by JT Lawrence
Crime stats are down and all in all it is a neat move; the conviction rates are still low, but at least the captured criminals are in some way paying their debt to society. The then-defunct ‘reclaimed’ farms have been revived and South Africa has reverted to being a mass exporter of goods. The general public is still divided on the matter, but the initial outrage seems to have dissipated, along with the trade deficit.
Kirsten scrolls down. Thabile Siceka, the health minister, is in Sweden to receive some kind of award. South Africa has had some pretty dodgy health ministers in the past, including HIV-denialists who promised that a beetroot and olive oil salsa would cure even the direst case of Aids. Siceka doesn’t have to excel at her job to be the best minister to date, but excel she has.
It is well known that she had a tough start in life. Both her parents and her grandparents died of Aids, and she had to leave school at eleven to look after her younger siblings. When the HI-Vax was in development she pushed it through every stumbling block. She raised funds when they were needed, flew in experts, sped up the testing phase. The vaccine could have taken twenty years to get into public circulation; Siceka had it out in four. She took HIV/Aids from being the Africa’s biggest killer—apart from mosquitoes—to being as easy to avoid as MMR.
The Nancies do have some strong ministers, but as a whole their leadership just doesn’t stand up to the pressures of the country. Too many poor people, poor for too long, too few rich people, and a wide, painful gap in between. Add to the mix deficient service delivery, economy-crippling strikes, the panic of the water shortage and relentless violent crime and it’s no wonder that creeps are ready to pull out an AK47 at any asshole who says the wrong thing. South Africans are frustrated, and it is erupting in every facet of life. Clearly she is not the only one with a hollow where her heart should be. Where is the Messiah Magic when you need it?
Journal Entry
13 February 1988, Westville
In the news: --- I don’t care.
Something strange is happening to me. A twisting inside. I have everything I want, a wonderful husband, a nice home, two precious little babies, but I have this weird feeling of dread and sadness. When I wake up in the morning I don’t want to get out of bed. I’m exhausted and just want to sleep all day. When I do get up I am like a zombie. Sometimes P gets home and I’m sitting in front of the TV in my sweaty pyjamas, not even watching, not really, and the kids are screaming from their room. He gets angry with me but he tries not to show it, tries to be understanding. When he is angry like that he doesn’t talk to me. Doesn’t want to show his feelings. In this terrible stony silence he fixes the babies up, changes them, feeds them, finishes the ironing. I should care more, but there is something wrong with me.
He doesn’t understand. The days are just too long.
I’ve lost my appetite, no food seems appealing anymore. I exist on endless cups of tea. Tea sometimes makes me feel better. Not sure if it’s the actual tea or if it’s just something to look forward to: a treat, to break up the day yawning ahead of me. And biscuits, if there are. A hot mug of tea and a biscuit—like a little steaming beacon of hope. If there is a (rare) moment in the day that I have my hands free, the first thing I do, instead of doing the washing or cleaning the kitchen, is have a cup of tea.
There is no energy for anything that is not completely vital: Washing my hair seems an insurmountable task. The thought of lifting my arms for that long just seems exhausting.
P hugs me and tells me that he loves me, but that I need to ‘snap out of it’, for the babies. Doesn’t he know that if I could, I would? Does he think I WANT to be like this?
I feel like nothing matters anymore. Don’t see the point in anything. Overwhelmed.
Maybe I am being punished for breaking up P’s marriage. Devastation wreaks devastation. Only myself to blame.
Sometimes I find myself wishing that we had never had the twins. They are so dear, they truly are, and I love them with my entire being but sometimes I just resent their existence. Wish we could go back in time when it was just P and me, and we went out to concerts and dinners, and sleep and sex came so easily. Sometimes when the babies are being demanding I want to pinch them. Hard, so it leaves a mark. Or just smack them when they won’t stop crying. I picture the welt my hand would leave behind on their pale thighs. Of course I don’t ever hurt them, won’t ever. But these dark thoughts smear my soul. Make me feel so terrible. Terrible mother.
Being washed away by despair.
The flowers I planted are dead. They were violas.
Chapter 14
Teambuilding
Johannesburg, 2021
Fiona and Seth lie naked in their hotel bed. They are on their backs, gazing at the ceiling, allowing the air conditioner to cool their pink skin. It’s a Friday afternoon and they’re supposed to be at teambuilding, but instead they’re at the third hotel on their list: The Five-Leafed Clover. They have decided to try out all the top hotels in Jo’burg; they have thirty-six to go.
Fiona loves hotels. She likes to arrive at the concierge, hot, breathless, and get a room for an hour, or an afternoon. She likes leaving the room a tangled, stained mess, steal the stationery, and flounce out of the entrance a few hours later, flashing the eyes of a woman clearly satisfied.
Seth expected her to be the opposite: shy of checking in, sure to make the bed before they left, straightening towels on her way out, but she has surprised him, and herself. She giggles, mid-strip, and says things like ‘Goodness, what has happened to me?’ or, more specifically, ‘What have you done to me?’
She still wears polka dot silk blouses, but underneath she has exchanged her practical undies for the expensive lingerie Seth buys her, or she now buys herself. She still has the innocent freckles and the easy-blush cheeks but she won’t hesitate to go down on him in his office, as long as the door is locked and the camera cloaked.
Seth holds her hand, which is wrapped around the locket she always wears. Lockets are back in style; even some forward-fashion men wear them, but Seth gets the feeling Fiona has been wearing hers long before they started trending again.
‘What’s in the locket?’ he asks. They are used for so many purposes nowadays: pills, flash drives, patches, pedometers, mirrors, cameras, keys, IDs, phones.
‘It’s a vintage one,’ she says, ‘just holds a couple of pictures.’
‘Let me see,’ he says, peeling her fingers back.
‘No!’
‘Why not? What are you hiding?’
Fiona giggles. ‘Nothing.’
‘You are,’ he says, kissing her nose. ‘What is it? A photo of your ex? Your KGB files? Your real identity?’
She laughs some more. ‘No, silly.’
She relents and lets him open the locket. Two cats stare back at him.
‘That’s Khaleesi.’ She points. ‘And that’s Killmouski. I have a third one now, but I don’t have his photo in here.’
‘Kevin?’ he asks. She smacks him, laughs, kisses him. He closes the locket and lays it back down to rest just above her cleavage.
‘Lucky kitties,’ he says, resisting a dirtier phrase.
She smiles at him. He thinks: I’ve got you.
‘Although,’ she starts.
‘Mmm?’ he murmurs.
‘Talking about spies... I’m sure it’s nothing... I don’t want to talk... but when I was looking at the composition reports, just as a matter of interest, ’cos I’m trying to learn everything there is to know about the Waters, I saw that this month’s Hydra reading was exactly the same as last month’s, and as the month before. I mean, I know nothing about science...’
Seth lifts his head, acting interested, but not too interested. ‘Isn’t that normal?’ This was just the pillow talk he was hoping for. ‘I mean, it’s supposed to remain stable.’
‘Relatively stable, yes, but these reports are carbon copies of each other! As if someone in the lab is too lazy to test the sample and is just copying the exact same data every month.
I mean, if I was too lazy to do the readings then I would just tweak them slightly month to month.’
‘And the others?’
‘Tethys and Anahita have fewer samples, fewer readings, but their reports vary slightly. You know, January magnesium 3.13, February it’s 3.11. It just doesn’t make any sense.’
‘Strange, indeed,’ Seth says, moving onto his side to face her, stroking her stomach. ‘I think you’d better investigate.’
Fiona scoffs. ‘Yeah, right, little Fiona Botes against the megacorp that is Fontus.’
Seth’s hand moves down to stroke her, and she stops laughing. ‘It’s probably nothing.’ She inhales. ‘An admin error.’ She feels the blood rush away from her head: no more talking shop now.
‘Yes,’ agrees Seth, ‘probably.’ He shifts his body down; she opens her legs.
Maybe she would just check it out.
Chapter 15
Every Perfect Bone
Johannesburg, 2021
An attractive platinum-haired woman sits on a park bench at a children’s playground in uptown ChinaCity/ Sandton. You can see that she is wealthy. She’s laser-tanned, wearing SaSirro top to bottom, some understated white gold jewellery, and has a smooth, unworried forehead, but that’s not what gives her wealth away. She is watching the ultimate status symbol: her white-ponytailed son, playing in the sandpit next to the jungle gym. He holds a dirty grey bunny—a stuffed animal—under one arm as he builds a sandcastle with the other. The toy clearly goes everywhere with the boy.
The perfectly made-up woman may look like a bored, stay-at-home mother, but in fact she is on her office lunch break. She was top of her class every year at Stellenbosch University and was fluent in 26 languages by the time she was twenty-one. She didn’t finish her degree: she was poached by the top legal attorney firm eight months before she graduated, won over by a huge salary and the promise that she would make partner by twenty-five, which she did.
She opens her handbag, takes out a pill, pops it into her mouth and washes it down with a gulp of Anahita, saying a silent prayer for whichever drug company it is that makes TranX. She should know the name—she can tell you the capital city, currency and political state of nearly every country in the world—but today she can’t picture the label on the box of capsules in her head. She wonders if she is burnt out; she definitely feels it.
Her son begins a tentative conversation with another little boy in the sandbox. Always the charmer. Her heart contracts; she loves him fiercely, every square millimetre of his skin, every pale hair, every perfect bone, she loves. The scent of his little-boy skin. His cow-licked crown. She has such dreams for him, wonders what he will be like at ten, sixteen, thirty. She never thought she’d feel this way about another person. She’d grown up feeling aloof, alone, her parents blaming it on her stellar IQ, but when her son was born that sad bubble burst. It hasn’t taken away her anxiety or depression, but it has given her quiet, exquisite moments of joy she hadn’t before imagined possible.
Satisfied that her son is playing happily, she opens her lunchbox. She takes home 14 million rand a year but she still packs her own lunch every day. Today it is a mango, pepper leaf and coriander salad, humble edamame with pink Maldon salt, and a goose carpaccio and kale poppy-seed bagel.
She takes a few bites of the bagel, enjoying the texture of the expensive meat, the tingling of the mustard. Soon there is a slight tickling at the back of her throat. She tries to swallow the irritation but it lingers. Trying to stay calm, she opens her bagel and inspects the contents, assuring herself that she had personally made the sandwich, there is no place for contamination, but the itch becomes stronger, furring over her tongue too.
She drops the bagel, starts to hyperventilate, presses the panic button on her locket. It sends a request for a heli-vac and a record of her medical history, including her severe peanut allergy, to the nearest hospital. Her airways are closing now and she clutches her throat, desperate to keep it open. She searches for her EpiPen, but when she can’t see it, looks for a straw, a ballpoint, anything she can force down her throat to keep breathing, but her hands are shaking too much and she loses control over her fingers.
She stands up, lurches forward, waves blindly trying to attract someone’s attention. Her vision becomes patchy; there are sparks and smoke clouds blotting out her son. She tries to call him, tries to call anyone for help, but it’s too late for that. One arm outstretched towards her son, she sinks to her knees on the grass, then, blue-faced, topples over.
A woman’s gasp rings out, and concerned strangers come to surround her. Ambulances are called, CPR is administered, but the woman dies within the minute. A white-haired toddler is held back, not kicking and screaming as you’d expect, but dumb with shock.
The strangers stand distraught, arms by their sides, not knowing what to do next. Just terrible. What a tragedy. They begin framing the story in their minds, to tell spouses and friends later. They think of how to word it in their respective status updates. Where is the ambulance? They have children to mind, places to be. One of the bystanders, a large man with a scarred arm, gives up on finding a pulse and walks away. Furtively, he strokes the soft stuffed rabbit he has hidden under his jacket. He retrieves his dog, a beagle, whose lead he tied to a swing post moments earlier, and ambles off. Chopping of the sky can be heard in the distance: the heli-vac approaching. It forms the intro to the song that starts in his head. He hums along—Pink Floyd?—and doesn’t look back.
Fiona is on top of a cliff, ready to tumble. She holds back her curls with one hand, breathes hard, feels all her muscles contract, is paralysed, and then she topples. She flies through the air, through warm air, sultry water, then lands, is laid down, her blood turned to syrup. Seth comes with her, gasps with her then holds her until she stops twitching.
They lie clutching each other on the floor of the Fontus recreational cloakroom. They’ve been playing lasertag. Down to her last life, her nerves on edge, she screamed into her mask as someone in the shadows tackled her to the floor and dragged her into the cloakroom.
She knew it was him, knows the feeling of his hands on her. He zipped her out of the body-hugging suit, out of her clothes, and took her roughly against one of the dressing room tables, watched her body spasm in the reflection of the mirror.
‘This is becoming a bad habit,’ she says.
‘I find that this kind of teambuilding is right up my alley.’
Fiona giggles. She can feel his gaze on her. She opens her eyes, self-conscious at his staring. Covers up her still-hard nipples.
‘You’re not going to spoil the moment, are you? By confessing how you really feel about me?’ She is half-joking, half-pleading. Please God, tell me you’re falling in love with me.
He laughs, a low bark, says, ‘That’s the last thing you need to worry about.’
While Fiona showers, Seth pulls on his clothes and adjusts his hair.
‘I’m heading off,’ he calls through the half-open shower door.
‘Okey dokey, pig-in-a-pokey,’ she sings. ‘See you later!’
On his way out, Seth pockets her Fontus access card.
Journal Entry
29 March 1988, Westville
In the news: --- Something about an ANC rep being assassinated in Paris. Not sure, just heard something about it on the radio.
After staying in bed for three (?) days, P showered me (washed my hair, tenderly), dressed me, and hauled me off to a shrink. After an hour or so of talking she explained to P & I that it looks like I have something called Post Partum Depression - PPD. I knew about Baby Blues—most women feel some kind of down after giving birth (hormone crash, exhaustion, disillusionment, etc.) but this is different.
Just admitting the terrible thoughts I have been having (only when P was out of the room) helped me. Judy (the shrink) asked me lots of questions and we went through a checklist of symptoms. Just knowing the symptoms exist on a piece of paper made me feel slightly better – definitely less guilty. Other mothers
also feel this way? It was like a huge raven that had been sitting on my shoulder shook his feathers and flew away.
She gave me some pills and I need to go back to see her a few times a week until I’m better. Before the session I had so little energy that I felt like I didn’t even care about getting better anymore. Now I feel like I would do anything to feel better. P kept glancing over at me on the way home, not sure if it was because he was worried or relieved.
Chapter 16
Hello, Pretties
Johannesburg, 2021
Fiona jumps out of the communal taxi with a skip in her step. She has ordered lingerie online and the nondescript parcel has been delivered to her at work. It has burnt a hole in her desk drawer the whole afternoon. She hasn’t been this excited to open a package since she won a stationery extravaganza basket a few years ago. At five o’clock she grabbed it and ran to catch a lift home.
She opens the door to her flat and her three cats rush to trip her.
‘Hello, pretties,’ she says, and they meow back at her. She stumbles in, looking for a place to put down her parcel while trying not to step on any of the cats.
In her bedroom she opens the box and spends time admiring the silk and satin. She can feel the excitement build in her pelvis. A hum, a zing. She strips down in front of her full-length mirror. The sun is setting and the light coming through the window bronzes her body. She touches her nipples. She takes the first set, an ivory satin push-up bra ribbed with black lace, and small matching panties, and puts them on. In her mind, the bra makes her cleavage look like a swimsuit model’s.
