Javas and Andile took great delight in telling Noord stories. The incredible hooting, the grinding crush of perpetually angry taxi drivers. The tsotsis and pickpockets. The mamas and children and students and artists and hawkers. The kieries and hidden guns. The crush the crush the crush.
Devoid of its humans, though, Noord was just a few intersecting streets. Well worked with rubber stains, yes, but just a few streets with a past, history bouncing around helpless, waiting.
On my first trip to the Drill Hall I followed the twins. I stood next to the Chicken Licken and watched from a few steps back as they processed a reality that had little bearing on me.
‘Unless you were here before,’ Javas explained, ‘you could never understand how this feels.’ He squatted on his heels. Andile stood separate, looking up at the flats, hands on her hips, shaking her head slowly.
Being inside the gates, on the Drill Hall square, was to be on a ghetto picnic island. Surrounded by towering, crumbling, white art deco buildings, the complex was crisply marked off by a serious set of gates, the bars of which had been decorated with African symbology, creating a curiously resonant vine of safety and art. The fences were children running, animals moving, ladies carrying wood and baskets on their heads, the motifs literally wound into the fabric of the iron. The island effect was enhanced by the sea of surrounding sleeping taxis. Twist Street was only pockmarked by the occasional midnight ride, but the surrounding streets and intersections were stacked four and five rows deep with waiting half loaves.
‘Blue, yellow, red HiAces, silently rejoicing,’ Andile mumbled.
‘Eh?’ I asked, still mesmerised by the ghetto art deco, especially the spooky extended vertical ovals on the left, which Javas said used to be a cinema.
‘Ah, nothing. Just an old song my uncle taught me – about taxis.’
Now I was back by myself in Javas’s studio, which used to be a library run by an NGO. It was a cavernous double-volume hall filled with five six-metre metal beasts, each staggering towards the other. I sat at the foot of the biggest one. Its absurdly square head (a radiator perhaps?) was bolted and/or welded onto rusty shoulders, the fringe of the weld purposefully messy and bold and orange, the function of the bolt and screw ambiguous – possibly aesthetic, possibly structural. The giant was reaching out, its right arm three-quarters extended.
I pulled my knees to my chin, Babalwa-like, and waited for something to happen. I examined the complex scaffold-and-pulley system that was rigged around the piece.
Now that I had seen his art, Javas’s general state of silence and passivity made much more sense. He had no need to displace or channel his energy – it was all being funnelled into this.
When I visited his studio I invariably talked to my Nikes. I tied and untied the laces. Patted the toes. Asked them where they would take me next. I felt as attached and friendly towards those shoes as I did to anyone in the house. The shoes took me places and never asked questions. They were simple and comfortable and friendly.
‘So.’ I spoke directly at them. ‘What now? What the fuck now?’
There was no answer.
I pushed the same question at Javas’s beasts, but they were silent.
I smacked my knees together. It hurt and made a loud, hollow noise.
I stood.
I wrapped my arms around the leg of my host beast and hugged. A spot of sun beamed in from the window on the upper side of the hall, forming a natural spotlight on the ankle and foot. The rusted metal of the calf (a car chassis? some kind of tractor part?) was warm and rough on my skin. It felt good.
I held on.
The others had rushed out to Waterkloof at first light to start powering up the simulator. Excitement had fanned across the house (bypassing myself and Babalwa, each immune for our own reasons) and great dreams were being sketched of transcontinental flight. Of trips to America and Europe. Maybe Russia, Lillian said.
I wasn’t sure we would ever be able to get a big enough aeroplane off the ground to fly to another continent. A few joyrides across sub-Saharan Africa, maybe, but full-on flying? The agreed-upon goal felt like it would be beyond us. Aeroplanes, even the smaller jets that business moguls and sports stars used, seemed to me to be inherently complicated. Runways and tyre pressure and lift-offs and wind speeds and landings and all those things were being funnelled in Teboho’s direction, and he was displaying more and more signs of coming unhinged. Our late-night joint conversations had become more speculative and wistful, his language and ideas drifting off to extraterrestrials and harnessing star power for proper energy, and then suddenly back to inner space and nano flights and the biological dimensions of internal infinity and such things.
I humoured him. I even went with him, as far as I was able to in my own more restricted, linear mind. But I also suspected that as the hack percentage in his piss was dwindling, Tebza had been topping up with things secured on his Durban scrounging session. I knew the symptoms well from the ad bunnies, who oscillated similarly between bright-eyed interest in and sudden hypersensitivity to the basic stimuli of life.
From a distance the Waterkloof Airforce Base looked like a poorly executed attempt at a school. The architectural signage at the sagging entrance gates announced structural redevelopment. Stabbed into the red earth next to the technical information was a logo mounted on a single steel leg: a sun rising over a generic horizon, beneath the header ‘Watching Over South Africa’s Future’. The sign had fallen dramatically to the left, the edge of the W hovering inches above the ground.
The base consisted of a collection of vaguely interlinked face-brick and temporary prefab buildings. A cluster of elderly, dirty-brown military planes were parked around the runways, waiting patiently behind a single, more prosperous white jumbo jet, which was aimed directly down the runway, ready to take off. Surrounding them all was an army of construction machines: yellow front-end loaders, trucks and others born to drag and move.
Lillian and the rest hovered in and around the simulator hut. (As Lillian had suggested, the building, based on appearance, shouldn’t have housed much more than detergents and brooms. According to an A4 laminated notice which had fallen from the door, it was the temporary flight-training facility.) Meanwhile I walked around the complex a few times, poking my head into offices, running my fingers over the many prefab walls, marvelling at the structural transience of a place that had been there since long before I was born. And of course it was all khaki and brown, the colours of the desks and files and folders and photos matching eerily with the cargo planes at the back, all of it mirrored by the deep orange of the Highveld soil, which swarmed around and over my peripheral vision.
It took a little over a week for us to set up the power for the simulator hut. I provided as much muscle as I could and tried not to think about anything specific. I carried and dropped off, and plugged and unplugged things in and out of various holes, obeying Fats and Gerald and Lillian in turn, sharing sighs and grunts with Beatrice and the twins, feeling Babalwa’s pregnant eyes on me as she sat and watched like a representative from the UN.
Once the power was set up and the simulator was fully operational, I fell back. I dedicated my early mornings to a long run, which generally ended with me sitting at the top of London Road and looking down over the shacks of Alex. After the run I made sure I managed the farm as best I could while the rest were occupied. I milked the cows, slaughtered whatever small creatures needed to die, and skinned and plucked and butchered as was necessary. I maintained the vegetable garden, turning the soil gently, picking dead leaves off here and there, talking to the plants, encouraging them in the way I myself needed encouragement. After the farm maintenance I allowed myself to drift into the mid-afternoon.