So, that was my routine during the expo days. I’m sure I am conflating the details as I look back. I know there were days when I simply ran, when I defied my compulsions. Nonetheless, this is the image: I am smashing things, hoarding electronic devices, pissing against the walls and couches of the middle classes. I am loping ever onward, crowbar in hand, not running as much as hunting.
The defence of my habit was, as it always is with habits, the hardest part. Hiding the crowbar. Stashing the loot beyond the inquisitive eyes of the kids, getting it into my house. All required a degree of subterfuge, even though no one would have cared to question my activities anyway. The dance was for me – an elaborate mechanism through which I protected myself from myself.
CHAPTER 51
Looking so hard to the sky
I wept at the expo.
All the adults shed tears, save for Fats, who was too involved in the execution to fully see, in the moment, what he and the children had done.
Fats had worked for many months on the rig and single-handedly created the frame for a multimedia experience the likes of which he would have delivered to his pre-life clients. He rigged enough panels to power the entire thing, and then cunningly worked up a labyrinth of painted canvas screens that closed the hall down while opening up the digital horizons. The small, almost suffocating labyrinth of canvas, once digitised, created an inverse universe of vast space and movement.
It was here that our children painted.
We stepped into a new world as we crossed the threshold into the St John’s hall. A world where we were repeatedly reflected at ourselves. The closing down of the physical space and the harnessing of the WAN and the transmission paint represented Fats’s genius at work – it allowed the kids to create the expo on machines, which meant their process wasn’t restricted. They had a planet of images and memories at their fingertips, and they had been chipping away at the thing for years.
I cried at the sight of myself. Of course. Is there any sight as moving?
The montage footage of my form, my image, all scrawny and jagged-toothed and dirty, hand in hand with Babalwa, arriving that first night. There we were, captured at various angles, all gawking eyes and dropped jaws. We were so filthy. Babalwa was also so pretty, beneath the grime, beneath those scrappy shorts and the Castle Lager T-shirt. Waves of nostalgia. I tried to gauge the reactions of the others but we had been cleverly split apart, each extracted into his or her own personal narrative corridor. This was my story.
Slowly, so slowly it was barely noticeable, the back track began to build. Steady beats – the ethno-India variety that the trance hippies always loved so much, but without the druggy speed. Rhythmic lady warbles pushing on, the beat breaking and reforming. Then the mood changed as the sombre and shocked images of self gave way to the coming together of us. The scenes were cut faster and the mood lifted with the volume, and then, God knows how long after we all entered our respective personal mazes, we gathered again in a central area. The cuts gained pace as we joined. Kids and nappies and bottles and cows and houses and kitchens and tractors and fences and libraries and bakkies and archives and Eeeyus and cups of semen and bread baking and arms linked and smiles and tears and hugs and screams and slaps and meetings and movies and lounges and families… and families. Families. Us together. Tebza and Lillian and death and life and hope and ambition. Over and above it all, hovering like a binding cloud. Ambition.
‘We decided…’ The music faded. Sthembiso stepped forward from the little cluster of desperately formal children facing us to speak, his pubescent voice omnipresent and fully amplified, an almost invisible fishing-line mike hooked over his ear. ‘… that this expo should be different to some of the others you might have experienced.’ He glanced through us, the adults, at Fats, who widened his eyes in encouragement while fiddling with the knobs on the master remote. ‘So we decided that you – that we – should be on display. That we would use this expo to show us to us.’ He paused, confident, yet clearly seeking somewhere inside. ‘Because we are special people. And we have done special things. A lot of special things. But sometimes we can’t see those things. Because we are looking so hard to the sky. To the future. So that is why we named it “Solo: Our Future”.’
He paused. The children started clapping and whistling, on cue, Fats nudging and twirling his producer hands as subtly as he could behind our backs. We started clapping too, and I cried again, which set Babalwa off. Sthembiso carried on, this time reading a pre-prepared speech from his tablet.
He announced the formalisation of the St John’s expo area as a ‘permanent memorial slash community space’, something ‘long-term and tangible’ and ‘able to tell our story in the future’.
‘Now, if you will follow your attendants, you will be taken to the food hall, where you will be given a ret… ret…’ – his eyes locked back onto Fats – ‘trospective journey into the edible past.’ Sthembiso bowed his head and shoulders ever so slightly. My left index finger was gripped by the soft pink flesh of Katlego, all of five years old, my right hand taken by English. Together they pulled me around the corner to a long table of snacks, meticulously laid out and prepared, each spiked with a toothpick, and a range of drinks – including non-alcoholic – racked up behind them.
We had become our own movie. We had documented ourselves.
I had been documented.
I was also completely integrated. Instead of being off to the left, or off to the right, or just there in the background, I was in the middle, in all my generally grubby glory, tooth gap glaring. I hadn’t ever, as far as I could remember, been at the centre of anything.
Extra laps of the hall once the drinks were done. Long minutes at the screens, reaching out, fingers against the rough transmission paint. Pause. Rewind. Play. Kids in my arms. Smiles and frowns and fingers and gestures in my direction – sometimes through me but just as often with me, at me, binding me.
CHAPTER 52
Later
Later. Much later.
Near the end. My end.
English will be raped and kicked around up north. Gerald will be powerless. ‘Dub’ will be all he says when they return, arm wrapped around the little bird, sharps and scraps of camping gear scattering behind them. ‘Dub.’
She’ll vanish to the comfort of the pigs. To her pig. Snowball. No one will see her for weeks. We’ll be shattered. Broken, for her. But at the time, even with the shock of it, at it, the invasion of her thighs, we’ll also be pulled north, unable to resist the knowledge.
We will meet, formally. There will be a war council. Talk of reprisals. Talk of peace. Talk of treaties.
The young will become old. The teens will pull their shoulders back and sharpen their blades.
Later, things will change.
‘Dub,’ Gerald will keep shaking his head, repeating it. ‘Dub.’ We’ll debrief him, Andile and Javas and me, the only ones able to follow the thread back to its Kruger Park source. Eventually, much later, we’ll establish the essence. A pack of five. Big guys. Scrawny guys. Wild guys. Black speakers lashed to the back of a white bakkie, somewhere near the middle of Zambia. Big dub beats pulsing while Gerald watches and English is split and spoiled and ejaculated upon.
‘Dub.’ He will shake his head, incredulous. He will never understand. Never. How something so light, so happily buried within his deeper self, now not only gone but ruined.