Because I Couldn't Kill You - Kelly-Eve Koopman

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prequel to Hitler and who amongst other things hated socialism, democracy and Liberalism. I think there was supposed to be some irony here. And then of course there was the time Max, the mixed husky you ‘rescued’, was stolen out the yard. That story is suddenly very different when written on the page.

      Or maybe it wasn’t a problem with being able to love us, after all. Maybe it was your pride. Maybe you couldn’t look at us after you vacated your job, exiled yourself from the company of other creatures besides books and junk and homemade weapons. And then once you had cleared away the clutter of most people, slowly and it seemed almost deliberately, you started losing your mind. The leftover parts of which are incompatible clues. The parts of an inane machine. As we grew up and became all the more intimately involved with life, so you fell out of love with it and tried to keep yourself as close to dead as possible. As you could be now, alone. Partially cast out, partially yourself an outcast. A thief who has allegedly stolen from his own mother’s safe after being put up in her house, discarded his phone and made a run for it, without a trace. An alleged abuser, which is somehow more acceptable. There are no more members of your family who will keep you in their homes. I say ‘keep you’ as if you are a pet. A big man-pet, who cannot feed itself or wash itself but who will bark viciously at all the intruders real and imagined.

      I don’t blame them for putting you out on the street. You’re the kind of damp that makes people’s houses fall apart, ceilings silently rot from the inside. The kind of damage that you can slowly get used to, mistaking gangrene for grass. You are less a plant than a broken mechanism. Rusty, archaic tool, blunt hacksaw, bent screw. I am not a naive and decadent young arts student anymore. Yet I fear there are still parts of me enamoured with the poetry of your tragedy, the lyrical complexity of you. You have always known exactly how to appeal to my creative fervour. I must try to remember you are a non-functional, un-aesthetic artefact that will not hang in the museum of anybody’s heart. Not a painting, or a dinosaur, or a work of literature. You’re more like a thick old phone book. Stuffed with the numbers of places that will no longer answer. People who can barely prove they were there to begin with. A paper wasteland, indecipherable hieroglyphs.

      Some of these nights, combing through these pieces of evidence, I wake up shaking. From a childhood nightmare that still fits snug. That you will emerge and come and kill us in our sleep. Even though you would have no idea where we live now. Me in Muizenberg, my sister in Joburg, my brother and mother in a house in Observatory. Well, I suppose I’ve just given you some idea if you ever read this. And even if you did go back to the old house in Glenhaven, where my grandparents still live, the locks on the doors have all been changed and a K9-trained Alsatian guards their front gate. I’m not really actually afraid you will come and kill us. I’ve had these sudden and fast-dissolving fears not because you were physically abusive, but because you are terrifyingly unpredictable, now more than ever before. Now that you are no longer contained in the room at the back of the house where you never ventured beyond the kitchen.

      The fear of you is more like being scared of a ghost. So I suppose searching for you is more like hunting for ghosts. And what I need more than an austere Famous-Five-style packed lunch is a strong sense of self, a proton pack and a particle accelerator. But men really didn’t like the women Ghostbusters. So who am I to revisit the narrative?

      For an ex-journalist, you have left little evidence of your story. More a spectre than a body. And even though I haven’t had and probably won’t have it in me to really go looking for you in shelters or in the streets, you might be upset that I chose to write you down in this book. But you set the precedent that we should always meet most authentically on the page. And I’m a little scared that by putting together the right collection of words I might summon you back like a spirit. But there is nothing unique here, this is no new story. In my country, everyone is a little haunted by all the lost bodies. And nobody knows where to put them to rest.

      CHAPTER 3

      Home invasion

      I have been looking for you, writing about you because I am afraid I will forget you. And now I’m afraid I never will. I forgot about you successfully, or pretended to forget, for almost 15 years. But now, when faced with the threat of your extinction, you are back.

      You keep intruding here where I want to be alone. You have now successfully crept into my new life. With my new family, my partner and my new home. You’re doing your damage from the inside. I feel myself become small, stifled. You are feeding off all the parts of me that are damaged, broken, unwhole. These are the spots that are vulnerable to parasitic mould, the invisible stuff that enters through even the smallest of cracks and suffocates from the inside. I can feel the beams and roof of me caving in. The water damage is spreading, swelling and bloating inside until my self, my home, will come crashing down and you will have slowly infected everything I love. You are trespassing in my life. You are sabotaging me. I am reminded you still have power over me, that even though you were banished from our house so many years ago, I will never be able to really kick you out.

      Just before my mother was born, my grandparents moved from Athlone to build the house in Glenhaven. The main accelerating factor behind the move was that the house in Athlone was damp and becoming covered in a mould that would not disappear in spite of endless cleaning. The kids, my mother’s older siblings, were developing swollen lungs. They should have recognised the damp on you when it came the second time, when you moved into their house. They should have moved us all out, and set the whole place alight, when they realised they couldn’t move you.

      For months, I hold Sarah close at night, latched to the harbour of her skin, hoping to anchor myself there. We can both hear the soft, foreboding drip, and I carry the fusty smell of mildew, it has crept into the sheets. My partner of five years. She needs time to talk and wind down. She has thoughts that spill over onto the pillow, drowning her head. She has become scared to open her mouth sometimes for fear these are not acceptable, so she comes to bed with them; but they are beautiful and terrifying, they both inspire and frighten me.

      We have emerged from a dank place, suffocated with rubbish and the flotsam and jetsam of the past; we clung to each other out of half loss, half loathing, and started thinking this looked like love. I am tempted to blame only myself. It seems I have brought all the worst hauntings of my old house into my new home. Maybe I am cursed by my father, maybe my parents’ mutilated love has left me with a mangled heart. But there are two of us and more in this home by the sea: Sarah’s revenants, her own complex histories, are here too. The past and the present, the ways we have injured and disappointed each other hang thick in the air between us, along with the ghosts of our past, who do not get along well, and the anxieties of an uncertain future. There are bills we are struggling to pay, jobs we are unable to finish, personal and professional crises that have come relentlessly one after the other. In our home there is a thick suffocating fog. We cannot see ourselves, so we cannot bear to look at each other.

      The depression is like an Arctic winter. Almost a year of time has gone by in darkness, without even an anchor for memory, only the oil of endless junk food, pizza, fish and chips, which accounts for the new 15 kilos of evidence we each bear of the Great Depression. We go to sleep bloated after the exchange of ugly words, a pitiless endless sleep. I don’t know what happened to time – it became quicksand we got sucked into, unaware of the passing of hours, days, months. It’s the kind of thing we thought we would not come back from, and that we are afraid we might still not come back from – that if we aren’t careful, and love each other too carelessly, we will fall into the rip tide and again be drowning, clinging to each other, arms wrapped around each other’s bodies, both unable to swim.

      The house we rent together in Muizenberg was a gift. Vacated by Sarah’s mother and generously handed over to us. With its lush back garden, its broad rooms and ageing high ceilings, she was gifting us the space we needed to expand ourselves, to cultivate our wide, wild dreams. On a good day the house is like an exuberant organic wilderness. One day we found a blade of grass peeking out from the floorboards, resilient, the triumph of nature. On a good day the quiet industry of a scorpion or spider was worth protecting, a privilege, an indication that we were not so separate from nature but an extension of it – no separation from the earth and the old wooden walls, the persistent sea air

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