They appeared childless, David and Jenny Crawford. The spare rooms were structured and neat and waiting for activity, which, by the looks of things, seldom occurred. Jenny – a marketing consultant – seemed to have spent most of her time in an office drowning under the weight of ancient business magazines. Harvard Business Review. Fast Company. The Media. Her pinboard was drilled firmly into the wall by schematics and spider diagrams and brand-positioning statements. I sat behind her desk, powered up her desktop and looked out over the stone balcony to northern Johannesburg. I clicked around her emails and folders, but there was nothing other than the expected. Musically, the returns were worse than average. All old-school stuff from the ’90s and 2000s. Freshlyground. Kings of Leon. Coldplay. I turned off the machine and sat, letting the afternoon sun bake my chest. This, I decided, would be my study too.
And I would use it.
The second floor I reserved as a reading station for mobiles and portables, as a music centre and as a photo-storage facility. I strung up ten different extensions and plugged in all the chargers I could find, catering to most brands and models. About thirty-five in total. Then I set up ten central fifty-terabyte music servers, and another six for photographs.
And then I archived.
They started to call me the librarian. Ask the librarian, they said, in the days when the kids began to ask about things. Check in the library. Ask Roy.
In my own time, after I had finished work and archiving, when I was sitting on my cool stone porch, watching the sun set over the Northcliff Dome, I became very attached to philosophy and home decor, in no specific order.
The best philosophy was wrapped up in history. It was, in effect, storytelling from a particular era. The worst was the pure sort. University stuff. Sartre. Nietzsche. Bertrand Russell.
The stories came to life up there on my hill. The texts would conjure the voices of people. The sounds of life as it used to be: trucks downshifting on the highway; washing machines and lawnmowers and crying children. I read a lot of Africana initially, following up on the sketchy stuff I had devoured at the Eastern Cape lodge, before I found Babalwa. After the Africana I drifted at random, picking up whatever I found in front of me. Mercenaries in West Africa. Paul Theroux on a train. Naipaul on America. JM Coetzee on Australia. It was the reality I was after. The reportage. Actions and transactions. The writers themselves… they were pitifully out of context. So self-assured, so assuming, so completely wrong. Unable – any of them – to imagine what might be coming. The home magazines offered a more tactile distraction. I carefully clipped out wives and husbands gazing at their lounges/gardens/homes. I stuck them to the side wall of my study in an oily collage – my own little monument to the great dream of family. A final nod towards the ridiculous idea of design, to the vanity of balance and style. When I ran out of room on the wall, I collected the cuttings in an apple box, which grew to two apple boxes and, over the years, three, then four, stacking up next to each other. It was a harmless compulsion – as I clipped, I considered creating some kind of artwork, something massive and tangible, like Javas’s pieces, something permanent, some recognition for the grandchildren of the cult of the interior. But I never did. The boxes filled, overflowed and started again. They’re still with me now. Next to me. Keeping me company. Maybe someone will find them one day and appreciate the beauty of those cashmere ladies. The wholeness of their manicured hands.
Babalwa’s second pregnancy came and went, resulting in Lydia. This time the birth was complicated. Babalwa bled heavily afterwards, and it was, Beatrice repeatedly informed us, touch and go. She cramped badly for a few weeks after Lydia arrived, prompting Andile and Beatrice to hit Joburg Gen for some morphine. Having known a few junkies in my time, I stopped them from using it.
We ran a lot in that week. Up and down with water and blankets and shit, just like in the movies. It was OK when we could run, and conversely the hardest when we just had to sit and listen to the pain. Gerald had brought cigars, and while we waited we smoked them like they were cigarettes, smacking our lungs for something to do, to give us something different to feel.
Personally, I remained narcissistic and inward. Each hug and worried brow or pat on the shoulder during Babalwa’s troubles revealed again to me how empty the core of my own life was, how devoid of similar contact. I would go back to my house depressed, flick on the light and stand there lost, choking on emptiness.
I read. I filed. I archived.
I clipped out and stuck on.
I looked out.
I waited.
I talked out loud. Long sentences, sometimes rambling, sometimes insightful, sometimes coherent.
After the panic and chaos of Lydia’s birth, Babalwa steadily increased the pressure, month on month, closing in on Andile and myself. Jabu was over two years old, as were Thabang and Roy Jnr. It was time.
I resisted.
I wanted to start with someone else – Beatrice or Babalwa would have been fine, but to start with Andile and Javas felt like treachery. Adultery, but sadder. Pathetic even. The idea of Andile having to open up to take my seed while Javas waited… I hated it. But Babalwa pushed us closer together until I visited Javas and Andile a few nights in a row for supper, a gradual wind-up to what needed to be done. We sat around the table and ate – me the uncle come to dinner. We talked of many things, but never the real thing, until the third night, when Javas finally, thankfully, broke it open. ‘Babalwa’s right you know,’ he said, right at me. ‘She’s right. We have to. We have no choice. It has to happen.’
‘That’s fine,’ I said, nausea hitting my gut. ‘It’s fine, Javas. I know it must be done, but what if it doesn’t take? I mean, I can handle the idea of having to do it, but Jesus, having to do it again and again… It makes me feel ill.’
‘Ag fok, Roy.’ Andile adopted a thick mock-Afrikaans accent while forking a broccoli head very practically into her mouth. ‘We need to get over it. We have to – all of us – and if that means eight times in a row, then that’s it. We’ve been through worse. You’ve been through worse. So have I. We’ll get hard about it – ’scuse the pun – and make it happen.’
And so we did.
We appointed a day and an hour and a place. The three of us met in the cottage kitchen, then split to the two main bathrooms. ‘We keep it clinical,’ Javas said. Crossing the threshold into the bathroom, which was decorated in various shades of brown and which featured a triptych of abstract black-and-white KwaZulu landscapes created by Andile, I felt like a transgressor, an invader.
I had been inside the twins’ cottage many times over the years. It was a journey into a different, parallel world. A world where tiny metal dwarfs – Javas’s creations – stood hiding within the leafy protection of well-watered pot plants. A world where not only did the colours match, but they actually seemed designed to work together. Andile picked her interior battles carefully, making sure to give each item the room it needed not only to breathe, but to dominate. My favourite was a large-scale black-and-white print of the Sandton riots, hanging in the lounge. Andile had found it about to rot in an artist’s studio in the city. It was typical of the Sandton-riot genre: hoodies, face masks, raised arms with petrol bombs, etc. But the artist – Mpho, she said his name was – had woven microscopic detail through everything. Tiny shocked faces at the stock-exchange windows. Infinitesimal pockmark dings in the parked BMWs. Full and accurate road maps, which you could actually read with a magnifying glass, in the hands of the global youth.