Authors: Miller,Andrew
‘Do you even know how to shoot one of these things?’ Babalwa laughed at me as she picked up the weapons, then laid them carefully back down again, one by one.
‘Blasted a few rounds. Landed on my ass.’
‘We should probably give ourselves lessons …’
We carted a shotgun, an AK and an R1 out the front entrance of Tyrwhitt Mansions. Guns, it turns out, aren’t that complicated. You open them up, shove in the bullets where it looks like they’re supposed to go, find the safety and fire.
If you’re a scrawny girl, you avoid the shotguns.
We blasted the stop sign at the bottom of Tyrwhitt Avenue to pieces, moving closer and closer as the reality of our talents became obvious, Babalwa burying her elbows in the tarmac with every shotgun effort.
The birds scattered with each shot, then came back down again. They were clustered in the trees, on the street signs, on the balconies. Egrets, eagles, loeries, hadedas. They made me think of the free pigs, and I wondered if they were still around.
‘Be a bit careful,’ I said as we packed the guns back into the basement armoury and selected a personal pistol each. Babalwa chose a Vektor SP4, a Russian thing, far too big in her baby hand. I took the Vektor CPZ, all rounded edges and
Star Wars
. ‘There was a pack of free pigs and dogs around when I was here. Big enough to tear up a young girl from PE.’
‘Thanks,’ she said caustically. ‘I’ll keep that in mind. Oh, we should look for solar or a generator while we’re out, nè? This water thing could screw us up. I know you don’t want to move from your cherry’s flat, but we might have to.’
‘We need to plan a route?’
Babalwa flicked her safety off, then on again, and shoved the
Vektor into the rear waistband of her gym shorts, where it sat, enormous and devoid of context. ‘Let’s just drive.’ She winked at me. ‘I can feel there’s something out there.’
She loaded the CDs into the van’s player as we searched the edges of Gauteng. Randfontein, Roodepoort, Krugersdorp, Daveyton, Vosloo, Magaliesberg, Midrand, Centurion, Tembisa, Pretoria, Benoni, Brakpan, Katlehong, Springs, Soweto. We pounded the speakers, not stopping, not talking, our heads bumping along, teenagers absorbing a new, morphing landscape.
The plants were pushing the houses back, each millimetre of growth adding to each tendril a new triumph of organic force. In the townships progress was slower but still real, clusters reaching up and over the roofs, sporadic grass patches spiralling upwards and sideways simultaneously.
‘We’re just starting summer rains, right?’ Babalwa asked rhetorically. ‘It’s October, right? And it rains hard up here?’ We were driving through the matchbox houses of Katlehong.
‘Very.’
‘What you reckon – two years? Three? Before everything is gone?’
‘Depends. At the zoo it’ll be less. Soon we’ll have to cut a path out, if we want to go back the way we came.’
‘Show me where you grew up,’ she said. ‘There’s no smoke.’
I pointed the van to Greymont Hills.
Babalwa took great interest in my childhood house, firing off a string of probing questions about my father as she shot away the locks to the front door and the security gate.
‘Did he beat you? You ever remember him sober? What about your mother?’
She roved through the house, picking up things – coffee mugs, pots, bowls, couch cushions – as if they represented me and my family rather than my tenants, then sitting on the front step contemplatively when I told her how many hours I had spent there myself. She cut an incongruous figure, there on my childhood front
step. A scrawny girl in filthy white gym shorts and a vest, shotgun hooked over her arm and a pistol jutting from her hip.
I was becoming genuinely enamoured.
We started having sex regularly after the PE movie debacle – after I had cried through
Spanglish
. She would hug. Rub my head. Hold my hand. At night – only ever at night – she would pull me towards her and take me in, guiding with authority, climaxing with a fierce grip and complete silence. I, in turn, made a habit of collapsing into her, of passing out in her arms, of harvesting the small doses she offered, as fully as possible, as often as possible.
Around that time, she began raising the idea of children.
If we are really the only ones, she would say, then our children are going to have to sleep with each other to breed. We’ll be inbreeders.
I would shrug. Grunt.
‘Seriously, Roy! D’you think about it? I mean, at some stage we’re going to have to breed, nè? We have to try, don’t we?’
Once she had forced the idea into my head I did begin to think about it. But inevitably my thoughts would end with the idea of Babalwa as wife – as partner. As family.
I stayed as quiet as she would let me, offering titbits, basic ideas, technical prods along the line of genetics, cross-pollination, and so on. I would research occasionally, presenting her with whatever facts I thought would add to the debate playing out in her head. Personally, though, breeding was an abstract notion. I knew that once she had decided, I would follow in the wake.
Still, my resignation wasn’t entirely passive. As the days passed I allowed myself to consider the idea of her in relation to me, in relation to family. I considered her form more deeply. Her child hips. Her adult eyes. Her details began to etch themselves on my brain, and my heart. Soon there would be no wiping them away.
For her part, Babalwa seemed only to grow used to me. Her touches, though warm, were calculated; they sought to heal, to help, to improve. She reached for me through genetic necessity. Through circumstance.
I wondered whether I would be informed of the child decision
or simply caught up in it. As we roamed the streets of PE, looting for health, activity, entertainment, smashing locks and walls and doors, I tried to imagine us as a family, but the images refused to form. She was too young. I was … I didn’t know what I was. But I knew I wasn’t exactly right.
‘Tell me,’ Babalwa said, still perched on my childhood step, the shotgun, now resting between her legs, making her especially dominant, ‘about being a drunk. There’s booze everywhere. You tempted again?’
The tooth episode hung thick between us.
‘Always tempted. But I have the fear. Keeps me in line. ’Specially after the tooth.’
‘So if we find others … you’ll drink again? Moments of joy? Excitement?’
‘I hope not. I’m a proper junkie though, so I know enough to know that I might. You know, the day-at-a-time thing. All standard twelve-step shit applies.’
‘Lately I’ve been feeling like just getting out of my mind. Completely fucked up.’ Babalwa peered over the shotgun muzzle at me with hooded, plotting eyes. ‘Whaddya think of that?’
We decided on sundowners at the Westcliff.
Splattered on multiple levels against the face of Westcliff ridge, the Westcliff Hotel hovered directly over Zoo Lake, an off-pink series of plush, interlinking five-star units. As we smashed through the front gates, I explained to Babalwa about the foreign tourists and their plastic-surgery safari holidays, with the hotel utilised as recovery venue, about the prostitutes snuck through the gates at night, about the Sunday afternoon high teas for the Parkview ladies and their daughters.
Unable to jump-start a golf cart, we skipped down the enormous staircase three at a time.
Babalwa blew away the security bars on the restaurant window. She had adjusted quickly to the power of the recoil, and was firing
the shotgun as regularly as possible now. We clambered in.
The serving trolleys were waiting for us, lined up in perfect threes, knives and forks at the ready. Cakes moulded to the point of crumbling. Proud mounds of green and moss trapped within blithe, unknowing glass cases.
Babalwa pulled a bottle of champagne from the kitchen wine cellar. The kitchen itself looked recently flooded. The floor was slick and sticky, a dirty high-water mark some two inches above the skirting rail. It was actually, she insisted, a high-blood mark; the apogee of fleeing freezer and fridge juice. I turned my head, unwilling to broach the idea of what might have happened to it, the blood and the muck, since.
Babalwa took care of another set of windows and security bars and we clambered out onto the terrace overlooking Zoo Lake and the northern suburbs. She cracked the champagne, took a long swig and spat it out. ‘I think it’s off?’ She handed the bottle over for testing.
I declined.
‘Sorry, my bad,’ she said. ‘But I really think it’s off.’ She slapped her tongue loudly between lips and teeth, testing.
‘Probably just French. Is it really bitter? Dry?’ I took the bottle. The label said Champagne. ‘Ja, it’s French. You might wanna look for something that says sparkling wine. French shit is hard.’
Babalwa hopped back through the window to the kitchen.
I rolled a small joint from my stash and considered Joburg’s north.
Trees. Trees. Trees. The forest almost pulsing it was growing so fast. I smoked and wondered. Inhaled and dreamed in reverse. Agency offices and houses of colleagues – their names already blurred and distant. Clubs and girls and campaigns. Media. Marketing. Copy. I was, I decided, looking over the metaphorical forest of my past. I could see nothing but a closing roof. A green, leafy mat.
Babalwa returned with the cheap stuff, cracked it, sat between my legs and leaned back against me.
She drank. I smoked.
We fucked ourselves up.
We crashed through the front door of Eileen’s flat chattering and laughing and collapsing in and out of each other’s arms.
There, flat out on the couch, was Fats Bonoko, creative director at TWF something something and something. A shotgun lay on the floor, waiting.
Babalwa swooned and fell to the floor in a heap.
I stood swaying, attempting to compute the fact that not only was there a live human being in Eileen’s flat, but that I knew exactly who he was.
Fats, for his part, grinned dangerously, his mini-afro wobbling slightly on top of a laughing face.
‘Good people,’ he said, pulling his torso lazily to the vertical. ‘I’ve been waiting forever. You, sir, look pretty wasted. Your young lady friend’ – he looked happily over at Babalwa’s slumped form, which mumbled something muffled and incomprehensible – ‘eish.’
‘Fats,’ I replied eventually, cautiously. ‘Howzit hanging?’
‘Not bad, Roy, not bad. I mean, I think I enjoyed advertising a bit more overall, but I’ve kind of taken to this survivor thing.’ He was dressed in combat pants, and an army-type shirt beneath a munitions vest. Army boots, sheepskin bangle on the wrist. Muscles rippling under all the gear. All in all, typical of Tšhegofatšo Bonoko, a man who had always been overtly – and frequently unreasonably – styled.
‘Jesus. I need to sit.’ I dropped onto the couch next to Fats.
‘You, Mr Fotheringham, I know pretty well,’ he continued blithely, billowing out his usual mock confidence. ‘But your young friend here’ – he glanced again at the lump that was Babalwa – ‘I haven’t had the pleasure.’
I was speechless, trapped by a flood of realisations and remembrances. I had never liked Fats Bonoko. He was arrogant,
under-talented and over-powerful. Off the top of my shocked, stoned head, I could think of at least four people he’d knifed on his way up the ladder. It didn’t seem right, or possible, or logical, that he was where he was, sitting next to me on this couch, grinning with inane self-satisfaction.
‘Babalwa,’ I said. ‘Her name’s Babalwa and she’s drunk.’
‘Ah, a celebration. Nice. I’ve had a few myself since this shit started.’
‘What shit? Do you know what happened?’
Fats looked at me, his face deeply serious. ‘I woke up and it was like this. Empty.’
‘So you know nothing?’
‘Nothing at all. Other than advertising is a pretty damn useless business without a target market.’
‘Are there others?’ I asked. ‘Alive?’
‘Plenty.’ Fats issued a patronising pat to my shoulder. ‘At least six. Maybe more.’
‘Six,’ Babalwa groaned from the floor. ‘Six.’
‘Roy, my man, what the fuck happened to your face?’ Fats stirred sugar into his cold water and tea bag as we stood around Eileen’s impotent kettle. ‘The tooth thing. That’s a powerful look for you.’
‘Ja,’ I mumbled, lips closed. ‘Know any dentists?’
Fats sipped his cold tea and grimaced. ‘On the real though, what the fuck?’
‘Let’s just say I had an encounter with a rock.’
As the time in PE dragged I found myself slowly, creepingly, thinking about alcohol again. I had run out of weed and the rawness of being stranded – initially a strange, fixating high in itself – was fading. I began to pick my toenails viciously, vacantly, at night. Unable to watch movies, tired of listening to music, listless and disconnected from my sole companion (who herself was drinking increasing volumes of white wine and gin), I was bored.
As we roamed and foraged, I began to look for booze cabinets. Not that I was digging into them or anything, but I noticed myself noticing myself paying attention to stock levels. I began to fantasise about good red wine, about that first sip, something deep and woody, something with the power to slip me up a notch, to refocus my view. My abstract passion for red evolved from observation to actually extracting bottles from the cabinets or shelves, examining them for potential, turning them over in my hands and feeling the weight. Then I would put them back, carefully.
Eventually I found myself in a Bianca’s bedroom in Summerstrand, on the beachfront. Her room looked out on Marine Drive, over a few scrub-covered dune humps and then onto the sea. Thin raindrops were tearing into the shoreline at forty-five degrees, the southwester driving perfect, glassy waves which peaked and rolled and peaked and rolled, an occasional dolphin the only surfer taking advantage.
Having stashed her mobile, I flipped through Bianca’s photo albums, which were meticulously ordered and maintained, and which stretched right from early childhood through to the end. In pink sleep shorts and a vest, arms around mother in the backyard. Father teaching her to sail a yacht on the Sundays River. Sixteenth birthday with friends at the Pizza Hut. Hair short and styled for the occasion, light make-up, all smiles, friends and lipgloss.
I went for her father’s 2019 Zonneblom Shiraz.
I returned with a corkscrew and the bottle and lay down on Bianca’s unmade bed.
And it was beautiful, while it lasted. The warmth of the wine, the blurring, evocative safety of her photos. She was ordinary, Bianca. Dark hair. Careful smile. Eyes that sparkled and evaded in equal measures. Bianca with her sailboat. Bianca and dad chasing older brother in fancy-dress masks. Bianca baking, silly hat on head, floury hands in the air.
The wine poured through me and healed me, touching gently, reaching into all the corners. My head went warm, then cold, then warm again. As the bottle died the red crust grew on my lips. I ground it off with the heel of my palm, examining it like it had some deeper, metaphorical meaning. Which it did.
I drained the bottle and passed out, Bianca on her bike in my lap.
I woke in the dark, throbbing drunk, the wind and rain pulsing outside.
Back to dad’s rack, another Zonneblom, back again, stumbling. Suddenly I was reaching for destruction or damnation or something similar and opening the third was impossible. I couldn’t get the screw into the cork.
And then out the front door and to the car and over a rock and smashing my face into the ground and the black wet darkness of being out cold in the rain on some stranger’s driveway. Then the waking and the pain needles all through my face and my torn lip and my ripped cheek and the sight, the awful, pathetic sight of my shard of tooth on the driveway, pointing like a compass in the direction of home.
I laughed when I saw Babalwa the next day but she didn’t return it. Her face fell, her eyes hooded and careful and a little bit scared.
‘What the fuck?’ She shouted like a mother. ‘What the bloody fuck Roy?’
‘I got lost.’
‘Your face.’ She shook her head and then snuck another look at me. ‘Your lips. Jesus, Roy, your tooth!’
‘I won’t do it again, promise.’
‘What?’
‘Drink.’
‘That’s what this is? You went drinking?’
She closed the space between us down to a millimetre and slapped me, through the cuts and scabs, through the broken lip and tortured gums. As the pain shot through my mouth I groaned and fell back a step or two. ‘You stupid fuck,’ she said, crying now, tears running down both cheeks. ‘Please, please, I’m begging you, Roy. You’re all I’ve got. You’re the only hope there is. If you turn into this …’ Her head twisted away from the horror. ‘If you turn into this, you’re pushing me out, totally alone, into the world. You can’t do that. Jesus Christ, you can’t do that, Roy.’
‘I said I won’t.’
‘I don’t believe you.’ Babalwa walked away.
I saw her again two days later.
By then my mouth had started the healing journey, healthy parts reaching for each other over the volcanoes. The remaining half of my tooth throbbed constantly. Babalwa insisted I extract it, but I refused. The pain would fade, or the nerve would numb, or something like that. She shook her head and walked away again.
The pain did numb, eventually, ratcheting down from a scream to a throb, from a throb to a pulse, from a pulse to an annoying dull ache. I sliced constantly on the guillotine that now hung from my gum, tiny, almost invisible trickles of blood forming repeatedly in the curl of my tongue.
It was weeks before Babalwa could look at me directly without her own countenance crumpling completely.
I stopped smiling.
I eliminated the smile from my life.
The very idea of smiling, gone.
Losing a back tooth is unfortunate. Losing a front tooth is life-changing. I would catch glimpses of myself in shop windows and stray mirrors and every time I was shocked; the combination of hair and tooth had created a reflection I didn’t recognise. I turned the van’s rear-view mirror far left, cutting myself out entirely. I withdrew from Babalwa, and from myself. I lay awake at night, fizzing in sobriety, frogmarching myself into dreams of magnitude. I whipped and whipped and whipped. But while the scars slowly grew closed, the damage remained.
‘Boss.’ Fats sipped his tea and blinked rapidly. ‘That’s about the most fucking tragic thing I’ve ever heard.’ He wiped back a tear. ‘Serious. Since all this shit happened, this is the most pathetic, disturbing thing …’
I shrugged, picked a tea mug off its stand, reached to turn on the kettle and then put the mug back. ‘Imagine how I feel.’
‘That’s the point, nè?’ Fats locked me in for a while, eyeball to eyeball. ‘That’s exactly the fucking point.’
‘What’s the point?’ Babalwa slurred, having appeared at the corner of the kitchen door. She was wiping her eyes.
‘Hai.’ Fats shook his head. ‘We were just discussing your mlungu here and his dental problems.’
‘You drinking tea?’ Babalwa asked Fats hopefully.
‘Ice-cold. Straight out the barrel. You want?’
‘No. Yuk’. She shivered in the doorway, hugging her elbows.
‘Where you from, anyway?’ Fats asked, managing to sound simultaneously serious and slyly suggestive of something unnamed.
‘Port Elizabeth. PE.’
‘Ah. Land of the defeated. Askies.’
‘Not so bad.’ Babalwa glared at him. ‘It wasn’t so bad.’
Fats carried on the conversation in a mix of bad isiXhosa and
tsotsitaal. Babalwa replied rapidly and within seconds I was gazing around the room looking for something. I tried to hang onto the one or two familiar words, but it was useless. The conversation shifted gear several times and I felt myself become the subject, discussed rapid fire, followed by an awkward silence.
‘Sorry, Roy, my man, you know, it’s good to connect. Authentically.’ Fats drained the last of his tea and thumped the mug down into the sink without looking at me.
Babalwa backed out of the kitchen, still hugging herself.
Fats turned and beamed at me blankly. ‘Well, I must tell you, it’s fucking good to have some more faces on board. And one that I already know – I would never have thought it was possible.’
‘How long you been following us?’ I asked on a whim.
‘Tebza and I heard the shots – when you were testing your cannons. We followed the sound, tried not to get pinned by stray bullets, and here we are. Tebza was supposed to follow you from a long distance but I presume you lost him at some stage. He’s not really the following type.’
‘Where’s he now? Tebza?’
‘Not sure,’ Fats replied, three-quarters of an eye seeking Babalwa’s vanished form. ‘That will have to be our next move, before we go back. We’ll have to find him.’
‘Back where?’
‘Home, my half-toothed friend. Home.’
There were a million reasons why I had never liked Fats Bonoko and they all came flooding back as he marched through Eileen’s flat calling the shots. Firstly, he was an arrogant son of a bitch. Secondly, he was extremely skilled at putting that arrogance to work. Fats invariably emerged shining from the rubble of his business interactions. He launched the hand grenades, picked out the prizes and stepped around the corpses. Hardly a unique paradigm in our business, but extremely frustrating for the foot soldiers.
He was, to top it all, good-looking, fit, muscular and possessed of a powerful, annoying wit.
‘I’ve just remembered,’ he offered as we waited for Babalwa to gather warmer clothes. ‘That chewing gum thing you came up with. Awesome. Quality work. What was the line again?’
‘Counter revolution.’
‘Counter revolution.’ He slapped the butt of his rifle. ‘Counter revolution. Love it. It was rare, that one. Perfect timing. Fantastic.’
‘I like to think I made a contribution.’
Fats burst into a guttural laugh, slapped his rifle again. ‘Ah man, too much. So dry. You always were so dry.’
We headed out. Fats in front, leading us down the stairs. Babalwa behind him, then me.
‘There are seven of us,’ he called out as we descended the stairwell. ‘Me, Tebza, Lillian the American – don’t even fucking ask me how we ended up with an American – sis Beatrice, Gerald the mercenary and the twins – well, that’s what we call them, they’re inseparable. Thus far, just so you know, we have no agreement on what happened. Tebza has his very own ideas, which no one can understand; the rest of us are split somewhere between the apocalypse, a virus and godly intervention of some kind or another.’
Our feet thumped in unison down the last stairs.
‘Me,’ Fats continued, ‘I’m scared shitless, but I’m also glad I’m not in advertising any more. You feeling me, Mr Fotheringham?’
I grunted.
Teboho appeared as we left the building. He was a tall, sloping kid of about nineteen or twenty, one tiny white earphone dangling over his heart, the other plugged in. There was a faint scar next to his left eye, which squeezed and wrinkled when he smiled or squinted. Basketball clothes: shorts cutting off below his knees, fat white sneakers, red Nike vest. An R1 wrapped uncomfortably around his left forearm. He stepped forward and shook hands politely, repeating his name to me and Babalwa.
Teboho.
Teboho.
He turned after the greeting and led us down the block and
into Jan Smuts, where their gleaming black Toyota 4x4 was parked beside an abandoned bus stop.
‘We did a big campaign for them years ago. Don’t know whether you noticed it, Fotheringham,’ Fats said, not bothering to look at me or wait for my participation, ‘but it was massive. Fell in love with these beasts then.’ He patted the Toyota’s bonnet. ‘Just can’t resist.’
We got into the car in silence.
Fats waved his thumb over the reader, started his beast and kicked it into first with relish.
‘For as long as there’s petrol, I think this is my baby.’
Teboho, front passenger, popped the dangling earphone in and stared out the window.
Babalwa took my hand and squeezed it.
Fats blitzed us over Bolton, then over the highway, and cut a series of sharp rights into the upper side of Houghton, where the mansions lined up on the ridge. He didn’t stop talking, rattling off random snippets like a tour guide, ranging from reminiscences from his ad days to broad reflections on the apocalypse and specific insights on the current practical difficulties in their community.
‘Our focus at the moment is on security – obviously – and the solar bank. That’s the big thing, for now. With enough power we can do pretty much what we want into the future with the farm and regularised production. That’s why we are where we are, on the ridge. We’re picking up wicked sun pretty much all day …’
Fats spoke in the classic manner of the project manager, the we’s and us’s flowing seamlessly into each other, pulling Babalwa and myself immediately into the centre of things. A de facto integration had already occurred. His mission was ours. Their challenges already belonged to me. I wondered what Teboho thought about it all – about Fats and his assumptions and directions. I looked for some kind of expression from him in the side mirror, but his face was completely blank. Zoned out.
‘Don’t mind him,’ Fats offered, letting me know he was observing as well as rambling. ‘He’s totally addicted. Don’t think I’ve ever
seen him without at least one ear plugged in. It’s disconcerting but you get used to it.’
‘Music?’ Babalwa asked. ‘Is he listening to music?’
‘Ja, that and scanning for communiques from the aliens, and pinging, always pinging. He can’t let go of the idea of the network.’ Fats chuckled, then added, ‘On the real, though – this boy’s on completely another trip. Personally I think he’s just got monster withdrawal, but there you go, we all cope in our own ways, nè?’
Teboho’s head bounced gently up and down to some kind of beat. He could have been agreeing with Fats’s assertions, or he could have been completely otherwise engaged. It was impossible to tell.
After we’d crested a steep series of S bends, Fats turned the Toyota into a plush lane, mansions on the left and the classic stone British public school buildings of King Edward High School on the right. Just past KES we pulled into an anonymous driveway fronted by Joburg’s traditional upper-class black gangster gates. The gates swung open.