Peddie, a mother and daughter on a fishing trip were thrown into the trunk of a car; the mother was raped and killed and the girl escaped.
I pack the papers back into the box, the world feeling dimmer.
•••
In the living room, I switch on the VHS and push in the dub I got from Litha. In Where Have All the People Gone?, a middle-aged woman walks into the ocean, unable to live in a world without humans, the global population incinerated into heaps of powder. It was released in 1974 to a US TV audience, and never recouped its production costs. Litha, Part, and I have watched it together twice now.
The first time I saw it, I’d walked into Mr Movie to look for Litha after school, and found him watching it on the TV hung above the Returns Box. He looked tired, leaning against the counter with a cup of tea.
“I don’t get it,” I said, after a moment. “How did the vegetation survive?”
Litha dipped behind the counter and pulled up the tape’s cover. “The solar flare didn’t burn them,” he said. “It activated a viral outbreak. A percentage of the population is immune.”
Then Tom, his colleague, walked in and dropped his backpack behind the counter. “The mother of all hangovers,” he announced, opening a can of Coke.
I didn’t like him. Tom always stared at me like I was a coin at the bottom of a pond, a habit that made me want him covered in paper cuts, but I knew Litha admired him for his videogaming talent. In fact, I knew too much about that. Litha could never quit talking about how Tom had locked himself in his room one weekend, not leaving until he’d solved the piano puzzle in Silent Hill. He’d also shown Litha that the frequency for Meryl’s codec in Metal Gear Solid was printed at the back of the jewel CD case, over the Konami logo, which the rental customers couldn’t take home with them. Tom found that hilarious. He was 23 with a nursing diploma from UKZN, and had moved back in with his parents. His blond hair grew out in a mullet at the back, and his prominent Adam’s apple rolled whenever he gulped one of his countless sodas.
I turned to Litha. “I have to go, but I’d like to watch more of it.”
“The movie?”
“It’s calming.”
“I’ll make a dub of it when I get home.”
“Thanks.”
Now my vegetable soup’s gone cold and the film hasn’t worked.
I let the credits roll until the end, then text Litha that I need to see him: It’s urgent.
Later, we sit watching TV in the one-bedroom flat his new foster parents rent in Alexandra. Part’s still on a field-trip to the aquarium in East London. I tell him about the articles with the murders and the rapes and he winces.
“I don’t know how you read the news.”
The two of us go quiet for a bit. Then I turn to him again. “The machine’s back.”
It takes him a while to nod. Then I tell him how the school thinks Kiran’s on acid.
“He might’ve been ratted out by a senior he sold a cap to, I don’t know,” I say. “Now he’s on the run and the school doesn’t care. I think it’s because he’s not a girl.”
Litha sighs. “I think so, too.” Then he asks me to describe the machine.
“It’s still the same.”
“The same?”
“Except for one thing.” I tell him about the triangle.
“You think the three are connected? Kiran, the girls, the machine?”
I pause, relieved—at least he doesn’t think I’m insane.
Then he asks to see my exercise book. He turns to a sketch of the machine and one of Kiran’s house. “Let’s talk to Part about it at the bazaar.” Then he hands me a dubbed tape of 2010 and tells me the same thing as always—that TV’s not a pollutant, it’s the inflation of our realities.
There’s rap music on the TV now, and the way I feel is that my inflated reality is sexual ambiguity. Next, there’s a sitcom and the characters get introduced one by one. Mom, dad, daughter, son, baby—a nucleus.
“The dad looks like my one father, the lawyer,” Litha says. “I can’t remember the year, but that foster beat me so hard I had to chew with my left molars for a week. They sent me back to Syringa Road after that, remember, next to Phakamisa Clinic, and gave me that bunk bed with Mongezi, who wanted to burn the place down?”
I nod. It happened in 1999—a year before we met. Litha’s told us.
I rest my head on the couch and listen to him talk. At night, Litha says the TV illuminates the whole flat, making it hard to sleep, but now, the daylight from the windows makes it look as if it’s off.
Litha says when you’re a child, what you think is that you can eat anything, and when you’re a parent, what you think is that you can teach anything. Leaning back on the sofa, with the light flooding in from Alexandra, he says when you’re a kid, everything you see is real. There are people inside your TV and plastic fruit is edible. “That’s the world you’re given.”
I get up and put on my scholar-patrol vest, and Litha opens the front door for me.
“The thing is,” he says, “when your father has his hands clenched around your neck and your mother’s screaming, trying to pull him off, what he wants everyone to think is that you’ve swallowed a plastic grape. He wants everyone to think you’re a child, and to you, plastic is another type of fruit,” he says. “That’s the world we’re given.”
I take the stairs. Outside, the glare from the sun is blinding. I remember how my urine smelled metallic yesterday, so I stop over at Parbhoo’s for tampons, but it’s closed.
October 23, 1999
That summer, when Tata hadn’t sold any of the weight-loss kits and his cough had worsened, my aunt arrived as his caretaker and my guardian.
I’d offered to work part-time to help him—to send out the boxes, even model the product—but Tata hadn’t answered me. Instead, one day when I returned from school, I found the boxes, still full, stacked in a heap on the curb with the rubbish we’d left for collection. They’d be gone before morning. Tata went to sleep before us that night.
“You’ll have to work from now on,” my aunt said. “I’ve heard how he lets you loaf.”
I turned from her and walked to my room, not bothering to hide my contempt. My aunt came from the Transkei, the poorer half of our province, and I’d never seen much of her. From the beginning, the two of us knew we wouldn’t get along, and we didn’t make much of it.
RTR: 006 / Date of Recollection: 05.29.2002 / 4 min
The talk with Litha calms me, and after I’ve said goodbye to him, I take the long way back to school. I stand on the side of the road, serving out my punishment—the lone interloper in the scholar patrol’s regular afternoon troop. The rest of them are volunteers: Candice, Gareth, and Phiwe. For the time being, the four of us are shackled to the same cause—to wait for the last of the detention class to be carted out at four, facilitating the zebra crossing while we wait, monitoring the stream of traffic outside the chapel.
I heard them talking about the girls, too, when I arrived, but now it’s quiet.
On opposite sides of the road, Phiwe and I raise and drop our steel beams for a maroon Corolla, followed by a white Mazda. The sunlight gets in my eyes and makes me squint, and I tell Candice, our team captain, that I need a break. I watch her smiling at me from across the road, her pale gums showing, before she blows on her whistle and walks over.
“I can only give you a minute. I’m sorry, but you’ll get used to it.”
“I