Why You Were Taken (21 page)

  ‘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.’

Journal entry

2 July 1988

Westville

In the news: A car bomb explodes near the gate of Ellis Park stadium in Johannesburg. Two people are killed and 37 injured. Bombs, bombs, bombs. What kind of world have we brought the twins into?

What I’m listening to:
Tracy Chapman. Fell for her after watching a bootleg VHS of her amazing performance at the Nelson Mandela 70
^th
birthday celebration concert at Wembley Stadium. Talkin’ about a Revolution!

What I’m reading:
‘Radical Gardening: Politics, Idealism and Rebellion in the Garden (George McKay).

What I’m watching:
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

I don’t know if it’s the pills or the sessions with my shrink or just the fact that the twins are sleeping through the night but I feel SO MUCH BETTER! I feel almost like myself again. It is like coming up for air after a long, deep dive in some cold black lake.

P hired a domestic worker / nanny to help me with the kids. She comes in on Tuesdays and Thursdays and does all the washing and cleaning (usually with one of the twins strapped to her back!) It gives me time and space to just ‘be.’ Who knew you needed time for that? But I do. I work in the garden and read books and then I feel ready to be a mom again. I no longer feel as though I am being consumed.

I feel better, I look better, I even put on a new dress the other day and took the kids for a walk. I am hungry again and it feels good to cook and eat.

P is so happy he is spoiling me. Buying me clothes and a nice necklace, and we even got a babysitter the other night and went to dinner like we used to. I had a sirloin and a baked potato with sour cream and P just watched me eat as if he had never seen anyone eat steak before.

My shrink says I’ll have good days and bad days while I’m getting better and soon the good days will outnumber the bad days. I think that is starting to happen.

I planted some new flowers – arums this time – they flower beautifully in winter instead of dying like some other annuals. Also planted some other things. P says I’ve got green fingers now. I laughed. It felt good.

TSOTSI

23

Johannesburg, 2021

Seth is in a communal taxi heading towards his apartment. His fellow passengers give him a wide berth as he tries to stem the flow of blood from his forehead. He was lucky the driver let him on. A pearl-clutcher wearing thick glasses clicks her tongue at him and calls him a
tsotsi
under her breath. He bumps Alba.

SD> In some trouble here, position at F compromised.

LL>> What do u need?

SD> Security check & bugsweep ASAP at my place. I’ll remotely disable my BM-retina access.

LL>> Motioned, will contact u when it’s confirmed clean. You need a bodyguard?

SD> Ha. Since when does Alba hve budget 4 bodyguards?

LL>> Worried about u. It can b arranged.

SD> I’ll b fine.

LL>> Famous last words.

SD> Hopefully not LAST words.

LL>> ROFLZ! Danger suits you. Never knew u had/sense/humour.

SD> Funny. Also, I’ll need someone/labs, I’ll b bringing in samples.

LL>> Excellent. Will have someone here ASAP.

Seth’s head stops bleeding.

*                  *                  *

Kirsten’s head stops bleeding. She switches on the shower and doesn’t wait for the water to get warm before she blasts her face, neck and back, then quickly towels off, leaving a Pollock of red and pink behind (Blood Marble). She throws on some fresh clothes: black, and steps into her dark trainers. Grabs her bag but leaves her Tile behind. Just as she is out the door she remembers the envelope and goes to fetch it, stuffs it in her bag along with a clean plaster and the pocketknife. She doesn’t have time to think, she just moves.

HER ABDUCTOR’S HANDWRITING

24

Johannesburg, 2021

Kirsten puts her watch up to the screen so that the ATM can scan it. She draws her daily limit of ten thousand rand, hoping it will keep her going for the next few days. The machine thanks her for her business and ejects 20 perfumed five hundred rand notes. The cash is bulky but she can’t leave a credit trail. She checks over her shoulder for anything suspicious but everyone seems to be going about their regular life without a clue of what hers has become.

She catches a communal taxi to Mbali Mall in Hyde Park. She can’t think of anywhere safe to go but when the taxi driver stops outside the shopping centre for another passenger, Kirsten jumps out, leaving the microchip hidden in the fold of the seat.

Usually she hates malls, but for now the soulless space and dazzling lights seem like a good idea. Polished floors, store staff too tired to smile and shopzombies bleached by the artificial light. The killer wouldn’t pump her full of bullets in front of all these people, would he? Still, she is cautious, keeps her head down and walks along the shop fronts, gazing at the window displays without seeing anything. She grabs a mask off a rotating display and covers her face with it.

*                  *                  *

Seth is walking, to kill time and get some air, and is twenty minutes away from home. Tuk-tuks and bike-cabs hoot at him as they pass, offering him a ride. Alba had just confirmed that their bugsweep has entered his apartment, so by the time he gets there it should have been given the all clear. It was just a precaution: as far as he knows, no one at Fontus knows his address, but he had been born with a healthy sense of paranoia and it had kept him alive and (relatively) unscathed up until now. What the fuck was going on at Fontus that they would remove Fiona and set armed security guards on him?
Numbers stream through his head as he thinks of the files he had accessed there, the graphs, the summaries, all seemingly in order. What is it that they’re so desperate to hide? He would find out soon enough: he needed to get the samples to Alba HQ.