Why You Were Taken

CORPSE FINGERS STROKE HER NECK ₁₂

Johannesburg, 2021

Kirsten watches Keke pull into her building’s entrance in a wide arc and is reminded why she has so many suitors of both genders: her punk hairstyles, roaring bike, deep, easy laugh and fuck-you fashion. It’s a hot little package.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ she says. She deflates her helmet and hugs Kirsten. She smells like leather and something more feminine. Hair product? Little violet shiny balls float in the air around them.

‘No problem. It’s probably my punctuality karma finally burning my ass.’ Kirsten had, herself, been twenty minutes late.

‘There was a breaking story and I was five minutes away so I had to pop in.’

‘Anything interesting?’

‘Not really. Just a little shoot-out between the AfriNazis and the Panthers. Some scratches, some crocodile tears, no fatalities.’

‘Oh my God, racism. It’s so 2016.’

The two groups were extreme right and left wings, white and black respectively. No one took them too seriously; in a nation that is now indifferent to skin colour, their bizarre antics leave everyone shaking their frowns.

‘Just some punks looking for an excuse to spill blood.’

‘Too many video games.’

‘I blame Hip Hop. No, marabi.’

‘I blame sugar. And processed food.’

‘Hyperconnectivity.’

‘The Net.’

‘GMO produce.’

‘ADHD.’

‘Neglectful parental units.’

‘Lack of corporal punishment in schools.’

‘Boredom. There’s nothing to rebel against anymore! We’re a nanny state and it’s a very gentle, easy-going nanny, with no tattoos or inappropriate piercings.’

‘Although she must have a very high libido.’

‘Ha!’ laughs Keke, ‘This nanny likes to screw!’

‘And get screwed,’ adds Kirsten. ‘It’s a mutual arrangement. And also: polyamorous.’

‘Hey,’ says Keke. ‘Don’t knock polyamory. It’s the way of the future.’

Inside Kekeletso’s Braamfontein apartment, the door automatically locks behind them.

‘Too early for wine?’ asks Keke, looking at the clock on the wall. 12:55. A giant Elvis Presley poster looks down at them.

‘I don’t understand the question,’ says Kirsten.

Keke smiles and grabs a bottle of Coffeeberry Verdant-Pino. Two glasses. Kirsten instinctively reaches for a nearby empty Tethys bottle, fills it up with grey water from the waterbank (Liquid Smoke), and goes around watering Keke’s sad-looking houseplants. Using her father’s pocketknife, which she now always keeps handy, she snips a few dead leaves off the aspidistra on the lounge coffee table and sends them down the communal compost chute.

‘It’s not that I don’t love them, you know.’ (That’s what she always says.) ‘It’s just that I’m never home.’

After binning a long-dead and crumbling plant a year before, Kirsten had suggested keeping succulents instead as they wouldn’t need as much care, but Keke said she had read somewhere that thorns were bad for your sex life. ‘Feng Shui or some shit. What is it with you and plants, anyway?’

Kirsten had shrugged: ‘I don’t know. I just like looking after them.’

Keke had pulled a ‘you’re sad!’ face, and Kirsten had thrown something at her.

‘If you knew how amazing they were, you wouldn’t perpetuate mass murder against them like you do.’ It was her pet hate. Her mother had been just as bad. Her teenhood had been strewn with dead chrysanthemums. ‘Besides the whole filters-the-air-we-breathe thing, do you know that there is a flower that turns red when it grows over landmines?’

‘Okay Miss Greenfingers,’ Keke had sighed, ‘I get it, no more needless slaughter of our plant-friends.’

‘If you’re like this with plants I’d hate to imagine you being responsible for something with actual feelings. Ever consider getting a pet?’

Keke had almost choked. ‘No!’

‘Good,’ Kirsten had snarked.

‘So, what’s the emergency?’ Kirsten says, commandeering the bottle and passing Keke a glass of wine, who in turn opens a packet of chilli-salted beetroot chips and empties them into a bowl, which may have needed a bit of a wipe beforehand. The shape of their taste is unusual: spinning flat discs, like frisbees, but not as rigid. Rubber. Quite uniform, earthy, with little spikes of salt and a halo of warmth from the chilli.

‘Something came for you today, through The Office.’

This wasn’t unusual. Keke and Kirsten office-share in the same building in the CBD. As card-carrying members, or colloquially: ‘Nomadders,’ they were allowed unlimited access to everything they might possibly need in an office environment, from receptionists, couriers, IT support, boardrooms, carpooling and bad filter coffee to 4D scanner/printers. There was always a steady stream of people coming and going, and a 24/7 cleaning team to make sure that each new client gets a sparkling office. They charge by the hour, but the longer you stay, the better the rate. They even have a (legendary) annual end-of-year office party.

Keke knows someone at The Desk who keeps a premium office free for her when he can, at no extra cost. It is one of the few with a fridge and a concealed safe where she can keep some of her grind paraphernalia and clean underwear without having to drag it around town on her bike. It also has a dry shower and a SleePod.

‘Through The Office?’ says Kirsten, thinking it must be something that she had ordered online and since forgotten. New lenses for her camera? Prickly-Pear Verjuice? Sex toy? Bulk box of pregnancy test strips?

Keke produces a small white envelope that looks a bit worse for wear.

‘That’s it?’

‘Yip. Isn’t it wonderful?’

Kirsten takes it from Keke’s hands and examines it. The address is scratched on, as if the penman-or-woman was in a hurry. She doesn’t recognise the handwriting. There are two colourful stamps glued on the front: an illustration of the president wearing too much lipstick and an extinct fish. The post office stamp obscures both of the pouting images. No return address.

‘I mean,’ says Keke, ‘when is the last time you saw an actual letter? In the – you know – the post! In an envelope! It has stamps and everything.’

Kirsten uses her pocketknife to slit open the envelope. She takes out the note, and as she does so a key drops into her lap. She picks it up and inspects it, recognises it; feels corpse fingers stroke her neck. Hands it to Keke.

‘It’s the same one,’ she says. ‘The same one James threw over the bridge that night…’

‘It’s a wafer-key,’ says Keke. ‘For a safety deposit box. This part,’ she says, touching the head, ‘contains some kind of circuit, to allow access. So, for example, the wafer will get you into the bank and into the safety deposit box room. Then the key itself is used to unlock the box.’

Kirsten opens the note and sees more of the scrawl: DOOMSDAY.

‘The fuck?’ Keke comes around to read it over her shoulder.

‘Who’s it from?’ she asks.

Kirsten looks at the signature. ‘A ghost.’

At exactly 1pm Seth watches The Weasel make his way down to the Fontus diner. Seth waits five minutes. In that time, three different sheeple stop outside his office to say hi and ask how he is. He recognises the same vacant look in their eyes as the employees he sees around the campus: scoffing ultrabran muffins, playing squash, jogging, waiting for the decaffee to percolate. Staring, expressionless, as if a zombie had eaten their brains. And then as soon as they’d register him (eyebrow ring, Smudged eyes, faux-hawk, hoodie) they would snap to attention and greet him effusively. Their smiles would be wide and full of white teeth, but it never reached their eyes.

Once the coast is clear, he slips into the filing room, which was really just a giant computer in the middle of the room full of whirring fans. He’s not allowed access to this room but the door is sometimes left ajar. There are clearly people in the world less paranoid than him. Ribbons in different shades of blue are tied to the fan skeletons, giving the feeling that the room was some kind of stage design for a scene out of Atlantis, or an experiential advert for Aquascape.

He closes the door and sits backwards on the swivel chair, starts to work on the machine. The security on the files he wants to look at is ironclad. There would be a chink, there always was, but as he looks around he realises that it would take him months to hack. He smacks the side of the flatscreen.

‘Fuck a monkey,’ he says.

‘Excuse me?’

Seth spins around. Weasel.

‘Oh,’ says Seth. Fuck!

With all the white noise of the fans he hadn’t heard Wesley come in. He quickly uses a short-cut to close the windows he had open. He wonders if The Weasel had left this door open on purpose: a test.

‘This is a limited access room,’ says Weasel, ‘you’re not allowed in here.’

‘I didn’t know,’ says Seth.

‘It was in your Fontus Welcome Pack,’ says Wesley. Seth gives him a blank look.

‘I needed to find something.’ It wasn’t a lie.

‘Look,’ starts Wesley, rubbing his beard and drumming his fingers on his chin. ‘I’m going to have to report this… incident. They’re not gonna like it. They’re not gonna like it one bit. We’re talking a warning, or a disciplinary meeting at best. You’d better come in tomorrow wearing that suit I’ve been asking you about.’

‘Are you kidding?’ asks Seth.

The Weasel starts guffawing. Seth looks on in astonishment.

‘Of course I am, Mr Maths!’ he snorts, whacking Seth on the back. ‘You genius-types sure lack a sense of humour. Ha! Ha!’ He steers Seth out of the room with a firm hand and makes sure he closes the door behind him. It beeps twice to signal that it’s locked.

‘Beep-beep!’ says Wesley, and guffaws again.

Kirsten reads the letter out to Keke:

Keke lets out a loud wolf whistle. ‘No prize for guessing which particular delusional schizophrenic sent this.’

Kirsten replays their interaction in her head: the shadows in the basement, the shock, the fetid warning, James throwing the key off the bridge.

‘I guess sometimes it pays to be paranoid,’ says Keke.

‘What do you mean?’ asks Kirsten, dry-mouthed.

‘Well, just that, you know, she knew you wouldn’t keep the first key.’

‘She said keys. She said I’m sending you extra keys, plural.’ She shakes the envelope even though she knows it’s empty.

‘Maybe she didn’t get around to sending the other one,’ reasons Keke, ‘you know, before she stuck her head in the oven.’

‘I don’t understand,’ says Kirsten.

‘I’ll explain it to you,’ says Keke, taking the letter to the compost chute. ‘This lunatic lady didn’t know fantasy from reality, and she for some reason decided to drag you into it.’ She is about to throw the note away when Kirsten jumps up.

‘Don’t you dare,’ she says, snatching it away.

‘Listen, Cat. She was a delusional schizophrenic. She killed herself. Surely that’s the end of this conversation?’

‘Not necessarily.’

‘You have got to be joking. They’re watching you? DOOMSday?’

Kirsten had thought Keke understood her Black Hole but clearly she didn’t.

‘She is dead, Keke. She said that they would kill her, and now she’s dead. She believed in this enough to track me down. Approach me. She wasn’t even leaving her flat to see her shrink anymore, but she came to see me. I think I at least owe it to her to see whatever this key unlocks.’

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees a familiar blue-and-white striped jersey (Cobalt & Cream). It doesn’t make any sense to her. It takes her a few moments to catch on. That’s James’s jersey. It should be on James, or at home. Their home. She walks towards it, picks it up, smells it. Marmalade.

‘What is this doing here?’

‘Kitty,’ says Keke, ‘I was going to tell you. I just wanted to give you the letter first.’

‘Fine, then, I have the letter.’

‘James was here last night.’

‘What?’

‘He’s worried about you.’

‘Why? What is there to worry about?’ She knows the question is disingenuous.

‘He says that you’ve been having a rough time. Obsessing about your parents—’

‘He used the word ‘obsessing’?’

‘Said you’re not sleeping. That you haven’t been feeling well. Haven’t been yourself. In denial about all of the above.’

‘What did he want you to do about it?’

‘He asked me to keep an eye on you. He said he knows you tell me things that you don’t tell him.’

‘He wants you to spy on me? Tell him what I tell you?’

‘He wants me to make sure you’re okay.’

‘Make sure I don’t stick my head in an oven, too?’

‘Well, yes. I guess that would be first prize. And he asked me to… discourage… you, from investigating any of this… what-what. Your parents. The crazy lady. He just wants what’s best for you. You guys have been together for what? Eleven years?’

‘Thirteen.’

‘A lifetime. He said you’re pushing him away. And he’s worried that you might do something… risky.’

‘Fuck,’ she sighs. ‘Am I out of control? I don’t feel out of control.’

‘That’s what you said when you went off chasing pirates.’

‘Which I won awards for. Which launched my career.’

‘Kitty, no one respects you as a photojournalist more than I do. No one. That story was cosmic. You deserved every award you got. But you almost died.’

‘Well, that’s an exaggeration.’

‘Cat, you almost DIED.’

‘Okay, but that was different. I was young. Reckless.’

‘So you’re less reckless now?’ laughs Keke.

‘Hello? Yes! I’m practically a housewife. I mean, look at me.’

‘The day you become anything close to a housewife I will personally deliver you to the Somalis.’

‘Keke, I have a fucking OvO app on my watch. I can tell you the actual minute that I ovulate.’

‘Marmalade is right, you are out of control. What’s next? Hosting crafternoons?’

‘Ha,’ says Kirsten.

‘Look, lady, I told your better half I’d watch over you, and I will. But I’m behind you all the way with finding out about your parents.’

Keke opens the freezer and brings out the bright red box that she keeps as a staple especially for Kirsten. She pops some waffles into the toaster and pushes down the lever.

‘So, what do we do next?’