Crashed. Melinda Ferguson

shifting sharply into focus. And now, here in reception at the Hotel Hospital, I found myself staring blankly at him. The image of me going down on him wouldn’t let up. He had this weird smile on his face. Like he remembered too.

      But what the hell was he doing here? Oh fuck. Of course, now I remembered – he worked here.

      He was one of the few addicts-turned-counsellors who did know what he was doing. There was no way I could get away, spirit myself away and out of this one.

      “Burnout, no sleep, my nine-year relationship’s over. And I crashed a car. I haven’t relapsed – it’s just that I’m fucked. Can’t stop crying,” I muttered, before a deep hiccup released a torrent of sobs. Jesus! Now I dissolved into another flood of tears. No hiding, no pretences. Fuck. Why did I always have to blurt it all out like some errant hosepipe. Now it was probably going to get out, slide away like a sick snake of rumour: “You hear? She’s relapsed … Oh, my word, after 14 years! Can you believe it?” Those toxic little addicts always feasting and burping like maggots on chaos to make themselves feel better.

      “I haven’t relapsed …” I said it again, before finally petering out. A pathetic bleat. As though relapsing was some terrible, seeping venereal disease.

      “That’s cool. Don’t worry,” he awkwardly tried to comfort me. “I won’t say anything. I work here – anonymity and all, you know. Part of the job. Everyone’s got burnout. It’s a New Millennium thing. Sometimes I wish I could book in myself. You’re doing the right thing.” And then, as he moved away, he grinned. “Welcome to The Clinic.”

      His attempts at comforting me, consoling me, left no impression. I was too way gone for sweet talk. Maybe I had relapsed? I obsessed. Maybe I had gone swinging like a pendulum backwards into that never-ending cycle of need: use-greed-use-need-greed-use.

      Relationship addiction. Work addiction. Crazy thought addiction. Facebook. Instagram … And then this fucking thing with food. And actually, while I was at it, probably sex addiction too.

      “You’re in relapse mode,” my longtime therapist, Dr ParaFreud, with little round shrink glasses, whom I hadn’t spoken to in three years, had told me when I called him on his cellphone that Sunday – family time, out of office – without even wondering whether I was being inappropriate. “Unbounderised,” he would have called it.

      “As much as you are in some type of crisis, don’t you think you are being a little over dramatic, Melinda? I don’t think you actually need to book into a treatment centre. You’re successful, you’ve written books, published books. You have your life together. I think you’re just going through a hard time. You just need to realign things, put new boundaries in place. Keep going to therapy.”

      And on some level he was right. Maybe I was being extreme. I’d always been a bit of a drama queen – I’d been told that often enough. Another thing to throw into the Addiction closet, Addicted to Drama. I had even got a degree in it from UCT. “Why you’d need to study it – Drama – I’ll never know,” my mother had often said. “Your whole life’s an act. You are one big drama.”

      My mother’s cruelty, her sharp, uncensored tongue, had the power to hurtle me into alleyways of self-doubt. I remember those deflated moments well. The way her words cut me up like soggy stir-fry.

      Genie arrived with the forms. She informed me medical aid had approved the “hospitalisation”. Fuck. Hospitalisation at Hotel Hospital. That was serious. Plus, I’ve always been suspicious of the use of too much alliteration …

      Were they going to put me on a drip, the dreaded intravenous approach? Hook me up with nasty needles?

      I signed on the dotted line.

      “I’m only staying for seven days,” I snarled.

      She smiled and nodded.

      She instructed me to wait on the couch to be taken up to the nurses’ station. Now there was no going back, no reversing.

      My mind once again hurtled back to what Dr ParaFreud had advised me. Sure, he may have been right about the outwardly successful part. For more than a decade I had been more than holding it together: author of two bestselling books on addiction. The third on township pop princess Kelly Khumalo, which had sold rather well. I had just finished my fourth – on that stump-legged athlete – which was waiting in the wings to be published. An award-winning magazine writer turned publisher. On the outside, it all looked fabulous … Here I was, a well-paid speaker at functions touted on my agent’s website as a Famous Speaker under the category of Inspirational. Paid thousands to talk for less than an hour on my journey to hell and back.

      “Manifest your lives,” I’d tell the audience. “Inspiring”, “strong”, “courageous” are what other people called me.

      I had money in the bank. Fifty pairs of shoes in my closet. I even had a Kate Unger dress for meetings to impress. I did all my banking online with a zooty app on my iPad Air. I had almost paid off my bond. I had medical aid, retirement funds and life insurance. I had Voyager miles, eBucks and Vitality points. I could even choose which lounge I wanted to chill in when I was travelling by air, for fuck’s sake.

      But since when did a person’s outsides become a barometer for the catastrophes we carry inside? The voice inside sneered.

      And why, you might ask, in the light of all I had achieved and owned, was I falling about on the floor in floods of tears? Like my epiglottis was about to throttle me? As desperately as I wanted to believe Dr ParaFreud, I knew that this time he was wrong. This time there really was something wrong. If there was one thing I had learned for sure over the years, it was: never judge a person’s insides by their outsides.

      “You probably just need to go to a few NA meetings, and get your life back on track.” Those were the last words Dr PF had said to me.

      The last meeting I had attended was the day before The Crash.

      CHAPTER 4

      Post-Crash

      In the weeks after The Crash, I discover that writing off a Ferrari carries its own baggage, its own heavy weight. It’s in a league of its own – very, very different to the consequences you may face if you, say, total an Uno or a Chevy Spark.

      “It was an accident. These things happen. It’s not like you woke up yesterday and said: ‘Oh yes, today I am going to write off a Ferrari.’”

      I am sitting, wracked in a heap of tears, in the boardroom of the Ferrari dealership on William Nicol, and the owner – a man who has every right to be angry – is trying to quietly comfort me.

      “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” I sob.

      My whiplashed neck is in a brace, I can barely breathe – my ribs and chest ache from where the airbags shot out and bruised me. In a tear-blurred daze, I sign heaps of forms, fill in accident reports, recount the details. Somehow, I managed to open a case, at the Sandton police station, with the help of Boyfriend, a few hours after The Crash took place.

      The woman dealing with the insurance at the Ferrari dealership tells me they have received CCTV footage of the incident, which they will examine. Footage? Oh my fuck! Where does that come from? She tells me that a business across the road has a permanent camera in position at the intersection. She is very reassuring. “You don’t appear to be speeding. We should be okay. It looks like it’s covered.” She takes a very long pause. “You will, however, have to deal with the excess,” she says, almost apologetically.

      “The excess? But that’s R32 000?” I whisper hoarsely. But I will deal with it, I decide. It’s a lot of money, but I can make a plan.

      “Uhmmm … No, it’s 10 per cent excess plus admin fees. That’s R350 000.”

      Fuck. Fucking-fuck. That’s the cost of a new 3-series. I go into a type of anaphylactic shock. I haven’t eaten for 24 hours.

      On