Dub Steps (20 page)

A month to rig up the solar panels.

A month to get control of the simulator and figure out how to program a flight plan.

A month to fuck around nervously.

Tebza and Lillian were dead in a second.

We watched.

We gripped each other, thrilled at seeing the plane fly, unable to let ourselves believe it was true – that they were up there, in a Boeing. The plane lumbered into the air like there was a real pilot in it and disappeared through the clouds. To me the angle looked steep, like they should have levelled off at some stage, but they kept climbing and disappeared into the thickness and we all jumped a bit on the spot and hugs were shared.

The plane looked good coming down, from what I could tell, and then just as I expected the thing to float onto the tarmac, its nose dipped forward and it lurched hard to the left and completed two shattering cartwheels. It’s an image I will never be able to erase, the jumbo flipping over and over, twice, like a child’s toy, then exploding.

We watched.

There were no emergency vehicles. None of us rushed forward or backward or called for help. We sat. We watched it go. Watched them blaze away in an orange sky.

Beatrice was the first to start screaming. Fats slapped her face hard and she throttled down to an ongoing series of wrenching sobs. The rest of us were silent.

I stared at my hands. My old man’s hands. My advertising hands. My confused, useless hands. The plane roared. The flames boiled the sky. The metal hissed. We remained in our seats on the towing machine – that squat yellow thing that pulls aeroplanes – that we used to pull our Boeing into place.

Andile ran. Back to the cars. She gunned it out of the airport alone, tires squealing.

The rest of us … we sat for a long time, watching the wreckage burn down. Listening to Beatrice bubbling and frothing.

The next day a weaver bird arrived on the big leafy tree down at the bottom of the garden. He looked young. He started on his first nest, stripping pieces from the adjoining property’s palm tree and flying back over to his construction, threading it all in an intricate, instinctive pattern. I watched him the whole day, from various vantage points. It was so natural, his process. So opposed to the idea of an aeroplane. The threading of matter into nest was very complex, yet innate to the bird. He knocked it off without thinking, whistling and chirping as he went. This strip here, that strip there, weaving and pulling, hanging underneath the bowl for long stretches as the first crucial structural layers were pulled tight.

I dragged a pool chair under the tree, rolled joint after joint and watched.

The house was silent.

The weaver chirped and burped and worked, alternating between his nest and clearing the tree of its leaves so he could see enemies approach. All day the leaves twirled to the ground, gentle little helicopters. The section of the tree that would house him grew sparse, more suited to a bird needing a clear view. By dusk he was damn close to done. The nest wasn’t fully stitched, but the frame had already received several layers.

I left the pool chair under the tree, grabbed a bottle of wine from the cellar and took it to bed.

I lay hugging it under the covers, a forty-something-year-old red, 1996.

It grew hot in my arms. The minutes ticked. Its heat grew steadily and somewhere there, somewhere in the middle of it all, I moved from jumping off the cliff to actually holding the fucking thing, embracing it, clinging to it like a lover. Right before I fell asleep I remember thinking that this bottle wasn’t really my crutch, nor my nemesis. It was my fucking baby. It was my small, innocent child.

The weaver bird was at it again from dawn.

I woke with his first chirp and I could think of nothing else to do but watch him and so I went outside and sat in the cold dawn on that white plastic pool chair and watched.

It took him the better part of the day to finish off, fine-tuning and fine-tuning, leaves twirling, always falling, even as he wove. I began to see him as one of those magicians with their spinning plates. From nest to branch to palm tree and back again.

And then he finished.

I stood and applauded. Whistled a few times. Stamped my feet.

Fats came out of the house in his shorts, stared at me and went back in.

That night I held my bottle of red again, felt its warmth wash me as I lay awake, unable to move, unable to think, surrounded by feathers and wings and falling leaves.

The next morning the nest was in a million torn-up strips on the ground.

I berated Lillian while I pounded Louis Botha, running repeatedly through her list of stupidities and crimes. First was her ambition, her desire for more than we already had, her inability to accept the reality we all, at some stage, should have come to terms with. Lillian just couldn’t let it settle. Her nationality was surely at the root of that thing in her that just had to fly a fucking Boeing off the continent, that just had to smash through the horizon. It was so typically American.

I was also pissed at Tebza, for other reasons, but whenever I thought of him, whenever his face (that crinkling, smiling scar) took form in my mind, I let go and refocused on something simpler.

I shoulder-charged door frames and lounge corners and even the occasional tree – anything that might have caught his own attention. It felt like a mark of respect, a sign of deference and remembrance. My shoulders bruised heavily, a complex purple and yellow weave extending slowly down my back. Each connection with the wall or the door or the pole added weight to the last and the pain built satisfyingly until I could detect a slight but definite chipping of the bone on certain contacts. I relished the bruises, the grinding sensation that had developed when I swung my arms, which I did frequently.

Gerald’s inner soldier needed to take responsibility.

The vibes coming off him were so strong I could almost hear him torturing himself for not … well, for whatever it is he thought he didn’t do. I didn’t see him for days after the crash, weeks possibly. He disappeared. When he returned he was an almost complete blank; there was only the smallest flicker in the far corners of his eyes, when he managed to raise the lids.

Of course we were all blank. We were completely stricken by the
reduction in our numbers, by the collapse of our horizon.

Now we were seven.

Fats worked in the gardens and with the cows, supported by Beatrice, with Babalwa looking on, still holding her belly. Gerald drifted. I ran. The twins were around but hard to find.

Two or three days in, Fats collapsed in the garden. I found him weeping into the basil, his feet kicking in a childlike rhythm against the carrots. I wanted to console him, but I was inconsolable myself. I had no words. I stood over his body for a while, reached out to pat his shaking shoulder and then retracted.

As much as Lillian’s obsession with flight ran against my own instincts, as dangerous as I thought her dream was, it was, after all, still a dream. It was a potential future, for her and for us all. It was something to look towards. To sketch out and plan, to calculate and recalculate.

It was something to do.

Now, there was nothing.

We tended the gardens, we milked those fucking cows, we ate and farted and slept and woke up and ran and did it all again. We walked and worked and tended. We did it in the absence of light. In the absence of hope. In the absence of anything.

I kept the bottle of red in my room, on the bedside table – a memento, a monument, perhaps, to a bad, bad time. Sometimes I would just look at it. Sometimes I would take it to bed with me, hugging it for warmth. It was my thing. My one little thing.

My other little thing was the weaver bird, who spent the rest of the summer building nests and tearing them down, obsessively clearing the space around his construction area until a full quarter of the tree was devoid of leaves. I couldn’t figure out what the deal was. The nests all looked good to me, but each one came down in a shredded mess. He built and built and built the whole summer, but never moved in.

An unsettling sadness grew in my gut in relation to that bird. I began to hope actively for each nest. I watched the progress carefully, talking to him as each one went up, advising him as best I could.

But the nests never made it.

With each nest that came down my own sense of futility deepened. Did the weaver know pain? Failure? The tearing of futility against his bright yellow heart? Was he truly content doing this, building nest after nest after nest? Did he question what the fuck he was doing this for? If he did, I felt sad for him, for his failures. If he didn’t, then it was even worse. Then he was just like me, an automaton moving by instinct and genetic force alone.

Babalwa had her baby three months after the crash. Gerald delivered it and cut the cord and slapped its pink ass and it cried and all was well. There was laughter. There were tears. It was a relief to experience it, the joy, to go high before another low. Up before down. And all that.

They named the baby Roy Junior, which was pretty damn odd.

Despite all her planning and her deep desire to perpetuate the species, initially Babalwa was a confused, nervous mother. Roy Jnr did not sit easily on her hip, nor on her tit. She looked bewildered a lot of the time, and Beatrice and Andile – neither of whom were mothers but both of whom had grown up in baby-heavy families – stepped in to guide and coax. Hold him like this. Head like that. Pat like this, on the small of the back, gently.

Fats emerged. He beamed. He made fatherly noises. He scuttled around trying to help without being able to. On occasion he just sat with his feet up, arms behind his head, looking like he had achieved something. Javas called it his dream phase, and we laughed. But below the laugh lay the understanding that we would all have to get breeding soon. Babalwa had been on point all along, even way back in PE. Now that we had lost a pair, the maths was dangerous. Three females and four males. We would have to breed vigorously and frequently across all possible combinations.

Babalwa sketched it out for us: four to the power of three was just enough to get a compounding dynamic going, but we would all need to cross-breed. There could be no exceptions.

‘It’s not about fucking,’ she asserted as we clucked nervously
over her diagram. ‘It’s about our species. We need to breed.’

‘They can just jerk off, then we pour it down,’ Andile offered sensibly. ‘I knew a few lesbians who did it that way. It works. You don’t need a lab and you definitely don’t need to fuck. Sorry, Roy.’ She laughed and patted my hand.

‘The only thing left is a decision,’ I said. ‘Are we now a breeding colony? Not that I’m opposed, but if we’re going to run a baby farm we’re all going to need to be involved for the rest of time. Our time anyway. It’s a big decision.’

‘Are there any other options?’ Babalwa rocked Roy Jnr in her arms.

‘There are always options. We could take Lillian’s plan B and go through Africa to find Europeans. We could just let ourselves die off. We have options.’

I was alone in my diffidence. The others had accepted their duty. We ended the discussion. Andile was already pregnant. The fences were up. The farm was being populated.

After a shaky start, Babalwa took well to motherhood, and the collective of mothers was effective. The three shared little Roy and the infant-care duties, while the men milked cows and managed the veggie patch with renewed vigour.

I kept running.

Whenever I could free myself, and after I had run as far as I could, I drove. The others seemed busy enough, content enough, to revolve around Houghton and the farm, the babies and the cows. I cruised through the city, including Sandton, probing at the glass façades, the gawking, empty corporate monoliths.

‘You’re a little bit mad, Roy, nè?’ Beatrice said to me after another wander. Since the crash she had started speaking to me, rather than across me or at me. ‘I mean, I know we’re all crazy now, living crazy, but you’re the real thing, nè?’

‘I was in advertising.’

‘Fats was in advertising.’

‘He was a suit. He wasn’t smoking crack to get the next idea.’

She tossed her head as she laughed, twirled a few strands of hair
with long fingers. Beatrice had some warmth to her. Or – let me rephrase – I was noticing her warmth. I could think of worse things than discovering what lay beneath. I wasn’t sure whether Gerald was of the same mindset. I tried not to think about it as I watched her breasts jiggle lightly in harmony with her amusement. I made a mental note to watch her more closely, more often.

Beatrice had cheekbones that held her face together – they gave it reason and shape, a noble and serious structure. Her use of make-up had steadily shrunk to more selective applications, and she was better off for it. I started to notice her actual skin, which was a rich olive and not at all as pockmarked or acne-ridden as I had assumed. Her obsession with heels had also faded, another considerable improvement. She had come down to size, literally. Less the CEO and more the human being. Her breasts were moderate, her body lean – but that was the case for all of us now. Fat was something from another time. She let loose her hair from the intensity of the railway braids, allowing it to morph slowly into a soft afro. Unlike Fats’s fro, which even when physically subdued was all dominance and power, hers bubbled up and then cascaded down loosely. It was feminine and accommodating.

The ‘you’re mad, aren’t you?’ conversation was, I gradually discovered, a purposeful entrance into my world.

Suddenly Beatrice was around more often. When I hoed the garden, she was there. As I pulled on my Nikes, she asked if she would be able to keep up if she tried. When I went for a drive, she was in the passenger seat, right thigh inching closer to mine, suggestions of perfume lingering in the cab the next day.

I responded in kind, but it worried me. Not politically – I had long ago made peace with the gritty reality of household politics, sexual and otherwise – but personally. I looked in the mirror, saw the hole in my mouth and knew I wasn’t worthy of, or ready for, an actual, adult relationship.

My life had always been solo, and singular. Even when I was married to Angie I was essentially alone. As Beatrice inched closer, my inner cunt began to hatch a counter-attack.

As he always did.

Beatrice was all Model C. Her accent, her neoliberal-CEO world view, her jeans, her heels. Her hands, most of all. Even sans nail polish, her fingers were immaculate, the nails long yet clipped, the tips always clean white despite the gardening and slaughtering, the plucking and skinning.

But Model C isn’t how you look. It’s how you think. I’d heard that many times before. At tertiary. At work. Also from Andile, herself markedly un–Model C. Model C is about marriage and children and financial planning. It’s about recycling and donations to charity. It’s afternoon braais with big fluffy salads.

All these things were inherent in Beatrice. They shone from her. Perhaps more so because she was born so far away from it all. Beatrice forced herself into the Model C life from the distance of Beaufort West. She made it happen through her personal force. I was also Model C, of course, but I had spent my life running away from it. So I ran away from her as well, yet again a slave to instinct.

The planning of the baby farm had opened up ideas in both of us. If we were going to go as far as jerking off into cups and pouring it down vaginas, well, we may just as well have gotten naked.

So we did.

Well, actually, we didn’t get naked that often. Initially we fucked in the 4x4, all fumblings and fingers and premature grunts. We progressed to parks and other vacant spaces, and we always kept it away from the house, where it didn’t really fit – where freedom and fantasies didn’t belong.

And that, in summary, is how I got Beatrice pregnant.

Everyone knew we were fucking, and we didn’t try to hide it. Babalwa caught my eye with regular grins and eyebrow movements with implications. Fats played it straight, the twins also kept it as straight as possible and Gerald simply disappeared from view.

‘Poor Gerald,’ Beatrice murmured abstractedly as she put my cock in her mouth. I was driving. It was some kind of fetish for her – vehicular sex. I accommodated it easily.

‘Let’s leave Gerald out of it,’ I suggested as she worked away.
‘It’ll be poor Roy soon enough.’

She pulled out of the dive, keeping a hand on my dick. ‘What you mean by that?’

‘Well, we’re not exactly getting married here, are we?’

She pulled her hand free. ‘Why not?’

‘Damn, is that a proposal?’

‘Don’t be such a wanker, Roy. You can be so mean. Jesus.’

‘No, but seriously, I mean … uh …’ Her reaction had caught me off guard. My assumption was that we were at an equal distance with the thing. The sex thing. I hadn’t yet considered our actual relationship.

‘So what you’re saying is that you expect me to be fucking you and Gerald at the same time?’

‘No, not at all. No. But, but you guys have been … I mean, you did for quite a while, nè?’

‘We did.’ She was bolt upright now, arms folded. ‘But it didn’t work out that good. And we stopped. And …’

‘And?’

‘You stupid fuck.’ She punched me, hard, on the arm. ‘You’re just fucking me, aren’t you?’

I spluttered.

‘Jesus, you are. Of course you are. You don’t give a shit about me, do you?’ She was raging now, heat pulsing off her forehead, clouds breaking in her eyes.

‘No, Beatrice, you need to understand. I don’t give a shit about anyone. I never have. I’m just trying to get through here.’

‘Oh fuck. Thanks a lot. You can drop me off here, Roy, right here.’ We were on the cusp of Linden, a good couple of hours’ walk from the farm. She yanked on the door handle and it sprung open as we drove.

‘No, B, no, that didn’t come out right. That’s not what I meant. I meant … I meant …’ She glared at me furiously. ‘I meant that I’m so fucked I’ve never been able to have a relationship. Ever. I just wasn’t expecting one now. I don’t even know if I’m capable of …’

‘I can answer that for you. Stop the car. STOP THE FUCKING CAR!’ She screamed into my ear, at my eardrum, which stretched
to pop. I braked and she bolted. ‘Just fuck off, Roy. Go be alone if that’s what you want.’

I circled a few Linden blocks, berating myself for being such a fool. Firstly, for tossing away another driving blow job, a quirky and not unpleasant experience, and secondly, for putting the cruel steel on the only person left in the world willing and able to screw me, and, more importantly, hold my hand.