A SWARM, A SMACK
11
Johannesburg, 2021
The ragged tooth shark swims straight towards her. His dull eyes virtually unseeing in the water the colour of an overcast sky. Serrated teeth hanging 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 had been tricky because she couldn’t use her flash; it would bounce off the glass. She was shooting in MultiFocus 3D to get more drama out of the looming shark. The shots were certainly dramatic, but shooting in MF3D always gives her a headache.
She sits down 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 had been at it for ages and she still wasn’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 were fantastic. The Blanket Octo looks like a silk scarf underwater: a billowing maroon cape. She could have watched it for hours.
The Sea Wasp was 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, said 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, nauseous. It had been a long morning and she still had to shoot the model. Her eyes are strained and she is 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 that an aquarium would work in Jozi? It had been an impromptu idea of some BEE-Kitten who had more investors than sense. There were 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 wondered why she lived inland. Perhaps one day they would retire to the Cape Republic.
As a teenager she had 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 that found her named her 52 Hertz. Her tone was bassa profunda, just a notch higher than the lowest note on a tuba, and it got 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 she does the odd job for. 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 on his face, 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. She 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 how ancient this woman was and how exactly she had kicked the bucket, so she could at all costs avoid the same sorry end.
But it turns out that the woman is precisely her 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.’ There was a little more info on her history, 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 showed a laughing young woman with long dark hair, obviously taken before her illness took hold of her. Something makes Kirsten look twice. She reads the article again. Betty. It couldn’t be.
It couldn’t be 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 put her fingers over the woman’s long hair, giving her a helmet-cut.
‘Your Kirsten is my Betty,’ she had said.
‘Fucking hell,’ she 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 had 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.