Эндрю Миллер (ЮАР) - Dub Steps

‘So…’ She leaned back further, posing a little. ‘Would you like to step into my parlour?’ She waved behind her, at the row of semi-detached houses. Whitewashed with green-and-black trim and red-and-white stoeps, the units started at the top of a savagely steep incline and rocketed half the way down to the city streets. She gave me the tour.

‘Since I was a little girl I always wanted to live here, in this house, with the view and everything. Long before the dealers took over again,’ she said as we opened and shut doors. ‘When it happened I thought, why not? I’m the only person left, I can just take one. So I did. The one I always looked at when I was a girl. Took me a few weeks to clean the fungus out but… time’s not an issue, eh?’

We stood in the neat pine-and-white kitchen, considering each other in the afternoon light.

I had driven into PE spurred by a new, Reitz-inspired understanding of the place. By a sudden desire for adventure; movement and action and all those things.

I came into the city via the modest highway leading in from the northern beaches. At what looked like the beginning of the docks, at the big red watchtower, I caught site of a very large flagpole at the top of a hill. I turned right, on instinct, then right again. At the base of the hill was a spiralling, climbing path, surrounded by mosaic art and the placards and historical-info signage of a public space. Above the path, up the hill, was the flagpole, surrounded by low walls and more education props. The pole and its walls fronted a squat pyramid and a lighthouse. They crowned the hill, and were surrounded by the bright colours and graffiti scaffoldings of a community skatepark.

I skirted the lower perimeter, then turned left up the hill, and up at the top was a living, breathing female.

Simple as that.

Babalwa pulled a chair from under the kitchen table and shoved it in my direction.

‘Tea? Coffee?’ she asked.

‘Jesus. Really? Yes. Uh, tea. Tea would be fantastic.’

She opened a cupboard door and extracted a silver camping kettle. ‘Water stopped ages ago,’ she said, taking the kettle out the tiny back door onto the small metre-square back stoep, where a gas cooker and water tank lay waiting.

‘Nice set-up. Take you long?’ I leaned back in my chair to get my head around the door.

‘Food?’ Babalwa ignored my question.

‘Nah. I’m full of shit already. Been eating Engen 1-Stop all day.’

‘Ah.’ She walked back into the kitchen, pulled her chair out and sat down. Then she reached a formal, bony young hand out to me. ‘OK, so, I’m Babalwa. And you are?’

‘Roy,’ I replied.

‘Roy…’ She tittered as we shook hands. ‘Great. Roy. Roooy.’ She stretched my name out between us. ‘I have definitely never met a Roy before. And where does Roy come from?’

‘Joburg.’

‘Damn. And you drove all the way down here—’

‘Well, kinda. I mean, really I’ve just been driving, you know. Looking. For something. For somebody.’

‘And now you’re found her.’

‘I guess.’

‘And what did Roy do before all this?’ Babalwa waved at the world surrounding us.

‘Um, advertising. Writing ads. And then recently running one of the VR clubs. You know, with the glasses.’

‘Wow. Nice.’ Babalwa gushed a little, with no obvious sign of irony.

‘And you?’ I ventured. Our eyes had been skirting the periphery of contact since we came inside, avoiding the intimacy already forged. Now she looked at me directly, smiled vaguely, then adjusted and gazed past me, at the wall.

‘Nothing as fancy. Sorry.’ Her fingers toyed with a splinter of wood that had come loose from the tabletop. ‘Call-centre agent. “Ngqura Development Project, how may I assist you?”’ Babalwa stood to attend to the kettle. ‘You stink, by the way,’ she said on her way out to the stoep. ‘Either I’m going to have to move upwind or you’re gonna need to take a bath.’

‘Uh, sorry, I kind of left the lodge where I was on impulse. Didn’t think I would find anyone to offend.’ I was shy. Suddenly claustrophobic. I considered bolting back to the van and hitting the road again, then swallowed the reflex. ‘So, do you know what the fuck happened?’ I asked.

Babalwa came through the back door with two steaming mugs of tea. Mine read ‘World’s Best Dad’, the words held aloft by an overly round brown bear of the generic Paddington/Pooh variety. Hers bore the word ‘Love’ in a large font, surrounded by a forest of red hearts in receding sizes.

‘Later, Roy, let’s talk about it later. But no, I don’t know what the fuck happened.’ She sat down behind her mug, voice shaky. ‘I woke up and I was alone. That’s it.’ She blinked the beginnings of a tear out of her left eye. ‘But we’ve got plenty of time. Tell me something fascinating. Tell me about Jozi. I’ve never been. They say it’s got everything.’

And so we sat at Babalwa’s pine kitchen table and talked about nothing. About Joburg and PE and work and advertising and call centres and lovers and salaries and mothers and jealous aunts – our stories overlapping hopelessly, both of us embellishing to ensure we travelled as far away as possible, for as long as possible.

Babalwa Busuku was born and raised in PE, on the southern edge of the New Brighton township, into the same compressed poverty as everyone else. Her mother was a maid/manager at a B&B on the beachfront, her father a shop steward at the Volkswagen plant. Her grandmother worked as a maid for the headmistress of Erica Girls Primary School. ‘I got to go to Erica for primary, hence the accent, the coconut vibe and the call-centre gig,’ she offered sarcastically. ‘Of course, Gogo got too old to clean just before I hit high school and the head lady moved to Cape Town so back I went – ekasi.’

The call centre was her third job after school, her university applications terminated by money. And the rest, as she told it, was typical. Too many responsibilities, not enough money. So many dreams, not enough hours in the day to add them up.

She was sparing, letting each sentence out carefully, but the words flew free once released. I thought suddenly of Angie and her verbal violence, the way her words attacked a room, any room. I thought also of the agency people, the theatricality with which they delivered the simplest sentences.

Humility, I thought. Maybe that was all it was. Nonetheless, it made her pretty. Her face shone from the inside, a glimmer rising from below the surface. The fuck against the grill rushed sneakily across the my brain, the urgency of her fingers on the elastic of my boxer shorts.

She stopped.

‘You can’t keep looking at me like that, please. You’re scaring me.’

‘Jesus.’ I jumped a little in my chair. ‘Fuck. Sorry. I can imagine. You’ve got a strange-smelling gorilla in your kitchen giving you the eye. Sorry. Sorry sorry sorry. Listen, should we get out of here? What’s the friendly city of PE got to offer?’

She deflated at my apology and I realised just how wound up she had been. ‘Um, shit, I don’t know. I mean… we can do anything we want. Anything. That’s what’s so horrible.’ Tears flowed down her face. She held her hands in her lap, her gnawed fingers flipping the splinter of wood over and over.

‘Excellent!’ I said, a few of my own tears also making a break. ‘Goddam. You just don’t know how great it is to see someone else’s pain.’ I grabbed her hand and pulled her from the table. ‘Let’s go to the beach.’

We drove down to the beach in the van and I was suddenly very aware of the chaos that reigned inside my vehicle. The shotguns piled up in the back, the stench of sweat and lingering piss and petrol, the hosepipe curled like a snake, the scattered Simba packets and baked bean cans.