Why You Were Taken (12 page)

Sometimes she needs to check the cupboards, too. Sometimes it’s not just the open things in the fridge that may have been tainted. She’ll get an idea, a name, in her head, and those things will have to go, too. Last week it was Bilchen. Pictures in her head of factorybots polluting the processed food and then sealing them in neat little parcels, ready to eat. It was as if someone was shouting at her: Bilchen! Bilchen! Like a branded panic attack. And then she had to check every box and packet in her cupboard and toss everything with the Bilchen logo. There wasn’t a lot left over.

She chooses a lonely tin of chickpeas, checks the label, and eases it open with an old appliance. She polishes a fork with her tracksuit top and eats directly out of the can. Canned food is relatively safe. She reaches for the kosher salt pebbles, but before she starts grinding it she sees the top is loose. She pictures arsenic, cyanide, a sprinkling of a strain of deadly virus, and puts it back without using it. Washes her hands twice and sprays them with hand sanitiser.

She takes the chickpea can with her and walks around her flat, checking all the windows. She touches the locks as she goes, counting them. Mid-count she hears a noise. A scraping, a whirring. Is someone trying to get in? Is the front door locked? Icy sweat.

There is a high-pitched squeal at her heels and Betty jumps in fright. Her beagle scurries away from her with hurt in her eyes.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ she says out loud, moving to hug and pet her. ‘I’m so sorry my girl. There’s a good girl, there’s a good girl.’ She finds herself soothed by the words.

Sometimes if she talks loudly enough to herself she can drown out the voices. Not in public, though. She shouldn’t talk to herself in public. She doesn’t like being in public any more. Sometimes she has to show people the note; she doesn’t like that, the look in their eyes.

Squatting on the ground, she feeds the dog some chickpeas. She’ll start the counting again.

Outside the door to her apartment, there is humming. A large man in overalls is polishing the parquet corridor.              
 

Journal entry

12 December 1987

Westville

In the news:
A group of police officers are fired upon by freedom fighters from a moving car in
Soweto
; two police officers are killed and four injured. In Melbourne, Australia, they are attempting to understand the Queen Street Massacre: why 22-year-old Frank Vitkovic killed 8 people in a post office building before jumping from the eleventh floor. Microsoft releases Windows 2.0.

What I’m listening to:
U2’s ‘Where the Streets have no Name’

What I’m reading:
‘Tommyknockers’ by Stephen King.

What I’m watching:
Flowers in the Attic. I’ve read the book before, but now that we have babies we just found it too creepy, P had to turn it off!

We brought the twins home this week. They keep us very busy but not-busy at the same time. Sometimes when they are both sleeping, P & I just sit in the lounge and wonder what to do. Other times they are both crying at the same time and we feel totally overwhelmed.

P has a pair of red DIY noise-cancelling headphones (that he uses when he does drilling etc.) which have come in very handy at bath-time!

I feel so attached to them that I want to be with them all the time. When we settle them down at night for their longer sleep I don’t want to leave the nursery. Once I’m out I feel relieved that I have some time to myself but miss them immediately. Sometimes when I’m not with them I catch myself looking at photos of them. Crazy!

We are totally in survival mode, sleeping when we can, showering IF we can, eating take-aways when we run out of 2-minutes noodles. I feel so consumed by the feeding and caring that I feel like I hardly exist. Or at least, the person I was before, hardly exists. I am just a vessel. A milk machine. As for P and I -- we are like ships passing in the night.

We keep the babies next to our bed at night so that I don’t have to get up to feed them every 2 hours. Then if they cry I just reach over and pop them in bed with us and snuggle while they feed. I feel very protective of them. Tiger mother.

It’s almost Christmas and I think it will be, like, the happiest Christmas ever.

A SWARM, A SMACK

11

Johannesburg, 2021

The ragged tooth shark swims straight towards her. His dull eyes virtually unseeing in the water the colour of an overcast sky. Serrated teeth hanging out at all angles, as if he has long given up hunting. Her pulse quickens as he approaches, her finger on the trigger. He glides quickly with little effort. The water is murkier than she had hoped. Kirsten fires away. Just before it reaches her – a severed arm’s length away – the shark turns to avoid the tempered glass of the tank. Superglass.

She gets a few shots of his profile: a vast muscle-and-cartilage body wrapped in slate sandpaper. Her head throbbing, she flicks through the thumbnails on the screen of her camera, making sure she has enough that are in sharp focus.

The lighting had been tricky because she couldn’t use her flash; it would bounce off the glass. She was shooting in MultiFocus 3D to get more drama out of the looming shark. The shots were certainly dramatic, but shooting in MF3D always gives her a headache.

She sits down for a moment, watches the dancing blue light of the water (Aqua Shimmer) paint her arms and hands. The pressure in her head makes her feel as though the silicone-framed glass is going to give way and knock everyone over in a tidal wave of exotic fish, eels, and strangling seaweed.

She has a long gulp of CinnaCola from the can her assistant hands her. She had been at it for ages and she still wasn’t sure if she had the shot. She powers up her Tile and looks at the pictures in subpixel HR. The pictures she had of the Leafy Sea Dragon, the Blanket Octopus and the Sea Wasp jellyfish were fantastic. The Blanket Octo looks like a silk scarf underwater: a billowing maroon cape. She could have watched it for hours.

The Sea Wasp was almost invisible: smoke caught in a bubble underwater, with elegant silver tentacles and enough deadly venom to kill up to sixty humans. If you get stung by this jellyfish in the sea, said the digital projection on the glass, it causes you such intense pain and shock you won’t make it to the shore. A group of jellyfish is called a swarm or a smack. Such grace in its movement: hypnotic. She makes a mental note to do a jellyfish project in the future.

Her assistant offers her a ganache-glazed kronut but she, for once, declines. She doesn’t feel great. A bit dizzy, nauseous. It had been a long morning and she still had to shoot the model. Her eyes are strained and she is battling to concentrate on the photos, so she closes the window and looks around the aquarium for a moment.

It’s deliciously cool and quiet inside; even the children whisper. The cobalt luminescence ripples over the floor and the visitors, making everyone seem calm. It has a clean taste: ice and fresh mint, with a hint of citrus.

Who would have thought that an aquarium would work in Jozi? It had been an impromptu idea of some BEE-Kitten who had more investors than sense. There were so many things up against the project: the water shortage, the protesting fish-hippies, the transport costs. Can you imagine the logistics of trucking sharks, dolphins and other endangered fish from some sleepy coastal town to Johannesburg? It was a joke. Until it wasn’t anymore, and now it’s AQUASCAPE: a gushing money-spinner, a veritable pot of liquid gold.  She looks around at the illuminated faces of the kids and their parental units, and feels a twinge. In drought-blasted South Africa it does feel magical to see so much water. She had always loved water – rivers, lakes, waterfalls, oceans – and swimming. She often wondered why she lived inland. Perhaps one day they would retire to the Cape Republic.

As a teenager she had read an article in the New York Times about the ‘loneliest whale in the world’. It was about an animal that looked like a whale and sounded like a whale, but her call was slightly off, which meant that even though she called and called, no other whales could hear her.

The people that found her named her 52 Hertz. Her tone was
bassa profunda,
just a notch higher than the lowest note on a tuba, and it got deeper over time. She kept swimming, kept calling, but the entire ocean was dark, cold and deaf to her. ‘That’s me,’ Kirsten had thought at the time, ‘that is the whale version of me.’

Her news tickertape lights up with a fresh story. She clicks it and is taken to page six of Echo.news, the local online newspaper she does the odd job for. It’s a satirical cartoon of the NANC politician who was caught with a secret pool. He is standing in court with a sheepish smile on his face, dressed in nothing more than soggy grey underpants, with a yellow duck-shaped inflatable tube around his waist. The prosecutor has a whistle around her neck and the judge is sitting on a lifeguard chair, the ones you used to get in public pools. She moves her cursor to close the window when she spots a headline that draws her in.

WOMAN FOUND DEAD IN BRAAMFONTEIN FLAT.

This has always been a secret fear of Kirsten’s: ending up old and alone, slipping in the shower/accidentally electrocuting herself/choking to death on a toaster waffle, only to be found weeks later by the building’s rodent-control man. She scans the article to see how ancient this woman was and how exactly she had kicked the bucket, so she could at all costs avoid the same sorry end.

But it turns out that the woman is precisely her age, and it’s a suspected suicide. ‘Betty Weil’s body,’ it read, ‘was found yesterday by her mental health doctor who had grown concerned when Miss Weil had missed several appointments. She was found in the kitchen where she had died after apparently gassing herself. Miss Weil had a history of mental illness, most notably paranoid schizophrenia.’ There was a little more info on her history, and then the usual disclaimer to seek help if needed. Lawsuits are sticky now that suicide is trending. The small black-and-white picture accompanying the article showed a laughing young woman with long dark hair, obviously taken before her illness took hold of her. Something makes Kirsten look twice. She reads the article again. Betty. It couldn’t be.

It couldn’t be the mad woman in the parking lot. She had to have been in her forties, at least, and didn’t look anything like this photograph. Kirsten put her fingers over the woman’s long hair, giving her a helmet-cut.

  ‘Your Kirsten is my Betty,’ she had said.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ she says, speed-dialling Keke.

  ‘I’m busy,’ Keke answers, noise and static in the background.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘The Gladiator Arena, in Roma. Well, fake Roma, anyway. Roman Rustenburg. Dusty as hell but some fine ass here in gladiator get-up. Skin all bronzed and shit. Failed Amusement Park turned film set for the second instalment of the
Mad Maximus
thrillogy.’

  ‘You do lead a charmed life,’ says Kirsten.

  ‘What’s up?’ asks Keke.

  ‘That mad woman I told you about, the one who stalked me in the basement the other night?’

  ‘Yebo?’

  ‘She’s in the paper today.’

  ‘Arrested? Admitted to an asylum? Elected as a minister?’

  ‘Dead.’

  ‘Who wrote the article?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Which journo wrote that article? Was it from Echo?’

Kirsten scrolls and sees the name of the journalist.

  ‘Echo, yes. Mpumi Dladla.’

  ‘Ha! He’s a hack. He probably didn’t even investigate. Most likely lifted a police report.’

  ‘Do you have his number?’

  ‘Of course I do.’

*                  *                  *

Fiona’s moans, though stifled, are getting louder. Seth cups her mouth with his hand, smudging her lipstick and butting the back of her head up against the gun-metal grey locker door in the stationery room, which makes her groan even more. It had started innocently enough, or so she had thought. She was there to pick out some new pens, e-paper and stickernotes for her desk. She had been looking forward to it all week: Fiona Botes had an almost unhealthy love of stationery. It was so old fashioned – romantic, really – to use real pens on real paper.

She had been inspecting the different kinds of yellow pens on offer in anticipation, when Seth strode in and locked the door, startling her. He had used her temporary breathlessness to advance on her. Not a word exchanged, he had put his hand behind her head and kissed her slowly, making sure at every stage that she wanted more. As the kiss grew deeper, she pulled her stomach in as his hand slid over her smooth pink shirt; her generous breasts. Seth used just the right amount of teasing, and the right amount of pressure. He pushed her against the closed door of a locker; trapping her body between the heat of his body and the cool metal. His mouth didn’t leave hers as his hand travelled down, lifting her knee-length tweed skirt and stroked her through her panties. At first slowly, in lazy circles, then faster and harder as he felt her grow wet. Her arms, holding the door behind her, became stiff; she stopped groaning, held her breath, and her whole body became rigid before the orgasm took her. He held her up as her knees almost buckled – her entire being felt like it was buckling – and tears sprang to her eyes.