by Miller
This is the last image I have of him, the one burned into my brain: a tall, too-thin forty-year-old man in white shorts and a maroon vest, bobbing his head to candy trance, smoke rising from the ashtray, track listings scrawled in an uncontrolled hand on scraps of paper around his laptop.
I asked him how long he had been up. He intimated via a series of nods and eyebrow raises that it had been a long time. A looong time. We did our usual dance around my disapproval and that was that. He died the next day.
I walked through the house with cardboard boxes. The disks and the laptop and the playlists and associated DJ paraphernalia. I piled it all in, randomly lifting interesting items into an old cardboard primary school suitcase. The few boxes went into my boot, and then into my basement. Everything else to charity.
I rented the place to a succession of young families – people too busy creating their own memories to bother about mine.
So there I sat, naked in Eileen’s sweet lounge, sucking on a cigarette, taking in the realisation that by smashing Clarissa’s mirror I had probably destroyed the last career opportunity open to me in the country. Rick Cohen was a lot more than a club boss. Rick Cohen was a media mogul, an industry general. What he thought radiated out across our business in influential circles. The dinner could have been a reconciliation. It could have been an opportunity. The door had opened. The door had closed.
The sun was setting. My glasses sat ominously on the lounge table. A day and half out of contact was a lifetime. I decided to go all in and make it two. I went back to bed.
I turned on midway through the following day and waited for the messages.
Nothing.
I opened a new bottle and poured a big glass of red.
And another.
I called work.
No network.
I tried to log in and accept my fate, but there was nothing, not even an interface. Just the click of the lost Google API call. I dialled technical, but the call failed. There wasn’t a single bar on the reception tower.
I turned the TV on.
Static.
CHAPTER 7
The occasional bark of what must have been a dog
Dry brown walls, stripped of their broadcast. Their colour. Their purpose. Dirty brown walls. Simple. Sagging.
I remember them above everything.
First and foremost, the brown.
I stuck my head out the window of Eileen’s Tyrwhitt Mansions flat to see two free pigs – strange genetic cocktails, easily over 350 kilograms, big ears, straight snouts and that specifically curious air of anger and intelligence that belongs to the free pig – loping down the hill together, heads swivelling.
As they picked up speed a small street dog – a black and brown brak, compact and wiry, likely full of rabies – fell in behind them.
There was never any quiet in those first days. The air buzzed with the futility of a million abandoned alarm systems – cars, houses, offices – and their desperate, decaying batteries. As the door panels forgot the thumbprints of their owners, as the last of the power trickled out of the grid, the electric yells merged into a crescendo.
And always the brown. The crushing, dirty brown. It had been decades since I had seen a simple painted wall, a wall without movement, without a message. The brown was bad, of course, but it was the uniformity that was so hard to digest. It stretched forever. And the closer you looked, the more alarming it was. Decay. Cracking walls. Rivers of damp, creeping, swelling. Pipes falling off the walls, cable ties and piles of bundled wiring. Slumping angles, falling arches.
As my eyes adjusted to the new vista, they slowly accepted. No colours. No messages. No accents. No shading. Just brown, from sky to floor, top to bottom, wall to wall.
Brown.
I lost sight of the pigs. The incessant whine of the alarms, the recurring crescendos, shook me awake and forced me to consider. To think.
I ran into Tyrwhitt Avenue, then jerked right and ran uphill for another fifty metres.
No people.
No movement.
Just the alarms. Just the brown. And the occasional bark of what must have been a dog.
CHAPTER 8
Just one
My name is Roy Fotheringham.
I am a little over forty years old. I walk with a shuffle developed in my twenties to indicate some kind of street/club cool and that I am now unable to shake, even though I know how it looks at this age.
I am wiry and lean. Lifestyle lean, not gym lean. I smoke when they’re around, and I don’t when they’re not.
I drink. Of course.
I am currently in shock.
I have destroyed my life, in small increments, each thoughtless step adding unbearable weight. The framework, the superstructure of Roy, has been knocked and beaten and rendered fundamentally fragile. All it took was one punch. A single fist.
Everything is over.
There is nothing left for me in this city. And therefore this country.
I will never work again.
Yes, there is that curious liberation. I am free in the world, and once the administrative details of my departure are finalised I will be able to go anywhere, do anything.
Problem.
There is nothing I want to do. There is nowhere I want to go. There is, in fact, only an echo at the centre of me. It has been filled for all these years by work, so called, management activities and the rest. Now that these are gone there is nothing but the reverb.
Shock.
Look, from this distance it all comes off as infantile and deluded in a childish, indulgent way. But at the time it was real. The shock. The horror of what I’d done. At Clarissa’s, and at the coalface of my pitiful life.
Jozi was empty. The people were gone. There was nothing.
Let me put it this way. Advertising and media and Mlungu’s was my life. It wasn’t much of a life, and it may not have meant much to anyone else, but it was the only life I had, and in that sense it defined the length and breadth of my personal universe.
The shock radiating through my core was personal. I had pulled the pin at Clarissa’s and everything exploded.
It seems deluded and indulgent now, but at the time everything was truly my fault. I had, somehow, caused this.
It was me.
I did it.
Now I would have to deal with it.
I stopped drinking. At first the adrenalin spur was so strong I didn’t need a drink, didn’t even think of it, and by the time I fully realised that I hadn’t had one in hours, I knew well enough. This was the time. My time. There would be no other.
I was as practical as I could possibly be, but I was also driven by a cacophony of competing, self-referential voices. There was the observer taking notes, lining up and prioritising the never-ending series of things that were not right. There was the reactor, the violent screamer who wouldn’t shut up at the shock of it, the emptiness. And there was the pacifier, the steady, assuring voice claiming calm and balance, resisting the reality with the understanding that this was all, well, a misunderstanding. Then there was the homosapien – who just wanted to see, to touch, to speak to another human being. Who was constantly clocking the horizon for one. Just one.
CHAPTER 9
Shotguns falling from my arms
I brushed my teeth. It felt like the right thing to do.
Just a glance. Casual, thoughtless. A quick check-in with my abluting self. But suddenly I was trapped, locked into the return view. My hair was grey. Completely, comprehensively, shockingly grey.
I was a different person.
Older, but softer. New, but decaying.
I examined the hairs, the impact of the colour on the lines and pits of my face. Zoom in. Zoom out.
Stunned, I could hardly look. I peered at the mirror out of the corner of my eye. But still, it was there. Grey.
Eventually I jumped (literally, there was a strange spring in my step) into the shower. The water was warm, but cooling noticeably.
I
got dressed, grabbed the keys and let myself out of the flat.
Up Tyrwhitt Avenue. As I broke into an army-type jog I realised I was going to the police station at the top of the road. As I ran I thought of my new grey hair. Then I realised I hadn’t run in decades – sweat broke through the freshness of the shower in waves. Will the water stay hot? I asked myself.
I stopped running. Strode up the hill.
Cars lost on the road. One or two piled into walls and street poles, glass confetti littering the street. An ancient 1990s red Volkswagen hatchback in the middle of the road. Empty. I popped the boot but it was clean. No jack, no wheel spanner.
Up to the Rosebank Hotel, then left to the police station, a half-brick, half-prefab oddity. The doors open, reception empty. A stiff breeze ran through it. I felt cool, then hot. Sweat.
I grabbed a set of keys off the front desk and went into the back. The interview rooms were empty, also the holding cells. There were four offices. The superintendent’s and duty sergeant’s were vacant, but there was a newspaper in one of the desk drawers. I grabbed it to take it with me, then realised I hadn’t brought a fucking bag, so how was I going to carry the guns?
I opened the newspaper and spread it on the desk. Tenth of April. The day after I fell into Eileen’s flat. The usual:
Behind the global youth. Chasing down the graf rebels. Crime. Violence. Service delivery. Corruption. Soccer. Cricket. Rugby. A double-spread free-pig feature – same old thing. Their intelligence levels. Pig steroids, fat cells and the frontal cortex. What a free pig actually feels. Why they run. Where they run to. Five Things to Do When You Encounter a Free Pig (1. Don’t stare. 2 Don’t start a fight. 3. Don’t laugh. 4. Be respectful. 5. Pigs want to be left alone as much as we do …).
I crumpled the front page of the paper, stuffed it into my pocket and searched for guns. Eventually I ended up back in the reception area and there it was, a recessed glass-fronted gun cupboard with four shotguns inside. I used a paper spike to smash the window, first with the spike itself and then beating the shards out of the sides and corners with the pedestal.
There were two boxes of shells in the drawer underneath the cupboard. I spilled the shells onto the desk and then stuffed them into all available pockets. I thought about trying to load one of the guns, but I’d never even held a gun before.
I jogged back down Tyrwhitt Avenue stuffed with bullets, shotguns falling from my arms. I realised as I ran and stumbled and dropped a gun, then another, as I bent to pick the second up and a few shells fell from my top pocket, that this was a real risk. I felt eyes watching me. I heard feet sneaking up into the backyard of my mind. As I reached the entrance to Tyrwhitt Mansions I stopped and swivelled. I glared back out at the world, radiating survivor vibes in case someone was watching and thinking anyone who carries guns like that must be an easy target.
I ran up the stairs to Eileen’s front door, dropped the guns outside with a clatter, fished the keys out of my pocket and got very confused with a lock I’d opened many times. I felt the eyes watching, again. Eventually I forced the door open, threw the guns inside, then myself, and slammed it.
I stank. Sweat and fear.
I couldn’t stop moving.
Tore my clothes off and jumped back in the shower.
I let the water pour over me until it went truly cold, then I dried myself. I caught a glimpse of my grey-haired reflection in the mirror.
I tried the TV again. Checked the lights (dead), then the stove (dead), then the mains board – switches up.
I threw my naked body back on Eileen’s bed and waited for a sound. But there was nothing. Just the smell of Eileen on the sheets, the pillow.
I tried to cry. I felt like I should. There was a slight moistness in the corner of my left eye, but otherwise nothing. I grabbed my dick and my balls in one hand and lifted my legs into the air. A light breeze blew over my exposed ass. It was the calmest I’d felt since I woke up. I stayed like that for a while, in self-defence.
CHAPTER 10
Five
I took a cold shower, created a seat on Eileen’s bedroom windowsill with pillows, and waited.
And waited.
I spent the day there. I watched the pigs and the dogs on their circuit, counted the heads. Five.
CHAPTER 11
The only reliable thing in the circumstances
Now, dangling over the cusp, I can tell you it was beautiful. I can carve and clip around the edges. I can look into that orange Cresta horizon, at that sagging water tower, and say the end of the world rescued me.
Of course I’m laughing at the younger me; the one who was actually there. The one who filled a cash-in-transit van with ten foraged barrels of diesel and drove south down the M1 crying like a girl.
The van, a vehicular pit bull, was shaped for attack as defence. I found it, door open, half a Tupperware of tripe and rice and morogo on the seat, white and green crumbs spilled on the brown plastic and down under the pedals, parked to the side of a yellow petrol station on Jan Smuts. Both front doors were open. The keys dangled in the ignition.
From a distance it had all the signs of a super vehicle. Of something from another time and place. In my mind these vans had always been something extra-human, apart from the prosaic realties of cars and highways. Up close, however, things were different. It smelled and looked like a prehistoric, atavistic creation, the panels consisting of buckled, reinforced, bulletproof sheet metal. Its snout broad and angled and ready, fronted by a black grill designed to crush and bounce. The thin front window squashed into place. The glass was many centimetres thick and comprehensively bulletproof, its density creating a blue tint inside the driver’s cabin, which in turn was tight and defensive – a cockpit made habitable only by a gushing aircon system. The two side-window slits were essentially decorative, and the rest pure fortress. The back section literally a vault on wheels. Impenetrable.
It was a van built to be shot at, bombed and attacked. Built to keep its cash guts from spilling out, at any cost.
It was also the only reliable thing in the circumstances – a vehicle I could use to smash and grind and rip my way through fences, over the spikes and razor wire, and into houses. That the van took diesel was painful, but the pain was offset by its smash-anything ability, and by the fact that no thumb was required to start it.
Also, it had a CD player – an ancient front-end loader that looked too dusty and scratched to ever work, but which actually did. An extreme, and welcome, cultural oddity. There were a few old Maskandi disks in the glovebox, a Zwakhe Mbuli, a Brenda greatest hits and an original copy of Vinny Da Vinci’s Africanism.
CHAPTER 12
Tears of ass pain
My grandfather Barnaby Fotheringham had been pathological about miscalculating the N1 slipway out of Joburg. I remembered him freaking out on one of our rare family holidays, as my father drifted left, flirting with Soweto.
‘Watch it, Rus, watch it!’ Grandfather Barnaby barked.
‘Jesus, Dad, we have to go left here. It’s Soweto, not the dark forest.’
‘Just watch it’s all I’m saying. Friends of mine got lost here – ended up God knows where …’
Born into a wealthy family of timber farmers in the Natal Midlands, Barnaby Fotheringham had conspired to lose his farm, his fortune, his self-respect and pretty much everything else thanks to an unreasonable attraction to the fine sport of polo. The great loss of the Fotheringham fortune wasn’t much discussed in our family, for obvious reasons, but from what I could gather the nut of it was that Barnaby had underestimated the time his father, and his father before him, had spent on the farming part of running a farm. He left the technicalities to the farm manager, who in turn left much of his load to his manager, and so on. When the timber market collapsed, Barnaby returned from the polo fields to find the outer shell of a business – the insides had rotted away. All he had left was a stable of ponies.
Thus, Russle was born a rich kid. He left high school a middle-class kid, and
he dropped out of university to pursue his cricket career the son of a living cautionary tale.
As I headed down the N1 in my armoured van, loaded up with supplies and jerry cans of diesel, Barnaby’s voice echoed in my head. ‘Just don’t go too far left. The Bloem slip road is the same as the one to Soweto. You have to go left, but then straight. Left then straight.’
I let the wheel drift left, then pulled straight. The rain smashed on the van’s armoured window, turned into hail and smashed again.
The N1 south was simultaneously reassuring and evocative of all the things I was trying not to think about. Orange Farm loomed up on the right, the township veneer familiar. On the left, Vanderbijl Park and Sasolburg, the cooling towers also reassuring, yet ominous in their lack of vapour. How many times had I travelled this road in my life? Fifty? Eighty? A hundred even?
Just after crashing through the lowered boom at the Kroonvaal toll plaza (another in an ongoing set of satisfying armoured van experiences), I stopped in a sunny post-storm spot on the highway and considered my father’s music collection, contained within a very old, brown cardboard school suitcase, my name stencilled in big, childlike letters on the lid.
The loss of the cloud – disconcerting in many ways – was most disruptive in terms of access to music. I was constantly patting my pockets, expecting contact. I carried my mobile in hope, but it lay silent, flashing the connection-failure notice ad infinitum, Bambi looking for his mom. Which meant my life’s music collection was scattered across the now dissipated cloud. Few of the cars, players, glasses or devices I had picked up along the way had anything in their memory banks aside from playlists; requests for beats lost to the sky.