‘I think you need to go back for Sthembiso,’ Javas said. He was amused by my eagerness. ‘He’ll never forgive you if you go in without him.’
Sthembiso was ready and waiting, fourth day in a row. With him were Lydia, English, Roy Jnr and Thabang. They were playing some kind of bastardised version of hopscotch at the bottom of the driveway, which Sthembiso killed as I drove in, scuffing through the chalk with his bare heel while English was in mid-jump. She launched the beginnings of a tantrum, which he diffused with an easy arm around her shoulder and a word in her little ear.
Lydia and Thabang and Roy Jnr fell into the back of the bakkie, Sthembiso and English took the prime spots up front, with me – a front seat obviously the prize with which Sthembiso had quelled English’s tears.
‘So, my dear.’ I took her four-year-old hand in mine. ‘Are you feeling all Eeeyuie?’ I stretched the word and pulled a face at the end, by which time all of us were grimacing and squealing. She squeezed my index finger, wrapping her whole hand around it tightly, and beamed up at me silently.
‘The CSIR,’ Sthembiso stated authoritatively. ‘It doesn’t get much better than that, eh Roy?’
‘Well, you never know. Eeeyus hang out in some very strange places. You can never really tell, can you?’
‘But it’s true, isn’t it?’ he insisted. ‘The CSIR is where they did all the science. The big things.’
‘Well, it’s one of the places. But the problem is the computers, nè? Much harder to find an Eeeyu in a computer than in a book. And the CSIR people used a lot of computers. In fact, they used computers way more than books. So there’s a chance you could be disappointed – we might only get back with a bakkie full of plastic.’
‘Some of the plastic might be tens.’
‘Yes, it might. You never know.’
English clutched her torn, dog-eared copy of Animal Farm under her elbow. It was an illustrated paperback version. The cover line drawings of Snowball and Napoleon had caught her attention before she was even three years old, reinforcing her already deep fascination with the idea of a pig. The book was always with her, even in her adult years. She thumbed it and pawed it and read it repeatedly, all through her life, although never, it seemed to me, in the literal or political sense, but rather as a general evocation of porcine power and import.
She gripped my finger tighter with her spare hand and beamed harder. Her smile was a lighthouse in the night. In fact, as she grew older the grin often replaced language altogether. For reasons well beyond her control or ken, it was as if she lived only to deny what we had bestowed on her.
Most of the kids’ names had our explicit ambitions and hopes threaded through them. Lerato was named after we were all involved in a protracted debate about the meaning of love. Elizabeth and English – both my kids – were named in direct, ironic reference to the now significantly reduced power of my British ancestry. We spent many consecutive nights drinking (well, pouring drinks, in my case) and discussing the extreme power of being British.
‘Genetically, you are plugged straight into money and power,’ said Beatrice. ‘They flow through your blood. The need to organise and have systems. To generate money. To pack it away in assets for your spawn. You can’t teach that stuff.’ She gripped Gerald’s knee as she spoke, her hand sliding up his thigh and then back down again, but the twinkle in her eye was mostly for me, I was sure.
‘True,’ Gerald added. ‘Actually true. We are born in place. If you measure by money and houses, then you want to be British. If you’re born Pedi, all you get is non-stop relatives and you can’t make eye contact with mlungus.’
‘The English language. Greatest skill you could ever have in sub-Saharan Africa,’ Javas said, tipping a bottle of home-made beer in our direction. ‘The rest you can fake, but not the English. I was going to call my firstborn that. English.’
‘Get the fuck outta here,’ I said.
‘For real. English. A complete statement of power.’
‘I like it,’ said Fats, nudging Babalwa with his elbow. ‘Eh, babe? English. That’s a power name.’
Babalwa wriggled defensively. ‘Hai. You can’t call someone English.’
‘Course you can. I knew a girl called Pain.’
Andile also warmed to the idea. ‘The child would be all power,’ she said. ‘But if we do it, we need to call one of the others French.’
The idea stayed with me, with us, and when Andile and I produced our second we decided, by mutual agreement, to call her English.
And, of course, she turned out to be completely self-contained, inwardly focused and pathologically silent. English spoke only when speech was functionally required. Words were irrelevant to her. Not that the child was mute or anything. When it mattered, her tongue was perfectly at home in her mouth. When we were parking in front of the nanotech building, for example, she gave Sthembiso a calculated lecture.
‘You must be happy, Sthembiso,’ she said, with reference to the newly cleared CSIR complex. ‘They made it into a playground just for you.’
‘Not just for him, English,’ I said as I led her by the finger to the front door of the nanotech building. We were following Sthembiso, who was already clambering through the hole in the fence Tebza had smashed years ago. ‘It’s for us too. This has always been one of my favourite places.’
‘Why, Roy?’
‘It reminds me of Uncle Tebza, whom you never met, but who was a wonderful, kind man who made my life a lot better when everyone disappeared.’
‘Were there lots of people?’
‘More than you can imagine, my dear.’ I allowed myself to get a little wistful. I stopped us at the door, knelt on one knee and pulled my daughter onto the other. I held her tight. ‘All these buildings were filled with people, marching up and down with their papers and their printouts, walking to their computers—’
‘To their Eeeyus!’ She beamed up at me.
‘Exactly. To their Eeeyus. And outside the gate the roads were filled with cars, people in their cars going places—’
‘Where?’
‘To their homes and families. To their work. To go shopping, that sort of thing.’
‘What’s shopping?’
‘Eish.’ The question was almost unanswerable. ‘There was this thing called money that was very, very important.’ Her eyes drilled into me, completely focused. ‘People used to swap it for things. So, if you had some money, you would give it to me and then I would give you a pair of shoes.’ She kept staring, and frowned. ‘And then I would use the money to give to someone else when I needed something, like food.’
English wriggled free, suddenly bored. ‘Inside!’ She pointed in Sthembiso’s direction. ‘Let’s go!’
I obeyed, allowing her to scramble through the jagged hole after Lydia and Thabang while I used the door, remembering in the midst of many retrospective flashes how we had broken open the lock. English ran after the others into the darkness of the corridor. I let them go, then panicked and ran after, just in case.
The buildings were exactly as we had left them. I could see the remnants of our activities scattered through the building; the chaos Tebza had caused as he ripped up the labs looking for a virtual explanation, or at least a nano sieve. Science equipment on the floor. Drawers pulled out, hanging awkwardly still, waiting.
Once I had adjusted to the darkness of the building, I let the kids go free to try to find Sthembiso, whom I could only catch flashes of as he hurtled between meeting rooms, laboratories and offices. English tried hard to catch him initially, but was unable to hold the pace and settled instead into her own exploratory rhythm. Roy Jnr disappeared, and Lydia and Thabang drifted through holding hands, unsure now why they were in this place and what the point was supposed to be. English’s attention was caught not by the Eeeyus, but by the photographs on the desks. Every now and again she would trot back to me clasping a framed family shot. Her attention was caught specifically by families featuring two or more young girls. ‘Look, Roy,’ she said, handing me a cheap fake-wood Clicks frame outlining a family of three girls and mom and dad, all unfortunately brushed with freckles and a disconcerting lack of facial proportion.