Dub Steps (11 page)

My guillotine tooth was an emblem for many other shortcomings, its jagged edges thrown into relief by Fats and his relentless march towards organisation, development and security.

Babalwa fell, inevitably, into his orbit. She didn’t fawn over his every move – well, not completely, anyway – but she was certainly increasingly guided by his alpha force and his big-ape vibe.

Beatrice and Fats had once been entangled sexually, and Babalwa’s presence thus generated the recurring sparks of low-level community conflict. The three circled each other in a wary triangle during the initial months. Innuendos, double meanings and flashes of sharp eye contact spiralled, without ever getting completely out of control.

But even outside of the Babalwa context, Beatrice looked perpetually out of alignment. Her frown was fluid, her eyes restless. She wrung her hands like washing, eventually ramming them into her pockets, then pulling them out and starting the cycle all over again.

She was a profiler and a networker. Her corporate career had been carefully shaped and crafted to brush over the fact that she grew up in Beaufort West, and that she was the offspring of no one at all. She had achieved her elevated corporate status through a careful construction of virtual profiles, which she maintained with diligence and care. While Tebza was always clicking and checking, jumpy and seeking to plug into this socket or that, it was Beatrice who, of all of us, was the most distraught at the digital detachment – specifically the separation from her profile. Her make-up, her new jeans, her cultivated look – all of these were dysfunctional proxies for her deeper compulsion to maintain her identity.

‘It’s tragic,’ Lillian stated authoritatively. ‘You can see she’s actually physiologically stressed by the whole thing. I guess that’s what working in marketing does.’

Teboho spent all of his time in front of a machine, or clicking on a device, or removing or inserting that dangling white earphone.

Our evening joints grew into a ritual (he was farming a huge plantation down in the far bottom corner of St John’s), which meant I got to know him best of all.

He released snippets of himself to me around the pool, and I slowly patched together the image of a young stockbroker who spent most of his time doing other, more interesting things. We slotted into the druggie-techno lingo of his generation easily enough, but his references were more nuanced than mine, and many times I found myself bumbling along while actually adrift. I had no practical experience of hack, a substance of some importance to him in his pre-life. Even given my considerable Mlungu’s experience, I was sadly out of touch with the VR and nanotech mix, my frame of reference limited to glasses and transmission paint. Already, and somewhat surprisingly, I came from the old school.

He didn’t offer much beyond slight references; how hectic the brokers had got with the illicit algos, which had veered far, far beyond trading and weather and customised movie predictions. He dropped small clues regularly enough for me to know that I didn’t really understand how the boundaries of his world were shaped, nor even what they were made of.

Some nights – frequently, in fact – he didn’t offer anything at all. Neither did I. We sat in silence next to the pool and contemplated the universe that had unfurled over the city now that the lights were out.

Now, looking back, it’s clear to me that Babalwa had broken some part of my heart, and that I was suffering. The mirror had shattered. At the time I simply felt numb, and tired, and sad. I was navigating mostly through stubbornness. There were so many conflicting forces at play I wasn’t able to discern the true source of any of them. I was simply surviving. Babalwa, for her part, was clear about the course of things and made regular attempts to recalibrate the dynamics of our relationship. Punches on the shoulder. Warm friendly hugs. Etc.

I considered pulling the guillotine tooth and living with the gap, but that felt like even more of a defeat than the half tooth itself. Instead, I spent an inordinate amount of time staring in the mirror at the disaster of my mouth, pondering its meaning, the social consequences of facial misfortune and other such indulgences. When I could no longer cope with my reflection, I retired to my room, locked the door and sat with my photo albums, a final and necessary refuge. I spent many hours leafing through them and constructing detailed stories for each girl and each family, stitching their lives together in my imagination. The albums were my true sanctuary. I buried myself in them gratefully.

Of course everyone had been untethered from their lives and their loves. Husbands and fathers, children and families. None of us had even a single mooring left and so we were all wafting across each other’s emotional paths. We came together successfully over the tasks and functions of the farm, but there was a cloud hanging over St Patrick Road that no force could move.

Fats’s obsession with project management, food production, setting up the slaughterhouse and gating off our enclave gave us a critical series of focus points. Food was food – it was governed by its own logic – but the gates were especially important practical pillars. They were our unspoken way of telling each other that we hadn’t lost hope, yet. It took special circumstances for discussions around our real plight to take place, and they seldom arose. Instead we worked on the gates and allowed ourselves to be led by Fats’s energy and vision, by his grand plan for our new city of nine people. Each gate closed was also another sign that we believed there could be other people out there.

I regret now, though, that I was so cut off. That I engaged so little. That I spent as much time as I did with my tongue running through the guillotine, or in my room indulging in neurotic (and, yes, erotic) fantasies.

One afternoon, about three months into our arrival, I was assisting Gerald with one of the last gates. Lacking any real technical skills,
I was, quite literally, his ‘hou vas’. I would cling onto whatever needing stabilising. I would pass him tools.

‘My skill set is a little limited for this kind of work,’ I offered in thoughtless ad language as he dismantled another set of wrought-iron spiked gates from one of St John’s inner fencing lines, his forearms rippling with pleasure.

‘Sho,’ Gerald grunted. He flicked his blowtorch off for a second. ‘We all live in our place, nè?’ He flipped his helmet back down and carried on.

Gerald’s pre-life in the army and security business gave him an edge. His latent talents, while thus far unexpressed, clearly lay in the area of shooting, muscling and enforcing. He had the air about him of a man who had messed with the bigger stuff. I probed while we piled the fencing onto the back of the bakkie.

‘You experience a lot of fire, then? Like fighting?’ I asked.

‘Fire? Ja, sho. Not in the army; there we were just running around with clipboards. But after, when I had the security company. Sho. Fire. Often. Translation …’ He gave me a long blank look. ‘You would like to know if I have taken a life?’

I was surprised by his interpretation. ‘Well, not really what I was thinking – well, not yet anyway.’

‘Maybe I’m just in front of you ’cause I already know where it’s going.’ He softened, let his forearm muscles slacken. ‘Anyway, the answer is yes. I have killed.’

‘Ah …’ Now I was even more intrigued, but unable to further what I had started. ‘It changed you? As a person?’

‘There is no describing death. All you know is, it is on your shoulder. It won’t leave.’ Gerald fished a pack of cigarettes, Peter Stuyvesant reds, out of his pocket. I had never seen him smoke before.

‘Smoke?’ He shook the packet at me and a single red came sliding out to meet my hand. I wasn’t a big smoker at all, but this seemed like an appropriate moment.

‘I didn’t know—’

‘I don’t. But Lillian brought a carton from Spar. It has been many years. Now I’m finding it’s making me feel alive. For now at least.’

We leaned against the bonnet of the bakkie, and Gerald released parts of his story.

He was born on the cusp of the Kruger National Park in the township of Mkhuhlu. His great-grandfather was one of the original ‘police boys’ hired by the white man setting up the Pretoriuskop Camp in the park. The police boys were drawn from all over. The tourists loved them because they were such exotic photo subjects, and the white rangers – whom they trained and educated – loved them because they knew the bush. They all came from different areas, and they were all called Shangaans.

‘So I am Shangaan in many ways,’ Gerald said, pulling reflectively on his smoke. ‘Properly Shangaan, but also like a toy. Tourist Shangaan.’

Gerald’s grandfather and father both worked on the Jozi mines, his father ending up as an alcoholic boss-boy. ‘Better pay, worse father.’

Determined to avoid the fate of his elders, Gerald joined the army at seventeen and put in a decade of administrative work before leaving with two partners to set up a security company to guard a Pretoria-north industrial complex on a cooked tender deal. The company lasted five years and then collapsed on its rotten foundations. Gerald started his own thing, which he grew, inch by inch, over the course of the rest of his life, starting small, guarding little shopping complexes and the like. ‘A business,’ he said as he dropped his cigarette butt onto the dirt and ground it out with a heel, ‘is like war – but harder, and longer.’

We spent several gate afternoons together and I came to be an admirer of his technical ability, his pure muscle and his willingness to be quiet. Before we set out, he would quickly knock off a sketch of the project in his little notebook with his clutch pencil, estimating rough lengths and widths and sizes. When we arrived at the installation point, his first action was to relook at his sketch, measure up whatever he could and finalise the numbers. Only then did he take off his invariably striped golf shirt and get to it. His skill, I realised gradually, was rooted in his focus on getting the numbers right first. It felt like a valuable lesson to me at the time.
In fact, it still does, although I can’t say I ever learned to apply it.

I had assumed Lillian and Gerald were together – if not sexually then certainly practically. As I spent more time with him on the gates, I realised that this wasn’t necessarily the case. It was more like Lillian had attached herself to him, and Gerald, in turn, had silently agreed to allow her into his range. The two of them were, in fact, many miles apart in important ways. Lillian, for example, had already been to the Kruger Park three times. Gerald had spent his life looking in exactly the opposite direction.

‘I’ve never been,’ he said. ‘There were school trips but I missed them all – this week I was sick, that week there was family business, sometimes I just didn’t go.’

‘Do you regret that?’

‘Maybe the animals. Not the people. The animals I should have seen. Leopard maybe. They should be part of our culture but they are not.’ He shrugged.

‘We should go someday,’ I offered. ‘At some stage Fats is gonna run out of work for us. Could be fun.’

Gerald grunted and powered up his drill.

As is the case for many academics, Lillian’s empathy gland appeared to have been severed at birth. She just didn’t have that thing a person needs to get along with other people. In her pre-life there were plenty of opportunities for her to fall into books and colleges and universities and working groups designed to accommodate such deficiencies. Now, her Achilles heel was painful to us all. We were forced to endure the ongoing pain of her stilted contact, her addiction to factual accuracy and her wont for entering into meaningless verbal conflict. And, she and I were the only whites. The two without a single indigenous tongue. We were thus often circumstantially lumped together on the outskirts of conversations whose meaning we could only guess at.

Over the years at Mlungu’s I had developed my tsotsitaal skills just enough to build the bridges I needed between people and conversations. I could greet and laugh and joke colloquially. I could ask for a rephrase. I could crack a joke at my own expense.

I had, of course, like most whites, lived a full life with people carrying out private conversations in front of me. I knew how to keep a steady face and pretend not to be bothered. In fact, most of the time I truly wasn’t bothered, even when I was clearly the subject. Call it a genetically inherited trait.

Lillian lacked such a fortunate inheritance and her resentment at being cut out of conversations – and, even worse, becoming the subject of them – grew. She fretted constantly: over the quality of the water, over potential snakes in the yard, over the future and the past, over the idea of never being able to return to her homeland. And over language. The conversations drove her a little bit more nutty every time they happened. She launched several formal
protests, gathering us together as a group to discuss her grievances and attempting one-on-one interventions with each of us in turn. She never seemed to realise that her attempts merely dribbled steady fuel onto the fire.

‘You seriously want us to stop speaking our language because you can’t follow the conversation?’ Babalwa mocked her openly. ‘Nxa!’ Laughter.

‘But Lillian, look at your fellow mlungu here,’ Fats climbed in. ‘He doesn’t give a shit – and we mock him in front of his face all day!’

‘Hayi suka, you poes.’ I did my best to roll with it. ‘I’m not as clever as I think I am, but I’m not as stupid as I look.’

‘See?’ Javas added, patting Lillian patronisingly on the arm. ‘All you need is to do is hint that you might be picking up a few words. Then everyone will be more careful. It’s a masquerade, darling. Everyone in Africa must play.’

It was a drinks session around the pool. An attempt at normality. Pool furniture and gin and tonics. The booze had blown the seal on Lillian’s pressure cooker and she was taking the fight to Fats via a thinly linked series of bleats about respect and human rights. The backfire was long and painful, but Lillian was nothing if not a fighter; well over an hour passed before she left to cry in her room.

The conversation spilled over as she left, a hodgepodge of tsotsitaal, isiZulu, English, Afrikaans, isiXhosa and Sesotho. I shifted in my pool chair, wishing it would stop.

‘Just for the record, boss.’ Gerald cracked a rare smile. ‘We’re saying that the thing about good mlungus is they know that they don’t know, and will admit it. That’s all anyone wants anyway.’

‘Sho, skhokho. Sho.’ I raised my gin in mock salute.

Andile trotted over drunkenly and gave me a hug, Javas rattled off an incomprehensible insult and we all got drunk while Lillian cried.

I was free.

But only just.

The next day Lillian, puffy-eyed and wary, enlisted Gerald, Teboho
and me to make a trip with her to the CSIR in Pretoria in an attempt to leapfrog the stalled flight-simulator/drone mission. Her theory was that somewhere on the CSIR campus we would find the kind of high-end simulator software required for her to get the fuck out of Africa. Something we could either dump onto a hard drive or just bring back in its box. Or, at least, we would locate the silver bullet needed to get the drones going.

The CSIR consisted of acres of carefully cultivated indigenous bush scrub with hints of concrete peeking out at strange, unexpected angles. The front gate was a typically South African façade, ten metres high and made out of the stuff they protect gold with. A face-brick security check-in building on the left held aloft a disproportionately large Council for Industrial and Scientific Research sign, while a smaller guard-point building between the entry and exit gates held up its own sign. While the rest of us tried to plot an entrance strategy, Gerald was circling the complex in a bakkie. He soon skidded back up to the front entrance. ‘Got it,’ he said, leaning out the driver’s window. ‘Two hundred metres up from here. A good spot. We can get the bakkies in. There’s an old path. Take about half an hour to cut.’

Teboho said, ‘Thank God for men who can do shit.’

We scraped noisily through Gerald’s freshly cut fence holes, ripping up the paintwork on the side of the vehicles, and then drove up a small hill into thick bush and out the other side over what used to be a verge surrounding the roads that linked the various CSIR units. We parked facing each other around the main traffic circle. Gerald jumped out of his bakkie, followed by Lillian. Tebza and I just shouted from our driver’s seats.

Lillian took charge. ‘I guess the first thing would be to follow the road signs?’ She issued the command as a question.

‘Anyone see a sign for flight simulators?’ Tebza asked, deadpan.

‘How ’bout Defence, Peace, Safety and Security?’ I asked, only half joking. ‘Buildings 11, 12 and 13.’

‘Biosciences.’

‘Materials Sciences and Manufacturing.’

‘Department of Science and Technology.’

We called them out one by one, in turn, hopefully. As if the answer would echo back to us.

Lacking logical options, we decided on Science and Technology.

Water features, paths, carports, pot plants and building entrances had all been carefully cocooned in trees and flowers and indigenous semi-forest. Each day, no doubt, twenty or thirty gardeners would have set to with their mowers and clippers to keep the frame in place and the buildings functionally foregrounded. Now, a year’s worth of cutting back having gone by, the bush was the foreground. Tendrils and branches and leaves all stretched towards each other, relentless in their quest to convene across the paths, roads and walkways. Grass climbed up the base of the signs, branches reached for windows and doors. The road signs and metal sculptures of miners stood tall, but the revolution grew, unstoppable, at their feet.

‘How long, you think, before everything is gone?’ Tebza asked no one in particular. ‘A year? Two?’

‘About a year,’ offered Lillian authoritatively. ‘Can’t see us being able to hack our way around much after a year. Maybe only the bigger buildings, with enough equipment.’

Gerald grunted and walked to the rusted metal sculptures of Marikana miners, scratching his back awkwardly through his golf shirt. Lillian, Tebza and I stood facing building 52. The Department of Science and Technology.

‘Roy, consider this.’ Gerald was hunched over a miner’s foot, pulling a vine loose from the rusted boot of one the five central figures – a group which watched over a central paved memorial installation of plaques and pictures describing the Marikana killings and how they impacted the South African mining industry and society, details quaintly out of context to us now. He showed me the head of a thick organic rope. It was flat and spiked, each spike potentially a new rope of its own. ‘I’ve always loved this thing, this plant,’ he said. ‘It sends out these shooters, these flat things. They move fast, man, metres in a week. You’ll see, when we come back again this will have moved on and on and on. Maybe to another structure or just around the leg. Whatever’s easiest I
suppose. It’s amazing, nè? ’Cause the rest of it, the bush, is not flat like this thing. It’s normal. It’s like this part is a special advanced force. An advancing force. Very similar to the army.’

We stood together and considered the progress of the creepers over the set of metal sculptures. Up close, we could see the death grip on the feet; all of them were covered, wrapped in layers, the thick ropes reaching sideways but also extending up the leg.

‘Rampacious. Is that a word?’ Gerald stood, hands on hips.

‘Close,’ I said. ‘Rapacious. You’re looking for rapacious.’

‘Rapacious.’ He said it reverentially, hands still on hips, head swivelling, taking in the implications.

The hopelessness of our mission was obvious as we broke through the front door. The reception area was wide and empty, cigar-lounge chairs awaiting occupation, surrounded by magazine racks bravely holding up a variety of in-house publications, themselves surrounded by long-dead pot plants, now just collections of rank soil. The red reception carpet cut off at the corridors, which stretched cheap grey arms out in all directions. The offices leading off the corridors were a uniform five by five metres; cheap pine desks, red-backed office chairs, and pinboards decorated with cuttings, clippings, photos and printouts. Divisional newsletters and project photos adorned the passage walls. Each corridor ended in a scatter of small meeting rooms with pine seats and dangerously old coffee machines.

‘Ridiculous,’ Tebza said to me as we moved together from office to office. ‘We should be at the air force base or something.’

We entered Super Computing via a common room dominated by a photo-montage pinboard, each shot showing the same group at different stages of a marathon. The tall, thin white guy, a little younger than me and clearly the boss, was at the forefront of most of the shots, grinning manfully, leading his sweating charges through the ABSA charity 10.4-kilometre race. The last shot showed them all arm in sweaty arm at the finish. The girl to the right of the boss had shoulder-length black hair pulled back into a ponytail and a fierce, highly charged look in her eye.

I pulled the photo from the board and put it in my pocket.

‘You go on, I’m gawn somewhere else,’ Tebza announced in a droll fake Jamaican accent, turning for the door. ‘Der havta be more interesting places than this.’

I grunted in affirmation. I wasn’t sure where Lillian and Gerald had got to and I was now loving the trawl, digging into the uniformity of it all, wondering exactly what kind of thinking and progress and imagination were locked into the machines on those desks. Equally attractive was the haul of photos. Wife and child. Husband and dog. Lovers and parents. I pocketed the best ones.

Of flight simulators, predictably, there was no trace. I backtracked from Super Computing and followed another corridor from the reception area. This one led to a more scientific set-up – the smell of formaldehyde and a hint of laboratories down at the bottom end. The plaque on the first door read Department of Bio Sciences.

I tiptoed my way through, opening and closing doors, looking at photographs, reading more divisional notices. Unlike the other divisions, the Synthetic Biology lab at the end of the corridor seemed empty and devoid of even a hint of prior activity. The counters were wiped a glimmering kind of clean. Equipment was packed tightly away in glass-fronted cupboards. Whoever ran the place was either bored or exceptionally organised.

And so the afternoon went, the four of us breaking doors, smashing locks, poking through filing cabinets and folders and printouts. I crossed paths frequently with Gerald and Lillian, both on missions similar to mine. Tebza, however, I lost track of. Eventually I sat on the wheelchair slope outside the front door of the Department of Science and Technology centre and listened to the birds sing and the forest hum. I closed my eyes and lay down.

The birds sang some more.

I listened.

Gerald shook me awake, wanting to know where Tebza was, issuing instructions on how and where we would all go to look for him.

That way lay more of the same. Scientific-looking buildings, some older than others, names outside like Materials Sciences and Manufacturing, or Defence, Peace, Safety and Security. A few minutes’ walk down ‘Karee Road’ (really just a path for the occasional maintenance vehicle) was a distinctly newer-looking glass centre, the National Centre for Nano-Structured Materials. Unlike most of the other buildings, which were at least sixty or seventy years old, the Nano building had the ring of early twenty-first century about it. The glimmering glass was not only more stylish but also clearly constituted an attempt at more effective utilisation of natural light – the phrase came winging back to me from a brochure I had written decades ago. I admired the design for a few seconds, then walked on. As I moved I heard the tinkle of glass breaking. I headed around the building and found a smashed entry point at the back. It was a tiny hole, only just big enough for a man to fit through, glass jaws still hanging open.

I squeezed myself through, scraping the skin on my cheek and cutting my forearm, which bled. I followed the sound of things breaking through a series of corridors and eventually, after a host of wrong turns and dead ends, came across a lab titled Recreational Nanotech. Tebza’s form moved behind the swing door. He was hurtling stuff left and right, even over his shoulder. He examined each of the items one by one in quick time, engaged in a personal battle of discovery. My hand stopped on the swing door. I stood and watched. The speed and intensity of his movement were totally out of whack with the Teboho I had known thus far. He looked desperate. I pushed through.

‘Tebza, dawg. Wot up?’

He turned fast, shocked at the intrusion, and said, ‘Forget it, there’s fuck all here. Let’s move.’

That was the first of several CSIR trips. We moved through the bottom half of the complex building by building, searching for additional salvation beyond the notion of a flight simulator, the thought of which seemed sillier with each journey. Tebza hauled in excess of fifteen computers back to Houghton with him, clucking
happily each time he came across a machine with superior specs to the last. Lillian remained steadfast, her jaw set with determination to find a simulator and a way out of this fucking country.