‘Then I’ll be there,’ he says.
‘Great,’ she says.
‘Great,’ he says, smiling, almost winking.
He turns to face the printer and presses PRINT on his Tile. The printer hums, then starts spitting out pages. She gives him a royal wave and walks away. He waits for a few moments, reading the moronic posters on the wall, then heads back to his office, leaving the blank pages in the printer tray.
Betty checks the locks on her door for the fifth time. She knows they’re locked, but checking them makes her feel safer. She has to do things that make her feel safer.
She sits in front of her blank homescreen but realises the remote isn’t working. She shakes the remote around a little, tries again. Then she opens up the back and makes sure the batteries are in place. Takes them out, puts them back in. Still the glass stays clear. Betty gets up to check its connections and sees that it’s unplugged. She picks up the plug and moves it towards the wall but stops when she reads an orange sticker covering the electricity outlet and switch: ‘Don’t watch TV.’ It’s in her handwriting.
Yes, she remembers, television is not good for me. She should really get rid of the screen, but it was expensive and she abhors waste. The voices are the reason she can’t watch any more. They tell her to do things. Soap opera stars, talk show hosts, newsreaders. They tell her that creeps are trying to kill her, blow up her building, decimate the country. They make her write letters to people, telling them that they are in danger. Politicians, local celebrities, airlines.
The police have been here before. They were rough until she showed them the doctor’s note she keeps in her bra. The paper is leathery, now. The voices speak directly to her. ‘Barbara,’ (for they had recently taken to calling her Barbara), ‘the next bus you take will be wired with a car-bomb with your name on it.’ That’s when she had stopped taking the bus. The communal taxi and individual cab drivers were also not to be trusted. They could take you anywhere and you’d never be seen again.
Disappear, she clicks her fingers, just like that. Click, click. She had started walking, then running everywhere. She’d get to the grind shining and slippery with sweat. She was losing a lot of weight. The running did it.
Also, food was a problem. She couldn’t run with all her groceries so she has to shop every day. She didn’t like shopping: too many people. Her psychologist said to try online shopping. Everyone’s doing it, she had said. But that would mean giving strangers her address and the hours she would be home. Even if the shop people were harmless, the information could be intercepted.
When she finally built up supplies she would end up throwing them away. The fridge door would look suspicious: like it had been opened by someone else. An intruder. She would try to work out exactly which food they had contaminated but could never stop at one item. Once the pineberry yoghurt had been binned, the cheddar looked suspect, after that, the pawpaw, the black bread, the SoySpread, the feta. The precious innocent-looking eggs, the vegetarian hotdogs, the green mango atchar, the leftover basmati, until it was all discarded and sealed tightly in a black plastic bag. The dumping of each individual item causes her pain, she so hates to fritter. This happens once a week.
Sometimes she needs to check the cupboards, too. Sometimes it’s not just the open things in the fridge that may have been tainted. She’ll get an idea, a name, in her head, and those things will have to go, too. Last week it was Bilchen. Pictures in her head of factorybots polluting the processed food and then sealing them in neat little parcels, ready to eat. It was as if someone was shouting at her: Bilchen! Bilchen! Like a branded panic attack. And then she had to check every box and packet in her cupboard and toss everything with the Bilchen logo. There wasn’t a lot left over.
She chooses a lonely tin of chickpeas, checks the label, and eases it open with an old appliance. She polishes a fork with her tracksuit top and eats directly out of the can. Canned food is relatively safe. She reaches for the kosher salt pebbles, but before she starts grinding it she sees the top is loose. She pictures arsenic, cyanide, a sprinkling of a strain of deadly virus, and puts it back without using it. Washes her hands twice and sprays them with hand sanitiser.
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 out loud, moving to hug and pet her. ‘I’m so sorry my girl. There’s a good girl, there’s a good girl.’ She finds herself soothed by the words.
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 any more. 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 are 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 take-aways 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.