Dub Steps (23 page)

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.’

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.

After years of rockiness and back-and-forthing, he and Babalwa had settled into a true man–wife thing. From the outside, their relationship appeared to be nearly as solid as the twins’. It was odd to observe, and to participate in, tangentially at least. In the main I was happy for both of them, and of course a little jealous, and a little paranoid, now that Gerald, myself and Beatrice were even more starkly shadowed by the reflected light of the two couples. (My semi-regular trysts with Beatrice were unnerving and guilt-inducing. I wondered frequently what the extent of her sex drive was: whether she was doubling up with me, or whether her cohabitation with Gerald was really just a matter of provisions and practicalities, jigsaw puzzles and boiled eggs.)

As the kids grew, Fats started organising them into units to be applied to various tasks, including my archiving project. Every now and then he would deliver a little army to me, a cluster of five or six children running in surprisingly orderly circles around his feet.

‘Right, boss, what’s it today? Wits? RAU? Oppenheimer library?’ I would pick the location and we would head off in two or three bakkies, depending on how many adults were along for the ride. Once or twice the entire farm set out – for some reason the Wits library trip sticks in my mind. (Why do we remember this, and not that? I can’t say. Maybe it was the light, the mood or the smell. We made many trips, but when I think of that time, the memory is of the horde of us crashing through the Wits library.) I had final
editorial call on what was picked and what was left behind. The adults would build piles of what they thought was relevant, and the kids would tear up and down the floors, academic confetti fluttering around their every step, and pop up randomly to present their wild selections. I would filter with authority. Keepers into boxes on the left, junk in a pile on the right. Undecided in the middle.

I favoured, after quite a bit of consultation with the adults, the scientific and mathematical over narratives. It wasn’t my natural inclination, but ultimately it seemed to be the right thing to do. Our kids and their kids were going to need to build up technical knowledge. And that meant maths and science.

JM Coetzee and Es’kia Mphahlele could offer, ultimately, only voices.

Still, we allowed ourselves indulgences. I enjoyed tossing Coetzee – nemesis of my tertiary days – onto the junk pile. Conversely, I made sure that PG Wodehouse and Lesego Rampolokeng were completely collected, as well as a full ten-year set of the
Daily Sun
. Fats stacked every issue of
Fast Company
he could find onto his own personal pile, fondly examining covers he remembered from the old days, clucking while he leafed back and forth.

They were fun, our outings. They were also a way to slowly introduce the kids to the idea of our past as a binary opposite of the present. Through the archive we could present the idea of loss. Knowledge loss. History loss. The loss of culture. The loss of family. Loss as the theme of their lives.

My house was overflowing. We needed a new, permanent venue for the library. It made logistical sense to use the KES schoolrooms as the hub for the collection, and so we began at the school library and computer centre and reached out classroom by classroom, altering each as we occupied it with either books or electronic storage sets. We shelved each wall with six rows of pine for the book rooms, and added a central shelving column down the middle. I did my best to structure the stacking of the shelves as the books were carted in from their various sources, but really all I managed was to roughly separate categories. Science and maths on the main building’s first
floor, arts and history on the second. It was going to take a lifetime – my lifetime, in all probability – to actually sort and index the titles, so to start with I allowed myself simply to achieve effective storage.

The computers and devices were more difficult. We knew where they had come from, but not what they contained. We debated for a good while the feasibility of plugging them in and examining their contents before storing them, but it would have taken too long. So we labelled the boxes and stored them like they were books. The idea was that sufficiently detailed labels would provide a simple filter through which to assess and deal with the contents. The labels included three categories:

Estimated intellectual worth, or EIW (pronounced ‘Eeeyu’ by the kids, as if describing a bad smell or taste), became the standard we applied to any particular thing to define its provisional intellectual potential. As the children grew older, they placed a lot of emphasis on big Eeeyu finds, motivated in no small measure by their parents.

‘Roy Roy Roy!’ Sthembiso, age seven, hurtled into the dining room. ‘Eeeyu ten, Eeeyu ten. I’ve got a Eeeyu ten!’ He was clutching a black spiral-bound notebook filled with what looked like mathematical schematics, stumbled upon during one of the increasingly frequent child-led excursions into the mansions of Munro Drive. Babalwa gently took the notebook from an excited dirty paw and flipped through it.

‘Well, it looks like a big Eeeyu, doesn’t it?’ She pulled the boy onto her lap and opened the notebook with the ends of her enveloping arms. ‘But our problem is the same as always, nè? We don’t really understand what any of the drawings mean. So I would say maybe it’s not a ten. Maybe it’s a seven?’

‘Not eight?’

‘You’ll have to ask Roy about that, but I would say a seven myself.’

Sthembiso handed me the book, dejected. I was notorious for my low Eeeyu scores. I considered the book quickly as I killed off my scrambled eggs. The schematics and drawings did look to be genuinely mathematical, as opposed to the far more common corporate spider diagrams the kids were often fooled by. The notebook was dirty and clearly well used. The pages had thumb marks on the lower right corner, indicating regular and repeated action. I pictured a generic mad scientist stuck away in the attic of his Houghton house, cooking up an equation he hoped would shake the world. Whoever the person was, he or she was dealing in subjects beyond my realm. Beyond any of our realms, really. I tossed it over to Fats without hope – his maths was some distance off mine, and that was saying something.

‘I think, Sthembiso, that you might actually have an eight on your hands, based on the WTF rule. Fats?’ I was half serious and half humouring the boy, now squirming profoundly in Babalwa’s lap at the thought of an eight, which would have constituted a rare victory.

Fats considered the notebook blankly. ‘Passes the WTF test on my side, but you knew that already.’ He flipped it over to Gerald, then Beatrice. Javas declined humbly – although superb with the construction of actual things, he held no mathematical pretensions.

We agreed it passed the WTF test – a simple mechanism to separate out material with indecipherable intellectual potential – and thus added an extra point.

‘Looks like a lucky day for Sthembiso!’ I handed the book back. ‘You know what to do, eh? Into the WTF filter for final review before you can claim the eight. Yes?’ He ripped the notebook from my hand. ‘And you need Andile to sign off before you can claim it.’

‘Yes yes yes,’ Sthembiso rattled back at me. ‘I know where she is. I just saw her. I’ll get her now.’

‘OK, go then.’ I tried to ruffle his hair, but my fingers hit fresh air.

Sthembiso, product of Javas and Babalwa, was my favourite. One isn’t supposed to have favourites, but now that I am knocking on the exit gate I can brush past delusions of objectivity. Sthembiso was my favourite – by some distance.

He was an intense little boy, packed with that special sort of life energy that never truly dissipates. He ran everywhere in high-powered circles, was constantly in an advanced state of filthiness and was by far the biggest reader of the bunch. There was no incongruity in his activity levels and his passion for reading. He read as he did everything else, as if the vitally important was at stake, his fingers always jammed into his mouth, his teeth snapping away on his nails, which he chewed and swallowed like food.

His reading was fired by his imagination, which was immense, and which frequently lured him to the classic adventure stories, generally of the British variety. From around the time of his discovery of the little black notebook, his focus morphed to encompass the larger adventure of the world around him. The story of our little group gripped him in a profound way, and once he had wrapped his mind around the notion of a prior world, a prior existence with tools and people and buildings and machinery and businesses, he was unstoppable. He plugged himself into computers with gusto, powered with a manic intensity that could only have come from a righteous genetic combination.

Lebogang, Katlego and Lerato – who all shared Gerald as a father – were, in their early years at least, very different. They were all a similar age, a year or two back from Sthembiso, and they shared a marked disinclination for matters of the extreme imagination. While Sthem was racing up the mountains of his mind, the three of them preferred a more placid and tactile approach. In the sandpit they let the sand dribble through their fingers and actually felt it, grain by grain, moving through. They played softer games, and it would take them several years longer than Sthembiso to fully grasp the nature of the world they had been born into.

As collective parents acting individually, we all tried to influence the mix. For me, that meant archiving. I took whatever opportunities were available to let the kids experience the full
extent of the knowledge challenge that lay ahead. In other words, I ratcheted up the Eeeyu rivalry.

Over the years of their births and early childhoods we covered many of Joburg’s major knowledge sites. All the universities, most of the Model C schools, all the notable art galleries. Then I pushed further. We cleared out the Sasol research department, all four floors of it, everything in the Innovation Hub complex north of Tshwane, and a lot of machines from the science and maths blocks of Wits, the Tshwane University of Technology and all the others. Of course, almost all of the plastic – the computers and pads and mobiles, etc. – was junk. Without the cloud, all that plastic was now simply boxes.

The futility of collecting the boxes was obvious to us all, and yet we carried on. Partially, I suppose, to create a sense of intellectual hope and purpose, and partially because it was fun for the kids. To hold them back on the great Eeeyu hunt seemed unfair.

Looking back, the most notable Eeeyu mission – and certainly the best documented
^*
– was to the president’s office in the Union Buildings. The buildings were everything one would expect, but President Mbangi’s office was a shock – pristine and completely empty. Just an oak desk facing two large chairs. A Kentridge print on one wall, a batik wall hanging on the other, and in between the usual framed photographs – Mandela, Mbeki, Merkel, Jonathon, Zuma, Clinton, Obama.

‘Why is it empty like this?’ Roy Jnr asked.

‘They worked mostly from Cape Town,’ Beatrice answered smoothly. ‘I think this office was just for meetings and things. A place to be when there was business in Tshwane. I’m sure he kept all his stuff in his Cape Town office.’ The kids were dubious. Fats chuckled in disbelief. As much as we tried to prevent it, the emptiness of the office quickly became legend. The kids would talk forever more about things being as empty as Mbangi.

For years, though, through all of our excursions, I avoided the CSIR. It reminded me too much of Tebza and Lillian. Driving past and seeing the side fence ripped up from where we had cut through all those years ago sent rumblings through my chest.

But eventually the time came. The complex loomed in the distance, an emotional black hole for us all. I gathered a posse of children and headed out to the place where we had allowed ourselves to dream our foolish, ambitious dreams.

The CSIR was an unrecognisable jungle, the incipient growth of our initial experience a long-lost memory. Every movement required calculated physical effort, and the first visit was nothing more than a mission designed to frustrate and annoy a pack of small children. I drove us back home amid snot-laden moans and irritations, Sthembiso leading the choir in intensity and volume. There are few things more frustrating to children than an adult who refuses to enter a jungle.

Javas and I returned the next day, equipped with machetes and chainsaws. I had made a complicated deal with Sthembiso that we would not do any exploring as such. According to the terms of the arrangement, we would restrict our activities to those of an adult, jungle-clearing nature. No exploring would be permitted until such time as children could participate in the Eeeyu potentialities. Sthembiso waved us out of the Houghton driveway with an intense, man-to-man look on his face.

As it turned out, he needn’t have worried. It took us three return trips to create reasonable vehicle access. On day two we roped Gerald in, and only then did we make meaningful headway, each of us shirtless and sweating as we hacked away at the enveloping forces.

‘Makes you think,’ Gerald panted as he powered down his chainsaw. ‘All over the world this has happened. Trees and snow and sand—’

‘Makes you think what?’ Javas asked.

‘That soon we’ll never be able to go anywhere again without this.’ He lifted the chainsaw a few inches from the ground and dropped it again.

We cleared enough to allow our vehicles in. We went a few steps further in some places, clearing the bush around seating areas in what used to be the park, as well as around the nanotech building, Tebza’s place. I told them his full hack story while we were working. It created a fair buzz. Javas was shocked I had kept it to myself for so long. Gerald was stunned that such things existed at all.