Why You Were Taken

RED FINGERPRINTS ₂₂

Johannesburg, 2021

Kirsten takes her eyes off her screen to think, and sees the file she has been keeping on her mother. Opens it, looks through the morbid illustrations, the pricked paper dolls, the onion-skin birth certificate, sees the colours. She thinks that’s the end of the file but then she sees the magazine cutting again, the one she had found framed, in storage. Cute baby, but not her. The date on the back says 1991.

She puts the file away and Googles the year 1991. She searches South African pages: South African cricket was unsanctioned, political violence continued, Nadine Gordimer won the Nobel Prize for literature. 1991: Yellow, brown, brown, yellow. Not a nicely coloured year at all. She can’t imagine it being a very happy year for anyone.

The birth dates, if that’s what they are, thinks Kirsten, are all around the same time. From 1986 to 1988: a year or two apart at most. So that’s seven people, born around similar dates. Then the other set of dates all contained 1991. Her watch rings, making her jump. She turns on her TileCam and answers the call.

‘Hi,’ she smiles, happy to see Keke, but Keke doesn’t return it.

‘Listen, you’re in trouble.’

‘What?’

‘You should leave your house.’

‘Now who’s paranoid?’ laughs Kirsten.

‘As soon as you can, Cat. The list, it’s a… kind of a… poisoned chain letter. It’s not just a list. It’s a hitlist.’

‘Slow down, Keke. You look manic. Too much caffeine?’

‘I’m not fucking around, Kirsten, you need to listen to me. It’s a HITLIST. You are ON IT.’

‘Seriously, you need to calm down.’

‘Someone wants you dead. You need to leave your apartment.’

‘You’re not making any sense. Why would anyone want to kill me?’

‘Marko… he came up with this mad algorithm and matched the birthdates with recently dead people. As in, the last few weeks, days. The people born in those years, the numbers at the end of the lines, they’re dead. 1, 2, 3, 4, they’re all dead, in that order. The schizo was number 3. William Soraya was 2^nd. Before him, a musician in the bath.’

Kirsten feels panic reaching for her: serpentine plumes of yellow smoke (Sick Leaf). Betty/Barbara had said something about a music man.

‘A musician, in the bath?’ she asked.

‘He was drowned.’

‘In the bath?’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’ screams Keke. ‘Just leave the fucking house already!’

‘But you’re not making any sense!’

‘Listen to me, Kitty. Number 4, a woman in a park. Dead. You’re number 5. You’re next on the list.’

‘I’m next on the list,’ repeats Kirsten.

‘You or the other person with your birthdate. You’re 5 or 6.’

‘Wait, you’re saying that the crazy lady was right?’

‘We don’t have time to talk about it now. Go to a police station. I’ll meet you there.’

‘Okay.’

‘Okay?’

‘Wait. No. She said no cops, Betty/Barbara said no cops.’

‘Well then just get out of there. They know where you live. Two of them were killed in their own homes. Get out and go somewhere public.’

‘But you said… number four was killed in a park?’

‘Jesus Christ, Kitty, I’m about to strangle you myself.’

‘Okay,’ she panics out loud, ‘okay. I’ll go somewhere safe.’ Even if this is some stupid misunderstanding. It doesn’t matter. Even if it is just to prevent Keke from having a heart attack.

‘Okay,’ she says, ‘I’m leaving.’

As she stands up a thought almost knocks her over.

‘What about the chip?’ she whispers.

‘What?’

‘The microchip. The crazy lady said she had a tracker chip in her head.’

A recent trend had been that overprotective mothers had them implanted in their children’s necks, but it had only became legal a couple of years ago. Kirsten’s hands fly up to her head. She tries to search her scalp but her hair gets in the way.

‘A tracker? That’s impossible, right?’

‘No. I don’t know. I just want you to get out of there.’

‘But if you’re right about the list, then Betty/Barbara was right, and she told me about the chip. Which means that they’ll find me wherever I am. I’m not safe anywhere.’

‘Yes,’ says Keke, ‘if she was right.’

‘But you’re saying she was right.’

‘I don’t know what I’m saying!’

‘Holy fuck, Keke!’

‘A chip is implausible, but even if it’s true… So there’s a chip in your head. What could you do about it anyway?’

‘Hold on,’ Kirsten says, and runs to the bathroom cupboard. Grabs James’s hair clippers. She sits in front of her screen and sweeps the zinging shaver from the base of her neck all the way to her forehead. Keke lets out a sound of shock: an almost-sob. Masses of red hair fall to the wooden floor as Kirsten finishes the job. The buzzing stops, and Kirsten is bald. She tries again, palpating her scalp to feel for anything strange.

‘Those things can… move,’ says Keke, emotional, ‘it could be anywhere.’

Kirsten’s fingers freeze at the back of her head. Just lower than halfway down is a thickness, a form. She gulps. She didn’t believe it existed until this moment. Now there it is, under her finger.

‘I think I found it. Now what?’

Keke looks at her with plates for eyes. They both know the answer.

‘Let me phone James,’ says Keke, ‘let him do it for you. He’ll have the right… instruments.’

‘Do you honestly think he is going to believe any of this?’ shouts Kirsten. ‘That I’m on a hitlist and have a fucking tracker in my head? I need to get it out NOW,’ she says. ‘Now!’

She runs to the spare room and starts to search through James’s things. It’s the room they use to store her camera equipment and his medical gear and its suitably messy. She doesn’t find a scalpel.

She doesn’t find a scalpel, but as she’s raiding, a white envelope falls out of a back pocket of his doctor’s bag. At first she ignores it, focussed on the search, but then she sees the envelope has her name on it, and her address. This apartment’s address. She remembers now a day not so long ago when she had walked in on him in here. He had jumped.

‘You gave me a fright,’ he had said, tucking a white piece of paper into his doctor’s bag.

‘Sorry,’ she had said, lifting a lens off the windowsill. ‘Just wanted to get this.’

She hadn’t given the interaction a second thought, except maybe to observe that they were being overly polite to each other: never a good sign for a relationship.

She pockets it and keeps looking for something sharp until she had gone through every satchel. Then she remembers the pocketknife in her handbag. She speeds back to her desk, brings it out, flicks open the glint.

‘No!’ whispers Keke, covering her eyes, ‘you can’t!’

Kirsten grabs a bottle of vodka and some surgical cotton wool. She wipes down the blade and the back of her head. Brings the knife up to her shorn skull, feels for the lump, takes a breath. She chickens out, puts the knife down and has a large mouthful of vodka, then another one, and tries again. This time she draws blood, splitting the skin just above the thing. She waits until the cut is finished before she shouts in pain. Keke is covering her eyes but shouts in sympathy. Kirsten tries to get it out but her fingers are shaking and greasy with blood. She gives up, wipes them on her jeans.

‘Tweezers!’ says Keke. Despite tears in her eyes, Kirsten finds a pair in her make-up bag, douses them, and starts to root around in the wound. Every movement of the sharp metal in the gash sends bright orange currents of pain down her neck, down her spine. She feels all the blood drain from her head, as if she’s about to faint, but then she gets a grip on what she hopes is the chip and pulls it out. She holds the tweezers up to the camera, and there, in its sticky grasp, is a tiny microchip in a glass capsule. A treacherous grain of rice. Kirsten feels warm liquid running down her neck, between her shoulder blades. She is swaying in her chair. She holds the cotton wool up to the wound to staunch the bleeding, then rips open a platelet-plaster and sticks it onto the wound.

‘Have some more vodka,’ says Keke, but Kirsten feels too dizzy, wants to keep her head.

‘I found this,’ says Kirsten, her speech slurred by shock and spirits. The envelope is stamped with red fingerprints. She tries to open it with her stuttering hands. Gives up. Says: ‘I don’t know where to go.’

‘Go anywhere, just get out of there!’

‘I need to warn the other people on the list.’