by JT Lawrence
“What are you TALKING about, man?” shouts Sifiso. “Have you gone CRAZY?”
The blood is shiny on the green grass. Wet, shiny rubies.
Painting the roses red.
Eve was my Queen of Hearts.
“You should be asking Slade that!”
Sifiso is impatient by nature and seems ready to punch out Frank’s lights, despite being a good two feet shorter than him.
I get to my knees and hold the bridge of my nose, trying to stem the flow. It doesn’t work and the front of my shirt is soon dyed red.
“You’ve made me an accomplice!” he yells at me, spit flying into the air.
I feel something inside me click, swivel, burst, dissolve. Something breaks, tears, starts leaking air like a bicycle puncture. Something changes inside me forever. I am damaged. Not because of Frank’s words or his fist in my face, not because of Eve’s tawdry funeral or mute dressed in tweed, but because this is the moment that everything makes sense and nothing makes sense. I see who I am but I don’t know who that is. My mind crumples up, and I am powerless to stop it.
“An accomplice to WHAT, Frank?” yells Sifiso.
“Keep your voice down,” I say to Sifiso through gritted teeth. Still in my position of surrender, I turn to Frank.
“You think I did it?” I ask him. “What kind of person do you think I am? You know how much I cared for her.”
Frank snorts.
A dark-haired beauty arrives. She has a red lipstick smile and a tattoo on her arm that peeks out from under a silk sleeve. She adjusts her sunglasses and lights a cigarette. Despite my situation I feel drawn to her; something in her face and body language strikes me. She feels my eyes on her and looks straight at me, at my crimson shirt, and I look away.
Frank speaks in low tones now: “All I know is that she was killed exactly the same way you described it. And I find that frikkin’ weird, what do you say?”
Sifiso erupts.
“What do I SAY? I say you’d better tell me what the hell’s going on here before I pop a cap in someone’s ass.”
Okay, he didn’t really say that. Sifiso is not ghetto like that. I just thought it sounded good coming from a short, angry black man.
“What do I SAY?” he really said, “I say you’d better tell me what the hell this is all about!”
At home I peel off my blood-soaked shirt and throw it in the bin. I have a gentle shower (Amazon Rainforest™) and watch all the brown pigment run from my body in a neat line down into the drain. I inspect my chest hair for any leftover blood and wonder briefly why we still have chest hair. I would have thought that we’ve evolved beyond it by now but then, remembering the day’s events, my question seems to be answered.
I wash my face, gingerly, trying not to touch my swollen nose. It will scar and be misshapen. I know I should go to Dr. Olaf to have it set but I feel like I deserve this impediment, just like I deserve the pain that is everywhere in my body. I am numb already but drink Glenfiddich out of the bottle anyway. I’m hoping that I will in time click back, uncrumple, heal. I wish that fate could have taken me instead of my Eve but now I realise that I am dying too. Only Eve didn’t have to suffer this torturous, slow decay.
In the mirror a purple raccoon stares back at me.
18
Indigo Shades
Only people who have been broken will know this feeling: that nothing matters anymore. It’s when things get so bad that you resign yourself to never being happy again, to living a sham of a life. It’s like having a permanent subtitle stamped on your vision: Nothing Matters. It’s there when you close your eyes to go to sleep at night and it’s there the next morning when you wake up, before you have time to think that this day will be better. It’s especially apparent when you are brushing your teeth or trying to summon the energy to lift your arms to wash your hair in the shower. Apart from the subtitle there is also a kind of blurriness to the picture. Whatever the opposite is of rose-tinted glasses – maybe they are indigo shades – too dark to see through properly, making flowers and reflections look fuzzy and black.
Meaning is hidden.
You would think that Nothing Matters makes the pain less, because whatever is causing you the pain doesn’t matter, but unfortunately it escapes this neat logic, and instead, the more life hurts, the more it doesn’t matter, so the more it hurts.
19
A Bad Wizard
Francina is still AWOL and my house is chaotic. I knew I wouldn’t be able to hold it together without her. The anarchic state of the place reflects my state of mind: spiralling. I know that I should start cleaning but I’m surrounded by such dark energy that I’m finding it difficult to feed myself, never mind pick up a dustbuster.
Eve’s violent death is sitting in my chest, hot and cold and heavy. With this come the mental Polaroids of the funeral: Eve’s toad-skinned aunt, the mute man, warm whisky in a teacup once my glass was shattered, pain, a bag of frozen peas, and rubies on green grass. Mixed in are the foggy memories of Emily’s funeral: being suffocated by the hot floral nylon dresses of well-meaning friends, the cloying sweetness of lemon cake icing, Mom, blank, looking like one of her Vermeer paintings. The smell of the over-polished timber pews. The chocolate-box picture of Em, blown up and framed for the ceremony. Dad looking like he should be the one in the coffin.
I realise that I have been standing in one spot for a very long time, staring at the state of the kitchen in some kind of zombie trance. There is just too much stuff. Too much mess. Too many memories.
I need to get out of the house. In an act of desperation I hit the tarmac in my designer running gear that I bought a year ago and have never worn except to try it on.
I stretch my calves on the grass verge and can’t help feeling like an idiot. Like someone who is pretending to be a runner. While I pretend to warm up my ankles I see the little Munchkin again. Isn’t that what they call the singing midgets in the Wizard of Oz? I think of how I am like the wizard. Orchestrating the show of my life only to be revealed as a fraud and a bad fraud at that.
Dorothy tells the wizard that he is a bad man, to which the wizard responds something like,”A bad wizard, but not a bad man.”
I fear that I am the inverse. Or worse, that I am bad at both.
She meows at me, narrows her yellow eyes. The base of her tail shakes like a rattlesnake. I know now that she won’t let me approach her, so I just keep still and try to appear non-threatening, which is relatively easy when you’re wearing Polyshorts.
She meows again and minces towards me. I crouch with caution. She is within stroking reach but I resist the temptation. She blinks at me. I narrow my eyes at her. And then she is gone, tail high in the air, as if I have bored her.
I ease into the run, with Sylvia chiming in her encouragement for every kilometre I reach. We are officially living in the future; I know this because my shoe talks to me when I run. She tells me how far I’ve gone, whether I’m running fast enough or not, and always congratulates me on my longest run or fastest time. If I was really dedicated I would plug it into my computer to log my runs and then I would have a graph of my performance. It’s straight out of the sci-fi comics I used to read as a kid.
On the mental rim of the memories of the funerals there is something more painful. Too intense to think about. For a moment I think that I am losing the battle and that the throbbing stuff will come crashing through, but in the end I win and it recedes. It is grey, stifling, acrid. I try to push it back as far as it will go, but I can tell that it is only a matter of time before it will break free and swirl through my body. It makes me run faster. My lungs and leg muscles burn, but it feels good.
20
Her Voice Is Charcoal, or,
Black Umbilical Cord
Still broken: there is only one thing for this misery and that is to see how much more miserable I can possibly become. I decide to visit my dad.
I spend less time at Woolworth’s than usual. I feel self-conscious because people are staring
at my blue and broken face. Usually I enjoy the attention but today it feels like everyone can see my dirty secret. I grab a few things I know my father will like. There’s no point shopping for myself – I have no appetite. And there is no Francina to cook. I stand at the shelf of tinned goods looking for sardines, thinking I’ll probably have more luck looking at the pet food section.
“Hello,” she says to me, as if we’d known each other all our lives. Her voice is charcoal.
“Hello,” I deadpan. For once, I’m not interested. I flash my eyes at her and back at the shelf. Something tingles. Avoiding eye contact, I grab a tin of something from the shelf.
“You were at the funeral,” she says.
I turn to her. It’s Tattoo Girl. Redlippedsilkshirtedinkskinned beauty. I definitely know her from somewhere.
“Yes,” I say, fingering my coconut milk.
“You were bleeding,” she says, and points to my nose.
“Yes,” I touch it. “Yes, I was.”
“Interesting thing to do at a funeral,” she says.
“Bleed?” I ask.
Husky laugh. “That too, but I meant … have a fist fight.”
“Ja,” I say, “it wasn’t my idea.”
Her lips twist into a scarlet smile. She has the most amazing eyelashes.
“It looks sore.”
“You should see the other guy.”
The laugh again.
“I should be going,” I say, motioning towards the junk food aisle.
“Yes,” she says, and watches me walk away.
I join the queue, wait in line and pay. Only when I reach my car do I realise I have made a mistake. There was definitely something between us, some spark, maybe something more interesting than a spark. I jog back to the store to see her but she has disappeared. I check the aisles and the parking lot but she is gone.
Dad seems to be in better spirits this time. The front doorbell is still not working but I knock hard enough and he hears me.
“Good God, son,” he exclaims when he sees my black eyes and purple nose. “It looks like you’ve gone ten rounds with Muhammed.”
He means the boxer, not the prophet.
“Was it for a girl?” he asks, mischief gleaming in his eyes. The poor bastard. I think if I had nice wife and few sprogs bouncing off the walls he’d feel a lot less hopeless.
“Kind of,” I say.
His ancient Dalmatian lumbers in. Domino’s fat and unsteady on her old legs. Her nails scratch the floor beneath her. I stroke her head and come away with waxy brown fingers. I wash my hands under the kitchen tap with a hard cake of soap.
I slice two soft rye rolls in half and fill them with butter lettuce, tomato, sliced pickle, shaved chicken, Perinaise, a dusting of black pepper. I open a packet of kettle-fried potato crisps and shake them out onto the side of the plates. We go through the motions. Dad takes the beers out of the fridge.
“Manchester United is playing Arsenal,” he announces and shuffles away in his old stokies.
All of a sudden I feel great comfort. The routine, the unstuck predictability of these days, my father’s prickly love.
During half time he asks me if I have heard anything from Mom. It makes me think that she hasn’t sent a gift for a long time and I wonder, briefly, if she is still alive. Not that it would make that much difference to us. She is not a person, not to me, not really. She is an abstract thought, a ghost, a distant memory. I can’t believe he’s still in love with her. There should be an emotional statute of limitations when it comes to loving someone who leaves you. After five years there should be a cutting of that black umbilical cord; a cool sharp snip and your sadness and longing should disappear.
He still keeps the photo he has of all of us above the fireplace. It was taken that summer in the Cape. I don’t know how he can stand it. Inside a burnished silver frame stands a beautiful auburn-haired mother, a tall, handsome father, a cocky eight-year-old holding his sister’s hand. The little sister with sun freckles and bright eyes; the prize of the family. The photo is old and faded but the vitality of the four people jumps off the page, nothing like we are now. Vast smiles and coral cheeks. I try to not think too much about it.
He catches me looking at it and I jump away, as if he’d walked in on me rifling through his medicine cabinet. At least he’s taken the rest down. This mantelpiece used to be a shrine to our patchy past.
The reception on the small TV set is snowy but the game is a good one. I spend the time drinking my beer in long draughts, stroking Domino’s stomach with my foot and thinking despairing thoughts. Eve was right. I don’t have any meaning in my life and that’s why it’s so damn dismal. But where do you get meaning? I’m sure Gandhi didn’t have to go looking for it. Or Charles Manson (meaning doesn’t have to be right or good, it just has to be meaningful) who knew without a doubt what he was put on this planet to do and he did it, brainwashing a good few kamikazes on the way. You could be outright evil and still have meaning in your life (Hitler, Idi Amin, Verwoerd). I should have it. I am a writer, for God’s sake. If anyone should have meaning it’s writers and artists and leaders – people whose work affects others. Even if I don’t want it, I have a certain responsibility to others because my work affects them. I don’t like that idea at all. I feel that it will limit me, strangle my voice. A part of me believes that I should be able to write whatever I want to, completely unhindered by the effect it will have on the reader. Surely that is true freedom?
There is a lull in the game and I go where I really don’t want to go, to the small, tucked- away room in my head I’ve been avoiding since the cops showed up at my house on Saturday morning. How much responsibility does a writer really have? If a writer kills someone in his story, he has to be accountable for that person. Writers can’t go around willy-nilly, killing off their characters, or can they? Before, I would have said isn’t that the whole point? That it’s not real and so you can do whatever you want to them. But now I wonder if there are consequences. For a writer, that means controlling words, characters, action. Perhaps, à la The Godfather, blood really is a big expense.
Death is a great plot device. Erica Jong says that when she looks back on her eight novels, she finds that she hasn’t murdered enough people. She finds breaking any of the Ten Commandments good for plotting a novel, but murder and adultery best. That authors lie about how much it hurts them to murder their characters; that, anyway, novelists love to weep.
Dad has fallen asleep in his chair, his dehydrated lips slightly parted, his wallpaper backdrop faded and peeling. I take the beer glass from his hand, set it down on the coffee table. I try to look at him without pity. That must be the worst – living with all that pity. All the kind smiles and tilted heads, the apple pies and oven-dried macaroni cheeses that still find their way to the door after all these years. I wouldn’t be able to stand it. Maybe that’s what he would have said at my age.
But things happen. If I don’t know anything else, I know that.
I watch the sunset from the park near my house. The usual pram-pushers and dog-walkers are about. I sit cross-legged on the grass and try not to think too much. I look around at the pink clouds and the light they cast on the willows. I try to keep my mind clear, not holding onto the thoughts that come into my head. It’s the most I can do at the moment: try to hold on to my sanity. I do this for about ten minutes before I give up. I wonder if I will ever feel peaceful again. And then I see her. Ink lady. The woman from Eve’s funeral. She’s walking down by the river. She is barefoot and has her sandals in her hand, as if she’s walking on the beach. To see her twice in one day strikes me as bizarre. She must live around here. I’m not in the mood for company but I am drawn to this strange woman. I’m on my feet, dusting the grass off my trousers and halfway to her before she notices me.
“Hello again,” I say.
“Hello,” she smiles. She’s wearing a peaked cap and sunglasses, which make her look like an undercover celebrity. She has straight white teeth. She smoothes
down her black hair and it shines in the dusk.
“I’m sorry I was rude earlier.”
“You weren’t,” she says.
She starts walking again, so I join her. We fall into a rhythm, as if we have done this before.
“I meant to ask you earlier how you knew Eve.”
“Well, that’s a long story,” she smiles.
“In that case, let’s discuss it over dinner,” I say. I don’t even have to think about picking up women anymore. I don’t have to try: the words just tumble out of my mouth.
She stops walking, which I take as a good sign. Takes off her sunglasses to look at me. Toes the grass while she thinks about it, then looks up and says “Okay.”
The soft light is in her eyes: an almost unbelievable shade of blue. I wonder if they are contacts.
“What about tomorrow night?” I ask.
“What about now?” she says.
We walk the kilometre or so until we get to the strip of restaurants and antique stores. We decide on a small Italian place that is decorated floor to ceiling with golden olive oil tins, bottles of wine with thick skins of dust, posters of Italia. There are only eight tables in the whole place. It’s my favourite place to eat. The waiter trips over himself to help us. He brings salty focaccia and a bottle of Diemersfontein. Eve doesn’t want to eat, so I pour her a glass of wine that she picks up and swirls. It smells like chocolate.
“So we haven’t officially introduced ourselves.”
I was enjoying not knowing her name; she is perhaps the most mysterious person I have met. She puts her glass down, shakes back her mane.
“I’m Slade,” I say, sticking out my hand.
“Denise,” she says, shaking.
“So do you live around here? You look so familiar, but I can’t quite place you.”
“No, I just came up for Eve’s funeral. I’m staying at her place, sorting out her stuff.”
