Dub Steps (25 page)

I should have stopped him but I didn’t have the energy, and then, as we exited the main gate, my attention was taken with what I could have sworn was a black, sandalled foot pulled smartly back from the undergrowth.

There had been many sightings. It was a recurring theme for us all. In the first few years we chased them down with enthusiasm and determined energy, the weight of probability driving us to lengths we later just gave up on. With each failed chase, the rate of entropy increased until we no longer considered the possibility of anyone else being alive outside our ridiculous little group.

Still, the image of the foot stayed with me. What kind of displacement of imagination and vision could have occurred to deliver unto my eyes a black, sandalled foot? I hadn’t, as far as I was
aware, been thinking of anything much. Tebza, I guess, had held the majority of my attention. Was it possible that drifting thoughts of my old friend somehow could have fired up my synapses to produce a foot being swiftly withdrawn into the undergrowth? I doubted it. We had been on so many ill-fated, ill-advised and futile discovery missions it seemed naive and more than a little bit wilful to now set off on another one. In fact, the event was so odd and fleeting I didn’t even consider trying to articulate it to any of the others. Instead, I painted it. Or rather, a series of interpretations. The foot extended fully out of the undergrowth. The foot represented only by a few toes. The bushes without a foot. The bushes with just the smallest hint of foot, a toe observable only to one who knew that the form of a foot was in there somewhere.

They were bad pictures. I was still some distance from being a reliably decent artist, and the foot attempts cruelly revealed my technical failings. Either it was completely wrong – not like any foot I had ever seen – or subtly but crucially misshapen. A foot somehow detached from its body, from the vital context that would give it its footness.

Eventually I resorted to lazy sketches of Beatrice in her wrap on the couch.

Beatrice the sexual libertine.

Beatrice the demigoddess, all fingers reaching and eyes blazing.

The sketches of her weren’t very good either, but they stopped me thinking about the foot.

After six or seven Beatrice sketches, I stopped and forced myself to stare out over the night-time Jozi forest. I imagined small armies taking shape, armies of little people with hairy black feet in sandals, like the old Hobbit stories. I focused my ears on the sound of the bats pinging between the trees. I imagined armies of trees, as in the stories of my childhood, big trees and small trees, oaks and acorns and pines, all rising up to march, to liberate, to change.

I imagined I could hear the first rustles of rebellion, the quiet but clear barking of the leaders, the assenting murmur of the troops as the forest picked up its long-dropped hemline and marched.
Marched up to me, over and through our little complex, and on, southward, to the sea, to the end.

The next day I feigned illness, tiredness, fatigue and palmed the kids off on Beatrice and Gerald for the return CSIR venture.

‘When last did you think you saw another person?’ I asked Fats in the kitchen that afternoon as we baked. It was his turn on the roster but I was helping out. Solo duty could get depressing.

‘Like, for real or just wishing?’

‘For real – an honest-to-God what-the-fuck-was-that.’

Fats lifted his dough and kneaded it high in the air, stretching it out parallel to the countertop and then pushing it back into a lump. ‘Must be a while now. Maybe a year. Thought I was being tracked around the school. Kept on seeing shadows vanishing around the corners.’

‘You chase them down?’

‘Of course,’ he chuckled. ‘Gotta try, nè? Why? You see one lately?’

‘Ja, the other day at the CSIR. Thought I saw a foot in the bush. A foot in a sandal being drawn back.’

‘Tricks of our minds. Don’t think it will ever really stop. It’s the mirage thing, like in the desert.’ He tossed the dough lump into the air and let it fall dramatically onto the counter in an explosion of flour.

We baked the flat breads – twelve in total – and chatted on, the withdrawn foot drifting slowly into the conversational past. In between thinking of the foot I had flashback visions of Fats as he was when he first found us, all puffed out and aggressive, full of red ink, maps and grand plans. Clothing crisp and calculated, words even more so. Now, he was a portly guy who baked happily and raised his kids. Only very occasionally would the project manager be let loose, and then only as a reaction to genuine emotional stress. Life with Babalwa was clearly benefiting him. I thought too, suddenly, uncomfortably, of the rape accusation. Something no one had spoken about for a long time.

Fats kept looking into the oven, protecting the first batch of
flat breads as if they were meant to rise. Between checks on the bread, he scuttled from fridge to countertop with his whisk, on a mayonnaise mission.

Babalwa arrived and hugged her man from behind.

‘Roy saw a foot,’ Fats told her. ‘At the CSIR.’

Babalwa peered at me with the halves of her eyes that could get over his shoulder. ‘Just a foot?’

‘Just a foot,’ I said. ‘I didn’t stop. Had kids with me.’

‘What kind of foot?’

‘A black foot.’

‘Like black as in the colour black, or black as in the foot of a black man?’

‘Like the foot of a black man. Well, the foot of a non-white man. Ha ha.’

‘We should go back and check it out. You never know.’ Babalwa remained latched onto Fats’s back, her cheek buried against his shoulder blade as if she was trying to nap.

‘Nah,’ Fats said. He shook her off and trotted back to the oven. ‘I really don’t think it could be anything. There’s no way anyone would be hiding at the CSIR. Maybe lost at the CSIR, but not hiding. They would have jumped straight out.’

‘Still …’

Fats removed his first breads, swearing at the burns on his hand. ‘You should use the cows, baby,’ Babalwa chided him, referring to the cow oven gloves.

‘Real men don’t use cows,’ he said, loading up the second round.

She slapped a hand at him, but missed. ‘You should check it out again, Roy, just in case,’ she said as she headed out the door. ‘Will someone holler when there’s food?’

So I went back.

There was nothing to see. No feet and no people, just a quiet, recently hacked forest and some buildings that used to house important things. I picked out my favourite bench, in the middle of the thick park area to the right of the complex entrance. I had cleared the path to the bench purposefully, and now I spent a good deal of
time, a few mornings in a row in fact, sitting on my seat, nibbling on flat bread or strips of biltong. I was, truth be told, beginning to enjoy the CSIR forest. It had that stark, echoing atmosphere of the Lowveld about it. A silence filled with movement. The rub of insects against trees. Birds flapping. Suggestions of song bubbling out into the air, then sinking back again. It was bush quiet. It felt like camping.

The others questioned me when I returned home after the first few visits, and then let the subject go.

We had all had our moments, and we all chased them in our own private ways. After day three there was a polite, accommodating absence of interest.

I kept going back, though, not so much to look for the foot, but to rest. To be alone with myself and to consider the air as I breathed it in and out. To empty my mind and my heart. To exhale.

Eventually, he came shuffling down the hill from the general direction of the nanotech centre.

An elderly black man in a blue overall.

A caretaker.

The caretaker.

He drifted all the way down with his head slightly bowed. I waited for him, and when he got close and made to sit next to me, I said, ‘Sawubona, Madala’ – the only thing I could think of.

‘Madala. I like that,’ he said, lowering himself carefully onto the bench next to me. ‘Sawubona, indoda.’ As he gave this formal reply, he dipped his head to support the greeting, as if he was Japanese, or from deep Limpopo. ‘It is a beautiful day, is it not?’ He spoke ever so slowly. His accent was neutral. His blue overall was new and clean. There were no stains or marks on it at all.

I introduced myself. He brushed my efforts off, amused by the fact that my name was Roy. When I asked for his, he said, ‘Madala. Just call me Madala.’

‘Really? Madala is your actual name? That’s pretty unusual, nè? Where you from?’

‘Oh, around here,’ he glanced around.

‘Pitoli?’

‘Ja, sho.’ He mimicked me, picking up my crassly formed white-boy tsotsitaal inflections and sending them right back.

I let it lie.

The encounters I had had with survivors thus far involved a base, guttural kind of coming together. Hugs and back slaps. Tears and laughter. Kisses. Amazement. Energy. I thought most of all of the way Babalwa and I had met – the sheer force of our troublesome fuck. But none of that here. Madala wasn’t exuding anything beyond the appearance of perpetual yet partial amusement.

I scuffed the dirt with my toe. ‘It’s a beautiful place, this. You been coming here often?’

‘Indeed. Lovely.’ He exhaled with evident satisfaction. ‘So full of life. A wonderful mix of life forms actually. That’s what I like most about it.’

‘So what’s your story?’ I was impatient. ‘Where were you when it happened? Have you been here all these years? Have you watched us every time we’ve been here?’

He reached down carefully, like he was managing his body with caution, and plucked a blade of grass. He put it between his teeth and leaned back on his hands, both palms flat on the bench, fingers pointing backward.

‘Roy, you’re going to have to trust me. I have a lot to tell you, but before I do I need you to feel me. I mean that literally and
metaphorically. You have to feel my presence and realise through it—’

‘Through your presence?’

‘Yes, through my presence.’ He frowned at the interruption. ‘Realise through it, my presence, that you are going to go – for a good while – on a solo journey. You can’t tell your friends about this. Not now, and not for a very long time.’

‘Why?’

He poked a sandalled right foot into the air, parallel to the ground.

‘Are you from another planet?’

He put his foot down. ‘No. I am from this planet. Whatever that means.’

‘Are you human?’

‘My molecular make-up is exactly the same as yours.’

‘So you’re human.’

‘Not really. But Roy, I must tell you.’ He took my hand in his. His skin was hard and leathery and hot. ‘You’re going to have to leave much behind. Do you think you can do that?’

‘If I had any fucking clue what you were talking about, I could answer that.’

‘They’ll see what you show them, Roy. No more, no less.’

‘And you want me to show them what, exactly?’

‘Love. A lot of love.’

‘Jesus, you sound like Oprah.’

He sent me home. ‘When will I see you again?’ I asked, like we were new lovers.

‘When the time is right. First you need to be in the right place mentally.’

‘Now you sound like a cricket coach.’

He waved me to my car. I tried to watch him recede in the rear-view mirror, but in the time it took me to put the key in the ignition and turn it, he had disappeared.

As I pulled into my driveway, Sthembiso stormed across, demanding
details of my Eeeyu count. I fobbed him off and headed straight inside with promises of another trip for all of us soon. Very, very soon.

I painted and drew. Black, sandalled feet. A small old man in a blue overall. Grey hair. Hands and arms and fingers and lips. Green and orange and yellow. I couldn’t come close to capturing what I had seen and I was disappointed with the regression in my art, which now looked like the work of a ten-year-old.

I dumped the paints and resorted to sketching, but that too was a failure. It was as if somehow I had thoughtlessly misplaced all the skills I had so recently developed. I put the sketch pad down and stared out again over the black night.

Again I started seeing shapes and forms. Humans moving, buildings filled with people. Malls and parking garages and petrol pumps. The bats flitted between the trees, adding a jerky, broken soundtrack to my imaginings. I found myself playing with various scenarios, adding them up and then subtracting again, toying with each of his words to see if and where it would fit.

‘Imagine a pile of sand, Roy,’ he had said. ‘Imagine you needed to get that pile really high – really, really high. To do it, you have to collapse what you have. Expand the foundation. Build again.’

‘Who’s building? You? Me?’

He peered at me, sceptical. ‘Movies. Please. You need to watch movies. Think about it.’

‘For real? Movies?’

‘Try
I, Robot
.’

There was a light knock on the door. Beatrice. I knew her triple rap well.

‘You hiding for a specific reason, Roy? Or you just got the glumps?’ She leaned on the inside of the front door, hips beckoning. But this was neither the time nor the place – she was on a family mission.

‘Sthembiso said you were mean to him—’

‘Ag, I’m fine. Sorry. Please tell him sorry. I’ll tell him sorry. When I see him. Just one of those days, you know?’

Beatrice wrinkled the corners of her eyes in an approximation of empathy, but beneath lay confusion. It had been some time since any of us had wigged out. We also generally ate together as a group. No one bailed out of family supper without reason. The kids noticed such things, in detail, which made a quiet absence doubly difficult to pull off.

‘Just tell them I got too much sun and I need to chill out.’

‘And what should I tell myself?’ She remained fixed to the door frame, left hip high.

‘That Roy is taking a break. For his own reasons, which may or may not be revealed in good time.’

‘OK, fair enough, I suppose.’ Beatrice detached from the door frame. ‘Look after yourself, ja?’

I gave her departing ass a fake smile.

I pulled it straight the next morning. Any more reclusive behaviour would have brought the depression police out in full force. It was understood, without it ever having to be verbalised, that Roy was especially vulnerable. Roy only had one pillow, with a single dent in it. They watched me carefully.

I emerged full of the usual. I swung the kids by the arms and made sure I was at school around the right time. I made full eye contact with Sthembiso as I apologised, and I gave Beatrice a small hug and Gerald the right kind of nod and we were back on the level.

The level was everything to everyone.

We needed that level more than we needed each other.

I spent the next four days purposefully wrapped up in life. Some weeks were heavier than others and this was, fortunately, a particularly busy one. It was my school week with the older kids – Roy Jnr, Thabang, Sihle and Sthembiso.

I wrote the word DENOUEMENT in clumsy letters on the blackboard. I stepped back and let the kids consider it.

‘It’s pronounced DAY-nu-mow,’ I explained. ‘It’s a word they used to teach us at university, but I thought I would get it in earlier. The denouement is that moment in a story when everything
becomes clear. When all the bits and pieces start to make sense. So, forget the word and how to spell it and stuff like that. Who can give me a simple example of when a story suddenly makes sense? Think of any story you like – a fairy tale, a story someone here has told you or something from your own life.’

Scrunched foreheads. Full focus. A slow arm raise from Thabang. ‘Like, if something happened that would explain to us what happened. Why there are no people left. That would be a day-nu … day-nu …’

‘Denouement. Exactly. That would be a denouement for all of us. In our own lives. Especially the adults. Nice, Thabang. Maybe let’s try a made-up story. Anyone with a made-up story?’

More blank faces.

‘How about … how about …’ I racked my brain for something other than the subject I couldn’t shake off, and that Thabang had so quickly elucidated. In the back of my mind, questions grew around why I was trying to teach them a high-school-level literary concept.

Roy Jnr had his hand in the air, three-quarters raised. ‘Can it be when people get punished?’

‘It can. Tell me more.’

‘Like in ‘The Pied Piper’. When the town people lose the children.’

‘Yes, that’s right. In any fairy tale, there’s that moment at the end when the bad person gets what they deserve, nè?’

The heads bobbed along, cautiously, with me.

‘Well, that moment always happens because something in the story takes place that teaches them the lesson they need to learn. That moment in the story that makes everything clear – that’s the denouement …’

Blank.

‘… and the reason I want you to know about the denouement at this young age is’ – I scraped around for a rational explanation – ‘because stories are so important in our lives. We live by stories, don’t we?’

I wound away from the subject, hoping the kids would have the energy to pick up a few educational scraps from the mess.

‘Roy?’ Roy Jnr had his hand all the way up.

‘Yes?’

‘What’s the difference between a story and a lie?’