The Memory of Water

⁵¹ THE ULTIMATE BETRAYAL

At first I think, Oh Fuck, I have finally snapped the delicate and trembling cord that was connecting me to sanity. And it’s about fucking time. I’ve had just about enough of the sane life. It was too hard and it never made sense.

I try to stand but find my legs no longer belong to me.

“Hello Slade,” she says.

I am numb, deaf and dumb. The jelly holds me in place.

“Eve?”

“Hi,” she says, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world to be raised from the dead. She takes a key out of her pocket and opens the cell door. I know I should be happy to see her, or at the very least, relieved. But seeing her walk in here has spun the world in the opposite direction, leaving my brain behind. Her movements are measured, fluid, confident. She has been planning this for a long time. When I realise that I may not be mad and this may in fact be happening, I gag.

She walks towards me, takes my hand, hoists me up and leads me out of the cell, down the corridor and into a large room where people are waiting for me. In the nervous crowd stand a tear-stained version of my father, an astounded Sifiso, a broken-nosed Frank. The room is whirling. I also see other faces I recognise. The executor of Eve’s will, the boy from the bank, the detectives in plain clothes: Sello and Madinga. The deaf-mute cousin who almost gave the game away. Everyone manages to look grim and hopeful at the same time.

“Surprise party?” I joke. I address Sello grimly: “You shouldn’t have.”

“I know I went too far,” starts Eve. “It started off as an idea, a small project, a benevolent hoax…”

“A betrayal,” I say. “The ultimate betrayal.”

“No,” she shakes her head. “Not a betrayal. A gift.”

I spit out bitter laughter.

“A gift? I almost died!”

“You were dead already,” she says, “We brought you back to life.”

“I thought you were dead for Christ’s sake!” I am shouting and my voice bounces off the spinning walls. “Do you know what that did to me? Do you have any idea? And to make me think that I played a part in it? Heartless, hateful…”

“You did play a part in it,” Eve says, “the most important part. It was your plan.”

“What?”

“It was your plan, your mind map, on the kitchen table. I saw it a few days after our fight at your party – I had gone to apologise – and that’s when I had the big idea. You planned to kill me in theory; all we did is continue the story. We followed it to see where it would go, to give you an authentic experience.”

I turn on the others, casting venom at my father and Frank.

“And you!” I shout, “You traitors! You cold-blooded traitors!”

“No one was against you Slade, the whole time everyone was with you, helping you, taking care of you.”

“Frank! Helping me? He was trying to kill me! And Dad… spying on me.”

Eve is calm. “We lost you once and your father let us know where you were and which car to find you in. He was helping us to look out for you. You became more and more… unpredictable. Frank has been acting as your bodyguard since the day of the ‘murder’. He made sure that you didn’t do anything too dangerous.”

I think of Edgar, AKA Frank, knocking the box of matches out of my hand. I am quiet for a while.

“When you started battling to write I wondered if a small mystery might coax you into a new story, so I wrote you a few letters. When that didn’t work, I spray-painted your wall. Threw a rock through your front window. That didn’t work either, so I gave up, until I saw your plan. It was perfect.”

“You all stood around and let me lose everything.”

“You lost nothing,” she says. “It was all part of the setup. I thought you must feel as though you have lost everything to realise how much you really had. Everything is exactly as it was before we started. You have your house, your car…”

“Your contract with Starling,” pipes Sifiso.

“Everything is as it was before?” I say, “Nothing is as it was before.”

“Well then,” smiles Eve, “We have accomplished what we set out to do.”

“Which was what, exactly?”

“Whether you see it now or not, we have given you your life back.”

“You could have fucking fooled me.”

“You needed something… devastating… to get you writing again. You were desperate, you told me so. You thought you were finished. I decided to show you that you weren’t. I gave you what you were begging for.”

“It wasn’t for you to do.”

“And who else would do it? If we hadn’t done this, where would you be?”

“I would be safe, at home, drinking whisky, instead of standing here with twenty years taken off my life.”

“Your reaction is understandable; we expected you to feel this way. We planned everything to the last detail. But that wasn’t enough… you kept on surprising us.”

“I dare say I return your sentiment.”

I am angry but I start to relax into the thought that I no longer have to fear for my life. More importantly, Eve is alive. The relief is heady.

“You really had us on our toes. We had a full team working on the project 24/7. We had actors, mostly, and some guys from the film production house to help with make-up and photos and props, like crime tape.”

“Your funeral,” I say.

“It was the best we could do at such short notice. It was practically rent-a-crowd. I was there, watching you through the curtain. Out of vanity, I guess. Although I noticed that you didn’t cry.”

“I was too busy having panic attacks,” I say. “The crying came before that, and after.”

“We felt like we were in control of the situation until you took off. That made us concerned. It was easy to manage while you were at home but when you left, there were so many… variables…so many things that could go wrong.”

“And clearly went wrong,” I say.

“And you went to Nigel of all places?”

“That’s where you pointed me to,” I say. She doesn’t understand. “The logo on your T-shirt, when you were a little girl, in the family photo.”

“Yes,” she smiles, “of course. But then something happened when you were there.”

“Yes,” I say.

“You had a kind of… episode.”

“I guess you could call it that.”

“You stayed in your room for three days with a case of whisky. You wouldn’t eat or talk. We were going to abort the mission, call in a shrink, when you deserted your father’s car and just started walking through the town in the middle of the night.”

“What?”

“That’s when we got those locals to pick you up, give you bed for the night and some food.”

“That’s not what happened,” I say. “I had to meet Mrs X. I went to Sub-Nigel. I almost got blown to pieces in that fucking explosion of yours in Duduza. Your special effects were astounding, realistic.”

“Explosion?” she blinks, “Mrs X?” She catches herself, half-chuckles. “Do you think those things happened?”

“Of course they fucking well happened. I almost got my head blown off.”

“Slade,” she smiles, but her eyes are worried. “There is no such place as Sub-Nigel. It’s the name of an abandoned mine. You must have seen a sign for it somewhere in town.”

“The explosion was real.” I say.

“No,” says Eve, “there was no explosion.”

I look down at my wrist and my watch stares back at me. I blink and touch it, to make sure it’s there.

“An episode?” I say.

Frank talks: “You just lay in bed, man, for days. Watching the ceiling fan. I thought you were one beer short of a six-pack. I was worried. I told Eve to call it off.”

I think of Mrs X, the outrageous décor, the pigeon, the Pomeranian. I pull her letter from out of my jacket pocket. Instead of the heavy stock and gold wax I remember, it is a cheap letterhead from the hotel: blank.

“You did what you do best, Slade,” she says, “You retreated into your imagination.”

I get flashes: plastic grapes, and toy dogs on coasters at the steakhouse bar; Dasher; Mrs X’s wall. A cocktail menu, dirty martinis, Buck’s Fizz. At the hotel: Paris, snow, and a fountain, framed in gold.

“This thing you did,” I say to her, “this experiment, hurt people.”

She shakes her head. “No one was hurt. Except Frank, a little.”

Frank shrugs and touches his nose. “You owed me, buddy.”

“What about Denise?” The blood rushes to my head. “That was also engineered, right? She’s okay?” I look around the crowd, desperate to see her face. “Where is she? I don’t see her here.”

Eve frowns, and looks uncertain.

“Who is Denise?”