Authors: Miller,Andrew
The sun rose the next morning, and darkness fell.
We were drifting awake, emerging from our bedrooms, mumbling quietly in the kitchen, when the clouds blacked out the day. Drops hit the ground like mortar rounds, each shattering into shrapnel. The dark was ominous, and complete.
‘This is too weird for me,’ said Lillian, who headed back up to her room.
The rest of us – save Tebza, who was still asleep – sat on the expensive porch furniture with our toast and black coffee and tea. Babalwa sat next to me. She pulled her wrought-iron chair up close, made eye contact and dropped a few direct conversational threads. I felt grateful and oddly patronised, but ultimately any kind of contact with someone familiar was settling. The stilted conversation and forced eyeballing of new people was like a trip back to junior school.
‘What’s on the agenda for today, kids?’ Fats asked the group, trying to make eye contact with each of us. Heads stayed low.
‘Javas?’
‘Dunno, boss.’ Javas bit a chunk off his toast and chewed. ‘But I have a feeling you’re about to tell me.’
‘I was thinking about a cow – a resident cow. As we’ve agreed before. For milk. It’s the next step. Can’t speak for y’all but I’m sick of this long-life shit.’
‘A. Resident. Cow.’ Javas repeated the words slowly, individually. ‘And I am the man for the cow, yes?’
‘Sho.’ Fats leaned back in his chair and pulled an oversized hunk off his toast. ‘You have cow experience, do you not?’
‘I do,’ Javas replied slowly. ‘I do.’
The mansion operated completely off-grid. Tucked into the tailored shrubbery beyond the driveway’s turning circle, the borehole was the philosophical and practical centre of things. Deep and plentiful, it fed a stocky, black plastic fifteen-thousand-litre tank. A criss-crossed trellis surrounded the tank, hosting the concealing shrubbery. The pump was noisy – wherever we were on the property, the random thwuuump thwuuump thwuuump reminded us of its service. We soon forgot it, how to even hear it, but it was nonetheless omnipresent – the subliminal functional soundtrack to life.
The solar bank supplied most of the power required, most of the time. For emergencies, there was a generator the size of a small caravan. A sick, old-looking thing on wheels, which only Tebza and Fats were technically familiar with, it was rarely required, because the erstwhile minister had also ensured that the septic tank, rather than draining away into the soil, fed its methane into the system.
‘We shit power,’ Fats announced proudly.
The miracle of it – the technical set-up – faded over time, but for Babalwa and me the breadth of the accomplishment was shocking, given how much we had struggled to establish even the most basic power in PE. For weeks after we arrived I would flick light switches on and off. Or stand wet and amazed in the bathroom post-shower, gazing at the geyser. One afternoon I found her tapping the borehole tank while hovering her ear over the black plastic, as if it held a secret.
The resonance within the house itself was that of money. Thick red carpeting, Persian rugs, oak panels and leather-backed armchairs – the smell of wealth was threaded into the structure of the place. Layered lightly over the booty of postgraduate decision-making
was the evidence of our more flippant, plastic existence. We each kept to our own residential quarters faithfully, but in the communal areas our collective presence steadily stained, moved and altered. Inconvenient Persians were rolled up and shoved to the side. Ring marks spread on the arms of the furniture. Stains and nicks and chips in the expensive wood. Mould.
One day Andile tramped garden mud through the entrance hall, initially unknowingly, then unapologetically. Beatrice tried to protect the carpet with a plea for immediate cleaning but was vetoed. Instead, we ripped up the lush red and brown and washed down the concrete underneath. The hallway echoed weirdly forever after, the floor stripped of all possible pretence.
Fats ordered and prompted and planned, and the rest of us, each for our own reasons, followed dutifully. With my meagre possessions packed into my oversized room, I lived a life in neutral. I completed my allotted tasks in their allotted time, and otherwise I drifted across the empty city, looking at full bottles of liquor through the closed store windows.
Lillian lectured anyone within earshot on the history of the area. Untouched by the irony of being the only foreigner, she lashed us repeatedly with her knowledge of the ridge: how it was occupied by the mining magnates and the original colonisers, back when Jozi was just a scrappy piece of dust with a lot of gold underneath it. It – the ridge – was occupied for all the obvious reasons. It allowed its inhabitants to perch on top of the city and observe the movements and machinations below. Lillian explained how the ridge was a slow starter as a residential area compared to Parktown, that it was only in the 1930s that it really took off with the larnies, when the so-called International Style of architecture came around and allowed the rich to feel like their Upper Houghton houses would compete with those in France, England et al.
Of course we all knew all this; the knowledge was threaded into our genes, and so Lillian was shrugged off and smiled at and tolerated with varying degrees of annoyance, frustration and
amusement. ‘These people,’ Gerald would occasionally mutter under his breath while being educated.
Word was that our arrival gave Fats the energy burst necessary to finalise his mission to enclose us. Our farming area occupied the King Edward High School sports fields. Some of the fields were being grown over to provide grazing for the cattle Javas was sourcing. Others were tilled and prepared to grow stuff. Corn. Vegetables. Sunflowers.
The school buildings were less important. We used them, classroom by classroom, for various functional ends – the closer the classroom to the fields, the higher its utility level for tool storage and such things. The outer third of the KES buildings, those facing towards St John’s, were left alone.
St John’s, Fats decided, should be treated as our moat. Our security façade. It was crucial, according to his strategy, to have a bulwark in place. He mounted a South African flag on the school’s outer pole, facing north, looking over the highway off-ramp.
His control-centre map marked off, with red pins of course, the areas where the already robust fencing could easily be repurposed. The southern fencing simply needed to be joined – each institution was already carefully cut off from Louis Botha Avenue, the historical divide between the schools and the real/ghetto worlds of Yeoville, Berea, Hillbrow and the city. The western fences around St John’s required only a moderate additional stretch to close off the small St Patrick Road entrance. Munro Drive twirled up in steep loops from Lower Houghton and could be easily sealed at the top, as it joined St Patrick. Here Fats planned to install a primary guard hut, our key defence post, which would protect the top of Munro Drive and the only entrance to St Patrick Lane, where our residence was located. Beyond our house, St Patrick died off into a dead end of ridge mansions overlooking the eastern city. All that remained, according to Fats, was to restructure the crime-prevention fencing that blocked off eastern suburban access via smaller roads leading off Louis Botha, and we had a secure area of more than a square kilometre.
There were questions, of course. Mutterings and mumblings. Lillian was the most prone to seeding rebellion. She cornered me a few days after our arrival, as I was pacing the artificial turf of the KES hockey fields trying to assess and understand. I saw her coming, shuffling aggressively across the field, the mousy intervener. Beatrice had coined the phrase and it stuck. Lillian moved like a mouse, always scratching, always ahead of herself, twitching, eyes on the move. She pulled her heavy ass around at high speed, accentuating the general impression, and once her mouth had started moving there was no stopping it. She was in every sense mousy. Equally, it was her essential nature to intervene.
She flicked curls away from her eyes with a pointed hand.
‘Fats’s thing’ – she moved to the point via an introduction on the extremeness of these public schools – ‘to tell you the truth, I’m not so sure. We could be wasting a lot of time and resources. I mean, there is no sign of anyone else, let alone invaders.’ She dropped onto her haunches and tried unsuccessfully to pluck a blade from the artificial turf. I wasn’t sure if there was more to come or if this was my cue. I let the silence settle, then initiated a stroll through the KES buildings.
I had, like most South African kids, walked into adulthood through the shadows cast by the country’s boys’ schools: KES, St John’s, Michaelhouse, Parktown, Grey, St Andrew’s, St Stithians, Bishops … Whatever city you were in, there was at least one school cut directly out of nineteenth- and twentieth-century England, dropped into the southern African bush. The names differed but they were all fundamentally linked in their structure, their uniforms, their architecture and their ability to push out generation after generation of CEOs, opening batsmen, fly-halves and marketing managers. My father was a product of one of these institutions, but his dalliances with fate ensured that I navigated a different channel. Me, I attended Northcliff High, a more common brick-and-prefab organisation devoid of national sporting, political or business ambitions. At Northcliff, graduate successes were the accidents of fortune likely to befall any institution that held its doors open long enough. At places like KES and St John’s, however, the school
legacy was threaded into the very edifice; every brick, every blade of rolled grass or every inch of carefully maintained artificial turf.
We walked into KES through the heavy stone arches of the hockey-field entrance, past a bronze statue of Graeme Smith leaning into an ugly, manly cover drive, then to the main hall, lush with rows of dark wooden chairs, honours boards, and stained-glass badges at the top of the double-volume glass windows, which shed bright light over the hall. The hall was, in the same manner as Big Ben and the old churches of Europe, undeniably magnificent.
I had always skirted around these buildings. Even on those occasions when our shoddy school bus would broach the gates, there was never enough space or time to truly observe and take it all in. We were always rushing through the process, through the event, eyes down, trying not to make any mistakes that would too obviously disclose the awe that the structures created.
Now, with Lillian rattling off facts at my side, I was able to step back and observe, step forward and run my fingers over the honours boards: Graeme Smith, Bryan Habana, Ronnie Kasrils, Donald Gordon – the list was endless. The wood was old and ever so slightly ridged under the fingertip. You could, if you knew what you were feeling for, actually touch the texture of the upper classes. I was, of course, an indirect descendant of this same lineage. The Maritzburg College boards featured several generations of Fotheringham success, not least of whom my father, national cricketer, DJ, oddball.
Lillian powered on as we bridged over to St John’s. ‘A World Class Christian School in Africa,’ the foyer brochures said. She informed me that the institution had maintained this motto for many decades. She snorted derisively as she parted with the information and, despite my general irritation, I snorted too. While KES was a brat factory of the highest order, St John’s was in a different, higher league. To anyone looking up at its multi-tiered stone immensity from the bottom rugby fields, it was at least as impressive in scope as the Union Buildings themselves. But its true magnificence lay in the details. Even after close on a year of natural growth, the lines of the almost nuclear green grass held steady along the stone paths
and walls, and pointed decisively to the stairs. St John’s, the grass said, maintained its lines. Always.
A single road separated the two primary segments of the ‘campus’. In the middle of the road stood a statue of a young boy, an eagle on his arm. The boy is releasing the bird to flight, a powerful metaphorical summary, according to Lillian, of the opportunities created by such institutions for those lucky enough to be well born. Further on, the ‘David quad’ featured a similar type of slim boy, but this one was simply looking outward, hand resting on a cocked hip covered by a boy skirt, creating a camp Peter Pan feel.
We climbed the bell tower. The view at the top was all-encompassing, pulling the breadth of the city easily under its wing, likewise the horizons of Sandton and Pretoria. The enormous sheer drop down to the front façade and the northern sports fields via a series of stone staircases, swaddled in upper-class creepers and surrounded by benches, pristine resting points and quaint yet classy alternative paths, was the kind of descent only those with permission would dare attempt.
The silence would have been an important, magnificent accompaniment were Lillian not still booming on, this time about her master’s thesis on how the Native Indian idea of photographs stealing your soul had finally come to fruition in the usage by NGOs of photos of indigenous locals, vital to securing the funding necessary to pay for upper-middle-class suburban Western lifestyles and a metaphysical lust to save the planet.
Which was all good and well, and possibly true, but the sound of her words was nibbling at my sanity. I reverted to Q&A format, speaking as slowly as I could to try to balance out her verbosity.
‘Where are you from in the US?’
‘Atlanta, Georgia. Can’t you tell from the accent?’ She looked serious.
‘Uh, nah. Skies. Hate to say it, but you all sound pretty similar to me. But ja, I guess now that you say it, it fits.’
‘Yeah.’ Her accent grew thicker. ‘Well, I’m a Georgia girl.’
‘You missing it? Home?’
Lillian blinked a few times and looked to the Pretoria horizon.
‘Beyond explanations. That’s how much I miss it.’ She locked me into eye contact. ‘But what do you think, Roy? About Fats’s gating thing. I mean, I know you haven’t been here long and all that, but I just wanted to get an idea of what your thoughts are—’
‘I knew Fats before, you know,’ I dodged, ‘and he was a pretty forceful guy then too.’ I laughed.
‘Sure. You can tell he’s used to getting what he wants. I’m not so sure that this is the same thing though. I don’t know, I just have doubts.’ Her eyebrows formed a McDonald’s arch.
‘Ag, I don’t see the harm so much. I mean, it could be good once it’s done. Then we’ll know that we’re safe, you know. But fuck, I haven’t really been here long enough. Haven’t got through the honeymoon yet, so what do I know?’
‘All I’m saying is there could be other, better things to do. And’ – her voice took on a sharp edge – ‘I seriously doubt whether we would ever be able to maintain such a big perimeter if there was an angry horde out there. There are nine of us. Just look at it. The fencing is like a square kilometre. It’s never going to work.’ She swivelled slowly, taking in a full view of her subject.
‘I think you need to understand, though,’ I said to her back as it turned, ‘that we’ve got a thing for fences, you know. They make us feel better. Secure.’
‘Thanks, I’ll bear that in mind.’ The mousy intervener dragged her ass down the bell tower stairs, through St John’s and back over the KES hockey fields. I trundled obediently behind as she further discussed the dichotomy between the global aid system and development of narratives within non-profit organisations.