Why You Were Taken

CHEERIOS ₃₃

Johannesburg, 2021

Kirsten presses the red button (Faded Flag) and a doorbell rings out, jarring in its cheer. Static. It’s an old Melville house, with chunky whitewashed walls and a green tin roof. It has the look of an artist’s residence: slightly run down, a little messy, decorated in a quirky way. The house number is a mosaic. If you look through the pedestrian gate you see a goat, made out of wire and beads, grazing in the garden. The rusted arms of an Adventure Golf windmill inch around. The black-spotted roses need pruning.

She presses the doorbell again, holds it down for longer. More static, and then they hear the phone being picked up. Crackling on the other end.

‘Hello?’ says Kirsten. ‘Ed Miller? I’m Kirsten Lovell. You knew my mother?’

There is a pause, then the gate buzzes. He opens the front door, cautious, sees her, and relaxes. When he sees Seth he looks nervous again.

‘You can trust him,’ she says.

‘How do you know?’ says the man she assumes is Ed Miller.

‘He’s blood of my blood.’

Miller stares at them for a while. He is wearing a creased Hawaiian shirt and ill-fitting chinos. Horrendous tan pleather sandals. He has a full head of snow-white hair that moves when he nods. He comes out to make sure the security gate is closed behind them, sweeps his gaze left and right on the street before he clangs it shut. Kirsten studies him. Can’t imagine her mother dating a hippie.

‘You have something for us?’ she asks.

‘It’s not here,’ he says. ‘Too risky. They’re everywhere. I put it somewhere safe.’

Kirsten closes her eyes, hears the ticking of time she doesn’t have.

‘It’s close,’ he says, ‘I’ll take you.’

His aftershave smells like something with a ship on the label. Small crunchy loops the shape of Cheerios float around him. He shrugs on a light jacket and takes a set of keys off the hook by the door. Seth grabs them out of his hand, startling him.

‘I’ll drive,’ he says.

They climb into the beetle of a car. Miller seems too tall for it and hunches over in the front. Kirsten wonders what kind of person buys a car that is so obviously too small for them.

‘Oh, wait,’ he says, tapping his temple with the side of his index finger. He gets out of the car, walks to the garden shed. Ducks under the door and disappears into darkness. Kirsten and Seth look at each other. They don’t have to say it out loud. They are both thinking: Fuck.

Miller steps out of the shed, back into the sunlight. He is holding a couple of shovels. He holds them above his head and shakes them, as if he has won a race.

‘My mother said we could trust him,’ Kirsten says.

‘By ‘mother’, you mean, ‘kidnapper’?’

She pulls a face at him. What choice did they have?

The walks back to the car, folds the passenger seat forward, takes in Kirsten’s long legs.

‘Move up, honey,’ he says, dumping the shovels next to her. He winks at her before he slams the chair back in place and climbs in. She kicks the back of his seat.

Seth starts the car. It’s a prehistoric thing, and chokes twice before it comes to life. Miller smacks the dashboard twice.

‘Good girl!’ he shouts, making them both jump.

Kirsten is still staring at him, trying to imagine what on earth they had to talk about. She had thought of her ‘mother’ as a dry, sexless, beige, irritated woman. She can’t imagine the two of them having a conversation, never mind a twenty-six-year-long affair.

‘Which one to open the garage door?’ asks Seth, looking at the rubber buttons on the ancient remote.

‘Uh, the blue one,’ he says, but nothing happens. Pins of dread on Kirsten’s skin. Seth is slowly reaching for his gun.

‘I mean, the orange one. Sorry,’ he laughs, ‘nervous.’

Seth clicks the orange button and the garage motor heaves the door up. They all exhale. 4 and 5, thinks Kirsten, easy enough to mix up.

The man beats a melody on his khaki-clad thigh.

‘Left,’ he says.

‘Where are we going?’ asks Seth.

‘To the hidey-hole I came up with. Genius, if I don’t say so myself.’

‘Where?’ asks Kirsten. ‘We don’t have much time.’

‘We’ll be there in twenty minutes,’ he says. Kirsten looks at her watch, feels the adrenaline pulling at her stomach. This better pay off, she thinks, or Keke is dead. Seth puts his foot down.

They pull up at a small flower farm on the outskirts of the city. The guard seems to recognise Ed and drags the gate open for them. The metal catches on the hard sand. Miller directs them along the powder dirt road, and they drive along until it comes to an abrupt end. Seth, driving too fast, slams on the brakes and they skid a little, landing in some wild grass. They look around, as if wondering how they got there – sitting in a vast field of flowers.

Kirsten is exhausted, nervous, dirty, and hurt, surrounded by blue skies and blooms. The prettiness around her is not making sense.

‘I don’t understand,’ she says, ‘why here?’

‘Why else? Your mother loved flowers,’ he says.

‘Loved killing flowers, more like,’ she says. ‘She killed every plant we ever had.’

‘Okay,’ he says, ‘correction: loved cut flowers. I sent her some every year on her birthday. Lilies,’ he sniffs, ‘were her favourite.’

Kirsten remembers the huge flower arrangements arriving once a year. She had always assumed they were from her father, but realises now that would have been out of character for their relationship: there hadn’t been a flicker of romance in it. She doesn’t remember ever seeing them touch. She didn’t realise that holding hands was a thing couples did until she saw someone else’s parents do it.

When the bouquets arrived her father would complain of hay fever. He’d throw out the flowers as soon as a single petal turned brown; inspected them daily until he found one.

‘It’s buried under that tree,’ he says, pointing at a leopard tree a hundred meters away. Kirsten and Seth grab a shovel, swing them over their shoulders. They must have looked daunting in their ripped clothes, their skin bruised with black blood.

‘Whoah,’ says Miller, feigning surrender. ‘Settle down there, puppies.’

‘Let’s get a move on,’ says Seth. The sun was sinking fast.

‘Seriously, whoah,’ says Miller. ‘I’m gonna need to pat you down, cowboy.’

‘No need,’ says Seth, taking his gun out of its holster. ‘I’m packing. So?’

‘Well, will you be kind enough to leave it in the car, please?’

‘Why?’

‘Son, no offence meant,’ he says, hand on hips, Hawaiian shirt restless in the breeze. ‘But I don’t know you, I can’t trust you. A couple of weeks ago the love of my life was murdered for a reason I’ll never understand. Then you two show up in your punk clothes saying you’re the people Carol told me to expect. I’m hoping for the best, etc. etc., but I will not walk into a field in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of strangers with a gun. I am not armed, I think it’s fair to ask you to leave your weapon in the car.’

Seth thinks about it, then shrugs: ‘Fair enough.’ He walks towards the boot but Miller stops him, putting his hand on the warm metal.

‘It’s broken,’ he says. ‘Hasn’t sprung open in years. Just put it in the cubbyhole.’

He does what Miller says. Gives Kirsten a quick questioning look; she barely nods. They rush to the tree, Miller falls behind.

‘Which side?’ Kirsten yells from under the canopy.

‘Where you’re standing!’ yells Miller. The twins begin to dig. Kirsten struggles with one arm, but is able to use her foot for leverage. The ground is baked clay. Keke’s phone beeps with a SugarApp warning. Code orange: 3 hours left.

‘Are you sure?’ asks Seth, swiping his brow. ‘You sure it’s here?’

They both look up at the same time, and find themselves staring up the barrel of his gun.

‘You have got to be fucking kidding,’ says Kirsten.

‘We are who we say we are,’ says Seth. ‘We’re the good guys.’

‘I know,’ he says, ‘Keep digging.’

They know he means for their graves.