I yank the tee down to his chin, so he can see me, see how serious I am. His lanky arms are still caught in it, sticking stiffly above his head, like he’s being robbed.
‘I didn’t say I wouldn’t do it, Toby. I just want you to appreciate the risk I’m taking on your behalf.’
‘Okay. Got it. Muchos graçias, scary intense girl. Can I have my t-shirt back?’
I step back so he can finish getting dressed.
‘And speaking of dangerous favours…’ I rummage in my suitcase for his present and toss it to him. He stashes the phone just in time, as the door cracks open.
‘Uh-oh,’ Toby stage-whispers, ‘evil housemate alert.’
Jane pokes her head in, bearing gifts. ‘Oh, hey, your food is here. What are you guys doing?’
‘Fucking,’ Toby says brightly. ‘You wanna join us?’
Kendra
As soon as I step out into Long Street and the warm sheet of rain that soaks through my clothes, I realise I can’t face going back to the loft right now. Not because of the gaping holes in the walls where the builders have knocked through the kitchen, or the dust that the absorbent tarps are supposed to sponge up right out of the air, but because it’s too weighed down with memories.
The way your brain works it’s always rewiring itself; the layers of association tangled up with different people and places recontextualised by new experiences. You can map out a whole city according to the weight of memory, like pins on the homicide board tracking the killer’s movements. But the connections get thicker and denser and more complicated all the time.
I feel like the tarps sop up emotional residue along with the dust drifting down to settle on the carpets, filming the walls; the shouting matches we degenerate into at two in the morning when he stops in for a ‘chat’ after a night out with his friends – and wants to leave straight after. Five months ago, I liked the glamour of being a kept woman. It made a change from being just another impoverished Michaelis student. But now it just seems stale and tired and terribly naïve.
I walk down the steps to the underway, below the new deco curls of the signage that says ‘Long’ and ‘D’, and stand on the platform along with some kids who epitomise the Michaelis breed, with their overtly punky hair and ramshackle clothes, cultivating the ugly look for the shock value.
The tunnels rumble and shush with far-off trains. It’s 98 seconds till the next connecting train to Chiappini Street. If it wasn’t so humid and soggy, I’d walk.
The rumbling amps up and the train rides in, sending plumes of water skating up on either side of it. The plastech doors slide open and I push past the crowd to slide into a seat while there’s still one going. The train rises slightly, hissing as the hover reinflates, and glides off, the neon lights on the tunnel walls slipping into blurred darts as we pick up speed towards Adderley Station.
I’ve got several spools to drop off with Mr. Muller. It was a mission to find someone who still dabbled in oldschool processes like film. If I were a real artist, Jonathan teased me, I would have done it myself as a point of pride.
Four Ghosts down, the sense of panicky urgency has eased up. Andile didn’t tell me it would be like this. That I would have to placate it. Or maybe it’s just the residual humiliation of Toby trying to kiss me. The pathetic truth is that Jonathan would probably encourage it.
I take out my Leica Zion, my everyday filter on the world, and start clicking through the memchip, past the people framed in the window of the Afro Café and the unfinished graffiti on the Parade clustered between the adboards, past the pictures of bridges from the negative space binge I went on last week, until I come to the images of my wrist.
Four thousand one hundred and twenty photographs over the time it took to develop, like film. Played back in timelapse the bruise blossoms and bursts, resolving like a Rorschach into the logo. It’s the exact colour of the phosphorescent algae shimmering in the waves on the beach in Langkawi, where Jonathan took me after the agonising slow-mo months of my father’s death.
I spent an hour looking at my skin this morning, studying my wrist, my face. The cosmetic effects are the most obvious, but it’s the stuff you can’t see that counts; the nano attacking toxins, sopping up free radicals, releasing antioxidants by the bucketload. It’s a marathon detox and a fine-tune all in one. And the nano’s programmed to search and destroy any abnormal developments, so I’ll never have to go through what Dad did, the cancer chewing its way through his stomach, consuming him from the inside out.
No promises, said Andile, before he made me sign the contradicting waiver: ‘The applicant understands that any claims made by Inatec staff regarding medical or health benefits are based on preliminary findings from testing in animals. The applicant understands that the Inatec nanotechnology is still in the prototype phase of development and, based on this information and understanding, accepts full responsibility for all the risks inherent, etc, etc.’
I don’t mean to be dismissive of the etceteras or the risks inherent. I know exactly what I’m in for, despite what that freakshow from the bar might think. Or my shrink, who believes I’m just doing this as a way of asserting myself in the whole bang shebang with Jonathan.
I’m a demo model for their demographic. An angel of aspiration. A guinea pig for an appropriate alliterative beginning with g. Ghost, I guess. Only once removed on the food chain from the kids who sell space on their chamo, adblips playing out on the plastivinyl of tees and jackets like walking projectaboards, only with more ‘risks inherent’.
And my skin does look amazing, like it’s been buffed and scrubbed and moisturised within an inch of its life, all velvaglow and radiant, even though the only cosmetic in the apartment is Jonathan’s aftershave. It’s been almost six days now with no side effects, or only good ones, apart from the first few miserable days when the flu and achiness hit. But then maybe that was self-induced. Maybe all of it is.
It’s a shock to find Jonathan at the gallery, but really, what did I expect? He and Sanjay are examining my prints, laid out on Propeller’s floor in a blunt mosaic. They weren’t supposed to start the selection without me. Sanjay is squatting, shuffling like a crab between the prints. He’s already set two aside. He flashes a smile at me when I come in, slightly strained at the edges.
‘Hey, sweetness.’ Jonathan gives me the fullbody up-down, like he does to the models in castings. It’s an old habit, he’s told me, from the job. As in, don’t take everything so personally, Kendra.
On any other day, the cigarette dangling off his lips would have annoyed the hell out of me, when he’s supposed to have quit again, but my secret makes me feel smug and secure, counterbalancing the elation, like a fish jumping in my chest, that I can’t keep down at seeing him.
‘You shouldn’t be smoking over the prints.’
‘Don’t be so tense, baby. It’s not going to hurt them.’ He starts to reach for my shoulder, to knead the knots in my neck, but I brush his hand away, irritated.
There are to be three of us in the group exhibition: Johannes Michael, who does intricate paperwork mobiles on a massive scale, taking up Propeller’s entire second floor; and Khanyi Nkosi, a legend at twenty-six. I am either privileged to be sharing a space with her, or at a serious disadvantage because no one is going to pay the slightest bit of attention to my work with her audio animal installation in the room. She’s only bringing the thing in at the last minute, because of all the controversy around it.
It’s the first time I’ve seen all the prints laid out together and, despite my anxieties about coexhibiting with Khanyi Nkosi, I’m deliriously happy about how they’ve come out. I’ve already made my final selection, although I’m glad to see Sanjay and Jonathan have picked out the portrait of the drag queen, caught bumming a light from a garage attendant at 3 am. I’ve blown it up, so that her face is all texture, the make-up caked in the lines around her pursed mouth, lit up by the flame cupped in her hands. It came out surprisingly perfect considering no one knows how to use film anymore.