by Miller
We returned an hour later and Gerald showed us how to soak and pluck the carcass properly. Complaints had been coming from the kitchen, Beatrice specifically, about quality.
Teboho, once finally focused on the task at hand, was surprisingly successful. He had watched his gogo pluck birds for much of his young life when the family visited the Free State rurals. I, on the other hand, found the task repulsive, and I was bad at it. I snatched poorly at the wrinkled wet skin, grabbing only small handfuls of feathers, sometimes getting nothing other than wet bird.
After the slaughterhouse was up and the farm was producing what we needed at a relatively regular rate, Fats took increasingly to his room. He would stand at his third-floor window and look north for long periods. From my own special places in the garden, I would see him standing with his hands behind his back in a military pose. To me he looked like he was urging the general inside him to deliver a better strategy, tighter execution, more predictable results. I once timed him at ninety minutes. Rooted to the spot. Eyes bolted on the horizon.
Later I realised he was probably not thinking about any of these things at all. He was, surely, debating Babalwa.
During this time I received more personal attention from her than I had since we’d first found Fats waiting for us on Eileen’s couch. It was, I surmised, a typically youthful female double play – the leveraging of the weaker male as a point of necessary tension through which to force the alpha into action. She needed him, in other words, to be jealous. Not raging, pull-the-walls-down jealous. Just enough to get him going. To inspire commitment.
At the same time Lillian pulled Gerald, Tebza and myself into her own agenda. The CSIR trips were followed by raids on other buildings and complexes in the same area. We went along, doing what we were told. Searching for flight.
Teboho’s behaviour had also become increasingly erratic – he was drifting away from all but the most necessary contact. He kept up with the trips to Tshwane, the CSIR and all that. Otherwise he slept through most of the day and sat behind his machines at night, occasionally disappearing altogether for long stretches. Once he was absent for a full forty-eight hours. He had also stopped eating regular meals, choosing instead to snack perpetually on crisps and Coke.
And so we circled.
Babalwa would sit alongside me, next to the pool, rabbiting about breeding and genetics and cross-pollination and on and on and on. Fats would watch us from on high, his eyes slipping down compulsively from the horizon, then back up again.
One afternoon, after she had bent my ear for an hour or so and then made an exit, Fats descended.
‘I just thought I should let you know,’ he said after an interminable, uncomfortable pause, ‘that I know.’ He let the sentence hang, ominous.
‘You know what?’ I asked, annoyed and threatened.
‘What you did. To Babalwa. In PE.’ He tried to find my eyes. I ducked.
‘What? Sorry?’
‘Come, Roy, she told me. There’s no point being evasive.’
‘I think you’d better spell it out for me, just in case.’
‘The rape. Clear enough?’
‘The rape?’ I spluttered, jolted. ‘The rape? Jesus Christ, that girl’s …’
‘That girl’s what, exactly?’ His fists were balled.
‘More calculating than I thought. There was no rape, Fats. We fucked, OK? We fucked then and we fucked many times afterwards. Two adults. Fucking. It happens.’
‘That’s not how she tells it.’ Fats stood, looking down on me. ‘And from what I know of the two of you, I’m inclined to go with her version.’
I stood up in rebuttal. We looked into each other’s mouths. ‘Well, that’s your choice,’ I said. ‘But she’s lying. I don’t know why, but she’s lying.’ I turned to leave, but I walked the wrong way – to the bottom of the garden, where I stood and stared at the stone wall, Fats watching my back. I stayed that way, trapped, not knowing why I was staring at that wall, or where I could go from there.
CHAPTER 26
Cloudy with a hint of yellow
The following days we experienced a rain assault. Flying bullets and shells, swirling pools of water and flooding of unexpected places. A Jozi monsoon.
We stayed indoors for the better part of two days, watching the battery from within the mansion and avoiding each other strategically. Fats stayed upstairs for the most part, which suited me fine. Babalwa skipped around as if nothing had happened, and perhaps for her nothing had. I had no idea exactly when she dropped the pearl onto Fats – it could have been the day before or weeks ago – or whether she intended him to challenge me with it.
The twins broke out the movies, slobbing on the couch to an endless run of decades-old sci-fi adventures and special effects.
I took to my books, smoked on my bed and, stoned, flipped page by page through a few Wilbur Smiths, an aborted attempt at Dostoyevsky and a surprisingly interesting biography of Sol Plaatje. The rape accusation bothered me intensely, my subconscious rabbiting away at itself, probing and pushing at my thoughts and also at Fats and Babalwa, issuing counter-accusations and rebuttals, reviews of the evidence, cross-examinations, and so on. The weed forced the weight of the diatribe to the back of my mind but also increased the frequency of the chatter, obliterating in the process logical, linear thought.
Rape.
Rape.
Rape.
I struggled, even in my darkest moments, to associate myself with it. In the best and worst of my memories, what Babalwa and I did on the grill of the cash-in-transit van was very far from rape. A lustful, violent fuck? Yes. Confused, wild sexual fumbling? Yes. But rape? I couldn’t even consider it, primarily because I remembered specifically and in detail how wet she was as I went into her. That kind of lubrication was a clear rebuttal. Or was it? I recalled magazine articles, TV shows, Oprah reruns that explained victim arousal as the deeper conundrum. One of the aspects that caused so much confusion and pain for the victim, over and above the violation of the act, etc., etc.
I decided I was going to have to talk to Babalwa. But I evaded it, brushing past her during our monsoon incarceration as quickly and efficiently as possible. A man with things to do. A man too busy to talk.
On the second evening, the rain still battering us inside and out, I walked past Teboho’s room and fate revealed him to me: crouched over an Energade bottle and pissing extremely carefully into it. I should never have gained the view I did, but his bedroom door had swung open accidentally, and in one of those double twists of destiny the door to his en-suite bathroom had also cracked open at just the right angle. My view was thus through a double-hinge crack. It was a flashing glance, and if he had been wiping his ass or beating one off I wouldn’t have thought twice about it. But there was something furtive in the manner of his crouch that made me stop and take a second, longer look.
Even then I walked on, deciding to file it under ‘Strange and Weird’, an already brimming category.
The next day the sun broke out. The clouds rolled back and we all ran from the house to escape each other; our recycled breath and farts, the sexual tension and betrayals, the mood stuff. I laced up my Nikes.
I had developed special routes. Straight down Louis Botha to Alex and back for strength work. Through the full breadth of the Houghton suburbs for endurance, and occasionally through Patterson Park for a light, head-clearing run. Given the claustrophobia of the last two days I chose Patterson Park, and there, as I entered the gates, was Teboho off in the distance, sitting with his back to me and leaning against a big oak tree.
He had the Energade bottle against his lips. The liquid was cloudy with a hint of yellow. I walked towards him as he drained the last of it.
As I approached he slumped. His torso lost its form. Then his arms, their willingness to resist gravity gone in an instant.
The bottle dropped from his hand. His chin fell onto his collarbone.
‘Tebza?’ I walked up noisily. ‘That you? Tebza? Tebza?’
Nothing.
Instinct said I should pick him up and carry him back to the house (thereby morphing my light run into an extreme strength session). But his breathing was normal, light but steady, and whatever he had drunk (his own piss, surely) must have had a lot, if not everything, to do with his state. In addition, he had chosen a faraway, quiet place for this. Somewhere he would never be seen, save by a manic runner.
I sat down in front of him – about two metres away – and waited. The grass was wet – deeply so. The damp rose quickly into my ass.
Every now and again, maybe every twenty minutes, I would probe at him with my toes. Lacking a watch, I had to guess at the strings of time looping themselves together. I marked off estimated periods of twenty minutes, promising myself that after seven such units I would pick him up and carry him back.
The extraordinary thing about his state, I realised gradually, was its rigidity. There were no eyelid flutters. No slight twitches of the leg or the arm. No sighing. No snorting, no changes in breathing. He was still in the absolute sense. Completely motionless.
Somewhere in the middle of the fourth twenty-minute block he sighed, stirred, snorted and rubbed his eyes. After the rubs he opened his eyes and saw me. His eyelids were heavy – dropping, then pushing open, then dropping again – weighed down by an obvious force. He recognised me, comprehended my presence, but was unable to address it. He leaned forward, rubbed his eyes again, then fell back against the tree, asleep.
I let him drift a while longer – this time he was making the noises and movements normally associated with sleep. Then I stood and kicked him hard on the leg. ‘Heita!’
Tebza’s torso shot forward, his eyes panicking as they shot open. He stared at me, wide-eyed and shocked. ‘Jesus, Roy, fuck, man. You should never do that. Never when someone’s …’
‘When someone’s what, Tebza?’
‘Uh, when someone’s been sleeping,’ he covered clumsily.
I sat back down next to him. ‘Tebz, you’re gonna need to explain this to me. Because it looks a lot like you’ve been drinking your own piss.’
Tebza pointed at the heavily gated door of flat 743, Slovo Mansions. ‘This is it,’ he said. ‘Shit, I didn’t remember the gate. We never gonna get in. This shit is unbreakable.’ He rattled the two-inch steel deadbolt. It rang firm.
‘Ag, maybe it doesn’t matter,’ he said, disappointed. ‘I wanted you to get some of the experience, but …’ He shrugged.
‘Let’s just walk,’ I offered. ‘I’ll use my imagination.’
True city sight was impossible, unless you lived right under the waterfall. For people like me, there was never a city to see. The city people, the flats, the shops, the hawkers, they lived and breathed beneath the gushing digital revenue. The poets and the lit students wrote about them, the shadows. The shadow lives. Me, all I saw was the outdoor revenue models: the chopping and slicing of space into money, of street frontage into monthly rentals, of air into brand experience.
Street names and important buildings were the necessary poles between which lay shocking colours, campaign points and enticements to act. To get to Mlungu’s from Louis Botha, I would take Joe Slovo to Pepsi corner, where the three chicks shook it for years, urban sexy-sumo style, in camouflage G-strings and Fidel hats. Then right at the bottom of Ponte, through the pink insurance strip for about half a kilometre, right again at the detergents, through the penis extensions, then left at the bottom of Carlton, left again at Black Like Me, and about fifty metres on, just past the Neo Afrika Theatre, was Mlungu’s. Each citizen had a similar yet personal experience of ‘getting there’. A lifelong gathering of tricks that allowed movement through the wash of mega brands and supersized churches and colours and exhortations. Of course the ‘where’ was always central to the experience of movement. If you turned left at Pepsi corner, it was all Maboneng art, city culture and coffee beans. High-colour fast-cut advocacy for sexual heath, democracy and creative thinking.
Then, once into the faster turns, the blizzard of smaller colours and faces and messages, the voices of the thousands of privates who – for whatever reason – hadn’t yet had their street frontage allotted to a greater outdoor advertising share scheme. The barber and the one-man loan sharks, the gurus and the prophets and the preachers, always the preachers, the little ones, growing nascent empires up to the heaven of high-impact roadside frontage.
The joy was always in the graf; the paint-over, the fight for control of the city canvas. The deeper the brands went, the more vulnerable they were to the paint-over, and therefore to the streaming rebel puns, the kiddie-war corpse feeds, the flashing art, the repeat challenges.
The agencies made the big money on public sites – but they pulled almost as much with the personalised, privacy-off stuff.
I only ever switched to privacy off when I was ordered to – when we were testing a new interface or some such mission-critical event. When I did, I came face to face with my public self. My aggregate avatar. For example, a shot from decades back: Roy the young advertising postgrad, leaning casually on a Wits Business School wall, talking to … who? I had no idea. I left it because, well, why not? Let the average live. Truthfully, I was helpless in the grip of my public profile, a force which insisted on an alternative me. A Roy I could barely comprehend, let alone modify to more suitable proportions.
Privacy off was a junkie’s experience, a digital game that belied the walls and the streets and the concrete underfoot. The addicts feasted on the perpetual motion, on plotting a path through the hall of personalised mirrors. No generic camo hip-hop G-strings for them – they customised those asses to their exact desires, picking each thong out, personally, from the Pepsi gallery.
Of course every time they chose – with every click or command or slide – they fed the third mouth of the beast. Customisation. Each wall talked to, each service portal accessed, each colour changed was an implicit request for more.
Even choosing not to choose was, eventually, a choice. Roy Fotheringham, the gantry scanner walls would beg. Take a journey into a new Jozi experience. See the other side of life. We value your privacy, but we know you’re going to love this.
Zoom here for selective privacy override.
Choose STOP to opt out.
Now, as we walked, the versions and requests and options were gone. The colours no longer existed.
Now, ghettos.
Now, brown.
Cracks carving through walls. Collapsing gutters.
We climbed into a few Hillbrow buildings, enticed by the opportunity to look, finally, at our own pace, with our own eyes, behind the curtain. The hallways were uniformly dark, dank wells. The art deco flats divided and divided and divided into sixteenths or more, each a quadrant for a family, each mattress shared, each view out to the north a taunt, a tease.
While we walked, west, towards Newtown, Tebza painted his story.
He had been getting seriously into hack.
‘I had this girlfriend, Joy. Hardcore algo freak. Physics at Oxford and all. Trader. She was always going on about it. Hack. The next level of human experience. She seemed cool. Healthy. Not strung out. Happy. Enlightened, possibly. So she took me to that flat, which belonged to a guy who worked for … I dunno. Government? Global youth? Graf rebels? I never really figured it out. Anyway, he was deep down there somewhere – wherever people like that live, that’s where he was. Where he came from.
‘There was no money or anything. We never paid for the stuff. There were just a few of us. We let him guide us, introduce us.’ Tebza stopped several times while we were walking for eye contact, for reassurance. Now he led us up a Rea Vaya bus ramp, into the scabby old bus station hut. We sat on opposite benches inside the glass container, our backs against the faded black-and-white city art, Tebza’s head framed by the outline of a beaming teenage African mouth.
‘So the guy g
ave us the pill. Nanobot. I was nervous as fuck, but Joy looked very chilled so I just followed her. He – Joel. That’s it, nè? Joel. His name was Joel.’
First the bots took the central nervous system – rerouting signals from the brain to the limbs, hands and sensory devices (tongue, ears, nose, etc.), and vice versa. Second, they linked to the WAN, superseding the physical context. The brain took in signals from the WAN, via the bots, and the arms and legs and eyes responded to those. The environment could have been anything, depending on the programs on the server.
‘We would obviously be able to run and jump and fuck, yadda yadda yadda. All the basics. Also fly. Run as fast as a car. X-ray vision, if you had enough points, et cetera, et cetera. But Roy’ – Tebza turned teary – ‘it changed everything. This wasn’t some rough glasses thing with bad joins and blur. This was real. Everything you know about the world, every touch and feeling and instinct, repackaged. Every basic physiological fact wiped away and replaced.’ He swatted the air with his free hand, flicking at non-existent flies.
‘You OK there, Tebz?’ I asked,
‘Sho, sho. We walk again?’ Tebza walked and talked in an increasingly fragmented fashion, looking up at the sky every so often and still swatting at the imaginary flies. Me, I will never forget it, him, the compulsive swatting, the rising sweat on his brow. And also the city, which, despite its lack, despite its sinking brown walls, seemed to be suddenly brimming with energy. With potential. I have a snapshot safe in my mind, the two of use walking west on Jeppe, alone yet powerful, confused yet profound, on the verge of something special. Something new.
Tebza babbled fast, rattling off descriptions of his hack experiences and insights, most of which sounded to me like standard (if very entertaining) drug fare. He was also sweating. A lot.