Why You Were Taken (6 page)

Kirsten was glad she didn’t have to date anymore. The dating pool in Jo’burg made her think of a tank of Piranhas; Keke loved it.

‘Chemically compatible couples, what’s not to love? And boy, are we … compatible. You’d never believe it if you met him. Anyway, so he’s actually the one who found this for me,’ she says, putting her hand on the folder.

  ‘It’s big. Really big. Cosmic. You ready for a mind-fuck?’

Kirsten’s fingers tingle. Keke slides it over to her, and she opens it.

TOMMYKNOCKERS

5

Johannesburg, 2021

The TommyKnockers club is underground. You have to know a person who knows a person to get in. There isn’t any secret code-word to gain access; the club is so difficult to find, you either know where it is or you don’t. That, and a giant Yoruba bouncer called Rolo, ensured that only the right kind of people got in. As he approaches the nondescript front door Rolo steps into the grey frame and tips his invisible hat to him. Diamond fingers catch the light.

‘Mister Denicker,’ he says in a voice as deep as a platinum mineshaft.

‘Rolo,’ Seth nods back.

On the other side of the door is another world. You step from the bleak and broken inner city street into a gaudy 40s Parisian-style steampunk bordello, replete with scarlet velvet bolted in gold, chain tassels, and oiled men and women wearing very few clothes and too much eye make-up. The twist comes later: as you move from room to room, and deeper underground, the imagery becomes more exaggerated, bizarre, sinister, as if someone had decided to cross a brothel with a spooky amusement ride. As if TommyKnockers was the representation of someone’s erotic dream turning into a nightmare.

The deeper you go, the less mainstream the dancers become, catering to more exotic tastes: a voluptuous woman with three breasts, a freakishly well-endowed man, a heavily-inked hermaphrodite with a clock etched into her back. The art on the walls changes from
chat noir
and
Marmorhaus
prints to surreal landscapes, obscured faces, bizarre vintage pornography, disturbing portraits hung at strange angles. Luminous sex toys alongside hallucinogenic shooters at the spinning bars, lit by deranged copper pipe chandeliers. Sex shows featuring Dali-esque hardcore fuckbots.

Seth didn’t usually go further than the first few rooms. He was no prude, enjoyed a bit of kink, but his insomnia didn’t need encouraging. He had enough to keep him up at night.

This evening, as soon as he crosses the threshold, he heads directly to an attractive blonde standing against a wall. It’s an old tactic, one that frequently paid off. None of that seedy languishing at the bar, surveying all the available meat on offer and later trying to hook up.

This technique is cleaner. It shows you are a man who knows what he wants. The woman, caught off-guard, invariably accepts the offer of a drink, and from then on it’s usually green lights all the way to the bedroom. Or club restroom. Or taxi. Or White Lobster den. Or wherever else they would happen to find themselves.

This particular blonde was wearing a belt for a skirt and black boots with heels so high he wondered how she managed to stay vertical. Masses of teased hair, powdered with fine glitter.

‘Hello there,’ says Seth. Not too friendly, not too distant.

‘Er,’ she says. Where did he come from?

He looks at the glass in her metallic-taloned hand: ‘Campari?’

The rose-coloured sequins above her eyes blink in the uneven light. He has a coldness in his eyes. A hardness. She tries to size him up. A drug dealer? A psychopath? A rufer? Does she, after her countless drinks, even care? She looks him up and down, nods. He leads her to the bar and orders her a double, vodka for himself, and two ShadowShots, which are not, strictly speaking, legal.

The Campari comes on the rocks – it’s one of the few clubs that still offer actual ice in drinks – despite the cost, instead of frozen silicone shapes. He grinds a block between his molars; he likes real ice. She purses her lips at the shooters, as if to say he’s naughty. He presses one into her hand; they touch glasses and down the drinks. Both feel the rush of the warm spirit as it washes through them.

She blinks at him; sighs as her pupils dilate. With a cool and gentle hand he propels her by her lower back to a more private area, with brocade curtains and oversized couches. An oil painting of a man with a patchwork blazer and rivets for eyes watches over them.

  ‘Let’s get you out of those dreadful shoes.’

*                  *                  *

Kirsten opens the folder while Kekeletso watches her. Inside: her parents’ autopsy reports. Keke had removed the photos that had been taken by the forensic team
in situ.
It was enough that Kirsten had been the one to find them dead, without having to see their death-grimaces again. Not that it made much difference to Kirsten: a picture on glossy paper wouldn’t be much more vivid than the images in her head.

The reports weren’t long. Kirsten skimmed a few pages describing what she already knew: bullet in brain, bullet in heart. .22 calibre Remingtons: one to stop thinking, one to stop feeling. Fired at arm’s length distance for her mom, half a room for her dad. Her mother had most likely been kneeling there when the killer squeezed a round into her head. Execution style, but face-to-face. The police say it was a botched burglary, but this creep wasn’t a stranger to murder.

Kirsten scans the medical jargon: entry wound of the mid-forehead; collapsed calvarium with multiple fractures; exit wound of occipital region. Official cause of death: Massive craniocerebral trauma due to gunshot wound.

On one of the final pages there were diagrams. Similar to what you would find in a biology textbook: line drawings of people dissected lengthways so that you could see their bones and organs. Kirsten was always better with pictures. She strokes the diagrams with her finger, following the coroner’s notes and asides. When she finishes with her father’s she starts on her mother’s. Immediately something looks wrong.

‘Do you see it?’ asks Kekeletso. Kirsten had been so absorbed she had almost forgotten Keke was there. She looks up, her finger glued to the illustration of her mother’s abdomen. The ceiling rains cerise spirals down on them.

‘She had a … hysterectomy?’

‘Yes.’

‘How come I didn’t know that? Did she do it when I was too young to remember?’ This was entirely possible given her sketchy childhood memories.

‘Turn to the last page. I found it in her private medical file.’

Without hesitating, Kirsten locates the last page in the folder and holds it up, pushing the others away. It was a record of an elective surgical procedure undergone by her mother in 1982. A full hysterectomy, five years before Kirsten had been born.

MAD FURNITURE WHISPERER

6

Johannesburg, 2021

Seeing as James was away in Zimbabwe and Kirsten had no grind planned for the day, she decided it was time to do something she had been putting off for too long. She caught a
boerepunk-
blasting taxi to the south of Johannesburg and took a long, brooding walk from the bus stop to the storage garages in Ormonde.

As she walked she snapped pictures with her locket. She used to have a superphone with a built-in camera, had a collection of lenses for it, but lugging a phone around when you could snap a Snakewatch on your arm just seemed archaic. Now smartwatches were being replaced with Tiles and Tiles were being replaced with Patches. It seemed impossible to keep up.

The LocketCam was tiny, smaller than a matchbox, and was really only a lens and a shutter release. She’d get the pictures later from her SkyBox. It was great for scenes like this: an old bus depot painted white by the ratty pigeons that had adopted it as their home; a mechanic’s cheerful advertising mural painted on a brick wall; a poster for a Nigerian doctor with an unpronounceable name who could enlarge your penis, get your ex-lover back, make your breasts grow, make you ‘like what you see in the mirror,’ vaccinate you against The Bug, and make you rich.
If he had that power,
thinks Kirsten,
I’m sure he wouldn’t be messing around with other men’s junk. Or, on second thoughts, maybe he
wanted
to mess around with other men’s junk, and that’s why he became a junk doctor.

When she reaches the storage building it looks all closed up. Not very promising. Then she sees their billboard, and the logo: a smiling Rhino. Ironic, and sad. Like a Dodo giving a thumbs-up, or a winking Coelacanth. Who would choose an extinct animal as their mascot?

Once the cops gave her the go-ahead to put her parents’ house on the market she paid a company to move all their possessions here. There was no way she could have faced doing it herself. It had been the first place she had found online, and she doesn’t remember the Rhino. Now she wonders if her parents’ things were really here or if they had been on the first truck out to some dodgy location: Alex, Lonehill, Potchefstroom.

There was no bell to ring or reception to visit. When she calls the number on the faded hoarding a telebot tells her it is no longer valid. She walks around the building and finds a back entrance, a simple fenced gate closed with a heavy padlock. She had been given two keys and had thought that they were identical, but she tries one now and the padlock springs open. She steps inside and locks the gate behind her.

The number on the cheap keyring is pink/purple-blue: 64 (Chewed Cherry Gum; Frozen Blueberry). She walks past a xylophone of colours before she finds her lot. The garage door is rusted and needs some persuading to roll up. It screams all the way and Kirsten is momentarily blinded by the red chevrons the noise causes in her vision.  Then, silence: dust glitters in the sunlight.

She stands still, breathing, blinking, trying to cope with the onslaught of smells, colours, feelings, memories whirling around her. The lounge suite is closest to her, and she focuses on that. She lifts the protective sheeting and glimpses the arm, a familiar tattoo of faded chintz. Pictures in her head: her lying on the couch, eating milky cereal while watching TV, one throw-cushion behind her back, another under her knees. The base ragged where their decrepit cat, Mingi, used to sharpen his claws. She lifts a seat cushion up and looks at its stained underside where her mother once spilled tomato soup, never to be forgiven by the stubborn fabric.

The coffee table with a small crack in the glass top that had been there for as long as she could remember. The server; the kitchen table; the counter swivel chairs. The buzz in her head dies down. She can do this. Slowly, methodically, she re-acquaints herself with each object. She lays her hand on them as she goes, acknowledging each piece, like some kind of mad furniture-whisperer.

The huge steel angle poise lamp, the bedside tables, the antique oak bookshelf. Box upon box of books and files and folders. Her parental units were academics and personally responsible, she was sure, for razing at least twenty rugby-field-size portions of rainforests each in the amount of paper they used over their lifetimes.

Despite being part of the original e-reader generation, they preferred their reading style old-school, and pen and paper to glass or projections. ‘It just feels more
real
,’ her mother used to say when Kirsten sighed at her for writing down her shopping lists on the back of old receipts. ‘Smartphones exist for a reason,’ Kirsten would say, showing her over and over how she could have a virtual shopping list, how she could send it to the store and have her groceries picked and delivered for her. Her mother would give her a tight smile, and she would know that she would never win this particular battle. When Cellpurses and then smart watches came on to the market it was just too much for them. They used to wield those old smartphone bricks as if they were something to be proud of, like the burning bras of the 60s. An image of a particularly ugly bra in flames comes to Kirsten’s mind; she doesn’t know where it comes from. One of her university courses? An ancient Fair Lady? Picstream? Webpedia? Flitter? Sometimes she feels as though her brain is a giant, multi-dimensional reflector, filled with the world’s random pictures. Where did they come from? A parallel life? A previous life? Someone else’s life?

The only exception to her parents’ fear of progressive technology was when she had given them a Holograph: a 3D-photo projector loaded with her Somali Pirates pictures. It was before the collection had won any awards. They were so proud of her, kept the projector running on loop, despite its rather macabre content: they had pirates in their lounge for months. The Holograph never moved from the mantelpiece, even when it stopped working.

 
There,
she thinks,
there’s a good memory to hold on to,
until she remembers that the Holograph was stolen in the burglary, which makes her see the crimson comets again.

She battles to tear open the buff boxtape, cursing herself for not thinking of bringing a pair of scissors, when she finds in the third carton a neat little pocket-knife (Royal Sky). It is, fittingly, a sharp taste, a stab of bitter on her tongue, a hint of cyanide, like chewing an apple seed. She remembers this taste exactly, and gets a poke of nostalgia. Her father would keep this knife in his pocket and bring it out on special occasions: when a bottle of wine needed de-corking at a neighbourhood braai, or a loose thread threatened to unravel a dress. There would always be a calm measured-ness on these occasions. A slow inspection of the problem, a thoughtful diagnosis, and the retrieval of the magical object from the deep recesses of his trousers. A slow opening of the blade, a glint of light when it was revealed, and then at last, the careful incising where it was needed. Never forgetting the cleaning of the tool afterwards, a sleeve-shining of its insignia, and its eventual evaporation. Considered, calculating, careful.