I considered pulling the guillotine tooth and living with the gap, but that felt like even more of a defeat than the half tooth itself. Instead, I spent an inordinate amount of time staring in the mirror at the disaster of my mouth, pondering its meaning, the social consequences of facial misfortune and other such indulgences. When I could no longer cope with my reflection, I retired to my room, locked the door and sat with my photo albums, a final and necessary refuge. I spent many hours leafing through them and constructing detailed stories for each girl and each family, stitching their lives together in my imagination. The albums were my true sanctuary. I buried myself in them gratefully.
Of course everyone had been untethered from their lives and their loves. Husbands and fathers, children and families. None of us had even a single mooring left and so we were all wafting across each other’s emotional paths. We came together successfully over the tasks and functions of the farm, but there was a cloud hanging over St Patrick Road that no force could move.
Fats’s obsession with project management, food production, setting up the slaughterhouse and gating off our enclave gave us a critical series of focus points. Food was food – it was governed by its own logic – but the gates were especially important practical pillars. They were our unspoken way of telling each other that we hadn’t lost hope, yet. It took special circumstances for discussions around our real plight to take place, and they seldom arose. Instead we worked on the gates and allowed ourselves to be led by Fats’s energy and vision, by his grand plan for our new city of nine people. Each gate closed was also another sign that we believed there could be other people out there.
I regret now, though, that I was so cut off. That I engaged so little. That I spent as much time as I did with my tongue running through the guillotine, or in my room indulging in neurotic (and, yes, erotic) fantasies.
One afternoon, about three months into our arrival, I was assisting Gerald with one of the last gates. Lacking any real technical skills, I was, quite literally, his ‘hou vas’. I would cling onto whatever needing stabilising. I would pass him tools.
‘My skill set is a little limited for this kind of work,’ I offered in thoughtless ad language as he dismantled another set of wrought-iron spiked gates from one of St John’s inner fencing lines, his forearms rippling with pleasure.
‘Sho,’ Gerald grunted. He flicked his blowtorch off for a second. ‘We all live in our place, nè?’ He flipped his helmet back down and carried on.
Gerald’s pre-life in the army and security business gave him an edge. His latent talents, while thus far unexpressed, clearly lay in the area of shooting, muscling and enforcing. He had the air about him of a man who had messed with the bigger stuff. I probed while we piled the fencing onto the back of the bakkie.
‘You experience a lot of fire, then? Like fighting?’ I asked.
‘Fire? Ja, sho. Not in the army; there we were just running around with clipboards. But after, when I had the security company. Sho. Fire. Often. Translation…’ He gave me a long blank look. ‘You would like to know if I have taken a life?’
I was surprised by his interpretation. ‘Well, not really what I was thinking – well, not yet anyway.’
‘Maybe I’m just in front of you ’cause I already know where it’s going.’ He softened, let his forearm muscles slacken. ‘Anyway, the answer is yes. I have killed.’
‘Ah…’ Now I was even more intrigued, but unable to further what I had started. ‘It changed you? As a person?’
‘There is no describing death. All you know is, it is on your shoulder. It won’t leave.’ Gerald fished a pack of cigarettes, Peter Stuyvesant reds, out of his pocket. I had never seen him smoke before.
‘Smoke?’ He shook the packet at me and a single red came sliding out to meet my hand. I wasn’t a big smoker at all, but this seemed like an appropriate moment.
‘I didn’t know—’
‘I don’t. But Lillian brought a carton from Spar. It has been many years. Now I’m finding it’s making me feel alive. For now at least.’
We leaned against the bonnet of the bakkie, and Gerald released parts of his story.
He was born on the cusp of the Kruger National Park in the township of Mkhuhlu. His great-grandfather was one of the original ‘police boys’ hired by the white man setting up the Pretoriuskop Camp in the park. The police boys were drawn from all over. The tourists loved them because they were such exotic photo subjects, and the white rangers – whom they trained and educated – loved them because they knew the bush. They all came from different areas, and they were all called Shangaans.
‘So I am Shangaan in many ways,’ Gerald said, pulling reflectively on his smoke. ‘Properly Shangaan, but also like a toy. Tourist Shangaan.’
Gerald’s grandfather and father both worked on the Jozi mines, his father ending up as an alcoholic boss-boy. ‘Better pay, worse father.’
Determined to avoid the fate of his elders, Gerald joined the army at seventeen and put in a decade of administrative work before leaving with two partners to set up a security company to guard a Pretoria-north industrial complex on a cooked tender deal. The company lasted five years and then collapsed on its rotten foundations. Gerald started his own thing, which he grew, inch by inch, over the course of the rest of his life, starting small, guarding little shopping complexes and the like. ‘A business,’ he said as he dropped his cigarette butt onto the dirt and ground it out with a heel, ‘is like war – but harder, and longer.’
We spent several gate afternoons together and I came to be an admirer of his technical ability, his pure muscle and his willingness to be quiet. Before we set out, he would quickly knock off a sketch of the project in his little notebook with his clutch pencil, estimating rough lengths and widths and sizes. When we arrived at the installation point, his first action was to relook at his sketch, measure up whatever he could and finalise the numbers. Only then did he take off his invariably striped golf shirt and get to it. His skill, I realised gradually, was rooted in his focus on getting the numbers right first. It felt like a valuable lesson to me at the time. In fact, it still does, although I can’t say I ever learned to apply it.
I had assumed Lillian and Gerald were together – if not sexually then certainly practically. As I spent more time with him on the gates, I realised that this wasn’t necessarily the case. It was more like Lillian had attached herself to him, and Gerald, in turn, had silently agreed to allow her into his range. The two of them were, in fact, many miles apart in important ways. Lillian, for example, had already been to the Kruger Park three times. Gerald had spent his life looking in exactly the opposite direction.
‘I’ve never been,’ he said. ‘There were school trips but I missed them all – this week I was sick, that week there was family business, sometimes I just didn’t go.’
‘Do you regret that?’
‘Maybe the animals. Not the people. The animals I should have seen. Leopard maybe. They should be part of our culture but they are not.’ He shrugged.
‘We should go someday,’ I offered. ‘At some stage Fats is gonna run out of work for us. Could be fun.’
Gerald grunted and powered up his drill.
CHAPTER 24
By the time we had meat in the freezer we hated each other