by JT Lawrence
Kate had taken the risk of leaving Mally at home so she could get the help she needed to sort out her head, but if anything, it’s made her feel more mixed up. Wouldn’t it be ironic if the measure she took to help herself, so that she could be wholly present to protect the kids, turned out to be the thing that jeopardised their lives? Her stomach roils. Seth’s not answering his phone. She hadn’t even really considered it a risk when she left this morning. Not really. It’s Seth, for Net’s sake, plus the security guards. Surely he’s safer there, than anywhere else?
He’s safe, she says to herself as they pass sunbaked buildings and cyclists with tadpole-shaped helmets. He’s safe.
They stop at a red light and a billboard starts talking to them.
“Have you tried our new Cosmic Cream?” the advert asks.
Kate snarks. She looks up at the projection and sees a whirlpool of white liquid splashing into someone’s cereal. It’s full of sparks and glints and is really pretty but Kate imagines it can’t be very nice to eat. All those little metallic starry explosions and planet dust in your mouth. But then she thinks maybe the creaminess takes the edge off the snapping sensation and in that case it may be quite nice. The next cut shows a woman adding the cream to her coffee and laughing as it sparkles. Kate rolls her eyes and looks away. Maistre Lumin’s voice comes on through the cab’s sound system. She’d far rather listen to what he has to say over crap advertising for (perhaps) an even crapper product. He looks at Kate from the cab’s smart mirror dash, and it’s like he’s in the car with her, with all his trademark impish charm. Kate turns off the sounds from outside and further darkens the windows.
Lumin’s face glows, and his voice is so calming; it always makes her think of getting into a bed with freshly laundered sheets. She likes listening to him speak in his vernacular, even though she understands very little of it; she has always loved the sound of the clicks and pops of isiXhosa. She’s never had a word for the soothing sensation it creates in her, but from now on she’ll call it Cosmic Cream, short for Cosmic Cream Without the Crap.
“Can you imagine a world,” he says, his generous smile ever-present,“free of anxiety?”
One of the things she likes about these in-cab messages is that it always feels like Lumin is speaking directly to her. She doesn’t know how they get that right. As if the car reads her emotional status on her Patch and gives her the message that is most appropriate. On the days she doesn’t leave the house – which have started to outnumber the days she does – he manages to find her anyway, on the homescreen or her news tickertape. He seems to know when she needs him.
“It may seem impossible to you,” he says, “but anxiety serves no one. Anxiety is just a byproduct of overthinking. Hai wena, that sounds too easy, hey? You need to stop thinking!” Clearly amused by the idea, he starts chuckling. “In order to cut anxiety out of your life, you need to realise that our souls are here for our own joy. Not just to go shopping. Not to grind. Not to pay debt. But for joy. Did you hear that?” he says playfully, eyes sparkling, “JOY!”
“Easy for you to say,” mumbles Kate. “You just sit on your gold throne all day and your minions bring you nice things to eat.”
That isn’t, strictly speaking, fair or true, although Lumin does have a reputation for having a sweet-tooth. He’s known for often misquoting Julia Child, saying “life without a cake is just a meeting”.
Lumin is frequently spotted digging community gardens for permaculture programmes in shack-towns and rural areas. He is forever backing previously disadvantaged communities with cheap green tech that improves their lives, like showing them how to make home-made refrigerators, sky-lights, and natural air-conditioning from sawn-off water bottles. He doesn’t have a PR firm working for the Luminary. Instead, civilians armed with their pointers and Tiles will record him and his people doing these things and plaster them all over social media. Perhaps it is their way of reassuring themselves there is still good in the world.
“So little time,” he says. “Look at me, I’m almost eighty years old, and I feel like a small boy.” He makes the hand gesture of all fingertips touching and pointing to the heavens, usually used, in African culture, to denote the height of a child. “Believe me now. One day you’re going to look up from all your anxious thoughts that you call your life and realise that it’s over. That it’s already over! Like a party when you are too busy thinking about the snax and the small talk to just let go and enjoy.”
Every time Kate brings him up in conversation with Seth he gives her the cynical look he usually reserves for people who still smoke. He likes to say that he’s allergic to KoolAid.
“How can you be suspicious of permaculture? It doesn’t make sense.”
“It’s not the permaculture, you know that.” (Seth has never grown a thing in his life, unless you include the clean-meat lab turkey he designed for Bilchen ten years ago).
“It’s the monastery itself?” Kate asked. “The Luminary? The gold paint?”
“Yes. It’s the gold paint. I mean, the man dresses like a monk who works in a 1940s flour mill, so what’s with the bling?”
“He likes the colour!”
He looked at her as if she was crackers.
“It’s a cheerful colour. He’s a cheerful chap. It brings him joy. Besides,” Kate said. “The man’s allowed to have some kind of shortcoming. He’d be too perfect, otherwise.”
Seth put his hands up. “Look, I’m not saying he’s a bad person. I’m just saying that he’s probably not the saint that everyone thinks he is.”
“You think he has some deep, dark secret?”
“I’d put serious bank on it. That man has skeletons in his closet.”
“Doesn’t everyone?”
“Not like his.”
Kate had laughed, and pictured a gold skeleton falling out of a creaking cupboard.
She thinks she knows what really bothers him, though. The Luminary published what they had called The Celestia Prophecies a few years ago. Really batshit biblical sounding things like “the sea will rise up and kill masses of men, women and children without discrimination”. Crazy until it happened: The 2022 Indo Tsunami wiped out thousands of people, including an old colleague of Seth’s who was workvaccing there. At least twelve of the hundred prophecies have so far come true.
“Coincidence,” Seth insists, but she isn’t so sure.
The cab pulls to a stop and the windows un-tint to reveal they’re already outside the apartment building. She rushes in. Her body is scrambling, but her mind is working in slow motion, as if Lumin has mesmerised her into a calm state of mind. Kate has the clarity now that she was after. When she reaches the front door nothing seems out of place. The guards greet her and open up to let her in.
“Mally?” she calls, checking his room. “Seth?”
No answer. This time she doesn’t panic, but instead calmly lopes from room to room, looking for her son. When the troubling emotions begin to rise, she pushes them down. Despite this, sweat breaks out on her upper lip. Where are they? Why aren’t they answering her? Then she thinks of the guards. Are they the same men who were there when she left, this morning? She doesn’t know. She didn’t look at them properly, their faces partly obscured with those turtle-shell shaped helmets and purple visors they wear. They could be anyone.
Then again, anyone could be anyone.
Just because they grind for a security company doesn’t mean they’re good people.
Anxiety serves no one, says Lumin in her head. Stop thinking.
She sees, out of the corner of her eye, that the delivery drone-pad window is open.
Mally’s body would fit through there.
She walks up to it and pulls the window closed, latches it. Swallows her electric blue agitation.
They’ll be in the panic room. They’ll be in the panic room, but then why aren’t they answering her?
She walks over and opens the panic room door, revealing chaos: the floor is littered with train tracks, snack bar wr
appers and spilled popgrains. Mally sits on Seth’s cross-legged lap, on the floor. They both have headphones on and are twiddling game remotes with their thumbs, eyes fixed on the cinescreen.
Kate lets out a long breath of relief. Waves at them. They’re so engrossed by the game they hardly acknowledge her. She hugs them anyway.
Chapter 47
Organic Martinis and Wild Sex
“Good God,” says the woman next to Keke. “Are you saying that’s the nanny’s arm?”
The room buzzes with questions.
“Mrs Lundy was at work that day, that was verified during the trial.”
“Are you saying that the Lundy boy was murdered? Premeditated?”
“That after he survived this fall, he was killed in the bath?”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Why would a nanny kill her charge? She’d be out of a job, for one thing.”
“I’m not saying anything,” says Keke, looking at the head juror. “I wouldn’t want to sway your vote.”
Everyone talks at the same time.
“Okay, okay,” says the man. “Settle down, everyone, please. Settle down. I don’t know how I’m going to explain this to the judges, but…what else do you have?”
Keke makes to put the Tile away in her bag but the HJ waggles his fingers at her and takes the device. His security guard brings him a green plastic envelope and he deposits the Tile inside and zips it up. Stamps the outside, signs it.
Keke’s not finished. “When I saw this video for the first time, it made me think of the interview with Maila, the nanny. When the cops spoke to her, that night, after the boy was found dead. It was part of the virtual reality evidence room.”
“Yes?” The man is suddenly very interested in what Keke has to say.
“Well, when I was looking in the bathroom, there was something on the floor, by the bathmat. Like, a sparkle. But then when I tried to inspect it, close up, it disappeared. I spoke to the VR facilitator about it and he said that it’s possible that they captured the floor last.”
“So, in other words,” The HJ says to the others, “there was something on the floor when they began recording the crime scene but it disappeared before they finished.”
“Exactly.”
“You’re saying that the crime scene was compromised.”
“But no one was allowed in there, apart from the forensic capture specialist.”
“Well…” The man with the world on his shoulders sighs. “Unfortunately…knowing what I know about the police force…it’s not entirely impossible that someone slipped in there and removed whatever it was you saw.”
“But what was it?” asks the woman in the silk dress.
“In the beginning of questioning the nanny,” says Keke, “on the video, with the cops. She wasn’t wearing her SurroSis pin.”
There is a hush.
“Then she takes a break, and when she comes back on, she’s wearing it.”
The HJ orders someone to fetch the footage, and they play it on the scoreboard holoscreen. There she is, the nanny, without the pin, and after the break, it appears.
“You see how she keeps touching her wrists, too?” says Keke. “Pulling her sleeves down to cover them.”
“She’s just doing that to wipe away her tears,” says someone.
“Maybe,” she says. “Or maybe there was a struggle in the bathroom when she was drowning the boy, and he managed to dislodge her pin and bruise or scratch her wrist.”
“The father would have heard a struggle,” says someone else.
“Not necessarily. He was cooking stir-fry. When I was in the VR kitchen, I couldn’t hear anything over the frying.”
“There was music, too,” says Zack. “He had classical piano playing on the sound system.”
“Blanco,” says the woman in silk. “I’d know Edward Blanco’s Aparello symphony anywhere.”
Blanco. What are the chances? She takes it as a sign that the universe is telling her that she’s on the right path.
“Well,” says the head juror, clasping his hands together. “This is an interesting turn of events.”
The jurors are excused until further notice. Keke is sure the HJ is glad to see the back of her, but then he surprises her by calling her over the din of dismissal and saying ‘Good job’ and that he’ll ‘be in touch’.
The jurors take their time in leaving. They don’t want to go without knowing What Happens Next. Will Lundy be let off? Will Maila be arrested? Most of all, Keke guesses, they want to know why on earth a nanny would kill a child.
“I guess it’s goodbye, then.” Zack’s looking especially dapper today in a pink silk tie.
“Not so fast,” says Keke. “You’ve got the rest of the day off, don’t you, now that we’ve been excused?”
“What do you have in mind? Organic martinis and wild sex?”
“I was thinking coffee.”
They grab a table at an Italian deli down the road from the courthouse. It’s called ProntoPrint and, as the name suggests, you don’t need to wait for the kitchen to make your food. Instead, it’s printed right in front of you. Great for quick lunches for important attorneys. Not great for your bank balance. Keke’s eyes widen at the menuscreen. R368 for a bullet coffee?
“I retract my offer,” she jokes.
“Of wild sex?”
“I wasn’t the one who offered wild sex,” she says, “I meant, the offer to pay for coffee.”
Zack adds on a chocroissant for each of them and Keke checks the time on her SnapTile. There’s a message from the police, updating her on their progress, which is, unsurprisingly, zero.
“You need to be somewhere else?”
“Yes. The hospital.”
“Oh, shit.” Zack’s face falls. “I completely forgot. Sorry. How’s he doing?”
“He made it through the night. That’s what they keep telling me, as if I wasn’t there, checking on his breathing every five minutes.”
“I’m really sorry. Is there anything I can do?”
“You’re doing it.” Keke takes the last bite of her croissant.
“More than coffee, I mean.”
“I need to talk it out. The Lundy case.”
“You solved it. You’re amazing.”
“Shut up.”
“Seriously. What’s to talk about?”
“Why would a nanny kill a child?”
“Who knows. Does it matter?”
The expensive coffee sparks an idea in Keke’s head. Helena Nash had accused them of ‘drinking overpriced coffee and thinking that everything is just fucking dandy’.
“Helena Nash. She was an accountant, right?”
“Yes?” says Zack.
“She had a full-time job. So…”
“So?”
“So, it’s likely that she had a nanny too. What are the chances it was the same woman?”
“Holy shit,” says Zack.
Keke places a call to the Carbon Factory. She spends five minutes convincing the operator to let her speak to Nash, and finally the convict is on the line. Zack looks uncomfortable. Keke puts her on speaker then grimaces as Nash clears her throat right into the receiver.
“Yup?”
“Did you have a nanny?” asks Keke.
“What?”
“Did you have a nanny, for your little girl?”
“Is this that journalist speaking? Kakky?”
“The nanny was on duty? That night?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“She didn’t work nights.”
“But was she there?” whispers Zack.
“Was she in the house?” Keke asks Nash.
“Is there someone else there? Who is it? What’s going on?”
“Helena. Please. Was the nanny in the house on the night your daughter fell down the stairs?”
“Yes,” says Nash. “Yes. She was always there. She was live-in. Her room was upstairs.”
“Was she around, you know
, when you poured your drink that night?”
There’s a brief silence.
“Hello?” says Keke. “Are you still there?”
“Jesus Christ,” says Nash. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
Chapter 48
Hard Pearl
“Kate, Kate,” says Keke through the line. There’s static and other noise. Buzzing. Zooming. She must be calling from her helmet.
Kate’s heart jumps. Her gaze falls, unseeingly, on Mally, who’s playing with his cars on the carpet.
“Keke? Oh no. I’ve been trying to get hold of you. Don’t tell me – ”
“Marko’s alive.”
“Oh, thank goodness.”
“I need to talk to you. Tell you something.”
The last time she heard those words from Keke it had forced her to run, and the information had saved her life.
“I’m listening.”
She leaves the panic room to get a better connection.
“Where is Mally?” asks Keke. “Please tell me you’re with him?”
“I’m with him. And Seth’s here. And a bodyguard. We’re safe.”
“Marko left me a couple of things on his old…”
“What?” says Kate.
“…dead…”
Keke’s voice crackles like foil packaging.
“What?”
“It’s why I called…found out…Lundy’s nanny…”