When the legs stopped kicking, it was time for cutting and slicing and dicing. Someone would cut the necessary slit through the skin on the Achilles tendon while the boys would use a hacksaw to take the head off. The rest of us would skin the legs and the rump as fast as possible. The carcass was then hoisted onto the gallows, and the rest of the skinning would happen.
We were terrible at it. Lillian wept profusely through the first two slaughters, and while her tears went well beyond irritation, they also articulated the dislocation I felt at the gore of the process. Fats, too, was green and quiet while following instructions.
We were particularly bad at the skinning. Gerald and Javas had to patrol around us like schoolteachers to make sure we were at least getting the core elements right. I was the chief culprit when it came to amateurish snipping of the connective tissue that held the leather and the meat together. Invariably Javas would nudge me aside and finish it off, denying me the final pleasure of balling my fist and ripping off the skin completely. I think he also denied me that pleasure to make sure I wouldn’t have to deal with getting the guts and entrails out – not out of any kind-heartedness, mind, but to avoid the tragedy of getting shit all over the meat with a slip of the knife or a shoddy tying-off of the rectum. Dealing with the entrails was an expert’s business – we would all step back and watch as the boys slit the stomach open and poured the guts carefully into the two large zinc tubs. Lillian would be sniffling and snorting. The rest of us were quiet and respectful.
By then it had already been a long, bloody day. But the skins had to be dealt with – Gerald insisted on working them into home-made shoes, etc. – as did the entrails, guts and organs, which were turned into tripe and liver and kidney meals for the next few nights.
And, before we could drag ourselves back to normality, for the night at least, the carcass had to be quartered, a process requiring the precision and muscles of three men to ensure the cut was accurate, right the way down the side of the tail bone. Eventually, years on, the girls and Fats and I became skilled enough and strong enough to deal with this heavy dismantling of the carcass. The strap-on knives were useful – we all started using them, even those of us with muscles. But that was all much later. In the early years, by the time the quartering came around, the stress and muck of the day, the physical exhaustion and Lillian’s tears had rendered most of us useless. I would collapse onto my haunches, watch the boys do their thing, and offer tools and rags and other such supportive items.
Setting up the slaughterhouse, sourcing our beasts (Javas drove all the way to the Eastern Cape to find the beasts he was looking for, five free-roaming cows and an ox that had – like us – somehow ducked the scythe), and actually killing and butchering our first victim took something on the order of three months. By the time we had meat in the freezer we hated each other, each in our own special kind of way.
And so I ran.
The flight-simulator failures saw Lillian voicing bolder plans, such as driving up through Africa until we got to the top and then simply boating over to Europe. This idea gained little traction, the response morphing quickly into a critique of American bias from Babalwa and Andile, who pointed out – with satisfaction – the assumption inherent in Lillian’s plan that getting to Europe would be some sort of inherent progression or achievement.
Beatrice offered an alternative to Lillian’s quest, suggesting an ongoing sub-Saharan African relay team of alternating twos, heading out at regular intervals in various directions. Her logic was that if there were nine of us here, there surely must be at least one other similar group below the Sahara. So seven could remain in Houghton managing the essentials, the farming structure and so on, while two could head out for a week, and then come back and swap with two others, who would go out again, then back.
Teboho said, ‘The twins will never be separated like that.’
‘Typical,’ said Lillian. ‘Nine people left on the planet and two of them actually fall in love.’
‘If they really are in love, that leaves seven of us for interbreeding,’ Babalwa said to me later as we perched on the edge of the swimming pool, which had grown a thick green skin while we were busy setting up the slaughterhouse.
I wasn’t yet ready to grapple with the notion that the nine of us constituted the future of humanity. Babalwa, on the other hand, had developed her calculations since our PE days. She said, and I was ready to agree with her, because what did I know anyway, that eight – four men and four women – would be just enough to get some genuine genetic diversity going, as long we ensured sustained cross-breeding. The twins’ blossoming love threw her approach into variable headwinds. ‘It’s an open question,’ she explained, ‘whether they would be willing or able to cross the line as many times as will be required to get it right.’
I pulled the laces on my Nikes tighter and thought about how I could expand my route.
CHAPTER 25
Fats took increasingly to his room
Everyone had their own idea of what was necessary, and the ideas were often in direct opposition. All we needed, Fats said, was four people to actually physically commit to their own plan and we were all completely fucked.
But Fats also needed the group. For him, it was the nucleus of our potential, our survival, our effort. In one of many attempts to re-establish unity of group purpose, he started calling house meetings.
I missed the start of the first one. I had been running and miscalculated, again, the uphill return.
I threw my sweating self between Andile and Babalwa on the lounge couch. They both leapt up, squealing and retching, and I ended up by myself in the far corner.
Fats launched proceedings with an unnecessary sermon on the necessity of planning, and followed it with an equally unnecessary outline of the various plans on the table:
Drive to the top of Africa and boat to Europe.
Build a community and colony here in Houghton.
Get the drones flying.
Learn how to fly – and fly away.
Dragnet South Africa again to search for more survivors.
Dragnet Africa to search for more survivors.
Get breeding to ensure perpetuation of the species.
The last item was Babalwa’s. She forced it onto the agenda amid the first genuine laughter we’d had as a group for a while. Within the mockery and the explosive fission of general sexual tension, she stuck to her guns. ‘You can think I’m crazy, but I’m telling you that if there are only nine of us, we can’t grow a community without inbreeding. Unless we purposefully cross-breed.’
And so our first formal house meeting dissolved into a farce of verbiage and theories. Lillian and Fats – representing the two truly polar views – put out the majority of it, facing off with argument and counter-argument. Halfway through the twins moved to sit together on the couch, articulating their own motivations and loyalties.
Gerald was quiet, voicing opinions only on technical matters. The likelihood of boating successfully over the Suez. The true benefits of drones unable to hook into satellites. The technicalities of dragnetting South Africa, or Africa. Tebza sat silent, his dangling earphone the only sign he was even thinking of participating. Mostly he stared at the intersection of wall and roof in the top corner of the lounge. I wondered again what he might be on. His blankness was not, I was sure, a passive-aggressive attack against the group. His brain seemed simply to be otherwise engaged.