They named the baby Roy Junior, which was pretty damn odd.
Despite all her planning and her deep desire to perpetuate the species, initially Babalwa was a confused, nervous mother. Roy Jnr did not sit easily on her hip, nor on her tit. She looked bewildered a lot of the time, and Beatrice and Andile – neither of whom were mothers but both of whom had grown up in baby-heavy families – stepped in to guide and coax. Hold him like this. Head like that. Pat like this, on the small of the back, gently.
Fats emerged. He beamed. He made fatherly noises. He scuttled around trying to help without being able to. On occasion he just sat with his feet up, arms behind his head, looking like he had achieved something. Javas called it his dream phase, and we laughed. But below the laugh lay the understanding that we would all have to get breeding soon. Babalwa had been on point all along, even way back in PE. Now that we had lost a pair, the maths was dangerous. Three females and four males. We would have to breed vigorously and frequently across all possible combinations.
Babalwa sketched it out for us: four to the power of three was just enough to get a compounding dynamic going, but we would all need to cross-breed. There could be no exceptions.
‘It’s not about fucking,’ she asserted as we clucked nervously over her diagram. ‘It’s about our species. We need to breed.’
‘They can just jerk off, then we pour it down,’ Andile offered sensibly. ‘I knew a few lesbians who did it that way. It works. You don’t need a lab and you definitely don’t need to fuck. Sorry, Roy.’ She laughed and patted my hand.
‘The only thing left is a decision,’ I said. ‘Are we now a breeding colony? Not that I’m opposed, but if we’re going to run a baby farm we’re all going to need to be involved for the rest of time. Our time anyway. It’s a big decision.’
‘Are there any other options?’ Babalwa rocked Roy Jnr in her arms.
‘There are always options. We could take Lillian’s plan B and go through Africa to find Europeans. We could just let ourselves die off. We have options.’
I was alone in my diffidence. The others had accepted their duty. We ended the discussion. Andile was already pregnant. The fences were up. The farm was being populated.
After a shaky start, Babalwa took well to motherhood, and the collective of mothers was effective. The three shared little Roy and the infant-care duties, while the men milked cows and managed the veggie patch with renewed vigour.
I kept running.
Whenever I could free myself, and after I had run as far as I could, I drove. The others seemed busy enough, content enough, to revolve around Houghton and the farm, the babies and the cows. I cruised through the city, including Sandton, probing at the glass façades, the gawking, empty corporate monoliths.
‘You’re a little bit mad, Roy, nè?’ Beatrice said to me after another wander. Since the crash she had started speaking to me, rather than across me or at me. ‘I mean, I know we’re all crazy now, living crazy, but you’re the real thing, nè?’
‘I was in advertising.’
‘Fats was in advertising.’
‘He was a suit. He wasn’t smoking crack to get the next idea.’
She tossed her head as she laughed, twirled a few strands of hair with long fingers. Beatrice had some warmth to her. Or – let me rephrase – I was noticing her warmth. I could think of worse things than discovering what lay beneath. I wasn’t sure whether Gerald was of the same mindset. I tried not to think about it as I watched her breasts jiggle lightly in harmony with her amusement. I made a mental note to watch her more closely, more often.
Beatrice had cheekbones that held her face together – they gave it reason and shape, a noble and serious structure. Her use of make-up had steadily shrunk to more selective applications, and she was better off for it. I started to notice her actual skin, which was a rich olive and not at all as pockmarked or acne-ridden as I had assumed. Her obsession with heels had also faded, another considerable improvement. She had come down to size, literally. Less the CEO and more the human being. Her breasts were moderate, her body lean – but that was the case for all of us now. Fat was something from another time. She let loose her hair from the intensity of the railway braids, allowing it to morph slowly into a soft afro. Unlike Fats’s fro, which even when physically subdued was all dominance and power, hers bubbled up and then cascaded down loosely. It was feminine and accommodating.
The ‘you’re mad, aren’t you?’ conversation was, I gradually discovered, a purposeful entrance into my world.
Suddenly Beatrice was around more often. When I hoed the garden, she was there. As I pulled on my Nikes, she asked if she would be able to keep up if she tried. When I went for a drive, she was in the passenger seat, right thigh inching closer to mine, suggestions of perfume lingering in the cab the next day.
I responded in kind, but it worried me. Not politically – I had long ago made peace with the gritty reality of household politics, sexual and otherwise – but personally. I looked in the mirror, saw the hole in my mouth and knew I wasn’t worthy of, or ready for, an actual, adult relationship.
My life had always been solo, and singular. Even when I was married to Angie I was essentially alone. As Beatrice inched closer, my inner cunt began to hatch a counter-attack.
As he always did.
Beatrice was all Model C. Her accent, her neoliberal-CEO world view, her jeans, her heels. Her hands, most of all. Even sans nail polish, her fingers were immaculate, the nails long yet clipped, the tips always clean white despite the gardening and slaughtering, the plucking and skinning.
But Model C isn’t how you look. It’s how you think. I’d heard that many times before. At tertiary. At work. Also from Andile, herself markedly un–Model C. Model C is about marriage and children and financial planning. It’s about recycling and donations to charity. It’s afternoon braais with big fluffy salads.
All these things were inherent in Beatrice. They shone from her. Perhaps more so because she was born so far away from it all. Beatrice forced herself into the Model C life from the distance of Beaufort West. She made it happen through her personal force. I was also Model C, of course, but I had spent my life running away from it. So I ran away from her as well, yet again a slave to instinct.
The planning of the baby farm had opened up ideas in both of us. If we were going to go as far as jerking off into cups and pouring it down vaginas, well, we may just as well have gotten naked.
So we did.
Well, actually, we didn’t get naked that often. Initially we fucked in the 4x4, all fumblings and fingers and premature grunts. We progressed to parks and other vacant spaces, and we always kept it away from the house, where it didn’t really fit – where freedom and fantasies didn’t belong.
And that, in summary, is how I got Beatrice pregnant.
Everyone knew we were fucking, and we didn’t try to hide it. Babalwa caught my eye with regular grins and eyebrow movements with implications. Fats played it straight, the twins also kept it as straight as possible and Gerald simply disappeared from view.
‘Poor Gerald,’ Beatrice murmured abstractedly as she put my cock in her mouth. I was driving. It was some kind of fetish for her – vehicular sex. I accommodated it easily.
‘Let’s leave Gerald out of it,’ I suggested as she worked away. ‘It’ll be poor Roy soon enough.’
She pulled out of the dive, keeping a hand on my dick. ‘What you mean by that?’
‘Well, we’re not exactly getting married here, are we?’