One Midlife Crisis and a Speedo Read online

  A few years ago I found myself in trouble over that quote that I hadn’t attributed. It was a difficult time: strangers wanted me fired; acquaintances became enemies; some friends stayed friends and others disappeared. The editor of a national newspaper, a man I hardly knew, tried to call me, and when he couldn’t reach me sent me an email. He said, “You’re in trouble here, and it’s all getting bigger than it needs to be but we can get you through this. If you want my help, I’d like to help you.”

  I never replied. In my head I was a kid lying in bed at 3 a.m., knowing that bad times are here but wanting nothing to have changed. I needed help but I never replied and I lost my job and it took ten years to come back again.

  I sat out on the lawn of the chalet above Ebenezer Dam that night, talking to my partner on the phone and listening to the warm wind moving through the pines like a shaggy dog, and I thought about what all that meant and how it was still happening. I thought about how I didn’t take a coach when I should obviously take a coach, and how I keep myself to myself and never ask for advice or help although a part of me is always crying out for advice and help.

  That night I lay awake listening to Tom snore, my head on a rolled-up T-shirt because I’d used my pillows to build a feathery Berlin Wall between us. I don’t care how uptight that makes me; at least I’ve never woken on the morning of a big swim spooning a naked eighty-three-year-old man.

  Next morning is the morning of the swim.

  We meet up with Heather and her family who are warm and welcoming and concerned about my chest, then we drive down to the dam and Tom sits on a folding chair in the shade while I register. I do a lot of staring nervously at the water. A mile is a long way when you see it all in front of you. The route is around two tall inflatable cones and back to the starting point, and it seems to me you could lose a Boeing in that triangle of water and search for years without finding it. I pace nervously, past the stand selling beers and boerewors rolls and the kids swimming off the wooden pier. I come back and sit coughing thoughtfully and calculating just how embarrassing it would be not to finish. Tom lets me pace and knows not to make conversation. He opens a cowboy novel and when it’s time for my swim he says good luck and waves goodbye.

  It’s hard in the water. I swim as slow as I can but all the kids and old men are beating me and no one wants to be stone last so I swim faster than I should. The water is cool and I can’t see the bottom. I reach the first inflatable cone and hold on a moment before I round it. The second leg runs close to the far bank. I could crawl out here and hide in the reeds and be safe. But Tom and Heather and her family will be back there waiting for me and what excuse can I give? Can I feign amnesia? Was I kidnapped by banjo-playing hillbillies?

  Instead I turn over onto my back and float and look at the sky. People come past me like a migration of walruses. The water is kind, it’s holding me up. Maybe I can just float here all day.

  But there are other people floating too, and some treading water. They don’t seem too bothered about it; they’re just taking a break. One guy smiles and waves. “Beautiful day,” he says, and I think, yes, actually it is a beautiful day.

  When I make it across the finish line they give me a medal for finishing. I stand in the yellow sunshine and look at my medal and it doesn’t bother me that I’m wearing a Speedo in public. I don’t worry what I look like. I feel proud.

  I call my partner to tell her I finished.

  “I know,” she says. “My dad’s been phoning every five minutes to tell me how you’re doing.”

  I look across at Tom with some surprise. He’s pretending to read his cowboy novel.

  “Really?”

  “He watched you the whole way through his binoculars. He was worried when you started floating belly-up.”

  I don’t know what to say.

  “He’s very proud of you,” she says.

  And then I have to stop talking to her, because something is catching in my throat.

  We go back to the chalet and Tom opens a bottle of wine he’s been saving for a big occasion. We have supper with Heather and her family in their chalet and watch Ireland play France in the Six Nations. There are small kids running around and Tom beams to look at them. We drink wine and cheer for Ireland and Ireland wins and then Tom says he’s turning in. He stands and says what a good day it has been, and as he walks past me he pats me once on the shoulder.

  A boy doesn’t become a man because he turns a man’s age, and he doesn’t become a man when his father dies. He becomes a man when he starts to get over it.

  12

  Juice

  “You’re not afraid of needles, are you?”

  I doubt there has ever been a transaction starting with those words that ended happily. Especially not when the person doing the asking is a woman with a severe blonde ponytail and icy blue eyes and arms like giant nutcrackers. She could have put a coconut in the crook of her elbow and turned it to suntan lotion with a simple flex. This woman was my drug dealer.

  “I’m not crazy about needles,” I said cautiously.

  She shrugged. “Here,” she said. “You can have this one.”

  I felt nervous. When embarking on a new course of action, the prudent man considers the trends of history; historically speaking, not much good has ever come of civilians being handed syringes in clandestine meetings in downtown coffee shops.

  I suppose I must have been complaining too often and too loudly about the ravages of age and the body, because one night at a dinner party the boyfriend of one of my friends sidled up to me.

  “What you need is GH,” he said. “Your GH has been declining since you turned forty.”

  “Oh, GH, yes, tch,” I murmured in a grave voice.

  But he knew where I could get some GH, he told me. He has a very good GH source. GH, he said, would change my life.

  Well, who doesn’t want to change their life?

  GH, as everyone knows who goes straight home from a dinner party and looks it up on the internet, is growth hormone, a production of the pituitary gland responsible for cell growth and regeneration. A scientifically rigorous website with the header “Everything you need to know about GH” informed me that GH injected into the folds of my belly flesh will “turn back your body’s internal clock, helping you rapidly build muscle, slash fat and increase libido, all while sending energy levels through the roof”.

  Well, that didn’t sound too bad. Energy levels through the roof are pretty much what you want when swimming from one continent to another. It went on to assure me that despite the fact that GH is a controlled substance almost everywhere in the world, and that its use in sports is strictly banned, it’s pretty much safeish.

  It cited no less an expert than “Eric Braverman, M.D., who specializes in anti-aging at Path Medical Center in New York City”, who assured me that “complications are very minimal”, and that “only a few people ever come in with big feet or big livers from mega-doses, and those aren’t my patients”. I was certainly reassured. This is the glory of the internet: at a finger-click we have access to all the objective scientific knowledge and reliable information that modern medicine has to offer. At the bottom of the page was a link to another section of the site where I could buy my own GH with free shipping.

  But the message here is that GH makes you younger. It makes your bones more dense and your skin more elastic; it gives you deeper sleep and glossier hair and a wetter nose. It’s the solution to middle age in a single syringe, regularly applied. Well, why not? It would be research for the book. How can I write about middle age without at least trying the cure? And if along the way I should become younger, sleeker and more like the way I would have been when I was younger if I’d worked out back then, then where’s the harm? After all, as Sylvester Stallone said when he was charged with importing forty-eight vials into Australia in 2007: “In ten years’ time, GH will be legal.”

  And that’s what happens, I suddenly realise, sitting in the coffee shop with my nutcracker-forearmed
pusher-lady as she slides me a packet with a month’s supply of GH and accepts R2500 back. That’s what happens when you’re middle-aged and you don’t know how to grow old with dignity: you forget the things you know and you start taking life advice from Sylvester Stallone.

  Because the thing I’ve nearly forgotten I know is that there isn’t a solution. There’s no elixir to make this right, because there’s nothing fundamentally wrong. Growing older isn’t the problem; growing older just happens. The problem with middle age isn’t that we’re changing, it’s that we don’t know how to do it. We panic and flail like drowning swimmers who can’t shout for help. I don’t need to go on some fool’s errand to turn back the clock, I need a way to make peace with the clock moving forward. Because the clock, no matter what you do, always moves forward. If I need this stuff to get across the Dardanelles, I may as well just take a boat.

  There are risks to GH: people develop joint problems and mood swings and it seems that some poor sods get oversized feet. If normal cells start dividing faster, so do the cancer cells you might not even know you have. But the biggest danger is the same danger as the boner potions and Viagra prescriptions: it’s the danger of trying to look backwards while your vehicle’s still moving forwards. It’s the foolishness of responding to autumn by trying to live like it’s still summer. It’s the sheer dumbheaded indignity, the tacky, childish, tasteless embarrassment, the simple, sad unwisdom of not knowing how to grow with your life, not knowing how to act your age.

  I gave her back the parcel and didn’t ask for my money. Sometimes, especially when you’re forty-three and you’ve become as stupid again as sixteen, a lesson needs to hurt before you learn it.

  13

  You Only Live Twice

  In Live and Let Die – the book, not the movie – James Bond flies from Florida to Jamaica. Somewhere over the Caribbean, just past Cuba, the plane encounters a tropical storm and we learn that James Bond is afraid of flying.

  This isn’t as surprising as it would be in the films – Live and Let Die is only the second book in the series, but we’ve already seen in Casino Royale that Bond is a cautious gambler who never wagers large sums, and we’ve been treated to the sight in New York City of Bond and Felix Leiter taking the cross-town bus to Harlem. The bus! That wouldn’t happen in the movies, but then the Bond books are fantasies for middle-aged men; the movies are for kids.

  When the storm hits, Bond white-knuckles the armrest and spends a page and a half fretting about what happens to metal when it’s placed under duress in mid-air. He calms himself by repeating, like a mantra, “Trust in your stars.” His stars have brought him this far; all he can do now is trust they’ll take him through.

  I’m not a nervous flyer and long-haul flight isn’t the Bondish adventure it was in 1953, but I sat in the aisle seat on Turkish Airways flight TK 1661 to Istanbul and remembered Bond and his stars.

  I also used to blindly believe that everything would be all right. Faith in your destiny is a useful delusion. It lets you do things that will surely fail, which is often the only way to succeed. It’s childish but it worked. Maybe “middle-aged” is another way of saying you’ve lost faith in your stars.

  My partner was asleep beside me. Sleeping on flights is a secretagent trick a damn sight more useful than fax machines in watches or cars that go underwater. I dozed briefly but woke from a dream of drowning. I stared at the ceiling for ten hours, thinking about the water and the grey misty hills on the far side, and everything that had brought me here. I wondered what the hell I thought I was doing.

  We hired a car in Istanbul. When I first conceived the swim I imagined myself alone out there in green waves with just a grumpy old Turk in a rowboat beside me, some local who knew the waters and would occasionally bark incomprehensible instructions and throw me apricots to keep my strength up. When the adventurer Richard Halliburton (who would later swim the length of the Panama Canal, paying thirty-six cents in toll fees) came to swim the Bosphorus in 1926 he stayed in Byron’s old house at Abydos for a week while he seduced local boys and gathered his nerve, then rose one windless morning and ate a tin of sardines and plunged in. The world isn’t like that any more.

  These days the Dardanelles churns with shipping, and the only time to swim it is 31 August each year when it’s closed for the Byron Memorial Swim (or Turkish Memorial Day Swim, as the Turks call it. Byron died at Messolonghi fighting to free Greece from Turkish rule, so he’s no hero in Turkey). The effect of it all is that 31 August is another great big sports day, a tide of rubber swimming caps and numbers written in koki pen on upper arms and someone speaking through a loudspeaker.

  That discovery was depressing enough, but the English company that runs the occasion encourages foreign swimmers to sign up for a kind of jolly package-tour experience, involving being bussed down with ruddy-faced fellow swimmers, no doubt swapping cheerful anecdotes and training regimes and comparing nose-plugs all the way. You’re all put up in hostels and small hotels at the site, and share an orientation dip the day before the swim and a celebratory meal when you’re all finished. I can imagine nothing less Byronic.

  I signed up and paid the registration fee, because there’s no other way into the water, but by god, no one’s getting me on a bus. Who do they think I am? James Bond circa 1953?

  We had a couple of days before the swim so we decided to go walking in the mountains. Well, I decided we should go walking. My partner enjoys a spin around the Promenade, but she had never been hiking before, not a long hike, out in nature where there are ravines and up-hills and wild boar. She was hesitant.

  “Don’t worry,” I told her. “I’ll keep you safe.”

  I said that because of a strange trick of the mind. I was so worried about the swim that I’d started assuming I was an expert on everything other than the swim.

  At the car-rental place a tall, thin man with a luxurious moustache that made him resemble a broom had me initial seventeen byzantine, or possibly Ottoman, pages of contract, detailing precisely the procedure for surrendering my oldest son to the Janissary guard should I return the car with scratches. He and his assistant suspiciously checked each page, faxed them to an undisclosed second location for safekeeping, then gave me a car and pointed to the highway.

  The only way onto the highway was down a one-way off-ramp, which I drove in reverse, merging backwards with a steel river of Turkish traffic. Cars hooted and yelled and converged like Kurds around an ISIS fighter. I was still raising my hand and saying “Sorry!” after an hour when the ring road swept us out of the dusty industrial suburbs and down to run along the Sea of Marmara.

  “Plastic bottle-tops?” my partner was saying, a few hours later.

  “Plastic screw-tops, like on a Coke bottle. On all the softdrinks.”

  “And that’s the closure industry?”

  “That’s the closure industry. You wouldn’t have thought they’d need a steam train, but they must make a lot of bottle-tops.”

  We crested the rise of a green field. There were bright yellow flowers across the meadow and a spreading tree speckled with white, and below the rise was the deep-blue Dardanelles.

  I pulled over and we stood watching it roll down to the Gallipoli peninsula and then to the sea. It was a hot, windless day but there were flecks of white where the different streams of current collided. It was wider than in my imagination, bigger. It was muscular. It didn’t flow like a river, it marched like an army.

  “There it is,” I said, and she put her hand on my arm.

  We drove down and straight onto the ferry at Eceabat. I stood at the railing as we crossed to Çanakkale, trying to estimate our speed and how long it was taking. Gulls wheeled above the high wooded shores. I saw an old castle through the trees. A branch came down in the current, moving fast, much faster than I can swim.

  On the ferry was a busload of schoolkids on a field trip to the Troad. Schoolkids are all the same. They just want to flirt with each other and get this over with. It doesn’t matter w
hether you’re on a trip to the ruins of Troy or to the Durban Mini-Town and Snake Park in 1981; if you’re a kid, the world’s right there and you don’t care.

  My plan was to walk the Lycian Way and use the time to get my head right for the swim. I’d been too busy in the last month before leaving: It had all come too soon and I hadn’t thought enough. You can’t go in the water if your head’s not ready.

  The Lycian Way is 540 kilometres down the Lycian peninsula but it was summer and our time was short so we were only doing a couple of days of a mostly shady section. Four or five hours a day would harden me up after too much time at my desk. I’d have time to get my nerve up.

  “You should think about other stuff too,” said my partner as we drove.

  “Huh?”

  “While you think about the swim. You should also think about other stuff.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like Clarence and his wedding. And about what you’re going to do about work.”

  “I’m not doing anything about work. What do you mean?”

  “You’re unhappy doing what you’re doing.”

  “I’m not that unhappy. It makes money.”

  “Well, that’s true,” she said. “Being only slightly unhappy is a good life-goal. And the thing with money is once it’s gone you can never get more.”

  I’ve never told her this, but I genuinely find her sarcasm attractive.

  “Just think about it,” she said. “That’s all.”

  “What will you be doing while I do all this thinking?”

  “I’ll be thinking as well. Or maybe I’ll just look at the scenery. I’ll see when the time comes.”

  We were to walk each day to a different inn or small hotel where our bags would be waiting, and at the end of it someone would bring us back to our car. When he was sixteen, Ernest Hemingway went alone from his home in Oak Park through the woods and backwaters of Illinois and Wisconsin to camp at Rapid River and Horton Bay, a week’s walk away. This would be like that, only with inns and each other and fewer rifles. The trail started from an old ski-lodge high in the white-capped Ovacik mountains.