Crashed. Melinda Ferguson

push-me-over-the-edge-of-the-cliff event had started six days earlier, before I checked in on Boyfriend on his birthday, April Fools’ Day.

      But for all of these events to have taken place, The Weekend of the Break-Up has to be considered a leading cause. This had happened six weeks earlier. At a seven-star luxury hotel.

      It had come as a total shock. Cold and icy even though the night was sweltering.

      You know those times when you don’t see something until it hits you? Like a car accident, when you’re left-sided by a truck or when you aquaplane across a wet road. When you swallow a bee from a can of fizzy drink at an airport, cut yourself on the jagged edge of a tin while you’re feeding a homeless stray? That feeling when you get axed in the head from behind. Blood and guts of the heart stuff.

      Just after Valentine’s Day (not that we celebrated that commercial cheese – we were both too cool for that), I had taken Boyfriend to a seven-star mountain getaway an hour and half out of town. A PR team representing the marketing of the hotel had been on my case for ages, relentlessly pursuing me (plus partner) to stay for two nights. The trip offered all expenses paid, including full access to the mini bar, and couple’s spa treatments. These were the obvious perks of working on a magazine. You get invited to things you could never normally afford, and get given gifts as veiled bribes in exchange for gushy editorial.

      Of course, as “gratitude” for all the treats laid on, you’re expected to review it. Favourably, of course. Travel and motoring journos are unarguably the biggest hos for freebies in the media industry. We might not earn huge amounts, but what we are rich in is experience.

      Wealth used to be judged by the amount of money you managed to accumulate. But things have been changing ever since the world economic meltdown that kicked off with the collapse of the global bank Lehman Brothers in September 2008, an event that exposed the fragility of the world’s economy and almost brought down the financial system of the entire planet.

      As a result, today the world is regarded as a much less stable or predictable place. According to a recent life survey conducted by American Express, known as The Life Twist survey (due to the respondents’ overwhelmingly similar attitudes towards the twists and turns they had come to expect in life), being regarded as successful no longer entails having money. In fact material wealth was right down at number 22 of 24 priorities in the survey. Having experiences such as happy relationships and adventures were regarded as by far the most important in order to have a fulfilled and successful life.

      By all accounts, being afforded plenty of opportunity to travel and savour sponsored adventures and experiences, I appeared to be living la vida loca, the envy of my friends and acquaintances. But, in reality, the majority of the time saw me playing in the playground of plastic.

      Of course, most people would have immediately leapt at the opportunity to stay in a seven-star joint, but after almost a decade with The Magazine I had grown a strange aversion to the relentless hunters who called themselves PRs. I got a certain kick out of playing slippery cat-and-mouse games with them until they were salivating at the bit to have me agree to attend their launch or trip. Weird that I would get off on such pathetic power games but, shamefully, at that time I did. Looking back, I have come to believe the crappier you feel inside, the more you objectify and treat others badly.

      Behind the scenes, me playing hard to get with the seven-star joint was utter bullshit on my part. I actually really didn’t need that much convincing. I was close to finishing my fourth book on the stump-legged athlete and I was exhausted. So the intention behind the getaway was twofold: to share some much-needed romantic time (read: sex) with Boyfriend, and to get some quiet space to at least make some headway into writing the introduction and author’s note for the book.

      With matching his-and-hers Samsonite luggage packed, we were ready to leave by late Friday afternoon. We looked the perfect upwardly mobile seven-star couple as we drove into end-of-week get-out-of-town rush-hour traffic in the gorgeous new Jaguar XFR-S 5-litre, V8, 460kW, R1.4-million super sedan. With its 20-inch Varuna alloy wheels and Meridian sound system banging out the beats, my life felt pretty much complete. It’s amazing how material objects can be such a seductive drug of denial and amnesia and how a Jag can make you forget a Ferrari, even if it’s just for a few hours.

      After checking in, we were taken in a golf cart to our VIP R7 000-a-night villa, perched on the edge of a never-ending smoky purple vista of mountains and valleys. The sweaty stiff-upper-lipped manager pointed out various high points: “The Jacuzzi is here, the mini bar here … This is the WiFi code … Breakfast is served from 7 am.”

      I wished he’d leave. I’d visited enough upscale joints to know where everything was. How hard was it going to be to find the kettle, for fuck’s sake? In the end, besides minor décor details, all these swanky places looked pretty much the same. All I was really interested in was the damn WiFi code.

      Fuck, I felt jaded. With the hotel man gone, surrounded by silence except for the whispering grass, and some faraway bird call, I found myself tumbling onto the triple king-size bed with 400-thread-count Egyptian linen.

      Fuck, I was tired. I hadn’t realised just how exhausted I really was. I half-heartedly shouted for Boyfriend, who was texting from a recliner on the deck of the plunge pool, to join me in the bedroom. He probably couldn’t hear me. I didn’t even have the energy to wonder who was taking up so much of his energy. Too tired to be curious, I made a mental note of it. It was a good line. “Too tired to be curious to care.”

      I closed my eyes and almost immediately drifted off into a deep slumber.

      Boyfriend had been calling me narcoleptic for the past year. Maybe he was right, but I was usually asleep before he even got to -leptic. Truth be told, though, I was actually quite affronted by the label. There was nothing attractive about falling asleep all over the place – unless you were hot, like River Phoenix, of course. The only time I had ever come across an actual narco was River as Mickey, the half-asleep gay homeless hustler in My Own Private Idaho.

      I loved that movie, especially River’s character, who called himself a “connoisseur of roads” because he had been “tasting roads all [his] life”. I guess he appealed to my sense of homelessness, never staying long enough in one place to allow grass to grow beneath my feet.

      I remember when River died. It was September 1993. Just 23 years old, he had died of a speedball – a deadly cocktail of heroin and cocaine. Around that time I had just started playing around with smack – chasing the dragon. Melting sticky lines of brown heroin on silver tinfoil and inhaling the clouds of heady smoke through a foil tube. Despite being high as a kite, touching the clouds, I felt sad inside the day that River died. To help me forget, I lit another hit.

      It was dark when I woke up in that king-size bed in the seven-star luxury hotel. I hated the grogginess you feel when you fall asleep at the wrong time, between that crack before day becomes night, and wake up feeling all wrong, like a chloroform cloud has invaded your brain.

      The acrid smell of cigarette smoke that drifted in from the lounge area didn’t help.

      Fuck. The one thing management had requested was no smoking in the villa. I had stopped eight years ago and I wasn’t one of those irritating non-smokers who held my nose and asked everyone else to abstain. Besides, I knew better than to ever say a word to Boyfriend when it came to his smoking. But still, right now I was the one responsible for the joint.

      The blare of a Man United football match sliced through the silence.

      I walked into the darkened lounge. He’d raided the mini bar, beer cans strewn all over the place. A bottle of red vintage wine stood open. R400 a pop. Merlot or Shiraz. It was too dark to tell.

      “Darling? Uhmmm … Could you maybe smoke outside? You know, they asked me—”

      “Fuck it!” he muttered, and hauled himself back onto the deck.

      I hated that passive-aggressive thing he did.

      “Okay, okay. Just not fight about it … Just calm down,” my inner voice placated me. I would later