The Memory of Water

by JT Lawrence

  I park, remembering not to stamp on the footbrake too hard. I buy a half-jack of cheap whisky and slip it into my pocket. The sun is on its way out and the dusk leaches the colour out of the street scene. My life in black and white. The red light of the steakhouse sign flickers on; I stumble into the darkness. The restaurant is all heavy beams and brick arches and makes me think of a hobbitwarren wine cellar, complete with flagstone floor and dusty fake grapes for décor. Walls made out of bottle bottoms and huge black metal light fittings straight out of Braveheart. There is a chalkboard illustrated with exotic sounding happy-hour cocktails: cheap thrills for locals. I approach the bar over which a giant Jagermeister bottle hangs and order a pint of Windhoek draught. A coaster with an illustration of a Yorkie is put in front of me. It is number sixteen in a series of fifty. I flip though the rest of the pile of thoroughbred coasters until I find a less gay dog. Halfway through I find a Rottweiler which I purloin. A cosmo would work, or a strawberry daiquiri, but it would just feel wrong to drink a pint off a Yorkie.

  Large beer in hand I find a table and I order a fillet, bloody, with rough-cut chips. When the waiter brings me a steak knife and condiments I ask him if he knows of a good place to stay the night. He gives me a baleful look.

  “Upstairs,” he says, pointing to the suspended barrels obscuring the ceiling.

  “There’s a place to stay … upstairs?” I say, over-enunciating, thinking he has misunderstood the question.

  “Yes,” he says, as if I am slow, and walks away.

  I have visions of a Texas Chainsaw Massacre scene where naïve tourists are promised rooms above a steakhouse only to be chopped up in the middle of the night and end up on the locals’ plates the next day. Roast thigh. Deep-fried finger chips. Elbow bacon. I remember watching a documentary about the making of the film, where they said they didn’t have a big enough budget for fake flesh and blood so they used the real thing. They showed the scene where the girl with the long bare legs is running from the chainsaw-wielding maniac and she trips and slides on all these small, sharp bones that cut up her knees. They were real chicken bones. And they shot in Texas, in summer, and as the shoot progressed all the meat started going off, so some of the scenes where the characters are retching and crying didn’t require much acting at all. A man dressed as a chef limps up to my table with the food, so I gulp down my beer and order another one. He nods and lurches away. I poke the rare red meat with my fork and wonder if I should have ordered vegetarian.

  After I pay the bill I head up the narrow stairs to the hotel. There is a no one at the reception desk so I move towards ringing the bell and as I touch the metal, someone behind me speaks and I jump.

  “Good God,” I say, trying to recover my composure.

  It is the waiter, sans apron. He moves to behind the desk.

  “Would you like a room, sir?” he asks, as if I hadn’t already told him that downstairs.

  “Er,” I say, “yes, please.” I smile, as if to show him I see the humour in the situation but he doesn’t smile back, and hands me a key.

  “Number 3,” he says, motioning vaguely to his left, “straight down the passage.”

  He moves away from the desk, puts his apron back on and walks downstairs.

  The room is a shock of bad taste, small and stuffy. There are gimcrack prints framed on the wall: kitsch paintings of an Italian landscape complete with generous fountain, some kind of snow palace I can’t place (Russia?) and, of course, the old Eiffel Tower, all splendidly mounted in chipped, gold-painted wood. I open the bathroom door and am shocked when I see a man with black hair. I run my hand through it. I can’t believe how different I look. I step closer to the spotted mirror to inspect my face. My eye sockets are no longer purple and my nose has healed with a slight bump in the bridge. The old scar on my cheek is almost invisible. I grimace and check my teeth. I can’t even tell which are mine anymore. I shake my head sadly at the shower; it’s a crude rusty rose stuck onto a pipe. The floor of cracked tile hides behind an antiseptic-green shower curtain. A shower curtain! I switch off the light before I gag. I close and bolt the main door, then walk to the opposite side of the room and slide the window upwards and open. My stomach is a cement mixer of dread and indigestion; I feel the acid in my throat. Looking out onto the dark street I wonder how long I have before the cops catch up with me. I wonder if tonight is going to be my last night of freedom and I have chosen to spend it here, in this blazing hellhole. For all I know this could be a wild goose chase. The only clue I have is a twenty-year-old photo of a child’s shirt that may or may not contain the word Aurumine. The breeze is good but my paranoia gets the better of me, so I close the window again and lock it. I lie on the bed, on top of the houndstooth bedspread, and watch the ceiling fan chop the air. I open my half-jack and drink straight from the bottle. It may be my last, but at least it’s an adventure.

  36

  Black Glitter

  I wake up with a start. There is someone in my bed. I freeze. I feel the extra weight on the mattress; I can smell there is someone in the room. Who would be able to get in? The creepy waiter would have keys. But it isn’t him. The body is smooth and it has long hair. It is so dark that I can’t see my hand in front of my face, but I know the black glitter is Denise. I don’t understand how she found me, or how she got into the room, but I am half asleep and dreaming so I don’t think too much about it. Neither of us speaks: there is nothing to say. She is stroking me, and when she gets on top, her body comforts my core in a meditation of deep motion. She takes her time and I stay in the trance until I can’t hold on anymore. As I come I wake up and there is enough light in the room to see that I am in bed alone.

  37

  The Golden Girl, or,

  An Old Secretary Trick

  I chew through an awful fried breakfast at the steakhouse while I plan the day. The obvious thing to do would be to go to the schools in the area and try to access Eve’s records. Her parents weren’t at her funeral, so I guess they must be dead or otherwise lost, but there may be other clues. I can’t help thinking that I am being an idiot. How will this amateur sleuthing help the insane situation I am in? Why would anything in Eve’s childhood be an answer to who is responsible for framing me? So I am an idiot, but I have no other leads. I can’t bear to go to jail, and I can’t sit around in fear and loathing. What I wouldn’t do to be in Vegas instead of this backwater town.

  Without finishing my bacon I throw some cash on the table and duck out. The light is whitebright outside and, fresh out of the hobbitwarren, it takes me a while to adjust. I get into my father’s car and start cruising, my new, cheap sunglasses feeling strange on my skin. You’d expect the houses to be quaint here, but they’re squat and ugly and I feel I have gone back in time to when this country wasn’t a nice place to be. No wonder Eve and Denise hightailed it out of here and didn’t look back. I expected a gold mining town to be a bit glam, a bit bling. The way you can tell that Jo’burg was built on gold: everyone is obsessed with materialism, fast cars and diamonds. Cape Town is a lot more down-to-earth: they were given the mountain and the sea. Bald and boring Nigel looks like it was given short shrift.

  I drive past church after church. At the hotel reception this morning there was a list of Nigel’s ‘attractions’ pinned to a mutilated cork board: six out of the ten were Afrikaans churches, and the rest were the Spar, the local butchery, the steakhouse and a bird sanctuary. I relax back into the seat and turn on the radio. It feels good to be in a place where no one knows me, knows I’m wanted by the police, knows I’m wanted by people who mean me harm. To these people I am just an ordinary man, driving an ordinary car, on an ordinary day. Out of the corner of my eye I see a sign that says ‘Ferryvale’. There is something distantly familiar about the name. I roll to a stop and try to think where I may have heard or seen it before. The car behind me, a grey Datsun, slows down too. I think the driver is going to offer me help or directions but instead, he picks up speed again and roars past me and out of sight,
covering my car in the fine white dust that seems to suffocate everything in this place.

  I start the car again and enter Ferryvale, sure there is a reason I am drawn to the name. An image shimmers in a far corner of my mind, too far for me to make out what it is. The area seems a little more upmarket than I have seen so far, but not by much. Soon I am driving past the much-lauded bird sanctuary. It looks like they have filled up old mine shafts with water and reeds and called it a sanctuary. Still, it provides a pleasant break in the hot powder that makes up the rest of the scenery. A good place to dump dead bodies. My writing hand itches.

  Soon enough I drive past a school called, imaginatively, Ferryvale High. It is fenced, unsettling with razor wire. It must be first break on a school day because the place is squirming with white limbs sticking out of teal uniforms. I consider staying in the car until the bell rings but anyone who sees a man in a day-old Hawaiian shirt hovering here will surely call the police. It’s steaming. I get out of the car and am thankful for the cheap breeze on my back and neck. I walk through the front gate and over the peanut-brittle walkway, into the building. I jump as the bell rings, right next to my ear, which sends my heart dashing. I didn’t realise I was so on edge. An overweight woman peers at me, adjusts her glasses, licks her coral lips. I walk towards her. I can tell immediately that she is not married and has no close friends because she is wearing a vast turquoise blouse that can only be described as a disaster, and clearly no one has told her. I remember then that I am wearing flamingos, so I guess I am not in the best position to judge. She looks me up and down, as if she knows I am a fornicator, wear old Metallica T-shirts to bed, or both, and doesn’t approve, either. She peels her lips off her horse’s teeth in an attempt at a smile and greets me with an Afrikaans accent. I put on my best face.

  “I was wondering if you could help me,” I say, in my Polite Voice. “I’m doing some research for a friend of mine.” The desk fan against the wall slowly rotates to face me, causing all the papers on the wall to flutter.

  “What can I do … to help you?” she asks, breathless. I’m guessing it’s because of her size, not my good looks or sense of style.

  “If you could allow me access to previous class lists from the early 1990s I would appreciate it. I assume you have a … system,” I say, and look in the direction of the dinosaur PC.

  She shakes her head. “We haven’t archived that far back.”

  I wait for her to offer another solution but she just stands there and looks at me.

  “Right,” I say. The papers pinned to the wall are whispering again.

  “Do you have the lists as hard copies then, in a file, in the library perhaps?”

  Again she shakes her head.

  “Old yearbooks? School magazines?”

  She narrows her eyes at this. She does everything unhurriedly. It’s irritating. She takes a few steps towards the phone and punches the keys with the back of a pencil. An old secretary trick, so that you don’t ruin your nails, but her nails are short and square. Maybe she learnt it from a movie, or maybe she has given up wearing nice clothes and having nice nails. Maybe someone broke her heart. After chatting in what sounds like baby-Afrikaans she hangs up and says that I can go to the library and look at the old school magazines. She tells me the way, I thank her and I walk away. She calls after me: “I can’t promise you’ll find what you’re looking for.”

  Story of my life, I think, without turning around.

  The library is cool and neat, apart from the wall-to-wall bald blue carpet. The librarian is expecting me and shows me to a seat and a pile of books. She is ancient and tiny, a pocket granny. She’s very talkative for a librarian, and for someone without any of her real teeth, but when I ignore her she doesn’t seem to take it personally. I start whipping through the books, starting with 1993 and going backwards. Eve wasn’t in matric in ’93 or ’92, but a photo in the 1990 magazine catches my eye. Standard seven class, it says, above a messy collage of athletics, science projects and fun days, and right in the middle is Eve, smiling shyly at the camera. Bingo. I check the subsequent editions again but she has disappeared. I page to the standard seven class list and there’s her name: Evelyn Shaw. I check all the other classes but there is no Denise Shaw. I take the magazine up to the librarian.

  “How long have you worked here?” I ask.

  She seems thrilled at the prospect of a conversation.

  “It’s coming up for thirty years,” she says, fingering the gold chain around her neck. I guess she had limited career opportunities.

  “Is there any chance,” I say, “that you remember the Shaw girls? They were here in the early nineties.”

  “I’ve seen thousands of children here,” she clucks. She smells like baby powder.

  “The Shaw girls,” I repeat, “Evelyn and Denise.” She closes her eyes and breathes through her nose. I show her the picture of Eve in the magazine. When she shakes her head at it, I pull out the family photo I have.

  “Oh!” she exclaims and gives a little jump. “The Shaws! Of course I remember them … Mister Shaw was the most famous man in town.” Then she drops her voice: “More famous than the mayor.”

  “So you remember the girls? Eve and Denise?”

  She looks confused. I’m sure her memory is not what it used be, being a century old, and all.

  “I remember the daughter. She was called the golden girl. They were a prominent family. Mister Shaw was the manager at AuruMine.”

  Yes, I think. Aurumine and the Golden Girl. I jot it down in my Moleskine.

  “She has – had – a sister, Denise,” I prompt.

  “No,” she says, “That girl was an only child. That’s what made it so hard, you know.”

  “Made what so hard?”

  “Pardon me?” she says.

  “You said that’s what made it so hard. Made what so hard?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says, pulling on her chain.

  “The Shaw family,” I say, “What happened to them?”

  “I don’t know any Shaws,” she mutters. “I’ve seen thousands of children here.”

  I can see she is agitated but I need an answer. I jab at the photo with my finger. “Mister Shaw,” I say, “More famous than the mayor?”

  She cowers, bewildered, and I realise I have raised my voice. I take a step back. She shakes her head, mumbles something to herself, has tears in her eyes. I walk back to the table and rip out the pages I need, put them in my pocket, and stalk out.

  Out of the school buildings I see the grey Datsun parked under a pine tree a little way down the road. I get into my car and slam the door. I take out my phone and Google ‘Aurumine, Shaw’. Nothing. A knock on the window makes me almost shit myself. It is the turquoise receptionist. I wind the stubborn thing down.

  “I took the liberty,” she drawls, “of calling someone about you.”

  Fuck. It’s always the quiet ones you have to beware of.

  “Who did you call?”

  She rests her fat forearms on the car door as she leans in.

  “Mrs X,” she whispers, then gives me the benefit of her horsey smile.

  I feel I am in a particularly bad episode of an outdated local soap opera.

  “Mrs X.” I sigh. Of course.

  “She said that she would see you.”

  “Nice of her,” I say. “Who is she?”

  The woman hands me an address scribbled on the back of a photocopied work sheet. Geometry.

  “She likes to be known as The Oracle.”

  You have to be kidding me.

  “But we sommer call her the Town Gossip behind her back.”

  I look at the crouching car in my rear-view mirror and put my foot down.

  The address is in the suburb of Sub-Nigel, which makes me think there is a whole parallel-universe version of this town: deeper, darker, stickier. Sub-Nigel. Sub-human. Creatures which have chosen to inhabit the other side of the tracks and perhaps only come out at nigh
t. I drive past houses with pre-cast front walls that wouldn’t keep anyone out, some shaped like picket fences, some like mining wheels and painted pink or aquamarine. Houses with their fronts falling off, watermarks on their walls like muddy waterfalls, rusted steel roofs and peeling concrete planters holding on to their long-ago perished plants. Sunsleeping dogs, broken down playsets and feral-looking barefoot kids who stop playing to look at me as I cruise past.

  I use the GPS on my phone to find my way. When I arrive at the address I see the house I have been looking for since I arrived. It is the size of a mansion and looks like it was designed and decorated by someone whose wealth is indirectly proportional to his or her good taste. On top of the high walls, on watch and ready to swoop, are statues of eagles, painted gold. The walls themselves are embellished with every pre-cast detail you can imagine, and then some. There are concrete ties and bows and bowls of grapes. I ring the bell and as the giant black gates swing open I see a water feature on the front lawn the size of the Trevi fountain. I can’t help smiling.

  A tall black gentleman with high cheekbones walks out to greet me. I stick out my hand.

  “Mister X, I presume?”

  The man smirks and leads me inside. It turns out he’s the butler. He purses his lips at the shirt I’m wearing, then hands me a jacket off the coat rail. It’s the right size. The interior décor is as deliciously hideous as the exterior. Italian renaissance meets Parisian whorehouse. The walls are covered top-to-bottom in maroon brocade damask wallpaper. The pattern is broken up only by the over-lit Roman statues and mirrors framed in golden waves. If Francina ever won the Lotto this is how she would decorate her house. The butler (A butler, really? In Sub-Nigel? I couldn’t believe my luck) escorts me down a long passage. I try to walk slowly so that I can peek into the adjoining rooms but he will have none of it and I have to hurry to keep up with him. I have the distinct feeling that I am a hare hurrying down the rabbit hole. There are paintings of toy dogs on the wall and the carpet pile is so lush it seems as though I’m tripping. Eventually the dark passage brightens and the butler disappears. I pick up my pace and get to the spot where I saw him last: there is a velvet-curtained entrance to a drawing room. I duck inside.