kagablog

now, with the same gravity as the words, “Dear Reader, I married him,” dear Aryan, I was committed to Sterkfontein.

I’d been in Tara for a week and a half and i was not feeling well at all. turns out i was addicted to xanor (tranquiliser) - had been on it for eight months and was chowing 8 a day by the time i got into tara. so my blood pressure was through the roof, i was unbelievably anxious ALL THE FUCKING TIME. to the point where i couldn’t feel my own skin. sounds weird, but you know when you play dead man’s finger. same phenomenon. and when you’re that dissociated you just want to get back into your body and i was fantasising more and more about cutting. was already a huge issue as they were literally body searching me every day (can’t even begin to tell you…).

anyway, when i told my therapist there, they immediately mobilised and announced to me that they were committing me for my own safety. as scared as i was, i was also relieved.

but fuck, sterkfontein is as bad as the rumours of it make it out to be. i was taken there at night, so my first real experience of it was waking up in the morning. you know those scenes from schindler’s list where the jews are hoarded into the showers, or the one where they’re made to march in a circle naked? Well, i was made to strip, along with the 40 odd other inmates (mostly black, 90% schizophrenic, 10% bipolar with psychotic symptoms) and made to move in a conveyer-like strip through the shower…

then, breakfast. (food not bad) and meds; then locked with other patients into a ’sun room/stoep’ until lunch, with NOTHING to do but smoke. and you’re not allowed lighters, matches, so have to rely on nurses’ whim - and dale, these were women who are so jaded by what they have to deal with, their favourite outburst is “Ek sal jou moer!”. same cigarette scenario i described in that story of mine - unbearable. and they do. there were frequent fights. incidents of girls putting their hands through windows. one girl had cut her neck open the week before i arrived. same drill till supper, same drill from supper to bedtime at the excruciatingly late hour of 9. i made it through the hell of this ‘chronic ward’ for a week by takng it a day at a time. there was nothing else i could do. the fear. i can’t describe. just knowing that you’re committed, that your freedom depends on whether a panel of 15 people think you’re sane - so debilitating.

then moved to ‘rehabilitation ward’. better. much. but still the hours. there was a skew pool table with a skew cue (sp?) and tv. but couldn’t watch tv - it not being at home just made it unbearable. other patients better in this ward and no more communal showering. but patients still really sick. one girl, for eg. constantly talking to herself, when she wasn’t begging for my stompie: her voices communicated through her and she had to voice them. asked her whether the medication didn’t stop the voices. she said that the only time the voices stop, since she was 14, is when she’s asleep - the meds only calm her down.

if it had been a few years ago, it might have been a bleaker situation for me, but being there and being literally jailed was enough to make sure that i didn’t hurt myself or entertain any real thoughts of it. that would have meant a sure 3 months extra. there are 2 girls - literally girls - who have been there for a combined 15 years…
i made it through the hours days and weeks by smoking, not thinking, just focusing on getting out - how to get out, what did they want to hear? obsessing about that. missing celeste and doggies chronically, but celeste, kate and my mom visited each weekend - thank god. spent my sister’s wedding there and my 30th birthday - you can imagine the existential angst of the latter.

then i discovered knitting in OT, and my sanity was restored! i just sat like Patience on her Monument and knitted and knitted, not thinking, just counting down the days, one day at a time, one week at a time. not knowing how many weeks it would be was unbearable, but knowing that i wasn’t acting crazy made it bearable, knowing that i would get out.

so now i’m on a week’s parole, having had a weekend’s parole. i go back on monday to report back and will probably be released. taking a bit of getting used to being ‘out’. very anxious. also need to make serious moves to finding freelance editing and writing work. but i don’t regret being there. if i’d been in tara i would have learnt a whole lot of stuff on paper. what i learnt in sterkfontein was so fucking excruciatingly tactile it feels etched into me; learnt that i can survive, that i can make it through, anything.

I write this with a heavy heart, but a sound mind. I am aware of what the media will turn this into, so I am writing this to you so that at least you will know the truth; so that at least you will understand that what I have done is the best thing I could have done for my family. You know how much I love Deborah, the children; you know they are my life. You know that I have always done what is best for them, and I want you to know that what I have done now is what I believe is best for them.

THE STAR; 16 March 2007
ANOTHER FATHER SLAYS INNOCENT FAMILY
YET ANOTHER BRUTAL FAMILY MURDER SHOCKS COMMUNITY
BY DAVID MKHIZE

MELVILLE, Johannesburg was the scene of yet another brutal family murder last night. Four family members murdered, in what appears to be yet another family slaying in a trend of fathers murdering their entire families and then committing suicide.

The police were alerted to the scene by a neighbour, Ms Karen Coetzee, who reported screams and sounds of a scuffle from inside her neighbour’s house. “At around 2 ‘o clock last night, I heard terrified screaming and loud bangs and crashes, and I knew something was wrong. Melville is notorious for its burglaries, so I immediately alerted the police. I just can’t believe that he murdered them. He was such a kind, friendly man, and it was obvious that he loved his family very much,” said a very distraught Ms Coetzee.

I want you to know that I have thought about this deeply, and for a long time. I have considered all the options, so many of them I can’t even keep track anymore, and nothing else seems to be a solution. Please know this. Know that I have searched my soul for any other way out besides this horror.

FORENSICS REPORT
Upon entry of the house, no visible signs of forced entry were noticeable. The entry hall and kitchen area seemed undisturbed, later verified by forensics. The downstairs family room was similarly undisturbed. Upon entry of the childrens’ bedroom, the bodies of Elizabeth Cook (10) and Elijah Cook (5) were found in their beds. Cause of death was determined to be asphyxiation. Post-mortem results confirmed this and fibre analysis determined the murder weapon to be the childrens’ own pillows.

With Stanley dead, the option of sending the kids to stay with relatives was no longer an option and the thought of my sensitive little Elizabeth, and tiny Elijah ending up in the South African foster-care system was just too much for me. I knew that they would end up in institutions where children raping other children was a common-day occurrence. I could not let that happen. I could not allow it up to chance that they might be adopted by a family genuinely wanting a child, rather than those families just providing foster-‘care’ for the government subsidy. I couldn’t bear to think of them ending up in homes where drugs or alcohol were part of their daily lives. I could not allow my little ones to be separated. Life is hard enough, and I could not stand the thought of my children having to grow up under unendurable circumstances, scarring them for life.

So I waited until Deborah and the children were asleep; I crept into their rooms and held the pillows over their little faces until I couldn’t find a pulse in their tiny little hands. God forgive me. In taking their lives I tried to spare them the suffering they would experience. I pray to God they didn’t wake up as they struggled to breathe. I pray to God that they didn’t for a moment wake up out of their sleep and feel the horror as their little lungs ran out of air. I pray to God they didn’t suffer.

THE STAR CONT.
The police have been very tight-lipped about the details of the murders. We have confirmation that Elizabeth Cook (13) and Eliza Cook (9) were found murdered in their beds. We managed to speak to one of the officers exiting the family home. The officer, who wishes to remain anonymous, told us through tears streaming down his face that “The monster had killed them in their beds. Their tiny bodies twisted and blue. Their fingers reaching out for help; frozen by rigor mortis in an endless scream for help. The monster! They
were so young. So helpless. Why?”
The officer was led away crying uncontrollably, mumbling hysterically about the brutality and the blood. He is currently being treated for shock at a nearby hospital and will undergo therapy.

FORENSICS REPORT CONT.
The upstairs area of the house was undisturbed, until entry into the master-bedroom, which exhibited signs of a struggle. Furniture and objects were disturbed and strewn across the floor. The struggle led from the master bedroom through the passage to the study, where a blood stain, later verified as that of Mrs Deborah Cook, was found on the carpet. A small spattering of blood was found close to the desk, confirmed as that of Mr Lance Cook’s. A bloodied letter-opener, bearing the blood of both victims, was found near the door leading to the family room. Large drops of blood on the floors and smears of blood on the walls, both Mr and Mrs Cook’s, led into the upstairs family room, where the body of Mrs Deborah Cook was found in a large pool of blood, her cranium crushed.

Deborah. My darling, Debbie. She’s suffered so much already. The anti-depressants weren’t helping and the doctor’s were recommending another stay at Tara. They said the death of Steph was just too much for her. That she couldn’t cope. What seemed to be post-natal depression after Elijah’s birth just never went away; just became worse and worse. But it was the fact that she couldn’t write anymore which really got to her. You know it was her only true joy, the only time she was really happy. Yes, she loved me, and she adored the children. But it was her writing she lived for.

My death would have been too much for her. She wouldn’t have been able to take care of the children by herself. She wouldn’t have been able to support herself financially. We were in enough debt as it was. And she would have had no one to turn to. You know what a loner she was.

I climbed the stairs from the kids’ room, sat next to her on the bed, watching her sleep, remembering all the good times, before she got sick, before Steph died. We used to be so happy. She used to be so happy. But now she couldn’t even get out of bed in the mornings without an anxiety attack. The doctors said that the likelihood of her trying to kill herself again was very high. She had to be hospitalised again. And she couldn’t face that. Not when everything had been taken from her. Now they wanted to take Elijah and Elizabeth from her again for two months, maybe more.

I leaned over her, kissed her on the forehead, placed the pillow over her face and held it down.

things happened very fast then too fast i was on the floor and hit my head against the bedside cabinet as I registered her kicks i saw her running down the passage as I got up i ran after her into the study i didn’t feel the pain when she hit me across the head with the lamp i only registered halfway to the family room door that she must have stabbed me in the thigh with the letter opener i didn’t want it to be like this i didn’t want her to suffer i didn’t want her to be scared but no choice i pulled the letter opener out of my leg cut her as she opened the door screaming & screaming unbearable didn’t want her to suffer promise you that God I hadn’t wanted her to suffer caught her in the middle of the room fell to the floor raised my hand to stab her with the letter opener wasn’t there can’t strangle her couldn’t strangle her couldn’t look into her eyes & see the confusion the pai got up took something from the mantelpiece crawling to get away smashed smashed smashed ‘til she stopped moving.

THE STAR CONT.
The murderer, Mr Lance Cook, described by neighbours as a pleasant, dedicated family man, worked as an IT consultant at a prominent Gauteng firm. Sources at the firm confirm that Mr Cook had recently been retrenched and was the only breadwinner of the Cook househould. Mrs Deborah Cook, an acclaimed fiction writer, suffered a nervous breakdown a year ago after the untimely deaths of her brother, Stanley and the still-birth of their third child. We have received confirmation from hospital staffs and friends of the family that Mrs Cook had been hospitalised several times at numerous hospitals in Gauteng, her last stay being at Tara four months prior to this tragedy.
The death of his son, the frail health of his wife and his financial concerns must have been too much for Mr Cook to bear, leading up to last night’s grisly events.

I know that you cannot forgive me for what I have done. But I hope that you will at least understand that what I did, I did with the best interests of my family at heart. My family and I have suffered enough.
May God forgive me

Your loving son
Lance

FORENSICS REPORT CONT.

Blood (confirmed to be Mr Cook’s) trailed from the body of Mrs Cook into the spare bedroom and the en-suite bathroom, where the body of Mr Cook was found, hanging from the shower curtain rail. Initial assessment of cause of death was thought to be massive blood loss, from a wound to the thigh which seemed to have severed the main artery, as there was a large pool of blood in the bath and on the bathroom floor, inconsistent with death by asphyxiation. This assessment was confirmed upon autopsy. A suicide letter written by Mr Cook was later found on the toilet cistern, written in the hand of Mr Cook (confirmed through handwriting analysis).

CONCLUSIONS:
Call to police by Mrs Karen Coetzee: 4h30am
Arrival of police on scene: 7h25am
Based on findings at the scene, a suicide letter written by Mr Cook and the the autopsies on all four bodies, Mr Cook entered the bedroom of his children and killed them. Cause of death: asphyxiation. Time of death: 3h05am (Elizabeth Cook); 3h09am (Elijah Cook). Mr Cook then went upstairs to the master bedroom where a scuffle ensued, leading to the study. In the study, Mrs Cook stabbed Mr Cook in the thigh with the letter opener found at the door of the study. Mr Cook stabbed Mrs Cook with same weapon in the upper arm as her back was turned towards him. The scuffle moved into the living room, where Mr Cook pinned Mrs Cook down. This is consistent with the large pool of blood found on the carpet of the living room, two metres from the position of the body. Mrs Cook crawled away from her assailant and was finally killed by repeated blows to the cranium by a blunt object. Cause of death: massive cranial haemorrhaging. Time of death: 3h23am. The weapon, a bronzed trophy, was found in the guest bedroom, on the bed. Mr Cook then moved into the guest bathroom, where he hung himself from the shower rail with the shower curtain. Cause of death: massive blood loss. Time of death: 6h48am.

The family are survived only by the parents of Mr Lance Cook, a Mr and Mrs Geoffrey Cook, aged 80 and 85 respectively, living at a nearby retirement village. At this time, the Cook’s have not made any comments to the press, but the head of the retirement village, Mr Kenneth O’ Bryan said in a statement to the press that the Cook’s were understandably shaken and upset by the untimely death of their only surviving children and grandchildren. Mr O’ Bryan also added that it was “shocking news” which “shook the very foundations of his belief in humanity” and that the entire village was in mourning. Mr O’ Bryan extended his heartfelt condolences to the Cook’s and added that because they could not afford the burials, “Happy Days Retirement Village would be more than happy to provide a memorial service for the family in the village’s beautiful gardens.”
While this might ease the minds of the Cook’s to some extent, the mind of society cannot help but be horrified by this apparent pandemic of family slayings. Both the ANC and the DP are outraged by the seeming moral decay in our society and the question as to what can be done about it rages from parliament through to the streets.

COULD YOUR HUSBAND TURN INTO A FAMILY SLAYER?: For more on family slayings and the psychological underpinnings of a family slayer, turn to page 4.

3.03.2007

The difference between crazy people and normal people is not what you might think. It’s some of those things: yes, they see reality in ‘distorted’ ways; yes, they take blades to their wrists, steak-knives to their throats, they burn themselves down to the bone with cigarettes; yes, they hear the voice of Jesus and answer only to the name ‘Mary’; yes, they experience life mostly as a constant and unremitting shit-storm. Yes, they do and experience all of these things, and that’s what makes them insane and you normal.

But the real difference between the sane and the mad is the language they speak: the sane speak English, French, Chinese or Zulu; the crazy speak in the language of cigarettes. The societal structures, roles and conventions of the ward are much like society outside of these barred windows and doors. The power-play is just as present. Just as insidious.

Upon entering the ward, it is not your name, or even your reason for being there that is important, or of any concern. It is your cigarette status:
1. do you smoke?
2. if so, do you have any?
3. if so, will you give/sell them?
Your status is determined within seconds. And word spreads. If you’re known as a carrier, you are approached constantly. Whether you say yes or no is inconsequential. They will keep asking, more so if you make the mistake of saying yes the first time you’re asked. It’s like feeding a dog off your plate one time. Just that one time. From then on, that dog will sit at your feet, staring pleadingly, then barking, sometimes ferociously, until you feed them again.

The hierarchy in this place is based on two criteria. The first, from the outsider’s perspective, seems to be the most distinctive: there are those of the frothing-at-the-mouth variety who are in a constant state of legal, governmental induced intoxication. They come off the street, their schizophrenia, paranoia and psychosis induced by heroine, crack, alcohol or marijuana. Here, there schizophrenia, paranoia and psychoses are perpetuated by seroquel, risperdal and lithium. You can tell them by the look in their eyes; the glazed, dead-pan marble. They have that constant look of being perplexed. As if someone has just asked them the meaning of the universe. Their mouths open, their heads down and slightly askew. They shuffle endlessly around the ward in shoes they’ve stolen from someone outside, or some unwitting and even more doped-up inmate inside. Or they walk around barefeet, their heels cracked and crusted from pacing the sleekly polished ward floors. I wonder why the nurses haven’t done anything about all this blood?

Then there are the garden-variety of depressives, bi-polars, suicide attempts: people who are just “Taking a bit of a break, a rest, to get their medication stabilised.” You can tell them from the street-clothes they wear. They only don their pyjamas at the civilised and agreed upon hour. Unless they smoke, or one of them are in your section of the ward, you only see them at communal gathering times: meal times or pill times. They seem strangely incongruous here, in this place, as if they’re undercover nurses, gathering info on the other patients for the matron. They are friendly, but quiet and keep to themselves.

There are, of course, the liminal – those that are difficult to distinguish and place in one of these two categories. You warily strike up a conversation, trying to determine whether you’re dealing with a pseudo-nurse or a psychopath. And trust me, it’s fucken difficult! If someone in a nuthouse tells you their name is Andrew and they’re a librarian or a fashion designer, how do you know he’s telling the truth? You don’t. there is no truth in here. The only truth, the only meaning and stability is the Brooklax-induced certainty of meds and mealtimes.

It is the second criteria for the hierarchy of this place which is the more powerful, the more insidious in the hierarchisation of the ward. It is this criterion that determines your place in the caste system. It is the same criterion as in the larger society – the haves and the have nots: those that have cigarettes, and those that don’t.

It is this 5cm cylindrical carcinogen that wields the power, regulates the ward, determines the rules. It’s the same as in prison. Cigarettes become the power tool, the bartering chip, the only intelligible language. It’s strange, isn’t it, this common element of cigarettes in the institutions of jails and nuthouses? I have my own little anthropological theory about that. (My meds make it difficult to concentrate, think and remember, but I know my little theory had something to do with the prison and the loony-bin as microcosms of societal structure and interaction between humans. I remember some ingenious thought I had about cigarettes being the lowest common denominator of the unhappy, the rejected, the scapegoated. I remember thinking that Claude Levi-Strauss would have been proud.) The dogs are also distracting me, lapping up the blood. How did the dogs get in here? The matron would never allow that…

More than any sedative or mood stabiliser, it is the cigarette that determines the placidity or paroxysms of madness of the inmates. The first rule is, do not, under any circumstances carry more than two cigarettes with you. You learn this rule within the first half an hour from one of the arse-licking pseudo-nurses. So you walk into the cramped, un-airconditioned smoking cell and you light up. The vultures appear from their wards, as if the meal-time bell has been rung, scurry, then settle, begging you for just one cigarette. just one gwaai my sister just one my people are coming tomorrow and its been so hard without a smoke so hard so hard theyre coming tomorrow and Ill give you a cig sister and theyre bringing coke too and Ill give you some coke too thank you sister thank you so much they just left me here with no clothes no cigarettes but they promised theyre coming tomorrow tomorrow or the next day maybe Saturday but they definitely coming sister and then Ill give you something sister god bless you. Depending on your mood, or more to the point, just to shut them up, you either give them the cigarette you’re not smoking, or you break it in half so that you can get rid of two crazies at one time; or, you simply shake your head, let them watch as you smoke both, leaving them behind to fight over the smouldering butt.

Why am I here? It was a simple matter. I couldn’t lug my breasts around any longer. They just got too heavy. And I thought it much more practical to put a pillow and a breadboard under them. Sawed them off with the breadknife. Apart from feeling a bit dizzy – all the blood-loss, I suppose – I felt ok. I wasn’t trying to kill myself. I just didn’t want to carry those fucking things around anymore. The hardest part was that I had to cut two-thirds of an awesome tattoo off. It ran from my collarbone to my nipple. And then it lay there, on the floor, misshapen by the lump of breast which lay mutating as the blood and lymph flowed out of it. I considered taking the nipple rings out. They’d come in handy later. But the metal in the breasts in the blood on the floor was rather aesthetically pleasing. I took a few photos. I remember that piercing taking months to heal. But it is – I suppose ‘was’ now – one of my favourites. Why are the breasts still lying there?

So that’s why I’m here.

Which group do I belong to? The mouth-frothers or the garden-variety pseudo-nurses? Well, I have cigarettes. I don’t hear voices (William Burroughs’ doesn’t count. If it were Jesus’ or Alistair Crowley’s, that would be a different matter). There’s so much blood. Where are the fucken nurses? The matron wouldn’t tolerate this from them.

I realise now, as I write this that the whole breast story might sound a bit incriminating in terms of my sanity status. And I know what you’re thinking. Unfortunately you’re just going to have to take my word for it.

There’s so much blood. It’s ruining this book, fuckit! And I’m feeling very tired now. Can’t write anymore. Must be the meds. I’m sorry to have to leave you at this point in the story, but I think I should sleep now. If only the dogs would stop licking up the blood so that I could rest.

It was a typically sunny highveld morning and the sun filtered through the blinds of her Melville home. She’d already been through her morning routine of yoga and meditation and was feeling particularly good. The radio was on and she was humming along to the normally nauseating Radio Highveld repetitions of the same old playlist as last week. She’d even found Jeremy Mansfield funny this morning. So it was a good morning.

The kharmic wheel must be turning, she told herself. She’d had a really rough time lately. Three weeks ago she’d been retrenched from the esoteric bookshop she’d worked at for five years. “We’re just not making enough profit to allow for the staff we have, Jeanine.” She’d stood there, feather-duster in hand, shocked, confused and, yes, angry. So, in fact, that she’d foregone the two-weeks notice period and left, handbag in hand, filled with her favourite vanilla incense and a couple of packs of tarot cards. Fuck them. Five years and then this. Fuck them. Then, two weeks ago her reliable little Datsun had given up the ghost and officially died. “There’s nothing to be done. Sell her for spares is the best we can do.” That little blue car had seen her through her entire adult life; her first car, and it was letting her down now. She kicked it in the door as she left the mechanics, R2 000 in her pocket all that was left of her only mode of transport.

But all of this was really nothing compared to the trouble she’d been having with Jesse. After a ‘tumultuous’ – sounded so shrink-wrapped and benign compared to the reality of it – Christmas period, Jesse had finally agreed to go to rehab. After two months at Tara she was now back home. The drugged haze and hellish ‘coming down’ had only been replaced by a gaping hole of dark depression. She’d never gone back to work after coming out of Tara and spent most of her days sleeping and watching really bad TV (as if there was any other kind). Jesse was at her wits end. True, their five year relationship had withstood worse, but right now it just felt as if everything was happening at once. To top it all off, typically, Jeanine’s therapist was out of town for two weeks. Her usual outlet for ‘blowing off some steam’ was off on some conference, or, even worse, on holiday with her fucken’ husband. In her time of need! How could she?

But this morning was good. She had to hold onto that. She was at least having a good morning. She’d decided to take advantage of it and was making Jesse’s favourite breakfast: eggs (scrambled and moist), toast (white, unburnt), bacon (streaky) and pork bangers (unbrowned). She had everything timed perfectly. She wasn’t exactly a whiz in the kitchen (something her mother still couldn’t get over. “How can you call yourself a woman if you can’t cook?”). But this morning everything was timed to perfection and it looked as though everything was going to be ready at the same time: a miracle.

It was when she started buttering the toast that things started going wrong. The phone rang. A we-regret-to-inform-you-but-your-application-has-been-rejected phone call. Fuckit! Seventh rejection for a job application this week alone. And her pension wasn’t going to last too long; not with having to support Jesse as well. Fuckit! She slammed the phone down and as she did so the buttered toast in her left hand slipped from her grasp and landed buttered side down on the not-too clean floor. Jesus Christ!! She bent down, picked it up, threw it in the bin, put another piece of toast in the toaster. The eggs were dry. Fuck! Jesse wouldn’t eat scrambled eggs dry. Something about her gag reflex. Well, today she’d just have to fucken’ deal with it! What had she been thinking about her kharma taking a turn for the better? She checked the bacon and the sausages and caught the sausages just before they browned too much, turned the heat down.

It was while she was buttering the replacement piece of toast that she noticed a buzzing over the DJ’s voice. It took her a few minutes to trace the buzzing to the pan with the sausages and bacon frying in it. Trapped under the lid: a fly. It had always been a bone of contention between Jesse and Jeanine: Jeanine’s ‘extreme’ animal rights activism. Jesse always joked that the cliché “wouldn’t hurt a fly” was literal with Jeanine. “Even when she accidentally steps on an ant, she mourns for days!” Jeanine’s belief in reincarnation was just one of those things they’d agreed to disagree about for the sake of the relationship. But now, Jeanine had had too much. God knows how long that fly had been buzzing around with the bacon and the sausages, how many pieces of food it had landed on, spread its noxious diseases upon? Slowly, she lifted the lid of the frying pan with her left hand, while her right hand reached above the stove and WHAM! as the fly exited it’s steamy death she killed it with the spatula.

She emptied the sausages and the bacon into the dustbin along with the first piece of toast and dished the now burnt egg into a plate with the now very cold pieces of toast. She poured some juice into two glasses and took the tray of food up to their bedroom. Jesse was still fast asleep, the TV on Ricki Lake. Finding Jesse still sleeping and Ricki Lake’s presence only aggravated her mood and Jeanine plomped onto the bed next to her partner, waking her roughly out of her drugged sleep. Jesse turned over, away from Jeanine, in the process hitting her with her pillow, mumbling a “Fuck off!”
This was too much. “No, fuck you, Jesse! How long have you been sleeping already? Get the fuck up!” And then, in a more reconciliatory tone, “I’ve made you breakfast in bed.”
Like a three year-old throwing a tantrum, Jesse sat up in bed. “Can’t anyone get some fucking sleep around here?!” And then looking over at the bedside-table, “This better be fucking good!”
Jeanine swallowed her retort and handed Jesse her juice, then arranged the tray of egg and toast on Jesse’s lap. Jesse stared at the tray incredulously. “What’s this? You know I can’t eat my eggs like this!” She picked up a piece of toast, then threw it back into the plate. “And this toast is cold. I can’t fucken eat this! I can’t believe you woke me up for this Jeanine! Jesus!”

Jesse heard the shattering glass before she felt the blow to her head; she looked over and saw the place where the bulky
Chinese lamp should be before she felt the blood pouring down her face; she saw Jeanine begin clearing up the debris of egg and toast and lamp before she lost consciousness.

15.02.2007
Johannesburg, South Africa

THE MEDIA AS MIRROR OF SOCIETAL VALUES

(photo johann jourens)

“The media has created a society supporting a million-dollar diet industry spawned by images of anorexic teenagers strutting international catwalks.” This is the predominant approach to the question of the relationship between the representation of men and women in the media. The scapegoat of society’s obsession with weight and the over-population of eating disorder clinics is the media.
Not only is this argument a cliché and an all too easy answer, but it is also fraught with questions of the ‘chicken or the egg?’ variety. The conventional view is that the media creates the benchmark for the human ideal, but is this not a skewed perception? Instead of living in a media-propelled society, is the media not propelled by the values and conceptions of society?
Representations of the genders in the media have changed considerably over the last decade. The macho, club-wielding Marlboro man has evolved into a diaper-wielding sensitive man of the 90’s. The representation of women as a male appendage, an Omo-sponsored maternal figure, has made way for the 21st Century woman in who’s life washing has to take up as little time as possible. She has become the McCain woman who is “too busy to peel a pea.” The one-dimensional “mother-woman” of the past has evolved into an überwoman who can now be a mother, a ‘domestic executive’, a career woman, a hostess and a lover.
Are we as woman supposed to celebrate this? Did our grandmothers burn their bras for this? This überwoman might appear to be a feminist’s dream, but in fact she is simply another stereotyped creation. “Mirror, mirror….” This stereotyped creation is reminiscent of the female characters in the popular fairytale, Snow White. This fairytale contains messages about the roles women should occupy: she is not only a wicked, barren, conniving witch and step-mother, but also a sweet, innocent, virginal girl. The überwoman is not more evolved, more liberated than this fairytale creation; she is simply an ‘all-in-one’ version. She has graduated from a repressed mother to an emancipated, post-feminist female with multiple personality disorder. Whereas before she had to restrain herself (and be restrained) to the mother role, she now has to cope with an even worse fate, the do-it-all-yourself mother/lover/wife who is lost somewhere in her myriad of roles.
Not only is the modern woman caught in a dysfunctional confusion of roles as in Snow White, but, as in the fairytale, she is a representation of woman, not a flesh and blood woman.

(illustration kiriko mukaiyama)

This is paralleled in the media. The ‘represented woman’ thus differs considerably from the ‘real woman.’ The ‘represented woman’ occupies her plethora of roles and completes all her requirements with a smile; the ‘real woman,’ however, struggles to come up for air in this sea of expectation.
The ‘represented woman’ and the ‘real woman’ also differ in one essential way: both Snow White and the wicked stepmother have one thing in common – they are sexless. The wicked woman is barren, Snow White is virginal. This indicates that there is an integral distinction which the media seems to ignore – the distinction between gender and sex. The gendered woman is idealized, multi-roled and sexless. She has no needs, no desires and no reality beyond what her roles require.
The essence of the stereotyped female in the media is, therefore, that of a gendered female, a representation of a female which ignores the distinction between gender and sex. By the ‘sexed’ woman I mean a woman who has needs, desires and hopes that extend beyond her roles: she is a ‘real’ woman.

Where does this ignorance of the distinction between gender and sex originate? The answer is deceptively simple: society. Gender is entirely a social construction. Sex is a biological fact: you are either a male or a female. Gender, on the other hand, is a societal construction of entire identities based on whether you are sexually a female or a male. If you are a male, you are macho, reasonable, immune to bouts of crying and like the colour blue; if you are a female, you are hysterical, maternal and into pink. There is, in other words, no scientific basis for gender.
The media represents this fictional, unscientific, non-biological view of the genders. The modern representation of the man who now changes diapers is only effective in advertising terms because of its comical value. It is comical in its total opposition to the reality of most modern families. More importantly, in the collective mind of society, the image of the ‘fatherman’ who changes diapers, cooks and cleans is an anomaly, an aberration that has homosexual overtones. The representation of the ‘fatherman’ thus works because the media realises that the ‘fatherman’ is a selling point because it simply does not exist in the mind of society.
The mind of society, therefore, is the driving force behind the media industry’s propagation of the gender myth, because the gender myth is a social creation. Advertising is a target audience based, market-researched industry. This implies that the media simply represents the genders as society see it themselves.
The media industry knows: it is not sex that sells, it is gender.

Escaping the body. The tenuous balance between reality, the tangible and that which beckons.

I sit here, trying to concentrate, grasp the illusions of reality around me: the wall I lean against, the mattress beneath me, the blade in my hand (left hand, right hand? Hard to distinguish right now, but the acknowledgement of ‘hand’ is comfort enough). The real comfort at the moment though, the indelible sign of reality, life, feeling is the stain on the sheet, growing, spreading.
The moment is all. The wrenching, eviscerating past is quenched by that which flows from the piece of flesh below my left hand (The flowing thoughts have been stemmed enough by the gash and I have been able to establish that it is the left). The firmness of the blade and the seeping pain is the moment, is all.
The sickness provided this body that I am trapped in with an escape, a release. The soothing letting of blood allows me to inhabit this body with some semblance of manageable discomfort.

I have come to the conclusion that all I can write is what I experience, what I have experienced in the past month. And I think what I have experienced is central to my “writing persona.” It is not that infamous “writer’s block” which carries with it romantic images of the writer’s ink-stained fingers sitting inert above a blank page, desperately summoning his muse. It is something I see as part and parcel of the artistic self: madness.
In “Against Interpretation”, Susan Sontag comments that the artist has taken the place of the martyr, the saint in modern consciousness. She argues that the artist has become the exemplary sufferer, and “among artists, the writer, the man of words is the person to whom we look to be able best to express his suffering. As a man, he suffers; as a writer, he transforms his suffering into art” (42).
Sontag quotes the examples of Cesare Pavese and Antonin Artaud. She describes the artist as “pure victim of his consciousness” (17). She writes that “Artaud does not simply record his psychic anguish”. It constitutes his work, for while the act of writing ” to give form to intelligence” is an agony, that agony also supplies the energy for the act of writing” (20).
As artists we literally suffer for our art. Our art would not exist without our suffering. The prefaratory quotation to White Oleander encapsulates this idea: “one becomes an artist unless they have to.” We suffer because we are artists, we are artists because we suffer.
Writing for me is a commentary on the human condition. This task requires both objectivity and an intense experience of the will to life and the need to die that this condition is composed of. Writing stems from the will to life and is a representation of the will to life overcoming the need to die. The will to life is thus the foundation of writing. The will to die is the blank page.
I haven’t written because I haven’t been able to. It’s not that there’s been nothing to write about, it’s that I haven’t had the energy. Sapped by depression, suicidality, the need to self-destruct. No creativity can stem from these roots.

If loneliness is a physical affliction, I’m suffering from it. The oppressive weight on my chest seeks escape from my body through my tear ducts, only for the oppressiveness to redouble itself with my body’s inability to cry.
I suffer from it daily, its presence a constant companion. The heavy depressions, the fear of the day manifests itself in an inability to wake up; the fear of rejection and more loneliness manifests itself in an inability to speak, an unwillingness to respond to even the smallest gesture of friendship.
It is a terminal affliction, my soul sensing that it will one day take me, hence my inability to plan a future for myself, a present other than the one bound by hours serving consumers of the Big Mac book. While there is always an awareness of the loneliness, there is the concurrent denial of it. One day I will be happy, one day I will be whole, one day my life will make sense and what I do will have worth, who I am will be worthy…. Of what? Of love? Impossible, I say. You are doomed to loneliness. You are doomed to the physical and psychical manifestations of the disease of loneliness, the dis-ease of it.
If loneliness is a physical affliction, I suffer from it. The pain wells up in my chest, with nowhere to go. The ink pouring onto the page a poor, cold substitute for the warmth of tears, the humanness of tears. I cannot respond in a human way. It would be too painful. The humanity of admitting my pain, of searching for a salve would be fatal. Better to wander hermit-like through humanity, hermetically sealing my own humanity, scientifically observing and commenting on humanity through my inky tears than expose the raw nerve. Better to cover the sensitive skin with the thickness of a scar which denies the skin’s sensitivity. Appear to the outside world as a freak who enjoys pain, an abomination who is insensitive to pain. Yes, I can slice through this, yes, I can pierce through that. Imagine what I can endure. I am impervious. While all the while I unsuccessfully seal off a writhing rawness which limpingly floats through the day, leaking ink.
It’s leaking ink, take it in for a service. Transfuse the ink of others into its body to make up for its daily wastage. Seal it off from the humanness of contact, conversation, friendship, love, sex. Steadily supply only that which is necessary for the minimum signs of life. We only need to keep it alive so that it can transcribe our experiences with its inky leakages. It can exist with the minimum of food, money, exposure to sunlight, enjoyment. It does not need any of those things. It cannot cry. Why supply humanity to that which is inhuman? It cannot cry, the pain wells up and loneliness becomes a physical affliction.

- Tell me a comforting story.

- There is nothing better than lying in bed at night with my two miniature daschunds, Saffie on my legs and Brontë pressed tightly against my side.

- Tell me a poignant story.

- A little girl walking home after spending the afternoon in the woods (they seem like woods to her, but in reality it’s probably just a veld densely populated with trees), and under her clothes she’s wearing a matching pair of underwear and a vest with the face of a little girl imprinted on them. Except she’s not wearing the pair of underwear anymore. She’s left them in the woods because she had to use them to wipe herself after taking a shit. And she’s scared.

- Tell me a happy story.

- I remember my sister and I swimming with my Dad when we were young, how he would do a couple of lengths of crawl, turning the tranquil water into a sloshing, rushing and receding turmoil of waves, quietly subsiding back into tranquility again once he sat on the edge of the pool with his legs dangling in the water, the little waves lapping more and more quietly against my body and the sides of the pool.
He would sit there on the edge of the pool in the swimming trunks my mother bought him for Christmas one year, those neon blue swimming trunks with its neon-pink and green flowers, and water pouring, then dripping, from his shoulder-length grey hair, kicking his legs lazily in the water. I would swim between his legs, grabbing hold of his calves on either side of me and allow myself to be swooshed through the water as he lifted me with his legs. I remember the feeling of his calves in my hands, the way I marveled at the hair on his legs trailing back and forth with me in the water.

- Tell me a story from your childhood.

- When I was living on a farm outside a small town, my friends and I used to walk to and from school. And as we walked the dusty roads we would pass, each day, a cripple man carrying two buckets on his way from the center of town. And we would make fun of his gait and laugh. One particular day after school, we decided to follow the man. We followed him to the river and its reedy banks, and we hid in the reeds as he made his way down to the river, curious about this man whom we saw every day of our lives, and why he was going down to the river with those buckets he was carrying.
We watched him as he put the buckets, which we now saw contained milk, down and began undressing. We were shocked, nervous and began giggling as only 10-year old boys can giggle. We watched him enter the water, naked with the two buckets of milk. We watched him pour the milk into the water and sit in the midst of it, the milky water swirling around his dark skin. We ran off, scared. I’ve never been able to get that day out of my mind.
- But what was he doing?
- I don’t know. That’s why it has stuck with me.
- But you can’t just end the story there! I want to know who he was, what he was doing there, why he bathed in milk in the river, why he was cripple?
- I don’t know. But I find the beauty of that story in the fact that I don’t know those things. We don’t have a beginning or an end, or a neat little parcel with all the answers. Isn’t that what stories are about? Stories that run into other stories that run into others, like a complex network of trails leading into one another, unsure of where one ends and another begins. They don’t satisfy our need for linearity, for encapsulated meaning. And that’s what makes them beautiful.

I am a mistress, but the cuckold is not her husband. There’s no groom at home harbouring increasing paranoia. She is not cheating on a man. I am not bedding another man’s wife. I am sleeping with a woman who is cheating on the heterosexual idyll that is her façade.
Stolen moments, lunches, public bathrooms. The eroticism of enforced silent embracing of tongues and limbs. The excruciating tingle of delayed gratification. I am her lunch-time and after dinner whore. There’ll be no waking up with her in the morning, no expeditions to acquire groceries, no lazing about on Saturday afternoons reading the papers and watching TV.
You would think that a hundred years’ lapse between now and Oscar Wilde calling it the “love that dare not speak its name” would have been sufficient to allow our love more than just a discursive space, more than just a space in the pornographic images on TV and in men’s fantasies.
But things haven’t changed, not really. There are the children to think about. The children who when we walk past them on the beach cause us to stop holding hands. Easier not to provoke that anxiety and unease. Instead of just two lovers holding hands over lunch we become the topic of conversation for their dinner later that night. Glances that become stares which are never polite or surreptitious.
I am the mistress and the cuckold is convention, and hell hath no fury like convention scorned.
The public and the private, the outer and the inner lives. For years I believed that the public, outer realm was ruled by superficial whim and convention and that what was important was what occurred in the inner realm of the private. But the truth is is that as human beings we have to live in both realms. We love and are loved in the realm of the private, but our love only becomes real when it is made public.
Psychologists speak of the term ‘reality testing’: something can be confirmed as real only once it is shared. And although our love is real, what I feel is real, it blurs into schizophrenic paranoia and delusion when it is not shared by others that you know and love. And if our love is a delusion, unreal, then I do not exist. Unless others know about our love I do not exist. Love has made me a spectre roaming the fringes of her life, waiting for her to leave the real world to enter the minutes we share.

She walks the tightrope. She’s become quite adept at it. Not so much adept at balancing, at maintaining focus but accustomed to the air, the rasping, gulping, concrete-lung quality of her breathing.
Nietzsche speaks about man walking the tightrope between the old world and the new, between the man in his white picket-fence existence and the übermensch. He speaks about smashing the old values, embracing the new. He was a visionary, a poet. He saw the human condition in its essence and was unfettered by the restraints of convention.
He was also mad.
Walking the tightrope is out of necessity an act of madness. Why leave the safety of solid ground to teeter on an inch of rope strung across an abyss? But for the tightrope-walker this balancing act is in and of itself sanity. Because to stay on the solid ground, to inhabit the white picket-fenced soil with its whisperings about the increase in petrol prices, soccer and laundry detergent would be death.
When they talk about Columbus, Drake and other explorers they do not tell you about the fear. They conjure up images of the excitement of mapping the unmapped, sailing the unsailed, conquering the unconquered. They do not tell you about the fear.
Each day seems to be going nowhere except into the next day (the hours, always the hours). Each day is exceedingly difficult and painful for her. Because she doesn’t know how to use her body. She cannot inhabit it comfortably, she cannot make it talk to people and fit in. Her mind is so accustomed to conversing with itself, with books and their characters, that she has formed her own language, lives in her own world. She cannot understand their language; they cannot understand hers. She’s surrounded by people, she’s got a job, a relationship, friends, but the effort of trying to converse in their language is slowly killing her.
She’s faced with two nightmares: the overwhelming loneliness of a world where she seems to fit in, but doesn’t, and the world of her mind where the victim is stalked by the rapist. She tries to have a conversation but it becomes a monologue; she tries to live but she wants to die. She tries to die but she wants to live.
This is her tightrope, and she has to walk it. She cannot stay in the world of white picket-fences because she knows it’s a mirage. She has learnt that the conventions, rules, mores, values and language of this picket-fence world are pink-coloured tissue paper held over a gushing wound.
Now that she has a taste for blood she cannot see the tissue paper. She cannot see the tissue paper and so cannot stay. She has to walk the tightrope with a taste of iron in her mouth.
As years pass, walking the tightrope becomes easier, she becomes more skilful. She learns to couch her fear of the world and her tears in the language of Nietzsche, Derrida, Woolf and Plath. Clutching this dictionary she walks the tightrope, smashing the values of the world she has left with Nietzsche’s hammer and Derrida’s differance, while chanting to herself from Mrs Dalloway. When confronted by patronising and paternal society she maintains her balance with a vociferous “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.”
She has, however, come to learn that no matter how well-versed she becomes in the lexicon of her dictionary, it is impotent in comparison to the wordless murmurings of a language beyond language, lessons learnt before she could learn. She cannot shout and scream and froth and bleed and mouth inaudibly the words beyond words because it is a language beyond language which she cannot utter because it is unutterable, a language beyond language which she cannot understand because she learnt it before she could learn, and a language beyond language which she cannot silence because it is always already inaudible, yet always already present in its absence.
She can only continue to walk the tightrope as long as she sticks to the socially accepted madness of philosophy. “Ontological doubt” does not compare to what she feels. But there is no space in the world for what she feels, no market, no future. With “ontological doubt” she earns accolades and degrees and admiration. She can speak about ontology and epistemology, but she cannot simply cry out, “Who am I? What does any of this mean?” So she clutches her dictionary tightly to her side, because she cannot shout and scream and froth and bleed.
We live in the era of the backlash of Nietzsche’s declaration that God is dead, Barthes’ cry that the Author is dead and postmodernism’s claustrophobic questioning of truth, history, identity and reality. Yes, art mirrors nature because the postmodern novel performs the writing subject’s discomfort. How can we have a coherent, cohesive, stable written text when s/he who holds the pen is falling to pieces?
Not only can the falcon not hear the falconer, but the tether has broken and both the falcon and the falconer wander the earth searching for that which used to centre them; they cannot remember what it was. They just know that they used to be in control, they once had purpose and meaning.
I can no longer pretend to be an author who creates, defines, delineates, controls. I cannot smooth over the cracks in my self by gluing pages together with meaningless scribblings of ink. So why do I write?
I’ve asked myself this question innumerable times, but the dissatisfying answer is always the same: it is a soundless, bloodless, toothless thrashing and screaming. You see, dear reader, I am just like you. I too like neat beginnings and endings; I too long for the comfort of the prince and the princess and the pea and the apple and the witch. I, who am versed in deconstruction and poststructuralist pulling apart of convention, would simply like something to cling to.
Writing is a desperation; a frantic ejaculation of ink in order to capture feelings, thoughts, events in the hopes that a story will emerge. In this sense my writing is very much like my self-mutilation: each incision, slash and wound is an archaeological attempt to excavate a solid self. Like the scalpel, the pen digs through the layers of paper in order to find that page with my story on it.

We were a few clubs up from Purple Fly, the club I usually frequented. Well, frequented is the wrong word. I’d been there twice for New Year’s Eve parties. I momentarily dwelled on those nights experienced through the haze of ecstasy and shooters. We walked hand in hand up to a door guarded by two dykes who looked like they drove trucks for a living. The sounds of Limp Bizkit emanated thumpingly through the door they flanked.The word ‘Dominion’ glowed in pink neon above the door. “Hey!” A double-headed nod in her direction, lascivious stares in mine. We exchanged money for a stamp of a pair of handcuffs on the back of our hands. “Mmm. Original!” I remarked. She shot me an impish grin and led me through the door.
My status as a foreigner to the land of clubs in general prepared me to expect anything, but what I saw once my eyes accustomed themselves to the smoke-filled passage really took me aback. The passage, which led you for about ten metres into the belly of the club, had display cases fixed to the walls on either side. I am not exactly innocent: I’ve seen underworld performance art and my share of pornography, but what now flanked me took my breath away.
Amongst the black and white photographs of live piercing performance art and body suspensions, were leather and metal implements of every imaginable, and unimaginable, persuasion: human dog collars with thick chains attached to them, hunting knives, razor blades, pvc masks, leather hoods, leather whips, cat o’ nine tails, riding crops, ropes fashioned out of silk, pvc, cotton, leather. The name of the club, ‘Dominion’ suddenly took on a whole new meaning.
The gothic museum-like passage opened up into a huge, darkened room, lit sporadically with blue globes hanging quite low from the ceiling. It took a while to realize that it was only a fair-sized space surrounded by floor to ceiling mirrors. The club didn’t seem to have reached capacity yet, it was still quite early, but the thirty or so people in the room were either crowded around the bar or seated on the couches along the walls or around the tables in the centre of the room. I was relieved to note that amongst the patrons there were a few whose most outlandish attire was a mohican or arms that were sleeved with tattoos. But leather seemed to be the most popular attire for the rest of them.
We moved through the crowd and pushed our way to a space at the bar. Limp Bizkit made way for Rob Zombie’s “Living Dead Girl.” I would have told her how much I loved the song had it not been for the volume of the music, and the fact that just as I leaned into her neck the barman approached us. Well, barman was a bit of a loose term to describe what stood before us.
He, I could only determine the sex due to the lack of breasts, wore a leather hood with a hole allowed for him to breathe through his nose. He had several piercings through each nipple and wore fur-lined leather cuffs. What held my attention though was the dog-collar around his neck, attached through the medium of a metre-long chain to a woman wearing nothing but a pvc mask, nipple piercings, a leather thong and thigh-high boots. I contemplated the intricacies of placing an order with this pair.
She didn’t seem to be deterred though. She leaned forward and shouted her order directly into the area of his face where his ear would be. At this point the leather-clad woman flicked her cat o’ nine tails over his shoulders and yanked the chain around his neck. Seemingly unperturbed, the bar-gimp followed his mistress around behind the bar, preparing our drinks.
She signaled that she wanted to say something by waving a hand in front of my face and yelled into my ear: “What with the music and the fact that his hearing is severely impeded by that hood, it’s quite entertaining to hang around and see how many orders he gets wrong, sometimes on purpose, ‘coz then his mistress whips him mercilessly and makes him grovel at her feet!” I mildly raised my eyebrows, trying to play it cool, but I was quite relieved when he placed the drinks in front of us and she indicated that he had the right order by paying him.
I downed the shot of Apple Sours, took a large swig from the bottle of Black Label, lit up a cigarette and began surveying the rest of the clientele in the room behind us. The momentary comparison I had registered outside between the bouncer-dykes and Cerberus guarding the gates of Hell flickered once again through my mind as the room mimicked a mirrored tableau of Dante’s Purgatory.
Most of the people in the room were couples. Those in leather resembled, in various forms, the master/slave barman duo. There were two girls forced into a tortuous Siamese pairing via a chain that was intricately linked through their multiple piercings. There was a scrawny bearded guy whose ironically much larger partner was gagged by a leather contraption shackled around his head clamping a red rubber ball between his teeth.
Amused I reflected how this and the other melodramatic scenarios reflected unspoken interrelations in every day partnerships. How many irritated husbands wouldn’t just love to attach that leather-ball contraption to their wives’ heads? How many wives would give anything to beat their husbands about the shoulders and then get them to lick their boots?
Not everyone was linked together in any visible bond of pain. Despite the Dantesque attitudes adopted by the couples, they behaved in a satirically normal way: they drank beer, smoked cigarettes, talked, perved, laughed.
She interrupted my musings and motioned me towards the door, which presumably led to the dance floor. Marilyn Manson’s remix of Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus” led us into the room adjoining the bar. In our eye-line, above the writhing bodies on the sunken dance floor, an intricate foliage of chain and leather decorated the ceiling. The theme of blue lighting was continued into this room and low-hung flickering strobe lighting intermittently illuminated the pulsating leather and metal of the dance floor.
On either side of the room a DJ hovered over their respective equipment, sweating in their vapour of blue light. She later told me that there were two DJs playing songs alternately in order to woo the crowd. The best DJ was then auctioned off at the end of the evening in order to participate in a ‘play’ (an erotic activity involving pain, domination, bondage, etc.) or ‘scene,’ also known as a ‘session’ (a ‘play’ between two or more people.)
Rather than hanging around on the edge of the dance floor, she led me straight onto the floor. We fought our way through leather, metal, flesh, smoke and sweat to the middle of the floor. The drinks earlier in the evening on top of the Black Label and tequila counteracted any anxiety I felt about the surroundings and I was soon enjoying myself, thrashing about to “House of Love” by Sisters of Mercy. I had no sense of the individuality of anybody around me. They were an organic seething mass, an extension of the throbbing bass of the music.
All I could hear was the music, all I could feel was the bass reverberating through my body, and all I could see was her, blue hair, piercings, eyes and lips erratically illuminated by the strobe lights. She was all concentration, jumping up and down to the screaming synthesis of electrical instruments and vocals, her head bobbing up and down in juddering flashes of blue.
The second DJ insinuated his next track between and above his rival’s, and as the easily recognisable thudding bass of Nine Inch Nails “I Wanna Fuck You Like An Animal” shuddered through our bodies, she lifted her grinning face onto my level, grabbed me by the front of the waistband of my jeans and pulled me against her. I smiled into her neck, slid my hands up and down her waist, concentrating on the pounding bass that dialogued between our breasts. Clutching my waistband with her left hand she slid her right hand up my abdomen and cupped my breast, gently, and then eagerly, deftly running her thumb over and over my pierced nipple. The throbbing of the bass in my body pooled under her hand and in my cunt.
I exhaled deeply into her neck, nestled her head into my hands as I ran my tongue over her sweating skin in the groove between her collarbone and the muscle of her shoulder, up along her neck, her earlobe. Finding her mouth I forced her head back into my hands and pushed my tongue deep into her mouth, pressing my hips against hers.
Her tongue reciprocated teasingly, massaging my tongue with hers while she gently tugged at the ring in my nipple, the pleasure of which forced me to disentangle my mouth from hers and emit a deep groan into her neck.
“Ohhh, fuck!” I breathed into her ear, nibbling the lobe, running my tongue over and between the piercings in her lobe.
“You like?” she asked, breathing a smile into my ear.
“Fuck yeah!” I answered, returning my mouth to hers, slowly running my hand up her ribcage to her breast where I found the nipple erect around the piercing. I pressed my thumb into her breast, pushing the hardness of piercing and nipple into the surrounding softness. She ground her pubic bone into mine, continuing to manipulate my nipple ring between her thumb and forefinger, grabbing a handful of my hair in her other hand, pressing my mouth deeper into hers.
I resurfaced to consciousness, realising that Nine Inch Nails had long ago been followed by Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters.” At about the same moment, she disengaged her mouth from mine. I looked up to see a guy in a Korn t-shirt handing her two tequilas. She nodded her thanks and handed me the shotglass. Like waking from a deep sleep I once again took in the crowd and the lights and the shotglass. Downing the tequila our bodies once again gravitated towards each other. She leaned into me and with her free hand pulled my face towards hers, running her tongue over my lips, inserting the rough wetness of her tongue into the blazing tequila-induced warmth of my mouth.
Sisters of Mercy soulfully droan “I Don’t Exist When You Don’t See Me” and I feel it, because nothing exists besides her body against mine, pounding the bass and voices into my body until my whole body vibrates against her frame. All I feel is the heat of her chest and her mouth and her cunt, the pulsating gentleness of her tongue in my mouth, the warmth and wholeness of her hand on my breast, her manipulation of my nipple. I push her mouth deeper into my mouth, my hands in the blue sweat of her hair, my tongue pushing into her mouth to the rhythm of the music and the rhythm of my hipbone pushing into her groin, yearning to put my tongue in the folds of her pussy, flicking my tongue in and over the folds of her lips. After a few seconds she whispers, “Wanna get outta here?”

The freshness of the night air didn’t interrupt the alcohol and lust induced trance I was in. I wasn’t conscious of how we got home and only realised we hadn’t gone back to my house when we came to a standstill outside an unfamiliar house. We hadn’t spoken in the car and didn’t speak as we got out of the car, entered the house and as she led me to the bedroom.
She pulled me towards her, burying her head in my neck, kissing, licking and then sucking the sensitive area between my neck and my shoulder. I ran my hands over her back, down her back, pulling her t-shirt up, feeling the smoothness of the skin, the beautiful contours of the small of her back. She lifted her lips and tongue from my neck as I pulled her t-shirt up over her head and reacquainted myself with the sensuality that only a woman’s body has: the contradiction between the firm planes of her hips, ribcage and the suppleness of stomach and breasts. I lowered my head to meet my fingers around her nipples and took the hardness of steel and nipple into my mouth. She moaned into my ear and pulled me onto her as she fell on top of the bed.
She ran her hands over my hips, the small of my back, my buttocks, pulling me against her. She lifted my t-shirt over my head, unclasped my bra and moaned as I ran my nipples over her stomach. She unbuttoned her jeans, kicked her Docs off and started unbuttoning my pants. We kicked and wriggled out of our pants while kissing, rolling around on the bed. In the darkness I took in the planes and curves of her body with one hand while playing with her nipple with the other.
She rolled over onto me, straddling my left leg so that I could feel her wetness on my upper thigh. She sucked my right nipple and pulled the left nipple ring with her hand. Fuck, it felt like she was stimulating a nerve that ran straight from my nipples to my clit. Moaning I pushed my cunt up into her hipbone. She sucked my right nipple deeper and harder into her mouth and tugged a little harder at the left one as she repositioned her wetness over my hipbone, without moving her mouth and hand from my breasts and began slowly rocking backwards and forwards onto my hip.
I removed my left hand from her nipple and felt my way towards her cunt. Sighing and biting into my nipple she lifted herself off my hip, high enough for me to insert one, then three fingers into her, my thumb locating and teasing the cold metal in her clit. God, I’d missed this! my fingers sliding in and out of the wet warmth. As she lifted her head and pushed her tongue into my mouth she slid her hand from my nipple, slowly down my side, onto my stomach, onto my hip, still slowly riding backwards and forwards onto my fingers. She ran her hand down the outside of my thigh, onto my knee, back up along the inside of my thigh and then rested her hand on the inside of my thigh so that the outside of her hand was gently rubbing against my labia. She kept this up until I thought I was going to explode. She slowly slid her hand over my labia, over and between the folds of my cunt, tortuously running her index finger from my entrance up to my clit, neither touching it nor entering me. Unable to take it any longer I disengaged myself from the kiss and breathed, “Touch me, please touch me. I need you inside me!” She lifted her head to look at me.
“Really?” she teased, “How much?”
“Fuck! Please, I really need you inside me.”
With that she moved two fingers up to my clitoris, massaging it gently but firmly, looking into my face the whole time, still rocking gently onto my fingers, which had by now increased to four. Then she slid the two fingers down towards the entrance of my cunt and put what felt like her whole hand into me.
At the moment she did this she watched my reaction, which was a sobbing “Oh fuck! Oh God!” and then forced her tongue deep into my throat, in and out, in and out, her fingers moving in unison with her tongue and her torso. She started moving down and onto my fingers faster and harder and I pushed up around her hand to the same rhythm. She came hard with a moan that was almost drowned out by my screams as I felt everything disappear, except the warm wetness of our mingling tongues merging with the warm wetness of my hand inside her and her inside me.

You could, I suppose, attribute the murders to the fact that I stopped believing in fairy-tales. The slack-jawed, gaping-eyed sense of wonderment and awe at the prince and the princess and the pea and the apple and the witch were replaced by a more sophisticated lexicon of adulthood consisting out of the vocabulary of disillusionment, the words of negation, the morphemes of cynicism and the phonemes of pain.
Suspension of disbelief. It is a prerequisite of awe and wonderment. And belief, and identity, and sanity. When you are willing to believe anything, the book that you clutch is solid, its book-smell pungent; the quarter-page bible-like illustrations outlining the prince and the princess and the pea and the witch have been grounded and solidified by the way in which you have lovingly crayoned in the colours of their hair and their clothes and their swords and their frogs; the territory and terrain of each story is concretely contained by its beginning and its end and the prince always gets the princess who feels the pea and survives the apple and escapes the witch.
Awe and wonderment, and belief, and identity, and sanity: the fairy-tale is the microcosmic blue-print for life. You clutch at the solid, pungent, outlined princes and princesses and peas and apples and witches with their hair and their clothes and their swords and their frogs and you mark your territory and your terrain and you cling to beginnings and endings and you get and you feel and you survive and you escape. You believe, you identify, you are sane. The suspension of disbelief.
“Suspension” – a holding back of something that already exists, is already there on the fringes of your consciousness, your belief. Belief does not exist without disbelief. The child-like bliss of awe and wonderment is based on a suspending of a knowing that what you believe is true, is not true. You believe, you identify, you are sane.

At first, when the disparity between the world of the prince and the princess and the pea and the apple and the witch and the world in which you live becomes more and more obvious, you murmur the wordless words that you were taught before you were able to learn. And you no longer feel the solidity of the book that you clutch, the book-smell fades and instead of rendering in colour the quarter-page bible-like illustrations, you become the prince and the princess and the pea and the witch and you are rendered colourful, solid, outlined. You become part of the terrain of the story, sturdily contained by the beginning and the end.
The fairy-tale is true because you live it, you believe it, and you believe it because you do not want to disbelieve the world outside of these pages with their book-smell, the story you are with a beginning and an end. You do not want to disbelieve the tale that you are told, the tale you live in the outside world. You cannot disbelieve it.
So you murmur the wordless words more and more and you are rendered colourful, solid, outlined in this world where there are beginnings and endings and you clutch at the solid, pungent, outlined princes and princesses and peas and apples and witches with their hair and their clothes and their swords and their frogs and you mark your territory and your terrain and you cling to beginnings and endings and you get and you feel and you survive and you escape.
It’s not the same as the time before the wordless words had to be murmured. You don’t believe as much as before, but you live it, you don’t identify as much as before because the outside self, the self that clutches the solid book with its book-smell has become a medium, an empty vessel for her fairy-tale selves, and you are not sane, but you are safe.
Suspension of disbelief.

Having lunch with her today I realise how much I’ve missed her. I smiled just looking at her. The way she smiles deeply, for the same reason, that she has missed just looking at you. And the two of you just sit there, just grinning, just looking at each other. And the need to just touch her, hold her hand, slide your hand into her; stroke her face, stroke her nipple; to hold her, to hold your cunt over her face; to kiss her, to kiss her clit deep into your mouth; to run your hands through her hair, to run your tongue through the folds of her cunt.
And you both writhe in this wanting of each other, and the not being able to have of each other. She sits there, just across the table, and you can hold her hand, stroke her face, kiss her, run your hands through her hair, but you can’t take her home with you, make love to her, fuck her for hours. You just sit there and touch her fingers across the table, thrill at the touch of her skin and fantasise about what you will do to her.
And you realise how much you had missed her, how much you missed loving her. How much you had missed having her in your life, there to talk to, there to phone, there to have breakfast with, there to be your person, the only person in your day who lives for you. And you want to convey to her how much you think about her how like once every ten minutes you think about her, but how actually its like ten times in every minute.
And I wonder whether she misses me as much. Does she find time during her day to have her thoughts intermittently interrupted by thoughts of me? Does she find that I intrude into the weirdest situations; as though somewhere in her mind I lie percolating, and every once in a while a bubble of me rises and pops the surface of her mind?
I’ll be thinking of my birthday, how I’ll be at the gallery opening and how afterwards you’ll be taking me to supper, where we go and what we’ll have to eat, how we’ll go home and make love afterwards. And then I remember that you won’t be there, how you can’t come out.
I’ll be visiting friends, drinking wine, smoking hash, and I’ll imagine getting high with you, lying side to side and discussing our thoughts, having a bath together and then being naked in the lounge in the semi-darkness, burning incense, talking about Virginia Woolf, being lesbian in South Africa, our plans for Christmas, how you were Vita Sackville-West to my Virginia Woolf, our mothers, how we’d build a house together and how we’d decorate it, the astrology behind our relationship with our mothers. We would drift in and out of talk, chocolate and sex. And then I’d realise you’re not with me anymore.
I’ll be at home washing the dishes, and I’ll think of hearing your keys rattle against the door as you let yourself in, how you’ll come up behind me and hug me against you, that feeling of rightness and safety and all the shit having stopped when you hold me. How I then turn around and shiver as my chest makes contact with yours for the first time and you kiss me, ask me about my day. And then I’ll start from my reverie and you’re not here, you’re there, not with me.
I’ll be lying at home, watching tv, and eating supper, and I’ll have to sms you and ask you what you’re having for supper, how your day was, how you’re feeling. And if you’re not feeling well how it kills me. How powerless I feel when the one I love is hurting and ill and I can’t be there to hold you, to make you feel better. How frustrating it is to have sms conversations when I’m limited to a certain amount of letters, a certain amount of smss. All I want to do is convey how much I miss you, love you, how often I think of you. Without the body language of love, the eight typed letters of ‘I love you’ lose their authenticity. Language begins to fail and you’re left with the inane, superficial, stacatto ping pong of conversation via cellphone

Attached to the inside of my grandparents’ guest toilet door the calendar was inevitably decorated with the standard flowers or birds, with the months in calligraphy. The majority of the calendar was taken up by little blocks making up the days of the year, and in one-third of these blocks, in my grandmother’s handwriting, resided the names of those who were deemed important enough to be part of this family monument.
The gravity of the word “monument” is appropriate, because as a grandmother, your family is impossibly large, the numbers of grandchildren rippling through the pond of society by the drop of your grandfather’s pebble. The calendar thus becomes a monument to the virility of the family: each name upon that chart is lovingly inscribed as it is a record, a family tree.
As a child I used to sit on the toilet and scan through the names on the chart, the comfort of the same chart with the same birds and flowers and the same names. Of course there were the intermittent additions to the list of names, but my interest in them and the other names was usually cursory. After imbibing the comfortable sameness and constancy of the chart upon the door I would scan through the dates until I reached May 15th and read the name filled into the corresponding block and it would be confirmed: I was indeed born on May 15th and I am indeed a member of this family and indeed important enough to have my name etched into this monument.

I remember the exact moment I lost my childhood very clearly. Quite appropriately it revolved around food and semantics.
It had happened often before, but on this particular evening the failure of my father to come home after work and eat the dinner I had prepared for him severed the already taut candy-floss fibres of my childhood.
I was twenty-four years old and had been playing parent and wife to my father for three years. These roles involved waiting. Waiting between the hours of my arrival home from university and the hours of his arrival home from work.
I didn’t of course at the time know I was waiting, but the hindsight of my therapised self looks upon those hours and realises that I became a character who joined Vladimir and Estragon in their waiting for something or someone who would never come because they existed only in the lexicon of a self desperately searching for a meaning outside of one’s self.
In short, the moment of my birth into adulthood was accompanied by blinding light, blood and screaming and unlike the first birth, was attended upon by my consciousness who was not wearing surgical gloves, a mask and gown and was soiled by the gurglings and oozings of this monstrous thing.
As the fish lay cooling and congealing in the oven and the broccoli swelled flaccidly, I realised that I was waiting for something that would never arrive. Yes, he would of course finally make his way home, fumbling with the keys and cursing the dogs under his beer-breath, but it was not him I was waiting for. What I was waiting for, the Daddy who held my hand as we walked through the mall, the Daddy whose legs I clung to as he sat on the edge of the pool, him smiling at me in the water, would never come home because he had been replaced by a man, a forty-eight year old man who was lonely, depressed and lost and used women and beer to forget.

“History is natural selection.” Memory is the same. We are who we choose to remember; we are the histories we choose to remember. The image of the child sitting on the toilet paying homage to a monument made out of paper. A paper family. The irony of the setting for this monument is only apparent now: she might as well have wiped her ass with those birds and flowers.

In his Metamorphosis, Ovid recounts the tale of the Thracian poet’s search for his dead lover, Eurydice: “when he had wept for her to the full in the upper world, he made so bold as to descend to the gate of Taenarus to the Styx, to try to rouse the sympathy of the shades as well” (Ovid 1955: 245).
After pleading his case with the gods of hell, “Orpheus received her, but on the condition that he must not look back until he had emerged from the valleys of Avernus, or else the gift he had been given would be taken from him” (Ovid 1955: 246). The two lovers make their way back up to the light of day, but before he reaches the surface, “anxious in case his wife’s strength be failing and eager to see her, the lover looked behind him, and straightway Eurydice slipped back into the depths” (Ovid 1955: 246).

I torture myself with what-ifs. If I had known I had to lose you, what would I have done differently? What would I have said differently? What would I have left unsaid? And what unsaids would I have picked up out of the constant stream of my mind and given to you to hold, to look at, to take away with you?
I always said that the time I spent with you, the moments we shared together were the most real, most alive, most present moments of my life. I saw, touched, tasted, heard, smelt as if for the first time.
And yet, looking back, I wasted so much time. If I had known then that the time we had together was limited, I would have touched more of you. I would have read your skin, the curves, hollows, hard and soft planes, smoothness and roughness of you like Braille and saved it on my hard drive, ready to be recalled, re-membered, re-cognised at the click of my mouse.
And in my “touch” folder I would have saved the files of what it was like to explore you with only my hands; how it felt to have you under me for my inspection, my exploration, my circumnavigation. I would have remembered to record how many finger-lengths it took to travel between the beginning of your collarbone and its end in the hollow of your neck; I would have copied and saved into document after document the parameters, diameter, circumference and volume of that little hollow in your neck.
I would have downloaded the data of your breasts: their shape, their weight, their texture, the relative textures of your breast as compared to your nipple. I would have flagged the file documenting your nipple with high importance, chronicling its shape, size, structure and texture in the various stages of its arousal. I would have made a note to remember exactly how many hands it would take to hold your breast, first the left and then the right.
And in the file marked “Her Vagina”, I would have faithfully recorded my Captain’s Log of voyages over the surfaces and folds of you, into the depths of you. I would have commentaries annotating each millimetre of progress into you, how and where I left markers signalling the end of one exploration and the beginning of the next.
In my “seeing” folder I would have architecturally and biologically accurate drawings of you, dissecting and rebuilding each inch of your flesh with draughtsman-like clarity. I would have a document indicating the size and exact topographical location of each mole, each freckle, each scar.
And in the “taste” folder I would have culinary dissertations recording the variety of tastes I marvelled at: the saltiness of your earlobes, the metallic bitterness of your perfumed neck, the complex richness of your lips and tongue, the arresting fruity acidity of your pussy.
What if I had known we would not be together for long? Would I have taken more care? Would I have lavished more attention on you?
Why did I sleep so late in the mornings? Why did I sleep at all? If only I had woken up with you we could have had hours of extra time to walk on the beach, watching the sunrise, holding hands, stopping and hugging each other every time we were overcome by the compulsion to tell each other how much we loved each other. Having leisurely breakfasts on sunbathing patios at restaurants and bars overlooking the sea.
We would have had all those extra minutes and seconds during which we could have woken up together; the electric warmth of coming to consciousness, hugging you towards me and feeling your body against mine as if for the first time. Opening my eyes to look at you only to see that you’re smiling too, because this is simply happiness. Pure, beyond words, mutual happiness. And how before I know it we’re hugging each other more tightly, then kissing, tenderly at first, then hungrily, regardless of the fact that neither of us have brushed our teeth because, after all, it’s your teeth, your tongue, you. And then, peristaltically and yet suddenly, you’re making love, fucking, for minutes, then hours. And then it’s lunch-time. And then we walk down to the closest seafood restaurant, feasting on prawns, performing cunnilingus on mussels, your eyes laughing.
That’s how it should have happened.

Why did Orpheus look back? Why did he take the risk of losing Eurydice forever?

And in retrospect you make all sorts of pacts involving Satan and your soul. You stop worrying about the what-ifs and start contemplating the “if she came back” scenarios.
If you came back, if we could be together again, we would be so happy. If there were no obstacles, just you and me, we would be happy, because we love each other and that is enough. (Isn’t it?) It’s enough because all we want is each other, and all we need is each other, and all we have is each other. We would spend each waking moment hungry for or sated from each other and nothing else would matter.

But Orpheus had to look back, didn’t he, exactly because he loved her so much, exactly because he was afraid of losing her.
And what did it feel like in that moment when he saw her and realised that she had followed him, that they had made it, that they would be together; and, that he had also lost her forever, irrevocably, because of his love for her. How did it feel knowing that his love for her, the very thing that had literally led him into the mouth of Hell to save her had in the end been the reason for his irredeemable loss of her?

I’ve begun the process of mourning you; the Daddy I thought I had. The protracted inquest takes place weekly in a therapist’s office.
Yesterday she asked me about the times I used to go and fetch you from the pubs, and it felt as if was giving part of us away, betraying you by admitting my pain.
And she gave me nothing to replace you with. She couldn’t fucking hold me and tell me that it would be ok. She couldn’t give me a placebo Daddy to tide me over while I dismantle you, and mourn the dismantled you.
And once I’ve taken a scalpel to you, laid your entrails alongside your broken, hollowed-out corpse, and once I’ve knelt beside you and chanted a litany for the death of you, and once I’ve lit the candle for my unfulfilled infant needs, what do I do then?
And what would be the point? I only ever did anything for you, so that you could look at me. Just so that you could fucking look at me.
Because the truth, Daddy, is that I won’t be able to do anything, because I’ll be as broken, as hollowed-out as you. And I’ll be left with this claustrophobic, all-encompassing, numbing emptiness, nothingness. Because, who am I without you? Who am I if I am not Daddy’s little girl?
And then how do I go through the day, dragging two empty corpses around with me?
Or do I do what I’m doing now? Try to provide the corpses with some substance, some meaning by coolly and scientifically recording each scalpel-stroke. I might have to murder you, and consequently myself, slowly and excruciatingly, but at least I’ll be able to fucking write.

How do you explain your choices to people? How do you explain yourself to people? It’s hard enough trying to understand yourself. My natural introspection, aided by numerous therapists, dragging me kicking and screaming towards the abyss that is selfhood, had made me internalise others’ questioning of my need to puncture and ink my body.
Tattoos and piercings are usually glamorously associated with rockstars and not so glamorous men of the I’m-overcompensating-for-something-with-my-stereotypical-butchness; men of the ilk that have one hand clasping both braai tongs and a Castle and the other proprietorially clasping his chick’s ass. You know the type – the I’m-sporting-a-mullet-underneath-my-motor-oil-soaked-overalls-and-Harley-Davidson-rip-off-helmet.
My tattoos are a sign, a symbol, a writing on the body, of difference. A statement. Every human being longs to be seen as unique, as different, as noticeable. In essence, we do not want to be invisible. In my more adult moments I realise that this need can be sated in less exhibitionist ways, but the fact is that my piercings and tattoos make me feel more confident about myself, less exposed.
It’s paradoxical, I know, because I’m attracting attention and therefore making myself more vulnerable, but what I’ve realised is that I’m using the very human habit of judging people by their looks to my own advantage. I’ve read that in pre-modern cultures, tattoos were worn to ward off evil spirits, to protect the wearer. Warding off, protection… I cannot allow you to get to know me, so I do the judging the book by its cover trick in reverse and repel people who are not psychologically aware of the implications of my adornments.