by Miller
Eventually, though, we gave up on the CSIR and admitted our inability to maximise its potential energy. None of us were intellectually equipped to understand the machinery or the technologies the place contained. The computers, powerful as they were, were also detached from the cloud. Their power was latent and waiting, just like us.
Back at the farm a stodgy collective depression was setting in. The shoddy treatment of Lillian by the group, myself included, peaked and then settled into a general unspoken dislike of the foreigner.
We retreated further and further into small sets of confusion. Fats’s gates had blocked off our farm in an impressive and impenetrable way. Once that mission had been completed there was little left to focus on, save for setting up the slaughterhouse, which wasn’t really on anyone’s priority list.
‘Just fuck off, Fats,’ Andile snapped as he tried to convince her that electrifying the perimeter should be the next strategic priority. ‘There. Is. No. One. Left. On. This. Continent.’ She eyeballed him angrily. ‘You can fucking electrify whatever you want, it’s not going to change it. Leave me alone.’
Fats stood silently next to the kitchen table, an electric-fence manual stuffed uselessly under his arm, pen flicking between his fingers.
Me, I took up jogging.
I couldn’t sleep at night. Worse, the days were becoming harder and harder to fill. I started talking to myself – too much. I also started stalking Babalwa, obsessed with her movements and her growing attachment to Fats. I thought seriously about booze, again.
One afternoon we stopped at the Bookdealers of Rosebank. Books were the theme of the day – grist in the mill of our still flickering consumer lust. The Bookdealers had been my old haunt, and so there we were, in one of the ancient, deep sub-malls of Rosebank. I grabbed a clutch of books at random and then drifted away down the dead escalator, past the business bookshop (Social Investment as a South African Business Paradigm; Management Theory in Practice: A Guide for the Emerging Manager; Contact Centres and the Service Challenge; etc.) and down to the underground parking. Even in the old days the mall had a weird, abandoned ring to it – now, it was freaky. On the right, just before the underground parking, was a clothing and shoe store, one of those last-century establishments that specialised in school outfits and such. I stood in front of the window and remembered. My father had actually brought me to this very store. He bought me a school tracksuit and, as a rare treat, a new stationery set. It was one of those odd memories, a hawk flashing through a dream.
I put my books down, kicked over a medium-sized pot, let the rotting soil spill out and smashed it through the window.
Posters of surfers and rugby stars and tennis players adorned the walls. It had been Kim Clijsters in my day, and the old classic Steffi Graf. Now it was a bunch I couldn’t recognise. Young and lean and leaning forward, asses rock-hard and full of fight. The school clothes hung pitifully off their circular racks. To the right of the blazer rack there was a line of sports stuff, takkies and so on. I lifted a pair of bright yellow Nikes off the shelf. They were feather-light. I tossed them into the air a few times, then tried on the right shoe. It fit perfectly. I kicked off my second slop and walked back to Bookdealers in a new pair of bright yellow running shoes.
Back at the house, I ran up the driveway and then down again. Totally out of breath, I hung around the garage with my hands on my knees, panting, then went back up the drive again. The next day the shoes, an even brighter yellow in the morning light, lay waiting at the foot of the bed. I put them on, grabbed a gate buzzer from the kitchen and started running.
South first. Over Louis Botha Avenue and into Yeoville, heading for Rocky Street. It had been many years since I had been to Rocky Street. As I ran I remembered going there in my university days with some hippies who needed weed, in bulk.
I stopped running as my legs denied me. I walked up Cavendish Road. Yeoville sang with empty character. Unlike the suburbs and unlike the townships, it felt like there was a dimensional depth to the place, its little rundown houses the repositories of silent stories. Stories from the old white ladies, stories from the African refugees, the Zimbabweans and Nigerians, the musicians and drug dealers, artists and pimps and agents and journos. My Nikes flashed against the voices as I walked. I started running again. Stopped. Leaned over my knees. Turned around and walked back.
In running I finally found a meaningful weapon in the insomnia fight – the exhaustion drove me easily into the pillow. And so my runs stretched out until I was often away from the house for most of the morning or afternoon. It was a good escape.
As we embarked on the gritty business of putting together the slaughterhouse, our residence felt suffocating. Now, from my old man’s perspective, I understand that many of the strange feelings of the time were rooted in the challenge, which evolved slowly over a period of months, of setting up a system that would allow us to kill and eat other living things. Javas and Gerald were the lone sources of expertise when it came to butchery and slaughter, and following their guidance was traumatic for the rest of us, who had only ever faced meat through a layer of cling wrap.
Philosophically, there were two key elements to our programme.
(1) Establishing a slaughterhouse that was close enough to the cows to be logistically convenient. (Debate as to whether the cows would sense the slaughter of their colleagues and be emotionally or behaviourally affected by it arose, led by Lillian, of course, but also entertained by Andile and Beatrice, of all people. The notion was, eventually, dismissed.)
(2) Three slaughter sessions a year. One midwinter, and one on either side of the cold. The meat generated would have to last us the year.
We built the slaughterhouse in the semi-underground cricket nets that ran off the side of the KES fields and that ended with a set of burglar bars looking onto the street separating the two halves of the school. The area offered good, easy access and, once the artificial turf was ripped up, the concrete was easy to wash down with buckets of water. Javas created a drainage furrow in the cement which led to a small portable swimming pool that could be punctured at the end to release the blood but contain the gunk – the bits of ear and hoof and so on.
We created a trestle table out of a large door, about three metres long and one metre wide. It stood on two empty oil drums. Javas and Gerald put together a slaughter-equipment inventory, locked up neatly in what used to be the kit room adjoining the nets. This included knives (conventional and the curved, strap-on variety, which locked to the wrist via Velcro and allowed the ladies and the weak – such a myself – to make big, decisive cuts), dishes, drying clothes, muslin to wrap the meat in, a generator and, finally, a Meatmaster 2020 Pro bandsaw.
Adjacent to the trestle table we erected a tap, fed by the biggest barrels we could find and pressurised as much as possible by extreme height. Filling the eight barrels – which stood back to back on an elevated scaffolding, the front barrel attached to the tap – was an exercise in patience and brute force. In the far corner was the chain block-and-tackle, set in a high frame strong enough to hold a fully outstretched carcass.
In the last corner an iron ring was set into the concrete floor. This was where the animal died. When we eventually got to the slaughter, we did our best to con the beast into calmness with cooing noises and patting of the snout as we separated it from the herd and walked it to its fate. Then we jumped it as fast as we could: secured the horns and pinned its head to the floor with rope fed through the ring.
At this point Javas or Gerald, the designated executioners, would step up with a loaded 9 mm, place it just above and right between the eyes, and pull. The nostrils would flare. The eyes went wild. The power slammed off.
The cow would collapse onto the concrete in death spasms and kicking fits and then someone (in the early years it was Gerald or Javas – later, myself and Fats and Beatrice also embraced the challenge) would slice its neck open while the rest held the head. It required a messy, collective effort. Once the knife opened the jug
ular, a fountain of red blood would gush out onto the concrete and we would try with our hose and much desperation to get the bulk of it down the gutter while the beast gurgled and its still beating heart pumped the blood out. Gerald and Javas insisted that the throat-slitting happen fast, so that the heart could pump as much blood as possible, thus preserving the quality of the meat.
When the legs stopped kicking, it was time for cutting and slicing and dicing. Someone would cut the necessary slit through the skin on the Achilles tendon while the boys would use a hacksaw to take the head off. The rest of us would skin the legs and the rump as fast as possible. The carcass was then hoisted onto the gallows, and the rest of the skinning would happen.
We were terrible at it. Lillian wept profusely through the first two slaughters, and while her tears went well beyond irritation, they also articulated the dislocation I felt at the gore of the process. Fats, too, was green and quiet while following instructions.
We were particularly bad at the skinning. Gerald and Javas had to patrol around us like schoolteachers to make sure we were at least getting the core elements right. I was the chief culprit when it came to amateurish snipping of the connective tissue that held the leather and the meat together. Invariably Javas would nudge me aside and finish it off, denying me the final pleasure of balling my fist and ripping off the skin completely. I think he also denied me that pleasure to make sure I wouldn’t have to deal with getting the guts and entrails out – not out of any kind-heartedness, mind, but to avoid the tragedy of getting shit all over the meat with a slip of the knife or a shoddy tying-off of the rectum. Dealing with the entrails was an expert’s business – we would all step back and watch as the boys slit the stomach open and poured the guts carefully into the two large zinc tubs. Lillian would be sniffling and snorting. The rest of us were quiet and respectful.
By then it had already been a long, bloody day. But the skins had to be dealt with – Gerald insisted on working them into home-made shoes, etc. – as did the entrails, guts and organs, which were turned into tripe and liver and kidney meals for the next few nights.
And, before we could drag ourselves back to normality, for the night at least, the carcass had to be quartered, a process requiring the precision and muscles of three men to ensure the cut was accurate, right the way down the side of the tail bone. Eventually, years on, the girls and Fats and I became skilled enough and strong enough to deal with this heavy dismantling of the carcass. The strap-on knives were useful – we all started using them, even those of us with muscles. But that was all much later. In the early years, by the time the quartering came around, the stress and muck of the day, the physical exhaustion and Lillian’s tears had rendered most of us useless. I would collapse onto my haunches, watch the boys do their thing, and offer tools and rags and other such supportive items.
Setting up the slaughterhouse, sourcing our beasts (Javas drove all the way to the Eastern Cape to find the beasts he was looking for, five free-roaming cows and an ox that had – like us – somehow ducked the scythe), and actually killing and butchering our first victim took something on the order of three months. By the time we had meat in the freezer we hated each other, each in our own special kind of way.
And so I ran.
The flight-simulator failures saw Lillian voicing bolder plans, such as driving up through Africa until we got to the top and then simply boating over to Europe. This idea gained little traction, the response morphing quickly into a critique of American bias from Babalwa and Andile, who pointed out – with satisfaction – the assumption inherent in Lillian’s plan that getting to Europe would be some sort of inherent progression or achievement.
Beatrice offered an alternative to Lillian’s quest, suggesting an ongoing sub-Saharan African relay team of alternating twos, heading out at regular intervals in various directions. Her logic was that if there were nine of us here, there surely must be at least one other similar group below the Sahara. So seven could remain in Houghton managing the essentials, the farming structure and so on, while two could head out for a week, and then come back and swap with two others, who would go out again, then back.
Teboho said, ‘The twins will never be separated like that.’
‘Typical,’ said Lillian. ‘Nine people left on the planet and two of them actually fall in love.’
‘If they really are in love, that leaves seven of us for interbreeding,’ Babalwa said to me later as we perched on the edge of the swimming pool, which had grown a thick green skin while we were busy setting up the slaughterhouse.
I wasn’t yet ready to grapple with the notion that the nine of us constituted the future of humanity. Babalwa, on the other hand, had developed her calculations since our PE days. She said, and I was ready to agree with her, because what did I know anyway, that eight – four men and four women – would be just enough to get some genuine genetic diversity going, as long we ensured sustained cross-breeding. The twins’ blossoming love threw her approach into variable headwinds. ‘It’s an open question,’ she explained, ‘whether they would be willing or able to cross the line as many times as will be required to get it right.’
I pulled the laces on my Nikes tighter and thought about how I could expand my route.
CHAPTER 25
Fats took increasingly to his room
Everyone had their own idea of what was necessary, and the ideas were often in direct opposition. All we needed, Fats said, was four people to actually physically commit to their own plan and we were all completely fucked.
But Fats also needed the group. For him, it was the nucleus of our potential, our survival, our effort. In one of many attempts to re-establish unity of group purpose, he started calling house meetings.
I missed the start of the first one. I had been running and miscalculated, again, the uphill return.
I threw my sweating self between Andile and Babalwa on the lounge couch. They both leapt up, squealing and retching, and I ended up by myself in the far corner.
Fats launched proceedings with an unnecessary sermon on the necessity of planning, and followed it with an equally unnecessary outline of the various plans on the table:
Drive to the top of Africa and boat to Europe.
Build a community and colony here in Houghton.
Get the drones flying.
Learn how to fly – and fly away.
Dragnet South Africa again to search for more survivors.
Dragnet Africa to search for more survivors.
Get breeding to ensure perpetuation of the species.
The last item was Babalwa’s. She forced it onto the agenda amid the first genuine laughter we’d had as a group for a while. Within the mockery and the explosive fission of general sexual tension, she stuck to her guns. ‘You can think I’m crazy, but I’m telling you that if there are only nine of us, we can’t grow a community without inbreeding. Unless we purposefully cross-breed.’
And so our first formal house meeting dissolved into a farce of verbiage and theories. Lillian and Fats – representing the two truly polar views – put out the majority of it, facing off with argument and counter-argument. Halfway through the twins moved to sit together on the couch, articulating their own motivations and loyalties.
Gerald was quiet, voicing opinions only on technical matters. The likelihood of boating successfully over the Suez. The true benefits of drones unable to hook into satellites. The technicalities of dragnetting South Africa, or Africa. Tebza sat silent, his dangling earphone the only sign he was even thinking of participating. Mostly he stared at the intersection of wall and roof in the top corner of the lounge. I wondered again what he might be on. His blankness was not, I was sure, a passive-aggressive attack against the group. His brain seemed simply to be otherwise engaged.
I floated along, thinking occasionally about my downtime (I had reached Alex in record time) and my uptime (I was still dying completely going up Munro Drive) and only occasionally focusing on the conversations swirling in front of me.
Gerald installed a nifty new guillotine at the back of the chicken run, located at the far end of the fields (to minimise annoying squawking). The guillotine was essentially a funnel bolted to the wall with its tip pointing down. It offered a far better and cleaner way of slaughtering fowl than the axe-and-block method we had employed thus far.
‘You keep them as calm as possible,’ Gerald said. He held the bird gently under his left arm and stroked its feathers rhythmically with his free hand as he explained to Tebza and me how the guillotine worked. ‘You don’t want to stress them out, so you just stroke and stroke.’ He ran his hand over the bird’s head and down its throat, then turned it upside down and pointed the head at the top of the funnel. ‘If you are calm it won’t even notice what is happening.’ Gerald inserted the head of the impressively relaxed chicken down the funnel. ‘Once the head is out the bottom, you just take the knife and do it.’ He sliced the chicken’s head off like a gentle uncle. ‘Then you just leave it there to drain.’ He stood back admiringly and wiped off the blade on the grass. The blood poured from the chicken’s neck into the waiting bucket while its legs and backside wriggled in final protest at the wide end of the funnel. ‘Adrenalin,’ he mused while we watched the body twitch and the blood drain. ‘It ruins meat.’
‘Ah,’ I said, transfixed by the pouring blood.
‘That’s why game can taste so bad,’ he carried on, warming again to one of his favourite subjects. ‘If the person does not know about shooting and can’t get the bullet through the head or the heart, then he has to chase the thing down. Lotta adrenalin. Bad meat.’
‘Ah,’ I added again. Tebza idled blankly next to me, staring right through the chicken’s gaping neck.