Dub Steps (6 page)

‘Anyway, in the dream I was sitting in a wooden chair. I remember the chair especially well, ’cause it felt out of context. Wrong. Then this face appears. Oprah. Not old Oprah. Young Oprah. Her voice was really warm. Gentle. Like it actually took hold of me a bit, like in my stomach – it gripped me. Anyway, ah fuck, I should just say it. She told me it was up to me now. That the key was love, not hate. That there are reasons for everything. Even the smallest things. Like a bird sitting in the tree. He’s there for a reason. She
told me that, and not to panic. That I need to think of the family and grow it. Shit, it sounds stupid now, but it was so real, so vivid. When I woke up in the morning, I took ages to get out of bed, just remembering it. The texture of it. Her words. How warm she was.’

‘And when you got up?’

‘Gone. Everything. Everybody.’

‘People, and pets,’ I said. ‘And livestock. I’ve seen a few dogs around, a couple free pigs, a wild cow, but other than that, nothing. Farms are empty. And it must have been at night, ’cause everything is locked up at night. Like the car park at the beach.’

‘I know.’ Babalwa looked up at Jesus, back at me, then Jesus again. ‘The dream, Roy, it was too much. Too real. It must have been something else. It must have been …’

I left the church.

Jesus was freaking me out.

I strolled back over to the pyramid and lighthouse; odd, incongruous structures. The pyramid especially, with a neat bench attached to the front of its skirt, welcoming sea-view visitors. I found a plaque on the reverse side, which read:

To the memory of one of the most perfect of human beings who has given her name to the Town below.

I sat on Elizabeth’s bench and stared out, over the skatepark and educational graffiti walls, at the sea.

I tried to woo her.

In writing it sounds different – teenage and constructed. But at the time it was real, the attempt wrapped around the weird fact of the two of us. Around the days we spent together, or near each other, circling from a middle distance. So call it love. Call it what you will, at the time and in those moments there was a pull towards her.

Why would I resist?

And what is to ‘woo’, anyway? It, the word, has all the hallmarks of a plan, a trap. But really it was the typical flutterings of a human heart. I saw her see me, and in the process I began to see myself, feel myself, become aware again of my feet on the ground; my grey, flying hair.

Or, put another way, my chest began to swell. So I pushed it forward. One does these things. One doesn’t always know why.

Often, one turns to jazz.

I had this idea. A vision, really. A dream.

Babalwa’s in the kitchen, stirring something light and non-taxing. She’s wearing a summer dress. It’s blue and a little bit yellow and every now and again it puffs out with the wind and you know there’s another form in there, a presence, waiting. Me, also in the kitchen, chopping and guiding, the master planner. Bill Evans or Moses Molelekwa is playing and there is wine in our glasses – metaphorically in my case (I’m sipping Appletiser maybe; regardless, the bubbles dance like champagne). The sun is thinking of setting, there’s that rich orange lightness in the air. She’s a little tipsy, but only a little (OK, maybe I’ve smoked the tiniest bit of something, just for mood’s sake). The air is rich with the smell of onions frying. It’s that smell as they hit the pan, the fizz and that first rush of it, then of the garlic and the simmer. The piano carries
us and she looks over, just a functional glance really, maybe she’s checking where the pepper is, and she catches a sideways slip of me and she smiles, instinctively.

And pause.

The generator – an old red thing requiring bicep force and much gas – delivered power, but proved surprisingly hopeless at charging the battery for longer than ten minutes.

The jazz, therefore, was tricky.

I initiated searches for inverters and other, better batteries, but we had, between us, a fool’s understanding of what we were doing, and why we were doing it. And the hard fact is that jazz doesn’t matter that much.

Still, there was a piano tinkling in my heart that evening. And the sun was actually right, just on the golden side of going down. She was in the kitchen, stirring something. I was alongside, chopping, and it felt, for a few moments, like
it
.

A little later, my heart still quietly whistling, she screamed from the back porch. ‘The water! Roy, the water!’

I dropped my wooden spoon into the garlic and onions and bolted, to find her, jaw chattering, eyes hysterical, pointing at the water tank, the receptacle for her strange and amateurish – yet effective – network of roof rainwater pipes. She was pointing at a crack, seeping and leaking, stretching before our eyes.

‘What do we do?’ She turned to me.

‘Pray.’

In the minute of our watching the crack raced across the plastic tank, which then exploded over us.

I took her hand as we stood there helpless, drenched.

She took it back.

Inside, the onions and the garlic had turned to a heap of hot black mush, billowing fire and smoke. Babalwa grabbed the pan, ran out
front and threw it all, everything, down the hill. It skipped a few yards and landed in a pile outside my front door. She turned and marched past my helpless presence, muttering something about useless and men.

As the sun set we sat in candle darkness, each with our own can of beans, each with our own thoughts and ideas about time and space and water and onions and garlic. She apologised, of course. It was no one’s fault, nothing to do with me per se, just frustration, and I accepted, of course, but we both knew that real men don’t say pray.

We scooped the beans, the hopeless beans, and said goodnight.

Later that night Babalwa vomited on my front door. She knocked and vomited and ran back. I followed slowly, grudgingly, then held her hand and her head while she spewed those bad beans back into a bucket, and then another, and then another. All of which I intended to wash, but eventually just kicked down the hill to join our other failures.

‘Roy,’ she called weakly from the shithouse, where her other end balanced over another bucket. ‘We need a plan.’

We settled after that. Each in our semi-detached flat, we coexisted gently for days, then weeks, then months. Water. Power. Food. Water. Power. Food. It was, ultimately, a simple equation.

Babalwa’s rain-catchment system was restored, rickety and yet ultimately effective. Trouble was, it didn’t rain too much, so every second morning I would drive around the suburbs and fill two twenty-litre barrels from the swimming pools.

I didn’t talk too much about the dream or her telling of it, and neither did she. We talked, instead, about our old lives. And then, the mirror image, our new life. The plan.

The grass on the reserve grew thicker, inching skywards in a knotted mat. I suggested trying to cut it, but Babalwa scoffed. ‘What,’ she asked snidely, ‘you’re gonna mow this hundred-square-metre lawn every week? Why?’

She was compelled by Joburg, by the VR clubs and naps, by the music scene and the graf rebels. In her mind they were all rolled up into a single metropolis where big things happened. She would pick at me with questions, one after the next, the links between each query leading me on to greater descriptive heights. I tried explaining that I had never even seen a graf rebel and that their lives were hard as stones – they were arrested and beaten, their nails were pulled, their balls shocked.

‘To do what they do … to repaint and rebroadcast, eish. It’s heavy. No glamour.’ She looked at me blankly, expectant, as I explained. ‘People like me never even got close. I wrote ads for those walls.’ She deflated, but recalibrated quickly. Kept me going for hours with demands for stories about the clubs. The naps. What is it like, VR sex? Better or worse or completely different? What kind of people? Where did they all end up, the ones in the early scene? Were they literally orgies? How many people did you fuck at one time? Just one nap for the whole night or did you have to log out, change it, then log in again?

I answered as honestly as I could, and realised in the process how detached I had been from the whole thing. To me it just seemed a bit silly. Pretentious. Messy. The dumb stuff ad people do because they need to feel rough, alive, edgy.

But to Babalwa, down in PE, it was the revolution. The very same revolution as the service delivery protests and the graf rebellion. As the global youth.

I did my best to set her straight.

The plan – Babalwa’s plan, really – started with power.

We collected portable solar panels, inverters and batteries. The idea was to build something akin to a home grid, a power source able to do more than boil the kettle or light a bulb.

The bean incident was a reminder that our raider-gatherer lifestyle had a limited time frame, and would have to morph into food production. A life of chickens (presuming we could catch the wild ones) and crops – plucking and hoeing and growing. Soil and harvest.

‘That means,’ said Babalwa, ‘there’s no way we can stay here. It’s all sand. We’ll never grow anything.’

Day to day, I foraged and raided. I drove ceaselessly, peering into the cracks and corners of Port Elizabeth from my obscene, crushed and dented armoured van, flipping ceaselessly through an always evolving stack of raided CDs and sticks and players. Even with all the musical foraging, I spent most of the time in my father’s dance space – not Schulz, but the old boys. The ones who had got him started.

Digweed, Tenaglia, Fatboy Slim,
Africanism
, Fresh House Flava et al.

Babalwa developed her own orbit. We inched into a mutual ritual that accommodated our disparate paths, our innate need for human contact and our permanent state of metaphysical terror. Seldom, if ever, did we join forces. The raiding was private – each person’s way of communicating internally, of addressing the context and the place and the situation.

I dissolved, for the second time and through calculated effort, my pissing habit, displacing it with an expanding collection of teenage girls’ photo albums, iPods and mobiles. I picked them carefully, cultivating an archetype to which I attached my lusts and dreams.

The girl – my girl – was between fifteen and eighteen years old. She wasn’t a rebel, but she wasn’t a nerd either. She was that quiet girl, still to be properly unveiled, especially to herself. She sat in the middle of the class and her mind drifted as much as it paid attention to geometry, biology and equations. She felt stirrings in her heart and her loins when she thought of him, but she was only just becoming aware of how to deal with them practically, firstly, and with him, secondly. Her underwear was, of course, crisp white. She listened to alternative indie-style sounds. The Canadian scene, but with old-fashioned hip hop and newer broken beats thrown in. She was conversant in local music – she knew her deep house from her kwaito from her trashy Eurobeats.

She read a lot of books. Any book really. Pulp fiction. Poetry. History. She was open. She was waiting. Every now and again she
wrote poetry.

She had friends.

Boys.

Girls.

They gathered in groups. Hugged. Held hands. Smoked illicitly, around corners.

Took photos.

And I collected them. I snuck them, presuming Babalwa was ever looking, into my flat. Pored over them gently, some days. Pawed them on others. Pulled the printed pictures out, examined them, put them back. Thumbed my grubby way across screen after screen after screen.

‘Roy,’ she said. We were sitting on the pyramid bench, looking out over the skatepark and the memorials at the sea, our toes tickling in the knee-high grass. ‘Just look at this grass. And think about it. We are going to run out of cans. The roads are already growing over. It’s going to get harder and harder to move. The animals will keep coming. It will get more dangerous. Harder to find food and, if we don’t make a serious plan, harder to grow it, to hunt it. If we just stay here, if we don’t build, we’ll be swallowed up.’

She leaned forward on her arms, lifting her backside slightly off the bench, and rocked. I considered her profile and realised how well I now knew her features. Her always shaved head. The clouds that hovered in her eyes. Her boyish body. Her ridiculously conservative clothes. Shorts, T-shirt, sandals. The incongruity of her. Of the two of us. I looked back out to the sea, all flat and benign.

‘Where do we live? Why? How do we live? Why? What do we do about power?’ she asked in a rush. ‘I mean, electricity – it must be possible to get much more than we have with the portable panels. We can’t just pile them up, we need to make them work. How do we farm? ’Cause we know nothing about farming, do we? Do we become hunters? Where, why and how? All of it, Roy. We can’t wait any more.

‘We can’t just collect portables and pretend it will be OK, that
someone will sail in off that fucking sea and rescue us.’

‘Power,’ I said. ‘We have tools. If we have the power to use them, we can build. We need power.’

We would become farmers, in one sense or another, but most probably in the sense I dreaded. Actual farming. Planting and reaping. Harvesting and watering. Tilling.

‘But Roy’ – she was earnest, pleading almost – ‘you need to think more widely … of why we would be farming. If we set it up right, if we get the tools we need and sort out the power, we can be pretty efficient, and the power wouldn’t only feed us, it would free us. Regular hot water. We could fry a steak—’

‘Who would kill the cow? You? Butcher it? Turn it into steak?’

‘OK, sho. Bad example. But you ken mos. You can’t think of it as farming. Think of living some kind of life in this place, in this situation.’

Babalwa insisted our current home wasn’t it. That the life we were destined for couldn’t possibly take root on the bare patch of scrub that was the Donkin Reserve. ‘Come!’ She dragged me by the arm and pulled me down onto my knees, then started clawing her fingers into the earth. ‘It’s fucking beach sand with a layer of evil, hard grass on top, Roy. Nothing can grow here. Nothing.’

‘We need to think of more than simple farming,’ I said, my fingers mirroring hers, pulling clumps of sandy earth up and letting it all spill back down again. ‘There are only two of us. If we want to get this right and not spend every waking hour until we die with a fucking hoe in our hands, then we need something better than a farm. We need more control. Greenhouses. Plant food, fertiliser and those artificial steroids. We need layers and layers of great soil and fresh compost and all that shit.’

‘What, like, import a nursery?’

‘Sho. We just load the shit up in a truck, and if we don’t have enough we get more from somewhere else and we keep going until we’ve got an artificial environment that meets our needs. We need control. And we can have it here – if we just look to control this
patch of land. Look.’ I stood up and pointed to the four corners of the reserve dramatically, like a settler. ‘We’ve got about, what, eight hundred square metres here to control. With the right tools – one of those lawnmowers you can drive and a set of greenhouses – we can control that pretty easily. Beyond the square, there’s not a lot to worry about in terms of vegetation.