CORPSE FINGERS STROKE HER NECK
12
Johannesburg, 2021
Kirsten watches Keke pull into her building’s entrance in a wide arc and is reminded why she has so many suitors of both genders: her punk hairstyles, roaring bike, deep, easy laugh and fuck-you fashion. It’s a hot little package.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ she says. She deflates her helmet and hugs Kirsten. She smells like leather and something more feminine. Hair product? Little violet shiny balls float in the air around them.
‘No problem. It’s probably my punctuality karma finally burning my ass.’ Kirsten had, herself, been twenty minutes late.
‘There was a breaking story and I was five minutes away so I had to pop in.’
‘Anything interesting?’
‘Not really. Just a little shoot-out between the AfriNazis and the Panthers. Some scratches, some crocodile tears, no fatalities.’
‘Oh my God, racism. It’s so 2016.’
The two groups were extreme right and left wings, white and black respectively. No one took them too seriously; in a nation that is now indifferent to skin colour, their bizarre antics leave everyone shaking their frowns.
‘Just some punks looking for an excuse to spill blood.’
‘Too many video games.’
‘I blame Hip Hop. No, marabi.’
‘I blame sugar. And processed food.’
‘Hyperconnectivity.’
‘The Net.’
‘GMO produce.’
‘ADHD.’
‘Neglectful parental units.’
‘Lack of corporal punishment in schools.’
‘Boredom. There’s nothing to rebel against anymore! We’re a nanny state and it’s a very gentle, easy-going nanny, with no tattoos or inappropriate piercings.’
‘Although she must have a very high libido.’
‘Ha!’ laughs Keke, ‘This nanny likes to screw!’
‘And get screwed,’ adds Kirsten. ‘It’s a mutual arrangement. And also: polyamorous.’
‘Hey,’ says Keke. ‘Don’t knock polyamory. It’s the way of the future.’
Inside Kekeletso’s Braamfontein apartment, the door automatically locks behind them.
‘Too early for wine?’ asks Keke, looking at the clock on the wall. 12:55. A giant Elvis Presley poster looks down at them.
‘I don’t understand the question,’ says Kirsten.
Keke smiles and grabs a bottle of Coffeeberry Verdant-Pino. Two glasses. Kirsten instinctively reaches for a nearby empty Tethys bottle, fills it up with grey water from the waterbank (Liquid Smoke), and goes around watering Keke’s sad-looking houseplants. Using her father’s pocketknife, which she now always keeps handy, she snips a few dead leaves off the aspidistra on the lounge coffee table and sends them down the communal compost chute.
‘It’s not that I don’t love them, you know.’ (That’s what she always says.) ‘It’s just that I’m never home.’
After binning a long-dead and crumbling plant a year before, Kirsten had suggested keeping succulents instead as they wouldn’t need as much care, but Keke said she had read somewhere that thorns were bad for your sex life. ‘Feng Shui or some shit. What is it with you and plants, anyway?’
Kirsten had shrugged: ‘I don’t know. I just like looking after them.’
Keke had pulled a ‘you’re sad!’ face, and Kirsten had thrown something at her.
‘If you knew how amazing they were, you wouldn’t perpetuate mass murder against them like you do.’ It was her pet hate. Her mother had been just as bad. Her teenhood had been strewn with dead chrysanthemums. ‘Besides the whole filters-the-air-we-breathe thing, do you know that there is a flower that turns red when it grows over landmines?’
‘Okay Miss Greenfingers,’ Keke had sighed, ‘I get it, no more needless slaughter of our plant-friends.’
‘If you’re like this with plants I’d hate to imagine you being responsible for something with actual feelings. Ever consider getting a pet?’
Keke had almost choked. ‘No!’
‘Good,’ Kirsten had snarked.
‘So, what’s the emergency?’ Kirsten says, commandeering the bottle and passing Keke a glass of wine, who in turn opens a packet of chilli-salted beetroot chips and empties them into a bowl, which may have needed a bit of a wipe beforehand. The shape of their taste is unusuaclass="underline" spinning flat discs, like frisbees, but not as rigid. Rubber. Quite uniform, earthy, with little spikes of salt and a halo of warmth from the chilli.
‘Something came for you today, through The Office.’
This wasn’t unusual. Keke and Kirsten office-share in the same building in the CBD. As card-carrying members, or colloquially: ‘Nomadders,’ they were allowed unlimited access to everything they might possibly need in an office environment, from receptionists, couriers, IT support, boardrooms, carpooling and bad filter coffee to 4D scanner/printers. There was always a steady stream of people coming and going, and a 24/7 cleaning team to make sure that each new client gets a sparkling office. They charge by the hour, but the longer you stay, the better the rate. They even have a (legendary) annual end-of-year office party.
Keke knows someone at The Desk who keeps a premium office free for her when he can, at no extra cost. It is one of the few with a fridge and a concealed safe where she can keep some of her grind paraphernalia and clean underwear without having to drag it around town on her bike. It also has a dry shower and a SleePod.
‘Through The Office?’ says Kirsten, thinking it must be something that she had ordered online and since forgotten. New lenses for her camera? Prickly-Pear Verjuice? Sex toy? Bulk box of pregnancy test strips?
Keke produces a small white envelope that looks a bit worse for wear.
‘That’s it?’
‘Yip. Isn’t it wonderful?’
Kirsten takes it from Keke’s hands and examines it. The address is scratched on, as if the penman-or-woman was in a hurry. She doesn’t recognise the handwriting. There are two colourful stamps glued on the front: an illustration of the president wearing too much lipstick and an extinct fish. The post office stamp obscures both of the pouting images. No return address.
‘I mean,’ says Keke, ‘when is the last time you saw an actual letter? In the – you know – the post! In an envelope! It has stamps and everything.’
Kirsten uses her pocketknife to slit open the envelope. She takes out the note, and as she does so a key drops into her lap. She picks it up and inspects it, recognises it; feels corpse fingers stroke her neck. Hands it to Keke.
‘It’s the same one,’ she says. ‘The same one James threw over the bridge that night…’
‘It’s a wafer-key,’ says Keke. ‘For a safety deposit box. This part,’ she says, touching the head, ‘contains some kind of circuit, to allow access. So, for example, the wafer will get you into the bank and into the safety deposit box room. Then the key itself is used to unlock the box.’
Kirsten opens the note and sees more of the scrawclass="underline" DOOMSDAY.
‘The fuck?’ Keke comes around to read it over her shoulder.
‘Who’s it from?’ she asks.
Kirsten looks at the signature. ‘A ghost.’
At exactly 1pm Seth watches The Weasel make his way down to the Fontus diner. Seth waits five minutes. In that time, three different sheeple stop outside his office to say hi and ask how he is. He recognises the same vacant look in their eyes as the employees he sees around the campus: scoffing ultrabran muffins, playing squash, jogging, waiting for the decaffee to percolate. Staring, expressionless, as if a zombie had eaten their brains. And then as soon as they’d register him (eyebrow ring, Smudged eyes, faux-hawk, hoodie) they would snap to attention and greet him effusively. Their smiles would be wide and full of white teeth, but it never reached their eyes.