AN EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK . . .

“PEOPLE talk of near-death experiences. I think that evening I had one of my own. I felt claustrophobic in that wideopen space. I could feel panic wash over me, and I wanted to scream. I don’t know how long I had been out for. A few minutes or a few seconds? It seemed like it had been forever. What happened? How did I end up there?

My eyes fought back the tears that threatened an avalanche. I’m not sure why or how, but I just knew that crying at that moment would seem pathetic. The sobs stayed stuck in my throat, and fear seeped out of every pore and into the cold, hard, unfeeling concrete beneath me, punishing me for my poor choices.

It took some time for my eyes to adjust to the fading daylight. I could feel the cold and damp penetrating my clothes and reaching into my skin.

I began to shiver, more from fear than from the chill of that winter’s evening in Durban. Funny how the memory stores what can seem like the most inane of details in a time of trauma.

Bit by bit I started to make sense of my surroundings, the blackness inside my head begrudgingly making way for consciousness.

Slowly I was making sense of myself. I had a pounding headache. My nose stung, and my face felt like it was on fire. I could taste blood.

And just as everything seemed to unfold in slow motion, it all suddenly began to come together fast. Still lying on the ground, I turned my head and looked straight into a pair of shoes. I smelled his cigarette smoke. I couldn’t breathe. So much air around me, yet I felt like I was suffocating.

I close my eyes now, more than a decade later, and I am back there on that floor.

I can feel all of it, like an out-of-body experience. I need to go back there and to so many other places, so that I can truly move forward to where I am now, so that I can be present in the here and now. But to be present in the here and now, I must take a few steps back.

The time has come to speak my truth. It has been waiting patiently, biding its time inside my head. My truth, dusty with lies and scattered in my memory…

With a lot of effort, I pushed myself up. My body ached. Every movement required mental coercion, my mind coaxing my limbs.

I stood, a little unsteady on my feet, and looked at him, searching his face for answers. He didn’t even have to say a word. A horrified look swept over his face as he drank in the damage. His unreadable, passive face changed within seconds.

Under different circumstances, I might have had a good chuckle at the swift change of expression. Except there was nothing remotely funny about the disaster my own face had become. But for those few seconds, while I stood before him, I remained blissfully unaware of the extent of the damage, of just how horribly my face had morphed into something utterly unsightly while my brain shut down and took me to that place of blackness.

He sucked on that cigarette like his life depended on it. I knew the signs all too well. His body language read like a cheap and predictable story. He was agitated. It was stress, it was fear, and his calculating brain was in overdrive. I could see it. I could smell it, and I could even hear him thinking above the sounds of the chirruping crickets and whooshing cars on the nearby road.

Oh, I knew him well! Better than he probably knew himself. And in that instant came the realisation – it was like being awakened roughly from a deep sleep – of the horror that had happened to me…”