Janita Lawrence - The Memory of Water

I also cross the following off the list: death by nicotine or Mr Muscle Window injection; hit-and-run; ricin-laced umbrella stab; silver body paint; gas leak; butterfly punch; arsenic-in-soup; puffer fish in the shower; strangulation; pillow-smothering. I find pillow-smothering such an interesting one. It’s a pillow, for Christ’s sake. Pillows are clean and soft and are associated with dreams and comfort and sex. In my opinion only Very Bad People would turn that into a murder weapon. A gunshot is so quick and can take place with half an intention. Pillow smothering requires a full two minutes of heavy-handedness and a sense of commitment I just don’t think I have.

After hours of throwing a paper ball against the wall I realise that the answer may not be in my brain and that I need some outside help.

On the way to the library I feel fit. I haven’t felt this good in seasons. I feel so good that I stop at the carwash to have the Jag given the platinum treatment. What it really needs is a good service, a new tail light and a bit of a panel beating but I haven’t been able to afford that for a while. The sorrowful glances which come my way for having a dirty, dinged sports car is enough to drive anyone off the edge. Even taxi drivers shake their heads at me. But today money is no object for my beautiful baby. As long as they don’t cut up the credit card. It occurs to me that I am spending money I don’t have on a car I don’t own. Ah, credit is a beautiful thing! I watch the attendant swipe the card and wait. Three, two, one – and yes! – the payment goes through. I turn the key and the nice carwash man waves me off. He may as well be waving a chequered flag. I pop the car into first, rev a little to warm her up, and accelerate in a wide arc onto the main road.

God, Jo’burg is beautiful in summer. Everything is so green. I can’t help feeling optimistic. I love going to the library. Especially nowadays when no one really needs a library because of Kindle and Google. It’s like having a huge revolving bookcase all to oneself. I walk up the corkscrew staircase with a bounce in my step.

My mother introduced me to libraries. It was ‘our thing’: books and reading. Emily would use her books to make stables for her fragrant pastelplastic ponies while Mom and I smirked at her.

If we had been good children during the day, she would let us climb into bed with her and read to us. One child on either side, with the book balanced on the incline of her warm, slanted thighs. I would edge nearer and nearer as the story progressed so that my whole body was in contact with hers. She would fidget and tell me to move over. ‘Claustrophobic’ was one of the first words I learnt. I craved proximity to her as if I had some kind of prescience of her leaving us. As if I knew that one day she would just vanish, and take colour with her.

But I still have those memories; she couldn’t take those away, those golden hours. I still have Alice in Wonderland , The Wizard of Oz, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory . Sometimes I wonder if I truly did love books as much as I remember, or if I was so desperate for her attention that I just grabbed on to the only thing that she would – with reluctance – offer me. In true Oedipal fashion I guess I had a love/hate relationship with my mother’s world of fiction. It erratically offered me the bliss of library trips and bedtime stories, but more often it took our mother away from us.

At first I didn’t understand the lucky logic of libraries. Books for free? As often as you wanted? It defied all I had learnt in my five years of being. Amazed at my appetite for words, my mother coerced some friends into registering for library cards and then handing them over to us, so that we could borrow thirty books at a time. She would wink at me if the librarian seemed sniffy, then we’d giggle to our ‘getaway car’, clutching our precious plunder.

First I case the joint. Familiarise myself with the categories and layout. Then I move closer: grazing book spines with my fingers as I go. I seize any title I think will come in handy and when the load becomes too heavy, carry them over to the most private reading table I can find. There are whole books dedicated to anthrax and letter bombs. The selection process having gone well, I make myself comfortable and start taking notes.

I pore over books with titles like Alchemy of Bones , An Almost Perfect Murder , Arsenic Under the Elms, Getting Away With Murder, In The Wake Of The Butcher, The Encyclopaedia of Murder, In Cold Blood, and Assassin!

I discover concepts like seppuku (Japanese ritual disembowelment, hara-kiri style). I discover the difference between hydrazine and chloroform.

When I’ve finally read all I can about bloody and bloodless ways to shuffle off this mortal coil, I decide to take the rest of the books home. The bug-eyed librarian glowers at me as she sweeps the barcode reader over the five books I’ve chosen. Her mouth is a small pink pucker. A cat’s bum. I think of my mother winking. I smile at her, which only seems to alarm her further, and skip out of there.

After two days of obsessive note-taking and more visits to the library I feel I have absorbed every relevant thing I can from the written word. Now it’s time to move on to popular culture. I go to my local DVD store and pick up a stack of murder mysteries, true-crime documentaries and enough microwave popcorn to stuff a horse. I pay very careful attention. I try to identify the mistakes the killer makes before the detective does. Sometimes I end up watching a scene over and over.

Nurse Daisy De Melker was caught only after poisoning her third victim. Before that she killed her previous husbands by sneaking strychnine into their daily fare. In those days pink strychnine was in fashion, which turned the bones of her prey pink. They hanged Daisy after finding evidence of arsenic in the thermos she prepared for her son the day he died.

‘Son of Sam’ mailman killer, David Berkowitz, despite being trained in Vietnam guerrilla warfare, made the mistake of parking his cream-coloured Ford Galaxy in the area where he shot those who were to be his last victims. In the car they found a loaded submachine gun and one of his infamous letters to the police. The lesson here is if you get away with too much, you get sloppy. Don’t get sloppy.

Over the years, Belle Sorensen Gunness (also known as the Black Widow) killed as many men as she could persuade to marry her and cashed in on the insurance. She also killed her ranch hands and some of her children. Her sister blamed Belle’s first husband who, in public, kicked the pregnant Belle in her stomach, resulting in her losing the baby.

Moses Sithole, South Africa’s most reviled serial killer, murdered over forty people, before making the mistake of using his real name on an application form to lure a victim. The court verdict took three hours and Sithole was sentenced to over two thousand years in jail.

Coral Eugene Watts used to drown women in baths to keep their spirits from escaping. Herman Mudgett lured people to his hundred-room torture castle where he would throw them down an elevator shaft and later dissect the bodies. He sold the reconstructed skeletal models to medical schools. Charles Manson loved the Beatles and made his spaced-out groupies call him Jesus Christ. Former boy-scout Richard Angelo injected his patients with Pavulon and then ‘saved their lives’. Sometimes the latter didn’t happen. Aileen Wournos, famous for killing at least seven men, was finally tracked down at a biker bar called The Last Resort.

Who were the killers that weren’t caught? Jack The Ripper, the bag-headed Zodiac killer, the Cleveland Torso murderer. And whoever killed Bubbles Schroeder.