Эндрю Миллер (ЮАР) - Dub Steps

I brushed my teeth. It felt like the right thing to do.

Just a glance. Casual, thoughtless. A quick check-in with my abluting self. But suddenly I was trapped, locked into the return view. My hair was grey. Completely, comprehensively, shockingly grey.

I was a different person.

Older, but softer. New, but decaying.

I examined the hairs, the impact of the colour on the lines and pits of my face. Zoom in. Zoom out.

Stunned, I could hardly look. I peered at the mirror out of the corner of my eye. But still, it was there. Grey.

Eventually I jumped (literally, there was a strange spring in my step) into the shower. The water was warm, but cooling noticeably.

I got dressed, grabbed the keys and let myself out of the flat.

Up Tyrwhitt Avenue. As I broke into an army-type jog I realised I was going to the police station at the top of the road. As I ran I thought of my new grey hair. Then I realised I hadn’t run in decades – sweat broke through the freshness of the shower in waves. Will the water stay hot? I asked myself.

I stopped running. Strode up the hill.

Cars lost on the road. One or two piled into walls and street poles, glass confetti littering the street. An ancient 1990s red Volkswagen hatchback in the middle of the road. Empty. I popped the boot but it was clean. No jack, no wheel spanner.

Up to the Rosebank Hotel, then left to the police station, a half-brick, half-prefab oddity. The doors open, reception empty. A stiff breeze ran through it. I felt cool, then hot. Sweat.

I grabbed a set of keys off the front desk and went into the back. The interview rooms were empty, also the holding cells. There were four offices. The superintendent’s and duty sergeant’s were vacant, but there was a newspaper in one of the desk drawers. I grabbed it to take it with me, then realised I hadn’t brought a fucking bag, so how was I going to carry the guns?

I opened the newspaper and spread it on the desk. Tenth of April. The day after I fell into Eileen’s flat. The usual:

Behind the global youth. Chasing down the graf rebels. Crime. Violence. Service delivery. Corruption. Soccer. Cricket. Rugby. A double-spread free-pig feature – same old thing. Their intelligence levels. Pig steroids, fat cells and the frontal cortex. What a free pig actually feels. Why they run. Where they run to. Five Things to Do When You Encounter a Free Pig (1. Don’t stare. 2 Don’t start a fight. 3. Don’t laugh. 4. Be respectful. 5. Pigs want to be left alone as much as we do…).

I crumpled the front page of the paper, stuffed it into my pocket and searched for guns. Eventually I ended up back in the reception area and there it was, a recessed glass-fronted gun cupboard with four shotguns inside. I used a paper spike to smash the window, first with the spike itself and then beating the shards out of the sides and corners with the pedestal.

There were two boxes of shells in the drawer underneath the cupboard. I spilled the shells onto the desk and then stuffed them into all available pockets. I thought about trying to load one of the guns, but I’d never even held a gun before.

I jogged back down Tyrwhitt Avenue stuffed with bullets, shotguns falling from my arms. I realised as I ran and stumbled and dropped a gun, then another, as I bent to pick the second up and a few shells fell from my top pocket, that this was a real risk. I felt eyes watching me. I heard feet sneaking up into the backyard of my mind. As I reached the entrance to Tyrwhitt Mansions I stopped and swivelled. I glared back out at the world, radiating survivor vibes in case someone was watching and thinking anyone who carries guns like that must be an easy target.

I ran up the stairs to Eileen’s front door, dropped the guns outside with a clatter, fished the keys out of my pocket and got very confused with a lock I’d opened many times. I felt the eyes watching, again. Eventually I forced the door open, threw the guns inside, then myself, and slammed it.

I stank. Sweat and fear.

I couldn’t stop moving.

Tore my clothes off and jumped back in the shower.

I let the water pour over me until it went truly cold, then I dried myself. I caught a glimpse of my grey-haired reflection in the mirror.

I tried the TV again. Checked the lights (dead), then the stove (dead), then the mains board – switches up.

I threw my naked body back on Eileen’s bed and waited for a sound. But there was nothing. Just the smell of Eileen on the sheets, the pillow.

I tried to cry. I felt like I should. There was a slight moistness in the corner of my left eye, but otherwise nothing. I grabbed my dick and my balls in one hand and lifted my legs into the air. A light breeze blew over my exposed ass. It was the calmest I’d felt since I woke up. I stayed like that for a while, in self-defence.

I took a cold shower, created a seat on Eileen’s bedroom windowsill with pillows, and waited.

And waited.

I spent the day there. I watched the pigs and the dogs on their circuit, counted the heads. Five.

Now, dangling over the cusp, I can tell you it was beautiful. I can carve and clip around the edges. I can look into that orange Cresta horizon, at that sagging water tower, and say the end of the world rescued me.

Of course I’m laughing at the younger me; the one who was actually there. The one who filled a cash-in-transit van with ten foraged barrels of diesel and drove south down the M1 crying like a girl.

The van, a vehicular pit bull, was shaped for attack as defence. I found it, door open, half a Tupperware of tripe and rice and morogo on the seat, white and green crumbs spilled on the brown plastic and down under the pedals, parked to the side of a yellow petrol station on Jan Smuts. Both front doors were open. The keys dangled in the ignition.

From a distance it had all the signs of a super vehicle. Of something from another time and place. In my mind these vans had always been something extra-human, apart from the prosaic realties of cars and highways. Up close, however, things were different. It smelled and looked like a prehistoric, atavistic creation, the panels consisting of buckled, reinforced, bulletproof sheet metal. Its snout broad and angled and ready, fronted by a black grill designed to crush and bounce. The thin front window squashed into place. The glass was many centimetres thick and comprehensively bulletproof, its density creating a blue tint inside the driver’s cabin, which in turn was tight and defensive – a cockpit made habitable only by a gushing aircon system. The two side-window slits were essentially decorative, and the rest pure fortress. The back section literally a vault on wheels. Impenetrable.

It was a van built to be shot at, bombed and attacked. Built to keep its cash guts from spilling out, at any cost.

It was also the only reliable thing in the circumstances – a vehicle I could use to smash and grind and rip my way through fences, over the spikes and razor wire, and into houses. That the van took diesel was painful, but the pain was offset by its smash-anything ability, and by the fact that no thumb was required to start it.

Also, it had a CD player – an ancient front-end loader that looked too dusty and scratched to ever work, but which actually did. An extreme, and welcome, cultural oddity. There were a few old Maskandi disks in the glovebox, a Zwakhe Mbuli, a Brenda greatest hits and an original copy of Vinny Da Vinci’s Africanism .

My grandfather Barnaby Fotheringham had been pathological about miscalculating the N1 slipway out of Joburg. I remembered him freaking out on one of our rare family holidays, as my father drifted left, flirting with Soweto.