Dub Steps (26 page)

I went back on many occasions. With the kids and by myself. I sat in that same seat and waited. Initially expectantly, then increasingly just as one of those things in life that become habit. The kids helped with the masquerade – we cleaned out much of the CSIR within six months.

‘Broe, it’s too much. You have to filter the shit. You can’t just dump every piece of plastic you find here,’ Fats said, puffed out with anxiety.

I apologised. Begged and joked a little. Masked the paranoia that someone would eventually dig into the source of my CSIR obsession.

True to my word, however, I did make a serious effort to filter. I sat for weeks dumping folders across to the library server, one by one. Most of it was junk – surprising proportions, in fact, were just office rubbish. Project reports, letters and process documents. Every now and then I stumbled onto a troop of Eeeyus. I was diligent about apportioning each one to the relevant child, the discoverer of the box. But as the weeks, and then the months, went by, the kids’ interest faded. Eventually their attention moved to other, more rewarding things.

I changed my routine. Explored new running routes. I began at the CSIR and headed out on the concrete highway, the N1. It was thrilling, running alone in this ocean. Different in every way to running down a street or through a suburb. The highway challenged me, urged me to keep going, north to Cairo. As I ran I imagined myself carrying on, never turning back. It was a satisfying thought – going face to face with my own life and death, step by yellow step.

For now, though, I made sure I returned, punishing myself by stretching the distance a little further each time until I was
completing twenty-, then twenty-five-, then thirty-kilometre stretches. I had become, in my own plodding way, an athlete.

I put everything into the last leg. Everything. All the frustration of nearly a year of waiting. My general rage, always building and growing. My ambition for something better. My impatience, my complete and utter impatience with the situation. I packed them all into that final, back-breaking three-kilometre sprint.

‘Not bad, not bad.’ Madala beamed at me as I burst into view. He was waiting on the bench.

Inevitably, beneath my anger and exhaustion was excitement. Here, finally, was the denouement. My denouement. I wasn’t mad. I hadn’t imagined.

We sat silent for a good while, my shattered breathing the only sound, a steady, rasping beat. I would not, I promised myself, come off all eager. As desperate as I was to talk to him, I knew I would appear like a pigeon in heat. We were courting. Or rather, I was chasing. Whatever. The metaphors rumbled broken through my mind.

I breathed.

We sat.

My lungs calmed, while the sound of the birds grew up around us, a beautiful, complex net of trills and shrills, layers and layers of harmonies and evasive melodies.

At the end of it all. After hours and hours of words and explanations, I left, Madala calling behind me, urging me not to talk. Not now. The time … wrong. The moment … not.

Fuck fuck fuck, I chanted all the way home. I was desperate to see the family. My family. I wanted the kids around me, and Fats. I needed to see Fats. Speak to him. Watch him smile his gruff, all-knowing smile and hear him say something predictable yet
profound. Javas and Andile. My children. I needed the brood. And, I needed them to know what I knew. I was going to tell them all and Madala be dammed.

My family was there. The kitchen buzzing with children and cooking, words flying like millions of small missiles through the heart of us. Nhlanhla jumped into my arms yelling my name and Motse tried to follow him, nearly sending us toppling into Beatrice’s salad. I was scolded for being late by every adult, and then by every child. ‘You couldn’t have been running for six hours, Roy,’ Babalwa chided. ‘Please tell me you weren’t running for six hours. You’re going to kill yourself.’

‘Nah, I ran for a few and then I spent the rest talking to an alien.’

English slapped Jacob’s face with a lettuce leaf. Lerato burst into tears at the shock of it and then Javas was singing. He started as an elephant and transitioned into a smooth tiger baritone, and in a few seconds he had everyone accompanying him on our favourite adaptation of an old children’s story, which came to a climax with him leading the entire troupe of kids out the back door into the evening light, like the Pied Piper, with two of them on his back and the rest singing and clapping in a row behind.

‘Eish, Roy, talking to aliens?’ Fats slapped a few steaks around to tenderise them. ‘People are going to start talking about you.’

‘Nothing wrong with aliens.’ I laughed and let go.

There would be no way to tell my story without changing everything.

And we had all been changed enough already.

So let me tell you about old age. About wisdom. Stories. Memory.

It’s bullshit.

There is only death.

The closer it comes, the louder the knock, the more you know that you were helpless all along. Really, you never knew. Even the things so certain. The hard facts. The basics.

Now you look back and there is nothing to hold. Your grip is a joke. All you have is the haze, a feeling that you were there, somewhere. But it’s far, far away, that place. You are a child once more, excited by the feeling, unable to hold the logic, blinded by the idea of memories.

So, what is true? What is story? What is my life?

All I have is what I can say, and I could say anything. I could say Flash Robinson or Rumpelstiltskin or George Bush and there is nothing you can do other than to smile and hold my hand and tell me yes, yes, Roy, Rumpelstiltskin.

Rumpelstiltskin.

Death.

Waiting for me.

So you can tour the expo and read our lives and gaze at the statue that is me, Roy Fotheringham, the one of the nine who etc., etc.,
blah blah, but that doesn’t mean you will ever truly know, ever truly see, this little old half-toothed man who, let’s be honest, can barely see himself. Life is not a story. Life is not if then, then that, then this. Life is lost memories, broken hearts, ideas of dreams, dreams of dreaming, losses and gains and hopes and hard-ons and rapes and babies and tears; we soak in tears.

Life is loss. The loss of everything.

Memory, of course, but worse than that, the loss of self.

Of you. Eventually, you will not be able to hold on.

It will be over.

All you will have as you leave is the idea, the thin whisper in your heart that this was real, that you were here. That the bird sang. And that it was beautiful.

Why me?

Why you?

Who are you anyway? Why are you reading this? From whence did you come and what do you hope to gain from this page?

I can’t answer. I can’t even imagine.

I can only hope you exist. That this is seen, and read, just once.

That would mean something.

Why?

I have no idea. It just feels like it would.

It was the smell of the kids that finally decided me.

In my pre-life I always found the smell of children disturbing. Offensive even, at times. All pink and potential. Unfettered. Raw meat.

But as they grew our kids developed their own particular reek, and to me it was, ultimately, and strangely, the reek of potential. Of some kind of happiness. Of my own happiness.

We had grown our family. We were all proud of this, our one true innovation in response to our truest crisis. We were growing the best possible genetic base for the future. We had a new start.

The smell of the kids in their fast-growing innocent pinkness encapsulated the success. Revealing my interactions with Madala, revealing and then proving the truth of them, would push a blade through the heart of it. Right through the pink.

So I kept it to myself.

But I was confused. So much so that I stopped going to the CSIR, as I was sure Madala expected me to. Instead I threw myself into the farm, which held challenges enough to occupy my frontal cortex.

I had always fulfilled my farm duties, but I was never what one would call a driving force. My sole strength was as the library guy, the archivist. Since Madala, however, the idea of knowledge itself, previously so preciously abstract, was now inevitably bound to him, and he, in turn, led only to more confusion.

Continually listless, seeking some kind of philosophical palliative, I fell onto the idea of bringing Javas’s giants over to the farm. Once it had occurred to me I was unable to push it back. We needed, I decided, a defining aesthetic for the community. There could be nothing better, nor more symbolic, than the giants.

Javas was initially put off by the effort involved, but I stuck to
it, forcing him, week on week, month on month, to concede one piece at a time, until we had fourteen of the statues scattered across the perimeter of the complex, guarding key points with their scale and implied force. Once they were in place no one complained, least of all Javas. It was, all of a sudden, impossible to imagine the farm without them. The giants gave us an immediate character – something all of our own that was defining and distinct. Something from the past but also uniquely from our own time, the time after. The giants were our outer defence personified. In their raised arms and legs, in their pained, ambitious faces, in their hopeless pressing for movement, they gave us a new identity. And Javas began building anew, this time shaping his creatures to fit the purpose and form of their function. Glasses for the library giant, thick Wellington boots for the guardian of the crops.

I thought of Tebza. His hack craziness seemed a lot less bizarre now than it had while he was alive. Madala had extended the range of possibilities and probabilities. If I was going to accept Madala, I was forced to give equal weight to Tebza’s idea that we had been quietly slipped into an interface. That we were indeed trapped in an experiment or a trick.

The two ideas were binary poles – the one gave credence to the other. Together, they inflated a bubble of possibilities. But how would we ever know? Were we really capable of figuring out what type of maze we were in?

I started charging corners again – partially because it felt good to remember Tebza, to physically acknowledge his legacy, and partially because I couldn’t shake the sense that he was somehow right. My heart was in it: each charge felt like an opportunity. But as emotionally right as it felt, charging corners wasn’t going to do any more than bruise my shoulder, as Tebza had already conclusively proved. Still, I lowered and charged. Lowered and charged. Sometimes the heart demands.

I also paid attention to the small details. I looked as deep as I could into the orange of the setting sun. I tasted things with a triple slap of the tongue. I hunted for any kind of pixelation, visual,
auditory or otherwise. I needed a crack within a crack. The tiniest hint of fissure, a fold within a fold, within an opening.

But there was nothing.

One afternoon the twins found me perched on Julius’s foot at the top entrance to Munro Drive, dabbing my tongue-wet finger onto his rusted toe and tasting it.

‘He won’t bite you, Roy. Give him a hug. Go all the way,’ Andile urged, sinking into a cross-legged position on the grass.

‘You were right, Roy, nè?’ Javas joined me at Julius’s feet. ‘They add so much. Everyone says so. It’s good to have them here, for me too. It’s like they’ve finally come home.’

‘Soul,’ I said. ‘They give the place soul. Like we’re real people living here. People reaching for things.’

Andile leaned back on her hands and listened as the conversation developed. This was always her way – she let it roll and roll and then, when most of the energy was released, she would pick a thread and pull.

‘When they dig us up,’ she interjected a few minutes later, while Javas and I were discussing his next piece, currently still a sketch, ‘they’ll think we had some kind of weird civilisation going. I can see them fencing it off and dusting with their little brushes to show what we did and why we did it. They will think these were our gods.’

‘They might be right,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure they aren’t right already. I talk to them all the time, even from the distance of my house. I see them on the horizon and I talk to them. I greet them in the morning. I tell them my worries. I say good morning … I pray …’

‘You and the kids,’ she added. ‘Their stories have changed. They’re bigger – the stories. What happens is bigger. Their events. More people hurt. More people saved. Weird.’

‘Epic,’ said Javas.

‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘Epic. They bring scale. Emotional scale. The epic.’

‘Ag fok, you sound like my art tutor.’ Andile tugged us quietly
back. ‘It’s true though. I wonder if it will change the way the kids grow.’

‘No doubt it will change what they dream about,’ Javas said, patting Julius’s big toe. ‘And if the scale of your dreams grows as a child, doesn’t matter for what reason, your life will grow like that too.’

Dreams aside, the kids’ world was shrinking fast. By the time the oldest were old enough to look back, they were viewing an opaque set of ideas and buildings and forms. The skylines spoke of another world, rich in temples and glass, but it was exceptionally challenging for them to gain even a tourist’s view of what that world had actually contained.

After the suburbs had grown dense to the point of impenetrability, mother earth launched a steady push – immense by all objective measures – across the concrete. Stretching in ultra slowmo, oceans of tar and commerce and past life were breached, millimetre by millimetre. We grew so used to the invisible speed of it that we forgot it, for years at a time in some cases. And then we remembered.

‘Roy.’ Sthembiso arrived with a fully loaded cannon. I could tell by the calculated lilt of his voice, a soft, pretend-innocuous winding up to something quite large.

‘Rastafari,’ I replied.

He shook his head angrily. ‘Roy,’ he insisted again, this time with a slight whine.

‘Yes, my son. Hit me. What wilst thou know?’ We were sitting on my balcony at sunset. I was sketching another horizon; he was watching me do it, paying careful attention to my treatment of the top of the Northcliff Dome.

‘What’s in the Dome?’ A leading question. The contents of the Dome had been covered many times previously.

‘When it happened they were having a car show. So there are a lot of cars in the Dome now. But they would change what was in it
according to what they needed. It wasn’t always cars.’

‘What else?’

‘Eish. Anything really. Hip-hop shows. Gardening shows. Baby shows. Every time it was different.’

‘What was a show?’

‘Eeeish.’ I put my brush down. ‘I guess more than anything it was a gathering of people. A lot of people would come together in a space – like the Dome – and then they would share everything they knew about a subject. So, if the subject was babies, for example, then anyone doing anything involving babies would present their activities at the Dome, and then all the other people interested in babies, people about to have a baby, maybe’ – I laughed as Sthembiso winced at the rhyme – ‘would go to the show and look at what the others were presenting and maybe discuss things about babies. Possibly they would buy something that someone or some business was presenting and take it home with them, to help them with whatever they were doing with babies. If that makes any kind of sense?’

He followed along carefully.

‘And then of course they would also have concerts at the Dome,’ I went on. ‘People would buy tickets to go and watch bands play, to listen to their music.’

Silence. ‘Roy?’

‘Yeah, mon.’

‘Could we have our own show?’

‘What kind of show?’

‘A kids’ show. We could display things we’re making, and then the visitors could see what we’re doing and then maybe buy some of it.’

‘Interesting idea. Not sure what we’d use for money though.’

‘I’ve got plenty of money. Hundreds of thousands of rands. In my room.’ He squirmed, beamed laser eyes at me.

‘What kind of things would you display?’

‘I’m making an aeroplane.’

‘Jesus. An aeroplane? Really? How big is it?’

‘Bigger than this house.’

‘How would you fit it into the show then? Tight fit, nè?’

Sthembiso paused.

‘Not to worry though, that’s just logistics. Let’s stick to blue sky. Have the others got anything to show? Do you have collaborators in this venture or is it a solo gig?’

‘Thabang and Lerato are making clothes.’

‘Nice. Clothes always work for a show. Anything else?’

‘The girls are making houses out of matchsticks.’

‘Which girls?’

‘Lizabeth and English.’

‘OK.’ I dribbled my brush through the water cup, thinking. As was often the case, Sthembiso was neatly setting and fulfilling his own specific agenda. ‘It sounds like you have the makings of a show. The beginnings at least. I think we should build it into school, so we can plan it properly and do the whole thing right. How does that sound?’

‘Fine …’

I waited for the coup de grâce.

‘Roy … can we do it at the Dome?’

Sthembiso was eleven years old, and like Babalwa, his mother, he had a prodigious talent for long-term planning. He also had no fear of extended negotiations. Final concession for the expo took, for example, over two months. He whittled away at us systematically, lobbying each adult individually, frequently on the sly, and then engineering casual group sessions where he incrementally nailed down a series of small victories and common assumptions. Eventually we gave our approval to an expo, delivered by the kids, that would occupy the unused bottom hallways and corridors of St John’s School – the portion where the scraps of our abandoned attempt to tell our survivors story lay. (Paintbrushes solid blocks of colour granite. Boards featuring the beginnings of visual ideas. Bad, self-conscious sketches of ourselves doing important things.)

Much as he lusted after the Dome as the expo venue, this was the one victory Sthembiso was unable to achieve. We pushed him
back with the ace of the wireless network, which was unavailable all the way out in Northgate. He mooted the roll-out of base stations to allow the extension of the network, a ploy which failed only when discussions reached the manual labour required to set up each station.

Once the expo was approved, Sthembiso worked on the name. The brand. Essential, he said, to the overall identity of the event and its long-term success. Fats accused him of reading too many old marketing magazines. The venom of his denial suggested the truth of this, and Fats looked proud. We had managed, despite the suffocating weight of our circumstances, to breed a marketer.

‘Solo: Our Future’ was just on two years in the making. If you count the full course of Sthembiso’s lobbying and approvals journey, the entire thing took twenty-seven months to conceptualise and deliver. Sthembiso himself was past his thirteenth birthday when the day finally came around. Throughout, his biggest challenge was the duality of the thing. Adults were unfortunately necessary to help with key construction elements, but were also the only audience. This division was one of the reasons behind the protracted time frame. Sthembiso and his lieutenants (Roy Jnr, Sihle, Lerato and Thabang) insisted that we – the audience – be given a genuinely fresh experience, something to ‘surprise and delight us’. This meant a lot of driving between the farm and the Dome, which held much in the way of expo trade tools, from carpeting to advanced WAN interfaces and the hardware required for a ‘properly compelling experience’.

We arranged the post-school schedule much as a normal family would have done. We moaned about the labour involved, about the kids’ inability to be ready on time – all important dynamics within the larger function of going somewhere, and coming home again. Fats and I took naturally to the whole thing, of course. The expo awakened many slumbering beasts.

‘In its best form an expo is a multi-level experience,’ Fats explained to the cluster of children gathered at his feet during class. ‘Stop me, Roy, if I go off track, nè?’ I nodded – in all seriousness –
from my perch on the windowsill.