by Miller
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.