by JT Lawrence
She takes the chickpea can with her and walks around her flat, checking all the windows. She touches the locks as she goes, counting them. Mid-count she hears a noise. A scraping, a whirring. Is someone trying to get in? Is the front door locked? Icy sweat.
There is a high-pitched squeal at her heels and Betty jumps in fright. Her beagle scurries away from her with hurt in her eyes.
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ she says, moving to hug and pet her. ‘I’m so sorry my girl. There’s a good girl, there’s a good girl.’ The words soothe her.
Sometimes if she talks loudly enough to herself she can drown out the voices. Not in public, though. She shouldn’t talk to herself in public. She doesn’t like being in public anymore. Sometimes she has to show people the note; she doesn’t like that, the look in their eyes.
Squatting on the ground, she feeds the dog some chickpeas. She’ll start the counting again.
Outside the door to her apartment, there is humming. A large man in overalls is polishing the parquet corridor.
Journal Entry
12 December 1987, Westville
In the news: A group of police officers is fired upon by freedom fighters from a moving car in Soweto; two police officers are killed and four injured. In Melbourne, Australia, they are attempting to understand the Queen Street Massacre: why 22-year-old Frank Vitkovic killed 8 people in a post office building before jumping from the eleventh floor. Microsoft releases Windows 2.0.
What I’m listening to: U2’s ‘Where the Streets have no Name’
What I’m reading: ‘Tommyknockers’ by Stephen King.
What I’m watching: Flowers in the Attic. I’ve read the book before, but now that we have babies we just found it too creepy, P had to turn it off!
We brought the twins home this week. They keep us very busy but not-busy at the same time. Sometimes when they are both sleeping, P & I just sit in the lounge and wonder what to do. Other times they are both crying at the same time and we feel totally overwhelmed.
P has a pair of red DIY noise-cancelling headphones (that he uses when he does drilling etc.) which have come in very handy at bath-time!
I feel so attached to them that I want to be with them all the time. When we settle them down at night for their longer sleep I don’t want to leave the nursery. Once I’m out I feel relieved that I have some time to myself but miss them immediately. Sometimes when I’m not with them I catch myself looking at photos of them. Crazy!
We are totally in survival mode, sleeping when we can, showering IF we can, eating takeaways when we run out of 2-minutes noodles. I feel so consumed by the feeding and caring that I feel like I hardly exist. Or at least, the person I was before, hardly exists. I am just a vessel. A milk machine. As for P and I—we are like ships passing in the night.
We keep the babies next to our bed at night so that I don’t have to get up to feed them every 2 hours. Then if they cry I just reach over and pop them in bed with us and snuggle while they feed. I feel very protective of them. Tiger mother.
It’s almost Christmas and I think it will be, like, the happiest Christmas ever.
Chapter 10
A Swarm, A Smack
Johannesburg, 2021
The ragged tooth shark swims straight towards her, his dull eyes apparently unseeing in water the colour of an overcast sky. Serrated teeth hang out at all angles, as if he has long given up hunting. Her pulse quickens as he approaches, her finger on the trigger. He glides quickly with little effort. The water is murkier than she had hoped. Kirsten fires away. Just before it reaches her—a severed arm’s length away—the shark turns to avoid the tempered glass of the tank. Superglass.
She gets a few shots of his profile: a vast muscle-and-cartilage body wrapped in slate sandpaper. Her head throbbing, she flicks through the thumbnails on the screen of her camera, making sure she has enough that are in sharp focus.
The lighting is tricky because she can’t use her flash; it will bounce off the glass. She is shooting in MultiFocus 3D to get more drama out of the looming shark. The shots are certainly dramatic, but shooting in MF3D always gives her a headache.
She sits for a moment, watches the dancing blue light of the water (Aqua Shimmer) paint her arms and hands. The pressure in her head makes her feel as though the silicone-framed glass is going to give way and knock everyone over in a tidal wave of exotic fish, eels, and strangling seaweed.
She has a long gulp of CinnaCola from the can her assistant hands her. She has been at it for ages and she still isn’t sure if she had the shot. She powers up her Tile and looks at the pictures in subpixel HR. The pictures she had of the Leafy Sea Dragon, the Blanket Octopus and the Sea Wasp jellyfish are fantastic. The Blanket Octo looks like a silk scarf underwater: a billowing maroon cape. She can watch it for hours.
The Sea Wasp is almost invisible: smoke caught in a bubble underwater, with elegant silver tentacles and enough deadly venom to kill up to sixty humans. If you get stung by this jellyfish in the sea, says the digital projection on the glass, it causes you such intense pain and shock you won’t make it to the shore. A group of jellyfish is called a swarm or a smack. Such grace in its movement: hypnotic. She makes a mental note to do a jellyfish project in the future.
Her assistant offers her a ganache-glazed kronut but she, for once, declines. She doesn’t feel great. A bit dizzy, nauseated. It had been a long morning and she still has to shoot the model. Her eyes are strained and she’s battling to concentrate on the photos, so she closes the window and looks around the aquarium for a moment.
It’s deliciously cool and quiet inside; even the children whisper. The cobalt luminescence ripples over the floor and the visitors, making everyone seem calm. It has a clean taste: ice and fresh mint, with a hint of citrus.
Who would have thought an aquarium would work in Jozi? It was an impromptu idea of some BEE-kitten who had more investors than sense. There are so many things up against the project: the water shortage, the protesting fish-hippies, the transport costs. Can you imagine the logistics of trucking sharks, dolphins and other endangered fish from some sleepy coastal town to Johannesburg? It was a joke. Until it wasn’t anymore, and now it’s AQUASCAPE: a gushing money-spinner, a veritable pot of liquid gold. She looks around at the illuminated faces of the kids and their parental units, and feels a twinge. In drought-blasted South Africa it does feel magical to see so much water. She had always loved water—rivers, lakes, waterfalls, oceans—and swimming. She often wonders why she lived inland. Perhaps one day they can retire to the Cape Republic.
As a teenager she read an article in the New York Times about the ‘loneliest whale in the world’. It was about an animal that looked like a whale and sounded like a whale, but her call was slightly off, which meant that even though she called and called, no other whales could hear her.
The people who found her named her 52 Hertz. Her tone was bassa profunda, just a notch higher than the lowest note on a tuba, and it became deeper over time. She kept swimming, kept calling, but the entire ocean was dark, cold and deaf to her. That’s me, Kirsten had thought at the time. That is the whale version of me.
Her news tickertape lights up with a fresh story. She clicks it and is taken to page six of Echo.news, the local online newspaper for which she does odd jobs. It’s a satirical cartoon of the NANC politician who was caught with a secret pool. He is standing in court with a sheepish smile, dressed in nothing more than soggy grey underpants, with a yellow duck-shaped inflatable tube around his waist. The prosecutor has a whistle around her neck and the judge is sitting on a lifeguard chair, the ones you used to get in public pools. Kirsten moves her cursor to close the window when she spots a headline that draws her in.
WOMAN FOUND DEAD IN BRAAMFONTEIN FLAT.
This has always been a secret fear of Kirsten’s: ending up old and alone, slipping in the shower/accidentally electrocuting herself/choking to death on a toaster waffle, only to be found weeks later by the building’s rodent-control man. She scans the article to see h
ow ancient this woman was and how exactly she kicked the bucket, so she can at all costs avoid the same sorry end.
But it turns out the woman is precisely Kirsten’s age, and it’s a suspected suicide. ‘Betty Weil’s body,’ it read, ‘was found yesterday by her mental health doctor who had grown concerned when Miss Weil had missed several appointments. She was found in the kitchen where she had died after apparently gassing herself. Miss Weil had a history of mental illness, most notably paranoid schizophrenia.’ A little more info on her history follows, and then the usual disclaimer to seek help if needed. Lawsuits are sticky now that suicide is trending. The small black-and-white picture accompanying the article shows a laughing young woman with long dark hair, obviously before her illness took hold of her. Something makes Kirsten look twice. She reads the article again. Betty. It can’t be.
Not the mad woman in the parking lot. She had to have been in her forties, at least, and didn’t look anything like this photograph. Kirsten puts her fingers over the woman’s long hair, giving her a helmet-cut.
Your Kirsten is my Betty.
‘Fucking hell,’ Kirsten says, speed-dialling Keke.
‘I’m busy,’ Keke answers, noise and static in the background.
‘Where are you?’
‘The Gladiator Arena, in Roma. Well, fake Roma, anyway. Roman Rustenburg. Dusty as hell but some fine ass here in gladiator get-up. Skin all bronzed and shit. Failed Amusement Park turned film set for the second instalment of the Mad Maximus thrillogy.’
‘You do lead a charmed life,’ says Kirsten.
‘What’s up?’ asks Keke.
‘That mad woman I told you about, the one who stalked me in the basement the other night?’
‘Yebo?’
‘She’s in the paper today.’
‘Arrested? Admitted to an asylum? Elected as a minister?’
‘Dead.’
‘Who wrote the article?’
‘What?’
‘Which journo wrote that article? Was it from Echo?’
Kirsten scrolls and sees the name of the journalist.
‘Echo, yes. Mpumi Dladla.’
‘Ha! He’s a hack. He probably didn’t even investigate. Most likely lifted a police report.’
‘Do you have his number?’
‘Of course I do.’
Fiona’s moans, though stifled, are getting louder. Seth cups her mouth with his hand, smudging her lipstick and butting the back of her head up against the gun-metal grey locker door in the stationery room, which makes her groan even more. It started innocently enough, or so she had thought. She was there to pick out some new pens, e-paper and stickernotes for her desk. She had been looking forward to it all week: Fiona Botes had an almost unhealthy love of stationery. It was so old fashioned—romantic, really—to use real pens on real paper.
She had been inspecting the different kinds of yellow pens on offer in anticipation, when Seth strode in and locked the door, startling her. He had used her temporary breathlessness to advance on her. Not a word exchanged, he had put his hand behind her head and kissed her slowly, making sure at every stage that she wanted more. As the kiss grew deeper, she pulled her stomach in as his hand slid over her smooth pink shirt, her generous breasts. Seth used just the right amount of teasing, and the right amount of pressure. He pushed her against the closed door of a locker, trapping her body between the heat of his body and the cool metal. His mouth didn’t leave hers as his hand travelled down, lifting her knee-length tweed skirt and stroked her through her panties. At first slowly, in lazy circles, then faster and harder as he felt her grow wet. Her arms, holding the door behind her, became stiff; she stopped groaning, held her breath, and her whole body became rigid before the orgasm took her. He held her up as her knees almost buckled—her entire being felt as if it was buckling—and tears sprang to her eyes.
Fiona Botes has not had many orgasms in her life, and the ones she has never seem quite satisfactory. Her girlfriends tell her that she has to DIY before she can show a man how to do it for her, but she doesn’t like thinking about that. It seems smutty. Besides, she believes a man should intuitively know what to do with her parts; she certainly doesn’t. Never has Fiona imagined that an orgasm could feel like this. And so quickly! Fully clothed! She is in shock. Intoxicated. What surprises her even more is that she finds herself unbuckling him. This gorgeous, tall man, in the stationery room, with her! She couldn’t have dreamt up a better fantasy if she had tried.
Kirsten feels a twinge in her abdomen. Maybe I’m ovulating. She checks the OvO app on her watch: 36 hours to go, it says. At least she’ll get laid this week. She takes the escalator to the second floor of the pastel green art deco building (Pistachio ice cream), where the journalists, editors, copy editors and layout artists buzz around in the open-plan offices of Echo.news like a drone-swarm.
They moved to this downtown building when their original offices in ChinaCity/Sandton were firebombed a few years ago by a group of Christian extremists called The Resurrectors. Previously infamous for their mission to ban The Net, the group had since taken to terrorising anyone who ‘disrespected Jesus’. The newspaper had published a column by a cocky, jaded journo in which he criticised each major religion in turn, and from which could extrapolated that he found anyone of religious persuasion a bit dim-witted. A line about rising-from-the-dead Jesus being a huggable zombie particularly inflamed the group and the next day—poof!—the Echo.news building was razed. The Lord doth smite cocky columnists. No one was hurt—how very Christian of them—and because Echo doesn’t put out a hard copy, the newspaper business goes on as usual, operating remotely from the employees’ individual lounges and tennis courts until this new building is found.
The Resurrectors have also recently taken to threatening fertility doctors, SurroSisters, and bombing IVF clinics. They call fertility treatment ‘devil’s work,’ surrogates ‘SurroSluts,’ and the resulting embryos—very unimaginatively, in Kirsten’s mind—‘devil spawn.’ They published a piece on FreeSpeech.za outlining their thinking, backing them up with archaic biblical verses. Kirsten tried to hate-read it once, to make fun, but all the exclamation marks had hurt her eyes.
Firebombing the Echo.news building is one thing, but a public outcry follows about their disrespect for the SurroSisters. Without professional surrogates, South Africa’s birth rate will be through the floor. Singe fertile women who volunteer to assist infertile couples are afforded special treatment in almost every facet of their lives: free accommodation, travel, medical treatment. Each SurroSis has their own bodyguard, and their own car. Fashion houses dress them, jewellers loan them diamonds, brands nearly trip over themselves to place their products in their hands. They wear ‘SS’ badges in public so they can be easily identified and shown the proper respect: the opposite of a scarlet letter.
When Kirsten reaches the top of the escalator at the Echo offices, no one takes any notice of her, so she walks up to the closest table and asks where she can find Mpumi. She is directed to the untidiest desk in the place where she casts around for familiar faces but sees no one she recognises. Mpumi is on the phone, and typing at the same time, so she smiles at him and gestures that she’ll wait. It’s obviously a personal call, because he wraps it up quickly and calls the person on the other side of the line a ‘chop’.
‘Hi,’ she ventures, but he holds up a silencing finger at her and finishes typing his sentence with his other hand. He reads it again, makes an adjustment, makes another adjustment, then smashes the save key.
He looks up at her and blinks, as if to clear his head of the previous conversation. Mpumi is super groomed and dressed in 1950s Sophiatown chic. Retrosexual. Kirsten thrusts an extra-large, double-shot cappuccino at him, believing from experience that you couldn’t go wrong with that in a news office. He crinkles his nose.
‘Sweet, darling, but I don’t do caffeine. Or sugar... or moo-milk.’
Kirsten swaps his for hers. He fiddles with his bowtie.
‘Half-caf
f, stevia, soymilk.’
He takes it from her, flips off the plastic top, and takes a small sip.
‘So you are an angel. I thought so, when you walked in. All fiery-haired and horny and shit, with the light behind you. Are you here for the Feminazi interview?’
‘No,’ she says. ‘I just need five minutes.’
‘What can I do for you?’
Kirsten sits on an old, bashed-up office chair, pulls it closer.
‘That article of yours on the tickertape this morning...’
‘The monkey that they’ve programmed to talk? My sources swear it’s true.’
‘No, the woman. The woman that committed suicide.’
‘Ah,’ he says, ‘you a relative? We haven’t been able to find any relatives, nor could the cops, so we went ahead and named her. Not a friend or frenemy in sight. If you’re—’
‘No,’ interrupts Kirsten. ‘I just have a question, about how she died.’
‘Straight up-and-down a suicide, m’lady.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘No sign of forced entry. In fact, the windows and doors were locked from the inside. The super had to get in by smashing a window—the lady had, like, ten different locks on the front door.’ He snorts. ‘Well, it’s ironic, isn’t it? Locking the baddies out before you stick your head in the oven.’
‘When do you think she died?’
He looks down at the masses of paper spread on his desk and, after a few moments, locates a blue file.
‘It’s a finely tuned arrangement.’ He smiles at her, gesturing at the mess. ‘It’s the only way I find anything.’
Keke is right: it’s a copy of the police file.
He flips through a few pages then stops, pointing to a detail Kirsten can’t see. ‘Estimated TOD was the evening before.’