Dub Steps (31 page)

Every now and again Matron isn’t around. One or two of the others will come by and check on me. They feed me and make sure that the provisions are all in the right place and that I haven’t cracked my nut on the basin or crashed into a heap in the shower I insist is still the best method of cleaning these old bones.

I am struck, always, by the bluntness of their beauty. Also, by how casual they all are with it, as if that shine is the natural way of things. I want to grasp their little shoulders and tell them, but it’s jealousy. I lust for it. We all know it.

They check on me because they suspect that it has come to that time, and of course I have spent several hours on the floor of this house in various positions of extreme strain, attempting to lift the deadweight back onto a chair, bed, sofa.

I measure inclines and gradients. I make sure that each step is an investment in turf of the appropriate type. Now, when I transport things – pots, bags, jugs of liquid – I shuffle them from post to post like freight. Kettle counter to top of fridge to next to the sink to dining room table to back of the couch to bar stool to front porch. I no longer put one foot forward, in front of the other. Rather, safer, I move a leg out at ninety degrees, then drag my body sideways to follow it. That way I can manage the load. That way the tripod holds steady for a few more metres.

That it has come to this is no surprise, obviously. We all must. I have watched other good people go, and I will follow. Even so, I find myself enraptured – shocked even, some days – by the extreme transience. It was all so weighty at the time, so dense and full of complexities, but that was then and this is now and I am simply an old, old man preparing his final mix.

When did it come to this? I wonder as I work. Exactly when did dub become the enemy, and trance the master of all things, the
very meaning itself? I use headphones as I compose. As I ponder. The chances of the wrong echoes reaching the wrong ears are too high, and I don’t want to put my final moment, my Johnny Cash farewell, at risk.

Somewhere around 2064 Sthembiso was in his twenties and began flexing a considerable set of muscles. He applied them across the full scope of the farm. Soon he controlled food production and music and education and – well, wherever you turned, there was a new policy in place, a new approach, a new way of thinking and doing.

But the big shift was with the pigs.

The archives clearly, and accurately, reflect the brutality of the slaughter.
^*
I suggest you consult them. They show the heads rammed onto poles. They even manage to suggest the insane stink of so many porcine corpses, all burned in a single day. Not only were all the pigs killed, they were explicitly savaged. They were to be made to understand in their bones (the survivors, that is) where the new boundaries had been set.

The archives do not show, however, what happened to English.

Sthembiso had whipped his kids into a killing frenzy, which manifested in all the hallmarks of genocide. Small squads marching up and down. Yells and smacks and grunts and male voices barking indecipherably. The muffled yet occasionally sharp screams, like metal tearing, of the animals as they were chased and sliced sounded so human it was like they were trying, even in their annihilation, to speak some kind of deeper truth to us.

I doubt very much if anyone else saw her face up there in the second-floor window. They were too busy – either killing or organising or telling themselves that it couldn’t possibly be so. But it was there, that face. I saw it. Each tear, I feared, could have been the last, the very last, she would ever be able to produce. And I’m afraid that’s how it turned out. We murdered the pigs, and
slaughtered in the process her last bridge back to us.

She saw me, briefly. I wanted to wave, to reach out physically, but what do you say with your arms when your eyes and your ears and your tongue are no longer able to function? I held both my palms out and up, imploring her silently not to let go, not to leave.

But it was too late.

It was days before anyone saw her again, and even when she did eventually come back, and finally even resorted to the occasional use of words, she was as hollow as the sounds falling from her lips.

Now she sits underneath the weaver tree, her primary occupation, talking to the colony as it expands, offering useless, muttered help to the males as they thread their nests together and wait for the inevitable. When a human tries to have a similar kind of conversation with her, she stops. Folds her hands into her lap. Smiles.

Snowball’s head was never seen. Or I, at least, never saw it. Initially I told myself it could have been a mark of some kind of benevolence from Sthembiso, but over time I realised the opposite was far more likely. Now I am sure he kept it out of view to torment her, to torture us, completely. To leave us without that final, terrible yet necessary knowledge.

Why did he do it?

There was never any formal explanation, but here’s what I think.

The pigs were no threat, but their presence represented an element of life beyond Sthembiso’s control. It crept up on us quietly, the fact of his growth and his need to control. I suppose this has always been the way – you fail to see what is most obvious, the things that are actually taking shape, in your offspring. Anyway, suddenly there it was, a horrific burning heap of pork. And deep inside that fire, right in the guts of the heat, baked the ambitions of our new leader.

Now the kids fuck wildly, breed wildly – but always under his careful eyes. Our noble, calculated aims with the cup and the genetic mapping have drifted. Instinct is instinct and evolution demands
diversity (and let me say now, hard as it is, that the rape of English by the dub Zambians – how else does one describe them, these people, this hidden force? – was an essential addition for us, for the group, for the future), and so they fuck and breed and I don’t even know who is who any more, it’s an endless succession of little heads running and smiling and asking and taking and the phones ring and there are screams and yells and tears and everything you would expect, really, from a bunch of apes let loose with computers and time and imagination and ceaseless ambition.

And yes, they have a god. They pray to him and he guides them, releasing small, important miracles, and they latch firmly onto each one. He is smart that way, their god – he understands that miracles need to be obvious. He keeps them in check with his titbits and they go to church on a Thursday and they scribble in their little books and make sure the rituals are kept and that the numbers add up and that the theorems apply, and really, he is smart, has been very smart, for now they pray to equations and circuits and connections and motherboards and parallel processing, of course, always parallel processing, and through their god they have learned how to switch this shit on and make the blue lights shine with actual, practical meaning, and they will go forward, they are rushing forward into something new, completely new and different.

We are, after all, human.

There is something wild in those opposable thumbs.

Occasionally I catch a glimpse of my reflection. I see – suddenly and shockingly – what I have become. A shuffling grey beard on fragile, bandy legs with a gaping guillotine tooth and a smile that shocks even its owner.

I think, not bad. Not too bad, considering. It could have been worse. I could have been worse.

The wall flashes. Message from Beatrice. She’s coming over with her long fingers and again I think, not bad. Not too bad, considering. This grey beard. That jagged tooth. This girl, this woman, this old lady, still attached to me, still holding this claw after all this time.

After the pigs I retreated.

I collect. I file. I archive. Sthembiso keeps me at it. He won’t let me stop, and he pays real attention, making sure I don’t follow my growing instinct just to form piles. I cross-reference and I cross-index and there are about seven of the little buggers who do what I say, even though no one ever goes in there. Ever. And of course there’s that fucking statue of me mounted at the front of it. The plaque has some ridiculous shit about the wizardry of knowledge and learning. Sthembiso made a speech and everyone cried, myself included. It’s strange how sentimental the years make you – even when you’re being screwed, even when you can feel the very twist, you remain pathetically vulnerable to the things you know are hurting you, must be hurting you, are actually making you sick.

Ego.

I have great-great-grandchildren – too many to count, too many names to try to file and match with faces. Their parents bring them to sit on my knee and I pat their heads and tell them whatever I can remember about a life I have pretty much forgotten myself.

They look up expectantly, following the eyes of their parents, as if I have some knowledge, some great thing to give, and that they must therefore per force receive, but are not sure how. Of course I do, I have great things, but they’re all locked up in this head and none can be put to use now. But still … still … I like them, the little ones, and some I even love – certain names and faces stick in my heart and these I favour with what little I have to offer.

Camille Paglia sits on my lap most afternoons. She’s about sixteen now and my hope is that we manage somehow to time the demise so as to leave this thing together. Can a cat be the true love of a human’s life? The one great and enduring emotional connection? As inured as I am to death – and life, for that matter – there is something about Camille and me, about how we live, that makes me want to weep. We are so close as to be welded. Of all the beings I have known and loved, she tops the list. I don’t say that lightly.

Camille is an African special, a cross of a multitude of continental feline influences, from the lion to the pet shop. Her markings are a mix of brown swirls and black accents, a shocking white chest plate and equally crisp white half-socks. She was born to Caesar and Condeleza, cats Mary secured for her first kids and who bred furiously (the cats, I mean) once they had settled into domestic life.

I couldn’t resist. She was sitting there waiting in that kitten box, calm and studied, and I picked her up and took her home.

Now we are together and we observe. I tell her what I think and she’s dismissive of most of it – but still she listens. She seems to have a natural respect for the interaction itself, and at my age I value that as much as anything else.

Of course Madala influenced my view of cats profoundly. If the trees and the plants are brothers, if the birds are my sisters, then cats are truly my kin. Maybe this was his one genuine legacy to me, his gift. The recognition of life in its widest sense.

So Camille sits on my lap, or next to me in her chair, or in the late-afternoon balcony sun. We watch the world drift by. I ruminate and she hums along. My thoughts and my memories and my ideas and my ambitions are all the same river now. Things that were so distinct in their time – in my time – but now they are simply confluence.

North, as far as my eyes can see, is the jungle. The tops of the Killarney Mall and the Sandton skyline are just visible, but now they are genuinely inaccessible for anyone other than jungle adventurers – kids with machetes and a will to explore and discover what once was. The likes of me will forever be elevated on this island, looking out and marvelling over what has become.

South is all decay: broken, sagging buildings, falling bricks and cracking roads. The city has sagged so much now as to be a jungle of its own kind – more accessible than the north but equally dangerous with its packs of dogs and other scavengers and its rain-soaked structural weaknesses. To the west the land has taken back its original desert form, Roodepoort still standing as a dusty, crumbling monument to a dusty, crumbled people. The east
runs away to mountains and bush, rivers and seas, depending on whether you go up or down.

They keep coming to talk to me, the kids, to explain how much easier it could be in one of the other places. Soweto maybe, where they have taken the Calabash. Where they are resourced and free and clear, unencumbered by the forest. But there is the inescapable fact of the library, my archive. It is simply not movable, although they’re starting to talk about that too. Restructuring. Resource control. Things I thought had died with the old world that have turned out to be very much alive. I tell them to get lost – they will move and change and grow and integrate and whatever else is necessary when they find Camille and myself bones in the air. We all know.

Until then, they can leave me here looking out over my forest. Really I think they’re just after change for change’s sake – there is nothing fundamentally wrong with our farm. It is central and well stocked and self-sufficient. It might be a little leafy, a little lush, but that’s no reason to move the whole thing. There are buildings aplenty and … ag, no matter. It’s not my business any more.

Babalwa is dead. That fact was one of the hardest to process and it remains a daily challenge dealing with the sight of Fats walking the never-ending yards. He stops all the time, caught contemplating simple physical things. Trees and walls and stumps and lumps. I know his feeling. That feeling. The loss. I miss her too.

Javas is also dead. His was an easier departure to bear. I always perceived Javas as a larger-than-life force – as an essence. His presence extended beyond bodies and words and locations, and so I feel like he’s still with us. With me. I talk to him and I reply on his behalf, which I know is a sign of my own slipping functioning, but I’m willing to accept that.

Ironically, Javas spent his last years working small. As the kids brought the giants into their story of us, as his work was used to represent us, the originators, he pulled away and focused inward. He worked in his little studio inside his and Andile’s garden cottage and few were invited in.

Once, about a year before he died, I spent a week or two visiting while he worked. It was just the three of us and we spent most of the time talking, his goggles perched on top of his grey dreads, waiting, the welding iron in his hand, raised but paused. And that’s how I’ll remember him. Javas in his tattered blue overalls, goggles up, arm about to strike, talking shit about something I can longer recall, but with a shine in his eye that lit the room – the same shine that always lit my heart.