I tried to explain this to Sally but she was a little slow on the uptake. Bit by bit I began to realise that one of her (many) personality flaws was jealousy: not the subtle, flattering variety but more the certifiable kind. I joked with her, quoting Hanif Kureishi, asking why people who are good at families have to be smug and assume it’s the only way to live, instead of being blamed for being bad at promiscuity. She didn’t find it funny. I did. She asked me what the hell I knew about family; that’s when it started going very much downhill. I, being very good at promiscuity, used to send her flying into acid rages. Her true character came out in exchanges with other people when she would snap, bite and break people’s necks (metaphorically speaking), like some kind of easy-on-the-eye Tyrannosaurus. It was magic material. I got more words down during that relationship than I ever had before. Once the fighting started in earnest and I had leached absolutely everything I could from her, I didn’t hang around for long. It felt like our elaborate dance was over.
I turned out the manuscript in record time.
I remember feeling relieved, elated. I had this stupid smile. I took her to the most public restaurant I could think of to break up with her, an expensive oyster bar in the Square. By then I didn’t even find her attractive anymore. Those cruel green eyes, thin lips, flat chest, insipid skin. It was like shaking off snow after a long walk home. After helping myself to another glass of chardonnay from the bottle and finishing her naked pink prawn starter, I had to stop myself from skipping out of there. It was my first successful novel. But, I thought as I looked at my wounded Jag, it came at a price.
The threats started a week before the release, when the good reviews hit the press, culminating in the unfortunate tyre-slashing episode. I may have let it slip while we were dating that I would use my first advance cheque as a deposit on the car of my dreams. She knew the car, freshly driven out of the dealership, was my Achilles heel, and forced her cold kitchen knife right through the fantasy. Tyres mutilated, she Picasso’d the doors with her car keys; the gun-metal grey paint never looked the same. Sifiso advised me to lay a charge against her but I couldn’t. I had no proof that it was her and I felt that I did, in a way, deserve it. I had more than enough money to fix it, and to buy the whole indoor soccer club beers the night Frank and I christened her PsychoSally.
She has mostly left me alone since then and only leaves threatening messages on my cell when she has had a particularly bad day, or sees something that reminds her of me, perhaps a steaming turd, or a particularly angry, infected boil, so I am surprised at the venom in this latest attack. Perhaps there is a sequel to Mercenary? A deranged ex is very fertile ground for a story. Little sparks of beginning-thoughts start glinting in my mind until I sit down with a pen and my new notebook. Then they disappear: snuffed out by the pesky winds of self-preservation.
I hope that Francina knows what to do about the writing on the wall. I guess the whole neighbourhood now knows where I live, which isn’t great for privacy. Already paranoid, I will now have to deal with Gawkers.
I moved to this neighbourhood in northern Jozi because I felt people here were rich enough to mind their own business. The Parks: small lock-up-and-go stands on beautiful tree-lined avenues. The kind of suburb that reminds you that Johannesburg is an urban forest. I knew I didn’t need a heated swimming pool, jacuzzi or sauna, nor did I need the cottage with the sky-lit studio. I definitely didn’t need the huge porcelain-tiled kitchen but I must admit that I do like the gadgets (electric and gas plates, giant Smeg fridge, Juicerator, Smoothie-maker, ice-maker, ice-crusher, mini blow-torch, glass toaster with matching panini press, seven-tiered steam machine, wine-cooler, cappuccino-maker…) and God knows I don’t need the other five rooms. But I do love the north-facing one – which I like to call the den – with its double-volume pressed ceilings and the way the light floods in there in the mornings. It is by far the most enchanting working space I have ever had; the two novels I wrote following Mercenary enjoyed their gestation in there. I guess, in a way, I have PsychoSally to thank for it. By the same token I could also thank her for the ridiculous, hefty bond repayment I have to make every month, which will probably contribute to the heart attack I will eventually have, causing me to fall (panini press in hand) into the bubbling jacuzzi and, therefore, to my eventual demise, securing her the best revenge without so much as the knowledge of it.
It’s not that I don’t know I sabotage my life. I’m completely aware of the fact I could lead a pretty normal life if I didn’t purposefully fuck everything up so much. But what would I do with a petite housewife in Abercrombie & Fitch and two little thugs for children? What would I write about if I spent all day drinking freshly-pressed beetroot juice laced with vodka and taking the Weimeranas and/or ungrateful kids to the park, seeing the same Smug Marrieds for dinner every Friday night? Perhaps I’d have a demanding silk-smothered mistress, one who makes me lick her stilettos and promise not to leave my wife. Or a stripper prostitute in a scabby hotel room once a week, in a vain attempt to inject some form of dirty excitement into my sad little life. I doubt it would be very entertaining by anyone’s standards. Yet this alternative way of living, the one I have chosen and designed with such care, is catching up with me. I feel myself being sucked into the widening gyre. Things Fall Apart.
Sometimes I wonder if I even have the right to exist. If I am my own invention, isn’t it the same as saying that I am zero to the power of zero? Tapping this foot, tossing this paper ball into the air. Bret Easton Ellis says in his Lunar Park that if one gives one’s life to fiction once, it becomes a character. A shadow of the real thing. No, less than that: a shadow of a shadow.
5
MAYBE EVERYONE ELSE WAS RIGHT
Francina lets herself in, as she always does, and stomps her way into the kitchen to make cappuccinos for us. It must be Tuesday or Thursday. By the time I join her she has my paper open on the kitchen table and is halfway through it. Her feet aren’t up on the table but you get the feeling they are.
“You’re out of rusks,” she mumbles, licking a finger to turn the page. It is clear that an article has captured her imagination.
“There are some in the larder,” I say, not knowing how I know this.
“No, Mister Harris, I mean the good ones from Woollies. The pecan nut ones.”
My flat white is strong and hot with lots of foam. The kitchen is already clean – it’s been Francinarised. I wouldn’t cope with a life without Francina. She cooks, cleans, washes, dusts, irons and polishes like a Stepford Wife, without the creepy hairstyle. She wears the best get-up of anyone I know. She’s sixty in the shade but she is always trying something new. Long, preppy socks wrapped around her chunky legs one day, head-to-toe primary-coloured traditional garb the next. Today she has on a yellow raincoat (there’s not a cloud in the sky) and the biggest golden hoop earrings I may have ever seen. She says she spends her (generous) wages on unit trusts but I reckon she likes to buoy the economy with it too.