Dub Steps (22 page)

‘That’s fine,’ I said, nausea hitting my gut. ‘It’s fine, Javas. I know it must be done, but what if it doesn’t take? I mean, I can handle the idea of having to do it, but Jesus, having to do it again and again … It makes me feel ill.’

‘Ag fok, Roy.’ Andile adopted a thick mock-Afrikaans accent while forking a broccoli head very practically into her mouth. ‘We need to get over it. We have to – all of us – and if that means eight times in a row, then that’s it. We’ve been through worse. You’ve been through worse. So have I. We’ll get hard about it – ’scuse the pun – and make it happen.’

And so we did.

We appointed a day and an hour and a place. The three of us met in the cottage kitchen, then split to the two main bathrooms. ‘We keep it clinical,’ Javas said. Crossing the threshold into the bathroom, which was decorated in various shades of brown and which featured a triptych of abstract black-and-white KwaZulu landscapes created by Andile, I felt like a transgressor, an invader.

I had been inside the twins’ cottage many times over the years. It was a journey into a different, parallel world. A world where tiny metal dwarfs – Javas’s creations – stood hiding within the leafy protection of well-watered pot plants. A world where not only did the colours match, but they actually seemed designed to work together. Andile picked her interior battles carefully, making sure to give each item the room it needed not only to breathe, but to dominate. My favourite was a large-scale black-and-white print of the Sandton riots, hanging in the lounge. Andile had found it about to rot in an artist’s studio in the city. It was typical of the Sandton-riot genre: hoodies, face masks, raised arms with petrol bombs, etc. But the artist – Mpho, she said his name was – had woven microscopic detail through everything. Tiny shocked faces at the stock-exchange windows. Infinitesimal pockmark dings in the parked BMWs. Full
and accurate road maps, which you could actually read with a magnifying glass, in the hands of the global youth.

As many times as I had been in their domain, however, I had never had even a second of this kind of privacy. Now the bathroom took on new echoes. Suddenly Andile’s landscapes held the voice and heart of their owner. Her sound and her smell surrounded me. It was like she was there with me, watching, questioning, examining my thin little mlungu legs as I sat on the toilet seat and wrapped my fist around a limp, uninspired dick. I pulled and stretched and eventually, half-heartedly, delivered.

Then I ran – I literally sprinted the fifteen metres that separated us. (We had agreed that the cooling of the junk was the creepiest part of the whole thing. When I imagined Andile’s horror, it was always the thought of the cold, glutinous substance that creeped me out …) Quickly I passed the cup over to a waiting Javas, who disappeared behind their door.

I hung around for five minutes, and they emerged, hand in hand, Javas leading, smiling. Andile pulling her cheeks backward.

‘Ugh,’ she said, then detached herself from Javas and gave me a long, warm hug, eventually holding me at arm’s length, by the shoulders. ‘We did well, Roy, we did well.’

‘It just better fucking take, eh?’ I ruffled her hair, then thumped Javas on his muscled shoulder. ‘The donor life … eish.’

Andile flipped into a handstand against the passage wall, allowing her skirt to fall over her head and flashing her white panties and well-formed legs. I blushed and looked away.

‘My gogo always said you must,’ she explained in a barely discernible, skirt-covered muffle.

We lost Jabu at the next winter slaughter. I say that like she went wandering through the forest and we couldn’t find her, but really we killed her. Gerald and I killed her. It’s as simple and brutal as that.

I had jerked into the cup for four months running. Andile and Javas had been steadfast and magnanimous in their reception of my spunk. Eventually, in month five, it took and we had another one on the go. We kept it mostly to our ourselves. The others knew we were engaged with it, this strangely intimate process, but sensed we were best left treating it in our own way. Babalwa would raise the occasional query, and we’d report back dutifully, but it never became a subject of public discussion. We had, by silent agreement, sanctified the thing, which was really the only way to go about it. Baby creation is rooted in love or lust, the basic human connections. Take these away and you have something too strange to grasp, and too powerful to brush off.

The big slaughter had taken place annually, and incrementally more professionally, each year in July. Year on year we had improved, but in that first year our failures were many and miserable. Gerald, for all his calm instruction, slipped with the gun at the last second, shooting the cow through the side of its head once we’d looped it down to the iron floor-ring. Instead of crashing to its knees it wailed and kicked crazily at the closing darkness, nearly decapitating Javas in the process. Blood sprayed out of the angular slot in its head, and in the twenty seconds it took Gerald to compose himself and get another round off we all saw life flashing before us. There was a distinct possibility we would all go down with the cow, pulled into a death of hoofs and screams. Eventually Gerald got the bullet in the right place and the beast crashed, but we were far too long
with the throat-slitting and the blood didn’t drain immediately. Our slaughter master spent the rest of the day chastising himself and warning us that our meat was going to be off. We shook the fear off gradually. (Andile clung to her cricket stump for a good time after.)

The next time it was much easier. Gerald put the bullet straight through and the cow’s eyes slammed shut. We skinned and pulled and gutted and carved. The next day we did the pig and used its entrails for sausage skins, Javas and Gerald guiding us in turn.

With operational success the slaughter became something of a celebration. A time of year to anticipate. A marker for us all. Another year gone. Another three freezers’ worth of meat. Another slash against the bedpost of our lost society. And yes, we used it all, once we had learned how to extract it. The tongue and brains, the offal and the kidneys, the heart and all the rest. Beatrice was still finding good packaged flour and she made pies. Rows and rows of pies. Steak and kidney, like granny would.

The fourth slaughter after the plane crash (this was how we had started marking time, not with a calendar but according to the happenings, the epochs of our own lives) we killed my first child. A child created not with cooling cups of semen but with love, albeit of the temporary and fractious sort.

Did I say
we
killed Jabulani? I mean
I
. I did it. I pushed the domino forward, tilted its ass over its head, and then it was too late to do anything but watch the falling.

‘Daddy,’ she piped up. ‘I watch?’

She was serious, completely intent on the wondrous butchery process.

‘Ja, Jabu,’ I said. ‘But you need to be very, very careful, nè? There are lots of sharp knives around and you could get hurt, so you need to stand here.’ I marked off a spot about five metres back of the concrete area, on the cusp of the cricket field/paddock. ‘This where you stay, yes?’ I ground the mark into the turf with my heel. ‘You stay right here and you don’t move.’

She nodded seriously. Several times. I hadn’t fully learned, yet, that children lie, just like everyone else. That they also dream of, and lust after, better things. And nod and plan accordingly.

Her eyes were big and brown, like the cow. They slammed shut in exactly the same way.

We had grown self-assured. We had slaughtered year after year and by now we all knew what we were doing, why we were doing it and how it would pan out. We were in control.

1. Jabu creeps forward, inch by tiny inch, to get a better view. She’s not freaked out by the blood and guts; she’s seeing chops and steaks and cuts.

2. Gerald jumps back to avoid some kind of spray. He’s using the wrist-strapped knife. The blade has become part of his arm. He has forgotten he is no longer all man.

3. His knife arm jerks back in anticipation of the rest of his body and the blade slices straight through Jabu’s curious neck.

4. There are no screams. Just a quiet thump. A little body falls softly to the ground.

Let me tell you now just how far we had come. Let me explain the terrible distance we had travelled away from ourselves, from everything we knew.

Let me explain what we did. We wept.

We tore our hair out.

We buried the little body.

We said a prayer to a strange, absent god.

And then we carried on.

I started writing this to reach out to you, whoever you are, wherever you are. I needed to extend, I needed to push further. Simply dying, which I will soon do, and letting my eyes slip shut – leaving behind only what is in this house, these libraries, these rooms and rooms of computers and devices and failed connections, leaving that as my only message to you – I refuse.

I need to talk.

I need to tell you more – of myself and my time – and so I started, word by word, to explain, to tell my story, to leave a personal interpretation behind. For you. And of course – obviously – for me.

But now, after this word and this one, and then this one, after the thousands and thousands of I’s and ands and buts, I am deeper than I expected. I am wrestling with time itself, the snake of my life, the python. I am throttled by what I have forgotten, by the mists of story, ever rolling. I duck and push the hair out of my eyes, looking for the few things I know for sure will be there. I jump, pillar to pillar, and all else is lost, shrouded and vague, opaque.

I wish I had paid more attention.

I wish I had written it down at the time, because now there are only statues and monuments, presentations and experiences. Narratives. Design.

The furrow on Gerald’s brow.

Babalwa and her babies and her breeding maps. Kiddies at the knee, charts and cross-referencing red lines and genetic mixes. Her hand on their heads, guiding.

Fats’s fro, always modest yet strong, hard. Small, even. Bouncing. Firm.

The twins. Hand in hand.

Jabu’s body, so tiny, covered in blood, her neck literally pumping the red out, her red mixing with the cows’.

Entrails and tears.

The years of us. Our farm and our people. The children, from this distance now almost all completely interchangeable faces and forms, smiling and running and growing so easily into this other thing. So unfettered by time. So shaped by our story, yet somehow so completely untouched by any of it.

It was the dream, Babalwa told me as we grew into our age. Right back at the beginning, the dream was complete and fully formed. She knew as she woke up, as soon as she met me, that the dream would always guide her. A rock, firm and flat-topped, solid in a terrible sea.

The baby farm allowed us to move. It was the only way to pick up momentum again. I see that now.

Now, also, I view Jabu’s death as the spark. As the shove in the back we needed to get serious. Of course, that’s my way of rationalising the horror of that soft thump, the sound I will never shake. Yes, it’s my method of layering some kind of sense into the incomprehensible.

Maybe.

Regardless, it’s the line I choose to take. It works for me.

The biggest miracle of all – as is meticulously detailed in the archives
^*
– is that we did it as planned. We jerked off, we poured cold semen down, again and again. The couples made sure that in a world without people, in a world begging for children, contraception was used and accidents avoided. We calculated the baseline requirement of diversity. Wherever possible, we followed the maths.

When there was no maths, we stumbled on.

‘Roy, you know I can’t explain things properly any more,’ Fats said to me sometime around the winter of ’49. ‘I used to be so sure. It used to be so easy. Simple. Now I look at you and I feel this love for you and I can’t even put it into words. You know?’

I did know. He was very drunk at the time. It came from somewhere deep inside, and it was also booze-true. It rang raw and honest. I rubbed his fro and offered something similar in return. He held my hand.

I started to draw. I took lessons from Andile, who equipped me with a few charcoals, some watercolours and a box of acrylics. I drew trees and landscapes. Fruit and such. Most of it looked worse than stuff I had done in Grade 7 art class. Gradually she showed me how to create perspective, to give trees shape and cheeks blush. How impossible watercolours are to use and how much faster rewards arrive with acrylics.

Drawing and painting quickly began to feel like a way to capture Jabulani, to hold on to her fading form before she was erased altogether. That was my initial reaction, but more followed. A desire to catch her actual death, somehow. To remove that terrible thud. To blur that single moment when she fell out of us.

My vast, expanding library was simply unable to help me cope with the death. There were hundreds – thousands – of texts on the shelves, virtual and otherwise, that addressed the subject, directly and tangentially, but they all missed the hammer blow. The direct, metaphysical impact of my own context. None could handle the electricity still buzzing on the muscles of my heart. They were all just words on a page and almost all of them spoke of the writer rather than the world being written. None of the carefully structured arguments and plots were relevant to my world of seven adults and their calculated brood.

I had built the library, the archive, in self-defence. As if by gathering around me the better, more acknowledged works of man, I could protect myself against the echoes booming up at the gates. But for the biggest, most important sound of all there was no help. No buffer at all. Art, on the other hand, offered at least a sliver of what I craved.

And so I drew.

I also widened the range of the library to include art. I started at the university art departments, where students were learning
to draw. In the paused classrooms there were definite flickers of life, of true moments being captured. A line drawing of the city. A man with a bag in his hand walking fast down the street. A nude girlfriend, sprawled yet guarded.

Once I was well into my lessons, the twins accompanied me and we targeted the museums and the corporate galleries. MTN, Standard Bank, Joburg Gallery, Everard Read, Goodman et al. Arts on Main.

‘Amazing,’ Andile said as we breezed through the collected works of our age – a post-1994 retrospective at the Goethe Project Space. ‘It’s so easy. It used to be so hard and now it’s so easy.’ She took a running kick at a coat-hanger installation.

‘I think I know what you mean,’ I said, grabbing a couple of the hangers, which were of the Woolworths variety, for my closet. ‘But enlighten me …’

‘Well, Roy, that picture there’ – Andile went into mock lecture mode as she pointed out a semi-abstract Kentridge, the usual man leaning/running – ‘at least has some kind of aesthetic value. It’s a not unpleasant image of a male moving. There’s some kind of flash that feels like something to me.

‘Whereas that’ – she pointed at the collapsed pile of coat hangers – ‘is just a bunch of fucking coat hangers. We all knew it at the time – I was at the opening of this show – but no one could say it out loud. Only whispers behind the hands.’

‘That’s why I fell in love with her,’ Javas jibed from his seat on top of a half tractor tire studded with gold pins entitled
Means of Production III
. ‘The power of her analysis.’

‘For real though.’ Andile kicked a hanger in Javas’s direction. ‘Now it’s simple. No brokers, no hustlers, no art slags or groupies, none of the PR chickies – just pictures on the wall. I look at some of it and I want to cry, it’s so beautiful. But there is just as much that is just … just …’ She took another skipping run up and hoofed a hanger at my head.

‘Depressing?’ I asked.

‘Irrelevant?’ Javas chipped in.

‘Kak.’ Andile took the Kentridge print and frisbeed it across
the length of the very white Goethe Project Space. It crashed into a long-dead video installation in a shower of glass.

‘And yet, in terms of its emotive potential, I still find art more attractive, currently, than books, which fail at a deeper level,’ I added, hurling a small, heavy blob of metal, about the size of a tennis ball and with no discernible aesthetic form, through another retro flat-screen (Sony 97-inch super plasma) installation entitled
Urban Dynamics – Ocean Flows
. The metal blob was called
Weeping Underground
. ‘All of the books, all of them, stay within the same place, the same realm. I read and read and read and I don’t find anything that even considers what actually happened to us. With art, at least, there is some kind of hit rate. Every twenty or thirty pieces you find something that screams at you, that at least gets close to the chaos of life. The books are just useless.’

‘We should go back to the student studio in town.’ Javas left his half tyre and began heading out. ‘There’ll be better stuff there. Better odds than here, anyway.’

I grabbed a few brochures for Urban Dynamics – the name of the exhibition as well as the video installation – on the way out. Andile took a small wooden sculpture of a lady balancing an absurdly large barrel on her head. ‘Reminds me of my mom,’ she said.

I drew cows’ heads and sweeping, curved knives and rivers of blood. I drew Jabu in the various stages of falling. I drew people in an abattoir clustered around a child corpse.

Jabu’s death was just the start. I needed to convey our new context. We weren’t just people who had killed their child. We were the only people, and we’d killed one of our only children. The work had to be unique. It could not be the same as anything that had gone before it. There was a gulf that had to be bridged, and I was lost as to how to do it.

But it needed to be done.

I moved through sheet after sheet of Fabriano. Andile told me to keep the rejects, so I piled them up, a huge stack of childlike failures. Stick figures without perspective. Cows’ heads and badly composed chainsaws and barrels in watercolour and charcoal and acrylic.

About thirty or forty attempts in, I switched subjects and began beating out an equally ill-composed series of us on the farm. Beatrice leading the cows. Fats on the ladder fiddling with another panel, screwdriver in his mouth. All of us in the abattoir, clustered in panic around a single cow head.

This series felt better. It had the ring of settler art to it. Strangers lost in a strange land. I began exaggerating the poses. Myself running up Munro Drive, but a steeper road, the kind that leads to God, the path thin and getting thinner, almost unimaginable as it faded through the growth and the trees. This was my first success. I enhanced the yellow of the Nikes to the kind of biblical hue able to compete with the surrounding jungle. My legs were super-hard, thighs bulging with effort, my face strained and taut with ascension, my eyes fixed on the pinprick of light breaking through the forest at the top. It was epic. Godly. The hyperbole worked.

Next, Babalwa. I fattened her up, added folds to her thighs and sat her on a kind of rocking chair with a quilt over her knees, a nursing baby in her crooked arms, and ten or eleven brats in various stages of development at her feet. Behind them, to the right, the complex, our complex, the endless horizon with just a hint of the Northgate Dome on the left. I added ten, twenty years to her face. A middle-aged woman surround by her brood. Her swarming brood. Some of them staring absently, some fiddling with toys, and a few at arm’s length, fighting over something. Babalwa the breeder.

Gerald alone. No backdrop. Nothing. Just standing there in a stained butcher’s coat with that curved knife strapped to his wrist, dangling limp, a smudge of congealed blood brown on the tip. His eyes vacant.

And on I went, my lines growing more and more biblical with each picture, my exaggerations extending, seeking out the nuggets in all of us and distorting them, twisting them up and out and into the open.

‘You got something going here, eh Roy?’ Andile clucked, poring over the pictures. She giggled initially and then was silent. ‘I mean … ja.’ She paused at the one of her and Javas, hand in hand, walking
into the sunset, an ambiguous Moses-type basket dangling lightly in Javas’s free hand. ‘You’re getting your shit together technically. Bodies and legs and all.’ She leafed through to Fats straining on his ladder, muscles bulging, arm reaching in vain for an elusive socket. ‘I don’t like them, but I’m not going to stop you.’ She pushed tears away with her palm – a strange, unproductive gesture, as if by using the part of her hand with the least utility she could reverse, or at least deny, the flow. ‘A lot of them are repulsive, in fact, Roy. You must carry on. And I must go.’ She walked away, pushing again with the palm.

Painting became my nightly ritual, the thing I now did to replace reading, which I had consigned to a necessary pre-sleep technicality. I let myself follow the perverse path I had started. Andile’s tears had been disturbing, but also inspiring. I was, I believed, accessing the bubbling anxiety that ran common through us.

I was making art.

We were now shut off. Initially, in those first few months in Houghton, I had felt the vegetation acutely. Our isolation was made all the worse by the unmown lawns, by the obvious disappearance of order and straight lines. But slowly the plants receded from my consciousness, and only occasionally would that initial sense of invasion and claustrophobia recur.

Our personal feelings were incidental, however, to the green forces inching over roads and fences, chipping away at the chasm. We noticed it – the growth – again in the months after Jabu’s death, when it suddenly seemed to become much harder to move outside our regular zones. And even those – the paths and roads we used the most – had begun to require steady, intensive maintenance.

Gerald was at the forefront of the hack-it-back campaign. His ambition in this regard was, I believed, a way for him to expunge or rechannel his anger at Jabu’s death. He would load the chainsaw and the axes into his bakkie, his jaw set and his mind fully on the battle. He never asked for a partner, but if any
of us offered he would hand out a tool and wordlessly pull the volunteer into the fight.

Eventually we had to structure the process. Once a month, during summer, we would all throw ourselves into a week-long maintenance mission. First, hack back the trees and vines trying to swallow Munro Drive. Second, clear the perimeter areas – Fats’s gates and the outer border. Third, make sure we had access to the major arteries in and out of the city. North and south were easy – nominal effort was required to access the M1 highway. Lastly, keep Louis Botha and Empire avenues clear. Not because the routes were necessary to us as such, but because it was philosophically impossible to concede to living in a jungle with only one road to the highway.

Regardless, Gaia shrugged off our fight. We were slowly becoming a one-road town.

We had too much invested in our set-up to try to move, although the idea of transferring out to flatter farm areas was increasingly mooted. The girls were sick of the creeping forest, and Javas and Gerald leaned in favour of relocation. I fought it, as did Fats. I couldn’t accept the idea of having to retreat from Jozi. It felt like the defeat that would crown them all. If we left we would never be able to come back. The forest would close its arms and that would be that. Joburg would be a mythical memory, a place of the past, of adventure stories for children, of warnings not to get lost.

Still, the summer monsoons kept coming, the forest grew and we were all carrying machetes and a chainsaw in our vehicles whenever we went anywhere.