The Memory of Water

⁵ MAYBE EVERYONE ELSE WAS RIGHT

Francina lets herself in, as she always does, and stomps her way into the kitchen to make cappuccinos for us. It must be Tuesday or Thursday. By the time I join her she has my paper open on the kitchen table and is halfway through it. Her feet aren’t up on the table but you get the feeling they are.

“You’re out of rusks,” she mumbles, licking a finger to turn the page. It is clear that an article has captured her imagination.

“There are some in the larder,” I say, not knowing how I know this.

“No, Mister Harris, I mean the good ones from Woollies. The pecan nut ones.”

My flat white is strong and hot with lots of foam. The kitchen is already clean – it’s been Francinarised. I wouldn’t cope with a life without Francina. She cooks, cleans, washes, dusts, irons and polishes like a Stepford Wife, without the creepy hairstyle. She wears the best get-up of anyone I know. She’s sixty in the shade but she is always trying something new. Long, preppy socks wrapped around her chunky legs one day, head-to-toe primary-coloured traditional garb the next. Today she has on a yellow raincoat (there’s not a cloud in the sky) and the biggest golden hoop earrings I may have ever seen. She says she spends her (generous) wages on unit trusts but I reckon she likes to buoy the economy with it too.

Also, she makes good snacks.

Francina tears herself away from the newspaper just long enough to look me up and down and furrow her brows.

“You going to wear that shirt, Mister Harris?”

“Is there a problem with this shirt?”

She shrugs and goes back to her reading.

I go to the bedroom to change.

I arrive at Eve’s place at one o’clock. She hates it when people are late, finds it disrespectful, so I always try my best to be on time. Ironic, as I’m usually the one that keeps women waiting. She has been a little cool towards me since our breakfast last week, so I thought I’d invite her out to lunch and attempt to charm her with my beguiling ways. I think she’s still annoyed with me: she said she didn’t have time, so I offered a quick one at her place. She thought I meant lunch.

She opens the door wearing one of her work shirts and an old pair of jeans. She smells of oil paint and Chanel.

“Ouch,” she says, eyebrows raised, then points to the laceration on the side of my head. “Did you get into a fight?”

I follow her through the apartment and into her studio, watching her hips sway in front of me. Christ, it’s hard being near her sometimes. Especially knowing there’s a bed in the next room. Not that my juvenile fantasies of her ever really include a bed. Mostly it’s up against a wall, or in the front seat of the Jag, or the heated pool, or on my kitchen table. But now I can imagine doing it here in the studio, getting covered in paint and…

“So what do you think?” she smiles at me. I feel like a puppy that’s been caught chewing a Manolo.

“Huh?”

“It’s for the bank. The triptych I told you about.”

Eve’s studio is always covered top to bottom in paintings and sculptures, so you have to pay attention if you want to look like you’re not an idiot. There are new drawings of dolls – girls and men and animals – all over the walls. The triptych is easy to spot because it’s shining wet. And it’s the biggest painting in the room. It is of a nude stretched voluptuously across the three panels. Very dark. Erotic.

“God,” I say.

“Do you hate it?” she asks with big eyes.

“No, I think it’s exquisite.”

She smiles like a little girl and takes my hand.

“Now you know why I am so busy. I need to finish it by next week.”

“Nothing like a deadline to kick you up the arse,” I say, not smiling at the irony.

She leads me into the studio’s kitchenette and we begin unpacking the lunch I have brought.

“How’s yours?” she asks.

“Firm but soft to the touch.”

I can’t believe I said that. I’m a complete imbecile. Eve is gracious and gives me a skew smile.

“I meant your deadline.”

She fills the kettle, switches it on and I start to build our sandwiches. Eve is a tea zealot. I keep quiet while I wait for something to say.

“Have you come up with anything good? For your book, I mean.”

I groan and pretend to be overly interested in the olive ciabatta I am sawing.

I don’t want Eve knowing how desperate I really feel. Anyway, I am bad at this, this intimate dialogue. I have always felt silly saying I am having a bad time. It’s self-indulgent. It makes me think of bald kids with leukaemia and makes me feel like even more of a dick, standing here, making a faux-Mediterranean lunch in my nine-hundred-rand-sneakers.

“All writers struggle at some point, even the greats,” she says, as she pauses to lick balsamic syrup off her finger. “Especially the greats. You’re just spoiled because all your other stories came to you so easily.” She pours two cups of what looks like urine into old mismatched mugs.

“It just… it feels different, this time.”

“It’ll come. I believe in you.”

We take the Brie, kiwi and watercress sandwiches through to her makeshift office in the corner, where there are two fold-up chairs and a table. The walls are covered in illustrations and photos and the room is like an artwork in itself.

“Sifiso’s all over me like a venereal disease.”

Venereal disease? Why would I say that in front of Eve? Now she’s going to associate me with herpes, chlamydia, gonorrhoea. God.

“Yes, well, he’s especially good at that,” she laughs and tilts her head. “So what are we going to do to get you over this… whatever it is?”

“I have to do something huge. Something that will eclipse all the others. I just need to figure out what that is.”

Eve makes a face to show me she’s thinking.

“Run a marathon?”

“Done it, and regretted it profoundly. Ended up at the half-way mark in a pub somewhere obscure with no way to get home.”

“Take ecstasy, acid, tik?”

“Yawn. Centuries ago.”

“Date a… er, I don’t know. A transsexual?”

“You know Palahniuk joined a sex-addiction support group? He attended a whole lot of meetings to try to understand what it was about. So that he could write with compassion. So that he knew he was writing the truth.”

“So what are you saying? That you’re not the only crazy writer in the world?”

“Maybe not the only one.”

“How about moving to another country?”

“Gee, thanks.”

“I mean temporarily, to get a new story.”

“Done it. A few times. But Marrakech ’98: unbelievable. That’s where the camel story comes from. Obviously. And then of course there was Bangkok.” Where I ended up staying a little longer than I had planned.

I don’t like talking about Bangkok.

A Thousand Camels, despite the unfortunate name, was one of my most successful short stories. It probably paid for my shower.

True story! According to my friend the bartender, anyway. So sometimes speaking to people pays off. Look at Yann Martell. The Life Of Pi was Martell telling us the story of what that old codger in the tearoom in India told him. Hungry and broke, Martell wanders into a packed café and has to share a table with this old guy, who rolls into action, saying that he’ll tell Martell a story that will make him believe in God. And hey presto! Suffice to say he probably isn’t poor any more.

I must say, the pressure to speak to every obscure person I meet does pinch my balls. Most obscure people, in fact, have nothing to say at all. By that I mean they have a lot of words, but not a lot to actually say. The pain is exacerbated by the fact that I’m not really a people’s person. I mean, I don’t even really like people, in general. I find most of them a little dull and feel my finite life ticking away, when Mrs. Someone from Somewhere starts telling me what she thinks of the proponents of local trade razing the underprivileged foreign markets which depend on our currency, I have been known to throw my head back and yawn in otherwise polite conversation. You’d think that would put a sock in it but you’d be surprised at how many people don’t get the hint.

“Bungee jumping?” volunteers Eve, sipping her tea.

“Skydiving trumps bungee jumping.”

“Especially if you end up snapping your collarbone,” she smiles. We look at each other for a while.

“You bought me grapes,” I say. I can hear my heart beating.

Eve giggles. “What?”

I swallow, wipe my lips with a knuckle.

“You bought me grapes when I was in hospital.”

“It’s sad that you remember that,” she laughs, teasing me. I play along. I laugh. I take another bite out of my sandwich. The truth is out: I am sad.

Eve is tender with me and asks if I am okay.

“I’ll be okay,” I say, playing it down, thinking of the bald kids. I absent-mindedly wind my wristwatch. It’s like a nervous tic. Eve knows me too well. She dusts the crumbs off her fingers and comes to sit on the table near my chair. She puts her hand on my watch and looks into my eyes.

“You are going to be okay,” she says.

The watch was a gift from Eve when I finished my last book. It’s platinum. I find it is both a gift and a curse. A gift, because every time I look at it, I get warm twinge in my chest, thinking of Eve. A curse because it tick-tocks. Time itself is a gift-curse. Time says: ‘Look here! Here is a precious moment to do something with!’ Then as soon as you try to grasp the moment, it’s gone. And you haven’t done anything. And while you’re thinking about that, there is another moment, and then it too is gone. Cruel, like an eternal game of pass-the-parcel.

After seeing Eve I am melancholic. I seem to be melancholic more and more these days. I actively push pictures of my shuffling, slippered father out of my head. I decide to go for an evening walk to clear my head, shake some endorphins into my bloodstream.

A quick confession: I feel dirtyguilty that while Eve was outside on the phone to someone I excused myself to go to the bathroom and instead, I crept into her bedroom. I didn’t mean to do it but as I passed I caught a glimpse of her bed through the half-closed door and took a step inside. And then another step. Then before I know it I was stroking her headboard and smelling her pillow like a spooky stalker. I had picked up her perfume and was about to spray it before I came to my senses and fled the room. I worry that this is the onset of unpredictable bad behaviour. I am not a man who loses control. My whole life is based on control.

I kick a stone. I can control the stone.

I see the Munchkin again. She is sitting upright with her chest out and her paws elegantly positioned in front of her, like a Negro sphinx. She seems hardly bothered that I’m almost in her personal space so I inch closer and reach out to stroke her and again, she runs away.

My cloudy mood deepens into a thing of despair. I am empty. I feel like I’m being sucked into an existential vacuum. Usually when I hear the word ‘existential’ my eyes roll into the back of my head. Meaning Schmeaning, Life is here for Living. But today I feel like I may be missing out on something. That stomach-heavy idea you get on dark nights that maybe everyone else was right.

As I am falling off to sleep that night I hear a car purr to a stop outside my house. My eyes fly open. Oh God, I think, it’s Psychosally with that Molotov Cocktail. I lie in corpse position: paralysed. I hear light footsteps outside. I wait for an explosion, or automatic gunfire, or the ragged revving of a chainsaw. I breathe as quietly as I can. Just when I think I’m being over-suspicious I am jolted out of bed by a racket of glass shattering. I cry out. The car drives away. I run towards the noise: I need to find the bomb before it blows up and takes my house with it. I stumble in the dark, trampling the broken glass, hyperventilating, till I find the missile. I pick it up and am about to hurl it out when I realise it’s a rock.