Dub Steps (4 page)

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.

‘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.

‘Seriously, Roy. When we get back I’m gonna run you a proper bath. For shiza. Then we need to clean this pit or trade it out for something else. It’s disgusting. You’ve let yourself go.’ Babalwa clipped her seat belt in and glared at me. ‘You stink. Sies.’

She directed us down to Kings Beach in embarrassed silence. Ours was the only car in the parking lot. ‘Only car here,’ I offered pointlessly.

‘Race you!’ Babalwa leaped from the cesspit and ran down the footpath to the beach, disappearing over a small dune. I ran after her to see her pulling her clothes off at the shoreline and jumping into the waves in underwear she must have snuck on at some stage.

The water was flat. Tiny waves rolled in and released themselves humbly onto the shoreline. The beach was about three-quarters of a kilometre wide, sandwiched between a small harbour wall, where the loading cranes hung limp in the evening breeze, and the entertainment zone, where the fast-food outlets sat waiting. After my swim I lay wet in the sand, watching Babalwa bodysurf. I thought of a hot bath while I pondered the girl in the waves,
already an inscrutable force in my life.

‘Look,’ she said, eventually flopping down on the sand next to me. ‘It’s too much. I’m gonna help you run a bath and then you and I are going to retire to our corners. May I suggest, before your bath, you find a mattress or something to sleep on. I need space. I haven’t spoken to a human being for over a month.’

She was gone when I woke on the minuscule lounge couch the next morning. There was a note on the kitchen table.

I made myself a cup on the tiny back stoep and eventually found the bread bin tucked away in the far corner of the kitchen, under a shelf with four mugs dangling off it. I carved two slices off the crumpled home-made loaf, which was surprisingly fresh, given its almost total lack of form. I opened the unplugged fridge in instinctive hope, looking for butter or some such. Inside there was simply a collection of durables. A blizzard of jams from Jenny’s Farm Stall, Bovril, Marmite and then spreads and spices. Oregano. Mixed herbs. Woolworths spicy dessert crumble. An open carton of long-life milk. I considered the Bovril, decided against it, and went out onto the front porch to eat my dry bread and drink my tea.

The morning cast a benevolent light. I could see why Babalwa the child had fallen so heavily for this particular cottage. The sheer drop down into the city on the left created a panoramic view of the bay, a view of the world really. The blue world. The sea air was fresh and clean, light ripples of wind creating a salty texture
on the tongue. Directly across from the porch was the Donkin Reserve, a chunk of lawn, maybe a hundred square metres, with a large triangular monument and what looked like a small white lighthouse perched off to the right.

I sat on a small, rickety fold-out chair on the porch – a chair I was pretty sure wasn’t there the day before. Had she put it out for me?

The bread was good, peppered with herbs and fresh spices. I sipped the tea and wished that long-life milk tasted less like a school camping trip.

The reserve lawn was scrappy, scattered palm trees holding their form against thick, rising clusters of harsh Eastern Cape grass. Soon, I thought, the grass would win.

Babalwa’s head appeared to the left, rising quickly up the slope.

‘You found the bread. Good.’

‘Ja, morning, thanks.’ I raised my tea mug in mock salute.

She was wearing white shorts, a white Castle Lager T-shirt and slip-slops. She leaned carefully against the white picket fence.

‘Look, sorry, I’ve been thinking and there are a few things I need to clear up.’ Her eyes were fiery.

‘Sure. Shoot.’

‘First, what happened yesterday.’

‘What, on the van?’

‘Yes, that.’ Her eyebrows arched. ‘What you—’

‘Ay, no, you mean what we—’

‘Oh fuck, it doesn’t matter. It’s fine. The situation and everything. All I’m saying is, it won’t happen again. Please. Just stay away from me physically. Try not to touch me. I mean, not touching, eish, not that kind of touching. You know what I mean. Yes?’

‘Well, fuck. I mean, Jesus. It takes two to—’

‘Oh please. It takes one. It takes you.’

‘OK. OK.’ I fell into the furthest corner of my chair and raised defensive palms. ‘I stay away. Totally away.’

‘Thanks.’ Babalwa folded her arms, looking ludicrously serious in her cricket clothes. ‘The other thing is, I would appreciate it if you moved in next door. Made a place of your own and all that. I
would … I would just feel easier. You know?’