Why You Were Taken

PIRANHAS ₂₀

Johannesburg, 2021

Seth gets home at midnight. He’d been drinking at TommyKnockers and is a bit unsteady on his feet. A cab had dropped him off, courtesy of Rolo. Upstairs on the 17^th floor, he punches in the code – 52Hz – and his retina unlocks his front door. It clicks open, and Sandy greets him. He shows the speaker his middle finger. He checks all the security screens, sees the place is empty.

Knowing he’s had too much to drink, he shrugs, pours a few fingers of vodka into a tumbler with ice. Takes it to his Tile to check for messages. He’d been checking throughout the day to see if Fiona had tried to get hold of him, but nada.

All he saw was update after update about William Soraya’s death in hospital. He tried to block the story in his feed but it kept on coming up on his screen, as if to haunt him, as if to say: this could have been you. You think you’re indestructible; so did Soraya. Now he’s lying on a slab with multiple organ failure, because that’s what happens to people like you.

Not being able to get hold of Fiona was adding to his anxiety. He didn’t know where she lived, didn’t know who her friends and family were, which made it impossible to get hold of her if she didn’t come to work, and didn’t answer her phone. It nagged at him: Fiona wasn’t the kind of girl to screen calls or not come to the grind for two days in row. He takes her Fontus access card out of his hoodie pocket, looks at it. His guilt accentuates her clear blue eyes, the salmon of her cheeks. No one had mentioned her absence at work. Piranhas.

He turns on the Tile, takes a slug of vodka. The green rabbit flashes; LL had bumped him earlier in the evening.

He knew she was kidding, but felt the pressure nonetheless. He’d been there for weeks without much progress. He’d figured Fiona would be his ticket, but she’d gone MIA. His drinking tonight had had a purpose: to wipe out any inclination that he was worried about her. It hadn’t worked. The more he drank, the more it became clear that, for the first time in his life, he cared about someone else.

He replies to LL:

Without washing his face or brushing his teeth, and still in his jacket, he gets into bed with his slippery glass of vodka. Takes a bottle of pills from the pocket, pops two, washes them down with the spirit. Spreads a throw untidily over his body, and falls asleep with the lights on.

Outside the building, a large man is walking his dog. The dog pauses to sniff the innards of a pothole. The man uses the time to look at the entrance of the building, get an idea of the security system. Backs up, looks up to the corner apartment of the 17^th floor where a light is still on. Having seen enough, he makes a kissing noise: pulls the protesting beagle along, firmly, but not unkindly.

Kirsten’s watch rings; it’s Marmalade. Oh shit, she thinks, looking at the time, then at the two empty bottles of wine on Keke’s desk. The clockologram clicks in disapproval. She touches her earbutton to answer the call.

‘Hi, sorry I’m late,’ she says, her voice gruff. Gives Keke the grimace of a schoolgirl in trouble.

‘And you haven’t called,’ he says.

‘And I haven’t called. Sorry.’

‘I was worried about you.’

‘Sorry.’

‘When are you coming home? I made dinner. Four hours ago.’

‘Ah, sorry! I didn’t know. You should have told me.’ She stands up, throws two empty sauce-stained Styrofoam shamburger clamshells in the bin.

‘I wanted to surprise you. Do something nice for you.’

‘I’m really sorry. I’m with Kex,’ Keke gives her a soft kick in the shins. She winces and hops up and down. ‘At The Office. We’re working on a… story.’

‘Well, wake me when you get home.’

‘It’ll be late.’

‘Wake me, Kitty. I miss you.’

He ends the call. They never say ‘I Love You.’ They agreed long ago that that the phrase was overused and trite. They wouldn’t reduce their relationship to a cliché. What they had was deeper.

‘How much trouble are in you in?’ asks Keke.

‘He cooked dinner for me: a surprise.’

Keke looks at the time on her phone. ‘Ouch.’

‘He wanted to do something nice for me.’

‘Double-ouch.’

‘So where were we?’ Kirsten asks, but Keke is looking at her strangely.

‘What?’

‘Since when do you lie to James?’

‘What? I didn’t. I don’t.’

‘We’re working on a ‘story’?’

‘Well,’ says Kirsten, ‘we are, kind of. Aren’t we?’

Keke pouts, not convinced.

‘You’re the one that says everyone has a story. Maybe this is mine. And, believe me, the less James knows, the better.’

They go back to solving the puzzle they had been working on all night: trying to make sense of the code that was in the plastic envelope they found in the seed bank. It was a list of barcodes that when scanned were numbers, 18 digits to a line.

They all started with either 10 or 20, all contained the numbers 1991 in the same position near the middle, and ended in 891. The more wine Kirsten drank, the more the numbers glowed with their colours. It was distracting. She had never been good at maths for this reason.

‘I don’t know how much longer I can look at this,’ she says, rubbing her neck, which was tender from the car accident. ‘Are you sure you don’t know any maths-geniuses-code-crackers?’

Keke shakes her head. ‘Nope.’

They had tried everything they could think of, from simple alphabet a=1 algorithms to squares and prime numbers, and all the search engines they could think of. Kirsten is playing with Keke’s Beckoning Cat. If you push its belly-button its USB port comes out the other side, like a stunted tail. A secret porthole of information.

Maneki Neko, she thinks: Japanese Lucky Cat. Brings good fortune to owners. She gives the hard plastic a squeeze, puts it back on Keke’s desk.

‘Look, we’ve had a hectic day and we’re not getting anywhere tonight,’ sighs Keke, standing up. ‘Why don’t you go home to Marmalade and make up?’

Kirsten starts to protest but she knows Keke is right. ‘Besides,’ says Keke, putting on her leather jacket, ‘I need to get laid.’

As soon as Kirsten opens the front door she smells roast chicken: her favourite. James had left a plate for her on the kitchen counter: a golden thigh, butter-roast potatoes, candied golden beetroot. She peels the cling wrap away and starts to eat the chicken with her fingers. It is exactly right, the taste: an undulating curve with a few small points bouncing off it, finishing in a wavering line. She’s exhausted; it feels like more than just tiredness. Deathargy.

Her body is cold when she climbs in next to James, and she’s unsure of whether to wake him. She moves closer to him, barely spoons him, trying to gauge how lightly he is sleeping.

‘Thank you,’ she whispers, ‘the potatoes were perfect.’

He grunts, turns around, pulls her towards him in a full-body hug. A warm, sleepy hand slides under her pyjama top, rubbing her back, then settles under her panties, on the arch of her hip. She moves against his hand, slowly, rhythmically, but stops when she realises he is asleep.

A few hours later Kirsten wakes with a start. Colours swirl in her head: green, grey, brown, yellow. 7891. She knows the colour combination so well, but where from? Pine Tree, Ash, Polished Meranti, English Mustard. Somehow she knows it’s part of her. Then she gets it. She bumps Keke, even though it’s past 2am:

Surprisingly, or not, Keke responds.