Janita Lawrence - The Memory of Water

I haven’t had it in a while. I keep hoping that my muse will rescue me, lift me out of this pit of desperation. I try to have faith but when you show up to the page every day for over a year and get nothing, you start to feel a little bereft. I’ve tried to fake it, tried to force it, but that never gets me past a couple of hundred bad words. I gaze at copies of my published work and wonder where the hell all those sentences came from. And what a schmuck I was, taking it all for granted. The Catastrophe of Success, as Tennessee puts it, embalmed by fame… and then, nothing. The cold abyss.

This blankness, this snowstorm, this nothingness makes me reckless. I start thinking I should do more, travel more, taste more, try more, fuck more. I am cast adrift in pages and pages of white paper and I realise that I will do whatever it takes to get me writing again.

Iwon’t bore the page with details of my hangover. All I’ll say is that on a scale of one to ten it’s a robust nine. The only other time I have ever had a bigger headache is when I had undiagnosed, untreated malaria in Lagos and spent a few delirious days sweating in my seedy hotel room, until a maid started screaming that I was dead and they arranged for me to be taken to a hospital. I was touched that she took it so much to heart but later found out that she was a deeply superstitious person and thought that I had a juju on me (Nigerian curses are contagious) and so was yelling for her own life, not mine. The worst parts of malaria were the crazy nighttimes, when I never really knew where I was and my dreams just became more and more surreal. At first I thought the symptoms were the side-effects of the malaria meds; then I suspected food poisoning; then that I had been abducted and locked in this pokey room with its resident cockroaches. Now there are cockroaches and then there are Lagos Cockroaches: the size of your thumb and built like army tanks. Pesticideresistant-waterresistant-fireresistant-heelofyourshoeresistant. In the beginning it freaked me out, turning on the hotel light and seeing these ungodly things scatter for shelter, so quickly, wondering if they are imagined. Lying on the stained bed in the darkness, the bugs became less bashful and eventually came out to play. I remember – whether imagined or not – how they felt on my exposed skin, how their hard thoraxes shone in the moonlight, how their needle-like feelers felt in my ears, my nostrils. And the noise they made: scratchycrickety. At times when I thought I was coming out of the stupor I wondered if I had conjured them up but they swiftly asserted their existence: in the minibar fridge, crawling out of the porcelain basin plughole to surprise me while I was brushing my teeth and, once, a crushed corpse in my underwear. I almost jumped out of the window.

Lagos is a noisy city – especially at night. It comes alive with a raw, pulsing energy, like Rio’s ugly sister with colourful litter and ringing gunshots and humidity that smacks you in the face. An old English professor of mine who has a reputation for his persistent puns and poignant turns of phrase refers to Nigeria as the Armpit of Africa. I’ve never known an entire country to be described so aptly in only three words.

So while my head feels like Hiroshima and my lacerated feet are stinging, I know that in theory it could be far, far worse. That’s something I have going for me: a bank of really bad experiences – which sounds awful but in reality is great, because I can always compare my current state of affairs with some of my worst and come out feeling like Lucky Jim. Maybe that’s why God made childbirth so painful, so that when your life is wrecked by children you know it could be worse. I keep the idea of my mother at bay. It could always be worse. I throw back two Disprins and a bottle of water. I’m sure they’ll dissolve in my stomach.

I’m sorry I didn’t get to enjoy the twins. Every time I think about them I get a pleasant twinge in my pants. I’ve tried a lot of things with girls (and the occasional guy) and have had more than my fair share of ménage à trois , my first going back as far as high school (which turned out to be a disaster, as you can imagine, no matter how much I closed my eyes and thought of the theory of Pythagoras). I still remember the girl, her face pinched with the shock of what had just happened. I guess the twin fantasy will remain just that, for now.

It is only when I walk through the house and see the devastation that it hits me, hard in the bottom of my stomach. Eve. Sucker punch.

The lounge floor is muddied with chocolate. The chandelier hangs askew.

I think she is lost to me forever. I’m not sure friends recover from that kind of fight. Especially after – I smack my tender forehead – God, I tried to kiss her. What the fucking fuck was I thinking? The shame makes me sweat.

I should call to apologise but I’d rather pull out my own toenails.

There are smashed flutes and tumblers and splinters of glass throughout the house, as well as the obligatory red wine stains (Flokati rug in foyer, wooden floor and deck chaise) and cigarette burns (sitting room Persian).

Maybe it’s best to cut our ties altogether. She wants me to be someone I’m not and I want her very badly, just as she is. Besides, she seems to have become morally superior, and morally superior people are like piles.

The air outside is hot and dry. I retrieve my phone from the bush. I can see beer bottles at the bottom of the pool. Who knows what else is in there. I’ll have to have the pool drained. Otherwise I can imagine, mid-swim, mid-lark, stepping hard on the stem of a broken martini glass, the sharp point being driven through the thick sole-skin and muscle, embedding itself deep in the soft tissue, like the needle of an angry urchin. I would have to pull myself out and end up bleeding to death on the bright green grass of the slope, only to be discovered by the caterers coming to pick up the last of their bains-marie. Or worse: a clucking Francina.

Not-so-celebrated Author Impaled on Designer Cocktail Glass.

God, the humiliation.

I could make it work, though. Just before my final breath I could hurl myself back into the swimming pool and float for my mock Gatsbyesque ending.

Maybe Eve and I were just caught up in the passion of the moment. Maybe there is something to be salvaged. But what is the point when I know that I can never have her? Who wants a friend who looks like Eve? It’s like being given a Maserati on blocks.

In Peter Godwin’s memoir ‘When A Crocodile Eats The Sun’ he expounds the theory that people love harder in Africa. He writes that in Africa, death is never far away – ‘Death has a seat at every table – and urgent winds whisper memento mori : You too shall die. You feel perishable, temporary, transient. You feel mortal.’. Maybe that’s why, he says, you seem to live more vividly in Africa. The ‘drama of life [here] is amplified by its constant proximity to death.’.

People love harder on this continent where things can be taken from you in a single violent fingerontrigger or flickofablade. I wonder if this goes a small way to explain why my feelings for Eve are so intense. God, I love her. She riles me with her horny body and virtuous lips. What will I do without her? My inky cloak descends upon me.

I look around, my arms drop to my sides and I feel the now-familiar tentacles of depression wrapping around my heart.

Just before I drop to my knees a spectacular idea startles me. I feel as though I have been stung.

It hits me between the eyes as clean and sharp as an archer’s arrow.

My whole body gasps.

It’s The Answer. To Everything.

The only other thought: that there is no other way.