Fats stood silently next to the kitchen table, an electric-fence manual stuffed uselessly under his arm, pen flicking between his fingers.
Me, I took up jogging.
I couldn’t sleep at night. Worse, the days were becoming harder and harder to fill. I started talking to myself – too much. I also started stalking Babalwa, obsessed with her movements and her growing attachment to Fats. I thought seriously about booze, again.
One afternoon we stopped at the Bookdealers of Rosebank. Books were the theme of the day – grist in the mill of our still flickering consumer lust. The Bookdealers had been my old haunt, and so there we were, in one of the ancient, deep sub-malls of Rosebank. I grabbed a clutch of books at random and then drifted away down the dead escalator, past the business bookshop (Social Investment as a South African Business Paradigm; Management Theory in Practice: A Guide for the Emerging Manager; Contact Centres and the Service Challenge; etc.) and down to the underground parking. Even in the old days the mall had a weird, abandoned ring to it – now, it was freaky. On the right, just before the underground parking, was a clothing and shoe store, one of those last-century establishments that specialised in school outfits and such. I stood in front of the window and remembered. My father had actually brought me to this very store. He bought me a school tracksuit and, as a rare treat, a new stationery set. It was one of those odd memories, a hawk flashing through a dream.
I put my books down, kicked over a medium-sized pot, let the rotting soil spill out and smashed it through the window.
Posters of surfers and rugby stars and tennis players adorned the walls. It had been Kim Clijsters in my day, and the old classic Steffi Graf. Now it was a bunch I couldn’t recognise. Young and lean and leaning forward, asses rock-hard and full of fight. The school clothes hung pitifully off their circular racks. To the right of the blazer rack there was a line of sports stuff, takkies and so on. I lifted a pair of bright yellow Nikes off the shelf. They were feather-light. I tossed them into the air a few times, then tried on the right shoe. It fit perfectly. I kicked off my second slop and walked back to Bookdealers in a new pair of bright yellow running shoes.
Back at the house, I ran up the driveway and then down again. Totally out of breath, I hung around the garage with my hands on my knees, panting, then went back up the drive again. The next day the shoes, an even brighter yellow in the morning light, lay waiting at the foot of the bed. I put them on, grabbed a gate buzzer from the kitchen and started running.
South first. Over Louis Botha Avenue and into Yeoville, heading for Rocky Street. It had been many years since I had been to Rocky Street. As I ran I remembered going there in my university days with some hippies who needed weed, in bulk.
I stopped running as my legs denied me. I walked up Cavendish Road. Yeoville sang with empty character. Unlike the suburbs and unlike the townships, it felt like there was a dimensional depth to the place, its little rundown houses the repositories of silent stories. Stories from the old white ladies, stories from the African refugees, the Zimbabweans and Nigerians, the musicians and drug dealers, artists and pimps and agents and journos. My Nikes flashed against the voices as I walked. I started running again. Stopped. Leaned over my knees. Turned around and walked back.
In running I finally found a meaningful weapon in the insomnia fight – the exhaustion drove me easily into the pillow. And so my runs stretched out until I was often away from the house for most of the morning or afternoon. It was a good escape.
As we embarked on the gritty business of putting together the slaughterhouse, our residence felt suffocating. Now, from my old man’s perspective, I understand that many of the strange feelings of the time were rooted in the challenge, which evolved slowly over a period of months, of setting up a system that would allow us to kill and eat other living things. Javas and Gerald were the lone sources of expertise when it came to butchery and slaughter, and following their guidance was traumatic for the rest of us, who had only ever faced meat through a layer of cling wrap.
Philosophically, there were two key elements to our programme.
(1) Establishing a slaughterhouse that was close enough to the cows to be logistically convenient. (Debate as to whether the cows would sense the slaughter of their colleagues and be emotionally or behaviourally affected by it arose, led by Lillian, of course, but also entertained by Andile and Beatrice, of all people. The notion was, eventually, dismissed.)
(2) Three slaughter sessions a year. One midwinter, and one on either side of the cold. The meat generated would have to last us the year.
We built the slaughterhouse in the semi-underground cricket nets that ran off the side of the KES fields and that ended with a set of burglar bars looking onto the street separating the two halves of the school. The area offered good, easy access and, once the artificial turf was ripped up, the concrete was easy to wash down with buckets of water. Javas created a drainage furrow in the cement which led to a small portable swimming pool that could be punctured at the end to release the blood but contain the gunk – the bits of ear and hoof and so on.
We created a trestle table out of a large door, about three metres long and one metre wide. It stood on two empty oil drums. Javas and Gerald put together a slaughter-equipment inventory, locked up neatly in what used to be the kit room adjoining the nets. This included knives (conventional and the curved, strap-on variety, which locked to the wrist via Velcro and allowed the ladies and the weak – such a myself – to make big, decisive cuts), dishes, drying clothes, muslin to wrap the meat in, a generator and, finally, a Meatmaster 2020 Pro bandsaw.
Adjacent to the trestle table we erected a tap, fed by the biggest barrels we could find and pressurised as much as possible by extreme height. Filling the eight barrels – which stood back to back on an elevated scaffolding, the front barrel attached to the tap – was an exercise in patience and brute force. In the far corner was the chain block-and-tackle, set in a high frame strong enough to hold a fully outstretched carcass.
In the last corner an iron ring was set into the concrete floor. This was where the animal died. When we eventually got to the slaughter, we did our best to con the beast into calmness with cooing noises and patting of the snout as we separated it from the herd and walked it to its fate. Then we jumped it as fast as we could: secured the horns and pinned its head to the floor with rope fed through the ring.
At this point Javas or Gerald, the designated executioners, would step up with a loaded 9 mm, place it just above and right between the eyes, and pull. The nostrils would flare. The eyes went wild. The power slammed off.
The cow would collapse onto the concrete in death spasms and kicking fits and then someone (in the early years it was Gerald or Javas – later, myself and Fats and Beatrice also embraced the challenge) would slice its neck open while the rest held the head. It required a messy, collective effort. Once the knife opened the jugular, a fountain of red blood would gush out onto the concrete and we would try with our hose and much desperation to get the bulk of it down the gutter while the beast gurgled and its still beating heart pumped the blood out. Gerald and Javas insisted that the throat-slitting happen fast, so that the heart could pump as much blood as possible, thus preserving the quality of the meat.