by Miller
‘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 st
ared 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* 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.’