‘Well, ja,’ Babalwa shot back. ‘None of this is my thing, but if we want our grandchildren to skip the whole four-eyes-and-eight-toes thing, we have to do it, nè?’
According to the schedule, the next pairings were Andile + Roy and Gerald + Beatrice. Which meant I would be the first to broach the cup.
Andile didn’t want to be rushed. ‘We’ve got all the time in the world’ was her stated position. I didn’t object. We agreed that ‘when Andile is ready’ it would happen, with Babalwa continually stressing the dangers of a repeat of her and Fats’s mistake. ‘Just pay attention!’ she barked, frequently. ‘Use the condoms, check your rhythms.’
CHAPTER 42
Blacks, browns, beiges and a few whites
I cleared out Tebza’s room. It had been two years since the crash and we were inching painfully towards the subject. To remembering the people. Talking about them. Threading them back into our ideas of our lives. Rooms had to be cleared and cleaned. Possessions boxed and/or distributed and/or thrown out. I volunteered for Tebza’s.
It was pitiful. Pads and mobiles and associated accessories. Clothes still piled up on the floor in what looked like three separate heaps – dirty, clean and transitional. A few scraps of paper on the pine desk, covered in water marks and rings from the various cups and containers. Scribbled notes and strings of IP addresses, each a minor variation of the last.
Bed unmade.
Cupboards empty, save for a few extra machines waiting in the far reaches of the shelves. The Energade bottle festering in the corner of the darkest shelf.
I scooped the clothes and the duvet and sheets into a few black bags, tied them up and lugged them over to the balcony and threw them off, straight down the cliff. I poured the nano piss down the sink. His pads I carted to my room and opened up one by one. Most of them were raw terminals running a basic open-source OS. Folders empty, no files. Shells. The last pad was different, though. It was his personal machine from the pre-days: email, designs, docs, music.
I started with email. The in-box ran several thousand mails deep, well past two years before it all stopped. Between the avalanche of corporate requests and replies, revisions and reversions, lay clues to a deeper life. Snappy one-liners from Joy, the hack girl, recurred in the four months before the end:
Sunday. 8pm. Keen? Bring music, naps, sense of anticipation…
j
And his reply:
Sho. Armed. Equipped. Metaphysical gumboots on.
Laytas
Tebza.
Closer to the end they were more connected.
Tebza
How you?
Feeling like maybe it’s time to move on. In my life I mean. Feeling stuck. Need adult things. Career progression. House down payment. How come other people seem so completely grown up and rooted and I’m just not?
Anyway. Gonna lay low for a while. Cook food. Eat it.
Holler back
j
And the reply:
Hear you. Feel you. Need to watch TV I think. TV is always the answer. Not sure about the questions.
I call.
Out
T
Little lines. People talking about small things. TV and weekend drugs and creeping fears. It made me want to cry.
Around the same time there were a few hospital exchanges. Booking forms and permission slips and insurance questionnaires. Cosmetic auditory enhancement, his procedure was called. The date was for about two months after he met Joy. A morning procedure, out in the afternoon. No insurance.
Otherwise, his folders were as folders generally are. Spreadsheets and investment product brochures. A million and one overviews of various trading algorithms. The ‘Instamatic’: ‘80% odds of a 25% return over 90 days through a considered focus on the performance potential of weather futures in the East African boom economy’. The documents stacked up. I scrolled and peeked and scrolled and read and glimpsed and scrolled.
Deep within his 2033 Potentials folder, which contained many hundreds of files of potential sales opportunities, was a folder called Youth, and inside that a string of typical Global Youth promos. Kids in hoodies with raised arms, pointing fingers, Molotov cocktails.
If not now, when?
Money is the only freedom
Release capital now
One poster was a midnight shot of graf rebels standing back and watching their stream on the walls of the stock exchange in Sandton. The video they’re watching shows men in rags digging through suburban garbage bins. The shot is just close enough to make out a Woolworths bag in one of the graf boys’ hands, inside it a lot of bright-looking apples. The strap line on the poster: ‘Action Counts: Johannesburg, South Africa, 2032.’
I examined the graf rebels carefully. Their shoes, their shoulders, their posture. There was nothing definitive. Tebza could have been simply an online fan – a downloader of posters. He could also have been personally spraying the stock-exchange walls at night. It was impossible to tell.
The Global Youth verbiage went on and on. Schematics for a stock-exchange jammer algorithm. More schematics for a youth-fund trading algo, the introductory text speaking of the need for centralised planning and funding to support youth activism and the fight against capital retention.
I dumped the empty machines in the corner of the computer room. I kept Tebza’s pad with me. It held clues to his life I intended to follow.
We locked up the empty rooms and held a bonfire of all additional clothing and organic matter. It turned into a funeral-type thing where Fats spoke out loud, full of purpose and meaning, while we all looked and felt solemn. It had been two years, but the pain of our stupidity was still fresh.
Everybody cried.
The kids too.
We went through the daily rituals and then we all went home – the couples to their beds and me to mine. Sometimes, in the darker nights, I would reach for my bottle of wine and take it in with me. Hug it and hold it.
But I also tried, to the best of my ability, to leave that shit behind.
I had come to view my idea of myself as the lonely drunk, the drifter and the outsider, as a hindrance. An indulgence. I slipped back sometimes, but mostly I focused on pushing away from it, in other, more positive directions.
I started building a library in the basement of my new house, which I had successfully moved into and powered up. I rekindled my PE habit of raiding buildings and houses for books. The houses of St Patrick Road and Munro Drive yielded an expected but nonetheless valuable haul of classics, academic stuff and straight pulp. I used the armoured van to go house to house, smashing straight through gates and walls and front doors, PE style, until I found the studies. The good stuff was generally in the studies, base camps for retreating husbands and fathers. History and Africana and international relations and so on. But I wasn’t picky. I took it all. The Cosmo and Car mags and the Wilbur Smiths and the finance textbooks.
My new house was all wooden floors, pressed ceilings and stone floors. The wood was offset by off-white walls and curtains and framed line drawings with dashes of watercolour. Jenny Crawford, judging by her cupboard, was as predictably stylish as her house. She worked off a core set of dresses, skirts and blouses ranging across the basic colours – blacks, browns, beiges and a few whites. Her collection of scarves was as enormous as it was colourful, and she obviously used these, her bags and her jewellery to add the flash. She was a good-looking late-forties woman, with dyed brown hair cut into an angled bob, a trim figure and a cardboard cut-out husband, David, CEO of a nutraceuticals company, Zest. The house was covered in a loosely scattered layer of supplement bottles, including a generous proportion of ginseng pills and sensual massage oils.