Janita Lawrence - The Memory of Water

“So what do you think?” she smiles at me. I feel like a puppy that’s been caught chewing a Manolo.

“Huh?”

“It’s for the bank. The triptych I told you about.”

Eve’s studio is always covered top to bottom in paintings and sculptures, so you have to pay attention if you want to look like you’re not an idiot. There are new drawings of dolls – girls and men and animals – all over the walls. The triptych is easy to spot because it’s shining wet. And it’s the biggest painting in the room. It is of a nude stretched voluptuously across the three panels. Very dark. Erotic.

“God,” I say.

“Do you hate it?” she asks with big eyes.

“No, I think it’s exquisite.”

She smiles like a little girl and takes my hand.

“Now you know why I am so busy. I need to finish it by next week.”

“Nothing like a deadline to kick you up the arse,” I say, not smiling at the irony.

She leads me into the studio’s kitchenette and we begin unpacking the lunch I have brought.

“How’s yours?” she asks.

“Firm but soft to the touch.”

I can’t believe I said that. I’m a complete imbecile. Eve is gracious and gives me a skew smile.

“I meant your deadline.”

She fills the kettle, switches it on and I start to build our sandwiches. Eve is a tea zealot. I keep quiet while I wait for something to say.

“Have you come up with anything good? For your book, I mean.”

I groan and pretend to be overly interested in the olive ciabatta I am sawing.

I don’t want Eve knowing how desperate I really feel. Anyway, I am bad at this, this intimate dialogue. I have always felt silly saying I am having a bad time. It’s self-indulgent. It makes me think of bald kids with leukaemia and makes me feel like even more of a dick, standing here, making a faux-Mediterranean lunch in my nine-hundred-rand-sneakers.

“All writers struggle at some point, even the greats,” she says, as she pauses to lick balsamic syrup off her finger. “Especially the greats. You’re just spoiled because all your other stories came to you so easily.” She pours two cups of what looks like urine into old mismatched mugs.

“It just… it feels different, this time.”

“It’ll come. I believe in you.”

We take the Brie, kiwi and watercress sandwiches through to her makeshift office in the corner, where there are two fold-up chairs and a table. The walls are covered in illustrations and photos and the room is like an artwork in itself.

“Sifiso’s all over me like a venereal disease.”

Venereal disease? Why would I say that in front of Eve? Now she’s going to associate me with herpes, chlamydia, gonorrhoea. God.

“Yes, well, he’s especially good at that,” she laughs and tilts her head. “So what are we going to do to get you over this… whatever it is?”

“I have to do something huge. Something that will eclipse all the others. I just need to figure out what that is.”

Eve makes a face to show me she’s thinking.

“Run a marathon?”

“Done it, and regretted it profoundly. Ended up at the half-way mark in a pub somewhere obscure with no way to get home.”

“Take ecstasy, acid, tik?”

“Yawn. Centuries ago.”

“Date a… er, I don’t know. A transsexual?”

“You know Palahniuk joined a sex-addiction support group? He attended a whole lot of meetings to try to understand what it was about. So that he could write with compassion. So that he knew he was writing the truth.”

“So what are you saying? That you’re not the only crazy writer in the world?”

“Maybe not the only one.”

“How about moving to another country?”

“Gee, thanks.”

“I mean temporarily, to get a new story.”

“Done it. A few times. But Marrakech ’98: unbelievable. That’s where the camel story comes from. Obviously. And then of course there was Bangkok.” Where I ended up staying a little longer than I had planned.

I don’t like talking about Bangkok.

A Thousand Camels , despite the unfortunate name, was one of my most successful short stories. It probably paid for my shower.

A dashing British pilot ardently pursues one of the terrific-looking cabin crew (think Paris Hilton, but with a personality) who has overly-shiny golden blonde hair straight out of a Pantene ad. She plays hard to get because she knows he is married but gives into his advances. (Impossibly romantic scenarios of their courtship in all the beautiful cities in the world and lots of hot, slightly bizarre, hotel sex follow). So far it’s a steamy Mills & Boon romance. This is where the story starts, when the relationship is stripped of its glossy plastic wrapper. The stewardess becomes jealous of the time the pilot spends with his wife and kids (no surprises there). Her bitterness starts eating away at her perfect complexion and she diets compulsively. She screams at him when they spend time together. The pilot, who started off banging a perfect cherubic goddess, now has to put up with a spotty, skinny banshee who’s closed for business. He has a feeling that his wife is suspicious (“Another overnighter? Who with?”) so he decides to break it off with Paris. Paris has other plans. While they are in Marrakech she tells him that if he doesn’t leave his family to be with her, she will go to his wife and tell her everything. She reminds him that she has photos from their more adventurous days. He gives in to her blackmail and assures her that he will break it to his wife when he gets home. The next day they go walking in the market, smiling and bargaining, holding hands, when all of a sudden her hand is no longer in his. He looks around but can’t see her anywhere and raises the alarm. It appears that Paris has been kidnapped (the stewardesses are warned before the stopover in Marrakech and Egypt to not go out alone, especially in crowded places, especially if they are blonde, because of the frequent rate of kidnapping in these areas). Late that night in a seedy bar, the pilot has the need to unburden himself to the bartender (this is the bartender I met, who told me the story – entertaining guy – I ended up spending many a night drinking sweet wine and eating schmutzullas at his bar). So he tells the bartender how clever he is: he managed to sell his overbearing mistress to a local tout who offered him a thousand camels for her. So not only did he manage to rid himself of his little problem without bloodying his hands (not immediately, anyway) but he also made a lot of money. Ha ha (dusting of hands), ain’t life grand? Another whisky please. And one for you.

What he doesn’t know, of course, is that the night before the pilot visited the bartender, Paris was confiding in the very same guy. She told him that a week ago she had given her best friend, an air stewardess she worked with (pretty brunette by the name of Jo), two ‘parcels’ to post in case of something happening to her. Each were identical in contents: the aforementioned dirty photos, a copy of a dated, scribbled erotic note, with a voice-recorded message of Paris saying that she was sorry for the pain that she had caused. One was to be sent to the pilot’s wife and the other to the police. Ha! said the bartender. Ha ha! Wasn’t that just the funniest thing? It had made his evening, he said. There was now the chance that the bastard pilot he was looking straight in the eyes would see the inside of a Marrakech jail cell, Paris would probably be rescued and all would be well in the world. Ha ha! That’s what made him love life, he said, the way things kind of work themselves out. I told him I thought it was a fantastic tale and would definitely do something with it. He poured me a drink and said that wasn’t the end of the story. I started wondering if he was pulling my leg with the whole thing. He assured me he wasn’t. Then he tells me that the pilot was a bit unsteady on his feet so he called a ‘friend’ to come and collect him and, who else showed up but a doting little ear-kisser called Jo?