Now I experienced personally why it all worked so easily. I also felt that essential change in perspective, inclusive of sudden rushes of empathy for, and an overwhelming sense of connection with, my father. Through the babies, and especially through Jabu, I now understood Russle Fotheringham not as the decisive force in my life but simply as another man trying. A man as helpless as I was with this thing in my arms. A man also leaning into the wind.
In this way, Jabu gave me peace. Not lasting peace. Not the kind of peace I could carry with me forever, but a short, sharp glimpse into my own demise.
Meanwhile, Fats launched another plan.
This time he wanted to extend the house to accommodate the babies and their future lives. The plan involved, naturally, a great deal of mapping and red ink, but at its core it was expansion across the ridge – a breaking down of the walls that separated the four properties adjacent to the mansion to create a mega complex. A mega mansion. Fats envisioned a sprawling property, an interlinking of many different dimensions, a space big enough to accommodate the various intricate family structures of our future.
I had long been claustrophobic in the house and had envied the twins their garden cottage. We never had enough power to allow anyone to move further out, but with Fats’s grand expansion things would change. I put my flag onto the small (in the Houghton sense) property perched on the far right corner of the ridge. Really it was quite a large house with a right-angled view of the north and the west. Its aesthetic was of posed humility, the gradations and reaches of the place all tucked neatly into a single-storey façade that dropped down the cliff face to form a second and third floor below the first.
Given the fact that I was the only partnerless adult, the odd man, the perpetual jerker into cups, I proposed the corner property as my payback, a karmic debt I hoped we would all agree was due to the guy with the guillotine tooth and several serious character flaws.
As we pounded away at the walls separating the properties, in my off-hours I packed my meagre possessions into boxes and carted them over to my new house, one by one.
I was leaving.
I was coming home.
As the babies took their place in our world, I followed the path carved out before me by billions of men. Activities and tickles and rubs and walks through the farm and lessons in anything and everything, as if I really did know and understand. As the years ticked by I found myself delivering lectures on the fly, ranging freely over subjects I knew almost nothing about. Roy Jnr would gape at me, kick his legs, frown, possibly burp in encouragement. Jabu never really gave a shit – her eyes always drifting to the left, looking for other, better things. Thabang was polite. He paid attention while looking bored.
Our relationships weren’t parent to child, they were person to person. I wasn’t guiding them or raising them; I was hoping to befriend them. I wanted to impress them. This was the most profound shock of fatherhood – the gradual, creeping understanding that they were my little friends. Above all else I wanted them to like me. I wanted to see them smile. I wanted to show them as much of my world as I could.
Roy Jnr, marginally the eldest, took on the role of all oldest children, bashing his head against authority with a steady frequency. Roy was the quickest to challenge, the meanest in a fight and the scariest when charting the rivers and valleys of his own moods. Publicly I treated him as my own – his name gave me licence. Privately I considered him to be mostly mine as well. The child I should have had with Babalwa, but didn’t.
While raised within the general brood, Thabang grew within the specific range of his parents. Andile always held his eye, and Javas his hand, and he benefited from having as parents the two most sensible and stable of our bunch. From a tiny infant Thabang was steady, assured and calm. Even in a crisis, he was measured. His tantrums were delivered with calculation and efficiency. He was a good follower, which meant, I thought, he would end up being a good leader.
Jabu was a little shit. She caused trouble with a smile. She manipulated wherever possible and was always the one to initiate conflict – and reap the rewards. She was constantly drifting away to places she shouldn’t, then allowing herself to be pulled back, with a beatific, adventurous smile on her face.
‘The result of a scratchy union,’ I said to Beatrice as Jabu tried to leap off her hip and into my arms over a distance of several metres. It was a regular habit of hers, leaping from the arms of whoever was holding her.
‘She can’t help it if her father’s a prick.’ Beatrice laughed a serious laugh.
‘Do you believe that kids are an even mix of their parents? I’m never sure.’
‘What else would they be?’ She heaved Jabu off her right hip and flung her in my direction. ‘We shouldn’t drag babies around when we do this. Take her, please. Asseblief.’
We were pushing the cows back into their paddock for the night. I wrestled our child into place under my right arm. ‘I don’t know. I mean, obviously Jabu is a mix of you and me, but when I talk to her and watch her move she seems to be a lot more than that as well. Like, she has our genes but she’s also a complete individual. Then I wonder if we’re born as individuals with our own place and point on the planet, or whether we’re born into a lineage and that that’s the real point. The lineage—’
‘Shit, Roy.’ Beatrice slammed the gate and counted the cows one last time. ‘I think you think too much.’ Her finger danced across the open space between us. ‘I’d hate to know what goes on inside that head of yours when you’re not talking.’
‘I think I need company.’ The words landed in a Freudian heap between us.
‘Don’t give me your bullshit, Roy.’ She swivelled around and marched back to the house, slapping her ass as she walked. ‘You had it and you didn’t want it,’ she called over her shoulder.
Jabu wrestled under my arm like a sea lion.
‘Check that ass, Jabu, check that ass,’ I said as Beatrice drifted out of focus. She was dressed in a simple, colourful skirt, probably an Oriental Plaza wrap-around. The make-up and heels had completely disappeared. She was natural and farmy, like a black diamond Bokomo rusks ad, or one of those laxative specials, all flowers and flowing gait. She could easily have clamped a stalk of wheat between her teeth.
Jabu finally managed to break out of my arms, still reaching at Beatrice. I caught her only semi-causally. ‘I could have tapped that, Jabu. I could have tapped that for the rest of time,’ I said to her as I stuffed her back under my armpit. She burped. I watched Beatrice go, feeling surges of something akin to regret. But it wasn’t quite that, either. Maybe it was loss. With a bit of jealousy. The numbers were never going to add up. There was always going to be someone left out.
I had made sure that that someone was me.
Babalwa fell pregnant again a few months after Roy Jnr was born – a fact that both pleased and irked her. Ideally, according to her grand plan, her next baby should have been fathered by either myself, Gerald or Javas, via the cum-cup method. She immediately drew up an extensive schedule, backed by consultation with Beatrice and Andile, both of whom were far more committed to the idea of pouring a lukewarm cup of alien semen down themselves than to the reality.
‘You just tell me when and where to wank, and I’ll do it’ was Fats’s only comment.
‘Don’t be such a prude,’ Babalwa chided. ‘You know I’ll help you.’
‘Public ejaculations’ – Fats glared at her – ‘are not really my thing.’