As many times as I had been in their domain, however, I had never had even a second of this kind of privacy. Now the bathroom took on new echoes. Suddenly Andile’s landscapes held the voice and heart of their owner. Her sound and her smell surrounded me. It was like she was there with me, watching, questioning, examining my thin little mlungu legs as I sat on the toilet seat and wrapped my fist around a limp, uninspired dick. I pulled and stretched and eventually, half-heartedly, delivered.
Then I ran – I literally sprinted the fifteen metres that separated us. (We had agreed that the cooling of the junk was the creepiest part of the whole thing. When I imagined Andile’s horror, it was always the thought of the cold, glutinous substance that creeped me out…) Quickly I passed the cup over to a waiting Javas, who disappeared behind their door.
I hung around for five minutes, and they emerged, hand in hand, Javas leading, smiling. Andile pulling her cheeks backward.
‘Ugh,’ she said, then detached herself from Javas and gave me a long, warm hug, eventually holding me at arm’s length, by the shoulders. ‘We did well, Roy, we did well.’
‘It just better fucking take, eh?’ I ruffled her hair, then thumped Javas on his muscled shoulder. ‘The donor life… eish.’
Andile flipped into a handstand against the passage wall, allowing her skirt to fall over her head and flashing her white panties and well-formed legs. I blushed and looked away.
‘My gogo always said you must,’ she explained in a barely discernible, skirt-covered muffle.
CHAPTER 43
We carried on
We lost Jabu at the next winter slaughter. I say that like she went wandering through the forest and we couldn’t find her, but really we killed her. Gerald and I killed her. It’s as simple and brutal as that.
I had jerked into the cup for four months running. Andile and Javas had been steadfast and magnanimous in their reception of my spunk. Eventually, in month five, it took and we had another one on the go. We kept it mostly to our ourselves. The others knew we were engaged with it, this strangely intimate process, but sensed we were best left treating it in our own way. Babalwa would raise the occasional query, and we’d report back dutifully, but it never became a subject of public discussion. We had, by silent agreement, sanctified the thing, which was really the only way to go about it. Baby creation is rooted in love or lust, the basic human connections. Take these away and you have something too strange to grasp, and too powerful to brush off.
The big slaughter had taken place annually, and incrementally more professionally, each year in July. Year on year we had improved, but in that first year our failures were many and miserable. Gerald, for all his calm instruction, slipped with the gun at the last second, shooting the cow through the side of its head once we’d looped it down to the iron floor-ring. Instead of crashing to its knees it wailed and kicked crazily at the closing darkness, nearly decapitating Javas in the process. Blood sprayed out of the angular slot in its head, and in the twenty seconds it took Gerald to compose himself and get another round off we all saw life flashing before us. There was a distinct possibility we would all go down with the cow, pulled into a death of hoofs and screams. Eventually Gerald got the bullet in the right place and the beast crashed, but we were far too long with the throat-slitting and the blood didn’t drain immediately. Our slaughter master spent the rest of the day chastising himself and warning us that our meat was going to be off. We shook the fear off gradually. (Andile clung to her cricket stump for a good time after.)
The next time it was much easier. Gerald put the bullet straight through and the cow’s eyes slammed shut. We skinned and pulled and gutted and carved. The next day we did the pig and used its entrails for sausage skins, Javas and Gerald guiding us in turn.
With operational success the slaughter became something of a celebration. A time of year to anticipate. A marker for us all. Another year gone. Another three freezers’ worth of meat. Another slash against the bedpost of our lost society. And yes, we used it all, once we had learned how to extract it. The tongue and brains, the offal and the kidneys, the heart and all the rest. Beatrice was still finding good packaged flour and she made pies. Rows and rows of pies. Steak and kidney, like granny would.
The fourth slaughter after the plane crash (this was how we had started marking time, not with a calendar but according to the happenings, the epochs of our own lives) we killed my first child. A child created not with cooling cups of semen but with love, albeit of the temporary and fractious sort.
Did I say we killed Jabulani? I mean I. I did it. I pushed the domino forward, tilted its ass over its head, and then it was too late to do anything but watch the falling.
‘Daddy,’ she piped up. ‘I watch?’
She was serious, completely intent on the wondrous butchery process.
‘Ja, Jabu,’ I said. ‘But you need to be very, very careful, nè? There are lots of sharp knives around and you could get hurt, so you need to stand here.’ I marked off a spot about five metres back of the concrete area, on the cusp of the cricket field/paddock. ‘This where you stay, yes?’ I ground the mark into the turf with my heel. ‘You stay right here and you don’t move.’
She nodded seriously. Several times. I hadn’t fully learned, yet, that children lie, just like everyone else. That they also dream of, and lust after, better things. And nod and plan accordingly.
Her eyes were big and brown, like the cow. They slammed shut in exactly the same way.
We had grown self-assured. We had slaughtered year after year and by now we all knew what we were doing, why we were doing it and how it would pan out. We were in control.
1. Jabu creeps forward, inch by tiny inch, to get a better view. She’s not freaked out by the blood and guts; she’s seeing chops and steaks and cuts.
2. Gerald jumps back to avoid some kind of spray. He’s using the wrist-strapped knife. The blade has become part of his arm. He has forgotten he is no longer all man.
3. His knife arm jerks back in anticipation of the rest of his body and the blade slices straight through Jabu’s curious neck.
4. There are no screams. Just a quiet thump. A little body falls softly to the ground.
Let me tell you now just how far we had come. Let me explain the terrible distance we had travelled away from ourselves, from everything we knew.
Let me explain what we did. We wept.
We tore our hair out.
We buried the little body.
We said a prayer to a strange, absent god.
And then we carried on.
IV
CHAPTER 44
I wish I had written it down at the time