Janita Lawrence - The Memory of Water

True story! According to my friend the bartender, anyway. So sometimes speaking to people pays off. Look at Yann Martell. The Life Of Pi was Martell telling us the story of what that old codger in the tearoom in India told him. Hungry and broke, Martell wanders into a packed café and has to share a table with this old guy, who rolls into action, saying that he’ll tell Martell a story that will make him believe in God. And hey presto! Suffice to say he probably isn’t poor any more.

I must say, the pressure to speak to every obscure person I meet does pinch my balls. Most obscure people, in fact, have nothing to say at all. By that I mean they have a lot of words, but not a lot to actually say. The pain is exacerbated by the fact that I’m not really a people’s person. I mean, I don’t even really like people, in general. I find most of them a little dull and feel my finite life ticking away, when Mrs. Someone from Somewhere starts telling me what she thinks of the proponents of local trade razing the underprivileged foreign markets which depend on our currency, I have been known to throw my head back and yawn in otherwise polite conversation. You’d think that would put a sock in it but you’d be surprised at how many people don’t get the hint.

“Bungee jumping?” volunteers Eve, sipping her tea.

“Skydiving trumps bungee jumping.”

“Especially if you end up snapping your collarbone,” she smiles. We look at each other for a while.

“You bought me grapes,” I say. I can hear my heart beating.

Eve giggles. “What?”

I swallow, wipe my lips with a knuckle.

“You bought me grapes when I was in hospital.”

“It’s sad that you remember that,” she laughs, teasing me. I play along. I laugh. I take another bite out of my sandwich. The truth is out: I am sad.

Eve is tender with me and asks if I am okay.

“I’ll be okay,” I say, playing it down, thinking of the bald kids. I absent-mindedly wind my wristwatch. It’s like a nervous tic. Eve knows me too well. She dusts the crumbs off her fingers and comes to sit on the table near my chair. She puts her hand on my watch and looks into my eyes.

“You are going to be okay,” she says.

The watch was a gift from Eve when I finished my last book. It’s platinum. I find it is both a gift and a curse. A gift, because every time I look at it, I get warm twinge in my chest, thinking of Eve. A curse because it tick-tocks. Time itself is a gift-curse. Time says: ‘Look here! Here is a precious moment to do something with!’ Then as soon as you try to grasp the moment, it’s gone. And you haven’t done anything. And while you’re thinking about that, there is another moment, and then it too is gone. Cruel, like an eternal game of pass-the-parcel.

After seeing Eve I am melancholic. I seem to be melancholic more and more these days. I actively push pictures of my shuffling, slippered father out of my head. I decide to go for an evening walk to clear my head, shake some endorphins into my bloodstream.

A quick confession: I feel dirtyguilty that while Eve was outside on the phone to someone I excused myself to go to the bathroom and instead, I crept into her bedroom. I didn’t mean to do it but as I passed I caught a glimpse of her bed through the half-closed door and took a step inside. And then another step. Then before I know it I was stroking her headboard and smelling her pillow like a spooky stalker. I had picked up her perfume and was about to spray it before I came to my senses and fled the room. I worry that this is the onset of unpredictable bad behaviour. I am not a man who loses control. My whole life is based on control.

I kick a stone. I can control the stone.

I see the Munchkin again. She is sitting upright with her chest out and her paws elegantly positioned in front of her, like a Negro sphinx. She seems hardly bothered that I’m almost in her personal space so I inch closer and reach out to stroke her and again, she runs away.

My cloudy mood deepens into a thing of despair. I am empty. I feel like I’m being sucked into an existential vacuum. Usually when I hear the word ‘existential’ my eyes roll into the back of my head. Meaning Schmeaning, Life is here for Living. But today I feel like I may be missing out on something. That stomach-heavy idea you get on dark nights that maybe everyone else was right.

As I am falling off to sleep that night I hear a car purr to a stop outside my house. My eyes fly open. Oh God, I think, it’s Psychosally with that Molotov Cocktail. I lie in corpse position: paralysed. I hear light footsteps outside. I wait for an explosion, or automatic gunfire, or the ragged revving of a chainsaw. I breathe as quietly as I can. Just when I think I’m being over-suspicious I am jolted out of bed by a racket of glass shattering. I cry out. The car drives away. I run towards the noise: I need to find the bomb before it blows up and takes my house with it. I stumble in the dark, trampling the broken glass, hyperventilating, till I find the missile. I pick it up and am about to hurl it out when I realise it’s a rock.

Mood today: Much Improved. I’ve had a fantastic idea. Instead of moping around in my bandaged feet and infinite loneliness I’m going to throw a party. It will be the thing of legends. Think Malletier, think Hugh Hefner, think of the champagne-guzzlers in The Great Gatsby . I’ll have the best caterers, buy the best booze. We’ll be gorging ourselves on Beluga and Kristal, oysters and Veuve, abalone and Campari cocktails. I’ll order two hundred fresh oranges, and someone to squeeze them. I’ll invite the paparazzi, to keep them off my back about the new novel. Sifiso, too, of course, ha! He’ll never know what’s hit him. I’ll get a DJ – God knows this house is big enough for one. I’ve never really had a proper housewarming so I sort of owe it to the place. These perfect wooden floors have never been danced on! This lounge has never had the sablesticky pleasure of a chocolate fountain! My couch has never had… oh wait, it has.

Okay… so… guest list… Eve. Sifiso and his wife. Uhhh. Frank From Football. Do the hired help count?

Me. Do I count?

Oh, I can invite Francina. She’s always up for a bit of a jive. She’ll bring a few mates. It will also make me look a bit more PC, having a few friends ‘of colour’. They will probably also be the only ones who, strictly speaking, can dance. Note to self: remember to put chicken on the menu. I can invite the neighbours to stop them from calling the police at three in the morning when there’s a naked drunk bloke singing on their front lawn, setting off the sprinklers. It’s happened before. I developed a nasty chest cough afterwards.

But clearly that won’t be enough if I want this party to be of gargantuan proportions. This is probably when liking people comes in handy.

I toy with a few different party concepts before deciding on ‘Moonshine’. I had ‘Poirot’ (murder mystery party: cheesy), ‘Memoirs of a Geisha’ (with attending Geishas and naked Japanese nymphs wrapped in cling film and sashimi: done, done, done), ‘Naked Lunch’ (fig leaves for all: but reckoned Francina had been through enough without subjecting her to Mugwumps and the Interzone), and ‘Monty Python’s Flying Circus’ (cheerful midgets, tightrope-walkers and fire-eaters would be fun, but it’s just not literary enough), and in the end I settled for something a bit more conservative, for the simple reason that I realised in a flash of wonder and light (yes, I was in the shower) that I am actually Jay Gatsby. A few decades late and the wrong nationality, as am decidedly un-American, but I am the man who made Fitzgerald famous. Not quite as gay (I don’t wear white suits and panama hats but I do admit to having episodes where I throw silk shirts around the room like a psychotic ballerina). And of course there’s Daisy.