I stared at my hands. My old man’s hands. My advertising hands. My confused, useless hands. The plane roared. The flames boiled the sky. The metal hissed. We remained in our seats on the towing machine – that squat yellow thing that pulls aeroplanes – that we used to pull our Boeing into place.
Andile ran. Back to the cars. She gunned it out of the airport alone, tires squealing.
The rest of us… we sat for a long time, watching the wreckage burn down. Listening to Beatrice bubbling and frothing.
The next day a weaver bird arrived on the big leafy tree down at the bottom of the garden. He looked young. He started on his first nest, stripping pieces from the adjoining property’s palm tree and flying back over to his construction, threading it all in an intricate, instinctive pattern. I watched him the whole day, from various vantage points. It was so natural, his process. So opposed to the idea of an aeroplane. The threading of matter into nest was very complex, yet innate to the bird. He knocked it off without thinking, whistling and chirping as he went. This strip here, that strip there, weaving and pulling, hanging underneath the bowl for long stretches as the first crucial structural layers were pulled tight.
I dragged a pool chair under the tree, rolled joint after joint and watched.
The house was silent.
The weaver chirped and burped and worked, alternating between his nest and clearing the tree of its leaves so he could see enemies approach. All day the leaves twirled to the ground, gentle little helicopters. The section of the tree that would house him grew sparse, more suited to a bird needing a clear view. By dusk he was damn close to done. The nest wasn’t fully stitched, but the frame had already received several layers.
I left the pool chair under the tree, grabbed a bottle of wine from the cellar and took it to bed.
I lay hugging it under the covers, a forty-something-year-old red, 1996.
It grew hot in my arms. The minutes ticked. Its heat grew steadily and somewhere there, somewhere in the middle of it all, I moved from jumping off the cliff to actually holding the fucking thing, embracing it, clinging to it like a lover. Right before I fell asleep I remember thinking that this bottle wasn’t really my crutch, nor my nemesis. It was my fucking baby. It was my small, innocent child.
The weaver bird was at it again from dawn.
I woke with his first chirp and I could think of nothing else to do but watch him and so I went outside and sat in the cold dawn on that white plastic pool chair and watched.
It took him the better part of the day to finish off, fine-tuning and fine-tuning, leaves twirling, always falling, even as he wove. I began to see him as one of those magicians with their spinning plates. From nest to branch to palm tree and back again.
And then he finished.
I stood and applauded. Whistled a few times. Stamped my feet.
Fats came out of the house in his shorts, stared at me and went back in.
That night I held my bottle of red again, felt its warmth wash me as I lay awake, unable to move, unable to think, surrounded by feathers and wings and falling leaves.
The next morning the nest was in a million torn-up strips on the ground.
CHAPTER 40
Weeping into the basil
I berated Lillian while I pounded Louis Botha, running repeatedly through her list of stupidities and crimes. First was her ambition, her desire for more than we already had, her inability to accept the reality we all, at some stage, should have come to terms with. Lillian just couldn’t let it settle. Her nationality was surely at the root of that thing in her that just had to fly a fucking Boeing off the continent, that just had to smash through the horizon. It was so typically American.
I was also pissed at Tebza, for other reasons, but whenever I thought of him, whenever his face (that crinkling, smiling scar) took form in my mind, I let go and refocused on something simpler.
I shoulder-charged door frames and lounge corners and even the occasional tree – anything that might have caught his own attention. It felt like a mark of respect, a sign of deference and remembrance. My shoulders bruised heavily, a complex purple and yellow weave extending slowly down my back. Each connection with the wall or the door or the pole added weight to the last and the pain built satisfyingly until I could detect a slight but definite chipping of the bone on certain contacts. I relished the bruises, the grinding sensation that had developed when I swung my arms, which I did frequently.
Gerald’s inner soldier needed to take responsibility.
The vibes coming off him were so strong I could almost hear him torturing himself for not… well, for whatever it is he thought he didn’t do. I didn’t see him for days after the crash, weeks possibly. He disappeared. When he returned he was an almost complete blank; there was only the smallest flicker in the far corners of his eyes, when he managed to raise the lids.
Of course we were all blank. We were completely stricken by the reduction in our numbers, by the collapse of our horizon.
Now we were seven.
Fats worked in the gardens and with the cows, supported by Beatrice, with Babalwa looking on, still holding her belly. Gerald drifted. I ran. The twins were around but hard to find.
Two or three days in, Fats collapsed in the garden. I found him weeping into the basil, his feet kicking in a childlike rhythm against the carrots. I wanted to console him, but I was inconsolable myself. I had no words. I stood over his body for a while, reached out to pat his shaking shoulder and then retracted.
As much as Lillian’s obsession with flight ran against my own instincts, as dangerous as I thought her dream was, it was, after all, still a dream. It was a potential future, for her and for us all. It was something to look towards. To sketch out and plan, to calculate and recalculate.
It was something to do.
Now, there was nothing.
We tended the gardens, we milked those fucking cows, we ate and farted and slept and woke up and ran and did it all again. We walked and worked and tended. We did it in the absence of light. In the absence of hope. In the absence of anything.
I kept the bottle of red in my room, on the bedside table – a memento, a monument, perhaps, to a bad, bad time. Sometimes I would just look at it. Sometimes I would take it to bed with me, hugging it for warmth. It was my thing. My one little thing.
My other little thing was the weaver bird, who spent the rest of the summer building nests and tearing them down, obsessively clearing the space around his construction area until a full quarter of the tree was devoid of leaves. I couldn’t figure out what the deal was. The nests all looked good to me, but each one came down in a shredded mess. He built and built and built the whole summer, but never moved in.
An unsettling sadness grew in my gut in relation to that bird. I began to hope actively for each nest. I watched the progress carefully, talking to him as each one went up, advising him as best I could.
But the nests never made it.
With each nest that came down my own sense of futility deepened. Did the weaver know pain? Failure? The tearing of futility against his bright yellow heart? Was he truly content doing this, building nest after nest after nest? Did he question what the fuck he was doing this for? If he did, I felt sad for him, for his failures. If he didn’t, then it was even worse. Then he was just like me, an automaton moving by instinct and genetic force alone.
Babalwa had her baby three months after the crash. Gerald delivered it and cut the cord and slapped its pink ass and it cried and all was well. There was laughter. There were tears. It was a relief to experience it, the joy, to go high before another low. Up before down. And all that.