The Memory of Water

⁶ AN ISLAND TO RUBY WATER

Mood today: Much Improved. I’ve had a fantastic idea. Instead of moping around in my bandaged feet and infinite loneliness I’m going to throw a party. It will be the thing of legends. Think Malletier, think Hugh Hefner, think of the champagne-guzzlers in The Great Gatsby. I’ll have the best caterers, buy the best booze. We’ll be gorging ourselves on Beluga and Kristal, oysters and Veuve, abalone and Campari cocktails. I’ll order two hundred fresh oranges, and someone to squeeze them. I’ll invite the paparazzi, to keep them off my back about the new novel. Sifiso, too, of course, ha! He’ll never know what’s hit him. I’ll get a DJ – God knows this house is big enough for one. I’ve never really had a proper housewarming so I sort of owe it to the place. These perfect wooden floors have never been danced on! This lounge has never had the sablesticky pleasure of a chocolate fountain! My couch has never had… oh wait, it has.

Okay… so… guest list… Eve. Sifiso and his wife. Uhhh. Frank From Football. Do the hired help count?

Me. Do I count?

Oh, I can invite Francina. She’s always up for a bit of a jive. She’ll bring a few mates. It will also make me look a bit more PC, having a few friends ‘of colour’. They will probably also be the only ones who, strictly speaking, can dance. Note to self: remember to put chicken on the menu. I can invite the neighbours to stop them from calling the police at three in the morning when there’s a naked drunk bloke singing on their front lawn, setting off the sprinklers. It’s happened before. I developed a nasty chest cough afterwards.

But clearly that won’t be enough if I want this party to be of gargantuan proportions. This is probably when liking people comes in handy.

I toy with a few different party concepts before deciding on ‘Moonshine’. I had ‘Poirot’ (murder mystery party: cheesy), ‘Memoirs of a Geisha’ (with attending Geishas and naked Japanese nymphs wrapped in cling film and sashimi: done, done, done), ‘Naked Lunch’ (fig leaves for all: but reckoned Francina had been through enough without subjecting her to Mugwumps and the Interzone), and ‘Monty Python’s Flying Circus’ (cheerful midgets, tightrope-walkers and fire-eaters would be fun, but it’s just not literary enough), and in the end I settled for something a bit more conservative, for the simple reason that I realised in a flash of wonder and light (yes, I was in the shower) that I am actually Jay Gatsby. A few decades late and the wrong nationality, as am decidedly un-American, but I am the man who made Fitzgerald famous. Not quite as gay (I don’t wear white suits and panama hats but I do admit to having episodes where I throw silk shirts around the room like a psychotic ballerina). And of course there’s Daisy.

I sigh at the evidence: I have an unreachable star.

It’s tempting to go as far as to say that I’ve modelled myself on Gatsby, but I know it’s not true. I was unhinging my life years before I even picked up a battered copy. Mostly it’s about being a figment of my own imagination. Meet Slade Harris, the tragic protagonist of his own life.

I have no friends and yet I am throwing an extravagant party. I have ordered 200 oranges (why 200? what am I going to do with the left over 196?) and have all but forsaken my family. As I write I create my life and the reverse is also true.

Like Gatsby, I’m a fraud. My whole life has been engineered, contrived. So much so that I don’t really know who I am or who I was or who I’m meant to be. In moments of melancholy I see visions of myself floating upside down in my pool, an island to ruby water. There are worse ways to go, I assure myself, there are worse ways to go.