Dub Steps (7 page)

‘We look to control the reserve as a clear area we can manage, and there’s enough concrete in this place to make sure that the jungle can’t close in on us. Where else can we find something like this?’

‘Well …’ Babalwa, doubtful, remained on her knees. ‘There must be plenty of similar places around the country, nè?’

‘Possibly. But how long will they take to find? How much work will they take to settle to the point where we are now already? How many will be right on the sea in case of miracle sea rescues and to service our need to fish?’ Babalwa snorted. Fishing had not, as of yet, taken place. ‘Seriously, I’ve been thinking about fishing quite a lot lately.’ I rolled with it. ‘It will probably end up being easier than trying to keep cattle.’

She nodded, head down, the corners of her mouth twitching.

‘Laugh, but if not here, then where? It’s going to be fucking tough to start again. And, like it or not, we have started here. And other people chose to start here too.’ I waved at the Donkin pyramid. ‘There was surely a reason why these people decided to start this city here. Right friggin here.’ I jumped slightly on the turf, issuing up a little puff of sand.

I had forced her. Bullied her. Or maybe she had conceded strategically. Not immediately, of course, but as I heaped the pressure on she gave a little, and a little more, and within an hour or two we had – by mutual agreement – decided to stay where we were, peering over the sea into an empty horizon, farming in the sand.

We had a cup of tea.

‘So what do you know about solar?’ Babalwa asked me as we sipped.

‘Less than fuck all. You?’

‘I know that you can only stack three panels to a battery before it blows.’

‘So I guess the question is, where? Where will we find more power than portables? We need better batteries.’

‘When we get the solar thing right we should rig up a player.’ Babalwa topped up her teacup, holding the lid and tipping from the pot in classic English style.

‘Home entertainment? We’ll need to be careful with the movies. When we’ve watched them all it’s repeats for the rest of our lives.’

‘Music would be wild though – somewhere to put all those sticks and things you been hording.’

‘Agreed. Agreed. Movies. Music. Stuff of life.’

‘Roy,’ Babalwa said, pulling out her chair. ‘Can I ask you something personal?’

‘Shoot.’

‘How scared are you? I mean, just like day on day. Are you scared?’ Her voice got a little higher. ‘Because, honestly, some days I can’t get out of bed. I have to pull myself out piece by piece. I mean, you’re out there all the time in your van, with that machete, doing whatever you do. So to me you look fine, but I feel awful. I just want to cry all the time.’ Tears rolled down her cheeks.

‘Come here,’ I beckoned. She rounded the pine coffee table, littered with the patchwork of A4 pages that constituted our farm plan, and sat on my lap, her arms around my neck, like a child.

‘Listen,’ I whispered into the nape of her neck. ‘I keep moving to stay alive.’ She pushed her chin into my collarbone, tears and snot smearing onto my cheek, mingling with mine, creating a mutual river between us. Then she pulled back.

‘Will you bring your mattress this side tonight? I don’t want you in my bed, but I don’t want to be alone either.’

‘Sure.’ My heart skipped, dropped, then picked up again. I didn’t want to sleep with her, per se. Sex was a peripheral consideration. I badly wanted to be wanted, though. To be held, also. To mix energy with her – to dilute myself and gain a little bit of someone else. ‘No problem. No problem at all. I don’t feel like flying solo either.’

Babalwa folded her arms around me again, leaning properly into my neck with her shaved head. She smelled slightly of sweat. Sweet sweat.

‘You got anything decent to read? I got a whole library over there, you know.’

She mumphed snottily into my neck.

I stroked her back slowly, my hand moving in ever-widening circles over the Castle Lager logo.

The next morning the air was thicker than usual, and spotted with smiles. I had dragged my mattress into the kitchen and slept there.

Her toe woke me, prodding against my forehead. She looked down on me, the length of her dramatically extended, my view deep into the inner thigh of her shorts.

‘Hey,’ she rubbed her head and yawned. ‘You a tea or coffee person?’

‘Uh, tea, I guess.’ I grabbed her ankle and gave it a playful twist. She yelped and jumped free. ‘Today we find power, nè? That movie thing has really got me going.’

Our next target was All Power EP, in Kempston Road.

‘Easy, right near our family home,’ said Babalwa. ‘I’ll show you where I grew up.’

‘Smoke,’ Babalwa said as we caught our first sight of the Jozi skyline. ‘There’s smoke.’

We were about seventy kilometres out. There was, indeed, a small spiral of smoke curling over the right-hand side of the city.

‘Looks like it could be coming from Ponte,’ I said casually, while my heart leapt, fists in the air. ‘Could be anywhere, I suppose – can’t tell from this far.’

‘Where there’s smoke …’ Babalwa wriggled excitedly.

‘There’s something burning,’ I finished coldly. ‘Could mean anything.’

‘Could mean everything.’ Babalwa laughed at my caution.

I ran my tongue through the guillotine gap in my front tooth and grimaced behind closed lips.

The smoke toyed with us over seventy kilometres, shifting the source of its dance as we threaded our way through the splatter of empty cars blocking the highway. Babalwa squirmed ceaselessly, thrilled at the idea of Jozi. My tongue matched her vigour, probing relentlessly, excitedly, for the missing half of my front tooth.

‘There’ll be nothing to see,’ I kept saying to her in the build-up to the trip. ‘It’s not a big city any more. It’s an abandoned pile of glass and brick.’

‘Still,’ she said, refusing to concede, ‘it’ll be fun. Better than pretending to be farmers. We can go shopping. Looting. Whatever. Sandton City.’

As much as I tried to deny it, I was with her. Jozi, as always, held the lure of change.

Once we had the player working, once we had watched that first movie, our PE lives slid into a shambolic routine. We mowed the
lawn and trimmed the edges of the reserve. We erected a greenhouse. We decided what to plant. We watched our seeds sprout, and rot.

Theoretically, hydroponics had seemed like the answer. In practice, however, we couldn’t get even the simplest elements of the process right, and after three months we had grown sick, thin and very tired of farming. We roamed further and further, seeking out homesteads and nurseries and smallholdings and farms with vegetable patches. We didn’t score often, but when we did we scored big. One farm in the Gamtoos Valley yielded a truckload. Spinach, carrots, green beans, potatoes – all waiting neatly in a lush garden, right next to the farmhouse.

But that was the exception. Generally we reached far and worked hard for little – the drooping, dying greenhouse mocking us each day when we returned.

‘We have to learn,’ I would insist to Babalwa. ‘How are we going to survive if we never learn to produce our own food?’

She agreed on the imperative but differed fundamentally on the rest. Babalwa saw clearly how bad we were at food production, and how much help we needed. Soil. Conditions. ‘You know, Roy, you know …’ She would stare and hold it until I walked away.

And really, I did know. Our few attempts to secure meat had failed badly. We had one or two surprisingly wild chickens cooped, providing eggs and, supposedly, meat. But we were as terrible at butchery – even something as simple as a chicken – as we were at farming. We never even thought of trying to find a roaming sheep or cow, the subject avoided by mutual silent agreement.

We survived, but in no comfort. Eventually, as the daily grind took proper hold, we fell back into a reliable rhythm of rice and canned beans. Rice and canned stew. Rice and spinach.

Perhaps most indicative of our state of decline was our inability to watch movies. After weeks and weeks of fiddling with panels and batteries and portable solars, we set up enough power to fire up genuinely warm water, as well as the entertainment system in Babalwa’s lounge. That first night she scattered the small room with cushions and prepared popcorn. I made coffee. We stacked the table with chocolate and argued over the first movie, eventually
settling on
Spanglish
. Something soft and old to start, please, she begged. Just to get going. Something American and stupid.

I conceded, then ruined the evening by crying.

Adam Sandler reaches into Téa Leoni’s bathrobe and cups her breast to calm her. It’s a mock funny scene, nothing really, but I was judderingly reminded of Angie and myself. It was exactly the kind of thing she would have done to me, had I had breasts. It was our kind of fight, comedy or not. Their weepy hysteria felt so much like home I crashed under the memory. We tried again, but the weight of the films was too much. Their ideas, their people, their references, their beauty all spoke of subjects too rich. So we walked through and around and over our home entertainment system, playing music on it occasionally but generally leaving it fallow.

‘If it’s people, what d’you think they’re burning?’ Babalwa asked as we slid past Gold Reef City. The column of smoke had drifted further back as we approached. Now it looked like it could be over Midrand, possibly even Pretoria. It thinned while we drove, threatening to disappear totally into the late afternoon clouds.

‘Who the fuck knows?’ I grunted, irritable now with the idea that coming back to Joburg would somehow alter our circumstances. ‘Probably just an accident of nature. Leaves burning through broken glass or something.’

Babalwa pulled her knees up to her chin and stuck her tongue out at me. ‘Poes! It better be fucking people. I’m not sure I can spend the rest of my life with a sulky pants like you.’

I laughed, then clamped my lips back over my half tooth. I managed to forget about it most of the time, but every now and again it came back to me how ridiculous I must have looked with this massive angular chunk missing from my face. Despite the fact that I was the only man on the planet, I still wanted to impress and please Babalwa in the way that men impress and please women. But I found myself keeping my mouth shut and looking away as much as possible. Dentistry was now my constant ironic companion.

‘You should just laugh. Let go, man,’ Babalwa said, eyes
twinkling. ‘I think it’s cute, anyway. Broken teeth are sexy in lotsa places.’

I grunted and made a pretence of refocusing on the road.

‘Don’t be grumpy, Roy. It’s my first time in Jozi. I’m excited.’ She reached a bony little hand over and patted my knee. ‘Tell me what it was like,’ she said, gripping my kneecap in encouragement.

‘Full. A lot of fokken traffic. Angry people.’

‘Liar.’ She tried to lift my patella, pushing it painfully around its socket. ‘You were probably the angry one. I’m sure there was lots that was great here. I wish I could have seen it …’ She trailed away and focused on the industrial landscape as we looped into the spaghetti junction.

I allowed myself a couple of flashbacks. Images of shiny cars and the glinting Highveld sun, traffic jams and metro roadblocks. Fat cops hustling for lunch. Maybe she was right, I conceded to myself. Quite possibly she was right …

Initially Jozi seemed little changed. The dry brown walls were still slumped and decaying and hopelessly wrong, but now the transmission paint was peeling, doubling up the ghetto atmosphere. Inside the easy lines of the skyline, the city had faded, was fading.

As we crested the hill to Zoo Lake we entered a teeming jungle. The birds had taken over. The hadedas perched in throngs on treetops, rooftops and garden walls, the packs on high supporting ground troops drilling the earth with prehistoric beaks. The hadada shrieks bounced against the softer calls of the loeries, also obscenely abundant over the forest tops. Then the weavers, the shrikes, the robins and all the smallers, crying and yelling and calling and hunting.

I stopped the van as we passed the zoo.

The houses and converted office-houses facing Jan Smuts Avenue had fallen so far back into the shrubbery they were barely recognisable. An old-school billboard had fallen completely off its wall mounting, the vines and creepers pulling it easily and slowly down. Windows were covered in vines. Where once the tops of the oak trees had merely brushed fingers to create a light canopy, now
they had threaded together to form a complete roof, filled in by shrubs and tendrils and leaves.

And birds.

The forest stood tall, as in a fairy tale. Grass poked up through General Smuts’s tarmac, challenging the dominance of hundreds of years. Soon it would be the tar that was repressed, and rare and alien. I knew the forest would end in less than a kilometre and we would emerge in the glassy shine of Rosebank. Still, I searched for breath.

‘Jesus’ was all I said to Babalwa. ‘A complete fucken forest.’ I felt like a twelve-year explorer, previously bulletproof, suddenly lost, realising the true worth of my meagre experience and supplies. ‘It can’t have closed off completely,’ I added, ostensibly to comfort her, but really speaking to myself, the one with the memories. I pressured the accelerator, urgent in my need to get us through the few hundred metres to Rosebank. Babalwa gawked happily at the hadedas and loeries, shrieking properly when she spotted a zebra grazing next to the road. ‘Must be from the zoo,’ I said.

She commanded me to stop so she could look at it properly. ‘Never seen one before,’ she muttered, her chin resting on the half-raised window. ‘Check how fat its ass is. That’s wonderful. Really wonderful.’ She laughed and her little paw came out again and patted me on the knee. ‘Thanks for bringing us, Roy. This is fun. Much better than PE.’

We burst through into Rosebank, which had all the hallmarks of a conventional concrete jungle.

We entered Eileen’s apartment like we were returning from some kind of prolonged holiday. Me, the father, carrying our baggage and supplies up the staircase from the basement. Babalwa running up the stairs to see if she could find a view of the smoke column, then running back down past me again, yelling about not being able to find it. I dragged the bags and the boxes of food, grumbling to myself. We had become an odd pair. A husband and a wife. A father and daughter. A mother and her lost, toothless son. My tongue slipped through the gap again, seeking out the sharpest
edge, playing with the idea of blood.

‘Absolutely fuck all!’ Babalwa thumped up the last steps to land next to me as I left Eileen’s flat for the last load. ‘Can’t see a damn thing. Maybe it was just a natural fire. Like on
Survivor
, before they get given flint.’

I grunted and turned for the basement, soothed in a strange but significant way by her chatter.

‘Can I go in?’ Babalwa half stepped over Eileen’s threshold.

I dumped the last box (canned beans, long-life milk, canned tuna, canned tomatoes) on the kitchen counter and heaved. As strong as I had become, the carrying had still taken it out of me.

‘Who was this chick, anyway?’ Babalwa bounced into the kitchen. ‘Girlfriend?’

‘Office associate.’

‘Not very creative though.’ Babalwa hoisted her narrow ass onto the counter. ‘Check out this flat. It’s like she was still sixteen and her mom did it for her.’

‘In many ways she was,’ I replied. ‘Look, it’s pretty dark now. We need to decide what we’re gonna eat, how we’re gonna heat it. We’ve got shit to do.’

Babalwa grabbed me by my hair, pulled me into her and locked her legs behind me. ‘You need to chill the fuck out, baba. There are no deadlines here.’ She kissed me carefully, like a wife, probing my mouth with her tongue, reassuring me with her hands and her legs and her grip. Just as I began leaning in, she slipped her tongue through the hole in my front tooth and burst out laughing, pushing me back, the heels of her palms against my chest. ‘Sexy!’ She laughed, looking me in the eye. ‘Sexy like a meth addict. Sexy like a crack pipe.’

I pushed her back, harder than I intended, almost slamming her head against the corner of Eileen’s smoke extractor. ‘Fuck you. You’re in Roy country now. Show respect.’

‘Pretty hard to respect a man with a gap like that in his teeth, mister!’ Babalwa slid off the counter, hugged me quickly and trotted
into the lounge. ‘Seriously?’ she called out. ‘You woke up here, in this flat? Must have been freaky. Seriously freaky. I mean, just being in a space like this, it’s like going …’ Her voice disappeared as she entered the bedroom.

We slept that night in Eileen’s bed, our stomachs grinding away at the beans and the tuna, Babalwa farting gently as she slumbered. I let my arm curl over her, like we were lovers and not lost, lonely refugees.