Dub Steps (18 page)

Tebza had finally delivered. Suddenly we had a WAN that covered three square kilometres. Not just any WAN, but one that locked into the IP address for the transmission-paint receptors. We were able to talk to the walls, to command and broadcast. In time, we would be able to create interfaces.

The WAN gave us partial drone ability – just enough to show how distant the real deal was, and would forever be. Without a satellite link the essential function of the drones was void. Images couldn’t be fed back to the controls, and so the things could never be sent out of human sight. They were little more than toys. Even if they could have ventured beyond us, we would never be able to see what they saw. They would be out there seeking, seeing, assessing all on their own.

Still, the WAN allowed Tebza to control a drone from a laptop hooked up to something akin to a PA system mixing desk, out of which extended a joystick. Using a combination of wireless signals and radio frequencies that was beyond our understanding, he gave us sight control over the planes, which he set to shoot video and store on the internal hard drive. Long after the little brown bullets were parked back next to us, we all pored over the laptop, peering hopefully into a video stream of vacant land.

We climbed the St John’s tower for the best view and reach, and flew the things for days. We flew them into trees and buildings, hovered them incessantly in fear of landing and then crashed them repeatedly in the attempt to bring them down.

The drones, secured from the Waterkloof Airforce Base, were the size of small seagulls. Some were even as small as large insects. They were observation devices and lacked guns and firepower, a fact which disappointed the boys but, Tebza educated us, at least ensured we would receive decent-quality video. You can only fit so much equipment onto a seagull.

It was thrilling, getting those things into the air and then letting them run through the blue. Infused in the thrill was the idea of our own flight, and thus it was Lillian who bounced and bobbed and squeaked with the most force. ‘I’m telling you!’ she shouted into the air above the clock tower, American fist raised. ‘I’m telling you, world! We will fly! We will not be beaten!’

‘Just focus, dear.’ Tebza reached out to steady her grip on the joystick, then retracted, his hand hovering nervously. ‘We don’t have an endless supply.’

Andile laid her body carefully on the tower’s thin stone ledge, suntanning, hands behind head, ignoring the sheer drop. ‘This blue sky,’ she said, to no one in particular. ‘The sky has just gone mal blue. Crazy blue. Imagine how blue it would be, to be a drone, floating in the sea, just you, just me.’ She rapped thoughtlessly, stumbling onto a hidden beat. ‘Baby, it’s life, baby, it’s a bee, it’s the drone, it’s you, it’s me, free in the deep blue sea …’

Lillian plunged to the right, the joystick pulling her body down as the drone flipped up in the sky, lost itself and started to crash. She yelled theatrically and thrust the stick in six different directions. The drone, tiny insect, dropped helpless onto the rugby field. ‘Wait, I’ll get it!’ she yelled and bolted down the stairs. We watched her shifting across the turf, lost in the simple thrill of the search.

‘I’m having a feeling,’ said Gerald carefully, ‘that this is the beginning of something.’

Drones aside, there was much debate around what use to make of our new ability, which, although exciting, was not immediately practical. Eventually we settled on painting the corner façade of the St John’s building, the bit overlooking Houghton Drive. We did a bad job, just a straight up-and-down lashing of the dull brown, but it was enough. After a week of energy and effort, we stood proudly below a twelve-metre-wide and thirty-metre-high rotating slide show. After we grew bored with pictures of ourselves, Tebza loaded up a static, shimmering South African flag and it sat there, humble during the day, insanely colourful and neon at night. It was, we decided, important. It marked our presence. At night, the
neon could be seen from Tshwane.

‘You’d swear by the size of the thing,’ said Andile, ‘that we would be thousands.’

It was an achievement. A clear and obvious accomplishment.

It deserved celebration.

We drove to the coast in three vehicles, drinking from early in the day and ending up on the Durban beachfront, wasted and crazed.

Fats shagged Lillian on the beach. Babalwa wept.

Gerald punched Fats.

Tebza disappeared.

Javas punched Fats.

The drinking actually started before we left Houghton. Beatrice produced two cases of cider. ‘Before this shit really does go off,’ she rationalised. But really it was the tequila Fats pulled into his 4x4 that sent it all to shit. I rolled a self-defence joint for the journey, and by the time we had passed Heidelberg it had all pretty much collapsed. Joints were being passed between moving vehicles; the cider and tequila and beer smashed head-on into much pent-up energy and scattered into the winds.

I took the Édith Piaf out of the CD player and replaced it with Fresh House Flava’s Volume II. Lillian and Fats were in my vehicle on the first leg and I watched in the rear-view as the spark of their eventual encounter flickered. The tequila had made them silly. The joint added a subtle kind of hysteria. A hand moved to the left. Another hand brushed a knee. Someone needed to lean somewhere to get something and suddenly the air was thick and sweet and about to explode.

The problem, we discovered on arriving in Durban, was that we had nothing to do.

Unlike Kruger, where the animals in themselves are an agenda that can roll out peacefully for days, now there was only the sea. Of the nine of us there were only four swimmers (myself, Andile,
Lillian and Beatrice), and in any case the waves were rough and churning and brown.

We swirled around the parking lot. Ran up and down the pier.

Lillian and Fats kept brushing against each other, and Babalwa started getting scratchy. I sat with Tebza on the low brick wall dividing the esplanade and the sand.

‘Heard there was hack going down here.’ Tebza spoke from the corner of his mouth. ‘Somewhere near the harbour.’

‘Lemme guess.’ I couldn’t resist. ‘A flat somewhere.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Nothing more than that?’

‘Blue,’ he added, laughing at himself. ‘A blue block of flats. On the beachfront. Near the harbour. That should narrow it down.’

‘Name of block? Owner?’

‘Nope. Blue block near the harbour. All I got.’

‘You gonna check it out?’

‘Why not?’ He glanced at Beatrice, who was doing drunken, misguided cartwheels on the sand. ‘I think I know where this is going.’

We watched Andile try to guide Beatrice’s legs through the last phase of the cartwheel. Beatrice yelped and shook her foot free, kicking Andile in the jaw in the process. Andile clutched her jaw in tequila drama and they stood in a sudden face-off, accusing each other.

Tebza drifted away. I joined Gerald on the pier, where he was fishing like an old man. We sat there for an hour without a real bite. The sun dropped fast behind the beachfront flats and hotels.

Gerald looked at the parking lot, at Beatrice, Lillian and Fats sitting on the wall talking animatedly, at Babalwa walking alone in a dramatically sulky fashion down the shoreline. ‘This,’ he said, ‘was a bad idea.’

Pause.

I sipped on my flat Coke.

‘Be dark soon. They’re too messed up to even walk.’

‘Gonna be a long night.’

‘Where’d the twins go?’

‘Dunno.’

‘Tebza?’

‘Said something about the harbour.’

Gerald sighed, and played the line out of the reel, bit by little bit.

Gerald was right, of course. They were too messed up to walk. Despite earlier plans to find suitable lodgings, we slept in the cars, like we were on some kind of school trip.

The twins parked their vehicle as far away from the rest as they could get. There was frequent vomiting, mostly from Beatrice.

After dark Fats and Lillian did what they were always going to do, right there on the beach.

Fats must have been punishing Babalwa for some transgression, such was the proximity of the coupling to the parking lot. It wasn’t close enough to watch, but it wasn’t far enough away to ignore either. Babalwa’s sobs, and her pseudo-attempt to muffle them, issued constantly from her 4x4 – regular little yelps of pain, anguish and tequila.

A few hours into darkness, the sobs had become too much to bear. As had the giggles emanating from Lillian and Fats, still cynically scooping handfuls of sand through entwined fingers. Parked in the passenger seat of my Toyota, I watched as Gerald marched up to Fats, yanked him to his feet and slugged him on the nose. Gerald tried to pick him up again and repeat the process, but Lillian had covered Fats’s shocked body in a fit of protesting arms and legs. Gerald stomped back to the Toyota, got in next to me, folded his arms and feigned immediate sleep.

The fight sparked a cacophony of drunken protests from Fats and, finally, the appearance of Babalwa, who stood confronting the cuckolding couple until eventually, like an avenging angel, Javas appeared, issued a few curt words to them all, ducked the two swings Fats sent his way and then knocked him out with a single, brutal shot to the snout. Fats slumped into a heap on the sand. Lillian and Babalwa screamed. Javas picked Fats up and slung him over his shoulder like a carcass. He carried him to the back of the Toyota and dumped him inside.

‘I think this might belong to you.’ He winked slowly at me, once, and marched back to Andile.

The next morning we couldn’t look at each other. I drifted over to the twins, who were, as usual, smiling and calm. Andile suggested a rapid departure. We engineered a quick round-up of the hungover, shamed troops, searched for Tebza for an hour or two and then decided to leave one of the 4x4s at the beachfront with a note on the dash.

We drove back to Jozi in silence.

Intimacy, finally, had got the better of us.

The fighting and fucking and embarrassment of our collective behaviour finally saw the gods rain change down on us. After many months of stagnation the dam wall broke.

Everyone got wet.

We parted ways as we arrived home from the beach. I went running, coughing the smoke out of my lungs as I pushed along Munro Drive, through Upper Houghton, into Louis Botha and the slow drift lower into Alexandra, right into London Road and up a last, punishing hill to join the N3 highway. I sat on a large rock by the on-ramp, a strange, out-of-place thing lost on the side of the road. I looked down on the shanty city. From up high, with the Sandton skyline as a backdrop, it was a truly ridiculous sight. The shacks began at the grossly confident feet of the glass horizon and lined up on each other interminably, never-ending rows cascading all the way down to the brown banks of the Jukskei River, where the last abodes hung impossibly over the water, destined to fall.

Running through Alex was an existential exercise I never got used to – which was why I did it so much. As alien as it felt to be stranded in Houghton, Alex reminded me of the essential alienness of my wider life. My pre-life.

There was anger and regret and tension and bruising back at the farm. I avoided it all.

When I eventually emerged ready to talk, make eye contact, and so forth, it was to greet Tebza as he pulled into the drive in the 4x4 we had left for him on the Durban beachfront.

‘Thanks for the note,’ he said. ‘Very considerate.’

‘Sorry, things got out of hand. We had to leave. Fast.’

‘Fine, fine.’ He shrugged. ‘Little freaky being abandoned, but I cope.’

‘You find the blue flat?’

‘Nah.’ He shook his head, clearly disappointed. ‘I mean, ja. Crack, coke, pills, weed. But not what I wanted.’ The scar wriggled as his cheek moved. He looked like a dealer, or a hard-times man – one of those guys who could do anything, be anything. He looked older than he had before, and even less like a broker.

‘Shit. Really?’

‘All of the above. But nothing else. I went flat to flat for a full day, mfana. Fokol. Nix.’

Two weeks later Lillian and Gerald roared up next to Tebza and me as we were walking up the driveway to check on the cows. Lillian leaped out of the Toyota. ‘Guess what?’ she asked excitedly, bouncing on her tiptoes, hands behind her back, beaming beaming beaming. Tebza and I looked at each other suspiciously. He sighed. ‘What?’

‘We have just found’ – Lillian made a sweeping, unveiling motion, a matador fooling the bull – ‘a complete flight simulator! Like the ones they use in the movies!’ She pulled me by the sleeve and I expected her to show me the thing in the back of the bakkie, but there was nothing – she was dragging me to the vision in her mind. ‘At fucking Waterkloof.’ Her American drawl was suddenly marked. ‘Same place we’ve been a hundred times. Don’t know how we missed it, it was in this shed type of thing. I dunno …’ She was babbling at high speed, her hand still clutching and pulling on my sleeve, tugging me in no particular direction. ‘When I think back, I guess I must have thought it was a shed or something. It looked like it should have had tools in it.’ Gerald had disembarked by this stage and was standing next to her, quietly radiating a similar high energy. ‘You know what this means?’ Lillian was bouncing on her toes again, her boobs and ass moving in excited asymmetric harmony. ‘Do you know what this means, Roy?’ she repeated. I
smiled, wishing she would calm down. ‘It means we can fly!’

I looked at Tebza, all question marks.

‘All we have to do is hook up some power and we can start using it.’ Lillian was still firing at a million words a minute. ‘We thought about trying to get it into the van, but it would never have fit. I reckon we’ll only need, like, twenty portable panels and we can power up that whole section.’ She stopped, cast her eyes to the heavens like a Brazilian soccer player and ran off to the house.

Gerald shrugged. ‘Here we go,’ he said as we followed her to the house. ‘Here we fucking go.’

Days later, once the excitement around the simulator had ebbed, Babalwa told me she was pregnant, as if I didn’t know.

She knocked softly on my door one night, hopped onto my bed and let the tears run. I asked her what type of tears they were, and she said after the Durban trip she wasn’t sure. Only thing she definitely knew was that at a higher level it felt right, even if the father happened to be a domineering prick who fucked other women on the beach pretty much in front of her.

‘He know yet?’ I guided her over the age-old, rocky path.

‘Sure. We found out properly a while back. I went to the chemist and found a pregnancy test and—’

‘So what happened with the Lillian thing? What’s going on?’

‘Eish. I mean, I dunno. I mean, I think I know …’ She took my hand. ‘Roy, I just wanted to apologise. For the rape thing. I don’t know, I don’t know what it was. It just frightened me, I guess, the whole thing, the animalness of it. But I know, in my heart, I know you’re not a rapist. You didn’t rape me. I know that.’ She pushed at the cuticles on her entwined hand with her free one, sorrowful. ‘I think I just scared myself, that’s all. You know? With what I was a capable of, and then I started to rationalise and … you know … you do know, don’t you, Roy?’

I tipped my head.

‘You told Fats this? Is that what the Lillian thing was?’

‘He won’t believe me.’ More eyes, more regret. ‘He thinks I’m in love with you or something, or, like, I’m addicted to you as a father
figure. Shit like that. Every time I try to explain he just talks over me. Like I’m a child.’

‘A naughty child.’

‘Ja. A naughty child.’ She batted teary eyes at me and waited for redemption.

I gave her the platitudes she was looking for and she eventually squeaked back out, pulling the door shut like a teenager. The latch clicked, and I was alone. I felt suddenly like I had on that first night in Houghton, pitifully small, stuck in a spare bedroom like a little boy. I looked around my room. After all this time I had barely occupied it. It was essentially in the same condition as when I had arrived, save for the addition of a computer and speakers. The MBA books sat waiting still, as expectant as on my first night.

Pitiful.

The others had all fully occupied their parts of the house. Beatrice, for example, had converted her wing into an empire. One needed permission to get through the front door, behind which cascaded various rooms and offshoots, all with specific functions. Her hallway included framed copies of her MBA certificates and company awards. Her bedroom lay recessed in the far corner, north-facing, naturally.

But me – I was just waiting. Marking time as usual. I thought of my corners of the house I had shared with Angie, the little areas clearly my own, which were just as spare as my current abode. As if I was denying the most basic human need to nest. As if nesting was just never for me. Maybe that was why Babalwa had jumped ship so fast. Maybe I just couldn’t provide the nest.

I was still at least partially in love with Babalwa. Our PE time had faded, but part of my half-toothed, jagged consciousness was still locked into her, especially after I was let loose for the mighty Fats. I was jilted, and I still felt the pain. I found myself dreaming odd thoughts about a life together with her, alone again somewhere, coexisting quietly, holding hands occasionally. That sort of thing.

For her part, Babalwa was clearly comfortable using me as a counterpoint (physically, emotionally, intellectually) to Fats. While
patting her hand I wondered what the hidden agenda of her visit was. I also questioned how in touch she was with her own agenda-setting. The best liars, they always say, believe they are telling the truth. How much belief was there in Babalwa at any one time?

The next morning I took off in the opposite direction of my traditional route, heading this time for the Drill Hall, in the city. Javas had his studio space there. It was where he built his monsters. Since the Kruger trip I had visited the studio several times. I was compelled by his creations. Being in their presence gave me a kind of metaphysical comfort.

The Drill Hall was an old military station converted into a quasi-cultural space featuring careful brickwork and commemorative plaques telling struggle and other stories. It sat in the middle of Noord, the biggest and most aggressive taxi rank in the country.

Javas and Andile took great delight in telling Noord stories. The incredible hooting, the grinding crush of perpetually angry taxi drivers. The tsotsis and pickpockets. The mamas and children and students and artists and hawkers. The kieries and hidden guns. The crush the crush the crush.

Devoid of its humans, though, Noord was just a few intersecting streets. Well worked with rubber stains, yes, but just a few streets with a past, history bouncing around helpless, waiting.

On my first trip to the Drill Hall I followed the twins. I stood next to the Chicken Licken and watched from a few steps back as they processed a reality that had little bearing on me.

‘Unless you were here before,’ Javas explained, ‘you could never understand how this feels.’ He squatted on his heels. Andile stood separate, looking up at the flats, hands on her hips, shaking her head slowly.

Being inside the gates, on the Drill Hall square, was to be on a ghetto picnic island. Surrounded by towering, crumbling, white art deco buildings, the complex was crisply marked off by a serious set of gates, the bars of which had been decorated with African
symbology, creating a curiously resonant vine of safety and art. The fences were children running, animals moving, ladies carrying wood and baskets on their heads, the motifs literally wound into the fabric of the iron. The island effect was enhanced by the sea of surrounding sleeping taxis. Twist Street was only pockmarked by the occasional midnight ride, but the surrounding streets and intersections were stacked four and five rows deep with waiting half loaves.

‘Blue, yellow, red HiAces, silently rejoicing,’ Andile mumbled.

‘Eh?’ I asked, still mesmerised by the ghetto art deco, especially the spooky extended vertical ovals on the left, which Javas said used to be a cinema.

‘Ah, nothing. Just an old song my uncle taught me – about taxis.’

Now I was back by myself in Javas’s studio, which used to be a library run by an NGO. It was a cavernous double-volume hall filled with five six-metre metal beasts, each staggering towards the other. I sat at the foot of the biggest one. Its absurdly square head (a radiator perhaps?) was bolted and/or welded onto rusty shoulders, the fringe of the weld purposefully messy and bold and orange, the function of the bolt and screw ambiguous – possibly aesthetic, possibly structural. The giant was reaching out, its right arm three-quarters extended.

I pulled my knees to my chin, Babalwa-like, and waited for something to happen. I examined the complex scaffold-and-pulley system that was rigged around the piece.

Now that I had seen his art, Javas’s general state of silence and passivity made much more sense. He had no need to displace or channel his energy – it was all being funnelled into this.

When I visited his studio I invariably talked to my Nikes. I tied and untied the laces. Patted the toes. Asked them where they would take me next. I felt as attached and friendly towards those shoes as I did to anyone in the house. The shoes took me places and never asked questions. They were simple and comfortable and friendly.

‘So.’ I spoke directly at them. ‘What now? What the fuck now?’

There was no answer.

I pushed the same question at Javas’s beasts, but they were silent.

I smacked my knees together. It hurt and made a loud, hollow noise.

I stood.

I wrapped my arms around the leg of my host beast and hugged. A spot of sun beamed in from the window on the upper side of the hall, forming a natural spotlight on the ankle and foot. The rusted metal of the calf (a car chassis? some kind of tractor part?) was warm and rough on my skin. It felt good.

I held on.

The others had rushed out to Waterkloof at first light to start powering up the simulator. Excitement had fanned across the house (bypassing myself and Babalwa, each immune for our own reasons) and great dreams were being sketched of transcontinental flight. Of trips to America and Europe. Maybe Russia, Lillian said.