CHAPTER 20
My entire life on that fucking cloud
Lillian, the American academic, was typical of her kind – always in the middle of the ‘narrative’ and prone to wholesale, orchestrated redirections of the conversational ship. She explained a lot, unknowingly talking to us as if to children. She looked, at first glance, to be between twenty-five and thirty years old. Of dumpy build, she had the whiff of cash about her; there had certainly been enough around to have expanded her backside with disproportionate weight, most likely the heaviness of supermarket muffins and cappuccinos. She smelled, also, of roll-on deodorant. The smell would take on a particular sharpness when she was angry and had her arms folded in attack mode. She was also prone to adopting calculated poses, which she held for inordinate lengths of time, until she was sure someone had taken note. She would sweep her hair up into a ponytail and then hold it there, elbows parallel to the ground, as if she were a model, or a socialite on the make. It was like she wasn’t quite sure who she was, or who she needed or wanted to be, on any given occasion. Bottom line: when she wasn’t carefully cutting a silhouette into the skyline, Lillian talked a hell of a lot, and appeared to believe her brain was a repository of all things worth knowing.
Gerald was quiet, older, very black and very muscular. He came from the north-east – Mpumalanga somewhere – and spent most of that first night watching Fats and mumbling his own unheard replies to the questions bouncing around the room. Barefoot, in jeans and a loose, striped pink golf shirt, he radiated a strong potential energy. Possibly he was desperate to be heard. Possibly he was just desperate for some silence, like me.
Teboho sat nodding, still staring off into the corners, the single white earphone dangling politely over his heart.
Andile perched on the kitchen counter next to Javas and they brushed against each other with easy frequency. Javas looked every inch the artist he apparently was. There were light paint splatters on his jeans, which were also torn at the ankles. He wore a faded dark-blue Standard Bank T-shirt and a Scottish-style golf cap, perched high on dreads. His face was leathery and crinkled and his eyes glimmered like those of a travelling man. Andile, in turn, was all eyes. Her ocular equipment was markedly bigger than average, and she had an unnerving ability to lock you into their big brown pools. She was, relatively speaking, lightly primped. She wore a very light brown lipstick, two neat silver teardrop earrings, and a knee-length frock neatly suspended over blue jeans.
At this early stage, Beatrice was the oddity. She was fully dressed and ready for the office – all she had to do was reach for her bag on the way out.
Babalwa talked on our behalf, dribbling out the details of our misguided PE stint and sudden compulsion to flee. Beatrice and Fats punctuated the flow with humour, ideas and plans. Always plans.
I let the words fly past. I looked at my feet. My filthy, filthy feet, still caked in the debris of our flight from PE. My equally damaged jeans. My dirty fingernails. I looked, I knew, like a lost bum. Babalwa, at least, was more together. No longer completely pissed on the champagne, she cut a reasonable, less bum-like figure in her T-shirt, jeans, sandals and socks.
‘So!’ Fats clapped his hands and brought us to order. ‘If we can just get practical for a few minutes. Any suggestions as to which rooms they should take?’
Lillian offered up two rooms in the left wing. ‘Ja? Guys?’ Fats beamed at Babalwa and me in turn.
‘Fine by me,’ said Babalwa, glancing in my direction without actually looking at me.
‘All good.’ I smiled, and fought an animal urge to run.
My room was clearly a spare. A decently wide single bed and a large bookcase filled with technical books: governance and leadership manuals, MBA study materials, policy guidelines and frameworks. A map of the world in a thick, black wooden frame on the wall.
I traced my finger over Africa, then America, down to South America. Brazil.
I considered going over to Babalwa’s room. I wondered whether she was thinking of knocking on my door. Our separation had been surgical and subtle. Fats was slick, I had to give him that. I missed her presence already. I counted the number of consecutive nights we had spent together in the same bed. Seven.
I probed the guillotine with my tongue while I lay on the bed and stared at the map.
I waited for her knock.
Hours later, in the dark of the early morning, I conceded defeat and wandered the mansion, strolling up and down the staircases, running my hand over the oak banisters, contemplating what kind of life the minister had led. Whether he had, on the odd occasion, paid attention to the same railings, run his hand down them, waited for his thoughts to catch up with his body.
Eventually I landed at the doorway to the computer room and there was Tebza, clicking and nodding. He turned, telepathically, pulled an earphone out and greeted me.
‘Come inside.’ He waved at the machines. ‘Feel free…’
‘What you up to?’ I tiptoed to his desk.
‘Ag, just network stuff, you know, trying to figure out the last of it. Jesus, even just a WAN that reaches past the gates. Mission.’
‘You in computers? Before?’
‘Nah,’ he scoffed. ‘Broker. Stocks and shit.’
‘Ah.’
‘And you? Advertising, nè?’
‘Ja, kinda. Initially anyway. Then I ended up in VR. You know, the clubs…’
‘Ah. Ja, I heard something like that in the kitchen. Mlungu’s, yes?’
‘My claim to fame.’
‘Had a few nights there myself. Good place.’ Tebza leaned back into his screen while keeping his nearest shoulder blade open in conversational invitation. He slammed the enter key through a never-ending string of IP addresses as we talked.
‘You think we’ll get it back? The net? A net? A cloud?’
‘I fucking doubt it. The cloud is now in a gazillion tiny pieces.’ Teboho leaned fully back in his office chair, the springs holding him at a dangerous forty-five degrees. He locked his hands around his head. ‘You have no idea how much shit I had on the cloud. So much shit. My entire life on that fucking cloud. Everything…’
‘Eish.’
‘It always worried me. To have everything that meant anything sitting there. So I made sure I backed it all up, twice.’
‘Onto the cloud?’
‘Onto the cloud.’ Teboho laughed and made genuine eye contact with me for the first time. ‘I dunno, maybe it’s just panic. A defence against everything, but I feel like if I could get just something back, a few albums, some photos, that would be a step. An important step.’ He shrugged, flapping his elbows a bit, and considered me.
‘Eish.’ I couldn’t think of anything else to say to indicate the sudden warmth I felt for him. ‘Jammer, nè? Hardcore. Me, I had nothing up there that meant anything.’
We shrugged together.
‘You smoke?’ I asked hopefully, my heart accelerating. ‘I do.’ Teboho sprung his chair forward, pulled a small bankie from his pocket and tossed it at me happily. ‘I most certainly do. Roll it up, son, roll it up.’
We sat on the brick stairs guarding the swimming pool and smoked.
Teboho was a middle-class kid. ‘Straight outta Midrand’, as he put it. With Model C schooling followed by an average BCom stint at an average university, he went straight into finance, banking and trading. There were constant hints, however, that he was more than a collection of banker parts. His music references were more complex than I expected. His technology obsession was genuine as well. Real geeks always had a certain manner about them – a particular way of describing life and ambition and the tools at our disposal as a lush, expanding horizon. Tebza fit the bill. He spoke easily, unthinkingly, of time-lapse nanotech, the importance of getting the raw vector designs right in the VR clubs, of algo trading and new beats emerging from somewhere in remote Russia that, by all accounts, were about to turn current notions of X, Y and Z on their heads.