Dub Steps (24 page)

‘You mean he was doing all that, the running into things, because he thought they could be fake?’ Gerald asked. ‘Computer corners?’

‘I guess it makes more sense if you’ve actually experienced it. Once you’ve been inside an interface for a while you can understand better. In my old Mlungu’s days, corners crumbled when you even looked. It was a big issue – holding it together.’

‘So you actually drank Tebza’s piss?’ Javas beamed at me, his biceps rippling, waiting to start up the chainsaw.

‘I did.’

‘Wonderful. You’re full of surprises, Roy.’ He ripped the cord and laughed as he attacked the trees.

Archiving often seemed futile. It was especially troubling when we were forced into heavy manual labour. I found myself begging for forgiveness at the CSIR. Javas and Gerald shut me down. ‘You’re like a teenage girl vrying and pleading no all at the same time,’ said Javas.

Gerald was more direct. ‘If we don’t do this, these children we have created will be running around in skins, grunting like baboons.’

Placated, I allowed myself to fall back into the dreamscape. The clearing away, the discovery and the archiving had become a kind of suspended fantasy, a ritualised physical experience that could be followed and repeated infinitely. A way to slow my brain down and keep my body moving.

I dumped my kit at the bakkie when we were finally done and headed for the nanotech building, seeking to retrace Tebza’s original steps.

‘I think you need to go back for Sthembiso,’ Javas said. He was amused by my eagerness. ‘He’ll never forgive you if you go in without him.’

Sthembiso was ready and waiting, fourth day in a row. With him were Lydia, English, Roy Jnr and Thabang. They were playing some kind of bastardised version of hopscotch at the bottom of the driveway, which Sthembiso killed as I drove in, scuffing through the chalk with his bare heel while English was in mid-jump. She launched the beginnings of a tantrum, which he diffused with an easy arm around her shoulder and a word in her little ear.

Lydia and Thabang and Roy Jnr fell into the back of the bakkie, Sthembiso and English took the prime spots up front, with me – a front seat obviously the prize with which Sthembiso had quelled English’s tears.

‘So, my dear.’ I took her four-year-old hand in mine. ‘Are you feeling all Eeeyuie?’ I stretched the word and pulled a face at the end, by which time all of us were grimacing and squealing. She squeezed my index finger, wrapping her whole hand around it tightly, and beamed up at me silently.

‘The CSIR,’ Sthembiso stated authoritatively. ‘It doesn’t get much better than that, eh Roy?’

‘Well, you never know. Eeeyus hang out in some very strange places. You can never really tell, can you?’

‘But it’s true, isn’t it?’ he insisted. ‘The CSIR is where they did all the science. The big things.’

‘Well, it’s one of the places. But the problem is the computers, nè? Much harder to find an Eeeyu in a computer than in a book. And the CSIR people used a lot of computers. In fact, they used computers way more than books. So there’s a chance you could be disappointed – we might only get back with a bakkie full of plastic.’

‘Some of the plastic might be tens.’

‘Yes, it might. You never know.’

English clutched her torn, dog-eared copy of
Animal Farm
under her elbow. It was an illustrated paperback version. The cover line drawings of Snowball and Napoleon had caught her attention before she was even three years old, reinforcing her already deep fascination with the idea of a pig. The book was always with her, even in her adult years. She thumbed it and pawed it and read it
repeatedly, all through her life, although never, it seemed to me, in the literal or political sense, but rather as a general evocation of porcine power and import.

She gripped my finger tighter with her spare hand and beamed harder. Her smile was a lighthouse in the night. In fact, as she grew older the grin often replaced language altogether. For reasons well beyond her control or ken, it was as if she lived only to deny what we had bestowed on her.

Most of the kids’ names had our explicit ambitions and hopes threaded through them. Lerato was named after we were all involved in a protracted debate about the meaning of love. Elizabeth and English – both my kids – were named in direct, ironic reference to the now significantly reduced power of my British ancestry. We spent many consecutive nights drinking (well, pouring drinks, in my case) and discussing the extreme power of being British.

‘Genetically, you are plugged straight into money and power,’ said Beatrice. ‘They flow through your blood. The need to organise and have systems. To generate money. To pack it away in assets for your spawn. You can’t teach that stuff.’ She gripped Gerald’s knee as she spoke, her hand sliding up his thigh and then back down again, but the twinkle in her eye was mostly for me, I was sure.

‘True,’ Gerald added. ‘Actually true. We are born in place. If you measure by money and houses, then you want to be British. If you’re born Pedi, all you get is non-stop relatives and you can’t make eye contact with mlungus.’

‘The English language. Greatest skill you could ever have in sub-Saharan Africa,’ Javas said, tipping a bottle of home-made beer in our direction. ‘The rest you can fake, but not the English. I was going to call my firstborn that. English.’

‘Get the fuck outta here,’ I said.

‘For real. English. A complete statement of power.’

‘I like it,’ said Fats, nudging Babalwa with his elbow. ‘Eh, babe? English. That’s a power name.’

Babalwa wriggled defensively. ‘Hai. You can’t call someone English.’

‘Course you can. I knew a girl called Pain.’

Andile also warmed to the idea. ‘The child would be all power,’ she said. ‘But if we do it, we need to call one of the others French.’

The idea stayed with me, with us, and when Andile and I produced our second we decided, by mutual agreement, to call her English.

And, of course, she turned out to be completely self-contained, inwardly focused and pathologically silent. English spoke only when speech was functionally required. Words were irrelevant to her. Not that the child was mute or anything. When it mattered, her tongue was perfectly at home in her mouth. When we were parking in front of the nanotech building, for example, she gave Sthembiso a calculated lecture.

‘You must be happy, Sthembiso,’ she said, with reference to the newly cleared CSIR complex. ‘They made it into a playground just for you.’

‘Not just for him, English,’ I said as I led her by the finger to the front door of the nanotech building. We were following Sthembiso, who was already clambering through the hole in the fence Tebza had smashed years ago. ‘It’s for us too. This has always been one of my favourite places.’

‘Why, Roy?’

‘It reminds me of Uncle Tebza, whom you never met, but who was a wonderful, kind man who made my life a lot better when everyone disappeared.’

‘Were there lots of people?’

‘More than you can imagine, my dear.’ I allowed myself to get a little wistful. I stopped us at the door, knelt on one knee and pulled my daughter onto the other. I held her tight. ‘All these buildings were filled with people, marching up and down with their papers and their printouts, walking to their computers—’

‘To their Eeeyus!’ She beamed up at me.

‘Exactly. To their Eeeyus. And outside the gate the roads were filled with cars, people in their cars going places—’

‘Where?’

‘To their homes and families. To their work. To go shopping, that sort of thing.’

‘What’s shopping?’

‘Eish.’ The question was almost unanswerable. ‘There was this thing called money that was very, very important.’ Her eyes drilled into me, completely focused. ‘People used to swap it for things. So, if you had some money, you would give it to me and then I would give you a pair of shoes.’ She kept staring, and frowned. ‘And then I would use the money to give to someone else when I needed something, like food.’

English wriggled free, suddenly bored. ‘Inside!’ She pointed in Sthembiso’s direction. ‘Let’s go!’

I obeyed, allowing her to scramble through the jagged hole after Lydia and Thabang while I used the door, remembering in the midst of many retrospective flashes how we had broken open the lock. English ran after the others into the darkness of the corridor. I let them go, then panicked and ran after, just in case.

The buildings were exactly as we had left them. I could see the remnants of our activities scattered through the building; the chaos Tebza had caused as he ripped up the labs looking for a virtual explanation, or at least a nano sieve. Science equipment on the floor. Drawers pulled out, hanging awkwardly still, waiting.

Once I had adjusted to the darkness of the building, I let the kids go free to try to find Sthembiso, whom I could only catch flashes of as he hurtled between meeting rooms, laboratories and offices. English tried hard to catch him initially, but was unable to hold the pace and settled instead into her own exploratory rhythm. Roy Jnr disappeared, and Lydia and Thabang drifted through holding hands, unsure now why they were in this place and what the point was supposed to be. English’s attention was caught not by the Eeeyus, but by the photographs on the desks. Every now and again she would trot back to me clasping a framed family shot. Her attention was caught specifically by families featuring two or more young girls. ‘Look, Roy,’ she said, handing me a cheap fake-wood Clicks frame outlining a family of three girls and mom and dad, all unfortunately brushed with freckles and a disconcerting lack of facial proportion.

‘Are they ugly?’ she asked.

‘There used to be all sorts of people, angel,’ I tried to explain. ‘There were people who were good to look at and then there were others who weren’t as fortunate.’

‘Not fair.’ She turned the frame over a few times while absorbing the implications of randomly assigned ugly genes.

As we began formalising school for the kids – each of us adults doing our best to cover not only subjects we knew a little about, but also those that were totally alien to us, like maths and science – we repeatedly ran up against the deeper challenge of context. Every tiny step we took towards formal numeracy and literacy had to be wrapped in a massive balloon of context – facts about the world that were innate to us adults and completely alien to the kids. Ugliness. War. Sport. Crowds. Television. Strangers. Grandparents.

The list was an endlessly unravelling ball of string. Eventually contextual frustration led us to try to formalise a central narrative that could be referred to by all. We destroyed the walls between a string of nine ground-floor St John’s classrooms and started painting the story of man from beginning to end – with the story of us adult individuals, each of the parents, foregrounded for ease of telling. In some ways our treatment was like the Afrikaner marble relief at the Voortrekker Monument, but with a more clearly demonstrable commitment to fact. Or at least that’s what we told ourselves.

We, the parents and adults, took up the positions of the dramatic, guarding generals. Babalwa was the metaphorical pioneer vrou with the kids protected under her iron skirts.

‘We gonna fuck these kids up proper,’ said Andile as we painted the first blocks of the story into place.

She was right. As good as our ground-floor narrative was, it could never cope with the subtlety of real life – with the raw inquisitiveness of a five-year-old yet to encounter true ugliness.

‘The world was never fair, angel. It is never fair.’ I ruffled English’s head as I settled into a generic, cover-all parental explanation.

‘Why?’

‘That is one of the great mysteries of being human,’ I said, falling even further back, inches away from ‘Only God can tell us that’.
She shrugged and returned the photograph to its desk.

Meanwhile, Sthembiso had wound himself into a considerable state, my warnings over how elusive the Eeeyus might prove to be long forgotten. ‘There’s nothing!’ he spat at me after two hours of full-throttle exertion. ‘Nothing! Just PCs!’

‘Well, in these types of places we might need to look a little bit differently,’ I told him. ‘You’re not going to find a lot of books here, as I said. But have you looked properly at all the files and folders?’ He shrugged, angry and sulking. Files and folders were not the stuff he was used to.

I tried again. ‘OK, how about we come back tomorrow – it’s a Sunday after all – and I’ll look with you. I bet we find at least two eights.’

Sthembiso eyed me suspiciously. The heels of his little feet pushed angrily against each other. ‘And if we don’t?’

‘Well …’ I stalled, unable to think of a reasonable safeguard able to protect us both.

‘Then pancakes, three weekends in a row,’ he said, jumping slyly into a new negotiation. I conceded warily, worrying what kind of precedent I was setting. I was pretty sure we’d find something of worth if the two of us looked together, however. And besides, I told myself, it was starting to feel like time the kids learned to cook properly, not just wash and pack. Pancakes could be a reasonable introduction, regardless of who won or lost.

I sent Sthembiso off to find English and Roy Jnr. Thabang and Lydia were already hanging off my legs and whining. We had only been in the complex a few hours, but it had been a long, emotional stretch. Memories of Tebza mingled with the smell of rot. I felt despondent.

The kids piled into the bakkie arguing about whether ugliness could be applied via a punch, Sthembiso holding his fist threateningly above Lydia’s shoulder. The argument turned nasty, and inevitably tracked from the idea of ugliness to the pigs, as all of the kids’ conflicts seemed to at this stage.

We had set up a complicated set of rules concerning our interactions with the pigs, who were growing their very own
community on the outskirts of ours. We kept a healthy distance most of the time, and it was easy enough to impress on the kids the need to stay away from the adults. At three-hundred-plus kilos and with long, sinister snouts and rough boar hair, they were hardly enticing to small children. Piglets, however, were another story. Whenever the piglets emerged they sparked an extended series of debates and discussions around the pig rules. English was the cause of most the anxiety – she fell head over heels for the babies and was caught on more than one occasion sneaking a wet little snout into the house to hide under her bed. Fats was hell-bent on creating the ‘climate of fear’ necessary to keep the pigs and kids apart, and issued a steady stream of anti-pig propaganda: little titbits about how free pigs were as mean as they were smart, and so on. Sthembiso responded to the hype, and did his best to keep the pig border patrolled at all times. English, on the other hand, saw Fats’s talk for exactly what it was, and eventually named her favourite of the new litter Snowball, Orwell’s dirty paperback – stripped of all irony – the inspiration. Sthembiso had got wind of the naming and was threatening legal action – and, of course, communicating the severity of it all with his ever-hovering fist.