Эндрю Миллер (ЮАР) - Dub Steps

The van erupted in a cloud of green. As did my lungs. The coal fell straight off, into my lap, and I exploded out the door. Four more failed attempts later, I realised I was stoned. I turned the CD player off.

Silence.

Stale heat in my mouth.

I sat in the middle of the highway, the wet white lines dividing my ass cheeks.

I got straight up again. The wet tar was boiling.

Back in the driver’s seat, tears of ass pain prickled behind my eyes. I drove, excruciatingly slowly at first, south. I hit play on the CD and felt better located, as if I was suddenly in place. The right place.

I bopped to my father’s demo for a while, then stopped it and let the whistle of the wind through the gaps in the van’s bodywork take over. I forced my arm through the slit of a driver’s window and hung it out while the van weaved back and forth across all four lanes. I tried to stick my head out of the window like a dog. It wouldn’t fit.

Off the highway, to Parys.

Green and white coffee shops, waiting. Landscapes and wildlife art on the walls, waiting.

I pulled into a rest stop at the bottom of the town, overlooking the Vaal River. I scaled the old sagging fence, pulled off my clothes and jumped in.

I swam to the middle of the river and lay naked on an expansive black rock, unfolding my whiteness and asking the early afternoon sun to sear it while my mind rumbled on and on and on.

With the sun baking my hake-white body, the faces and the beats and the spikes and the colours bubbled over my mind’s eye, the sound of the river and the power of the weed winding it all tighter and tighter until I opened my eyes and let the relief wash over me. Somehow, in the midst of the mess, right smack in the centre of it, I appeared to have been set free.

Back at the van, I put my glasses on again, checked one last time for a log-in screen, then threw them in the river.

Through to Kroonstad. Trucks falling against themselves, waiting.

The sign to Ficksburg. The idea that maybe a few old ravers like my father were still out there at Rustlers, eyes blazing.

I pulled in at the Engen 1-Stop on the Joburg side of Bloem, rejecting the Shell Russle was always loyal to, and rammed the van through the Quick Shop glass doors, running right through to the Wimpy at the back of the building.

I stomped to the toilet, which was clean and expectant, the attendant’s folded paper towel peppered with hopeful coppers. I pissed all over the sinks, and all over the floor. I walked the full length of the restroom, steering a spiralling yellow arc out in front of me, spraying the toilet doors and ending with the paper towel, pissing it and the coppers into a mess on the floor.

I zipped up and marched back to the van. En route I grabbed a few bags of crisps, some Jack’s popcorn and three warm Cokes from the rancid freezer. I held my nose tightly, denying the rotting braai packs. Outside, I sucked diesel with my hosepipe, a diabolical, exhaustive effort involving an hour-long search for a set of keys able to unlock the underground storage tank.

And so I went. Trying to stay left, swerving always around the stranded vehicles, crying occasionally, thinking of my father and my youth and the life I had abandoned before it abandoned me. I stopped where I felt the need, the urge, and I destroyed as much as I could en route, battering the van into houses, resorts and hotels, bursting randomly into lounges and kitchens. I pissed on floors. I shat an increasingly fluid stool onto dining room tables and the beds of sweet teenage girls.

I spat a lot. The diesel was permanently slick over my tongue. I drank warm Coke and fruit juice and bottled water and I spat.

I burned a twisted trail. Colesberg. Graaff Reinet. Beaufort West. Oudtshoorn. George. Mossel Bay. De Rust. Jansenville. Somerset East. Kenton-on-Sea. Bathurst. De Doorns. Butterworth. Elliot. Barkly East. Kokstad. Pietermaritzburg. Cape Town.

I abandoned the stockpiling as I finished my supplies. All I really needed was the hosepipe for diesel. The rest was on tap. Bags of crisps, boxes of biscuits, cans of beans, etc.

I lurched from house to hotel to garage driven only by an evolving desire to shit and piss on all signs of life.

I ripped the houses apart, developing an addiction to the nuances of the South African suburb in the process. The placement of the kitchen, the type of duvets used, the clothes and underwear and school projects and mobiles and glasses and lipstick. Each was the same, yet ever so slightly geared to its owners. I was fascinated. I took mental notes as to structure and design and composition before I kicked it all apart.

Why was I destroying? What led me to shit on the pages of family photo albums? Even now, all these years later, I can’t answer.

Suffice to say I was surviving.

Every now and then I would run across a pack of wild dogs or a cluster of free pigs. The dogs would watch me from a distance, tongues lolling as they considered the anomaly. The pigs, secure in their size and their hunger and their extended frontal cortex, simply foraged. Once I saw a lone cow, suddenly wild, static on the horizon.

But the encounters were few and far between. Reality was empty.

Was it weeks?

Months?

I came to some kind of stop at the Blaauwbosch Game Lodge and Rest Camp, perched on the Baviaanskloof mountains of the Eastern Cape. I swam in the resort’s ice-cold pool for days and lay in the sun, letting my skin roast an even dark brown.

I bullied the van through the resort’s kitchen wall and, defying the rotten meat and pools of blood on the floor, used the well-stocked larder to cook real vegetarian food on the gas cooker. I drank expensive fizzy drinks and watched the sun set and rise and set and rise and set and rise.

I smoked all Eileen’s weed. I muttered and walked. Prowled, resisting the urge to defecate and piss, forcing myself to use a toilet again, dreaming each day that I was working to some kind of plan and that, ultimately, I would emerge better for it.

I started reading: through the Wilbur Smiths and all the other resort pulp and then more widely, into the dusty colonial history, ending, finally, with a tatty, broken copy of Deneys Reitz’s Commando . I remember sitting perched on the low front wall of my suite’s private patio overlooking the Klein Karoo, following Reitz and his Boers in my mind as they ran up and through the country in search of a battle they could win. Eventually they ended up at the foot of the Zuurberg, not fifty kilometres from Port Elizabeth and, I calculated roughly, not far at all from where I sat reading. They considered how far they had come, straight through the British lines, to a point where they were looking down on the sea, the literal edge of things. They could hardly attack the city, but as the British moved around them they thought seriously of it.

I closed the book.

I needed a war.

I needed an enemy.

I needed to fight.

I ran at her. We hugged furiously, wildly. Even when she felt my erection she didn’t pull away. She clung, instead, to this last thread.

We fucked immediately, our hands finding each other with a deeper desperation than the need for names or stories. Against the black grill of the armoured van. She yelped at the heat. I rammed it home like a wild animal. She responded in kind.

Her name was Babalwa.

‘It means “Blessed”,’ she said, filling the space as we pushed away from each other. ‘I was the second. And the last.’

I looked over my shoulder, wondering suddenly if we were alone.

‘There’s no one else,’ Babalwa said. ‘Just us.’ She leaned against the grill, her brown skirt pulled back down to above her knees. She looked in her early twenties. Thin. Head closely shaved. Neutral brown T-shirt to go with the skirt. Gentle acne bumps across her skin. A girl in a young boy’s body, her small breasts and big, rounded eyes accentuated by the shaved head.