by Miller
‘Check. Is low, Roy.’ She stepped back to consider it properly, then moved forward again and kicked the base. ‘You OK? Sho? Not easier if higher?’
‘Ja, maybe. But then if I stop trying, if I stop working at things like getting up, soon I won’t be able to. So maybe height is good. Like exercise?’
Matron stopped. Suddenly she looked terribly, terribly young. The skin around her eyes was stretched to a confused kind of smooth. A twitching, chemical smooth. I wanted to reach out and touch it. The cheek. ‘Is that so crazy?’ I asked.
‘Crazy? No!’ She snapped back into focus. ‘Nay. Clever mebbe …’ Now she drifted again, thinking ulterior thoughts. ‘Ay, askies, tata, I’m kinda everywhere. I been tinking so many things. Den when you talk like that – bout effort being good and such – ut just make me tink dem more.’
‘What kind of things, dear?’
‘Ag, nuttin. You shouldna even have to bother.’ She consulted her clipboard.
‘Try me, you’d be surprised.’
Matron stared through my eyes, still young, still flickering. Calculating. Then she pulled her glasses from her afro and held them between us. ‘I been strugglin wif dese. Wif the big guy.’
‘What about them?’
‘Fixed hours. Everyone. Every day. Compulsory. You ken mos. Four-hour minimum. Normally is not my jol. I don come close to decisions. I jus do. But last night dey argue while I walk past and he call me in, like some kinda experiment. Start hittin me with all dese personal questions bout wot I want and wot I believe and how many kids I’m plannin for next two years. I got real bad uncomfortable.
‘I know we not supposed to ask this shit but I start tinking bout wot if de were options. Udda kinds of options, ken. Wot if rules not the only ting. And then I kinda sensed he sensed, ’cause he stop with questions and jus stare at me for a long, long time, in front of all da others, so dey all starin me, an now, I dunno, I jus feel different. Nervous. You know, proppa nerves. Like I done summin wrong. Only I don tink I have. Unless tinking is wrong. And den I tink mebbe it is. So I guess … I guess I jus feelin nervous. And den I tink bout havin to wear these’ – she waggled the glasses and then returned them to her fro, checking their position for balance and solidity before carrying on – ‘and I resent as well. Like a bit angry.’ Matron shrugged, about to cry. She breathed deep and rumbled on. ‘An also da beat. Da beat an pills. Is hard to keep going all the time. Dis I know you know, nè?’ She chuckled, too nervous to look at me. ‘He so hectic bout the beat. Bout the dub thing. He won even let the kids mix de own trance. Even if ut fast and hard like Schulz. Only wot he say. An def no other beat. Neva. Neva neva neva anudda beat but we all know dere’s more. Much more. Everybody know but is scary to say. To risk, yes? Like jazz – we got lotta jazz in your house, tata. Udder tings too. Everybody know. But the beat he won’t stop. Neva. Any time anyone even tink of it, he blitz mad with English and the Zambians and the dub. Scared. Fridays most of all I feel scared. Shaky. Even when dey slow it. The down stuff, also the same. Just slower. Same beat. Shaky. He control it all. Always.’
‘Who do you love?’ I asked without thinking.
‘Sorry?’
‘Well, where do you go when your heart is hurting, or worried, or fearful? Is there anyone who makes you feel safe – emotionally safe?’
Her eyes twitched, flicked. She peered at me as if for the first time. ‘Love? Like in books? Movies?’
‘As in the twins. Andile and Javas. For example. They loved each other.’
‘Nay. Neva. They say it’s myth. Like democracy. Mebbe ut work, by accident, but not really true. Summint that explain sex and fucking, which we don need to know now.’
‘Well, it might be something to explore. Love. As far as I ever knew it was quite distinct from sex. Involved in sex, maybe, but by no means definitely. When faced with real confusion, it can help to speak to someone who knows your heart.’
‘Who you love?’
‘Me? Well I struggled a bit in that way. Later, like now, now that I am where I am, I look back and I can see who I loved. At the time I wasn’t able, though. I just lived with it. The confusion. It became part of me. Not necessarily a great thing.’
‘An now? When you look back?’
‘I loved them all, of course. It’s easy to say that now. When you’re old you love easily. But now … well, Babalwa, of course. But Beatrice too. English. And Sthembiso. Always Sthembiso …’
‘Really? Sthembiso?’ Her eyes were widening, alert, worried. ‘But he keep you here. Locked—’
‘Locked up? No, my child. I mean, yes. Of course. He keeps me here. He has his reasons; he needs certain things from me. Fears other things, maybe. But the locking up? That was me. I put myself right here, long before he had any power or ideas or anything of the sort. I am my own jailer. Always have been.’
Matron cried. The clipboard fell half out of her hand before she caught it and then put it back against her hip. Then she faced me again, tears running. I reached out, took the clipboard and put it on the bed. Then I pulled her into my old musty chest and hugged the girl.
She sobbed into me – sobs of the young. Sobs of the innocent. I rubbed her back and cooed and clucked into her sweet-smelling afro. After a long time she pushed me away, slowly, and looked up into my craggy old lines. ‘An you, tata? Wot bout you?’
‘Of course, dear,’ I replied. ‘Me, I am full of love. For you most of all. Sadly, though, I don’t think I’m a long-term option.’
‘No, Roy!’ Matron grabbed her clipboard off the bed and pulled it to her chest. ‘You don say that. You not allowed.’
‘Yes, ma’am!’ I laughed, took her hand and tried one last time. ‘Seriously, though, you need to think about it. Your heart. Don’t let it overflow. If you’re feeling things, you need to share those feelings, discuss them, express them. Don’t make my mistake. Don’t think you don’t need love.’
‘Ag tata, I tink I just need a good fuck.’ She said it without a trace of humour, or irony, or anything. The words struck like iron.
Then she led me to the bathroom, where we discussed the slipperiness of the tiles.
CHAPTER 59
Of course they follow
Heaven Sent (Instrumental Mix).
Like all Markus Schulz tracks, it builds very slowly and you always know exactly where it’s going. There will be no surprises.
Steady percussion layers on the intro, then the thwump thwump thwump of the drum, then the bass lines and symbols and hand claps and the train has left the station. The lilting melody layers drift in and out, dream-like, of course. This is when those Finnish girls and boys, those Nordic ravers, those German party people, would have pushed their shiny white fingers to the sky. Then the drum and the bass line drop out suddenly and it’s all spacey, we are quiet now, empty, almost. The melody slips back in, centre stage, supported by a flutter or a whistle or some such happy beeping, up to the stars, resting now on aural cushions and clouds. The kids stand, shuffling, grinning insanely, inanely, hugging, waiting, waiting, waiting …
And bang.
They’re off.
I am amazed, shocked, that this is the soundtrack to the end of my days. That these sounds, the back track to my father’s last pathetic years, to my teenage angst and annoyance, are now the sound of authority. Of power and meaning. Of life as it will go on without me.
Trance.
And I started it.
Sthembiso’s love affair with my music collection, which was really my father’s, never ended. It was always Markus Schulz who captured him. Even as he left his teenage years behind, as he dropped all the childlike things of his past, he never let go of the candy floss, of the lure of the flock of beeps.
It is, ultimately, a blessed sound, I tell myself. A sound I should welcome. It is sometimes, in fact, the sound of life itself. Of creativity. Of music. No matter how hard it is to sleep, I must – I repeat like a Buddhist mantra – remember what it was like when there was nothing. When there were o
nly the chirps of my brothers in the trees, only the jagged barking of insects crossing and uncrossing their legs.
I creep sometimes to the edge of it, just to see. To observe. To experience.
It is erotic, of course. Titillating. The sight of those bodies and blushed, flushed faces. The red lips and the tight tops. The tiny thin hips and the arms and hands and wrists and thighs all intertwined. The thumping heads and thumping drum.
But it is hard too, this thing. Those jaws, they grind. Always grind. Those eyes, many are beginning to reflect rather than absorb, shining like metal or plastic caught in the light. They have a lab now. (Who are they, exactly? I don’t know. When I say ‘they’, I refer, in my own mind, to the decision-making and operational unit. I refer to Sthembiso. He of the ideas. He of the action.) I saw them once ferrying scientific-looking boxes into it. Test tubes and some liquid. What do they make in the lab? It could be anything. It’s probably everything. Some of it is hard. Trance hard. Dance hard. All-night hard.
I think of my father. His narcotic grin and those insensible, inane, supercharged Monday-morning eyes. After so much change, so much difference, we’ve ended up, he and I, in the same place.
Well, almost. There are differences, of course. Babies are everywhere. Parenthood and partyhood have merged. Mothers cradle children while they dance, fondle boyfriends and feed, push prams, dance some more. We were also always at least partially dressed. These people, my children, are often almost completely naked.
Who are the parents? Who are the kids? Who is in control? Who sets the rules and who is forced to toe the line? Sthembiso is at the head of it, but other than that it’s impossible to tell. From the long distance of my age all I see is a swarming, pulsating mass of hyper-sexualised children.
We’re into the fourth generation now and I haven’t yet seen any of the signs of inbreeding. Thus, at some basic level our attempt to secure genetic diversity seems to have worked. But, to be honest, I can’t see how our small pool has created this many of them over such a short period of time. Whenever I try to add them up (I count the heads, quietly, some days) I come out with a number that exceeds the realms of possibility. There are simply too many.
I am forced, as a result, to think of Madala.
In my rare, fully rational moments I see that my children are not what I am.
I reach out. I try to touch them. But I fail. I don’t have the language. I don’t have the proximity. My fingers slide off a metallic, alien surface.
Somewhere back there Sthembiso grew quiet. He stopped asking questions. For years I took this to be the sign of a mind and a personality breaking free from its parental moorings, and it warmed me. I was watching, I believed, the maturing. Our leader. So I detached. I took the steps back, and then to the left, then the right, to accommodate a painful but necessary process. It was only after the pigs that I forced myself to look at the signs. To really look.
He could fix things. Bodies and broken bones were repaired.
Illnesses were addressed.
He could erect a cell tower.
He could program computers and build software. He could network machines across time and space and enormous, baffling distances.
He could pray.
He could lecture and speak and chant and bring people to their feet to sing and bow.
He could preach.
And he did.
In moments of vanity I tell myself I could have taken control and steered the boat in a different direction. I could have made sure that that child – all the children, in fact – remained somewhere close to my wing.
Of course this is deluded. I know that, when I think about it hard enough. Control is an advertising concept.
Sthembiso and his lieutenants initiated the great moving. All Javas’s giants, each previously unique and apart, now watch over the party area in front of the stairs leading up to the expo. The church. This is now their role. It is not insignificant. They are not aesthetic props. They are not pissed upon (literally or figuratively) or mistreated. They are venerated. Obscenely so.
Sthembiso’s art is not new. I know that. He is the preacher. The preacher who smiles with a level voice and complete freedom. A preacher sitting ready, decisions primed in the palms of his rough, impossibly experienced hands.
He leads his prayers and his lectures at the giants’ feet. I have listened in on many of these. I have watched the lips of the youngsters flapping in time with his words, I have seen them recite – from memory – his sayings.
‘Brothers and sisters,’ he says. ‘We are but few, but we have been blessed with the divine, with the revelations of science and love that will lead us into the future in a manner our forefathers could never have dreamed of. Brothers and sisters …’ He pauses, essence of Obama and Luther King and Clinton and Mandela and Tutu and Hitler on his lips, stares them down, deep into their little pubescent eyes. They lock into him and wait, and wait, until they are leaning into his eyes and his words. He takes them on.
‘Brothers. Sisters. Now that we are moving. Now that we have been blessed with the gifts of science and the land. Now that we are truly on the move, it behoves us to look back and to see with the clarity our Lord has given us the mistakes of our fathers.
‘Not to accuse.
‘Not to denigrate.
‘But to learn. To look back and learn. And when we do cast ourselves in that earlier direction, we will see – it is quite obvious now that we know how to look and what we are looking at – that our fathers forsook the most basic human skill of all. That they forsook it almost completely. They forgot how to dream. How to look into the jungle of the self, how to read the patterns and the words. And …’ Pause. Eyes. Smiles. Eager nodding. ‘And well we might ask, how did they manage to forget – forsake even – this, the most valuable ability the human has? How did they come to forget and abandon this, the root of all things? How did they lose touch with the skill that orients our minds, that provides the very gearing for what we do and how we do it? How did they forget how to dream?’
Full eyes. Wet lips. Leaning forward. All of fifteen, thirteen, eleven, ten, eight years old. Prams and babies and ecstatic yells and science and lectures and preaching. Trance.
They are completely in this thing and he is pulling them forward and of course they follow.
Of course they follow.
CHAPTER 60
Seeds need to spread
Let me not misrepresent these kids, these entities – whatever they are.
For the sake of historical accuracy, and my own mental balance, let me try to paint the picture as it is, with accents applied fairly over space and time.
The parties used to be very frequent, but they have dropped off to once every three or four weeks. The preaching occurs daily, but has not – yet – attained the level of stupid superstition. They seem to pray quickly in the mornings, and then, from what I can gather, Thursday, holy day, when not a trance day, involves rest and a lot of sex. They wander around naked and fuck, in other words, on a Thursday.
I need not go into too much detail concerning the sight of roaming teenage hard-ons and moist, ready vaginas. They are, obviously, impossible to ignore. They are also more than a little bit scary to me, the cocks vigorous and purple, throbbing and straining and leading their owners into … well, whatever. Thus far (thanks to the gods, whatever gods, for small mercies) the actual sex has not been something for upfront public display. Rather, one catches repeat glimpses of buttocks and thighs, arms and hands, accompanied always by a cacophony of small sighs and aroused child grunts.
On Thursdays I try to stay indoors.
But let me be fair. It’s not as if they’re running some kind of perpetual kiddie orgy. The nudity and the copulation and the day of rest have been clearly delineated. They are not random acts – they are planned and carried out according to an agreed set of rules. I won’t claim to know the rules, but I do understand that sex is a fundamentally different thing for them than it was for us, who lived in a wor
ld full of people. These kids need to fuck – they need to fuck a lot. Seeds need to spread. We realised the necessity when we created the baby farm in its first incarnation, and now the idea has become thoughtless belief – action – as ideas must if they are going to live.
So, while I find the manifestation disturbing in too many ways to describe, I do appreciate that there are reasons behind those pink little asses humping up and down in the near distance.
Still, I ask myself, do they really need a god?
Do these kids, young and frisky and free as they are, really need to tap into a higher power? Are they not capable of living and fucking and breeding on their own?
I cannot answer.
The parties have drawn deeply from the source created by my father and his kin. The DJ is pre-eminent, as one would expect, high up in his booth. All beats are, of course, underpinned by the 4/4 thump of the pre-dawn trance rhythm, a universal drive we all understand.
They (who? I’m not sure – some young thing, pert as a button, together with her stringy, flushed boyfriend) have asked me to do a set at the next party. Mthakathi has developed, by all accounts, a mystical reputation as a beat archivist as well as a general knowledge collector, and while they seem completely unconcerned with the ideas and facts I have at my disposal, the music they slobber for.
I have agreed, but with conditions. I want the pre-dawn slot. The April clouds are rolling in and the sky is darkening, so that means four to seven a.m. This will be, I suspect, my one and only headline gig and I would be lying if I said there wasn’t a small river of excitement running through me. There are things these kids have missed and have been denied. Things they are actually not allowed (I think of Matron), and I intend to bring them, to open that horizon just a tiny bit. DJ Mthakathi. Aged ninety-something. On the decks at … at what, exactly? I don’t know. There are no names for these things. No one is making posters.