The Memory of Water

³⁰ NIGHTS ARE QUICK

I begin to worry about Denise. How my psychological vacuum is affecting her. She hardly eats, hardly goes out. Has she always worn this much black? I wonder if she has contracted my emptiness. When we are together we are still alone. Is this love?

We don’t talk about it. I spend time in my den, trying to get words on paper, giving up, then drinking enough whisky to fell a small elephant and generally wallowing in my existential angst. She disappears into the garden. I have stopped cooking. Even grocery stores seem out of bounds to me now. When I think I am being overtly paranoid I look at the rock that was thrown through my front window. I keep it in the lounge near the jagged window frame. It’s a warning. ‘Stay on your toes,’ it breathes, ‘there are people who mean you harm.’

I want to write to Denise, tell her she is crisp and honeyed but that makes me think of apples and fruit-juicers and Eve. I want to type words about the corrugated silk on the inside of her body but my fingers just hover, impotent, above the keyboard, thinking of the pink pills, the mind map, the porcelain knife. I want to scribble that without her, I wouldn’t get out of bed in the mornings, wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t shower. The days are everlasting but the nights are quick. She wraps me up in her molten body till I fall through the floor.