The Memory of Water

³⁵ HERE BE DRAGONS, OR, ^{ELBOW BACON}

As I speed away from my crumbling family home, I try to imagine who it was he was talking to, but I decide I don’t want to think about it. I’m feeling pretty fragile to be honest, pretty fucking down-in-the-mouth and I don’t want to think of anything that will further retard my emotional state. I get on the highway, not knowing where I am going. I feel like pulling in to the closest bar and downing a few fingers of whisky but know if I do that I may as well drive straight to the cop shop and show them my wrists.

I have no idea who is behind this… this thing my life has become. This person who sends me letters and watches me from dark corners is interred so far in my head that I have begun to turn on myself. I have no idea where to even start looking. I drive for a long time before I have a vague idea. The thing that I have in common with this nebulous antagonist is, obviously, Eve. So if I start with Eve, start at the beginning, maybe I will find my way to this person. The problem with this idea is that I know virtually nothing about Eve’s past. If only I could trust Denise. Why would she never talk about Eve? Why would neither of them talk about growing up? I’m a writer, for God’s sake, not a private investigator. I get off the highway somewhere in Houghton and park the car on the shoulder of the road while I pull out my phone. The screen is cracked but it still seems to work. I Google Eve’s name but it is too wide a search, she has been in the media consistently for her art and there seem to be hundreds of entries on her latest exhibition alone. I Google ‘Denise Shaw’ but none of them is my Denise. Resisting the urge to throw the phone out of the window, I try to breathe and to focus. There is no air-con in the Merc and my skin is sticking to the cracked leather upholstery. I try to think of any clue she has ever possibly given me but I draw a blank. How could I have known her for so long, loved her, when I didn’t even know who she was or where she came from? And then, not learning from mistakes, go on to do the exact same thing to her shadowsister? I pull the photo of her family out of my pocket and search it for clues. It could be a picture of any (white) family in South Africa in the 70s: overdressed, overexposed. Probably taken after a Sunday Lunch. The mother with sticks for fingers and too many gold rings. Eve squirming under the gaze of the camera. Even the intimacy of a family portrait was too much for her. Despite the feigned formality of the occasion she is dressed like a boy, in shorts and a t-shirt. There is a kind of logo or insignia on the shirt but it’s small and the picture isn’t sharp. I need one of those programmes in CSI where they take a blurry photo from a hundred years ago and miraculously zoom in and sharpen it up to high res. It’s circular, with text on the circumference and some kind of graphic on the inside, but that’s all I can make out. I lean back into the car seat, close my eyes and think of Eve: I see her in her studio, bent over some finicky project, face and arms covered in paint and wallpaper glue, looking up at me as I tease her, her mouth showing one big, beautiful grin. The room darkens and Denise now stands where Eve was working. She is wearing Eve’s splattered work shirt but has nothing on underneath, and the paint is scarlet. She begins to lift the shirt over her…

A car driving past me hoots, making me jump. Asshole. I study the photo again and try to make out the words in the logo on Eve’s shirt. Aurohine, Automin, Aoruhin, like characters in a Tolkein novel. I jab them all into my keypad but the results look like gobbledegook, or Czechoslovakian. Eventually a variation I try—Auramine—picks up some promising results. On the www it tells me that Auramine O is a fluorescent dye also known as Basic Yellow 2, but on the South African pages AuruMine is a name of a mining operation in Nigel. Gold. Au. Aurum in Latin. Gold Mine.

Half an hour later I have left civilization behind me and am heading east towards the hillbillies. There is a roadblock just outside of Jo’burg and when I see the blue lights I start to sweat. I have the urge to run my car over the centre island and start a high-speed chase on the wrong side of the highway. End my life in a blaze of glory. Instead I swallow a lot and try to look normal. I don’t want to avoid looking at them because I’m sure that’s what criminals do, nor do I want to look too directly at them. Nothing screams guilt more than looking someone straight in the eyes. I make sure that I’m wearing my safety belt. The fake driver’s license burns a hole in my wallet. The cars around me slow down to a virtual stop at the officers’ command and I can just feel that they are going to pull me over. The music on the radio is shouting at me so I turn it off. I am a few meters away from a busty policewoman who is bursting out of her uniform and has wet black marbles for eyes. She blinks at me, looks too long. She holds out her hand. She has recognised me and is going to pull me over. I look left and right for an escape route but am boxed in by cars on all sides. I think of jettisoning the car and running but I wouldn’t stand a chance with all these uniforms and walkie-talkies about. Just as I lose my hearing to the blood in my ears, the policewoman shunts her arm at the car behind me, signalling it to park. Bless you, Jesus. The breeze rushes in the window as I accelerate, away from the spinning lights. Maybe my luck is turning, after all.

Within ten minutes I am far enough away from the cops to feel hopped up. I can see how Bonnie and Clyde became addicted to being on the run. The frisson of the open road; the rushing knowledge that one has just dodged a bullet. The tinny banjo tune from Deliverance strums my brain. High-rise steel and glass gives way to crumbling concrete and bad paint jobs. Trees morph into pylons. The smell of city grit gives way to the rotten vegetable smell of abandoned fields. The land becomes flat and I drive past a glass factory and commercial cold storage. A fine dust covers the car. I eat the pasty.

When I reach what I guess is halfway, before the first toll road, I pull into a quiet service station and fill up. In the convenience store I find cheap orange razors, nail scissors, black hair dye, a Hawaiian shirt flocked with flamingos and a pair of cheap Ray-Ban knockoffs. Instead of using the public toilets I walk around the back of the building and find the staff amenities. I lock myself in and begin cutting my hair. I mix the dye and massage it in. The plastic gloves are too damn tight and they split as I am working, leaving me with black welts on my hands and mechanic’s fingernails that look like they have been slammed in the door. While the dye is in I shave off my beard, find a bottle of bleach in the supplies cupboard and try to clean my hands with it. It’s soapy and feels good, the way it stings my skin. I wash out the dye, using my T-shirt as a towel, then put all the used things back into the plastic bag and dump it. When I get to the car I take off the license plates and chuck them in the boot.

I drive through Boksburg, Brakpan, Springs and, just when I think I’m going to fall off the edge of the world (Here Be Dragons!) I see the sign, a huge green mining wheel: Nigel Welcomes You. Not very auspicious, I agree.

I have hollow hope that there is a pleasant place to stay. I head slowly to the main road on the lookout for promises of accommodation but end up collecting hostile stares instead. The locals here don’t like strangers. Especially strangers like me prowling around in old junkers looking (I can imagine) like evangelists, molesters, or crack dealers. I pass giant peaks of fine yellow sand, mining dust melted by the rain, like wax mountains. Eventually I roll on down to what seems to be the popular part of town. There is a butcher, a bottle store and a steakhouse, with a church on every block. What more does a small town need? I will stick to the bottle store for my brand of entertainment. In general I am not anti-religion, just anti-stupidity. I drive past a shop called ‘Tombstoneland’ and it reminds me of the gravestone showroom I saw on the way to Eve’s wake, a hundred years ago. A minute ago. Am I the only one who finds this bizarre? You would think that with my preoccupation with death, I would delight in bright yellow signs on shop windows promising marked-down caskets, but I don’t. If it was my coffin then perhaps I would be interested, enough even to venture inside and run my fingers over the cheap finishes and Chinese satin but, as they stand, they remind me of what I have lost, and I drive on.

I park, remembering not to stamp on the footbrake too hard. I buy a half-jack of cheap whisky and slip it into my pocket. The sun is on its way out and the dusk leaches the colour out of the street scene. My life in black and white. The red light of the steakhouse sign flickers on; I stumble into the darkness. The restaurant is all heavy beams and brick arches and makes me think of a hobbitwarren wine cellar, complete with flagstone floor and dusty fake grapes for décor. Walls made out of bottle bottoms and huge black metal light fittings straight out of Braveheart. There is a chalkboard illustrated with exotic sounding happy-hour cocktails: cheap thrills for locals. I approach the bar over which a giant Jagermeister bottle hangs and order a pint of Windhoek draught. A coaster with an illustration of a Yorkie is put in front of me. It is number sixteen in a series of fifty. I flip though the rest of the pile of thoroughbred coasters until I find a less gay dog. Halfway through I find a Rottweiler which I purloin. A cosmo would work, or a strawberry daiquiri, but it would just feel wrong to drink a pint off a Yorkie.

Large beer in hand I find a table and I order a fillet, bloody, with rough-cut chips. When the waiter brings me a steak knife and condiments I ask him if he knows of a good place to stay the night. He gives me a baleful look.

“Upstairs,” he says, pointing to the suspended barrels obscuring the ceiling.

“There’s a place to stay… upstairs?” I say, over-enunciating, thinking he has misunderstood the question.

“Yes,” he says, as if I am slow, and walks away.

I have visions of a Texas Chainsaw Massacre scene where naïve tourists are promised rooms above a steakhouse only to be chopped up in the middle of the night and end up on the locals’ plates the next day. Roast thigh. Deep-fried finger chips. Elbow bacon. I remember watching a documentary about the making of the film, where they said they didn’t have a big enough budget for fake flesh and blood so they used the real thing. They showed the scene where the girl with the long bare legs is running from the chainsaw-wielding maniac and she trips and slides on all these small, sharp bones that cut up her knees. They were real chicken bones. And they shot in Texas, in summer, and as the shoot progressed all the meat started going off, so some of the scenes where the characters are retching and crying didn’t require much acting at all. A man dressed as a chef limps up to my table with the food, so I gulp down my beer and order another one. He nods and lurches away. I poke the rare red meat with my fork and wonder if I should have ordered vegetarian.

After I pay the bill I head up the narrow stairs to the hotel. There is a no one at the reception desk so I move towards ringing the bell and as I touch the metal, someone behind me speaks and I jump.

“Good God,” I say, trying to recover my composure.

It is the waiter, sans apron. He moves to behind the desk.

“Would you like a room, sir?” he asks, as if I hadn’t already told him that downstairs.

“Er,” I say, “yes, please.” I smile, as if to show him I see the humour in the situation but he doesn’t smile back, and hands me a key.

“Number 3,” he says, motioning vaguely to his left, “straight down the passage.”

He moves away from the desk, puts his apron back on and walks downstairs.

The room is a shock of bad taste, small and stuffy. There are gimcrack prints framed on the wall: kitsch paintings of an Italian landscape complete with generous fountain, some kind of snow palace I can’t place (Russia?) and, of course, the old Eiffel Tower, all splendidly mounted in chipped, gold-painted wood. I open the bathroom door and am shocked when I see a man with black hair. I run my hand through it. I can’t believe how different I look. I step closer to the spotted mirror to inspect my face. My eye sockets are no longer purple and my nose has healed with a slight bump in the bridge. The old scar on my cheek is almost invisible. I grimace and check my teeth. I can’t even tell which are mine anymore. I shake my head sadly at the shower; it’s a crude rusty rose stuck onto a pipe. The floor of cracked tile hides behind an antiseptic-green shower curtain. A shower curtain! I switch off the light before I gag. I close and bolt the main door, then walk to the opposite side of the room and slide the window upwards and open. My stomach is a cement mixer of dread and indigestion; I feel the acid in my throat. Looking out onto the dark street I wonder how long I have before the cops catch up with me. I wonder if tonight is going to be my last night of freedom and I have chosen to spend it here, in this blazing hellhole. For all I know this could be a wild goose chase. The only clue I have is a twenty-year-old photo of a child’s shirt that may or may not contain the word Aurumine. The breeze is good but my paranoia gets the better of me, so I close the window again and lock it. I lie on the bed, on top of the houndstooth bedspread, and watch the ceiling fan chop the air. I open my half-jack and drink straight from the bottle. It may be my last, but at least it’s an adventure.