The Million-Rand Teaspoon

by Nikki Ridley

  We didn’t eat for four days. Not a thing. Two able-bodied young South Africans from middle-class Johannesburg, starving in London!

  After the fourth day, my cousin came to see me and took me to McDonald’s for what must have been the best meal of my life!

  Paul missed it, because he was somewhere with his ‘friends’.

  It was then that I found out that the entire time that Paul and I had not been eating, he’d been shooting up. I’m not sure where he got the money from. Probably from selling hash, or one of his other ‘deals’. All I knew was that I had seen none of it. Not a damn penny.

  That was the beginning of the end for me. I told myself that this was it. I could either go down with him from this point, or I could break away. If it wasn’t bad enough that we were reduced to moving into a squat and unable to even buy food, Paul was managing to get money for heroin, but not to feed himself or me. He was supposed to care about me! It was a huge wake-up call. I was shocked by the selfishness that it indicated, and it forced me to face facts about the extent and seriousness of Paul’s habit.

  There was a second thing that led me to reaching a turning point where I knew that I would have to leave Paul. He refused to take an HIV test.

  I’d plead with him to go for one, but he flatly refused. The same conversation was repeated so many times. The same things said, and the same stubborn, selfish refusal the outcome.

  ‘You are sharing needles, Paul.’

  ‘Ja, but I clean them.’

  ‘Dude. You have to listen to yourself! You have to hear what you are saying! It’s not possible.’

  ‘I don’t want a test. I don’t want to know.’

  ‘Well, thank you very much, Paul. I’d like to know, you know.’

  Never mind you. Drug addicts are incredibly selfish. Not in a mean way. There is no maliciousness intended. It’s just that they come first, middle and last, and you, as their partner, end up on the periphery, because nothing is that important to them any more.

  It hurts, because you cannot understand it.

  It hurts, because you want to help, and you think that if you just love him enough it’ll make the difference. If you just want his salvation enough, more than he wants it for himself, that it will count to him. But it can never count. You think that because you still love him so much, he must still love you, and there must be some part of him that wants to do whatever he has to do to be with you. You believe it. How can you not believe it?

  It hurts, because after a while you realise you are wrong.

  It hurt when it really began to sink in – him not caring that I didn’t have any food for four days and the refusal to do an HIV test, and I thought about the way things would be if I allowed myself to stay. I knew that I wouldn’t – that I couldn’t. I refused to move into the squat. I left him and came home.

  You can never come first in a drug addict’s life.

  That place is already taken.

  We stayed in contact after I left London. While I had refused to remain in a situation where he could take me down with him, I still loved him, and I still had hope. Hope has a way of digging in its heels.

  We decided that we would go to Thailand together the following year, and Paul cooked up another one of his fantastic plans to make money to buy the tickets.

  There was a gap in the drug market in London at the time – actual grass as opposed to hashish. It was hard to get in London, and very expensive. People only really smoked hash over there. In addition, South Africa’s famous variety, Durban Poison, had a ‘wicked’ reputation, and so finding buyers for the stuff would not be a problem. You just had to get it there. That’s where I fitted into the scheme. Paul convinced me to buy it here and post it over to him – not an uncommon practice then, or now, in fact, but one fraught with risk, and carrying a high price if you got caught. The reward, however, outweighed the risk for us because of the money we knew we could get for it. We figured that if I sent enough over in one go, it would be enough to pay for our flights to Thailand, and it would all be done with.

  However common the practice is, standing in that post office with a copious amount of dope ready for postage was one of the most terrifying moments of my life. It was horrendous to me that I was actually doing this, and pathetic … but still … Thailand. The idea of us in Thailand, together, away from everything, spurred me on. Surely Paul would not be able to get heroin in Thailand. Hope. There it was again.

  So I did it. I posted the pencils, wrapped in socks, and Paul duly received them without a hitch.

  He then smoked it all with his friends. Again. I do believe he sold some of it, but the money was never going to get to a travel agent. Of course not. He had better things to spend it on. More immediate concerns.

  That was it for me. For the third time. Only this time, probably because I was away from Paul, it was more ‘it’ than it had ever been before. I was far enough away from Paul to have a degree of objectivity about him, and my future with him if I did not break away completely. He had let me down again, and that was a pattern that would never change. I could not deny it to myself. I could not let hope in again.

  If he could let me go without food for days while he had money to spend on smack; if he could put my life, never mind his own life, at risk by sharing needles and not even going for one HIV test; if he couldn’t even hold up his side of a bargain in an illegal venture that could have ruined my future if I had been caught …

  I was back in that horrible place, but this time I knew, with absolute certainty, and with the resolve and strength that comes with absolute certainty, that I would cut him off. I did not want to see him again.

  And so I did it. I cut him off. When he came home a few months later, I refused to see him. I refused to take calls from him. Without exception. If he called, I put the phone down on him. It was very hard. Unbelievably hard. I would put the phone down on him, and then cry for a day.

  Paul was completely freaked out that I wouldn’t even speak to him, and he did not give up. He kept calling, and I kept slamming the phone down. I wouldn’t even have a conversation with him. I knew that I couldn’t allow that, or my resolve might fail, and this was the only way. I had gone down as far as I was willing to go. I had to draw a line, and not go over it.

  Then he got arrested for the first time.

  He was so cunning. He was terrible! He knew exactly how to find a chink in my armour. He knew that I loved getting letters. I have this ‘thing’ about letters, so the little bastard would send me all these letters from prison, knowing that I would not be able to resist opening them up. He knew there was no way I would be able to throw them away without reading them. But I never wrote back, or responded in any way.

  He then tried phoning me from prison, and he really pulled at my heartstrings with that. He would tell me that he was only allowed one phone call that day, and he was phoning me. Terrible. How do you hang up on that? But I did. I would say that I was sorry, that I couldn’t speak to him, and I’d put the phone down. I didn’t cross the line. Not once.

  It was over. Third time lucky.

  I didn’t see or speak to Paul again for five years.

  My best friend, whom I had known just a little longer than I had known Paul, also became addicted to Wellconal.

  She started shooting up and going out with the biggest dealer in Jo’burg. He was a truly terrifying guy, but she still ended up living with him. They would pawn their television set every week, then buy stock, sell it, and buy the TV back. Then a few days later, they’d pawn it again, and so on. Every week. That was her life. She also stole from me.

  She managed to pull herself right, which is amazing. An absolute miracle, in fact, because the percentage of pinks addicts who manage to get off the stuff and stay off it is something ridiculously small – don’t know the exact stats, but it is somewhere around 2 per cent. The rest die.

  Her salvation began one night when her dealer boyfriend came home with the pinks and their flatmate demanded that he get som
e first. When the boyfriend refused, the flatmate pulled out a gun and shot him in the face.

  I’ve always blessed the bastard for dying when he did, because my friend wouldn’t have come right if he hadn’t. Still, it was a long road for her. It took a couple of years for her to get off it completely, and those were very difficult years. She would stop using, then start again, then stop, then start, again and again. It was a real struggle.

  She would often come and stay with us, and my parents took her in when I went overseas a second time, to Edinburgh, in 1992.

  They knew what she was doing, but, just as they had tried to help Paul, they tried to help her. She was like their ‘other daughter’. They told her that although they couldn’t tell her what to do with her life, she must not bring drugs into their house. That didn’t last long, though. They asked her to leave after she shot up and blacked out in the bathroom – leaving the bath running and flooding the place. The only place she had left to go then was to London, where her father lived.

  She eventually made it to London, where she still lives. She is married now, with a little girl. One of the tiny minority to make it out and live a normal life. A real miracle.

  My best friend and my boyfriend. London was her beginning, but it was his end.

  Right up until they stuck a needle in their arms, we had all done the same things. We had all played with the same drugs, but they did the one thing that I didn’t do, and even though they are both alive, the divergence between the paths that their lives took and the path that mine took is extraordinary to me.

  Getting Tough

  Val

  WHEN HE CAME BACK FROM LONDON IT WAS IMMEDIATELY evident that nothing had changed. If anything, it had got worse. He looked terrible. He had always maintained a meticulous appearance, but now he looked shaggy and unkempt – and thin. He’d grown his hair, but it wasn’t just that. There was a difference in the way he carried himself. He looked as if he didn’t care about himself.

  He’d been deported from France for not having the right visa, and Air France had tried to make us pay for the flight. When I explained to them that we didn’t have any money to pay for it, they wanted to make an arrangement for Paul to pay, forcing me to explain that he was a drug addict who had no job and was unlikely to be getting one in the near future. They then – very graciously, I thought – agreed to cover the cost of the flight themselves.

  He was out the door again as soon as he’d dropped his bags.

  Once again, he’d be gone for days, so it was hard to get a fix on anything specific, and when we did try to speak to him, he had an excuse for every occasion – delivered with the utmost innocence. He told us he wanted to work, and a friend of ours organised him a job at Edgars, but on the third day I dropped him off and drove around to the far corner of the building, just in time to see him leap the fence onto the Nicol Highway and stick out his thumb. Direction – Town. I’d become suspicious, not from anything he’d done, but from his manner. He’d shown signs of agitation, and I knew his pattern from before. I wasn’t surprised by what I saw.

  With no job, the stealing quickly started up again as before, and became so intense that it was soon clear that he had got far worse with this second foray overseas.

  I caught him out the first time after hearing him talking on the phone. He had put it down and made to leave, and when I asked where he was going he told me he had to go meet a friend. The word ‘friend’ aroused suspicion in me, as did the fact that when I offered him a lift, he wouldn’t wait. He said it was urgent, and the next minute he was gone.

  As soon as he had left, I pressed redial on the phone and a woman answered at a pawnshop in Hillbrow. I rushed out there in time to see Paul outside the shop. He was of course startled to see me and tried desperately to stop me from entering, but with no success.

  He had brought in my mother’s silver teaspoons (they had been a wedding present and were part of the family heritage), and I had to pay R100 to get them back, right there. A hundred rand for my own things! The lady at the shop must have been quite used to this sort of thing happening, though, because she could have easily got far more for them. They were worth about R400. Paul had been given R50 for them – basically just enough to get a fix, which was of course all he cared about.

  On another memorable occasion, I quite coincidentally spotted him walking down the street with a pair of shoes that I later discovered he had lifted from a nearby gym. What was so particularly memorable about it was the way he was walking down the street. Not a care in the world, as if they were his shoes and he had every right to be swinging them from his hand. He had told me that he was going to play tennis with a friend, but when I questioned him later about the identity of the friend, he couldn’t tell me quickly enough who it was.

  In time we realised that gyms were a favourite haunt for Paul. It was easy pickings for him. We had received a phone call from a good friend of ours who was a member at the Wanderers Club. He told us that there had been complaints about clothes and equipment going missing from the clubhouse on a regular basis, and always when Paul was there. People were becoming suspicious of him, and were planning to set a trap. Prior to the call to warn us, our friend had confronted Paul as he walked out of the changing rooms, asking what he was doing there. Paul had said that he was supposed to have met a friend for a game of squash, but that the friend had not turned up. He had apparently seemed quite calm and sure of himself – totally ‘unfazed’.

  We confronted Paul, and accused him, and of course he denied everything … but he never went back to the Wanderers again.

  On another occasion I found a briefcase hidden outside near the front gate, and I opened it to find it crammed with brand new CDs.

  As I’d once feared, I had to start hiding things and locking them away from Paul, and sometimes I would leave the house and have to go back, because I couldn’t remember if I had locked everything up or not. Like wondering if you have forgotten to switch off the iron. It was a terrible way to live.

  Paul made absolutely no effort whatsoever to help himself. He just kept on denying everything and disappearing for days on end, then coming back and telling us that he was going to ‘pull it together’ now. Sometimes he’d seem so earnest and determined, and I think that at those times he really meant it. But twenty-four hours later, usually less, he was off to ‘see a friend’ again. Everything that had been put on the table would go out the window. There were so many lies.

  He was always so contrite. When we caught him pawning our video machine, he went to my brother-in-law, Nathan, and asked to borrow R200 to buy it back, promising to pay him back as soon as he started working.

  Stealing from Peter to appease Paul.

  During one of these periods when he was making noises about stopping and getting his life on track, he actually did go as far as getting himself a job. This development gave us some hope, but the outcome was somewhat inevitable.

  He’d found work selling books door to door with a group of other young people, and they’d come and pick him up each day. We were sceptical, but we thought that there was some chance, because he, at least, wasn’t driving the car. He was being picked up. He wasn’t on his own.

  It lasted a couple of weeks. Not bad considering his pattern, but it all fell apart after they took him off for a weekend sales training camp. He’d left after a day and come home, and they arrived that evening.

  I heard them calling him from outside and he wouldn’t go out. They carried on and carried on calling him, until eventually he had to go out, and then we heard the yelling and shouting. The voices rose enough for us to hear what they were saying, and I realised that it was all over. A girl was accusing Paul of having stolen her suede jacket out of the boot of the car. He was, of course, vehemently denying it. I heard him demanding to know how she could think it was him, when he didn’t even have a key to the car! Anyone listening who didn’t know what we knew would have believed him – he sounded so convincing.

  In the end, it tur
ned out that he had taken the jacket, and he had also stolen a gold necklace from another member of the group. It was him. He was always the one who was there.

  It was always him.

  I was angry, but helpless.

  Mark and I realised that Paul needed professional help. It was outside our capabilities to influence him, and we decided upon a private rehabilitation centre, Riverfield, in Sandton.

  It was expensive, but we honestly thought it would help. At that early stage we weren’t very experienced at all with this whole affair, and lacked the wisdom to foresee the lack of success that we would have with the rehabs. Riverfield was rather a smart place, and we had to go and see a psychologist there. She tried to imply that because Paul was so much younger than his siblings he must have been a ‘mistake’, and that this had affected him.

  No doubt she was looking for a reason – something on which to pin his obvious psychological problems, and therefore his addiction. Something she could work with and treat, perhaps with the premise that if you remove the cause, you remove the effect. I don’t know, I am not trained in psychology, but I am a parent who always did the best for my children, and I did not agree with her line of investigation. In fact, it seemed somewhat frivolous to me in his case, though I concede that it may well not be in many other cases.

  If, and where, there is rightful blame to be placed, or mistakes to be dealt with, fine. But as far as I was concerned she was barking up the wrong tree.

  Paul was loved, completely and without reservation, and that love would never desert him, although he was to turn away from it totally and that would at first be inexplicable to me.

  Paul was there about a month, before they asked us to take him away. He had caused some sort of trouble, but I don’t remember exactly what it was now. Something to do with pills. I remember the other inmates crying and getting terribly upset when we collected him, because they loved him. When I think of that now, I think: What a waste of a personality.