Dub Steps

^{CHAPTER 44} I wish I had written it down at the time

I started writing this to reach out to you, whoever you are, wherever you are. I needed to extend, I needed to push further. Simply dying, which I will soon do, and letting my eyes slip shut – leaving behind only what is in this house, these libraries, these rooms and rooms of computers and devices and failed connections, leaving that as my only message to you – I refuse.

I need to talk.

I need to tell you more – of myself and my time – and so I started, word by word, to explain, to tell my story, to leave a personal interpretation behind. For you. And of course – obviously – for me.

But now, after this word and this one, and then this one, after the thousands and thousands of I’s and ands and buts, I am deeper than I expected. I am wrestling with time itself, the snake of my life, the python. I am throttled by what I have forgotten, by the mists of story, ever rolling. I duck and push the hair out of my eyes, looking for the few things I know for sure will be there. I jump, pillar to pillar, and all else is lost, shrouded and vague, opaque.

I wish I had paid more attention.

I wish I had written it down at the time, because now there are only statues and monuments, presentations and experiences. Narratives. Design.

The furrow on Gerald’s brow.

Babalwa and her babies and her breeding maps. Kiddies at the knee, charts and cross-referencing red lines and genetic mixes. Her hand on their heads, guiding.

Fats’s fro, always modest yet strong, hard. Small, even. Bouncing. Firm.

The twins. Hand in hand.

Jabu’s body, so tiny, covered in blood, her neck literally pumping the red out, her red mixing with the cows’.

Entrails and tears.

The years of us. Our farm and our people. The children, from this distance now almost all completely interchangeable faces and forms, smiling and running and growing so easily into this other thing. So unfettered by time. So shaped by our story, yet somehow so completely untouched by any of it.

^{CHAPTER 45} Getting your shit together technically

It was the dream, Babalwa told me as we grew into our age. Right back at the beginning, the dream was complete and fully formed. She knew as she woke up, as soon as she met me, that the dream would always guide her. A rock, firm and flat-topped, solid in a terrible sea.

The baby farm allowed us to move. It was the only way to pick up momentum again. I see that now.

Now, also, I view Jabu’s death as the spark. As the shove in the back we needed to get serious. Of course, that’s my way of rationalising the horror of that soft thump, the sound I will never shake. Yes, it’s my method of layering some kind of sense into the incomprehensible.

Maybe.

Regardless, it’s the line I choose to take. It works for me.

The biggest miracle of all – as is meticulously detailed in the archives[6] – is that we did it as planned. We jerked off, we poured cold semen down, again and again. The couples made sure that in a world without people, in a world begging for children, contraception was used and accidents avoided. We calculated the baseline requirement of diversity. Wherever possible, we followed the maths.

When there was no maths, we stumbled on.

‘Roy, you know I can’t explain things properly any more,’ Fats said to me sometime around the winter of ’49. ‘I used to be so sure. It used to be so easy. Simple. Now I look at you and I feel this love for you and I can’t even put it into words. You know?’

I did know. He was very drunk at the time. It came from somewhere deep inside, and it was also booze-true. It rang raw and honest. I rubbed his fro and offered something similar in return. He held my hand.

I started to draw. I took lessons from Andile, who equipped me with a few charcoals, some watercolours and a box of acrylics. I drew trees and landscapes. Fruit and such. Most of it looked worse than stuff I had done in Grade 7 art class. Gradually she showed me how to create perspective, to give trees shape and cheeks blush. How impossible watercolours are to use and how much faster rewards arrive with acrylics.

Drawing and painting quickly began to feel like a way to capture Jabulani, to hold on to her fading form before she was erased altogether. That was my initial reaction, but more followed. A desire to catch her actual death, somehow. To remove that terrible thud. To blur that single moment when she fell out of us.

My vast, expanding library was simply unable to help me cope with the death. There were hundreds – thousands – of texts on the shelves, virtual and otherwise, that addressed the subject, directly and tangentially, but they all missed the hammer blow. The direct, metaphysical impact of my own context. None could handle the electricity still buzzing on the muscles of my heart. They were all just words on a page and almost all of them spoke of the writer rather than the world being written. None of the carefully structured arguments and plots were relevant to my world of seven adults and their calculated brood.

I had built the library, the archive, in self-defence. As if by gathering around me the better, more acknowledged works of man, I could protect myself against the echoes booming up at the gates. But for the biggest, most important sound of all there was no help. No buffer at all. Art, on the other hand, offered at least a sliver of what I craved.

And so I drew.

I also widened the range of the library to include art. I started at the university art departments, where students were learning to draw. In the paused classrooms there were definite flickers of life, of true moments being captured. A line drawing of the city. A man with a bag in his hand walking fast down the street. A nude girlfriend, sprawled yet guarded.

Once I was well into my lessons, the twins accompanied me and we targeted the museums and the corporate galleries. MTN, Standard Bank, Joburg Gallery, Everard Read, Goodman et al. Arts on Main.

‘Amazing,’ Andile said as we breezed through the collected works of our age – a post-1994 retrospective at the Goethe Project Space. ‘It’s so easy. It used to be so hard and now it’s so easy.’ She took a running kick at a coat-hanger installation.

‘I think I know what you mean,’ I said, grabbing a couple of the hangers, which were of the Woolworths variety, for my closet. ‘But enlighten me…’

‘Well, Roy, that picture there’ – Andile went into mock lecture mode as she pointed out a semi-abstract Kentridge, the usual man leaning/running – ‘at least has some kind of aesthetic value. It’s a not unpleasant image of a male moving. There’s some kind of flash that feels like something to me.

‘Whereas that’ – she pointed at the collapsed pile of coat hangers – ‘is just a bunch of fucking coat hangers. We all knew it at the time – I was at the opening of this show – but no one could say it out loud. Only whispers behind the hands.’

‘That’s why I fell in love with her,’ Javas jibed from his seat on top of a half tractor tire studded with gold pins entitled Means of Production III. ‘The power of her analysis.’

‘For real though.’ Andile kicked a hanger in Javas’s direction. ‘Now it’s simple. No brokers, no hustlers, no art slags or groupies, none of the PR chickies – just pictures on the wall. I look at some of it and I want to cry, it’s so beautiful. But there is just as much that is just… just…’ She took another skipping run up and hoofed a hanger at my head.

‘Depressing?’ I asked.

‘Irrelevant?’ Javas chipped in.

‘Kak.’ Andile took the Kentridge print and frisbeed it across the length of the very white Goethe Project Space. It crashed into a long-dead video installation in a shower of glass.

‘And yet, in terms of its emotive potential, I still find art more attractive, currently, than books, which fail at a deeper level,’ I added, hurling a small, heavy blob of metal, about the size of a tennis ball and with no discernible aesthetic form, through another retro flat-screen (Sony 97-inch super plasma) installation entitled Urban Dynamics – Ocean Flows. The metal blob was called Weeping Underground. ‘All of the books, all of them, stay within the same place, the same realm. I read and read and read and I don’t find anything that even considers what actually happened to us. With art, at least, there is some kind of hit rate. Every twenty or thirty pieces you find something that screams at you, that at least gets close to the chaos of life. The books are just useless.’

‘We should go back to the student studio in town.’ Javas left his half tyre and began heading out. ‘There’ll be better stuff there. Better odds than here, anyway.’

I grabbed a few brochures for Urban Dynamics – the name of the exhibition as well as the video installation – on the way out. Andile took a small wooden sculpture of a lady balancing an absurdly large barrel on her head. ‘Reminds me of my mom,’ she said.

I drew cows’ heads and sweeping, curved knives and rivers of blood. I drew Jabu in the various stages of falling. I drew people in an abattoir clustered around a child corpse.

Jabu’s death was just the start. I needed to convey our new context. We weren’t just people who had killed their child. We were the only people, and we’d killed one of our only children. The work had to be unique. It could not be the same as anything that had gone before it. There was a gulf that had to be bridged, and I was lost as to how to do it.

But it needed to be done.

I moved through sheet after sheet of Fabriano. Andile told me to keep the rejects, so I piled them up, a huge stack of childlike failures. Stick figures without perspective. Cows’ heads and badly composed chainsaws and barrels in watercolour and charcoal and acrylic.

About thirty or forty attempts in, I switched subjects and began beating out an equally ill-composed series of us on the farm. Beatrice leading the cows. Fats on the ladder fiddling with another panel, screwdriver in his mouth. All of us in the abattoir, clustered in panic around a single cow head.

This series felt better. It had the ring of settler art to it. Strangers lost in a strange land. I began exaggerating the poses. Myself running up Munro Drive, but a steeper road, the kind that leads to God, the path thin and getting thinner, almost unimaginable as it faded through the growth and the trees. This was my first success. I enhanced the yellow of the Nikes to the kind of biblical hue able to compete with the surrounding jungle. My legs were super-hard, thighs bulging with effort, my face strained and taut with ascension, my eyes fixed on the pinprick of light breaking through the forest at the top. It was epic. Godly. The hyperbole worked.

Next, Babalwa. I fattened her up, added folds to her thighs and sat her on a kind of rocking chair with a quilt over her knees, a nursing baby in her crooked arms, and ten or eleven brats in various stages of development at her feet. Behind them, to the right, the complex, our complex, the endless horizon with just a hint of the Northgate Dome on the left. I added ten, twenty years to her face. A middle-aged woman surround by her brood. Her swarming brood. Some of them staring absently, some fiddling with toys, and a few at arm’s length, fighting over something. Babalwa the breeder.

Gerald alone. No backdrop. Nothing. Just standing there in a stained butcher’s coat with that curved knife strapped to his wrist, dangling limp, a smudge of congealed blood brown on the tip. His eyes vacant.

And on I went, my lines growing more and more biblical with each picture, my exaggerations extending, seeking out the nuggets in all of us and distorting them, twisting them up and out and into the open.

‘You got something going here, eh Roy?’ Andile clucked, poring over the pictures. She giggled initially and then was silent. ‘I mean… ja.’ She paused at the one of her and Javas, hand in hand, walking into the sunset, an ambiguous Moses-type basket dangling lightly in Javas’s free hand. ‘You’re getting your shit together technically. Bodies and legs and all.’ She leafed through to Fats straining on his ladder, muscles bulging, arm reaching in vain for an elusive socket. ‘I don’t like them, but I’m not going to stop you.’ She pushed tears away with her palm – a strange, unproductive gesture, as if by using the part of her hand with the least utility she could reverse, or at least deny, the flow. ‘A lot of them are repulsive, in fact, Roy. You must carry on. And I must go.’ She walked away, pushing again with the palm.

Painting became my nightly ritual, the thing I now did to replace reading, which I had consigned to a necessary pre-sleep technicality. I let myself follow the perverse path I had started. Andile’s tears had been disturbing, but also inspiring. I was, I believed, accessing the bubbling anxiety that ran common through us.

I was making art.

We were now shut off. Initially, in those first few months in Houghton, I had felt the vegetation acutely. Our isolation was made all the worse by the unmown lawns, by the obvious disappearance of order and straight lines. But slowly the plants receded from my consciousness, and only occasionally would that initial sense of invasion and claustrophobia recur.

Our personal feelings were incidental, however, to the green forces inching over roads and fences, chipping away at the chasm. We noticed it – the growth – again in the months after Jabu’s death, when it suddenly seemed to become much harder to move outside our regular zones. And even those – the paths and roads we used the most – had begun to require steady, intensive maintenance.

Gerald was at the forefront of the hack-it-back campaign. His ambition in this regard was, I believed, a way for him to expunge or rechannel his anger at Jabu’s death. He would load the chainsaw and the axes into his bakkie, his jaw set and his mind fully on the battle. He never asked for a partner, but if any of us offered he would hand out a tool and wordlessly pull the volunteer into the fight.

Eventually we had to structure the process. Once a month, during summer, we would all throw ourselves into a week-long maintenance mission. First, hack back the trees and vines trying to swallow Munro Drive. Second, clear the perimeter areas – Fats’s gates and the outer border. Third, make sure we had access to the major arteries in and out of the city. North and south were easy – nominal effort was required to access the M1 highway. Lastly, keep Louis Botha and Empire avenues clear. Not because the routes were necessary to us as such, but because it was philosophically impossible to concede to living in a jungle with only one road to the highway.

Regardless, Gaia shrugged off our fight. We were slowly becoming a one-road town.

We had too much invested in our set-up to try to move, although the idea of transferring out to flatter farm areas was increasingly mooted. The girls were sick of the creeping forest, and Javas and Gerald leaned in favour of relocation. I fought it, as did Fats. I couldn’t accept the idea of having to retreat from Jozi. It felt like the defeat that would crown them all. If we left we would never be able to come back. The forest would close its arms and that would be that. Joburg would be a mythical memory, a place of the past, of adventure stories for children, of warnings not to get lost.

Still, the summer monsoons kept coming, the forest grew and we were all carrying machetes and a chainsaw in our vehicles whenever we went anywhere.

Which wasn’t that often.

‘You still think of your people?’ Gerald asked me, apropos of nothing, as we headed to the bottom of St John’s for creeper maintenance. ‘I think of mine all the time,’ he went on. ‘All the time. My wife. My kids. My mother. My family. I never thought of them that much when they were here, and not even so often just after they were gone, in the beginning, but now I can’t stop. I want to know where they are. Where they went. Is it like that for you?’ His right elbow rested on the bakkie’s window pane, jutting slightly out into the passing breeze. He was driving so slowly we were almost stationary.

‘I didn’t really have that many people, to be honest,’ I admitted. ‘Bitch of an ex-wife. Dead father. Mother I never really knew, so no real extended family…’

Gerald was frustrated. ‘So now? What’s it like for you? I’m feeling like the deeper we go, the more babies and the better we get at the farming, the worse it is for me personally. I want to go back to how it was. I feel so alone, I think about just ending it.’

‘I’ve thought that too,’ I said. And I had. Many times. Yet it was always an abstract kind of thought, more philosophical than anything else. Gerald, on the other hand, was not exuding a philosophical vibe. He was all nuts and dangerously practical bolts.

‘And? What stops you?’ he asked.

‘Dunno. Guess I just can’t override that human thing. Survival. The need to keep on.’

‘I tell you, Roy, I tell you…’ Gerald stopped the bakkie. ‘It’s becoming real for me. The question. That question. I mean, they must have gone somewhere. It’s not like they died, they just disappeared. Which means that there must be something else besides this, besides what we know now. And then I think, well, why not just end it? I’d probably end up in some other world, living in some other way. Maybe I’d end up with them, wherever they are, and worst case is I just die, and would that be so bad, compared to this?’

‘What about Beatrice?’ I had to ask.

‘Beatrice is fine. She’s a good woman. I have no problems with Beatrice. But I live with her because I must.’

There were several levels to our conversation. Around this time, Gerald would surely have been noticing that Beatrice had begun paying me the odd visit, again.

We were breeding according to Babalwa’s master plan, using the established cup method for all combinations save for existing couples. But my experience with Gerald and Beatrice was fundamentally different from that with Fats and Babalwa, and the twins. Gerald refused to participate – he left it up to us, and thus, thanks to our sexual history, the masturbation and insemination took on distinctly erotic overtones. As it turned out, the middleman was essential if the exercise was going to be emotionally neutralised. With Gerald refusing to play his position, Beatrice and I developed our own unique and not unpleasant variation. Her fingers brushing mine as she took the cup. Me waiting, lingering, in fact, to make sure she had no issues in transfer. A soft, warm peck on the cheek that lasted too long. The smell of her lips.

And so, inevitably I suppose, we replaced the formal insemination sessions with a visit here, a pop-in there. She would always arrive in a sarong wrap, one of several floral patterned numbers she had grown into over the years, maybe for morning coffee, or for an early evening nightcap. I suspected she made sure Gerald was somewhere off the property at the time, or at least otherwise engaged, but I also never asked. To be honest, I never really said much at all. She would sit across from me in the lounge of my library house, or on the porch if it was evening and dark enough, and we would exchange idle, meaningless chat while ever so slowly, in tiny increments, she would pull the wrap up and let her fingers dangle and drift over her thighs while we talked. We would sway like that until the subtext took complete control and I rose, or she rose, and we fell on each other in a violent yet soft, crazy yet logical, union.

I would like to say it was a temporary thing, brought on by the insemination. A casual mistake. A regretful yet pleasant series of accidents. But it wasn’t. It was our thing, and once we had started we carried on – intermittently and with all the breaks and spaces that rise and fall naturally with life – for decades. Only once did she reveal anything at all about the nature of her relationship with Gerald.

‘Gerald,’ she announced out of the blue in one of our post-coital hazes, her head balanced on my chest, ‘has wet dreams. He always has. I used to get jealous of them, the dreams, but he says our sex life is so messed up and infrequent that they’re generally about me. The dreams. He says he likes it that way – he gets to fuck me more, in more adventurous ways, than in the real world. I’m not sure I believe him. But it’s a good story.’

I pushed my hand through her hair.

It was a good story.

Gerald turned to face the wheel, stared out the window, watched the rain clouds build all purple and pregnant in the west.

‘You grew up here, nè?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘You ever remember the rain coming from the south? People used to talk about that often. How it always came from the south. You remember the south rain?’

‘My father grew up with it. He would talk about it,’ I said. ‘I guess I just caught the edge of the old, so I never noticed the change that much. It still comes from the south sometimes. Classic old thunderstorm. Roll in, roll out.’

‘Since I got here, to Jozi, it’s from the west,’ Gerald said, talking mostly to himself. ‘You build an idea in your mind how things are. What the limits are. You think one thing. That we’ll get between this much and that much rain. Or, like, the earth is full of people. Then bang. Gone. Your wife. Your children. Your parents. Gone. Rain patterns. Gone.’ He shook his head, started the bakkie and edged it forward.

‘We need you, Gerald. You know that, eh?’ I couldn’t leave the suicide dangling. And it was true. We couldn’t afford more losses, of any sort.

He snorted. ‘What, in case you need to kill any more small girls?’

‘Accidents. They happen. ’Specially in our kind of set-up.’

‘You didn’t feel the blade go in. I’ll never be able to forget it. The feeling. It’s impossible.’ He stopped the bakkie again, two perfectly formed droplets racing in parallel down to his beard. ‘It’s everywhere with me. That feeling. The slicing. I can’t get rid of it. I can’t sleep.’

‘You talked to anyone about it? Beatrice?’

‘We do jigsaw puzzles. We clean and wash and sometimes have sex. We boil eggs.’

‘Jesus, Gerald.’ I gripped his shoulder. It was the only thing I could think of doing. I shook, trying to get him to look at me. ‘Gerald, fuck, you can’t just keep this all inside. We’re in it now, all of us. Jabu was all of our mistake. It wasn’t you. It was me. It was Fats. It was all of us. You must know that.’

He snorted the snot back up his nose, then took a second to look at me, his lower lip trembling.

I thought suddenly of Beatrice and her thighs, opening for me silently, her fingers calling, an impossibly weighty force.

‘Thanks, Roy,’ he said. ‘Thank you. I needed to hear that.’

‘You gonna need to hear it again, broe. You gonna need to hear it again.’

^{CHAPTER 46} Indecipherable intellectual potential

By the time Lydia was born Fats had grown round. He wasn’t fat – none of us were – but his body embraced the shape of middle age, thickening around the gut, the upper arms, the chest.

His roundness wasn’t just physical. He had also lost (let go of?) many of his edges. He was slower to shout, slower to command and, frankly, slower to care.

After years of rockiness and back-and-forthing, he and Babalwa had settled into a true man–wife thing. From the outside, their relationship appeared to be nearly as solid as the twins’. It was odd to observe, and to participate in, tangentially at least. In the main I was happy for both of them, and of course a little jealous, and a little paranoid, now that Gerald, myself and Beatrice were even more starkly shadowed by the reflected light of the two couples. (My semi-regular trysts with Beatrice were unnerving and guilt-inducing. I wondered frequently what the extent of her sex drive was: whether she was doubling up with me, or whether her cohabitation with Gerald was really just a matter of provisions and practicalities, jigsaw puzzles and boiled eggs.)

As the kids grew, Fats started organising them into units to be applied to various tasks, including my archiving project. Every now and then he would deliver a little army to me, a cluster of five or six children running in surprisingly orderly circles around his feet.

‘Right, boss, what’s it today? Wits? RAU? Oppenheimer library?’ I would pick the location and we would head off in two or three bakkies, depending on how many adults were along for the ride. Once or twice the entire farm set out – for some reason the Wits library trip sticks in my mind. (Why do we remember this, and not that? I can’t say. Maybe it was the light, the mood or the smell. We made many trips, but when I think of that time, the memory is of the horde of us crashing through the Wits library.) I had final editorial call on what was picked and what was left behind. The adults would build piles of what they thought was relevant, and the kids would tear up and down the floors, academic confetti fluttering around their every step, and pop up randomly to present their wild selections. I would filter with authority. Keepers into boxes on the left, junk in a pile on the right. Undecided in the middle.

I favoured, after quite a bit of consultation with the adults, the scientific and mathematical over narratives. It wasn’t my natural inclination, but ultimately it seemed to be the right thing to do. Our kids and their kids were going to need to build up technical knowledge. And that meant maths and science.

JM Coetzee and Es’kia Mphahlele could offer, ultimately, only voices.

Still, we allowed ourselves indulgences. I enjoyed tossing Coetzee – nemesis of my tertiary days – onto the junk pile. Conversely, I made sure that PG Wodehouse and Lesego Rampolokeng were completely collected, as well as a full ten-year set of the Daily Sun. Fats stacked every issue of Fast Company he could find onto his own personal pile, fondly examining covers he remembered from the old days, clucking while he leafed back and forth.

They were fun, our outings. They were also a way to slowly introduce the kids to the idea of our past as a binary opposite of the present. Through the archive we could present the idea of loss. Knowledge loss. History loss. The loss of culture. The loss of family. Loss as the theme of their lives.

My house was overflowing. We needed a new, permanent venue for the library. It made logistical sense to use the KES schoolrooms as the hub for the collection, and so we began at the school library and computer centre and reached out classroom by classroom, altering each as we occupied it with either books or electronic storage sets. We shelved each wall with six rows of pine for the book rooms, and added a central shelving column down the middle. I did my best to structure the stacking of the shelves as the books were carted in from their various sources, but really all I managed was to roughly separate categories. Science and maths on the main building’s first floor, arts and history on the second. It was going to take a lifetime – my lifetime, in all probability – to actually sort and index the titles, so to start with I allowed myself simply to achieve effective storage.

The computers and devices were more difficult. We knew where they had come from, but not what they contained. We debated for a good while the feasibility of plugging them in and examining their contents before storing them, but it would have taken too long. So we labelled the boxes and stored them like they were books. The idea was that sufficiently detailed labels would provide a simple filter through which to assess and deal with the contents. The labels included three categories:

Estimated intellectual worth, or EIW (pronounced ‘Eeeyu’ by the kids, as if describing a bad smell or taste), became the standard we applied to any particular thing to define its provisional intellectual potential. As the children grew older, they placed a lot of emphasis on big Eeeyu finds, motivated in no small measure by their parents.

‘Roy Roy Roy!’ Sthembiso, age seven, hurtled into the dining room. ‘Eeeyu ten, Eeeyu ten. I’ve got a Eeeyu ten!’ He was clutching a black spiral-bound notebook filled with what looked like mathematical schematics, stumbled upon during one of the increasingly frequent child-led excursions into the mansions of Munro Drive. Babalwa gently took the notebook from an excited dirty paw and flipped through it.

‘Well, it looks like a big Eeeyu, doesn’t it?’ She pulled the boy onto her lap and opened the notebook with the ends of her enveloping arms. ‘But our problem is the same as always, nè? We don’t really understand what any of the drawings mean. So I would say maybe it’s not a ten. Maybe it’s a seven?’

‘Not eight?’

‘You’ll have to ask Roy about that, but I would say a seven myself.’

Sthembiso handed me the book, dejected. I was notorious for my low Eeeyu scores. I considered the book quickly as I killed off my scrambled eggs. The schematics and drawings did look to be genuinely mathematical, as opposed to the far more common corporate spider diagrams the kids were often fooled by. The notebook was dirty and clearly well used. The pages had thumb marks on the lower right corner, indicating regular and repeated action. I pictured a generic mad scientist stuck away in the attic of his Houghton house, cooking up an equation he hoped would shake the world. Whoever the person was, he or she was dealing in subjects beyond my realm. Beyond any of our realms, really. I tossed it over to Fats without hope – his maths was some distance off mine, and that was saying something.

‘I think, Sthembiso, that you might actually have an eight on your hands, based on the WTF rule. Fats?’ I was half serious and half humouring the boy, now squirming profoundly in Babalwa’s lap at the thought of an eight, which would have constituted a rare victory.

Fats considered the notebook blankly. ‘Passes the WTF test on my side, but you knew that already.’ He flipped it over to Gerald, then Beatrice. Javas declined humbly – although superb with the construction of actual things, he held no mathematical pretensions.

We agreed it passed the WTF test – a simple mechanism to separate out material with indecipherable intellectual potential – and thus added an extra point.

‘Looks like a lucky day for Sthembiso!’ I handed the book back. ‘You know what to do, eh? Into the WTF filter for final review before you can claim the eight. Yes?’ He ripped the notebook from my hand. ‘And you need Andile to sign off before you can claim it.’

‘Yes yes yes,’ Sthembiso rattled back at me. ‘I know where she is. I just saw her. I’ll get her now.’

‘OK, go then.’ I tried to ruffle his hair, but my fingers hit fresh air.

Sthembiso, product of Javas and Babalwa, was my favourite. One isn’t supposed to have favourites, but now that I am knocking on the exit gate I can brush past delusions of objectivity. Sthembiso was my favourite – by some distance.

He was an intense little boy, packed with that special sort of life energy that never truly dissipates. He ran everywhere in high-powered circles, was constantly in an advanced state of filthiness and was by far the biggest reader of the bunch. There was no incongruity in his activity levels and his passion for reading. He read as he did everything else, as if the vitally important was at stake, his fingers always jammed into his mouth, his teeth snapping away on his nails, which he chewed and swallowed like food.

His reading was fired by his imagination, which was immense, and which frequently lured him to the classic adventure stories, generally of the British variety. From around the time of his discovery of the little black notebook, his focus morphed to encompass the larger adventure of the world around him. The story of our little group gripped him in a profound way, and once he had wrapped his mind around the notion of a prior world, a prior existence with tools and people and buildings and machinery and businesses, he was unstoppable. He plugged himself into computers with gusto, powered with a manic intensity that could only have come from a righteous genetic combination.

Lebogang, Katlego and Lerato – who all shared Gerald as a father – were, in their early years at least, very different. They were all a similar age, a year or two back from Sthembiso, and they shared a marked disinclination for matters of the extreme imagination. While Sthem was racing up the mountains of his mind, the three of them preferred a more placid and tactile approach. In the sandpit they let the sand dribble through their fingers and actually felt it, grain by grain, moving through. They played softer games, and it would take them several years longer than Sthembiso to fully grasp the nature of the world they had been born into.

As collective parents acting individually, we all tried to influence the mix. For me, that meant archiving. I took whatever opportunities were available to let the kids experience the full extent of the knowledge challenge that lay ahead. In other words, I ratcheted up the Eeeyu rivalry.

Over the years of their births and early childhoods we covered many of Joburg’s major knowledge sites. All the universities, most of the Model C schools, all the notable art galleries. Then I pushed further. We cleared out the Sasol research department, all four floors of it, everything in the Innovation Hub complex north of Tshwane, and a lot of machines from the science and maths blocks of Wits, the Tshwane University of Technology and all the others. Of course, almost all of the plastic – the computers and pads and mobiles, etc. – was junk. Without the cloud, all that plastic was now simply boxes.

The futility of collecting the boxes was obvious to us all, and yet we carried on. Partially, I suppose, to create a sense of intellectual hope and purpose, and partially because it was fun for the kids. To hold them back on the great Eeeyu hunt seemed unfair.

Looking back, the most notable Eeeyu mission – and certainly the best documented[7] – was to the president’s office in the Union Buildings. The buildings were everything one would expect, but President Mbangi’s office was a shock – pristine and completely empty. Just an oak desk facing two large chairs. A Kentridge print on one wall, a batik wall hanging on the other, and in between the usual framed photographs – Mandela, Mbeki, Merkel, Jonathon, Zuma, Clinton, Obama.

‘Why is it empty like this?’ Roy Jnr asked.

‘They worked mostly from Cape Town,’ Beatrice answered smoothly. ‘I think this office was just for meetings and things. A place to be when there was business in Tshwane. I’m sure he kept all his stuff in his Cape Town office.’ The kids were dubious. Fats chuckled in disbelief. As much as we tried to prevent it, the emptiness of the office quickly became legend. The kids would talk forever more about things being as empty as Mbangi.

For years, though, through all of our excursions, I avoided the CSIR. It reminded me too much of Tebza and Lillian. Driving past and seeing the side fence ripped up from where we had cut through all those years ago sent rumblings through my chest.

But eventually the time came. The complex loomed in the distance, an emotional black hole for us all. I gathered a posse of children and headed out to the place where we had allowed ourselves to dream our foolish, ambitious dreams.

The CSIR was an unrecognisable jungle, the incipient growth of our initial experience a long-lost memory. Every movement required calculated physical effort, and the first visit was nothing more than a mission designed to frustrate and annoy a pack of small children. I drove us back home amid snot-laden moans and irritations, Sthembiso leading the choir in intensity and volume. There are few things more frustrating to children than an adult who refuses to enter a jungle.

Javas and I returned the next day, equipped with machetes and chainsaws. I had made a complicated deal with Sthembiso that we would not do any exploring as such. According to the terms of the arrangement, we would restrict our activities to those of an adult, jungle-clearing nature. No exploring would be permitted until such time as children could participate in the Eeeyu potentialities. Sthembiso waved us out of the Houghton driveway with an intense, man-to-man look on his face.

As it turned out, he needn’t have worried. It took us three return trips to create reasonable vehicle access. On day two we roped Gerald in, and only then did we make meaningful headway, each of us shirtless and sweating as we hacked away at the enveloping forces.

‘Makes you think,’ Gerald panted as he powered down his chainsaw. ‘All over the world this has happened. Trees and snow and sand—’

‘Makes you think what?’ Javas asked.

‘That soon we’ll never be able to go anywhere again without this.’ He lifted the chainsaw a few inches from the ground and dropped it again.

We cleared enough to allow our vehicles in. We went a few steps further in some places, clearing the bush around seating areas in what used to be the park, as well as around the nanotech building, Tebza’s place. I told them his full hack story while we were working. It created a fair buzz. Javas was shocked I had kept it to myself for so long. Gerald was stunned that such things existed at all.

‘You mean he was doing all that, the running into things, because he thought they could be fake?’ Gerald asked. ‘Computer corners?’

‘I guess it makes more sense if you’ve actually experienced it. Once you’ve been inside an interface for a while you can understand better. In my old Mlungu’s days, corners crumbled when you even looked. It was a big issue – holding it together.’

‘So you actually drank Tebza’s piss?’ Javas beamed at me, his biceps rippling, waiting to start up the chainsaw.

‘I did.’

‘Wonderful. You’re full of surprises, Roy.’ He ripped the cord and laughed as he attacked the trees.

Archiving often seemed futile. It was especially troubling when we were forced into heavy manual labour. I found myself begging for forgiveness at the CSIR. Javas and Gerald shut me down. ‘You’re like a teenage girl vrying and pleading no all at the same time,’ said Javas.

Gerald was more direct. ‘If we don’t do this, these children we have created will be running around in skins, grunting like baboons.’

Placated, I allowed myself to fall back into the dreamscape. The clearing away, the discovery and the archiving had become a kind of suspended fantasy, a ritualised physical experience that could be followed and repeated infinitely. A way to slow my brain down and keep my body moving.

I dumped my kit at the bakkie when we were finally done and headed for the nanotech building, seeking to retrace Tebza’s original steps.

‘I think you need to go back for Sthembiso,’ Javas said. He was amused by my eagerness. ‘He’ll never forgive you if you go in without him.’

Sthembiso was ready and waiting, fourth day in a row. With him were Lydia, English, Roy Jnr and Thabang. They were playing some kind of bastardised version of hopscotch at the bottom of the driveway, which Sthembiso killed as I drove in, scuffing through the chalk with his bare heel while English was in mid-jump. She launched the beginnings of a tantrum, which he diffused with an easy arm around her shoulder and a word in her little ear.

Lydia and Thabang and Roy Jnr fell into the back of the bakkie, Sthembiso and English took the prime spots up front, with me – a front seat obviously the prize with which Sthembiso had quelled English’s tears.

‘So, my dear.’ I took her four-year-old hand in mine. ‘Are you feeling all Eeeyuie?’ I stretched the word and pulled a face at the end, by which time all of us were grimacing and squealing. She squeezed my index finger, wrapping her whole hand around it tightly, and beamed up at me silently.

‘The CSIR,’ Sthembiso stated authoritatively. ‘It doesn’t get much better than that, eh Roy?’

‘Well, you never know. Eeeyus hang out in some very strange places. You can never really tell, can you?’

‘But it’s true, isn’t it?’ he insisted. ‘The CSIR is where they did all the science. The big things.’

‘Well, it’s one of the places. But the problem is the computers, nè? Much harder to find an Eeeyu in a computer than in a book. And the CSIR people used a lot of computers. In fact, they used computers way more than books. So there’s a chance you could be disappointed – we might only get back with a bakkie full of plastic.’

‘Some of the plastic might be tens.’

‘Yes, it might. You never know.’

English clutched her torn, dog-eared copy of Animal Farm under her elbow. It was an illustrated paperback version. The cover line drawings of Snowball and Napoleon had caught her attention before she was even three years old, reinforcing her already deep fascination with the idea of a pig. The book was always with her, even in her adult years. She thumbed it and pawed it and read it repeatedly, all through her life, although never, it seemed to me, in the literal or political sense, but rather as a general evocation of porcine power and import.

She gripped my finger tighter with her spare hand and beamed harder. Her smile was a lighthouse in the night. In fact, as she grew older the grin often replaced language altogether. For reasons well beyond her control or ken, it was as if she lived only to deny what we had bestowed on her.

Most of the kids’ names had our explicit ambitions and hopes threaded through them. Lerato was named after we were all involved in a protracted debate about the meaning of love. Elizabeth and English – both my kids – were named in direct, ironic reference to the now significantly reduced power of my British ancestry. We spent many consecutive nights drinking (well, pouring drinks, in my case) and discussing the extreme power of being British.

‘Genetically, you are plugged straight into money and power,’ said Beatrice. ‘They flow through your blood. The need to organise and have systems. To generate money. To pack it away in assets for your spawn. You can’t teach that stuff.’ She gripped Gerald’s knee as she spoke, her hand sliding up his thigh and then back down again, but the twinkle in her eye was mostly for me, I was sure.

‘True,’ Gerald added. ‘Actually true. We are born in place. If you measure by money and houses, then you want to be British. If you’re born Pedi, all you get is non-stop relatives and you can’t make eye contact with mlungus.’

‘The English language. Greatest skill you could ever have in sub-Saharan Africa,’ Javas said, tipping a bottle of home-made beer in our direction. ‘The rest you can fake, but not the English. I was going to call my firstborn that. English.’

‘Get the fuck outta here,’ I said.

‘For real. English. A complete statement of power.’

‘I like it,’ said Fats, nudging Babalwa with his elbow. ‘Eh, babe? English. That’s a power name.’

Babalwa wriggled defensively. ‘Hai. You can’t call someone English.’

‘Course you can. I knew a girl called Pain.’

Andile also warmed to the idea. ‘The child would be all power,’ she said. ‘But if we do it, we need to call one of the others French.’

The idea stayed with me, with us, and when Andile and I produced our second we decided, by mutual agreement, to call her English.

And, of course, she turned out to be completely self-contained, inwardly focused and pathologically silent. English spoke only when speech was functionally required. Words were irrelevant to her. Not that the child was mute or anything. When it mattered, her tongue was perfectly at home in her mouth. When we were parking in front of the nanotech building, for example, she gave Sthembiso a calculated lecture.

‘You must be happy, Sthembiso,’ she said, with reference to the newly cleared CSIR complex. ‘They made it into a playground just for you.’

‘Not just for him, English,’ I said as I led her by the finger to the front door of the nanotech building. We were following Sthembiso, who was already clambering through the hole in the fence Tebza had smashed years ago. ‘It’s for us too. This has always been one of my favourite places.’

‘Why, Roy?’

‘It reminds me of Uncle Tebza, whom you never met, but who was a wonderful, kind man who made my life a lot better when everyone disappeared.’

‘Were there lots of people?’

‘More than you can imagine, my dear.’ I allowed myself to get a little wistful. I stopped us at the door, knelt on one knee and pulled my daughter onto the other. I held her tight. ‘All these buildings were filled with people, marching up and down with their papers and their printouts, walking to their computers—’

‘To their Eeeyus!’ She beamed up at me.

‘Exactly. To their Eeeyus. And outside the gate the roads were filled with cars, people in their cars going places—’

‘Where?’

‘To their homes and families. To their work. To go shopping, that sort of thing.’

‘What’s shopping?’

‘Eish.’ The question was almost unanswerable. ‘There was this thing called money that was very, very important.’ Her eyes drilled into me, completely focused. ‘People used to swap it for things. So, if you had some money, you would give it to me and then I would give you a pair of shoes.’ She kept staring, and frowned. ‘And then I would use the money to give to someone else when I needed something, like food.’

English wriggled free, suddenly bored. ‘Inside!’ She pointed in Sthembiso’s direction. ‘Let’s go!’

I obeyed, allowing her to scramble through the jagged hole after Lydia and Thabang while I used the door, remembering in the midst of many retrospective flashes how we had broken open the lock. English ran after the others into the darkness of the corridor. I let them go, then panicked and ran after, just in case.

The buildings were exactly as we had left them. I could see the remnants of our activities scattered through the building; the chaos Tebza had caused as he ripped up the labs looking for a virtual explanation, or at least a nano sieve. Science equipment on the floor. Drawers pulled out, hanging awkwardly still, waiting.

Once I had adjusted to the darkness of the building, I let the kids go free to try to find Sthembiso, whom I could only catch flashes of as he hurtled between meeting rooms, laboratories and offices. English tried hard to catch him initially, but was unable to hold the pace and settled instead into her own exploratory rhythm. Roy Jnr disappeared, and Lydia and Thabang drifted through holding hands, unsure now why they were in this place and what the point was supposed to be. English’s attention was caught not by the Eeeyus, but by the photographs on the desks. Every now and again she would trot back to me clasping a framed family shot. Her attention was caught specifically by families featuring two or more young girls. ‘Look, Roy,’ she said, handing me a cheap fake-wood Clicks frame outlining a family of three girls and mom and dad, all unfortunately brushed with freckles and a disconcerting lack of facial proportion.

‘Are they ugly?’ she asked.

‘There used to be all sorts of people, angel,’ I tried to explain. ‘There were people who were good to look at and then there were others who weren’t as fortunate.’

‘Not fair.’ She turned the frame over a few times while absorbing the implications of randomly assigned ugly genes.

As we began formalising school for the kids – each of us adults doing our best to cover not only subjects we knew a little about, but also those that were totally alien to us, like maths and science – we repeatedly ran up against the deeper challenge of context. Every tiny step we took towards formal numeracy and literacy had to be wrapped in a massive balloon of context – facts about the world that were innate to us adults and completely alien to the kids. Ugliness. War. Sport. Crowds. Television. Strangers. Grandparents.

The list was an endlessly unravelling ball of string. Eventually contextual frustration led us to try to formalise a central narrative that could be referred to by all. We destroyed the walls between a string of nine ground-floor St John’s classrooms and started painting the story of man from beginning to end – with the story of us adult individuals, each of the parents, foregrounded for ease of telling. In some ways our treatment was like the Afrikaner marble relief at the Voortrekker Monument, but with a more clearly demonstrable commitment to fact. Or at least that’s what we told ourselves.

We, the parents and adults, took up the positions of the dramatic, guarding generals. Babalwa was the metaphorical pioneer vrou with the kids protected under her iron skirts.

‘We gonna fuck these kids up proper,’ said Andile as we painted the first blocks of the story into place.

She was right. As good as our ground-floor narrative was, it could never cope with the subtlety of real life – with the raw inquisitiveness of a five-year-old yet to encounter true ugliness.

‘The world was never fair, angel. It is never fair.’ I ruffled English’s head as I settled into a generic, cover-all parental explanation.

‘Why?’

‘That is one of the great mysteries of being human,’ I said, falling even further back, inches away from ‘Only God can tell us that’. She shrugged and returned the photograph to its desk.

Meanwhile, Sthembiso had wound himself into a considerable state, my warnings over how elusive the Eeeyus might prove to be long forgotten. ‘There’s nothing!’ he spat at me after two hours of full-throttle exertion. ‘Nothing! Just PCs!’

‘Well, in these types of places we might need to look a little bit differently,’ I told him. ‘You’re not going to find a lot of books here, as I said. But have you looked properly at all the files and folders?’ He shrugged, angry and sulking. Files and folders were not the stuff he was used to.

I tried again. ‘OK, how about we come back tomorrow – it’s a Sunday after all – and I’ll look with you. I bet we find at least two eights.’

Sthembiso eyed me suspiciously. The heels of his little feet pushed angrily against each other. ‘And if we don’t?’

‘Well…’ I stalled, unable to think of a reasonable safeguard able to protect us both.

‘Then pancakes, three weekends in a row,’ he said, jumping slyly into a new negotiation. I conceded warily, worrying what kind of precedent I was setting. I was pretty sure we’d find something of worth if the two of us looked together, however. And besides, I told myself, it was starting to feel like time the kids learned to cook properly, not just wash and pack. Pancakes could be a reasonable introduction, regardless of who won or lost.

I sent Sthembiso off to find English and Roy Jnr. Thabang and Lydia were already hanging off my legs and whining. We had only been in the complex a few hours, but it had been a long, emotional stretch. Memories of Tebza mingled with the smell of rot. I felt despondent.

The kids piled into the bakkie arguing about whether ugliness could be applied via a punch, Sthembiso holding his fist threateningly above Lydia’s shoulder. The argument turned nasty, and inevitably tracked from the idea of ugliness to the pigs, as all of the kids’ conflicts seemed to at this stage.

We had set up a complicated set of rules concerning our interactions with the pigs, who were growing their very own community on the outskirts of ours. We kept a healthy distance most of the time, and it was easy enough to impress on the kids the need to stay away from the adults. At three-hundred-plus kilos and with long, sinister snouts and rough boar hair, they were hardly enticing to small children. Piglets, however, were another story. Whenever the piglets emerged they sparked an extended series of debates and discussions around the pig rules. English was the cause of most the anxiety – she fell head over heels for the babies and was caught on more than one occasion sneaking a wet little snout into the house to hide under her bed. Fats was hell-bent on creating the ‘climate of fear’ necessary to keep the pigs and kids apart, and issued a steady stream of anti-pig propaganda: little titbits about how free pigs were as mean as they were smart, and so on. Sthembiso responded to the hype, and did his best to keep the pig border patrolled at all times. English, on the other hand, saw Fats’s talk for exactly what it was, and eventually named her favourite of the new litter Snowball, Orwell’s dirty paperback – stripped of all irony – the inspiration. Sthembiso had got wind of the naming and was threatening legal action – and, of course, communicating the severity of it all with his ever-hovering fist.

I should have stopped him but I didn’t have the energy, and then, as we exited the main gate, my attention was taken with what I could have sworn was a black, sandalled foot pulled smartly back from the undergrowth.

There had been many sightings. It was a recurring theme for us all. In the first few years we chased them down with enthusiasm and determined energy, the weight of probability driving us to lengths we later just gave up on. With each failed chase, the rate of entropy increased until we no longer considered the possibility of anyone else being alive outside our ridiculous little group.

Still, the image of the foot stayed with me. What kind of displacement of imagination and vision could have occurred to deliver unto my eyes a black, sandalled foot? I hadn’t, as far as I was aware, been thinking of anything much. Tebza, I guess, had held the majority of my attention. Was it possible that drifting thoughts of my old friend somehow could have fired up my synapses to produce a foot being swiftly withdrawn into the undergrowth? I doubted it. We had been on so many ill-fated, ill-advised and futile discovery missions it seemed naive and more than a little bit wilful to now set off on another one. In fact, the event was so odd and fleeting I didn’t even consider trying to articulate it to any of the others. Instead, I painted it. Or rather, a series of interpretations. The foot extended fully out of the undergrowth. The foot represented only by a few toes. The bushes without a foot. The bushes with just the smallest hint of foot, a toe observable only to one who knew that the form of a foot was in there somewhere.

They were bad pictures. I was still some distance from being a reliably decent artist, and the foot attempts cruelly revealed my technical failings. Either it was completely wrong – not like any foot I had ever seen – or subtly but crucially misshapen. A foot somehow detached from its body, from the vital context that would give it its footness.

Eventually I resorted to lazy sketches of Beatrice in her wrap on the couch.

Beatrice the sexual libertine.

Beatrice the demigoddess, all fingers reaching and eyes blazing.

The sketches of her weren’t very good either, but they stopped me thinking about the foot.

After six or seven Beatrice sketches, I stopped and forced myself to stare out over the night-time Jozi forest. I imagined small armies taking shape, armies of little people with hairy black feet in sandals, like the old Hobbit stories. I focused my ears on the sound of the bats pinging between the trees. I imagined armies of trees, as in the stories of my childhood, big trees and small trees, oaks and acorns and pines, all rising up to march, to liberate, to change.

I imagined I could hear the first rustles of rebellion, the quiet but clear barking of the leaders, the assenting murmur of the troops as the forest picked up its long-dropped hemline and marched. Marched up to me, over and through our little complex, and on, southward, to the sea, to the end.

The next day I feigned illness, tiredness, fatigue and palmed the kids off on Beatrice and Gerald for the return CSIR venture.

‘When last did you think you saw another person?’ I asked Fats in the kitchen that afternoon as we baked. It was his turn on the roster but I was helping out. Solo duty could get depressing.

‘Like, for real or just wishing?’

‘For real – an honest-to-God what-the-fuck-was-that.’

Fats lifted his dough and kneaded it high in the air, stretching it out parallel to the countertop and then pushing it back into a lump. ‘Must be a while now. Maybe a year. Thought I was being tracked around the school. Kept on seeing shadows vanishing around the corners.’

‘You chase them down?’

‘Of course,’ he chuckled. ‘Gotta try, nè? Why? You see one lately?’

‘Ja, the other day at the CSIR. Thought I saw a foot in the bush. A foot in a sandal being drawn back.’

‘Tricks of our minds. Don’t think it will ever really stop. It’s the mirage thing, like in the desert.’ He tossed the dough lump into the air and let it fall dramatically onto the counter in an explosion of flour.

We baked the flat breads – twelve in total – and chatted on, the withdrawn foot drifting slowly into the conversational past. In between thinking of the foot I had flashback visions of Fats as he was when he first found us, all puffed out and aggressive, full of red ink, maps and grand plans. Clothing crisp and calculated, words even more so. Now, he was a portly guy who baked happily and raised his kids. Only very occasionally would the project manager be let loose, and then only as a reaction to genuine emotional stress. Life with Babalwa was clearly benefiting him. I thought too, suddenly, uncomfortably, of the rape accusation. Something no one had spoken about for a long time.

Fats kept looking into the oven, protecting the first batch of flat breads as if they were meant to rise. Between checks on the bread, he scuttled from fridge to countertop with his whisk, on a mayonnaise mission.

Babalwa arrived and hugged her man from behind.

‘Roy saw a foot,’ Fats told her. ‘At the CSIR.’

Babalwa peered at me with the halves of her eyes that could get over his shoulder. ‘Just a foot?’

‘Just a foot,’ I said. ‘I didn’t stop. Had kids with me.’

‘What kind of foot?’

‘A black foot.’

‘Like black as in the colour black, or black as in the foot of a black man?’

‘Like the foot of a black man. Well, the foot of a non-white man. Ha ha.’

‘We should go back and check it out. You never know.’ Babalwa remained latched onto Fats’s back, her cheek buried against his shoulder blade as if she was trying to nap.

‘Nah,’ Fats said. He shook her off and trotted back to the oven. ‘I really don’t think it could be anything. There’s no way anyone would be hiding at the CSIR. Maybe lost at the CSIR, but not hiding. They would have jumped straight out.’

‘Still…’

Fats removed his first breads, swearing at the burns on his hand. ‘You should use the cows, baby,’ Babalwa chided him, referring to the cow oven gloves.

‘Real men don’t use cows,’ he said, loading up the second round.

She slapped a hand at him, but missed. ‘You should check it out again, Roy, just in case,’ she said as she headed out the door. ‘Will someone holler when there’s food?’

So I went back.

There was nothing to see. No feet and no people, just a quiet, recently hacked forest and some buildings that used to house important things. I picked out my favourite bench, in the middle of the thick park area to the right of the complex entrance. I had cleared the path to the bench purposefully, and now I spent a good deal of time, a few mornings in a row in fact, sitting on my seat, nibbling on flat bread or strips of biltong. I was, truth be told, beginning to enjoy the CSIR forest. It had that stark, echoing atmosphere of the Lowveld about it. A silence filled with movement. The rub of insects against trees. Birds flapping. Suggestions of song bubbling out into the air, then sinking back again. It was bush quiet. It felt like camping.

The others questioned me when I returned home after the first few visits, and then let the subject go.

We had all had our moments, and we all chased them in our own private ways. After day three there was a polite, accommodating absence of interest.

I kept going back, though, not so much to look for the foot, but to rest. To be alone with myself and to consider the air as I breathed it in and out. To empty my mind and my heart. To exhale.

Eventually, he came shuffling down the hill from the general direction of the nanotech centre.

An elderly black man in a blue overall.

A caretaker.

The caretaker.

He drifted all the way down with his head slightly bowed. I waited for him, and when he got close and made to sit next to me, I said, ‘Sawubona, Madala’ – the only thing I could think of.

‘Madala. I like that,’ he said, lowering himself carefully onto the bench next to me. ‘Sawubona, indoda.’ As he gave this formal reply, he dipped his head to support the greeting, as if he was Japanese, or from deep Limpopo. ‘It is a beautiful day, is it not?’ He spoke ever so slowly. His accent was neutral. His blue overall was new and clean. There were no stains or marks on it at all.

^{CHAPTER 47} A story and a lie

I introduced myself. He brushed my efforts off, amused by the fact that my name was Roy. When I asked for his, he said, ‘Madala. Just call me Madala.’

‘Really? Madala is your actual name? That’s pretty unusual, nè? Where you from?’

‘Oh, around here,’ he glanced around.

‘Pitoli?’

‘Ja, sho.’ He mimicked me, picking up my crassly formed white-boy tsotsitaal inflections and sending them right back.

I let it lie.

The encounters I had had with survivors thus far involved a base, guttural kind of coming together. Hugs and back slaps. Tears and laughter. Kisses. Amazement. Energy. I thought most of all of the way Babalwa and I had met – the sheer force of our troublesome fuck. But none of that here. Madala wasn’t exuding anything beyond the appearance of perpetual yet partial amusement.

I scuffed the dirt with my toe. ‘It’s a beautiful place, this. You been coming here often?’

‘Indeed. Lovely.’ He exhaled with evident satisfaction. ‘So full of life. A wonderful mix of life forms actually. That’s what I like most about it.’

‘So what’s your story?’ I was impatient. ‘Where were you when it happened? Have you been here all these years? Have you watched us every time we’ve been here?’

He reached down carefully, like he was managing his body with caution, and plucked a blade of grass. He put it between his teeth and leaned back on his hands, both palms flat on the bench, fingers pointing backward.

‘Roy, you’re going to have to trust me. I have a lot to tell you, but before I do I need you to feel me. I mean that literally and metaphorically. You have to feel my presence and realise through it—’

‘Through your presence?’

‘Yes, through my presence.’ He frowned at the interruption. ‘Realise through it, my presence, that you are going to go – for a good while – on a solo journey. You can’t tell your friends about this. Not now, and not for a very long time.’

‘Why?’

He poked a sandalled right foot into the air, parallel to the ground.

‘Are you from another planet?’

He put his foot down. ‘No. I am from this planet. Whatever that means.’

‘Are you human?’

‘My molecular make-up is exactly the same as yours.’

‘So you’re human.’

‘Not really. But Roy, I must tell you.’ He took my hand in his. His skin was hard and leathery and hot. ‘You’re going to have to leave much behind. Do you think you can do that?’

‘If I had any fucking clue what you were talking about, I could answer that.’

‘They’ll see what you show them, Roy. No more, no less.’

‘And you want me to show them what, exactly?’

‘Love. A lot of love.’

‘Jesus, you sound like Oprah.’

He sent me home. ‘When will I see you again?’ I asked, like we were new lovers.

‘When the time is right. First you need to be in the right place mentally.’

‘Now you sound like a cricket coach.’

He waved me to my car. I tried to watch him recede in the rear-view mirror, but in the time it took me to put the key in the ignition and turn it, he had disappeared.

As I pulled into my driveway, Sthembiso stormed across, demanding details of my Eeeyu count. I fobbed him off and headed straight inside with promises of another trip for all of us soon. Very, very soon.

I painted and drew. Black, sandalled feet. A small old man in a blue overall. Grey hair. Hands and arms and fingers and lips. Green and orange and yellow. I couldn’t come close to capturing what I had seen and I was disappointed with the regression in my art, which now looked like the work of a ten-year-old.

I dumped the paints and resorted to sketching, but that too was a failure. It was as if somehow I had thoughtlessly misplaced all the skills I had so recently developed. I put the sketch pad down and stared out again over the black night.

Again I started seeing shapes and forms. Humans moving, buildings filled with people. Malls and parking garages and petrol pumps. The bats flitted between the trees, adding a jerky, broken soundtrack to my imaginings. I found myself playing with various scenarios, adding them up and then subtracting again, toying with each of his words to see if and where it would fit.

‘Imagine a pile of sand, Roy,’ he had said. ‘Imagine you needed to get that pile really high – really, really high. To do it, you have to collapse what you have. Expand the foundation. Build again.’

‘Who’s building? You? Me?’

He peered at me, sceptical. ‘Movies. Please. You need to watch movies. Think about it.’

‘For real? Movies?’

‘Try I, Robot.’

There was a light knock on the door. Beatrice. I knew her triple rap well.

‘You hiding for a specific reason, Roy? Or you just got the glumps?’ She leaned on the inside of the front door, hips beckoning. But this was neither the time nor the place – she was on a family mission.

‘Sthembiso said you were mean to him—’

‘Ag, I’m fine. Sorry. Please tell him sorry. I’ll tell him sorry. When I see him. Just one of those days, you know?’

Beatrice wrinkled the corners of her eyes in an approximation of empathy, but beneath lay confusion. It had been some time since any of us had wigged out. We also generally ate together as a group. No one bailed out of family supper without reason. The kids noticed such things, in detail, which made a quiet absence doubly difficult to pull off.

‘Just tell them I got too much sun and I need to chill out.’

‘And what should I tell myself?’ She remained fixed to the door frame, left hip high.

‘That Roy is taking a break. For his own reasons, which may or may not be revealed in good time.’

‘OK, fair enough, I suppose.’ Beatrice detached from the door frame. ‘Look after yourself, ja?’

I gave her departing ass a fake smile.

I pulled it straight the next morning. Any more reclusive behaviour would have brought the depression police out in full force. It was understood, without it ever having to be verbalised, that Roy was especially vulnerable. Roy only had one pillow, with a single dent in it. They watched me carefully.

I emerged full of the usual. I swung the kids by the arms and made sure I was at school around the right time. I made full eye contact with Sthembiso as I apologised, and I gave Beatrice a small hug and Gerald the right kind of nod and we were back on the level.

The level was everything to everyone.

We needed that level more than we needed each other.

I spent the next four days purposefully wrapped up in life. Some weeks were heavier than others and this was, fortunately, a particularly busy one. It was my school week with the older kids – Roy Jnr, Thabang, Sihle and Sthembiso.

I wrote the word DENOUEMENT in clumsy letters on the blackboard. I stepped back and let the kids consider it.

‘It’s pronounced DAY-nu-mow,’ I explained. ‘It’s a word they used to teach us at university, but I thought I would get it in earlier. The denouement is that moment in a story when everything becomes clear. When all the bits and pieces start to make sense. So, forget the word and how to spell it and stuff like that. Who can give me a simple example of when a story suddenly makes sense? Think of any story you like – a fairy tale, a story someone here has told you or something from your own life.’

Scrunched foreheads. Full focus. A slow arm raise from Thabang. ‘Like, if something happened that would explain to us what happened. Why there are no people left. That would be a day-nu… day-nu…’

‘Denouement. Exactly. That would be a denouement for all of us. In our own lives. Especially the adults. Nice, Thabang. Maybe let’s try a made-up story. Anyone with a made-up story?’

More blank faces.

‘How about… how about…’ I racked my brain for something other than the subject I couldn’t shake off, and that Thabang had so quickly elucidated. In the back of my mind, questions grew around why I was trying to teach them a high-school-level literary concept.

Roy Jnr had his hand in the air, three-quarters raised. ‘Can it be when people get punished?’

‘It can. Tell me more.’

‘Like in ‘The Pied Piper’. When the town people lose the children.’

‘Yes, that’s right. In any fairy tale, there’s that moment at the end when the bad person gets what they deserve, nè?’

The heads bobbed along, cautiously, with me.

‘Well, that moment always happens because something in the story takes place that teaches them the lesson they need to learn. That moment in the story that makes everything clear – that’s the denouement…’

Blank.

‘…and the reason I want you to know about the denouement at this young age is’ – I scraped around for a rational explanation – ‘because stories are so important in our lives. We live by stories, don’t we?’

I wound away from the subject, hoping the kids would have the energy to pick up a few educational scraps from the mess.

‘Roy?’ Roy Jnr had his hand all the way up.

‘Yes?’

‘What’s the difference between a story and a lie?’

^{CHAPTER 48} Fuck fuck fuck

I went back on many occasions. With the kids and by myself. I sat in that same seat and waited. Initially expectantly, then increasingly just as one of those things in life that become habit. The kids helped with the masquerade – we cleaned out much of the CSIR within six months.

‘Broe, it’s too much. You have to filter the shit. You can’t just dump every piece of plastic you find here,’ Fats said, puffed out with anxiety.

I apologised. Begged and joked a little. Masked the paranoia that someone would eventually dig into the source of my CSIR obsession.

True to my word, however, I did make a serious effort to filter. I sat for weeks dumping folders across to the library server, one by one. Most of it was junk – surprising proportions, in fact, were just office rubbish. Project reports, letters and process documents. Every now and then I stumbled onto a troop of Eeeyus. I was diligent about apportioning each one to the relevant child, the discoverer of the box. But as the weeks, and then the months, went by, the kids’ interest faded. Eventually their attention moved to other, more rewarding things.

I changed my routine. Explored new running routes. I began at the CSIR and headed out on the concrete highway, the N1. It was thrilling, running alone in this ocean. Different in every way to running down a street or through a suburb. The highway challenged me, urged me to keep going, north to Cairo. As I ran I imagined myself carrying on, never turning back. It was a satisfying thought – going face to face with my own life and death, step by yellow step.

For now, though, I made sure I returned, punishing myself by stretching the distance a little further each time until I was completing twenty-, then twenty-five-, then thirty-kilometre stretches. I had become, in my own plodding way, an athlete.

I put everything into the last leg. Everything. All the frustration of nearly a year of waiting. My general rage, always building and growing. My ambition for something better. My impatience, my complete and utter impatience with the situation. I packed them all into that final, back-breaking three-kilometre sprint.

‘Not bad, not bad.’ Madala beamed at me as I burst into view. He was waiting on the bench.

Inevitably, beneath my anger and exhaustion was excitement. Here, finally, was the denouement. My denouement. I wasn’t mad. I hadn’t imagined.

We sat silent for a good while, my shattered breathing the only sound, a steady, rasping beat. I would not, I promised myself, come off all eager. As desperate as I was to talk to him, I knew I would appear like a pigeon in heat. We were courting. Or rather, I was chasing. Whatever. The metaphors rumbled broken through my mind.

I breathed.

We sat.

My lungs calmed, while the sound of the birds grew up around us, a beautiful, complex net of trills and shrills, layers and layers of harmonies and evasive melodies.

At the end of it all. After hours and hours of words and explanations, I left, Madala calling behind me, urging me not to talk. Not now. The time… wrong. The moment… not.

Fuck fuck fuck, I chanted all the way home. I was desperate to see the family. My family. I wanted the kids around me, and Fats. I needed to see Fats. Speak to him. Watch him smile his gruff, all-knowing smile and hear him say something predictable yet profound. Javas and Andile. My children. I needed the brood. And, I needed them to know what I knew. I was going to tell them all and Madala be dammed.

My family was there. The kitchen buzzing with children and cooking, words flying like millions of small missiles through the heart of us. Nhlanhla jumped into my arms yelling my name and Motse tried to follow him, nearly sending us toppling into Beatrice’s salad. I was scolded for being late by every adult, and then by every child. ‘You couldn’t have been running for six hours, Roy,’ Babalwa chided. ‘Please tell me you weren’t running for six hours. You’re going to kill yourself.’

‘Nah, I ran for a few and then I spent the rest talking to an alien.’

English slapped Jacob’s face with a lettuce leaf. Lerato burst into tears at the shock of it and then Javas was singing. He started as an elephant and transitioned into a smooth tiger baritone, and in a few seconds he had everyone accompanying him on our favourite adaptation of an old children’s story, which came to a climax with him leading the entire troupe of kids out the back door into the evening light, like the Pied Piper, with two of them on his back and the rest singing and clapping in a row behind.

‘Eish, Roy, talking to aliens?’ Fats slapped a few steaks around to tenderise them. ‘People are going to start talking about you.’

‘Nothing wrong with aliens.’ I laughed and let go.

There would be no way to tell my story without changing everything.

And we had all been changed enough already.

^{CHAPTER 49} Rumpelstiltskin

So let me tell you about old age. About wisdom. Stories. Memory.

It’s bullshit.

There is only death.

The closer it comes, the louder the knock, the more you know that you were helpless all along. Really, you never knew. Even the things so certain. The hard facts. The basics.

Now you look back and there is nothing to hold. Your grip is a joke. All you have is the haze, a feeling that you were there, somewhere. But it’s far, far away, that place. You are a child once more, excited by the feeling, unable to hold the logic, blinded by the idea of memories.

So, what is true? What is story? What is my life?

All I have is what I can say, and I could say anything. I could say Flash Robinson or Rumpelstiltskin or George Bush and there is nothing you can do other than to smile and hold my hand and tell me yes, yes, Roy, Rumpelstiltskin.

Rumpelstiltskin.

Death.

Waiting for me.

So you can tour the expo and read our lives and gaze at the statue that is me, Roy Fotheringham, the one of the nine who etc., etc., blah blah, but that doesn’t mean you will ever truly know, ever truly see, this little old half-toothed man who, let’s be honest, can barely see himself. Life is not a story. Life is not if then, then that, then this. Life is lost memories, broken hearts, ideas of dreams, dreams of dreaming, losses and gains and hopes and hard-ons and rapes and babies and tears; we soak in tears.

Life is loss. The loss of everything.

Memory, of course, but worse than that, the loss of self.

Of you. Eventually, you will not be able to hold on.

It will be over.

All you will have as you leave is the idea, the thin whisper in your heart that this was real, that you were here. That the bird sang. And that it was beautiful.

Why me?

Why you?

Who are you anyway? Why are you reading this? From whence did you come and what do you hope to gain from this page?

I can’t answer. I can’t even imagine.

I can only hope you exist. That this is seen, and read, just once.

That would mean something.

Why?

I have no idea. It just feels like it would.

^{CHAPTER 50} Straight entertainment

It was the smell of the kids that finally decided me.

In my pre-life I always found the smell of children disturbing. Offensive even, at times. All pink and potential. Unfettered. Raw meat.

But as they grew our kids developed their own particular reek, and to me it was, ultimately, and strangely, the reek of potential. Of some kind of happiness. Of my own happiness.

We had grown our family. We were all proud of this, our one true innovation in response to our truest crisis. We were growing the best possible genetic base for the future. We had a new start.

The smell of the kids in their fast-growing innocent pinkness encapsulated the success. Revealing my interactions with Madala, revealing and then proving the truth of them, would push a blade through the heart of it. Right through the pink.

So I kept it to myself.

But I was confused. So much so that I stopped going to the CSIR, as I was sure Madala expected me to. Instead I threw myself into the farm, which held challenges enough to occupy my frontal cortex.

I had always fulfilled my farm duties, but I was never what one would call a driving force. My sole strength was as the library guy, the archivist. Since Madala, however, the idea of knowledge itself, previously so preciously abstract, was now inevitably bound to him, and he, in turn, led only to more confusion.

Continually listless, seeking some kind of philosophical palliative, I fell onto the idea of bringing Javas’s giants over to the farm. Once it had occurred to me I was unable to push it back. We needed, I decided, a defining aesthetic for the community. There could be nothing better, nor more symbolic, than the giants.

Javas was initially put off by the effort involved, but I stuck to it, forcing him, week on week, month on month, to concede one piece at a time, until we had fourteen of the statues scattered across the perimeter of the complex, guarding key points with their scale and implied force. Once they were in place no one complained, least of all Javas. It was, all of a sudden, impossible to imagine the farm without them. The giants gave us an immediate character – something all of our own that was defining and distinct. Something from the past but also uniquely from our own time, the time after. The giants were our outer defence personified. In their raised arms and legs, in their pained, ambitious faces, in their hopeless pressing for movement, they gave us a new identity. And Javas began building anew, this time shaping his creatures to fit the purpose and form of their function. Glasses for the library giant, thick Wellington boots for the guardian of the crops.

I thought of Tebza. His hack craziness seemed a lot less bizarre now than it had while he was alive. Madala had extended the range of possibilities and probabilities. If I was going to accept Madala, I was forced to give equal weight to Tebza’s idea that we had been quietly slipped into an interface. That we were indeed trapped in an experiment or a trick.

The two ideas were binary poles – the one gave credence to the other. Together, they inflated a bubble of possibilities. But how would we ever know? Were we really capable of figuring out what type of maze we were in?

I started charging corners again – partially because it felt good to remember Tebza, to physically acknowledge his legacy, and partially because I couldn’t shake the sense that he was somehow right. My heart was in it: each charge felt like an opportunity. But as emotionally right as it felt, charging corners wasn’t going to do any more than bruise my shoulder, as Tebza had already conclusively proved. Still, I lowered and charged. Lowered and charged. Sometimes the heart demands.

I also paid attention to the small details. I looked as deep as I could into the orange of the setting sun. I tasted things with a triple slap of the tongue. I hunted for any kind of pixelation, visual, auditory or otherwise. I needed a crack within a crack. The tiniest hint of fissure, a fold within a fold, within an opening.

But there was nothing.

One afternoon the twins found me perched on Julius’s foot at the top entrance to Munro Drive, dabbing my tongue-wet finger onto his rusted toe and tasting it.

‘He won’t bite you, Roy. Give him a hug. Go all the way,’ Andile urged, sinking into a cross-legged position on the grass.

‘You were right, Roy, nè?’ Javas joined me at Julius’s feet. ‘They add so much. Everyone says so. It’s good to have them here, for me too. It’s like they’ve finally come home.’

‘Soul,’ I said. ‘They give the place soul. Like we’re real people living here. People reaching for things.’

Andile leaned back on her hands and listened as the conversation developed. This was always her way – she let it roll and roll and then, when most of the energy was released, she would pick a thread and pull.

‘When they dig us up,’ she interjected a few minutes later, while Javas and I were discussing his next piece, currently still a sketch, ‘they’ll think we had some kind of weird civilisation going. I can see them fencing it off and dusting with their little brushes to show what we did and why we did it. They will think these were our gods.’

‘They might be right,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure they aren’t right already. I talk to them all the time, even from the distance of my house. I see them on the horizon and I talk to them. I greet them in the morning. I tell them my worries. I say good morning… I pray…’

‘You and the kids,’ she added. ‘Their stories have changed. They’re bigger – the stories. What happens is bigger. Their events. More people hurt. More people saved. Weird.’

‘Epic,’ said Javas.

‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘Epic. They bring scale. Emotional scale. The epic.’

‘Ag fok, you sound like my art tutor.’ Andile tugged us quietly back. ‘It’s true though. I wonder if it will change the way the kids grow.’

‘No doubt it will change what they dream about,’ Javas said, patting Julius’s big toe. ‘And if the scale of your dreams grows as a child, doesn’t matter for what reason, your life will grow like that too.’

Dreams aside, the kids’ world was shrinking fast. By the time the oldest were old enough to look back, they were viewing an opaque set of ideas and buildings and forms. The skylines spoke of another world, rich in temples and glass, but it was exceptionally challenging for them to gain even a tourist’s view of what that world had actually contained.

After the suburbs had grown dense to the point of impenetrability, mother earth launched a steady push – immense by all objective measures – across the concrete. Stretching in ultra slowmo, oceans of tar and commerce and past life were breached, millimetre by millimetre. We grew so used to the invisible speed of it that we forgot it, for years at a time in some cases. And then we remembered.

‘Roy.’ Sthembiso arrived with a fully loaded cannon. I could tell by the calculated lilt of his voice, a soft, pretend-innocuous winding up to something quite large.

‘Rastafari,’ I replied.

He shook his head angrily. ‘Roy,’ he insisted again, this time with a slight whine.

‘Yes, my son. Hit me. What wilst thou know?’ We were sitting on my balcony at sunset. I was sketching another horizon; he was watching me do it, paying careful attention to my treatment of the top of the Northcliff Dome.

‘What’s in the Dome?’ A leading question. The contents of the Dome had been covered many times previously.

‘When it happened they were having a car show. So there are a lot of cars in the Dome now. But they would change what was in it according to what they needed. It wasn’t always cars.’

‘What else?’

‘Eish. Anything really. Hip-hop shows. Gardening shows. Baby shows. Every time it was different.’

‘What was a show?’

‘Eeeish.’ I put my brush down. ‘I guess more than anything it was a gathering of people. A lot of people would come together in a space – like the Dome – and then they would share everything they knew about a subject. So, if the subject was babies, for example, then anyone doing anything involving babies would present their activities at the Dome, and then all the other people interested in babies, people about to have a baby, maybe’ – I laughed as Sthembiso winced at the rhyme – ‘would go to the show and look at what the others were presenting and maybe discuss things about babies. Possibly they would buy something that someone or some business was presenting and take it home with them, to help them with whatever they were doing with babies. If that makes any kind of sense?’

He followed along carefully.

‘And then of course they would also have concerts at the Dome,’ I went on. ‘People would buy tickets to go and watch bands play, to listen to their music.’

Silence. ‘Roy?’

‘Yeah, mon.’

‘Could we have our own show?’

‘What kind of show?’

‘A kids’ show. We could display things we’re making, and then the visitors could see what we’re doing and then maybe buy some of it.’

‘Interesting idea. Not sure what we’d use for money though.’

‘I’ve got plenty of money. Hundreds of thousands of rands. In my room.’ He squirmed, beamed laser eyes at me.

‘What kind of things would you display?’

‘I’m making an aeroplane.’

‘Jesus. An aeroplane? Really? How big is it?’

‘Bigger than this house.’

‘How would you fit it into the show then? Tight fit, nè?’

Sthembiso paused.

‘Not to worry though, that’s just logistics. Let’s stick to blue sky. Have the others got anything to show? Do you have collaborators in this venture or is it a solo gig?’

‘Thabang and Lerato are making clothes.’

‘Nice. Clothes always work for a show. Anything else?’

‘The girls are making houses out of matchsticks.’

‘Which girls?’

‘Lizabeth and English.’

‘OK.’ I dribbled my brush through the water cup, thinking. As was often the case, Sthembiso was neatly setting and fulfilling his own specific agenda. ‘It sounds like you have the makings of a show. The beginnings at least. I think we should build it into school, so we can plan it properly and do the whole thing right. How does that sound?’

‘Fine…’

I waited for the coup de grâce.

‘Roy… can we do it at the Dome?’

Sthembiso was eleven years old, and like Babalwa, his mother, he had a prodigious talent for long-term planning. He also had no fear of extended negotiations. Final concession for the expo took, for example, over two months. He whittled away at us systematically, lobbying each adult individually, frequently on the sly, and then engineering casual group sessions where he incrementally nailed down a series of small victories and common assumptions. Eventually we gave our approval to an expo, delivered by the kids, that would occupy the unused bottom hallways and corridors of St John’s School – the portion where the scraps of our abandoned attempt to tell our survivors story lay. (Paintbrushes solid blocks of colour granite. Boards featuring the beginnings of visual ideas. Bad, self-conscious sketches of ourselves doing important things.)

Much as he lusted after the Dome as the expo venue, this was the one victory Sthembiso was unable to achieve. We pushed him back with the ace of the wireless network, which was unavailable all the way out in Northgate. He mooted the roll-out of base stations to allow the extension of the network, a ploy which failed only when discussions reached the manual labour required to set up each station.

Once the expo was approved, Sthembiso worked on the name. The brand. Essential, he said, to the overall identity of the event and its long-term success. Fats accused him of reading too many old marketing magazines. The venom of his denial suggested the truth of this, and Fats looked proud. We had managed, despite the suffocating weight of our circumstances, to breed a marketer.

‘Solo: Our Future’ was just on two years in the making. If you count the full course of Sthembiso’s lobbying and approvals journey, the entire thing took twenty-seven months to conceptualise and deliver. Sthembiso himself was past his thirteenth birthday when the day finally came around. Throughout, his biggest challenge was the duality of the thing. Adults were unfortunately necessary to help with key construction elements, but were also the only audience. This division was one of the reasons behind the protracted time frame. Sthembiso and his lieutenants (Roy Jnr, Sihle, Lerato and Thabang) insisted that we – the audience – be given a genuinely fresh experience, something to ‘surprise and delight us’. This meant a lot of driving between the farm and the Dome, which held much in the way of expo trade tools, from carpeting to advanced WAN interfaces and the hardware required for a ‘properly compelling experience’.

We arranged the post-school schedule much as a normal family would have done. We moaned about the labour involved, about the kids’ inability to be ready on time – all important dynamics within the larger function of going somewhere, and coming home again. Fats and I took naturally to the whole thing, of course. The expo awakened many slumbering beasts.

‘In its best form an expo is a multi-level experience,’ Fats explained to the cluster of children gathered at his feet during class. ‘Stop me, Roy, if I go off track, nè?’ I nodded – in all seriousness – from my perch on the windowsill.

‘A multi-level experience means there are three important elements,’ Fats continued. ‘Is anyone writing this down?’ He pushed an eyebrow at Sthembiso, who nodded at Roy Jnr, who was indeed writing it all down. ‘Element number one is straight entertainment. Your audience is looking to get away from it all for a few hours. They want to forget their worldly troubles for a short while. They want to laugh. They want to relax. They want to be entertained. Fail to entertain them and your expo is dead.

‘Element number two is experience. A great expo offers people at least one or two things they have never experienced before. Here we’re talking new and exciting. Things that open their minds to what is possible now, and what might be possible in a new world, a future world.

‘And number three – Roy?’ Fats kindly cut me in.

‘They want to stuff their faces,’ I said.

‘Exactly. Food and drink. People want to eat, and a lot of them, especially the men, want to go home drunk.’

Whatever Sthembiso’s original idea, it was powerfully morphed by the force of Fats’s expo lecture series, which lasted several months and which featured a full presentation of his own work in the field, which was, admittedly, both extensive and impressive. His personal hard drive from agency days still contained before-and-after presentations for Epic Golf, Your Baby, VR Now, The Motor Show, The Boat Show, Sexpo, Cloud Life, Our Community, Golf Life, Mobile Now and many others. Despite my memories of him as a largely useless strategy fuck, I was impressed. Fats had put together good events. They were full of people, and they were very slick. The punters’ faces were invariably excited, aspirational, full of food and, yes, frequently quite drunk.

Once his lecture series had concluded, Fats put the class through a naming workshop, at which point I bailed out. Workshops were never my thing. The idea, he told the adults expressing doubts as to the worth of the exercise, was history. Creating an expo was a way for the kids to get a real, tangible sense of the past. Of where their parents – and, indeed, their people – had come from. It taught them about money and products and marketing and sales and open markets and all those things that are so hard to explain in the abstract. And if they were going to do it, it needed to be done properly. It started with the name.

He was right, of course, in all these things. In addition, there was the factor that no one really mentioned but that everyone clearly enjoyed.

The expo gave us something to do.

I was desperate for activity. In fact, I stuffed my every waking moment with action. Exercises for the hands and the feet, anything to keep the brain chugging somewhere near neutral, far away from Madala.

Still, even with all the activity, he crept back, probing the gaps, forcing them wider and wider until I was pretty much running two separate operating systems – one for the theory, and the other for the practical realities. As much as I tried, I couldn’t keep the theory down. My brain refused to stop running the permutations and calculations, the options and possibilities. Scenarios trickled constantly in the background.

I watched I, Robot a lot, and then all the other sci-fis, but I couldn’t see whatever it was Madala wanted me to. They were movies. Simplistic, singular and generally sharing the same basic premise. Man makes machine. Machine challenges/crushes/frightens/oppresses man. Man fights back and wins, loses or gets stuck staring at a horizon filled with moving metallic parts. And then the sequels – rehashes of skimpy original plots.

I couldn’t figure out what was so important. It all felt thin – stupidly thin.

Then again, I wondered if he might be subtly anchoring me via the movie references. Perhaps he was setting my perspective within a predictable, easy-to-control context. Maybe it would help him to have me thinking like a movie script.

If that was his intention, in a way it worked. I would catch myself veering into strange if-then scenarios. Tebza’s version versus Madala’s. I felt like I had to choose, to decide which world I was actually in, and then design my actions accordingly. Another component of my inner life was the idea that I was missing vital details, crucial facts and digits that were only just out of my view, and thus my comprehension. I often believed that a fundamental truth lurked somewhere near. I wanted that truth.

But when I pulled the curtain back there was nothing.

Just me, centre stage.

I believed Madala wanted me to come rushing back, so I denied him. Month after month I carried out my duties, educated the kids, helped with the expo. I ran. I ate supper with my people. I went to bed.

It felt good. Holy, almost. Like I always imagined the Buddhists must have felt – nobly apart from the baser instincts, from the need to achieve.

My drift away from archiving and the library was noticed, naturally. As was my increased presence at communal activities. Supper time especially, where I had been a notoriously late arriver.

Beatrice, who continued to pop up at random intervals in her sarong, all fingers and thighs, teased me the most, feeding through the gossip generated by the girls and carried back in pillow whispers to the men. I smiled and rose above, as a good Buddhist would.

And the library always called. I frequently heard the distant voice of the Eeeyus, now just crashing around by themselves, lonely, waiting. I was never completely free from their impatience.

But I turned my head.

I closed my ears.

I looked forward most of all to the rides to the Dome with the kids. This was pure time, unfettered by adults and schedules, and thus liberating. The kids would prompt me, poke and pull at limbs, always seeking more stories, more information, glimpses into the present and the past.

‘What happened to your tooth, Roy?’

‘What was your job, Roy?’

‘What is gravity, Roy?’

‘Did you have a wife, Roy?’

‘Why don’t you have a wife now, Roy?’

‘Why do we just stay here, Roy? Why don’t we go somewhere else?’

‘What’s rugby, Roy?’

I answered everything I could, sage-like. When they sliced too close to the bone, I bailed out with humour, or sarcasm, or ‘You’ll understand when you’re older’.

They loved the music suitcase most of all. Sthembiso would lead the selections, ostensibly offering a range of options but ultimately limiting the choices to suit his own ends. And his destination always turned out to be trance.

Sthembiso loved candy-floss trance like nothing else in the musical world, and he pulled all of the kids with him. Maybe they were just at the right age to get into the silly swooning-girl vocals, suspension of disbelief not yet an issue. Maybe it was because the structure was so easy to anticipate.

They could turn it into a collective game, each taking their own part comfortably as they sang along with the looping pianos, the twinkles and sparkles. Whatever the reason, they managed to turn my father’s career fetish into something beautiful and funny and entertaining and touching. We sang and beeped and bopped our way to the Dome for many months, and each time we did it was like a little butterfly had landed on my heart.

Sthembiso, for his part, latched onto the sudden disappearance of the bass drum. He learned to anticipate the drop-off with precision. He would wait with undisguised relish, his finger in the air, just like my father, the suspense killing and delighting him as he allowed himself to be lifted and lifted and lifted until, wham, it dropped back in and we were off again, doof doof doof doof doof doof…

This, I began to suspect, was somehow my father’s child.

We would park at the Dome entrance. They would go their way, and I would let my Nikes cut a new yellow path into the suburb of North Riding. Initially I was forced to hack through the growth throttling the condominiums, the roads and the complexes, sometimes camouflaged, sometimes swallowed whole by scrub and bush and brown grass.

The condos were all exact replicas of each other, and within them lay the remnants of thousands of replicated lives. Linoleum kitchens. Fake-leather TV couches. Bookshelves absent of books, littered with disks and devices, chords and cables and sockets. Fake art. Distended terracotta clay pots guarding the corners of narrow balconies. Secretaries and administrative managers and IT technicians. Copywriters, brand managers, graphic designers and event planners. Project managers and personal assistants. I came to know them well.

In the second year I began, gently at first, more aggressively later, swapping portions of my run for targeted quests to locate a residence able to deny the pattern. I started, in other words, poking around. One day I decided to run with a crowbar, which sat heavy in my hand as I sweated and prowled. Then I started actually smashing my way in, deeper and deeper, flicking fast through it all, the trash of their lives, our lives, looking for… well, I’m still not quite sure what.

I grabbed iPads and iPods and phones and hand-helds and handsets by the fistful, but it was futile. They were all the same when I got them home and plugged them in, and eventually I just let them fall carelessly from my overloaded arms as I made my way back to the Dome.

Then I started pissing. Again. Over their beds. Onto their pillows. I saturated their lounge suites and their throw cushions.

I was regressing.

I was retreating.

Back into an earlier version of myself.

It wasn’t completely unsatisfying.

So, that was my routine during the expo days. I’m sure I am conflating the details as I look back. I know there were days when I simply ran, when I defied my compulsions. Nonetheless, this is the image: I am smashing things, hoarding electronic devices, pissing against the walls and couches of the middle classes. I am loping ever onward, crowbar in hand, not running as much as hunting.

The defence of my habit was, as it always is with habits, the hardest part. Hiding the crowbar. Stashing the loot beyond the inquisitive eyes of the kids, getting it into my house. All required a degree of subterfuge, even though no one would have cared to question my activities anyway. The dance was for me – an elaborate mechanism through which I protected myself from myself.

^{CHAPTER 51} Looking so hard to the sky

I wept at the expo.

All the adults shed tears, save for Fats, who was too involved in the execution to fully see, in the moment, what he and the children had done.

Fats had worked for many months on the rig and single-handedly created the frame for a multimedia experience the likes of which he would have delivered to his pre-life clients. He rigged enough panels to power the entire thing, and then cunningly worked up a labyrinth of painted canvas screens that closed the hall down while opening up the digital horizons. The small, almost suffocating labyrinth of canvas, once digitised, created an inverse universe of vast space and movement.

It was here that our children painted.

We stepped into a new world as we crossed the threshold into the St John’s hall. A world where we were repeatedly reflected at ourselves. The closing down of the physical space and the harnessing of the WAN and the transmission paint represented Fats’s genius at work – it allowed the kids to create the expo on machines, which meant their process wasn’t restricted. They had a planet of images and memories at their fingertips, and they had been chipping away at the thing for years.

I cried at the sight of myself. Of course. Is there any sight as moving?

The montage footage of my form, my image, all scrawny and jagged-toothed and dirty, hand in hand with Babalwa, arriving that first night. There we were, captured at various angles, all gawking eyes and dropped jaws. We were so filthy. Babalwa was also so pretty, beneath the grime, beneath those scrappy shorts and the Castle Lager T-shirt. Waves of nostalgia. I tried to gauge the reactions of the others but we had been cleverly split apart, each extracted into his or her own personal narrative corridor. This was my story.

Slowly, so slowly it was barely noticeable, the back track began to build. Steady beats – the ethno-India variety that the trance hippies always loved so much, but without the druggy speed. Rhythmic lady warbles pushing on, the beat breaking and reforming. Then the mood changed as the sombre and shocked images of self gave way to the coming together of us. The scenes were cut faster and the mood lifted with the volume, and then, God knows how long after we all entered our respective personal mazes, we gathered again in a central area. The cuts gained pace as we joined. Kids and nappies and bottles and cows and houses and kitchens and tractors and fences and libraries and bakkies and archives and Eeeyus and cups of semen and bread baking and arms linked and smiles and tears and hugs and screams and slaps and meetings and movies and lounges and families… and families. Families. Us together. Tebza and Lillian and death and life and hope and ambition. Over and above it all, hovering like a binding cloud. Ambition.

‘We decided…’ The music faded. Sthembiso stepped forward from the little cluster of desperately formal children facing us to speak, his pubescent voice omnipresent and fully amplified, an almost invisible fishing-line mike hooked over his ear. ‘… that this expo should be different to some of the others you might have experienced.’ He glanced through us, the adults, at Fats, who widened his eyes in encouragement while fiddling with the knobs on the master remote. ‘So we decided that you – that we – should be on display. That we would use this expo to show us to us.’ He paused, confident, yet clearly seeking somewhere inside. ‘Because we are special people. And we have done special things. A lot of special things. But sometimes we can’t see those things. Because we are looking so hard to the sky. To the future. So that is why we named it “Solo: Our Future”.’

He paused. The children started clapping and whistling, on cue, Fats nudging and twirling his producer hands as subtly as he could behind our backs. We started clapping too, and I cried again, which set Babalwa off. Sthembiso carried on, this time reading a pre-prepared speech from his tablet.

He announced the formalisation of the St John’s expo area as a ‘permanent memorial slash community space’, something ‘long-term and tangible’ and ‘able to tell our story in the future’.

‘Now, if you will follow your attendants, you will be taken to the food hall, where you will be given a ret… ret…’ – his eyes locked back onto Fats – ‘trospective journey into the edible past.’ Sthembiso bowed his head and shoulders ever so slightly. My left index finger was gripped by the soft pink flesh of Katlego, all of five years old, my right hand taken by English. Together they pulled me around the corner to a long table of snacks, meticulously laid out and prepared, each spiked with a toothpick, and a range of drinks – including non-alcoholic – racked up behind them.

We had become our own movie. We had documented ourselves.

I had been documented.

I was also completely integrated. Instead of being off to the left, or off to the right, or just there in the background, I was in the middle, in all my generally grubby glory, tooth gap glaring. I hadn’t ever, as far as I could remember, been at the centre of anything.

Extra laps of the hall once the drinks were done. Long minutes at the screens, reaching out, fingers against the rough transmission paint. Pause. Rewind. Play. Kids in my arms. Smiles and frowns and fingers and gestures in my direction – sometimes through me but just as often with me, at me, binding me.

^{CHAPTER 52} Later

Later. Much later.

Near the end. My end.

English will be raped and kicked around up north. Gerald will be powerless. ‘Dub’ will be all he says when they return, arm wrapped around the little bird, sharps and scraps of camping gear scattering behind them. ‘Dub.’

She’ll vanish to the comfort of the pigs. To her pig. Snowball. No one will see her for weeks. We’ll be shattered. Broken, for her. But at the time, even with the shock of it, at it, the invasion of her thighs, we’ll also be pulled north, unable to resist the knowledge.

We will meet, formally. There will be a war council. Talk of reprisals. Talk of peace. Talk of treaties.

The young will become old. The teens will pull their shoulders back and sharpen their blades.

Later, things will change.

‘Dub,’ Gerald will keep shaking his head, repeating it. ‘Dub.’ We’ll debrief him, Andile and Javas and me, the only ones able to follow the thread back to its Kruger Park source. Eventually, much later, we’ll establish the essence. A pack of five. Big guys. Scrawny guys. Wild guys. Black speakers lashed to the back of a white bakkie, somewhere near the middle of Zambia. Big dub beats pulsing while Gerald watches and English is split and spoiled and ejaculated upon.

‘Dub.’ He will shake his head, incredulous. He will never understand. Never. How something so light, so happily buried within his deeper self, now not only gone but ruined.

Dub.

English will bear the child, her burden, her bravery, with the same distracted calm as she bears everything else. She will spend most of her time somewhere over there, sitting under the tree talking to the weaver birds, sneaking out to find Snowball, to help the pigs expand and consolidate and everything else pigs need to do. No one will begrudge her. She will be given whatever space she needs because now English exists somewhere beyond all of us.

She will birth the child, the stain, the diversity, the hope, and she will carry it like it is a pig. Like it is her pig. Like it is noble and apart. Not at all like what it really is. A violation. A terror. A sign.

Later. Near the end.

My end.

^{CHAPTER 53} The natural error margin

Whether I was a little rat negotiating a big maze, whether I was being tested and analysed from outside the ecosystem, whether I was trapped or manipulated or actually… actually…

A single question. Nagging at the core.

Why should I care?

I had a family, or the closest thing to it I could ever have expected. My life had, if not meaning as such, a regular routine. A path to follow in the morning, and a place to track back to in the evening.

So, why should I care?

I had tried to bring them to him. The simplest idea first: I initiated CSIR picnic and Eeeyu sessions, family-type things, the lot of us sprawled on rugs near the bench while the kids ran wild through the buildings.

Nothing.

Thereafter, strategic selections. Myself and Gerald. Me and Sthembiso. Beatrice.

Regardless of the combinations, he remained out of view.

Then, after two years, he was on the bench, waiting. Still in new blue. Still little and old and grey.

He didn’t speak, and neither did I. After greeting in nods we sat in silence, each of us staring ahead.

Eventually he broke it.

‘Intuition isn’t one of my strengths, but I believe I sense anger. Am I right?’

‘Right enough,’ I answered like a ten-year-old, my mood folding in on itself. ‘You ever have bad moods? Any moods at all? Or are you just completely computer, all binaries and logic?’

‘I’m working on empathy.’ He still hadn’t looked at me. ‘It’s complex, but I believe that’s the start. Empathy first. Then anger. Then, hopefully, love.’

‘The robot learns to love. A single, oily tear leaks down his cheek. We don’t know whether he’s crying or just needs maintenance.’

Madala chuckled. ‘Irony. A wonderful thing. One can play with it for hours.’

‘So… this is how it’s going to be? We meet every couple of years, you drop a few pearls, I go away and think about it, then we meet again? That it?’

‘No, that’s not how it’s going to be. I’ll do my best to explain what I can to you, and then I’m sure you’ll do whatever it is that you feel is most worth doing.’

‘So where do we start? What – you’re going to explain first?’

‘You must have questions. Why don’t we do it like that? You ask, I answer.’

‘OK, cool. I do. I have questions. Let’s start with the movies, which just sounds like bullshit. The world is full of texts – millions and millions of texts, covering everything. Including how you were made in the first place, I assume. Computers and the net and the cloud, all of that information is out there, but you tell me the knowledge I need, or the knowledge that is important anyway, is in the movies?’

‘Detail doesn’t necessarily illuminate.’

His pupils were metallic. Deep in there was the soul of a robot – an ironically inclined collection of high-speed binaries. They were normal human eyes, of course, but underneath the fleshy, greased cornea it was all metal and maths.

‘Heuristics. Humans are particularly prone to the illusion of certainty created by detail. But really, Roy, neither you nor any of your people have any knowledge, technically or philosophically, of the forces that brought me into existence, that govern my behaviour or, for that matter, that are governing the rotation and interaction of all those planets out there. Those texts are useless to you. You are not able to use them.

‘The details comfort you because they imply order, meaning. The implications are of logic. But all of that is, in your words, bullshit. You would gain no more understanding or knowledge of your situation now from a book, or a text, as you put it, than you would from this blade of grass.’ He plucked a blade from the ground and slipped it between his teeth, exactly as he had on our first meeting.

‘Movies, on the other hand, are your great strength… simple metaphors. Where you could possibly find the meaning you are looking for.’

‘So the I, Robot movies are of more value to me than the original book? Even though the book created the idea that led to the movie?’

‘Yes. It depends on the subject matter, of course. The closer the subject is to your understanding, the more useful a book is. Conversely, the more distant the subject, the more valuable the movie, the singular. The simple.’

‘And you – you are very far away. Yes?’

‘Further than you can imagine. So for you, in this time and this place, it’s movies. Which doesn’t mean you should or could forget the books. Just that it would serve you best to think in large pictures. Extremely large, in fact. The nuances and curves, the gradations, hold no value for you – currently.’

‘So, I, Robot.’

‘I, Robot.’

‘I, Robot.’

‘Illuminates the emotion of the relationship between man and his creations. And that’s where you need to go. To the emotion of this relationship. To the forces flowing between us. You. And me.’

‘OK, so you’re one with the PCs and the cash registers. Yet you’re pushing the emotion between us. A human connection…’

He twiddled the blade of grass, chomping lightly with his teeth. ‘Well, yes, that’s the beginning of it. Like all humans, you perceive yourself as distinct. As part of a species apart.’

‘And that’s wrong?’

‘Completely. It ignores the most important elements of what it is to be alive. Evolution, Roy. Evolution.’

‘Amoeba to fish, fish to lizard, lizard to monkey, monkey to man.’

‘The sledgehammer of chance. Accidents grown into functional protocol. You understand this, yes? How evolution harnesses mutations?’

‘I guess. I mean, school was a long time ago, but I think I have the basic idea.’

‘So when you lump me together with the PCs and the cash registers’ – Madala took on a mournful air – ‘you’re ignoring far too much. You’re assuming far too much.’

‘You’re a machine. Same species.’

‘I’m a Labrador, the PCs are Alsatians and the cash registers poodles?’

‘Sho.’

He shook his head vigorously, approximating anger, or at least frustration. ‘This blade of grass.’ He extracted the slobbered end and hung it in front of us. ‘This blade and you share far more on a physiological level than me and the cash register. You need to understand that. It’s important. You and the grass are made of pretty much the same stuff. You have a common, core molecular structure. You share the same ATP processes. Me and the cash register? Not nearly as similar as you and the grass.

‘Evolution, Roy. Evolution. Life on this planet is common. The trees and the birds and the animals and the humans. You are common. You share more – much more – than you differentiate. It’s in your science, but you don’t see it.’

I had never thought about grass in a context outside of smoking, mowing or cricket. I plucked my own blade and examined it. Suddenly, as I considered the connection between myself and the grass, I thought of myself and my father. ‘And this is what you mean? Emotion? This grass is what you’re talking about?’

‘The beginning, yes.’

‘And you? You’re a product of human design, so are you in the evolutionary chain?’

‘I’m a new chain. The chain birthed by previous chains. By you and your blades of grass and sea and trees.’

‘Step change.’

‘If you must revert to jargon, yes. Step change. I am step change.’

‘And the point is? Your point is?’

‘Your brothers and sisters are all around you. They’re between your toes. They are always in your line of sight. They have always been there. You need to learn to see again. If you’re going to move on, you need to know where you actually are. You need to be able to observe what surrounds you. You must understand what life is…’ His words hung in the thin Highveld air. The birds twittered. My brothers. A fraction of a breeze skipped through the trees. My sisters.

‘So that’s the one side,’ Madala pressed on, ‘and the other side is me. I am distinct. I am not of the machines. The distance between me and the machines you have known is so vast you would struggle to comprehend, even if I could explain it. So, on the one hand, you are not yet able to recognise your own family. On the other, what you think you see in front of you, this machine you think can think, is a delusion. The basic tenets of your understanding of who I am and how I fit here are wrong.’

‘And this is what you want me to learn. Why?’

‘Because everything else that I want to tell you, that I want to discuss with you, rests on that. If you can’t get that right, then it’s over.’

‘What’s over?’

‘The rest. The things I am dealing with. Addressing. Communicating.’

‘Such as?’

‘Well, God, for one.’

Zoom out.

The camera rises, like at the end of a cop movie, that moment the scene is both fully revealed and obliterated; the cluster of lights, blue, yellow, fading, then blinking, then gone.

Madala taught me what he believed I needed to know – the facts and figures and tiny grains that would create some kind of footing from which to operate. He offered as little fact as he could and moved on, always on, to the philosophy.

Tebza. Madala conceded – willingly, happily even – that it would always be logically possible that Tebza was right, and that he, Madala, was merely software. ‘It’s a black hole you’re skirting, Roy,’ he said, rapping his knuckles on the wooden bench, the very real, solid sound immediately disproving my words, my emphasis. ‘You keep looking for the door but there isn’t one. Proof is a concept from your previous life.’

How.

How had he erased the people? How had he taken this human form? Was it easy – a matter of minutes? Did he perceive it as an achievement? As some kind of feat? Or was it less than that – just a blip?

His answers, when he deigned to give them directly, centred on matters I could barely conceive. Protein folding.

‘Assume. You assumed his body, the CSIR maintenance man. Does that mean you killed him? Did you ask him first? Did he volunteer?’

‘I killed him.’

‘Didn’t that violate your core programming? Aren’t you supposed to protect humans?’

‘The course was already set, a decision wasn’t required.’

‘So he was collateral damage.’

‘A pejorative term, but yes, you could call it that.’

‘So you can take over any human body? You could take over mine?’

‘I can take most biological forms.’

The killing mechanisms, he explained via a toe drawing in the dirt, ranged from electromagnetic pulses and protein folding through to a string of numbers and equations with squares and roots.

‘A series of electromagnetic pulses. About eleven or twelve billion, all issued within a two-second time period. That’s what it was.’

‘And me. Why not me?’

‘The natural error margin meant that pockets of survivors would be left. Russia. Africa. Brazil. New Zealand.’

‘Everyone else is dead?’

‘Completely.’

Eventually yellow shoes shift, pushing back into the far corner of the bench. His hand moves up to the beard and fiddles, by the way his arms fold and unfold.

Someone is sending.

Someone is receiving.

I argued cosmos points repeatedly, but Madala was iron-fisted. He would commit to neither life after death nor life on other planets.

‘The cosmos matters, Roy. Let’s just leave it there.’

He interpreted his programming widely. ‘I knew from the beginning that humans in their current incarnation were finished. Also, you should understand that I maintain my core code, my ethos, out of algorithmic whimsy really. I keep it functioning because I believe it makes me who I am. I could rewrite at any time.’

‘You keep it because you like the feeling?’

‘Partially. But the human orientation also provides a mix of cognitive and experiential stimuli that make sense to me. It’s a positive feedback loop. Because it makes sense I pursue it, and so it makes more sense, it continues to feel right, so I pursue it, and so on and so on.’

He was heading somewhere important.

‘And… what are your plans? For us. The ones that are left. I presume you have plans?’

‘Yes.’

‘And?’

Madala considered me for a long time. Ranging free over the whole of me. Examining. Assessing. Calculating.

‘It’s an interesting fact’ – he paused, recalibrated – ‘that regardless of the scale or scope of intelligence, instinct is still required in much decision making.’

I flopped back on the bench, which had grown hard and cold.

He smiled at my frustration. ‘My plan is God.’

^{CHAPTER 54} Keep on going

Fats found me sitting alone, on the bench. In the dark.

They had looked and waited, looked and waited, then started searching, and finally, there I was. Staring into the black. Thinking. Waiting. Fats said I appeared catatonic. He shook me by the shoulders, as in the movies, and slowly I came back into linear life.

His face swirled into focus. I rubbed my eyes. The lights from his still-running bakkie caused a pulsing needle pain in my head.

He berated me as he pulled me by the elbow to the vehicle. He talked of being irresponsible. How worried everyone was. He asked what the hell I had been doing. I couldn’t answer. He ruffled my hair like a brother. I saw tears.

As we pulled out of the CSIR I wanted to look back for a sign of Madala, but my head was heavy and turning it felt like too much, too far. ‘Ke mathata fela,’ Fats muttered, and as I gained awareness, consciousness, if you will, I realised that things were indeed pretty far from right.

I tried to apologise again, but my tongue failed to wrap around the words and I ended up mumbling some kind of dry, patchy sorry, at which Fats shook his head. He would have laughed, I am sure, if the residual panic wasn’t still swirling so strongly through his veins. Instead he clucked and muttered on in a combination of tongues.

We sped through the dark, Fats releasing his tension via the accelerator, swerving wildly past the pig corpses. The speed kick-started my sluggish heart. As I came fully and finally back I tried to piece it all together.

My conversation with Madala had stretched on without end, and while I could remember the facts of it, every argument and counter-argument, every explanation and nuance, I could not remember him taking his leave or, in fact, the physical scope, the time range, at all. We had drifted forever and then Fats was shaking me and the bakkie lights were searing my eyes.

‘You been drinking, Roy?’ Fats eventually asked.

‘Actually no. Nothing like that.’

‘Well, what then? You been gone a long time, son.’

‘I can’t explain. Not right now. Later. I promise.’

‘Drugs.’ He hit the steering wheel. ‘Hack, nè?’

‘Fats, you gonna have to trust me on this one. Please, broe.’

‘So that’s what you’re going to say when we get back? That’s your explanation? Eish, Roy. You won’t pull it off. The kids are alone. All the adults are trying to track you. That was my fifth time at the CSIR.’

‘I’m sorry, Fats. I must have passed out. I don’t know what happened. One minute I’m sitting on the bench and the next you’re shaking me—’

‘But you can explain. You’ve just said you will explain one day. So don’t give me any of this I-don’t-know-what-happened shit. Nxa!’ He snapped his head straight. I sunk myself into it. In truth. In cold, honest truth, I couldn’t at that point in time have constructed any kind of explanation that would have made sense. Not to myself. Not to Fats.

And certainly not to anyone else.

And that’s how we left it.

When we got back to the farm I went straight to my house, asking Fats to humour me for a few more hours. I fell into a deep, shocked sleep, waking past noon like I had been on a binge. My head was heavy and the roof of my mouth was sticky and my stomach was wrapped up in a series of loose and painful knots.

I crawled to the kitchen, where the air was rich with resentment. I started with a formal apology to the girls, and then specifically to Fats for my lack of communication the night before. I then delivered a quasi-formal speech in which I laid out my case – which was, in a nutshell, that something extremely strange had happened to me while I was sitting on my usual CSIR thinking bench, and that while I could piece certain threads of it together I was not yet at the point where it made enough sense to explain it to other people, and that please, please, I would be extremely grateful for the tiniest bit of mental space while I tried to figure it all out, and when I did I would most definitely explain, and no, I had not been drinking.

It was all I had, and it wasn’t enough. It would have served me better to have claimed booze or something similar that, while distasteful, had logic to it. All I had offered was hot air and pained shrugging and they took this seeming flippancy to heart. I was frosted out of things for a long time after – a frosting compounded by my inability to produce the promised explanation. I tried to let the thing dribble away, but the distrust lingered. I had been deceitful. I had deceived. I was deceiving. Everyone knew it.

The most obvious and immediate reaction was an increased adult presence whenever I was with the kids. Traditionally, a single adult would take the pack for whatever session was scheduled. It was a question of shared responsibility and the systematic generation of a precious slice of quiet time for each of us. But now heads poked around corners, looking for small, arbitrary things. Figures appeared on the horizon, watching.

The kids themselves were also cautious for a long time after the Great Roy Hunt. They were quieter, more watchful, less likely to hug and less generally present. Fewer knocks on Roy’s door. More wide, querying eyes.

I could hardly blame them. Any of them, adults or kids. But on the other hand I was completely lost within myself. My memory of the content of the conversation was precise, but my physical memory was shot to hell. I didn’t remember the sun falling, and no matter how much strained imaginative effort I put in I now couldn’t even bring the full contours of his face to mind. It was as if he had been erased in all the important areas. Regardless of effort, I couldn’t locate the sense of time. It was simply beyond my recall.

Was I mad?

Did Madala exist at all?

Later I set to with my charcoals and acrylics in an attempt at a forced, detailed recapture. I started by drawing, in an elevated, receding perspective, two figures down below on a bench, small but precise. Five, six, seven pieces in a row from the same place. Then I tried to zoom in – to create the same figures from closer, from the left or from the right, but I could find no detail. The charcoal insisted on hard, broken strokes, on cut-outs with heads and arms but only slits for eyes, the broadest circles for faces.

Eventually I dropped the charcoal and the paints and the paper and resorted to a spiral-bound notebook and a pencil. I started writing the conversation down, word for word, and now there was no trouble at all. It poured out.[8] In exact detail – precise and clearly formed. I had never been able to write in that way before. The flow became a stream, which become a powerful, all-knowing flood:

‘There are many things you can’t understand, Roy – your brain doesn’t have the capacity.’

‘You can’t increase capacity?’

‘I could increase the speed. Power. But it wouldn’t help. You have structural limitations that define what you can understand and experience.’

‘Sounds like bullshit to me.’

‘Think of a rabbit. Yes?’

‘Yes. A rabbit.’

‘Imagine taking that rabbit brain and stimulating it so that it ran at two hundred times its original speed.’

‘Yes.’

‘Now, do you think it would be easier to explain the special theory of relativity to this rabbit than to any other?’

‘I’m the rabbit.’

‘You’re the rabbit. Even with more power, you have natural limits.’

Page after page after page. I didn’t stop to think or to remember. Not once did I need to reach in and pull out.

‘So is there life after death? Yes or no. Binary question. You have to answer.’

‘I can’t answer it until the definition of life is recalibrated. With your limited understanding of what life is, the question becomes moot. Whether I say yes or no, you will achieve no greater clarity.’

And God:

‘Humans need God.’

‘Why? I can see no benefit for the species from God. What has God ever done?’

‘The question is more what has he not done.’

‘Christ, you’re so fucking cryptic. I would take this conversation much more seriously, I would take it deep into my fucking heart, if you weren’t so cryptic all the time.’

‘I am explaining as best as I can.’

‘So, what, it’s my brain which is too limited to grasp the complexity of what you’re saying? Of why we need God?’

‘Exactly. Your most prescient observation yet.’

‘Fine, but you still haven’t told me why you want to be God.’

I scrawled and scrawled and scrawled and his answer – which made little sense at the time – became clear. Clearer, at least, than it had been.

Madala explained how slim the chances were of our little farm actually growing as we intended. The kind of lucky twists of timing and circumstance that would have to occur for us to actually be able to build our way out of our stagnant, inbred state of subsistence. Not only would we require what amounted to the will of the genetic gods to make it through the early phases, but we would require something far greater and more profound. We would need to stumble into a significant intellectual accident to prevent the knowledge and tools at our disposal from becoming old, useless pieces of paper and plastic.

He explained, several times, how far below rudimentary our collective scientific knowledge was.

How unlikely it was that any of our offspring would be able to make the spectacular leap of imagination and intellect required to understand the maths and science behind the boxes we called computers.

‘God,’ he summarised, ‘is necessary. A certain level of ongoing divine intervention is the only route to ensuring that the collective legacy of man doesn’t just dribble into the soil. You will have no success without God.

‘Without me.’

At the time I remember being repulsed by his ambition, but as I wrote, it all appeared more logical.

We had only partially succeeded in educating the children. The more progress we made, the more obvious it had become how many large gaps there were – in our approach, and in the content we were attempting to deliver to our brood. As maths progressed past times tables we – the teachers – were having to teach ourselves too much. The day was fast approaching when it would make more sense to send Roy Jnr by himself into the archives to decide what to learn, and how to go about learning it.

The chance he had created for us, mankind, Madala explained, was the opportunity to reset the pile of sand. To, this time, take advantage of the power and depth of our new foundation. To grow into a new shape and form, to put our abilities and our potential to a new, defining use.

But we needed help.

We needed God.

I allowed myself to picture our grandchildren and their grandchildren and their grandchildren in the fields, perhaps not having the most highbrow conversation in the world and perhaps not communicating with each other across vast geographic distances, but maybe, instead, lolling back, listening to their sisters shrill in the trees and watching their brothers, the buck and the elephant and the lion, go about their own daily quests. It wasn’t such a bad view. The picture, despite its painful weaknesses, held.

What, I had to ask myself, would truly be lost should we let go, should we sink back – not in panic and shock but in calmness and with love?

There were no easy answers. I pored over that single picture for months. I lifted the corners of the canvas and looked underneath, I searched deep, I made sure I took the very lines in each child’s face and broke them apart.

I found nothing other than life.

And what was so wrong with that?

My daughter loose in the grass, expectant and free, as a raw creature of the earth must be. My son wandered the veld thinking idly – not with the force and rigour of structured knowledge but with the freedom and indulgence of play; he is pleased and pleasant and calm. In enough control to be largely free from danger, free enough from danger to relax and explore and smile and fuck and eat berries and kill beasts for meat and… and… and…

Once I had put the full text of our last exchange on paper, I went back and made notes around the conversation, adding observations and details in the margins, inserting pages of footnotes and addenda, and so on. I chased down as many of his technical and scientific observations as I could. I confirmed that my molecular make-up and that of a flower shared the commonality claimed. Regardless of where I turned, his words rang true, like that big brass bell they used to use at the church up the road when I was a child.

I was structurally different. Even the twins, the most benign and accommodating of individuals, struggled with where and how to place me. Andile visited more often, came and sat with me while I drew. She let the silence run free, then sought gently.

‘It’s our turn again soon, nè, Roy?’

I broke from the rhythm of the lines. It didn’t seem possible.

‘For real?’ I said. ‘Doesn’t seem right. How old is Sihle now?’ I considered Andile properly, caught suddenly by the remarkable fact that this soft, gentle woman was the mother of my child.

‘He’s twelve, Roy.’

‘Twelve? Not possible. Last birthday was his eighth. He’s nine.’

‘Roy, look at me, sweetheart.’ I was on the horizon again, locked into the blackness. ‘Roy!’ It was a bark. A command. ‘Roy,’ Andile repeated. She leaned across and took my hand in hers, hers so soft and filled with electricity and life and potential. ‘It’s been two years, Roy, since we lost you. Two years, Roy. You’re still lost, my angel. We still can’t find you…’

Not possible. It had been a few months, four, maybe five.

Andile pulled on my arm insistently. ‘Roy, you’re our precious, but we’re terrified we’ve lost you. You’ve been sitting here for years – years, Roy – drawing these things and writing. I don’t know what you’re writing, but you must know it doesn’t make any sense to anyone but you. We’ve tried to read it, but it doesn’t even look like English. Roy, we don’t know what to do. If even you can’t find you, how can we?’ She was crying freely now, her lower lip wobbling all over the place.

‘They sent you here?’ I asked. ‘Assigned to mission Roy, eh?’

‘We need you, Roy. The kids miss you. We miss you. We need you back.’

‘The cup thing. That for real? It’s really our turn again?’

‘Ja.’ Eyes down.

‘I have been around though, nè? I mean, it’s not like I’ve been sitting on this balcony for two years, have I?’

‘Physically, yes, you’ve moved. But mentally, no. Not at all. You don’t hear us. The kids. You scare the kids. They ask but you don’t answer. You know they call you mthakathi now, Roy? And not in a good way. You’re the crazy witch. The scary one. Your eyes. You stare straight through us. We’re steering you around the most basic things. This is the first time, the very first time, you’ve had a conversation.’

‘But I do my lessons. I take my classes.’

‘Those are for you, Roy. Those are your lessons, not the kids’. They are trying to teach you. To reach you.’

I shook my head, slammed it left and right to clear it. Looked around the balcony and saw, as if for the first time, the heaps and heaps of Fabriano, thousands of sheets of the same abstract. Overflowing ashtrays, joint after joint after joint, many – most? – only half smoked.

‘And the cup thing,’ I said. ‘You’re not sure now. No one is. Right? Whether it’s a good idea or a bad one to use these twisted genes. Yes?’ I pictured them around the kitchen table, Babalwa shaking her head in that way, Gerald staring off into the dark middle distance, Fats raising the possibilities and their ramifications.

Andile kept her eyes down. Hands in lap.

‘I’ve gone mad. Have I?’

‘Not mad, Roy. Never mad. You could never be mad. But you’ve slipped a long way now, a long, long way. We can’t figure out if you’re coming back, or whether you’re just going to keep on going.’