Dub Steps

^{CHAPTER 16} Refugees

‘Smoke,’ Babalwa said as we caught our first sight of the Jozi skyline. ‘There’s smoke.’

We were about seventy kilometres out. There was, indeed, a small spiral of smoke curling over the right-hand side of the city.

‘Looks like it could be coming from Ponte,’ I said casually, while my heart leapt, fists in the air. ‘Could be anywhere, I suppose – can’t tell from this far.’

‘Where there’s smoke…’ Babalwa wriggled excitedly.

‘There’s something burning,’ I finished coldly. ‘Could mean anything.’

‘Could mean everything.’ Babalwa laughed at my caution.

I ran my tongue through the guillotine gap in my front tooth and grimaced behind closed lips.

The smoke toyed with us over seventy kilometres, shifting the source of its dance as we threaded our way through the splatter of empty cars blocking the highway. Babalwa squirmed ceaselessly, thrilled at the idea of Jozi. My tongue matched her vigour, probing relentlessly, excitedly, for the missing half of my front tooth.

‘There’ll be nothing to see,’ I kept saying to her in the build-up to the trip. ‘It’s not a big city any more. It’s an abandoned pile of glass and brick.’

‘Still,’ she said, refusing to concede, ‘it’ll be fun. Better than pretending to be farmers. We can go shopping. Looting. Whatever. Sandton City.’

As much as I tried to deny it, I was with her. Jozi, as always, held the lure of change.

Once we had the player working, once we had watched that first movie, our PE lives slid into a shambolic routine. We mowed the lawn and trimmed the edges of the reserve. We erected a greenhouse. We decided what to plant. We watched our seeds sprout, and rot.

Theoretically, hydroponics had seemed like the answer. In practice, however, we couldn’t get even the simplest elements of the process right, and after three months we had grown sick, thin and very tired of farming. We roamed further and further, seeking out homesteads and nurseries and smallholdings and farms with vegetable patches. We didn’t score often, but when we did we scored big. One farm in the Gamtoos Valley yielded a truckload. Spinach, carrots, green beans, potatoes – all waiting neatly in a lush garden, right next to the farmhouse.

But that was the exception. Generally we reached far and worked hard for little – the drooping, dying greenhouse mocking us each day when we returned.

‘We have to learn,’ I would insist to Babalwa. ‘How are we going to survive if we never learn to produce our own food?’

She agreed on the imperative but differed fundamentally on the rest. Babalwa saw clearly how bad we were at food production, and how much help we needed. Soil. Conditions. ‘You know, Roy, you know…’ She would stare and hold it until I walked away.

And really, I did know. Our few attempts to secure meat had failed badly. We had one or two surprisingly wild chickens cooped, providing eggs and, supposedly, meat. But we were as terrible at butchery – even something as simple as a chicken – as we were at farming. We never even thought of trying to find a roaming sheep or cow, the subject avoided by mutual silent agreement.

We survived, but in no comfort. Eventually, as the daily grind took proper hold, we fell back into a reliable rhythm of rice and canned beans. Rice and canned stew. Rice and spinach.

Perhaps most indicative of our state of decline was our inability to watch movies. After weeks and weeks of fiddling with panels and batteries and portable solars, we set up enough power to fire up genuinely warm water, as well as the entertainment system in Babalwa’s lounge. That first night she scattered the small room with cushions and prepared popcorn. I made coffee. We stacked the table with chocolate and argued over the first movie, eventually settling on Spanglish. Something soft and old to start, please, she begged. Just to get going. Something American and stupid.

I conceded, then ruined the evening by crying.

Adam Sandler reaches into Téa Leoni’s bathrobe and cups her breast to calm her. It’s a mock funny scene, nothing really, but I was judderingly reminded of Angie and myself. It was exactly the kind of thing she would have done to me, had I had breasts. It was our kind of fight, comedy or not. Their weepy hysteria felt so much like home I crashed under the memory. We tried again, but the weight of the films was too much. Their ideas, their people, their references, their beauty all spoke of subjects too rich. So we walked through and around and over our home entertainment system, playing music on it occasionally but generally leaving it fallow.

‘If it’s people, what d’you think they’re burning?’ Babalwa asked as we slid past Gold Reef City. The column of smoke had drifted further back as we approached. Now it looked like it could be over Midrand, possibly even Pretoria. It thinned while we drove, threatening to disappear totally into the late afternoon clouds.

‘Who the fuck knows?’ I grunted, irritable now with the idea that coming back to Joburg would somehow alter our circumstances. ‘Probably just an accident of nature. Leaves burning through broken glass or something.’

Babalwa pulled her knees up to her chin and stuck her tongue out at me. ‘Poes! It better be fucking people. I’m not sure I can spend the rest of my life with a sulky pants like you.’

I laughed, then clamped my lips back over my half tooth. I managed to forget about it most of the time, but every now and again it came back to me how ridiculous I must have looked with this massive angular chunk missing from my face. Despite the fact that I was the only man on the planet, I still wanted to impress and please Babalwa in the way that men impress and please women. But I found myself keeping my mouth shut and looking away as much as possible. Dentistry was now my constant ironic companion.

‘You should just laugh. Let go, man,’ Babalwa said, eyes twinkling. ‘I think it’s cute, anyway. Broken teeth are sexy in lotsa places.’

I grunted and made a pretence of refocusing on the road.

‘Don’t be grumpy, Roy. It’s my first time in Jozi. I’m excited.’ She reached a bony little hand over and patted my knee. ‘Tell me what it was like,’ she said, gripping my kneecap in encouragement.

‘Full. A lot of fokken traffic. Angry people.’

‘Liar.’ She tried to lift my patella, pushing it painfully around its socket. ‘You were probably the angry one. I’m sure there was lots that was great here. I wish I could have seen it…’ She trailed away and focused on the industrial landscape as we looped into the spaghetti junction.

I allowed myself a couple of flashbacks. Images of shiny cars and the glinting Highveld sun, traffic jams and metro roadblocks. Fat cops hustling for lunch. Maybe she was right, I conceded to myself. Quite possibly she was right…

Initially Jozi seemed little changed. The dry brown walls were still slumped and decaying and hopelessly wrong, but now the transmission paint was peeling, doubling up the ghetto atmosphere. Inside the easy lines of the skyline, the city had faded, was fading.

As we crested the hill to Zoo Lake we entered a teeming jungle. The birds had taken over. The hadedas perched in throngs on treetops, rooftops and garden walls, the packs on high supporting ground troops drilling the earth with prehistoric beaks. The hadada shrieks bounced against the softer calls of the loeries, also obscenely abundant over the forest tops. Then the weavers, the shrikes, the robins and all the smallers, crying and yelling and calling and hunting.

I stopped the van as we passed the zoo.

The houses and converted office-houses facing Jan Smuts Avenue had fallen so far back into the shrubbery they were barely recognisable. An old-school billboard had fallen completely off its wall mounting, the vines and creepers pulling it easily and slowly down. Windows were covered in vines. Where once the tops of the oak trees had merely brushed fingers to create a light canopy, now they had threaded together to form a complete roof, filled in by shrubs and tendrils and leaves.

And birds.

The forest stood tall, as in a fairy tale. Grass poked up through General Smuts’s tarmac, challenging the dominance of hundreds of years. Soon it would be the tar that was repressed, and rare and alien. I knew the forest would end in less than a kilometre and we would emerge in the glassy shine of Rosebank. Still, I searched for breath.

‘Jesus’ was all I said to Babalwa. ‘A complete fucken forest.’ I felt like a twelve-year explorer, previously bulletproof, suddenly lost, realising the true worth of my meagre experience and supplies. ‘It can’t have closed off completely,’ I added, ostensibly to comfort her, but really speaking to myself, the one with the memories. I pressured the accelerator, urgent in my need to get us through the few hundred metres to Rosebank. Babalwa gawked happily at the hadedas and loeries, shrieking properly when she spotted a zebra grazing next to the road. ‘Must be from the zoo,’ I said.

She commanded me to stop so she could look at it properly. ‘Never seen one before,’ she muttered, her chin resting on the half-raised window. ‘Check how fat its ass is. That’s wonderful. Really wonderful.’ She laughed and her little paw came out again and patted me on the knee. ‘Thanks for bringing us, Roy. This is fun. Much better than PE.’

We burst through into Rosebank, which had all the hallmarks of a conventional concrete jungle.

We entered Eileen’s apartment like we were returning from some kind of prolonged holiday. Me, the father, carrying our baggage and supplies up the staircase from the basement. Babalwa running up the stairs to see if she could find a view of the smoke column, then running back down past me again, yelling about not being able to find it. I dragged the bags and the boxes of food, grumbling to myself. We had become an odd pair. A husband and a wife. A father and daughter. A mother and her lost, toothless son. My tongue slipped through the gap again, seeking out the sharpest edge, playing with the idea of blood.

‘Absolutely fuck all!’ Babalwa thumped up the last steps to land next to me as I left Eileen’s flat for the last load. ‘Can’t see a damn thing. Maybe it was just a natural fire. Like on Survivor, before they get given flint.’

I grunted and turned for the basement, soothed in a strange but significant way by her chatter.

‘Can I go in?’ Babalwa half stepped over Eileen’s threshold.

I dumped the last box (canned beans, long-life milk, canned tuna, canned tomatoes) on the kitchen counter and heaved. As strong as I had become, the carrying had still taken it out of me.

‘Who was this chick, anyway?’ Babalwa bounced into the kitchen. ‘Girlfriend?’

‘Office associate.’

‘Not very creative though.’ Babalwa hoisted her narrow ass onto the counter. ‘Check out this flat. It’s like she was still sixteen and her mom did it for her.’

‘In many ways she was,’ I replied. ‘Look, it’s pretty dark now. We need to decide what we’re gonna eat, how we’re gonna heat it. We’ve got shit to do.’

Babalwa grabbed me by my hair, pulled me into her and locked her legs behind me. ‘You need to chill the fuck out, baba. There are no deadlines here.’ She kissed me carefully, like a wife, probing my mouth with her tongue, reassuring me with her hands and her legs and her grip. Just as I began leaning in, she slipped her tongue through the hole in my front tooth and burst out laughing, pushing me back, the heels of her palms against my chest. ‘Sexy!’ She laughed, looking me in the eye. ‘Sexy like a meth addict. Sexy like a crack pipe.’

I pushed her back, harder than I intended, almost slamming her head against the corner of Eileen’s smoke extractor. ‘Fuck you. You’re in Roy country now. Show respect.’

‘Pretty hard to respect a man with a gap like that in his teeth, mister!’ Babalwa slid off the counter, hugged me quickly and trotted into the lounge. ‘Seriously?’ she called out. ‘You woke up here, in this flat? Must have been freaky. Seriously freaky. I mean, just being in a space like this, it’s like going…’ Her voice disappeared as she entered the bedroom.

We slept that night in Eileen’s bed, our stomachs grinding away at the beans and the tuna, Babalwa farting gently as she slumbered. I let my arm curl over her, like we were lovers and not lost, lonely refugees.

^{CHAPTER 17} Genuinely enamoured

‘Do you even know how to shoot one of these things?’ Babalwa laughed at me as she picked up the weapons, then laid them carefully back down again, one by one.

‘Blasted a few rounds. Landed on my ass.’

‘We should probably give ourselves lessons…’

We carted a shotgun, an AK and an R1 out the front entrance of Tyrwhitt Mansions. Guns, it turns out, aren’t that complicated. You open them up, shove in the bullets where it looks like they’re supposed to go, find the safety and fire.

If you’re a scrawny girl, you avoid the shotguns.

We blasted the stop sign at the bottom of Tyrwhitt Avenue to pieces, moving closer and closer as the reality of our talents became obvious, Babalwa burying her elbows in the tarmac with every shotgun effort.

The birds scattered with each shot, then came back down again. They were clustered in the trees, on the street signs, on the balconies. Egrets, eagles, loeries, hadedas. They made me think of the free pigs, and I wondered if they were still around.

‘Be a bit careful,’ I said as we packed the guns back into the basement armoury and selected a personal pistol each. Babalwa chose a Vektor SP4, a Russian thing, far too big in her baby hand. I took the Vektor CPZ, all rounded edges and Star Wars. ‘There was a pack of free pigs and dogs around when I was here. Big enough to tear up a young girl from PE.’

‘Thanks,’ she said caustically. ‘I’ll keep that in mind. Oh, we should look for solar or a generator while we’re out, nè? This water thing could screw us up. I know you don’t want to move from your cherry’s flat, but we might have to.’

‘We need to plan a route?’

Babalwa flicked her safety off, then on again, and shoved the Vektor into the rear waistband of her gym shorts, where it sat, enormous and devoid of context. ‘Let’s just drive.’ She winked at me. ‘I can feel there’s something out there.’

She loaded the CDs into the van’s player as we searched the edges of Gauteng. Randfontein, Roodepoort, Krugersdorp, Daveyton, Vosloo, Magaliesberg, Midrand, Centurion, Tembisa, Pretoria, Benoni, Brakpan, Katlehong, Springs, Soweto. We pounded the speakers, not stopping, not talking, our heads bumping along, teenagers absorbing a new, morphing landscape.

The plants were pushing the houses back, each millimetre of growth adding to each tendril a new triumph of organic force. In the townships progress was slower but still real, clusters reaching up and over the roofs, sporadic grass patches spiralling upwards and sideways simultaneously.

‘We’re just starting summer rains, right?’ Babalwa asked rhetorically. ‘It’s October, right? And it rains hard up here?’ We were driving through the matchbox houses of Katlehong.

‘Very.’

‘What you reckon – two years? Three? Before everything is gone?’

‘Depends. At the zoo it’ll be less. Soon we’ll have to cut a path out, if we want to go back the way we came.’

‘Show me where you grew up,’ she said. ‘There’s no smoke.’

I pointed the van to Greymont Hills.

Babalwa took great interest in my childhood house, firing off a string of probing questions about my father as she shot away the locks to the front door and the security gate.

‘Did he beat you? You ever remember him sober? What about your mother?’

She roved through the house, picking up things – coffee mugs, pots, bowls, couch cushions – as if they represented me and my family rather than my tenants, then sitting on the front step contemplatively when I told her how many hours I had spent there myself. She cut an incongruous figure, there on my childhood front step. A scrawny girl in filthy white gym shorts and a vest, shotgun hooked over her arm and a pistol jutting from her hip.

I was becoming genuinely enamoured.

We started having sex regularly after the PE movie debacle – after I had cried through Spanglish. She would hug. Rub my head. Hold my hand. At night – only ever at night – she would pull me towards her and take me in, guiding with authority, climaxing with a fierce grip and complete silence. I, in turn, made a habit of collapsing into her, of passing out in her arms, of harvesting the small doses she offered, as fully as possible, as often as possible.

Around that time, she began raising the idea of children.

If we are really the only ones, she would say, then our children are going to have to sleep with each other to breed. We’ll be inbreeders.

I would shrug. Grunt.

‘Seriously, Roy! D’you think about it? I mean, at some stage we’re going to have to breed, nè? We have to try, don’t we?’

Once she had forced the idea into my head I did begin to think about it. But inevitably my thoughts would end with the idea of Babalwa as wife – as partner. As family.

I stayed as quiet as she would let me, offering titbits, basic ideas, technical prods along the line of genetics, cross-pollination, and so on. I would research occasionally, presenting her with whatever facts I thought would add to the debate playing out in her head. Personally, though, breeding was an abstract notion. I knew that once she had decided, I would follow in the wake.

Still, my resignation wasn’t entirely passive. As the days passed I allowed myself to consider the idea of her in relation to me, in relation to family. I considered her form more deeply. Her child hips. Her adult eyes. Her details began to etch themselves on my brain, and my heart. Soon there would be no wiping them away.

For her part, Babalwa seemed only to grow used to me. Her touches, though warm, were calculated; they sought to heal, to help, to improve. She reached for me through genetic necessity. Through circumstance.

I wondered whether I would be informed of the child decision or simply caught up in it. As we roamed the streets of PE, looting for health, activity, entertainment, smashing locks and walls and doors, I tried to imagine us as a family, but the images refused to form. She was too young. I was… I didn’t know what I was. But I knew I wasn’t exactly right.

‘Tell me,’ Babalwa said, still perched on my childhood step, the shotgun, now resting between her legs, making her especially dominant, ‘about being a drunk. There’s booze everywhere. You tempted again?’

The tooth episode hung thick between us.

‘Always tempted. But I have the fear. Keeps me in line. ’Specially after the tooth.’

‘So if we find others… you’ll drink again? Moments of joy? Excitement?’

‘I hope not. I’m a proper junkie though, so I know enough to know that I might. You know, the day-at-a-time thing. All standard twelve-step shit applies.’

‘Lately I’ve been feeling like just getting out of my mind. Completely fucked up.’ Babalwa peered over the shotgun muzzle at me with hooded, plotting eyes. ‘Whaddya think of that?’

We decided on sundowners at the Westcliff.

Splattered on multiple levels against the face of Westcliff ridge, the Westcliff Hotel hovered directly over Zoo Lake, an off-pink series of plush, interlinking five-star units. As we smashed through the front gates, I explained to Babalwa about the foreign tourists and their plastic-surgery safari holidays, with the hotel utilised as recovery venue, about the prostitutes snuck through the gates at night, about the Sunday afternoon high teas for the Parkview ladies and their daughters.

Unable to jump-start a golf cart, we skipped down the enormous staircase three at a time.

Babalwa blew away the security bars on the restaurant window. She had adjusted quickly to the power of the recoil, and was firing the shotgun as regularly as possible now. We clambered in.

The serving trolleys were waiting for us, lined up in perfect threes, knives and forks at the ready. Cakes moulded to the point of crumbling. Proud mounds of green and moss trapped within blithe, unknowing glass cases.

Babalwa pulled a bottle of champagne from the kitchen wine cellar. The kitchen itself looked recently flooded. The floor was slick and sticky, a dirty high-water mark some two inches above the skirting rail. It was actually, she insisted, a high-blood mark; the apogee of fleeing freezer and fridge juice. I turned my head, unwilling to broach the idea of what might have happened to it, the blood and the muck, since.

Babalwa took care of another set of windows and security bars and we clambered out onto the terrace overlooking Zoo Lake and the northern suburbs. She cracked the champagne, took a long swig and spat it out. ‘I think it’s off?’ She handed the bottle over for testing.

I declined.

‘Sorry, my bad,’ she said. ‘But I really think it’s off.’ She slapped her tongue loudly between lips and teeth, testing.

‘Probably just French. Is it really bitter? Dry?’ I took the bottle. The label said Champagne. ‘Ja, it’s French. You might wanna look for something that says sparkling wine. French shit is hard.’

Babalwa hopped back through the window to the kitchen.

I rolled a small joint from my stash and considered Joburg’s north.

Trees. Trees. Trees. The forest almost pulsing it was growing so fast. I smoked and wondered. Inhaled and dreamed in reverse. Agency offices and houses of colleagues – their names already blurred and distant. Clubs and girls and campaigns. Media. Marketing. Copy. I was, I decided, looking over the metaphorical forest of my past. I could see nothing but a closing roof. A green, leafy mat.

Babalwa returned with the cheap stuff, cracked it, sat between my legs and leaned back against me.

She drank. I smoked.

We fucked ourselves up.

^{CHAPTER 18} Six

We crashed through the front door of Eileen’s flat chattering and laughing and collapsing in and out of each other’s arms.

There, flat out on the couch, was Fats Bonoko, creative director at TWF something something and something. A shotgun lay on the floor, waiting.

Babalwa swooned and fell to the floor in a heap.

I stood swaying, attempting to compute the fact that not only was there a live human being in Eileen’s flat, but that I knew exactly who he was.

Fats, for his part, grinned dangerously, his mini-afro wobbling slightly on top of a laughing face.

‘Good people,’ he said, pulling his torso lazily to the vertical. ‘I’ve been waiting forever. You, sir, look pretty wasted. Your young lady friend’ – he looked happily over at Babalwa’s slumped form, which mumbled something muffled and incomprehensible – ‘eish.’

‘Fats,’ I replied eventually, cautiously. ‘Howzit hanging?’

‘Not bad, Roy, not bad. I mean, I think I enjoyed advertising a bit more overall, but I’ve kind of taken to this survivor thing.’ He was dressed in combat pants, and an army-type shirt beneath a munitions vest. Army boots, sheepskin bangle on the wrist. Muscles rippling under all the gear. All in all, typical of Tšhegofatšo Bonoko, a man who had always been overtly – and frequently unreasonably – styled.

‘Jesus. I need to sit.’ I dropped onto the couch next to Fats.

‘You, Mr Fotheringham, I know pretty well,’ he continued blithely, billowing out his usual mock confidence. ‘But your young friend here’ – he glanced again at the lump that was Babalwa – ‘I haven’t had the pleasure.’

I was speechless, trapped by a flood of realisations and remembrances. I had never liked Fats Bonoko. He was arrogant, under-talented and over-powerful. Off the top of my shocked, stoned head, I could think of at least four people he’d knifed on his way up the ladder. It didn’t seem right, or possible, or logical, that he was where he was, sitting next to me on this couch, grinning with inane self-satisfaction.

‘Babalwa,’ I said. ‘Her name’s Babalwa and she’s drunk.’

‘Ah, a celebration. Nice. I’ve had a few myself since this shit started.’

‘What shit? Do you know what happened?’

Fats looked at me, his face deeply serious. ‘I woke up and it was like this. Empty.’

‘So you know nothing?’

‘Nothing at all. Other than advertising is a pretty damn useless business without a target market.’

‘Are there others?’ I asked. ‘Alive?’

‘Plenty.’ Fats issued a patronising pat to my shoulder. ‘At least six. Maybe more.’

‘Six,’ Babalwa groaned from the floor. ‘Six.’

^{CHAPTER 19} The pain did numb, eventually

‘Roy, my man, what the fuck happened to your face?’ Fats stirred sugar into his cold water and tea bag as we stood around Eileen’s impotent kettle. ‘The tooth thing. That’s a powerful look for you.’

‘Ja,’ I mumbled, lips closed. ‘Know any dentists?’

Fats sipped his cold tea and grimaced. ‘On the real though, what the fuck?’

‘Let’s just say I had an encounter with a rock.’

As the time in PE dragged I found myself slowly, creepingly, thinking about alcohol again. I had run out of weed and the rawness of being stranded – initially a strange, fixating high in itself – was fading. I began to pick my toenails viciously, vacantly, at night. Unable to watch movies, tired of listening to music, listless and disconnected from my sole companion (who herself was drinking increasing volumes of white wine and gin), I was bored.

As we roamed and foraged, I began to look for booze cabinets. Not that I was digging into them or anything, but I noticed myself noticing myself paying attention to stock levels. I began to fantasise about good red wine, about that first sip, something deep and woody, something with the power to slip me up a notch, to refocus my view. My abstract passion for red evolved from observation to actually extracting bottles from the cabinets or shelves, examining them for potential, turning them over in my hands and feeling the weight. Then I would put them back, carefully.

Eventually I found myself in a Bianca’s bedroom in Summerstrand, on the beachfront. Her room looked out on Marine Drive, over a few scrub-covered dune humps and then onto the sea. Thin raindrops were tearing into the shoreline at forty-five degrees, the southwester driving perfect, glassy waves which peaked and rolled and peaked and rolled, an occasional dolphin the only surfer taking advantage.

Having stashed her mobile, I flipped through Bianca’s photo albums, which were meticulously ordered and maintained, and which stretched right from early childhood through to the end. In pink sleep shorts and a vest, arms around mother in the backyard. Father teaching her to sail a yacht on the Sundays River. Sixteenth birthday with friends at the Pizza Hut. Hair short and styled for the occasion, light make-up, all smiles, friends and lipgloss.

I went for her father’s 2019 Zonneblom Shiraz.

I returned with a corkscrew and the bottle and lay down on Bianca’s unmade bed.

And it was beautiful, while it lasted. The warmth of the wine, the blurring, evocative safety of her photos. She was ordinary, Bianca. Dark hair. Careful smile. Eyes that sparkled and evaded in equal measures. Bianca with her sailboat. Bianca and dad chasing older brother in fancy-dress masks. Bianca baking, silly hat on head, floury hands in the air.

The wine poured through me and healed me, touching gently, reaching into all the corners. My head went warm, then cold, then warm again. As the bottle died the red crust grew on my lips. I ground it off with the heel of my palm, examining it like it had some deeper, metaphorical meaning. Which it did.

I drained the bottle and passed out, Bianca on her bike in my lap.

I woke in the dark, throbbing drunk, the wind and rain pulsing outside.

Back to dad’s rack, another Zonneblom, back again, stumbling. Suddenly I was reaching for destruction or damnation or something similar and opening the third was impossible. I couldn’t get the screw into the cork.

And then out the front door and to the car and over a rock and smashing my face into the ground and the black wet darkness of being out cold in the rain on some stranger’s driveway. Then the waking and the pain needles all through my face and my torn lip and my ripped cheek and the sight, the awful, pathetic sight of my shard of tooth on the driveway, pointing like a compass in the direction of home.

I laughed when I saw Babalwa the next day but she didn’t return it. Her face fell, her eyes hooded and careful and a little bit scared.

‘What the fuck?’ She shouted like a mother. ‘What the bloody fuck Roy?’

‘I got lost.’

‘Your face.’ She shook her head and then snuck another look at me. ‘Your lips. Jesus, Roy, your tooth!’

‘I won’t do it again, promise.’

‘What?’

‘Drink.’

‘That’s what this is? You went drinking?’

She closed the space between us down to a millimetre and slapped me, through the cuts and scabs, through the broken lip and tortured gums. As the pain shot through my mouth I groaned and fell back a step or two. ‘You stupid fuck,’ she said, crying now, tears running down both cheeks. ‘Please, please, I’m begging you, Roy. You’re all I’ve got. You’re the only hope there is. If you turn into this…’ Her head twisted away from the horror. ‘If you turn into this, you’re pushing me out, totally alone, into the world. You can’t do that. Jesus Christ, you can’t do that, Roy.’

‘I said I won’t.’

‘I don’t believe you.’ Babalwa walked away.

I saw her again two days later.

By then my mouth had started the healing journey, healthy parts reaching for each other over the volcanoes. The remaining half of my tooth throbbed constantly. Babalwa insisted I extract it, but I refused. The pain would fade, or the nerve would numb, or something like that. She shook her head and walked away again.

The pain did numb, eventually, ratcheting down from a scream to a throb, from a throb to a pulse, from a pulse to an annoying dull ache. I sliced constantly on the guillotine that now hung from my gum, tiny, almost invisible trickles of blood forming repeatedly in the curl of my tongue.

It was weeks before Babalwa could look at me directly without her own countenance crumpling completely.

I stopped smiling.

I eliminated the smile from my life.

The very idea of smiling, gone.

Losing a back tooth is unfortunate. Losing a front tooth is life-changing. I would catch glimpses of myself in shop windows and stray mirrors and every time I was shocked; the combination of hair and tooth had created a reflection I didn’t recognise. I turned the van’s rear-view mirror far left, cutting myself out entirely. I withdrew from Babalwa, and from myself. I lay awake at night, fizzing in sobriety, frogmarching myself into dreams of magnitude. I whipped and whipped and whipped. But while the scars slowly grew closed, the damage remained.

‘Boss.’ Fats sipped his tea and blinked rapidly. ‘That’s about the most fucking tragic thing I’ve ever heard.’ He wiped back a tear. ‘Serious. Since all this shit happened, this is the most pathetic, disturbing thing…’

I shrugged, picked a tea mug off its stand, reached to turn on the kettle and then put the mug back. ‘Imagine how I feel.’

‘That’s the point, nè?’ Fats locked me in for a while, eyeball to eyeball. ‘That’s exactly the fucking point.’

‘What’s the point?’ Babalwa slurred, having appeared at the corner of the kitchen door. She was wiping her eyes.

‘Hai.’ Fats shook his head. ‘We were just discussing your mlungu here and his dental problems.’

‘You drinking tea?’ Babalwa asked Fats hopefully.

‘Ice-cold. Straight out the barrel. You want?’

‘No. Yuk’. She shivered in the doorway, hugging her elbows.

‘Where you from, anyway?’ Fats asked, managing to sound simultaneously serious and slyly suggestive of something unnamed.

‘Port Elizabeth. PE.’

‘Ah. Land of the defeated. Askies.’

‘Not so bad.’ Babalwa glared at him. ‘It wasn’t so bad.’

Fats carried on the conversation in a mix of bad isiXhosa and tsotsitaal. Babalwa replied rapidly and within seconds I was gazing around the room looking for something. I tried to hang onto the one or two familiar words, but it was useless. The conversation shifted gear several times and I felt myself become the subject, discussed rapid fire, followed by an awkward silence.

‘Sorry, Roy, my man, you know, it’s good to connect. Authentically.’ Fats drained the last of his tea and thumped the mug down into the sink without looking at me.

Babalwa backed out of the kitchen, still hugging herself.

Fats turned and beamed at me blankly. ‘Well, I must tell you, it’s fucking good to have some more faces on board. And one that I already know – I would never have thought it was possible.’

‘How long you been following us?’ I asked on a whim.

‘Tebza and I heard the shots – when you were testing your cannons. We followed the sound, tried not to get pinned by stray bullets, and here we are. Tebza was supposed to follow you from a long distance but I presume you lost him at some stage. He’s not really the following type.’

‘Where’s he now? Tebza?’

‘Not sure,’ Fats replied, three-quarters of an eye seeking Babalwa’s vanished form. ‘That will have to be our next move, before we go back. We’ll have to find him.’

‘Back where?’

‘Home, my half-toothed friend. Home.’

There were a million reasons why I had never liked Fats Bonoko and they all came flooding back as he marched through Eileen’s flat calling the shots. Firstly, he was an arrogant son of a bitch. Secondly, he was extremely skilled at putting that arrogance to work. Fats invariably emerged shining from the rubble of his business interactions. He launched the hand grenades, picked out the prizes and stepped around the corpses. Hardly a unique paradigm in our business, but extremely frustrating for the foot soldiers.

He was, to top it all, good-looking, fit, muscular and possessed of a powerful, annoying wit.

‘I’ve just remembered,’ he offered as we waited for Babalwa to gather warmer clothes. ‘That chewing gum thing you came up with. Awesome. Quality work. What was the line again?’

‘Counter revolution.’

‘Counter revolution.’ He slapped the butt of his rifle. ‘Counter revolution. Love it. It was rare, that one. Perfect timing. Fantastic.’

‘I like to think I made a contribution.’

Fats burst into a guttural laugh, slapped his rifle again. ‘Ah man, too much. So dry. You always were so dry.’

We headed out. Fats in front, leading us down the stairs. Babalwa behind him, then me.

‘There are seven of us,’ he called out as we descended the stairwell. ‘Me, Tebza, Lillian the American – don’t even fucking ask me how we ended up with an American – sis Beatrice, Gerald the mercenary and the twins – well, that’s what we call them, they’re inseparable. Thus far, just so you know, we have no agreement on what happened. Tebza has his very own ideas, which no one can understand; the rest of us are split somewhere between the apocalypse, a virus and godly intervention of some kind or another.’

Our feet thumped in unison down the last stairs.

‘Me,’ Fats continued, ‘I’m scared shitless, but I’m also glad I’m not in advertising any more. You feeling me, Mr Fotheringham?’

I grunted.

Teboho appeared as we left the building. He was a tall, sloping kid of about nineteen or twenty, one tiny white earphone dangling over his heart, the other plugged in. There was a faint scar next to his left eye, which squeezed and wrinkled when he smiled or squinted. Basketball clothes: shorts cutting off below his knees, fat white sneakers, red Nike vest. An R1 wrapped uncomfortably around his left forearm. He stepped forward and shook hands politely, repeating his name to me and Babalwa.

Teboho.

Teboho.

He turned after the greeting and led us down the block and into Jan Smuts, where their gleaming black Toyota 4x4 was parked beside an abandoned bus stop.

‘We did a big campaign for them years ago. Don’t know whether you noticed it, Fotheringham,’ Fats said, not bothering to look at me or wait for my participation, ‘but it was massive. Fell in love with these beasts then.’ He patted the Toyota’s bonnet. ‘Just can’t resist.’

We got into the car in silence.

Fats waved his thumb over the reader, started his beast and kicked it into first with relish.

‘For as long as there’s petrol, I think this is my baby.’

Teboho, front passenger, popped the dangling earphone in and stared out the window.

Babalwa took my hand and squeezed it.

Fats blitzed us over Bolton, then over the highway, and cut a series of sharp rights into the upper side of Houghton, where the mansions lined up on the ridge. He didn’t stop talking, rattling off random snippets like a tour guide, ranging from reminiscences from his ad days to broad reflections on the apocalypse and specific insights on the current practical difficulties in their community.

‘Our focus at the moment is on security – obviously – and the solar bank. That’s the big thing, for now. With enough power we can do pretty much what we want into the future with the farm and regularised production. That’s why we are where we are, on the ridge. We’re picking up wicked sun pretty much all day…’

Fats spoke in the classic manner of the project manager, the we’s and us’s flowing seamlessly into each other, pulling Babalwa and myself immediately into the centre of things. A de facto integration had already occurred. His mission was ours. Their challenges already belonged to me. I wondered what Teboho thought about it all – about Fats and his assumptions and directions. I looked for some kind of expression from him in the side mirror, but his face was completely blank. Zoned out.

‘Don’t mind him,’ Fats offered, letting me know he was observing as well as rambling. ‘He’s totally addicted. Don’t think I’ve ever seen him without at least one ear plugged in. It’s disconcerting but you get used to it.’

‘Music?’ Babalwa asked. ‘Is he listening to music?’

‘Ja, that and scanning for communiques from the aliens, and pinging, always pinging. He can’t let go of the idea of the network.’ Fats chuckled, then added, ‘On the real, though – this boy’s on completely another trip. Personally I think he’s just got monster withdrawal, but there you go, we all cope in our own ways, nè?’

Teboho’s head bounced gently up and down to some kind of beat. He could have been agreeing with Fats’s assertions, or he could have been completely otherwise engaged. It was impossible to tell.

After we’d crested a steep series of S bends, Fats turned the Toyota into a plush lane, mansions on the left and the classic stone British public school buildings of King Edward High School on the right. Just past KES we pulled into an anonymous driveway fronted by Joburg’s traditional upper-class black gangster gates. The gates swung open.

‘Look,’ Babalwa poked me excitedly in the ribs. ‘They’ve got power.’

‘Not a lot,’ gushed Fats. ‘But enough to cover all the basics and we’re growing the bank every day. Soon we should be able to juice up anything that needs it.’ He steered us through a driveway designed to impress and maybe even humiliate its visitors. We rolled down a steep slope, stone walls on either side fighting a barely controlled jungle.

‘We haven’t got to regular gardening yet,’ Fats added, in reference to the foliage. ‘But soon. The way these fucking things are growing, very soon.’ He stomped hard on the brake and guided us down an especially sharp slope before parking in a garage area littered with 4x4s of various colours and sizes and featuring a long, extended turning loop. On the left of the parking area was a multi-levelled stone mansion behind an enormous and surprisingly clear swimming pool.

The mansion rolled out across the property in several different directions. Each wing looked like it could have lived a full life on its own – creeping vine covered the central hub and stretched out to each arm, but the four quarters could have worked as stand-alone buildings. At the far end of the garden, near the front gate, stood a separate house, a cottage for the help. Also built from stone, it had its own small swimming pool, a tiled veranda and four or five rooms.

‘Previously owned by the Minister for What, What and What, I believe,’ said Fats. ‘The Right Honourable Jackson something. Also, obviously, a member of the King Edward High School governing body, et cetera, et cetera.’ He waved in the direction of KES. Babalwa looked at me blankly, seeking elaboration, but before I could get going a tall, incongruously made-up and polished lady clipped beaming out the front door. She fit well into her mid-range stilettos, blue jeans and neat black vest. She sported gold hoop earrings and maroon nail polish, her hair swept into a tight set of braids running in parallel lines over her skull and down into a funky yet neat tail that rested, mullet-like, on the back of her neck.

‘And that,’ Fats bellowed as we walked awkwardly towards each other, ‘is our ever impeccable sis Beatrice.’ He gave her a fake advertising hug and introduced us all. ‘Beatrice is never, ever, caught out,’ he observed as I shook her hand and Babalwa fell into her arms in a child’s hug. ‘Regardless of the circumstances, even in the midst of the apocalypse, sis Beatrice is impeccable. It’s the CEO in her’ – he was unable to stop – ‘she brings style, grace and a little bit of sexiness to every occasion.’

Beatrice shot him a look, blushed a little and told us how happy she was to see us. She joined the tour as if she was also new to the place, listening intently to Fats’s explanations and introductions. We wandered through the property, picking up new members with every stop. The greetings ranged from wild hugs and yells from Andile (the loudest noise, it turned out, we’d ever hear from her) to a smile from Javas, and a gentleman’s handshake from Gerald. Fats marched us through the facilities in the dark, waving his torch around a series of vague shapes and forms. Eventually the group wound downstairs to the deck area overlooking northern Johannesburg, below which was a glimmering solar bank. The panels covered the entire slope underneath the deck, a space of about three hundred square metres. The panels blinked a confident silver in the moonlight.

‘This, really, is it.’ Fats waved his hand in a full arc around the panel area. ‘This has been our mission since we found each other. Power, people, is everything. And what makes this lot work are the batteries. They are the latest, the very latest, in fact, from Germany. These babies can store for over four days.’

‘It was all set up when we got here. That’s why we chose it,’ Lillian, the plump white American, whispered at me conspiratorially. ‘All we’ve done is add more panels.’

We stood in silence for a while, blinking back at the panels.

‘Anyone hungry?’ Beatrice asked, looking at Babalwa with motherly concern, then at me. ‘You must be hungry.’

‘Starving, thanks.’

‘OK, a lightning pass over the rest then, just so they can get their bearings!’ Fats pulled us back upstairs, through the cavernous foyer and into one of the other wings. ‘This is Tebza’s domain, eh, Tebza?’ The first room in the wing was packed with old-school flat-screen monitors and blinking green and red lights. Teboho blinked at us from the back. ‘Tebza is pinging wildly at the walls, hoping to find a connection to something somewhere. Like those people who send radio signals to space looking for aliens. He’s also setting up a WAN[3] to cover this house; then we’ll move it out to wider areas. The idea, obviously, is to get to a point where we start connecting to other terminals in the city, the country, the continent and then the world. The hope, obviously, being that some people somewhere else are doing the same thing. The other hope, more localised, is that re-establishing some form of net will help deal with Tebza’s digital withdrawal. Eh, Tebza?’

Teboho pulled a very slim silver something out of his pocket, clicked twice, and returned it without looking up.

‘The other thing,’ Fats continued blithely, ‘is the whole flying bit. But I’ll let Lillian tell you about that.’

Lillian stepped forward, cleared her throat and began talking like she was presenting a conference paper. ‘Drones are the starting point, obviously. We have secured three from the Waterkloof Airforce Base, but the relationship between the drone and the software is complex – hence the WAN work Teboho is doing. If we can’t set up a link between the plane and the software, we won’t be able to capture the imagery and then there’s no point. But the drones, really, are a stepping stone to the larger aim of flight.

‘There are planes and fuel we can access, but what we don’t have and what we really need are pilots. So that machine there’ – she pointed out a large PC box with an ancient sixty-inch screen attached – ‘is our pilot training machine. At the moment we’ve only got a kiddy-game simulator running, but we’re aiming to source a proper training simulator and to learn how to fly. Then it’s a question of being brave enough to try it in the real world.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Then the next—’

‘Thanks, Lillian.’ Fats cut her off. ‘Good summary. OK, kids, last stop before food, the garden. This way.’

We trooped behind him, obedient. As we walked I thought more about Fats. Ad Fats. With effort, I remembered him as less headmaster and more free radical; most people were jealous of him because it was never clear exactly what he did. He wasn’t practical. I never, for example, saw him cook anything up on Photoshop, or write a line of copy, or sketch out a brand idea or a conference map. Fats Bonoko was the ideas man, the guy who breezed past your shoulder saying, ‘Love it’ or ‘Nice, but maybe try a softer green for the housewives’. He was, I remembered, also an experiential specialist, which meant he created events for brands. Parties. Boat trips. Cooking tours. VR extravaganzas. Experiential campaigns equated essentially to brand-activation projects – Fats was the guy who took ‘it’ off TV, whatever ‘it’ was, and delivered ‘it’ to people in the flesh, so to speak.

‘This,’ Fats boomed as we trooped out the kitchen door, ‘is our day-to-day survival patch. There’s a lot more going on food-wise outside the house, but this is where we go when we need quick stuff for cooking.’ We gathered around a vegetable garden – much of it protected by various combinations of green netting.

‘Beans, spinach, carrots, potatoes, lettuce, cauliflower, herb garden, et cetera. Obviously, our major long-term challenges are meat, milk and any kind of dairy. But the vegetables are the foundation. Andile, care to explain?’

Andile snorted. ‘It’s mos a veggie patch, Fats.’

‘Right, thanks.’ Fats brushed through the insult and rounded on myself and Babalwa. ‘Any questions, guys? We’re pretty much an open book here. I know this must be a bit overwhelming for you after all this time alone, but if there’s anything specific you want to know, hit me. Or anyone else.’

We glanced at each other. Babalwa shrugged, shy.

‘Um,’ I piped up uncertainly, ‘I guess the only one for me is, like, are there rules or something? Who decides who does what and why… all that kind of stuff?’

Andile and Javas coughed simultaneously. Lillian smiled. Gerald frowned and scuffed the garden soil with a toe. Beatrice stared straight ahead, unmoved.

‘It’s a collective,’ said Fats. ‘We all do what needs to be done. We agree on what we can. But really it’s about everyone taking responsibility, nè? Ubuntu, et cetera.’

‘It’s like Survivor,’ added Andile, giggling out of the corner of her mouth.

‘Only no one gets voted out,’ Fats said as he herded us back through the kitchen door.

The evening rushed on. We gathered and regathered in small groups, discussing ‘the situation’ and sharing anecdotes and experiences, most of them revolving around waking up to an empty world. Beatrice set to in the kitchen, making lettuce and tomato sandwiches – from our garden, Fats stressed, all from our garden.

Disquiet rose from my toes, trickled through my gut and into my aching tooth and my head.

Conversely, Babalwa lit up slowly with social fluorescence. I had never heard her voice this light, her laughter this floaty. In small but definitive ways I was already no longer her primary reference point. As for me – despite my better judgement, despite everything I knew to be sensible and right – I wanted to go home.

^{CHAPTER 20} My entire life on that fucking cloud

Lillian, the American academic, was typical of her kind – always in the middle of the ‘narrative’ and prone to wholesale, orchestrated redirections of the conversational ship. She explained a lot, unknowingly talking to us as if to children. She looked, at first glance, to be between twenty-five and thirty years old. Of dumpy build, she had the whiff of cash about her; there had certainly been enough around to have expanded her backside with disproportionate weight, most likely the heaviness of supermarket muffins and cappuccinos. She smelled, also, of roll-on deodorant. The smell would take on a particular sharpness when she was angry and had her arms folded in attack mode. She was also prone to adopting calculated poses, which she held for inordinate lengths of time, until she was sure someone had taken note. She would sweep her hair up into a ponytail and then hold it there, elbows parallel to the ground, as if she were a model, or a socialite on the make. It was like she wasn’t quite sure who she was, or who she needed or wanted to be, on any given occasion. Bottom line: when she wasn’t carefully cutting a silhouette into the skyline, Lillian talked a hell of a lot, and appeared to believe her brain was a repository of all things worth knowing.

Gerald was quiet, older, very black and very muscular. He came from the north-east – Mpumalanga somewhere – and spent most of that first night watching Fats and mumbling his own unheard replies to the questions bouncing around the room. Barefoot, in jeans and a loose, striped pink golf shirt, he radiated a strong potential energy. Possibly he was desperate to be heard. Possibly he was just desperate for some silence, like me.

Teboho sat nodding, still staring off into the corners, the single white earphone dangling politely over his heart.

Andile perched on the kitchen counter next to Javas and they brushed against each other with easy frequency. Javas looked every inch the artist he apparently was. There were light paint splatters on his jeans, which were also torn at the ankles. He wore a faded dark-blue Standard Bank T-shirt and a Scottish-style golf cap, perched high on dreads. His face was leathery and crinkled and his eyes glimmered like those of a travelling man. Andile, in turn, was all eyes. Her ocular equipment was markedly bigger than average, and she had an unnerving ability to lock you into their big brown pools. She was, relatively speaking, lightly primped. She wore a very light brown lipstick, two neat silver teardrop earrings, and a knee-length frock neatly suspended over blue jeans.

At this early stage, Beatrice was the oddity. She was fully dressed and ready for the office – all she had to do was reach for her bag on the way out.

Babalwa talked on our behalf, dribbling out the details of our misguided PE stint and sudden compulsion to flee. Beatrice and Fats punctuated the flow with humour, ideas and plans. Always plans.

I let the words fly past. I looked at my feet. My filthy, filthy feet, still caked in the debris of our flight from PE. My equally damaged jeans. My dirty fingernails. I looked, I knew, like a lost bum. Babalwa, at least, was more together. No longer completely pissed on the champagne, she cut a reasonable, less bum-like figure in her T-shirt, jeans, sandals and socks.

‘So!’ Fats clapped his hands and brought us to order. ‘If we can just get practical for a few minutes. Any suggestions as to which rooms they should take?’

Lillian offered up two rooms in the left wing. ‘Ja? Guys?’ Fats beamed at Babalwa and me in turn.

‘Fine by me,’ said Babalwa, glancing in my direction without actually looking at me.

‘All good.’ I smiled, and fought an animal urge to run.

My room was clearly a spare. A decently wide single bed and a large bookcase filled with technical books: governance and leadership manuals, MBA study materials, policy guidelines and frameworks. A map of the world in a thick, black wooden frame on the wall.

I traced my finger over Africa, then America, down to South America. Brazil.

I considered going over to Babalwa’s room. I wondered whether she was thinking of knocking on my door. Our separation had been surgical and subtle. Fats was slick, I had to give him that. I missed her presence already. I counted the number of consecutive nights we had spent together in the same bed. Seven.

I probed the guillotine with my tongue while I lay on the bed and stared at the map.

I waited for her knock.

Hours later, in the dark of the early morning, I conceded defeat and wandered the mansion, strolling up and down the staircases, running my hand over the oak banisters, contemplating what kind of life the minister had led. Whether he had, on the odd occasion, paid attention to the same railings, run his hand down them, waited for his thoughts to catch up with his body.

Eventually I landed at the doorway to the computer room and there was Tebza, clicking and nodding. He turned, telepathically, pulled an earphone out and greeted me.

‘Come inside.’ He waved at the machines. ‘Feel free…’

‘What you up to?’ I tiptoed to his desk.

‘Ag, just network stuff, you know, trying to figure out the last of it. Jesus, even just a WAN that reaches past the gates. Mission.’

‘You in computers? Before?’

‘Nah,’ he scoffed. ‘Broker. Stocks and shit.’

‘Ah.’

‘And you? Advertising, nè?’

‘Ja, kinda. Initially anyway. Then I ended up in VR. You know, the clubs…’

‘Ah. Ja, I heard something like that in the kitchen. Mlungu’s, yes?’

‘My claim to fame.’

‘Had a few nights there myself. Good place.’ Tebza leaned back into his screen while keeping his nearest shoulder blade open in conversational invitation. He slammed the enter key through a never-ending string of IP addresses as we talked.

‘You think we’ll get it back? The net? A net? A cloud?’

‘I fucking doubt it. The cloud is now in a gazillion tiny pieces.’ Teboho leaned fully back in his office chair, the springs holding him at a dangerous forty-five degrees. He locked his hands around his head. ‘You have no idea how much shit I had on the cloud. So much shit. My entire life on that fucking cloud. Everything…’

‘Eish.’

‘It always worried me. To have everything that meant anything sitting there. So I made sure I backed it all up, twice.’

‘Onto the cloud?’

‘Onto the cloud.’ Teboho laughed and made genuine eye contact with me for the first time. ‘I dunno, maybe it’s just panic. A defence against everything, but I feel like if I could get just something back, a few albums, some photos, that would be a step. An important step.’ He shrugged, flapping his elbows a bit, and considered me.

‘Eish.’ I couldn’t think of anything else to say to indicate the sudden warmth I felt for him. ‘Jammer, nè? Hardcore. Me, I had nothing up there that meant anything.’

We shrugged together.

‘You smoke?’ I asked hopefully, my heart accelerating. ‘I do.’ Teboho sprung his chair forward, pulled a small bankie from his pocket and tossed it at me happily. ‘I most certainly do. Roll it up, son, roll it up.’

We sat on the brick stairs guarding the swimming pool and smoked.

Teboho was a middle-class kid. ‘Straight outta Midrand’, as he put it. With Model C schooling followed by an average BCom stint at an average university, he went straight into finance, banking and trading. There were constant hints, however, that he was more than a collection of banker parts. His music references were more complex than I expected. His technology obsession was genuine as well. Real geeks always had a certain manner about them – a particular way of describing life and ambition and the tools at our disposal as a lush, expanding horizon. Tebza fit the bill. He spoke easily, unthinkingly, of time-lapse nanotech, the importance of getting the raw vector designs right in the VR clubs, of algo trading and new beats emerging from somewhere in remote Russia that, by all accounts, were about to turn current notions of X, Y and Z on their heads.

And the boy was genuinely, seriously pained by the loss of the cloud.

‘Dumb-assed.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘Just dumb-assed. I thought about hard backups so many times, but I was lazy. Told myself I was being paranoid. But fuck…’ He tailed off. ‘All that’s gone now. No use dreaming. It’s a long, long way away. I’ll always miss it though, you know. As shallow and cheesy and stupid as it was, our life, I’ll miss it. The clubs and the music and the people. Maybe there was a kind of security in the triviality?’

‘That’s my life,’ I grunted in affirmation, mesmerised by the glow of the moon on the pool. ‘Security in triviality.’

‘Ha.’ Tebza flicked the roach into the hedges. ‘I suppose we’re learning now, nè?’

Our conversation drifted back and forth across the landscape of our past. Together we reached as far back as we could go, pushing into the jelly of what was. Of times that were sweet and green and simple.

Eventually we fell to quiet, and then back into the present, and Fats.

‘He’s obsessed, just so you know,’ Tebza warned. ‘He has this master plan. Pretty freaky. He can be forceful, you know? It’s tough, ’cause he also seriously gets shit done. He’s got the farm and the food and the power moving, and so, you know, he can be hard to deny.’

According to Tebza, Fats aimed to fence off our block completely, including not only the entire grounds of King Edward High School, but also St John’s – an even bigger and richer stone institution, adjacent to KES, at the end of the lane we occupied. If Fats had his way, our enclave would feature controlled access points at the beginning of our lane and in key areas: the top of Munro Drive – apparently the name of the steep S bend we had travelled to get to the ridge – the outer edge of St John’s School, where the property linked with the main road, and others. Fats, apparently, was obsessed by the idea of invasion. The idea of a pack of others the same size as us.

‘Dunno, could have merit,’ Tebza mused. ‘I mean, a posse with big enough guns could just come and take it. Take us. So that’s his thing – the fencing. He’s pushing hard on it, got district maps and everything all up on the wall, the perimeters marked out. Red pins, little marker pens and the whole bit. Jesus. All in his control room.’

‘His bedroom?’

‘No, the control room. Next to his bedroom he’s converted this study-type room into a control room, centre, thingy. Put a few computers in – for atmosphere more than anything else at this stage, I think – rigged up a two-way radio, that kinda thing. Massive map, red pins, bits of linking string and such.’

‘Bit freaky.’

‘Bit, ja. But you know what they say – fattest stomach wins, eh?’

‘Ja…’ I mulled over the idea of Fats The General. He had spent a lifetime designing and managing events – for forty thousand people and more. He probably needed a way to carry on with what he knew. Didn’t we all?

‘I guess he could have a point. I mean, we can’t be the only nine people left on the planet.’

Teboho patted my knee and stood. ‘My friend,’ he said, ‘we could be anything at all. Absolutely anything at all.’

^{CHAPTER 21} Cow experience

The sun rose the next morning, and darkness fell.

We were drifting awake, emerging from our bedrooms, mumbling quietly in the kitchen, when the clouds blacked out the day. Drops hit the ground like mortar rounds, each shattering into shrapnel. The dark was ominous, and complete.

‘This is too weird for me,’ said Lillian, who headed back up to her room.

The rest of us – save Tebza, who was still asleep – sat on the expensive porch furniture with our toast and black coffee and tea. Babalwa sat next to me. She pulled her wrought-iron chair up close, made eye contact and dropped a few direct conversational threads. I felt grateful and oddly patronised, but ultimately any kind of contact with someone familiar was settling. The stilted conversation and forced eyeballing of new people was like a trip back to junior school.

‘What’s on the agenda for today, kids?’ Fats asked the group, trying to make eye contact with each of us. Heads stayed low.

‘Javas?’

‘Dunno, boss.’ Javas bit a chunk off his toast and chewed. ‘But I have a feeling you’re about to tell me.’

‘I was thinking about a cow – a resident cow. As we’ve agreed before. For milk. It’s the next step. Can’t speak for y’all but I’m sick of this long-life shit.’

‘A. Resident. Cow.’ Javas repeated the words slowly, individually. ‘And I am the man for the cow, yes?’

‘Sho.’ Fats leaned back in his chair and pulled an oversized hunk off his toast. ‘You have cow experience, do you not?’

‘I do,’ Javas replied slowly. ‘I do.’

^{CHAPTER 22} It could be good once it’s done

The mansion operated completely off-grid. Tucked into the tailored shrubbery beyond the driveway’s turning circle, the borehole was the philosophical and practical centre of things. Deep and plentiful, it fed a stocky, black plastic fifteen-thousand-litre tank. A criss-crossed trellis surrounded the tank, hosting the concealing shrubbery. The pump was noisy – wherever we were on the property, the random thwuuump thwuuump thwuuump reminded us of its service. We soon forgot it, how to even hear it, but it was nonetheless omnipresent – the subliminal functional soundtrack to life.

The solar bank supplied most of the power required, most of the time. For emergencies, there was a generator the size of a small caravan. A sick, old-looking thing on wheels, which only Tebza and Fats were technically familiar with, it was rarely required, because the erstwhile minister had also ensured that the septic tank, rather than draining away into the soil, fed its methane into the system.

‘We shit power,’ Fats announced proudly.

The miracle of it – the technical set-up – faded over time, but for Babalwa and me the breadth of the accomplishment was shocking, given how much we had struggled to establish even the most basic power in PE. For weeks after we arrived I would flick light switches on and off. Or stand wet and amazed in the bathroom post-shower, gazing at the geyser. One afternoon I found her tapping the borehole tank while hovering her ear over the black plastic, as if it held a secret.

The resonance within the house itself was that of money. Thick red carpeting, Persian rugs, oak panels and leather-backed armchairs – the smell of wealth was threaded into the structure of the place. Layered lightly over the booty of postgraduate decision-making was the evidence of our more flippant, plastic existence. We each kept to our own residential quarters faithfully, but in the communal areas our collective presence steadily stained, moved and altered. Inconvenient Persians were rolled up and shoved to the side. Ring marks spread on the arms of the furniture. Stains and nicks and chips in the expensive wood. Mould.

One day Andile tramped garden mud through the entrance hall, initially unknowingly, then unapologetically. Beatrice tried to protect the carpet with a plea for immediate cleaning but was vetoed. Instead, we ripped up the lush red and brown and washed down the concrete underneath. The hallway echoed weirdly forever after, the floor stripped of all possible pretence.

Fats ordered and prompted and planned, and the rest of us, each for our own reasons, followed dutifully. With my meagre possessions packed into my oversized room, I lived a life in neutral. I completed my allotted tasks in their allotted time, and otherwise I drifted across the empty city, looking at full bottles of liquor through the closed store windows.

Lillian lectured anyone within earshot on the history of the area. Untouched by the irony of being the only foreigner, she lashed us repeatedly with her knowledge of the ridge: how it was occupied by the mining magnates and the original colonisers, back when Jozi was just a scrappy piece of dust with a lot of gold underneath it. It – the ridge – was occupied for all the obvious reasons. It allowed its inhabitants to perch on top of the city and observe the movements and machinations below. Lillian explained how the ridge was a slow starter as a residential area compared to Parktown, that it was only in the 1930s that it really took off with the larnies, when the so-called International Style of architecture came around and allowed the rich to feel like their Upper Houghton houses would compete with those in France, England et al.

Of course we all knew all this; the knowledge was threaded into our genes, and so Lillian was shrugged off and smiled at and tolerated with varying degrees of annoyance, frustration and amusement. ‘These people,’ Gerald would occasionally mutter under his breath while being educated.

Word was that our arrival gave Fats the energy burst necessary to finalise his mission to enclose us. Our farming area occupied the King Edward High School sports fields. Some of the fields were being grown over to provide grazing for the cattle Javas was sourcing. Others were tilled and prepared to grow stuff. Corn. Vegetables. Sunflowers.

The school buildings were less important. We used them, classroom by classroom, for various functional ends – the closer the classroom to the fields, the higher its utility level for tool storage and such things. The outer third of the KES buildings, those facing towards St John’s, were left alone.

St John’s, Fats decided, should be treated as our moat. Our security façade. It was crucial, according to his strategy, to have a bulwark in place. He mounted a South African flag on the school’s outer pole, facing north, looking over the highway off-ramp.

His control-centre map marked off, with red pins of course, the areas where the already robust fencing could easily be repurposed. The southern fencing simply needed to be joined – each institution was already carefully cut off from Louis Botha Avenue, the historical divide between the schools and the real/ghetto worlds of Yeoville, Berea, Hillbrow and the city. The western fences around St John’s required only a moderate additional stretch to close off the small St Patrick Road entrance. Munro Drive twirled up in steep loops from Lower Houghton and could be easily sealed at the top, as it joined St Patrick. Here Fats planned to install a primary guard hut, our key defence post, which would protect the top of Munro Drive and the only entrance to St Patrick Lane, where our residence was located. Beyond our house, St Patrick died off into a dead end of ridge mansions overlooking the eastern city. All that remained, according to Fats, was to restructure the crime-prevention fencing that blocked off eastern suburban access via smaller roads leading off Louis Botha, and we had a secure area of more than a square kilometre.

There were questions, of course. Mutterings and mumblings. Lillian was the most prone to seeding rebellion. She cornered me a few days after our arrival, as I was pacing the artificial turf of the KES hockey fields trying to assess and understand. I saw her coming, shuffling aggressively across the field, the mousy intervener. Beatrice had coined the phrase and it stuck. Lillian moved like a mouse, always scratching, always ahead of herself, twitching, eyes on the move. She pulled her heavy ass around at high speed, accentuating the general impression, and once her mouth had started moving there was no stopping it. She was in every sense mousy. Equally, it was her essential nature to intervene.

She flicked curls away from her eyes with a pointed hand.

‘Fats’s thing’ – she moved to the point via an introduction on the extremeness of these public schools – ‘to tell you the truth, I’m not so sure. We could be wasting a lot of time and resources. I mean, there is no sign of anyone else, let alone invaders.’ She dropped onto her haunches and tried unsuccessfully to pluck a blade from the artificial turf. I wasn’t sure if there was more to come or if this was my cue. I let the silence settle, then initiated a stroll through the KES buildings.

I had, like most South African kids, walked into adulthood through the shadows cast by the country’s boys’ schools: KES, St John’s, Michaelhouse, Parktown, Grey, St Andrew’s, St Stithians, Bishops… Whatever city you were in, there was at least one school cut directly out of nineteenth- and twentieth-century England, dropped into the southern African bush. The names differed but they were all fundamentally linked in their structure, their uniforms, their architecture and their ability to push out generation after generation of CEOs, opening batsmen, fly-halves and marketing managers. My father was a product of one of these institutions, but his dalliances with fate ensured that I navigated a different channel. Me, I attended Northcliff High, a more common brick-and-prefab organisation devoid of national sporting, political or business ambitions. At Northcliff, graduate successes were the accidents of fortune likely to befall any institution that held its doors open long enough. At places like KES and St John’s, however, the school legacy was threaded into the very edifice; every brick, every blade of rolled grass or every inch of carefully maintained artificial turf.

We walked into KES through the heavy stone arches of the hockey-field entrance, past a bronze statue of Graeme Smith leaning into an ugly, manly cover drive, then to the main hall, lush with rows of dark wooden chairs, honours boards, and stained-glass badges at the top of the double-volume glass windows, which shed bright light over the hall. The hall was, in the same manner as Big Ben and the old churches of Europe, undeniably magnificent.

I had always skirted around these buildings. Even on those occasions when our shoddy school bus would broach the gates, there was never enough space or time to truly observe and take it all in. We were always rushing through the process, through the event, eyes down, trying not to make any mistakes that would too obviously disclose the awe that the structures created.

Now, with Lillian rattling off facts at my side, I was able to step back and observe, step forward and run my fingers over the honours boards: Graeme Smith, Bryan Habana, Ronnie Kasrils, Donald Gordon – the list was endless. The wood was old and ever so slightly ridged under the fingertip. You could, if you knew what you were feeling for, actually touch the texture of the upper classes. I was, of course, an indirect descendant of this same lineage. The Maritzburg College boards featured several generations of Fotheringham success, not least of whom my father, national cricketer, DJ, oddball.

Lillian powered on as we bridged over to St John’s. ‘A World Class Christian School in Africa,’ the foyer brochures said. She informed me that the institution had maintained this motto for many decades. She snorted derisively as she parted with the information and, despite my general irritation, I snorted too. While KES was a brat factory of the highest order, St John’s was in a different, higher league. To anyone looking up at its multi-tiered stone immensity from the bottom rugby fields, it was at least as impressive in scope as the Union Buildings themselves. But its true magnificence lay in the details. Even after close on a year of natural growth, the lines of the almost nuclear green grass held steady along the stone paths and walls, and pointed decisively to the stairs. St John’s, the grass said, maintained its lines. Always.

A single road separated the two primary segments of the ‘campus’. In the middle of the road stood a statue of a young boy, an eagle on his arm. The boy is releasing the bird to flight, a powerful metaphorical summary, according to Lillian, of the opportunities created by such institutions for those lucky enough to be well born. Further on, the ‘David quad’ featured a similar type of slim boy, but this one was simply looking outward, hand resting on a cocked hip covered by a boy skirt, creating a camp Peter Pan feel.

We climbed the bell tower. The view at the top was all-encompassing, pulling the breadth of the city easily under its wing, likewise the horizons of Sandton and Pretoria. The enormous sheer drop down to the front façade and the northern sports fields via a series of stone staircases, swaddled in upper-class creepers and surrounded by benches, pristine resting points and quaint yet classy alternative paths, was the kind of descent only those with permission would dare attempt.

The silence would have been an important, magnificent accompaniment were Lillian not still booming on, this time about her master’s thesis on how the Native Indian idea of photographs stealing your soul had finally come to fruition in the usage by NGOs of photos of indigenous locals, vital to securing the funding necessary to pay for upper-middle-class suburban Western lifestyles and a metaphysical lust to save the planet.

Which was all good and well, and possibly true, but the sound of her words was nibbling at my sanity. I reverted to Q&A format, speaking as slowly as I could to try to balance out her verbosity.

‘Where are you from in the US?’

‘Atlanta, Georgia. Can’t you tell from the accent?’ She looked serious.

‘Uh, nah. Skies. Hate to say it, but you all sound pretty similar to me. But ja, I guess now that you say it, it fits.’

‘Yeah.’ Her accent grew thicker. ‘Well, I’m a Georgia girl.’

‘You missing it? Home?’

Lillian blinked a few times and looked to the Pretoria horizon. ‘Beyond explanations. That’s how much I miss it.’ She locked me into eye contact. ‘But what do you think, Roy? About Fats’s gating thing. I mean, I know you haven’t been here long and all that, but I just wanted to get an idea of what your thoughts are—’

‘I knew Fats before, you know,’ I dodged, ‘and he was a pretty forceful guy then too.’ I laughed.

‘Sure. You can tell he’s used to getting what he wants. I’m not so sure that this is the same thing though. I don’t know, I just have doubts.’ Her eyebrows formed a McDonald’s arch.

‘Ag, I don’t see the harm so much. I mean, it could be good once it’s done. Then we’ll know that we’re safe, you know. But fuck, I haven’t really been here long enough. Haven’t got through the honeymoon yet, so what do I know?’

‘All I’m saying is there could be other, better things to do. And’ – her voice took on a sharp edge – ‘I seriously doubt whether we would ever be able to maintain such a big perimeter if there was an angry horde out there. There are nine of us. Just look at it. The fencing is like a square kilometre. It’s never going to work.’ She swivelled slowly, taking in a full view of her subject.

‘I think you need to understand, though,’ I said to her back as it turned, ‘that we’ve got a thing for fences, you know. They make us feel better. Secure.’

‘Thanks, I’ll bear that in mind.’ The mousy intervener dragged her ass down the bell tower stairs, through St John’s and back over the KES hockey fields. I trundled obediently behind as she further discussed the dichotomy between the global aid system and development of narratives within non-profit organisations.

^{CHAPTER 23} Shangaan in many ways

My guillotine tooth was an emblem for many other shortcomings, its jagged edges thrown into relief by Fats and his relentless march towards organisation, development and security.

Babalwa fell, inevitably, into his orbit. She didn’t fawn over his every move – well, not completely, anyway – but she was certainly increasingly guided by his alpha force and his big-ape vibe.

Beatrice and Fats had once been entangled sexually, and Babalwa’s presence thus generated the recurring sparks of low-level community conflict. The three circled each other in a wary triangle during the initial months. Innuendos, double meanings and flashes of sharp eye contact spiralled, without ever getting completely out of control.

But even outside of the Babalwa context, Beatrice looked perpetually out of alignment. Her frown was fluid, her eyes restless. She wrung her hands like washing, eventually ramming them into her pockets, then pulling them out and starting the cycle all over again.

She was a profiler and a networker. Her corporate career had been carefully shaped and crafted to brush over the fact that she grew up in Beaufort West, and that she was the offspring of no one at all. She had achieved her elevated corporate status through a careful construction of virtual profiles, which she maintained with diligence and care. While Tebza was always clicking and checking, jumpy and seeking to plug into this socket or that, it was Beatrice who, of all of us, was the most distraught at the digital detachment – specifically the separation from her profile. Her make-up, her new jeans, her cultivated look – all of these were dysfunctional proxies for her deeper compulsion to maintain her identity.

‘It’s tragic,’ Lillian stated authoritatively. ‘You can see she’s actually physiologically stressed by the whole thing. I guess that’s what working in marketing does.’

Teboho spent all of his time in front of a machine, or clicking on a device, or removing or inserting that dangling white earphone.

Our evening joints grew into a ritual (he was farming a huge plantation down in the far bottom corner of St John’s), which meant I got to know him best of all.

He released snippets of himself to me around the pool, and I slowly patched together the image of a young stockbroker who spent most of his time doing other, more interesting things. We slotted into the druggie-techno lingo of his generation easily enough, but his references were more nuanced than mine, and many times I found myself bumbling along while actually adrift. I had no practical experience of hack, a substance of some importance to him in his pre-life. Even given my considerable Mlungu’s experience, I was sadly out of touch with the VR and nanotech mix, my frame of reference limited to glasses and transmission paint. Already, and somewhat surprisingly, I came from the old school.

He didn’t offer much beyond slight references; how hectic the brokers had got with the illicit algos, which had veered far, far beyond trading and weather and customised movie predictions. He dropped small clues regularly enough for me to know that I didn’t really understand how the boundaries of his world were shaped, nor even what they were made of.

Some nights – frequently, in fact – he didn’t offer anything at all. Neither did I. We sat in silence next to the pool and contemplated the universe that had unfurled over the city now that the lights were out.

Now, looking back, it’s clear to me that Babalwa had broken some part of my heart, and that I was suffering. The mirror had shattered. At the time I simply felt numb, and tired, and sad. I was navigating mostly through stubbornness. There were so many conflicting forces at play I wasn’t able to discern the true source of any of them. I was simply surviving. Babalwa, for her part, was clear about the course of things and made regular attempts to recalibrate the dynamics of our relationship. Punches on the shoulder. Warm friendly hugs. Etc.

I considered pulling the guillotine tooth and living with the gap, but that felt like even more of a defeat than the half tooth itself. Instead, I spent an inordinate amount of time staring in the mirror at the disaster of my mouth, pondering its meaning, the social consequences of facial misfortune and other such indulgences. When I could no longer cope with my reflection, I retired to my room, locked the door and sat with my photo albums, a final and necessary refuge. I spent many hours leafing through them and constructing detailed stories for each girl and each family, stitching their lives together in my imagination. The albums were my true sanctuary. I buried myself in them gratefully.

Of course everyone had been untethered from their lives and their loves. Husbands and fathers, children and families. None of us had even a single mooring left and so we were all wafting across each other’s emotional paths. We came together successfully over the tasks and functions of the farm, but there was a cloud hanging over St Patrick Road that no force could move.

Fats’s obsession with project management, food production, setting up the slaughterhouse and gating off our enclave gave us a critical series of focus points. Food was food – it was governed by its own logic – but the gates were especially important practical pillars. They were our unspoken way of telling each other that we hadn’t lost hope, yet. It took special circumstances for discussions around our real plight to take place, and they seldom arose. Instead we worked on the gates and allowed ourselves to be led by Fats’s energy and vision, by his grand plan for our new city of nine people. Each gate closed was also another sign that we believed there could be other people out there.

I regret now, though, that I was so cut off. That I engaged so little. That I spent as much time as I did with my tongue running through the guillotine, or in my room indulging in neurotic (and, yes, erotic) fantasies.

One afternoon, about three months into our arrival, I was assisting Gerald with one of the last gates. Lacking any real technical skills, I was, quite literally, his ‘hou vas’. I would cling onto whatever needing stabilising. I would pass him tools.

‘My skill set is a little limited for this kind of work,’ I offered in thoughtless ad language as he dismantled another set of wrought-iron spiked gates from one of St John’s inner fencing lines, his forearms rippling with pleasure.

‘Sho,’ Gerald grunted. He flicked his blowtorch off for a second. ‘We all live in our place, nè?’ He flipped his helmet back down and carried on.

Gerald’s pre-life in the army and security business gave him an edge. His latent talents, while thus far unexpressed, clearly lay in the area of shooting, muscling and enforcing. He had the air about him of a man who had messed with the bigger stuff. I probed while we piled the fencing onto the back of the bakkie.

‘You experience a lot of fire, then? Like fighting?’ I asked.

‘Fire? Ja, sho. Not in the army; there we were just running around with clipboards. But after, when I had the security company. Sho. Fire. Often. Translation…’ He gave me a long blank look. ‘You would like to know if I have taken a life?’

I was surprised by his interpretation. ‘Well, not really what I was thinking – well, not yet anyway.’

‘Maybe I’m just in front of you ’cause I already know where it’s going.’ He softened, let his forearm muscles slacken. ‘Anyway, the answer is yes. I have killed.’

‘Ah…’ Now I was even more intrigued, but unable to further what I had started. ‘It changed you? As a person?’

‘There is no describing death. All you know is, it is on your shoulder. It won’t leave.’ Gerald fished a pack of cigarettes, Peter Stuyvesant reds, out of his pocket. I had never seen him smoke before.

‘Smoke?’ He shook the packet at me and a single red came sliding out to meet my hand. I wasn’t a big smoker at all, but this seemed like an appropriate moment.

‘I didn’t know—’

‘I don’t. But Lillian brought a carton from Spar. It has been many years. Now I’m finding it’s making me feel alive. For now at least.’

We leaned against the bonnet of the bakkie, and Gerald released parts of his story.

He was born on the cusp of the Kruger National Park in the township of Mkhuhlu. His great-grandfather was one of the original ‘police boys’ hired by the white man setting up the Pretoriuskop Camp in the park. The police boys were drawn from all over. The tourists loved them because they were such exotic photo subjects, and the white rangers – whom they trained and educated – loved them because they knew the bush. They all came from different areas, and they were all called Shangaans.

‘So I am Shangaan in many ways,’ Gerald said, pulling reflectively on his smoke. ‘Properly Shangaan, but also like a toy. Tourist Shangaan.’

Gerald’s grandfather and father both worked on the Jozi mines, his father ending up as an alcoholic boss-boy. ‘Better pay, worse father.’

Determined to avoid the fate of his elders, Gerald joined the army at seventeen and put in a decade of administrative work before leaving with two partners to set up a security company to guard a Pretoria-north industrial complex on a cooked tender deal. The company lasted five years and then collapsed on its rotten foundations. Gerald started his own thing, which he grew, inch by inch, over the course of the rest of his life, starting small, guarding little shopping complexes and the like. ‘A business,’ he said as he dropped his cigarette butt onto the dirt and ground it out with a heel, ‘is like war – but harder, and longer.’

We spent several gate afternoons together and I came to be an admirer of his technical ability, his pure muscle and his willingness to be quiet. Before we set out, he would quickly knock off a sketch of the project in his little notebook with his clutch pencil, estimating rough lengths and widths and sizes. When we arrived at the installation point, his first action was to relook at his sketch, measure up whatever he could and finalise the numbers. Only then did he take off his invariably striped golf shirt and get to it. His skill, I realised gradually, was rooted in his focus on getting the numbers right first. It felt like a valuable lesson to me at the time. In fact, it still does, although I can’t say I ever learned to apply it.

I had assumed Lillian and Gerald were together – if not sexually then certainly practically. As I spent more time with him on the gates, I realised that this wasn’t necessarily the case. It was more like Lillian had attached herself to him, and Gerald, in turn, had silently agreed to allow her into his range. The two of them were, in fact, many miles apart in important ways. Lillian, for example, had already been to the Kruger Park three times. Gerald had spent his life looking in exactly the opposite direction.

‘I’ve never been,’ he said. ‘There were school trips but I missed them all – this week I was sick, that week there was family business, sometimes I just didn’t go.’

‘Do you regret that?’

‘Maybe the animals. Not the people. The animals I should have seen. Leopard maybe. They should be part of our culture but they are not.’ He shrugged.

‘We should go someday,’ I offered. ‘At some stage Fats is gonna run out of work for us. Could be fun.’

Gerald grunted and powered up his drill.

^{CHAPTER 24} By the time we had meat in the freezer we hated each other

As is the case for many academics, Lillian’s empathy gland appeared to have been severed at birth. She just didn’t have that thing a person needs to get along with other people. In her pre-life there were plenty of opportunities for her to fall into books and colleges and universities and working groups designed to accommodate such deficiencies. Now, her Achilles heel was painful to us all. We were forced to endure the ongoing pain of her stilted contact, her addiction to factual accuracy and her wont for entering into meaningless verbal conflict. And, she and I were the only whites. The two without a single indigenous tongue. We were thus often circumstantially lumped together on the outskirts of conversations whose meaning we could only guess at.

Over the years at Mlungu’s I had developed my tsotsitaal skills just enough to build the bridges I needed between people and conversations. I could greet and laugh and joke colloquially. I could ask for a rephrase. I could crack a joke at my own expense.

I had, of course, like most whites, lived a full life with people carrying out private conversations in front of me. I knew how to keep a steady face and pretend not to be bothered. In fact, most of the time I truly wasn’t bothered, even when I was clearly the subject. Call it a genetically inherited trait.

Lillian lacked such a fortunate inheritance and her resentment at being cut out of conversations – and, even worse, becoming the subject of them – grew. She fretted constantly: over the quality of the water, over potential snakes in the yard, over the future and the past, over the idea of never being able to return to her homeland. And over language. The conversations drove her a little bit more nutty every time they happened. She launched several formal protests, gathering us together as a group to discuss her grievances and attempting one-on-one interventions with each of us in turn. She never seemed to realise that her attempts merely dribbled steady fuel onto the fire.

‘You seriously want us to stop speaking our language because you can’t follow the conversation?’ Babalwa mocked her openly. ‘Nxa!’ Laughter.

‘But Lillian, look at your fellow mlungu here,’ Fats climbed in. ‘He doesn’t give a shit – and we mock him in front of his face all day!’

‘Hayi suka, you poes.’ I did my best to roll with it. ‘I’m not as clever as I think I am, but I’m not as stupid as I look.’

‘See?’ Javas added, patting Lillian patronisingly on the arm. ‘All you need is to do is hint that you might be picking up a few words. Then everyone will be more careful. It’s a masquerade, darling. Everyone in Africa must play.’

It was a drinks session around the pool. An attempt at normality. Pool furniture and gin and tonics. The booze had blown the seal on Lillian’s pressure cooker and she was taking the fight to Fats via a thinly linked series of bleats about respect and human rights. The backfire was long and painful, but Lillian was nothing if not a fighter; well over an hour passed before she left to cry in her room.

The conversation spilled over as she left, a hodgepodge of tsotsitaal, isiZulu, English, Afrikaans, isiXhosa and Sesotho. I shifted in my pool chair, wishing it would stop.

‘Just for the record, boss.’ Gerald cracked a rare smile. ‘We’re saying that the thing about good mlungus is they know that they don’t know, and will admit it. That’s all anyone wants anyway.’

‘Sho, skhokho. Sho.’ I raised my gin in mock salute.

Andile trotted over drunkenly and gave me a hug, Javas rattled off an incomprehensible insult and we all got drunk while Lillian cried.

I was free.

But only just.

The next day Lillian, puffy-eyed and wary, enlisted Gerald, Teboho and me to make a trip with her to the CSIR in Pretoria in an attempt to leapfrog the stalled flight-simulator/drone mission. Her theory was that somewhere on the CSIR campus we would find the kind of high-end simulator software required for her to get the fuck out of Africa. Something we could either dump onto a hard drive or just bring back in its box. Or, at least, we would locate the silver bullet needed to get the drones going.

The CSIR consisted of acres of carefully cultivated indigenous bush scrub with hints of concrete peeking out at strange, unexpected angles. The front gate was a typically South African façade, ten metres high and made out of the stuff they protect gold with. A face-brick security check-in building on the left held aloft a disproportionately large Council for Industrial and Scientific Research sign, while a smaller guard-point building between the entry and exit gates held up its own sign. While the rest of us tried to plot an entrance strategy, Gerald was circling the complex in a bakkie. He soon skidded back up to the front entrance. ‘Got it,’ he said, leaning out the driver’s window. ‘Two hundred metres up from here. A good spot. We can get the bakkies in. There’s an old path. Take about half an hour to cut.’

Teboho said, ‘Thank God for men who can do shit.’

We scraped noisily through Gerald’s freshly cut fence holes, ripping up the paintwork on the side of the vehicles, and then drove up a small hill into thick bush and out the other side over what used to be a verge surrounding the roads that linked the various CSIR units. We parked facing each other around the main traffic circle. Gerald jumped out of his bakkie, followed by Lillian. Tebza and I just shouted from our driver’s seats.

Lillian took charge. ‘I guess the first thing would be to follow the road signs?’ She issued the command as a question.

‘Anyone see a sign for flight simulators?’ Tebza asked, deadpan.

‘How ’bout Defence, Peace, Safety and Security?’ I asked, only half joking. ‘Buildings 11, 12 and 13.’

‘Biosciences.’

‘Materials Sciences and Manufacturing.’

‘Department of Science and Technology.’

We called them out one by one, in turn, hopefully. As if the answer would echo back to us.

Lacking logical options, we decided on Science and Technology.

Water features, paths, carports, pot plants and building entrances had all been carefully cocooned in trees and flowers and indigenous semi-forest. Each day, no doubt, twenty or thirty gardeners would have set to with their mowers and clippers to keep the frame in place and the buildings functionally foregrounded. Now, a year’s worth of cutting back having gone by, the bush was the foreground. Tendrils and branches and leaves all stretched towards each other, relentless in their quest to convene across the paths, roads and walkways. Grass climbed up the base of the signs, branches reached for windows and doors. The road signs and metal sculptures of miners stood tall, but the revolution grew, unstoppable, at their feet.

‘How long, you think, before everything is gone?’ Tebza asked no one in particular. ‘A year? Two?’

‘About a year,’ offered Lillian authoritatively. ‘Can’t see us being able to hack our way around much after a year. Maybe only the bigger buildings, with enough equipment.’

Gerald grunted and walked to the rusted metal sculptures of Marikana miners, scratching his back awkwardly through his golf shirt. Lillian, Tebza and I stood facing building 52. The Department of Science and Technology.

‘Roy, consider this.’ Gerald was hunched over a miner’s foot, pulling a vine loose from the rusted boot of one the five central figures – a group which watched over a central paved memorial installation of plaques and pictures describing the Marikana killings and how they impacted the South African mining industry and society, details quaintly out of context to us now. He showed me the head of a thick organic rope. It was flat and spiked, each spike potentially a new rope of its own. ‘I’ve always loved this thing, this plant,’ he said. ‘It sends out these shooters, these flat things. They move fast, man, metres in a week. You’ll see, when we come back again this will have moved on and on and on. Maybe to another structure or just around the leg. Whatever’s easiest I suppose. It’s amazing, nè? ’Cause the rest of it, the bush, is not flat like this thing. It’s normal. It’s like this part is a special advanced force. An advancing force. Very similar to the army.’

We stood together and considered the progress of the creepers over the set of metal sculptures. Up close, we could see the death grip on the feet; all of them were covered, wrapped in layers, the thick ropes reaching sideways but also extending up the leg.

‘Rampacious. Is that a word?’ Gerald stood, hands on hips.

‘Close,’ I said. ‘Rapacious. You’re looking for rapacious.’

‘Rapacious.’ He said it reverentially, hands still on hips, head swivelling, taking in the implications.

The hopelessness of our mission was obvious as we broke through the front door. The reception area was wide and empty, cigar-lounge chairs awaiting occupation, surrounded by magazine racks bravely holding up a variety of in-house publications, themselves surrounded by long-dead pot plants, now just collections of rank soil. The red reception carpet cut off at the corridors, which stretched cheap grey arms out in all directions. The offices leading off the corridors were a uniform five by five metres; cheap pine desks, red-backed office chairs, and pinboards decorated with cuttings, clippings, photos and printouts. Divisional newsletters and project photos adorned the passage walls. Each corridor ended in a scatter of small meeting rooms with pine seats and dangerously old coffee machines.

‘Ridiculous,’ Tebza said to me as we moved together from office to office. ‘We should be at the air force base or something.’

We entered Super Computing via a common room dominated by a photo-montage pinboard, each shot showing the same group at different stages of a marathon. The tall, thin white guy, a little younger than me and clearly the boss, was at the forefront of most of the shots, grinning manfully, leading his sweating charges through the ABSA charity 10.4-kilometre race. The last shot showed them all arm in sweaty arm at the finish. The girl to the right of the boss had shoulder-length black hair pulled back into a ponytail and a fierce, highly charged look in her eye.

I pulled the photo from the board and put it in my pocket.

‘You go on, I’m gawn somewhere else,’ Tebza announced in a droll fake Jamaican accent, turning for the door. ‘Der havta be more interesting places than this.’

I grunted in affirmation. I wasn’t sure where Lillian and Gerald had got to and I was now loving the trawl, digging into the uniformity of it all, wondering exactly what kind of thinking and progress and imagination were locked into the machines on those desks. Equally attractive was the haul of photos. Wife and child. Husband and dog. Lovers and parents. I pocketed the best ones.

Of flight simulators, predictably, there was no trace. I backtracked from Super Computing and followed another corridor from the reception area. This one led to a more scientific set-up – the smell of formaldehyde and a hint of laboratories down at the bottom end. The plaque on the first door read Department of Bio Sciences.

I tiptoed my way through, opening and closing doors, looking at photographs, reading more divisional notices. Unlike the other divisions, the Synthetic Biology lab at the end of the corridor seemed empty and devoid of even a hint of prior activity. The counters were wiped a glimmering kind of clean. Equipment was packed tightly away in glass-fronted cupboards. Whoever ran the place was either bored or exceptionally organised.

And so the afternoon went, the four of us breaking doors, smashing locks, poking through filing cabinets and folders and printouts. I crossed paths frequently with Gerald and Lillian, both on missions similar to mine. Tebza, however, I lost track of. Eventually I sat on the wheelchair slope outside the front door of the Department of Science and Technology centre and listened to the birds sing and the forest hum. I closed my eyes and lay down.

The birds sang some more.

I listened.

Gerald shook me awake, wanting to know where Tebza was, issuing instructions on how and where we would all go to look for him.

That way lay more of the same. Scientific-looking buildings, some older than others, names outside like Materials Sciences and Manufacturing, or Defence, Peace, Safety and Security. A few minutes’ walk down ‘Karee Road’ (really just a path for the occasional maintenance vehicle) was a distinctly newer-looking glass centre, the National Centre for Nano-Structured Materials. Unlike most of the other buildings, which were at least sixty or seventy years old, the Nano building had the ring of early twenty-first century about it. The glimmering glass was not only more stylish but also clearly constituted an attempt at more effective utilisation of natural light – the phrase came winging back to me from a brochure I had written decades ago. I admired the design for a few seconds, then walked on. As I moved I heard the tinkle of glass breaking. I headed around the building and found a smashed entry point at the back. It was a tiny hole, only just big enough for a man to fit through, glass jaws still hanging open.

I squeezed myself through, scraping the skin on my cheek and cutting my forearm, which bled. I followed the sound of things breaking through a series of corridors and eventually, after a host of wrong turns and dead ends, came across a lab titled Recreational Nanotech. Tebza’s form moved behind the swing door. He was hurtling stuff left and right, even over his shoulder. He examined each of the items one by one in quick time, engaged in a personal battle of discovery. My hand stopped on the swing door. I stood and watched. The speed and intensity of his movement were totally out of whack with the Teboho I had known thus far. He looked desperate. I pushed through.

‘Tebza, dawg. Wot up?’

He turned fast, shocked at the intrusion, and said, ‘Forget it, there’s fuck all here. Let’s move.’

That was the first of several CSIR trips. We moved through the bottom half of the complex building by building, searching for additional salvation beyond the notion of a flight simulator, the thought of which seemed sillier with each journey. Tebza hauled in excess of fifteen computers back to Houghton with him, clucking happily each time he came across a machine with superior specs to the last. Lillian remained steadfast, her jaw set with determination to find a simulator and a way out of this fucking country.

I started packing picnics for the excursions. Bread and juice and fruit and some jams. Each trip, I spent a little longer lying on the thickening lawns or walking around the perimeter, examining the trees and foliage and talking to the birds. Tebza was present but absent. Ever since I had surprised him in the Recreational Nano lab, our tasks and functions were in polar opposition – where I was, he wasn’t.

Eventually, though, we gave up on the CSIR and admitted our inability to maximise its potential energy. None of us were intellectually equipped to understand the machinery or the technologies the place contained. The computers, powerful as they were, were also detached from the cloud. Their power was latent and waiting, just like us.

Back at the farm a stodgy collective depression was setting in. The shoddy treatment of Lillian by the group, myself included, peaked and then settled into a general unspoken dislike of the foreigner.

We retreated further and further into small sets of confusion. Fats’s gates had blocked off our farm in an impressive and impenetrable way. Once that mission had been completed there was little left to focus on, save for setting up the slaughterhouse, which wasn’t really on anyone’s priority list.

‘Just fuck off, Fats,’ Andile snapped as he tried to convince her that electrifying the perimeter should be the next strategic priority. ‘There. Is. No. One. Left. On. This. Continent.’ She eyeballed him angrily. ‘You can fucking electrify whatever you want, it’s not going to change it. Leave me alone.’

Fats stood silently next to the kitchen table, an electric-fence manual stuffed uselessly under his arm, pen flicking between his fingers.

Me, I took up jogging.

I couldn’t sleep at night. Worse, the days were becoming harder and harder to fill. I started talking to myself – too much. I also started stalking Babalwa, obsessed with her movements and her growing attachment to Fats. I thought seriously about booze, again.

One afternoon we stopped at the Bookdealers of Rosebank. Books were the theme of the day – grist in the mill of our still flickering consumer lust. The Bookdealers had been my old haunt, and so there we were, in one of the ancient, deep sub-malls of Rosebank. I grabbed a clutch of books at random and then drifted away down the dead escalator, past the business bookshop (Social Investment as a South African Business Paradigm; Management Theory in Practice: A Guide for the Emerging Manager; Contact Centres and the Service Challenge; etc.) and down to the underground parking. Even in the old days the mall had a weird, abandoned ring to it – now, it was freaky. On the right, just before the underground parking, was a clothing and shoe store, one of those last-century establishments that specialised in school outfits and such. I stood in front of the window and remembered. My father had actually brought me to this very store. He bought me a school tracksuit and, as a rare treat, a new stationery set. It was one of those odd memories, a hawk flashing through a dream.

I put my books down, kicked over a medium-sized pot, let the rotting soil spill out and smashed it through the window.

Posters of surfers and rugby stars and tennis players adorned the walls. It had been Kim Clijsters in my day, and the old classic Steffi Graf. Now it was a bunch I couldn’t recognise. Young and lean and leaning forward, asses rock-hard and full of fight. The school clothes hung pitifully off their circular racks. To the right of the blazer rack there was a line of sports stuff, takkies and so on. I lifted a pair of bright yellow Nikes off the shelf. They were feather-light. I tossed them into the air a few times, then tried on the right shoe. It fit perfectly. I kicked off my second slop and walked back to Bookdealers in a new pair of bright yellow running shoes.

Back at the house, I ran up the driveway and then down again. Totally out of breath, I hung around the garage with my hands on my knees, panting, then went back up the drive again. The next day the shoes, an even brighter yellow in the morning light, lay waiting at the foot of the bed. I put them on, grabbed a gate buzzer from the kitchen and started running.

South first. Over Louis Botha Avenue and into Yeoville, heading for Rocky Street. It had been many years since I had been to Rocky Street. As I ran I remembered going there in my university days with some hippies who needed weed, in bulk.

I stopped running as my legs denied me. I walked up Cavendish Road. Yeoville sang with empty character. Unlike the suburbs and unlike the townships, it felt like there was a dimensional depth to the place, its little rundown houses the repositories of silent stories. Stories from the old white ladies, stories from the African refugees, the Zimbabweans and Nigerians, the musicians and drug dealers, artists and pimps and agents and journos. My Nikes flashed against the voices as I walked. I started running again. Stopped. Leaned over my knees. Turned around and walked back.

In running I finally found a meaningful weapon in the insomnia fight – the exhaustion drove me easily into the pillow. And so my runs stretched out until I was often away from the house for most of the morning or afternoon. It was a good escape.

As we embarked on the gritty business of putting together the slaughterhouse, our residence felt suffocating. Now, from my old man’s perspective, I understand that many of the strange feelings of the time were rooted in the challenge, which evolved slowly over a period of months, of setting up a system that would allow us to kill and eat other living things. Javas and Gerald were the lone sources of expertise when it came to butchery and slaughter, and following their guidance was traumatic for the rest of us, who had only ever faced meat through a layer of cling wrap.

Philosophically, there were two key elements to our programme.

(1) Establishing a slaughterhouse that was close enough to the cows to be logistically convenient. (Debate as to whether the cows would sense the slaughter of their colleagues and be emotionally or behaviourally affected by it arose, led by Lillian, of course, but also entertained by Andile and Beatrice, of all people. The notion was, eventually, dismissed.)

(2) Three slaughter sessions a year. One midwinter, and one on either side of the cold. The meat generated would have to last us the year.

We built the slaughterhouse in the semi-underground cricket nets that ran off the side of the KES fields and that ended with a set of burglar bars looking onto the street separating the two halves of the school. The area offered good, easy access and, once the artificial turf was ripped up, the concrete was easy to wash down with buckets of water. Javas created a drainage furrow in the cement which led to a small portable swimming pool that could be punctured at the end to release the blood but contain the gunk – the bits of ear and hoof and so on.

We created a trestle table out of a large door, about three metres long and one metre wide. It stood on two empty oil drums. Javas and Gerald put together a slaughter-equipment inventory, locked up neatly in what used to be the kit room adjoining the nets. This included knives (conventional and the curved, strap-on variety, which locked to the wrist via Velcro and allowed the ladies and the weak – such a myself – to make big, decisive cuts), dishes, drying clothes, muslin to wrap the meat in, a generator and, finally, a Meatmaster 2020 Pro bandsaw.

Adjacent to the trestle table we erected a tap, fed by the biggest barrels we could find and pressurised as much as possible by extreme height. Filling the eight barrels – which stood back to back on an elevated scaffolding, the front barrel attached to the tap – was an exercise in patience and brute force. In the far corner was the chain block-and-tackle, set in a high frame strong enough to hold a fully outstretched carcass.

In the last corner an iron ring was set into the concrete floor. This was where the animal died. When we eventually got to the slaughter, we did our best to con the beast into calmness with cooing noises and patting of the snout as we separated it from the herd and walked it to its fate. Then we jumped it as fast as we could: secured the horns and pinned its head to the floor with rope fed through the ring.

At this point Javas or Gerald, the designated executioners, would step up with a loaded 9 mm, place it just above and right between the eyes, and pull. The nostrils would flare. The eyes went wild. The power slammed off.

The cow would collapse onto the concrete in death spasms and kicking fits and then someone (in the early years it was Gerald or Javas – later, myself and Fats and Beatrice also embraced the challenge) would slice its neck open while the rest held the head. It required a messy, collective effort. Once the knife opened the jugular, a fountain of red blood would gush out onto the concrete and we would try with our hose and much desperation to get the bulk of it down the gutter while the beast gurgled and its still beating heart pumped the blood out. Gerald and Javas insisted that the throat-slitting happen fast, so that the heart could pump as much blood as possible, thus preserving the quality of the meat.

When the legs stopped kicking, it was time for cutting and slicing and dicing. Someone would cut the necessary slit through the skin on the Achilles tendon while the boys would use a hacksaw to take the head off. The rest of us would skin the legs and the rump as fast as possible. The carcass was then hoisted onto the gallows, and the rest of the skinning would happen.

We were terrible at it. Lillian wept profusely through the first two slaughters, and while her tears went well beyond irritation, they also articulated the dislocation I felt at the gore of the process. Fats, too, was green and quiet while following instructions.

We were particularly bad at the skinning. Gerald and Javas had to patrol around us like schoolteachers to make sure we were at least getting the core elements right. I was the chief culprit when it came to amateurish snipping of the connective tissue that held the leather and the meat together. Invariably Javas would nudge me aside and finish it off, denying me the final pleasure of balling my fist and ripping off the skin completely. I think he also denied me that pleasure to make sure I wouldn’t have to deal with getting the guts and entrails out – not out of any kind-heartedness, mind, but to avoid the tragedy of getting shit all over the meat with a slip of the knife or a shoddy tying-off of the rectum. Dealing with the entrails was an expert’s business – we would all step back and watch as the boys slit the stomach open and poured the guts carefully into the two large zinc tubs. Lillian would be sniffling and snorting. The rest of us were quiet and respectful.

By then it had already been a long, bloody day. But the skins had to be dealt with – Gerald insisted on working them into home-made shoes, etc. – as did the entrails, guts and organs, which were turned into tripe and liver and kidney meals for the next few nights.

And, before we could drag ourselves back to normality, for the night at least, the carcass had to be quartered, a process requiring the precision and muscles of three men to ensure the cut was accurate, right the way down the side of the tail bone. Eventually, years on, the girls and Fats and I became skilled enough and strong enough to deal with this heavy dismantling of the carcass. The strap-on knives were useful – we all started using them, even those of us with muscles. But that was all much later. In the early years, by the time the quartering came around, the stress and muck of the day, the physical exhaustion and Lillian’s tears had rendered most of us useless. I would collapse onto my haunches, watch the boys do their thing, and offer tools and rags and other such supportive items.

Setting up the slaughterhouse, sourcing our beasts (Javas drove all the way to the Eastern Cape to find the beasts he was looking for, five free-roaming cows and an ox that had – like us – somehow ducked the scythe), and actually killing and butchering our first victim took something on the order of three months. By the time we had meat in the freezer we hated each other, each in our own special kind of way.

And so I ran.

The flight-simulator failures saw Lillian voicing bolder plans, such as driving up through Africa until we got to the top and then simply boating over to Europe. This idea gained little traction, the response morphing quickly into a critique of American bias from Babalwa and Andile, who pointed out – with satisfaction – the assumption inherent in Lillian’s plan that getting to Europe would be some sort of inherent progression or achievement.

Beatrice offered an alternative to Lillian’s quest, suggesting an ongoing sub-Saharan African relay team of alternating twos, heading out at regular intervals in various directions. Her logic was that if there were nine of us here, there surely must be at least one other similar group below the Sahara. So seven could remain in Houghton managing the essentials, the farming structure and so on, while two could head out for a week, and then come back and swap with two others, who would go out again, then back.

Teboho said, ‘The twins will never be separated like that.’

‘Typical,’ said Lillian. ‘Nine people left on the planet and two of them actually fall in love.’

‘If they really are in love, that leaves seven of us for interbreeding,’ Babalwa said to me later as we perched on the edge of the swimming pool, which had grown a thick green skin while we were busy setting up the slaughterhouse.

I wasn’t yet ready to grapple with the notion that the nine of us constituted the future of humanity. Babalwa, on the other hand, had developed her calculations since our PE days. She said, and I was ready to agree with her, because what did I know anyway, that eight – four men and four women – would be just enough to get some genuine genetic diversity going, as long we ensured sustained cross-breeding. The twins’ blossoming love threw her approach into variable headwinds. ‘It’s an open question,’ she explained, ‘whether they would be willing or able to cross the line as many times as will be required to get it right.’

I pulled the laces on my Nikes tighter and thought about how I could expand my route.

^{CHAPTER 25} Fats took increasingly to his room

Everyone had their own idea of what was necessary, and the ideas were often in direct opposition. All we needed, Fats said, was four people to actually physically commit to their own plan and we were all completely fucked.

But Fats also needed the group. For him, it was the nucleus of our potential, our survival, our effort. In one of many attempts to re-establish unity of group purpose, he started calling house meetings.

I missed the start of the first one. I had been running and miscalculated, again, the uphill return.

I threw my sweating self between Andile and Babalwa on the lounge couch. They both leapt up, squealing and retching, and I ended up by myself in the far corner.

Fats launched proceedings with an unnecessary sermon on the necessity of planning, and followed it with an equally unnecessary outline of the various plans on the table:

The last item was Babalwa’s. She forced it onto the agenda amid the first genuine laughter we’d had as a group for a while. Within the mockery and the explosive fission of general sexual tension, she stuck to her guns. ‘You can think I’m crazy, but I’m telling you that if there are only nine of us, we can’t grow a community without inbreeding. Unless we purposefully cross-breed.’

And so our first formal house meeting dissolved into a farce of verbiage and theories. Lillian and Fats – representing the two truly polar views – put out the majority of it, facing off with argument and counter-argument. Halfway through the twins moved to sit together on the couch, articulating their own motivations and loyalties.

Gerald was quiet, voicing opinions only on technical matters. The likelihood of boating successfully over the Suez. The true benefits of drones unable to hook into satellites. The technicalities of dragnetting South Africa, or Africa. Tebza sat silent, his dangling earphone the only sign he was even thinking of participating. Mostly he stared at the intersection of wall and roof in the top corner of the lounge. I wondered again what he might be on. His blankness was not, I was sure, a passive-aggressive attack against the group. His brain seemed simply to be otherwise engaged.

I floated along, thinking occasionally about my downtime (I had reached Alex in record time) and my uptime (I was still dying completely going up Munro Drive) and only occasionally focusing on the conversations swirling in front of me.

Between the plan-making and life-dreaming, the daily demands reared up, relentless.

Gerald installed a nifty new guillotine at the back of the chicken run, located at the far end of the fields (to minimise annoying squawking). The guillotine was essentially a funnel bolted to the wall with its tip pointing down. It offered a far better and cleaner way of slaughtering fowl than the axe-and-block method we had employed thus far.

‘You keep them as calm as possible,’ Gerald said. He held the bird gently under his left arm and stroked its feathers rhythmically with his free hand as he explained to Tebza and me how the guillotine worked. ‘You don’t want to stress them out, so you just stroke and stroke.’ He ran his hand over the bird’s head and down its throat, then turned it upside down and pointed the head at the top of the funnel. ‘If you are calm it won’t even notice what is happening.’ Gerald inserted the head of the impressively relaxed chicken down the funnel. ‘Once the head is out the bottom, you just take the knife and do it.’ He sliced the chicken’s head off like a gentle uncle. ‘Then you just leave it there to drain.’ He stood back admiringly and wiped off the blade on the grass. The blood poured from the chicken’s neck into the waiting bucket while its legs and backside wriggled in final protest at the wide end of the funnel. ‘Adrenalin,’ he mused while we watched the body twitch and the blood drain. ‘It ruins meat.’

‘Ah,’ I said, transfixed by the pouring blood.

‘That’s why game can taste so bad,’ he carried on, warming again to one of his favourite subjects. ‘If the person does not know about shooting and can’t get the bullet through the head or the heart, then he has to chase the thing down. Lotta adrenalin. Bad meat.’

‘Ah,’ I added again. Tebza idled blankly next to me, staring right through the chicken’s gaping neck.

We returned an hour later and Gerald showed us how to soak and pluck the carcass properly. Complaints had been coming from the kitchen, Beatrice specifically, about quality.

Teboho, once finally focused on the task at hand, was surprisingly successful. He had watched his gogo pluck birds for much of his young life when the family visited the Free State rurals. I, on the other hand, found the task repulsive, and I was bad at it. I snatched poorly at the wrinkled wet skin, grabbing only small handfuls of feathers, sometimes getting nothing other than wet bird.

After the slaughterhouse was up and the farm was producing what we needed at a relatively regular rate, Fats took increasingly to his room. He would stand at his third-floor window and look north for long periods. From my own special places in the garden, I would see him standing with his hands behind his back in a military pose. To me he looked like he was urging the general inside him to deliver a better strategy, tighter execution, more predictable results. I once timed him at ninety minutes. Rooted to the spot. Eyes bolted on the horizon.

Later I realised he was probably not thinking about any of these things at all. He was, surely, debating Babalwa.

During this time I received more personal attention from her than I had since we’d first found Fats waiting for us on Eileen’s couch. It was, I surmised, a typically youthful female double play – the leveraging of the weaker male as a point of necessary tension through which to force the alpha into action. She needed him, in other words, to be jealous. Not raging, pull-the-walls-down jealous. Just enough to get him going. To inspire commitment.

At the same time Lillian pulled Gerald, Tebza and myself into her own agenda. The CSIR trips were followed by raids on other buildings and complexes in the same area. We went along, doing what we were told. Searching for flight.

Teboho’s behaviour had also become increasingly erratic – he was drifting away from all but the most necessary contact. He kept up with the trips to Tshwane, the CSIR and all that. Otherwise he slept through most of the day and sat behind his machines at night, occasionally disappearing altogether for long stretches. Once he was absent for a full forty-eight hours. He had also stopped eating regular meals, choosing instead to snack perpetually on crisps and Coke.

And so we circled.

Babalwa would sit alongside me, next to the pool, rabbiting about breeding and genetics and cross-pollination and on and on and on. Fats would watch us from on high, his eyes slipping down compulsively from the horizon, then back up again.

One afternoon, after she had bent my ear for an hour or so and then made an exit, Fats descended.

‘I just thought I should let you know,’ he said after an interminable, uncomfortable pause, ‘that I know.’ He let the sentence hang, ominous.

‘You know what?’ I asked, annoyed and threatened.

‘What you did. To Babalwa. In PE.’ He tried to find my eyes. I ducked.

‘What? Sorry?’

‘Come, Roy, she told me. There’s no point being evasive.’

‘I think you’d better spell it out for me, just in case.’

‘The rape. Clear enough?’

‘The rape?’ I spluttered, jolted. ‘The rape? Jesus Christ, that girl’s…’

‘That girl’s what, exactly?’ His fists were balled.

‘More calculating than I thought. There was no rape, Fats. We fucked, OK? We fucked then and we fucked many times afterwards. Two adults. Fucking. It happens.’

‘That’s not how she tells it.’ Fats stood, looking down on me. ‘And from what I know of the two of you, I’m inclined to go with her version.’

I stood up in rebuttal. We looked into each other’s mouths. ‘Well, that’s your choice,’ I said. ‘But she’s lying. I don’t know why, but she’s lying.’ I turned to leave, but I walked the wrong way – to the bottom of the garden, where I stood and stared at the stone wall, Fats watching my back. I stayed that way, trapped, not knowing why I was staring at that wall, or where I could go from there.

^{CHAPTER 26} Cloudy with a hint of yellow

The following days we experienced a rain assault. Flying bullets and shells, swirling pools of water and flooding of unexpected places. A Jozi monsoon.

We stayed indoors for the better part of two days, watching the battery from within the mansion and avoiding each other strategically. Fats stayed upstairs for the most part, which suited me fine. Babalwa skipped around as if nothing had happened, and perhaps for her nothing had. I had no idea exactly when she dropped the pearl onto Fats – it could have been the day before or weeks ago – or whether she intended him to challenge me with it.

The twins broke out the movies, slobbing on the couch to an endless run of decades-old sci-fi adventures and special effects.

I took to my books, smoked on my bed and, stoned, flipped page by page through a few Wilbur Smiths, an aborted attempt at Dostoyevsky and a surprisingly interesting biography of Sol Plaatje. The rape accusation bothered me intensely, my subconscious rabbiting away at itself, probing and pushing at my thoughts and also at Fats and Babalwa, issuing counter-accusations and rebuttals, reviews of the evidence, cross-examinations, and so on. The weed forced the weight of the diatribe to the back of my mind but also increased the frequency of the chatter, obliterating in the process logical, linear thought.

Rape.

Rape.

Rape.

I struggled, even in my darkest moments, to associate myself with it. In the best and worst of my memories, what Babalwa and I did on the grill of the cash-in-transit van was very far from rape. A lustful, violent fuck? Yes. Confused, wild sexual fumbling? Yes. But rape? I couldn’t even consider it, primarily because I remembered specifically and in detail how wet she was as I went into her. That kind of lubrication was a clear rebuttal. Or was it? I recalled magazine articles, TV shows, Oprah reruns that explained victim arousal as the deeper conundrum. One of the aspects that caused so much confusion and pain for the victim, over and above the violation of the act, etc., etc.

I decided I was going to have to talk to Babalwa. But I evaded it, brushing past her during our monsoon incarceration as quickly and efficiently as possible. A man with things to do. A man too busy to talk.

On the second evening, the rain still battering us inside and out, I walked past Teboho’s room and fate revealed him to me: crouched over an Energade bottle and pissing extremely carefully into it. I should never have gained the view I did, but his bedroom door had swung open accidentally, and in one of those double twists of destiny the door to his en-suite bathroom had also cracked open at just the right angle. My view was thus through a double-hinge crack. It was a flashing glance, and if he had been wiping his ass or beating one off I wouldn’t have thought twice about it. But there was something furtive in the manner of his crouch that made me stop and take a second, longer look.

Even then I walked on, deciding to file it under ‘Strange and Weird’, an already brimming category.

The next day the sun broke out. The clouds rolled back and we all ran from the house to escape each other; our recycled breath and farts, the sexual tension and betrayals, the mood stuff. I laced up my Nikes.

I had developed special routes. Straight down Louis Botha to Alex and back for strength work. Through the full breadth of the Houghton suburbs for endurance, and occasionally through Patterson Park for a light, head-clearing run. Given the claustrophobia of the last two days I chose Patterson Park, and there, as I entered the gates, was Teboho off in the distance, sitting with his back to me and leaning against a big oak tree.

He had the Energade bottle against his lips. The liquid was cloudy with a hint of yellow. I walked towards him as he drained the last of it.

As I approached he slumped. His torso lost its form. Then his arms, their willingness to resist gravity gone in an instant.

The bottle dropped from his hand. His chin fell onto his collarbone.

‘Tebza?’ I walked up noisily. ‘That you? Tebza? Tebza?’

Nothing.

‘Teboho!’ I tried the angry mother voice. Then I shook his shoulder, hard. He remained folded in on himself, lost in a personal sinkhole.

Instinct said I should pick him up and carry him back to the house (thereby morphing my light run into an extreme strength session). But his breathing was normal, light but steady, and whatever he had drunk (his own piss, surely) must have had a lot, if not everything, to do with his state. In addition, he had chosen a faraway, quiet place for this. Somewhere he would never be seen, save by a manic runner.

I sat down in front of him – about two metres away – and waited. The grass was wet – deeply so. The damp rose quickly into my ass.

Every now and again, maybe every twenty minutes, I would probe at him with my toes. Lacking a watch, I had to guess at the strings of time looping themselves together. I marked off estimated periods of twenty minutes, promising myself that after seven such units I would pick him up and carry him back.

The extraordinary thing about his state, I realised gradually, was its rigidity. There were no eyelid flutters. No slight twitches of the leg or the arm. No sighing. No snorting, no changes in breathing. He was still in the absolute sense. Completely motionless.

Somewhere in the middle of the fourth twenty-minute block he sighed, stirred, snorted and rubbed his eyes. After the rubs he opened his eyes and saw me. His eyelids were heavy – dropping, then pushing open, then dropping again – weighed down by an obvious force. He recognised me, comprehended my presence, but was unable to address it. He leaned forward, rubbed his eyes again, then fell back against the tree, asleep.

I let him drift a while longer – this time he was making the noises and movements normally associated with sleep. Then I stood and kicked him hard on the leg. ‘Heita!’

Tebza’s torso shot forward, his eyes panicking as they shot open. He stared at me, wide-eyed and shocked. ‘Jesus, Roy, fuck, man. You should never do that. Never when someone’s…’

‘When someone’s what, Tebza?’

‘Uh, when someone’s been sleeping,’ he covered clumsily.

I sat back down next to him. ‘Tebz, you’re gonna need to explain this to me. Because it looks a lot like you’ve been drinking your own piss.’

Tebza pointed at the heavily gated door of flat 743, Slovo Mansions. ‘This is it,’ he said. ‘Shit, I didn’t remember the gate. We never gonna get in. This shit is unbreakable.’ He rattled the two-inch steel deadbolt. It rang firm.

‘Ag, maybe it doesn’t matter,’ he said, disappointed. ‘I wanted you to get some of the experience, but…’ He shrugged.

‘Let’s just walk,’ I offered. ‘I’ll use my imagination.’

True city sight was impossible, unless you lived right under the waterfall. For people like me, there was never a city to see. The city people, the flats, the shops, the hawkers, they lived and breathed beneath the gushing digital revenue. The poets and the lit students wrote about them, the shadows. The shadow lives. Me, all I saw was the outdoor revenue models: the chopping and slicing of space into money, of street frontage into monthly rentals, of air into brand experience.

Street names and important buildings were the necessary poles between which lay shocking colours, campaign points and enticements to act. To get to Mlungu’s from Louis Botha, I would take Joe Slovo to Pepsi corner, where the three chicks shook it for years, urban sexy-sumo style, in camouflage G-strings and Fidel hats. Then right at the bottom of Ponte, through the pink insurance strip for about half a kilometre, right again at the detergents, through the penis extensions, then left at the bottom of Carlton, left again at Black Like Me, and about fifty metres on, just past the Neo Afrika Theatre, was Mlungu’s. Each citizen had a similar yet personal experience of ‘getting there’. A lifelong gathering of tricks that allowed movement through the wash of mega brands and supersized churches and colours and exhortations. Of course the ‘where’ was always central to the experience of movement. If you turned left at Pepsi corner, it was all Maboneng art, city culture and coffee beans. High-colour fast-cut advocacy for sexual heath, democracy and creative thinking.

Then, once into the faster turns, the blizzard of smaller colours and faces and messages, the voices of the thousands of privates who – for whatever reason – hadn’t yet had their street frontage allotted to a greater outdoor advertising share scheme. The barber and the one-man loan sharks, the gurus and the prophets and the preachers, always the preachers, the little ones, growing nascent empires up to the heaven of high-impact roadside frontage.

The joy was always in the graf; the paint-over, the fight for control of the city canvas. The deeper the brands went, the more vulnerable they were to the paint-over, and therefore to the streaming rebel puns, the kiddie-war corpse feeds, the flashing art, the repeat challenges.

The agencies made the big money on public sites – but they pulled almost as much with the personalised, privacy-off stuff.

I only ever switched to privacy off when I was ordered to – when we were testing a new interface or some such mission-critical event. When I did, I came face to face with my public self. My aggregate avatar. For example, a shot from decades back: Roy the young advertising postgrad, leaning casually on a Wits Business School wall, talking to… who? I had no idea. I left it because, well, why not? Let the average live. Truthfully, I was helpless in the grip of my public profile, a force which insisted on an alternative me. A Roy I could barely comprehend, let alone modify to more suitable proportions.

Privacy off was a junkie’s experience, a digital game that belied the walls and the streets and the concrete underfoot. The addicts feasted on the perpetual motion, on plotting a path through the hall of personalised mirrors. No generic camo hip-hop G-strings for them – they customised those asses to their exact desires, picking each thong out, personally, from the Pepsi gallery.

Of course every time they chose – with every click or command or slide – they fed the third mouth of the beast. Customisation. Each wall talked to, each service portal accessed, each colour changed was an implicit request for more.

Even choosing not to choose was, eventually, a choice. Roy Fotheringham, the gantry scanner walls would beg. Take a journey into a new Jozi experience. See the other side of life. We value your privacy, but we know you’re going to love this.

Zoom here for selective privacy override.

Choose STOP to opt out.

Now, as we walked, the versions and requests and options were gone. The colours no longer existed.

Now, ghettos.

Now, brown.

Cracks carving through walls. Collapsing gutters.

We climbed into a few Hillbrow buildings, enticed by the opportunity to look, finally, at our own pace, with our own eyes, behind the curtain. The hallways were uniformly dark, dank wells. The art deco flats divided and divided and divided into sixteenths or more, each a quadrant for a family, each mattress shared, each view out to the north a taunt, a tease.

While we walked, west, towards Newtown, Tebza painted his story.

He had been getting seriously into hack.

‘I had this girlfriend, Joy. Hardcore algo freak. Physics at Oxford and all. Trader. She was always going on about it. Hack. The next level of human experience. She seemed cool. Healthy. Not strung out. Happy. Enlightened, possibly. So she took me to that flat, which belonged to a guy who worked for… I dunno. Government? Global youth? Graf rebels? I never really figured it out. Anyway, he was deep down there somewhere – wherever people like that live, that’s where he was. Where he came from.

‘There was no money or anything. We never paid for the stuff. There were just a few of us. We let him guide us, introduce us.’ Tebza stopped several times while we were walking for eye contact, for reassurance. Now he led us up a Rea Vaya bus ramp, into the scabby old bus station hut. We sat on opposite benches inside the glass container, our backs against the faded black-and-white city art, Tebza’s head framed by the outline of a beaming teenage African mouth.

‘So the guy gave us the pill. Nanobot. I was nervous as fuck, but Joy looked very chilled so I just followed her. He – Joel. That’s it, nè? Joel. His name was Joel.’

First the bots took the central nervous system – rerouting signals from the brain to the limbs, hands and sensory devices (tongue, ears, nose, etc.), and vice versa. Second, they linked to the WAN, superseding the physical context. The brain took in signals from the WAN, via the bots, and the arms and legs and eyes responded to those. The environment could have been anything, depending on the programs on the server.

‘We would obviously be able to run and jump and fuck, yadda yadda yadda. All the basics. Also fly. Run as fast as a car. X-ray vision, if you had enough points, et cetera, et cetera. But Roy’ – Tebza turned teary – ‘it changed everything. This wasn’t some rough glasses thing with bad joins and blur. This was real. Everything you know about the world, every touch and feeling and instinct, repackaged. Every basic physiological fact wiped away and replaced.’ He swatted the air with his free hand, flicking at non-existent flies.

‘You OK there, Tebz?’ I asked,

‘Sho, sho. We walk again?’ Tebza walked and talked in an increasingly fragmented fashion, looking up at the sky every so often and still swatting at the imaginary flies. Me, I will never forget it, him, the compulsive swatting, the rising sweat on his brow. And also the city, which, despite its lack, despite its sinking brown walls, seemed to be suddenly brimming with energy. With potential. I have a snapshot safe in my mind, the two of use walking west on Jeppe, alone yet powerful, confused yet profound, on the verge of something special. Something new.

Tebza babbled fast, rattling off descriptions of his hack experiences and insights, most of which sounded to me like standard (if very entertaining) drug fare. He was also sweating. A lot.

‘Am I sweating?’ he asked suddenly, dropping the monologue.

‘Sho. Fair bit.’

‘Shit, where’s that bottle? In the car? Fuck fuck fuck. I’m gonna lose them if I don’t piss now.’ His face crumpled.

‘Here, you told me to bring it.’ I pulled the Energade bottle from my pants pocket, where it had been sitting uncomfortably for the last few hours.

‘Oh sweet baby Jesus, thank you for that.’ Tebza whipped out his dick and pissed into the bottle. ‘You’ve seen this before so I’m not going to get all coy on you. The only way to save the bots. Disgusting, I know, but I can’t let go.’ He crouched carefully over the bottle. The level rose rapidly.

‘What happens if you overflow?’ I panicked on his behalf.

‘Doubt it, I don’t drink anything before for that reason. Soon as you start sweating, that’s the sign the bots are ready to jump ship. You got five minutes and thirty seconds before you actually start sweating them out.’

‘And then what, you drain the piss to get them back?’

Tebza shook off, zipped up and let his face take shape again. ‘Askies. No.’ He winked at me. ‘They’re molecular, nè? That’s one of the things I was looking for at the CSIR nanotech lab. A fucken nano sieve. I’m getting very tired of drinking my own piss.’ The wink had died away. He was serious.

‘Serious? You been drinking your own piss all this time? And the bots are still active – they don’t fade?’ I was incredulous.

‘Ja. There’s only a one to two per cent loss factor.’

‘Shit. And it’s that good?’

‘Actually no, it’s pathetic,’ he said shyly. ‘It’s just a blank canvas. No other players. No software, no functionality. With the nanobots I’ve got all you can do is bounce around between four templates. Desert, nightclub, bedroom and forest.’ Tebza rubbed the bottle between his hands as if trying to warm himself, or start a fire.

‘So why, then?’

‘Because… you need to understand, Roy. Because hack could explain this.’ He waved a theatrical hand at our empty city.

Contrary to his declared where-were-you-when-it-happened story, Tebza had been on hack in the Slovo Mansions flat. During the last few minutes of his trip – a clubby thing, he said – he was suddenly alone; the interface had emptied out. When he came around at three in the morning, the flat was deserted. It was doubly confusing because they had loaded up on MDMA, along with the hack.

Hack, while cognitively revolutionary and of a higher order to anything that had gone before, eventually took the path of all narcotics. It became expected. Slowly you recognised the parameters of the software and the experience, and the limitations – initially so far out on the horizon as to be irrelevant – became tangible. ‘Obviously people want to take it further,’ Tebza said. He was sheepish again, the scar on his cheek crinkling in an endearing embarrassment. ‘You know – humans must. We must take it on.’ According to my stockbroker friend, who was now considerably more than that in my eyes, the street had been making steady inroads into the initially glass-office hack scene. Traders were joined by dealers. Financial administrators by DJs. Artists – replete with piercings and tattoos and strangely coloured hair – started popping up outside the Sandton stock exchange, just kinda waiting. Tebza shook his head. ‘People were really starting to go off. Whoonga. Nyaope. Tuk. Buttons.[4] The mixes created a video game that was completely real and mad violent. Bad stories. Terrible shit going down in some places. People were getting damaged. Out of this world, Roy. Out of this world.’

‘OK, so, why are you now drinking your own piss to go play on a blank VR canvas?’

‘It might be blank but it’s real, mfana. Completely real. As real as the ground you’re walking on right now.’

‘I get that. A very real experience.’

‘Completely real. One hundred per cent real. As real as what you’re thinking and feeling and experiencing now. As real as this step on the ground.’ He hopped slightly for emphasis, then again. ‘Come, Roy, I’m leading you to the obvious.’ Tebza moved ahead at a trot, then turned and faced me dramatically, the Energade bottle swinging from his fingers. ‘So, when I came around and saw that there was no one left in the flat, in the city, my first thought wasn’t that everyone else had disappeared—’

‘But that you had.’ The penny clanged on its way down.

‘Exactly.’ He fell back in next to me. ‘My first thought is the same one I keep on having now – that I hadn’t come out. That something had happened. That I was stuck.’

‘You still think that’s possible?’

‘Possible, yes. Likely, not so much. The group of us would have had more common experiences. Our frames of reference would have been more in alignment. I think, anyway. That’s what I’ve been thinking.’

We crossed over Simmonds Street. The sun blazed over the city. Late February. Lunchtime. Light wisps of wind ruffled our hair. Bright blue skies to our right, to the north. Purple thunderclouds rising up from the south.

We walked in silence, our footfalls echoing in the streets. Tebza swung the bottle carefully yet casually from his right hand.

I stopped, knelt and undid the shoelaces on my Nikes, then retied them, slowly. I felt the texture of the laces carefully with my fingertips, the combination of a million tiny threads. This lace could not be VR. It was too nuanced. Too subtle. The rub of it between my fingers too complex. I placed my open palm on the pavement and ran it across the gravel and the city dirt. Again, too textured. Too literal on my fingertips.

‘So, what?’ I remained kneeling, my laces now very well tied, Tebza hovering above me. ‘You’re saying that you and I – theoretically – could be flat out on our backs somewhere, not moving, and this’ – I rubbed my palm over the pavement again – ‘could all be interface?’

‘It’s possible. But I can’t find evidence, anything to support it. The glitch. The thread to pull on. If we were navigating via software there would have to be an outer edge. To the interface. You know this from Mlungu’s, where the edge is soooo obvious.’

‘More than. You have to pretend it’s not there.’

‘Exactly. Even with hack – I was told, but I never experienced it myself – there are limits, edges. Finely threaded and completely invisible, but if you push the right corner the interface will break and you end up back at the entry point. Problem with hack is that it’s seamless. I’ve been pushing at a lot of corners and have never found one. I still don’t know what they look like.’ Tebza flopped down next to me. We sat side by side on the corner of Simmonds and Anderson, facing a McDonald’s.

‘How does one push at a corner – practically speaking?’

‘Run hard at it. Drive fast at forty-five degrees until you smash into the koppie. That kinda thing.’

‘And nothing. No thread?’

‘Not here. And nothing on hack either. Which is why I keep on with the piss. I had one pill left.’ Tebza shook the Energade bottle sarcastically. ‘Which is now at about eighty-nine per cent strength, in this bottle.’

‘How does strength impact it? Does dilution create threads? Interface breakdown?’

‘It just shortens the duration. Designed that way. At the flat the pills would knock us out completely for two hours, and then we would come down through a set of screens designed to make re-entry easy. In total the whole thing would be about two and a half. Now, with just this pill and no network, there are no re-entry screens and it’s a rough jump back. Time is down to somewhere just over eighty minutes.’

‘So in there and out here you’re just looking at – pushing at – corners?’ I felt a little high all of a sudden. Tebza’s profile was cut out against the purple sky building steadily behind him. The thunderous backdrop made his skin look blacker, sharper.

‘Sho. Kinda. At some stage the system has to break down, and I want to know what the breakdown looks like. How to recognise it. Otherwise I don’t know what I’m looking for.’ He paused. ‘But it could also just be because I’m homesick for it. The last time I was there – genuinely there – I was having the craziest sex with Joy. It was extraterrestrial. Like we were aliens. Non-human. Past human. Maybe I want to relive that. I don’t know.’

‘And the others? You haven’t told anyone?’ I thought of Fats, hands behind his back, staring out of the third-floor window.

‘Nah. I mean, I wouldn’t have told you if you hadn’t bust me.’ He looked sheepish again. ‘I mean, it’s just too much, you know? Too far-fetched. Turns me into some kind of cyborg in everyone’s eyes, for no real reason.’

‘I get you. I’d like to try it though, for my own sanity.’ The words were out of my mouth before I had thought about creating them.

We talked and talked and talked on that pavement. It was the first emotive, heartfelt conversation I had had with anyone for years – certainly since the people disappeared, but also since well before that, stretching all the way back to that uncertain point in time when I withdrew from people, and from my life. The most obvious thing about our conversation – and I realised this fully at the time, and relished it – was the clarity. The smell of the impending rain. The burn of the afternoon sun on my skin, searing it. The silence. The way the absence of sound actually enveloped our voices. Each word had weight, fell down on top of the last and clattered.

Tebza’s emotional tap was wide open thanks to the comedown. He explained in passionate detail the intensity of the experience, his hand forming explanatory circles, his fingers drawing words and ideas in the pavement dirt. The cracking open of his cognitive horizon, his falling in love with the girl and the alien sex and, finally, his tipping over the edge of experience into compulsion and, yes, ultimately, addiction.

I followed Tebza intently, my tongue sliding in and out of the guillotine, slicing gently, evoking the smallest dribbles of blood. Slowly I began adding, telling, agreeing, and revealing those parts of myself that, well, that I had spent many years pushing down.

The clouds moved over us. Suddenly we were covered in rolling purple.

‘That is the point, isn’t it?’ Tebza said, rising to his feet. I remained sitting, knees tucked into elbows. ‘The desperation. We need people. Even when we hate them. Especially when we hate them.’

I stood.

We decided to walk it. To use our feet all the way back, through the wet.

Despite the intensity of the day, despite the revelations and the change of view and the confessions we had engendered, despite it all – I could not mention rape.

I did not mention rape.

I would not mention rape.

^{CHAPTER 27} I also imagined her in his arms

During our time in PE I had grown to love, for my own reasons, Babalwa’s emotional distance from me. Even when we were at our closest, even on those rare occasions when we rose together to the heights of actual lovemaking, we were far apart. The distance was comfortable. It fit easily with my own abstracted state. And so I rendered her form in easy, hard lines. I constructed Babalwa as a simple PE girl. I never really considered other possibilities. Now I had to broach the notion that she may not have been that simple. That her dry, withdrawn PE state may have been tailored around my presence rather than being an inherent part of her personality. That she had throttled so far back in self-defence in reaction to an impossible situation in which she could not tolerate me, nor life without me.

After we arrived in Jozi, she began to express herself in ways I hadn’t seen before. And since she had taken up sexually with Fats, what I had known as her natural silence had morphed into a quiet, assertive confidence. Now she was allowing herself to think, and then to communicate her thinking. The white shorts and Castle Lager T-shirt had slowly disappeared, replaced by fitted jeans, vests and the occasional skirt. In group conversations she sat back and forward in equal measures.

I suspected that Fats was particularly successful at making love to her. That, instead of twisting and rubbing mechanically (as I now was forced to admit I may have been doing), he enticed her out into the world of active expression. Maybe that inner process was translating into her external life.

I felt shamed.

I looked back with half-shut eyes at our sexual encounters. I saw myself humping and jabbing, fucking and grinding. I wished now that I could erase it. Take it back. Reconstruct.

I also imagined her in his arms, exhausted and raw emotionally and otherwise, confessing, letting go of that terrible first memory of me on the heavy black grill. I pictured the creeping tears, his strong black thumb pushing the first one back, then massaging its companions from their hiding places.

I was shamed.

But was it rape?

Did I overpower her and force her?

Did I hold those wrists in a lockdown, pin her so she couldn’t move, break her open and stab and stab and stab?

^{CHAPTER 28} Allowing myself to dream

We stomped home through the monsoon. Initially talking, but when the thud of the drops drowned our voices out, just stomping, walking, stomping. We were wet – soaked through – but refreshed, in a childlike, druggy way. Up to the top of Rissik Street, round Constitution Hill, up past the park, past Joburg General and east into Houghton. By the time we got to the St Patrick gate, clouds had wiped the blue away completely and it was pitch-dark. And the gate was locked.

The spikes on top of the wrought-iron fencing were not to be fucked with. Fats had made sure the fence was impossible to climb without a genuine risk of impalement.

The idea of walking back in the rain seemed suddenly very stupid. The drops drove into us like industrial knitting needles. We ducked into a decaying wooden guard hut that stood a few hundred metres back down the street. The thudding of the monsoon prevented all but the most basic communication.

‘That fucker Fats.’

‘Who locked the gate?’

‘They knew we must be coming.’

‘These fucking gates.’

‘Stupid, stupid shit.’

The hut was rank with decay and wet wood. The floor planks had curled in protest and most had ejected the nails trying to hold them down. An ancient radio tape deck sat helpless on one rising piece of wood, surfing in perpetuity. A small pile of Houghton Times and Daily Sun newspapers, held down with a brick, rotted neatly underneath a single dirty-white pool chair.

‘Jesus, imagine spending your work night in one of these!’ Tebza bellowed, hunched up on the sliver of a bench running along the left inside wall.

I nodded. Imagine.

We sat soaking in the hut for ten or fifteen minutes. The rain was going nowhere. The sun was gone, and we had no way of getting back inside the laager. Tebza hugged his knees, shivering, the balls of his feet jackhammering against the pine floor.

Suddenly there was a thud against the rotten wall of the hut and an angry wet snout, flanked by two shortish, chipped brown tusks, burst into the space between Tebza’s legs. I jumped vertically. Tebza tried to climb the side wall with his elbows. ‘Jezuz fuck! What the fuck!’ The snout pulled out, ripping some of the rotten wood along with it, then snuffled back into the vacant space. Tebza tried to kick it, missing completely.

‘Tebz Tebz Tebz. No no no,’ I hissed, grabbing him by the arm and trying to smother the wildly flailing limbs. ‘Kicking pigs in the face. Not a good idea. Not good. Sensitive. They are very sensitive there.’ His eyes were wide as dinner plates. I put my finger to my lips and shushed him. Outside we could hear wet snorting and foraging. There were a few more bumps against the hut.

‘How many?’ Tebza mouthed at me.

It sounded like there were at least three. My immediate worry was that the other two had tusks as big as the first, who, going by snout size, was a certifiably big bastard.

Generally we lived in a state of amicable cohabitation with the pigs, who watched us as much as we watched them. In daylight and with the free run of the land in front of them they didn’t pose much of a threat, but now, at night, all sodden snouts and long tusks, it was a different story. It felt like we were being hunted.

The snout came back a few more times, but in a less aggressive manner. We decided in fearful whispers that they were probably just curious.

About an hour in, as the torrent eased, we walked. The pigs followed, snuffling and grunting in the shadows around us. We looked for holes in the fence, or a small road or alley that would get us back inside the perimeter. Although lighter, the rain pounded us at every step. With each blow our enmity towards Fats grew. ‘Change in gate policy!’ Tebza screamed into the sodden night. ‘Complete change!’ A pig snorted in agreement, just out of sight.

We eventually found a gap on the Louis Botha side of St John’s, and after six or seven tragic wrong turns we made it back. The pigs dropped off once we were through the perimeter fence, but not before two of them, both males, came into full view and watched us as we poked around. Tebza was more disturbed by the pigs than I was. In the full wetness of the night it seemed obvious they meant us no harm. They were observing, and looked, to me anyway, a little hurt at our fear of them. One male lowered his head slightly as we considered each other, in deference, perhaps. Or maybe just to let me know… what? I couldn’t quite get a handle on the communication. After some time he kicked the turf twice and he and his buddies turned and left.

Tebza stormed into the lounge screaming murder about gate policies and the threat of pigs and consideration for others. I quietly deposited the Energade bottle in my bedroom cupboard and took a shower.

When I came downstairs the pot was still simmering, Tebza confronting Fats, who sat unmoved, arms folded, mouth resisting the invading creases of a smirk. The others, looking bored but nervous, tried to wind the subject down with apologies and promises.

The air was thick. Beatrice, hopefully unaware of the rape subtext shimmering beneath, cleared her throat as if to speak, but no words came. Babalwa was seated on the couch next to Fats and picked at her toenails nervously. Fats folded and unfolded his arms and stared into the middle distance as Tebza raged on.

I was all subtext. I watched Babalwa pick her toes and wondered again what her agenda was. Whether she had an angle on the rape thing, and, perhaps more importantly, whether she was in concert with Fats or not. My earlier reflections had led me to conclude it was against the odds that she had an agenda. More likely the memory had slipped out while she was in his arms and he, typical alpha, could not help but chase me down.

But if that was the case, it meant Babalwa truly believed I had raped her.

I would have preferred an insidious agenda.

I would have preferred a plot.

But she just picked at her nails. Pick. Pick. Pick. Fats staring ahead. The rain bombarding the roof. Beatrice clearing her throat, expectant.

The end of the world.

Beatrice clearing her throat one last time, standing, leaving.

Fats and Babalwa sharing a glance.

Me looking down, allowing myself to dream of another reality.