The Memory of Water

³⁴ NIGHT OF THE LONG KNIVES

When Denise doesn’t show up in her own family portrait (or for breakfast the next day), I give in to the hungry paranoia and look through her handbag. She has the usual feminine trinkets: a half-empty pack of tissues, a rattling tin of mints, cinnamonwax lipstick and a spare, slightly scuffed tampon. I also find her wallet, a sleek rectangular mockadile rectangle with a large silver clasp but, in it, only cash. The paranoia coldpaws the skin on the back of my neck. I rationalise: not everyone has a credit card. Not everyone has a driving license. Not everyone carries their ID around like it’s 1984. And anyway she must have a second wallet, a second handbag which she has with her now or how would she get around? I wonder fleetingly if she has left me and so check the drawers for her clothes, which all seem to be there, tousled and softsable. As I am fingering her things I feel something hard and cold. Small metal symbols on a circle. I extract them and see that they are three keys attached to a silver apple key ring. Eve’s house keys.

The doorbell rings and without looking I know it’s the cops. They have come to handcuff me and push my head down into their shrieking blue and white car. I grab the tote bag out of my cupboard. It is pre-packed with a few changes of clothes, essential toiletries, condoms (force of habit) and my Moleskine. I packed it days ago when I began to suspect that my life was about to take an unusual turn. It reminds me of the bag my mother kept in the latter months of her pregnancy with Emily. She would sit with it on her bed and unpack it once a week, shaking out the clothes and receiving blanket and smoothing them down, only to refold and pack them again. Dad used to shake his head and make vague cuckoo gestures. She’s at it again, he would say with an elbow in my ribs. I wondered if that meant she did it for me, too.

I reach under the bed for my emergency wad of cash. The envelope isn’t as thick as I remember it but it’s all I have, so I toss it in before zipping up. I can’t take my car because A) it no longer belongs to me, and B) the cops will be camped outside the front of the house where the garage is. The doorbell goes again. I consider leaving a note for Denise but I have no idea what to say. I take the keys instead.

The boundary walls in Johannesburg are notoriously high and usually barbed or electrified but there is a chink in my neighbour’s barricade I think I can slip through. I sling the tote over my back like a backpack and launch myself up into a tree. If I can climb along the branch we share, I should be able to make it over the deadly palisade fence without losing my manhood. Crouching there, holding on with hot fingers, I wonder what the hell I am doing. I should definitely climb back down and hand myself over. Be responsible. Be an adult. Face whatever consequences there may be. Instead I scuttle and jump and land on happy groundcover. When I stand up, I’m in the neighbour’s garden and I hear a growl.

The dog isn’t that scary. I mean, it’s not one of those Dobermans like Higgins has in Magnum P.I., the ones that look like the Devil’s dogs. And I am sure this particular dog’s growl can be interpreted as ‘Oi, have we met?’ rather than ‘I’m going to tear you limb from limb’, but one can never be sure. He looks like a giant whippet. I don’t know what they are called, perhaps a greyhound? I hope he doesn’t recognise my voice from all the times I’ve yelled at him to shut up. I don’t know much about dogs but I know that greyhounds are fast, so I need to outsmart him because there is no way I will be able to outrun him. I look him in the eyes and try to act firm but friendly. I take a few slow steps in the direction of the west wall. He barks, once, twice, like Lassie reporting a girl child fallen down a forgotten well.

“Gravy,” comes a sweet female voice from heaven, and then a beckoning whistle. “Gray-vee, c’mere boy.” Another friendly whistle. Gravy doesn’t take his eyes off me but rears back and lifts his snout in the air and barks again. I take a few more steps away. I motion wildly for him to go toward the voice. He is not fooled – until there is clanging of metal food bowls – then he is gone in a wag of a tail.

I am able to climb over the west wall too, thanks to a giant compost cube; from there I jump down onto the grassy pavement where I am free and clear. As soon as my feet touch land I run in the opposite direction to my house and the visitors. My heart is pumping, my muscles are singing and I feel good. Thank God I have been running in the last few days. It takes five minutes to get to a main road where I point upwards with my right index finger to signal a taxi to take me into town. A red kombi in particularly bad nick comes barrelling past but then slams on the brakes so hard the cars behind him have to squeal to stop. I hop in and the passengers shuffle aside to make space for me.

I am heavy-breathed and sweaty but the taxi is overcrowded, so I guess there is no chance of a window seat. There is kwaito on the sound system which more or less blankets the noise of the angry hooting outside and once I pay and sit back, the rest of the passengers seem to get over the novelty of having a white man in the car and start talking again. We lurch forward, nudge our way back into the lane in small jumps and we’re off. Various parts of the interior are stuck together with Prestik and masking tape. The rear-view mirror is barely hanging onto the ceiling of the car, weighed down by purple fuzzy dice, a hula girl and some prayer beads. The driver eyes me, suspicious, and I look away.

When we reach town I have to ask a few people how to catch the next ride: I don’t know the hand signal or where I should go. Someone outside the Chicken Licken on Bree Street directs me to a huge taxi rank I never knew existed and find my way pretty easily from there. Strangers smile. They must think I am a lost (or brave) tourist and they flash their gums at me. I wonder how they would react if I was driving my air-conditioned Jag XKR around here, instead of sweating through my shirt, trying to find the way out. To reach the rank I pass market stalls which deserve to feature in Visi magazine: beautifully arranged bowls of colour with green Granny Smiths, vibrant naartjies and bruised guavas. A few meters on, the panorama of food becomes nightmarish: tables of sheeps’ heads, some skinned with bursting eyeballs, others still in their wool, matted with blood. There are men without their shirts on, bloodslick on blackskin, with pangas in their raised hands. There are women squatting on beer crates, hunched over and stirring aluminium pots over small fires. Skaapkop. Sheep’s head. I smell the guavas and the milky-eyed skop. Flies buzz in the hot air.

When I reach the taxi rank it is easy to find the right car. The stereotypical taxi driver is aggressive, disrespectful and violent and most times I wouldn’t want to be caught in a dark alley with one, but today there is a sense of levity with whistling and comradely shouting back and forth. I wonder if there is an important soccer match today. I have to wait for the minibus to fill up with passengers before we head off and this takes about half an hour. I spend the time trying to plan what to do next but I don’t come up with anything promising and instead walk around reading bumper stickers. I jot the best ones in my Moleskine:

When the driver deems the taxi suffiently overcrowded we’re off. Apart from ploughing through the occasional red light, he is a good driver.

When I arrive at the house and ring the doorbell everything looks the same but I feel I have been away for years. I see him stomp up to the frosted glass and I wait while he shuffles keys, then opens the door. He squints at me, blinks, adjusts his glasses.

“Slade?” he frowns.

“Hi Dad,” I say. “I need a favour.”

My father pours me half a glass of beer from an open quart of Amstel. He slaps my back as he gives it to me, as if to say that it will sort me out.

We stand, awkward, in the kitchen.

“You fixed the doorbell,” I say. He presses his lips together.

“I had to. Some tsotsi tried to break in and made a mess of the damn gate. Had to re-wire the whole thing.”

All of a sudden my mind is clear of my own predicament.

“What? When did this happen? Are you okay?”

He unbuttons his shirt to reveal a continent of purple on his chest.

“Bugger smashed my chest in with a knobkerrie.”

I look at his liver-spotted hands holding open his shirt, the fabric trembling, the blood under his skin.

“Fucking savages,” I seethe. “You need to get out of this house. It’s too big for you. And the neighbourhood has gone to shit.”

He shakes his head. His pale eyes are moist.

“What more will it take? Next they will be in here slitting your throat with a bread knife!”

“Good God,” he says, taking a sip of his beer. “This isn’t Rhodesia, son.”

“Zimbabwe, Dad.”

“No, I meant Rhodesia. Night of the Long Knives, or something like that. Besides, there’s nothing of any value here to steal.”

I won’t argue with that.

“Have the cops been round?” I ask.

He buttons his shirt and picks up his beer.

“Yes, they took their time but when they arrived they took fingerprints. And the bloke filling out the report could read and write so I was pleasantly surprised.”

“No,” I say, “I mean, looking for me.”

“What?”

“The cops. Have they called?”

“Er…”

“Look Dad, I’m in some trouble.”

He looks at me long, as if he didn’t hear, then snaps into real time.

“Anything you need,” he says. He doesn’t ask what kind of trouble, he doesn’t round on me like I do him. He just looks at me and waits to hear what help I need.

“There has been a misunderstanding,” I say. “The police think I’ve done something and they want to arrest me. But I’m worried that if they do, they’ll stop looking for the person who actually did it. So I need to find that person.”

He frowns. “They can’t arrest you without evidence. Without a warrant.”

“There is plenty of evidence. Unfortunately it all seems to point to me.”

He looks into my eyes and something touches his face, as if he wants to tell me something, but then it clears.

“I need to get out of the city. Can I borrow the Merc?”

Dad has a Mercedes Benz from the 1950s that used to embarrass the hell out of me when I was a kid but it’s so old now, it’s cool. He keeps it as a spare car. Dad’s never been good at getting rid of things.

“Of course,” he says and leaves the room. When he gets back he hands the keys to me with a slight tremor, along with a wad of cash. I protest but he doesn’t say anything. He just presses the cash into my hands.

“I’ll pay you back,” I say. I move as if to leave but he puts a finger in the air as though he’s just remembered something. He opens his ancient fridge and retrieves a Cornish pasty still in its wax paper.

“I was saving it for dinner,” he smiles, handing it to me.

He walks me out to the car where he opens a padlock on the inside of the garage door. The door is one of those ancient ones with two long, heavy weights on either side, like metal punching bags. I shoulder my way in and try to do most of the work. As it gains momentum and gives way the light pours in and the world is lost in bronze dust particles and the scurrying things that live in abandoned places. We say goodbye. My father reminds me not to step on his footbrake too hard and I nod. I shake his hand and he pats me on the back. I climb in, praying to no one in particular, and it starts first time. I reverse into the street and Dad salutes me before he closes the garage door. I open the cubby hole to throw my things in when I see his wallet. I whisperswear and pull back into the drive. I try to open the garage door but it’s already locked so I go around to the front entrance. His spare house keys are on the car keys so I let myself in and call out to him. Wallet in hand I bound up the front steps. He is standing in the entrance hall with his rounded back to me, holding the phone up to his ear. No wonder he didn’t hear me. I’m about to call him again when I hear him say, “Yes, he’s just left. Yes, in the Merc. LDR 504 GP. Out of the city. No. No, he didn’t say.”

I place his wallet on a nearby chair and back soundlessly away.