Эндрю Миллер (ЮАР) - Dub Steps

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.