Which wasn’t that often.
‘You still think of your people?’ Gerald asked me, apropos of nothing, as we headed to the bottom of St John’s for creeper maintenance. ‘I think of mine all the time,’ he went on. ‘All the time. My wife. My kids. My mother. My family. I never thought of them that much when they were here, and not even so often just after they were gone, in the beginning, but now I can’t stop. I want to know where they are. Where they went. Is it like that for you?’ His right elbow rested on the bakkie’s window pane, jutting slightly out into the passing breeze. He was driving so slowly we were almost stationary.
‘I didn’t really have that many people, to be honest,’ I admitted. ‘Bitch of an ex-wife. Dead father. Mother I never really knew, so no real extended family…’
Gerald was frustrated. ‘So now? What’s it like for you? I’m feeling like the deeper we go, the more babies and the better we get at the farming, the worse it is for me personally. I want to go back to how it was. I feel so alone, I think about just ending it.’
‘I’ve thought that too,’ I said. And I had. Many times. Yet it was always an abstract kind of thought, more philosophical than anything else. Gerald, on the other hand, was not exuding a philosophical vibe. He was all nuts and dangerously practical bolts.
‘And? What stops you?’ he asked.
‘Dunno. Guess I just can’t override that human thing. Survival. The need to keep on.’
‘I tell you, Roy, I tell you…’ Gerald stopped the bakkie. ‘It’s becoming real for me. The question. That question. I mean, they must have gone somewhere. It’s not like they died, they just disappeared. Which means that there must be something else besides this, besides what we know now. And then I think, well, why not just end it? I’d probably end up in some other world, living in some other way. Maybe I’d end up with them, wherever they are, and worst case is I just die, and would that be so bad, compared to this?’
‘What about Beatrice?’ I had to ask.
‘Beatrice is fine. She’s a good woman. I have no problems with Beatrice. But I live with her because I must.’
There were several levels to our conversation. Around this time, Gerald would surely have been noticing that Beatrice had begun paying me the odd visit, again.
We were breeding according to Babalwa’s master plan, using the established cup method for all combinations save for existing couples. But my experience with Gerald and Beatrice was fundamentally different from that with Fats and Babalwa, and the twins. Gerald refused to participate – he left it up to us, and thus, thanks to our sexual history, the masturbation and insemination took on distinctly erotic overtones. As it turned out, the middleman was essential if the exercise was going to be emotionally neutralised. With Gerald refusing to play his position, Beatrice and I developed our own unique and not unpleasant variation. Her fingers brushing mine as she took the cup. Me waiting, lingering, in fact, to make sure she had no issues in transfer. A soft, warm peck on the cheek that lasted too long. The smell of her lips.
And so, inevitably I suppose, we replaced the formal insemination sessions with a visit here, a pop-in there. She would always arrive in a sarong wrap, one of several floral patterned numbers she had grown into over the years, maybe for morning coffee, or for an early evening nightcap. I suspected she made sure Gerald was somewhere off the property at the time, or at least otherwise engaged, but I also never asked. To be honest, I never really said much at all. She would sit across from me in the lounge of my library house, or on the porch if it was evening and dark enough, and we would exchange idle, meaningless chat while ever so slowly, in tiny increments, she would pull the wrap up and let her fingers dangle and drift over her thighs while we talked. We would sway like that until the subtext took complete control and I rose, or she rose, and we fell on each other in a violent yet soft, crazy yet logical, union.
I would like to say it was a temporary thing, brought on by the insemination. A casual mistake. A regretful yet pleasant series of accidents. But it wasn’t. It was our thing, and once we had started we carried on – intermittently and with all the breaks and spaces that rise and fall naturally with life – for decades. Only once did she reveal anything at all about the nature of her relationship with Gerald.
‘Gerald,’ she announced out of the blue in one of our post-coital hazes, her head balanced on my chest, ‘has wet dreams. He always has. I used to get jealous of them, the dreams, but he says our sex life is so messed up and infrequent that they’re generally about me. The dreams. He says he likes it that way – he gets to fuck me more, in more adventurous ways, than in the real world. I’m not sure I believe him. But it’s a good story.’
I pushed my hand through her hair.
It was a good story.
Gerald turned to face the wheel, stared out the window, watched the rain clouds build all purple and pregnant in the west.
‘You grew up here, nè?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘You ever remember the rain coming from the south? People used to talk about that often. How it always came from the south. You remember the south rain?’
‘My father grew up with it. He would talk about it,’ I said. ‘I guess I just caught the edge of the old, so I never noticed the change that much. It still comes from the south sometimes. Classic old thunderstorm. Roll in, roll out.’
‘Since I got here, to Jozi, it’s from the west,’ Gerald said, talking mostly to himself. ‘You build an idea in your mind how things are. What the limits are. You think one thing. That we’ll get between this much and that much rain. Or, like, the earth is full of people. Then bang. Gone. Your wife. Your children. Your parents. Gone. Rain patterns. Gone.’ He shook his head, started the bakkie and edged it forward.
‘We need you, Gerald. You know that, eh?’ I couldn’t leave the suicide dangling. And it was true. We couldn’t afford more losses, of any sort.
He snorted. ‘What, in case you need to kill any more small girls?’
‘Accidents. They happen. ’Specially in our kind of set-up.’
‘You didn’t feel the blade go in. I’ll never be able to forget it. The feeling. It’s impossible.’ He stopped the bakkie again, two perfectly formed droplets racing in parallel down to his beard. ‘It’s everywhere with me. That feeling. The slicing. I can’t get rid of it. I can’t sleep.’
‘You talked to anyone about it? Beatrice?’
‘We do jigsaw puzzles. We clean and wash and sometimes have sex. We boil eggs.’
‘Jesus, Gerald.’ I gripped his shoulder. It was the only thing I could think of doing. I shook, trying to get him to look at me. ‘Gerald, fuck, you can’t just keep this all inside. We’re in it now, all of us. Jabu was all of our mistake. It wasn’t you. It was me. It was Fats. It was all of us. You must know that.’
He snorted the snot back up his nose, then took a second to look at me, his lower lip trembling.
I thought suddenly of Beatrice and her thighs, opening for me silently, her fingers calling, an impossibly weighty force.
‘Thanks, Roy,’ he said. ‘Thank you. I needed to hear that.’
‘You gonna need to hear it again, broe. You gonna need to hear it again.’
CHAPTER 46
Indecipherable intellectual potential
By the time Lydia was born Fats had grown round. He wasn’t fat – none of us were – but his body embraced the shape of middle age, thickening around the gut, the upper arms, the chest.
His roundness wasn’t just physical. He had also lost (let go of?) many of his edges. He was slower to shout, slower to command and, frankly, slower to care.