One Midlife Crisis and a Speedo Read online

  I sat with Mike in the glum bachelor flat he now rents on Corlett Drive. We sat on beanbags because in both break-ups he did not get to keep the furniture. “Look on the bright side,” I told him. “You don’t have to wonder ‘what if ’, like everyone else. You know that no matter what, you’d have probably made the same mistakes and still ended in the same dumb place.”

  Mike didn’t answer. He just poured us another glass of cheap whisky.

  Case study 2: Napoleon Bonaparte:

  The Forty-Three-Year-Old crisis

  One day I’ll publish my theory that some of the most critical moments in history only happened because someone or other was turning forty-three. It doesn’t matter how much you’ve achieved, when the crisis strikes you feel the need to do more, and something different, and right now, while you still can. If you’re a man of action and influence, it’s like suddenly putting a teenaged boy in charge of national policy.

  Consider Napoleon Bonaparte. By most standards – yours and mine, say – Boney had done quite a bit by the time he was forty-two. He’d invaded Egypt, seized France in a coup d’état, become First Consul and then, quite impressively, Emperor of France. He’d fought a war in Europe against a coalition of all the powers and was handily beating them. He was almost invincible in land warfare. The only way he could blow this would be by making some vast over-reaching strategic blunder, and he had shown little inclination to blunder strategically. Then two months before his forty-third birthday he gathered up an army of 400 000 men and invaded Russia.

  Napoleon’s birthday was 15 August, the height of European summer, and he must have had a pretty sweet time of it out there on the warm steppes, toasting his troops with a glass of Vin de Constance, murmuring to himself, “Ah, maybe forty-three’s not so bad.” Before the end of November he came crawling back over the Berezina River with only 40 000 men left, frozen, starving, eating their own horses.

  Not everyone works as well for my theory as Napoleon, but some come close. Hitler was forty-three in 1932 and that’s the year he decided to take up German citizenship and run for chancellor of Germany. Mind you, he started the Second World War when he was fifty, which I’m told is also quite a tough year, and then invaded Russia the year after, so maybe he was just a late bloomer.

  Saloth Sar, the hitherto easy-going leader of the Khmer Rouge, turned forty-three in 1968. In that year he underwent a personality change, became more secretive and sullen, ordered the people around him not to approach him directly, and changed his name to Pol Pot. He launched the Cambodian national uprising two months before his forty-third birthday, and had murdered nearly a quarter of his countrymen by the time he turned fifty.

  Of all the weird, pointless midlife-crisis quests, trekking to the South Pole has to be high among them. There’s no money to be made from it, no land or minerals to be annexed, nothing but hardship, challenge, frostbite and the satisfaction of proving you can do without your fingertips. Robert Falcon Scott was forty-two when he set out on his doomed expedition to furthest south, and spent his forty-third birthday wintering on the Antarctic ice-shelf. Things were already going wrong, but he made the decision to push south and never came back. Roald Amundsen beat him to it, arriving there on 11 December 1911, three months before his own forty-third birthday.

  Ernest Shackleton’s disastrous expedition to cross Antarctica from sea to sea via the pole, which ended with his ship being crushed in the pack-ice and all his men marooned, started in 1914 when he was forty and ended when he was forty-three. Some day, you’ll see, history will prove me right. The key to almost all catastrophes lies in the midlife crisis. Douglas Adams knew it before me: the answer to life, the universe and everything is forty-two, just about to turn forty-three.

  My partner was right. A quest gives shape to your struggle. It gives you something productive to do while you work through the mismatch in your life, the struggle between the part of you that’s still growing and the part that knows it’s dying. You can pour your energy and anxiety into the quest instead of allowing it to thrash around, unfocused and blind, making bad decisions.

  But you need to think it through before you go a-questing. If you jump too far, you end up like Robert Falcon Scott. If you don’t jump far enough, you end up like my friends Hanneli and Danny.

  Case study 3: Hanneli D:

  The Not Going Far Enough crisis

  Hanneli is forty-two and has three children and thinks at least one of them was a mistake. She loves them all equally, you understand, and wouldn’t part with any of them, but she still thinks that three is too many and one or two would have been enough.

  Hanneli decided she would climb Kilimanjaro. She was determined. She bought the boots and the jacket and the extra socks. She bought the beanie and the headband that goes over your ears. She trained by walking up the Westcliff stairs and watching movies with mountain climbing: Everest documentaries and Clint Eastwood in The Eiger Sanction and Sylvester Stallone in the one where he looks like a rocky outcrop. I tried to lend her a documentary about Kilimanjaro but she didn’t want it. “I want it to be a surprise,” she said. “I want to test my limits.”

  “Mmm,” I said.

  “I want to face my fears in the death zone.”

  “There isn’t a death zone on Kilimanjaro,” I told her. “It’s not high enough. It’s just a lot of walking. Are you sure this is the thing you want to do?”

  She went to Tanzania then came back. She seemed despondent.

  “I walked a long way,” she said. “Mostly up, while the porters carried everything on their shoulders. Then I got there, and there was a lot of cloud, but I could also see some of the countryside, and I was quite tired, and then I came down.”

  “Still though,” I said. “You faced your fears.”

  “I actually wasn’t all that afraid,” she confessed.

  “Hey,” I said. “You sat on top of Kilimanjaro. Can you see a new tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow?” she said. “Tomorrow I have to drop Oliver at school. Then after that I have to pick him up again.”

  And she walked off with her shoulders slumped and her problems unresolved. There’s nothing sadder than someone wasting their midlife crisis.

  Case study 4: Danny B:

  The Going In The Wrong Direction crisis

  My friend Danny is my age, and last December he decided he needed to spend some time with himself in Patagonia. He left on the 23rd and didn’t take a cellphone or a laptop. He wanted to experience nature and solitude and rediscover himself. His wife, who is the real hero of this story, didn’t object to him spending Christmas in Tierra del Fuego while she stayed at home with the children. “It’s better than running off with a twenty-year-old,” she figured.

  Danny spent two weeks getting drunk in hotels and rented rooms, tearfully trying to call home to tell them he missed them. Now he’s in training for Iron Man. He’s just come back from Tokyo and he’s off to Barcelona in a few days. The goal he has set himself is to compete in the world championships of the Iron Man. He knows he can’t qualify on his times alone, because he’s not very good at the Iron Man, but there’s a special category of qualification: if you complete fifteen Iron Men in fifteen years, you have entry to the finals. He’s trying to do all fifteen in three years to get it over with, because he hates it so much.

  Case study 5: Vincent Deary: The Gauguin crisis

  Families and relatives of middle-aged men are understandably most wary of the crisis that involves giving it all up to follow their dreams. They’re afraid he’ll turn into Paul Gauguin. In 1891, when he was forty-three years old, Gauguin abandoned his life in France and sailed off to Tahiti for the first time to escape “everything that is conventional” and to paint women with flowers in their hair. He may be a big wheel in post-impressionism now, but he died penniless fifteen years later of a heart attack brought on by alcohol, morphine and syphilis, while waiting to begin a prison sentence in Papeete.

  Consider now the case of Vincent Deary. Vincent Deary
was a psychotherapist working for the National Health Service in south London. At the age of forty, somewhat spoiling my sequence of forty-threes but close enough, he sold his house, quit his job and moved to Edinburgh. Edinburgh was Vincent Deary’s Tahiti, and he went there to write a book. He gave himself two years, and shut himself away in a garret. He spent the first year thinking and writing notes, and then another four years writing the damn thing. The book he wrote was a lengthy philosophical musing about his life called How to Live, intended to be the first of a trilogy. (I don’t know what he’s intending to call the sequels. When to Live? Whether to Live? Harry Potter and the Presumptuous Book Title?) At the age of forty-five he finished, then put the manuscript to one side, the midlife crisis presumably out of his system, and went back to work, taking a job as a research fellow at Northumbria University.

  Five years later, when he turned fifty, the Hitler year, he showed someone the manuscript for the first time. She liked it, and so did the three agents he sent it to. And so did several publishers. Finally, after a bidding war, he sold it to an imprint of Penguin for what is coyly referred to in the UK as a six-figure advance, or, to translate that into rands, a seven-figure advance. It was published in the UK on the day I’m writing these words. Vincent Deary is the worst kind of case study: the man who risked it all and took a swing at a ridiculous and improbable quest, who not only didn’t die of syphilis while awaiting imprisonment, but brought meaning and satisfaction into his life and became a millionaire in the process. There’s no comfort there. Case studies about midlife crises are supposed to reassure you that it’s folly to drop everything, that middle-aged people trying something new are comical and should be pitied. The comfort is in being told that the right thing to do is nothing. What’s my excuse now? The odds are against me? Who cares about the odds? Damn you, Vincent Deary. Couldn’t you have climbed Kilimanjaro instead?

  “Do you want to give it all up and take a swing at changing your life?” my partner asked. “I’ll help you.”

  “I don’t think so,” I told her.

  “I think you should. You hate working on that TV show.”

  “No. I know. But I don’t have the nerve yet.”

  “Get the nerve.”

  “Maybe later. Right now I should try something else. Something less permanent.”

  “But still a quest?”

  “Yeah, definitely a quest.”

  So we sat in the café and tried to work out some guidelines for the midlife-crisis quest.

  It should be difficult. If it doesn’t take time and involve effort and sacrifice and maybe even suffering, it’s just a hobby. It should be something you’ve never done and maybe something you never thought you could do. But it should be something achievable. There’s no point setting out to seduce Sophia Loren or read the collected works of Nadine Gordimer. It must be something humanly possible.

  It should be personal. When you’re in the hard slog of a quest, if the goal isn’t something that on some level matters to you, you’ll never keep going. (It should also be something that doesn’t embarrass your partner too much. When friends or family ask where you are, she shouldn’t have to reply, “He’s at guitar lessons. He wants to start a grunge band.”)

  It should be transformative, or you may as well spend the time watching Masterchef marathons.

  It should be fun. Not every moment of it, of course – leave room for the sacrifice and suffering – but the overall feel shouldn’t be like someone getting his paperwork together for SARS. At the end you should feel sexier than when you started.

  But what quest?

  “What about that list you wrote?” she said. “The list of things to do before you die? There should be something on there, right? It’s a place to start.”

  I went through them again, but there was nothing there. Most of them were too expensive (“Learn to fly”) or inconvenient (“Spend a night in the ruins of Dracula’s castle in Romania”) or time-consuming (“Win two Booker prizes”) or delusional (“Weigh 80 kilograms”) or weirdly specific and unsatisfying (“Visit the English village of Nether Wallop”).

  I shook my head as I read them. It was all too flimsy, too quirky, too serious or too impossible. Oh, what a pitiful midlife crisis I’m having: most people look back on their achievements with dissatisfaction; I’m even disgruntled with the things I haven’t achieved.

  My partner suggested that when we’re faced with choices in life, very often we should take the one that frightens us most.

  “That makes sense.”

  “What about giving it all up and changing your life like Vincent Deary? That’s scary.”

  “That’s a bit too scary.”

  She narrowed her eyes a bit, the way she does when she wants to argue but is making the strategic decision to wait for a better time. She suggested I take another look at my list and see which one there most frightened me.

  There was really only one.

  When I was ten years old we lived in a pink house on a green ridge above the Indian Ocean. My father was dead and my mother worked late and I was quite lonely. Each afternoon after school I walked down to the beach to see if the ocean had washed up any bottles with messages from castaways corked inside. Often I would swim.

  The sand shelves steeply on the Bluff, and the waves break big and untidy so you have to duck under the first breakers and by that time you’re already out of your depth, but ordinarily that didn’t bother me. There was always a rip at Brighton Beach but on this day it was especially strong. It was a grey day, the sea was grey and the grey clouds hung low, and there was no one on the beach. I tried to swim back in but I couldn’t so I kicked water and waited to get my breath back. You can wait in the Indian Ocean because the water’s warm, but the longer I waited, the further out I went.

  Things were no longer in my control. I thought, I’m going to be the boy in school who drowned. There was some consolation in that. Even in years to come, when old classmates come together they’ll say, “Remember there was that boy who drowned?” It’s a kind of immortality, even if no one remembers my name.

  Then a teenager in a red swimming costume came from the lifesavers’ clubhouse with a red plastic float. He swam out to me and I held onto him and to the float and he swam us sideways and then to shore. I didn’t mention it to my mom, but after that day I didn’t swim on my own any more. I larked around in the pool at school but I never swam in dams or fast rivers or the sea, not without being able to stand. I didn’t ever again want that feeling of nothing below me.

  Fifteen years later on a Friday evening in winter I went to Camps Bay beach with some people I worked with. We drank some wine and it was dusk and quite cold but I was trying to impress a girl so I decided to swim.

  I didn’t intend to go out so far but again there was a rip. I hadn’t been so deep in fifteen years, and never in water so cold. Your breathing becomes shallow in the cold; you pant like a dog. Quick, shallow breathing increases levels of carbon dioxide in your blood, which increases fatigue and brings on a dizzy feeling like panic. The dizzy feeling like panic becomes actual panic.

  I wasn’t far out but I couldn’t stand. I waved for help. Someone waved back. Weirdly, I was too embarrassed to shout for help. I didn’t want to be a bother.

  Then a man came running into the sea. “Hold on!” he shouted, and when he reached me I held on, trying not to pull him under. He had a British accent.

  He tried to swim us to shore but the rip was too strong and he couldn’t get us both in. I told him to leave me and go in himself and he hesitated but then he tried. But maybe he had waited too long, because he couldn’t get back in either. I apologised to him for all of this. I am socially awkward at the best of times, and this was my worst WASPy nightmare: Not merely have I inconvenienced this man, now I’ve killed him too.

  He told me he was a lifesaver back home in Cornwall and he was here on holiday. I told him Cape Town would be much nicer in summer, although it can be a bit windy.

  I knew we were
going to drown and I wasn’t panicking any more. I wasn’t even cold any more. I remember the pencil colour of the sky and the dark mountains behind the beach and the clear cold water on my face.

  Then the man took my hand, and with his other hand he reached out and I saw that he was taking someone else’s hand. There was a human chain of men and women stretching into the sea from the beach – lifesavers, passers-by. We were linked to the land, there was someone at the end of the chain with their feet on the land and that brought our feet there too.

  Afterwards, shaking, I remembered how convinced I was that I would die, and I thought I had somehow cheated it, and that having cheated it, nothing else could kill me. I was marked down to die in deep water, and as long as I never swam in deep water again, nothing would ever happen to me. It had happened twice in my life and I’d survived, and then it happened a third time with Clarence and the sharks, and there’s no way I would be that lucky again.

  And there on my list of things to do before I’m dead was number 4: “Swim across the Dardanelles”.

  Ridiculous.

  How did that even get on the list in the first place?

  *

  The Dardanelles is the long channel of water that runs between the Black Sea and the Aegean. The ancient Greeks called it the Hellespont, or “Sea of Helle”, because that’s where Helle drowned. Helle and her twin brother Phrixus, in the usual complicated story of step-motherly resentment that the ancient Greeks liked to tell each other as bedtime tales, were to be sacrificed by their dad’s new wife Ino, but their real mom sent a flying golden ram to save them. All went well but these were the days before seatbelts were standard on flying golden rams. Helle fell off, landed in the Dardanelles and drowned. It’s one of the recurring themes in stories of the Dardanelles: people are always drowning there.