Why You Were Taken (16 page)

3 February 1988

Westville

In the news:
I don’t know. When I look at P’s newspaper the words all swim before me.

Not watching, reading or listening to anything. Have the concentration span of a gnat. When will the babies sleep through the night?!

Need. To. Sleep.

But now there is more than just sleep deprivation. There is a darkness.

A nothingness. Am being swallowed whole.

MESSIAH MAGIC

14

Johannesburg, 2021

Kirsten waits for James to leave for the paediatric clinic in Alexandra before she pulls out the envelope from Betty/Barbara. While he tries to save the world she’ll try to, well, save herself. She flattens out the note on the desk in front of her and tries to decipher it.

Doomsday. D-day. Apocalypse. Armageddon. End-of-the-world.  She’s never been good at this hellfire and brimstone thing. While everyone else in the classroom was learning about the cheerful trio of Christ, Mohammed and Buddha she had been staring out of the window, wondering why no one else saw what she saw, felt what she felt.

A school religious counsellor once tried to tell her that her Black Hole was the absence of Jesus’s light, God’s love, and if she were to take the righteous steps and be saved then it would disappear, just like that. Messiah Magic.

Kirsten’s eyes had rolled so far back in her head she almost lost them completely. Later, with his warm hand on her back, he had instructed her to stay behind after class, with a look in his eyes that told her that if she did her life would never be the same. His handprint still tingling on her skin, she had been first out the door when the bell rang.

She holds the note to the light, hoping to find a clue. Turns it over and over in her hands. Suddenly she feels ridiculous, trying to make sense of a demented woman’s ramblings. She looks at her Tile. Her Echo.news tickertape flashes with new stories. A man gunned down fellow shoppers in a Boksburg mall, killing five people and injuring three. A(nother) municipal worker strike, as if our streets didn’t stink enough.

The usual spate of muggings and hijackings, some fatal, some just inconvenient. A flaming crucifixion in Sandton Square, courtesy of The Resurrectors. Funny, that they call themselves that, thinks Kirsten, when they do the opposite. Jesus’s light, my foot. They also covered the small spat that Keke had told her about the day before, exaggerated by graphic pictures of gaping knife wounds, and a convicted rapist taking the government to the Constitutional Court for ‘enrolling’ him in a Crim Colony, or PLC.

When the government instituted the Penal Labour Camps the rest of the world was horrified.
Concentration camps for criminals!
Shouted the international headlines.
New Apartheid for SA!
and
Underground Crim Colonies!
It was in the beginning of the New ANC rule – when they still had balls – and they were dead-set on implementing the programme despite the international pressure not to.

They moved prisoners from their crowded, dirty cells to various high-security farms and mines throughout the country and set them to grind. They learned skills and earned wages, with which they paid their food and board, and had mandatory saving schemes that would be released to them, with interest, at the end of their sentences. The money that was saved by emptying the prisons went to prisoner rehabilitation and university fees.

Crime stats were down and all in all it was a neat move; the conviction rates were still low, but at least the captured criminals were in some way paying their debt to society. The then-defunct ‘reclaimed’ farms were revived and South Africa reverted to being a mass exporter of goods. The general public was still divided on the matter, but the initial outrage seemed to have dissipated along with the trade deficit.

Kirsten scrolls down. Thabile Siceka, the health minister, was in Sweden to receive some kind of award. South Africa has had some pretty dodgy health ministers in the past, including HIV-denialists who promised that a beetroot and olive oil salsa would cure even the direst case of AIDS. Siceka didn’t have to excel at her job to be the best minister to date, but excel she had.

It was well known that she had had a tough start in life. Both her parents and her grandparents died of AIDS, and she had to leave school at eleven years old to look after her younger siblings. When the HI-Vax was in development she pushed it through every stumbling block. She raised funds when they were needed, flew in experts, sped up the testing phase. The vaccine could have taken twenty years to get into public circulation; Siceka had it out in four. She took HIV/AIDS from being the Africa’s biggest killer – apart from mosquitoes – to being as easy to avoid as MMR.

The Nancies did have some strong ministers, but as a whole their leadership just didn’t stand up to the pressures of the country. Too many poor people, poor for too long, too few rich people, and a wide, painful gap in between. Add to the mix deficient service delivery, economy-crippling strikes, the panic of the water shortage and relentless violent crime and it’s no wonder that creeps are ready to pull out an AK47 at any asshole who says the wrong thing. South Africans were frustrated, and it was erupting in every facet of life. Clearly she was not the only one with a hollow where her heart should be. Where was the Messiah Magic when you needed it?                                                              
 

Journal entry

13 February 1988

Westville

In the news:
--- I don’t care.

Something strange is happening to me. A twisting inside. I have everything I want, a wonderful husband, a nice home, two precious little babies, but I have this weird feeling of dread and sadness. When I wake up in the morning I don’t want to get out of bed. I’m exhausted and just want to sleep all day. When I do get up I am like a zombie. Sometimes P gets home and I’m sitting in front of the TV in my sweaty pyjamas, not even watching, not really, and the kids are screaming from their room. He gets angry with me but he tries not to show it, tries to be understanding. When he is angry like that he doesn’t talk to me. Doesn’t want to show his feelings. In this terrible stony silence he fixes the babies up, changes them, feeds them, finishes the ironing. I should care more, but there is something wrong with me.

He doesn’t understand. The days are just too long.

I’ve lost my appetite, no food seems appealing anymore. I exist on endless cups of tea. Tea sometimes makes me feel better. Not sure if it’s the actual tea or if it’s just something to look forward to: a treat, to break up the day yawning ahead of me. And biscuits, if there are. A hot mug of tea and a biscuit – like a little steaming beacon of hope. If there is a (rare) moment in the day that I have my hands free, the first thing I do, instead of doing the washing or cleaning the kitchen, is have a cup of tea.

There is no energy for anything that is not completely vital: Washing my hair seems an insurmountable task. The thought of lifting my arms for that long just seems exhausting.

P hugs me and tells me that he loves me, but that I need to ‘snap out of it’, for the babies. Doesn’t he know that if I could, I would? Does he think I WANT to be like this?

I feel like nothing matters anymore. Don’t see the point in anything. Overwhelmed.

Maybe I am being punished for breaking up P’s marriage. Devastation wreaks devastation. Only myself to blame.

Sometimes I find myself wishing that we had never had the twins. They are so dear, they truly are, and I love them with my entire being but sometimes I just resent their existence. Wish we could go back in time when it was just P and me, and we went out to concerts and dinners, and sleep and sex came so easily. Sometimes when the babies are being demanding I want to pinch them. Hard, so it leaves a mark. Or just smack them when they won’t stop crying. I picture the welt my hand would leave behind on their pale thighs. Of course I don’t ever hurt them, won’t ever. But these dark thoughts smear my soul. Make me feel so terrible. Terrible mother.

Being washed away by despair.

The flowers I planted are dead. They were violas.

TEAMBUILDING

15

Johannesburg, 2021

Fiona and Seth lie naked in their hotel bed. They are on their backs, gazing at the ceiling, allowing the air conditioner to cool their pink skin. It’s a Friday afternoon and they’re supposed to be at teambuilding, but instead they’re at the 3rd hotel on their list: The Five-Leafed Clover. They have decided to try out all the top hotels in Jo’burg; they have 36 to go.

Fiona loves hotels. She likes to arrive at the concierge, hot, breathless, and get a room for an hour, or an afternoon. She likes leaving the room a tangled, stained mess, steal the stationery, and flounce out of the entrance a few hours later, flashing the eyes of a woman clearly satisfied.

Seth had expected her to be the opposite: shy of checking in, sure to make the bed before they left, straightening towels on her way out, but she had surprised him, and herself. She would giggle, mid-strip, and say things like ‘Goodness, what has happened to me?’ or, more specifically, ‘What have you done to me?’

She still wore polka dot silk blouses, but underneath she had exchanged her practical undies for the expensive lingerie Seth would buy her, or she would now buy herself. She still had the innocent freckles and the easy-blush cheeks but she wouldn’t hesitate to go down on him in his office, as long as the door was locked and the camera cloaked.

Seth held her hand, which was wrapped around the locket she always wore. Lockets were back in style, even some forward-fashion men wore them, but Seth got the feeling Fiona was wearing hers long before they started trending again.

  ‘What’s in the locket?’ he asks. They were used for so many purposes nowadays: pills, flash drives, patches, pedometers, mirrors, cameras, keys, IDs, phones.

  ‘It’s a vintage one,’ she says, ‘just holds a couple of pictures.’

  ‘Let me see,’ he says, peeling her fingers back.

  ‘No!’

  ‘Why not? What are you hiding?’

Fiona giggles. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You are,’ he says, kissing her nose. ‘What is it? A photo of your ex? Your KGB files? Your real identity?’

  She laughs some more. ‘No, silly.’

She relents and lets him open the locket. Two cats stare back at him.

  ‘That’s Khaleesi,’ she points, ‘and that’s Killmouski. I have a third one now, but I don’t have his photo in here.’

  ‘Kevin?’ he asks. She smacks him, laughs, kisses him. He closes the locket and lays it back down to rest just above her cleavage.

  ‘Lucky kitties,’ he says, resisting a dirtier phrase.

  She smiles at him. He thinks:
I’ve got you.

  ‘Although,’ she starts.

  ‘Mmm?’ he murmurs.

  ‘Talking about spies … I’m sure it’s nothing … I don’t want to talk grind … but when I was looking at the composition reports, just as a matter of interest, ‘cos I’m trying to learn everything there is to know about the Waters, I saw that this month’s Hydra reading was exactly the same as last month’s, and as the month before. I mean, I know nothing about science …’

Seth lifts his head, acting interested, but not too interested. ‘Isn’t that normal?’ This was just the pillow talk he was hoping for. ‘I mean, it’s supposed to remain stable.’

  ‘Relatively stable, yes, but these reports are carbon copies of each other! As if someone in the lab is too lazy to test the sample and is just copying the exact same data every month. I mean, if I was too lazy to do the readings then I would just tweak them slightly month-to-month.’

  ‘And the others?’

  ‘Tethys and Anahita have fewer samples, fewer readings, but their reports vary slightly. You know, January magnesium 3.13, February it’s 3.11. It just doesn’t make any sense.’

  ‘Strange, indeed,’ Seth says, moving onto his side to face her, stroking her stomach. ‘I think you’d better investigate.’

  Fiona scoffs. ‘Yeah, right, little Fiona Botes against the megacorp that is Fontus.’

Seth’s hand moves down to stroke her, and she stops laughing. ‘It’s probably nothing,’ she inhales, ‘an admin error.’ She feels the blood rush away from her head: no more talking shop now.

  ‘Yes,’ agrees Seth, ‘probably.’ He shifts his body down, she opens her legs.

  Maybe she would just check it out.