Эндрю Миллер (ЮАР) - Dub Steps

She loaded the CDs into the van’s player as we searched the edges of Gauteng. Randfontein, Roodepoort, Krugersdorp, Daveyton, Vosloo, Magaliesberg, Midrand, Centurion, Tembisa, Pretoria, Benoni, Brakpan, Katlehong, Springs, Soweto. We pounded the speakers, not stopping, not talking, our heads bumping along, teenagers absorbing a new, morphing landscape.

The plants were pushing the houses back, each millimetre of growth adding to each tendril a new triumph of organic force. In the townships progress was slower but still real, clusters reaching up and over the roofs, sporadic grass patches spiralling upwards and sideways simultaneously.

‘We’re just starting summer rains, right?’ Babalwa asked rhetorically. ‘It’s October, right? And it rains hard up here?’ We were driving through the matchbox houses of Katlehong.

‘Very.’

‘What you reckon – two years? Three? Before everything is gone?’

‘Depends. At the zoo it’ll be less. Soon we’ll have to cut a path out, if we want to go back the way we came.’

‘Show me where you grew up,’ she said. ‘There’s no smoke.’

I pointed the van to Greymont Hills.

Babalwa took great interest in my childhood house, firing off a string of probing questions about my father as she shot away the locks to the front door and the security gate.

‘Did he beat you? You ever remember him sober? What about your mother?’

She roved through the house, picking up things – coffee mugs, pots, bowls, couch cushions – as if they represented me and my family rather than my tenants, then sitting on the front step contemplatively when I told her how many hours I had spent there myself. She cut an incongruous figure, there on my childhood front step. A scrawny girl in filthy white gym shorts and a vest, shotgun hooked over her arm and a pistol jutting from her hip.

I was becoming genuinely enamoured.

We started having sex regularly after the PE movie debacle – after I had cried through Spanglish . She would hug. Rub my head. Hold my hand. At night – only ever at night – she would pull me towards her and take me in, guiding with authority, climaxing with a fierce grip and complete silence. I, in turn, made a habit of collapsing into her, of passing out in her arms, of harvesting the small doses she offered, as fully as possible, as often as possible.

Around that time, she began raising the idea of children.

If we are really the only ones, she would say, then our children are going to have to sleep with each other to breed. We’ll be inbreeders.

I would shrug. Grunt.

‘Seriously, Roy! D’you think about it? I mean, at some stage we’re going to have to breed, nè? We have to try, don’t we?’

Once she had forced the idea into my head I did begin to think about it. But inevitably my thoughts would end with the idea of Babalwa as wife – as partner. As family.

I stayed as quiet as she would let me, offering titbits, basic ideas, technical prods along the line of genetics, cross-pollination, and so on. I would research occasionally, presenting her with whatever facts I thought would add to the debate playing out in her head. Personally, though, breeding was an abstract notion. I knew that once she had decided, I would follow in the wake.

Still, my resignation wasn’t entirely passive. As the days passed I allowed myself to consider the idea of her in relation to me, in relation to family. I considered her form more deeply. Her child hips. Her adult eyes. Her details began to etch themselves on my brain, and my heart. Soon there would be no wiping them away.

For her part, Babalwa seemed only to grow used to me. Her touches, though warm, were calculated; they sought to heal, to help, to improve. She reached for me through genetic necessity. Through circumstance.

I wondered whether I would be informed of the child decision or simply caught up in it. As we roamed the streets of PE, looting for health, activity, entertainment, smashing locks and walls and doors, I tried to imagine us as a family, but the images refused to form. She was too young. I was… I didn’t know what I was. But I knew I wasn’t exactly right.

‘Tell me,’ Babalwa said, still perched on my childhood step, the shotgun, now resting between her legs, making her especially dominant, ‘about being a drunk. There’s booze everywhere. You tempted again?’

The tooth episode hung thick between us.

‘Always tempted. But I have the fear. Keeps me in line. ’Specially after the tooth.’

‘So if we find others… you’ll drink again? Moments of joy? Excitement?’

‘I hope not. I’m a proper junkie though, so I know enough to know that I might. You know, the day-at-a-time thing. All standard twelve-step shit applies.’

‘Lately I’ve been feeling like just getting out of my mind. Completely fucked up.’ Babalwa peered over the shotgun muzzle at me with hooded, plotting eyes. ‘Whaddya think of that?’

We decided on sundowners at the Westcliff.

Splattered on multiple levels against the face of Westcliff ridge, the Westcliff Hotel hovered directly over Zoo Lake, an off-pink series of plush, interlinking five-star units. As we smashed through the front gates, I explained to Babalwa about the foreign tourists and their plastic-surgery safari holidays, with the hotel utilised as recovery venue, about the prostitutes snuck through the gates at night, about the Sunday afternoon high teas for the Parkview ladies and their daughters.

Unable to jump-start a golf cart, we skipped down the enormous staircase three at a time.

Babalwa blew away the security bars on the restaurant window. She had adjusted quickly to the power of the recoil, and was firing the shotgun as regularly as possible now. We clambered in.

The serving trolleys were waiting for us, lined up in perfect threes, knives and forks at the ready. Cakes moulded to the point of crumbling. Proud mounds of green and moss trapped within blithe, unknowing glass cases.

Babalwa pulled a bottle of champagne from the kitchen wine cellar. The kitchen itself looked recently flooded. The floor was slick and sticky, a dirty high-water mark some two inches above the skirting rail. It was actually, she insisted, a high-blood mark; the apogee of fleeing freezer and fridge juice. I turned my head, unwilling to broach the idea of what might have happened to it, the blood and the muck, since.

Babalwa took care of another set of windows and security bars and we clambered out onto the terrace overlooking Zoo Lake and the northern suburbs. She cracked the champagne, took a long swig and spat it out. ‘I think it’s off?’ She handed the bottle over for testing.

I declined.

‘Sorry, my bad,’ she said. ‘But I really think it’s off.’ She slapped her tongue loudly between lips and teeth, testing.

‘Probably just French. Is it really bitter? Dry?’ I took the bottle. The label said Champagne. ‘Ja, it’s French. You might wanna look for something that says sparkling wine. French shit is hard.’

Babalwa hopped back through the window to the kitchen.

I rolled a small joint from my stash and considered Joburg’s north.

Trees. Trees. Trees. The forest almost pulsing it was growing so fast. I smoked and wondered. Inhaled and dreamed in reverse. Agency offices and houses of colleagues – their names already blurred and distant. Clubs and girls and campaigns. Media. Marketing. Copy. I was, I decided, looking over the metaphorical forest of my past. I could see nothing but a closing roof. A green, leafy mat.

Babalwa returned with the cheap stuff, cracked it, sat between my legs and leaned back against me.

She drank. I smoked.

We fucked ourselves up.

We crashed through the front door of Eileen’s flat chattering and laughing and collapsing in and out of each other’s arms.