by JT Lawrence
40
Birdsong
I walk for hours until a car picks me up. They speak urgent Afrikaans to me, pointing to my bleeding ears and blackened face. Their voices are muffled. They want to take me to the hospital. They want to take me to the police station. I say no and try to get out of the car but they peel my hands away. They want to take me home to clean me up. I don’t have a home, I want to tell them, but my mouth isn’t working. I lose consciousness.
I wake up in a strange house. I am lying in a child’s bed, my feet hang over the edge. The walls are pink and there are fairies and decrepit stuffed toys. I can’t possibly imagine where I am. I close my eyes again. The memories come to me in startled flashes. The man wearing my watch. The young kid in the torn shirt. The blinding crunch of the bomb blast. Tears burn my eyes and leak down my temples, staining the pillow. I can’t help wishing I had been in the car. At this stage, death would be sweet oblivion. My body convulses and everything hurts, then I am again dragged away by sleep.
I wake up to birdsong. It’s difficult to move but I manage to swing my heavy body out of the miniature bed and try to open the bedroom door but it’s locked from the outside. The Deliverance song banjos my brain. Taking fright I rattle the doorknob and shout. Perfect, I think, to be kidnapped by the Deliverance Gang. What’s next? Hallways of chicken bones?
The door is unlocked by a woman I don’t recognise.
“Sorry for that,” she blushes, “we just locked it for safety.” She hands me a tray of breakfast food and leaves. Fried polony and margarine on white toast isn’t my thing but I can’t remember when last I ate and I inhale the plate in minutes. The coffee is instant and over-sugared but it is one of the best cups I’ve ever had. When I’m finished I take the tray into the kitchen. Everyone stops what they are doing to stare at me, including two cereal-mouthed, saucer-eyed children at the breakfast table. I look down to make sure I’m wearing clothes. My limbs are blackened so I guess my face is too, apart from the lines the tears left. One of the men gives me a threadbare towel and shows me where I can shower and, afterwards, on the way out, points me in the direction of the bus station. He tries to give me cash, some pink fifties, but I refuse, showing him my wallet.
I’m astonished at their hospitality. This would never happen in Jo’burg. The criminal climate just doesn’t allow for it. As I limp towards the station my breath is shallow. I wonder if I have broken a rib. Perhaps there is something to be said for backwater towns after all.
Once I am on the bus destined for home I feel safe, cocooned. I wait for the pylons to turn back into trees before I take out the letter from Mrs X and hold it in my hand for a while before opening it. It’s a little bent and marked and the gold wax is cracked. I think: This had better be good.
Goldfields Manor
49 The Straight
Sub-Nigel
Dear Mister Slade Harris
Mr X and I apologise for our hasty departure. We had some urgent business to attend to. Okay, that’s a lie. We’re off on a shopping jaunt in Aspen and thought we’d practice our alpine skiing while we’re here. Mr X was taken by a sudden fancy for fake snow and so we had no choice but to leave immediately. I am sorry that you will not get to taste Cook’s pigeon but the universe obviously has its reasons and who are we to quarrel with the stars?! Dasher is most disappointed. He took a liking to you, of course, but it is his dismay at missing the pigeon dinner I am referring to. These Royal Dogs are very sensitive! Perhaps the next time you have The Mark Of Death you can pop by and we can try to accommodate you once again.
Butler is packing my clothes as I write, the sweet man. I don’t know what Mr X and I would do without him and Cook. And Gardener, of course! And Maid. But now let’s stop with the idle chatter and address the reason why you came to see me today and why you are reading this letter!
Here’s the thing: you wanted to know what the Shaw family attempted to hide from this town twenty years ago. But you should know by now, Mister Harris, that no one hides anything from Mrs X. Oh sweet! Dasher is barking like a rabid dog. He must know it is to you that I am writing. Okay Dasher darling, calm down, Mommy needs to finish this letter so that we can jump in the chopper! Now settle down and here, have a treat. Good boy.
The truth is that the Shaws caused an absolute scandal here back in the 90s. It is a sad story and this is how it goes: Dasher! You naughty thing! You’ve just laddered mama’s stockings! Butler! Butler! Where were you, I’ve been calling you for centuries! I need new stockings. Yes. I don’t care, just get them! Yes, I’ll have another Buck’s Fizz, thank you. Dasher knows that Mama needs her medicine.
Miles Shaw was the mining manager at AuruMine here in Sub-Nigel. It’s closed now but when he was running the show – and believe me he was a man that was large and in charge! – it simply churned out a fortune of wealth. It made the town rich and so Miles became a bit of a local hero, despite being English. He had a trophy wife, a real poppie, a little stick insect who used to be weighed down by all the gold Miles used to give her. Oh God, what would I do without Buck’s Fizz? Bottoms Up!
They tried for years to fall pregnant, and then one day Miles announced that they were going to have a daughter the whole town was behind them! And that daughter was born healthy and beautiful and kept growing more and more beautiful and she was the poster child for Nigel. So you can understand that when what happened, happened, it was shame on a drastic scale! I take it that you knew this daughter and so you will know what it was that caused the uproar. But what you won’t know is Miles was so outraged, so disappointed, so shocked – he was English, but had the moral values of an Afrikaner! – he banished Eve from town. She was only fifteen when he kicked her out with nothing but the dress on her back. We never heard from her again. And of course the other family was disgraced! After that Miles slunk into a deep depression and within the year, he had gassed himself in his home garage. All because of an illicit love affair! Can you imagine?!
So that is what you wanted to know, Mister Harris, I hope I have helped you in your quest. What the tragedy of the Shaw family has to do with you I can only imagine. I wish you good luck but I must also warn you that you are in grave danger. Nothing is what it seems, Mister Harris. If you can just manage to stay alive for the next few days you will outlive the shadow that is upon you. Now I must run, the chopper is here and Dasher seems determined to choke on a fur ball.
Ciao!!
Mrs X
PS. You mentioned a Denise Shaw, sister to Evelyn? She doesn’t exist. At least not in this particular universe! Toodle doo, darling.
41
Puppet Master
I arrive at the Sandton Bus Depot at dusk and catch a taxi to Rosebank, to Eve’s flat. The ride there is rough, the driver malefic, but I am becoming accustomed to this new dangerous way. My plan is to ransack the place and not leave till I find what I am looking for. At the block of flats a strong feeling of déjà vu hits me in the chest. I stumble but keep going. In my backpack jingle Eve’s keys, the ones I lifted from Denise, so I let myself in. The crime tape has been taken down, half-heartedly, as if the person responsible didn’t see the point. I drink water in hungry gulps straight from the kitchen tap. I look for food in the refrigerator but it is a dark empty cave.
Eve’s bedroom is exactly how I remember it from the last time I was here, except that there are some sealed boxes on the floor. Her essence is still here. I can feel her energy, smell her. I pick up a few things on her dressing table. A hairbrush, a half-moon of face powder. Her perfume is gone. I slide open the drawer. It is a mess of alien things: bracelets, lipstick and clips. No gold – Eve never wore gold. I recognise one pair of earrings and pick them up: black chandeliers. They remind me of a day I spent with her a few years ago, before I began to worry if I would ever be able to think of another story. We joined some of her friends at the Johannesburg Country Club for a picnic and fireworks display. We were a motley crew: writers, artists, directors, bankers. There was a great deal of champagne a
nd we all got on pretty well. Fair weather friends: none of those people bothered to come to her funeral.
I put them back, close the drawer and prowl towards her studio. I think I hear something outside and I freeze. I wait for a few minutes, ears trained, before I carry on. Her studio has not yet been packed up. The unfinished canvases sit patiently on their easels, frozen in time. Paint brushes wait in their jars of turpentine and the walls, still layered with overlapping pieces of paper: quotes, rough sketches, photographs, look like the scales on a dead fish. I start studying them as if they hold some kind of clue to what happened to her, to what is happening to me. For a long time there is nothing. I scan every page, standing and crouching and standing again. Every now and then I see something I think means something: a bridge, a mountain that could be a mine, a woman who could be Mrs X, a man who could be Edgar, if I knew what Edgar looked like. She had been working on some kind of puppet-themed project. At first I thought they were dolls, but now I see the spider webs shooting out of their arms and heads. Almost invisible, the fine threads hold the dolls in various poses, ready for commands. There are scribbled doodles of marionettes and photocopies of all kinds of puppets through the ages. In the corner there is a plaster cast of a tall, long-eared rabbit with jointed paws and legs. With so many puppets, I think, this could be an abstract illustration of my life. Always playing at puppet master: realising now that I was never in charge. And even if I was, for a short time, that every puppet master has his puppet master. That people play with other peoples’ lives but in the end the universe has the final say. I am seized by a reckless feeling. I hope that whoever is trying to kill me will just show up tonight. I won’t run away. I need to know what this whole thing has been about; I need to understand, even if it ends in my death. It’s not as though I have a life to go back to, anyway. I have lost my world.
I continue scanning the wall. Every now and then an illustration makes me stop and I have to step closer so that I can take in its delicate lines. I look at a photo and automatically move on. There is a tingling and an urge to go back. A bell. A nagging. I look at it again. A photo of two young girls, arms over each other’s shoulders, their school blazers hunched up around their necks in the easy embrace. Sisters, maybe twins. The crest on the uniforms: Ferryvale. I tear the picture off the wall. The girl on the right is blonde, petite, and lifts her chin up to the camera as she grins. Eve. The other girl is sable, curvaceous, with a dark twinkle in her eyes. Denise? I flip the photo over, but there is no inscription. I swing my bag off my back and poke around for the stolen school magazine pages. I search the thumbnail portraits of Eve’s class for this girl-version of Denise, and I find her. Except that her name isn’t Denise or Shaw. It’s Susannah. I must be wrong. I look again, holding the picture to the page. It’s the same girl. Susannah Fox. Susannah Fox. The name is familiar. Why would she lie about her name, about being Eve’s sister? Why would she be the one packing boxes? In some spare corner of my mind I see her name in print. I see it on a piece of paper, A4, white, on a desk. In Eve’s will. Eve left her everything.
“Slade,” comes a voice from behind and an electric current runs through me.
42
A Conversation with a Hologram
I spin around, cry out. The studio has grown dark and at first, I think it’s Eve, but then she walks forward into a shaft of light and I see Denise. Susannah. The woman who had sixteen million reasons to kill Eve and anyone else who stood in the way.
“Susannah,” I whisper into the dark.
“You can call me that,” she says.
“Why did you say your name was Denise?”
“I never did. That’s the name you chose.”
I shout out an ugly laugh.
“That’s the name I chose,” I splutter.
“Yes,” she says, stepping closer.
“But now you’re Susannah,” I say.
“Yes,” she says, “if you like.”
“I found this photo of you, and this one. Your name is Susannah.”
“Okay,” she says.
“And Eve was an only child,” I say. Denise nods.
“Why did you pretend to be her sister? What was the point? Why didn’t you just take the money and run?”
She looks at me as if I should know the answer.
“I didn’t know about the money,” she says, then shakes her head and corrects herself. “I knew about the money but not about the will. Not about the life insurance.”
We keep quiet for a while.
“No one suspects you. No one even knows you …”
“No one even knows I exist,” she says. Her words echo in my head. No one even knows she exists. She is close now. If I reach out I will be able to touch her. Heat creeps up my body in a smooth, liquid motion, as if I am being filled up with boiling water. There is anger in every muscle, organ, cell.
“How could you?” I demand.
“I didn’t,” she says.
“You may as well tell me the truth. I’m going to die tonight, aren’t I?”
“Are you?” Jesus, it’s like having a conversation with a hologram.
“I’m surprised you didn’t do it sooner,” I say, “You had so many opportunities.”
We had been so intimate, I feel sick with it. Sick with the blood-red intimacy.
“I didn’t kill Eve,” she says again.
“Why would I believe that?”
“Because I was in love with her,” she whispers.
“What?” I say. I am confused, knocked off balance.
“I’ve always been in love with her.”
“What?”
“We’ve been … lovers …since school.”
“If that were true I would know,” I say. “Eve and I were close.”
“We kept it secret. Telling the truth caused a lot of pain.”
“What do you mean?”
“We were fifteen when we told our parents. My dad beat me so badly I had to be hospitalised. You’ve seen my scar,” she says, touching her chest. “One of the broken ribs punctured my lung. Eve’s parents didn’t touch her, wouldn’t touch her, wouldn’t look at her, just threw her out. Her father’s reputation was ruined.”
I search her eyes but I can’t read them.
“She moved to Jo’burg. She used to write to me but if my dad found a letter from her he would lay into me. It was worth the risk, just to hear from her, but when I told her she stopped. That’s been the pattern of our relationship our whole lives: bad things happen when we are together, but we can’t be apart. Because we love each other, we want to protect each other, so we stay away. But sometimes we can’t help it, and then we have to deal with the consequences. The last time we were together is the last time I saw her alive.”
“I don’t understand. What consequences? Do you mean because you are gay?”
“No, being gay has nothing to do with it. Being in love with Eve didn’t make me gay any more than being with you didn’t make me straight. Love isn’t held back by gender. The consequences I am talking about run deeper than that. We were never meant to be together. We were star-cross’d.”
“Romeo and Juliet,” I murmur. Their fate was sealed the moment they locked eyes on each other. In the end, their actions were inconsequential because their destinies were already in the stars.
“You didn’t kill her?”
She is close now, our bodies are touching. She takes my hand.
“How could I?” she breathes into me. “Killing Eve would be like killing myself.”
This makes sense. In my mind they are becoming the same person. Yes, I think, you are Eve’s shadow.
She pulls my head down and forces her lips onto mine. I hesitate. I try to think. Slowly, slowly, she draws me out. Her mouth is safe and familiar. I feel the wall come up from behind me and touch my back. I don’t remember taking off my clothes but we are skin-on-skin. I feel weak and we sink down onto the spattered sheets. She senses my weakness and takes control, manoeuvring so that the whole length o
f her body is on top of mine. Then I am inside her and she rocks up and down, up and down until I am hypnotised. There is weight on my wrists. I open my eyes but it’s dark. I feel her fingernails – she is holding me, pinning me down. She is a Black Widow spider. Up and down, the smoothest breast-skin, breast-silk, her nipples graze my chest. I start to feel the build, coming from somewhere far away. A spark, a low flame.
She whispers something into my ear but it seems so far away that I can’t hear what she is saying. The flame creeps nearer.
“What?” I say, my voice is a growl.
“I said, ‘So now you can stop the act’.”
“What are you talking about?”
She leans right in, her lips touch my ear.
“I know.”
The flame is a fire. As she continues to rock I feel all the blood I have go to my cock.
“What do you know?” I groan. There is a rushing in my ears.
“I know your secrets. I know what you are.”
“Tell me.”
Oh God, the trail of fire is coming at me fast.
“I know it was you.”
Must have misheard. Paranoid. She doesn’t stop rocking.
“I know you killed Eve,” she says.
My eyes fly open. Here eyes bite into mine. I try to shake her off but she is holding me down, her hands full of new power.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I say. “I had no reason to.”
“You had the oldest reason in the book: you loved her and you couldn’t have her. You thought, if I can’t have her, then I will have her story. You sacrificed her for your writing.”