Dub Steps

^{CHAPTER 1} Failure and I considered each other

I looked into the bathroom mirror and ground my knuckles into the sink.

A face too pockmarked.

Skin: puffy. Eye sockets: grey, pushed in too far. I shoved a thumb into the half-moon beneath the left eye and the white indentation stayed.

Failure and I considered each other, Angie’s cackle rising and falling and rising again from the dining room. I ratcheted my knuckles further. Then I punched the mirror, smashed it.

I marched through the dining room as hostess Clarissa, followed by Angie, was clicking in my direction to assess exactly what the fuck.

I mumbled a thank you at Clarissa, then at the rest of the now standing guests, lastly at the seething form of my wife, whose keys I grabbed from the foyer table.

No one moved to follow.

I took Angie’s retro Mini Cooper, a vile black-and-cream thing, and aimed it right at the complex boom, as they did in those old movies. We came to an auto American halt inches from the red-and-white pole. The guard hit the button from his booth. I slammed the heel of my palm against the steering wheel and let the blood splatter across the cream leather.

I drove to Eileen’s Rosebank apartment, parked the Mini deep under and went to sleep for two days.

^{CHAPTER 2} Drunk

The dinner party had been Angie’s attempt to get me straight with the Mlungu’s ownership. There were rumblings and rumours, talk, mutterings about Roy. The usual. As the business grew I was receding, and I was receding because I had been drinking for the greater part of twenty years.

There were pauses, but they were brief and inconsequential.

Once, I booked into rehab for two weeks.

Otherwise I was drunk.

The dinner had rolled along. We were all wit and astute, analytical asides. The boss boys, Rick and Mongezi, were calculatingly casual, keeping the talk light, shop. The VR legislation, the new drugs on the underground, and so on.

Mongezi, bless his humble little black ass, did his best to stay parallel to me. We had started together, and no matter how far away he grew, he was always loyal.

Which was no easy thing. The bottle tipped and I tipped the bottle and it was too fast, of course it was too fast, the anxiety simmering already, less than an hour in. I was talking too much – I should never talk – and I was messing.

Red wine in all the wrong places.

^{CHAPTER 3} The ultimate farce

I only met my mother a few times and my father – despite his many talents and attempts to be something else – was ultimately a useless fucker.

We lived in Greymont, on the cusp of Triomf, a shattered, angry suburb still trying to become Sophiatown again after all these years. She lived on the Westcliff hills, locked into the glimmering heights by her father. Punished.

Their story was the ultimate farce, and I the farcical result.

My father was at the height of a failed international cricket career, and my mother was in London on one of those white South African working trips. She was beautiful. Trim and fit and a dancer, part-time, but good enough at waggling around to be asked to appear on the boundary at one of the night games, where her form caught his eye and… it’s obvious and predictable. They came together full of pills in a club somewhere on the fringes of the West End, he a minor celebrity, she very star-struck. They fell into each other, fingers and blushes, sweaty palms and neck massages, and nine months later I came carelessly into existence.

My most vivid maternal memory is her arriving one evening when I was around five years old. I remember her hand and its foreign dimensions. The length of her fingers. Their restlessness. She had mousy brown hair and nervous eyes. Oh, and she was wearing brown slip-ons. I remember that.

She thrust a present at me. I opened the rectangular gift, pulling red ribbon off patterned brown-and-gold paper. I peeled the expensive sticky tape easily off either side and unfolded the paper to reveal a royal blue box. Inside the box was an overwhelmingly classy pen. Silver, very understated, thin, heavy.

An adult’s pen.

She crouched next to me and brushed my cheek with long, anxious fingers. ‘It’s in case you need to think out loud,’ she said. I was busy assessing the gift, clicking the push button in and out, captured by the smoothness of the internal latch, still searching for the right reply, when he kicked her out.

‘We gotta go.’ Russle Fotheringham stomped into the lounge, bakkie keys in hand. ‘I’m late. Next time, yes?’ She left the lounge quickly, half looking back. Russle and I drove to the bottle store, then back home again.

^{CHAPTER 4} Genital nappies

Even in Jozi – thousands of miles from the celebrity moon shots, from Silicon Valley and the baked bean teleportation parties – there was a belief that we were shifting it.

Life.

Change was the thrill as I left university and entered advertising school. Mankind was, so the story went, finally crossing the threshold into a truly functional existence. If we chose the right combinations we could augment and magnify and enhance forever. The pavement, the sky, the air pushing quietly in and out of our snouts.

Our first copywriting module of the year was delivered by a thirty-something man in wire frames, stubble and a Steve Jobs buzz cut.

The class was twenty deep, all Model C kids with family backing (such as myself – my mother was absent, but her father funded any educational desire) or corporate sponsorship. Mr Jobs peered down on us.

‘I believe in change,’ he said, deathly career-serious. ‘Not that it is often very likely, in a deep, fundamental sense, but rather that it is our true hope as a species. The desire to change is all we have.’

I waded through the hype with as little focus as I had applied to everything else. I drank. I went to clubs. I tried to date girls, and failed, because I drank.

Still, I put my glasses on and marched out to the street with the rest of class as the wise Jobs added colour to the walls. As he raised the elevation of a passing pair of middle-aged breasts. Copywriting, he told us as we walked, was dead. Yes, there would be a requirement for a certain volume of text, but our professional lives would be defined less by our words than by our ability to manipulate the paradigm of experience.

Which sounded fine to me. To all of us, thumbs hovering, eyes rushing. We were the pioneers. Eventually, we would pass the gifts on. To our parents. To schoolkids in Uganda. To the mamas in the rurals.

The year passed, a thin layer of communication verbiage fell over my equally thin arts degree and I stepped into ‘the agency’. HHN – Huber Huber & Ndimande – a sixty-person set-up with offices in Hyde Park and an array of young, fiery-eyed executives leading the charge.

Looking back on my first days at the agency, I perceive Mongezi as a friend. He now possesses, via the warmth of an old man’s imagination and despite everything to come, a benign and accommodating place in my idea of my story. I see him clearly: a tall, thoughtful young man, prone to empathy.

Before we got into serious business, we were chat partners on the agency balcony. During work hours the rotation of smokers and gossipers and chatterers was ceaseless. But after hours I would inhale tobacco, he would drag on his blunt and together we’d pick the world apart.

In my hood, Mongezi said, there is nothing. At home people fetch water in buckets and walk kilometres carrying it. No one is networked or connected or app-enabled. If we had the net, or credit cards, the goods would still never arrive. There are no deliveries.

I admired him. He had all the southern African tongues, including media and technology. He travelled regularly north, and east, into the landscape that for most of us was just backdrop. Mongezi was aware of the distance between his chosen profession and his philosophical heart. He was not out to save the world, but he knew it needed saving.

In our business that was no small thing.

I remember a time. An episode. On the balcony, leaning on the rail, watching over the unfurling minutiae of the post-rush-hour parking lot.

‘I was thinking last night,’ he said, releasing a long dribble of spit down onto a Mercedes. ‘Labour will not be required. It’s redundant. Human muscle has peaked.’

‘We rocket past the sun in technicolour glory.’

‘Sho. Of course. But I’ve always thought of it in terms of labour. Elites up in space. Chunks of meat down here, harvesting food. Screwing the lids on Coke bottles.’

‘Which are sent up daily, in fleets, unpacked at the Virgin docking station.’

‘Sho. But maybe not. Maybe they won’t need us. My mother, in Limpopo. Not required. My gogo. Aunts. They’ll grow their shit in space. Automagically generating food. Livers. Feet. Rice Krispies.’

‘Who? The rich?’

‘They won’t need us. We won’t need them. My grandmother can grow her sweet potatoes in peace.’

‘We say fuck off!’ I shouted to the dusk.

Mongezi flicked his roach over. We watched it fall, hoping to see it stick in the spit on the Merc’s window.

The door to the balcony swung open. A middle-aged traffic lady from Venda scolded Mongezi in vernac, then slammed it shut.

Most of our time together was on that balcony, and it was usually much less philosophical. We smoked and developed, in spiralling increments, our current obsession: our premise for a truly South African slasher flick.

Housewife in car, somewhere in Bryanston. Sandwiched behind the driver’s seat is her hedge cutter, which she is driving back from the repair man. She’s rich, but sensible too. She fixes the hedge cutter instead of replacing it, even though the rewards are negligible.

‘Three hundred bucks is three hundred bucks. It all matters.’

‘Even if a new hedge cutter would ultimately last longer than the broken one.’

‘Even if.’

A street thug passes her at the traffic light, can’t spot a device worth anything, decides to drift by, but at the last second spots the cutter and smashes the back-seat window with the spark plug gripped between his knuckles, the glass spraying all over the baby in the booster seat. He grabs the cutter, which, conveniently enough, is petrol powered, and rips it to life.

The thug has issues. He feels a need to express them. He runs the cutter through a newspaper seller, then lops off the head of a young biker guy on a 50cc. In the midst of the ensuing ruckus he slips away, marches casually to the Bryanston Spar, cutter in hand, looking like a reasonable enough man on his way to do reasonable things.

‘He blazes into the Spar at ankle height.’

‘Optimum height for chaos.’

‘Ankles and baby heads.’

‘The chocolate shelves.’

‘Mixed nuts everywhere.’

‘Screams. Blood. Mixed nuts.’

Before it was serious, before business fell accidentally onto us, it was that kind of thing. Our movie. Our lives. Wild ideas about all the things we were lucky enough to know very little about.

All the while, the media philosophy fell like steady coastal rain. The creative directors and division heads looked over us as they spoke, their eyes locked into the mythical middle distance, where they saw community. Always community. Placing the brand at the centre of a community. Facilitating community interactions. Creating genuine, tangible community value. Bringing the virtual to life within the community. Developing brand equity within the new paradigm of real-world augmentation and the limitless virtual possibilities for community interaction.

That sort of thing.

Juniors spent productive time managing social chat. Agency legend said it would take a small lifetime, most of the rest of one’s twenties, to gain the privilege of writing. Until we had the wisdom necessary to write, we were to interact with the public According To The Brand Guidelines Supplied.

I spent my first month tweeting for a dish-wash brand, posting pre-prepared competition content on Facebook and escalating all but the most basic interactions.

Social media was our training ground for immersive VR – the true front line. The technology was scratchy, the resolution pixelated, the interface prone to breaks, but the kiddies couldn’t get enough. The holograms – big-breasted Disney ladies wrapped in cat suits and motherly smiles – beckoned and cajoled at the mall entrance. Moms dumped their kids at the pen, glasses already on, and they sunk straight into it.

I eventually graduated to babysitter at a franchised mall holding pen for three- and four-year-olds, Barney’s. The interface was a simple fantasy forest. Castle at one end, playground at the other, rivers in between. The kids picked one of five available avatars and ran up and down from the castle to the jungle gym. Snow White took them all into her arms. Dwarves jumped and blew bubbles into the sky.

The children loved it. But they would have loved anything. The real traction was created by the parents, who spent the bulk of their own time at the mall blinking wildly into their glasses, reaching for virtual specials, chatting and sharing. When they came back to the Barney’s virtual spectator deck – always stuffed to overflowing – their eyes thrummed at the site of their progeny.

It wasn’t just the parents. We all thrilled. The suburbs reached and blinked and clicked and gawked. The holograms stood proud and fluid and sexy.

And then it changed.

They painted the bottom half of an under-maintenance cooling tower on the N4 to Mozambique and the Kruger Park. The video flashed from a hundred kilometres out, a crudely cut mash-up of squatter camps and mine workers going down the shaft. Gardeners in blue overalls walking dogs. Maids in pastel pink pushing prams, little white heads bobbing inside. Open Free State farmlands, rich with crops. Sandton parking lots, replete with luxury vehicles.

Democracy is digital

the text flashed. Then

Land was taken

…then

People will not be quiet

…then

Reparation | return | revolution

It took close to a full day for the cops to find the cellphone paired to the paint. It was buried in a bucket, underneath a mop, in the tower’s maintenance basement.

Meanwhile, the press flocked. The public too. Land Rovers – carrying British and French and German and Japanese game viewers – parked on the highway verge, and then at the petrol-station lots. The khaki tour guides unfolded camping chairs and proffered coffee flasks. They pointed to the tower and its message. Tourists dunked rusks and refocused binoculars. Initially the cops pushed them away, but the scope of the cooling-tower broadcast was so extensive anyone could park on any road – primary or secondary – and enjoy the view. Eventually the scuffles settled and everyone watched it play out, together.

They stayed long after the phone was turned off and the video stopped. They watched the paint being scraped away with wire brushes and solvent, hoses and solutions. The breathless reporters with swept-back hair, the tourists, the government officials, the cops. They all stayed.

Transmission paint was cheap. And simple. Lash the dirty brown onto any surface. Wait for it to dry. Enter pin. Pair. Broadcast.

Post-cooling-tower-show, transmission paint was sold out, restocked and sold out again. The rush was led by street protesters, red berets, political challengers. Behind them the rest: small-time advertisers, the floggers of products, remedies, solutions. The hawkers and preachers and tyre repairmen. If you had a wall you had a stage. If you had a phone you had a broadcast. All you needed was transmission paint.

Back in ad land, the geeks figured out what the paint could mean for the consumer and the brand experience.

Entertainment.

Communication.

Etc.

Paint innovation was mandated and costed and assessed. Strategists plotted. Clients caught their collective breath.

But nothing could match club land.

Club VR had been fine, fun, entertaining in the sense that the future was fuzzy yet tangible. But the interface was inherently fake. The VR clubs were, despite much effort, mall kiddie pens with booze and pills.

Now, painted clubs stitched geolocation to the network, creating an interface with actual, physical depth. Now, once the punters paid and stepped through, the walls fell away. They could be taken anywhere. No matter who you were or where you went, the experience suddenly felt seamless. Limitless.

After years of burrowing down inside ourselves, we poured out of our houses – big and small, brick and tin, flat and shack – into the basements and the warehouses.

To touch, to hold hands, to kiss… to blow it all up into hyper augmentation and exaggeration. To step inside, then out into the stars and the planets and the true mythical. Well, fuck. It was great.

Genital nappies – naps – became the accessories of my generation.

And yes, I explored as well. I slipped my nap on, zipped up my retro advertising pants, donned my wire frames, descended to the basements, paid my money and did what everyone else was doing.

It was a clear, assumed city agreement. Clubs and drugs and VR sex downstairs. Advertisers and government up top, controlling the veneer.[1]

Everyone else in the cracks.

‘There is appeal,’ said Mongezi at the time. ‘If they weren’t such monkeys with the avatars it could be wild, nè? But I felt a bit stupid at the end. You know, when you take that nap thing off and admit you were fucking the same shitty JPEG as everyone else.’

It was an offhand balcony conversation. A flippant comment. But it made both of us rich.

VR punters wanted fantasy. They wanted to fuck the woman or man of their dreams, and they wanted to look unbearably hot doing it.

Mogz’s idea was simple: punters should compose avatars, not select them. They should wield the freedom of the four critical categories (face, ass, chest and legs). They should morph and blur identities. They should be able to pull together any mix of face and ass and have the result feel and look and taste right. None of it was new, but his brilliance was the jacking of open-source image software to deliver the fractional file sizes that allowed thousands of users to interact seamlessly within the club network – sexually and otherwise.

I knew none of these things. I barely knew what image resolution was. Nonetheless, about a month after our conversation, two things happened.

(1) Rick Cohen, a university associate, stumbled into my table at a Rosebank coffee shop, drunk, depressed and bemoaning the fact that he was closing down his VR club – the punters were dribbling away… the fad was over.

(2) The following week Mongezi sent me a message:

We sold it to Rick, who rebranded his city VR club as Mlungu’s. He gave us fifteen per cent each.

Heels clicked through all night, down the concrete stairs, ominous rather than filthy, then into the reception area staffed by rippling Zimbabweans who patted them down, took their cash and pushed the trembling punters in.

Rick Cohen was a true businessman. He knew the underground hype would die, fast, and when it did he was already selling off virtual chunks of Mlungu’s to sponsors. The bar counter, the tabletops, the urinals, the waitress’s cleavage. He lured the brands with the promise of their own slice of the legend, virtual reality in perpetuity, blah blah.

Smarts aside, he was also connected. Within six weeks Mlungu’s had formal office space at HHN. As the ‘reputational head’ of a new division, I had the job of making sure Mlungu’s sponsors looked good.

‘Mlungu’s changes the VR game,’ the street-pole slugs said.[2]

The door to the top floor of media life swung open, but instead of walking over the threshold I stepped back.

‘What is it with you?’ Angie taunted. ‘When the suits arrive it’s like you’re back in nursery school.’

I changed corners many times. I logged in from the office, I logged in from home, I logged in at Mlungu’s itself, but I always ended up in essentially the same position, just off the bar, on the side, watching the same scene play out over and over again.

‘Are you actually drunk if you’ve been drinking at Mlungu’s all day?’ Rick asked quasi-seriously, more than once.

Being perpetually drunk was – in the context of Mlungu’s – almost the same as being sober. Regardless of location or orientation, getting high and fucking – the combination, the marriage of the two – was the point. The only point. The perpetual point. Without drugs, even the new-generation interface became generic, the avatars recognisable, the stitching on the seams of the interface a little too predictable.

Drugs and fucking. Fucking and drugs.

Thus, yes, I was permanently drunk, but I was also, within the jagged reality of the club, the sober-minded guiding hand.

^{CHAPTER 5} I leaned back casually

By the time I fled to Eileen’s flat, I had been running Mlungu’s for over ten years and Angie and I had parted ways in every respect except the sharing of a residential address. We lived in the same building but, as in a classic TV series of your choosing, we hardly saw each other. The evening at Clarissa’s had in fact been our first out together for months. I worked late, drank late, slept late, and she did the same, but according to a different sequence.

Eileen wasn’t an affair and her flat wasn’t our love nest. She was a sweet, plain, thin, twenty-three-year-old account manager with a wealthy, concerned daddy watching over her.

She gave me the spare keys to her flat in a rush. ‘My grandmother,’ she said, shoving them anxiously into my fist, ‘in Cape Town. She’s… she’s… not well. At all. Will you feed Mozart?’ She looked panicked, embarrassed. ‘Sorry. I don’t know who else to ask.’

No problem. ‘Dog or cat?’ I asked.

‘Oh!’ she barked with relief. ‘Cat. Very self-contained. Female. Sleeps most of the day. This is my address.’ She buzzed the details through. ‘Parking bay, alarm codes, instructions on how to feed her. Once a day – should be pretty easy. I’ll call as soon as I know what’s going on.’

‘Take your time.’ I leaned back casually, pretending I wasn’t already worried about fucking the whole thing up.

^{CHAPTER 6} I lit a cigarette and thought about my father

Lean. All in black. Daniel Craig beneath a half-smiling, ironic, clubby-cool exterior.

It was important to be clean and straight. Unflappable. They had to be able to recognise me. And they did.

They called my name.

Life passed like that. Me, avatar-black, striding in slow motion, ears primed, waiting for the call.

Years after he had stopped, become adult and all that, Mongezi pulled me aside. Skin bunched up around his eyes. He winced. It had looked like he was about to smile, as if the glory would flicker again. But he winced.

‘You haven’t had enough yet, Roy?’

‘I can’t do media management, Mogz. I just can’t do it.’

‘Sho. But clubs. You can’t do those either. Not for so long. You just can’t, my broe. It’s gonna kill you.’

‘Ah, but what a way to die!’

‘It’s a shitty way to die, Roy. Shitty.’

I had my reasons, then. I’m sure they made sense. Now I think maybe I just fell in love with a time. A place. An idea. For those first few years we thought we had the world in our hands. Planet earth. City of Joburg. We owned it all. We changed it on a whim. I met and married Angie in that place. Ceremony in Rosebank Church, reception at Mlungu’s. We hatched the dragon. We hung on as it flew. That it would fly was never a question. Not to me anyway. I would be firmly on its back as we crashed through the atmosphere. It never occurred to me that we were already done. That change had come. And gone.

Year after year, hype cycle after hype cycle, there was nothing new. The revolution stalled at paint broadcasts and geo-located VR. Technologies were turned into advertising. Messages were bought, broadcast, sold. Clubs stayed clubs. The drugs evolved. There were additions to the technology, incremental shifts, but that next quantum leap… well, it turned out to be a mirage. A myth, forming and swirling in the middle distance.

‘You got money, my ninja. Money. You can do anything. Why don’t you quit? I know Angie would love a change. Go overseas. France. The south of France. You could write a novel.’

‘And Angie could paint.’

‘Ja!’ Mongezi’s eyes lit, then faded, angry. ‘Fuck you. Stay cynical like that and life will punish you.’

‘Ag sorry, Mogz. Jammer. For real. It’s just that Angie and me… we struggle, nè? Even to be in the same room, if I’m honest, if she’s honest, she’ll tell you we struggle.’

‘Well, fucking get a divorce then, you fuck. Do something. Anything. You have to do something.’

‘I do do something. You people might need to accept that I am happy doing this.’

You people. Once it was us, all of us, together. We were powerful. Full. Stuffed. Then it was you people. I was the only one left, still at the bar, still zooming and refocusing. The rest were in meetings. Building houses. Having babies.

You people.

How did I get so angry? So lost? Where did that decade actually go?

Mongezi believed it was all my father. His death. My denial.

Roy, he would say. Roy, you can’t. You have to. You can’t. You must. Look. Look at it. At him. You can’t just. Please. Roy. Please. Please.

But I didn’t look. I would like to say it wasn’t possible. That there was a mess inside that was simply too much. But really I could have.

Still, I chose not to. I turned away. Fuck Russle. Fuck parents. Family. There was never anything for me in that place. I was different. Others might need to look back, down, into the past. Me, I was headed in one direction.

Forward.

And then they let go. Mongezi drifted away. Angie too. Rick. The rest.

Me? I remained in rotation, swirling in tight, personal little circles.

Eileen, and the others like her, were the final evidence of my decade of decline. After I had pissed on my friends, after the wife and I had spat at each other, green and angry, I was adopted by a succession of thin, anxiety-ridden young girls. Girls who liked cats and struggled with men and worked far too well. Organisers. Anxious little beings. Filers of documents. Placers of calls.

And really, it was right. For what was I other than feral? Wild. Hungry. Hunting for affection I would instantly reject.

Eileen’s flat eased my aches and awakened a sense of shame at my own shabby, juvenile existence. The place reeked of adherence to a life regime. From the well-used exercise bike to the bookshelf and its contents (Cormac McCarthy, Josie Blues, Mtutuzeli Matshoba, JG Ballard, Lesego Rampolokeng, Gabriel García Márquez, Vince Khumalo, Gore Vidal, Kagiso Nkuna, Zadie Smith, Zapiro, Calvin and Hobbes), the markers of structure and adult activity were everywhere.

Most attractive was sleeping in her bed, which I did shamelessly, making sure to ruffle the linen in the spare bedroom, where I was supposed to be. Her bed, full of the olfactory pleasures of the female nest, was my sanctuary. I wallowed in it.

I turned off my mobile and dropped naked into her soft, dark-pink bedding. I drained the red wine in my glass, poured another, drank that and went to sleep.

I dreamed of my father. He was chasing me. As usual.

With knives. Belt buckles. Broken bottles. He chased and I ran and it lasted for days, weeks, until eventually he stopped. Hands on knees. Panting. Staring at me. Exhausted. Tears in his eyes.

I woke up.

I sat in the lounge. I’d been out for a long time. I lit a cigarette and thought about my father.

He died when I was twenty, crashing into his coffin with a brain haemorrhage. He warranted a few column inches here and there, a mention on the news scroller, that kind of thing.

Towards the end, just before the haemorrhage, my father had fallen into fluffy trance. The last time I had visited him he was spinning Markus Schulz obsessively in the lounge, finger in the air, eyes half closed.

‘This,’ he said, pulling the cans behind his ears and looking at me seriously, ‘is actually very good stuff. People say it’s too simple and too happy, but I’m telling you, this is good music.’

I took the Senheissers from him and plonked them on. It was standard four-to-the-floor trance, a simple, never-ending bass underneath a litany of equally simple, rising candy synths. Beats for children, sports back-tracks and junkies. I put my finger in the air. ‘Someone pass me my lollipop.’

Russle Fotheringham took his headphones back.

He was all spindly legs and arms. A cigarette burned in the ashtray next to him. There was always one waiting, smoke curling. It was one of the marvels of my father, his ability to keep a smoke alive without ever really smoking it. He would grab it with long, accomplished fingers, toss the butt into his lips, give it the smallest nip possible and then lay it back in the groove.

This is the last image I have of him, the one burned into my brain: a tall, too-thin forty-year-old man in white shorts and a maroon vest, bobbing his head to candy trance, smoke rising from the ashtray, track listings scrawled in an uncontrolled hand on scraps of paper around his laptop.

I asked him how long he had been up. He intimated via a series of nods and eyebrow raises that it had been a long time. A looong time. We did our usual dance around my disapproval and that was that. He died the next day.

I walked through the house with cardboard boxes. The disks and the laptop and the playlists and associated DJ paraphernalia. I piled it all in, randomly lifting interesting items into an old cardboard primary school suitcase. The few boxes went into my boot, and then into my basement. Everything else to charity.

I rented the place to a succession of young families – people too busy creating their own memories to bother about mine.

So there I sat, naked in Eileen’s sweet lounge, sucking on a cigarette, taking in the realisation that by smashing Clarissa’s mirror I had probably destroyed the last career opportunity open to me in the country. Rick Cohen was a lot more than a club boss. Rick Cohen was a media mogul, an industry general. What he thought radiated out across our business in influential circles. The dinner could have been a reconciliation. It could have been an opportunity. The door had opened. The door had closed.

The sun was setting. My glasses sat ominously on the lounge table. A day and half out of contact was a lifetime. I decided to go all in and make it two. I went back to bed.

I turned on midway through the following day and waited for the messages.

Nothing.

I opened a new bottle and poured a big glass of red.

And another.

I called work.

No network.

I tried to log in and accept my fate, but there was nothing, not even an interface. Just the click of the lost Google API call. I dialled technical, but the call failed. There wasn’t a single bar on the reception tower.

I turned the TV on.

Static.

^{CHAPTER 7} The occasional bark of what must have been a dog

Dry brown walls, stripped of their broadcast. Their colour. Their purpose. Dirty brown walls. Simple. Sagging.

I remember them above everything.

First and foremost, the brown.

I stuck my head out the window of Eileen’s Tyrwhitt Mansions flat to see two free pigs – strange genetic cocktails, easily over 350 kilograms, big ears, straight snouts and that specifically curious air of anger and intelligence that belongs to the free pig – loping down the hill together, heads swivelling.

As they picked up speed a small street dog – a black and brown brak, compact and wiry, likely full of rabies – fell in behind them.

There was never any quiet in those first days. The air buzzed with the futility of a million abandoned alarm systems – cars, houses, offices – and their desperate, decaying batteries. As the door panels forgot the thumbprints of their owners, as the last of the power trickled out of the grid, the electric yells merged into a crescendo.

And always the brown. The crushing, dirty brown. It had been decades since I had seen a simple painted wall, a wall without movement, without a message. The brown was bad, of course, but it was the uniformity that was so hard to digest. It stretched forever. And the closer you looked, the more alarming it was. Decay. Cracking walls. Rivers of damp, creeping, swelling. Pipes falling off the walls, cable ties and piles of bundled wiring. Slumping angles, falling arches.

As my eyes adjusted to the new vista, they slowly accepted. No colours. No messages. No accents. No shading. Just brown, from sky to floor, top to bottom, wall to wall.

Brown.

I lost sight of the pigs. The incessant whine of the alarms, the recurring crescendos, shook me awake and forced me to consider. To think.

I ran into Tyrwhitt Avenue, then jerked right and ran uphill for another fifty metres.

No people.

No movement.

Just the alarms. Just the brown. And the occasional bark of what must have been a dog.

^{CHAPTER 8} Just one

My name is Roy Fotheringham.

I am a little over forty years old. I walk with a shuffle developed in my twenties to indicate some kind of street/club cool and that I am now unable to shake, even though I know how it looks at this age.

I am wiry and lean. Lifestyle lean, not gym lean. I smoke when they’re around, and I don’t when they’re not.

I drink. Of course.

I am currently in shock.

I have destroyed my life, in small increments, each thoughtless step adding unbearable weight. The framework, the superstructure of Roy, has been knocked and beaten and rendered fundamentally fragile. All it took was one punch. A single fist.

Everything is over.

There is nothing left for me in this city. And therefore this country.

I will never work again.

Yes, there is that curious liberation. I am free in the world, and once the administrative details of my departure are finalised I will be able to go anywhere, do anything.

Problem.

There is nothing I want to do. There is nowhere I want to go. There is, in fact, only an echo at the centre of me. It has been filled for all these years by work, so called, management activities and the rest. Now that these are gone there is nothing but the reverb.

Shock.

Look, from this distance it all comes off as infantile and deluded in a childish, indulgent way. But at the time it was real. The shock. The horror of what I’d done. At Clarissa’s, and at the coalface of my pitiful life.

Jozi was empty. The people were gone. There was nothing.

Let me put it this way. Advertising and media and Mlungu’s was my life. It wasn’t much of a life, and it may not have meant much to anyone else, but it was the only life I had, and in that sense it defined the length and breadth of my personal universe.

The shock radiating through my core was personal. I had pulled the pin at Clarissa’s and everything exploded.

It seems deluded and indulgent now, but at the time everything was truly my fault. I had, somehow, caused this.

It was me.

I did it.

Now I would have to deal with it.

I stopped drinking. At first the adrenalin spur was so strong I didn’t need a drink, didn’t even think of it, and by the time I fully realised that I hadn’t had one in hours, I knew well enough. This was the time. My time. There would be no other.

I was as practical as I could possibly be, but I was also driven by a cacophony of competing, self-referential voices. There was the observer taking notes, lining up and prioritising the never-ending series of things that were not right. There was the reactor, the violent screamer who wouldn’t shut up at the shock of it, the emptiness. And there was the pacifier, the steady, assuring voice claiming calm and balance, resisting the reality with the understanding that this was all, well, a misunderstanding. Then there was the homosapien – who just wanted to see, to touch, to speak to another human being. Who was constantly clocking the horizon for one. Just one.

^{CHAPTER 9} Shotguns falling from my arms

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.

^{CHAPTER 10} Five

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.

^{CHAPTER 11} The only reliable thing in the circumstances

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.

^{CHAPTER 12} Tears of ass pain

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.

‘Watch it, Rus, watch it!’ Grandfather Barnaby barked.

‘Jesus, Dad, we have to go left here. It’s Soweto, not the dark forest.’

‘Just watch it’s all I’m saying. Friends of mine got lost here – ended up God knows where…’

Born into a wealthy family of timber farmers in the Natal Midlands, Barnaby Fotheringham had conspired to lose his farm, his fortune, his self-respect and pretty much everything else thanks to an unreasonable attraction to the fine sport of polo. The great loss of the Fotheringham fortune wasn’t much discussed in our family, for obvious reasons, but from what I could gather the nut of it was that Barnaby had underestimated the time his father, and his father before him, had spent on the farming part of running a farm. He left the technicalities to the farm manager, who in turn left much of his load to his manager, and so on. When the timber market collapsed, Barnaby returned from the polo fields to find the outer shell of a business – the insides had rotted away. All he had left was a stable of ponies.

Thus, Russle was born a rich kid. He left high school a middle-class kid, and he dropped out of university to pursue his cricket career the son of a living cautionary tale.

As I headed down the N1 in my armoured van, loaded up with supplies and jerry cans of diesel, Barnaby’s voice echoed in my head. ‘Just don’t go too far left. The Bloem slip road is the same as the one to Soweto. You have to go left, but then straight. Left then straight.’

I let the wheel drift left, then pulled straight. The rain smashed on the van’s armoured window, turned into hail and smashed again.

The N1 south was simultaneously reassuring and evocative of all the things I was trying not to think about. Orange Farm loomed up on the right, the township veneer familiar. On the left, Vanderbijl Park and Sasolburg, the cooling towers also reassuring, yet ominous in their lack of vapour. How many times had I travelled this road in my life? Fifty? Eighty? A hundred even?

Just after crashing through the lowered boom at the Kroonvaal toll plaza (another in an ongoing set of satisfying armoured van experiences), I stopped in a sunny post-storm spot on the highway and considered my father’s music collection, contained within a very old, brown cardboard school suitcase, my name stencilled in big, childlike letters on the lid.

The loss of the cloud – disconcerting in many ways – was most disruptive in terms of access to music. I was constantly patting my pockets, expecting contact. I carried my mobile in hope, but it lay silent, flashing the connection-failure notice ad infinitum, Bambi looking for his mom. Which meant my life’s music collection was scattered across the now dissipated cloud. Few of the cars, players, glasses or devices I had picked up along the way had anything in their memory banks aside from playlists; requests for beats lost to the sky.

The first cover in the suitcase had my father’s hopeful spider-writing scrawled over the front. ‘Schulz – Demo Mix 1 – Final,’ it read.

Two tightly folded A4 email printouts fell from the jewel case as I opened it.

On 17/06/2011 4:05 PM, Russle Fotheringham wrote:

My father was dead three months later. He had never mentioned the Schulz exchange to me, but then I was simply a son, riddled with emotion and judgement. It would have been safer to keep quiet.

The emails explained a lot. I had always wondered about the sudden swing to trance. More than being annoying, which it definitely was, it was also odd. Russle Fotheringham had always been a deep house man. Throw in a few breakbeats and some of those slower hip-hop thumpers and that was him really. Deep house. And then suddenly, just before the end, he was all trance.

I put the disk in the front loader.

I left the CD box and printouts on the passenger seat, along with the mementos I had culled from Eileen’s flat, all stuffed, together with various last-minute additions, into a large green Woolworths carrier bag. A few of her old shirts, a blue skirt, a bottle of old perfume and a newish-looking pair of white panties I had found in the back of her cupboard.

At the bottom of the Woolworths bag was a small chequered wallet I had pulled from behind her underwear while rummaging. I unzipped it. Inside, a stuffed plastic baggie of what looked like very old weed, a matchbook from a hotel bar (the Balalaika, of all places) and a totally out-of-proportion, scrunched-up, king-size Rizla pack.

Weed.

A tingle of excitement, rooted in my early HHN balcony days with Mogz, the only time I had properly engaged with grass… a time when its jagged whack to my psyche felt more thrilling than dangerous. I zipped the wallet back up and flipped through Eileen’s CDs.

Bobby McFerrin.

The Pet Shop Boys.

Bump Volume 3.

Peter Gabriel.

Deep Forest.

Eileen must have been several years older than I had always thought she was. Either that or she had inherited her father’s music collection, in toto.

Fun Lovin’ Criminals.

I extracted the weed wallet again and rolled a terrible, mangled joint as the first run of angelic voices came together at the trance crossroads. The girl voice began to sing: ‘There’s something in the air / Baby, we just don’t care / I see you in the mist tonight / Thula thula baby, thula, alright / We sleep / Tonight…’

There was some relief, I thought as I rolled the joint, in knowing that my father hadn’t simply lost his musical mind towards the end, but was rather working on career progression with a famous Germanic-American DJ. It gave him credibility – something he needed a lot of with me. I particularly enjoyed the tiny slip of vernacular into the vocal. The girl sounded as generic as trance girls always did, but that one word – thula – gave the track a touch of something different. Mr Schulz would surely have loved it.

Stalks poked through the spit-addled mess of a joint in several places. There was no discernible end to the construction, so I just stuffed it in my mouth, holding fingers and thumbs over as many of the holes as I could and burning my right forefinger badly in the tussle with the matchbook.

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.

^{CHAPTER 13} Suddenly claustrophobic

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?’

‘Sure. I know.’ Tears welled. I stood to return my mug to the kitchen. ‘Don’t worry,’ I called back over my shoulder. ‘I know how freaky this is. I know exactly how freaky.’ I placed my mug overly carefully into the sink and turned on the red tap. The pipes groaned, then screamed. I turned it off, then hung my head over the sink.

Babalwa’s feet flopped down the ancient wooden floors to the kitchen doorway.

‘Look, it doesn’t mean—’ she offered eventually.

‘Leave it,’ I said to the sink. ‘Trust me, I know what you mean. I’m as scared as you are.’

‘I just need—’

‘Trust me, Babalwa, I understand. I really do understand.’

‘I’ll help you move?’

‘Sure. Let’s do that.’

^{CHAPTER 14} I hopped around on my other leg

I kicked down the door to the adjacent semi, carving up the skin on my right ankle as it caught on the edge of the broken Yale lock. ‘Fuck! Fuck fuck fucking mother of God! You got first aid?’ I bellowed at Babalwa, who was standing in the street behind me, arms folded, amused.

‘Actually I do, Chuck. Stay there. I don’t want you bleeding in my house.’

She came back carrying a full see-through medical box with a red cross on the top. She dropped it next to me and retreated.

‘The cross glows in the dark. Found it in a 7-Eleven just after—’ She broke off mid-sentence.

I opened the box and used some of the contents to bandage the wound, which wasn’t as impressive as I had first thought. A scratch with some blood really. ‘Where do the larnies live?’ I asked. ‘Clearly nowhere around here. I need supplies.’

‘Walmer. Big walls. Swimming pools. Golf.’

‘Perfect. How do I get there?’

‘Seriously? You’re not even going to clean that out with salt water or anything? You’re just gonna wrap a bandage on like that? Damn, who raised you, boy?’ Babalwa knelt down next to me, unwrapped the bandage and said, ‘Wait – I’ll be back.’

She returned with a bowl of salt water and proceeded to clean and bandage my foot as I hopped around on my other leg, painfully aware of the sparse nature of my boxer shorts.

‘Roy, you stink. I mean, you really, really smell. You should have bathed last night. When last did you actually wash? Like, with soap?’

‘A while back, but chill. Chill.’ I felt defensive. ‘Soon as I’m done here and I’ve got some supplies I’ll clean up – proper.’

‘Bullshit. I’m getting you a bar of soap right now and when you find one of those larny swimming pools, you use it, right?’ She was laughing as she looked up at me. ‘And see if you can find some actual underpants. I’ve seen too much of you already.’ She patted my freshly dressed ankle wound and packed up the first aid kit. ‘I’ll draw you a map to Walmer. It’s easy. You won’t get lost.’

Babalwa’s map included these directions:

‘Target Kloof?’ I asked as I stepped up into the van.

‘It’ll make sense,’ Babalwa replied. ‘Big S bend. People always wrapping their cars around the poles.’

‘Sounds exciting. See you now now.’

I drove away, up Parliament Street. At the top of the road I looked in the rear-view mirror to see Babalwa waving goodbye.

I waved back.

Target Kloof was as she had described it, a sweeping downward S bend ending in a little bridge over a valley, the road dividing two lush halves of suburban jungle. I drove at a crawl. A troop of monkeys watched me from the tops of the trees, a large male scratching his balls as the van passed. I waved at them.

Once through Target Kloof I took the right where Babalwa suggested, although at this stage I was already where I needed to be: fences, signature gates, walls, swimming pools, satellite dishes. I cruised, looking for easy targets.

Eventually I settled on River Road, a strip of double- and triple-storey houses facing onto a golf course, a few of them gabled, a few done out in mock-modest homey style and a few completely walled off. I smashed the van through a relatively humble black-and-white gated entrance, and then straight through the wall of a family entertainment area. A flat-screen TV – a relic or family keepsake of some sort – fell forward from its cabinet and shattered on the van’s bonnet.

I kicked through the thin, locked inter-leading door with my good ankle and headed into the main house. This, the bills on the entrance hall table said, was the residence of the Cotton family. Mr Ken Cotton. His wife, Barbara.

Hallway family photos. Their two girls, bright teenagers, arms around parents, themselves content in plastic pool furniture. The girls playing tennis in all-white, alluring outfits. The wider Cotton family on Christmas Day, lined up in two rows, arms linking, each combination telling its own story.

I pissed over the photo collection and the bills, soaking the Cottons as thoroughly as possible. Then I walked, dick out, as far as I could into the lounge proper, hosing the off-white lounge suite and the expensive wooden coffee table. It was a relief to be able to slip back into my habit. I zipped and thought of Babalwa’s request that I secure clothing, and then of her wrinkled nose at my stench. Too lazy to go back to the van, I searched the Cotton house looking for soap, finding a spicy underwear collection in one of the girl’s bedrooms instead. Pink G-strings. A studded bra with fake gems on the rim. Suspenders. I stopped awhile on her bed, running my hands through the teenage fabric, my erection throbbing half-heartedly at the loss.

The wall above the bed was covered in photos stuck onto the wall with Prestik, the montage carefully constructed to portray the life of a young PE debutante and her beau, who looked, in almost every respect, like a fool. He posed in each shot – sometimes pulling muscles overtly, or simply beaming far too intensely into the camera. Throwing a rugby ball to his mates. Running. Jumping. Pointing. He was on the ugly side and wouldn’t have aged well at all; but in the pictures the ugliness was light, a hint beneath the dominant, metallic veneer of youth.

I spat at him first, then at her, both lugs finding their mark on the wall and slowly dribbling down over their young faces.

In her cupboard I found a bar of Reece-Marie herbal soap (coarse rosemary, sage, lemon grass, teatree oil, aqueous cream and glycerine). The packaging promised it would lather exceptionally well.

I turned into Ken and Barbara’s bedroom, a typically dull set-up attempting to mimic magazine style. Creams and off-whites, wooden-framed pictures of Cotton life through the ages. Young Ken making his way in the world with a fishing rod and a smile – about twenty years old. Young Barbara gazing with measured effort to the horizon from what looked very much like the same beach Babalwa and I had visited. Ken and Barbara must have been, I guessed, around my age: the grain on the photos matched the scant remains of my own past.

I found a fluffy off-white bathroom towel in the en-suite bathroom and, even better, a key to the door leading out to the pool.

The back garden was ominous. Vast lawns tracked away from the pool, down a series of mini rolling hills, but they were out of control, the grass wild and angry. Shrubs and bushes created a barrier between the kitchen and the pool which, back in the day, would surely have been cut back weekly. But as I stood there the Cotton family entertainment zone hummed with decay, reinforced by the green skin on the pool and a layer of aqua-bugs and insects dancing on the corpses of drowned colleagues.

I sucked in a deep breath, dropped my towel and my threaded pants, and jumped.

Ken Cotton, it turned out, was pretty much my size. I pulled everything he owned out of the cupboard and onto the bed and selected a hardy range.

I stuffed the lot into the carry-on bag, save for a pair of khaki shorts, a brownish-red T-shirt, long white socks and the hiking boots, which I wore as a joke I hoped would impress Babalwa. As I stood in front of the mirror, now more Ken Cotton than myself, I wondered what she might find funny about it, other than my shockingly grey hair, which looked, well, funny. My long, freshly clean, grey flyaway hair, the big grey beard, the hiking gear… I was a caricature of myself and Ken.

I loaded up a second bag on exit. A printed photo album from the saucy teenager’s room; the bra, G-string and suspenders from the same; her mobile and Kindle; a bunch of toothbrushes and toothpaste from the bathroom. I dumped the bags in the hallway and went back to clean out the kitchen.

Next I reversed the van from the rubble of the family room and rolled it around to the edge of the front garden, where the garage adjoined the kitchen. I put my seat belt on and smashed the van through the reinforced garage door. Reversed, and smashed again. Reversed, and smashed again. Reversed, and again. The van was shrill now, the engine and chassis moaning together. I parked in the driveway, walked back and checked out the Cotton garage, which contained, predictably, a BMW and a ladies’ 4x4, a RAV4. My heart leapt. The RAV’s metallic-blue shimmer was evocative. Neater than the cash-in-transit van, far less aggressive, it probably handled better on the road too. My heart still lifting, I stomped through the rubble in my new hiking boots to look for keys, which were hanging dutifully on a hook on the side of the kitchen cupboard, but which, of course, also had the biometric logo on the ring.

I went back to the saucy teenager’s room, pulled her queen mattress off its base, dragged it out to the driveway and pushed it into my beaten van.

‘Honey, I’m home!’ I shouted as I hopped out in front of my new apartment: 1B Donkin Terrace.

There was no reply.

In my charged and refreshed state, I had expected Babalwa to come out and greet me. To laugh – possibly – at my bizarre new attire. Instead, I dragged all my new stuff into the flat on my own. I pulled the hiking boots off when I was done and sat for a while on the white rail of my flat, which was really a stinking ghetto apartment with a teenage girl’s mattress and bedding dumped in the hallway.

I had, I now realised, neglected to bring any cleaning materials from the Cottons.

I wondered where Babalwa was.

I waited most of the morning for Babalwa’s return, dawdling around the front entrance of 1B, but there was no sign of her. Eventually I drove all the way back to the Cottons’ house, emptied out their cleaning cupboard, and then went back and scrubbed my new flat. Or at least the important parts of it. I would not, I suspected, be entertaining vast crowds.

The rooms were mostly empty. One had what looked like the remnants of a mattress on the floor, an overflowing ashtray, and a litter of broken and abandoned quart bottles. What passed for the lounge was really just a collection of beer crates, bits of wood and other odd seating devices on top of a morphing, interlocking spread of floor stains. I threw all the shit as far down Donkin Hill as I could, then went back to deal with the toilet, which I treated initially by hurling three buckets of Babalwa’s collected water over everything in the place, and then attacking it with Handy Andy and rags until it looked like somewhere I might be able to shit.

She returned a day later, by which point I had been back to the Cottons’ place too many times to count. Towels. The family book collection. A pillow. Another pillow. Another swimming-pool bath.

‘Nice,’ she said, using her big toe to mark areas still needing attention as she walked through my renovated digs. A mouldy corner of the bathroom. A light tickle against the grime on the bottom row of the stack of bean and tuna cans. ‘Not bad. Like a home, nè?’

‘So where you been?’ I trailed expectantly behind her.

‘Ah, I went home for a bit, you know, just… just to see. I dunno. Had some thinking to do. You know…’

‘We haven’t talked about it yet. I mean, we need to. I need to. I need to find out what you know. Jesus. I need to tell you what I know.’

‘Sho.’ She opened the door to the spare bedroom, then closed it again. ‘Limiting your range. Fair enough.’

‘So, fine. Can you tell me what happened? What happened to you? Or should I tell you what happened to me first? Maybe that’s better. Me, I was going through a bit of a life crisis that involved a serious need to sleep, which I did for a few days, and then I woke up and—’

‘Everyone was gone.’

‘Ja. All gone.’

‘Did you dream?’ In the kitchen now, Babalwa turned to face me, arms folded. ‘I dreamed.’

‘No – nothing. But, I mean, I wasn’t really in a condition to dream. Or maybe I dreamed and didn’t remember anything. Totally possible. One thousand per cent possible. In fact, very likely. What do you mean, dream?’

‘Let’s go to church.’ Babalwa marched out the front door.

I followed her over the crest of our hill to the Hill Presbyterian Church, an 1800s classic, replete with huge spire and broken front door.

‘Took me days to get this open,’ Babalwa said as she pushed the oak door gently forward. ‘Beat the lock with a hammer. Tiny thing. Took forever.’

We headed into the interior carefully, respectfully. Babalwa lead us to a front pew, where we sat in full view of a struggling Jesus.

‘I don’t know why. It makes me peaceful, this place,’ she said softly, still not looking at me. ‘Silly, I know. But—’

‘Christ, there’s no silliness left any more,’ I offered.

‘Sho. Sho.’ She folded her hands into her lap, priest-like, and looked me in the eye. ‘I was really tired that night. You know, beaten. It was a Thursday; I remember being rude to my mother and going to bed early. I was in that way, you know. Just kind of hating everything, but I couldn’t sleep either. I remember lying there and looking at the ceiling and questioning whether this was it. You know?’ Her eyes darted between me and her lap. I nodded encouragingly. ‘Anyway, do you know what lucid dreaming is? Ever had a lucid dream?’

‘Babalwa, I was a bad drunk. To be really honest about it, I can’t remember dreaming at all, ever. I passed out every night for over twenty years, so… no. Until it happened, nothing. After that, of course, I’ve been dreaming like a wild man. All over the place. But I can’t say any of them were lucid. The normal stuff, hard to keep a handle on when you wake up.’

‘I’ve heard the term before,’ Babalwa said, ‘so I’ve been wondering since I had the dream if that was what it was. A lucid dream. Anyway, I couldn’t sleep so I just let myself drift, wallowing in being awake, or half awake, or drifting. Whatever.’ She looked up at Jesus, then back down at her lap. ‘So at some stage I’m definitely not awake any more, I can’t be, but I don’t feel like I’m dreaming either. I’m alert. Even now, when I think back I can remember the small details, which is strange, because who can ever remember the details of a dream?

‘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:

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

^{CHAPTER 15} Just look at this grass

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.

‘We look to control the reserve as a clear area we can manage, and there’s enough concrete in this place to make sure that the jungle can’t close in on us. Where else can we find something like this?’

‘Well…’ Babalwa, doubtful, remained on her knees. ‘There must be plenty of similar places around the country, nè?’

‘Possibly. But how long will they take to find? How much work will they take to settle to the point where we are now already? How many will be right on the sea in case of miracle sea rescues and to service our need to fish?’ Babalwa snorted. Fishing had not, as of yet, taken place. ‘Seriously, I’ve been thinking about fishing quite a lot lately.’ I rolled with it. ‘It will probably end up being easier than trying to keep cattle.’

She nodded, head down, the corners of her mouth twitching.

‘Laugh, but if not here, then where? It’s going to be fucking tough to start again. And, like it or not, we have started here. And other people chose to start here too.’ I waved at the Donkin pyramid. ‘There was surely a reason why these people decided to start this city here. Right friggin here.’ I jumped slightly on the turf, issuing up a little puff of sand.

I had forced her. Bullied her. Or maybe she had conceded strategically. Not immediately, of course, but as I heaped the pressure on she gave a little, and a little more, and within an hour or two we had – by mutual agreement – decided to stay where we were, peering over the sea into an empty horizon, farming in the sand.

We had a cup of tea.

‘So what do you know about solar?’ Babalwa asked me as we sipped.

‘Less than fuck all. You?’

‘I know that you can only stack three panels to a battery before it blows.’

‘So I guess the question is, where? Where will we find more power than portables? We need better batteries.’

‘When we get the solar thing right we should rig up a player.’ Babalwa topped up her teacup, holding the lid and tipping from the pot in classic English style.

‘Home entertainment? We’ll need to be careful with the movies. When we’ve watched them all it’s repeats for the rest of our lives.’

‘Music would be wild though – somewhere to put all those sticks and things you been hording.’

‘Agreed. Agreed. Movies. Music. Stuff of life.’

‘Roy,’ Babalwa said, pulling out her chair. ‘Can I ask you something personal?’

‘Shoot.’

‘How scared are you? I mean, just like day on day. Are you scared?’ Her voice got a little higher. ‘Because, honestly, some days I can’t get out of bed. I have to pull myself out piece by piece. I mean, you’re out there all the time in your van, with that machete, doing whatever you do. So to me you look fine, but I feel awful. I just want to cry all the time.’ Tears rolled down her cheeks.

‘Come here,’ I beckoned. She rounded the pine coffee table, littered with the patchwork of A4 pages that constituted our farm plan, and sat on my lap, her arms around my neck, like a child.

‘Listen,’ I whispered into the nape of her neck. ‘I keep moving to stay alive.’ She pushed her chin into my collarbone, tears and snot smearing onto my cheek, mingling with mine, creating a mutual river between us. Then she pulled back.

‘Will you bring your mattress this side tonight? I don’t want you in my bed, but I don’t want to be alone either.’

‘Sure.’ My heart skipped, dropped, then picked up again. I didn’t want to sleep with her, per se. Sex was a peripheral consideration. I badly wanted to be wanted, though. To be held, also. To mix energy with her – to dilute myself and gain a little bit of someone else. ‘No problem. No problem at all. I don’t feel like flying solo either.’

Babalwa folded her arms around me again, leaning properly into my neck with her shaved head. She smelled slightly of sweat. Sweet sweat.

‘You got anything decent to read? I got a whole library over there, you know.’

She mumphed snottily into my neck.

I stroked her back slowly, my hand moving in ever-widening circles over the Castle Lager logo.

The next morning the air was thicker than usual, and spotted with smiles. I had dragged my mattress into the kitchen and slept there.

Her toe woke me, prodding against my forehead. She looked down on me, the length of her dramatically extended, my view deep into the inner thigh of her shorts.

‘Hey,’ she rubbed her head and yawned. ‘You a tea or coffee person?’

‘Uh, tea, I guess.’ I grabbed her ankle and gave it a playful twist. She yelped and jumped free. ‘Today we find power, nè? That movie thing has really got me going.’

Our next target was All Power EP, in Kempston Road.

‘Easy, right near our family home,’ said Babalwa. ‘I’ll show you where I grew up.’