Why You Were Taken (7 page)

She remembers specifically an occasion when she was battling to free a new baby doll from its suffocating plastic shell. The way he had achingly-slowly dismantled the packaging and kneeled down to hand the toy to her. The way he had looked at her, almost with sadness, as if he had some kind of prescience that she wouldn’t be able to bear children of her own. The memory, before fond and with pretty edges, now stings her with its poignancy. She swallows the hard stone in her throat.

Kirsten was never allowed to touch the knife, it was forbidden. She flicks it open and starts ripping into the boxes.

*                  *                  *

Seth knows before he opens his eyes that he is late for his grind. He groans and stretches for the Anahita water bottle he keeps next to his swingbed. Switches off his dreamrecorder. A few gulps later he turns on his Sunrise. Throughout the apartment all the curtains open, allowing the morning light to bleach the inside of the rooms, and what feels like the inside of his head. The apartment voice, which he has nicknamed ‘Sandy,’ wishes him a good morning and proceeds to play his Saturday playlist. 

It’s his last day at Pharmax so it shouldn’t be too much of a problem if he’s a few hours late. It takes him a while to remember why his head feels like it had been left on a township soccer field: Salvia pills, cocaine drops, ShadowShots, a beautiful girl with sequins for eyes. Having sex with the shining girl behind one of the curtains in the club, but bringing another girl home. Rolo calling them a private cab. Long chestnut- and blonde-striped hair, palest skin, beautiful tits, cosmic blowjob. He yawns and rearranges himself, has another sip of water.

 
Shit,
he thinks,
he didn’t even check her ID for her Hi-Vax status.

That was dumb, but lately he’s done worse. He was either getting less paranoid or more self-destructive. Maybe it was the Salvia. Stretching his arms above his head, he makes a verbal note for his Pharmax report. Seth reaches over for his jacket, lying on the floor, and checks the inner pocket. He shakes the white bottle: almost half of the pills gone. He’ll need to top up today before he says his goodbyes.

The stripey-haired hook-up hadn’t been happy when he had asked her to leave at around 3AM but that was pretty much the standard reaction. He had made the night more than worth her while, so he told her to suck it up as he pushed taxi tokens into her hand and closed the door behind her, opening it again just to turf out a lone red boot that smelled of Givenchy and old carpets.

As always, he was surprised by the hurt expression.
Honestly, how could she expect him to get a decent night’s sleep with a total stranger in his bed? Some creeps were Fucked Up.

He gets up and wraps his raw silk dressing gown around himself. He doesn’t like walking around the place naked, even though he lives on his own. He finds people doing mundane things in the nude – like eating breakfast – distasteful. Naked is for showering and sex, for God’s sake, not for frying eggs and pressing wapple juice. He switches on the kettle, pours Ethiopian javaberry grounds into his antique espresso maker, and puts it on the gas stove to percolate. While he’s waiting he supercharges his Tile, steams some double-cream milk. Makes seedtoast with almond butter and wolfs it down. Makes some more, and takes it to his tablet along with his mug of fragrant coffee. Just as he had hoped, a small green rabbit blinks on his screen. Someone from Alba is online and bumps him. He types in his password, ‘52Hz,’ to gain access to the thread.

LL> Hey SD. You ready?

He takes a sip of his coffee, dusts crumbs off his fingertips, and types a reply:

SD>> Hello my favourite cyberstalker. Yebo. Starting/F on Monday.

LL> U happy/brief?

SD>> As always.

LL> U did a good job/Pharmax.

SD>> There was nothing 2 do.

Out of nowhere, his left thumb starts tingling. He examines it, rubs it on the top of his thigh, and carries on typing.

SD>> They had nothing for us.

LL> Clean corporate? Thought those went/way/rhinos.

SD>> Me 2. But they R squeaky. Apart/drugging up country & making lds $$ off vuln & desperate.

LL>Hey, we all need 2 earn/living.

SD>> Sure. Any news re anything else? Heard about/stupid politician/pool?

LL> Criminal.

SD>> : )

LL> Sure there are lots of those at F.

SD>> Criminals or pools?

LL> Both. If u find 1 have/swim for me. Haven’t swum since/kid.

SD>> Me neither. Probably have heated springs & shit in there. I’ll do/fucking backstroke 4 U. YOLO!

LL> LOLZ! LFD. YOLO FOMO FML.

SD>> Congrats on Tabula Rasa bust. Excellent work. Mind-5.

LL> Going 2 break story next week.

SD>> They’ll make good miners/farmers/etc at the PLC.

LL> Ha! Can U imagine? 1 day a botox billionaire, the next you’re lubing up a cow.

SD>> Karma’s a bitch.

LL> U said it, baby.

SD>> Nice/catch up.

LL> Ja, B careful now.

SD>> Always.

LL> Seriously. Watch yourself.

SD>> I am being serious. I’m paranoid, always careful.

LL> LOL! Funny cos iz true. X

The green rabbit disappears.

*                  *                  *

Kirsten’s left thumb is bleeding. She hadn’t realised you could get a (double) paper cut from double-walled cardboard. After swearing a great deal in every colour she can think of, she kicks the box that had inflicted the damage. She wants it to go flying, but it’s heavy and all she manages to do is nudge it off the pile. It lands with a thud of disappointment on the concrete floor.

The corner of a white card sticks out from underneath the box. She pries it loose. Smaller than the palm of her hand, tacky double-sided tape on the back: it’s the kind of card that gets sent with flower deliveries. The illustration is of a lily, printed in sparkling pink ink (Strawberry Spangle), which she bleeds on.

Inside, in a script she doesn’t recognise, it says ‘CL, yours forever, X, EM.’

Her watch beeps. It’s a bump from Keke, wanting to meet up for drinks next week. Says she has something to celebrate. Somewhere dark and clubby, she says.

  ‘Affirmative,’ Kirsten replies, ‘Congratulations in advance for whatever we’re celebrating. Let’s bask in our mutual claustrophilia.’

Bumps, or chatmail messages, are getting so short nowadays they can be impossible to textlate. Sometimes Kirsten uses the longest word she can think of, just to rebel against the often ridiculously abbreviated chat language.

She realises that this probably makes her old, and wonders if it is the equivalent of wielding a brick for a cellphone. Even her Snakewatch is now old technology. She doesn’t have the energy to upgrade devices every season. Maybe she is more like her mother than she has ever realised.

She flicks the card back into the box and sucks the side of her thumb, where the skin is dual-sliced, and waits for the red to stop. She feels hung over, even though she didn’t drink
that
much the night before. Another sign of aging? She sometimes feels like she’s ninety. And not today’s ‘90 is the new 40!’ but real, steel, brittle ninety. Grey-hair, purple-rinse, hip-replacement ninety.

So far she had flipped through what felt like hundreds of files and documents, most written in jargon that she doesn’t understand. She had to page through a library of notes before she found her birth certificate. Onionskin paper, slightly wrinkled, low-resolution print, ugly typography, but there her name was in black and white: Kirsten Lovell; daughter of Sebastian and Carol Lovell. Born on the 6
^th
of December 1988 at the Trinity Clinic in Sandton, Johannesburg.

 
So she does exist,
she thinks,
even though it should seem clear.
Cogito ergo fucking sum.

Perhaps the autopsy report was wrong? They could have mixed up her mother’s body with someone else’s, easy enough to do when so many people are dying of the Bug. Or the discharge note from the hospital could have been wrong; they got the date of her hysterectomy wrong. A sleep-deprived nurse on her midnight shift could easily have written down the wrong year. Perhaps absent-mindedly thinking of her own surgery, or the birth of one of her own kids.

Getting tired of hunting through the boxes now, she finally finds the one she had come all this way for. It’s a bit squashed on the edges, and grubby with handprints. Sealed with three different kinds of tape, it has clearly been opened and closed a number of times over the years. ‘PHOTO ALBUMS’ is scribbled on the side in her mother’s terrible handwriting. When Kirsten catches sight of the scrawl she feels a twinge of tenderness and has to sit down for a breath.

She opens the box with a little more care than she had the others. Twelve hardcover photo albums take up the top half of the box, and the bottom is lined with DVDs. They only started taking digital photos when she was in high school, so it was safe to say what she was looking for would be in one of the paper albums.

There is a specific picture of herself as a baby that she wants to find. She guesses the photo was taken when she was around 6 months old. Somewhere outside in the sun with a tree, or trees, in the background. Her hairless moon of a head decorated with a silly, fabric-flowered headband. Back slightly arched and an arm outstretched to someone off-camera, a pale pink starfish for a hand.

Slowly she pages through each album, trying to not get caught in the webs of emotion they contain: Rhubarb crumble, ash grey, Peppermint (the colour, not the taste), coconut sunscreen, soggy egg sandwiches (Sulphurous Sponge), some kind of flat sucker with a milky taste – butterscotch? Butterscotch with beach-sand. Marshmallow mice – available only at a game-hall tuckshop at a family holiday resort in the Drakensberg. Ammonia, baby oil, cherry cigars. Silk carnations, flaking slasto, ants that taste like pepper. She snaps the last album shut and looks for another box of photos.

This can’t be all there is,
she thinks.
We’re missing 3 years. The first 3 years.

Kirsten, now driven by a fierce energy, attacks what is left of the boxes. Her mind races with possible explanations. Maybe they didn’t own a camera. Maybe they believed it was bad luck to photograph a baby. Maybe the photos were lost, stolen, burnt in a fire. There are no baby clothes either. No baby toys, but she’s sure they must have been given away – there were hundreds of orphans in those days – abandoned babies: unheard of today. She feels wet patches bloom under her arms as she scrabbles through the contents. Her hair begins to bother her and she ties it up roughly into an untidy bun. As the boxes start to run out, her anxiety builds. She finds no more albums, but in the second last box she opens she discovers some framed photographs.
Of course!
She thinks,
it was framed!
That’s why it’s not in an album.
A calming finger on her heart.

And there it is, almost exactly how she remembers it. She clutches it, searching it for detail. The heat of her hands mist the silver frame: heavy, decorative, tasteful. The picture not exactly in focus, but close enough. A blue cotton dress (Robin Egg) puckered by the tanned arm holding her up. She has no aunts, no grandmothers; that must be her mom’s arm, although she doesn’t recognise it.

She expects the photo to make her feel some kind of relief, but it has the opposite effect. Some small idea is tapping at her, whirring in her brain. Something feels off the mark. She scans the picture again.

What is it? The texture. The texture of the paper is wrong. It isn’t printed on glossy or matt photo paper, the way it would have been in 1987. It’s grainy, pulpy. Kirsten turns the frame over in her hands and pries the back loose. A quarter of a glamorous cigarette print ad stares back at her, its bright blue slashing her vision.

Kirsten turns it over and over again, battling to understand, not wanting to understand. It’s not a photo of her. It’s not a photo at all, but a cutting from a magazine. The autopsy diagram flits into her mind with its careless cross over her mother’s lower abdomen.

She glances over at the cheap looking birth certificate, and then down to the piece of paper in her hands. Perhaps her photo was published in the magazine for some reason? Living & Loving, the cutting says, ‘New Winter Beauties,’ July 1991. She had been three years old when this issue had been printed. 

Journal entry

12 March 1987

Westville

In the news:
Sweden announces a total boycott on trading with South Africa. Les Miserables opens at Broadway.

What I’m listening to:
The Joshua Tree by U2. Radical.

What I’m reading:
The scariest book known to man: IT by Stephen King.

What I’m watching:
Lethal Weapon

I am, like, the happiest person in the world right now. When I told P about the baby I thought the worst, but I am right to love him because he is the nicest, sweetest, strongest man ever. Okay he was totally shocked but after a few minutes he hugged me so tightly and said that he would take care of the baby and me. I thought that he meant having us holed up somewhere as a secret lover and lovechild (which would have been totally fine by me!) but he is a better man than that. Said he wants to be a good father and you can’t do that not living in the same house. He asked me to MARRY HIM!!!