Authors: Miller,Andrew
‘Look,’ Babalwa poked me excitedly in the ribs. ‘They’ve got power.’
‘Not a lot,’ gushed Fats. ‘But enough to cover all the basics and we’re growing the bank every day. Soon we should be able to juice up anything that needs it.’ He steered us through a driveway designed to impress and maybe even humiliate its visitors. We rolled down a steep slope, stone walls on either side fighting a barely controlled jungle.
‘We haven’t got to regular gardening yet,’ Fats added, in reference to the foliage. ‘But soon. The way these fucking things are growing, very soon.’ He stomped hard on the brake and guided us down an especially sharp slope before parking in a garage area littered with 4x4s of various colours and sizes and featuring a long, extended turning loop. On the left of the parking area was a multi-levelled stone mansion behind an enormous and surprisingly clear swimming pool.
The mansion rolled out across the property in several different directions. Each wing looked like it could have lived a full life on
its own – creeping vine covered the central hub and stretched out to each arm, but the four quarters could have worked as stand-alone buildings. At the far end of the garden, near the front gate, stood a separate house, a cottage for the help. Also built from stone, it had its own small swimming pool, a tiled veranda and four or five rooms.
‘Previously owned by the Minister for What, What and What, I believe,’ said Fats. ‘The Right Honourable Jackson something. Also, obviously, a member of the King Edward High School governing body, et cetera, et cetera.’ He waved in the direction of KES. Babalwa looked at me blankly, seeking elaboration, but before I could get going a tall, incongruously made-up and polished lady clipped beaming out the front door. She fit well into her mid-range stilettos, blue jeans and neat black vest. She sported gold hoop earrings and maroon nail polish, her hair swept into a tight set of braids running in parallel lines over her skull and down into a funky yet neat tail that rested, mullet-like, on the back of her neck.
‘And that,’ Fats bellowed as we walked awkwardly towards each other, ‘is our ever impeccable sis Beatrice.’ He gave her a fake advertising hug and introduced us all. ‘Beatrice is never, ever, caught out,’ he observed as I shook her hand and Babalwa fell into her arms in a child’s hug. ‘Regardless of the circumstances, even in the midst of the apocalypse, sis Beatrice is impeccable. It’s the CEO in her’ – he was unable to stop – ‘she brings style, grace and a little bit of sexiness to every occasion.’
Beatrice shot him a look, blushed a little and told us how happy she was to see us. She joined the tour as if she was also new to the place, listening intently to Fats’s explanations and introductions. We wandered through the property, picking up new members with every stop. The greetings ranged from wild hugs and yells from Andile (the loudest noise, it turned out, we’d ever hear from her) to a smile from Javas, and a gentleman’s handshake from Gerald. Fats marched us through the facilities in the dark, waving his torch around a series of vague shapes and forms. Eventually the group wound downstairs to the deck area overlooking northern Johannesburg, below which was a glimmering solar bank. The panels covered the entire slope underneath the deck, a space of
about three hundred square metres. The panels blinked a confident silver in the moonlight.
‘This, really, is it.’ Fats waved his hand in a full arc around the panel area. ‘This has been our mission since we found each other. Power, people, is everything. And what makes this lot work are the batteries. They are the latest, the very latest, in fact, from Germany. These babies can store for over four days.’
‘It was all set up when we got here. That’s why we chose it,’ Lillian, the plump white American, whispered at me conspiratorially. ‘All we’ve done is add more panels.’
We stood in silence for a while, blinking back at the panels.
‘Anyone hungry?’ Beatrice asked, looking at Babalwa with motherly concern, then at me. ‘You must be hungry.’
‘Starving, thanks.’
‘OK, a lightning pass over the rest then, just so they can get their bearings!’ Fats pulled us back upstairs, through the cavernous foyer and into one of the other wings. ‘This is Tebza’s domain, eh, Tebza?’ The first room in the wing was packed with old-school flat-screen monitors and blinking green and red lights. Teboho blinked at us from the back. ‘Tebza is pinging wildly at the walls, hoping to find a connection to something somewhere. Like those people who send radio signals to space looking for aliens. He’s also setting up a WAN
*
to cover this house; then we’ll move it out to wider areas. The idea, obviously, is to get to a point where we start connecting to other terminals in the city, the country, the continent and then the world. The hope, obviously, being that some people somewhere else are doing the same thing. The other hope, more localised, is that re-establishing some form of net will help deal with Tebza’s digital withdrawal. Eh, Tebza?’
Teboho pulled a very slim silver something out of his pocket, clicked twice, and returned it without looking up.
‘The other thing,’ Fats continued blithely, ‘is the whole flying
bit. But I’ll let Lillian tell you about that.’
Lillian stepped forward, cleared her throat and began talking like she was presenting a conference paper. ‘Drones are the starting point, obviously. We have secured three from the Waterkloof Airforce Base, but the relationship between the drone and the software is complex – hence the WAN work Teboho is doing. If we can’t set up a link between the plane and the software, we won’t be able to capture the imagery and then there’s no point. But the drones, really, are a stepping stone to the larger aim of flight.
‘There are planes and fuel we can access, but what we don’t have and what we really need are pilots. So that machine there’ – she pointed out a large PC box with an ancient sixty-inch screen attached – ‘is our pilot training machine. At the moment we’ve only got a kiddy-game simulator running, but we’re aiming to source a proper training simulator and to learn how to fly. Then it’s a question of being brave enough to try it in the real world.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Then the next—’
‘Thanks, Lillian.’ Fats cut her off. ‘Good summary. OK, kids, last stop before food, the garden. This way.’
We trooped behind him, obedient. As we walked I thought more about Fats. Ad Fats. With effort, I remembered him as less headmaster and more free radical; most people were jealous of him because it was never clear exactly what he did. He wasn’t practical. I never, for example, saw him cook anything up on Photoshop, or write a line of copy, or sketch out a brand idea or a conference map. Fats Bonoko was the ideas man, the guy who breezed past your shoulder saying, ‘Love it’ or ‘Nice, but maybe try a softer green for the housewives’. He was, I remembered, also an experiential specialist, which meant he created events for brands. Parties. Boat trips. Cooking tours. VR extravaganzas. Experiential campaigns equated essentially to brand-activation projects – Fats was the guy who took ‘it’ off TV, whatever ‘it’ was, and delivered ‘it’ to people in the flesh, so to speak.
‘This,’ Fats boomed as we trooped out the kitchen door, ‘is our day-to-day survival patch. There’s a lot more going on food-wise outside the house, but this is where we go when we need quick stuff
for cooking.’ We gathered around a vegetable garden – much of it protected by various combinations of green netting.
‘Beans, spinach, carrots, potatoes, lettuce, cauliflower, herb garden, et cetera. Obviously, our major long-term challenges are meat, milk and any kind of dairy. But the vegetables are the foundation. Andile, care to explain?’
Andile snorted. ‘It’s mos a veggie patch, Fats.’
‘Right, thanks.’ Fats brushed through the insult and rounded on myself and Babalwa. ‘Any questions, guys? We’re pretty much an open book here. I know this must be a bit overwhelming for you after all this time alone, but if there’s anything specific you want to know, hit me. Or anyone else.’
We glanced at each other. Babalwa shrugged, shy.
‘Um,’ I piped up uncertainly, ‘I guess the only one for me is, like, are there rules or something? Who decides who does what and why … all that kind of stuff?’
Andile and Javas coughed simultaneously. Lillian smiled. Gerald frowned and scuffed the garden soil with a toe. Beatrice stared straight ahead, unmoved.
‘It’s a collective,’ said Fats. ‘We all do what needs to be done. We agree on what we can. But really it’s about everyone taking responsibility, nè? Ubuntu, et cetera.’
‘It’s like
Survivor
,’ added Andile, giggling out of the corner of her mouth.
‘Only no one gets voted out,’ Fats said as he herded us back through the kitchen door.
The evening rushed on. We gathered and regathered in small groups, discussing ‘the situation’ and sharing anecdotes and experiences, most of them revolving around waking up to an empty world. Beatrice set to in the kitchen, making lettuce and tomato sandwiches – from our garden, Fats stressed, all from our garden.
Disquiet rose from my toes, trickled through my gut and into my aching tooth and my head.
Conversely, Babalwa lit up slowly with social fluorescence. I had never heard her voice this light, her laughter this floaty. In small
but definitive ways I was already no longer her primary reference point. As for me – despite my better judgement, despite everything I knew to be sensible and right – I wanted to go home.
Lillian, the American academic, was typical of her kind – always in the middle of the ‘narrative’ and prone to wholesale, orchestrated redirections of the conversational ship. She explained a lot, unknowingly talking to us as if to children. She looked, at first glance, to be between twenty-five and thirty years old. Of dumpy build, she had the whiff of cash about her; there had certainly been enough around to have expanded her backside with disproportionate weight, most likely the heaviness of supermarket muffins and cappuccinos. She smelled, also, of roll-on deodorant. The smell would take on a particular sharpness when she was angry and had her arms folded in attack mode. She was also prone to adopting calculated poses, which she held for inordinate lengths of time, until she was sure someone had taken note. She would sweep her hair up into a ponytail and then hold it there, elbows parallel to the ground, as if she were a model, or a socialite on the make. It was like she wasn’t quite sure who she was, or who she needed or wanted to be, on any given occasion. Bottom line: when she wasn’t carefully cutting a silhouette into the skyline, Lillian talked a hell of a lot, and appeared to believe her brain was a repository of all things worth knowing.
Gerald was quiet, older, very black and very muscular. He came from the north-east – Mpumalanga somewhere – and spent most of that first night watching Fats and mumbling his own unheard replies to the questions bouncing around the room. Barefoot, in jeans and a loose, striped pink golf shirt, he radiated a strong potential energy. Possibly he was desperate to be heard. Possibly he was just desperate for some silence, like me.
Teboho sat nodding, still staring off into the corners, the single white earphone dangling politely over his heart.
Andile perched on the kitchen counter next to Javas and they
brushed against each other with easy frequency. Javas looked every inch the artist he apparently was. There were light paint splatters on his jeans, which were also torn at the ankles. He wore a faded dark-blue Standard Bank T-shirt and a Scottish-style golf cap, perched high on dreads. His face was leathery and crinkled and his eyes glimmered like those of a travelling man. Andile, in turn, was all eyes. Her ocular equipment was markedly bigger than average, and she had an unnerving ability to lock you into their big brown pools. She was, relatively speaking, lightly primped. She wore a very light brown lipstick, two neat silver teardrop earrings, and a knee-length frock neatly suspended over blue jeans.
At this early stage, Beatrice was the oddity. She was fully dressed and ready for the office – all she had to do was reach for her bag on the way out.
Babalwa talked on our behalf, dribbling out the details of our misguided PE stint and sudden compulsion to flee. Beatrice and Fats punctuated the flow with humour, ideas and plans. Always plans.
I let the words fly past. I looked at my feet. My filthy, filthy feet, still caked in the debris of our flight from PE. My equally damaged jeans. My dirty fingernails. I looked, I knew, like a lost bum. Babalwa, at least, was more together. No longer completely pissed on the champagne, she cut a reasonable, less bum-like figure in her T-shirt, jeans, sandals and socks.
‘So!’ Fats clapped his hands and brought us to order. ‘If we can just get practical for a few minutes. Any suggestions as to which rooms they should take?’
Lillian offered up two rooms in the left wing. ‘Ja? Guys?’ Fats beamed at Babalwa and me in turn.
‘Fine by me,’ said Babalwa, glancing in my direction without actually looking at me.
‘All good.’ I smiled, and fought an animal urge to run.
My room was clearly a spare. A decently wide single bed and a large bookcase filled with technical books: governance and leadership manuals, MBA study materials, policy guidelines and frameworks.
A map of the world in a thick, black wooden frame on the wall.
I traced my finger over Africa, then America, down to South America. Brazil.
I considered going over to Babalwa’s room. I wondered whether she was thinking of knocking on my door. Our separation had been surgical and subtle. Fats was slick, I had to give him that. I missed her presence already. I counted the number of consecutive nights we had spent together in the same bed. Seven.
I probed the guillotine with my tongue while I lay on the bed and stared at the map.
I waited for her knock.
Hours later, in the dark of the early morning, I conceded defeat and wandered the mansion, strolling up and down the staircases, running my hand over the oak banisters, contemplating what kind of life the minister had led. Whether he had, on the odd occasion, paid attention to the same railings, run his hand down them, waited for his thoughts to catch up with his body.
Eventually I landed at the doorway to the computer room and there was Tebza, clicking and nodding. He turned, telepathically, pulled an earphone out and greeted me.
‘Come inside.’ He waved at the machines. ‘Feel free …’
‘What you up to?’ I tiptoed to his desk.
‘Ag, just network stuff, you know, trying to figure out the last of it. Jesus, even just a WAN that reaches past the gates. Mission.’
‘You in computers? Before?’
‘Nah,’ he scoffed. ‘Broker. Stocks and shit.’
‘Ah.’
‘And you? Advertising, nè?’
‘Ja, kinda. Initially anyway. Then I ended up in VR. You know, the clubs …’
‘Ah. Ja, I heard something like that in the kitchen. Mlungu’s, yes?’
‘My claim to fame.’
‘Had a few nights there myself. Good place.’ Tebza leaned back into his screen while keeping his nearest shoulder blade open in
conversational invitation. He slammed the enter key through a never-ending string of IP addresses as we talked.
‘You think we’ll get it back? The net? A net? A cloud?’
‘I fucking doubt it. The cloud is now in a gazillion tiny pieces.’ Teboho leaned fully back in his office chair, the springs holding him at a dangerous forty-five degrees. He locked his hands around his head. ‘You have no idea how much shit I had on the cloud. So much shit. My entire life on that fucking cloud. Everything …’
‘Eish.’
‘It always worried me. To have everything that meant anything sitting there. So I made sure I backed it all up, twice.’
‘Onto the cloud?’
‘Onto the cloud.’ Teboho laughed and made genuine eye contact with me for the first time. ‘I dunno, maybe it’s just panic. A defence against everything, but I feel like if I could get just something back, a few albums, some photos, that would be a step. An important step.’ He shrugged, flapping his elbows a bit, and considered me.
‘Eish.’ I couldn’t think of anything else to say to indicate the sudden warmth I felt for him. ‘Jammer, nè? Hardcore. Me, I had nothing up there that meant anything.’
We shrugged together.
‘You smoke?’ I asked hopefully, my heart accelerating. ‘I do.’ Teboho sprung his chair forward, pulled a small bankie from his pocket and tossed it at me happily. ‘I most certainly do. Roll it up, son, roll it up.’
We sat on the brick stairs guarding the swimming pool and smoked.
Teboho was a middle-class kid. ‘Straight outta Midrand’, as he put it. With Model C schooling followed by an average BCom stint at an average university, he went straight into finance, banking and trading. There were constant hints, however, that he was more than a collection of banker parts. His music references were more complex than I expected. His technology obsession was genuine as well. Real geeks always had a certain manner about them – a particular way of describing life and ambition and the tools at our disposal as a lush, expanding horizon. Tebza fit the bill. He spoke
easily, unthinkingly, of time-lapse nanotech, the importance of getting the raw vector designs right in the VR clubs, of algo trading and new beats emerging from somewhere in remote Russia that, by all accounts, were about to turn current notions of X, Y and Z on their heads.
And the boy was genuinely, seriously pained by the loss of the cloud.
‘Dumb-assed.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘Just dumb-assed. I thought about hard backups so many times, but I was lazy. Told myself I was being paranoid. But fuck …’ He tailed off. ‘All that’s gone now. No use dreaming. It’s a long, long way away. I’ll always miss it though, you know. As shallow and cheesy and stupid as it was, our life, I’ll miss it. The clubs and the music and the people. Maybe there was a kind of security in the triviality?’
‘That’s my life,’ I grunted in affirmation, mesmerised by the glow of the moon on the pool. ‘Security in triviality.’
‘Ha.’ Tebza flicked the roach into the hedges. ‘I suppose we’re learning now, nè?’
Our conversation drifted back and forth across the landscape of our past. Together we reached as far back as we could go, pushing into the jelly of what was. Of times that were sweet and green and simple.
Eventually we fell to quiet, and then back into the present, and Fats.
‘He’s obsessed, just so you know,’ Tebza warned. ‘He has this master plan. Pretty freaky. He can be forceful, you know? It’s tough, ’cause he also seriously gets shit done. He’s got the farm and the food and the power moving, and so, you know, he can be hard to deny.’
According to Tebza, Fats aimed to fence off our block completely, including not only the entire grounds of King Edward High School, but also St John’s – an even bigger and richer stone institution, adjacent to KES, at the end of the lane we occupied. If Fats had his way, our enclave would feature controlled access points at the beginning of our lane and in key areas: the top of Munro Drive – apparently the name of the steep S bend we had travelled to
get to the ridge – the outer edge of St John’s School, where the property linked with the main road, and others. Fats, apparently, was obsessed by the idea of invasion. The idea of a pack of others the same size as us.
‘Dunno, could have merit,’ Tebza mused. ‘I mean, a posse with big enough guns could just come and take it. Take us. So that’s his thing – the fencing. He’s pushing hard on it, got district maps and everything all up on the wall, the perimeters marked out. Red pins, little marker pens and the whole bit. Jesus. All in his control room.’
‘His bedroom?’
‘No, the control room. Next to his bedroom he’s converted this study-type room into a control room, centre, thingy. Put a few computers in – for atmosphere more than anything else at this stage, I think – rigged up a two-way radio, that kinda thing. Massive map, red pins, bits of linking string and such.’
‘Bit freaky.’
‘Bit, ja. But you know what they say – fattest stomach wins, eh?’
‘Ja …’ I mulled over the idea of Fats The General. He had spent a lifetime designing and managing events – for forty thousand people and more. He probably needed a way to carry on with what he knew. Didn’t we all?
‘I guess he could have a point. I mean, we can’t be the only nine people left on the planet.’
Teboho patted my knee and stood. ‘My friend,’ he said, ‘we could be anything at all. Absolutely anything at all.’