by JT Lawrence
Usually I would do anything to avoid going anywhere with bars on the windows, but I have a feeling that if I don’t oblige today I will be hauled away by SAPS thugs, amongst wailing sirens and camera flashes. Also, I want to take advantage of this strange numb feeling I have, God knows I wouldn’t be this calm about the situation without it. I drive to the Parkview Police Station with the top down, looking at the sky and feeling the summer wind on my cheeks. If they arrest me, who knows how long I will go without this? I have my lawyer’s number on speed dial but I don’t want to use it unless I have to. I don’t want to be defensive. An innocent man doesn’t bring his lawyer into every meeting with the authorities, does he?
I park my car on a yellow line and push open the worn, heavy entrance door. I interrupt a man stamping documents to introduce myself, and he looks confused. He yells to the other man behind the counter, who looks at me and also shakes his head. Typical, I think, only in South Africa do you practically hand yourself over to the cops only to be rebuffed by inefficient bureaucracy. It reminds me of Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Next I’ll be carrying a towel over my shoulder and be tortured by being forced to listen to someone’s disgracefully bad poetry. So long and thanks for all the fish.
I am busy dictating a message to the man behind the counter when I see Sello through the window. I tell the man to forget the message and head outside.
“Glad you could make it,” says Sello, breathing hard. He has a light sheen on his forehead and looks a bit ruffled. Maybe he has just come from a crime scene. Despite my morbid curiosity I resist asking him about it.
“Didn’t feel I had much of a choice,” I say, but he has already turned and begun walking away. I catch up and he leads me around the building to a back door. It seems to be disconnected, somewhere they use only on special occasions. Rapists, serial killers, writers. I am not worried till Sello double-bolts the door from the inside. The walls are thick and the air holds a slight chill. The cold clamminess reminds me of The Old Fort on Constitutional Hill. There is no one else around and it unnerves me. We walk down a passage and turn into the first open door on the left. It is an interrogation room, empty except for two plastic chairs and a table made from an old door. There is a two-way mirror on the far wall, which tricks you into thinking the room is bigger than it really is. Sello motions for me to sit down and excuses himself. I take a chair and sit in a way that I hope makes me look relaxed, so that the people behind the mirror will say: “He looks innocent.” There are no windows.
Sello comes back with a grubby folder in his hands. It is the same one he and Madinga brought to my house before they searched it, but it’s now considerably thicker and a great deal more foxed.
“Where is Madinga?” I ask.
Sello purses his lips and his eyes move up towards the corner of the room: a classic indication of lying.
“He’s busy with another case today.”
He shouldn’t have bothered; I am not that interested.
“Cash-in-transit heist,” he adds, seemingly enjoying the small deception.
“So he is trying to catch actual criminals,” I say.
Detective Inspector Sello ignores this and opens his folder. I start to feel the first gnawing of nerves. My underarms are wet, despite the frosty surroundings, and my stomach is tight. I hope he can’t see the patches of sweat blooming from my pits. I keep my arms close to my body.
“Mister Harris,” he says, “we found some disturbing things in the last few days.” His face gives nothing away. I try to follow suit.
“In your house. Powder residue … an illegal drug.”
God, I thought I had used all the coke in my house.
“GHB,” he says, tasting all the letters.
Now I don’t know whether to tell the truth or not. You shouldn’t lie to cops. But wouldn’t not lying be stupid?
“What is that?” I ask.
“You don’t know?” he asks, knowing the answer.
“No,” I say.
He is quiet for a moment. Scratches his scalp in a measured, practised way.
“Mister Harris,” he says, speaking slowly. “I thought you came in to co-operate.”
It’s my turn to be quiet.
“Look,” he says, “it doesn’t matter if you admit to knowing what it is or not, or whether you have ever used it. The point is that we found some in your house.”
“I’m finding it hard to see the relevance,” I say. Now I can feel perspiration on my face, and I wipe my upper lip.
“The relevance is that GHB can be used as a date rape drug, like Rohypnol. Miss Shaw had it in her labs.”
I laugh out loud. This has become ridiculous. It’s as if someone had seen the mind map and followed it step by step. I wonder if I am dreaming. If one night after working on Eve’s Graceful Demise I went to sleep and this has just been one big, ugly dream. I pinch myself. It hurts.
So much for GHB being untraceable. I guess that’s what you get from doing your research on Google instead of asking your drug dealer. Sello is watching me. I close my eyes and try not to sweat. He turns a few pages until he finds what he is looking for.
“We also found blood,” he says.
“Bullshit.” The word is out of my mouth before I’ve even thought it. “You’re making this shit up.”
Sello just looks at me.
“Okay,” I say. “I may have had some illegal drugs in my house, but there was no blood. There was no blood because there was no fucking murder. You’re trying to break me, get a confession out of me to make your job easier. Well, it won’t fucking work. I was in special training in the army. I laid landmines in Angola. I was in a hellhole in Bangkok where they interviewed me with a piece of hosepipe every day for two weeks. I will not confess to something I didn’t do. You can’t change my mind. I am not breakable.”
With his mouth closed, Sello runs his tongue over his teeth. He knows I’m lying.
27
Not Waving
I am sitting in my lounge, drinking merlot and looking at the blue-skinned man. The wine is a vintage Meerlust I have been saving for a special occasion. I picked up a case on some or other Cape wine route holiday. I sigh. Those were the days. I figure that if I wait till I get out of prison to drink it I would kick myself for every day of my sentence. After this bottle I have another lined up. And another.
There is something unnerving about the painting. Not only do his eyes follow me around the room, but they seem to have some knowledge of who I am and what I’ve done, and it makes me feel on edge. After regarding him for a while I raise my glass to him and, in a way, to Eve. I see Eve in Denise’s eyes, and in the way she purses her lips to smile, but apart from that they are polar opposites. Eve was so cool and reserved and pure and Denise is mysterious, provocative, dark. Impossible to pin down. Almost as if she is Eve’s shady reflection. That’s why we connect: in this over-lit world, we are both shadows.
She is healing me, in a way. I catch myself thinking of her often. Wondering what my life would be like if we hadn’t met. I’m under no illusions: I know that I don’t know anything about her, and that she will leave me in a beat. But when everyone else is banging down the doors she asks nothing of me. She seems to know when I need her and when I need space. As if she has had some kind of special training. I have never been in a relationship with a girl who knows how close I want her. I usually feel overwhelmed, then abandoned. Denise makes companionship an art form. An intuitive foxtrot. I wonder why she is being so good to me, a stranger. Maybe she is doing it for Eve: a final gift.
I have broken all my rules for her. I make her breakfast every morning (rye melba toast with cheddar and marmalade, black coffee, neither of which she finishes). I hold her as we fall asleep. I emptied out a bedroom drawer of mine so that she doesn’t have to live out of a suitcase. She hardly takes up any space. I seem to have lost interest in other women. Sometimes, at night, when we are exhausted but too giddy to sleep, I read to her. Faulks, Gordime
r, Rushdie, Niffenegger, Murakami. She purrs when I open Atwood or Mantel. She transcribes Plath and leaves the scribbled notes around the house for me to find. I discover Contusion hiding in the crevice of the couch, Kindness in the shower, Cut inside the fridge, Edge on my pillow. I whisper Ondaatjie’s The Cinnamon Peeler’s Wife into her ear. I have so little to offer, but at least I can give her that. We get lost in it, together. I keep Stevie Smith’s poignant and perfect poem, Not Waving But Drowning, to myself. It is too true to share with anyone else. I am, have always been, the one not waving.
And, of course, the sex. It allows me to go somewhere in my head I’ve never been before. An intense feeling I am somewhere else. I’ve been trying to figure it out. Maybe it’s something to do with the fact that your body is so earth-bound during sex that your mind has the freedom to explore. Sexual astral-travelling. Whatever the reason, sex with Denise is nothing short of transcendental.
“I’m going to make you start writing again,” Denise announces, mid-fuck.
“You’re good,” I say, “but not that good.”
She makes me stand near the full-length mirror in the bedroom so I can watch her give me head. She kneels in front of me, one hand on my hip, and uses her mouth and throat in a way that would make Linda Lovelace proud. After a while she lets me thrust into her mouth. I watch her body in the mirror, her black hair, her rocking tits. Naked except for her designer heels.
Maybe she is that good. Or that bad.
I go from safe in bed to being held down in the Bangkok jail cell with a shiv to my throat. It’s an old dream now and I try to go through the motions without feeling the fear. Unfortunately dreams don’t seem to work like that. It’s always the same nightmare with slight variations. Sometimes the knife-wielder isn’t Thai; sometimes the jail cell is the infested hotel room in Lagos; sometimes I survive. There is always a shiv – or something sharpened to be a knife – an enemy, and a sense of urgency. They want something from me and sometimes I figure it out in time. Tonight I am treated to the original version. A hundred and fifty kilo Muay Thai thug is in my face, shouting at me in words I don’t understand. I want to understand: I know that if I don’t give him what he wants I may as well say my prayers. But it’s dripping hot, there are fifty men in a cell made for five, and I haven’t had a drink of water in the last 48 hours. My left eye is swollen shut and I think he may have broken my ribs, but I stand my ground. I learnt the hard way, in the army, that you should rather cross the Great Divide than give in to the playground bully. The audience urge us on, whistling and clapping, as if this is a backstreet dogfight. Cockfight. He is hopping and shouting and spitting and I wonder how long he will be able to keep it up. He looks like he has moves but if I am clever I think I can outlast him. I am wrong. He roundhouses me, planting his foot in my mouth, and I drop. Then he is kneeling on my chest, shinysharpness to my throat. My brain and tongue are swollen and I just want to know what the fuck he wants. In the beginning I gave him my wallet, fat with US dollars. I reasoned it would buy me a few hours of safety, especially if everyone in the cell saw me do it. The man took out the notes, threw them in the air, death confetti, and started shouting again. After that I gave up trying to appease him and stood my ground, fists raised to protect my head, much to the amusement of the other men in the cell, and the guards. Then came the blows. Consistent, well-aimed kicks to my sweet spots, until I am lying there, waiting for my throat to be slit like a goat on New Year’s Eve. A smaller man, a boy, is instructed to strip me, which he does, paying close attention to the buttons on my shirt. He takes everything off except my jocks. I am too distracted to be grateful. I can feel blood run down my neck where the knifepoint rests just under my skin. For the first time I wonder if I’m going to die.
Before this moment it was Another Great Story. I was thinking how I would tell people when I got home. It was the craziest thing. All a misunderstanding. Yes, locked up! Can you imagine? (An outraged chuckle, a sip of chardonnay) In Bangkok! And then this Muay Thai thug starts taunting me. It was going to be the article of my career. I wondered if I would win an award. But then the shiv slides in slightly deeper and I realise there is actually a chance of me not making it out of here. That I am going to die this silly, senseless death without the solace of knowing why. Who knows how long it will take for them to identify my body, naked and slick with dirt and blood, alert my publisher, my agent, my father.
A misunderstanding.
Ja, I guess it was. I was on assignment to write a story about underage prostitution in Thailand so instead of going and observing from a distance I looked at a menu and chose a girl – one who could speak English – and paid for a whole night with her so that I could hear her story while sitting in her damp box of a room.
I was getting some good words down when the brothel was raided and I, realising the situation and my odds, decided to run. I learnt that night that Thai whores make most of their money when they are barely in their teens and that Thai police run like quicksilver. That was unlucky, and unluckier still was being stuck in a cell with a man who had lost his twelve-year-old daughter to a violent tourist john.
Tonight I wake up before they knock me out and drag my body across the cell, depositing me in the small space between the back wall and the maggoty latrine. Tonight I wake up and I have a guardian angel silhouette bent over me, warm skin shaking me, smelling like Chanel, telling me it’s only a dream.
28
Creation Or Destruction
The cream-coloured letters started arriving about a year ago. They started off polite, even complimentary. They were delivered by hand so there were no stamps as clues. Always written in the same handwriting on the same paper. It was heavy, textured like watercolour paper, and the top centre was embossed with a decorative circle: perhaps a wheel of sorts. I always read my fan mail. My ego demands it. Also, I am always freakishly interested to see what my readers have to say about my work. Some letters are easy to ignore: the ones that say they enjoyed the book, it was okay, they would make the following changes, in fact they have also written a book, and they’re sure that if my meagre offerings are published then they also have a shot. And the ones that reprimand me: for saying too little; for saying too much; for being racist/liberal/chauvinist/feminist/dishonest/too honest; for being potty-mouthed; for being a gutter-brained, debauched sex addict. Some wish me a speedy trip to hell. These never bother me, and are usually mildly entertaining. God forbid a writer mentions violence or sex. Write about life, they demand, tell the truth! But God forbid you write about the creation or destruction of it.
But some letters I have kept. Some readers say their lives have been enriched by reading my work; that it led them to some kind of pint-sized epiphany, or made them think differently about an aspect of their lives they were struggling with. Some go further – these are my favourites – and explicate some thematic concepts or symbolism that I completely missed when I was writing it. I find it interesting that a novel is a different story to each person who reads it. It’s also different to the same reader, at different points in his life. As if the words are living, breathing. I’ve read somewhere that, à la Heraclitus, you can never step into the same novel twice. There is sorcery in the words.
The embossed letters started in a gentle trickle. I was flattered. I’m not exactly sure when the flattery turned to fear; probably when they began arriving every week and contained hints that the writer seemed to know private details of my life. He/she would make a passing remark about my car, the irises in my front garden, my hair that ‘needed cutting’. That was the last non-stamped creamy envelope I opened.
The words in the letters were never threatening in any way, and it didn’t seem that the writer wished me any harm, but those damned envelopes spooked the hell out of me. Eve laughed when I told her about them, she was sure I was overreacting. She accused me often of injecting more drama into situations than was strictly necessary, which goes without saying, I thought, taking my profession into account. She was sure it wa
s just an ex of mine, having a laugh, or an overenthusiastic fan. Through the gap in the bedroom curtains I can see the sun is rising and the blue morning light comforts me.
I have an arm around Denise’s naked waist but I am thinking of Eve.
29
I Am Missing A Hand
I feel as though I am coming back to life, but it is a different life. I feel as if I have stopped chasing whatever it was that I was chasing. Not because I found what I was looking for but because I have given up. I see with absolute clarity that life is, ultimately, pointless, and this knowledge makes me feel like I am drowning. Not fighting the current that takes my warmth and my air but instead, letting it pull me down.
I no longer feel the need to travel, to find people’s secrets, to risk my safety. Day to day is dull. I don’t know why Denise stays. Without writing I am a shell. Gwendolyn MacEwan said that authors have the Jekyll hand and the Hyde hand. The idea is that a writer has one hand for their mundane existence, like walking the dog, jerking off, or flipping a pancake, and the other for creating. In my case it’s about creating havoc. The inseparable twins: Havoc and Harmony. I am missing a hand.