The Memory of Water

⁵⁴ INSIDE OUT

And then of course there could be a fourth ending. A real ending. How wonderful it would have been, how neat, if Eve were miraculously alive again and she loved me – enough to wreck my life, teach me meaning. To have the troops rallying around me, to have been willing to turn my life upside-down, like a game, like a too-clever film. In fact, I may well have seen the device used in a movie a long time ago, and it resurfaced while I was having my ‘episode’. It’s an ending only a smug writer could come up with. Too-tidy, contrived. Desperate: down to the repainted front wall, the cat, the flower garland. It would have been good for the old Slade, the pre-fucked, pre-confession, pre-jail Slade, but it won’t do for me now. I feel different, turned inside out. A neat ending will no longer do.

“Can I get more paper?” I ask the guard. I have used up the SAP issue notepad they gave me earlier – hours (days?) ago. Once he snorts and obliges I take a breath and begin again. The real ending isn’t as pretty and it’s the last thing I will ever write.