And the boy was genuinely, seriously pained by the loss of the cloud.
‘Dumb-assed.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘Just dumb-assed. I thought about hard backups so many times, but I was lazy. Told myself I was being paranoid. But fuck…’ He tailed off. ‘All that’s gone now. No use dreaming. It’s a long, long way away. I’ll always miss it though, you know. As shallow and cheesy and stupid as it was, our life, I’ll miss it. The clubs and the music and the people. Maybe there was a kind of security in the triviality?’
‘That’s my life,’ I grunted in affirmation, mesmerised by the glow of the moon on the pool. ‘Security in triviality.’
‘Ha.’ Tebza flicked the roach into the hedges. ‘I suppose we’re learning now, nè?’
Our conversation drifted back and forth across the landscape of our past. Together we reached as far back as we could go, pushing into the jelly of what was. Of times that were sweet and green and simple.
Eventually we fell to quiet, and then back into the present, and Fats.
‘He’s obsessed, just so you know,’ Tebza warned. ‘He has this master plan. Pretty freaky. He can be forceful, you know? It’s tough, ’cause he also seriously gets shit done. He’s got the farm and the food and the power moving, and so, you know, he can be hard to deny.’
According to Tebza, Fats aimed to fence off our block completely, including not only the entire grounds of King Edward High School, but also St John’s – an even bigger and richer stone institution, adjacent to KES, at the end of the lane we occupied. If Fats had his way, our enclave would feature controlled access points at the beginning of our lane and in key areas: the top of Munro Drive – apparently the name of the steep S bend we had travelled to get to the ridge – the outer edge of St John’s School, where the property linked with the main road, and others. Fats, apparently, was obsessed by the idea of invasion. The idea of a pack of others the same size as us.
‘Dunno, could have merit,’ Tebza mused. ‘I mean, a posse with big enough guns could just come and take it. Take us. So that’s his thing – the fencing. He’s pushing hard on it, got district maps and everything all up on the wall, the perimeters marked out. Red pins, little marker pens and the whole bit. Jesus. All in his control room.’
‘His bedroom?’
‘No, the control room. Next to his bedroom he’s converted this study-type room into a control room, centre, thingy. Put a few computers in – for atmosphere more than anything else at this stage, I think – rigged up a two-way radio, that kinda thing. Massive map, red pins, bits of linking string and such.’
‘Bit freaky.’
‘Bit, ja. But you know what they say – fattest stomach wins, eh?’
‘Ja…’ I mulled over the idea of Fats The General. He had spent a lifetime designing and managing events – for forty thousand people and more. He probably needed a way to carry on with what he knew. Didn’t we all?
‘I guess he could have a point. I mean, we can’t be the only nine people left on the planet.’
Teboho patted my knee and stood. ‘My friend,’ he said, ‘we could be anything at all. Absolutely anything at all.’
CHAPTER 21
Cow experience
The sun rose the next morning, and darkness fell.
We were drifting awake, emerging from our bedrooms, mumbling quietly in the kitchen, when the clouds blacked out the day. Drops hit the ground like mortar rounds, each shattering into shrapnel. The dark was ominous, and complete.
‘This is too weird for me,’ said Lillian, who headed back up to her room.
The rest of us – save Tebza, who was still asleep – sat on the expensive porch furniture with our toast and black coffee and tea. Babalwa sat next to me. She pulled her wrought-iron chair up close, made eye contact and dropped a few direct conversational threads. I felt grateful and oddly patronised, but ultimately any kind of contact with someone familiar was settling. The stilted conversation and forced eyeballing of new people was like a trip back to junior school.
‘What’s on the agenda for today, kids?’ Fats asked the group, trying to make eye contact with each of us. Heads stayed low.
‘Javas?’
‘Dunno, boss.’ Javas bit a chunk off his toast and chewed. ‘But I have a feeling you’re about to tell me.’
‘I was thinking about a cow – a resident cow. As we’ve agreed before. For milk. It’s the next step. Can’t speak for y’all but I’m sick of this long-life shit.’
‘A. Resident. Cow.’ Javas repeated the words slowly, individually. ‘And I am the man for the cow, yes?’
‘Sho.’ Fats leaned back in his chair and pulled an oversized hunk off his toast. ‘You have cow experience, do you not?’
‘I do,’ Javas replied slowly. ‘I do.’
CHAPTER 22
It could be good once it’s done
The mansion operated completely off-grid. Tucked into the tailored shrubbery beyond the driveway’s turning circle, the borehole was the philosophical and practical centre of things. Deep and plentiful, it fed a stocky, black plastic fifteen-thousand-litre tank. A criss-crossed trellis surrounded the tank, hosting the concealing shrubbery. The pump was noisy – wherever we were on the property, the random thwuuump thwuuump thwuuump reminded us of its service. We soon forgot it, how to even hear it, but it was nonetheless omnipresent – the subliminal functional soundtrack to life.
The solar bank supplied most of the power required, most of the time. For emergencies, there was a generator the size of a small caravan. A sick, old-looking thing on wheels, which only Tebza and Fats were technically familiar with, it was rarely required, because the erstwhile minister had also ensured that the septic tank, rather than draining away into the soil, fed its methane into the system.
‘We shit power,’ Fats announced proudly.
The miracle of it – the technical set-up – faded over time, but for Babalwa and me the breadth of the accomplishment was shocking, given how much we had struggled to establish even the most basic power in PE. For weeks after we arrived I would flick light switches on and off. Or stand wet and amazed in the bathroom post-shower, gazing at the geyser. One afternoon I found her tapping the borehole tank while hovering her ear over the black plastic, as if it held a secret.
The resonance within the house itself was that of money. Thick red carpeting, Persian rugs, oak panels and leather-backed armchairs – the smell of wealth was threaded into the structure of the place. Layered lightly over the booty of postgraduate decision-making was the evidence of our more flippant, plastic existence. We each kept to our own residential quarters faithfully, but in the communal areas our collective presence steadily stained, moved and altered. Inconvenient Persians were rolled up and shoved to the side. Ring marks spread on the arms of the furniture. Stains and nicks and chips in the expensive wood. Mould.
One day Andile tramped garden mud through the entrance hall, initially unknowingly, then unapologetically. Beatrice tried to protect the carpet with a plea for immediate cleaning but was vetoed. Instead, we ripped up the lush red and brown and washed down the concrete underneath. The hallway echoed weirdly forever after, the floor stripped of all possible pretence.