by JT Lawrence
At the look in Seth’s eyes, the receptionist takes a step back, despite the counter separating them. His eyes dart to the army of security guards. Seth retreats. He has five, maybe ten minutes before someone with clout realises he needs to be taken care of.
He runs to the Waters wing and uses Fiona’s access card to get into the lab, hurries to put on a mask. Once he gets into the factory it’s easy to disappear between the giant vessels of water, darting between gauges, graphs, clicking dials. Fiona had told him that the tap at the end of all the barrels and valves, just before the bottling, is where the sample test tubes are filled.
Seth removes the test sample of Anahita, replacing it with a virgin tube, and slips the sample into his pocket. Then he walks over to the Tethys section, and the Hydra section, and does the same there. Cameras are everywhere.
Once he is out of the lab he bins his mask, runs up the stairs, towards his office to grab his Tile, but immediately feels as if someone is following him. He picks up his pace. As he’s about to turn into his office he sees them: three security guards armed to the max, ready to pounce. Dobermans with a rabbit in their sights. Just before they grab him, The Weasel steps in their way.
‘No, no,’ he’s saying. ‘I’m telling you there has been a mistake.’
Hurting an innocent Fontus employee would have consequences.
‘On whose orders?’ Weasel’s demanding, the back of his white-collared shirt straining, struggling with the mountainous men as they try to reach around him, but Seth is just out of their grasp.
He darts into his office and locks the door. Grabs his backpack and jumps out of the window, onto the narrow balcony. Sprints towards the back of the building and runs down the perforated metal stairs of the fire escape. Once he hits the grass, he hijacks a CinnaCola golf cart, floors it, mows through a gazebo, sending trays of breakfast hors d’oevres and flutes of Buck’s Fizz flying. A waiter in a tux stands frozen, open-jawed. Seth swerves and narrowly misses the corner of the squash courts.
He can hear them behind him now, in turbo-carts with flashing lights. They motor past the swimming pool, a strip of restaurants, a mini touch-rugby field. It’s like playing cops and robbers in Toyland. He can see the exit, but at the speed they’re approaching they’ll be able to stop him before he reaches it. A bullet zings past his head. Another hits his cart. Toy chase, but real guns, real bullets.
A small bang and his cart spins and tumbles, rolling over itself and throwing Seth out. He stands, re-orients himself, notices his head is bleeding. Feels for the test samples to make sure they’re not broken. The three guards are out of their vehicle and pointing their weapons at him with practised aims. A trio of testosterone. More guards will be on their way. Seth doesn’t have a choice: he reaches to his ankle holster and pulls out his gun. They all begin to shout orders at him, drowning each other out.
‘Put down your weapon!’ yells the one with the blond crew cut.
‘You put your fucking weapons down!’ shouts Seth, flicking off the safety catch. No one moves.
‘I am warning you, Mister Denicker, we will use force against you if you don’t come with us.’
‘We just want to talk,’ pipes the other one.
Seth walks backwards, towards the exit. The men stiffen their arms, each one wanting to take the shot. Frustrated wannabes with itchy fingers: dangerous.
‘You have families, children,’ he shouts at them. ‘I have fuck-all. No one. Nothing. You’ve got the most to lose.’ They keep their sights trained on him. Then, slowly, the youngest of the three lowers his gun. The crew cut shouts at him, swears, but the man slides his gun back into his hip holster, backs away.
‘You two: you’re ready to widow your wives over fucking bottled water?’
They don’t say anything but keep advancing while he inches closer to the exit. Seth has no choice: he squeezes the trigger and puts a bullet in crew cut’s leg. The man lets out a shocked noise, falls to the floor, lifts his gun at Seth, pulls the trigger, misses, and misses again. Now empty, the felled man’s gun clicks impotently in Seth’s direction, and he roars in frustration. Specks of saliva in the sunlight. The other man doesn’t know what to do. He appears shocked by the blood and doesn’t seem to want to shoot or be shot. His gun is still raised but it’s at an unconvincing angle.
‘Tell them to open the exit,’ says Seth.
‘No!’ shouts the crew cut, his arms out at his side as if to hold back the other man. Seth points his gun at the uninjured man’s thigh.
‘Wait!’ shouts the man, ‘wait,’ and he throws his weapon forward, onto the grass, and speaks into the crackle of his radio.
‘We have the suspect in hand. Call off back-up and open exits. Repeat: suspect is apprehended, all clear.’ An acknowledgement sputters back.
Seth collects the abandoned gun. ‘Give me your access card,’ he says, and the man does so. He wonders what in particular this man has to live for.
Thirty seconds later Seth walks out of the Fontus grounds and the colourful throngs of morning tuk-tuk and taxi traffic swallow him up. Until now he hasn’t been convinced that Fontus had something to hide.
Chapter 21
Red Fingerprints
Johannesburg, 2021
Kirsten takes her eyes off her screen to think, and sees the file she has been keeping on her mother. Opens it, looks through the morbid illustrations, the pricked paper dolls, the onion-skin birth certificate, sees the colours. She thinks that’s the end of the file but then she sees the magazine cutting again, the one she found framed in storage. Cute baby, but not her. The date on the back says 1991.
She puts away the file and Googles the year 1991. She searches South African pages: South African cricket was unsanctioned, political violence continued, Nadine Gordimer won the Nobel Prize for literature. 1991: Yellow, brown, brown, yellow. Not a nicely coloured year at all. She can’t imagine it being a very happy year for anyone.
The birth dates, if that’s what they are, thinks Kirsten, are all around the same time. From 1986 to 1988: a year or two apart at most. So that’s seven people, born around similar dates. Then the other set of dates all contained 1991. Her watch rings, making her jump. She turns on her TileCam and answers the call.
‘Hi,’ she smiles, happy to see Keke, but Keke doesn’t return it.
‘Listen, you’re in trouble.’
‘What?’
‘You should leave your house.’
‘Now who’s paranoid?’ Kirsten laughs.
‘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. One, two, three, four, they’re all dead, in that order. The schizo was number three. William Soraya was second. Before him, a musician in the bath.’
Panic reaches for her: serpentine plumes of yellow smoke (Sick Leaf). Betty/Barbara had said something about a music man.
‘A musician, in the bath?’ she asks.
‘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 four, a woman in a park. Dead. You’re number five. You’re next on the list.’
‘I’m next on the list.’
‘You or the other person with your birthdate. You’re five or six.’
‘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. 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, 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 few 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. 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.
As she’s raiding, a white envelope falls out of a back pocket of his doctor’s bag. At first she ignores it, focused 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 said, tucking a white piece of paper into his doctor’s bag.
‘Sorry,’ she said, lifting a lens off the windowsill. ‘Just wanted to get this.’
She hasn’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 the envelope 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. Warm liquid runs down Kirsten’s 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. ‘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 70th 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.
Chapter 22
Tsotsi
Johannesburg, 2021
SD> In some trouble here, position at F compromised.
FlowerGrrl>> What do u need?
SD> Security check & bugsweep ASAP at my place. I’ll remotely disable my BM-retina access.
FlowerGrrl>> Motioned, will contact u when it’s confirmed clean. You need a bodyguard?
SD> Ha. Since when does Alba hve budget 4 bodyguards?
FlowerGrrl>> Worried about u. It can b arranged.
SD> I’ll b fine.
FlowerGrrl>> Famous last words.
SD> Hopefully not LAST words.
FlowerGrrl>> ROFLZ! Danger suits you. Never knew u had/sense/humour.
SD> Funny. Also, I’ll need someone/labs, I’ll b bringing in samples.
FlowerGrrl>> 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.
Chapter 23
Her Abductor’s Handwriting
Johannesburg, 2021
Kirsten puts her watch up to the screen so 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 lives without a clue of what hers has become.