by Miller
‘I can answer that for you. Stop the car. STOP THE FUCKING CAR!’ She screamed into my ear, at my eardrum, which stretched to pop. I braked and she bolted. ‘Just fuck off, Roy. Go be alone if that’s what you want.’
I circled a few Linden blocks, berating myself for being such a fool. Firstly, for tossing away another driving blow job, a quirky and not unpleasant experience, and secondly, for putting the cruel steel on the only person left in the world willing and able to screw me, and, more importantly, hold my hand.
Maybe, I rationalised as I turned another corner, surprised again not to find Beatrice’s stomping form, I was actually jealous of Gerald. Maybe I was too much of a South African male to be able to express my anxiety, and so her slightly cruel raising of his name as she was lowering got me scared and I reacted emotionally, etc., etc.
I drove up and down Barry Hertzog a few times – criss-crossing the side roads as I went – expecting to find her. But I didn’t.
As I drove I remembered a story my dad told me about how Hertzog was named after James Barry, the South African surgeon general and British frontier military doctor, because he, Hertzog, was a result of – or his family somehow was involved in – Barry’s introduction of the Caesarean section to South Africa. And how the Hertzogs, on naming their son, were completely unaware that Dr Barry was actually a hermaphrodite who had lived his entire life with undiscovered female genitalia. I loved that story as a child. It gave me goosebumps to think I knew this little snippet of history, a piece of us that no one around me perceived.
‘Female genitalia, huh!’ Russle, beaming, concluded with a thump on my knee. ‘Imagine that, Roy, just imagine.’ Knee thump, beam. ‘You go through a lifetime in the army with a punani and nobody notices? Imagine!’
Beatrice had vanished. She must have ducked across Victory Park. (Which victory was that? I asked myself, thinking again of my father and the paucity of his historical knowledge – Dr Barry’s punani was all he had.) I crashed the 4x4 through the low wooden railings into the park, skirted a few trees, examined the trickle of the Braamfontein Spruit – with no success. I got out and walked. I yelled out her name, feeling strangely conspicuous. A free pig checked me out from a distance. We held eye contact for a few seconds and then he turned back into the bush.
Nothing.
I thought of Angie and it stopped me dead. I tried to count how long it had been since she had even occurred to me. Months. Several months. At least. The thought of her occupied my mind as I drove back to Houghton, having given up on locating Beatrice, who clearly did not want to be found. I hoped she didn’t have to deal with too many animals on her journey back. It was a long walk.
Things weren’t the same between Beatrice and me after that. They weren’t the same between her and Gerald either, nor between me and Gerald. It was, of course, of bloody fucking course, a classic love triangle, straight out of the Hollywood script machine.
We covered ourselves in silence and functional tasks.
We spoke to others and got on with whatever we could.
We watched Beatrice’s belly grow, following Andile’s and Babalwa’s before her. We were all affected, those outside the triangle as much as those in it. Despite the careful planning, we had three babies in the works and no one had yet jerked off into a cup.
Watching the belly grow, something of mine baking inside it, I drifted further and further back into the past, latching onto smells and sights and riding their resonance into my teenage and childhood years. Flashcard memories of life as a very young child. The smell of the rain. The smell of my father’s cricket bat, unused, but always leaking the strange odour of his previous life. The light, woolly fragrance of my first kiss. Girls’ underwear. Trees bending in the wind, signalling September. Tobacco. The sharp stink of my old man’s cigarettes and then, in turn, the charming cloud of my own first inhalations. Life passing. Life smelling. Life taking shape, without ever taking form.
CHAPTER 41
You had it and you didn’t want it
As the babies arrived we all became like the weaver bird. Plucking and binding and stripping and threading an endless series of domestic compulsions. Now, our only reason was to keep it all going. We were governed by an arcing, noble aim. We lost the need to do anything else. To even think about anything else. We shut the horizon down and focused on the farm, and yes, there were rewards. Many, in fact.
The weaver, by the way, stayed in that tree, building and tearing down. I never saw a mate or an egg or a baby bird or anything. Just a weaver and his nests, falling as regularly as they went up. A never-ending procession of weaver engineering, with no end result.
I would sit and watch him after hours, in the early mornings or whenever I caught a break. Each year as spring broke the first descending helicopter leaves would announce his arrival. Each year my excitement grew, my hopes for him compounding annually. The second year I laughed. Teased him. Mocked a little. I presumed he would sort it out and his wife would descend from wherever weaver wives descend, and finally the family would progress and nest.
But it didn’t happen.
I stopped teasing and began encouraging and as soon as I started that the whole thing developed a level of pathos I was unprepared for. The weaver and I were now somehow bound together. Our trajectories and ambitions had accidentally meshed. I began to urge him on out loud. Come on guy, what’s the problem?
The thought of his life being as futile and directionless as mine, the thought of him failing at the single clear objective of his existence …
Eish.
After Roy Jnr came Andile and Javas’s Thabang, then Jabulani, the result of Beatrice and my awkward union. The three babies created a natural realignment of labour. To wit: heavy shit for the men, cooking and cleaning for the ladies.
At the agency, baby ads were always the easiest. We would rattle them off, always targeting the fathers, who held the metaphorical key to purchase decisions. The change of life. The embracing of responsibility. That bright little future all tucked up in your big manly hands. The time when a man must do what a man must do.
Now I experienced personally why it all worked so easily. I also felt that essential change in perspective, inclusive of sudden rushes of empathy for, and an overwhelming sense of connection with, my father. Through the babies, and especially through Jabu, I now understood Russle Fotheringham not as the decisive force in my life but simply as another man trying. A man as helpless as I was with this thing in my arms. A man also leaning into the wind.
In this way, Jabu gave me peace. Not lasting peace. Not the kind of peace I could carry with me forever, but a short, sharp glimpse into my own demise.
Meanwhile, Fats launched another plan.
This time he wanted to extend the house to accommodate the babies and their future lives. The plan involved, naturally, a great deal of mapping and red ink, but at its core it was expansion across the ridge – a breaking down of the walls that separated the four properties adjacent to the mansion to create a mega complex. A mega mansion. Fats envisioned a sprawling property, an interlinking of many different dimensions, a space big enough to accommodate the various intricate family structures of our future.
I had long been claustrophobic in the house and had envied the twins their garden cottage. We never had enough power to allow anyone to move further out, but with Fats’s grand expansion things would change. I put my flag onto the small (in the Houghton sense) property perched on the far right corner of the ridge. Really it was quite a large house with a right-angled view of the north and the west. Its aesthetic was of posed humility, the gradations and reaches of the place all tucked neatly into a single-storey façade that dropped down the cliff face to form a second and third floor below the first.
Given the fact that I was the only partnerless adult, the odd man, the perpetual jerker into cups, I proposed the corner property as my payback, a karmic debt I hoped we would all agree was due to the guy with the guillotine tooth and several serious character flaws
.
As we pounded away at the walls separating the properties, in my off-hours I packed my meagre possessions into boxes and carted them over to my new house, one by one.
I was leaving.
I was coming home.
As the babies took their place in our world, I followed the path carved out before me by billions of men. Activities and tickles and rubs and walks through the farm and lessons in anything and everything, as if I really did know and understand. As the years ticked by I found myself delivering lectures on the fly, ranging freely over subjects I knew almost nothing about. Roy Jnr would gape at me, kick his legs, frown, possibly burp in encouragement. Jabu never really gave a shit – her eyes always drifting to the left, looking for other, better things. Thabang was polite. He paid attention while looking bored.
Our relationships weren’t parent to child, they were person to person. I wasn’t guiding them or raising them; I was hoping to befriend them. I wanted to impress them. This was the most profound shock of fatherhood – the gradual, creeping understanding that they were my little friends. Above all else I wanted them to like me. I wanted to see them smile. I wanted to show them as much of my world as I could.
Roy Jnr, marginally the eldest, took on the role of all oldest children, bashing his head against authority with a steady frequency. Roy was the quickest to challenge, the meanest in a fight and the scariest when charting the rivers and valleys of his own moods. Publicly I treated him as my own – his name gave me licence. Privately I considered him to be mostly mine as well. The child I should have had with Babalwa, but didn’t.
While raised within the general brood, Thabang grew within the specific range of his parents. Andile always held his eye, and Javas his hand, and he benefited from having as parents the two most sensible and stable of our bunch. From a tiny infant Thabang was steady, assured and calm. Even in a crisis, he was measured. His tantrums were delivered with calculation and efficiency. He was a good follower, which meant, I thought, he would end up being a good leader.
Jabu was a little shit. She caused trouble with a smile. She manipulated wherever possible and was always the one to initiate conflict – and reap the rewards. She was constantly drifting away to places she shouldn’t, then allowing herself to be pulled back, with a beatific, adventurous smile on her face.
‘The result of a scratchy union,’ I said to Beatrice as Jabu tried to leap off her hip and into my arms over a distance of several metres. It was a regular habit of hers, leaping from the arms of whoever was holding her.
‘She can’t help it if her father’s a prick.’ Beatrice laughed a serious laugh.
‘Do you believe that kids are an even mix of their parents? I’m never sure.’
‘What else would they be?’ She heaved Jabu off her right hip and flung her in my direction. ‘We shouldn’t drag babies around when we do this. Take her, please. Asseblief.’
We were pushing the cows back into their paddock for the night. I wrestled our child into place under my right arm. ‘I don’t know. I mean, obviously Jabu is a mix of you and me, but when I talk to her and watch her move she seems to be a lot more than that as well. Like, she has our genes but she’s also a complete individual. Then I wonder if we’re born as individuals with our own place and point on the planet, or whether we’re born into a lineage and that that’s the real point. The lineage—’
‘Shit, Roy.’ Beatrice slammed the gate and counted the cows one last time. ‘I think you think too much.’ Her finger danced across the open space between us. ‘I’d hate to know what goes on inside that head of yours when you’re not talking.’
‘I think I need company.’ The words landed in a Freudian heap between us.
‘Don’t give me your bullshit, Roy.’ She swivelled around and marched back to the house, slapping her ass as she walked. ‘You had it and you didn’t want it,’ she called over her shoulder.
Jabu wrestled under my arm like a sea lion.
‘Check that ass, Jabu, check that ass,’ I said as Beatrice drifted out of focus. She was dressed in a simple, colourful skirt, probably an Oriental Plaza wrap-around. The make-up and heels had completely disappeared. She was natural and farmy, like a black diamond Bokomo rusks ad, or one of those laxative specials, all flowers and flowing gait. She could easily have clamped a stalk of wheat between her teeth.
Jabu finally managed to break out of my arms, still reaching at Beatrice. I caught her only semi-causally. ‘I could have tapped that, Jabu. I could have tapped that for the rest of time,’ I said to her as I stuffed her back under my armpit. She burped. I watched Beatrice go, feeling surges of something akin to regret. But it wasn’t quite that, either. Maybe it was loss. With a bit of jealousy. The numbers were never going to add up. There was always going to be someone left out.
I had made sure that that someone was me.
Babalwa fell pregnant again a few months after Roy Jnr was born – a fact that both pleased and irked her. Ideally, according to her grand plan, her next baby should have been fathered by either myself, Gerald or Javas, via the cum-cup method. She immediately drew up an extensive schedule, backed by consultation with Beatrice and Andile, both of whom were far more committed to the idea of pouring a lukewarm cup of alien semen down themselves than to the reality.
‘You just tell me when and where to wank, and I’ll do it’ was Fats’s only comment.
‘Don’t be such a prude,’ Babalwa chided. ‘You know I’ll help you.’
‘Public ejaculations’ – Fats glared at her – ‘are not really my thing.’
‘Well, ja,’ Babalwa shot back. ‘None of this is my thing, but if we want our grandchildren to skip the whole four-eyes-and-eight-toes thing, we have to do it, nè?’
According to the schedule, the next pairings were Andile + Roy and Gerald + Beatrice. Which meant I would be the first to broach the cup.
Andile didn’t want to be rushed. ‘We’ve got all the time in the world’ was her stated position. I didn’t object. We agreed that ‘when Andile is ready’ it would happen, with Babalwa continually stressing the dangers of a repeat of her and Fats’s mistake. ‘Just pay attention!’ she barked, frequently. ‘Use the condoms, check your rhythms.’
CHAPTER 42
Blacks, browns, beiges and a few whites
I cleared out Tebza’s room. It had been two years since the crash and we were inching painfully towards the subject. To remembering the people. Talking about them. Threading them back into our ideas of our lives. Rooms had to be cleared and cleaned. Possessions boxed and/or distributed and/or thrown out. I volunteered for Tebza’s.
It was pitiful. Pads and mobiles and associated accessories. Clothes still piled up on the floor in what looked like three separate heaps – dirty, clean and transitional. A few scraps of paper on the pine desk, covered in water marks and rings from the various cups and containers. Scribbled notes and strings of IP addresses, each a minor variation of the last.
Bed unmade.
Cupboards empty, save for a few extra machines waiting in the far reaches of the shelves. The Energade bottle festering in the corner of the darkest shelf.
I scooped the clothes and the duvet and sheets into a few black bags, tied them up and lugged them over to the balcony and threw them off, straight down the cliff. I poured the nano piss down the sink. His pads I carted to my room and opened up one by one. Most of them were raw terminals running a basic open-source OS. Folders empty, no files. Shells. The last pad was different, though. It was his personal machine from the pre-days: email, designs, docs, music.
I started with email. The in-box ran several thousand mails deep, well past two years before it all stopped. Between the avalanche of corporate requests and replies, revisions and reversions, lay clues to a deeper life. Snappy one-liners from Joy, the hack girl, recurred in the four months before the end:
Sunday. 8pm. Keen? Bring music, naps, sense of anticipation …
j
And his reply:
Sho. Armed. Equipped.
Metaphysical gumboots on.
Laytas
Tebza.
Closer to the end they were more connected.
Tebza
How you?
Feeling like maybe it’s time to move on. In my life I mean. Feeling stuck. Need adult things. Career progression. House down payment. How come other people seem so completely grown up and rooted and I’m just not?
Anyway. Gonna lay low for a while. Cook food. Eat it.
Holler back
j
And the reply:
Hear you. Feel you. Need to watch TV I think. TV is always the answer. Not sure about the questions.
I call.
Out
T
Little lines. People talking about small things. TV and weekend drugs and creeping fears. It made me want to cry.
Around the same time there were a few hospital exchanges. Booking forms and permission slips and insurance questionnaires. Cosmetic auditory enhancement, his procedure was called. The date was for about two months after he met Joy. A morning procedure, out in the afternoon. No insurance.
Otherwise, his folders were as folders generally are. Spreadsheets and investment product brochures. A million and one overviews of various trading algorithms. The ‘Instamatic’: ‘80% odds of a 25% return over 90 days through a considered focus on the performance potential of weather futures in the East African boom economy’. The documents stacked up. I scrolled and peeked and scrolled and read and glimpsed and scrolled.
Deep within his 2033 Potentials folder, which contained many hundreds of files of potential sales opportunities, was a folder called Youth, and inside that a string of typical Global Youth promos. Kids in hoodies with raised arms, pointing fingers, Molotov cocktails.