Janita Lawrence - The Memory of Water

“Your funeral,” I say.

“It was the best we could do at such short notice. It was practically rent-a-crowd. I was there, watching you through the curtain. Out of vanity, I guess. Although I noticed that you didn’t cry.”

“I was too busy having panic attacks,” I say. “The crying came before that, and after.”

“We felt like we were in control of the situation until you took off. That made us concerned. It was easy to manage while you were at home but when you left, there were so many… variables…so many things that could go wrong.”

“And clearly went wrong,” I say.

“And you went to Nigel of all places?”

“That’s where you pointed me to,” I say. She doesn’t understand. “The logo on your T-shirt, when you were a little girl, in the family photo.”

“Yes,” she smiles, “of course. But then something happened when you were there.”

“Yes,” I say.

“You had a kind of… episode.”

“I guess you could call it that.”

“You stayed in your room for three days with a case of whisky. You wouldn’t eat or talk. We were going to abort the mission, call in a shrink, when you deserted your father’s car and just started walking through the town in the middle of the night.”

“What?”

“That’s when we got those locals to pick you up, give you bed for the night and some food.”

“That’s not what happened,” I say. “I had to meet Mrs X. I went to Sub-Nigel. I almost got blown to pieces in that fucking explosion of yours in Duduza. Your special effects were astounding, realistic.”

“Explosion?” she blinks, “Mrs X?” She catches herself, half-chuckles. “Do you think those things happened?”

“Of course they fucking well happened. I almost got my head blown off.”

“Slade,” she smiles, but her eyes are worried. “There is no such place as Sub-Nigel. It’s the name of an abandoned mine. You must have seen a sign for it somewhere in town.”

“The explosion was real.” I say.

“No,” says Eve, “there was no explosion.”

I look down at my wrist and my watch stares back at me. I blink and touch it, to make sure it’s there.

“An episode?” I say.

Frank talks: “You just lay in bed, man, for days. Watching the ceiling fan. I thought you were one beer short of a six-pack. I was worried. I told Eve to call it off.”

I think of Mrs X, the outrageous décor, the pigeon, the Pomeranian. I pull her letter from out of my jacket pocket. Instead of the heavy stock and gold wax I remember, it is a cheap letterhead from the hotel: blank.

“You did what you do best, Slade,” she says, “You retreated into your imagination.”

I get flashes: plastic grapes, and toy dogs on coasters at the steakhouse bar; Dasher; Mrs X’s wall. A cocktail menu, dirty martinis, Buck’s Fizz. At the hotel: Paris, snow, and a fountain, framed in gold.

“This thing you did,” I say to her, “this experiment, hurt people.”

She shakes her head. “No one was hurt. Except Frank, a little.”

Frank shrugs and touches his nose. “You owed me, buddy.”

“What about Denise?” The blood rushes to my head. “That was also engineered, right? She’s okay?” I look around the crowd, desperate to see her face. “Where is she? I don’t see her here.”

Eve frowns, and looks uncertain.

“Who is Denise?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, you’re fucking unbelievable. You know who I mean. Susannah. Susannah Fox, or whatever the hell her name really is.”

“Er…” says Eve, “I really don’t know who you mean.”

“Your sister. Or, at least, she said she was your sister. At the funeral.”

“We hired actors for the funeral, no one was told to play the part of my sister. I never had a sister.”

“I know!” I say.

“Susannah Fox,” she says, “was a made-up name for my fake will. It was a red herring.”

“No,” I say, “Denise was real. She lived with me. We were together after you died. She helped me through it.”

Frank is shaking his head and I want to punch him again.

“No one entered or left your house for the whole week after Eve’s funeral,” he says.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I say. “I’m mind-fucked enough now, stop playing around. I thought I’d fucking killed her. Do you know what that does to someone?”

The room stares at me. Silence. Frank clears his throat.

“Did anyone else see her, speak to her?” Eve asks, looking around. Everyone stares blank-faced.

I rack my brain. She never seemed to be around for introductions. She wasn’t around for much. She never ate anything. She had no ID.

Frank steps forward. “She doesn’t exist, man. I have been following you every second and you haven’t killed anyone.”

“Have you checked your apartment?” I ask Eve. “Her body is there.”

“We checked it,” she says, “full of thinners and turpentine. No body. Certainly no dead body.”

“If I’m so deranged, then how do I know this is happening? How do I know I’m not lying somewhere, catatonic, dreaming all this up?”

“This is happening,” says Eve, touching my arm, looking into my eyes. “This is happening.”

I look around the room.

“What about Francina?” I say, “Was she in on this too?”

Eve shakes her head.

“I tried everything to get her to co-operate but she refused. Said it wasn’t right. She wouldn’t even give us your house key.” She pulls silver out of her pocket and jingles my spare keys at me. “Luckily I had my own.”

“What did you do with her?”

“Don’t say it like that,” she says, “don’t say it like I am some kind of Godfather who makes people disappear.”

“What did you do with her?”

“I sent her on a paid holiday. I told her she could choose her destination. She flew back from Mauritius yesterday.”

I take a deep breath.

“It was never meant to get so complicated,” she says.

“Famous last words.”

“I’m sorry. It spun out of control. It was a risk I took. I just thought, like you have often told me, that if you don’t risk anything, you risk everything.”

“Yes,” I say. “Although I didn’t quite mean for you to risk my life.”

She touches me again, I flinch. She bites a nail.

“I went too far.”

I take a breath, and look long and hard at Eve. Magic woman, witch, porcelain doll, back-from-the-dead. Stolen mantle of Master Puppeteer.

The real Backwater Beauty.

“Thank you for saving my life,” I say, “but I never want to see you again.”

“Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life.”

My father runs to catch up with me as a leave the police station.

“Slade,” he calls, and I ignore him, keep walking. He catches my arm. “Let me drive you home.”

I acquiesce. I don’t have a choice.

In the car, he says, “I take responsibility for the part I played in this. But I didn’t realise the extent of it. All Eve asked me to do was call her if you ever showed up, which I did. I knew you two were friends. She said it was to protect you. All the rest of it was nonsense.”

That may be the understatement of the year, but I take his point.

“But what happened between me and you today, that was real.”

I look at him; familiar hands gripping the steering wheel, flushed face concentrating on the road.