‘I’m having a feeling,’ said Gerald carefully, ‘that this is the beginning of something.’
Drones aside, there was much debate around what use to make of our new ability, which, although exciting, was not immediately practical. Eventually we settled on painting the corner façade of the St John’s building, the bit overlooking Houghton Drive. We did a bad job, just a straight up-and-down lashing of the dull brown, but it was enough. After a week of energy and effort, we stood proudly below a twelve-metre-wide and thirty-metre-high rotating slide show. After we grew bored with pictures of ourselves, Tebza loaded up a static, shimmering South African flag and it sat there, humble during the day, insanely colourful and neon at night. It was, we decided, important. It marked our presence. At night, the neon could be seen from Tshwane.
‘You’d swear by the size of the thing,’ said Andile, ‘that we would be thousands.’
It was an achievement. A clear and obvious accomplishment.
It deserved celebration.
We drove to the coast in three vehicles, drinking from early in the day and ending up on the Durban beachfront, wasted and crazed.
Fats shagged Lillian on the beach. Babalwa wept.
Gerald punched Fats.
Tebza disappeared.
Javas punched Fats.
The drinking actually started before we left Houghton. Beatrice produced two cases of cider. ‘Before this shit really does go off,’ she rationalised. But really it was the tequila Fats pulled into his 4x4 that sent it all to shit. I rolled a self-defence joint for the journey, and by the time we had passed Heidelberg it had all pretty much collapsed. Joints were being passed between moving vehicles; the cider and tequila and beer smashed head-on into much pent-up energy and scattered into the winds.
I took the Édith Piaf out of the CD player and replaced it with Fresh House Flava’s Volume II. Lillian and Fats were in my vehicle on the first leg and I watched in the rear-view as the spark of their eventual encounter flickered. The tequila had made them silly. The joint added a subtle kind of hysteria. A hand moved to the left. Another hand brushed a knee. Someone needed to lean somewhere to get something and suddenly the air was thick and sweet and about to explode.
The problem, we discovered on arriving in Durban, was that we had nothing to do.
Unlike Kruger, where the animals in themselves are an agenda that can roll out peacefully for days, now there was only the sea. Of the nine of us there were only four swimmers (myself, Andile, Lillian and Beatrice), and in any case the waves were rough and churning and brown.
We swirled around the parking lot. Ran up and down the pier.
Lillian and Fats kept brushing against each other, and Babalwa started getting scratchy. I sat with Tebza on the low brick wall dividing the esplanade and the sand.
‘Heard there was hack going down here.’ Tebza spoke from the corner of his mouth. ‘Somewhere near the harbour.’
‘Lemme guess.’ I couldn’t resist. ‘A flat somewhere.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Nothing more than that?’
‘Blue,’ he added, laughing at himself. ‘A blue block of flats. On the beachfront. Near the harbour. That should narrow it down.’
‘Name of block? Owner?’
‘Nope. Blue block near the harbour. All I got.’
‘You gonna check it out?’
‘Why not?’ He glanced at Beatrice, who was doing drunken, misguided cartwheels on the sand. ‘I think I know where this is going.’
We watched Andile try to guide Beatrice’s legs through the last phase of the cartwheel. Beatrice yelped and shook her foot free, kicking Andile in the jaw in the process. Andile clutched her jaw in tequila drama and they stood in a sudden face-off, accusing each other.
Tebza drifted away. I joined Gerald on the pier, where he was fishing like an old man. We sat there for an hour without a real bite. The sun dropped fast behind the beachfront flats and hotels.
Gerald looked at the parking lot, at Beatrice, Lillian and Fats sitting on the wall talking animatedly, at Babalwa walking alone in a dramatically sulky fashion down the shoreline. ‘This,’ he said, ‘was a bad idea.’
Pause.
I sipped on my flat Coke.
‘Be dark soon. They’re too messed up to even walk.’
‘Gonna be a long night.’
‘Where’d the twins go?’
‘Dunno.’
‘Tebza?’
‘Said something about the harbour.’
Gerald sighed, and played the line out of the reel, bit by little bit.
Gerald was right, of course. They were too messed up to walk. Despite earlier plans to find suitable lodgings, we slept in the cars, like we were on some kind of school trip.
The twins parked their vehicle as far away from the rest as they could get. There was frequent vomiting, mostly from Beatrice.
After dark Fats and Lillian did what they were always going to do, right there on the beach.
Fats must have been punishing Babalwa for some transgression, such was the proximity of the coupling to the parking lot. It wasn’t close enough to watch, but it wasn’t far enough away to ignore either. Babalwa’s sobs, and her pseudo-attempt to muffle them, issued constantly from her 4x4 – regular little yelps of pain, anguish and tequila.
A few hours into darkness, the sobs had become too much to bear. As had the giggles emanating from Lillian and Fats, still cynically scooping handfuls of sand through entwined fingers. Parked in the passenger seat of my Toyota, I watched as Gerald marched up to Fats, yanked him to his feet and slugged him on the nose. Gerald tried to pick him up again and repeat the process, but Lillian had covered Fats’s shocked body in a fit of protesting arms and legs. Gerald stomped back to the Toyota, got in next to me, folded his arms and feigned immediate sleep.
The fight sparked a cacophony of drunken protests from Fats and, finally, the appearance of Babalwa, who stood confronting the cuckolding couple until eventually, like an avenging angel, Javas appeared, issued a few curt words to them all, ducked the two swings Fats sent his way and then knocked him out with a single, brutal shot to the snout. Fats slumped into a heap on the sand. Lillian and Babalwa screamed. Javas picked Fats up and slung him over his shoulder like a carcass. He carried him to the back of the Toyota and dumped him inside.
‘I think this might belong to you.’ He winked slowly at me, once, and marched back to Andile.
The next morning we couldn’t look at each other. I drifted over to the twins, who were, as usual, smiling and calm. Andile suggested a rapid departure. We engineered a quick round-up of the hungover, shamed troops, searched for Tebza for an hour or two and then decided to leave one of the 4x4s at the beachfront with a note on the dash.
We drove back to Jozi in silence.
Intimacy, finally, had got the better of us.
CHAPTER 35
Guinea pig in the air
The fighting and fucking and embarrassment of our collective behaviour finally saw the gods rain change down on us. After many months of stagnation the dam wall broke.
Everyone got wet.
We parted ways as we arrived home from the beach. I went running, coughing the smoke out of my lungs as I pushed along Munro Drive, through Upper Houghton, into Louis Botha and the slow drift lower into Alexandra, right into London Road and up a last, punishing hill to join the N3 highway. I sat on a large rock by the on-ramp, a strange, out-of-place thing lost on the side of the road. I looked down on the shanty city. From up high, with the Sandton skyline as a backdrop, it was a truly ridiculous sight. The shacks began at the grossly confident feet of the glass horizon and lined up on each other interminably, never-ending rows cascading all the way down to the brown banks of the Jukskei River, where the last abodes hung impossibly over the water, destined to fall.