Crashed. Melinda Ferguson

the then editor – who is also my friend – plus the woman from HR, Boyfriend and I drive along the road I had travelled the day before, the day of The Crash. As we near the accident intersection, I can barely look. Metal and rubber debris litter the tar, the robot is still down, like a sentinel felled. Boyfriend turns the car around and heads down the road in exactly the same direction I was driving yesterday. “Think. Try to remember exactly what happened,” he encourages me.

      I force myself to stare into the eye of the oncoming storm. And then we see it. The overgrowth of a tree that obliterates all signs of an intersection approaching. He stops the car, turns around and we drive the route again. And there it is. A huge branch across the view of the robot, preventing a driver from seeing that a traffic light or an intersection lies ahead. This time I take pictures as we drive the route over and over again, trying to get the angle from the driver’s perspective. I feel a small squeeze of relief. Maybe it wasn’t all my fault. Maybe there’s a perfectly legitimate explanation for why I simply didn’t see the intersection. At this stage, all I am is confused.

      The atmosphere in The Magazine’s boardroom is vastly different to the one at the Ferrari dealership. While both the editor and publisher seem to be in shock, the HR woman appears to be in complete control. She spares no sympathy. “This is very, very serious,” she says as she rattles off procedures: I am to provide a statement, as well as the accident report and case number, as soon as possible. As we leave the boardroom she finds a moment alone with me. “The company is going to get to the bottom of this.” She also informs me that there will be some kind of disciplinary action.

      What does this mean? I am terrified. “Am I going to lose my job? Get fired?” I ask, eyes huge.

      “All I can tell you is that they are seeing this in a very serious light,” I think I hear her say. “Gross negligence.” Oh my god. My neck in the brace aches. I feel like my world is exploding. I can hardly breathe.

      A blanket of doom settles over the office when I return to work. It seems that everyone in the entire building has heard about The Crash, and few of my colleagues are even talking to me. Whenever I walk into the canteen, it all goes dead quiet. The three passengers with me in the car are not yet back at work, and when they do return I suspect they have been told not to discuss the accident with me. I am desperate to make amends, but I don’t quite know how – especially when no one’s talking to me. The silence is unnerving. It feels like I am about to get the chop.

      One afternoon I manage to catch a moment with the Food Ed. She is the only one with a visible injury, a line of tiny stitches crisscross her eyebrow. I crouch beside her at her desk, on my knees.

      “I’m so, so sorry,” I weep.

      She opens her heart to me and receives me. Later she will tell me she too experienced The White Light when the Ferrari spun out of control.

      Boyfriend advises me to get a lawyer. And, for a change, I don’t argue. It’s probably one of the most grown-up, self-loving things I have ever done for myself.

      Owen, my attorney, is a small moonfaced beam of super energy with a brilliant legal mind. I have had a few contract negotiations with him over the years and he is the first legal person I think of. I leave a message on his voicemail.

      It is over the final days of the Jewish holiday Sukkot – the Festival of the Tabernacle – that Owen agrees to meet me for breakfast in Norwood. I unpack the events around The Crash, give him copies of the police statement and show him the pics of the accident scene. He tells me he will begin to start compiling a statement and forbids me to communicate another written word about the accident to the company unless he scrutinises it first. He is convinced the company is going to try to fire me and hold me liable for the R350 000 excess.

      As we finish off our meeting I find myself telling him in detail what I experience during The Crash, when the car begins to career out of control and how a powerful white light comes down to bring the spinning metal to a stop. He remains silent for a while and then begins talk to me about Sukkot, in terms of the Kabbalah. He says, according to Kabbalah, absolutely nothing in this world exists outside of God. However, for us to have a human experience, most of the time God hides his infinite presence. So we go through life believing that ours is the true reality, and that God is somewhere out there, distant and separate from us.

      “Around the time of Sukkot, this illusion begins to break down,” he explains. “During this celebration we are supposed to build sukkah or some type of rectangular structure where we experience the existential truth and joy that we are not separate from God but within him. As we sit within the sukkah, we are sitting inside God.”

      He then says something that blows my mind. “The car you were driving at the time of the accident was a rectangular shape, a structure you had ‘built’ in the sense that you related deeply to it, in your materialistic, human experience. Your sukkah. I think what you experienced during the crash was a true Sukkot experience, where God showed himself – not to be something separate and apart from you, but right within you.”

      By the end of the story my eyes are streaming with tears. So are his.

      Over the next 90 days, a long, drawn-out process begins to establish who is liable for the excess – me or the company. I am charged with gross negligence and served notice to attend a disciplinary hearing. This is a charge that carries with it the possibility of instant dismissal. I feel like my life and finances are hanging in the balance. There are times that I am so stressed that I drive both Boyfriend and my lawyer demented.

      “You are one of the highest maintenance clients I have ever had,” Owen blurts out at me in exasperation. I am not, however, one of his highest-paying ones, because by the end of the long, drawn-out case, he has charged me less than R10 000 for what could easily have been a bill of over R80 000 from any other lawyer.

      Then, finally, on 2 December 2013, three months to the day after The Crash, I walk into the boardroom where my hearing is to take place. According to standard company law, because this is an internal process, I am not allowed to have legal representation. Although I am told I may have someone from within the company to defend me, it is clear that there is absolutely no one who can do this so I decide to represent myself.

      I am well prepared, armed with a file of evidence, photographs and even a flip chart with diagrams of how the accident unfolded. The CCTV footage, saved on USB, is ready to be shown if need be. It effectively displays a discrepancy in when exactly the robot turned red, as well as showing the Ferrari moving to overtake slowly. In contrast, it shows the Pajero moving at a much higher speed.

      I have spent most of the previous night with Owen at his office, putting the four pillars of my defence together. But as the night progresses I am so stressed that I can hardly breathe and I throw some irrational tantrum. Owen tells me to go home and get some sleep. He will send the rest of my defence later. When I wake up at 6 am my entire case is in my inbox.

      In my best attempt to power dress and channel my no-nonsense LA Law look, I wear my Karen Millen pin-stripe suit. The day before, I have my hair done sleek and straight to mimic a let’s-get-down-to-business look.

      It turns out, I don’t get fired. I get a final written warning and, when the time comes to pay a whopping bill of R650 000 – the owners of the Pajero had decided to weigh in with another 300k – the company comes to the table and pays. I will always be supremely grateful for their generosity.

      But, as I’m about to find out, despite my money worries now finally over and my job still intact, post traumatic stress and all the fallout that comes with it is more insidious and a lot harder to deal with.

      CHAPTER 5

      The Weekend at the 7-Star Hotel

      I said it all started with The Crash. But sometimes, when you look back at a powerful life-changing event that implodes, there are a whole bunch of mitigating factors that contribute to the actual explosion, the gunshot thwack, where the head cracks open like a big, pippy pomegranate.

      So the actual trigger