Dub Steps (2 page)

We sold it to Rick, who rebranded his city VR club as Mlungu’s. He gave us fifteen per cent each.

Heels clicked through all night, down the concrete stairs, ominous rather than filthy, then into the reception area staffed by rippling Zimbabweans who patted them down, took their cash and pushed the trembling punters in.

Rick Cohen was a true businessman. He knew the underground hype would die, fast, and when it did he was already selling off virtual chunks of Mlungu’s to sponsors. The bar counter, the tabletops, the urinals, the waitress’s cleavage. He lured the brands with the promise of their own slice of the legend, virtual reality in perpetuity, blah blah.

Smarts aside, he was also connected. Within six weeks Mlungu’s had formal office space at HHN. As the ‘reputational head’ of a new division, I had the job of making sure Mlungu’s sponsors looked good.

‘Mlungu’s changes the VR game,’ the street-pole slugs said.
^*

The door to the top floor of media life swung open, but instead of walking over the threshold I stepped back.

‘What is it with you?’ Angie taunted. ‘When the suits arrive it’s like you’re back in nursery school.’

I changed corners many times. I logged in from the office, I logged in from home, I logged in at Mlungu’s itself, but I always ended up in essentially the same position, just off the bar, on the side, watching the same scene play out over and over again.

‘Are you actually drunk if you’ve been drinking at Mlungu’s all day?’ Rick asked quasi-seriously, more than once.

Being perpetually drunk was – in the context of Mlungu’s – almost the same as being sober. Regardless of location or orientation, getting high and fucking – the combination, the marriage of the two – was the point. The only point. The perpetual point. Without drugs, even the new-generation interface became generic, the avatars recognisable, the stitching on the seams of the interface a little too predictable.

Drugs and fucking. Fucking and drugs.

Thus, yes, I was permanently drunk, but I was also, within the jagged reality of the club, the sober-minded guiding hand.

By the time I fled to Eileen’s flat, I had been running Mlungu’s for over ten years and Angie and I had parted ways in every respect except the sharing of a residential address. We lived in the same building but, as in a classic TV series of your choosing, we hardly saw each other. The evening at Clarissa’s had in fact been our first out together for months. I worked late, drank late, slept late, and she did the same, but according to a different sequence.

Eileen wasn’t an affair and her flat wasn’t our love nest. She was a sweet, plain, thin, twenty-three-year-old account manager with a wealthy, concerned daddy watching over her.

She gave me the spare keys to her flat in a rush. ‘My grandmother,’ she said, shoving them anxiously into my fist, ‘in Cape Town. She’s … she’s … not well. At all. Will you feed Mozart?’ She looked panicked, embarrassed. ‘Sorry. I don’t know who else to ask.’

No problem. ‘Dog or cat?’ I asked.

‘Oh!’ she barked with relief. ‘Cat. Very self-contained. Female. Sleeps most of the day. This is my address.’ She buzzed the details through. ‘Parking bay, alarm codes, instructions on how to feed her. Once a day – should be pretty easy. I’ll call as soon as I know what’s going on.’

‘Take your time.’ I leaned back casually, pretending I wasn’t already worried about fucking the whole thing up.

Lean. All in black. Daniel Craig beneath a half-smiling, ironic, clubby-cool exterior.

It was important to be clean and straight. Unflappable. They had to be able to recognise me. And they did.

They called my name.

Life passed like that. Me, avatar-black, striding in slow motion, ears primed, waiting for the call.

Years after he had stopped, become adult and all that, Mongezi pulled me aside. Skin bunched up around his eyes. He winced. It had looked like he was about to smile, as if the glory would flicker again. But he winced.

‘You haven’t had enough yet, Roy?’

‘I can’t do media management, Mogz. I just can’t do it.’

‘Sho. But clubs. You can’t do those either. Not for so long. You just can’t, my broe. It’s gonna kill you.’

‘Ah, but what a way to die!’

‘It’s a shitty way to die, Roy. Shitty.’

I had my reasons, then. I’m sure they made sense. Now I think maybe I just fell in love with a time. A place. An idea. For those first few years we thought we had the world in our hands. Planet earth. City of Joburg. We owned it all. We changed it on a whim. I met and married Angie in that place. Ceremony in Rosebank Church, reception at Mlungu’s. We hatched the dragon. We hung on as it flew. That it would fly was never a question. Not to me anyway. I would be firmly on its back as we crashed through the atmosphere. It never occurred to me that we were already done. That change had come. And gone.

Year after year, hype cycle after hype cycle, there was nothing new. The revolution stalled at paint broadcasts and geo-located VR. Technologies were turned into advertising. Messages were bought, broadcast, sold. Clubs stayed clubs. The drugs evolved. There were additions to the technology, incremental shifts, but that next quantum leap … well, it turned out to be a mirage. A myth, forming and swirling in the middle distance.

‘You got money, my ninja. Money. You can do anything. Why don’t you quit? I know Angie would love a change. Go overseas. France. The south of France. You could write a novel.’

‘And Angie could paint.’

‘Ja!’ Mongezi’s eyes lit, then faded, angry. ‘Fuck you. Stay cynical like that and life will punish you.’

‘Ag sorry, Mogz. Jammer. For real. It’s just that Angie and me … we struggle, nè? Even to be in the same room, if I’m honest, if she’s honest, she’ll tell you we struggle.’

‘Well, fucking get a divorce then, you fuck. Do something. Anything. You have to do something.’

‘I
do
do something. You people might need to accept that I am happy doing this.’

You people. Once it was us, all of us, together. We were powerful. Full. Stuffed. Then it was you people. I was the only one left, still at the bar, still zooming and refocusing. The rest were in meetings. Building houses. Having babies.

You people.

How did I get so angry? So lost? Where did that decade actually go?

Mongezi believed it was all my father. His death. My denial.

Roy, he would say. Roy, you can’t. You have to. You can’t. You must. Look. Look at it. At him. You can’t just. Please. Roy. Please. Please.

But I didn’t look. I would like to say it wasn’t possible. That there was a mess inside that was simply too much. But really I could have.

Still, I chose not to. I turned away. Fuck Russle. Fuck parents. Family. There was never anything for me in that place. I was different. Others might need to look back, down, into the past. Me, I was headed in one direction.

Forward.

And then they let go. Mongezi drifted away. Angie too. Rick. The rest.

Me? I remained in rotation, swirling in tight, personal little circles.

Eileen, and the others like her, were the final evidence of my decade of decline. After I had pissed on my friends, after the wife and I had spat at each other, green and angry, I was adopted by a succession of thin, anxiety-ridden young girls. Girls who liked cats and struggled with men and worked far too well. Organisers. Anxious little beings. Filers of documents. Placers of calls.

And really, it was right. For what was I other than feral? Wild. Hungry. Hunting for affection I would instantly reject.

Eileen’s flat eased my aches and awakened a sense of shame at my own shabby, juvenile existence. The place reeked of adherence to a life regime. From the well-used exercise bike to the bookshelf and its contents (Cormac McCarthy, Josie Blues, Mtutuzeli Matshoba, JG Ballard, Lesego Rampolokeng, Gabriel García Márquez, Vince Khumalo, Gore Vidal, Kagiso Nkuna, Zadie Smith, Zapiro, Calvin and Hobbes), the markers of structure and adult activity were everywhere.

Most attractive was sleeping in her bed, which I did shamelessly, making sure to ruffle the linen in the spare bedroom, where I was supposed to be. Her bed, full of the olfactory pleasures of the female nest, was my sanctuary. I wallowed in it.

I turned off my mobile and dropped naked into her soft, dark-pink
bedding. I drained the red wine in my glass, poured another, drank that and went to sleep.

I dreamed of my father. He was chasing me. As usual.

With knives. Belt buckles. Broken bottles. He chased and I ran and it lasted for days, weeks, until eventually he stopped. Hands on knees. Panting. Staring at me. Exhausted. Tears in his eyes.

I woke up.

I sat in the lounge. I’d been out for a long time. I lit a cigarette and thought about my father.

He died when I was twenty, crashing into his coffin with a brain haemorrhage. He warranted a few column inches here and there, a mention on the news scroller, that kind of thing.

Towards the end, just before the haemorrhage, my father had fallen into fluffy trance. The last time I had visited him he was spinning Markus Schulz obsessively in the lounge, finger in the air, eyes half closed.

‘This,’ he said, pulling the cans behind his ears and looking at me seriously, ‘is actually very good stuff. People say it’s too simple and too happy, but I’m telling you, this is good music.’

I took the Senheissers from him and plonked them on. It was standard four-to-the-floor trance, a simple, never-ending bass underneath a litany of equally simple, rising candy synths. Beats for children, sports back-tracks and junkies. I put my finger in the air. ‘Someone pass me my lollipop.’

Russle Fotheringham took his headphones back.

He was all spindly legs and arms. A cigarette burned in the ashtray next to him. There was always one waiting, smoke curling. It was one of the marvels of my father, his ability to keep a smoke alive without ever really smoking it. He would grab it with long, accomplished fingers, toss the butt into his lips, give it the smallest nip possible and then lay it back in the groove.

This is the last image I have of him, the one burned into my brain: a tall, too-thin forty-year-old man in white shorts and a maroon vest, bobbing his head to candy trance, smoke rising from the ashtray, track listings scrawled in an uncontrolled hand on scraps of paper around his laptop.

I asked him how long he had been up. He intimated via a series of nods and eyebrow raises that it had been a long time. A looong time. We did our usual dance around my disapproval and that was that. He died the next day.

I walked through the house with cardboard boxes. The disks and the laptop and the playlists and associated DJ paraphernalia. I piled it all in, randomly lifting interesting items into an old cardboard primary school suitcase. The few boxes went into my boot, and then into my basement. Everything else to charity.

I rented the place to a succession of young families – people too busy creating their own memories to bother about mine.

So there I sat, naked in Eileen’s sweet lounge, sucking on a cigarette, taking in the realisation that by smashing Clarissa’s mirror I had probably destroyed the last career opportunity open to me in the country. Rick Cohen was a lot more than a club boss. Rick Cohen was a media mogul, an industry general. What he thought radiated out across our business in influential circles. The dinner could have been a reconciliation. It could have been an opportunity. The door had opened. The door had closed.

The sun was setting. My glasses sat ominously on the lounge table. A day and half out of contact was a lifetime. I decided to go all in
and make it two. I went back to bed.

I turned on midway through the following day and waited for the messages.

Nothing.

I opened a new bottle and poured a big glass of red.

And another.

I called work.

No network.

I tried to log in and accept my fate, but there was nothing, not even an interface. Just the click of the lost Google API call. I dialled technical, but the call failed. There wasn’t a single bar on the reception tower.

I turned the TV on.

Static.