Why You Were Taken

EVERY PERFECT BONE ₁₆

Johannesburg, 2021

An attractive platinum-haired woman sits on a park bench at a children’s playground in uptown ChinaCity/Sandton. You can see that she is wealthy. She’s laser-tanned, wearing SaSirro top to bottom, some understated white gold jewellery, and has a smooth, unworried forehead, but that’s not what gives her wealth away. She is watching the ultimate status symbol: her white-ponytailed son, playing in the sandpit next to the jungle gym. He holds a dirty grey bunny – a stuffed animal – under one arm as he builds a sandcastle with the other. It is clear that the toy goes everywhere with the boy.

The perfectly made-up woman may look like a bored stay-at-home mother, but in fact she is on her office lunch break. She was top of her class every year at Stellenbosch University and was fluent in 26 different languages by the time she was 21. She didn’t finish her degree: she was poached by the top legal attorney firm eight months before she graduated, won over by a huge salary and the promise that she would make partner by 25, which she did.

She opens her handbag, takes out a pill, pops it into her mouth and washes it down with a gulp of Anahita, saying a silent prayer for whichever drug company it is that makes TranX. She should know the name – she could tell you the capital city, currency and political state of practically every country in the world – but today she can’t picture the label on the box of capsules in her head. She wonders if she is burnt out; she definitely feels it.

Her son begins a tentative conversation with another little boy in the sandbox. Always the charmer, she smiles. Her heart contracts; she loves him fiercely, every square millimetre of his skin, every pale hair, every perfect bone, she loves. The scent of his little-boy skin. His cow-licked crown. She has such dreams for him, wonders what he will be like at ten, sixteen, thirty. She never thought she’d feel this way about another person. She’d grown up feeling aloof, alone, her parents blaming it on her stellar IQ, but when her son was born that sad bubble burst. It hadn’t taken her anxiety or depression away, but it did give her quiet, exquisite moments of joy she hadn’t before imagined possible.

Satisfied that her son is playing happily, she opens her lunchbox. She takes home 14 million rand a year but she still packs her own lunch every day. Today it is a mango, pepper leaf and coriander salad, humble edamame with pink Maldon salt, and a goose carpaccio and kale poppy-seed bagel.

She takes a few bites of the bagel, enjoying the texture of the expensive meat, the tingling of the mustard. Soon there is a slight tickling at the back of her throat. She tries to swallow the irritation but it lingers. Trying to stay calm, she opens her bagel and inspects the contents, assuring herself that she had personally made the sandwich, there was no place for contamination, but the itch becomes stronger, furring over her tongue too.

She drops the bagel, starts to hyperventilate, presses the panic button on her locket. It sends a request for a heli-vac and a record of her medical history, including her severe peanut allergy, to the nearest hospital. Her airways are closing now and she clutches her throat, desperate to keep it open. She searches for her EpiPen, but when she can’t see it, looks for a straw, a ballpoint, anything she can force down her throat to keep breathing, but her hands are shaking too much and she loses control over her fingers.

She stands up, lurches forward, waves blindly trying to attract someone’s attention. Her vision becomes patchy; there are sparks and smoke clouds blotting out her son. She tries to call him, tries to call anyone for help, but it’s too late for that. One arm outstretched towards her son, she sinks to her knees on the grass, then, blue-faced, topples over.

A woman’s gasp rings out, and concerned strangers come to surround her. Ambulances are called, CPR is administered, but the woman dies within the minute. A white-haired toddler is held back, not kicking and screaming as you’d expect, but dumb with shock.

The strangers stand distraught, arms by their sides, not knowing what to do next. Just terrible. What a tragedy. They begin framing the story in their minds, to tell spouses and friends later. They think of how to word it in their respective status updates. Where is the ambulance? They have children to mind, places to be. One of the bystanders, a large man with a scarred arm, gives up on finding a pulse and walks away. Furtively, he strokes the soft stuffed rabbit he has hidden under his jacket. He retrieves his dog, a beagle, whose lead he had tied to a swing post moments earlier, and ambles off. Chopping of the sky can be heard in the distance: the heli-vac approaching. It forms the intro to the song that starts in his head. He hums along – Pink Floyd? – and doesn’t look back.

Fiona is on top of a cliff, ready to tumble. She holds back her curls with one hand, breathes hard, feels all her muscles contract, is paralysed, and then she topples. She flies through the air, through warm air, sultry water, then lands, is laid down, her blood turned to syrup. Seth comes with her, gasps with her, then holds her until she stops twitching.

They lie clutching each other on the floor of the Fontus recreational cloakroom. They had been playing lasertag. Everyone had been dressed in figure-fitting black, in the dark, as they sought each other out. Down to her last life, her nerves on edge, she had screamed into her mask as someone in the shadows had tackled her to the floor and dragged her into the cloakroom.

She had known it was him, now knew the feeling of his hands on her. He had zipped her out of her suit, out of her clothes, and taken her roughly against one of the dressing room tables. He had watched her body spasm in the reflection of the mirror. Afterwards they lay on the smooth, cool concrete floor.

‘This is becoming a bad habit,’ she breathes. ‘This “teambuilding”.’

‘More like a good habit. A very good habit,’ he says.

He looks at her while her eyes are still closed. Eyelids shiny, make-up smeared by sweat; her freckles just peaking out of the flush on her cheeks. The more time they spent together the more he understands her body, her responses. He’d have to end it soon, as soon as he had what he needed, but he didn’t enjoy the thought. Usually he wouldn’t think twice about booting a girl out of his bed, but Fiona was different. There was something inherently good about her. He didn’t want to hurt her, damage her, turn her into spoiled goods like he was.

‘Miss Botes,’ he says, looking at her pale, vulnerable body, ‘I find that this kind of teambuilding is right up my alley.’

Fiona giggles. She can feel his gaze on her. She opens her eyes, self-conscious at his staring. Covers up her still-hard nipples.

‘You’re not going to spoil the moment, are you?’ she pants, ‘by confessing how you really feel about me?’ She is half-joking, half-pleading. Please God, she thinks, tell me you’re falling in love with me.

He laughs, a low bark, says: ‘That’s the last thing you need to worry about.’

While Fiona showers, Seth pulls on his clothes and adjusts his hair.

‘I’m heading off,’ he calls through the half-open shower door.

‘Okey dokey, pig-in-a-pokey,’ she sings. ‘See you later!’

On his way out, and without hesitation, Seth takes her Fontus access card and pockets it.