Эндрю Миллер (ЮАР) - Dub Steps

Took photos.

And I collected them. I snuck them, presuming Babalwa was ever looking, into my flat. Pored over them gently, some days. Pawed them on others. Pulled the printed pictures out, examined them, put them back. Thumbed my grubby way across screen after screen after screen.

‘Roy,’ she said. We were sitting on the pyramid bench, looking out over the skatepark and the memorials at the sea, our toes tickling in the knee-high grass. ‘Just look at this grass. And think about it. We are going to run out of cans. The roads are already growing over. It’s going to get harder and harder to move. The animals will keep coming. It will get more dangerous. Harder to find food and, if we don’t make a serious plan, harder to grow it, to hunt it. If we just stay here, if we don’t build, we’ll be swallowed up.’

She leaned forward on her arms, lifting her backside slightly off the bench, and rocked. I considered her profile and realised how well I now knew her features. Her always shaved head. The clouds that hovered in her eyes. Her boyish body. Her ridiculously conservative clothes. Shorts, T-shirt, sandals. The incongruity of her. Of the two of us. I looked back out to the sea, all flat and benign.

‘Where do we live? Why? How do we live? Why? What do we do about power?’ she asked in a rush. ‘I mean, electricity – it must be possible to get much more than we have with the portable panels. We can’t just pile them up, we need to make them work. How do we farm? ’Cause we know nothing about farming, do we? Do we become hunters? Where, why and how? All of it, Roy. We can’t wait any more.

‘We can’t just collect portables and pretend it will be OK, that someone will sail in off that fucking sea and rescue us.’

‘Power,’ I said. ‘We have tools. If we have the power to use them, we can build. We need power.’

We would become farmers, in one sense or another, but most probably in the sense I dreaded. Actual farming. Planting and reaping. Harvesting and watering. Tilling.

‘But Roy’ – she was earnest, pleading almost – ‘you need to think more widely… of why we would be farming. If we set it up right, if we get the tools we need and sort out the power, we can be pretty efficient, and the power wouldn’t only feed us, it would free us. Regular hot water. We could fry a steak—’

‘Who would kill the cow? You? Butcher it? Turn it into steak?’

‘OK, sho. Bad example. But you ken mos. You can’t think of it as farming. Think of living some kind of life in this place, in this situation.’

Babalwa insisted our current home wasn’t it. That the life we were destined for couldn’t possibly take root on the bare patch of scrub that was the Donkin Reserve. ‘Come!’ She dragged me by the arm and pulled me down onto my knees, then started clawing her fingers into the earth. ‘It’s fucking beach sand with a layer of evil, hard grass on top, Roy. Nothing can grow here. Nothing.’

‘We need to think of more than simple farming,’ I said, my fingers mirroring hers, pulling clumps of sandy earth up and letting it all spill back down again. ‘There are only two of us. If we want to get this right and not spend every waking hour until we die with a fucking hoe in our hands, then we need something better than a farm. We need more control. Greenhouses. Plant food, fertiliser and those artificial steroids. We need layers and layers of great soil and fresh compost and all that shit.’

‘What, like, import a nursery?’

‘Sho. We just load the shit up in a truck, and if we don’t have enough we get more from somewhere else and we keep going until we’ve got an artificial environment that meets our needs. We need control. And we can have it here – if we just look to control this patch of land. Look.’ I stood up and pointed to the four corners of the reserve dramatically, like a settler. ‘We’ve got about, what, eight hundred square metres here to control. With the right tools – one of those lawnmowers you can drive and a set of greenhouses – we can control that pretty easily. Beyond the square, there’s not a lot to worry about in terms of vegetation.

‘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.’