‘Are you actually drunk if you’ve been drinking at Mlungu’s all day?’ Rick asked quasi-seriously, more than once.
Being perpetually drunk was – in the context of Mlungu’s – almost the same as being sober. Regardless of location or orientation, getting high and fucking – the combination, the marriage of the two – was the point. The only point. The perpetual point. Without drugs, even the new-generation interface became generic, the avatars recognisable, the stitching on the seams of the interface a little too predictable.
Drugs and fucking. Fucking and drugs.
Thus, yes, I was permanently drunk, but I was also, within the jagged reality of the club, the sober-minded guiding hand.
CHAPTER 5
I leaned back casually
By the time I fled to Eileen’s flat, I had been running Mlungu’s for over ten years and Angie and I had parted ways in every respect except the sharing of a residential address. We lived in the same building but, as in a classic TV series of your choosing, we hardly saw each other. The evening at Clarissa’s had in fact been our first out together for months. I worked late, drank late, slept late, and she did the same, but according to a different sequence.
Eileen wasn’t an affair and her flat wasn’t our love nest. She was a sweet, plain, thin, twenty-three-year-old account manager with a wealthy, concerned daddy watching over her.
She gave me the spare keys to her flat in a rush. ‘My grandmother,’ she said, shoving them anxiously into my fist, ‘in Cape Town. She’s… she’s… not well. At all. Will you feed Mozart?’ She looked panicked, embarrassed. ‘Sorry. I don’t know who else to ask.’
No problem. ‘Dog or cat?’ I asked.
‘Oh!’ she barked with relief. ‘Cat. Very self-contained. Female. Sleeps most of the day. This is my address.’ She buzzed the details through. ‘Parking bay, alarm codes, instructions on how to feed her. Once a day – should be pretty easy. I’ll call as soon as I know what’s going on.’
‘Take your time.’ I leaned back casually, pretending I wasn’t already worried about fucking the whole thing up.
CHAPTER 6
I lit a cigarette and thought about my father
Lean. All in black. Daniel Craig beneath a half-smiling, ironic, clubby-cool exterior.
It was important to be clean and straight. Unflappable. They had to be able to recognise me. And they did.
They called my name.
Life passed like that. Me, avatar-black, striding in slow motion, ears primed, waiting for the call.
Years after he had stopped, become adult and all that, Mongezi pulled me aside. Skin bunched up around his eyes. He winced. It had looked like he was about to smile, as if the glory would flicker again. But he winced.
‘You haven’t had enough yet, Roy?’
‘I can’t do media management, Mogz. I just can’t do it.’
‘Sho. But clubs. You can’t do those either. Not for so long. You just can’t, my broe. It’s gonna kill you.’
‘Ah, but what a way to die!’
‘It’s a shitty way to die, Roy. Shitty.’
I had my reasons, then. I’m sure they made sense. Now I think maybe I just fell in love with a time. A place. An idea. For those first few years we thought we had the world in our hands. Planet earth. City of Joburg. We owned it all. We changed it on a whim. I met and married Angie in that place. Ceremony in Rosebank Church, reception at Mlungu’s. We hatched the dragon. We hung on as it flew. That it would fly was never a question. Not to me anyway. I would be firmly on its back as we crashed through the atmosphere. It never occurred to me that we were already done. That change had come. And gone.
Year after year, hype cycle after hype cycle, there was nothing new. The revolution stalled at paint broadcasts and geo-located VR. Technologies were turned into advertising. Messages were bought, broadcast, sold. Clubs stayed clubs. The drugs evolved. There were additions to the technology, incremental shifts, but that next quantum leap… well, it turned out to be a mirage. A myth, forming and swirling in the middle distance.
‘You got money, my ninja. Money. You can do anything. Why don’t you quit? I know Angie would love a change. Go overseas. France. The south of France. You could write a novel.’
‘And Angie could paint.’
‘Ja!’ Mongezi’s eyes lit, then faded, angry. ‘Fuck you. Stay cynical like that and life will punish you.’
‘Ag sorry, Mogz. Jammer. For real. It’s just that Angie and me… we struggle, nè? Even to be in the same room, if I’m honest, if she’s honest, she’ll tell you we struggle.’
‘Well, fucking get a divorce then, you fuck. Do something. Anything. You have to do something.’
‘I do do something. You people might need to accept that I am happy doing this.’
You people. Once it was us, all of us, together. We were powerful. Full. Stuffed. Then it was you people. I was the only one left, still at the bar, still zooming and refocusing. The rest were in meetings. Building houses. Having babies.
You people.
How did I get so angry? So lost? Where did that decade actually go?
Mongezi believed it was all my father. His death. My denial.
Roy, he would say. Roy, you can’t. You have to. You can’t. You must. Look. Look at it. At him. You can’t just. Please. Roy. Please. Please.
But I didn’t look. I would like to say it wasn’t possible. That there was a mess inside that was simply too much. But really I could have.
Still, I chose not to. I turned away. Fuck Russle. Fuck parents. Family. There was never anything for me in that place. I was different. Others might need to look back, down, into the past. Me, I was headed in one direction.
Forward.
And then they let go. Mongezi drifted away. Angie too. Rick. The rest.
Me? I remained in rotation, swirling in tight, personal little circles.
Eileen, and the others like her, were the final evidence of my decade of decline. After I had pissed on my friends, after the wife and I had spat at each other, green and angry, I was adopted by a succession of thin, anxiety-ridden young girls. Girls who liked cats and struggled with men and worked far too well. Organisers. Anxious little beings. Filers of documents. Placers of calls.
And really, it was right. For what was I other than feral? Wild. Hungry. Hunting for affection I would instantly reject.
Eileen’s flat eased my aches and awakened a sense of shame at my own shabby, juvenile existence. The place reeked of adherence to a life regime. From the well-used exercise bike to the bookshelf and its contents (Cormac McCarthy, Josie Blues, Mtutuzeli Matshoba, JG Ballard, Lesego Rampolokeng, Gabriel García Márquez, Vince Khumalo, Gore Vidal, Kagiso Nkuna, Zadie Smith, Zapiro, Calvin and Hobbes), the markers of structure and adult activity were everywhere.
Most attractive was sleeping in her bed, which I did shamelessly, making sure to ruffle the linen in the spare bedroom, where I was supposed to be. Her bed, full of the olfactory pleasures of the female nest, was my sanctuary. I wallowed in it.
I turned off my mobile and dropped naked into her soft, dark-pink bedding. I drained the red wine in my glass, poured another, drank that and went to sleep.
I dreamed of my father. He was chasing me. As usual.
With knives. Belt buckles. Broken bottles. He chased and I ran and it lasted for days, weeks, until eventually he stopped. Hands on knees. Panting. Staring at me. Exhausted. Tears in his eyes.