Janita Lawrence - The Memory of Water

I wash my face, gingerly, trying not to touch my swollen nose. It will scar and be misshapen. I know I should go to Dr. Olaf to have it set but I feel like I deserve this impediment, just like I deserve the pain that is everywhere in my body. I am numb already but drink Glenfiddich out of the bottle anyway. I’m hoping that I will in time click back, uncrumple, heal. I wish that fate could have taken me instead of my Eve but now I realise that I am dying too. Only Eve didn’t have to suffer this torturous, slow decay.

In the mirror a purple raccoon stares back at me.

Only people who have been broken will know this feeling: that nothing matters anymore. It’s when things get so bad that you resign yourself to never being happy again, to living a sham of a life. It’s like having a permanent subtitle stamped on your vision: Nothing Matters . It’s there when you close your eyes to go to sleep at night and it’s there the next morning when you wake up, before you have time to think that this day will be better. It’s especially apparent when you are brushing your teeth or trying to summon the energy to lift your arms to wash your hair in the shower. Apart from the subtitle there is also a kind of blurriness to the picture. Whatever the opposite is of rose-tinted glasses – maybe they are indigo shades – too dark to see through properly, making flowers and reflections look fuzzy and black.

Meaning is hidden.

You would think that Nothing Matters makes the pain less, because whatever is causing you the pain doesn’t matter, but unfortunately it escapes this neat logic, and instead, the more life hurts, the more it doesn’t matter, so the more it hurts.

Francina is still AWOL and my house is chaotic. I knew I wouldn’t be able to hold it together without her. The anarchic state of the place reflects my state of mind: spiralling. I know that I should start cleaning but I’m surrounded by such dark energy that I’m finding it difficult to feed myself, never mind pick up a dustbuster.

Eve’s violent death is sitting in my chest, hot and cold and heavy. With this come the mental Polaroids of the funeral: Eve’s toad-skinned aunt, the mute man, warm whisky in a teacup once my glass was shattered, pain, a bag of frozen peas, and rubies on green grass. Mixed in are the foggy memories of Emily’s funeral: being suffocated by the hot floral nylon dresses of well-meaning friends, the cloying sweetness of lemon cake icing, Mom, blank, looking like one of her Vermeer paintings. The smell of the over-polished timber pews. The chocolate-box picture of Em, blown up and framed for the ceremony. Dad looking like he should be the one in the coffin.

I realise that I have been standing in one spot for a very long time, staring at the state of the kitchen in some kind of zombie trance. There is just too much stuff. Too much mess. Too many memories.

I need to get out of the house. In an act of desperation I hit the tarmac in my designer running gear that I bought a year ago and have never worn except to try it on.

I stretch my calves on the grass verge and can’t help feeling like an idiot. Like someone who is pretending to be a runner. While I pretend to warm up my ankles I see the little Munchkin again. Isn’t that what they call the singing midgets in the Wizard of Oz? I think of how I am like the wizard. Orchestrating the show of my life only to be revealed as a fraud and a bad fraud at that.

Dorothy tells the wizard that he is a bad man, to which the wizard responds something like,”A bad wizard, but not a bad man.”

I fear that I am the inverse. Or worse, that I am bad at both.

She meows at me, narrows her yellow eyes. The base of her tail shakes like a rattlesnake. I know now that she won’t let me approach her, so I just keep still and try to appear non-threatening, which is relatively easy when you’re wearing Polyshorts.

She meows again and minces towards me. I crouch with caution. She is within stroking reach but I resist the temptation. She blinks at me. I narrow my eyes at her. And then she is gone, tail high in the air, as if I have bored her.

I ease into the run, with Sylvia chiming in her encouragement for every kilometre I reach. We are officially living in the future; I know this because my shoe talks to me when I run. She tells me how far I’ve gone, whether I’m running fast enough or not, and always congratulates me on my longest run or fastest time. If I was really dedicated I would plug it into my computer to log my runs and then I would have a graph of my performance. It’s straight out of the sci-fi comics I used to read as a kid.

On the mental rim of the memories of the funerals there is something more painful. Too intense to think about. For a moment I think that I am losing the battle and that the throbbing stuff will come crashing through, but in the end I win and it recedes. It is grey, stifling, acrid. I try to push it back as far as it will go, but I can tell that it is only a matter of time before it will break free and swirl through my body. It makes me run faster. My lungs and leg muscles burn, but it feels good.

Still broken: there is only one thing for this misery and that is to see how much more miserable I can possibly become. I decide to visit my dad.

I spend less time at Woolworth’s than usual. I feel self-conscious because people are staring at my blue and broken face. Usually I enjoy the attention but today it feels like everyone can see my dirty secret. I grab a few things I know my father will like. There’s no point shopping for myself – I have no appetite. And there is no Francina to cook. I stand at the shelf of tinned goods looking for sardines, thinking I’ll probably have more luck looking at the pet food section.

“Hello,” she says to me, as if we’d known each other all our lives. Her voice is charcoal.

“Hello,” I deadpan. For once, I’m not interested. I flash my eyes at her and back at the shelf. Something tingles. Avoiding eye contact, I grab a tin of something from the shelf.

“You were at the funeral,” she says.

I turn to her. It’s Tattoo Girl. Redlippedsilkshirtedinkskinned beauty. I definitely know her from somewhere.

“Yes,” I say, fingering my coconut milk.

“You were bleeding,” she says, and points to my nose.

“Yes,” I touch it. “Yes, I was.”

“Interesting thing to do at a funeral,” she says.

“Bleed?” I ask.

Husky laugh. “That too, but I meant… have a fist fight.”

“ Ja ,” I say, “it wasn’t my idea.”

Her lips twist into a scarlet smile. She has the most amazing eyelashes.

“It looks sore.”

“You should see the other guy.”

The laugh again.

“I should be going,” I say, motioning towards the junk food aisle.

“Yes,” she says, and watches me walk away.

I join the queue, wait in line and pay. Only when I reach my car do I realise I have made a mistake. There was definitely something between us, some spark, maybe something more interesting than a spark. I jog back to the store to see her but she has disappeared. I check the aisles and the parking lot but she is gone.

Dad seems to be in better spirits this time. The front doorbell is still not working but I knock hard enough and he hears me.

“Good God, son,” he exclaims when he sees my black eyes and purple nose. “It looks like you’ve gone ten rounds with Muhammed.”

He means the boxer, not the prophet.

“Was it for a girl?” he asks, mischief gleaming in his eyes. The poor bastard. I think if I had nice wife and few sprogs bouncing off the walls he’d feel a lot less hopeless.