Why You Were Taken

1. They Must Be Playing With the Weather Again

1

Johannesburg, August 2021

She is holding the pale plastic object in her hand as she has done so many times before. She puts it down alongside her on the bay window where she sits, cocooned in billowing curtains, and picks it up again. Puts it down, picks it up. It's a nervous but practised movement, a dance she has rehearsed for years but never quite mastered.

She tries to quiet the hot hammering of her heart; she tells herself that she isn't excited but still she feels the purple pulsing of blood through her veins. There is the hum of white static behind her eyes, as if the room is a screen of a vintage television.

Outside: a determined downpour, with the occasional shock of lightning scratching silver into the sky. When the thunder rolls into the room it paints the walls midnight blue. Water streams down the outside of the window: Cops and Robbers. Goodies and Baddies. Kirsten always expects the rain to be perfumed by the data in The Cloud. She imagines all the pictures there, all the poetry and music. Surely the rain should taste of something?

She looks at her Snakewatch: 21:36. One crawling minute to go. She pictures it as a fat green caterpillar (Spring Lawn) inching along the windowsill.

Across town a hooded shadow walks in the rain. Thunder in winter, he thinks: they must be playing with the weather again. He is eager to get home – he's expecting an important message. His superblack jacket renders him almost invisible, and his silver-tipped umbrella shields his face from the unseasonal shower. The city street is dark and slick, highlighted only occasionally by pops of lightning and the reflection of neon shop signs on the tar's uneven surface. Algaetrees, green streetlights, flicker on and off as he moves beneath them. There is some jubilant shouting in the distance; a wave of music; a car backfires. A building's clockologram blinks 21:36.

The man's usually elegant stride is interrupted by the jutting edges of the pavement: missing bricks, gaping manholes, roots of trees smashing their way through crumbling concrete. Undulating and decorated by shimmering litter, the walkway seems to take on a life of its own.

A group of people are up ahead, he sees them walking in his direction. Coal-skinned men dressed in oiled leathers and animal skins. Sandals and scarred faces. He sees their determined foreheads in blasts of light as they pass under the streetlights. Gadawan Kura. Ivory bracelets click as they walk.

When they get closer he lifts his chin at the leader. He doesn't step aside, as most people would. Instead he brushes an arm and keeps moving. Once they are clear, one of the men starts shrieking, imitating the hyenas they are known for keeping, and the rest of the men cackle. Our man adjusts his hood and walks on.

Suddenly a stranger in rags steps out of a side alley and into his path. A hobo? Impossible. There were no more homeless creeps in the city: they had all been 'enrolled' in the Penal Labour Colonies. A CrimCol graduate? The faint whiff of matches and booze. Our man's hand tightens around the gun in his pocket, snicks the safety off.

 'What do you want?' he asks, his voice even, as if this was a safe neighbourhood and the sun was shining. Water droplets glisten on the ragman's dark skin and hair; he pats himself down with twirling hands and a gap-toothed smile to show his tattered pockets are empty. He smells like the street.

  'Jog on,' says our hooded man. 'Scram.'

  'Jus' asking for a smoke, bra.' One of his eyes is black, bottomless. The other is overcast.

A cigarette? our man thinks. You've got to be kidding. It's 2021 – nobody smokes anymore.

He closes his umbrella.