The Memory of Water

⁴¹ PUPPET MASTER

I arrive at the Sandton Bus Depot at dusk and catch a taxi to Rosebank, to Eve’s flat. The ride there is rough, the driver malefic, but I am becoming accustomed to this new dangerous way. My plan is to ransack the place and not leave till I find what I am looking for. At the block of flats a strong feeling of déjà vu hits me in the chest. I stumble but keep going. In my backpack jingle Eve’s keys, the ones I lifted from Denise, so I let myself in. The crime tape has been taken down, half-heartedly, as if the person responsible didn’t see the point. I drink water in hungry gulps straight from the kitchen tap. I look for food in the refrigerator but it is a dark empty cave.

Eve’s bedroom is exactly how I remember it from the last time I was here, except that there are some sealed boxes on the floor. Her essence is still here. I can feel her energy, smell her. I pick up a few things on her dressing table. A hairbrush, a half-moon of face powder. Her perfume is gone. I slide open the drawer. It is a mess of alien things: bracelets, lipstick and clips. No gold – Eve never wore gold. I recognise one pair of earrings and pick them up: black chandeliers. They remind me of a day I spent with her a few years ago, before I began to worry if I would ever be able to think of another story. We joined some of her friends at the Johannesburg Country Club for a picnic and fireworks display. We were a motley crew: writers, artists, directors, bankers. There was a great deal of champagne and we all got on pretty well. Fair weather friends: none of those people bothered to come to her funeral.

I put them back, close the drawer and prowl towards her studio. I think I hear something outside and I freeze. I wait for a few minutes, ears trained, before I carry on. Her studio has not yet been packed up. The unfinished canvases sit patiently on their easels, frozen in time. Paint brushes wait in their jars of turpentine and the walls, still layered with overlapping pieces of paper: quotes, rough sketches, photographs, look like the scales on a dead fish. I start studying them as if they hold some kind of clue to what happened to her, to what is happening to me. For a long time there is nothing. I scan every page, standing and crouching and standing again. Every now and then I see something I think means something: a bridge, a mountain that could be a mine, a woman who could be Mrs X, a man who could be Edgar, if I knew what Edgar looked like. She had been working on some kind of puppet-themed project. At first I thought they were dolls, but now I see the spider webs shooting out of their arms and heads. Almost invisible, the fine threads hold the dolls in various poses, ready for commands. There are scribbled doodles of marionettes and photocopies of all kinds of puppets through the ages. In the corner there is a plaster cast of a tall, long-eared rabbit with jointed paws and legs. With so many puppets, I think, this could be an abstract illustration of my life. Always playing at puppet master: realising now that I was never in charge. And even if I was, for a short time, that every puppet master has his puppet master. That people play with other peoples’ lives but in the end the universe has the final say. I am seized by a reckless feeling. I hope that whoever is trying to kill me will just show up tonight. I won’t run away. I need to know what this whole thing has been about; I need to understand, even if it ends in my death. It’s not as though I have a life to go back to, anyway. I have lost my world.

I continue scanning the wall. Every now and then an illustration makes me stop and I have to step closer so that I can take in its delicate lines. I look at a photo and automatically move on. There is a tingling and an urge to go back. A bell. A nagging. I look at it again. A photo of two young girls, arms over each other’s shoulders, their school blazers hunched up around their necks in the easy embrace. Sisters, maybe twins. The crest on the uniforms: Ferryvale. I tear the picture off the wall. The girl on the right is blonde, petite, and lifts her chin up to the camera as she grins. Eve. The other girl is sable, curvaceous, with a dark twinkle in her eyes. Denise? I flip the photo over, but there is no inscription. I swing my bag off my back and poke around for the stolen school magazine pages. I search the thumbnail portraits of Eve’s class for this girl-version of Denise, and I find her. Except that her name isn’t Denise or Shaw. It’s Susannah. I must be wrong. I look again, holding the picture to the page. It’s the same girl. Susannah Fox. Susannah Fox. The name is familiar. Why would she lie about her name, about being Eve’s sister? Why would she be the one packing boxes? In some spare corner of my mind I see her name in print. I see it on a piece of paper, A4, white, on a desk. In Eve’s will. Eve left her everything.

“Slade,” comes a voice from behind and an electric current runs through me.