The Memory of Water

¹⁵ LIKE DOGS, I’M SURE THEY CAN SMELL FEAR.

Something wakes me.

My eyes feel as though they have sand in them, reminding me that I haven’t had enough sleep. I look down and see that I have slept clutching my pen to my heart. My notebook is at my bent knee. I feel oddly at peace with the world. I think I’m even smiling a little.

The doorbell rings. That’s what must have woken me. I swear under my breath at whichever hawker is getting me out of bed at this hour but it fails to dampen my mood. I get ready to yell and shake my fist.

I look through the peephole and see a uniform. I rub my eyes.

Blue. SAPS blue. Then I see another. Their squad car is parked politely in my visitor’s bay.

I feel like I’ve been punched in the face.

Has something happened? Has my car been stolen? The neighbour been burgled? Has my father had a heart attack?

Have they caught me buying a fake driver’s license?

Did they catch me buying drugs? Those sneaky anti-crime cameras in the dodgy parts of the city can pick up number plates. It doesn’t help that mine is personalised. It reads ‘MERCENARY’ in honour of my first novel, when now, in retrospect, I think it should read JACKASS.

I jab the speaker button.

“Hello?” I say with all the calm I can.

“Open up please sir, this is the police.”

“The police?”

So I wasn’t imagining it.

“Yes, sir, this is the police.”

Oh my God, I know something is wrong. Maybe if I don’t let them in they will go away.

“Well, what do you want?”

They speak amongst themselves. I hear eish-ing and shushing, ambush sounds, as if they’re discussing how to break down the security gate so that they can slap cuffs on me and drag me to the car.

“We have some questions, Mr Harris,” says one.

“Just open the gate, sir,” says the other.

“Please,” adds the first one.

Oh God. Good cop, bad cop. I’m about to let them in when I remember the giant mind map on the kitchen table. I run through, scrunch it up and look for somewhere to hide it. I feel panic rising and try to keep a level head. I end up dumping it in the laundry hamper in the bathroom and cover it with a towel. Out of breath, I press the buzzer to open the gate and with shaking hands I unlock and open my front door. They both stop in their tracks when they lay eyes on me. I look down and see that I’m only wearing a pair of jocks. In my fright I hadn’t thought of what I had on.

“Come inside,” I say. “Let me just throw on some pants.”

Pants? Why did I say pants?

The Good Cop smiles. Toujours la politesse. The taller one avoids eye contact. I throw open my cupboard and reach for the first things I see: torn jeans and grubby t-shirt. I lead them to the kitchen. They decline cappuccinos. They probably hate people who drink cappuccinos. They probably despise people who sit at arty cafes and smoke Vogues while talking about literature and sipping frothy coffee drinks. They probably drink neat Ricoffy, black and scalding, or burnt, tepid filter coffee, while they find missing persons and hunt down dangerous criminals and make the world a better place.

They also decline fresh squeezed juice from my Juicerator and Francina’s favourite pecan nut rusks.

The taller one is still not meeting my gaze. I look down again and see that I’m wearing an old varsity shirt that says ‘Half Man, Half Horse’.

I’m sure they can tell I’m nervous. I’m fluttering around the kitchen like Albert Goldman in Birdcage. I plug in the cappuccino machine anyway and flick the switch. I try to calm down.

Like dogs, I’m sure they can smell fear.

“Would you like to sit down?” I ask, sure that they’ll shake their heads. They don’t have time to lounge around my kitchen. They’ve got serious cop business to attend to.

They nod and pull up a chair. I gulp and sit down with them. I read the names off their badges. Madinga and Sello. Shifty-eyed Sello. It occurs to me that I didn’t ask for any kind of identification. I don’t want to piss them off and it’s probably too late anyway, seeing as they’re sitting in my kitchen with revolvers on their hips.

“Do you mind if I… can I ask you for… some ID?” I ask, too bright by far.

They look at each other as if I’ve told them an old joke. Each suppressing a sigh, they reach for their cards and flash them at me, too fast for me to register anything but badly-lit photos and the same names glinting on their golden badges. The cards are back in the shadows of their pockets before I have time to blink. Seem all right. But what the fuck do I know? They may have ordered them from the same place I bought my fake driving license. I wouldn’t know the difference. It’s not pretty to be paranoid, but paranoid people live longer, I’ve read that somewhere. And now I have the distinct feeling that something bad has happened.

“Mister Harris?” Madinga asks, rather too late in the game.

“Present.” I say.

“We have some bad news for you.”

I knew it! I knew it! Something horrible has happened. Cops don’t just show up at your door for nothing. Madinga pronounced ‘bad’ like ‘bed’. Bed news.

“And some questions.”

“Well,” I say, “can I have the good news first?”

Madinga blinks at me. Intent, Sello looks at the magnets on my refrigerator. They don’t have time to lighten the mood. They prefer the Wham-Bam approach to police work.

“Mister Harris,” Sello says, and my face pales in anticipation. “Evelyn Shaw was found murdered this morning.”

His words take the breath from my lungs.

I realise mid-chortle that I’m chortling and stop. There are blades slicing up my brain.

“What do you mean?”

Sello takes a moment and then repeats himself. And still it takes a while for the words to make sense to me.

Eve. Dead. This morning.

When I finally grasp it I feel like the world is tumbling out of my body. I try to breathe in and out so that I don’t faint on the hard shiny floor tiles, but I’m not doing such a great job. I’m dizzy. I hold onto the kitchen countertop with one hand and scratch my head with the other. Then I put my hands behind my head, elbows akimbo, and walk around the kitchen trying to get oxygen into my lungs. The pressed ceiling above me is a blur.

“Dead?” I say, hoping that I have heard wrong.

“Eve is dead? Murdered?” Hoping for anything but what these indifferent men have just told me. I know I’m pulling a strange face and I’m sorry they are here to see it.

“What happened? How do you know it was murder?” I ask.

Sello shrugs. I feel like punching him in the face.

“A car was spotted at the bottom of the river this morning by a pedestrian crossing the bridge. A beige Land Rover. We pulled it up and she was in there. We thought it was strange that… that she didn’t try to get out – then we saw the lady had been killed – before she went in the river.”

“What river?” I demanded.

“The Vaal,” says Sello without taking his eyes off my Juicerator. I realise Sello isn’t rude; he’s just not good at dealing with delivering bed news.

I feel like laughing, smacking the guys on their backs and looking for a hidden camera because I can’t imagine this news to be true.

That’s when I experience a searing pain in my stomach. As if allergic to the lethal combination of fear and heartbreak, my spleen twists, my intestines knot, my kidneys burst. I double over. I hear the men speaking their ambush tongue again. In a jerk I stand up to run and make it to the guest toilet, just in time to heave. Afterwards it’s dry and bitter in my mouth, like citrus pith, a drought-conceived lemon turned inside out. I check out my reflection and see red eyes floating in pale skin. I put my forehead against the mirror of the medicine cabinet. I sit on the edge of the bath. When I can breathe again I splash water on my face. I walk back to the kitchen and slump down on my chair. What a catastrophe, what a disaster. Someone is killed in the same way a writer has planned. Death imitating art. Meta-murder. What a cliché!

I sit with my head in my hands. It is perhaps the one time in my life that I have been truly speechless.

“We have some questions,” says Madinga.

I shake my head. No one talks for a while. Eventually I get out a few stuttered words.

“I don’t think I can answer any questions right now.”

Laurel and Hardy look at each other again. They have a silent code. Sello takes out his notepad and lays it on the table. Then he takes a pen out of his shirt pocket and clicks it open next to his ear.

“Jesus Christ!” I explode. “Can’t you people have some fucking sensitivity? I’ve just found out that the woman I love has been found dead, for God’s sake. Can’t you leave your Goddamn questions for another day?”

Sello is now looking at my glass toaster with a faraway look in his eyes. I expect him to start whistling any second.

“I’m sorry,” says Madinga, “but we will ask you now.”

I bang my fist on the table. I want to roar at them and chase them from my house.

“Why? Do you think I had something to do with it? With killing Eve?” I splutter.

Madinga shakes his head. No, no, no, he is saying, no, well, maybe.

“We have no suspects yet,” he says, “it is too early for that. We only ID’d her body a few hours ago. But we need to ask questions early.”

I glare at him.

“It’s routine,” he says.

I can’t argue with that. I will sit here and answer their questions like a good citizen and then show them on their way. As long as they don’t ask to look around I should be okay.

“How well did you know Evelyn Shaw?”

How well did Gatsby know Daisy?

“Very well.”

Madinga sees that I’m not going to be generous with my answers. Sello draws invisible squiggles on the paper in front of him, trying to make his dry ballpoint to work.

“Were you romantically involved?”

“I don’t see how that’s any of your business, or how that has a bearing on the investigation.”

“Were you or not?” asks Madinga. As polite as he is, he’s not going to be pushed around by an arty suburbian like me.

“No.”

“But you said earlier that you loved her.”

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“How did you mean it?”

“I’ve known Eve for years, we were close. I loved her in that way.”

Madinga’s dark fingers play a piano melody on my table.

“What were you fighting about the other night?”

“The other night?”

“The night of your party, last weekend,” says Sello, glad to chip in.

“Oh. It was nothing, just a few words said in a moment of anger.”

“Did you push her to the floor?”

“What? No!”

“I have a witness who says you were shouting at her and then you pushed her down.”

“Well, I didn’t. Did you ask that person if he was drunk at the time?”

Madinga doesn’t answer.

“But you admit to being angry with her.”

“Yes,” I say, “but friends get angry with one another. It doesn’t mean that they go around stabbing each other and chucking cars off bridges on a whim. Yes, I was pissed off with her and yes, we raised our voices, but then it was over. She left the party. You can ask my domestic worker, Francina, she was here. She saw Eve leave.”

“Is she around today?” asks Madinga, eyeing my smelly, crumpled shirt.

All of a sudden I’m really worried that something has happened to Francina too.

“She’s missing,” I blurt out. I motion to the messy state of the house.

“Well, I mean, not missing per se, but she hasn’t come in to work this week and that’s really unusual. And she’s not answering her phone.”

I give Sello her name, cell number and home address.

“How did you know the car went off the bridge?” asks Sello.

“Because. Because that’s what you said.”

“No,” says Madinga, “I said the car was spotted by a pedestrian on the bridge.”

“Well, I obviously misheard. It’s a lot to take in.” Fuck.

Sello makes his notes in long scrawls of vernacular.

I’ve had enough now. I’ve passed my being-polite-to-cops threshold. They stand up and Sello shakes my hand. I’m strangely touched by this.

I let them out of the front door and buzz the security gate for them.

Madinga nods a chary goodbye.

I go back to the kitchen, back to the scene of devastation. Everything I look at has Eve’s face in it. I have to do something, something with my hands or I’ll go mad. I turn on the Juicerator and watch the shiny blade spin. I take the biggest knife I can find in the stabbing block and grab an apple. I brutally chop it in half, then quarters, and feed it to the hungry machine. It makes short work of it – a chew, a gargle, and the apple has vanished, leaving a tot of cloudy apple juice in the jug. I feed it another apple, drawn and quartered, then a few apricots. I put in a pawpaw and a pineapple, skin and all. A peeled banana. A carrot. The jug is full now, past its ‘max’ marking on the side. I throw in all the kiwi fruit in the fridge. A guava quivers in the fruit bowl. The jug starts to overflow. A punnet of blueberries. I can smell the engine burning. Soon it will explode and I’ll be covered in flaming engine parts and juice. I want to explode along with it.

In Chuck Palahniuk’s Diary, an art student pours cement into a blender and switches it on. Of course it eventually, with a bit of noise and smoke, burns out, her unequivocal statement about her feelings regarding housework.

The Juicerator is shaking and overflowing.

My varsity shirt is covered in fruity offal. It looks like my organs have exploded onto my shirt: pawpaw seeds and blueberry juice. I let go of the Juicerator button and the silence hurts my ears. As if shot, I hold my fruit salad innards in and sink down onto the floor. I cry.

I wake up with my face glued to the kitchen floor. It’s dark. My initial shock has given way to a duller kind of grief. I leave the mess I have made and go for a hot shower (Monsoon™). My mind has gone from a machine gun assault of thoughts to an unruly queue, one that I can just about control. Once clean, I set out to do what I should have done the second I saw a uniform at the door.

I retrieve my mind map with its awful dates and descriptions and creative scribblings and I tear it up into small pieces, cursing myself as I ransack my study. I cut up the photos with the kitchen scissors. I want to flush the GHB down the toilet but it has fallen off the map. I get down on my hands and knees and look for it. Breathe in floor-dust. I check the laundry basket. I shift my desk, my bookshelf, lift my couch, can’t see the pills anywhere. I will look again in daylight.

I start a hungry fire in my BraaiMaster 1000 and when it’s really hot I start adding the scraps and shreds, one fistful at a time. The photos bubble and melt over the hot coals. Note-ashes levitate above the fire and catch the wind. Soon every trace I have of Eve will be gone.

When the plans have been turned to cinders I pick up my beloved Moleskine and hold it for a while. All those words! Precious, priceless words: letters and punctuation and sentences and paragraphs and pages of irreplaceable markings.

I feel like Abraham in Genesis, offering up my child to be burnt as a sacrifice. Or an island savage, keen to appease the gods, strong-arming a virgin into the liquid blaze of a volcano. Not wanting to, God knows, but knowing what has to be done.

I strip the cover off the book and throw it in, then tear the pages in half down the spine and throw those in too. Then I add extra lighter fluid and there is a woof of flames. Unable to stand there and watch it burn, I walk away.

I recheck my study for anything else that could possibly tie me to Eve’s murder but think I found everything the first time round. I switch on my laptop, find my word document that I started yesterday (ten thousand really good words) and trash it. Then I empty my trash. The crumple sound-effect hurts.

The last thing I have to do is make the knife disappear. I look in the drawer of neglected kitchen utensils, but it’s not there. I think I must have moved it when I was planning and writing. Caught in a thought, I could have absent-mindedly put it somewhere else. Methodically, I start going through one drawer at a time, until I know for certain it’s not in any drawer then I start on the cupboards. Nothing. I start on the drawers again but this time I empty all their contents onto the floor. I switch on every light in the house. I go from room to room. After an hour of frantic searching I feel acid rising in my throat. It has disappeared: the knife is no longer in my house.

In a flash of crimson dread I remember the day I had lunch with Eve in her studio and how I went into her room and touched her things. My fingerprints must be all over the place. Jesus Christ. My stalker episode couldn’t have had worse timing. My heart raps against my ribs. With shaking hands I pour myself a glass of water. I have to get rid of those damn prints. I’m sure that her place is overrun with cops at the moment but I’ll have to get in somehow. Without a sip I grab my car keys and head out of the door, into the dark.

There is a police guard outside Eve’s front door, as if to protect her memory because it is too late to protect her. I have to wait for almost two hours before he abandons his post for some kind of break. I move as quickly and quietly as possible and find myself standing in the lounge, gloved hands by my sides, my breath coming in short, sharp gasps.

Eve’s flat is an uproar of yellow and black crime tape.

I go straight to her bedroom. The other prints can be explained but not the ones on her headboard, mirror, perfume. I start looking around to see if they have dusted for prints already but don’t see any powder residue. Perhaps that’s why they have the guard at the door: they haven’t completed the processing of the crime scene yet. I use a bandanna I bought on the way here to wipe everything I remember touching. The whole exercise, while peculiar, is therapeutic. Eve’s room doesn’t look very different from how it looked a week ago when she was still breathing. Its sameness is haunting.

When I think I am done I begin walking to the studio kitchen, but a noise at the door startles me and I jump back behind the doorframe. The door handle turns. Surely the policeman shouldn’t be coming in? It’s a crime scene for God’s sake. Then: a woman’s voice and high heels on tiles. My mind hurtles. The hair on the back of my neck stands up. I try to control my breathing. Figure out what to do. The back window is protected with burglar bars. The bathroom window is too small for escape. I hear a handbag being dropped onto the kitchen counter, and then a heavier sound, on the floor. The kettle is switched on. A sigh as a hinge yields: a cupboard door opening. Porcelain plunked on marble. The kettle clicks off and hot water streams into the mug. Another breath and then the melody of a teaspoon stirring. A snapping sound as the crime tape is ripped down. I wonder if I am imagining the moment when Eve was killed. If it is my punishment to have to relive, second by excruciating second, what happened to her last night. I sense that she is moving towards me and I dive under the bed. She turns the light on and seems to hesitate before she walks in. I’m sure she can hear my heart beating, smell the hot sweat I feel under my clothes. She walks past the bed and into the bathroom. All I can see are her feet. Elegant black shoes. She turns on the bath taps and adds foam. I don’t dare risk edging closer to get a better look at her. She dims the lights, puts a match to candles. She goes back to the kitchen to fetch her tea and brings it to the bath, each time walking past the bed, so close to me I could reach out and touch her ankle.

I have no idea what to do except lie where I am and be as quiet as possible. I will stay here for days if it means not being caught under the bed of the woman I am suspected of killing. It would be impossible to explain. If I die here, under this bed, at least I will never have to put this trespassing into words.

My muddled brain tells me Eve’s ghost is here: come to show me my culpability in this crime. I did, after all, imagine this over and over again, in this exact sequence. As truly shocked as I was to learn that Eve had been murdered – and I was, still am, truly, completely, exhaustively shocked – there was some kind of harrowing glint, some small flash of acquaintance with the fact, as if some tucked-away part of me knew it would happen all along.