Эндрю Миллер (ЮАР) - Dub Steps

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.

‘Do you even know how to shoot one of these things?’ Babalwa laughed at me as she picked up the weapons, then laid them carefully back down again, one by one.

‘Blasted a few rounds. Landed on my ass.’

‘We should probably give ourselves lessons…’

We carted a shotgun, an AK and an R1 out the front entrance of Tyrwhitt Mansions. Guns, it turns out, aren’t that complicated. You open them up, shove in the bullets where it looks like they’re supposed to go, find the safety and fire.

If you’re a scrawny girl, you avoid the shotguns.

We blasted the stop sign at the bottom of Tyrwhitt Avenue to pieces, moving closer and closer as the reality of our talents became obvious, Babalwa burying her elbows in the tarmac with every shotgun effort.

The birds scattered with each shot, then came back down again. They were clustered in the trees, on the street signs, on the balconies. Egrets, eagles, loeries, hadedas. They made me think of the free pigs, and I wondered if they were still around.

‘Be a bit careful,’ I said as we packed the guns back into the basement armoury and selected a personal pistol each. Babalwa chose a Vektor SP4, a Russian thing, far too big in her baby hand. I took the Vektor CPZ, all rounded edges and Star Wars . ‘There was a pack of free pigs and dogs around when I was here. Big enough to tear up a young girl from PE.’

‘Thanks,’ she said caustically. ‘I’ll keep that in mind. Oh, we should look for solar or a generator while we’re out, nè? This water thing could screw us up. I know you don’t want to move from your cherry’s flat, but we might have to.’

‘We need to plan a route?’

Babalwa flicked her safety off, then on again, and shoved the Vektor into the rear waistband of her gym shorts, where it sat, enormous and devoid of context. ‘Let’s just drive.’ She winked at me. ‘I can feel there’s something out there.’