Now You See Me, Now You Don’t

Yoliswa’s lifeless body lay sprawled on the kitchen floor. With his bloody hands on his head, Thembani paced back and forth, hyperventilating. What did I just do?

He stopped pacing but couldn’t return his gaze to his dead fiancé. The dripping kitchen knife was still beside her. He had yanked it out when he realised what he had done.

Think… think…

No. It wasn’t his fault. He wasn’t a violent man. She had made him do it. It was all her fault—her with her accusations, her detecting, her coming to the truth and confronting him. And then she just had to come at him with that kitchen knife after he had slapped her. Why hadn’t she just broken into tears? Why had she tried to be brave, taking revenge for an open-handed slap?

He reached for his cell phone and dialled Mark’s number. His director’s gruff baritone responded with: “What?”

“She’s dead,” Thembani said, breathing deeply again. “Yoliswa’s dead—”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“She found out about the fraud. She found out about what we did with the clients’ pension funds.”

“But how…?”

“She worked it all out, okay. She’s smart like that…” he paused. He turned to the corpse. “She was smart like that.”

His mind went back to half an hour ago. Yoliswa had tossed the soft blue cover file at him. “Really, Thembani?” She had scolded. “Stealing money from defenceless pensioners? Don’t just stand there looking stupid. Oh, I worked it all out. It’s one thing to deceive the auditor who is helping the company you work for. It’s another thing when the auditor’s going to be your wife.”

And of course, his stuttering didn’t seem to convince her. She raised one corner of her mouth, revealing disgust. She clicked her tongue and began typing on her phone. He tried to grab it from her. But Yoliswa always had quick hands, like she was on constant alert each second of her life. It was the disdain her brown eyes now carried that made him snap. He raised the back of his hand. After the second thud, she stumbled to the countertop. She turned towards him, raising the knife in the air…

 Before Thembani knew it, she was on the floor, gagging for air. After a few seconds, she stopped breathing altogether. Pulling the knife out of her didn’t bring her back to life.

Mark de Jager, the Director of Gaba Matrix, and Wilmina Smut, the CFO were in the apartment within the next thirty minutes. Wilmina paged through the file Yoliswa had compiled, hissing, and throwing the blame at her two accomplices for not having covered their tracks well enough. Mark wrapped the bloody body inside the @Home carpet Thembani had brought as a gift for Yoliswa. A dumb Thembani just gaped. Had Mark done this kind of thing before? The over six feet tall gorilla man lifted Yoliswa’s petite body over his shoulder.

“Help me get this into your boot,” was his muffled speech to Thembani. He turned to Wilmina. “Clean this all up.”

***

“This man is crazy. I need to get out of here. Y-SWA.”

Those were the words Yolokazi saw on the cracked screen of her phone. She had been meaning to get a new phone for months now. But this one still worked just fine. So what was the rush? She didn’t blink as she stared at Yoliswa’s message. Not shocked or scared. For all their lives, Yoliswa and Yolokazi had always been alert to danger. It had always been lurking in the shadows. Being frightened only wasted the precious time there was to act.

Yolokazi inhaled and exhaled. She typed: “Ok. Let me know what to do. YOLO.” She put the phone aside and went to the kitchen to dish out four full spoons of vanilla ice cream. Ice cream had always been the go-to comfort food for her and Yoliswa. She would give it half an hour before she called. When she did, the phone rang until Yoliswa’s jovial voice announced that the caller could leave a message. She tried again. And again. And again.

Yolokazi put the phone aside. She knew her sister was in definite danger — if she was still alive.

Identical twins, born only five minutes apart, Yoliswa and Yolokazi’s thinking was so in sync, that Yolokazi swore they even shared the same dreams at night. But this was the first time in her existence that her mind saw blackness when she thought about her sister. It was as if Yoliswa’s existence was chalk writing recently erased from a blackboard.

Two little girls, raised in eGcuwa by their God-fearing grandmother. Their father had disappeared to buy milk and never came back. Their mother had thrown herself in front of a moving train when they were three years old. Tongues had always wagged about how disturbed their twenty-one-year-old mother had been. It was concluded that it must have been the voices in her head that had made her do such a thing. But Granny tried to close Yoliswa and Yolokazi’s ears to the gossip. They knew it was their duty to close each other’s ears, to protect each other, in case the voices came to speak to either one of them one day.

But chattering voices of invisible beings were for the uneducated. The educated went to a clinic and got medication. That was what Yolokazi learned at school from her interest in the human mind. She had set her sister free from worry when she told her. Yoliswa wasn’t interested in the human mind, though. She liked numbers instead. Their brains worked so differently. Where one excelled, the other struggled. But Yolokazi soon stumbled across a way around their perceived failures:

 Yoliswa hated history so much that she once fell sick before writing a test, not being able to leave the toilet cubicle. Yolo thought it would be a joke to walk into Yoliswa’s history class and just write the test for her. The farce worked. How stupid teachers were! How on earth could people not tell them apart? So, the plan was devised. When need be, Yoliswa became Yolo. Yolo became Yoliswa.

When they were eighteen, it was Yoliswa who came with the idea of merging their identities. She was off to the university in Port Elizabeth to study accounting. Yolo was originally planning to go to Rhodes University and try her hand in journalism.

“You’re kidding, right?” Yolo had asked.

The corners of Yoliswa’s mouth curled downwards. “Why not?”

Yolo narrowed her eyes. “But why?”

“Easier to protect one person than two. The world won’t know what hit them when they try to take down one, but they didn’t realise there were two. Think about it. One brilliant mind is an accountant, the other brilliant mind a journalist… or whatever you want to be. 200% instead 100.”   

“But if there is just one of us, who has to disappear?”

Yoliswa held Yolo’s hand. “Neither one of us will ever disappear. But you choose a name we go by.”

On that day, two Yoliswas were born. One became an audit executive at Gaba Matrix in Port Elizabeth, the other one the assistant to the head of research at Rhodes. But the danger of being found out always loomed in the air. How long could the world remain stupid?

When Yoliswa still did not answer her phone on the following day, Yolo knew she had to act. She had of course never met Yoliswa’s fiancé. How could a man meet the twin of his future wife that he didn’t know existed? She arrived in Port Elizabeth during the middle of a workday, certain that Thembani was not around. Yoliswa had given her the spare keys to her apartment, just the same as Yolo had done with her. The flat was immaculate. Yolo was certain her sister had a maid. She thought back fondly of how she always had to remind Yoliswa to make her bed in the mornings. Yolo went into the bedroom. She opened the wardrobe. Half of her sister’s clothes were gone. What had Thembani done to her? Yolo tried her sister’s number again. Straight to voicemail. Yolo didn’t gasp. Didn’t cry. Didn’t panic. If this man had hurt her sister, her other half, he would have to pay. He thought he had got rid of one. He hadn’t known there were two.

****

 Thembani Donga couldn’t count how often he had to use his inhaler during the day. Asthma hadn’t plagued him since he was in his teens. The silence and stares that were exchanged between him, Mark and Wilmina were too much. Wilmina’s frown and quivering lips, that glare: “Has anyone asked after Yoliswa yet?”

And no. No-one had asked after her. The woman he loved had claimed she didn’t have a family. Lucky for him, right? No lobola negotiations. But it didn’t make sense. How can you not have a family? Where did you come from?

He limped into the office basement carpark. That was another thing: limping. He wasn’t physically hurt? Why was he in so much pain? He didn’t notice the figure of the dead woman leaning against his Benz as he muttered to himself. It was the heels that caught his attention. Then those shapely legs in a suit trouser. The slender waist he had loved to put his hands around. Her C-cup breasts. Then those spell-binding eyes. He froze. It must have been an aberration. Either he was finally losing it, or his uncle had been right that reading too many books would make him bonkers one day.

Yoliswa grinned.

“B… b… baby…?” he stuttered.

“I know. I’m supposed to be dead.”

He searched for his inhaler again.

“Your chest sounds bad,” she continued, arms folded, still leaning against his sedan.

“I… I… I’m sorry…”

“I don’t want an apology, Thembani. Just tell me why you did it? Tell me what happened to me?”

“What happened to you? But you… you… know what I did.”

She shrugged. “You’ll feel better. Then I’ll be out of your life.”

“I don’t want you out of my life. It was a mistake.”

“Too late now, isn’t it?” she laughed. “I’m dead. But think about it this way: Very few people get to confess to a ghost. You’ll never need a therapist.”

The headache he had last night returned. His chest wasn’t loosening when he inhaled. He shut his eyes, tears now wetting his face. Thembani couldn’t recall when last he cried. He told her everything, as if she hadn’t been there, as if he was confessing to a complete stranger and not to the woman who would give him children. Everything: the fraud, Mark, Wilmina, her death…

After the last syllable had left his lips, he looked up at her. But there was something different. Same woman, but there was just something… something.

“Thank you,” she said. “All the best.”

He watched her turn to strut away. He tried to call out to her but couldn’t. The inhaler was now empty. When he looked up again, Yoliswa was gone, and he had a feeling it was forever this time. He drove around for almost an hour, not sure how many times he had past their apartment. Eventually, drowsiness kicking in, he went home. He would take this opportunity to sleep because he didn’t know when he would have the luxury again.

But at his door stood two men in police uniforms and one in civilian clothing. The civilian-dressed man introduced himself as Detective Sergeant Bhunga. He held up a cell phone with a cracked screen, saying something about a confession having been recorded and that he had to answer for where his fiancé was.

“I don’t know,” Thembani said. “But she’s still alive. I just saw her. Just now. Just now-now. She’s fine.”

The detective raised his eyebrows. “Really? Because according to your recorded confession, she’s dead.” He held up the phone again. “So, you can’t have seen her just now-now. Only cats have nine lives, Mr Donga. And you only live once.”