Janita Lawrence - The Memory of Water

They tried for years to fall pregnant, and then one day Miles announced that they were going to have a daughter the whole town was behind them! And that daughter was born healthy and beautiful and kept growing more and more beautiful and she was the poster child for Nigel. So you can understand that when what happened, happened, it was shame on a drastic scale! I take it that you knew this daughter and so you will know what it was that caused the uproar. But what you won’t know is Miles was so outraged, so disappointed, so shocked – he was English, but had the moral values of an Afrikaner! – he banished Eve from town. She was only fifteen when he kicked her out with nothing but the dress on her back. We never heard from her again. And of course the other family was disgraced ! After that Miles slunk into a deep depression and within the year, he had gassed himself in his home garage. All because of an illicit love affair ! Can you imagine ?!

So that is what you wanted to know, Mister Harris, I hope I have helped you in your quest. What the tragedy of the Shaw family has to do with you I can only imagine. I wish you good luck but I must also warn you that you are in grave danger. Nothing is what it seems , Mister Harris. If you can just manage to stay alive for the next few days you will outlive the shadow that is upon you. Now I must run, the chopper is here and Dasher seems determined to choke on a fur ball.

PS. You mentioned a Denise Shaw, sister to Evelyn? She doesn’t exist. At least not in this particular universe! Toodle doo, darling.

Iarrive at the Sandton Bus Depot at dusk and catch a taxi to Rosebank, to Eve’s flat. The ride there is rough, the driver malefic, but I am becoming accustomed to this new dangerous way. My plan is to ransack the place and not leave till I find what I am looking for. At the block of flats a strong feeling of déjà vu hits me in the chest. I stumble but keep going. In my backpack jingle Eve’s keys, the ones I lifted from Denise, so I let myself in. The crime tape has been taken down, half-heartedly, as if the person responsible didn’t see the point. I drink water in hungry gulps straight from the kitchen tap. I look for food in the refrigerator but it is a dark empty cave.

Eve’s bedroom is exactly how I remember it from the last time I was here, except that there are some sealed boxes on the floor. Her essence is still here. I can feel her energy, smell her. I pick up a few things on her dressing table. A hairbrush, a half-moon of face powder. Her perfume is gone. I slide open the drawer. It is a mess of alien things: bracelets, lipstick and clips. No gold – Eve never wore gold. I recognise one pair of earrings and pick them up: black chandeliers. They remind me of a day I spent with her a few years ago, before I began to worry if I would ever be able to think of another story. We joined some of her friends at the Johannesburg Country Club for a picnic and fireworks display. We were a motley crew: writers, artists, directors, bankers. There was a great deal of champagne and we all got on pretty well. Fair weather friends: none of those people bothered to come to her funeral.

I put them back, close the drawer and prowl towards her studio. I think I hear something outside and I freeze. I wait for a few minutes, ears trained, before I carry on. Her studio has not yet been packed up. The unfinished canvases sit patiently on their easels, frozen in time. Paint brushes wait in their jars of turpentine and the walls, still layered with overlapping pieces of paper: quotes, rough sketches, photographs, look like the scales on a dead fish. I start studying them as if they hold some kind of clue to what happened to her, to what is happening to me. For a long time there is nothing. I scan every page, standing and crouching and standing again. Every now and then I see something I think means something: a bridge, a mountain that could be a mine, a woman who could be Mrs X, a man who could be Edgar, if I knew what Edgar looked like. She had been working on some kind of puppet-themed project. At first I thought they were dolls, but now I see the spider webs shooting out of their arms and heads. Almost invisible, the fine threads hold the dolls in various poses, ready for commands. There are scribbled doodles of marionettes and photocopies of all kinds of puppets through the ages. In the corner there is a plaster cast of a tall, long-eared rabbit with jointed paws and legs. With so many puppets, I think, this could be an abstract illustration of my life. Always playing at puppet master: realising now that I was never in charge. And even if I was, for a short time, that every puppet master has his puppet master. That people play with other peoples’ lives but in the end the universe has the final say. I am seized by a reckless feeling. I hope that whoever is trying to kill me will just show up tonight. I won’t run away. I need to know what this whole thing has been about; I need to understand, even if it ends in my death. It’s not as though I have a life to go back to, anyway. I have lost my world.

I continue scanning the wall. Every now and then an illustration makes me stop and I have to step closer so that I can take in its delicate lines. I look at a photo and automatically move on. There is a tingling and an urge to go back. A bell. A nagging. I look at it again. A photo of two young girls, arms over each other’s shoulders, their school blazers hunched up around their necks in the easy embrace. Sisters, maybe twins. The crest on the uniforms: Ferryvale. I tear the picture off the wall. The girl on the right is blonde, petite, and lifts her chin up to the camera as she grins. Eve. The other girl is sable, curvaceous, with a dark twinkle in her eyes. Denise? I flip the photo over, but there is no inscription. I swing my bag off my back and poke around for the stolen school magazine pages. I search the thumbnail portraits of Eve’s class for this girl-version of Denise, and I find her. Except that her name isn’t Denise or Shaw. It’s Susannah. I must be wrong. I look again, holding the picture to the page. It’s the same girl. Susannah Fox. Susannah Fox. The name is familiar. Why would she lie about her name, about being Eve’s sister? Why would she be the one packing boxes? In some spare corner of my mind I see her name in print. I see it on a piece of paper, A4, white, on a desk. In Eve’s will. Eve left her everything.

“Slade,” comes a voice from behind and an electric current runs through me.

Ispin around, cry out. The studio has grown dark and at first, I think it’s Eve, but then she walks forward into a shaft of light and I see Denise. Susannah. The woman who had sixteen million reasons to kill Eve and anyone else who stood in the way.

“Susannah,” I whisper into the dark.

“You can call me that,” she says.

“Why did you say your name was Denise?”

“I never did. That’s the name you chose.”

I shout out an ugly laugh.

“That’s the name I chose,” I splutter.

“Yes,” she says, stepping closer.

“But now you’re Susannah,” I say.

“Yes,” she says, “if you like.”

“I found this photo of you, and this one. Your name is Susannah.”

“Okay,” she says.

“And Eve was an only child,” I say. Denise nods.

“Why did you pretend to be her sister? What was the point? Why didn’t you just take the money and run?”

She looks at me as if I should know the answer.

“I didn’t know about the money,” she says, then shakes her head and corrects herself. “I knew about the money but not about the will. Not about the life insurance.”