The Memory of Water

by JT Lawrence

  Emily dived down first. I thought I’d give her a head start, her being small, and a girl. I watched her wild underwater kicking as she tried to reach the bottom. She stayed down a bit longer than I thought she would and, just as I was about to worry, her head popped out of the water, grinning and gasping, a stone clasped in her hand. It was a good game and we played for a while, piling up our treasures until the time that Emily didn’t come up. I thought she was playing a joke so pretended not to worry for a while but then it seemed too long, so I went under with open eyes trying to spot her ballooning white dress in the browncloudy water.

  I saw her right away, swept a small distance way from me, struggling against some unseen thing, some watery ghost. I swam towards her with every muscle pumping and when I reached her, I went under to find what was holding her down. She was fighting hard for air and managed a lungful every now and then but her head stayed mostly underwater. I went under again and again to see what it was and I flailed around her in the hope of somehow detaching her.

  Only then, when the desperation hit, did I think of calling for help. I broke the water and yelled with all my might. I screamed and shouted, but the dry world was still and quiet. Em was slowing down now, not kicking as vigorously as before.

  I screamed for help again then ducked under. That time I saw her dress was caught on something: a root or branch, a sharp black arm pulling her under. I grabbed it with both hands, trying to break it, but without being able to touch the river bottom my arms were powerless. I tried to unhook Emily’s dress but she was pulling too hard in the opposite direction. I came up again, gasping for air, with not enough breath in me to yell. The only thing left to do was to push her under and at the same time, unhook her dress. She was pedalling in slow motion then, as if asleep, but when I tried to push her down, further into the water, she woke up and thrashed around, kicking me and scratching my cheek. She was almost low down enough; I could feel the material give somewhat with my right hand. I pushed her harder, deeper, and the dress was released.

  A feeling, a golden feeling came over me. Emily would be okay. I brought her to the surface and looked up in triumph. A small white face stared back at me from the faraway house then disappeared into a run. That’s when I noticed that Emily wasn’t breathing. I floated her in my arms, not sure what to do, when there was a yell and a blast of water in my face.

  A man I’d never seen before snatched my sister out of my arms and handed her upwards to another man standing on the bank, who laid her on the grass and began beating her chest and breathing into her small blue lips.

  The man in the water was as big as a giant. He lifted me with one arm and carried me out of the water. On land, he placed his vast hand on my shoulder as we watched, then he swapped positions with the other man. On land, my heart was sprinting, my legs were riverweed. Eventually they stopped beating her and kissing her. The giant picked her up in her sticky white dress and cradled her in his arms.

  I looked up at him, the man like a tree, the image forever burnt into my mind: a Monument. An animal noise made us look over to the other side of the river, where the houses were, and the white face came racing toward us. Mom. Gasping, shaking, all four of us dripped.

  We waited for the screams in silence and dread.

  49

  The Memory of Water

  “She saw you?” he asks. He is as grey as the room.

  I nod. It has been a difficult secret to keep, and at last I am free of it.

  “She could only have imagined the worst,” I say.

  He sits back. “Yes,” he says, taking a while to grasp the implications.

  “Dad, she left because she couldn’t live with what she saw that day. She couldn’t live with a murderer for a son.”

  Dad is shaking his head again. “What a waste,” he mutters with clenched teeth, “What a goddamn shame. Why didn’t you tell us?”

  “What could I say? At first I didn’t want to get into trouble, I couldn’t imagine being responsible for such a loss, such heartbreak. Then later – I felt like a murderer – I did whatever I could to pretend it never happened. She would be alive today if it weren’t for me.”

  We are both crying openly now. He reaches into his top pocket for a crumpled tissue.

  “I loved Emily, Dad. I loved her. I would never have hurt her.”

  “Yes,” he nods, and blows his nose. “I know that. We all loved her. Perhaps too much. She made us … skinless.”

  An avalanche of relief: I have confessed. I have confessed. I sob. I say that I am lost.

  After a long pause, he says, “Sometimes getting lost is part of finding your way.”

  When it is over we stand and call the guard. My father hugs me once more but he is shaking and it leaves me feeling empty. The cell is locked and I am on my own. It astounds me that after such a revelation the building is still standing, the cell is exactly how it was before. A shift has taken place in me; you’d expect the tornado in my head to have affected the landscape too. You’d expect roofs to be lifted, walls smashed, pets missing. But instead here I am in a little cell, looking at my hands, awaiting my fate.

  The feeling comes at me full-force, with no warning tease. I stand up and my body – exhausted, bruised, dried out – is filled with hot-blooded purpose. It’s the fingertingle. The zone. The feeling that if I don’t write now, if I don’t put these words on paper then they – and I – will be lost forever. I shout for the guard and he tortures me with his lazy sway.

  “Pen!” I shout, “Please! Pen and paper!”

  He looks worried.

  “They said you would ask for that,” he says. “I don’t know.”

  “What don’t you know? You don’t need to know anything, just bring me something to write with. I will pay you! I will give you anything you want!”

  “I don’t know how they knew. They told me to tell them when you were ready.”

  Despite my delirious state, this sounds ominous.

  “Who is ‘they’?” I ask. And then I understand.

  “I’ll confess,” I promise, “I will write everything down. Whatever it takes, I will do it. Just bring the pen.”

  “You are ready,” he says, and leaves.

  While I wait, I think of what I am going to write. Words, before so aloof, now tumble down on me. The floodgate is opening and I brace myself. Of course, I will write about this adventure of mine. This insane, nonsensical exploit my life has become. I will write about everything that has happened to me since I became blocked a year ago, about what it has taken to unblock me. And this time, I will write the real story: I will finally write about Emily. Not in the way I used to write about other people, using and discarding them, but a different kind of writing, with truth and integrity. The confession I owe to her and the world. The unwritten, unreadable diary I carry: The Memory of Water.

  But how does it end? Sitting in a cell being bathed in a glorious revelation is not satisfying enough. Besides, I am raw from the encounter with my father. I need a better ending: the story demands it. I’m going to have to wait and see; but for now, as far as I can imagine, there could be three different endings. The first one involves the protagonist being sentenced to life in jail. He is made to wear orange overalls and eat out of his hat, buying the guards Mister Delivery KFC so that he can keep his small luxuries: a pen, a book, a toothbrush. And his cappuccino machine. He would peel potatoes and lift weights and watch Days Of Our Lives during the day and scribble all night. He would write on smuggled-in paper and when that ran out, tissues, toilet paper, and chickenwinggreasy serviettes. Like Nelson Mandela. Okay, nothing like Nelson Mandela, apart from, well, illicit writing in prison. Life would be a heady mix of trying to stay alive despite the rusted jerry-built shivs, the guns, the rapists, the gold-toothed guards and the gangs. Christ, imagine the material; imagine the murderers I could meet, the things I could write about. It almost makes me want to go until reality hits and I realise that I’ll probably end up in some maximum-security inferno. I probably
won’t survive the first lights-out. The second ending is a little more optimistic. My lawyer develops magical powers of persuasion overnight and somehow wins my case for me, pro-bono. I am acquitted and set free among an insane media frenzy. My back issues start selling again and so Starling & Co. decide to renew my contract, enabling me to buy back my house. I spend the days creating brilliant new novels, having long showers and eating paninis.

  But it’s too easy and karma isn’t that forgiving. Something will have to give and I guess it will be the most important thing. My writer’s block will return and I will never be able to write again. That will be my punishment. I will have this crazy story to tell and I just won’t be able to get the words down. I have used so many people; it makes sense that the fruit of that abuse is toxic, even though my intentions weren’t.

  In the beginning of my writing career my motives were pure enough: to tell the truth. Writing is above all, telling the truth. But it’s not sustainable if you don’t live truthfully, which I haven’t done since I was eight years old. And now that it’s too late I know what Eve said that night was true: that my writing is a gift and if I misuse it, it will – and did – abandon me.

  I feel I have turned a corner now. I understand that the universe wants more out of a person than I have been offering. It is time to live a more authentic writing life.

  The third ending. I can hear voices through the swing-doors, down the corridor, low and muffled. I want to tell someone about my epiphany. Anyone will do at this stage, even Sello. Their muted voices grow louder as they near. I stand up and try to look through the bars but the angle is wrong, so I pace for a while and sit down again. I wonder if they will bring me a pen. I perch on the end of the bed and play imaginary piano on my knees. And I wait.

  50

  Waking Up Without Your Legs

  Sometimes, things in life happen which shock you on such a fundamental level, you know for sure that you will never be the same person again. They don’t happen often, and perhaps some people don’t ever experience it. It’s like being hit by a car you didn’t see coming, despite looking both ways before stepping off the pavement. Like waking up without your legs, or being turned to dust after being caught by an early dawn.

  The first time it happened to me was that summer in Pringle Bay when I held my sleeping sister in my arms. And now it happens again. My heart stops beating, the hair on the back of my neck stands up, and the air turns to clear jelly. The double doors swing open and in she strides.

  “True friends stab you in the front.”

  - Oscar Wilde

  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.”