Hack was fundamentally different. I spent the duration of my time marvelling over the seamlessness of the thing, once I had resigned myself to the awful influence of the music. (I had been intent on taking my own music with me, but there was no way to integrate an external feed and the bots without exactly the right kind of high-end wireless router.) I was stuck with four preselected back tracks – a problem Tebza had circumvented much earlier in his life. While prepping me, he confessed that his little white dangling earpiece was a fake – a prop to support his real, physiological audio system. Encouraged by Joy, Tebza had gone deep, implanting an audio chip onto both eardrums, effectively internalising his home entertainment system. He kept the white earphones in his ear and dangling over his chest to cover for the fact that often he was listening to his own internal music or, in the days before the disappearance, to his operating system.
Lacking his internal magic, I was bolted to the four provided tracks for the duration, dire generic downbeat things. Perversely, I was unable to turn the sound off, or even down. The default system settings could be modified only through the software running off the router – which we didn’t have.
At the high end of the park, up past the dam, there was a gate. An old, Boer-style farm gate. I walked around the dam to the gate, opened it, stepped through and emerged where I had started, at the bottom of the park. A virtual loop.
I ran to the left, straight at the far row of pine trees marking off the park’s boundary. I got to about three metres from the trees and then was caught treading water, the pines stubbornly out of reach. Unlike my walk to the gate, there was no progression, no sense of movement or change – this was a holding pattern, an edge that refused to come any closer. But even under this system stress, the visual seam held firm – again in complete contrast to Mlungu’s, where the walls crumbled at the slightest pressure.
And that was it.
A park.
A pretty, green park.
I lay in the middle of grass and let the birds sing to me until, without warning, the sky dissolved, clouds puffy then white then strands then gone, and I was back in my bedroom, dislocated and regretting I hadn’t explored one of the other three interfaces.
I returned the full Energade bottle to Tebza the next morning. Aside from the bummer of the comedown, my mind was consumed by the potential of thing.
‘So?’ he asked.
‘Eish… so much…’ I struggled for the words. ‘The possibilities.’
‘Ja, I knew my life had changed when I first took it.’ He shook his head. ‘Who can ever guess, eh? What happens, happens. We are just spectators.’
I was tempted to go back to it, but I was also wary of becoming as attached to the calm and otherness of the park as Tebza was to the escape. Or the nightclub. His lure was the spacey, empty floor and the mirrorball. Also, I presumed, the lingering, almost tangible hope of more punters arriving. I guessed ultimately I would have taken the park pretty much every time, but the detachment of the experience was too much, the return to life too edgy and jagged.
That, and the taste of piss, which was just hard to stomach.
CHAPTER 31
None brave enough to stop
I discovered around this time that my father was an authentic beat master. It’s a simple fact, but it had eluded me.
I had always fallen into the trap – understandable enough, I suppose, considering the circumstances of our lives – of judging him by the primary layer: according to the visible evidence. I failed to look seriously beneath the business end of his suitcase, and so I missed the cluster of hard drives that captured the true scope of his musical interest, and, yes, I’ll admit it now, his talent. Buried beneath the stupid trance and the club mixes and remixes, underneath the devices that stored his ability to make money, and a career, was jazz and breakbeat. Hip hop and jungle, drum and bass and old-school crooners, dub (reggae, dubstep, German ambient, etc.), classical by the bucketload, the full range of singer-songwriters, rock, and a staggering, confusing depth of pop.
It was an accidental discovery. I was rooting through the case looking for a particular Thievery Corp mix that Tebza and I had been discussing and that I knew lay within, when, on a whim, I decided to plug one of the anonymous hard drives into my machine. And there, folder after folder after folder. A cornucopia. A lifetime.
The depth of the collection – its whimsical range, its sheer adventurousness – sent me into an extended spiral of reflection. From the perspective of my grey hair and formally declared alcoholism, from the view of a lost man with a jagged tooth and few prospects – spiritual, physical or otherwise – my father now cut an entirely different figure. A figure of loss and pathos. A figure of farce, of course, but also of hidden dignity.
I had never allowed myself to consider what it must have felt like to travel the strange and distorted road he had. Now, I thought seriously of cricket. Of the smell of the game that occupied so much of his life and his consciousness. How the Velcro of the pads must have felt when he pulled the straps tight. The insane nerves and stomach-rumbling that would have overtaken him as he sat waiting in the hut, heel slamming against the floor. The ball in his hand. How it would have fit so neatly. The roll of his fingers over the seam, the vision of it twirling in flight, alternately shiny red and broken-skinned. All these things, so alien to me, would have been threaded into him and the way he understood and interpreted the world.
I remembered something long-forgotten, or buried, or whatever. The whole Fotheringham hot-spot thing. My father had, for some unknown, unidentifiable reason, cut a very striking figure in the negative TV-replay view. There was something about the sharpness and angularity of his jawline, in combination with his subtle retro sunglasses, that made his X-ray hot-spot profile incredibly dashing and attractive – far more so than that of any of his peers. You magazine actually ran a double-page photo feature of Russle Fotheringham in a series of hot-spot frames titled ‘The Sexiest Sportsman in SA?’
He didn’t like it at all. On the few occasions it was mentioned, he referred to the tyranny of the negative. Of the black-and-white cut-out. He had this idea of himself, post-cricket fame, as only ever successful in the negative sense, when viewed in the simplest terms of black and white. He disliked the metaphor, but he latched onto it well past his cricket days. Maybe – and who can ever truly know these things now that they are gone? – it was this idea that pushed him to let it all go.
He moved from the smell and the texture of fresh-cut grass to the smoke and grime of the clubs. It must have been, I always assumed, a deep and hard fall indeed. And yet, I had never properly considered the possibility that the choice took him by the neck. Trawling through his folders (Amy Winehouse, Josh Rouse, Cassandra Wilson, Taj Mahal, Stimela, Tananas, Gito Baloi, Mad Professor, Brad Mehldau, new jazz, old jazz, country, Jim White, TKZee, Mapaputsi, Neko Case, Professor, BOP, the folders just ran on and on and on), I broached the idea that trance and house weren’t so much his new love as his recalibrated and recalculated hope – that he didn’t run to the clubs in a misguided high passion, but in search of a viable way out of the rabbit warren. His star had risen and fallen, and having brushed the outer heights it simply wasn’t possible for him – for his heart, for his buzzing, intense head – to spend a decade or two foraging on the commons. He needed something new, and dance and trance offered it. Did that make him a dance-and-trance guy? Possibly not. Based on the evidence of the suitcase, probably not. Now he started to make a kind of sense. He became stark, a man forced by circumstance and unfortunate choices into the simple negative. A man forced to dance. A man tapping incessantly on the walls, hoping for return sound.