I filled up with regret. I lashed myself with it. If I had been paying more attention, if I had been less obsessed and internally riveted by my own life, I might have seen more of this man. I might have recognised and realised.
I started refiling and recategorising his collections on my machine. I set up the biggest speakers I could find and played his music in huge, thumping beats that shook the house. I lay back on my bed and thought of spinning cricket balls, recalling the smell of leather, sweat and linseed oil that always somehow lingered in our house, over and above – through even – the cigarettes and club sweat.
I also allowed myself to imagine my mother. Young and rosy-cheeked, eyes ablaze, heart ripping through her ribcage as this man – all muscles and smiles and fame and magnetic, hypnotic charm – pulled beats from the sky and fed them to her. I drew sketches in my mind. I watched two young beautiful fools fall into each other’s arms and, for the first time in my life, I allowed my heart to beat in time to theirs.
Fats’s obsession with locking us into a secure complex evolved along with our situation. Now the focus was less on the idea of defying raiding hordes and more on keeping out the animals, specifically the pigs, who effectively surrounded our world. So much had been made of them in the newspapers that we were all a little in awe of their intelligence, their steroid-enhanced raw power and their emotional drive. Free pigs wanted to escape. They wanted to be free. And they had the brains and muscle to make it happen. That single fact made them different from any other animals – ourselves included.
I had always considered the free-pig hype to be, well, hype. The kind of stuff journos can’t help but crank up. Yes, their snouts extended and straightened the longer they were free, a freaky instance of instant evolution. Yes, they seemed to grow bigger and more powerful the longer they were out. They swelled, by all accounts, with a kind of atavistic juice of the jungle. But I was always sceptical. Now, having come to face to face with so many of them, having shared post-apocalyptic space with them, I finally understood that, if anything, their immensity had been downplayed. When you stare a quarter-tonne monster right in the eye, like we began doing on a regular basis, when you speak in tones they understood and work with – well, you realise how quickly hierarchies can be restructured.
So we all kept our respective distances. The pigs didn’t need us in any specific way. I think maybe they hung around us for the company as much as anything else. They were passive and distant during the day, but at night, while the meat eaters roamed, they were quicker to move, more likely to rush and charge. We took a group decision that anything weighing over three hundred kilograms and possessing tusks and/or wire-brush hair should be kept out.
Fats had, thankfully, begun to slowly let go of his ideas of himself as a leader of men. I suspect Babalwa had a direct as well as circumstantial role in the change, but of course we’ll never know for sure. Pillow talk dries on the pillow.
His control centre grew stale. The red polka-dot maps of Gauteng, the complex electricity-enhancement diagrams and schematics, the grand plans of extension and establishment were allowed to yellow and age. He would bring them out when asked or when necessary, but he was no longer frogmarching pieces across the board. Something soft had crept into his demeanour now that Babalwa’s fingers curled through his hand. They were expecting. One day she ran her hand over her stomach and smiled silently. Javas caught my eye, and winked.
I laced up my stinking yellow Nikes and hit the road.
I exited our compound down Munro Drive, a thirty-degree slope about half a kilometre long. The trip down Munro was jarring, and the return run a complete, recurring punishment. Together the two halves tore at my calves and my thighs. I imagined myself as one of those masochistic emo teens nipping away at their wrists with a blade, desperately needing to finally feel something, anything. I tore my muscles apart one by one, until one day I realised that I felt most alive, most ready for the world, on that upward crawl past the stone walls of Munro Drive.
I had become a jogger.
Lillian sketched things on pieces of paper. She listed possible pilots and calculated flight durations, petrol requirements and flight paths. Her dream continued to take shape, at least in her own mind. She conducted excursions across the province, to the Lanseria airport, then out to the fringes, Germiston and Benoni and beyond. Gerald, who, I believed, was suffering as badly as I was in the stultifying atmosphere of survival, allowed himself to be pulled along, as did Javas, as did Andile, as did I. We took turns really. None of us admitting to believing, but none brave enough to stop.
CHAPTER 32
German Valium
The Kruger Park trip had its roots in my conversation with Gerald while doing gate work. It was my initiative. Quite possibly, now that I think about it, it was my one and only attempt to drive something. To engineer.
I felt a sense of karmic wrong at the fact that Gerald had never experienced the bush in the white man’s sense – that he had only ever broached the extended reaches of his homeland, the place of his birth and childhood, by looking over the fence.
Initially it was only going to be myself and Gerald. The twins were a late, surprise addition to the party. Javas slung a backpack each for him and Andile into their Toyota as we started packing ours.
‘We’ll follow,’ he said casually. ‘Been a while since I was that side.’
Tebza jumped into our back seat at the last second with no bags or luggage at all. ‘Please get me the fuck out of this place,’ he said.
We drove like real tourists. Gerald had secured several pairs of binoculars and we were stacked past the rooftop with wood and firelighters, even a cooler box with ice bricks. We were a fully stocked tour party.
It was a quiet trip, but not deathly quiet. Quiet as antidote, rather. Quiet as relaxation and holiday. Gerald looked genuinely happy. The corners of his leathery face tweaked frequently in what approximated a smile, and there was a looseness in his form that ran contrary to the tight barrel of the man I had always known.
The road opened up as we came over the escarpment past eMalahleni, past the heaps and heaps of coal, the rudderless conveyor belts and black dumps of stuff. We turned to Dullstroom to find six shiny 4x4s stranded outside a pseudo English-style pub. We smashed through a few lodges for trout rods and made a pretence of fly-fishing.
The dams were overrun.
‘Be easier just to grab one,’ said Javas, and Andile did exactly that, squealing with triumph as she wrestled the resistant fish into the air. We built a fire and braaied the trout with onion and garlic, then slung ourselves out on the five-star balcony, beers in hand.
Gerald belched. ‘The rich. So few ideas…’ He shook his head and wiped the lemon-butter sauce from his lips. We all agreed, without understanding. Our dynamic had become very much like this: a series of vaguely linked comments and assertions, expressions of mood really. We were feeling each other instead of understanding. Words were irrelevant.