Once I am on the bus destined for home I feel safe, cocooned. I wait for the pylons to turn back into trees before I take out the letter from Mrs X and hold it in my hand for a while before opening it. It’s a little bent and marked and the gold wax is cracked. I think: This had better be good.
Goldfields Manor
49 The Straight
Sub-Nigel
Dear Mister Slade Harris
Mr X and I apologise for our hasty departure. We had some urgent business to attend to. Okay, that’s a lie. We’re off on a shopping jaunt in Aspen and thought we’d practice our alpine skiing while we’re here. Mr X was taken by a sudden fancy for fake snow and so we had no choice but to leave immediately. I am sorry that you will not get to taste Cook’s pigeon but the universe obviously has its reasons and who are we to quarrel with the stars?! Dasher is most disappointed. He took a liking to you, of course, but it is his dismay at missing the pigeon dinner I am referring to. These Royal Dogs are very sensitive! Perhaps the next time you have The Mark Of Death you can pop by and we can try to accommodate you once again.
Butler is packing my clothes as I write, the sweet man. I don’t know what Mr X and I would do without him and Cook. And Gardener, of course! And Maid. But now let’s stop with the idle chatter and address the reason why you came to see me today and why you are reading this letter!
Here’s the thing: you wanted to know what the Shaw family attempted to hide from this town twenty years ago. But you should know by now, Mister Harris, that no one hides anything from Mrs X. Oh sweet! Dasher is barking like a rabid dog. He must know it is to you that I am writing. Okay Dasher darling, calm down, Mommy needs to finish this letter so that we can jump in the chopper! Now settle down and here, have a treat. Good boy.
The truth is that the Shaws caused an absolute scandal here back in the 90s. It is a sad story and this is how it goes: Dasher! You naughty thing! You’ve just laddered mama’s stockings! Butler! Butler! Where were you, I’ve been calling you for centuries! I need new stockings. Yes. I don’t care, just get them! Yes, I’ll have another Buck’s Fizz, thank you. Dasher knows that Mama needs her medicine.
Miles Shaw was the mining manager at AuruMine here in Sub-Nigel. It’s closed now but when he was running the show – and believe me he was a man that was large and in charge! – it simply churned out a fortune of wealth. It made the town rich and so Miles became a bit of a local hero, despite being English. He had a trophy wife, a real poppie, a little stick insect who used to be weighed down by all the gold Miles used to give her. Oh God, what would I do without Buck’s Fizz? Bottoms Up!
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.
41
PUPPET MASTER
I arrive 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.