by JT Lawrence
I prowl to the peephole.
I can’t see anyone out there. My persecution complex jabs me in the ribs. It might be PsychoSally. She’s probably thought of a new creative way to defame me or deface my house. Probably rang the doorbell and hid behind a bush so that she could watch me admire her work. I strain my eye trying to see the impossible angle of the space behind the front pillars of the pedestrian gate. My heart has not fully recovered from the brisk awakening. Gingerly I touch the door handle and turn it. In a dream sequence of déjà vu I take the six steps to my newspaper, pick it up and turn around to face the house, this time expecting the worst. I don’t see anything out of place. I let my shoulders relax.
“Hello stranger,” comes a purr from behind me.
I jump what feels like a metre in the air.
“Christ,” I say, clasping the newspaper to my chest. “You f-frightened me.”
She laughs her gravel laugh.
I am frozen to the spot.
“Well,” she says, swinging her hips, “are you going to invite me in?”
I’ve barely closed the front door when her lips are on mine. I drop the newspaper. She pushes me up against the door and pulls down my boxers and I wonder if I am still dreaming. Then I remember I read somewhere that if you ever think you may be dreaming you are, ipso facto, not dreaming. Then I try to stop thinking because all of a sudden my dick is in her hot mouth and it feels so fucking good and who cares if it’s a dream or not. I feel like my whole body is in the dark red heat of her lips and I have to stop her before I lose it. I haul her up by the hand she has resting on my hip and, forcing her backwards, against the wall, rip open her blouse while I kiss her. She lets out a shriek of a laugh. Black clothes open up to reveal lightly sunned skin and lace. I taste her neck, just under her right ear. She is smiling but I can hear the barb of desire in her breath. I spin her around and push her skirt up over her arse. Down on my knees I lick the silk of the inside of her thigh but then can’t wait any longer so I stand and find her hole with my cock and drive it into her smooth, tight pussy. My left hand is on the wall to steady us and my right is inside her bra, squeezing her hard nipple. Denise grips me, traps me, after every thrust, as if to show me that I’m not in charge. I move my hand to the tangle of her dark hair and grab it but she bats my hand away. I see her tattoo and I have a fleeting feeling of being somewhere else, somewhere in the thorny garden. Again, that feeling that I know her, that I know this body. Her moans bring me back and I let my body go. After a few final thrusts I empty myself into her, into this exquisite creature. Afterwards we crawl to bed.
Later, after she has gone, I am lying on the chaise in the sun porch reading The Time Traveler’s Wife. I still feel a little stunned by Denise’s visit, like I have been given a gift by a stranger in the street. When the doorbell rings again I waste no time in answering it, much to my detriment.
It’s as if the universe had suddenly realised that nothing bad had happened to me in the last twenty-four hours so they’d better make up for lost time. It is the boys in blue: good cop, bad cop. I was feeling so buoyed by Denise’s visit that morning that I was able to open the door.
“Hello, officers,” I say, in a way that was not unfriendly.
“Hello Mister Harris,” says the bad one, Sello.
The good one has the grace to look uncomfortable.
I buzz the gate but they don’t move. It seems that today we are observing niceties.
“Would you like to come in?” I ask.
“We’re here to take you down to the station,” says Sello, not taking his eyes off me.
“Why?” I say, acting surprised. In fact I am a little surprised. What do they have on me? Can’t they just ask me questions here?
“Can’t you just ask me questions here?” I say, trying to look inviting. “This time you can have cappuccinos,” I smile. I buzz the gate again.
They both look at me with a cool distance in their eyes. There is obviously no smiling allowed on duty.
“We phoned you,” says Madinga, “but no answer.”
“Often,” adds Sello. “Maybe twenty times. We wanted you to come to the station.”
“I get anxiety,” I tell them. “Panic attacks. When I’m in closed spaces.”
Especially in interrogation rooms and cells.
“Can we please rather just do it here?”
I think they see the genuine worry in my eyes because they turn away from me and speak their ambush language. No one wants to be responsible for the heart attack of a paranoid post-traumatic stress claustrophobe. After a quick discussion and a shushed phone call to a superior they relent, but still refuse the cappuccinos.
We sit at the kitchen table again. My senses are on high alert and the chairs scrape against my eardrum. Déjà vu again, as if my reality has turned into a giant fucking hamster wheel.
“Your domestic worker,” says Madinga, looking around the now clean kitchen, “she’s back?”
He can’t see the five unwashed noodle bowls in the sink.
I shake my head. They obviously have no news on Francina’s whereabouts.
“Look,” says Sello, holding his hand at his stomach and leaning back in his chair as if he has just finished a good dinner. “New evidence has come to light.”
He has been watching too many episodes of Law and Order.
I think of that stupid Chuck Norris joke, when he introduces his legs individually as Law and Order.
“Really?” I say, “Well, that’s good news, isn’t it?”
Madinga looks at Sello. Both are expressionless.
“Maybe not for you,” he says.
My intestines squirm and I swallow hard.
“I can’t imagine what you mean,” I say, trying to keep my voice even.
There is a Latin proverb that says that when one’s life path is steep, try to keep one’s mind even. I am way past that and just an even voice will do for now.
“What would you like to talk about first, Mister Harris? Perhaps about your last appointment with your doctor and what was discussed there? Or maybe the library titles you have borrowed? Or the fingerprints we found all over Miss Shaw’s apartment?”
So they have been watching me. But before Eve’s body was found? Not necessarily. They could have discovered it all afterwards. I swallow again.
“Perhaps the fingerprints are the most compelling,” I say.
“We found at least six areas in Miss Shaw’s flat with your fingerprints,” says Madinga, “and some of your hair.”
“So what?” I say, knowing I sound guilty. “We were friends. I spent time there. I was over there just the other day having lunch.”
“Do you have anyone who can confirm your story?” Sello says.
I bridle at his use of the word ‘story’: it implies fiction.
I shake my head, more in annoyance at them than at the question.
“If that is your strongest lead I suggest you keep looking for who really killed Eve, instead of wasting your time with me.”
The men take their time in replying.
Sello steeples his fingers and leans towards me so that our faces are close. “You know what the most interesting thing about the fingerprints is, Mister Harris?”
“What?” I ask, with a touch of belligerence.
“The fact that we didn’t have to call you in to take yours, to make the match.”
“So you have my fingerprints on file. That’s hardly interesting. We are practically living in 1984, aren’t we? If anyone should know, it should be you.”
“1984?” says Madinga.
“Orwell,” I say.
He blinks a few times and then writes it down.
“Never mind,” I say and slump on the table.
“We have your prints on file because you have a criminal record,” says Sello, “which you conveniently forgot to tell us about the last time we were here.”
I harrumph.
“Why on earth would I tell you?”
“Because
it may pertain to the case.”
“Bullshit, pertain to the case! This case has nothing to do with me! And it certainly has nothing to do with my so-called ‘criminal record’, of which crime I was acquitted.”
“Doesn’t mean you weren’t guilty,” says Sello.
“It was a misunderstanding. Thai authorities aren’t spectacularly fluent in English.”
I wonder if they can see I’m lying.
“Moving on,” says Sello, “your doctor informed us that you asked him about the technicalities of stabbing someone.”
“Well,” I say, “I did.”
That singing bastard! So much for patient privilege. And since when did cops interview your goddamned doctor? Something feels off here. I think back to the split-second they flashed me their ID cards, not giving me enough time to study them, see if they were authentic. I squint at them, trying to work out if they really are cops.
They stare back at me with their overworked eyes.
“I’m writing a book and was doing research.”
Sello leans back again.
“A book? What kind of book?”
“A novel. I am a novelist, you know.”
“I meant, what is it about?”
I scratch my nose, still tender.
“It’s about … someone who gets … stabbed.”
“Ha!” says Sello. Or maybe I imagine that part.
“Like Miss Shaw?” Madinga asks.
“Miss Shaw wasn’t stabbed,” I say, “You said you found her drowned, in the river.”
Ha! I think.
“We said we found her in the river. We never said drowned.”
I know that, but I am trying to avoid falling for one of their Law & Order traps.
“What are you saying? That she was stabbed?”
Madinga opens up the file he brought in with him. He lays eight 12 x 9 glossy photos on the table.
I feel rising acid in my mouth and throat. Eve’s blue-ivory limbs are spread before me. Her blonde hair is slicked back, brown with water and dirt. Her eyes open and milky.
One photo shows a deep slit in her chest. I blanch. I remind myself to keep breathing. I want to trace the cut with my finger. The pictures are beautiful in a raw, eerie way. They wouldn’t be out of place in an avant-garde art exhibition. The whiteness of her water-bleached skin against the oily coffee grounds of the sandbank. The chalky lips. The vulnerability of her bare breasts, small nipples, protruding ribs. The dark ribbon of red over her heart.
I feel like I am falling away from this moment, as though I am in danger of disconnecting with reality. Becoming unhinged.
So not only did someone kill Eve, but they seem to have followed my plan to the letter. It’s impossible, I know it is. Some kind of crazy coincidence. And yet there she is in the photos, cold, bloodless marble. As I had pictured her.
Exactly as I had pictured her.
I am lying on my couch and an hour has passed. I don’t remember much. There are strangers here and they are searching through everything. They are wearing strange uniforms. It is as if a UFO has descended and the aliens in hazmats are taking their information-collection duties particularly seriously. They have their scary space tools and little extraterrestrial cooler boxes and they speak in their Martian dialect. They are emptying drawers and sweeping cupboards and scraping DNA samples off everything in sight. They empty the ashes from the BraaiMaster 1000 into a plastic packet. Madinga dangles something silvershiny in front of Sello: Eve’s spare keys. They are promptly confiscated. I look at my hands: my fingertips are black. Inky. How apt.
I don’t remember them taking the prints, and don’t understand why they would do so after saying they had them on file.
The house is a fog of white noise: I can’t hear anything. I wonder what they are hoping to find, and what they will find. I don’t think that anything in my house will tie me to Eve’s murder but it is clear that stranger things have happened. If the person who has done this meant to frame me, then I’m damn sure there will be some evidence planted somewhere in the house that is just out of my reach.
The men swarm out in the same manner they arrived and Madinga says something to me but I don’t hear him. I watch his lips move and then he is also gone, leaving the warrant on the Flokati rug next to me. The sun goes down and I am still on the couch. The darkness is comforting.
The doorbell goes again. It is really dark now and I have to feel my way to the light switch. I think it must be the aliens to take me away but then I hear her voice and I am relieved in a detached kind of way. I let Denise in and she sits on the couch with me.
“You poor baby,” she says, climbs on my lap and straddles me, as if she knows just by looking at me what I have been through today. She slowly kisses my starless fingertips, my forehead, temples, cheekbones. She wraps her arms around me so that our chests are one. She feels weightless apart from where our upper bodies are joined. She pushes my face into her shoulder and strokes the back of my neck.
“How did you know?” I ask her.
“Know what?” she whispers.
“How did you know I needed you tonight?”
“I didn’t,” she says. “I came to say goodbye.”
“No.”
“I’ve packed up most of Eve’s things and sorted out her apartment. I need to go home. Back to my life.”
“No,” I say again. “Don’t.”
She starts kissing me all over again.
“I have to,” she whispers.
I don’t want to be abandoned. Not again.
“I need you,” I say. I have never said this to anyone before.
She is quiet as she pets and strokes me. She tilts back my face and looks into my eyes; sees my vulnerability. I have moved her. I think: this is the most honest moment I have ever had. She leans in and opens my mouth with hers. She rises a little on her knees and pushes my torso and head against the couch and I surrender to her slow, sweet kiss.
I sink.
A whispered afterthought: “Okay.”
24
My Soul On A Silver Platter
I have unplugged my landline and only turn on my cell to listen to messages. This way I can avoid the debtors and the heavy breathers, who may or may not be the same people.
I am under attack. They want my car and my house. Francina has deserted me. People are spying on me. The police are determined to take my freedom. Sifiso wants my soul on a silver platter. In plain English, he wants my manuscript. He hasn’t yet given up on me but I can feel that his prolonged tentative hope is reaching its end. I have reached the end.
I have no proof but I know that someone out there wants me dead. Sometimes I want to just offer myself to them, resign myself to their forces. They watch me. They are just waiting for the right moment before they reach out and snap me up. I am treading in someone’s crosshairs. I’d rather just give up. Like a refugee who walks, unarmed and unprotected, arms lifted above his head. Let them just take my life now instead of this cat-and-mouse game, this sport. I’d rather give them a clear shot.
Sometimes I see them in the house. A head at the foot of my bed, or behind me in the mirror. Sometimes they are perched in the tree outside. When the claustrophobia gets the better of me I go for a run and I see them running, too. Or walking, or grey-bearded, rooting through rubbish bins. Denise doesn’t want to leave me alone and so she stays cooped up with me. Sometimes we don’t go out for days and she doesn’t complain. She says she likes it. We order in groceries and I cook elaborate meals for us. I have to do something. She hardly eats a thing. I’m surprised she can actually exist on so little food. I am working my way through Ferran Adria’s El Bulli cookbook. It takes my mind off the attack and means that I won’t slowly die of scurvy, the way they want me to. It feels good to open the fridge and see that it’s not empty. It’s been a long time, and it makes me feel better. Sometimes I open it to make sure the food is still there. Sometimes I just open it to feel safe. Sometimes I imagine that Denise is one of Them and I h
yperventilate. She knows how to calm me down. It usually involves heavy petting. She tells me that no one is after me, no one wants to kill me, but she doesn’t see the faces.
I have acquired the habit of looking through the peephole to try to catch sight of whoever it is I feel is watching me. They are clever. They always look different. One day it’s a black man in chinos with a rolling walk, next it’s a huge Indian woman in turquoise Lycra, stopping outside my house, ostensibly to look at my roses. They’ve only sent the same person twice. He is tall, shinypale and always wears dark clothes: a black hoodie. He looks at me without even looking at me. When I saw him the second time I felt a cold flame zinging down my spine. I know that he has been sent to kill me. I have named him Edgar.
On a rare occasion we go out together, we find ourselves at a restaurant down the road called The Attic. It’s a kind of sham-chic eatery with old-school brocade wallpaper, kitsch on the walls, and a giant pink jellyfish of a chandelier. The menu recommends a specific wine per course and they offer you amuse-bouches before you order. Their roast chicken is deboned, stuffed with onion and sage, and the texture of the gravy alone deserves a medal. The roast potatoes taste of lemon oil and rosemary. I have two glasses of Stormhoek Barrel 72 Semillon. Denise doesn’t order a main meal but we share the hot chocolate pudding with homemade vanilla bean ice cream.
As we stand to leave, a man on the opposite side of the restaurant laughs loudly and I glance over without meaning to. He is telling a funny story. Something about him is familiar; I can’t think of who he is or how I know him but I am drawn to him. I tell Denise I will meet her outside and I cross the room. He is sitting with a group of young, modish people who could be writers or artists. As soon as he sees me he shuts up and shields his face. His friends look at me, then him, then at me again, puzzled. As I realise who he is I stop in my tracks. Take off his trendy glasses, comb over his fauxhawk and swap his Mingo Lamberti shirt for tweed: it’s Eve’s deaf/mute relative. Except that he is clearly not deaf, or mute, nor does he have terrible fashion sense.
