, creating something akin to a pastel ice box early in the morning, but it also provides the ideal peephole for whoever may be walking around the back of the house. Additionally, I must contend with the considerable distance of both the shower and the toilet from the bathroom door. It’s a good few naked, or at best, knickerless steps should anyone inadvertently walk in because, of course, there are no locks on this door either. I learn to wash and pee with lightning speed and even become used to my daily scalding, care of the demon shower, which seems determined to strip me of my thick skin by discharging a stream of boiling lava every day without fail.
And so it happens that within just two days of arriving, I happen into a routine of sorts. It mainly c
onsists of smoking, reading and drinking awful coffee, but it is a routine nonetheless. The spaces I inhabit stop feeling quite so new and unfamiliar. The fact that the drawer in my bedside pedestal catches each and every time I pull on it is no longer a revelation but an expected annoyance. The small but cunning step leading down into the kitchen from the dining room no longer trips me unawares, but has settled in my subconscious and is now just another thing my body accommodates. I know now where to find teaspoons and how to unlock the dining-room doors if I am the first one up and want to go out for a cigarette. Lift the handle, jiggle the key. Save for one or two, I remember everyone’s names and am able to morph into whomever I need to be in order to be around them either as a group or individually. I pat myself on the back for being such a ‘people’s person’. I jump on their curiosity to know more about life in the desert, and regale them with stories of extravagance, wealth and celebrity. I recreate for them (and myself) a life of endless excitement, adventure, glamour and exhilaration. Fun with a capital F. I don’t mention the raging eating disorder, the unmanageable drinking, the dysfunctional, sexless, pseudo relationship, the soulless apartment, the shameful firing, the financial suffocation or the unbearable, intolerable, insufferable fucking heat. Because where would the fun be in that?
CHAPTER 19
The beloved country
* * *
‘For fuck’s sake, you black bitch!’ Audrey furiously swerves her shiny black Z3 out of the way of the elderly Xhosa woman crossing the busy intersection on Malibongwe Drive in Randburg, Johannesburg. I sit in stunned silence in the passenger seat, my eyes wide.
Killing Karoline Page 16