The Memory of Water

by JT Lawrence

  “Yes,” I say.

  “You had a kind of … episode.”

  “I guess you could call it that.”

  “You stayed in your room for three days with a case of whisky. You wouldn’t eat or talk. We were going to abort the mission, call in a shrink, when you deserted your father’s car and just started walking through the town in the middle of the night.”

  “What?”

  “That’s when we got those locals to pick you up, give you bed for the night and some food.”

  “That’s not what happened,” I say. “I had to meet Mrs X. I went to Sub-Nigel. I almost got blown to pieces in that fucking explosion of yours in Duduza. Your special effects were astounding, realistic.”

  “Explosion?” she blinks, “Mrs X?” She catches herself, half-chuckles. “Do you think those things happened?”

  “Of course they fucking well happened. I almost got my head blown off.”

  “Slade,” she smiles, but her eyes are worried. “There is no such place as Sub-Nigel. It’s the name of an abandoned mine. You must have seen a sign for it somewhere in town.”

  “The explosion was real.” I say.

  “No,” says Eve, “there was no explosion.”

  I look down at my wrist and my watch stares back at me. I blink and touch it, to make sure it’s there.

  “An episode?” I say.

  Frank talks: “You just lay in bed, man, for days. Watching the ceiling fan. I thought you were one beer short of a six-pack. I was worried. I told Eve to call it off.”

  I think of Mrs X, the outrageous décor, the pigeon, the Pomeranian. I pull her letter from out of my jacket pocket. Instead of the heavy stock and gold wax I remember, it is a cheap letterhead from the hotel: blank.

  “You did what you do best, Slade,” she says, “You retreated into your imagination.”

  I get flashes: plastic grapes, and toy dogs on coasters at the steakhouse bar; Dasher; Mrs X’s wall. A cocktail menu, dirty martinis, Buck’s Fizz. At the hotel: Paris, snow, and a fountain, framed in gold.

  “This thing you did,” I say to her, “this experiment, hurt people.”

  She shakes her head. “No one was hurt. Except Frank, a little.”

  Frank shrugs and touches his nose. “You owed me, buddy.”

  “What about Denise?” The blood rushes to my head. “That was also engineered, right? She’s okay?” I look around the crowd, desperate to see her face. “Where is she? I don’t see her here.”

  Eve frowns, and looks uncertain.

  “Who is Denise?”

  52

  Backwater Beauty

  “Oh, for God’s sake, you’re fucking unbelievable. You know who I mean. Susannah. Susannah Fox, or whatever the hell her name really is.”

  “Er …” says Eve, “I really don’t know who you mean.”

  “Your sister. Or, at least, she said she was your sister. At the funeral.”

  “We hired actors for the funeral, no one was told to play the part of my sister. I never had a sister.”

  “I know!” I say.

  “Susannah Fox,” she says, “was a made-up name for my fake will. It was a red herring.”

  “No,” I say, “Denise was real. She lived with me. We were together after you died. She helped me through it.”

  Frank is shaking his head and I want to punch him again.

  “No one entered or left your house for the whole week after Eve’s funeral,” he says.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I say. “I’m mind-fucked enough now, stop playing around. I thought I’d fucking killed her. Do you know what that does to someone?”

  The room stares at me. Silence. Frank clears his throat.

  “Did anyone else see her, speak to her?” Eve asks, looking around. Everyone stares blank-faced.

  I rack my brain. She never seemed to be around for introductions. She wasn’t around for much. She never ate anything. She had no ID.

  Frank steps forward. “She doesn’t exist, man. I have been following you every second and you haven’t killed anyone.”

  “Have you checked your apartment?” I ask Eve. “Her body is there.”

  “We checked it,” she says, “full of thinners and turpentine. No body. Certainly no dead body.”

  “If I’m so deranged, then how do I know this is happening? How do I know I’m not lying somewhere, catatonic, dreaming all this up?”

  “This is happening,” says Eve, touching my arm, looking into my eyes. “This is happening.”

  I look around the room.

  “What about Francina?” I say, “Was she in on this too?”

  Eve shakes her head.

  “I tried everything to get her to co-operate but she refused. Said it wasn’t right. She wouldn’t even give us your house key.” She pulls silver out of her pocket and jingles my spare keys at me. “Luckily I had my own.”

  “What did you do with her?”

  “Don’t say it like that,” she says, “don’t say it like I am some kind of Godfather who makes people disappear.”

  “What did you do with her?”

  “I sent her on a paid holiday. I told her she could choose her destination. She flew back from Mauritius yesterday.”

  I take a deep breath.

  “It was never meant to get so complicated,” she says.

  “Famous last words.”

  “I’m sorry. It spun out of control. It was a risk I took. I just thought, like you have often told me, that if you don’t risk anything, you risk everything.”

  “Yes,” I say. “Although I didn’t quite mean for you to risk my life.”

  She touches me again, I flinch. She bites a nail.

  “I went too far.”

  I take a breath, and look long and hard at Eve. Magic woman, witch, porcelain doll, back-from-the-dead. Stolen mantle of Master Puppeteer.

  The real Backwater Beauty.

  “Thank you for saving my life,” I say, “but I never want to see you again.”

  “Writing is not life,

  but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life.”

  – Stephen King

  53

  More To Life

  My father runs to catch up with me as a leave the police station.

  “Slade,” he calls, and I ignore him, keep walking. He catches my arm. “Let me drive you home.”

  I acquiesce. I don’t have a choice.

  In the car, he says, “I take responsibility for the part I played in this. But I didn’t realise the extent of it. All Eve asked me to do was call her if you ever showed up, which I did. I knew you two were friends. She said it was to protect you. All the rest of it was nonsense.”

  That may be the understatement of the year, but I take his point.

  “But what happened between me and you today, that was real.”

  I look at him; familiar hands gripping the steering wheel, flushed face concentrating on the road.

  I realise in that moment that there is more to life than writing.

  “Yes,” I say, “That was real.”

  He drops me off outside my house and tosses me the house keys. It’s strange to be back. To be in such a familiar place, feeling so different. So altered. On the outside, everything looks almost the way I left it. The window has been replaced, the front wall bright with a fresh coat of paint. Again I am surprised that the roof is not missing, the walls are not knocked down. But inside: inside it has been Francinarised. I stand open-armed, breathing in the smell of furniture polish and bleach. There is a visitor on the couch, someone who took the liberty of moving in while I was away. Munchkin looks at me, bored, stretches, and goes back to sleep. I walk through to the kitchen. The place is spotless and shiny. The huge refrigerator is well-stocked and restored to its previous magnificence. There is a flower garland on the kitchen table, and a note written in Francina’s spidery scrawl. “Bless You, Mister Harris.”

  I put the garland around my neck and glide through to my den. Everything is in its place. I
take a new Moleskine off the bookshelf, sit down, and uncap my pen. I open the book up on the first blank page and I start writing.

  54

  Inside Out

  And then of course there could be a fourth ending. A real ending. How wonderful it would have been, how neat, if Eve were miraculously alive again and she loved me – enough to wreck my life, teach me meaning. To have the troops rallying around me, to have been willing to turn my life upside-down, like a game, like a too-clever film. In fact, I may well have seen the device used in a movie a long time ago, and it resurfaced while I was having my ‘episode’. It’s an ending only a smug writer could come up with. Too-tidy, contrived. Desperate: down to the repainted front wall, the cat, the flower garland. It would have been good for the old Slade, the pre-fucked, pre-confession, pre-jail Slade, but it won’t do for me now. I feel different, turned inside out. A neat ending will no longer do.

  “Can I get more paper?” I ask the guard. I have used up the SAP issue notepad they gave me earlier – hours (days?) ago. Once he snorts and obliges I take a breath and begin again. The real ending isn’t as pretty and it’s the last thing I will ever write.

  55

  Invisible Leash

  I hear the ghost’s high heels clacking towards me and I don’t look up until they stop outside my cell. I look up just enough to see a beautiful pair of shoes. Denise. The guard makes a show of taking out the keys and opening the heavy metal door. She strides in, bloodlipsticksmile.

  “I thought you were a ghost,” I say, putting down my pen. “I thought you didn’t exist, that I had made you up.”

  She runs a slow finger through my hair.

  “You did make me up,” she says, “in a way.”

  I shake my head. I want to dash my head against the bed frame, crack my skull, let the demons out.

  “I strangled you. You stopped breathing.”

  “No, I didn’t stop breathing. It was a game we played. Don’t you remember that?”

  “I remember trying to make you stop talking, squeezing too hard.”

  “If that were true,” she says, “I wouldn’t be here right now.”

  “Are you here?” I ask.

  “What do you think?”

  “Honestly, I’m not sure.”

  “That’s good enough, for now.”

  We sit and look at each other for a long while.

  “You still don’t recognise me, do you?” she smiles.

  I rub my eyes, stare at her. I see a flashing of faces. A dark corner. A kitchen knife. She takes off her black wig and shakes out her red hair. Peels off her eyelashes.

  The world cracks open. “It can’t be,” I say with my heart beating out of my chest.

  She wipes off her red lipstick, leaving a messy, stained mouth. Blood-grin.

  “Oh, it is. Have I changed that much? Or it is because you hardly ever actually looked at me when we were dating? All I’ve had done is a nose job.”

  She pauses a while, her cheeks colour. “And my lips. I had my lips done. And my boobs. But that’s all. You still could have recognised me, for God’s sake.”

  My cheek and mouth muscles go slack. The temperature in the room drops.

  “It can’t be,” I say. “You were supposed to be the red herring.”

  Her blue irises flare.

  “Fuck you,” she says. No one can quite deliver that line like PsychoSally.

  I look at the concrete floor, trying to piece the last few days together. Another pair of shoes arrives: tan loafers, wet grass.

  “Hey buddy,” says Frank. Kicked-puppy eyes.

  “You got to Frank,” I say.

  “I didn’t get to Frank, I’ve always had Frank. That stupid soccer club of yours was my ticket in.” She rests a hand on her hip. “You weren’t at all suspicious? He’s no soccer player. He’s built like a prop for God’s sake. I had to pay him double when he actually had to play.”

  Frank dumb-shrugs.

  “And if that didn’t tip you off, you should have been suspicious when someone actually made friends with you. I mean, it’s a pretty rare occurrence, taking your personality into account.”

  “Well I actually …” begins Frank, before he is shoved by PsychoSally.

  “Oh, shut the fuck up,” she snaps, trying to blink away her irritation. “None of it matters anymore. You’re going to get what you deserve and I am going to watch it happen.”

  I look at her, with her dark wig in her hand and coloured contact lenses, her blonde eyelashes, cracked tattoo, fading spray-tan, and I try to see Denise, but she is gone. The venom in Sally’s face has wiped out any trace of the woman I have been living with. There is cold water where my organs used to be.

  “What did you do?” I ask.

  “Nothing you didn’t think of. When you told Frank your plan to murder Eve I couldn’t believe my luck. You handed me the blueprint to your undoing. All I had to do was follow the plan. I admired your boldness. I would never have done it if it weren’t for your … writing project.”

  “You killed Eve? Dumped her body?”

  Sally laughs. “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m a lady,” she slaps Frank on the shoulder, “I paid this schmuck to do it.”

  “You’re a hit man?” I ask Frank.

  “Well, I prefer …”

  “Shut up Frank!” she shrills.

  “So you murder Eve to frame me. What about all the orchestrated details? Why would you do that? The actor at the funeral? The dodgy lawyer?”

  “None of that was staged. That actor is some kind of schizo. Or crackhead. He pretends to be a new character every time I see him. Some kind of avante-garde acting experiment. He used to work for Eve’s film studio. What can I say? That woman surrounded herself with fuck-ups. The lawyer was genuine, though. Hence the dodginess.”

  “Sub-Nigel?”

  “I think you know the answer to that.”

  I dream of ripping open my shirt to reveal a wire over my nipple, or pressing ‘stop’ on the recorder I had been secretly stashing under my pillow, but I have neither.

  “The look on your face,” Sally says leaning over to kiss me, “has made it all worthwhile.” Her lips are as cold as I remember.

  “Come,” she barks as Frank and he follows on an invisible leash. As they get to the door of the cell Sello appears.

  “Mrs Ellis,” he says. Sally stiffens. Sello grabs her wrists and motions at Madinga to handcuff Frank. “You have just given us … everything … we were waiting for.”

  I jump up.

  Sally starts swearing, calling him a cocksucker over and over again, struggling with her new metal bracelets. Frank doesn’t look surprised at all.

  I can’t believe this is happening. At a loss as to what to do, I put my hands on the back of my head.

  “You were the wire!” I say to Sello, “you were taped to my chest hair!”

  He ignores me and speaks ambush language to Madinga. I don’t mind. The room spins and I have to sit down again.

  After a while he turns his attention to me.

  “I’m sorry we had to keep you in the dark,” he says, “it was the only way to draw her out. We’ve been monitoring her since the vandalism episode. You aren’t the only one she was threatening. You were in no danger; we had people watching you 24/7.”

  “How …?”

  “We had people following you, and the room bugged.”

  I am out of words. I just nod.

  He motions to my scribbled notes.

  “Collect your papers. Your father is here to pick you up. He has been co-operating with us.”

  I remember the traitorous phone call I overheard.

  “Says you will be living with him for a while … until your next book is finished.”

  I crumple up all the papers with their inky scratches and words and dump them into the bin. I walk out of the cell, out of the building, into the brisk air and weak light of dusk.

  That, I think, will be a very long time.

  The End

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  “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.

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  "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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  Also By Jt Lawrence

  Why You Were Taken (2015)

  Sticky Fingers (2016)

  The Underachieving Ovary (2016)

  Grey Magic (2016)

  How We Found You (2017)

  About the Author

  JT Lawrence is an author, playwright

  & bookdealer. She lives in Parkhurst, Johannesburg,

  in a house with a red front door.

  @pulpbooks