Moxyland (8 page)

   And my skin does look amazing, like it's been buffed and scrubbed and moisturised within an inch of its life, all velvaglow and radiant, even though the only cosmetic in the apartment is Jonathan's aftershave. It's been almost six days now with no side effects, or only good ones, apart from the first few miserable days when the flu and achiness hit. But then maybe that was self-induced. Maybe all of it is.

   It's a shock to find Jonathan at the gallery, but really, what did I expect? He and Sanjay are examining my prints, laid out on Propeller's floor in a blunt mosaic. They weren't supposed to start the selection without me. Sanjay is squatting, shuffling like a crab between the prints. He's already set two aside. He flashes a smile at me when I come in, slightly strained at the edges.

   'Hey, sweetness.' Jonathan gives me the fullbody up-down, like he does to the models in castings. It's an old habit, he's told me, from the job. As in, don't take everything so personally, Kendra.

   On any other day, the cigarette dangling off his lips would have annoyed the hell out of me, when he's supposed to have quit again, but my secret makes me feel smug and secure, counterbalancing the elation, like a fish jumping in my chest, that I can't keep down at seeing him.

   'You shouldn't be smoking over the prints.'

   'Don't be so tense, baby. It's not going to hurt them.' He starts to reach for my shoulder, to knead the knots in my neck, but I brush his hand away, irritated.

   There are to be three of us in the group exhibition: Johannes Michael, who does intricate paperwork mobiles on a massive scale, taking up Propeller's entire second floor; and Khanyi Nkosi, a legend at twenty-six. I am either privileged to be sharing a space with her, or at a serious disadvantage because no one is going to pay the slightest bit of attention to my work with her audio animal installation in the room. She's only bringing the thing in at the last minute, because of all the controversy around it.

   It's the first time I've seen all the prints laid out together and, despite my anxieties about coexhibiting with Khanyi Nkosi, I'm deliriously happy about how they've come out. I've already made my final selection, although I'm glad to see Sanjay and Jonathan have picked out the portrait of the drag queen, caught bumming a light from a garage attendant at 3 am. I've blown it up, so that her face is all texture, the make-up caked in the lines around her pursed mouth, lit up by the flame cupped in her hands. It came out surprisingly perfect considering no one knows how to use film anymore.

   The others have not, and Sanjay is still wary about the whole thing. The over- and under-exposed, bleached, washed out, over-saturated with colour, blotches and speckles and stains like coffee-cup rings, or arcs of white on white where the canister has cracked and let the light slip inside.

   My shrink tells me I'm co-dependencing; my father's death means I'm paralysed, afraid to make my own decisions, so I defer to Jonathan because it's easy, and this is my core problem. Well, actually, he didn't; he let me figure that out for myself, which cost a little more, a few months more of therapay, more wasted time, when apparently he had the answer all along.

   What he does tell me of his own accord, after this revelation, is that I should move out and cut Jonathan off, get some distance to regain my equilibrium, to recover a sense of self. He uses a lot of shrink-speak that doesn't translate, like it's only applicable to someone else's ordered

life, where the rules work.

   So I'm still speaking to Jonathan, still hanging out with him, still sleeping with him – when he comes round. Still deferring to him on the important stuff. Because he's the guy orchestrating all the moves. Because I don't have his pull or his contacts, like Sanjay, for example. Sanjay is a major name on the international art scene, responsible for launching the trajectories of people like Susu Ngubane or Cameron Sterling, whose sculptures now sell for in the region of seven hundred grand. Jonathan deals with Sanjay on all of the details of the exhibition. Or should that be exhibitionism? Because isn't it my soul being laid bare here?

   I know he's been seeing at least two other women in the times between, when we are off, on, off. Because we are just 'casual', as he calls it, because quantifying something puts it in its place. But sometimes I feel like he's reminding himself rather than me. Maybe that's just wishful thinking.

   I met the one, Stacy, at a party. One of those awful media blitzes, hanging off him like she was his handbag. Old bag. Cos she was – thirtyeight at least. An editor at one of the pushmags he works for occasionally. One of the perks of the job, fraternising with the help. Of course, Jonathan is thirty-eight, so he's right up there

with her. Closer to her than me.

   I asked to take her picture, to Jonathan's delight. 'You cunning little fox,' he whispered, kissing my shoulder, as if we were all supposed to pretend I didn't know they were fucking. 'You just guaranteed yourself a publicity splash, sweetheart. We'll have to make the event worthy of the write-up.'

   But, really I was more interested in reducing her to planes of colour, the hard sculptural bones offsetting the flicker of pity in her eyes.

   The print I went with was an accident, a misfire while I was adjusting the light settings. It shows her sitting on the edge of the fire escape stair, on the balcony outside the apartment. The focus is on the shapely knot of her knee, one hand resting in the dark fall of her skirt, a black blur. You can only see the angle of her jaw tilted out of frame. It makes her look vulnerable.

   When I confronted him about her later, sitting in the window of his loft, the night bitter cold against my naked back and the traffic streaming below, he ducked and evaded. But I know I am cast in the role of Poor Thing. The doomed unrequited who can't quite let go. And it is my fault that we still fall into bed. His mercy fuck. But really, I think the word should be mercenary, for all the benefits I score: the loft, the career guidance, this show.

   'Do you love him?' my shrink asks, and I feel angry because it's so obvious, and is this really what I'm paying for? But I don't have a coherent response. I love his ferocious confidence, the way he charms strangers, so they flock to him like tame little birds to peck at the compliments that drop from his lips. And the way you know it's only crumbs, and long for more.

   But I have a greater sense of his physicality. The image I have of Jonathan, one of the first, which I have tried to document on film countless times, but also keep in my head, are the lines that crease the corners of his eyes in bright sunlight when he smiles. Why this and not any of the other details – the triumvirate of moles in the crook of his arm; his lips, slightly too plump, too voluptuous for a man; his giant hands with knuckles like the knobbly skulls of little animals – or the whole, I don't know. But then Jonathan says that's just like me, to take in the partials rather than the composite.

   The shrink doesn't even bother to make notes. When he gives me the bill, I include it in my expenses, and Jonathan pays it without comment.

   'Hey, dreamy girl,' Jonathan waves impatiently from the other side of the room. 'This is your exhibition, you want to pay attention?' I set down the print and drift across the room. Not telling him about the branding feels like my counter to the Stacys, to all the times he doesn't answer his phone. An amulet of protection.

   'Babes, you can't be serious about this,' he says, tapping one of the photographs, already mounted and leaning against the wall.

   It is my favourite.

   'It's really childish.'

   They are both waiting for my reaction, Jonathan irritable and Sanjay polite, but evaluating at the same time, like he already has the measure of my work, but not yet of me.

   'What do you think?' I ask him.

   'No ways. You're deluded if you're making that the centrepiece, sweetheart. It's not right.' Jonathan interjects, but Sanjay gives me a little nod of approval.

   It's like the night dive Jonathan and I went on in Malaysia. It was only my eighth dive, and I wasn't qualified for it, but for five hundred bucks, qualifications can mysteriously be overlooked. In the boat, over the nasal whine of the engine and the oxygen tanks clanking against their restraints, Jonathan teased me about being scared, winding me up about how claustrophobic, how suffocating it would be.

   And it was terrifying when I rolled off the boat backwards, and the shock of water engulfed me, but not because the darkness closed in. Because it made the sea wide open.

   Visibility limits your imagination of the ocean only as far as you can see, ten metres, fifteen at a stretch. But it's only in the utter black that you can feel the true scale, the volume and weight of that gaping unknowable drift between continents.

   The photograph is called
Self-Portrait
. It is a print from a rotten piece of film. Two metres by three and a half.

   It came out entirely black.

 

I'm stoked with my stash, kids: new illicit phone that's immune to defusings
and
capable of reading illegal downloads (let's try not to spread that around too much), and a spiffing VIMbot to restore my swivel to the state of superclean it hasn't seen since my old lady first picked it out of the catalogue. Not that I've ever been especially bothered about fighting the good fight against creeping entropy, but it'll make for a change.

   I spill the VIMbot out of my pack onto the bed and it goes zooting between my Pumas, breaking for the corridor and nearly gets away. Luckily the door has already started to rotate away. A lot of people don't like this whole cog system of floors, the entire building like a gyroscope in perpetual motion, but, hey, it saves space on doors and it just saved my VIMbot from bolting.

   The little fucker just misses the gap and thwacks off the wall, tipping itself over and lying with its legs twitching frantically, a fantastic dirty sound emanating from its inner devicings. If a robot could grind its teeth, assuming they had teeth, that's what it would sound like. It's the kind of sound that's eminently sampleable.

   I like to mix it up eclectic, got over 150,000 songs on my phone, ready to download to the decks and about nine and a half thou records in the mix. Everything from spectro to new bliss jazz, and some oldtime stuff too. And my brand spanking handset will double that capacity, now I'm free to loot and plunder without the digital rights malware blowing up in my face.

   I set the VIMbot down on the kitchen counter, holding it down with one hand, and sample that deliciously awful sound directly to my phone. I can already hear the track unfolding in my head, with that metallic teethedge in the backbeat.

   I play around with that for a while, thinking about how I really like sweet-K, and what a bad sign that is. The last person I was this interested in was Tamarin, and she was psycho deluxe, especially when she bust me and Nokulelo together. But what was she expecting when I was still with Jenna when we hooked up? Forget the rational; they always think they can change you. Rearrange the furniture. What is it with that?

   If I'm going to do this Kendra thing properly, I'm going to have to upgrade my gear. The way I'm figuring it, fuck
Boing Boing
, I'm gonna syndicate this straight to CNN or Sky News, then hit up some funding to do a proper documentary or a feature, and land a sweet deal on a major cast channel. MicrosoftTimeWarner or Al Jazeera.

   I'm going to need a decent mic, a broadcastquality lens, and to stock up on extra memory – and the fridge while I'm at it. It's glaringly empty, like my bank balance, which is already looking unhealthy deluxe, even with Lerato's loan. My mother doesn't realise how much maintenance my accustomed lifestyle chows up. She would have to cut me off mid-month. Cunt.

   So it's off to hook up with Unathi and make some quick cash-in-phone. When I finally make it through the traffic, it takes me another halfhour to find his dockside squat among the derelict buildings. It's borderline illegal, mainly because of the health hazard he and his slumfriends pose, but at least they're not drug dealers or human traffickers or anti-corporate terrorists, which are all the cops really care about. Occasionally, they'll get harassed, mainly for tapping into the grid and using juice they're not paying for, and they've had to move twice already in the last six months, but it's all par for the lifestyle, kids. Take note before you consider a career in the lucrative but feckless world of underground game-dealing.

   A shaven-headed someone, so nondescript I can't distinguish if it's guy or girl, opens the door without so much as a heita, then vanishes into the maze of backrooms which smell of burnt rice and that heavy sour smell of humanity that hasn't had access to running water for a while.

   Unathi doesn't bother to surface from the sagging wallow of the couch, which is the only furniture in the room, apart from a deflated beanbag and the scramble of consoles and wiring and six different screens blaring a mash of content into the lounge, providing the only light. He's wearing the same leopard-print vest I saw him in last time, which was at some LAN party, but when I rib him about not having any other clothes, he claims it's just cos he's got three of them. He's also shaved his head, so between him and the androgynous thing at the door, it's beginning to look like a real cult around here.

   'I don't know, man. When was the last time you played?' he hedges, fiddling with the frayed tassle of the shweshwe throw that has solidified from unidentified spillage like a topographical map.

   'Cut the sceptical, man. You know I can handle it.' The truth, kids, is that I can't remember. 'I've been busy, man. Diary of Cunt takes up most of my day. Have you checked it?'

   'No.'

   'And I've been working the decks, sampled a VIMbot earlier, which was mental.' I half raise my phone to transfuse him a copy of the Replica invite, but he's not keen. Never one for the social. 'And girls,' I add, cos I can't resist the dig at him nesting in this shithole, pre-demolition, twentyfour/seven by seven, getting it on only in Pluslife. 'Uh-huh. Maybe you could bring 'em round some time. Get me a piece of your pie. For once.'