For her part, Babalwa seemed only to grow used to me. Her touches, though warm, were calculated; they sought to heal, to help, to improve. She reached for me through genetic necessity. Through circumstance.
I wondered whether I would be informed of the child decision or simply caught up in it. As we roamed the streets of PE, looting for health, activity, entertainment, smashing locks and walls and doors, I tried to imagine us as a family, but the images refused to form. She was too young. I was… I didn’t know what I was. But I knew I wasn’t exactly right.
‘Tell me,’ Babalwa said, still perched on my childhood step, the shotgun, now resting between her legs, making her especially dominant, ‘about being a drunk. There’s booze everywhere. You tempted again?’
The tooth episode hung thick between us.
‘Always tempted. But I have the fear. Keeps me in line. ’Specially after the tooth.’
‘So if we find others… you’ll drink again? Moments of joy? Excitement?’
‘I hope not. I’m a proper junkie though, so I know enough to know that I might. You know, the day-at-a-time thing. All standard twelve-step shit applies.’
‘Lately I’ve been feeling like just getting out of my mind. Completely fucked up.’ Babalwa peered over the shotgun muzzle at me with hooded, plotting eyes. ‘Whaddya think of that?’
We decided on sundowners at the Westcliff.
Splattered on multiple levels against the face of Westcliff ridge, the Westcliff Hotel hovered directly over Zoo Lake, an off-pink series of plush, interlinking five-star units. As we smashed through the front gates, I explained to Babalwa about the foreign tourists and their plastic-surgery safari holidays, with the hotel utilised as recovery venue, about the prostitutes snuck through the gates at night, about the Sunday afternoon high teas for the Parkview ladies and their daughters.
Unable to jump-start a golf cart, we skipped down the enormous staircase three at a time.
Babalwa blew away the security bars on the restaurant window. She had adjusted quickly to the power of the recoil, and was firing the shotgun as regularly as possible now. We clambered in.
The serving trolleys were waiting for us, lined up in perfect threes, knives and forks at the ready. Cakes moulded to the point of crumbling. Proud mounds of green and moss trapped within blithe, unknowing glass cases.
Babalwa pulled a bottle of champagne from the kitchen wine cellar. The kitchen itself looked recently flooded. The floor was slick and sticky, a dirty high-water mark some two inches above the skirting rail. It was actually, she insisted, a high-blood mark; the apogee of fleeing freezer and fridge juice. I turned my head, unwilling to broach the idea of what might have happened to it, the blood and the muck, since.
Babalwa took care of another set of windows and security bars and we clambered out onto the terrace overlooking Zoo Lake and the northern suburbs. She cracked the champagne, took a long swig and spat it out. ‘I think it’s off?’ She handed the bottle over for testing.
I declined.
‘Sorry, my bad,’ she said. ‘But I really think it’s off.’ She slapped her tongue loudly between lips and teeth, testing.
‘Probably just French. Is it really bitter? Dry?’ I took the bottle. The label said Champagne. ‘Ja, it’s French. You might wanna look for something that says sparkling wine. French shit is hard.’
Babalwa hopped back through the window to the kitchen.
I rolled a small joint from my stash and considered Joburg’s north.
Trees. Trees. Trees. The forest almost pulsing it was growing so fast. I smoked and wondered. Inhaled and dreamed in reverse. Agency offices and houses of colleagues – their names already blurred and distant. Clubs and girls and campaigns. Media. Marketing. Copy. I was, I decided, looking over the metaphorical forest of my past. I could see nothing but a closing roof. A green, leafy mat.
Babalwa returned with the cheap stuff, cracked it, sat between my legs and leaned back against me.
She drank. I smoked.
We fucked ourselves up.
CHAPTER 18
Six
We crashed through the front door of Eileen’s flat chattering and laughing and collapsing in and out of each other’s arms.
There, flat out on the couch, was Fats Bonoko, creative director at TWF something something and something. A shotgun lay on the floor, waiting.
Babalwa swooned and fell to the floor in a heap.
I stood swaying, attempting to compute the fact that not only was there a live human being in Eileen’s flat, but that I knew exactly who he was.
Fats, for his part, grinned dangerously, his mini-afro wobbling slightly on top of a laughing face.
‘Good people,’ he said, pulling his torso lazily to the vertical. ‘I’ve been waiting forever. You, sir, look pretty wasted. Your young lady friend’ – he looked happily over at Babalwa’s slumped form, which mumbled something muffled and incomprehensible – ‘eish.’
‘Fats,’ I replied eventually, cautiously. ‘Howzit hanging?’
‘Not bad, Roy, not bad. I mean, I think I enjoyed advertising a bit more overall, but I’ve kind of taken to this survivor thing.’ He was dressed in combat pants, and an army-type shirt beneath a munitions vest. Army boots, sheepskin bangle on the wrist. Muscles rippling under all the gear. All in all, typical of Tšhegofatšo Bonoko, a man who had always been overtly – and frequently unreasonably – styled.
‘Jesus. I need to sit.’ I dropped onto the couch next to Fats.
‘You, Mr Fotheringham, I know pretty well,’ he continued blithely, billowing out his usual mock confidence. ‘But your young friend here’ – he glanced again at the lump that was Babalwa – ‘I haven’t had the pleasure.’
I was speechless, trapped by a flood of realisations and remembrances. I had never liked Fats Bonoko. He was arrogant, under-talented and over-powerful. Off the top of my shocked, stoned head, I could think of at least four people he’d knifed on his way up the ladder. It didn’t seem right, or possible, or logical, that he was where he was, sitting next to me on this couch, grinning with inane self-satisfaction.
‘Babalwa,’ I said. ‘Her name’s Babalwa and she’s drunk.’
‘Ah, a celebration. Nice. I’ve had a few myself since this shit started.’
‘What shit? Do you know what happened?’
Fats looked at me, his face deeply serious. ‘I woke up and it was like this. Empty.’
‘So you know nothing?’
‘Nothing at all. Other than advertising is a pretty damn useless business without a target market.’
‘Are there others?’ I asked. ‘Alive?’
‘Plenty.’ Fats issued a patronising pat to my shoulder. ‘At least six. Maybe more.’
‘Six,’ Babalwa groaned from the floor. ‘Six.’
CHAPTER 19
The pain did numb, eventually
‘Roy, my man, what the fuck happened to your face?’ Fats stirred sugar into his cold water and tea bag as we stood around Eileen’s impotent kettle. ‘The tooth thing. That’s a powerful look for you.’
‘Ja,’ I mumbled, lips closed. ‘Know any dentists?’
Fats sipped his cold tea and grimaced. ‘On the real though, what the fuck?’
‘Let’s just say I had an encounter with a rock.’
As the time in PE dragged I found myself slowly, creepingly, thinking about alcohol again. I had run out of weed and the rawness of being stranded – initially a strange, fixating high in itself – was fading. I began to pick my toenails viciously, vacantly, at night. Unable to watch movies, tired of listening to music, listless and disconnected from my sole companion (who herself was drinking increasing volumes of white wine and gin), I was bored.