Loveletter

Lauren Beukes

Dear Mariana

I have FAllen in love with your typwriter, typ½os and all. The tactility, the stacatto click of THe keys is so much mpore fuFILLing than the dulled ergonomics of my keyboard.

I always thought to be a writer yiu should have a ,magnificent old typewrter, polished black and roosting among the white sheaves of paper and crumpled mistakes like some nasty prehistoric insect of curves and clivcks. I KNow this is cliche. But that it should be muse anddrug, hungry for you rather than the other way round. As all GOod drugs are.

So, while your typeweiter (ticking out these words, astonishing me with the immediacy of creation; ink on paper so much more tngible than pixels of 10-pt Times New Roman. It lends the wrods a sense of permanence that my computer lacks entirely. And look, I am getting better! My fingers are adjusting (finally!) to the rhythms of teh spaces. Anyway, I digress. It's this hopeless infatuation with this machine.)

So. Again. While your typwriter, being electric and that blonde beige of deskbound electronics pre-candy-coated imacs, is not quite the slick black BEast of my imaginings, the novelty of the thing is delightful, and thus, inspiring.

I think, perhaps, it extends beyond the typewriter though, to your feng shui-ed house that bears my invasion a little uneasily I'm afraid. But ah, Mariana, what stories your things tell of you. Oh, don't worry, I haven't been prying. I'm not the type to snoop, or at least only a litlte.

You've no idea how much you are embodied in this space. I can breathe you in these rooms. There is so much more I know from trning over the secret places of you, like the soft underbelly of some thorny beetle. For you can be thorny, honeybee. You can be a hellcat. Like Dante, who I am afraid still doesn't like me verfy much. He pouts and skulks around the house, indignant tail puffed out like a toilet brush, quivering. It's that ridiculous name. I've told you it would give any cat a complex.

Anyway. Sitting at your desk, my hands dancing over the typewriter like pale spiders, looking out at your view of the mountain, I feel at once diSplaced and at home. I have to confess to wanting to pull a MR. Ripley and neatly acquiring your life.

It's all spelled out so clearly in even just the surface of your possessions. No need to open drawers or read old letters when evrything I need to know of you lies out here, so naively exposed. A stranger could construct you from your things. Your books and CDs and photographs tell me more than billsor diary entries. It's all so naked, so open to casual violation. You should be more careful.

A list then to illustrate the pieces of the puzzle:

1. The pictures of your fucked-up slick clique hipster friends and the total absence of photos of your fucked-up highbrow parents (or of me, I've noted, but it's been a while and I've already forgiven you this slight).
2. Your old fashioned rollerskates to take to Mouille Point, gliding along the promenade like rollergirl.
3. The sixties-style furniture of which you've collected quite a mismatched assortment.
4. Eccentric artwork done by those fu 000cked-up boho friends and glossy coffee table books.
5. Obscure "cutting edge" electronica that you know I have no tolerance for, blurred beats and whines like the sonic nightmares of kitchen appliances.
6. Sartre and Tolstoy cosied next to Eve Ensler's twat and David Egger's monstrous ego - and all that other contemporary literary wanking you seem to go in for.
7. two ply T.P., Clinique, Dove and a loot of Mac cosmetics in every shade.
8. A wardrobe full ofDiesel and EVisu, trading in your parent's high-priced fashion fetishes for your own.
9. And let's not forget the health-conscious single (!) girl's refrigerator, adorned with erotic fridge magnet poetry and more photos, stocked with coke light and heineken and single-serving portions of various easy-cook ingredients. One aubergine, 1 red pepper, one yellow, one onion, one plain greekstyle yoghurt, one pack of tofu, one butternut, one slab of butter, one litre of soy milk, omne thai-style green curry paste, one clasisc mnt sauce, one jar odf lemomn grass oeneoneoneone oeneoNEONEONE ONE ONE ONE ONE ONE ONE EOINEJNEHEHE OEN df';hjlgkjlkjl ts rghjrggjh eark,jfdz

Anyway. While you are supposedly away, like little red riding hood off into the dark woods to visit your sick grandma, I will simply slide into your life as you would a pair of shoes.

I will change my star sign. You're Aries Tiger? I'll start doing pilates, drink green tea and eat at swish restaurants where they serve sorbet between courses. I will go to auditions and acting clases and feverishly type scenes for countless unfinished plays that will never be performed in coke-fuelled fits on this very typewriter, and chain smoke lucky strikes in the cxrisp office of your therapist and bitch about my mother.

The bitch has been calling you know. Your mother, not your therapist. And perhaps that's one thing I would not wish to assimilate as your doting dopplegang, not even to have something to talk about with my/your therapist. I can see where you get your razor tongue from. Jesus. She leaves shrill messages on your voicemail (for obvious reasons I don't pick up) in that FUCKING posh tone of voice that sometimes creeps into your own like when we fgight, like a switch. Snotty on-off-on-off, hotcold, hot-clolf. Like that fcuking cat.

Look, kust loojkj how upset I am just thinking about that fuCKIGN bitch makes me lapse into typois again. I HAve to go out

I'm back. I went to Spar. I got flour and potatoes and eggs to make gnocchi. For two. Although you won't be here. After all, you've been gone weeks now. Who knows when you might come back? I'll toast you though, all the same. I bought wine - Thelema red, candles, baby tomatoes, onions, peppers, garlic and home-made cannelloni from Carlucci's. More paraffin too.

Sorry I lost it, your mother … No wonder you never told her. Her messages have become increasingly, I don't know, like there's a sense of nervous disquiet to her grating soliloquys after the beep. I think she's worried. I think she's suspicious. Maybe I'm imagining it.

I know I'm not imagining the other messages you've been getting. I know, I know. I promised I wouldn't snoop, but what if there was an urgent call? What if there was an emergency? You'd need to know wouldn't you?

Steve has been calling a LOT, M. And I mean a LOT. He seems terribly ------- familiar on the phone. On the answring machine, I mean. I'm not jealous. Really, I'm not. I mean, we're over, right? It's got nothing to do with me anymore. I'm just curious, that's all. I guess I ujst wish you'd told me. Thatsall. Were you seeing him before? You said you weren't that way inclined. You said you weren;t interested. I know, I'm sorry, I'm not jealous. I'm just sad. I still care aboiut you. I just don't like to thoijnk of anyone else toufching you

sorry. I;m sorry. I'm back again.

I'm afraid I'm going to have to do something about Dante. He's sort of a typo too. Like we were. See, I'm not afraid to admit it now. You were right, we're not good for each other, we can't compromise. I know it was only a couple of months. I know I have issues with trust. And that was all part of it.

This whole thing has given me a lot of time to think and I've finally accepted that it wasn't working, wasn't ever going to work. You're right. I can't own you. I don't want to. I'm sorry if all this Mr. Ripley stuff has been a little out there. It's just hard to let go, you know?

I think I've finally come to terms with it, Mariana. Wouldn't your therapist have been pleased? And after this I will be out of your life forever, I promise. Don't get me wrong, I'll always love you. You've meant a lot to me and while I know things fucked up, that I fucked up, that doesn't change the way I feel. Part of me feels like you played me for a fool, all those lies, all those games. Oh it was fun for a while, the furtiveness of this delicious secret, like an affair, our own private reality that excluded the rest of the world.

It got too much though, you know? It all became really difficult. It was sore. And I still don't really understand. I mean I can understand your mother, but I don't get why you were so scared, why you pretneded in front of your friends. Were you ashamed of me, M? Or only of us? It's really sad that you denied yourself like that. It's not healthy M. You can't live a lie like that. I'm saving you.

But I still have to do something about that fucking cat. Oh, I put out those scientifically formulated maximum nutrition vitamin-fortified R70-a-bag pellets you feed the little fucker, but he's been steadfastly refusing to eat. I can't fuckging HSAndle it. I can't. I'm sorry.

I was tempted to take some keepsake of you, to save it from the house, but I don't think there's anything I really want. I did try to take one last photograph of us together but your flash's broken, so I don't know that it'll come out.

Anyway, sweetheart, it's getting late. You know part of me will always love you. I don't regret anything we had, anything that happened. But I think all this has showed me that I'm ready to move on. I think I'm going to be okay.

Love (always)

Claudia

Lauren Beukes By day, Lauren Beukes is an intrepid girl reporter, writing on anything from Rwandan refugees to pop provocateurs for the likes of Colors and Dazed & Confused, among others. She has had short stories published in the Laugh It Off Annual 2, Urban 03, Itch, Paperkut, donga and SL magazine. She is finishing off her MA in Creative Writing at UCT under André Brink and recently received a grant from the National Arts Council for her novel-in-progress, Branded, set in a dystopian future South Africa governed by a corporate apartheid system, where cell phones are used for social control and branding is literally addictive. She also writes computer game scripts and has a fiendishly tongue-in-cheek comedy screenplay, Porno, currently in development.

LitNet: 5 November 2004

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