A revelation, death-defying miracles and the joys of the Jobseeker’s Centre.
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A story in several parts.
We picked through the possessions of our late grandfather, in a small victorian terraced house that smelled faintly of vinegar, red brick on the outside with eggshell glossed sills, systematically maintained until the end. The half-empty can of gloss paint was is in the shed. Inside the vinegary home was brown and cream and faded orange, dust-free but stale and cluttered with his accumulations. We worked quietly through the house. This box for mementos, this bag for rubbish, these for the charity shop. Objects like this: a tiny leather wallet, containing what looked like two miniature books. On the spines, one says Time To Play, and the other, At Leisure. When you open the stud fastening, not books but tiny decks of playing cards. One still in a cellophane wrapper: for the charity shop.
Three things you need to know about Esa:
He has scandinavian parents but he hates cold weather: like the Norwegians he suffers great bouts of seasonal unipolar depression.
He was a successful chef and restauranteur with two Michelin stars to his name.
Last April, aged 39, he was driving to work in his black Alpina BMW M5 when, in the murky pre-dawn light on an empty road bridging the valley of the River Athlinne, he was visited by a revelation.
~
He had no right to walk away from the resulting collision with the crash barrier, the flip over the safety rail, the 53-metre plunge into the river below, the complete destruction of his Alpina. On the dewy bank of the Athlinne, wet, shocked, bruised, confused and alive, Esa reflected on his revelation. He came to some startling conclusions, and began to formulate the plan that would transform him, his life, and the world around him. Sixty minutes later, sitting in the air ambulance with an oxygen mask strapped over his face, being heli-lifted to the nearest accident and emergency hospital with seemingly only minor injuries, and attended by an astonished paramedic, he had a massive heart attack. It was caused not by the crash but, as later tests would reveal, by a genetic defect that had waited his whole life to kill him. Yet he miraculously escaped death a second time, largely due to the immediate presence and skill of the paramedic, who saved his life. When Esa woke up in hospital, one day, one revelation, and one heart bypass later, he couldn’t remember anything of his accident, or the visitation. The changes life brought upon him in the coming months – the separation, the bankruptcy, the breakdown, the divorce, the institutionalisation – were inexplicable to him.
How it came to be, that he was sat here, in the Employment Centre, talking about rebuilding his life with a career advisor called Coleman, about his recent release into the community and the many schemes to help him back into the world of gainful employment, he could not easily say. There was a crash, he told Coleman. I could not work, I lost my business. And everything else, he told Coleman. And your sanity, thought Coleman, looking at the records on his computer screen. What Esa did not tell Coleman was that something had happened out at the bridge, he couldn’t remember what. Something had put his life on a different course, and he had an obligation to fulfil, or a role to play, or a predestiny to experience, but what, he could not say. He didn’t tell Coleman this because he had learned at the clinic not to talk about the things he could not remember. I just need to start over, he told the career advisor, who was inputting his qualifications onto the computer but was having difficulty spelling Philosophy, which Esa told him was the first word of the abbreviation PhD.
Perhaps, for now, said Coleman, you could dip your toe in the water. Nothing too strenuous, nothing too pressured. Something like this, a volunteer at a charity shop. General assistant, Coleman said. Sorting out the donations, making sales, housekeeping. At this little charity shop supporting orphanages in Albania. It’s called – Coleman made a poor attempt, stunted by uncertainty, at pronouncing – Lëmoshë.
~
“Come on Little Stevie, you’re too big for it now!” Little Stevie loved his old plastic trike, the toy pedal-car that had powered his early years around the nursery and the gardens of his home. His mother was explaining – she was always explaining – and he was resisting: he was always resisting. Whatever her message, it wasn’t getting through the emotional barriers of the self-serving child-ego. Little Stevie might be too big for that trike on the outside, but on the inside, he was the same child that just a few hours before was the sole owner-occupier, unchallenged. He didn’t want to be too big. He didn’t want to have a bicycle. Or he did, but not in place of his favourite racing machine. Whole summer months – like decades to a grown-up – he had spent around the gardens, chasing the ducks from the lake, surprising the gardeners, pretending to be lost in the maze. He could not comprehend a time when he would not want it. When there would not be a duck to chase or a gardener to run down. Why did he have to lose out? What did he care for orphans?
