I floated along, thinking occasionally about my downtime (I had reached Alex in record time) and my uptime (I was still dying completely going up Munro Drive) and only occasionally focusing on the conversations swirling in front of me.
Between the plan-making and life-dreaming, the daily demands reared up, relentless.
Gerald installed a nifty new guillotine at the back of the chicken run, located at the far end of the fields (to minimise annoying squawking). The guillotine was essentially a funnel bolted to the wall with its tip pointing down. It offered a far better and cleaner way of slaughtering fowl than the axe-and-block method we had employed thus far.
‘You keep them as calm as possible,’ Gerald said. He held the bird gently under his left arm and stroked its feathers rhythmically with his free hand as he explained to Tebza and me how the guillotine worked. ‘You don’t want to stress them out, so you just stroke and stroke.’ He ran his hand over the bird’s head and down its throat, then turned it upside down and pointed the head at the top of the funnel. ‘If you are calm it won’t even notice what is happening.’ Gerald inserted the head of the impressively relaxed chicken down the funnel. ‘Once the head is out the bottom, you just take the knife and do it.’ He sliced the chicken’s head off like a gentle uncle. ‘Then you just leave it there to drain.’ He stood back admiringly and wiped off the blade on the grass. The blood poured from the chicken’s neck into the waiting bucket while its legs and backside wriggled in final protest at the wide end of the funnel. ‘Adrenalin,’ he mused while we watched the body twitch and the blood drain. ‘It ruins meat.’
‘Ah,’ I said, transfixed by the pouring blood.
‘That’s why game can taste so bad,’ he carried on, warming again to one of his favourite subjects. ‘If the person does not know about shooting and can’t get the bullet through the head or the heart, then he has to chase the thing down. Lotta adrenalin. Bad meat.’
‘Ah,’ I added again. Tebza idled blankly next to me, staring right through the chicken’s gaping neck.
We returned an hour later and Gerald showed us how to soak and pluck the carcass properly. Complaints had been coming from the kitchen, Beatrice specifically, about quality.
Teboho, once finally focused on the task at hand, was surprisingly successful. He had watched his gogo pluck birds for much of his young life when the family visited the Free State rurals. I, on the other hand, found the task repulsive, and I was bad at it. I snatched poorly at the wrinkled wet skin, grabbing only small handfuls of feathers, sometimes getting nothing other than wet bird.
After the slaughterhouse was up and the farm was producing what we needed at a relatively regular rate, Fats took increasingly to his room. He would stand at his third-floor window and look north for long periods. From my own special places in the garden, I would see him standing with his hands behind his back in a military pose. To me he looked like he was urging the general inside him to deliver a better strategy, tighter execution, more predictable results. I once timed him at ninety minutes. Rooted to the spot. Eyes bolted on the horizon.
Later I realised he was probably not thinking about any of these things at all. He was, surely, debating Babalwa.
During this time I received more personal attention from her than I had since we’d first found Fats waiting for us on Eileen’s couch. It was, I surmised, a typically youthful female double play – the leveraging of the weaker male as a point of necessary tension through which to force the alpha into action. She needed him, in other words, to be jealous. Not raging, pull-the-walls-down jealous. Just enough to get him going. To inspire commitment.
At the same time Lillian pulled Gerald, Tebza and myself into her own agenda. The CSIR trips were followed by raids on other buildings and complexes in the same area. We went along, doing what we were told. Searching for flight.
Teboho’s behaviour had also become increasingly erratic – he was drifting away from all but the most necessary contact. He kept up with the trips to Tshwane, the CSIR and all that. Otherwise he slept through most of the day and sat behind his machines at night, occasionally disappearing altogether for long stretches. Once he was absent for a full forty-eight hours. He had also stopped eating regular meals, choosing instead to snack perpetually on crisps and Coke.
And so we circled.
Babalwa would sit alongside me, next to the pool, rabbiting about breeding and genetics and cross-pollination and on and on and on. Fats would watch us from on high, his eyes slipping down compulsively from the horizon, then back up again.
One afternoon, after she had bent my ear for an hour or so and then made an exit, Fats descended.
‘I just thought I should let you know,’ he said after an interminable, uncomfortable pause, ‘that I know.’ He let the sentence hang, ominous.
‘You know what?’ I asked, annoyed and threatened.
‘What you did. To Babalwa. In PE.’ He tried to find my eyes. I ducked.
‘What? Sorry?’
‘Come, Roy, she told me. There’s no point being evasive.’
‘I think you’d better spell it out for me, just in case.’
‘The rape. Clear enough?’
‘The rape?’ I spluttered, jolted. ‘The rape? Jesus Christ, that girl’s…’
‘That girl’s what, exactly?’ His fists were balled.
‘More calculating than I thought. There was no rape, Fats. We fucked, OK? We fucked then and we fucked many times afterwards. Two adults. Fucking. It happens.’
‘That’s not how she tells it.’ Fats stood, looking down on me. ‘And from what I know of the two of you, I’m inclined to go with her version.’
I stood up in rebuttal. We looked into each other’s mouths. ‘Well, that’s your choice,’ I said. ‘But she’s lying. I don’t know why, but she’s lying.’ I turned to leave, but I walked the wrong way – to the bottom of the garden, where I stood and stared at the stone wall, Fats watching my back. I stayed that way, trapped, not knowing why I was staring at that wall, or where I could go from there.
CHAPTER 26
Cloudy with a hint of yellow
The following days we experienced a rain assault. Flying bullets and shells, swirling pools of water and flooding of unexpected places. A Jozi monsoon.
We stayed indoors for the better part of two days, watching the battery from within the mansion and avoiding each other strategically. Fats stayed upstairs for the most part, which suited me fine. Babalwa skipped around as if nothing had happened, and perhaps for her nothing had. I had no idea exactly when she dropped the pearl onto Fats – it could have been the day before or weeks ago – or whether she intended him to challenge me with it.
The twins broke out the movies, slobbing on the couch to an endless run of decades-old sci-fi adventures and special effects.
I took to my books, smoked on my bed and, stoned, flipped page by page through a few Wilbur Smiths, an aborted attempt at Dostoyevsky and a surprisingly interesting biography of Sol Plaatje. The rape accusation bothered me intensely, my subconscious rabbiting away at itself, probing and pushing at my thoughts and also at Fats and Babalwa, issuing counter-accusations and rebuttals, reviews of the evidence, cross-examinations, and so on. The weed forced the weight of the diatribe to the back of my mind but also increased the frequency of the chatter, obliterating in the process logical, linear thought.
Rape.
Rape.