I stood.
We decided to walk it. To use our feet all the way back, through the wet.
Despite the intensity of the day, despite the revelations and the change of view and the confessions we had engendered, despite it all – I could not mention rape.
I did not mention rape.
I would not mention rape.
CHAPTER 27
I also imagined her in his arms
During our time in PE I had grown to love, for my own reasons, Babalwa’s emotional distance from me. Even when we were at our closest, even on those rare occasions when we rose together to the heights of actual lovemaking, we were far apart. The distance was comfortable. It fit easily with my own abstracted state. And so I rendered her form in easy, hard lines. I constructed Babalwa as a simple PE girl. I never really considered other possibilities. Now I had to broach the notion that she may not have been that simple. That her dry, withdrawn PE state may have been tailored around my presence rather than being an inherent part of her personality. That she had throttled so far back in self-defence in reaction to an impossible situation in which she could not tolerate me, nor life without me.
After we arrived in Jozi, she began to express herself in ways I hadn’t seen before. And since she had taken up sexually with Fats, what I had known as her natural silence had morphed into a quiet, assertive confidence. Now she was allowing herself to think, and then to communicate her thinking. The white shorts and Castle Lager T-shirt had slowly disappeared, replaced by fitted jeans, vests and the occasional skirt. In group conversations she sat back and forward in equal measures.
I suspected that Fats was particularly successful at making love to her. That, instead of twisting and rubbing mechanically (as I now was forced to admit I may have been doing), he enticed her out into the world of active expression. Maybe that inner process was translating into her external life.
I felt shamed.
I looked back with half-shut eyes at our sexual encounters. I saw myself humping and jabbing, fucking and grinding. I wished now that I could erase it. Take it back. Reconstruct.
I also imagined her in his arms, exhausted and raw emotionally and otherwise, confessing, letting go of that terrible first memory of me on the heavy black grill. I pictured the creeping tears, his strong black thumb pushing the first one back, then massaging its companions from their hiding places.
I was shamed.
But was it rape?
Did I overpower her and force her?
Did I hold those wrists in a lockdown, pin her so she couldn’t move, break her open and stab and stab and stab?
CHAPTER 28
Allowing myself to dream
We stomped home through the monsoon. Initially talking, but when the thud of the drops drowned our voices out, just stomping, walking, stomping. We were wet – soaked through – but refreshed, in a childlike, druggy way. Up to the top of Rissik Street, round Constitution Hill, up past the park, past Joburg General and east into Houghton. By the time we got to the St Patrick gate, clouds had wiped the blue away completely and it was pitch-dark. And the gate was locked.
The spikes on top of the wrought-iron fencing were not to be fucked with. Fats had made sure the fence was impossible to climb without a genuine risk of impalement.
The idea of walking back in the rain seemed suddenly very stupid. The drops drove into us like industrial knitting needles. We ducked into a decaying wooden guard hut that stood a few hundred metres back down the street. The thudding of the monsoon prevented all but the most basic communication.
‘That fucker Fats.’
‘Who locked the gate?’
‘They knew we must be coming.’
‘These fucking gates.’
‘Stupid, stupid shit.’
The hut was rank with decay and wet wood. The floor planks had curled in protest and most had ejected the nails trying to hold them down. An ancient radio tape deck sat helpless on one rising piece of wood, surfing in perpetuity. A small pile of Houghton Times and Daily Sun newspapers, held down with a brick, rotted neatly underneath a single dirty-white pool chair.
‘Jesus, imagine spending your work night in one of these!’ Tebza bellowed, hunched up on the sliver of a bench running along the left inside wall.
I nodded. Imagine.
We sat soaking in the hut for ten or fifteen minutes. The rain was going nowhere. The sun was gone, and we had no way of getting back inside the laager. Tebza hugged his knees, shivering, the balls of his feet jackhammering against the pine floor.
Suddenly there was a thud against the rotten wall of the hut and an angry wet snout, flanked by two shortish, chipped brown tusks, burst into the space between Tebza’s legs. I jumped vertically. Tebza tried to climb the side wall with his elbows. ‘Jezuz fuck! What the fuck!’ The snout pulled out, ripping some of the rotten wood along with it, then snuffled back into the vacant space. Tebza tried to kick it, missing completely.
‘Tebz Tebz Tebz. No no no,’ I hissed, grabbing him by the arm and trying to smother the wildly flailing limbs. ‘Kicking pigs in the face. Not a good idea. Not good. Sensitive. They are very sensitive there.’ His eyes were wide as dinner plates. I put my finger to my lips and shushed him. Outside we could hear wet snorting and foraging. There were a few more bumps against the hut.
‘How many?’ Tebza mouthed at me.
It sounded like there were at least three. My immediate worry was that the other two had tusks as big as the first, who, going by snout size, was a certifiably big bastard.
Generally we lived in a state of amicable cohabitation with the pigs, who watched us as much as we watched them. In daylight and with the free run of the land in front of them they didn’t pose much of a threat, but now, at night, all sodden snouts and long tusks, it was a different story. It felt like we were being hunted.
The snout came back a few more times, but in a less aggressive manner. We decided in fearful whispers that they were probably just curious.
About an hour in, as the torrent eased, we walked. The pigs followed, snuffling and grunting in the shadows around us. We looked for holes in the fence, or a small road or alley that would get us back inside the perimeter. Although lighter, the rain pounded us at every step. With each blow our enmity towards Fats grew. ‘Change in gate policy!’ Tebza screamed into the sodden night. ‘Complete change!’ A pig snorted in agreement, just out of sight.
We eventually found a gap on the Louis Botha side of St John’s, and after six or seven tragic wrong turns we made it back. The pigs dropped off once we were through the perimeter fence, but not before two of them, both males, came into full view and watched us as we poked around. Tebza was more disturbed by the pigs than I was. In the full wetness of the night it seemed obvious they meant us no harm. They were observing, and looked, to me anyway, a little hurt at our fear of them. One male lowered his head slightly as we considered each other, in deference, perhaps. Or maybe just to let me know… what? I couldn’t quite get a handle on the communication. After some time he kicked the turf twice and he and his buddies turned and left.
Tebza stormed into the lounge screaming murder about gate policies and the threat of pigs and consideration for others. I quietly deposited the Energade bottle in my bedroom cupboard and took a shower.
When I came downstairs the pot was still simmering, Tebza confronting Fats, who sat unmoved, arms folded, mouth resisting the invading creases of a smirk. The others, looking bored but nervous, tried to wind the subject down with apologies and promises.