Janita Lawrence - Why You Were Taken

But then later I realised that she had smiled at me because she had recognised me – she was the nurse at that family planning clinic that was so kind to me and held my hand! I wonder what she must have thought, seeing us together. I wonder how it made her feel.

Westville, KZN, 2022

Kate sits in her hired car, parked a little way away from the river, under the glittering dappled shade of willow trees. She takes off her safety belt, adjusts her tender back in the chair. Her left arm is slightly paler and thinner than her right, still recovering from being in the exoskeletal cast she had to wear for months.

She breathes in the muddy green smell of the river (Wilted Waterlily): a smooth, undulating smell. Balmy Verdant. Rolling Hills.

Keke urged her – citing her ‘condition’ – to take the isiPhapha speed train from Jo’burg to Durban, but she had wanted to drive, to take her time, to think. To appreciate the journey.

Keke had just won another journalism award for her coverage of the Genesis Project. She is always telling people that she doesn’t deserve them, that Alba deserves all the credit, but they just call her ‘humble’ and love her all the more. She’s getting job offers from all over the world: most notably, Sweden, where they have offered her an eight-figure retainer for a year’s contract. She and Marko are considering it, but only when she is fully recovered. In the meantime she gets weekly Tupperware take-aways from Marko’s mother, who insists that good Indian food, specifically dosa, can cure any affliction. Keke is sure she’ll hate the cold, and Kate knows it would be difficult for Keke to leave her post of Godmother to Baby Marmalade. She doesn’t want to give up her partial custody of Betty/Barbara the Beagle, either.

God, Kate missed driving. The freedom of the open road to the thrumming soundtrack of your choice. Stopping for a hydrogen refuel – not as pungent a memory as petrol – and greasy toasted cheese in a wax paper envelope. Flimsy paper serviette. Vanilla whipped Soy-Ice in a hard chocolate coating that you get to crack open with your teeth. Noticing, inside the store, that all the Fontus fridges are gone. Kirsten imagines them yawning in recycle tips, stripped of any valuable metal, or re-purposed as beds or dining-room tables in townships. Most likely, though, they were just bleached and re-branded with S/LAKE decals: Bilchen’s “100% pure” bottled water, Hydra’s supposedly incorrupt replacement.

Alba’s secret underground identity was blown wide open after they disclosed the information they had on Walden and his company. They were instant heroes, and the logo of the green rabbit silhouette went viral. True to hypothetical bunny breeding, they multiplied overnight. Virtual stickers, 3D wallpaper, hoverboard art, graffiti stencils, playful holograms: Alba was everywhere.

They received offers of funding from various (apparently non-evil) corporates. Keke had heard rumours of a splinter group forming, with new ‘unknowns’: a secret faction that can still do the same job without worrying that their mugs are splashed on every news tickertape (and Talking Tee) in the country.

Kate winds her window down further, allowing more of the clear air into the car. After tossing out the air-freshener at the car rental agency (Retching Pink) she had driven the first hour with all the windows down to try to flush out the fragrance. Artificial roses: the too-sweet scent painted thick vertical lines in her vision. Her sense of smell seemed to be in overdrive lately, and the shapes more vivid than ever.

It was a superb day: warm, the humidity mitigated by a cool breeze, and the sky brighter than she ever remembered seeing it. The branches of the weeping willows stroke the ground, whispering, as if to soothe it. She can smell a hundred different shades of green in the motion of leaves.

A woman pops up in the distance, walking towards the river. She has handsome silver hair, a thick mass of it, twisted up and fixed in place with a clip and a fresh flower. A stained wicker picnic basket in her hand. She is tall and moves in elegant strides: not rushing, nor dawdling, her sense of purpose clear. She doesn’t look around for a good spot; she knows exactly where the good spot is.

She sets down her basket, lays out the picnic blanket, smoothes it down in a practised movement. She takes off her shoes and sits with her legs out in front of her, crossed at the knees, leaning back on her hands with her eyes closed and her face to the sky.

Takes her clip out and lets her hair tumble down like mercury. Kate unthinkingly touches her own short hair, rakes her fingers though the awkward length of re-growth. The woman relaxes like that for a while, then sits up and opens her basket, bringing out a plastic plate and knife, a packet of crackers, cheese triangles. A small yellow juicebox.

Kate snaps a photo of her with her LocketCam, then retrieves the cooler-box from the back seat that she had packed that morning. She takes out a dripping bottle of iced tea, a packet of Blacksalt crisps, and a CaraCrunch chocolate bar. Watching the woman by the river, she opens the foil packet and starts to eat; then she remembers the bright green apple in her bag (Granny Smith), and eats that too.

So this is what her real mother looks like, she thinks. Not just her non-abductor mother, more than just her biological mother, but her real mother. She can feel it. She sees Seth/Sam in her body language, her straight nose. But the hair and the eyes are hers.

She looks at her reflection in the rear-view mirror, touches the new streak of grey at her temple (Silver Floss).

‘We have the same hair, and eyes,’ she whispers to herself.

She feels a welling up in her chest, an inflating of her ribcage, and breathes deeply to stay calm. Warm tears rush down her face; she is used to the feeling now, even welcomes the release. In the last few months she has made up for a lifetime of not crying.

The woman looks so peaceful, so at ease with the world: a trait Kate wasn’t lucky enough to inherit. But she wasn’t always like this, she thinks, she also had her dark days.

James had kept an eye on the Chapmans for the last twenty years, even kept a file, which he had left in his SkyBox for Kate. She found the access code in the Hansel & Gretel book he had bought for her a lifetime ago. It had been there all along. The file contained a comprehensive log of the Chapmans’ lives: the different jobs they held, the close friends they had, the holidays they went on. The grief counsellor they consulted. They never moved house – they still lived at 22 Hibiscus Road – as if they thought if they moved, they would lose all hope of the twins finding their way home.

Anne Chapman still visits the river almost every day, the spot where she used to sit in the shade while the twins splashed around, and then later, their subsequent children: another son and daughter, born five years after Kate and Sam, spaced three years apart. The children, now grown, visit often, and the family looks like any normal, happy, loving family. It would be difficult, seeing them laughing and joking at family dinners, to guess at their sad and fragmented past.

Kate’s yearning crowds the car. How she would love to meet her mother, grasp her hand, taste her cooking, ask her about the years before the kidnapping, and after. But looking at her, seeing how contented she is, how restful her spirit seems, she knows she can’t do it. It would be like smashing a shattered mirror that had taken decades to put together. Its hold is tenuous, gossamer, and she won’t be the one to re-splinter it.

No fresh heartbreak.

She has a new life, thinks Kate, like I do now. She thinks of Seth at home in Illovo with Baby Marmalade: how good he is with him, how gentle. Seth who wanted to keep his Genesis name, instead of ‘Sam,’ said it didn’t suit him, and he was right.