by Miller
‘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.