Janita Lawrence - The Memory of Water

“Mister Harris?” Madinga asks, rather too late in the game.

“Present.” I say.

“We have some bad news for you.”

I knew it! I knew it! Something horrible has happened. Cops don’t just show up at your door for nothing. Madinga pronounced ‘bad’ like ‘bed’. Bed news.

“And some questions.”

“Well,” I say, “can I have the good news first?”

Madinga blinks at me. Intent, Sello looks at the magnets on my refrigerator. They don’t have time to lighten the mood. They prefer the Wham-Bam approach to police work.

“Mister Harris,” Sello says, and my face pales in anticipation. “Evelyn Shaw was found murdered this morning.”

His words take the breath from my lungs.

I realise mid-chortle that I’m chortling and stop. There are blades slicing up my brain.

“What do you mean?”

Sello takes a moment and then repeats himself. And still it takes a while for the words to make sense to me.

Eve. Dead. This morning.

When I finally grasp it I feel like the world is tumbling out of my body. I try to breathe in and out so that I don’t faint on the hard shiny floor tiles, but I’m not doing such a great job. I’m dizzy. I hold onto the kitchen countertop with one hand and scratch my head with the other. Then I put my hands behind my head, elbows akimbo, and walk around the kitchen trying to get oxygen into my lungs. The pressed ceiling above me is a blur.

“ Dead?” I say, hoping that I have heard wrong.

“Eve is dead? Murdered?” Hoping for anything but what these indifferent men have just told me. I know I’m pulling a strange face and I’m sorry they are here to see it.

“What happened? How do you know it was murder?” I ask.

Sello shrugs. I feel like punching him in the face.

“A car was spotted at the bottom of the river this morning by a pedestrian crossing the bridge. A beige Land Rover. We pulled it up and she was in there. We thought it was strange that… that she didn’t try to get out – then we saw the lady had been killed – before she went in the river.”

“What river?” I demanded.

“The Vaal,” says Sello without taking his eyes off my Juicerator. I realise Sello isn’t rude; he’s just not good at dealing with delivering bed news.

I feel like laughing, smacking the guys on their backs and looking for a hidden camera because I can’t imagine this news to be true.

That’s when I experience a searing pain in my stomach. As if allergic to the lethal combination of fear and heartbreak, my spleen twists, my intestines knot, my kidneys burst. I double over. I hear the men speaking their ambush tongue again. In a jerk I stand up to run and make it to the guest toilet, just in time to heave. Afterwards it’s dry and bitter in my mouth, like citrus pith, a drought-conceived lemon turned inside out. I check out my reflection and see red eyes floating in pale skin. I put my forehead against the mirror of the medicine cabinet. I sit on the edge of the bath. When I can breathe again I splash water on my face. I walk back to the kitchen and slump down on my chair. What a catastrophe, what a disaster. Someone is killed in the same way a writer has planned. Death imitating art. Meta-murder. What a cliché!

I sit with my head in my hands. It is perhaps the one time in my life that I have been truly speechless.

“We have some questions,” says Madinga.

I shake my head. No one talks for a while. Eventually I get out a few stuttered words.

“I don’t think I can answer any questions right now.”

Laurel and Hardy look at each other again. They have a silent code. Sello takes out his notepad and lays it on the table. Then he takes a pen out of his shirt pocket and clicks it open next to his ear.

“Jesus Christ!” I explode. “Can’t you people have some fucking sensitivity? I’ve just found out that the woman I love has been found dead, for God’s sake. Can’t you leave your Goddamn questions for another day?”

Sello is now looking at my glass toaster with a faraway look in his eyes. I expect him to start whistling any second.

“I’m sorry,” says Madinga, “but we will ask you now.”

I bang my fist on the table. I want to roar at them and chase them from my house.

“Why? Do you think I had something to do with it? With killing Eve?” I splutter.

Madinga shakes his head. No, no, no, he is saying, no, well, maybe.

“We have no suspects yet,” he says, “it is too early for that. We only ID’d her body a few hours ago. But we need to ask questions early.”

I glare at him.

“It’s routine,” he says.

I can’t argue with that. I will sit here and answer their questions like a good citizen and then show them on their way. As long as they don’t ask to look around I should be okay.

“How well did you know Evelyn Shaw?”

How well did Gatsby know Daisy?

“Very well.”

Madinga sees that I’m not going to be generous with my answers. Sello draws invisible squiggles on the paper in front of him, trying to make his dry ballpoint to work.

“Were you romantically involved?”

“I don’t see how that’s any of your business, or how that has a bearing on the investigation.”

“Were you or not?” asks Madinga. As polite as he is, he’s not going to be pushed around by an arty suburbian like me.

“No.”

“But you said earlier that you loved her.”

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“How did you mean it?”

“I’ve known Eve for years, we were close. I loved her in that way.”

Madinga’s dark fingers play a piano melody on my table.

“What were you fighting about the other night?”

“The other night?”

“The night of your party, last weekend,” says Sello, glad to chip in.

“Oh. It was nothing, just a few words said in a moment of anger.”

“Did you push her to the floor?”

“What? No!”

“I have a witness who says you were shouting at her and then you pushed her down.”

“Well, I didn’t. Did you ask that person if he was drunk at the time?”

Madinga doesn’t answer.

“But you admit to being angry with her.”

“Yes,” I say, “but friends get angry with one another. It doesn’t mean that they go around stabbing each other and chucking cars off bridges on a whim. Yes, I was pissed off with her and yes, we raised our voices, but then it was over. She left the party. You can ask my domestic worker, Francina, she was here. She saw Eve leave.”

“Is she around today?” asks Madinga, eyeing my smelly, crumpled shirt.

All of a sudden I’m really worried that something has happened to Francina too.

“She’s missing,” I blurt out. I motion to the messy state of the house.

“Well, I mean, not missing per se, but she hasn’t come in to work this week and that’s really unusual. And she’s not answering her phone.”

I give Sello her name, cell number and home address.

“How did you know the car went off the bridge?” asks Sello.

“Because. Because that’s what you said.”

“No,” says Madinga, “I said the car was spotted by a pedestrian on the bridge.”

“Well, I obviously misheard. It’s a lot to take in.” Fuck.

Sello makes his notes in long scrawls of vernacular.

I’ve had enough now. I’ve passed my being-polite-to-cops threshold. They stand up and Sello shakes my hand. I’m strangely touched by this.

I let them out of the front door and buzz the security gate for them.

Madinga nods a chary goodbye.

I go back to the kitchen, back to the scene of devastation. Everything I look at has Eve’s face in it. I have to do something, something with my hands or I’ll go mad. I turn on the Juicerator and watch the shiny blade spin. I take the biggest knife I can find in the stabbing block and grab an apple. I brutally chop it in half, then quarters, and feed it to the hungry machine. It makes short work of it – a chew, a gargle, and the apple has vanished, leaving a tot of cloudy apple juice in the jug. I feed it another apple, drawn and quartered, then a few apricots. I put in a pawpaw and a pineapple, skin and all. A peeled banana. A carrot. The jug is full now, past its ‘max’ marking on the side. I throw in all the kiwi fruit in the fridge. A guava quivers in the fruit bowl. The jug starts to overflow. A punnet of blueberries. I can smell the engine burning. Soon it will explode and I’ll be covered in flaming engine parts and juice. I want to explode along with it.