The Memory of Water

²⁰ HER VOICE IS CHARCOAL, OR, ^{BLACK UMBILICAL CORD}

Still broken: there is only one thing for this misery and that is to see how much more miserable I can possibly become. I decide to visit my dad.

I spend less time at Woolworth’s than usual. I feel self-conscious because people are staring at my blue and broken face. Usually I enjoy the attention but today it feels like everyone can see my dirty secret. I grab a few things I know my father will like. There’s no point shopping for myself – I have no appetite. And there is no Francina to cook. I stand at the shelf of tinned goods looking for sardines, thinking I’ll probably have more luck looking at the pet food section.

“Hello,” she says to me, as if we’d known each other all our lives. Her voice is charcoal.

“Hello,” I deadpan. For once, I’m not interested. I flash my eyes at her and back at the shelf. Something tingles. Avoiding eye contact, I grab a tin of something from the shelf.

“You were at the funeral,” she says.

I turn to her. It’s Tattoo Girl. Redlippedsilkshirtedinkskinned beauty. I definitely know her from somewhere.

“Yes,” I say, fingering my coconut milk.

“You were bleeding,” she says, and points to my nose.

“Yes,” I touch it. “Yes, I was.”

“Interesting thing to do at a funeral,” she says.

“Bleed?” I ask.

Husky laugh. “That too, but I meant… have a fist fight.”

“Ja,” I say, “it wasn’t my idea.”

Her lips twist into a scarlet smile. She has the most amazing eyelashes.

“It looks sore.”

“You should see the other guy.”

The laugh again.

“I should be going,” I say, motioning towards the junk food aisle.

“Yes,” she says, and watches me walk away.

I join the queue, wait in line and pay. Only when I reach my car do I realise I have made a mistake. There was definitely something between us, some spark, maybe something more interesting than a spark. I jog back to the store to see her but she has disappeared. I check the aisles and the parking lot but she is gone.

Dad seems to be in better spirits this time. The front doorbell is still not working but I knock hard enough and he hears me.

“Good God, son,” he exclaims when he sees my black eyes and purple nose. “It looks like you’ve gone ten rounds with Muhammed.”

He means the boxer, not the prophet.

“Was it for a girl?” he asks, mischief gleaming in his eyes. The poor bastard. I think if I had nice wife and few sprogs bouncing off the walls he’d feel a lot less hopeless.

“Kind of,” I say.

His ancient Dalmatian lumbers in. Domino’s fat and unsteady on her old legs. Her nails scratch the floor beneath her. I stroke her head and come away with waxy brown fingers. I wash my hands under the kitchen tap with a hard cake of soap.

I slice two soft rye rolls in half and fill them with butter lettuce, tomato, sliced pickle, shaved chicken, Perinaise, a dusting of black pepper. I open a packet of kettle-fried potato crisps and shake them out onto the side of the plates. We go through the motions. Dad takes the beers out of the fridge.

“Manchester United is playing Arsenal,” he announces and shuffles away in his old stokies.

All of a sudden I feel great comfort. The routine, the unstuck predictability of these days, my father’s prickly love.

During half time he asks me if I have heard anything from Mom. It makes me think that she hasn’t sent a gift for a long time and I wonder, briefly, if she is still alive. Not that it would make that much difference to us. She is not a person, not to me, not really. She is an abstract thought, a ghost, a distant memory. I can’t believe he’s still in love with her. There should be an emotional statute of limitations when it comes to loving someone who leaves you. After five years there should be a cutting of that black umbilical cord; a cool sharp snip and your sadness and longing should disappear.

He still keeps the photo he has of all of us above the fireplace. It was taken that summer in the Cape. I don’t know how he can stand it. Inside a burnished silver frame stands a beautiful auburn-haired mother, a tall, handsome father, a cocky eight-year-old holding his sister’s hand. The little sister with sun freckles and bright eyes; the prize of the family. The photo is old and faded but the vitality of the four people jumps off the page, nothing like we are now. Vast smiles and coral cheeks. I try to not think too much about it.

He catches me looking at it and I jump away, as if he’d walked in on me rifling through his medicine cabinet. At least he’s taken the rest down. This mantelpiece used to be a shrine to our patchy past.

The reception on the small TV set is snowy but the game is a good one. I spend the time drinking my beer in long draughts, stroking Domino’s stomach with my foot and thinking despairing thoughts. Eve was right. I don’t have any meaning in my life and that’s why it’s so damn dismal. But where do you get meaning? I’m sure Gandhi didn’t have to go looking for it. Or Charles Manson (meaning doesn’t have to be right or good, it just has to be meaningful) who knew without a doubt what he was put on this planet to do and he did it, brainwashing a good few kamikazes on the way. You could be outright evil and still have meaning in your life (Hitler, Idi Amin, Verwoerd). I should have it. I am a writer, for God’s sake. If anyone should have meaning it’s writers and artists and leaders – people whose work affects others. Even if I don’t want it, I have a certain responsibility to others because my work affects them. I don’t like that idea at all. I feel that it will limit me, strangle my voice. A part of me believes that I should be able to write whatever I want to, completely unhindered by the effect it will have on the reader. Surely that is true freedom?

There is a lull in the game and I go where I really don’t want to go, to the small, tucked- away room in my head I’ve been avoiding since the cops showed up at my house on Saturday morning. How much responsibility does a writer really have? If a writer kills someone in his story, he has to be accountable for that person. Writers can’t go around willy-nilly, killing off their characters, or can they? Before, I would have said isn’t that the whole point? That it’s not real and so you can do whatever you want to them. But now I wonder if there are consequences. For a writer, that means controlling words, characters, action. Perhaps, à la The Godfather, blood really is a big expense.

Death is a great plot device. Erica Jong says that when she looks back on her eight novels, she finds that she hasn’t murdered enough people. She finds breaking any of the Ten Commandments good for plotting a novel, but murder and adultery best. That authors lie about how much it hurts them to murder their characters; that, anyway, novelists love to weep.

Dad has fallen asleep in his chair, his dehydrated lips slightly parted, his wallpaper backdrop faded and peeling. I take the beer glass from his hand, set it down on the coffee table. I try to look at him without pity. That must be the worst – living with all that pity. All the kind smiles and tilted heads, the apple pies and oven-dried macaroni cheeses that still find their way to the door after all these years. I wouldn’t be able to stand it. Maybe that’s what he would have said at my age.

But things happen. If I don’t know anything else, I know that.

I watch the sunset from the park near my house. The usual pram-pushers and dog-walkers are about. I sit cross-legged on the grass and try not to think too much. I look around at the pink clouds and the light they cast on the willows. I try to keep my mind clear, not holding onto the thoughts that come into my head. It’s the most I can do at the moment: try to hold on to my sanity. I do this for about ten minutes before I give up. I wonder if I will ever feel peaceful again. And then I see her. Ink lady. The woman from Eve’s funeral. She’s walking down by the river. She is barefoot and has her sandals in her hand, as if she’s walking on the beach. To see her twice in one day strikes me as bizarre. She must live around here. I’m not in the mood for company but I am drawn to this strange woman. I’m on my feet, dusting the grass off my trousers and halfway to her before she notices me.

“Hello again,” I say.

“Hello,” she smiles. She’s wearing a peaked cap and sunglasses, which make her look like an undercover celebrity. She has straight white teeth. She smoothes down her black hair and it shines in the dusk.

“I’m sorry I was rude earlier.”

“You weren’t,” she says.

She starts walking again, so I join her. We fall into a rhythm, as if we have done this before.

“I meant to ask you earlier how you knew Eve.”

“Well, that’s a long story,” she smiles.

“In that case, let’s discuss it over dinner,” I say. I don’t even have to think about picking up women anymore. I don’t have to try: the words just tumble out of my mouth.

She stops walking, which I take as a good sign. Takes off her sunglasses to look at me. Toes the grass while she thinks about it, then looks up and says “Okay.”

The soft light is in her eyes: an almost unbelievable shade of blue. I wonder if they are contacts.

“What about tomorrow night?” I ask.

“What about now?” she says.

We walk the kilometre or so until we get to the strip of restaurants and antique stores. We decide on a small Italian place that is decorated floor to ceiling with golden olive oil tins, bottles of wine with thick skins of dust, posters of Italia. There are only eight tables in the whole place. It’s my favourite place to eat. The waiter trips over himself to help us. He brings salty focaccia and a bottle of Diemersfontein. Eve doesn’t want to eat, so I pour her a glass of wine that she picks up and swirls. It smells like chocolate.

“So we haven’t officially introduced ourselves.”

I was enjoying not knowing her name; she is perhaps the most mysterious person I have met. She puts her glass down, shakes back her mane.

“I’m Slade,” I say, sticking out my hand.

“Denise,” she says, shaking.

“So do you live around here? You look so familiar, but I can’t quite place you.”

“No, I just came up for Eve’s funeral. I’m staying at her place, sorting out her stuff.”

Ah. I’ve seen her naked.

We are serenaded by Eros Ramazotti singing ‘L’Aurora’ on the crackly speakers.

“I’m surprised she’s never mentioned you to me. You two must have been close – I mean – if she trusted you with sorting out her things.”

“It just kind of fell to me to do. We weren’t that close,” she says.

“Oh.” There is a lull. I try to think of something else to say, but she beats me to it.

“We were sisters.”

Sisters? Eve never talked about a sister.

“Let me guess,” Denise says wryly, “She never mentioned a sister.”

“No, she didn’t,” I say, “but to be honest she never talked about any of her family. The lot at the funeral could have been rent-a-crowd for all I know.”

Denise’s lips stutter a smile.

“When she left home, she didn’t look back. She cut off her family completely.”

“But Eve’s not like that,” I say, “Not the Eve I know. Knew.”

“There were things… that happened. I don’t blame her for leaving. It’s a small town. Not a lot happens, but when things do, there’s nowhere to hide.”

“What things?”

“It’s not really for me to say.”

I can tell that she doesn’t want to talk about it and I don’t push her. Not yet.

“So you’re a small-town girl?”

“Yip,” she says, nodding, not offering any more details.

“Do you want to come to my place for a cappuccino?” I ask.

“Why? Are the cappuccinos here bad?”

I lean in to her. “Foul. Blinding. The worst you’ll ever taste.”

When she doesn’t agree straight away I say, “I, on the other hand, make extraordinary cappuccinos. And I live just up the road.”

It’s one of my dating rules: always ask a woman in on the first date. Even if she turns you down she will know you want her.