Janita Lawrence - The Memory of Water

I come to in the police van, handcuffed and lying across the backseat. It smells like petrol and sweat. They are speaking their ambush language, boasting about their catch. Every now and then the radio crackles to life but they ignore it. The back of my head is blazing from where they hit me, and my broken knuckle is throbbing. I feel a sense of downward resignation and traitorous relief. I won’t die tonight, I think. I have escaped. Other thoughts are hammering but I try to hold on to this one for the feeling it gives me, but then it is gone, and so am I.

I come to again and my vision is crossed with lines. I am lying on top of a grey mattress in a grey jail cell. I recognise the walls from my previous visit. Is the main block of cells full up? Why am I always relegated to this spare building? I sit up too fast and my head fills with sparks so I sit still for a long time until I feel that I can stand up. My ankle is stiff and swollen and it hurts to breathe. Panic fills my chest. I limp to the bars, rattle them and shout for someone. I do this over and over but no one comes, so after a long while of shouting and trying to catch my breath I lie down again, to try to forget where I am.

When I open my eyes, Sello is standing outside the cell.

“Detective,” I say, swinging my legs off the bed to sit up.

“Hello, Mister Harris,” he replies, more polite than usual.

I touch the lump on the back of my head. It has stopped bleeding.

“Was it really necessary for your boys to pistol-whip me?”

“Apparently so.”

“Seems like a violent way to deal with someone you know isn’t the murderer.”

“On the contrary,” Sello says, shifty-eyed.

On the contrary? I think they must have switched Law and Order for old reruns of Sherlock Holmes mysteries.

“We have found all the evidence we need.”

“I can explain that,” I say. Sello shakes his head. “The time for stories is over.”

“Do I get a phone call?” I ask.

“If you wish,” he says, “I advise you to call your lawyer.”

He unlocks the door with a clang that resonates through my body, and walks me down an abraded linoleum corridor to a pay phone.

Still cuffed, I pick up the receiver and balance it between my ear and shoulder. The machine wants money before I dial and I don’t have any. Sello fishes in his pockets and slips a shiny R5 coin into the slit. I nod my thanks and dial my father’s number.

It rings for a full minute before he answers. He sounds distracted, annoyed.

“Dad!” I can’t help the emotion that pushes the word out of my mouth and down into the receiver.

“Slade?” There is feeling in his voice too, as if he never expected to hear from me again. I stumble, not sure what to say.

“God, Dad, I don’t know where to start.”

“Do you need help?” he says.

“Yes,” I say, “Yes, I need help.”

Both of our voices are unsteady.

“What can I do?”

“Can you come down to the police station? I’ve been arrested.”

“Arrested?”

“Never mind that, I just need to talk to you. I need to tell you something.”

“I’ll be there in half an hour.”

On the way back to the cell I ask Sello if I can have a shower and some clean clothes. Anything to avoid the darkcloudconfines of the cell. He slams the door shut. It is obvious there is no other way to close cell doors.

“No,” he says. “This isn’t a hotel.”

I think he still holds the offer of cappuccinos against me. We are on his turf now and he wants to make it clear there will be no cappuccinos. Back in the cell I feel I am disappearing in all the grey. My mind is blank: grey. I lower myself onto the mattress, play steeple with my fingers, and wait.

When my father arrives they let him into my cell. He smells like shaving cream. We hug for the first time in as long as I can remember. Like two bears with sore heads. When we pull away, his eyes are shining. I offer him the seat of the bed opposite mine and we sit. It is a small cell and our knees are almost touching. We are quiet for a while.

“I need to tell you something,” I say. My voice is not to be trusted.

He shakes his head. Tries to talk, then gives up and shakes it again.

“It’s about Emily,” I say.

“No,” he says, clearing his throat. “You don’t need to tell me… anything.”

“That day… by the river,” I start.

“I know you blame yourself, son.”

He called me son.

“But it wasn’t your fault. It was an accident. Everyone knew that… except you.”

My face is wet.

“And look what it did to you.”

Am I an empty shell because of that day? That precarious minute?

“You’ve been punishing yourself ever since. Pushing everyone away, trying to get yourself killed. Angola, Nigeria, Thailand. And now you’ve finally committed a crime that vindicates your punishments. You’re like a goddamned Kafka character. You’re stuck in your own twisted novel like a fly in amber.”

I blink at him, wanting him to say more and therefore postponing the words that will have to leave my mouth.

“Your mother couldn’t stand it,” he says, “She couldn’t stand your mortality. She told me that when you were born it was like some part of her was cut open, never to heal. Every bruise you had hurt her, every scratch. It was like walking around without skin.”

I have heard this a hundred times. Every time I asked where Mom had gone in the year after she left, I heard this speech. Skinless. She couldn’t stand it, he always said. But I knew it was because she couldn’t stand me. Couldn’t stand the memory of that day, of what I had done.

“That’s not the reason she left,” I whisper, head in hands.

“Of course it is. She told me so. She was so… depressed. She’d go days without changing her clothes, or washing her hair. She wouldn’t talk. Do you remember that? It got to the stage that I didn’t know if she would… survive… her grief. There were warning signs. Extra bottles of pills, Minora blades in the bathroom, sitting in her running car in the middle of the night. That’s why I let her go. She wouldn’t have survived the life she had with us, with me.”

“That day,” I stammer, “At the river. I pushed her under.”

Dad looks at me, not understanding what I am saying. “I pushed Emily under and Mom saw it happen.”

It was my idea to swim. I knew that we weren’t allowed to, that it was dangerous. At first Emily said no, she didn’t want to get into trouble. But I jumped in, told her how cool it was and called her a chickenshit. She always hated that. She sat on the bank for a while with pinched lips and watched me while I did tricks for her: backward roll, dead man floating, walking handstand. She crept closer and closer, edging down onto the slippery rocks until, splashless and without a ripple, she was in the water. We laughed at how the cold water made her breathe too fast. Her summer dress floated around her body like a giant lampshade and we giggled at that, too. I tried to teach her how to backward roll but she got a nose full of water the first time and didn’t want to try again. I was always trying to teach her things. She was my baby sister. Then I thought of a new game. We could go to the deeper part, just a few metres away, and dive down for jewels. Whoever got the most jewels would win. We were pirates on a dangerous mission – going to the deeper part would mean that we were just in view of the family holiday house – and if we got caught we’d get a really good thrashing, or not be allowed to go to the beach the next day, or both.

Emily dived down first. I thought I’d give her a head start, her being small, and a girl. I watched her wild underwater kicking as she tried to reach the bottom. She stayed down a bit longer than I thought she would and, just as I was about to worry, her head popped out of the water, grinning and gasping, a stone clasped in her hand. It was a good game and we played for a while, piling up our treasures until the time that Emily didn’t come up. I thought she was playing a joke so pretended not to worry for a while but then it seemed too long, so I went under with open eyes trying to spot her ballooning white dress in the browncloudy water.