Rape.
I struggled, even in my darkest moments, to associate myself with it. In the best and worst of my memories, what Babalwa and I did on the grill of the cash-in-transit van was very far from rape. A lustful, violent fuck? Yes. Confused, wild sexual fumbling? Yes. But rape? I couldn’t even consider it, primarily because I remembered specifically and in detail how wet she was as I went into her. That kind of lubrication was a clear rebuttal. Or was it? I recalled magazine articles, TV shows, Oprah reruns that explained victim arousal as the deeper conundrum. One of the aspects that caused so much confusion and pain for the victim, over and above the violation of the act, etc., etc.
I decided I was going to have to talk to Babalwa. But I evaded it, brushing past her during our monsoon incarceration as quickly and efficiently as possible. A man with things to do. A man too busy to talk.
On the second evening, the rain still battering us inside and out, I walked past Teboho’s room and fate revealed him to me: crouched over an Energade bottle and pissing extremely carefully into it. I should never have gained the view I did, but his bedroom door had swung open accidentally, and in one of those double twists of destiny the door to his en-suite bathroom had also cracked open at just the right angle. My view was thus through a double-hinge crack. It was a flashing glance, and if he had been wiping his ass or beating one off I wouldn’t have thought twice about it. But there was something furtive in the manner of his crouch that made me stop and take a second, longer look.
Even then I walked on, deciding to file it under ‘Strange and Weird’, an already brimming category.
The next day the sun broke out. The clouds rolled back and we all ran from the house to escape each other; our recycled breath and farts, the sexual tension and betrayals, the mood stuff. I laced up my Nikes.
I had developed special routes. Straight down Louis Botha to Alex and back for strength work. Through the full breadth of the Houghton suburbs for endurance, and occasionally through Patterson Park for a light, head-clearing run. Given the claustrophobia of the last two days I chose Patterson Park, and there, as I entered the gates, was Teboho off in the distance, sitting with his back to me and leaning against a big oak tree.
He had the Energade bottle against his lips. The liquid was cloudy with a hint of yellow. I walked towards him as he drained the last of it.
As I approached he slumped. His torso lost its form. Then his arms, their willingness to resist gravity gone in an instant.
The bottle dropped from his hand. His chin fell onto his collarbone.
‘Tebza?’ I walked up noisily. ‘That you? Tebza? Tebza?’
Nothing.
‘Teboho!’ I tried the angry mother voice. Then I shook his shoulder, hard. He remained folded in on himself, lost in a personal sinkhole.
Instinct said I should pick him up and carry him back to the house (thereby morphing my light run into an extreme strength session). But his breathing was normal, light but steady, and whatever he had drunk (his own piss, surely) must have had a lot, if not everything, to do with his state. In addition, he had chosen a faraway, quiet place for this. Somewhere he would never be seen, save by a manic runner.
I sat down in front of him – about two metres away – and waited. The grass was wet – deeply so. The damp rose quickly into my ass.
Every now and again, maybe every twenty minutes, I would probe at him with my toes. Lacking a watch, I had to guess at the strings of time looping themselves together. I marked off estimated periods of twenty minutes, promising myself that after seven such units I would pick him up and carry him back.
The extraordinary thing about his state, I realised gradually, was its rigidity. There were no eyelid flutters. No slight twitches of the leg or the arm. No sighing. No snorting, no changes in breathing. He was still in the absolute sense. Completely motionless.
Somewhere in the middle of the fourth twenty-minute block he sighed, stirred, snorted and rubbed his eyes. After the rubs he opened his eyes and saw me. His eyelids were heavy – dropping, then pushing open, then dropping again – weighed down by an obvious force. He recognised me, comprehended my presence, but was unable to address it. He leaned forward, rubbed his eyes again, then fell back against the tree, asleep.
I let him drift a while longer – this time he was making the noises and movements normally associated with sleep. Then I stood and kicked him hard on the leg. ‘Heita!’
Tebza’s torso shot forward, his eyes panicking as they shot open. He stared at me, wide-eyed and shocked. ‘Jesus, Roy, fuck, man. You should never do that. Never when someone’s…’
‘When someone’s what, Tebza?’
‘Uh, when someone’s been sleeping,’ he covered clumsily.
I sat back down next to him. ‘Tebz, you’re gonna need to explain this to me. Because it looks a lot like you’ve been drinking your own piss.’
Tebza pointed at the heavily gated door of flat 743, Slovo Mansions. ‘This is it,’ he said. ‘Shit, I didn’t remember the gate. We never gonna get in. This shit is unbreakable.’ He rattled the two-inch steel deadbolt. It rang firm.
‘Ag, maybe it doesn’t matter,’ he said, disappointed. ‘I wanted you to get some of the experience, but…’ He shrugged.
‘Let’s just walk,’ I offered. ‘I’ll use my imagination.’
True city sight was impossible, unless you lived right under the waterfall. For people like me, there was never a city to see. The city people, the flats, the shops, the hawkers, they lived and breathed beneath the gushing digital revenue. The poets and the lit students wrote about them, the shadows. The shadow lives. Me, all I saw was the outdoor revenue models: the chopping and slicing of space into money, of street frontage into monthly rentals, of air into brand experience.
Street names and important buildings were the necessary poles between which lay shocking colours, campaign points and enticements to act. To get to Mlungu’s from Louis Botha, I would take Joe Slovo to Pepsi corner, where the three chicks shook it for years, urban sexy-sumo style, in camouflage G-strings and Fidel hats. Then right at the bottom of Ponte, through the pink insurance strip for about half a kilometre, right again at the detergents, through the penis extensions, then left at the bottom of Carlton, left again at Black Like Me, and about fifty metres on, just past the Neo Afrika Theatre, was Mlungu’s. Each citizen had a similar yet personal experience of ‘getting there’. A lifelong gathering of tricks that allowed movement through the wash of mega brands and supersized churches and colours and exhortations. Of course the ‘where’ was always central to the experience of movement. If you turned left at Pepsi corner, it was all Maboneng art, city culture and coffee beans. High-colour fast-cut advocacy for sexual heath, democracy and creative thinking.
Then, once into the faster turns, the blizzard of smaller colours and faces and messages, the voices of the thousands of privates who – for whatever reason – hadn’t yet had their street frontage allotted to a greater outdoor advertising share scheme. The barber and the one-man loan sharks, the gurus and the prophets and the preachers, always the preachers, the little ones, growing nascent empires up to the heaven of high-impact roadside frontage.
The joy was always in the graf; the paint-over, the fight for control of the city canvas. The deeper the brands went, the more vulnerable they were to the paint-over, and therefore to the streaming rebel puns, the kiddie-war corpse feeds, the flashing art, the repeat challenges.
The agencies made the big money on public sites – but they pulled almost as much with the personalised, privacy-off stuff.