I retreated, suitably scolded, and still unclear. I turned to Tebza, who said he had suspected and/or surmised the basics without ever knowing the details and that I should really track down this incredibly racist yet accurate book by some colonist who had mapped the different types of sub-Saharan African races by facial type.
Andile grew up a Zulu girl in a Zulu world. She went to school (her school name was Prudence, and she ditched it age ten) and dodged the boys until she found one she liked. She ran the family shop – a small spaza – through her teens and was set to marry when the boy was killed in a car accident. Shattered by the loss, by the idea of loss, by the suddenness and severity of the change, Andile packed her bags.
Washed up on the concrete shores, she remembered art. At school, aside from being successful in dating that boy, that one single boy, she had been pretty good at sketching. She picked up her pencil and in those crucial three months after beaching at a friend’s place in Vosloo, those months when you’ll take anything, do anything, be anything, she stumbled across an arts college. The tutors noticed a freedom in her lines and she lucked into a full three-year sponsorship, stipend and all. After years of dutiful attention, after months of wracking grief, after weeks of urban confusion, she was riding at a particular pace in a particular direction, and it all seemed to make sense, like someone had planned it.
The art training led to graduation, with no particular honour. Andile ended up running the office of the NGO that had trained her. She managed student stipends and training programmes, secured funding for arts events and herded the artists together for whatever was required. ‘I am skilled in chowing the budget’ was her sardonic summation. ‘I know how to eat. And how others eat. I understand the shipping margins for arts fairs. I know how to overbook hotels.’
It was the inflections, the small hand movements, the gestures and flickers of emphasis that did the real telling. The eyes flashing, sometimes tearing up. A belly laugh. I began to try – while listening to her and following her, while starting to paint my own pictures of her life in KwaZulu, then Vosloo, then the city – to seriously piece it together. Her story, like Javas’s and Gerald’s, was that of the refugee.
I too had some of the refugee in me, although the troubles I had fled through my life were largely of my own making. Nonetheless, I had perfected an ability to stay away from the core of things, to float myself off, slightly to the left, keeping as silent as possible and as participative as necessary.
Artists could never, would never, harm anybody. They’re too busy painting. Same with ad drunks. They might be a bit useless at functional tasks, they may break things (small objects, precious objects, door handles, car accessories, and such), but they’re too pissed to get seriously involved in anything.
While considering Andile, I pondered how I was viewed, and how the others perceived me. I had had few conversations of this sort with anyone other than Tebza. The usual chatter and basic information sharing, of course, but I could recall precious few occasions where I had told my story with my hands and my heart, like Andile and Javas had done.
And then, of course, the bigger questions. Had my decades of retreat and personal isolation rendered these skills void in me? Was my heart rusted shut? Was my tongue beyond any meaningful redemption? Could it even tell what needed to be told?
For the moment, the questions were moot. No one had asked for my story yet. Not that story.
We headed back to Jozi enriched, enlivened and imbued with a sense of movement, with notions of hope, change and progression.
‘It makes me think,’ said Andile as we bulleted down the N4 in the Hummer, chasing Javas and Tebza and Gerald as they led us home in the Toyota, ‘that anything is possible. That maybe we’re hiding in Jozi. We should move. We could move, if we wanted to. We could go anywhere we liked. Why not move up here? Even if there aren’t people, there’s places out there, nè?’
I agreed. I imagined. The roadside swept past at pace, the smokestacks on the left horizon teasing with the suggestion of utility, power, progression.
CHAPTER 34
Hungover, shamed troops
Tebza had finally delivered. Suddenly we had a WAN that covered three square kilometres. Not just any WAN, but one that locked into the IP address for the transmission-paint receptors. We were able to talk to the walls, to command and broadcast. In time, we would be able to create interfaces.
The WAN gave us partial drone ability – just enough to show how distant the real deal was, and would forever be. Without a satellite link the essential function of the drones was void. Images couldn’t be fed back to the controls, and so the things could never be sent out of human sight. They were little more than toys. Even if they could have ventured beyond us, we would never be able to see what they saw. They would be out there seeking, seeing, assessing all on their own.
Still, the WAN allowed Tebza to control a drone from a laptop hooked up to something akin to a PA system mixing desk, out of which extended a joystick. Using a combination of wireless signals and radio frequencies that was beyond our understanding, he gave us sight control over the planes, which he set to shoot video and store on the internal hard drive. Long after the little brown bullets were parked back next to us, we all pored over the laptop, peering hopefully into a video stream of vacant land.
We climbed the St John’s tower for the best view and reach, and flew the things for days. We flew them into trees and buildings, hovered them incessantly in fear of landing and then crashed them repeatedly in the attempt to bring them down.
The drones, secured from the Waterkloof Airforce Base, were the size of small seagulls. Some were even as small as large insects. They were observation devices and lacked guns and firepower, a fact which disappointed the boys but, Tebza educated us, at least ensured we would receive decent-quality video. You can only fit so much equipment onto a seagull.
It was thrilling, getting those things into the air and then letting them run through the blue. Infused in the thrill was the idea of our own flight, and thus it was Lillian who bounced and bobbed and squeaked with the most force. ‘I’m telling you!’ she shouted into the air above the clock tower, American fist raised. ‘I’m telling you, world! We will fly! We will not be beaten!’
‘Just focus, dear.’ Tebza reached out to steady her grip on the joystick, then retracted, his hand hovering nervously. ‘We don’t have an endless supply.’
Andile laid her body carefully on the tower’s thin stone ledge, suntanning, hands behind head, ignoring the sheer drop. ‘This blue sky,’ she said, to no one in particular. ‘The sky has just gone mal blue. Crazy blue. Imagine how blue it would be, to be a drone, floating in the sea, just you, just me.’ She rapped thoughtlessly, stumbling onto a hidden beat. ‘Baby, it’s life, baby, it’s a bee, it’s the drone, it’s you, it’s me, free in the deep blue sea…’
Lillian plunged to the right, the joystick pulling her body down as the drone flipped up in the sky, lost itself and started to crash. She yelled theatrically and thrust the stick in six different directions. The drone, tiny insect, dropped helpless onto the rugby field. ‘Wait, I’ll get it!’ she yelled and bolted down the stairs. We watched her shifting across the turf, lost in the simple thrill of the search.