by Miller
If not now, when?
Money is the only freedom
Release capital now
One poster was a midnight shot of graf rebels standing back and watching their stream on the walls of the stock exchange in Sandton. The video they’re watching shows men in rags digging through suburban garbage bins. The shot is just close enough to make out a Woolworths bag in one of the graf boys’ hands, inside it a lot of bright-looking apples. The strap line on the poster: ‘Action Counts: Johannesburg, South Africa, 2032.’
I examined the graf rebels carefully. Their shoes, their shoulders, their posture. There was nothing definitive. Tebza could have been simply an online fan – a downloader of posters. He could also have been personally spraying the stock-exchange walls at night. It was impossible to tell.
The Global Youth verbiage went on and on. Schematics for a stock-exchange jammer algorithm. More schematics for a youth-fund trading algo, the introductory text speaking of the need for centralised planning and funding to support youth activism and the fight against capital retention.
I dumped the empty machines in the corner of the computer room. I kept Tebza’s pad with me. It held clues to his life I intended to follow.
We locked up the empty rooms and held a bonfire of all additional clothing and organic matter. It turned into a funeral-type thing where Fats spoke out loud, full of purpose and meaning, while we all looked and felt solemn. It had been two years, but the pain of our stupidity was still fresh.
Everybody cried.
The kids too.
We went through the daily rituals and then we all went home – the couples to their beds and me to mine. Sometimes, in the darker nights, I would reach for my bottle of wine and take it in with me. Hug it and hold it.
But I also tried, to the best of my ability, to leave that shit behind.
I had come to view my idea of myself as the lonely drunk, the drifter and the outsider, as a hindrance. An indulgence. I slipped back sometimes, but mostly I focused on pushing away from it, in other, more positive directions.
I started building a library in the basement of my new house, which I had successfully moved into and powered up. I rekindled my PE habit of raiding buildings and houses for books. The houses of St Patrick Road and Munro Drive yielded an expected but nonetheless valuable haul of classics, academic stuff and straight pulp. I used the armoured van to go house to house, smashing straight through gates and walls and front doors, PE style, until I found the studies. The good stuff was generally in the studies, base camps for retreating husbands and fathers. History and Africana and international relations and so on. But I wasn’t picky. I took it all. The Cosmo and Car mags and the Wilbur Smiths and the finance textbooks.
My new house was all wooden floors, pressed ceilings and stone floors. The wood was offset by off-white walls and curtains and framed line drawings with dashes of watercolour. Jenny Crawford, judging by her cupboard, was as predictably stylish as her house. She worked off a core set of dresses, skirts and blouses ranging across the basic colours – blacks, browns, beiges and a few whites. Her collection of scarves was as enormous as it was colourful, and she obviously used these, her bags and her jewellery to add the flash. She was a good-looking late-forties woman, with dyed brown hair cut into an angled bob, a trim figure and a cardboard cut-out husband, David, CEO of a nutraceuticals company, Zest. The house was covered in a loosely scattered layer of supplement bottles, including a generous proportion of ginseng pills and sensual massage oils.
They appeared childless, David and Jenny Crawford. The spare rooms were structured and neat and waiting for activity, which, by the looks of things, seldom occurred. Jenny – a marketing consultant – seemed to have spent most of her time in an office drowning under the weight of ancient business magazines. Harvard Business Review. Fast Company. The Media. Her pinboard was drilled firmly into the wall by schematics and spider diagrams and brand-positioning statements. I sat behind her desk, powered up her desktop and looked out over the stone balcony to northern Johannesburg. I clicked around her emails and folders, but there was nothing other than the expected. Musically, the returns were worse than average. All old-school stuff from the ’90s and 2000s. Freshlyground. Kings of Leon. Coldplay. I turned off the machine and sat, letting the afternoon sun bake my chest. This, I decided, would be my study too.
And I would use it.
The second floor I reserved as a reading station for mobiles and portables, as a music centre and as a photo-storage facility. I strung up ten different extensions and plugged in all the chargers I could find, catering to most brands and models. About thirty-five in total. Then I set up ten central fifty-terabyte music servers, and another six for photographs.
And then I archived.
They started to call me the librarian. Ask the librarian, they said, in the days when the kids began to ask about things. Check in the library. Ask Roy.
In my own time, after I had finished work and archiving, when I was sitting on my cool stone porch, watching the sun set over the Northcliff Dome, I became very attached to philosophy and home decor, in no specific order.
The best philosophy was wrapped up in history. It was, in effect, storytelling from a particular era. The worst was the pure sort. University stuff. Sartre. Nietzsche. Bertrand Russell.
The stories came to life up there on my hill. The texts would conjure the voices of people. The sounds of life as it used to be: trucks downshifting on the highway; washing machines and lawnmowers and crying children. I read a lot of Africana initially, following up on the sketchy stuff I had devoured at the Eastern Cape lodge, before I found Babalwa. After the Africana I drifted at random, picking up whatever I found in front of me. Mercenaries in West Africa. Paul Theroux on a train. Naipaul on America. JM Coetzee on Australia. It was the reality I was after. The reportage. Actions and transactions. The writers themselves … they were pitifully out of context. So self-assured, so assuming, so completely wrong. Unable – any of them – to imagine what might be coming. The home magazines offered a more tactile distraction. I carefully clipped out wives and husbands gazing at their lounges/gardens/homes. I stuck them to the side wall of my study in an oily collage – my own little monument to the great dream of family. A final nod towards the ridiculous idea of design, to the vanity of balance and style. When I ran out of room on the wall, I collected the cuttings in an apple box, which grew to two apple boxes and, over the years, three, then four, stacking up next to each other. It was a harmless compulsion – as I clipped, I considered creating some kind of artwork, something massive and tangible, like Javas’s pieces, something permanent, some recognition for the grandchildren of the cult of the interior. But I never did. The boxes filled, overflowed and started again. They’re still with me now. Next to me. Keeping me company. Maybe someone will find them one day and appreciate the beauty of those cashmere ladies. The wholeness of their manicured hands.
Babalwa’s second pregnancy came and went, resulting in Lydia. This time the birth was complicated. Babalwa bled heavily afterwards, and it was, Beatrice repeatedly informed us, touch and go. She cramped badly for a few weeks after Lydia arrived, prompting Andile and Beatrice to hit Joburg Gen for some morphine. Having known a few junkies in my time, I stopped them from using it.
We ran a lot in that week. Up and down with water and blankets and shit, just like in the movies. It was OK when we could run, and conversely the hardest when we just had to sit and listen to the pain. Gerald had brought cigars, and while we waited we smoked them like they were cigarettes, smacking our lungs for something to do, to give us something different to feel.
Personally, I remained narcissistic and inward. Each hug and worried brow or pat on the shoulder during Babalwa’s troubles revealed again to me how empty the core of my own life was, how devoid of similar contact. I would go back to my house depressed, flick on the light and stand there lost, choking on emptiness.
I read. I filed. I archived.
I clipped out and stuck on.<
br />
I looked out.
I waited.
I talked out loud. Long sentences, sometimes rambling, sometimes insightful, sometimes coherent.
After the panic and chaos of Lydia’s birth, Babalwa steadily increased the pressure, month on month, closing in on Andile and myself. Jabu was over two years old, as were Thabang and Roy Jnr. It was time.
I resisted.
I wanted to start with someone else – Beatrice or Babalwa would have been fine, but to start with Andile and Javas felt like treachery. Adultery, but sadder. Pathetic even. The idea of Andile having to open up to take my seed while Javas waited … I hated it. But Babalwa pushed us closer together until I visited Javas and Andile a few nights in a row for supper, a gradual wind-up to what needed to be done. We sat around the table and ate – me the uncle come to dinner. We talked of many things, but never the real thing, until the third night, when Javas finally, thankfully, broke it open. ‘Babalwa’s right you know,’ he said, right at me. ‘She’s right. We have to. We have no choice. It has to happen.’
‘That’s fine,’ I said, nausea hitting my gut. ‘It’s fine, Javas. I know it must be done, but what if it doesn’t take? I mean, I can handle the idea of having to do it, but Jesus, having to do it again and again … It makes me feel ill.’
‘Ag fok, Roy.’ Andile adopted a thick mock-Afrikaans accent while forking a broccoli head very practically into her mouth. ‘We need to get over it. We have to – all of us – and if that means eight times in a row, then that’s it. We’ve been through worse. You’ve been through worse. So have I. We’ll get hard about it – ’scuse the pun – and make it happen.’
And so we did.
We appointed a day and an hour and a place. The three of us met in the cottage kitchen, then split to the two main bathrooms. ‘We keep it clinical,’ Javas said. Crossing the threshold into the bathroom, which was decorated in various shades of brown and which featured a triptych of abstract black-and-white KwaZulu landscapes created by Andile, I felt like a transgressor, an invader.
I had been inside the twins’ cottage many times over the years. It was a journey into a different, parallel world. A world where tiny metal dwarfs – Javas’s creations – stood hiding within the leafy protection of well-watered pot plants. A world where not only did the colours match, but they actually seemed designed to work together. Andile picked her interior battles carefully, making sure to give each item the room it needed not only to breathe, but to dominate. My favourite was a large-scale black-and-white print of the Sandton riots, hanging in the lounge. Andile had found it about to rot in an artist’s studio in the city. It was typical of the Sandton-riot genre: hoodies, face masks, raised arms with petrol bombs, etc. But the artist – Mpho, she said his name was – had woven microscopic detail through everything. Tiny shocked faces at the stock-exchange windows. Infinitesimal pockmark dings in the parked BMWs. Full and accurate road maps, which you could actually read with a magnifying glass, in the hands of the global youth.
As many times as I had been in their domain, however, I had never had even a second of this kind of privacy. Now the bathroom took on new echoes. Suddenly Andile’s landscapes held the voice and heart of their owner. Her sound and her smell surrounded me. It was like she was there with me, watching, questioning, examining my thin little mlungu legs as I sat on the toilet seat and wrapped my fist around a limp, uninspired dick. I pulled and stretched and eventually, half-heartedly, delivered.
Then I ran – I literally sprinted the fifteen metres that separated us. (We had agreed that the cooling of the junk was the creepiest part of the whole thing. When I imagined Andile’s horror, it was always the thought of the cold, glutinous substance that creeped me out …) Quickly I passed the cup over to a waiting Javas, who disappeared behind their door.
I hung around for five minutes, and they emerged, hand in hand, Javas leading, smiling. Andile pulling her cheeks backward.
‘Ugh,’ she said, then detached herself from Javas and gave me a long, warm hug, eventually holding me at arm’s length, by the shoulders. ‘We did well, Roy, we did well.’
‘It just better fucking take, eh?’ I ruffled her hair, then thumped Javas on his muscled shoulder. ‘The donor life … eish.’
Andile flipped into a handstand against the passage wall, allowing her skirt to fall over her head and flashing her white panties and well-formed legs. I blushed and looked away.
‘My gogo always said you must,’ she explained in a barely discernible, skirt-covered muffle.
CHAPTER 43
We carried on
We lost Jabu at the next winter slaughter. I say that like she went wandering through the forest and we couldn’t find her, but really we killed her. Gerald and I killed her. It’s as simple and brutal as that.
I had jerked into the cup for four months running. Andile and Javas had been steadfast and magnanimous in their reception of my spunk. Eventually, in month five, it took and we had another one on the go. We kept it mostly to our ourselves. The others knew we were engaged with it, this strangely intimate process, but sensed we were best left treating it in our own way. Babalwa would raise the occasional query, and we’d report back dutifully, but it never became a subject of public discussion. We had, by silent agreement, sanctified the thing, which was really the only way to go about it. Baby creation is rooted in love or lust, the basic human connections. Take these away and you have something too strange to grasp, and too powerful to brush off.
The big slaughter had taken place annually, and incrementally more professionally, each year in July. Year on year we had improved, but in that first year our failures were many and miserable. Gerald, for all his calm instruction, slipped with the gun at the last second, shooting the cow through the side of its head once we’d looped it down to the iron floor-ring. Instead of crashing to its knees it wailed and kicked crazily at the closing darkness, nearly decapitating Javas in the process. Blood sprayed out of the angular slot in its head, and in the twenty seconds it took Gerald to compose himself and get another round off we all saw life flashing before us. There was a distinct possibility we would all go down with the cow, pulled into a death of hoofs and screams. Eventually Gerald got the bullet in the right place and the beast crashed, but we were far too long with the throat-slitting and the blood didn’t drain immediately. Our slaughter master spent the rest of the day chastising himself and warning us that our meat was going to be off. We shook the fear off gradually. (Andile clung to her cricket stump for a good time after.)
The next time it was much easier. Gerald put the bullet straight through and the cow’s eyes slammed shut. We skinned and pulled and gutted and carved. The next day we did the pig and used its entrails for sausage skins, Javas and Gerald guiding us in turn.
With operational success the slaughter became something of a celebration. A time of year to anticipate. A marker for us all. Another year gone. Another three freezers’ worth of meat. Another slash against the bedpost of our lost society. And yes, we used it all, once we had learned how to extract it. The tongue and brains, the offal and the kidneys, the heart and all the rest. Beatrice was still finding good packaged flour and she made pies. Rows and rows of pies. Steak and kidney, like granny would.
The fourth slaughter after the plane crash (this was how we had started marking time, not with a calendar but according to the happenings, the epochs of our own lives) we killed my first child. A child created not with cooling cups of semen but with love, albeit of the temporary and fractious sort.
Did I say we killed Jabulani? I mean I. I did it. I pushed the domino forward, tilted its ass over its head, and then it was too late to do anything but watch the falling.
‘Daddy,’ she piped up. ‘I watch?’
She was serious, completely intent on the wondrous butchery process.
‘Ja, Jabu,’ I said. ‘But you need to be very, very careful, nè? There are lots of sharp knives around and you could get hurt, so you need to stand here.’ I marked off a spot a
bout five metres back of the concrete area, on the cusp of the cricket field/paddock. ‘This where you stay, yes?’ I ground the mark into the turf with my heel. ‘You stay right here and you don’t move.’
She nodded seriously. Several times. I hadn’t fully learned, yet, that children lie, just like everyone else. That they also dream of, and lust after, better things. And nod and plan accordingly.
Her eyes were big and brown, like the cow. They slammed shut in exactly the same way.
We had grown self-assured. We had slaughtered year after year and by now we all knew what we were doing, why we were doing it and how it would pan out. We were in control.
1. Jabu creeps forward, inch by tiny inch, to get a better view. She’s not freaked out by the blood and guts; she’s seeing chops and steaks and cuts.
2. Gerald jumps back to avoid some kind of spray. He’s using the wrist-strapped knife. The blade has become part of his arm. He has forgotten he is no longer all man.
3. His knife arm jerks back in anticipation of the rest of his body and the blade slices straight through Jabu’s curious neck.
4. There are no screams. Just a quiet thump. A little body falls softly to the ground.
Let me tell you now just how far we had come. Let me explain the terrible distance we had travelled away from ourselves, from everything we knew.
Let me explain what we did. We wept.
We tore our hair out.
We buried the little body.
We said a prayer to a strange, absent god.
And then we carried on.