Seth didn’t usually go further than the first few rooms. He was no prude, enjoyed a bit of kink, but his insomnia didn’t need encouraging. He had enough to keep him up at night.
This evening, as soon as he crosses the threshold, he heads directly to an attractive blonde standing against a wall. It’s an old tactic, one that frequently paid off. None of that seedy languishing at the bar, surveying all the available meat on offer and later trying to hook up.
This technique is cleaner. It shows you are a man who knows what he wants. The woman, caught off-guard, invariably accepts the offer of a drink, and from then on it’s usually green lights all the way to the bedroom. Or club restroom. Or taxi. Or White Lobster den. Or wherever else they would happen to find themselves.
This particular blonde was wearing a belt for a skirt and black boots with heels so high he wondered how she managed to stay vertical. Masses of teased hair, powdered with fine glitter.
‘Hello there,’ says Seth. Not too friendly, not too distant.
‘Er,’ she says. Where did he come from?
He looks at the glass in her metallic-taloned hand: ‘Campari?’
The rose-coloured sequins above her eyes blink in the uneven light. He has a coldness in his eyes. A hardness. She tries to size him up. A drug dealer? A psychopath? A rufer? Does she, after her countless drinks, even care? She looks him up and down, nods. He leads her to the bar and orders her a double, vodka for himself, and two ShadowShots, which are not, strictly speaking, legal.
The Campari comes on the rocks – it’s one of the few clubs that still offer actual ice in drinks – despite the cost, instead of frozen silicone shapes. He grinds a block between his molars; he likes real ice. She purses her lips at the shooters, as if to say he’s naughty. He presses one into her hand; they touch glasses and down the drinks. Both feel the rush of the warm spirit as it washes through them.
She blinks at him; sighs as her pupils dilate. With a cool and gentle hand he propels her by her lower back to a more private area, with brocade curtains and oversized couches. An oil painting of a man with a patchwork blazer and rivets for eyes watches over them.
‘Let’s get you out of those dreadful shoes.’
Kirsten opens the folder while Kekeletso watches her. Inside: her parents’ autopsy reports. Keke had removed the photos that had been taken by the forensic team in situ. It was enough that Kirsten had been the one to find them dead, without having to see their death-grimaces again. Not that it made much difference to Kirsten: a picture on glossy paper wouldn’t be much more vivid than the images in her head.
The reports weren’t long. Kirsten skimmed a few pages describing what she already knew: bullet in brain, bullet in heart. .22 calibre Remingtons: one to stop thinking, one to stop feeling. Fired at arm’s length distance for her mom, half a room for her dad. Her mother had most likely been kneeling there when the killer squeezed a round into her head. Execution style, but face-to-face. The police say it was a botched burglary, but this creep wasn’t a stranger to murder.
Kirsten scans the medical jargon: entry wound of the mid-forehead; collapsed calvarium with multiple fractures; exit wound of occipital region. Official cause of death: Massive craniocerebral trauma due to gunshot wound.
On one of the final pages there were diagrams. Similar to what you would find in a biology textbook: line drawings of people dissected lengthways so that you could see their bones and organs. Kirsten was always better with pictures. She strokes the diagrams with her finger, following the coroner’s notes and asides. When she finishes with her father’s she starts on her mother’s. Immediately something looks wrong.
‘Do you see it?’ asks Kekeletso. Kirsten had been so absorbed she had almost forgotten Keke was there. She looks up, her finger glued to the illustration of her mother’s abdomen. The ceiling rains cerise spirals down on them.
‘She had a… hysterectomy?’
‘Yes.’
‘How come I didn’t know that? Did she do it when I was too young to remember?’ This was entirely possible given her sketchy childhood memories.
‘Turn to the last page. I found it in her private medical file.’
Without hesitating, Kirsten locates the last page in the folder and holds it up, pushing the others away. It was a record of an elective surgical procedure undergone by her mother in 1982. A full hysterectomy, five years before Kirsten had been born.
MAD FURNITURE WHISPERER
6
Johannesburg, 2021
Seeing as James was away in Zimbabwe and Kirsten had no grind planned for the day, she decided it was time to do something she had been putting off for too long. She caught a boerepunk-blasting taxi to the south of Johannesburg and took a long, brooding walk from the bus stop to the storage garages in Ormonde.
As she walked she snapped pictures with her locket. She used to have a superphone with a built-in camera, had a collection of lenses for it, but lugging a phone around when you could snap a Snakewatch on your arm just seemed archaic. Now smartwatches were being replaced with Tiles and Tiles were being replaced with Patches. It seemed impossible to keep up.
The LocketCam was tiny, smaller than a matchbox, and was really only a lens and a shutter release. She’d get the pictures later from her SkyBox. It was great for scenes like this: an old bus depot painted white by the ratty pigeons that had adopted it as their home; a mechanic’s cheerful advertising mural painted on a brick wall; a poster for a Nigerian doctor with an unpronounceable name who could enlarge your penis, get your ex-lover back, make your breasts grow, make you ‘like what you see in the mirror,’ vaccinate you against The Bug, and make you rich. If he had that power, thinks Kirsten, I’m sure he wouldn’t be messing around with other men’s junk. Or, on second thoughts, maybe he wanted to mess around with other men’s junk, and that’s why he became a junk doctor.
When she reaches the storage building it looks all closed up. Not very promising. Then she sees their billboard, and the logo: a smiling Rhino. Ironic, and sad. Like a Dodo giving a thumbs-up, or a winking Coelacanth. Who would choose an extinct animal as their mascot?
Once the cops gave her the go-ahead to put her parents’ house on the market she paid a company to move all their possessions here. There was no way she could have faced doing it herself. It had been the first place she had found online, and she doesn’t remember the Rhino. Now she wonders if her parents’ things were really here or if they had been on the first truck out to some dodgy location: Alex, Lonehill, Potchefstroom.
There was no bell to ring or reception to visit. When she calls the number on the faded hoarding a telebot tells her it is no longer valid. She walks around the building and finds a back entrance, a simple fenced gate closed with a heavy padlock. She had been given two keys and had thought that they were identical, but she tries one now and the padlock springs open. She steps inside and locks the gate behind her.
The number on the cheap keyring is pink/purple-blue: 64 (Chewed Cherry Gum; Frozen Blueberry). She walks past a xylophone of colours before she finds her lot. The garage door is rusted and needs some persuading to roll up. It screams all the way and Kirsten is momentarily blinded by the red chevrons the noise causes in her vision. Then, silence: dust glitters in the sunlight.