Dub Steps

^{CHAPTER 29} We did our chores

With every sunset another cry echoed out and new predators arrived: feathered, clawed, horned. We watched the world reshape itself. The free pigs prospered quietly, growing in numbers and confidence, their enormous forms staking out swathes of turf, concrete and grass, which they now called their own. The predators followed them, of course. We slept listening to lions cough and hyenas laugh. We woke to the call of raptors. Vultures circled, and sometimes – often, in fact – I had the feeling they were waiting right above our property. Above us.

I tied a small, ladies’ revolver in a holster to my ankle, safety firmly on, when I ran.

We did our chores.

We fed ourselves.

The canned food went bad.

The bottled water became sour.

We became truly lonely.

We became alone.

^{CHAPTER 30} Just spectators

Teboho drank his piss regularly, the nanobots leaking out every time until he was scrabbling for five minutes, three minutes, one minute more.

He couldn’t let go of the idea of finding the door to our prison, nor of the hope that someone in a white coat watching over us in a location beyond our comprehension would take pity, let the bots in our system drain out and grant us exit. I would often catch him running for a corner. Ramming his shoulder hard into a wall, veering his car to the left or suddenly accelerating into a blind rise. When we were alone he would simply crash into objects and areas without pausing. One minute we were talking, the next he was thumping into a tree, a door, a piece of shrubbery.

Once he had revealed his secret to me, Tebza appeared to worry less about exposing his eccentricity to the others. ‘Sorry,’ he would say, mid-conversation. ‘I just, I just need to.’

He would target his spot, line it all up with eye and brain, lower his shoulder and bust into it. It was disturbing to me, who understood the rationale, but to the others it was plain crazy. Each attempt, each hard cement or brick encounter, doubled the confusion, which compounded again as the air was forced from his lungs and he groaned, sometimes falling to the ground, righted himself and then carried on, rubbing the shoulder, wincing abstractedly, adjusting his little white earphone as if the pause, the halt in the conversation or interaction, had simply been one of those things. As if he had merely been coughing, or wiping his nose.

When confronted he would duck, brazenly denying the reality just seen and experienced. ‘Thing I read,’ he would say, for example, deadpan. ‘The gym people reckoned you can harness the adrenalin of pain for muscle growth blah blah. Hurts like hell.’

His behaviour was so bizarre, so out of whack, they had little choice but to let it go. To confront him would be to challenge his essential sanity. And we were all a little too unhinged in ourselves for that.

Tebza, Fats decided, simply had a problem in his head. No one, he said, could possibly rack up that many cuts and bruises without some serious wire-stripping going on inside.

My heart ached a little more with every bump and crash, every trickle of blood, every scab formed. I was the only one who had an idea of where his dreams actually lay and how hard he was striving to reach them. And yet even I found it impossible to wake Tebza from his snowballing internal reverie. He took to his computers for longer and longer stretches, days at a time sometimes, pausing for only the briefest periods to piss or to wander outside for a late-night joint.

Tebza was roaming across two frontiers. He was desperate for a gap, for that hole in the fabric to finally stick his finger through, but he was also clicking and pinging constantly in search of the cloud, waiting for that single, telling beep that would change everything.

But it never came.

I drank his piss a few weeks after the Patterson Park discovery and our walking tour of the city. I expected the atmosphere of androids. The taste of outer space. What I got was a clear, simple canvas. A park with trees, like a golf course but without the fairway up the middle. A set of birds chirping and swapping places on the oak trees. A dam in the distance which I walked up to and drank from and swam in. Grass between my toes, tickling slightly.

I lay around. I rolled in it. Took off my clothes (the same clothes I was wearing in the real world, a nifty hack-programming trick). I held my dick in my hand and jerked it a little until I had a free, natural hard-on. I did a cartwheel. I pinched myself and felt the pain. I contemplated breaking a bone – a toe maybe – to test the outer limits. I climbed a tree.

‘Going in,’ Tebza said, ‘don’t expect anything. There’s no software other than the basic OS, and it’s very basic.’ But our earlier conversations dominated my expectations, and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed, given the barriers I’d had to hurdle to get there. Tebza’s piss tasted, well, like piss. It was tangy and urinary and all the things I expected. The taste lurked on my tongue for weeks after, a subtle yet compelling reminder of our hidden world.

Blank as the experience was, however, technically there was no questioning the hack accomplishment.

At Mlungu’s you always knew you were in an interface. The ground was blurry, the walls were blurry, everything was blurry, thanks to compression needed to keep the stream moving. The trick was never to focus too much, to keep your eyes in the middle distance, the range at which the imagery held best. You needed to keep moving too. If Lady Di approached you seductively, for example, peeling off a layer here, a bra strap there, reaching in your direction, there was an art to making the most of her invitation. The first trick was to get your dick out of your pants and into an orifice as soon as possible. The mixed rush of dopamine, serotonin and adrenalin would override your brain’s questioning of the JPEG stitching and enforce a kind of physiological suspension of disbelief. VR sex took off the way it did not only because everyone wanted to fuck, but because sex was the best way to enjoy the nascent VR experience. The sexual fizz provided the cognitive compression necessary to make the sketchy technology behind the whole thing work. As long as you were in a semi- or fully erect state, it was compelling. The final trick was to wet your nap – to use the popular phrase of the time – only when you were ready to leave. The vasopressin released by the brain during orgasm was short-lived, and after it had drained off you were left with the blurry JPEGs Mongezi had detested so. His innovation had vastly improved the paradigm, granted, but the basic limitations still dominated. Only the teenagers and the perverts were willing, or able, to keep going and going.

Hack was fundamentally different. I spent the duration of my time marvelling over the seamlessness of the thing, once I had resigned myself to the awful influence of the music. (I had been intent on taking my own music with me, but there was no way to integrate an external feed and the bots without exactly the right kind of high-end wireless router.) I was stuck with four preselected back tracks – a problem Tebza had circumvented much earlier in his life. While prepping me, he confessed that his little white dangling earpiece was a fake – a prop to support his real, physiological audio system. Encouraged by Joy, Tebza had gone deep, implanting an audio chip onto both eardrums, effectively internalising his home entertainment system. He kept the white earphones in his ear and dangling over his chest to cover for the fact that often he was listening to his own internal music or, in the days before the disappearance, to his operating system.

Lacking his internal magic, I was bolted to the four provided tracks for the duration, dire generic downbeat things. Perversely, I was unable to turn the sound off, or even down. The default system settings could be modified only through the software running off the router – which we didn’t have.

At the high end of the park, up past the dam, there was a gate. An old, Boer-style farm gate. I walked around the dam to the gate, opened it, stepped through and emerged where I had started, at the bottom of the park. A virtual loop.

I ran to the left, straight at the far row of pine trees marking off the park’s boundary. I got to about three metres from the trees and then was caught treading water, the pines stubbornly out of reach. Unlike my walk to the gate, there was no progression, no sense of movement or change – this was a holding pattern, an edge that refused to come any closer. But even under this system stress, the visual seam held firm – again in complete contrast to Mlungu’s, where the walls crumbled at the slightest pressure.

And that was it.

A park.

A pretty, green park.

I lay in the middle of grass and let the birds sing to me until, without warning, the sky dissolved, clouds puffy then white then strands then gone, and I was back in my bedroom, dislocated and regretting I hadn’t explored one of the other three interfaces.

I returned the full Energade bottle to Tebza the next morning. Aside from the bummer of the comedown, my mind was consumed by the potential of thing.

‘So?’ he asked.

‘Eish… so much…’ I struggled for the words. ‘The possibilities.’

‘Ja, I knew my life had changed when I first took it.’ He shook his head. ‘Who can ever guess, eh? What happens, happens. We are just spectators.’

I was tempted to go back to it, but I was also wary of becoming as attached to the calm and otherness of the park as Tebza was to the escape. Or the nightclub. His lure was the spacey, empty floor and the mirrorball. Also, I presumed, the lingering, almost tangible hope of more punters arriving. I guessed ultimately I would have taken the park pretty much every time, but the detachment of the experience was too much, the return to life too edgy and jagged.

That, and the taste of piss, which was just hard to stomach.

^{CHAPTER 31} None brave enough to stop

I discovered around this time that my father was an authentic beat master. It’s a simple fact, but it had eluded me.

I had always fallen into the trap – understandable enough, I suppose, considering the circumstances of our lives – of judging him by the primary layer: according to the visible evidence. I failed to look seriously beneath the business end of his suitcase, and so I missed the cluster of hard drives that captured the true scope of his musical interest, and, yes, I’ll admit it now, his talent. Buried beneath the stupid trance and the club mixes and remixes, underneath the devices that stored his ability to make money, and a career, was jazz and breakbeat. Hip hop and jungle, drum and bass and old-school crooners, dub (reggae, dubstep, German ambient, etc.), classical by the bucketload, the full range of singer-songwriters, rock, and a staggering, confusing depth of pop.

It was an accidental discovery. I was rooting through the case looking for a particular Thievery Corp mix that Tebza and I had been discussing and that I knew lay within, when, on a whim, I decided to plug one of the anonymous hard drives into my machine. And there, folder after folder after folder. A cornucopia. A lifetime.

The depth of the collection – its whimsical range, its sheer adventurousness – sent me into an extended spiral of reflection. From the perspective of my grey hair and formally declared alcoholism, from the view of a lost man with a jagged tooth and few prospects – spiritual, physical or otherwise – my father now cut an entirely different figure. A figure of loss and pathos. A figure of farce, of course, but also of hidden dignity.

I had never allowed myself to consider what it must have felt like to travel the strange and distorted road he had. Now, I thought seriously of cricket. Of the smell of the game that occupied so much of his life and his consciousness. How the Velcro of the pads must have felt when he pulled the straps tight. The insane nerves and stomach-rumbling that would have overtaken him as he sat waiting in the hut, heel slamming against the floor. The ball in his hand. How it would have fit so neatly. The roll of his fingers over the seam, the vision of it twirling in flight, alternately shiny red and broken-skinned. All these things, so alien to me, would have been threaded into him and the way he understood and interpreted the world.

I remembered something long-forgotten, or buried, or whatever. The whole Fotheringham hot-spot thing. My father had, for some unknown, unidentifiable reason, cut a very striking figure in the negative TV-replay view. There was something about the sharpness and angularity of his jawline, in combination with his subtle retro sunglasses, that made his X-ray hot-spot profile incredibly dashing and attractive – far more so than that of any of his peers. You magazine actually ran a double-page photo feature of Russle Fotheringham in a series of hot-spot frames titled ‘The Sexiest Sportsman in SA?’

He didn’t like it at all. On the few occasions it was mentioned, he referred to the tyranny of the negative. Of the black-and-white cut-out. He had this idea of himself, post-cricket fame, as only ever successful in the negative sense, when viewed in the simplest terms of black and white. He disliked the metaphor, but he latched onto it well past his cricket days. Maybe – and who can ever truly know these things now that they are gone? – it was this idea that pushed him to let it all go.

He moved from the smell and the texture of fresh-cut grass to the smoke and grime of the clubs. It must have been, I always assumed, a deep and hard fall indeed. And yet, I had never properly considered the possibility that the choice took him by the neck. Trawling through his folders (Amy Winehouse, Josh Rouse, Cassandra Wilson, Taj Mahal, Stimela, Tananas, Gito Baloi, Mad Professor, Brad Mehldau, new jazz, old jazz, country, Jim White, TKZee, Mapaputsi, Neko Case, Professor, BOP, the folders just ran on and on and on), I broached the idea that trance and house weren’t so much his new love as his recalibrated and recalculated hope – that he didn’t run to the clubs in a misguided high passion, but in search of a viable way out of the rabbit warren. His star had risen and fallen, and having brushed the outer heights it simply wasn’t possible for him – for his heart, for his buzzing, intense head – to spend a decade or two foraging on the commons. He needed something new, and dance and trance offered it. Did that make him a dance-and-trance guy? Possibly not. Based on the evidence of the suitcase, probably not. Now he started to make a kind of sense. He became stark, a man forced by circumstance and unfortunate choices into the simple negative. A man forced to dance. A man tapping incessantly on the walls, hoping for return sound.

I filled up with regret. I lashed myself with it. If I had been paying more attention, if I had been less obsessed and internally riveted by my own life, I might have seen more of this man. I might have recognised and realised.

I started refiling and recategorising his collections on my machine. I set up the biggest speakers I could find and played his music in huge, thumping beats that shook the house. I lay back on my bed and thought of spinning cricket balls, recalling the smell of leather, sweat and linseed oil that always somehow lingered in our house, over and above – through even – the cigarettes and club sweat.

I also allowed myself to imagine my mother. Young and rosy-cheeked, eyes ablaze, heart ripping through her ribcage as this man – all muscles and smiles and fame and magnetic, hypnotic charm – pulled beats from the sky and fed them to her. I drew sketches in my mind. I watched two young beautiful fools fall into each other’s arms and, for the first time in my life, I allowed my heart to beat in time to theirs.

Fats’s obsession with locking us into a secure complex evolved along with our situation. Now the focus was less on the idea of defying raiding hordes and more on keeping out the animals, specifically the pigs, who effectively surrounded our world. So much had been made of them in the newspapers that we were all a little in awe of their intelligence, their steroid-enhanced raw power and their emotional drive. Free pigs wanted to escape. They wanted to be free. And they had the brains and muscle to make it happen. That single fact made them different from any other animals – ourselves included.

I had always considered the free-pig hype to be, well, hype. The kind of stuff journos can’t help but crank up. Yes, their snouts extended and straightened the longer they were free, a freaky instance of instant evolution. Yes, they seemed to grow bigger and more powerful the longer they were out. They swelled, by all accounts, with a kind of atavistic juice of the jungle. But I was always sceptical. Now, having come to face to face with so many of them, having shared post-apocalyptic space with them, I finally understood that, if anything, their immensity had been downplayed. When you stare a quarter-tonne monster right in the eye, like we began doing on a regular basis, when you speak in tones they understood and work with – well, you realise how quickly hierarchies can be restructured.

So we all kept our respective distances. The pigs didn’t need us in any specific way. I think maybe they hung around us for the company as much as anything else. They were passive and distant during the day, but at night, while the meat eaters roamed, they were quicker to move, more likely to rush and charge. We took a group decision that anything weighing over three hundred kilograms and possessing tusks and/or wire-brush hair should be kept out.

Fats had, thankfully, begun to slowly let go of his ideas of himself as a leader of men. I suspect Babalwa had a direct as well as circumstantial role in the change, but of course we’ll never know for sure. Pillow talk dries on the pillow.

His control centre grew stale. The red polka-dot maps of Gauteng, the complex electricity-enhancement diagrams and schematics, the grand plans of extension and establishment were allowed to yellow and age. He would bring them out when asked or when necessary, but he was no longer frogmarching pieces across the board. Something soft had crept into his demeanour now that Babalwa’s fingers curled through his hand. They were expecting. One day she ran her hand over her stomach and smiled silently. Javas caught my eye, and winked.

I laced up my stinking yellow Nikes and hit the road.

I exited our compound down Munro Drive, a thirty-degree slope about half a kilometre long. The trip down Munro was jarring, and the return run a complete, recurring punishment. Together the two halves tore at my calves and my thighs. I imagined myself as one of those masochistic emo teens nipping away at their wrists with a blade, desperately needing to finally feel something, anything. I tore my muscles apart one by one, until one day I realised that I felt most alive, most ready for the world, on that upward crawl past the stone walls of Munro Drive.

I had become a jogger.

Lillian sketched things on pieces of paper. She listed possible pilots and calculated flight durations, petrol requirements and flight paths. Her dream continued to take shape, at least in her own mind. She conducted excursions across the province, to the Lanseria airport, then out to the fringes, Germiston and Benoni and beyond. Gerald, who, I believed, was suffering as badly as I was in the stultifying atmosphere of survival, allowed himself to be pulled along, as did Javas, as did Andile, as did I. We took turns really. None of us admitting to believing, but none brave enough to stop.

^{CHAPTER 32} German Valium

The Kruger Park trip had its roots in my conversation with Gerald while doing gate work. It was my initiative. Quite possibly, now that I think about it, it was my one and only attempt to drive something. To engineer.

I felt a sense of karmic wrong at the fact that Gerald had never experienced the bush in the white man’s sense – that he had only ever broached the extended reaches of his homeland, the place of his birth and childhood, by looking over the fence.

Initially it was only going to be myself and Gerald. The twins were a late, surprise addition to the party. Javas slung a backpack each for him and Andile into their Toyota as we started packing ours.

‘We’ll follow,’ he said casually. ‘Been a while since I was that side.’

Tebza jumped into our back seat at the last second with no bags or luggage at all. ‘Please get me the fuck out of this place,’ he said.

We drove like real tourists. Gerald had secured several pairs of binoculars and we were stacked past the rooftop with wood and firelighters, even a cooler box with ice bricks. We were a fully stocked tour party.

It was a quiet trip, but not deathly quiet. Quiet as antidote, rather. Quiet as relaxation and holiday. Gerald looked genuinely happy. The corners of his leathery face tweaked frequently in what approximated a smile, and there was a looseness in his form that ran contrary to the tight barrel of the man I had always known.

The road opened up as we came over the escarpment past eMalahleni, past the heaps and heaps of coal, the rudderless conveyor belts and black dumps of stuff. We turned to Dullstroom to find six shiny 4x4s stranded outside a pseudo English-style pub. We smashed through a few lodges for trout rods and made a pretence of fly-fishing.

The dams were overrun.

‘Be easier just to grab one,’ said Javas, and Andile did exactly that, squealing with triumph as she wrestled the resistant fish into the air. We built a fire and braaied the trout with onion and garlic, then slung ourselves out on the five-star balcony, beers in hand.

Gerald belched. ‘The rich. So few ideas…’ He shook his head and wiped the lemon-butter sauce from his lips. We all agreed, without understanding. Our dynamic had become very much like this: a series of vaguely linked comments and assertions, expressions of mood really. We were feeling each other instead of understanding. Words were irrelevant.

In Hazyview we found an enormous yellow Hummer in the parking lot of a single-storey strip mall that stretched around four different streets, all cheap face-brick and peeling transmission paint.

The Hummer was a triple-cab beast. We dumped our vehicles and loaded everything and everyone in it. I played DJ. We left the town with Brenda Fassie, and then Andile started requesting.

‘Any dub?’ she asked.

Tebza sought clarity. ‘Reggae dub, dubstep or German I’ve-been-taking-Valium-for-three-weeks dub?’

‘The stuff in the middle,’ Javas said. ‘You know, big Eurobeats and the reggae feel. Crossover stuff.’

There followed an extended two-day debate of the technical specifications of the various dub genres. I took them on the widest journey possible, reaching into the far corners of Russle’s musical armoury. Gerald didn’t participate, of course, only smiling ironically at the nuances of a conversation he would never understand. We explained dubstep to him as best we could, but the blankness of his face always pushed the lessons back to the essential basics.

True dub, Tebza maintained (and I was with him), required a repetitive beat – a steady rhythm that resisted the drift. Where the Germans always got it wrong was with the beat – they let the pacing go, and as soon as it did the dub was over. Javas defended the Germans, we all laughed, and then somewhere along the way we realised we were laughing, really laughing, and we did it some more.

We entered the park at the Kruger Gate. It was appropriate, symbolic somehow, to go past the man’s granite bust and to enter at the front, such as it was. We stopped the Hummer at the statue and had a good look. Javas squatted on his heels, ran sand through his fingers and considered Oom Paul. The dub – German Valium – rumbled on from inside the Hummer.

‘What you thinking?’ Gerald asked him.

‘A doos ahead of his time,’ Javas said, rocking back lightly on his heels as the Afrikaans expletive rolled awkwardly off his tongue. ‘The park was a good call. Can’t deny it. In a time when people just shot everything.’

It was one of the longest sentences I had ever heard him produce, and it was impressively decisive.

There was nothing to add.

In keeping with the spirit of visionary ecological decision-making, as we travelled we decided to open the park’s gates, which were all in the night-time lockdown position. We started with Oom Paul. It was initially a flippant suggestion from Tebza and we laughed at the idea of it, like we were kids trying to open up the zoo at night, but then, as we collectively put our hands on that red-and-white boom and pushed, it felt profound and metaphorical and important.

Of course the animals had already been drifting across the borders of the park on their own accord. No longer bound by humanity, they took natural advantage of existing gaps in the fencing, and of the fact that the front gates – really just simple, symbolic booms – were always intended to be protected by humans. We had started seeing the first herds from the town of Sabie. Packs of zebras, their fat asses glistening in black-and-white health, followed by wildebeest and impala. Plenty and plenty of impala. Grazing on the lawn outside the Sabie Spar, grazing on the hills. We stopped to examine them in their new context, peering and leaning.

‘Weird, eh?’ I asked.

‘Sho,’ Gerald said. ‘Won’t be long before there’s nothing but animals.’

‘What I want to know is, what was the big deal with the Kruger Park anyway?’ Andile asked, her question floating in search of a respondent.

I, the most frequent visitor to the place, tried to explain. ‘It was a culture. For Afrikaners especially, but also the English. Everything about it. The huts, the camping, the camps, each camp with its own identity and way of being. A family thing. Driving all day, looking for game. Going to the bush without having to go to the zoo.’

‘No blacks?’ she queried knowingly.

‘Plenty washing and serving. A few scattered tourists. But no, no blacks.’

‘As a black,’ she giggled at her boldness, ‘I always wondered about it. Looking at animals. We just never had it. Nè…’ She shrugged.

‘It’s peaceful,’ I explained. ‘Watching animals being animals.’

‘Let’s go learn,’ Andile said, thumping the back of Gerald’s headrest excitedly. ‘Teach me to be white, Roy, teach me.’

I had believed, down in the place where we assume and hope for such things, that Gerald would be revealed on this trip. That the bush – the real bush – would bring him, a local boy, out of himself, and that we, myself especially, would gain insight into who he really was.

But Gerald remained inscrutable. We drove to the Kruger Gate, past his hometown of Mkhuhlu, in silence. He pointed at a cluster of houses set at the base of a hill, four hundred metres back from the main road. ‘Scene of the crimes,’ he said.

‘Should we stop? Wanna pull over?’ I asked, wanting him to want to.

‘I know what it looks like, thanks.’

‘Must have been a weird place to grow up, nè?’ I prodded, half to try to get him going and half in genuine reflection on the road we had just travelled, a blizzard of eco resorts, game resorts, golf resorts, getaways and hideaways. Jams and biltong and carvings and breads. Maps of the park, hats and sunglasses, signs for game meat, dried wors and fruit. Bananas and mangoes. And, filling in the cracks, the townships and shacks, homes of the servants and game rangers, receptionists and cleaners. Barbers and petrol stations.

‘More than you can imagine,’ said Gerald. Later he pointed out a lone buffalo grazing outside the gates of the Protea Hotel, on the public side of the Sabie River, just before the Kruger Gate. ‘I’ve never seen a buffalo before like that.’ He stopped the Hummer and half leaned over me for a better view.

‘Beautiful.’

And that was it. Gerald was on a game drive. He wanted nothing of his past.

We camped the first night at the completely off-grid Tinga Game Lodge, outside Skakuza. It was as typical, eco-themed and high-end as a lodge could get. A flat wooden deck overlooking the river, with what once must have been a crisp-blue swimming pool sunk into the far right corner, now green and festering with life. Low-slung cane furniture stacked and waiting at the back of the deck, along with loungers and sleepers and general sun-worshipping equipment. A thatched roof, generic African landscape prints on the walls, wooden sculptures from across the continent. Big rooms with yawning double beds and en-suite bathrooms.

We cracked all the windows open and the winter sun poured in.

We had beer. We had vegetables. Bread. Potatoes. But no meat.

‘Someone will have to go hunting,’ Gerald cracked. He pulled a lounger to the deck railings and put his feet on them. ‘Meat,’ he mumbled. ‘Fucking meat. I lust.’

Twenty minutes later we heard the crack of a rifle shot, and about forty minutes after that Javas marched across the lawn in front of the deck covered in blood, a skinned, gutted buck carcass draped around his neck. ‘Let’s eat,’ he said.

Javas crouched on the grass in front of us, a green Amstel bottle propped next to the carcass, and delivered what can only be described as performance butchery, carving the prime chunks off the impala and stripping the rest of the easily accessible meat off onto biltong hooks he had prepared who knew where or when. Andile sat next to Gerald and myself, grinning.

‘You okes take a break,’ Javas said. He stood up, sipped on his beer and paused to check out the setting orange sun, the buck and the giraffe drinking at the dam. ‘This one’s on me.’ I laughed at his sarcasm – we were all completely slumped in our chairs – but realised as the evening grew that he was serious. He built his fire casually yet methodically, creating a small oven with firelighters and twigs and bringing a cooking flame to life within half an hour. At his invitation, we jumped down as the sun set and added logs to the flame, creating a bonfire. When we were good and drunk and the sun was completely gone, Javas built a set of brick walls, pulled a spade out of nowhere and shovelled hot coals into his new oven. Andile threw foil-wrapped potatoes into the fire and organised the vegetables, and then we burned and ate the impala steaks.

And they were delicious.

Better, really, than anything I had eaten in my life. This was meat in its original sense. It made me want to learn how to hunt.

When we were fully gorged and rubbing our stomachs and listening to the bats and the bugs, Javas told us his story.

Javas was not his real name. South Africa was not his country.

Art was a recent flourish.

He was born in a small village on the outskirts of the Tsholotsho district in Zimbabwe, and it was there that his father told him how his great-grandfather had been hung by his feet from the rafters of the shed and cooked alive by Mugabe’s Shona. It was one small episode. A tiny, almost forgotten sliver of tragedy in the wider river of blood that was the Ndebele extermination.

The image was etched into his father’s heart. The story was told and retold, the details sharper and clearer with each telling, a small boy’s horrified view through the corner cracks growing more stark, casting brighter, clearer light on the savagery every time.

The death of his great-grandfather was the crux of Javas’s family. His father rolled in it, in his anger towards Mugabe and the Shona. But he wasn’t a man able or willing to turn to politics. Instead he veered inward, rotting in booze and recriminations, losing his family along the way, his wife and offspring drifting away in ever-widening circles, without him.

Javas – Jabulani actually, at that time – grew up a quiet, unobtrusive middle child. Like all children of his geography and generation, by the time he hit puberty his ambition had expanded to incorporate Jozi as a logical antidote to living the rest of his life on, as he put it, a ‘sinister, abandoned farm’.

Even after Mugabe’s death, Javas wanted nothing more than to leave the country of his birth. While waiting, he turned himself into an adult in the bush, tracking and watching game, making fires, climbing trees, observing. Retrospectively it was, he said, one of the happiest times of his life.

Gerald grunted at this. I couldn’t tell whether it was affirmation or rejection. He slipped a few notches further down in his lounge chair, his face a mask.

Aged sixteen, having nursed his father out of his frothing, bitter deathbed and into his grave, Jabulani hugged his mother, punched his younger siblings on the arm and hit the road. Before he even got to the border crossing – he had intended to take the through-the-Kruger route – he met up with two teenagers en route to a game farm balanced on the tip of the triangle joining Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe, the furthest point of the transfrontier game reserve. They claimed work was available there. He followed them, and so began his five-year stint as a game ranger. He lasted less than six months at the first park (‘It was like school, but the pay was worse’) but developed the contacts necessary to get a gig at the Mukato Reserve, on the South African side. Here he became a genuine ranger, ferrying foreigners from camp to camp, leading night drives and bush walks, answering questions, and explaining spoors and nesting habits and who kills who and why. He stayed at Mukato for three years, and then was poached by a new reserve further south. Now working in the area of the Groot Letaba (he laughed again at his Afrikaans pronunciation, at the impossibility of rolling his tongue that far around anything), he was part of a more commercialised set-up, one of a crew of twenty or more rangers.

The hustle for clients, the constant push and pull over tips and pay, the strange and often bizarre divisions of labour (blacks carrying and cleaning, whites guiding and talking) ate his love for the bush and created a new and growing set of resentments and frustrations. It was, of course, never as simple as black and white. Instead, he had to negotiate a convoluted maze of relationships and vested interests, alliances and partnerships. He never quite figured out who was with whom, nor who owed whom what. What he did figure out was that he didn’t understand enough of what was going on.

Jabulani was paid half the wage the white rangers were earning, and less than what most of the blacks were making as well. He was also being cut out of the lucrative personalised bush tours for the German and Japanese tourists. A confrontation with management ended with his fist on Franz Calitz’s nose and a fast, calculated trot through the reserve and out over the fence, into Limpopo. He faded into the background of migrant farm slave labour, inching his way south-west to Jozi. They were looking for him, of course, but only with the lazy South African half eye. Still, Jabulani decided it would be prudent to change his name. He adopted Javas, and along with it a fictional Zulu heritage.

‘If you really want to vanish, like in the movies, you must be committed.’ He spoke directly to me when he said this. ‘If you really wanna keep a secret, you can’t tell nobody. Ever.’ As he told his story, I realised that Gerald and Tebza already knew, or had surmised, a lot of it. I was the only one who had no idea.

Slamming Franz Calitz on the nose was merely the spark. Something bubbling down near his toes drove him not only to get out of Zimbabwe but to leave his life, in its entirety, for good. Javas was hell-bent on starting from scratch. With the right approach he could redefine himself as South African and get away, permanently.

So he worked his way down to Jozi and into Hillbrow and the life of a nightclub bouncer and knee-breaker. He gymmed at the right place in town, he fought when necessary, he collected debts, he ducked knives and he broke bones, not only as part of his job, but also as part of his professional identity.

‘I never fought unless I had to,’ he said. ‘But when I did I made sure I klapped them proper.’ Javas snapped his fingers through the air to indicate the severity. ‘People have to know. Everyone must know.’

It was terrible, he said. The city. Life was dark and dangerous and filled with the stink of humanity. ‘Jozi is fucked. If you gonna survive, you have to become fucked too. Crazy like the city. Otherwise you go home.’ Eventually, though, once his credentials as a lethal cunt had been established, most of the hard work was done via inference. ‘The phone is your most powerful weapon. Once you have created the fear, you keep it, you own it, with the phone. Late night. Early morning. Lunchtime is worst. People are very afraid at lunchtime.’

We were like Out of Africa gone to Mars. Me, Meryl Streep, the confused Euro observing the locals, my impassioned white skin glowing while my mind failed. I was stretching, reaching hard to follow Javas’s story and his descriptions of his transition into Jozi life, constantly aware of the subtleties I had missed, and was still missing. Gerald’s and Andile’s – and, to a lesser extent, Teboho’s – laughs and clucks echoed tellingly. I didn’t have the experience or the language to appreciate the full scope of Javas’s humour, nor the true darkness of his venture.

But I could imagine.

And in my imagining, my perception of Javas, and of the people I was living with, morphed. I now saw the deeper lines on his face, the etchings of a man who had truly travelled. I also suddenly saw the lean muscle beneath his clothing. I watched the way he moved and realised the economy of his motion. Javas was a big guy. Javas was a tough guy.

And I had never noticed.

Art, I subsequently realised, is like that. It softens by association and implication. It renders the hard pliable. It creates gaps, gaping holes really, in possibility. As he released the last parts of his history, I began to see Javas himself as a work of African art. A fluid, changeable and dynamic form. A self-sculpture. A muscled metaphor for everything that is beautiful and fucked up on the road from Harare.

Javas kept rolling. ‘What I learned is that there is only fashion. No one decides on their own whether they like art or not. They are taken to art by the winds, they are told what it is, and what it’s worth, in whispers.’

Javas told a good story. He also knew how to make a print, having been trained in the art of spoon printing by a benevolent teacher in his early childhood. A few years into his stint as city knee-breaker, he began an affair with a Zulu girl of a similar age, an artist who had moved through the Jozi system, studying at UJ and then going on to be mentored by bigger names at bigger venues.

Thus the artist life of Javas Khumalo was born. Funded by his knee-breaker savings, Javas’s career followed a remarkable upward curve. A few months into producing cheap but innately sellable prints, he took a studio space in the inner city and began welding scrap metal together, creating massive, demonic, disturbing figures. Towering events really, more than sculptures.

‘Remarkable for their combination of size and form, for their ability to both mimic and reflect the fluidity of African life,’ said Andile.

‘She’s quoting a brochure,’ Javas added. To hear him tell it, his works were simply collections of scrap metal welded into each other and given names, stories, faces – and a big fucking selling price.

Gangster connections and art connections were not as mutually exclusive as one might think. Kentridges and Makamos and Sterns and Ngobenis and Catherines were always in underground circulation, alongside diamonds and gold, sewage tenders and IT systems, and teenage girls from Thailand or Swaziland. Art, as well as the influence and fame it evoked, was a sought-after commodity. Above ground and underneath.

Javas’s connections dovetailed powerfully. The girlfriend’s crowd of teachers and mentors and buyers were awfully impressed. The zing of hard gangster money reinforced the magic, creating an elixir of success, excitement and ego. Men from across the continent, afro mamas in dashikis, tight young girlfriends in super-high heels. The sunglasses and the BMWs and the pink shirts. His exhibitions created the slippery, high-tension buzz that advertising people dream of and that art buyers are powerless to resist.

And so the drug dealers chatted smoothly to the professors, who rubbed shoulders with politicians and DJs, and the hype grew and the prices went up and the girlfriend was overshadowed and outstripped by her find: Javas Khumalo, game ranger turned refugee turned debt collector and club bouncer turned artist turned sculptor. Javas was moving his pieces for well over thirty million each when…

When…

He shrugged and threw a log onto the fire.

When I actually saw Javas’s sculptures, deeper dimensions emerged. Despite his story, even recognising and respecting his claim of being the incidental recipient of the winds-of-art fate, there was magnificence. The sculptures towered six metres in the air. The heads – sometimes made of engine cylinders or even complete car radiators – balanced easily on top of tortured metal bodies twisted with movement and potential. Tractor wheels and driveshafts and bearings and God knows what else combined to create an immense parody of humankind. Monstrous, delicately balanced, vulnerable giants on their last legs, reaching out for hope, for stability, for one last step before the fall.

I saw Andile’s art too, in later months, and it was more technically accomplished, more thoughtful and nuanced. But it was small and usual and, ultimately, expected. A1 Fabrianos have been lining up, side by side, across Africa for generations. Her work was simply unable to match Javas’s brute force. His ambition. I wished that I could have seen just one of his events, could have just once been in the city to witness his giants surrounded by the cloying ambition of man perfume and chequebooks.

And that, in a three-hour session of beer and fire, laughter and complete seriousness, was Javas’s story. At the end, deep into the night, when we finally dragged ourselves off to our respective lodge beds, I was overcome by the desire to hug him. To embrace him. To enfold him in my arms.

And I did.

^{CHAPTER 33} My school name

We spent the next two days roaming the park in the Hummer, braaiing meat and eating it, opening gates, looking at game and swapping positions. It was, structurally speaking, a classic Kruger Park trip.

After the enlightenment of his life story, Javas was good company. Not only did we pick up on many of the personal threads he’d let loose, but he was also a mine of wildlife information. He would force us to get out of the vehicle and make friends with a zebra, a buck and even an elephant – none of whom cared about our presence. He explained the details. What they wanted to eat, who they wanted to fuck and when, spoors and tracks.

We drove up from Skakuza through Letaba, Satara, Olifants and up to Pafuri, the dry north. Every time we opened a gate it felt like a grand, important action. We did it ceremoniously, in recognition of our fundamental inversion of the order of things. Often we weren’t opening much at all. The bigger gates were really just booms fronting empty guard huts. We swung them nonetheless.

Once we reached the top of the park we contemplated keeping going, up through Zim. Suddenly Lillian’s let’s-drive-through-Africa vibe didn’t seem that weird. There was easy fuel wherever we went, and there we were on the border of Zim with no problems whatsoever.

Gerald nixed the idea. ‘Risk,’ he said. ‘The odds are wrong. We make decisions as a group so we all understand what’s happening. It wouldn’t be fair to the rest. Which would be bad for us. Risk.’

And that was that.

Still, it was enticing. Point north and vok voort. I couldn’t quite shake the idea, even as we turned back south.

We took a lot of pictures.[5] Well, Andile did. She wanted them for her paintings – source material and such. It wasn’t something I had considered before the trip, but on the occasions I had a camera in my hands I shot with relish. I realised months later, looking over my animal photos, that I had developed the habit of always positioning someone in a far corner of the frame, nearly, but not quite, out of the shot. Just a hint, the tiniest hint, of humanity.

We only took one full-group picture, tourist style. Andile balanced the camera on a table and the five of us linked arms and beamed at the lens like we were Germans. I still have that shot now, pinned up on my wall. We all look so young. Young and bedraggled and bush dirty. My top lip had slipped up in the heat of the moment to reveal my guillotine, making me appear the most hobo-like of us all. Andile looks alarmingly young in that shot – just a girl really, just coming into the world. And beautiful in the way only the young can be.

Her own story slipped out piece by piece, in the shadow of Javas’s epic. Even at the end of our excursion I saw her within the context of him, although by then I had begun to perceive the outer edges of her shape.

I only truly considered Andile and her trajectory once Javas had shocked me with his. Before, I simply perceived them as the twins. As a singular entity. I was comfortable with them sitting neatly in the middle distance of my consciousness. I’m still not sure whether I was the only one to be so slow, so self-obsessed and wrapped up in my own ideas, or whether the rest also suffered from a similar blinkered state. I remember asking Gerald at the time how much he had known of Javas’s story. He gave me the Gerald sigh and beady eye and said, ‘I am the same. I have two names. Gerald is my school name. My real name is Mudyathlari. I have also travelled and disappeared. Javas’s story is mine. It’s just that he had borders and passports.’

I retreated, suitably scolded, and still unclear. I turned to Tebza, who said he had suspected and/or surmised the basics without ever knowing the details and that I should really track down this incredibly racist yet accurate book by some colonist who had mapped the different types of sub-Saharan African races by facial type.

Andile grew up a Zulu girl in a Zulu world. She went to school (her school name was Prudence, and she ditched it age ten) and dodged the boys until she found one she liked. She ran the family shop – a small spaza – through her teens and was set to marry when the boy was killed in a car accident. Shattered by the loss, by the idea of loss, by the suddenness and severity of the change, Andile packed her bags.

Washed up on the concrete shores, she remembered art. At school, aside from being successful in dating that boy, that one single boy, she had been pretty good at sketching. She picked up her pencil and in those crucial three months after beaching at a friend’s place in Vosloo, those months when you’ll take anything, do anything, be anything, she stumbled across an arts college. The tutors noticed a freedom in her lines and she lucked into a full three-year sponsorship, stipend and all. After years of dutiful attention, after months of wracking grief, after weeks of urban confusion, she was riding at a particular pace in a particular direction, and it all seemed to make sense, like someone had planned it.

The art training led to graduation, with no particular honour. Andile ended up running the office of the NGO that had trained her. She managed student stipends and training programmes, secured funding for arts events and herded the artists together for whatever was required. ‘I am skilled in chowing the budget’ was her sardonic summation. ‘I know how to eat. And how others eat. I understand the shipping margins for arts fairs. I know how to overbook hotels.’

It was the inflections, the small hand movements, the gestures and flickers of emphasis that did the real telling. The eyes flashing, sometimes tearing up. A belly laugh. I began to try – while listening to her and following her, while starting to paint my own pictures of her life in KwaZulu, then Vosloo, then the city – to seriously piece it together. Her story, like Javas’s and Gerald’s, was that of the refugee.

I too had some of the refugee in me, although the troubles I had fled through my life were largely of my own making. Nonetheless, I had perfected an ability to stay away from the core of things, to float myself off, slightly to the left, keeping as silent as possible and as participative as necessary.

Artists could never, would never, harm anybody. They’re too busy painting. Same with ad drunks. They might be a bit useless at functional tasks, they may break things (small objects, precious objects, door handles, car accessories, and such), but they’re too pissed to get seriously involved in anything.

While considering Andile, I pondered how I was viewed, and how the others perceived me. I had had few conversations of this sort with anyone other than Tebza. The usual chatter and basic information sharing, of course, but I could recall precious few occasions where I had told my story with my hands and my heart, like Andile and Javas had done.

And then, of course, the bigger questions. Had my decades of retreat and personal isolation rendered these skills void in me? Was my heart rusted shut? Was my tongue beyond any meaningful redemption? Could it even tell what needed to be told?

For the moment, the questions were moot. No one had asked for my story yet. Not that story.

We headed back to Jozi enriched, enlivened and imbued with a sense of movement, with notions of hope, change and progression.

‘It makes me think,’ said Andile as we bulleted down the N4 in the Hummer, chasing Javas and Tebza and Gerald as they led us home in the Toyota, ‘that anything is possible. That maybe we’re hiding in Jozi. We should move. We could move, if we wanted to. We could go anywhere we liked. Why not move up here? Even if there aren’t people, there’s places out there, nè?’

I agreed. I imagined. The roadside swept past at pace, the smokestacks on the left horizon teasing with the suggestion of utility, power, progression.

^{CHAPTER 34} Hungover, shamed troops

Tebza had finally delivered. Suddenly we had a WAN that covered three square kilometres. Not just any WAN, but one that locked into the IP address for the transmission-paint receptors. We were able to talk to the walls, to command and broadcast. In time, we would be able to create interfaces.

The WAN gave us partial drone ability – just enough to show how distant the real deal was, and would forever be. Without a satellite link the essential function of the drones was void. Images couldn’t be fed back to the controls, and so the things could never be sent out of human sight. They were little more than toys. Even if they could have ventured beyond us, we would never be able to see what they saw. They would be out there seeking, seeing, assessing all on their own.

Still, the WAN allowed Tebza to control a drone from a laptop hooked up to something akin to a PA system mixing desk, out of which extended a joystick. Using a combination of wireless signals and radio frequencies that was beyond our understanding, he gave us sight control over the planes, which he set to shoot video and store on the internal hard drive. Long after the little brown bullets were parked back next to us, we all pored over the laptop, peering hopefully into a video stream of vacant land.

We climbed the St John’s tower for the best view and reach, and flew the things for days. We flew them into trees and buildings, hovered them incessantly in fear of landing and then crashed them repeatedly in the attempt to bring them down.

The drones, secured from the Waterkloof Airforce Base, were the size of small seagulls. Some were even as small as large insects. They were observation devices and lacked guns and firepower, a fact which disappointed the boys but, Tebza educated us, at least ensured we would receive decent-quality video. You can only fit so much equipment onto a seagull.

It was thrilling, getting those things into the air and then letting them run through the blue. Infused in the thrill was the idea of our own flight, and thus it was Lillian who bounced and bobbed and squeaked with the most force. ‘I’m telling you!’ she shouted into the air above the clock tower, American fist raised. ‘I’m telling you, world! We will fly! We will not be beaten!’

‘Just focus, dear.’ Tebza reached out to steady her grip on the joystick, then retracted, his hand hovering nervously. ‘We don’t have an endless supply.’

Andile laid her body carefully on the tower’s thin stone ledge, suntanning, hands behind head, ignoring the sheer drop. ‘This blue sky,’ she said, to no one in particular. ‘The sky has just gone mal blue. Crazy blue. Imagine how blue it would be, to be a drone, floating in the sea, just you, just me.’ She rapped thoughtlessly, stumbling onto a hidden beat. ‘Baby, it’s life, baby, it’s a bee, it’s the drone, it’s you, it’s me, free in the deep blue sea…’

Lillian plunged to the right, the joystick pulling her body down as the drone flipped up in the sky, lost itself and started to crash. She yelled theatrically and thrust the stick in six different directions. The drone, tiny insect, dropped helpless onto the rugby field. ‘Wait, I’ll get it!’ she yelled and bolted down the stairs. We watched her shifting across the turf, lost in the simple thrill of the search.

‘I’m having a feeling,’ said Gerald carefully, ‘that this is the beginning of something.’

Drones aside, there was much debate around what use to make of our new ability, which, although exciting, was not immediately practical. Eventually we settled on painting the corner façade of the St John’s building, the bit overlooking Houghton Drive. We did a bad job, just a straight up-and-down lashing of the dull brown, but it was enough. After a week of energy and effort, we stood proudly below a twelve-metre-wide and thirty-metre-high rotating slide show. After we grew bored with pictures of ourselves, Tebza loaded up a static, shimmering South African flag and it sat there, humble during the day, insanely colourful and neon at night. It was, we decided, important. It marked our presence. At night, the neon could be seen from Tshwane.

‘You’d swear by the size of the thing,’ said Andile, ‘that we would be thousands.’

It was an achievement. A clear and obvious accomplishment.

It deserved celebration.

We drove to the coast in three vehicles, drinking from early in the day and ending up on the Durban beachfront, wasted and crazed.

Fats shagged Lillian on the beach. Babalwa wept.

Gerald punched Fats.

Tebza disappeared.

Javas punched Fats.

The drinking actually started before we left Houghton. Beatrice produced two cases of cider. ‘Before this shit really does go off,’ she rationalised. But really it was the tequila Fats pulled into his 4x4 that sent it all to shit. I rolled a self-defence joint for the journey, and by the time we had passed Heidelberg it had all pretty much collapsed. Joints were being passed between moving vehicles; the cider and tequila and beer smashed head-on into much pent-up energy and scattered into the winds.

I took the Édith Piaf out of the CD player and replaced it with Fresh House Flava’s Volume II. Lillian and Fats were in my vehicle on the first leg and I watched in the rear-view as the spark of their eventual encounter flickered. The tequila had made them silly. The joint added a subtle kind of hysteria. A hand moved to the left. Another hand brushed a knee. Someone needed to lean somewhere to get something and suddenly the air was thick and sweet and about to explode.

The problem, we discovered on arriving in Durban, was that we had nothing to do.

Unlike Kruger, where the animals in themselves are an agenda that can roll out peacefully for days, now there was only the sea. Of the nine of us there were only four swimmers (myself, Andile, Lillian and Beatrice), and in any case the waves were rough and churning and brown.

We swirled around the parking lot. Ran up and down the pier.

Lillian and Fats kept brushing against each other, and Babalwa started getting scratchy. I sat with Tebza on the low brick wall dividing the esplanade and the sand.

‘Heard there was hack going down here.’ Tebza spoke from the corner of his mouth. ‘Somewhere near the harbour.’

‘Lemme guess.’ I couldn’t resist. ‘A flat somewhere.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Nothing more than that?’

‘Blue,’ he added, laughing at himself. ‘A blue block of flats. On the beachfront. Near the harbour. That should narrow it down.’

‘Name of block? Owner?’

‘Nope. Blue block near the harbour. All I got.’

‘You gonna check it out?’

‘Why not?’ He glanced at Beatrice, who was doing drunken, misguided cartwheels on the sand. ‘I think I know where this is going.’

We watched Andile try to guide Beatrice’s legs through the last phase of the cartwheel. Beatrice yelped and shook her foot free, kicking Andile in the jaw in the process. Andile clutched her jaw in tequila drama and they stood in a sudden face-off, accusing each other.

Tebza drifted away. I joined Gerald on the pier, where he was fishing like an old man. We sat there for an hour without a real bite. The sun dropped fast behind the beachfront flats and hotels.

Gerald looked at the parking lot, at Beatrice, Lillian and Fats sitting on the wall talking animatedly, at Babalwa walking alone in a dramatically sulky fashion down the shoreline. ‘This,’ he said, ‘was a bad idea.’

Pause.

I sipped on my flat Coke.

‘Be dark soon. They’re too messed up to even walk.’

‘Gonna be a long night.’

‘Where’d the twins go?’

‘Dunno.’

‘Tebza?’

‘Said something about the harbour.’

Gerald sighed, and played the line out of the reel, bit by little bit.

Gerald was right, of course. They were too messed up to walk. Despite earlier plans to find suitable lodgings, we slept in the cars, like we were on some kind of school trip.

The twins parked their vehicle as far away from the rest as they could get. There was frequent vomiting, mostly from Beatrice.

After dark Fats and Lillian did what they were always going to do, right there on the beach.

Fats must have been punishing Babalwa for some transgression, such was the proximity of the coupling to the parking lot. It wasn’t close enough to watch, but it wasn’t far enough away to ignore either. Babalwa’s sobs, and her pseudo-attempt to muffle them, issued constantly from her 4x4 – regular little yelps of pain, anguish and tequila.

A few hours into darkness, the sobs had become too much to bear. As had the giggles emanating from Lillian and Fats, still cynically scooping handfuls of sand through entwined fingers. Parked in the passenger seat of my Toyota, I watched as Gerald marched up to Fats, yanked him to his feet and slugged him on the nose. Gerald tried to pick him up again and repeat the process, but Lillian had covered Fats’s shocked body in a fit of protesting arms and legs. Gerald stomped back to the Toyota, got in next to me, folded his arms and feigned immediate sleep.

The fight sparked a cacophony of drunken protests from Fats and, finally, the appearance of Babalwa, who stood confronting the cuckolding couple until eventually, like an avenging angel, Javas appeared, issued a few curt words to them all, ducked the two swings Fats sent his way and then knocked him out with a single, brutal shot to the snout. Fats slumped into a heap on the sand. Lillian and Babalwa screamed. Javas picked Fats up and slung him over his shoulder like a carcass. He carried him to the back of the Toyota and dumped him inside.

‘I think this might belong to you.’ He winked slowly at me, once, and marched back to Andile.

The next morning we couldn’t look at each other. I drifted over to the twins, who were, as usual, smiling and calm. Andile suggested a rapid departure. We engineered a quick round-up of the hungover, shamed troops, searched for Tebza for an hour or two and then decided to leave one of the 4x4s at the beachfront with a note on the dash.

We drove back to Jozi in silence.

Intimacy, finally, had got the better of us.

^{CHAPTER 35} Guinea pig in the air

The fighting and fucking and embarrassment of our collective behaviour finally saw the gods rain change down on us. After many months of stagnation the dam wall broke.

Everyone got wet.

We parted ways as we arrived home from the beach. I went running, coughing the smoke out of my lungs as I pushed along Munro Drive, through Upper Houghton, into Louis Botha and the slow drift lower into Alexandra, right into London Road and up a last, punishing hill to join the N3 highway. I sat on a large rock by the on-ramp, a strange, out-of-place thing lost on the side of the road. I looked down on the shanty city. From up high, with the Sandton skyline as a backdrop, it was a truly ridiculous sight. The shacks began at the grossly confident feet of the glass horizon and lined up on each other interminably, never-ending rows cascading all the way down to the brown banks of the Jukskei River, where the last abodes hung impossibly over the water, destined to fall.

Running through Alex was an existential exercise I never got used to – which was why I did it so much. As alien as it felt to be stranded in Houghton, Alex reminded me of the essential alienness of my wider life. My pre-life.

There was anger and regret and tension and bruising back at the farm. I avoided it all.

When I eventually emerged ready to talk, make eye contact, and so forth, it was to greet Tebza as he pulled into the drive in the 4x4 we had left for him on the Durban beachfront.

‘Thanks for the note,’ he said. ‘Very considerate.’

‘Sorry, things got out of hand. We had to leave. Fast.’

‘Fine, fine.’ He shrugged. ‘Little freaky being abandoned, but I cope.’

‘You find the blue flat?’

‘Nah.’ He shook his head, clearly disappointed. ‘I mean, ja. Crack, coke, pills, weed. But not what I wanted.’ The scar wriggled as his cheek moved. He looked like a dealer, or a hard-times man – one of those guys who could do anything, be anything. He looked older than he had before, and even less like a broker.

‘Shit. Really?’

‘All of the above. But nothing else. I went flat to flat for a full day, mfana. Fokol. Nix.’

Two weeks later Lillian and Gerald roared up next to Tebza and me as we were walking up the driveway to check on the cows. Lillian leaped out of the Toyota. ‘Guess what?’ she asked excitedly, bouncing on her tiptoes, hands behind her back, beaming beaming beaming. Tebza and I looked at each other suspiciously. He sighed. ‘What?’

‘We have just found’ – Lillian made a sweeping, unveiling motion, a matador fooling the bull – ‘a complete flight simulator! Like the ones they use in the movies!’ She pulled me by the sleeve and I expected her to show me the thing in the back of the bakkie, but there was nothing – she was dragging me to the vision in her mind. ‘At fucking Waterkloof.’ Her American drawl was suddenly marked. ‘Same place we’ve been a hundred times. Don’t know how we missed it, it was in this shed type of thing. I dunno…’ She was babbling at high speed, her hand still clutching and pulling on my sleeve, tugging me in no particular direction. ‘When I think back, I guess I must have thought it was a shed or something. It looked like it should have had tools in it.’ Gerald had disembarked by this stage and was standing next to her, quietly radiating a similar high energy. ‘You know what this means?’ Lillian was bouncing on her toes again, her boobs and ass moving in excited asymmetric harmony. ‘Do you know what this means, Roy?’ she repeated. I smiled, wishing she would calm down. ‘It means we can fly!’

I looked at Tebza, all question marks.

‘All we have to do is hook up some power and we can start using it.’ Lillian was still firing at a million words a minute. ‘We thought about trying to get it into the van, but it would never have fit. I reckon we’ll only need, like, twenty portable panels and we can power up that whole section.’ She stopped, cast her eyes to the heavens like a Brazilian soccer player and ran off to the house.

Gerald shrugged. ‘Here we go,’ he said as we followed her to the house. ‘Here we fucking go.’

Days later, once the excitement around the simulator had ebbed, Babalwa told me she was pregnant, as if I didn’t know.

She knocked softly on my door one night, hopped onto my bed and let the tears run. I asked her what type of tears they were, and she said after the Durban trip she wasn’t sure. Only thing she definitely knew was that at a higher level it felt right, even if the father happened to be a domineering prick who fucked other women on the beach pretty much in front of her.

‘He know yet?’ I guided her over the age-old, rocky path.

‘Sure. We found out properly a while back. I went to the chemist and found a pregnancy test and—’

‘So what happened with the Lillian thing? What’s going on?’

‘Eish. I mean, I dunno. I mean, I think I know…’ She took my hand. ‘Roy, I just wanted to apologise. For the rape thing. I don’t know, I don’t know what it was. It just frightened me, I guess, the whole thing, the animalness of it. But I know, in my heart, I know you’re not a rapist. You didn’t rape me. I know that.’ She pushed at the cuticles on her entwined hand with her free one, sorrowful. ‘I think I just scared myself, that’s all. You know? With what I was a capable of, and then I started to rationalise and… you know… you do know, don’t you, Roy?’

I tipped my head.

‘You told Fats this? Is that what the Lillian thing was?’

‘He won’t believe me.’ More eyes, more regret. ‘He thinks I’m in love with you or something, or, like, I’m addicted to you as a father figure. Shit like that. Every time I try to explain he just talks over me. Like I’m a child.’

‘A naughty child.’

‘Ja. A naughty child.’ She batted teary eyes at me and waited for redemption.

I gave her the platitudes she was looking for and she eventually squeaked back out, pulling the door shut like a teenager. The latch clicked, and I was alone. I felt suddenly like I had on that first night in Houghton, pitifully small, stuck in a spare bedroom like a little boy. I looked around my room. After all this time I had barely occupied it. It was essentially in the same condition as when I had arrived, save for the addition of a computer and speakers. The MBA books sat waiting still, as expectant as on my first night.

Pitiful.

The others had all fully occupied their parts of the house. Beatrice, for example, had converted her wing into an empire. One needed permission to get through the front door, behind which cascaded various rooms and offshoots, all with specific functions. Her hallway included framed copies of her MBA certificates and company awards. Her bedroom lay recessed in the far corner, north-facing, naturally.

But me – I was just waiting. Marking time as usual. I thought of my corners of the house I had shared with Angie, the little areas clearly my own, which were just as spare as my current abode. As if I was denying the most basic human need to nest. As if nesting was just never for me. Maybe that was why Babalwa had jumped ship so fast. Maybe I just couldn’t provide the nest.

I was still at least partially in love with Babalwa. Our PE time had faded, but part of my half-toothed, jagged consciousness was still locked into her, especially after I was let loose for the mighty Fats. I was jilted, and I still felt the pain. I found myself dreaming odd thoughts about a life together with her, alone again somewhere, coexisting quietly, holding hands occasionally. That sort of thing.

For her part, Babalwa was clearly comfortable using me as a counterpoint (physically, emotionally, intellectually) to Fats. While patting her hand I wondered what the hidden agenda of her visit was. I also questioned how in touch she was with her own agenda-setting. The best liars, they always say, believe they are telling the truth. How much belief was there in Babalwa at any one time?

The next morning I took off in the opposite direction of my traditional route, heading this time for the Drill Hall, in the city. Javas had his studio space there. It was where he built his monsters. Since the Kruger trip I had visited the studio several times. I was compelled by his creations. Being in their presence gave me a kind of metaphysical comfort.

The Drill Hall was an old military station converted into a quasi-cultural space featuring careful brickwork and commemorative plaques telling struggle and other stories. It sat in the middle of Noord, the biggest and most aggressive taxi rank in the country.

Javas and Andile took great delight in telling Noord stories. The incredible hooting, the grinding crush of perpetually angry taxi drivers. The tsotsis and pickpockets. The mamas and children and students and artists and hawkers. The kieries and hidden guns. The crush the crush the crush.

Devoid of its humans, though, Noord was just a few intersecting streets. Well worked with rubber stains, yes, but just a few streets with a past, history bouncing around helpless, waiting.

On my first trip to the Drill Hall I followed the twins. I stood next to the Chicken Licken and watched from a few steps back as they processed a reality that had little bearing on me.

‘Unless you were here before,’ Javas explained, ‘you could never understand how this feels.’ He squatted on his heels. Andile stood separate, looking up at the flats, hands on her hips, shaking her head slowly.

Being inside the gates, on the Drill Hall square, was to be on a ghetto picnic island. Surrounded by towering, crumbling, white art deco buildings, the complex was crisply marked off by a serious set of gates, the bars of which had been decorated with African symbology, creating a curiously resonant vine of safety and art. The fences were children running, animals moving, ladies carrying wood and baskets on their heads, the motifs literally wound into the fabric of the iron. The island effect was enhanced by the sea of surrounding sleeping taxis. Twist Street was only pockmarked by the occasional midnight ride, but the surrounding streets and intersections were stacked four and five rows deep with waiting half loaves.

‘Blue, yellow, red HiAces, silently rejoicing,’ Andile mumbled.

‘Eh?’ I asked, still mesmerised by the ghetto art deco, especially the spooky extended vertical ovals on the left, which Javas said used to be a cinema.

‘Ah, nothing. Just an old song my uncle taught me – about taxis.’

Now I was back by myself in Javas’s studio, which used to be a library run by an NGO. It was a cavernous double-volume hall filled with five six-metre metal beasts, each staggering towards the other. I sat at the foot of the biggest one. Its absurdly square head (a radiator perhaps?) was bolted and/or welded onto rusty shoulders, the fringe of the weld purposefully messy and bold and orange, the function of the bolt and screw ambiguous – possibly aesthetic, possibly structural. The giant was reaching out, its right arm three-quarters extended.

I pulled my knees to my chin, Babalwa-like, and waited for something to happen. I examined the complex scaffold-and-pulley system that was rigged around the piece.

Now that I had seen his art, Javas’s general state of silence and passivity made much more sense. He had no need to displace or channel his energy – it was all being funnelled into this.

When I visited his studio I invariably talked to my Nikes. I tied and untied the laces. Patted the toes. Asked them where they would take me next. I felt as attached and friendly towards those shoes as I did to anyone in the house. The shoes took me places and never asked questions. They were simple and comfortable and friendly.

‘So.’ I spoke directly at them. ‘What now? What the fuck now?’

There was no answer.

I pushed the same question at Javas’s beasts, but they were silent.

I smacked my knees together. It hurt and made a loud, hollow noise.

I stood.

I wrapped my arms around the leg of my host beast and hugged. A spot of sun beamed in from the window on the upper side of the hall, forming a natural spotlight on the ankle and foot. The rusted metal of the calf (a car chassis? some kind of tractor part?) was warm and rough on my skin. It felt good.

I held on.

The others had rushed out to Waterkloof at first light to start powering up the simulator. Excitement had fanned across the house (bypassing myself and Babalwa, each immune for our own reasons) and great dreams were being sketched of transcontinental flight. Of trips to America and Europe. Maybe Russia, Lillian said.

I wasn’t sure we would ever be able to get a big enough aeroplane off the ground to fly to another continent. A few joyrides across sub-Saharan Africa, maybe, but full-on flying? The agreed-upon goal felt like it would be beyond us. Aeroplanes, even the smaller jets that business moguls and sports stars used, seemed to me to be inherently complicated. Runways and tyre pressure and lift-offs and wind speeds and landings and all those things were being funnelled in Teboho’s direction, and he was displaying more and more signs of coming unhinged. Our late-night joint conversations had become more speculative and wistful, his language and ideas drifting off to extraterrestrials and harnessing star power for proper energy, and then suddenly back to inner space and nano flights and the biological dimensions of internal infinity and such things.

I humoured him. I even went with him, as far as I was able to in my own more restricted, linear mind. But I also suspected that as the hack percentage in his piss was dwindling, Tebza had been topping up with things secured on his Durban scrounging session. I knew the symptoms well from the ad bunnies, who oscillated similarly between bright-eyed interest in and sudden hypersensitivity to the basic stimuli of life.

From a distance the Waterkloof Airforce Base looked like a poorly executed attempt at a school. The architectural signage at the sagging entrance gates announced structural redevelopment. Stabbed into the red earth next to the technical information was a logo mounted on a single steel leg: a sun rising over a generic horizon, beneath the header ‘Watching Over South Africa’s Future’. The sign had fallen dramatically to the left, the edge of the W hovering inches above the ground.

The base consisted of a collection of vaguely interlinked face-brick and temporary prefab buildings. A cluster of elderly, dirty-brown military planes were parked around the runways, waiting patiently behind a single, more prosperous white jumbo jet, which was aimed directly down the runway, ready to take off. Surrounding them all was an army of construction machines: yellow front-end loaders, trucks and others born to drag and move.

Lillian and the rest hovered in and around the simulator hut. (As Lillian had suggested, the building, based on appearance, shouldn’t have housed much more than detergents and brooms. According to an A4 laminated notice which had fallen from the door, it was the temporary flight-training facility.) Meanwhile I walked around the complex a few times, poking my head into offices, running my fingers over the many prefab walls, marvelling at the structural transience of a place that had been there since long before I was born. And of course it was all khaki and brown, the colours of the desks and files and folders and photos matching eerily with the cargo planes at the back, all of it mirrored by the deep orange of the Highveld soil, which swarmed around and over my peripheral vision.

It took a little over a week for us to set up the power for the simulator hut. I provided as much muscle as I could and tried not to think about anything specific. I carried and dropped off, and plugged and unplugged things in and out of various holes, obeying Fats and Gerald and Lillian in turn, sharing sighs and grunts with Beatrice and the twins, feeling Babalwa’s pregnant eyes on me as she sat and watched like a representative from the UN.

Once the power was set up and the simulator was fully operational, I fell back. I dedicated my early mornings to a long run, which generally ended with me sitting at the top of London Road and looking down over the shacks of Alex. After the run I made sure I managed the farm as best I could while the rest were occupied. I milked the cows, slaughtered whatever small creatures needed to die, and skinned and plucked and butchered as was necessary. I maintained the vegetable garden, turning the soil gently, picking dead leaves off here and there, talking to the plants, encouraging them in the way I myself needed encouragement. After the farm maintenance I allowed myself to drift into the mid-afternoon.

Sometimes I would dream while lounging on the pool furniture, arms behind my head, eyelids heavy and falling. Other days I would read, stocking up on South African history. Joburg history. The miners and the slaves. That sort of thing. Sometimes I would just stare out at the northern horizon and wonder how they were getting on with flight.

The twins operated in a parallel orbit to mine, staying chiefly housebound and focusing on food and maintenance. Andile and Javas would take turns in the kitchen, and often one of them would join me for a period in the garden or – when necessary – in wielding the knife on a chicken. Javas spent nights in his studio and woke just before lunch. The three of us maintained a pleasant mutual quietude.

Then the rest would arrive back from the base: Tebza looking frazzled and disturbed; Lillian and Fats arguing some point (take-off trajectory, flaps or fuel); Gerald trailing behind, arms full of the day’s supplies and equipment; Babalwa at the back, belly cupped in her hands.

I made sure I visited the base every few days. It felt important to be seen as part of the venture – as part of the team and all that. In truth I was relieved the farm had to be maintained and that there were viable tasks for me back home. The simulator hut was hot and cramped. With two people in the available seats and three more hovering around the edges of the plastic bucket that housed the dash and screen, it was a stuffy, hot and bothersome gig. The less I participated, the fewer reasons there were for me to be near the action, and so when I did visit I generally ended up kicking it with Babalwa just outside the hut, the two of us perched awkwardly on plastic pool furniture.

Cheers would rattle the hut after hours of silence. With each roar we grew closer to the idea of actually taking off. Even I, the sceptic, felt myself occasionally roused at the thought of the ability to break free of our domain. I pictured other small packs of people in different parts of the world attempting similar things. I imagined us crossing paths in mid-air, waving at each other.

Even when we were fighting – and there was always an argument of some sort on the go, to say nothing of the lingering Durban resentments – we were driven by an intention, by a goal. This was in marked contrast to earlier months, which had felt like a steady march towards complete stagnation or death. As a group we were now imbued with meaning and a larger purpose. There was, in a word, progress.

I don’t think Tebza felt very much of that. Towards the end of training, when regular touchdowns and landings were being achieved, he began to openly question his position as pilot. He had never wanted to be the pilot. He felt that Lillian and Fats had bestowed the position on him because of his computer addiction and his drive to establish the WAN – hardly, he said, the same thing as wanting to fly. He also said to me privately, on several occasions, that he was feeling extremely pressured. He would have preferred to be the training guy on the ground rather than the guinea pig in the air. I couldn’t fault his argument, but Fats and Lillian shut him down with the brute force of a fait accompli. Fats would pat him on the head or fake punch his shoulder and say, ‘Too late my son. You’re our pilot now. You’re our man in the air. The guy with the skills. Sometimes destiny is undeniable, eh?’ Or some other such fatuous rubbish.

Some nights I would push my head into his room to see Tebza slumped and drugged in front of his machine, listening to old broken dubstep beats, eyes drilling into the fractals on some retro reconstruction of a ’90s-era Windows Media Player. I would call his name, but my voice was unable to spark even a grunt of acknowledgement, let alone a reply.

So, at Javas’s Drill Hall studio I found peace of the sort I just couldn’t get my hands on anywhere else. As often as was logistically possible, I began to reverse my routine. Laundry first, then cow milking and general farm maintenance, followed by a run to Drill Hall and a long session in the midday sun, letting the warmth of the metal sculptures broil me as I leaned against the legs of the biggest one – who I had come to call George. I talked to George, running him through events in the house and preparations for the flight. He was a good confidant, always listening, always neutral. As the weeks of preparation drifted into months, I relied on him more and more to keep my mental balance in check.

‘You never know, Roy,’ Javas said as he stepped out from wherever he had been listening. ‘Miracles do happen. They could just as easily figure it all out as fuck it all up.’

I shot to my feet, shocked, and gulped a few times. Thankfully I hadn’t been gossiping.

‘Ag, moenie worry, mchana. I talk to them too. All the time.’ He drifted between iron legs, patting a thigh, kneeling occasionally to inspect the weld on a foot. ‘They’re like that, nè? The more you get to know them, the more they want to get to know you – your story.’

‘Strange shit’ was the best response I could come up with.

‘Ja. Strange shit.’ Javas took a seat at the feet of Julius, a fatter, squatter, meaner-looking creature. ‘This one’s my favourite,’ he said. ‘He’s a bit fucked up. Quite ugly. He lacks the abilities of the others.’

It was odd to hear him refer to the creatures so personally, as individual humans, in just the same way as I had been interacting with them. I sat back down at George’s feet. ‘George is my man,’ I said. ‘Something about him, I don’t know. He’s just… my guy.’

Javas smiled and leaned back against Julius’s fat, ungainly foot. ‘So, Roy, what the fuck is going on with you, son? Everyone is talking about how you’re drifting. Not involved. Et cetera, et cetera.’

My heart thumped. ‘You’re not exactly in the middle of things either, are you?’ I said.

‘Well, you’re right there. But I think, and forgive me, I don’t mean to insult’ – he smiled warmly to reinforce the non-insult – ‘that I’m a bit smoother than you. I don’t make people jumpy like you do.’

‘I make them jumpy?’ I wasn’t completely shocked by this, but still, it was strange to hear it out loud. ‘Must be this bladdy tooth.’

We roamed for a while around the flight and its potential for success or otherwise, and then further out to art and the Drill Hall and life and advertising and all the things we had, respectively, left behind. Javas talked straight at me, his words bouncing lightly off the roof. I was struck again by how articulate he was, by his ability to warm me up with words. Mostly, I was struck by his interest in advertising, a subject of little worth or interest to anyone else. He questioned me repeatedly about what I had worked on before getting involved with Mlungu’s, what my job actually was, who controlled me, who controlled the process, how much I got paid, and so on. I self-expressed, as we used to joke at the agency while mimicking a lactating breast.

Eventually I reversed the Q&A. ‘So you were famous?’

‘Depends on your definition,’ Javas said. ‘I mean, no one outside of these people’ – he indicated the statues and, I assumed, their associated industry humans – ‘would know who I was. Just artists. Buyers, you know. That stuff. So no, not famous. Not in the real way.’

‘But on the up, yes?’ I pressed on.

‘On the up. Ja. I like that. I was on the up.’

‘How much were you selling these for again?’

‘’Bout three bar, sometimes four, five, six even.’

I whistled.

‘Not a lot, Roy,’ he countered. ‘Each one takes more than six months to build. Hard cost is about eight hundred thousand rand. And a million today’s not what it was.’

‘So you weren’t rich.’

‘Eish, no. Just bought my first car. Tiny BMW.’

‘But happy?’

‘Crazy happy. Crazy happy, boss. It was a miracle, for someone like me to fall into this stuff and find money in it. The shock of my life.’

‘But you’re good, hey. I mean, it’s so obvious. You’re a really talented artist.’

Javas laughed. A good, long, cynical laugh. It came right from his belly. ‘I’m not an artist’s ass, Roy. I’m a guy who learned how to weld and met some people in sunglasses.’

^{CHAPTER 36} Kids and grannies scrambled

So that was it. The ability to weld and the good fortune that arrives with people in sunglasses. The critics called it his ‘genuine humanity’.

I agreed with the critics. Javas was humble and thoughtful, and both characteristics found form in his art, in his creatures, his monsters, who weren’t trying to prove anything, or win any competitions, or better anyone else working the block. They were complete and confident on their own, and that was thanks to their creator.

Javas forced me into a reciprocal effort. Tired of ‘I was an advertising drunk’ and the crass simplicity of my time as Mlungu’s manager, I scratched around for something a little more genuine. Eventually I settled on cheese.

Our agency was hired on the Dairy Board account, and I was given cheese. I stole a very old idea from the Americans, tweaked it a little and got the credit. It was simple enough. We put the Dairy Board and a pizza house together. The board subsidised the development and promotion of an uber-cheese pizza – with twelve times more cheese than a regular. It was a giant success, in every sense, and changed the standard across the country. Cheese volumes went through the roof, kids and grannies scrambled for the giant pizzas, and the fattening-foods debate only sparked more exposure and more sales. The Dairy Board was ecstatic, and I was personally responsible for adding at least two extra inches to the national waistline.

‘Cheese,’ Javas tutted. ‘Cheese.’ He was only half laughing. ‘I had no idea things like that happened. Cheese.’

We left it at that. His monsters. My cheese.

^{CHAPTER 37} Picking and biting

The excitement grew. Like one of those really old movies about going into space. The ones with Clint Eastwood or Ed Harris or Burt Reynolds, where the wives flutter around making sandwiches and staring up at the moon, kids under wing.

With every successful simulator trip they (we) allowed themselves (ourselves) to crank it up a notch. Plans were laid for which plane to use, a not insignificant question. They (we) settled on something small (but not too small, pleaded Tebza), but when they got into the cockpit it bore almost no resemblance to the simulator.

The simulator turned out to be for a fighter jet – but it took over six weeks to discover this. It seems bizarre in the telling, but this is how things actually happen. You jump in the simulator, learn how to fly, presume the best and ask the important questions later. Only once Tebza was successfully taking off and landing regularly did anyone think to question what kind of plane he was learning to fly.

And so we stalled. None of us were foolish enough to think Tebza could fly a fighter jet – even a small one. We would have to find another simulator, and another method.

The failure sent Lillian into a crushing decline. I frequently found her in strange corners, peering into the middle distance, picking and biting at her fingernails. Once I made the mistake of enquiring after her mental health and in reply she delivered, in shocking and extended detail, an exposition on the fundamental differences between the USA and South Africa. It was a searing monologue, born of a great deal of frustration. The only thing the two places had in common was their obsession with God. Otherwise, it was extreme contrasts and damaging mirror images. She rattled them off (ethics, innovation, music diversity, national planning, tendencies towards a feudal state, physical security, consequences for actions, entrepreneurial culture, etc., etc.), but while she began the tirade powered by a tart, ironic sense of humour, this ebbed as the list grew and eventually she was, knowingly, and semi-ashamedly but still unable to stop herself, dragging me through a pool of her own bile.

She tailed off eventually. ‘I’m sorry, Roy, I am,’ she said. ‘I just want to go home.’

‘But Lillian,’ I replied, squeezing her shoulder tentatively, ‘do you really think there’s a home to go to?’

‘Well, I’ve got to, don’t I? This can’t be it. We can’t be it.’

I went running.

I milked cows.

I slaughtered chickens.

Fats eventually emerged from his rejuvenated office to pronounce that, based on his reading and research, a commercial Boeing was our only option. A simulator was unable to replicate the physical forces involved in piloting a small plane, which ultimately required hands-on-the-stick experience. Fighter jets and other types of army planes were too powerful and risky. Commercial passenger planes like Boeings, on the other hand, were almost completely automated. Once you knew what you were doing, it was simply a question of telling the on-board computer to follow the flight plan.

‘How do you create a flight plan?’ Gerald asked.

Fats brought the answer back from the OR Tambo International pilot-training centre, which included a full simulator, instructions on how to file flight plans, and everything else anyone wanting to learn to fly a Boeing could possibly need.

Yet again, none of us could figure out how we missed it. Lillian accused me of a lack of thoroughness and/or vision. I took the blow, although we had all been to the airport several times, and none of us had come close to the training centre.

We moved out to Kempton Park to repeat the process.

^{CHAPTER 38} A month

A month to rig up the solar panels.

A month to get control of the simulator and figure out how to program a flight plan.

A month to fuck around nervously.

^{CHAPTER 39} No emergency vehicles

Tebza and Lillian were dead in a second.

We watched.

We gripped each other, thrilled at seeing the plane fly, unable to let ourselves believe it was true – that they were up there, in a Boeing. The plane lumbered into the air like there was a real pilot in it and disappeared through the clouds. To me the angle looked steep, like they should have levelled off at some stage, but they kept climbing and disappeared into the thickness and we all jumped a bit on the spot and hugs were shared.

The plane looked good coming down, from what I could tell, and then just as I expected the thing to float onto the tarmac, its nose dipped forward and it lurched hard to the left and completed two shattering cartwheels. It’s an image I will never be able to erase, the jumbo flipping over and over, twice, like a child’s toy, then exploding.

We watched.

There were no emergency vehicles. None of us rushed forward or backward or called for help. We sat. We watched it go. Watched them blaze away in an orange sky.

Beatrice was the first to start screaming. Fats slapped her face hard and she throttled down to an ongoing series of wrenching sobs. The rest of us were silent.

I stared at my hands. My old man’s hands. My advertising hands. My confused, useless hands. The plane roared. The flames boiled the sky. The metal hissed. We remained in our seats on the towing machine – that squat yellow thing that pulls aeroplanes – that we used to pull our Boeing into place.

Andile ran. Back to the cars. She gunned it out of the airport alone, tires squealing.

The rest of us… we sat for a long time, watching the wreckage burn down. Listening to Beatrice bubbling and frothing.

The next day a weaver bird arrived on the big leafy tree down at the bottom of the garden. He looked young. He started on his first nest, stripping pieces from the adjoining property’s palm tree and flying back over to his construction, threading it all in an intricate, instinctive pattern. I watched him the whole day, from various vantage points. It was so natural, his process. So opposed to the idea of an aeroplane. The threading of matter into nest was very complex, yet innate to the bird. He knocked it off without thinking, whistling and chirping as he went. This strip here, that strip there, weaving and pulling, hanging underneath the bowl for long stretches as the first crucial structural layers were pulled tight.

I dragged a pool chair under the tree, rolled joint after joint and watched.

The house was silent.

The weaver chirped and burped and worked, alternating between his nest and clearing the tree of its leaves so he could see enemies approach. All day the leaves twirled to the ground, gentle little helicopters. The section of the tree that would house him grew sparse, more suited to a bird needing a clear view. By dusk he was damn close to done. The nest wasn’t fully stitched, but the frame had already received several layers.

I left the pool chair under the tree, grabbed a bottle of wine from the cellar and took it to bed.

I lay hugging it under the covers, a forty-something-year-old red, 1996.

It grew hot in my arms. The minutes ticked. Its heat grew steadily and somewhere there, somewhere in the middle of it all, I moved from jumping off the cliff to actually holding the fucking thing, embracing it, clinging to it like a lover. Right before I fell asleep I remember thinking that this bottle wasn’t really my crutch, nor my nemesis. It was my fucking baby. It was my small, innocent child.

The weaver bird was at it again from dawn.

I woke with his first chirp and I could think of nothing else to do but watch him and so I went outside and sat in the cold dawn on that white plastic pool chair and watched.

It took him the better part of the day to finish off, fine-tuning and fine-tuning, leaves twirling, always falling, even as he wove. I began to see him as one of those magicians with their spinning plates. From nest to branch to palm tree and back again.

And then he finished.

I stood and applauded. Whistled a few times. Stamped my feet.

Fats came out of the house in his shorts, stared at me and went back in.

That night I held my bottle of red again, felt its warmth wash me as I lay awake, unable to move, unable to think, surrounded by feathers and wings and falling leaves.

The next morning the nest was in a million torn-up strips on the ground.

^{CHAPTER 40} Weeping into the basil

I berated Lillian while I pounded Louis Botha, running repeatedly through her list of stupidities and crimes. First was her ambition, her desire for more than we already had, her inability to accept the reality we all, at some stage, should have come to terms with. Lillian just couldn’t let it settle. Her nationality was surely at the root of that thing in her that just had to fly a fucking Boeing off the continent, that just had to smash through the horizon. It was so typically American.

I was also pissed at Tebza, for other reasons, but whenever I thought of him, whenever his face (that crinkling, smiling scar) took form in my mind, I let go and refocused on something simpler.

I shoulder-charged door frames and lounge corners and even the occasional tree – anything that might have caught his own attention. It felt like a mark of respect, a sign of deference and remembrance. My shoulders bruised heavily, a complex purple and yellow weave extending slowly down my back. Each connection with the wall or the door or the pole added weight to the last and the pain built satisfyingly until I could detect a slight but definite chipping of the bone on certain contacts. I relished the bruises, the grinding sensation that had developed when I swung my arms, which I did frequently.

Gerald’s inner soldier needed to take responsibility.

The vibes coming off him were so strong I could almost hear him torturing himself for not… well, for whatever it is he thought he didn’t do. I didn’t see him for days after the crash, weeks possibly. He disappeared. When he returned he was an almost complete blank; there was only the smallest flicker in the far corners of his eyes, when he managed to raise the lids.

Of course we were all blank. We were completely stricken by the reduction in our numbers, by the collapse of our horizon.

Now we were seven.

Fats worked in the gardens and with the cows, supported by Beatrice, with Babalwa looking on, still holding her belly. Gerald drifted. I ran. The twins were around but hard to find.

Two or three days in, Fats collapsed in the garden. I found him weeping into the basil, his feet kicking in a childlike rhythm against the carrots. I wanted to console him, but I was inconsolable myself. I had no words. I stood over his body for a while, reached out to pat his shaking shoulder and then retracted.

As much as Lillian’s obsession with flight ran against my own instincts, as dangerous as I thought her dream was, it was, after all, still a dream. It was a potential future, for her and for us all. It was something to look towards. To sketch out and plan, to calculate and recalculate.

It was something to do.

Now, there was nothing.

We tended the gardens, we milked those fucking cows, we ate and farted and slept and woke up and ran and did it all again. We walked and worked and tended. We did it in the absence of light. In the absence of hope. In the absence of anything.

I kept the bottle of red in my room, on the bedside table – a memento, a monument, perhaps, to a bad, bad time. Sometimes I would just look at it. Sometimes I would take it to bed with me, hugging it for warmth. It was my thing. My one little thing.

My other little thing was the weaver bird, who spent the rest of the summer building nests and tearing them down, obsessively clearing the space around his construction area until a full quarter of the tree was devoid of leaves. I couldn’t figure out what the deal was. The nests all looked good to me, but each one came down in a shredded mess. He built and built and built the whole summer, but never moved in.

An unsettling sadness grew in my gut in relation to that bird. I began to hope actively for each nest. I watched the progress carefully, talking to him as each one went up, advising him as best I could.

But the nests never made it.

With each nest that came down my own sense of futility deepened. Did the weaver know pain? Failure? The tearing of futility against his bright yellow heart? Was he truly content doing this, building nest after nest after nest? Did he question what the fuck he was doing this for? If he did, I felt sad for him, for his failures. If he didn’t, then it was even worse. Then he was just like me, an automaton moving by instinct and genetic force alone.

Babalwa had her baby three months after the crash. Gerald delivered it and cut the cord and slapped its pink ass and it cried and all was well. There was laughter. There were tears. It was a relief to experience it, the joy, to go high before another low. Up before down. And all that.

They named the baby Roy Junior, which was pretty damn odd.

Despite all her planning and her deep desire to perpetuate the species, initially Babalwa was a confused, nervous mother. Roy Jnr did not sit easily on her hip, nor on her tit. She looked bewildered a lot of the time, and Beatrice and Andile – neither of whom were mothers but both of whom had grown up in baby-heavy families – stepped in to guide and coax. Hold him like this. Head like that. Pat like this, on the small of the back, gently.

Fats emerged. He beamed. He made fatherly noises. He scuttled around trying to help without being able to. On occasion he just sat with his feet up, arms behind his head, looking like he had achieved something. Javas called it his dream phase, and we laughed. But below the laugh lay the understanding that we would all have to get breeding soon. Babalwa had been on point all along, even way back in PE. Now that we had lost a pair, the maths was dangerous. Three females and four males. We would have to breed vigorously and frequently across all possible combinations.

Babalwa sketched it out for us: four to the power of three was just enough to get a compounding dynamic going, but we would all need to cross-breed. There could be no exceptions.

‘It’s not about fucking,’ she asserted as we clucked nervously over her diagram. ‘It’s about our species. We need to breed.’

‘They can just jerk off, then we pour it down,’ Andile offered sensibly. ‘I knew a few lesbians who did it that way. It works. You don’t need a lab and you definitely don’t need to fuck. Sorry, Roy.’ She laughed and patted my hand.

‘The only thing left is a decision,’ I said. ‘Are we now a breeding colony? Not that I’m opposed, but if we’re going to run a baby farm we’re all going to need to be involved for the rest of time. Our time anyway. It’s a big decision.’

‘Are there any other options?’ Babalwa rocked Roy Jnr in her arms.

‘There are always options. We could take Lillian’s plan B and go through Africa to find Europeans. We could just let ourselves die off. We have options.’

I was alone in my diffidence. The others had accepted their duty. We ended the discussion. Andile was already pregnant. The fences were up. The farm was being populated.

After a shaky start, Babalwa took well to motherhood, and the collective of mothers was effective. The three shared little Roy and the infant-care duties, while the men milked cows and managed the veggie patch with renewed vigour.

I kept running.

Whenever I could free myself, and after I had run as far as I could, I drove. The others seemed busy enough, content enough, to revolve around Houghton and the farm, the babies and the cows. I cruised through the city, including Sandton, probing at the glass façades, the gawking, empty corporate monoliths.

‘You’re a little bit mad, Roy, nè?’ Beatrice said to me after another wander. Since the crash she had started speaking to me, rather than across me or at me. ‘I mean, I know we’re all crazy now, living crazy, but you’re the real thing, nè?’

‘I was in advertising.’

‘Fats was in advertising.’

‘He was a suit. He wasn’t smoking crack to get the next idea.’

She tossed her head as she laughed, twirled a few strands of hair with long fingers. Beatrice had some warmth to her. Or – let me rephrase – I was noticing her warmth. I could think of worse things than discovering what lay beneath. I wasn’t sure whether Gerald was of the same mindset. I tried not to think about it as I watched her breasts jiggle lightly in harmony with her amusement. I made a mental note to watch her more closely, more often.

Beatrice had cheekbones that held her face together – they gave it reason and shape, a noble and serious structure. Her use of make-up had steadily shrunk to more selective applications, and she was better off for it. I started to notice her actual skin, which was a rich olive and not at all as pockmarked or acne-ridden as I had assumed. Her obsession with heels had also faded, another considerable improvement. She had come down to size, literally. Less the CEO and more the human being. Her breasts were moderate, her body lean – but that was the case for all of us now. Fat was something from another time. She let loose her hair from the intensity of the railway braids, allowing it to morph slowly into a soft afro. Unlike Fats’s fro, which even when physically subdued was all dominance and power, hers bubbled up and then cascaded down loosely. It was feminine and accommodating.

The ‘you’re mad, aren’t you?’ conversation was, I gradually discovered, a purposeful entrance into my world.

Suddenly Beatrice was around more often. When I hoed the garden, she was there. As I pulled on my Nikes, she asked if she would be able to keep up if she tried. When I went for a drive, she was in the passenger seat, right thigh inching closer to mine, suggestions of perfume lingering in the cab the next day.

I responded in kind, but it worried me. Not politically – I had long ago made peace with the gritty reality of household politics, sexual and otherwise – but personally. I looked in the mirror, saw the hole in my mouth and knew I wasn’t worthy of, or ready for, an actual, adult relationship.

My life had always been solo, and singular. Even when I was married to Angie I was essentially alone. As Beatrice inched closer, my inner cunt began to hatch a counter-attack.

As he always did.

Beatrice was all Model C. Her accent, her neoliberal-CEO world view, her jeans, her heels. Her hands, most of all. Even sans nail polish, her fingers were immaculate, the nails long yet clipped, the tips always clean white despite the gardening and slaughtering, the plucking and skinning.

But Model C isn’t how you look. It’s how you think. I’d heard that many times before. At tertiary. At work. Also from Andile, herself markedly un–Model C. Model C is about marriage and children and financial planning. It’s about recycling and donations to charity. It’s afternoon braais with big fluffy salads.

All these things were inherent in Beatrice. They shone from her. Perhaps more so because she was born so far away from it all. Beatrice forced herself into the Model C life from the distance of Beaufort West. She made it happen through her personal force. I was also Model C, of course, but I had spent my life running away from it. So I ran away from her as well, yet again a slave to instinct.

The planning of the baby farm had opened up ideas in both of us. If we were going to go as far as jerking off into cups and pouring it down vaginas, well, we may just as well have gotten naked.

So we did.

Well, actually, we didn’t get naked that often. Initially we fucked in the 4x4, all fumblings and fingers and premature grunts. We progressed to parks and other vacant spaces, and we always kept it away from the house, where it didn’t really fit – where freedom and fantasies didn’t belong.

And that, in summary, is how I got Beatrice pregnant.

Everyone knew we were fucking, and we didn’t try to hide it. Babalwa caught my eye with regular grins and eyebrow movements with implications. Fats played it straight, the twins also kept it as straight as possible and Gerald simply disappeared from view.

‘Poor Gerald,’ Beatrice murmured abstractedly as she put my cock in her mouth. I was driving. It was some kind of fetish for her – vehicular sex. I accommodated it easily.

‘Let’s leave Gerald out of it,’ I suggested as she worked away. ‘It’ll be poor Roy soon enough.’

She pulled out of the dive, keeping a hand on my dick. ‘What you mean by that?’

‘Well, we’re not exactly getting married here, are we?’

She pulled her hand free. ‘Why not?’

‘Damn, is that a proposal?’

‘Don’t be such a wanker, Roy. You can be so mean. Jesus.’

‘No, but seriously, I mean… uh…’ Her reaction had caught me off guard. My assumption was that we were at an equal distance with the thing. The sex thing. I hadn’t yet considered our actual relationship.

‘So what you’re saying is that you expect me to be fucking you and Gerald at the same time?’

‘No, not at all. No. But, but you guys have been… I mean, you did for quite a while, nè?’

‘We did.’ She was bolt upright now, arms folded. ‘But it didn’t work out that good. And we stopped. And…’

‘And?’

‘You stupid fuck.’ She punched me, hard, on the arm. ‘You’re just fucking me, aren’t you?’

I spluttered.

‘Jesus, you are. Of course you are. You don’t give a shit about me, do you?’ She was raging now, heat pulsing off her forehead, clouds breaking in her eyes.

‘No, Beatrice, you need to understand. I don’t give a shit about anyone. I never have. I’m just trying to get through here.’

‘Oh fuck. Thanks a lot. You can drop me off here, Roy, right here.’ We were on the cusp of Linden, a good couple of hours’ walk from the farm. She yanked on the door handle and it sprung open as we drove.

‘No, B, no, that didn’t come out right. That’s not what I meant. I meant… I meant…’ She glared at me furiously. ‘I meant that I’m so fucked I’ve never been able to have a relationship. Ever. I just wasn’t expecting one now. I don’t even know if I’m capable of…’

‘I can answer that for you. Stop the car. STOP THE FUCKING CAR!’ She screamed into my ear, at my eardrum, which stretched to pop. I braked and she bolted. ‘Just fuck off, Roy. Go be alone if that’s what you want.’

I circled a few Linden blocks, berating myself for being such a fool. Firstly, for tossing away another driving blow job, a quirky and not unpleasant experience, and secondly, for putting the cruel steel on the only person left in the world willing and able to screw me, and, more importantly, hold my hand.

Maybe, I rationalised as I turned another corner, surprised again not to find Beatrice’s stomping form, I was actually jealous of Gerald. Maybe I was too much of a South African male to be able to express my anxiety, and so her slightly cruel raising of his name as she was lowering got me scared and I reacted emotionally, etc., etc.

I drove up and down Barry Hertzog a few times – criss-crossing the side roads as I went – expecting to find her. But I didn’t.

As I drove I remembered a story my dad told me about how Hertzog was named after James Barry, the South African surgeon general and British frontier military doctor, because he, Hertzog, was a result of – or his family somehow was involved in – Barry’s introduction of the Caesarean section to South Africa. And how the Hertzogs, on naming their son, were completely unaware that Dr Barry was actually a hermaphrodite who had lived his entire life with undiscovered female genitalia. I loved that story as a child. It gave me goosebumps to think I knew this little snippet of history, a piece of us that no one around me perceived.

‘Female genitalia, huh!’ Russle, beaming, concluded with a thump on my knee. ‘Imagine that, Roy, just imagine.’ Knee thump, beam. ‘You go through a lifetime in the army with a punani and nobody notices? Imagine!’

Beatrice had vanished. She must have ducked across Victory Park. (Which victory was that? I asked myself, thinking again of my father and the paucity of his historical knowledge – Dr Barry’s punani was all he had.) I crashed the 4x4 through the low wooden railings into the park, skirted a few trees, examined the trickle of the Braamfontein Spruit – with no success. I got out and walked. I yelled out her name, feeling strangely conspicuous. A free pig checked me out from a distance. We held eye contact for a few seconds and then he turned back into the bush.

Nothing.

I thought of Angie and it stopped me dead. I tried to count how long it had been since she had even occurred to me. Months. Several months. At least. The thought of her occupied my mind as I drove back to Houghton, having given up on locating Beatrice, who clearly did not want to be found. I hoped she didn’t have to deal with too many animals on her journey back. It was a long walk.

Things weren’t the same between Beatrice and me after that. They weren’t the same between her and Gerald either, nor between me and Gerald. It was, of course, of bloody fucking course, a classic love triangle, straight out of the Hollywood script machine.

We covered ourselves in silence and functional tasks.

We spoke to others and got on with whatever we could.

We watched Beatrice’s belly grow, following Andile’s and Babalwa’s before her. We were all affected, those outside the triangle as much as those in it. Despite the careful planning, we had three babies in the works and no one had yet jerked off into a cup.

Watching the belly grow, something of mine baking inside it, I drifted further and further back into the past, latching onto smells and sights and riding their resonance into my teenage and childhood years. Flashcard memories of life as a very young child. The smell of the rain. The smell of my father’s cricket bat, unused, but always leaking the strange odour of his previous life. The light, woolly fragrance of my first kiss. Girls’ underwear. Trees bending in the wind, signalling September. Tobacco. The sharp stink of my old man’s cigarettes and then, in turn, the charming cloud of my own first inhalations. Life passing. Life smelling. Life taking shape, without ever taking form.

^{CHAPTER 41} You had it and you didn’t want it

As the babies arrived we all became like the weaver bird. Plucking and binding and stripping and threading an endless series of domestic compulsions. Now, our only reason was to keep it all going. We were governed by an arcing, noble aim. We lost the need to do anything else. To even think about anything else. We shut the horizon down and focused on the farm, and yes, there were rewards. Many, in fact.

The weaver, by the way, stayed in that tree, building and tearing down. I never saw a mate or an egg or a baby bird or anything. Just a weaver and his nests, falling as regularly as they went up. A never-ending procession of weaver engineering, with no end result.

I would sit and watch him after hours, in the early mornings or whenever I caught a break. Each year as spring broke the first descending helicopter leaves would announce his arrival. Each year my excitement grew, my hopes for him compounding annually. The second year I laughed. Teased him. Mocked a little. I presumed he would sort it out and his wife would descend from wherever weaver wives descend, and finally the family would progress and nest.

But it didn’t happen.

I stopped teasing and began encouraging and as soon as I started that the whole thing developed a level of pathos I was unprepared for. The weaver and I were now somehow bound together. Our trajectories and ambitions had accidentally meshed. I began to urge him on out loud. Come on guy, what’s the problem?

The thought of his life being as futile and directionless as mine, the thought of him failing at the single clear objective of his existence…

Eish.

After Roy Jnr came Andile and Javas’s Thabang, then Jabulani, the result of Beatrice and my awkward union. The three babies created a natural realignment of labour. To wit: heavy shit for the men, cooking and cleaning for the ladies.

At the agency, baby ads were always the easiest. We would rattle them off, always targeting the fathers, who held the metaphorical key to purchase decisions. The change of life. The embracing of responsibility. That bright little future all tucked up in your big manly hands. The time when a man must do what a man must do.

Now I experienced personally why it all worked so easily. I also felt that essential change in perspective, inclusive of sudden rushes of empathy for, and an overwhelming sense of connection with, my father. Through the babies, and especially through Jabu, I now understood Russle Fotheringham not as the decisive force in my life but simply as another man trying. A man as helpless as I was with this thing in my arms. A man also leaning into the wind.

In this way, Jabu gave me peace. Not lasting peace. Not the kind of peace I could carry with me forever, but a short, sharp glimpse into my own demise.

Meanwhile, Fats launched another plan.

This time he wanted to extend the house to accommodate the babies and their future lives. The plan involved, naturally, a great deal of mapping and red ink, but at its core it was expansion across the ridge – a breaking down of the walls that separated the four properties adjacent to the mansion to create a mega complex. A mega mansion. Fats envisioned a sprawling property, an interlinking of many different dimensions, a space big enough to accommodate the various intricate family structures of our future.

I had long been claustrophobic in the house and had envied the twins their garden cottage. We never had enough power to allow anyone to move further out, but with Fats’s grand expansion things would change. I put my flag onto the small (in the Houghton sense) property perched on the far right corner of the ridge. Really it was quite a large house with a right-angled view of the north and the west. Its aesthetic was of posed humility, the gradations and reaches of the place all tucked neatly into a single-storey façade that dropped down the cliff face to form a second and third floor below the first.

Given the fact that I was the only partnerless adult, the odd man, the perpetual jerker into cups, I proposed the corner property as my payback, a karmic debt I hoped we would all agree was due to the guy with the guillotine tooth and several serious character flaws.

As we pounded away at the walls separating the properties, in my off-hours I packed my meagre possessions into boxes and carted them over to my new house, one by one.

I was leaving.

I was coming home.

As the babies took their place in our world, I followed the path carved out before me by billions of men. Activities and tickles and rubs and walks through the farm and lessons in anything and everything, as if I really did know and understand. As the years ticked by I found myself delivering lectures on the fly, ranging freely over subjects I knew almost nothing about. Roy Jnr would gape at me, kick his legs, frown, possibly burp in encouragement. Jabu never really gave a shit – her eyes always drifting to the left, looking for other, better things. Thabang was polite. He paid attention while looking bored.

Our relationships weren’t parent to child, they were person to person. I wasn’t guiding them or raising them; I was hoping to befriend them. I wanted to impress them. This was the most profound shock of fatherhood – the gradual, creeping understanding that they were my little friends. Above all else I wanted them to like me. I wanted to see them smile. I wanted to show them as much of my world as I could.

Roy Jnr, marginally the eldest, took on the role of all oldest children, bashing his head against authority with a steady frequency. Roy was the quickest to challenge, the meanest in a fight and the scariest when charting the rivers and valleys of his own moods. Publicly I treated him as my own – his name gave me licence. Privately I considered him to be mostly mine as well. The child I should have had with Babalwa, but didn’t.

While raised within the general brood, Thabang grew within the specific range of his parents. Andile always held his eye, and Javas his hand, and he benefited from having as parents the two most sensible and stable of our bunch. From a tiny infant Thabang was steady, assured and calm. Even in a crisis, he was measured. His tantrums were delivered with calculation and efficiency. He was a good follower, which meant, I thought, he would end up being a good leader.

Jabu was a little shit. She caused trouble with a smile. She manipulated wherever possible and was always the one to initiate conflict – and reap the rewards. She was constantly drifting away to places she shouldn’t, then allowing herself to be pulled back, with a beatific, adventurous smile on her face.

‘The result of a scratchy union,’ I said to Beatrice as Jabu tried to leap off her hip and into my arms over a distance of several metres. It was a regular habit of hers, leaping from the arms of whoever was holding her.

‘She can’t help it if her father’s a prick.’ Beatrice laughed a serious laugh.

‘Do you believe that kids are an even mix of their parents? I’m never sure.’

‘What else would they be?’ She heaved Jabu off her right hip and flung her in my direction. ‘We shouldn’t drag babies around when we do this. Take her, please. Asseblief.’

We were pushing the cows back into their paddock for the night. I wrestled our child into place under my right arm. ‘I don’t know. I mean, obviously Jabu is a mix of you and me, but when I talk to her and watch her move she seems to be a lot more than that as well. Like, she has our genes but she’s also a complete individual. Then I wonder if we’re born as individuals with our own place and point on the planet, or whether we’re born into a lineage and that that’s the real point. The lineage—’

‘Shit, Roy.’ Beatrice slammed the gate and counted the cows one last time. ‘I think you think too much.’ Her finger danced across the open space between us. ‘I’d hate to know what goes on inside that head of yours when you’re not talking.’

‘I think I need company.’ The words landed in a Freudian heap between us.

‘Don’t give me your bullshit, Roy.’ She swivelled around and marched back to the house, slapping her ass as she walked. ‘You had it and you didn’t want it,’ she called over her shoulder.

Jabu wrestled under my arm like a sea lion.

‘Check that ass, Jabu, check that ass,’ I said as Beatrice drifted out of focus. She was dressed in a simple, colourful skirt, probably an Oriental Plaza wrap-around. The make-up and heels had completely disappeared. She was natural and farmy, like a black diamond Bokomo rusks ad, or one of those laxative specials, all flowers and flowing gait. She could easily have clamped a stalk of wheat between her teeth.

Jabu finally managed to break out of my arms, still reaching at Beatrice. I caught her only semi-causally. ‘I could have tapped that, Jabu. I could have tapped that for the rest of time,’ I said to her as I stuffed her back under my armpit. She burped. I watched Beatrice go, feeling surges of something akin to regret. But it wasn’t quite that, either. Maybe it was loss. With a bit of jealousy. The numbers were never going to add up. There was always going to be someone left out.

I had made sure that that someone was me.

Babalwa fell pregnant again a few months after Roy Jnr was born – a fact that both pleased and irked her. Ideally, according to her grand plan, her next baby should have been fathered by either myself, Gerald or Javas, via the cum-cup method. She immediately drew up an extensive schedule, backed by consultation with Beatrice and Andile, both of whom were far more committed to the idea of pouring a lukewarm cup of alien semen down themselves than to the reality.

‘You just tell me when and where to wank, and I’ll do it’ was Fats’s only comment.

‘Don’t be such a prude,’ Babalwa chided. ‘You know I’ll help you.’

‘Public ejaculations’ – Fats glared at her – ‘are not really my thing.’

‘Well, ja,’ Babalwa shot back. ‘None of this is my thing, but if we want our grandchildren to skip the whole four-eyes-and-eight-toes thing, we have to do it, nè?’

According to the schedule, the next pairings were Andile + Roy and Gerald + Beatrice. Which meant I would be the first to broach the cup.

Andile didn’t want to be rushed. ‘We’ve got all the time in the world’ was her stated position. I didn’t object. We agreed that ‘when Andile is ready’ it would happen, with Babalwa continually stressing the dangers of a repeat of her and Fats’s mistake. ‘Just pay attention!’ she barked, frequently. ‘Use the condoms, check your rhythms.’

^{CHAPTER 42} Blacks, browns, beiges and a few whites

I cleared out Tebza’s room. It had been two years since the crash and we were inching painfully towards the subject. To remembering the people. Talking about them. Threading them back into our ideas of our lives. Rooms had to be cleared and cleaned. Possessions boxed and/or distributed and/or thrown out. I volunteered for Tebza’s.

It was pitiful. Pads and mobiles and associated accessories. Clothes still piled up on the floor in what looked like three separate heaps – dirty, clean and transitional. A few scraps of paper on the pine desk, covered in water marks and rings from the various cups and containers. Scribbled notes and strings of IP addresses, each a minor variation of the last.

Bed unmade.

Cupboards empty, save for a few extra machines waiting in the far reaches of the shelves. The Energade bottle festering in the corner of the darkest shelf.

I scooped the clothes and the duvet and sheets into a few black bags, tied them up and lugged them over to the balcony and threw them off, straight down the cliff. I poured the nano piss down the sink. His pads I carted to my room and opened up one by one. Most of them were raw terminals running a basic open-source OS. Folders empty, no files. Shells. The last pad was different, though. It was his personal machine from the pre-days: email, designs, docs, music.

I started with email. The in-box ran several thousand mails deep, well past two years before it all stopped. Between the avalanche of corporate requests and replies, revisions and reversions, lay clues to a deeper life. Snappy one-liners from Joy, the hack girl, recurred in the four months before the end:

And his reply:

Closer to the end they were more connected.

And the reply:

Little lines. People talking about small things. TV and weekend drugs and creeping fears. It made me want to cry.

Around the same time there were a few hospital exchanges. Booking forms and permission slips and insurance questionnaires. Cosmetic auditory enhancement, his procedure was called. The date was for about two months after he met Joy. A morning procedure, out in the afternoon. No insurance.

Otherwise, his folders were as folders generally are. Spreadsheets and investment product brochures. A million and one overviews of various trading algorithms. The ‘Instamatic’: ‘80% odds of a 25% return over 90 days through a considered focus on the performance potential of weather futures in the East African boom economy’. The documents stacked up. I scrolled and peeked and scrolled and read and glimpsed and scrolled.

Deep within his 2033 Potentials folder, which contained many hundreds of files of potential sales opportunities, was a folder called Youth, and inside that a string of typical Global Youth promos. Kids in hoodies with raised arms, pointing fingers, Molotov cocktails.

One poster was a midnight shot of graf rebels standing back and watching their stream on the walls of the stock exchange in Sandton. The video they’re watching shows men in rags digging through suburban garbage bins. The shot is just close enough to make out a Woolworths bag in one of the graf boys’ hands, inside it a lot of bright-looking apples. The strap line on the poster: ‘Action Counts: Johannesburg, South Africa, 2032.’

I examined the graf rebels carefully. Their shoes, their shoulders, their posture. There was nothing definitive. Tebza could have been simply an online fan – a downloader of posters. He could also have been personally spraying the stock-exchange walls at night. It was impossible to tell.

The Global Youth verbiage went on and on. Schematics for a stock-exchange jammer algorithm. More schematics for a youth-fund trading algo, the introductory text speaking of the need for centralised planning and funding to support youth activism and the fight against capital retention.

I dumped the empty machines in the corner of the computer room. I kept Tebza’s pad with me. It held clues to his life I intended to follow.

We locked up the empty rooms and held a bonfire of all additional clothing and organic matter. It turned into a funeral-type thing where Fats spoke out loud, full of purpose and meaning, while we all looked and felt solemn. It had been two years, but the pain of our stupidity was still fresh.

Everybody cried.

The kids too.

We went through the daily rituals and then we all went home – the couples to their beds and me to mine. Sometimes, in the darker nights, I would reach for my bottle of wine and take it in with me. Hug it and hold it.

But I also tried, to the best of my ability, to leave that shit behind.

I had come to view my idea of myself as the lonely drunk, the drifter and the outsider, as a hindrance. An indulgence. I slipped back sometimes, but mostly I focused on pushing away from it, in other, more positive directions.

I started building a library in the basement of my new house, which I had successfully moved into and powered up. I rekindled my PE habit of raiding buildings and houses for books. The houses of St Patrick Road and Munro Drive yielded an expected but nonetheless valuable haul of classics, academic stuff and straight pulp. I used the armoured van to go house to house, smashing straight through gates and walls and front doors, PE style, until I found the studies. The good stuff was generally in the studies, base camps for retreating husbands and fathers. History and Africana and international relations and so on. But I wasn’t picky. I took it all. The Cosmo and Car mags and the Wilbur Smiths and the finance textbooks.

My new house was all wooden floors, pressed ceilings and stone floors. The wood was offset by off-white walls and curtains and framed line drawings with dashes of watercolour. Jenny Crawford, judging by her cupboard, was as predictably stylish as her house. She worked off a core set of dresses, skirts and blouses ranging across the basic colours – blacks, browns, beiges and a few whites. Her collection of scarves was as enormous as it was colourful, and she obviously used these, her bags and her jewellery to add the flash. She was a good-looking late-forties woman, with dyed brown hair cut into an angled bob, a trim figure and a cardboard cut-out husband, David, CEO of a nutraceuticals company, Zest. The house was covered in a loosely scattered layer of supplement bottles, including a generous proportion of ginseng pills and sensual massage oils.

They appeared childless, David and Jenny Crawford. The spare rooms were structured and neat and waiting for activity, which, by the looks of things, seldom occurred. Jenny – a marketing consultant – seemed to have spent most of her time in an office drowning under the weight of ancient business magazines. Harvard Business Review. Fast Company. The Media. Her pinboard was drilled firmly into the wall by schematics and spider diagrams and brand-positioning statements. I sat behind her desk, powered up her desktop and looked out over the stone balcony to northern Johannesburg. I clicked around her emails and folders, but there was nothing other than the expected. Musically, the returns were worse than average. All old-school stuff from the ’90s and 2000s. Freshlyground. Kings of Leon. Coldplay. I turned off the machine and sat, letting the afternoon sun bake my chest. This, I decided, would be my study too.

And I would use it.

The second floor I reserved as a reading station for mobiles and portables, as a music centre and as a photo-storage facility. I strung up ten different extensions and plugged in all the chargers I could find, catering to most brands and models. About thirty-five in total. Then I set up ten central fifty-terabyte music servers, and another six for photographs.

And then I archived.

They started to call me the librarian. Ask the librarian, they said, in the days when the kids began to ask about things. Check in the library. Ask Roy.

In my own time, after I had finished work and archiving, when I was sitting on my cool stone porch, watching the sun set over the Northcliff Dome, I became very attached to philosophy and home decor, in no specific order.

The best philosophy was wrapped up in history. It was, in effect, storytelling from a particular era. The worst was the pure sort. University stuff. Sartre. Nietzsche. Bertrand Russell.

The stories came to life up there on my hill. The texts would conjure the voices of people. The sounds of life as it used to be: trucks downshifting on the highway; washing machines and lawnmowers and crying children. I read a lot of Africana initially, following up on the sketchy stuff I had devoured at the Eastern Cape lodge, before I found Babalwa. After the Africana I drifted at random, picking up whatever I found in front of me. Mercenaries in West Africa. Paul Theroux on a train. Naipaul on America. JM Coetzee on Australia. It was the reality I was after. The reportage. Actions and transactions. The writers themselves… they were pitifully out of context. So self-assured, so assuming, so completely wrong. Unable – any of them – to imagine what might be coming. The home magazines offered a more tactile distraction. I carefully clipped out wives and husbands gazing at their lounges/gardens/homes. I stuck them to the side wall of my study in an oily collage – my own little monument to the great dream of family. A final nod towards the ridiculous idea of design, to the vanity of balance and style. When I ran out of room on the wall, I collected the cuttings in an apple box, which grew to two apple boxes and, over the years, three, then four, stacking up next to each other. It was a harmless compulsion – as I clipped, I considered creating some kind of artwork, something massive and tangible, like Javas’s pieces, something permanent, some recognition for the grandchildren of the cult of the interior. But I never did. The boxes filled, overflowed and started again. They’re still with me now. Next to me. Keeping me company. Maybe someone will find them one day and appreciate the beauty of those cashmere ladies. The wholeness of their manicured hands.

Babalwa’s second pregnancy came and went, resulting in Lydia. This time the birth was complicated. Babalwa bled heavily afterwards, and it was, Beatrice repeatedly informed us, touch and go. She cramped badly for a few weeks after Lydia arrived, prompting Andile and Beatrice to hit Joburg Gen for some morphine. Having known a few junkies in my time, I stopped them from using it.

We ran a lot in that week. Up and down with water and blankets and shit, just like in the movies. It was OK when we could run, and conversely the hardest when we just had to sit and listen to the pain. Gerald had brought cigars, and while we waited we smoked them like they were cigarettes, smacking our lungs for something to do, to give us something different to feel.

Personally, I remained narcissistic and inward. Each hug and worried brow or pat on the shoulder during Babalwa’s troubles revealed again to me how empty the core of my own life was, how devoid of similar contact. I would go back to my house depressed, flick on the light and stand there lost, choking on emptiness.

I read. I filed. I archived.

I clipped out and stuck on.

I looked out.

I waited.

I talked out loud. Long sentences, sometimes rambling, sometimes insightful, sometimes coherent.

After the panic and chaos of Lydia’s birth, Babalwa steadily increased the pressure, month on month, closing in on Andile and myself. Jabu was over two years old, as were Thabang and Roy Jnr. It was time.

I resisted.

I wanted to start with someone else – Beatrice or Babalwa would have been fine, but to start with Andile and Javas felt like treachery. Adultery, but sadder. Pathetic even. The idea of Andile having to open up to take my seed while Javas waited… I hated it. But Babalwa pushed us closer together until I visited Javas and Andile a few nights in a row for supper, a gradual wind-up to what needed to be done. We sat around the table and ate – me the uncle come to dinner. We talked of many things, but never the real thing, until the third night, when Javas finally, thankfully, broke it open. ‘Babalwa’s right you know,’ he said, right at me. ‘She’s right. We have to. We have no choice. It has to happen.’

‘That’s fine,’ I said, nausea hitting my gut. ‘It’s fine, Javas. I know it must be done, but what if it doesn’t take? I mean, I can handle the idea of having to do it, but Jesus, having to do it again and again… It makes me feel ill.’

‘Ag fok, Roy.’ Andile adopted a thick mock-Afrikaans accent while forking a broccoli head very practically into her mouth. ‘We need to get over it. We have to – all of us – and if that means eight times in a row, then that’s it. We’ve been through worse. You’ve been through worse. So have I. We’ll get hard about it – ’scuse the pun – and make it happen.’

And so we did.

We appointed a day and an hour and a place. The three of us met in the cottage kitchen, then split to the two main bathrooms. ‘We keep it clinical,’ Javas said. Crossing the threshold into the bathroom, which was decorated in various shades of brown and which featured a triptych of abstract black-and-white KwaZulu landscapes created by Andile, I felt like a transgressor, an invader.

I had been inside the twins’ cottage many times over the years. It was a journey into a different, parallel world. A world where tiny metal dwarfs – Javas’s creations – stood hiding within the leafy protection of well-watered pot plants. A world where not only did the colours match, but they actually seemed designed to work together. Andile picked her interior battles carefully, making sure to give each item the room it needed not only to breathe, but to dominate. My favourite was a large-scale black-and-white print of the Sandton riots, hanging in the lounge. Andile had found it about to rot in an artist’s studio in the city. It was typical of the Sandton-riot genre: hoodies, face masks, raised arms with petrol bombs, etc. But the artist – Mpho, she said his name was – had woven microscopic detail through everything. Tiny shocked faces at the stock-exchange windows. Infinitesimal pockmark dings in the parked BMWs. Full and accurate road maps, which you could actually read with a magnifying glass, in the hands of the global youth.

As many times as I had been in their domain, however, I had never had even a second of this kind of privacy. Now the bathroom took on new echoes. Suddenly Andile’s landscapes held the voice and heart of their owner. Her sound and her smell surrounded me. It was like she was there with me, watching, questioning, examining my thin little mlungu legs as I sat on the toilet seat and wrapped my fist around a limp, uninspired dick. I pulled and stretched and eventually, half-heartedly, delivered.

Then I ran – I literally sprinted the fifteen metres that separated us. (We had agreed that the cooling of the junk was the creepiest part of the whole thing. When I imagined Andile’s horror, it was always the thought of the cold, glutinous substance that creeped me out…) Quickly I passed the cup over to a waiting Javas, who disappeared behind their door.

I hung around for five minutes, and they emerged, hand in hand, Javas leading, smiling. Andile pulling her cheeks backward.

‘Ugh,’ she said, then detached herself from Javas and gave me a long, warm hug, eventually holding me at arm’s length, by the shoulders. ‘We did well, Roy, we did well.’

‘It just better fucking take, eh?’ I ruffled her hair, then thumped Javas on his muscled shoulder. ‘The donor life… eish.’

Andile flipped into a handstand against the passage wall, allowing her skirt to fall over her head and flashing her white panties and well-formed legs. I blushed and looked away.

‘My gogo always said you must,’ she explained in a barely discernible, skirt-covered muffle.

^{CHAPTER 43} We carried on

We lost Jabu at the next winter slaughter. I say that like she went wandering through the forest and we couldn’t find her, but really we killed her. Gerald and I killed her. It’s as simple and brutal as that.

I had jerked into the cup for four months running. Andile and Javas had been steadfast and magnanimous in their reception of my spunk. Eventually, in month five, it took and we had another one on the go. We kept it mostly to our ourselves. The others knew we were engaged with it, this strangely intimate process, but sensed we were best left treating it in our own way. Babalwa would raise the occasional query, and we’d report back dutifully, but it never became a subject of public discussion. We had, by silent agreement, sanctified the thing, which was really the only way to go about it. Baby creation is rooted in love or lust, the basic human connections. Take these away and you have something too strange to grasp, and too powerful to brush off.

The big slaughter had taken place annually, and incrementally more professionally, each year in July. Year on year we had improved, but in that first year our failures were many and miserable. Gerald, for all his calm instruction, slipped with the gun at the last second, shooting the cow through the side of its head once we’d looped it down to the iron floor-ring. Instead of crashing to its knees it wailed and kicked crazily at the closing darkness, nearly decapitating Javas in the process. Blood sprayed out of the angular slot in its head, and in the twenty seconds it took Gerald to compose himself and get another round off we all saw life flashing before us. There was a distinct possibility we would all go down with the cow, pulled into a death of hoofs and screams. Eventually Gerald got the bullet in the right place and the beast crashed, but we were far too long with the throat-slitting and the blood didn’t drain immediately. Our slaughter master spent the rest of the day chastising himself and warning us that our meat was going to be off. We shook the fear off gradually. (Andile clung to her cricket stump for a good time after.)

The next time it was much easier. Gerald put the bullet straight through and the cow’s eyes slammed shut. We skinned and pulled and gutted and carved. The next day we did the pig and used its entrails for sausage skins, Javas and Gerald guiding us in turn.

With operational success the slaughter became something of a celebration. A time of year to anticipate. A marker for us all. Another year gone. Another three freezers’ worth of meat. Another slash against the bedpost of our lost society. And yes, we used it all, once we had learned how to extract it. The tongue and brains, the offal and the kidneys, the heart and all the rest. Beatrice was still finding good packaged flour and she made pies. Rows and rows of pies. Steak and kidney, like granny would.

The fourth slaughter after the plane crash (this was how we had started marking time, not with a calendar but according to the happenings, the epochs of our own lives) we killed my first child. A child created not with cooling cups of semen but with love, albeit of the temporary and fractious sort.

Did I say we killed Jabulani? I mean I. I did it. I pushed the domino forward, tilted its ass over its head, and then it was too late to do anything but watch the falling.

‘Daddy,’ she piped up. ‘I watch?’

She was serious, completely intent on the wondrous butchery process.

‘Ja, Jabu,’ I said. ‘But you need to be very, very careful, nè? There are lots of sharp knives around and you could get hurt, so you need to stand here.’ I marked off a spot about five metres back of the concrete area, on the cusp of the cricket field/paddock. ‘This where you stay, yes?’ I ground the mark into the turf with my heel. ‘You stay right here and you don’t move.’

She nodded seriously. Several times. I hadn’t fully learned, yet, that children lie, just like everyone else. That they also dream of, and lust after, better things. And nod and plan accordingly.

Her eyes were big and brown, like the cow. They slammed shut in exactly the same way.

We had grown self-assured. We had slaughtered year after year and by now we all knew what we were doing, why we were doing it and how it would pan out. We were in control.

1. Jabu creeps forward, inch by tiny inch, to get a better view. She’s not freaked out by the blood and guts; she’s seeing chops and steaks and cuts.

2. Gerald jumps back to avoid some kind of spray. He’s using the wrist-strapped knife. The blade has become part of his arm. He has forgotten he is no longer all man.

3. His knife arm jerks back in anticipation of the rest of his body and the blade slices straight through Jabu’s curious neck.

4. There are no screams. Just a quiet thump. A little body falls softly to the ground.

Let me tell you now just how far we had come. Let me explain the terrible distance we had travelled away from ourselves, from everything we knew.

Let me explain what we did. We wept.

We tore our hair out.

We buried the little body.

We said a prayer to a strange, absent god.

And then we carried on.