It is only when I walk through the house and see the devastation that it hits me, hard in the bottom of my stomach. Eve. Sucker punch.
The lounge floor is muddied with chocolate. The chandelier hangs askew.
I think she is lost to me forever. I’m not sure friends recover from that kind of fight. Especially after – I smack my tender forehead – God, I tried to kiss her. What the fucking fuck was I thinking? The shame makes me sweat.
I should call to apologise but I’d rather pull out my own toenails.
There are smashed flutes and tumblers and splinters of glass throughout the house, as well as the obligatory red wine stains (Flokati rug in foyer, wooden floor and deck chaise) and cigarette burns (sitting room Persian).
Maybe it’s best to cut our ties altogether. She wants me to be someone I’m not and I want her very badly, just as she is. Besides, she seems to have become morally superior, and morally superior people are like piles.
The air outside is hot and dry. I retrieve my phone from the bush. I can see beer bottles at the bottom of the pool. Who knows what else is in there. I’ll have to have the pool drained. Otherwise I can imagine, mid-swim, mid-lark, stepping hard on the stem of a broken martini glass, the sharp point being driven through the thick sole-skin and muscle, embedding itself deep in the soft tissue, like the needle of an angry urchin. I would have to pull myself out and end up bleeding to death on the bright green grass of the slope, only to be discovered by the caterers coming to pick up the last of their bains-marie. Or worse: a clucking Francina.
Not-so-celebrated Author Impaled on Designer Cocktail Glass.
God, the humiliation.
I could make it work, though. Just before my final breath I could hurl myself back into the swimming pool and float for my mock Gatsbyesque ending.
Maybe Eve and I were just caught up in the passion of the moment. Maybe there is something to be salvaged. But what is the point when I know that I can never have her? Who wants a friend who looks like Eve? It’s like being given a Maserati on blocks.
In Peter Godwin’s memoir ‘When A Crocodile Eats The Sun’ he expounds the theory that people love harder in Africa. He writes that in Africa, death is never far away – ‘Death has a seat at every table – and urgent winds whisper memento mori: You too shall die. You feel perishable, temporary, transient. You feel mortal.’. Maybe that’s why, he says, you seem to live more vividly in Africa. The ‘drama of life [here] is amplified by its constant proximity to death.’.
People love harder on this continent where things can be taken from you in a single violent fingerontrigger or flickofablade. I wonder if this goes a small way to explain why my feelings for Eve are so intense. God, I love her. She riles me with her horny body and virtuous lips. What will I do without her? My inky cloak descends upon me.
I look around, my arms drop to my sides and I feel the now-familiar tentacles of depression wrapping around my heart.
Just before I drop to my knees a spectacular idea startles me. I feel as though I have been stung.
It hits me between the eyes as clean and sharp as an archer’s arrow.
My whole body gasps.
It’s The Answer. To Everything.
The only other thought: that there is no other way.
I will have to kill Eve.
Quote: Oscar Wilde
“The advantage of emotions is that they lead us astray.”
10
EVE’S GRACEFUL DEMISE
I have to plan her murder. I am pinned to that fate like a crucified man to his olive tree.
In my mind’s eye there is the dry and desolate landscape of my life; planted in the middle is Eve’s murder, startling in its clarity and brilliance. I fight the idea for a while but it’s like losing a mental arm-wrestle, millimetre by millimetre. God knows I love her, have always loved her but, for the sake of my own survival, I need to do this. Destinies have to be met. Sacrifices have to be made.
This is what will save my career. And with my career – everything else. I know it. Already I feel the hot excitement in my fingers. I am nothing without writing. It is my life force.
And my writing, like a certain bloodthirsty plant, needs to be fed.
I begin the planning tentatively, tasting it, rolling it around in my mouth. As it picks up momentum I find myself tantalised. There are so many ways to kill someone I am almost overwhelmed. Worried that I will become rabid and crazed like a family pet after tasting human blood, I take a step back and realise that this has to be approached in a cold and logical way: without the psychological chaos of bloodlust. Hitler was, after all, a vegetarian.
I take a cold shower (Inuit Deluge™), shave, dress in sensible clothes, and unplug my cappuccino machine. Caffeine has no place in this no-nonsense man’s bloodstream. No sir, not today. Even the Juicerator is shunned: who knows what effect all that fructose can have on a sober man. If I had a tie, I would wear it now. But I don’t. So I make up for it by wearing tan loafers I never knew I had. I begin to wish that I had a dictaphone to speak into, in a clipped American accent, like Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks. I pretend to have one anyway and, after pressing the imaginary red button in the palm of my hand, I say “Diane, remind me to buy a tie the next time I’m in town. An appropriate one, with stripes. You’ll be pleased to know that for now, I have other things to worry about. I received the doughnuts you sent me, the ones with holes. Thank you. Diane, I need to go, I have a murder to plan.” Stop.
On the kitchen table I set out reams of white paper, pens and pencils. I crack my knuckles and do a few wrist rotations and breathing exercises before I sit down. I need to be cool and collected. I need to be methodical. I wish my stomach wouldn’t flutter so. I try to keep my mind even.
Where do I start?
In my limited experience of murder and speaking very generally, there seem to be three different ways of dying and eight different causes (please accept my apologies for my oversimplification; deconstructing death: it is necessary for me to get my head around this). Scribbled on the paper before me I have:
The Three Ways of Dying:
Accident
Suicide
Murder
The Eight Instruments of Death:
Weapon
Illness
Weather
Car
Fire
Water
Toxins (including venom, poison and drugs)
Asphyxiation
Now you could put these lists side by side and play joining the columns and come up with perhaps (I’m no mathematician) A Billion Ways To Die.
Id est, draw a line from Suicide to Weapon and you get hanging, a shotgun to the head, or taking the Panini Press into the jacuzzi with you. It’s a bit like playing Cluedo. A line from Suicide to Illness will give you a heart attack via anorexia nervosa, or dying from Pneumonia after having sex without a condom. The list seems infinite. Then of course there are other broad categories such as homicide, patricide, matricide, infanticide. Cross Murder with Water and you get women driven by demons who drown their babies. Or Murder with Weapon: fathers who gun down their entire families, or lonely school kids in trench coats who don’t like Mondays and take revenge the best way they know how. I try it out by resurrecting a few top-of-mind deaths I can think of, and all of them fit neatly somewhere on my list.