by JT Lawrence
The Memory of Water
JT Lawrence
Contents
Also By Jt Lawrence
Because Loyal Readers Deserve Rewards
Prologue
Quote: Oscar Wilde
1. At Least Someone Is Having An Interesting Morning
2. Likefatherlikeson
Quote: W. Somerset Maugham
3. She Brought Me Grapes
4. Shaking Off Snow After A Long Walk Home
5. Maybe everyone else was right
A Thousand Camels (digested)
…
Quote: Upanishads
6. An Island To Ruby Water
7. Condemned To Being A Silhouette
Quote: Kafka
8. Divine Dictation
9. Tentacles of Depression Around My Heart
Quote: Oscar Wilde
10. Eve’s Graceful Demise
11. Don’t Act Creepy, or,
12. Who Has Time To Read In This Rat Race? Or, White Canary
Quote: Neil Gaiman
13. Mind Map
Quote: Oscar Wilde
14. Unfortunately, Corpses Don’t Bruise
15. Like Dogs, I’m Sure They Can Smell Fear.
16. The Ghost Begins Taking Off Her Clothes
17. As If Anything Mattered
18. Indigo Shades
19. A Bad Wizard
20. Her Voice Is Charcoal, or,
21. Hand Touches Warm Skin
22. Dirty Death Metal
23. Dark Ribbon of Red
24. My Soul On A Silver Platter
Quote: William Shakespeare
25. The Courage to Cringe
26. Seven Lives Left
27. Not Waving
28. Creation Or Destruction
29. I Am Missing A Hand
30. Nights Are Quick
31. Red Islands on Her Neck
32. Kiss the Bruises
33. A Life In The Sky
34. Night of the Long Knives
35. Here Be Dragons, or,
36. Black Glitter
37. The Golden Girl, or,
38. Pigeon
39. The Sun Sinks
40. Birdsong
41. Puppet Master
42. A Conversation with a Hologram
Quote: Virgil
43. Rolling and wailing
44. Still Skin
45. Headfirst Into Black Dew
Quote: Willa Cather
46. His Strings Cut
47. Skinless
48. A Monument To Lost Causes, Revisited
49. The Memory of Water
50. Waking Up Without Your Legs
Quote: Oscar Wilde
51. The Ultimate Betrayal
52. Backwater Beauty
Quote: Stephen King
53. More To Life
54. Inside Out
55. Invisible Leash
What’s next?
Also By Jt Lawrence
About the Author
Stay In Touch
Also By Jt Lawrence
Why You Were Taken (2015)
Sticky Fingers (2016)
The Underachieving Ovary (2016)
Grey Magic (2016)
How We Found You (2017)
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Grab ‘Why You Were Taken’ for free.
“A tightly wound and imaginative thriller.” — Paige Nick.
In tomorrow's world, Kirsten is a roaming, restless synaesthete: a photographer with bad habits and a fertility problem. A troubled woman approaches Kirsten with a warning, and is found dead shortly afterwards. The warning leads her to the Doomsday Vault and a hit list of seven people – and Kirsten’s barcode is on it.
Edgy and original, Why You Were Taken is a glittering, dark, cinematic thriller that will keep you guessing till the last page.
"Sexy, smart, and sci-fi."
-- Tian van den Heever, 5* Amazon review
"A far out, near future, Afro-punk, Gibsonesque, instant classic sci-fi thriller. JT Lawrence has painted a sexy, smart, surprising and ultra cool vision of South Africa in the year 2021. I loved the textures and the tech and, most of all, the characters, who stayed with me long after I’d burned through the book. Highly recommended. Can't wait for the movie."
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“So here we are again, with the cold-eyed, cold-hearted artist,
the one who has sacrificed himself for his art
and forfeited his human ability to feel, but this time there’s a distinct suggestion of a pact with the devil.
Not only the heart has gone, but the soul has been lost as well.”
- Margaret Atwood, Negotiating With The Dead.
Prologue
A Monument to Lost Causes
My little sister’s body was blue when they pulled it out of the river. Such a small thing, she was. Usually the shock of it would make one disillusioned, confused, blurry. Not me. I was startled into detail. Shocked into being the most alive I had ever been. Her sleeping lungs made mine gasp for air. I was electrified by the green of the river reeds, strangled by the summer air; everything else out of that moment was washed away by the gurgle of the persuasive current.
The men were taller than trees, the men who helped. They had heard my high-pitched flailing but not in time.
Afterwards, the grey tree-man couldn’t leave Emily lying on the ground. Cradled in his arms, her wet dress stuck, resolved, to her body. He tugged at it, as if to cover her, as if to shield her, but not in time. He was planted in such a determined way it seemed that he would never again move from that bit of land: a monument to lost causes. The other man sat on the bank, gulping, head wobbling on shaking knees. He had tried to revive her with a combination of violence and care, unsure how much the porcelain body could endure, desperate to get her drifting heart pumping. He went from savage breastbone-beating to gentle kisses and back again. Gasping, shuddering, all four of us dripped.
We waited for the screams in silence and dread.
“An idea that is not dangerous
is unworthy of being called an idea at all.”
- Oscar Wilde
1
At Least Someone Is Having An Interesting Morning
In darkness: headpounding, stomachswimming, eyesitching.
I reach for the bottle of San Pellegrino I keep next to my bed. Someone has taken it.Bastard.
No, that’s not right.
The neighbour’s junker is grumbling. Jack Russell barking.
I left the bottle in the den last night, was using it to top up my whiskies. Amateur mistake. I raise my eyelids just enough to get a bright slice of white ceiling.
After a few shallow breaths I stand up and fall down. Starsinhead. Dizzy. Make it to the coffee machine and flick the red switch. It growls.
Scratch my stubble. Brainonfire.
The morning glare through the kitchen window is ruthless. I close my eyes for a while to give them a bit of a rest. I need to piss and shower and eat something greasy. Breakfast at Salvation Café. A double Bloody Mary blitzed with raw egg and Tabasco.
Now warm, the coffee machine grinds, blasts and spits. The fridge is vacant apart from some old oil-blemished pizza boxes, crystallized balsamic syrup and a never-opened jar of mysteries picked up at the last organic market with Eve. I should never go to organic markets. And I should never have bought such a leviathan fridge. Peering into its airy innards makes me feel lonely. It never used to be this way. This appliance has seen its fair share of riches: countless bottles of Veuve Cliquot and glittering round tins of Russian Caviar, like gold coins for giants. Now it sits, sulking, vacant, desolate. My heart is an empty refrigerator.
; The milk is beyond rescue and it swirls down the sink trap. I stir the coffee too hard, slopping it down the side of the mug, leaving an eclipse on the pale marble slab of the countertop. I’ll clean it up later.
Like the walking dead, dripping hot mug in hand, I stagger to my writing desk in the den to survey the damage, taking care to not trip over the piles of books lying in the way. It doesn’t look too bad at first glance. Doesn’t look too bad at all till I see my murdered Moleskine lying like a dead animal on the edge of the bureau, creamy belly exposed, inky guts ripped out.
“You look like shit.”
“Thanks. I look way better than I feel.”
It’s been a wreck of a morning so far and smiling hurts. I kiss her on the cheek and grab the chair in the shade, not too close, in the empty hope that she doesn’t smell the stale whisky leaking from my pores. I put my phone on the table beside her bunch of keys: her silver apple keyring glints in the sun.
She is dressed up. I wonder if she is meeting someone after breakfast. Another man maybe, or a sponsor. Or maybe it’s a shoot: apart from being an artist, she’s a partner in a small film company. I am immediately jealous.
She lowers her very large sunglasses slightly and takes a look at my sorry state.
“Did you party too hard last night with what’s-her-name?”
“Kind of,” I grin. Ouch. “You could say that.”
Eve sits back with her arms crossed. She always has her arms crossed. She’s always disapproving in a hot librarian kind of way.
“So? How are things with her? What’s her name again?”
The waitress arrives with menus too big to be practical. I struggle with mine and almost knock over my pre-ordered double-hot Bloody Mary.
“It’s over. So it doesn’t matter.” I mumble, but she gets the gist.
“Why am I not surprised?” She sighs, closing her menu and setting it down on the table.”What happened?”
“I broke it off last night.”
“Another non-surprise then.” She makes a show of yawning. Taps the table leg with her ballet flat. “Very boring, Slade.”
This jabs me in the stomach. There are not many things I fear more than predictability. Being a bore: I find that terrifying. She knows this and indulges me with a half-smile, to show that she was half-kidding.
God, Eve is sexy in her tailored ivory suit and bare pink lips. Jackie O shades. Although she looks just as desirable in the paint-stained oversized men’s collared shirts she works in. And her ponytail. I love her hair in a ponytail. What I wouldn’t do to grab … I realise I am daydreaming and try to remember what it was we were speaking about. I hide behind my Oakley’s: this babbelas is making me feel a thousand years old.
Ponytails, lips, yawning: Ah, whatshername.
“Well, it wasn’t working. I had to end it. She was no good.”
A man from the adjacent table glances over, curious, then turns away before I can tell him to mind his own damn business.
“No good for your writing, you mean.”
“Yes. Well, it’s the same thing, isn’t it? It’s not like I can be okay without my writing.”
It’s all I have.
I didn’t tell Eve I broke the news to the woman early in the evening so I could get home in time to work on a few notes. It didn’t work: nothing came to me. In the end I – apparently - finished a bottle of whisky and tore up my notebook. Which is becoming a habit.
I ignore the flash of annoyance in Eve’s eyes. She nibbles a nail.
“How did she take it?”
“Fine.”
“Fine?”
“Not as heartbroken as the accountant, not as happy as the talk-show host. Somewhere in between. Pretty neutral, really. I think that’s what I didn’t like about her.”
“Her grace? Equanimity? Even-temperedness? I can see how that could be very unappealing.”
The waitress is back with a hopeful look on her face.
I clench my fist.“She didn’t give me anything.”
The man looks over again: I can feel his eyes on me. Who is he? A fan? A spy? An assassin? I glare at him and he immediately begins to inspect his sunny-side-up. Nosy fucker.
“I bet you didn’t give her anything.”
I look into the distance and adjust my scarf against the breeze. We order the Brie omelette and Caribbean sweet French toast with maple syrup, berries and organic cream. A giant pot of Earl Grey.
What Eve didn’t know was that karma had burnt me just that morning. The hangover wasn’t the only thing nudging me to the edge. As I had lurched from my writing den to the front door and turned the key, I heard a car door slam shut outside and burn rubber. I remember thinking: at least someone is having an interesting morning. I’d made a distracted effort to close my dressing gown over my old Iron Maiden T-shirt and grey jocks, put on my sunglasses to mitigate the evil brightness of the Johannesburg sun, and opened the door. Nothing looked out of place but I’d had a strange feeling in my gut, which may or may not have had something to do with the previous night’s Glenfiddich. A few cool, barefoot steps later I had the newspaper in one hand, coffee in the other, and felt a little better about life in general. Until I turned around.
It wasn’t that bad. I mean, she could have thrown a Molotov cocktail through the window and burnt the place down altogether. She could have pulled an Al-Qaeda and detonated some sweet-smelling plastic explosive on the front lawn. She could have hired a Casspir – Mellow-Yellow - and mown the house down. That would have been worse. Instead she had graffiti’d ‘SLADE HARRIS YOU CUNTING FUCK’, all along the front wall in a particularly fetching shade of crimson. I still haven’t decided if I enjoyed her creative license with the shoddy punctuation and the transmutation of the word ‘cunt’ into an adjective. Anyhow, it has a certain ring to it, and it’s certainly not easy to forget. Full marks for punchiness. Standing there with the cool morning air on my still bed-warm thighs and admiring her work had a kind of justice in it, I suppose, for I have hurt a lot of women and it seems time that one of them has become intent on punishing me. It is unfortunate, however, that this particular one happens to be a psychopath.
When I get back from breakfast with Eve I am still a little jumpy. I keep picturing Sally standing motionless outside my house, looking straight ahead, the epitome of calm apart from a single spray-paint-stained hand. A street version of Queen Macbeth. The idea unsettles me a bit, so I like it. Not because I’m fearless: the opposite is true. I spend the rest of the day avoiding walking past windows and don’t open the door to anyone, not even the feather-duster man. I like it because having a beautiful, persistent, bunnyboiler ex could be very interesting.
And I am desperate for interesting.
2
Likefatherlikeson
A few days later I wake up with a grim sense of purpose. It’s Emily’s birthday. Born two years after me, she would have been thirty-six today. I can’t really imagine it. She is frozen in my mind as she was on That Day – tangled hair, summer freckles and a milk-tooth smile – all but bursting with sunshine and promise. And here I am: limping towards forty with the bleakness that comes with age. Knowing the dull pain of the thought that I am past my prime. Some people peak at sixty, I know. It would be nice to look forward to something like that. Instead of what I have.
She probably would have done more with her life than I have with mine; had more meaning. Chances are she would have had a family with a faithful (read: tedious) husband and two little scurrilous sprogs. Dogs, too. She would definitely have had dogs. She would be like those yuppies I used to jog past in the morning with their golden labs and 4x4 strollers, who run right past people like me, who are more like the red-cheeked, defeated-looking fat man being pulled along by his huskies.
I arrive at my father’s house in Belgravia with a bottle of Johnny Walker and some food supplies from Fournos. Every now and then I do a bit of grocery shopping for him. Like me, he is always more grateful for the whisky. Grumpy, but grateful. Likefatherlikeson. I
do it out of guilt more than feelings of benevolence. I’ve never been particularly kind. I just feel the guilt weighing heavier and heavier the longer I put off seeing the old man; eventually I have to go just to salvage what sanity I have left. Shopping postpones the moment I actually have to start spending time with him, so it’s usually a pretty drawn-out affair. There is always a new bottle of pickles to inspect, or a fresh artichoke to stroke. In The Godfather Don Corleone says that a man who doesn’t spend time with his family can never be a real man. I guess I’ve never really been one.
I press the buzzer on the gate. It will take him a while to reach the front door so I wait, watching the paint peel. God, I wish he’d listen to sense and get the hell out of this place. It’s so grotty. Probably not the safest neighbourhood, either.
I feel I am being watched so I look around a bit, feigning nonchalance, trying to not look like a paranoid white man. No one needs to know that I am a paranoid white man. Who isn’t suspicious, in this country, where a healthy sense of paranoia keeps you alive? Stupid people, I guess, and people who have given up. I wind my watch.
The house takes up the entire block and is fenced off with dark, rotting planks. The gaps in it, like decaying teeth, serve as an invitation to opportunistic thieves. The front door is opposite a municipal park, full of drunken sun-sleepers and litter and lazy lovers with arses too big to sit comfortably on the knee-high gum poles of the wooden perimeter. In The Bad Old Days the grass was green and the playground full of bright new colours. Loiterers would be chased away (if you were black you were a loiterer, white – a visitor). I remember the taste of the painted metal of the jungle gym, I’m not sure why; I suppose kids try to taste everything. Metallic, cool and hard, with a softer, thick paint-skin.