by Miller
The first cover in the suitcase had my father’s hopeful spider-writing scrawled over the front. ‘Schulz – Demo Mix 1 – Final,’ it read.
Two tightly folded A4 email printouts fell from the jewel case as I opened it.
Thanks Markus. That’s exciting. I’ll get something through to you asap.
Best
Russle
-----Original Message----
From: Markus Schulz [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Friday, June 19, 2011 4:28 PM
To: Russle Fotheringham
Subject: Re: great
I think send me a sample of what you’re thinking. It’s best to have the conversation revolve around something tangible – if we’re both listening to the same thing we can make appropriate decisions.
Let me know when you’re ready and we can Dropbox it. We might need to get you over to Miami to work on it when the time comes …
Peace
markus
On 17/06/2011 4:05 PM, Russle Fotheringham wrote:
Thanks markus – that means a lot, coming from you. Delighted you enjoyed it as it was a bit of a departure for me.
I’m actually putting together an odd kind of mix at the moment. Plays with some of the ideas that came out in the Cape Town set, but maybe in a more steady, hook-filled way than that gig, which got a little wild and broken.
If you like it, it could be a good project to explore?
Lemme know
r
-----Original Message----
From: Markus Schulz [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Friday, June 12, 2011 3:45 PM
To: Russle Fotheringham
Subject: great
russle
just wanted to say wow. Wow wow wow. That set last friday at Immortals. It just blew me out of the water. Completely unexpected and weirdly beautiful. And I see and hear a lot of sets.
I’m looking for something fresh for Coldharbour. Would you consider a project within that realm?
Let me know, and thanks for the experience
markus
19 June 2011.
My father was dead three months later. He had never mentioned the Schulz exchange to me, but then I was simply a son, riddled with emotion and judgement. It would have been safer to keep quiet.
The emails explained a lot. I had always wondered about the sudden swing to trance. More than being annoying, which it definitely was, it was also odd. Russle Fotheringham had always been a deep house man. Throw in a few breakbeats and some of those slower hip-hop thumpers and that was him really. Deep house. And then suddenly, just before the end, he was all trance.
I put the disk in the front loader.
I left the CD box and printouts on the passenger seat, along with the mementos I had culled from Eileen’s flat, all stuffed, together with various last-minute additions, into a large green Woolworths carrier bag. A few of her old shirts, a blue skirt, a bottle of old perfume and a newish-looking pair of white panties I had found in the back of her cupboard.
At the bottom of the Woolworths bag was a small chequered wallet I had pulled from behind her underwear while rummaging. I unzipped it. Inside, a stuffed plastic baggie of what looked like very old weed, a matchbook from a hotel bar (the Balalaika, of all places) and a totally out-of-proportion, scrunched-up, king-size Rizla pack.
Weed.
A tingle of excitement, rooted in my early HHN balcony days with Mogz, the only time I had properly engaged with grass … a time when its jagged whack to my psyche felt more thrilling than dangerous. I zipped the wallet back up and flipped through Eileen’s CDs.
Bobby McFerrin.
The Pet Shop Boys.
Bump Volume 3.
Peter Gabriel.
Deep Forest.
Eileen must have been several years older than I had always thought she was. Either that or she had inherited her father’s music collection, in toto.
Fun Lovin’ Criminals.
I extracted the weed wallet again and rolled a terrible, mangled joint as the first run of angelic voices came together at the trance crossroads. The girl voice began to sing: ‘There’s something in the air / Baby, we just don’t care / I see you in the mist tonight / Thula thula baby, thula, alright / We sleep / Tonight …’
There was some relief, I thought as I rolled the joint, in knowing that my father hadn’t simply lost his musical mind towards the end, but was rather working on career progression with a famous Germanic-American DJ. It gave him credibility – something he needed a lot of with me. I particularly enjoyed the tiny slip of vernacular into the vocal. The girl sounded as generic as trance girls always did, but that one word – thula – gave the track a touch of something different. Mr Schulz would surely have loved it.
Stalks poked through the spit-addled mess of a joint in several places. There was no discernible end to the construction, so I just stuffed it in my mouth, holding fingers and thumbs over as many of the holes as I could and burning my right forefinger badly in the tussle with the matchbook.
The van erupted in a cloud of green. As did my lungs. The coal fell straight off, into my lap, and I exploded out the door. Four more failed attempts later, I realised I was stoned. I turned the CD player off.
Silence.
Stale heat in my mouth.
I sat in the middle of the highway, the wet white lines dividing my ass cheeks.
I got straight up again. The wet tar was boiling.
Back in the driver’s seat, tears of ass pain prickled behind my eyes. I drove, excruciatingly slowly at first, south. I hit play on the CD and felt better located, as if I was suddenly in place. The right place.
I bopped to my father’s demo for a while, then stopped it and let the whistle of the wind through the gaps in the van’s bodywork take over. I forced my arm through the slit of a driver’s window and hung it out while the van weaved back and forth across all four lanes. I tried to stick my head out of the window like a dog. It wouldn’t fit.
Off the highway, to Parys.
Green and white coffee shops, waiting. Landscapes and wildlife art on the walls, waiting.
I pulled into a rest stop at the bottom of the town, overlooking the Vaal River. I scaled the old sagging fence, pulled off my clothes and jumped in.
I swam to the middle of the river and lay naked on an expansive black rock, unfolding my whiteness and asking the early afternoon sun to sear it while my mind rumbled on and on and on.
With the sun baking my hake-white body, the faces and the beats and the spikes and the colours bubbled over my mind’s eye, the sound of the river and the power of the weed winding it all tighter and tighter until I opened my eyes and let the relief wash over me. Somehow, in the midst of the mess, right smack in the centre of it, I appeared to have been set free.
Back at the van, I put my glasses on again, checked one last time for a log-in screen, then threw them in the river.
Through to Kroonstad. Trucks falling against themselves, waiting.
The sign to Ficksburg. The idea that maybe a few old ravers like my father were still out there at Rustlers, eyes blazing.
I pulled in at the Engen 1-Stop on the Joburg side of Bloem, rejecting the Shell Russle was always loyal to, and rammed the van through the Quick Shop glass doors, running right through to the Wimpy at the back of the building.
I stomped to the toilet, which was clean and expectant, the attendant’s folded paper towel peppered with hopeful coppers. I pissed all over the sinks, and all over the floor. I walked the full length of the restroom, steering a spiralling yellow arc out in front of me, spraying the toilet doors and ending with the paper towel, pissing it and the coppers into a mess on the floor.
I zipped up and marched back to the van. En route I grabbed a few bags of crisps, some Jack’s popcorn and three warm Cokes from the rancid freezer. I held my nose tightly, denying the rotting braai packs. Outside, I sucked diesel with my hosepipe, a diabolical, exhaustive effort involving an hour-long search
for a set of keys able to unlock the underground storage tank.
And so I went. Trying to stay left, swerving always around the stranded vehicles, crying occasionally, thinking of my father and my youth and the life I had abandoned before it abandoned me. I stopped where I felt the need, the urge, and I destroyed as much as I could en route, battering the van into houses, resorts and hotels, bursting randomly into lounges and kitchens. I pissed on floors. I shat an increasingly fluid stool onto dining room tables and the beds of sweet teenage girls.
I spat a lot. The diesel was permanently slick over my tongue. I drank warm Coke and fruit juice and bottled water and I spat.
I burned a twisted trail. Colesberg. Graaff Reinet. Beaufort West. Oudtshoorn. George. Mossel Bay. De Rust. Jansenville. Somerset East. Kenton-on-Sea. Bathurst. De Doorns. Butterworth. Elliot. Barkly East. Kokstad. Pietermaritzburg. Cape Town.
I abandoned the stockpiling as I finished my supplies. All I really needed was the hosepipe for diesel. The rest was on tap. Bags of crisps, boxes of biscuits, cans of beans, etc.
I lurched from house to hotel to garage driven only by an evolving desire to shit and piss on all signs of life.
I ripped the houses apart, developing an addiction to the nuances of the South African suburb in the process. The placement of the kitchen, the type of duvets used, the clothes and underwear and school projects and mobiles and glasses and lipstick. Each was the same, yet ever so slightly geared to its owners. I was fascinated. I took mental notes as to structure and design and composition before I kicked it all apart.
Why was I destroying? What led me to shit on the pages of family photo albums? Even now, all these years later, I can’t answer.
Suffice to say I was surviving.
Every now and then I would run across a pack of wild dogs or a cluster of free pigs. The dogs would watch me from a distance, tongues lolling as they considered the anomaly. The pigs, secure in their size and their hunger and their extended frontal cortex, simply foraged. Once I saw a lone cow, suddenly wild, static on the horizon.
But the encounters were few and far between. Reality was empty.
Was it weeks?
Months?
I came to some kind of stop at the Blaauwbosch Game Lodge and Rest Camp, perched on the Baviaanskloof mountains of the Eastern Cape. I swam in the resort’s ice-cold pool for days and lay in the sun, letting my skin roast an even dark brown.
I bullied the van through the resort’s kitchen wall and, defying the rotten meat and pools of blood on the floor, used the well-stocked larder to cook real vegetarian food on the gas cooker. I drank expensive fizzy drinks and watched the sun set and rise and set and rise and set and rise.
I smoked all Eileen’s weed. I muttered and walked. Prowled, resisting the urge to defecate and piss, forcing myself to use a toilet again, dreaming each day that I was working to some kind of plan and that, ultimately, I would emerge better for it.
I started reading: through the Wilbur Smiths and all the other resort pulp and then more widely, into the dusty colonial history, ending, finally, with a tatty, broken copy of Deneys Reitz’s Commando. I remember sitting perched on the low front wall of my suite’s private patio overlooking the Klein Karoo, following Reitz and his Boers in my mind as they ran up and through the country in search of a battle they could win. Eventually they ended up at the foot of the Zuurberg, not fifty kilometres from Port Elizabeth and, I calculated roughly, not far at all from where I sat reading. They considered how far they had come, straight through the British lines, to a point where they were looking down on the sea, the literal edge of things. They could hardly attack the city, but as the British moved around them they thought seriously of it.
I closed the book.
I needed a war.
I needed an enemy.
I needed to fight.
CHAPTER 13
Suddenly claustrophobic
I ran at her. We hugged furiously, wildly. Even when she felt my erection she didn’t pull away. She clung, instead, to this last thread.
We fucked immediately, our hands finding each other with a deeper desperation than the need for names or stories. Against the black grill of the armoured van. She yelped at the heat. I rammed it home like a wild animal. She responded in kind.
Her name was Babalwa.
‘It means “Blessed”,’ she said, filling the space as we pushed away from each other. ‘I was the second. And the last.’
I looked over my shoulder, wondering suddenly if we were alone.
‘There’s no one else,’ Babalwa said. ‘Just us.’ She leaned against the grill, her brown skirt pulled back down to above her knees. She looked in her early twenties. Thin. Head closely shaved. Neutral brown T-shirt to go with the skirt. Gentle acne bumps across her skin. A girl in a young boy’s body, her small breasts and big, rounded eyes accentuated by the shaved head.
‘So …’ She leaned back further, posing a little. ‘Would you like to step into my parlour?’ She waved behind her, at the row of semi-detached houses. Whitewashed with green-and-black trim and red-and-white stoeps, the units started at the top of a savagely steep incline and rocketed half the way down to the city streets. She gave me the tour.
‘Since I was a little girl I always wanted to live here, in this house, with the view and everything. Long before the dealers took over again,’ she said as we opened and shut doors. ‘When it happened I thought, why not? I’m the only person left, I can just take one. So I did. The one I always looked at when I was a girl. Took me a few weeks to clean the fungus out but … time’s not an issue, eh?’
We stood in the neat pine-and-white kitchen, considering each other in the afternoon light.
I had driven into PE spurred by a new, Reitz-inspired understanding of the place. By a sudden desire for adventure; movement and action and all those things.
I came into the city via the modest highway leading in from the northern beaches. At what looked like the beginning of the docks, at the big red watchtower, I caught site of a very large flagpole at the top of a hill. I turned right, on instinct, then right again. At the base of the hill was a spiralling, climbing path, surrounded by mosaic art and the placards and historical-info signage of a public space. Above the path, up the hill, was the flagpole, surrounded by low walls and more education props. The pole and its walls fronted a squat pyramid and a lighthouse. They crowned the hill, and were surrounded by the bright colours and graffiti scaffoldings of a community skatepark.
I skirted the lower perimeter, then turned left up the hill, and up at the top was a living, breathing female.
Simple as that.
Babalwa pulled a chair from under the kitchen table and shoved it in my direction.
‘Tea? Coffee?’ she asked.
‘Jesus. Really? Yes. Uh, tea. Tea would be fantastic.’
She opened a cupboard door and extracted a silver camping kettle. ‘Water stopped ages ago,’ she said, taking the kettle out the tiny back door onto the small metre-square back stoep, where a gas cooker and water tank lay waiting.
‘Nice set-up. Take you long?’ I leaned back in my chair to get my head around the door.
‘Food?’ Babalwa ignored my question.
‘Nah. I’m full of shit already. Been eating Engen 1-Stop all day.’
‘Ah.’ She walked back into the kitchen, pulled her chair out and sat down. Then she reached a formal, bony young hand out to me. ‘OK, so, I’m Babalwa. And you are?’
‘Roy,’ I replied.
‘Roy …’ She tittered as we shook hands. ‘Great. Roy. Roooy.’ She stretched my name out between us. ‘I have definitely never met a Roy before. And where does Roy come from?’
‘Joburg.’
‘Damn. And you drove all the way down here—’
‘Well, kinda. I mean, really I’ve just been driving, you know. Looking. For something. For somebody.’
‘And now you’re found her.’
‘I guess.’
‘And what did Roy do before
all this?’ Babalwa waved at the world surrounding us.
‘Um, advertising. Writing ads. And then recently running one of the VR clubs. You know, with the glasses.’
‘Wow. Nice.’ Babalwa gushed a little, with no obvious sign of irony.
‘And you?’ I ventured. Our eyes had been skirting the periphery of contact since we came inside, avoiding the intimacy already forged. Now she looked at me directly, smiled vaguely, then adjusted and gazed past me, at the wall.
‘Nothing as fancy. Sorry.’ Her fingers toyed with a splinter of wood that had come loose from the tabletop. ‘Call-centre agent. “Ngqura Development Project, how may I assist you?”’ Babalwa stood to attend to the kettle. ‘You stink, by the way,’ she said on her way out to the stoep. ‘Either I’m going to have to move upwind or you’re gonna need to take a bath.’
‘Uh, sorry, I kind of left the lodge where I was on impulse. Didn’t think I would find anyone to offend.’ I was shy. Suddenly claustrophobic. I considered bolting back to the van and hitting the road again, then swallowed the reflex. ‘So, do you know what the fuck happened?’ I asked.
Babalwa came through the back door with two steaming mugs of tea. Mine read ‘World’s Best Dad’, the words held aloft by an overly round brown bear of the generic Paddington/Pooh variety. Hers bore the word ‘Love’ in a large font, surrounded by a forest of red hearts in receding sizes.