‘Are they ugly?’ she asked.
‘There used to be all sorts of people, angel,’ I tried to explain. ‘There were people who were good to look at and then there were others who weren’t as fortunate.’
‘Not fair.’ She turned the frame over a few times while absorbing the implications of randomly assigned ugly genes.
As we began formalising school for the kids – each of us adults doing our best to cover not only subjects we knew a little about, but also those that were totally alien to us, like maths and science – we repeatedly ran up against the deeper challenge of context. Every tiny step we took towards formal numeracy and literacy had to be wrapped in a massive balloon of context – facts about the world that were innate to us adults and completely alien to the kids. Ugliness. War. Sport. Crowds. Television. Strangers. Grandparents.
The list was an endlessly unravelling ball of string. Eventually contextual frustration led us to try to formalise a central narrative that could be referred to by all. We destroyed the walls between a string of nine ground-floor St John’s classrooms and started painting the story of man from beginning to end – with the story of us adult individuals, each of the parents, foregrounded for ease of telling. In some ways our treatment was like the Afrikaner marble relief at the Voortrekker Monument, but with a more clearly demonstrable commitment to fact. Or at least that’s what we told ourselves.
We, the parents and adults, took up the positions of the dramatic, guarding generals. Babalwa was the metaphorical pioneer vrou with the kids protected under her iron skirts.
‘We gonna fuck these kids up proper,’ said Andile as we painted the first blocks of the story into place.
She was right. As good as our ground-floor narrative was, it could never cope with the subtlety of real life – with the raw inquisitiveness of a five-year-old yet to encounter true ugliness.
‘The world was never fair, angel. It is never fair.’ I ruffled English’s head as I settled into a generic, cover-all parental explanation.
‘Why?’
‘That is one of the great mysteries of being human,’ I said, falling even further back, inches away from ‘Only God can tell us that’. She shrugged and returned the photograph to its desk.
Meanwhile, Sthembiso had wound himself into a considerable state, my warnings over how elusive the Eeeyus might prove to be long forgotten. ‘There’s nothing!’ he spat at me after two hours of full-throttle exertion. ‘Nothing! Just PCs!’
‘Well, in these types of places we might need to look a little bit differently,’ I told him. ‘You’re not going to find a lot of books here, as I said. But have you looked properly at all the files and folders?’ He shrugged, angry and sulking. Files and folders were not the stuff he was used to.
I tried again. ‘OK, how about we come back tomorrow – it’s a Sunday after all – and I’ll look with you. I bet we find at least two eights.’
Sthembiso eyed me suspiciously. The heels of his little feet pushed angrily against each other. ‘And if we don’t?’
‘Well…’ I stalled, unable to think of a reasonable safeguard able to protect us both.
‘Then pancakes, three weekends in a row,’ he said, jumping slyly into a new negotiation. I conceded warily, worrying what kind of precedent I was setting. I was pretty sure we’d find something of worth if the two of us looked together, however. And besides, I told myself, it was starting to feel like time the kids learned to cook properly, not just wash and pack. Pancakes could be a reasonable introduction, regardless of who won or lost.
I sent Sthembiso off to find English and Roy Jnr. Thabang and Lydia were already hanging off my legs and whining. We had only been in the complex a few hours, but it had been a long, emotional stretch. Memories of Tebza mingled with the smell of rot. I felt despondent.
The kids piled into the bakkie arguing about whether ugliness could be applied via a punch, Sthembiso holding his fist threateningly above Lydia’s shoulder. The argument turned nasty, and inevitably tracked from the idea of ugliness to the pigs, as all of the kids’ conflicts seemed to at this stage.
We had set up a complicated set of rules concerning our interactions with the pigs, who were growing their very own community on the outskirts of ours. We kept a healthy distance most of the time, and it was easy enough to impress on the kids the need to stay away from the adults. At three-hundred-plus kilos and with long, sinister snouts and rough boar hair, they were hardly enticing to small children. Piglets, however, were another story. Whenever the piglets emerged they sparked an extended series of debates and discussions around the pig rules. English was the cause of most the anxiety – she fell head over heels for the babies and was caught on more than one occasion sneaking a wet little snout into the house to hide under her bed. Fats was hell-bent on creating the ‘climate of fear’ necessary to keep the pigs and kids apart, and issued a steady stream of anti-pig propaganda: little titbits about how free pigs were as mean as they were smart, and so on. Sthembiso responded to the hype, and did his best to keep the pig border patrolled at all times. English, on the other hand, saw Fats’s talk for exactly what it was, and eventually named her favourite of the new litter Snowball, Orwell’s dirty paperback – stripped of all irony – the inspiration. Sthembiso had got wind of the naming and was threatening legal action – and, of course, communicating the severity of it all with his ever-hovering fist.
I should have stopped him but I didn’t have the energy, and then, as we exited the main gate, my attention was taken with what I could have sworn was a black, sandalled foot pulled smartly back from the undergrowth.
There had been many sightings. It was a recurring theme for us all. In the first few years we chased them down with enthusiasm and determined energy, the weight of probability driving us to lengths we later just gave up on. With each failed chase, the rate of entropy increased until we no longer considered the possibility of anyone else being alive outside our ridiculous little group.
Still, the image of the foot stayed with me. What kind of displacement of imagination and vision could have occurred to deliver unto my eyes a black, sandalled foot? I hadn’t, as far as I was aware, been thinking of anything much. Tebza, I guess, had held the majority of my attention. Was it possible that drifting thoughts of my old friend somehow could have fired up my synapses to produce a foot being swiftly withdrawn into the undergrowth? I doubted it. We had been on so many ill-fated, ill-advised and futile discovery missions it seemed naive and more than a little bit wilful to now set off on another one. In fact, the event was so odd and fleeting I didn’t even consider trying to articulate it to any of the others. Instead, I painted it. Or rather, a series of interpretations. The foot extended fully out of the undergrowth. The foot represented only by a few toes. The bushes without a foot. The bushes with just the smallest hint of foot, a toe observable only to one who knew that the form of a foot was in there somewhere.
They were bad pictures. I was still some distance from being a reliably decent artist, and the foot attempts cruelly revealed my technical failings. Either it was completely wrong – not like any foot I had ever seen – or subtly but crucially misshapen. A foot somehow detached from its body, from the vital context that would give it its footness.